After an aside on European vs American videogame culture, we talked about the deep strike escalation with Russia “turning off” the port of Odessa, an increase in Ukrainian terrorism -- the restaurant bombing in Moscow as well as a car bomb in Yekaterinburg, the designation of Pavel Durov as an “extremist” b…

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In his best-known book, The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu characterized Russia through an absence: the absence of an “intermediate estate”, or, in today’s language, a “middle class”. In his view, it was this middle class — although Montesquieu meant by it something closer to the lesser nobility — standing between peasants and boyars, that guaranteed “liberty” in other European countries. Russia’s backwardness was explained by its lack of the chief element behind Western Europe’s superiority. This view of Russia persisted in France for quite some time. Apart from a brief period of admiration for Peter and Catherine — one need only recall Voltaire’s myth of Peter — the French intelligentsia returned to the “sociological” theory of Russian “backwardness”. Diderot and later liberals spoke more specifically of Russia’s lack of a “Third Estate”, that “ferment of liberty” and source of progress. Right up to the French Revolution, the dichotomy between “barbarous” Russia, without a Third Estate, and civilized Western Europe, the birthplace of the Third Estate, became a foundational current among French political and social thinkers.

The French Revolution, in addition to every other rupture it brought to France, Europe, and the world, led to a flourishing of many different approaches to the “Russian question”. Post-revolutionary France perceived both itself and Europe through the prism of Russia. To begin with, it is worth pausing over what French intellectuals actually meant when they spoke of “Europe”. In the eighteenth century, enlightened Frenchmen stripped the term of its religious meaning: before that, “Europe” and “Christendom” had effectively been synonyms. In the course of this process, a new set of ideas replaced the traditional foundations of self-identification: “progress”, “liberty”, “reason”, and, of course, the “Enlightenment”. These concepts were associated with economic development and the level of culture, thereby giving the Enlightenment itself and its values a universal and cosmopolitan character.

Voltaire, for example, regarded Europe as merely the place where progress and enlightenment had advanced furthest; it was otherwise no different from other regions of the world. Diderot attached greater importance precisely to socioeconomic factors. In his understanding, “Europe” was the cradle of “Civilization”, while “Civilization” was the result of a high level of commercial development supported by a class of “intermediaries” - the notorious middle class. Under Diderot’s scheme, Russia was the country where this estate was absent and, consequently, the country of despotism.

The counterweight to the cosmopolitan Enlightenment was a deeply national Romanticism. As is well known, German Romanticism advanced the idea of Kultur: the unique development of an individual nation. Unlike socioeconomic “Civilization”, the concept of Kultur defined the spiritual and cultural sphere as the nation’s treasury, containing the elements that determined its character. The Romantic conflict between civilisation and Kultur also contained the seeds of a conflict between individualism and communitarianism. The Romantics accused the Enlightenment of “atomization” - of turning individualism into a doctrine that tore human beings from their roots. This included an early critique of capitalism, which began on the Right: the Romantics drew inspiration from the social organization of the Middle Ages, with their crafts and guilds, in which they saw a healthy alternative to the factories and corporations then appearing. Romanticism therefore stirred the minds not only of conservatives but also of socialists. It is no secret that many ideas about communal life circulated between Right and Left. “Communalism” was a goal for socialists and for the far Right alike: the former looked to the future, while the latter mourned the past.

Nevertheless, far from all Romantics shared communitarian ideas; in France especially, many Romantics inhabited liberalism’s intellectual cosmos. As Arthur Lovejoy eloquently put, “Romanticism” encompassed so many ideas, sometimes mutually contradictory, that it is impossible to speak of a single intellectual space, and extremely difficult even to find a common denominator. When we speak of Romantics here, it means communitarians: advocates of a strong society who viewed the liberals’ extreme individualism with skepticism.

It was this group that mounted the most conspicuous challenge to the liberal image of Russia as an example of “Eastern despotism”. On the whole, the concept of “Eastern Europe” had a markedly polemical character directed precisely against Russia. French liberals began applying the term Europe orientale to Russia in order to conflate it with the places originally known by that name: the regions of Europe occupied by the Ottoman Empire. Traditionally, Russia was considered part of the “north”, and the cultural space of Europe was characterized by a North-South axis, not an East-West one1. By calling Russia part of the East, these thinkers ascribed to it every connotation associated with the image of the Turks: Asiatic despotism, servility, and barbarism. The Romantics and reactionaries, by contrast, saw in Russia a force capable of returning Europe to the true path. If liberals believed Russia deficient because it lacked a key element required for admission among the “civilized” countries, the Romantics believed Russia possessed what Europe had lost after the Enlightenment and the revolutions: the community, or commune. For both camps, Russia was still organized around the peasant mir and could therefore show Europe the way toward the desired community in the socialist version, or the lost community in the conservative one.

Napoleonic adventurism aside, until the 1840s, Frenchmen knew next to nothing about the Russian peasant “commune” whose wisdom they were so eager to partake in. France already possessed the useful word commune, and French political thought appeared to be in dire need of applications for it. Mir and obshchina are often translated by the same word, commune, although they were not exact synonyms. Broadly speaking, obshchina describes the village internally, as an economic and land-holding community, while mir is applied to its assembly and its external judicial-administrative entity. The “collectivism” of rural Russia is routinely overstated; common tenure did not imply any dissolution of individuality. Russian peasant households cultivated their allotted strips separately and there were enormous regional differences in the ways and means they employed. The much-abused image of the Russian peasant “collectivism” barely withstands a closer look, revealing the Russian farmer to be an ever-moving anarcho-entrepreneur, only too eager to escape the “people’s court” of village grandmothers — yet our topic du jour is not the reality but the imagination, so forgive my digression.

The political career of the “Russian” “commune” in France began, appropriately enough, with a Polish exile. Adam Mickiewicz occupied the chair of Slavic Language and Literature at the Collège de France from 1840 to 1844, and his lectures, later collected in Les Slaves, supplied Paris with a Slavic world to exoticize. In particular, this allowed for a sharp distinction between the government and the governed; a French radical might detest Nicholas I and still discover a providential future among the Slavic peoples. Mickiewicz described the Slavs as strangers to absolute private ownership of land and invited the sects of the French Left to consider which of their ideas might be entrusted to this immense historical force.

Alexander Herzen performed even more song and dance for the European Left. In The Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia and The Russian People and Socialism, both published in French in 1851, he, like Mickiewicz, separated “official” Russia from the living nation beneath it. He painted the autocratic state as artificial and even “foreign” (beginning a tradition of Russian left-wing auto-orientalism that culminates in doctrines such as that Peter I imported homophobia from Western Europe, and before that the Muscovite had no concept of it). For Herzen, the mir and the artel were “indigenous” habits of equality, as opposed to the hierarchical society imposed by the Tsars.

The chief French proponent of this tradition was Cyprien Robert, Mickiewicz’s successor at the Collège de France from 1845 to 1857. In his his two-volume opus The Slavic World (1852), Robert presented the commune as a remedy for the “fever of individualism” undermining Western society. The Slavic village, he believed, lived the Western dream of “fraternal equality” as ordinary life, while proletariat and pauperism were absent. He claimed that a Russian muzhik who came to Paris and simply described the legal privileges of his village would be arrested as an anarchist.

The French republican imagination could be no less extravagant. In Poland and Russia (1852), Jules Michelet announced that “Russian life is communism”. For Michelet, the commune rocked the peasant into childish improvidence; the country was “the empire of illusion”; Russians, so he said, lacked any moral sense and “were not yet men”. Henri Martin expanded Michelet’s argument to the realm of biology and in Russia and Europe (1866) stated that the Muscovites were not even Slavs at all but “Turanians” instead, Asiatic in origin and spirit. As ardent a Polonophile as any good French liberal, Martin saw Russian dominion in Poland as “Muscovite communism”, a geopolitical weapon, spreading the seeds of social unrest throughout Europe.

In 1814, the Russian army entered Paris, and the hopes of a generation of French liberals were shattered (along with Bonapartist dreams of hegemony). From then on, Imperial Russia became their great fear and eternal enemy.

On the other side stood the French Right, the reactionaries, longing to be delivered from revolutionary terror by Russian soldiers and seeing Russia as an example of traditional European order. This group included royalist Legitimists and ultramontanist Catholics. These traditionalists rejected the French Revolution and wished for a restoration of the Ancien Régime. After the experience of the French Revolution, these “ultra-royalists” — with Louis de Bonald foremost among them — set against the chaos and war brought by the Revolution and its ideas the restoration of a “natural order” growing organically from tradition and religion, an order spitefully destroyed by liberal intellectuals and a brainless mob.

Russia’s role in the struggle against the Revolution is well known, and we shall not repeat it here. It is worth noting only that the three sovereigns who signed the Holy Alliance declared themselves “members of one and the same Christian nation”. The fascination of Frenchmen who saw in this self-conception an answer to the secular notion of liberal “Europe” was therefore perfectly understandable and natural. Yet for all their sympathies, many reactionaries held an ambivalent position toward Russia. Their criticism proceeded partly from positions derived from the liberal paradigm, partly from strictly Catholic positions, and partly “from the Right”.

One of the chief royalist thinkers was Louis de Bonald. Born in 1754 into an old noble family, Bonald served in the Royal Musketeers until they were disbanded and in 1785 became mayor of his native town of Millau. His son became a cardinal. During the Revolution, de Bonald initially remained in office by force of inertia, but after the anti-clerical Civil Constitution of the Clergy was introduced — requiring, among other things, that priests swear an oath to the revolutionary authorities — he resigned and left for Heidelberg to join the counterrevolutionary army of French émigrés under the Prince of Condé. De Bonald returned clandestinely to France in 1797. Under the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte he rebuffed honors and offices for years, although in 1810 even he yielded to Fontanes’s entreaties and took a seat on the Council of the Imperial University. After the Bourbon Restoration, he enjoyed a brilliant career: he was elected to the Académie française and in 1823 received the prestigious dignity of Peer of France. De Bonald greeted the July Revolution with contempt; he refused to swear allegiance to the “Citizen King”, just as he refused every state pension to which he was entitled.

In his Theory of Political and Religious Power in Civil Society, de Bonald explained Russian “despotism” not as a legacy of the benighted past but as the creation of Peter I. This despotism manifested itself in the violation of the traditional laws of succession to the throne. Bonald, by contrast, placed his trust in Catherine II and believed she could “constitute” the Russian state and “determine the fate of Russia and, perhaps, of Europe”. One of the most important elements in Bonald’s definition of “despotism”, however, was the absence of “social distinctions”, by which he meant privileged estates that protected society from the monarch’s arbitrariness. He compared despotism with democracy: the first was the unlimited power of one man, the second the unlimited power of the crowd. Here, of course, his reasoning was most likely based less on Christian theology than on Aristotle: it was necessary to find a “golden mean” between the monarch’s power and the liberties of the people, and only a strong landed aristocracy could provide it. Bonald, thus, preferred feudalism to absolutism.

In his Political Discourses on the Present State of Europe, Bonald argued that Russia lagged behind Europe on the “path of human knowledge” because it did not possess a “Latin and Roman” inheritance. This assertion fairly oozes Catholic and Western European arrogance about the “Roman” legacy. France’s Roman inheritance was real enough, but Bonald treated that inheritance as the exclusive property of Latin Christendom, ignorant of Russia’s Eastern Roman inheritance, which carried a theological, political and institutional continuity with surely stronger claims to Imperium Romanum than Carolingian appropriations.

Even so, he believed that pre-Petrine Russia contained all the ingredients necessary for social perfection. Then Peter I arrived and spoiled everything:

Later, Bonald believed that Russia had left “despotism” behind and that the Russian Emperor might even be able to reunite Catholics and Orthodox Christians. By the end of his life, however, he had become utterly disillusioned with Russia and saw it as almost the chief enemy of the Catholic faith. Perhaps this was also connected with the suppression of the Polish November Uprising of 1830-31; a peculiar obsession with their Polish comrades was by no means exclusive to French liberals. In any event, Bonald’s views were, firstly, fundamentally different from everything the liberals said about Russia, for he thought in entirely different categories, and, secondly, changed from timid optimism to explicit disappointment, as happened with many other writers when it suddenly turned out that Russia did not intend to drop everything and rescue France from itself again and again.

Few foreigners knew Russia as intimately as Joseph de Maistre. He was born in Chambéry, the eldest of ten children in a Savoyard noble family. His father was president of the Senate of the Duchy of Savoy, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. A year before the Revolution began in France, de Maistre himself became a Savoyard senator. Fleeing the armies of revolutionary France, he moved to Lausanne in 1793. As envoy of the Kingdom of Sardinia, Joseph de Maistre lived in Russia for fourteen years, from 1803 to 1817. His social circle and position in Russia are well known, and we shall not dwell on them here. Joseph de Maistre was the blackest of reactionaries: he called for the monarchy’s immediate return, for recognition of the Pope’s temporal sovereignty, and regarded the Revolutionary Terror as the French people’s just punishment for their sins against King and God.

It was in Saint Petersburg that de Maistre, the first pen of royalism, wrote his best-known works. Like de Bonald, he followed an evolutionary path from admiration for Russia to disappointment — or, at least, disappointment in the person of Emperor Alexander I. In 1806, de Maistre wrote enthusiastically that Russia was “untouched” by the corrupt philosophy of France and Germany, and that the Tsar, “protector of European liberty”, would lead the nations into war against the Usurper.

By 1810, however, the tune had already changed:

Where French liberals sometimes admired individual rulers while despising Russian society as a whole, with de Maistre the reverse was true: in his later years he criticized the Emperor and the upper echelons of the Russian state, but spoke flatteringly of the people. In 1812, for example, he wrote:

Disarming the liberal current of French thought, de Maistre immediately excluded accusations of “despotism” from the ranks of legitimate reasons to criticize Russia. On the contrary, he offered unprecedented praise to the Table of Ranks (famously introduced by Peter the Great) and the service nobility, which he regarded as superior even to the society of the Ancien Régime. De Maistre even arrived at the thought that, had France possessed a Table of Ranks, there would not have been a Revolution2. Nevertheless, he found much in Russia to condemn, especially Speransky’s proposed reforms and the liberal attitudes of the aristocracy as a whole.

In the first third of the nineteenth century, Russian educational policy ranged from liberal and progressive to conservative and classical; the relevant laws formed a puzzle that had to be assembled into a definite picture. From 1803 to 1828 the direction shifted toward conservatism and the classics, a shift in which Count Joseph de Maistre may have had a hand. He was in Russia as a diplomatic representative, but involved himself with great enthusiasm into the internal affairs of the Russian Empire. He was especially interested in educational policy, on which he filled many pages in 1810 and 1811.

Alexander I reformed the Russian Empire’s educational system under the guidance of Enlightenment ideas and the French example, hoping to create a large and capable bureaucratic class like the one that existed in e.g. Prussia. Class origin was removed from the list of requirements for pupils, and even the study of Latin became optional. Reforms aimed at educating a classless bureaucracy provoked sharp hostility among the Russian aristocracy. Beyond breaking the nobility’s monopoly on state service, the requirement of a university education and examinations could bar unqualified aristocrats from even the most prestigious families from the bureaucratic apparatus altogether. Unwilling to remain in the gilded cage of their estates and country seats, part of the nobility resisted these reforms. They found allies among people of a more theoretical cast of mind and with a burning hatred for the ideals of the Enlightenment; foremost among them was Joseph de Maistre.

De Maistre’s reputation preceded him even before his arrival in Russia’s capital. His friendship with the Vyazemskys gave him access to the highest circles of the Russian aristocracy, while his home became a kind of club where Russians and foreigners met, united by their opposition to the Corsican Usurper. De Maistre won the admiration of conservative Russian aristocrats by condemning Francophilia in Russia even more harshly than the Russians themselves did:

De Maistre accused the Ministry of National Education of mindlessly imitating French — and therefore liberal — fashions. He regarded the half-educated Francophiles, with Speransky as their standard-bearer, as Russia’s chief danger:

This naturally brought him closer to Russian conservatives. He conducted an extensive correspondence with Uvarov and Razumovsky, while Karamzin independently developed a strikingly similar critique of Speransky’s reforms. De Maistre also attended Derzhavin and Shishkov’s Colloquy of Lovers of the Russian Word, despite knowing nothing about the subject.

De Maistre and Uvarov found more similarities than differences between them. Both adhered to an anti-revolutionary and anti-materialist ideology; both opposed the ideals of the Enlightenment. These two men fought against the ideas prevailing under Alexander I — liberalism in education, ecumenism, sympathy for France and Bonaparte, and Freemasonry — and, despite preferring different methods, often reached similar conclusions in their recommendations. In his writings on education in Russia, consisting of correspondence with Uvarov and Razumovsky as well as a number of publications, de Maistre demanded, in philosophical fashion, that the character of the Russian state first be defined, and only then should anyone consider what kind of educational system it required. Every state needed a means of governing its population and maintaining order, but, as de Maistre wrote, no nation could be governed by the government alone:

Before the advent of the Christian era in Europe, he argues, slavery had been the sole method of government, but religion replaced it as the state’s system of support. In the West, despite the relaxation of control over serfs, power over them belonged to the clergy. In de Maistre’s view, Russia differed from the West in this respect and lagged behind it in civilization because of “Byzantinism”, the Mongol yoke, and the religious schism. Rome, he believed, was the ink with which the book of civilization was written, and Russia, because of its separation from the Eternal City, had followed a different path of social and political development.

However clear and interesting de Maistre’s views on Russia may have been, they cannot be considered apart from his profound Catholic convictions, which eventually made his diplomatic presence intolerable to Alexander I. His support for the Jesuits and his involvement in the conversion to Catholicism of several young Saint Petersburg aristocrats finally convinced the Emperor to ask the Sardinian court to recall him; de Maistre left Russia in 1817.

In On the Pope, de Maistre set out in detail the conception of European civilization as the result of a thousand years of spiritual guardianship by the Church — unlike the liberals, who viewed it merely as a socioeconomic process. For this reason, de Maistre simply could not sing the praises of Peter the Great’s attempts to accelerate “progress” in Russia artificially. In contrast to Voltaire, he refused to accept a man who “did not follow the course of nature”. On the contrary, looking upon the shattering experience of the French Revolution, de Maistre would have liked to eliminate the human will from history altogether. Unsurprisingly, On the Pope contains a passage concerning Russia in which de Maistre argued that the chief problem of Russian history was the absence of the Roman religion. While defending the Russians from negative stereotypes widespread among his contemporaries, he nonetheless accused Peter of imposing a “false civilization”, taken from the gutters of European history, instead of allowing (Catholic) religion to carry on with its unhurried work of nurturing civilization.

De Maistre’s overall conception of Russia was the source of his position on education. He expounded it most fully in Five Letters on Public Education in Russia, addressed to Razumovsky.

“Every nation has the government it deserves”, de Maistre said, and the same applies to its educational system. Russia ought not to ask which principles of education sounded pleasant or conformed to some theory; it had to understand what schools it needed and establish harmony among government, educational system, and people. Before offering recommendations, de Maistre set out his ideas about what Russia ought not to do. Science and education, he said, had brought the most lamentable consequences upon Europe. A “certain secret force” was trying to use them to destroy monarchy and Christianity. De Maistre loved quoting his enemies, and to confirm his point he cited Voltaire’s aphorism: “Books have done it all”. In de Maistre’s judgment, the Russian people were not yet ready to digest the concepts of the Enlightenment without the gravest consequences for society and state.

De Maistre is now little read and little studied, like every writer who found himself on the “wrong side of history”. Yet the judgment expressed by E. M. Cioran in “An Essay on Reactionary Thought” has been borne out:

The great irony of history is that Marx and Engels sincerely believed there would never be a revolution in Russia because the Russians were backward rabble. De Maistre, by contrast, knew the instability of the Russian national character and accurately predicted that if intellectual, religious, and political liberty were permitted in Russia, a “Pugachev from the University” — what apt expression — would inevitably unleash a bloody revolution. As we can see, the prophecy of the obscurantist theocrat came true, not that of the inventors of “historical materialism”.

Besides those titans of far-right thought, de Bonald and de Maistre, other conservative publicists of the nineteenth century also wrote about Russia. Gabriel de Castelnau — a nobleman from the Gironde, a Knight of Malta, and, during his exile, secretary to Emperor Paul I — collected his thoughts and knowledge of Russia in an Essay on the Ancient and Modern History of New Russia. In addition to refined geographical, historical, and local-history notes on Odessa, Taurida, and other regions then only recently restored to the bosom of the Russian Empire, he offered what might be called the “ordinary person’s” perspective of an adherent of the Ancien Régime. He praised the Russian government, because true liberty could exist only where the monarchy could use its power to protect the people from those who wished to exploit them for their own ends. Between remarks on the Crimean climate and the region’s commercial statistics, de Castelnau inserted, with distinctly French nonchalance, reflections to the effect that “the Rights of Man without limits” were a false liberty — that is, a slavery far worse than the hierarchical order for which liberals so hated Russia.

Honoré de Balzac was likewise an unrepentant monarchist and Legitimist. Russia played an important role in both his personal life and his writing: Balzac made three journeys into the Russian Empire — in 1843, 1847, and 1848 — and corresponded with his beloved, the Polish noblewoman and Russian subject Ewelina Hańska. In his letters to Hańska, which he signed “Votre mougik, Honoré”, he expressed a desire to move to Russia and become a Russian himself. In 1840, Balzac published the Russian Letters, an interesting critique of the French government written in the form of letters to a fictional Russian prince. In them, he harshly reprimanded the French government under the July Monarchy and that gang of bourgeois nouveaux riches whom, in his view, it alone represented. Like many Frenchmen before him, Balzac viewed his own country through the prism of Russia, but it was only in his Letter on Kiev that he revealed the full depth of his reflections on Russia. Balzac formulated his venomous aristocratism with perfect clarity: “absolute power” and “so-called despotism” were always preferable to “the mob”. Criticizing the well-known anti-Russian pamphlet Russia in 1839, he refuted the arguments of its author, de Custine3. Balzac praised the Russians’ “blind obedience”, which in any event was better than the “profound lack of discipline” from which the French suffered. For the anti-liberal Balzac, a furious enemy of the ideas of equality, democracy, and atheism, Russia represented a healthy alternative and a legitimate order.

The deeper the French Revolution receded into the past, the more completely old France died; this could not fail to affect the image of Russia among the French Right. Dreams of reviving the Ancien Régime became the preserve of people on the absolute political fringe, while most Legitimists, in an attempt to retain at least a small measure of political relevance, happily made common cause with their former enemies, the Orléanists, and even with moderate liberals. Nevertheless, the Second French Republic, born after the Revolution of 1848, still knew the monarchist slogan Plutôt les Russes que les Rouges: “Better the Russians than the Reds”.

Balzac’s opposite was Victor Hugo; a writer just as great, but of a different political orientation and with a different opinion of Russia. In 1851, he reproached the Right for “dreaming of the Russian army” every time they heard the words “progress”, “liberty”, or “democracy”. We do not know what army the liberal Hugo dreamed of when the French landed in Crimea. In any event, the conservatives of France and Russia were brothers-in-arms in every sense of the phrase — the liberals certainly never forgot it — and it took four decades after Russian troops entered Paris for those ties finally to drift away into the darkness of time.

In On the Russian Alliance, published in La Mode in 1850, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly insisted that France’s great external interests required an intimate union with Russia, around which every lesser alliance should be arranged. Yet a republic born from revolution, he argued, could not accomplish it. Russia was “the government which most purely represents, in Europe, the notion of authority”; d’Aurevilly extolled her as “the Virgin of monarchies”, armed like Joan of Arc, who had saved her king and might yet save the principle of royalty altogether. Only restored Legitimacy could speak naturally to such a power and, with its help, undo the humiliations of Vienna.

Nor did every dream of Russian armies belong to the Right. Six years before Cœurderoy’s bizarre Hurrah!!!4, the leading Fourierist Victor Considérant had already cast Nicholas I as the Scourge of God: a Pan-Slavic invasion would unleash the “Asiatic hordes”, smash old Europe, and end when the invaders fraternized with European workers and all turned into socialists. Cœurderoy, a physician and self-declared anarchist driven into exile in 1849, expanded the conceit into a veritable eschatology. He foresaw the Russians at Constantinople by the end of 1855 and Paris within ten years. Yet he had no love for Tsarism; “Tsarism is Demolition”, he wrote; “Socialism is Reconstruction”. Russian force would break states, property, and national frontiers, and then be broken itself. France was a corpse and Russia a fetus; both, he declared, had to disappear. In Cœurderoy’s imagery, the — heavily orientalized — Cossack was simultaneously the Tsar’s cavalryman, the Romantic “new barbarian”, and a sort of mounted proletarian who would shake the European workers from their slumber. The Legitimists dreamed of a Russian sword to save civilization; Considérant and Cœurderoy wished for Russia to destroy it.

As so often in French imagination, Russia served as a mirror for French political and cultural anxieties; Russia, the knight in shining armor, or Russia, the barbarian; an invasion from le Nord, or l’Orient, used often more as a literary device than an analytical category.

Though Old France and its ideas had guttered out, a certain romantic image of Russia persisted in the more esoteric corners of French thought, even after France and Russia had crossed swords again in decidedly non-fraternal ways in Crimea.

Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, a Catholic aristocrat and former diplomat in Saint Petersburg, wrote The Russian Novel (1886), ostensibly a humble personal attempt to rekindle the lost camaraderie5. He believed French culture to be existentially exhausted and in dire need of the pity, sincerity, and religious hunger of the Russians; they might be able to “renew the French blood”:

Vogüé’s appeal to blood was not purely metaphorical; looking at the Russians, he commended “the purity of their Aryan blood” and direct descent from the ancient Aryans. Even the deviations and shortcomings were sacralized; Vogüé proposed the charmingly eccentric theory that Russian nihilism could be traced back to Graeco-Buddhist ideas of Nirvana.

The occultist Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, whose work would later inspire René Guénon, had stranger ideas still about Russia’s “mission”. This theorist of the Synarchy, an “ideal government” that would resolve all conflicts of class with a religious harmony of social functions, regarded the Emperor Alexander III as an instrument of such sacred politics. In The Mission of India in Europe, circulated only in private until after d’Alveydre’s death, he described the Russian people as having “atavistic affinities with all the divisions of the white race” and possessing an exquisite “instinct for occultism” that could serve to bridge the divide between Europe and Asia. Britain may yet unwittingly introduce synarchy in India, so he believed, but should they fail, the Tsar must conquer Asia in the name of Saint Michael, “the Solar Archangel”. He composed a poem addressed to Alexander III: an eschatology in which Russia’s destiny culminated in vast conquest and synarchy established over all Eurasia.

In less than a century, the “one Christian nation” of the Holy Alliance had died and been resurrected in the occult fringes as a vision of solar conquests, Agartha and Eurasianism6. Nothing could more neatly illustrate the limitations of this century-long French ideological projection — a borealism in which Russia was either a savage oppressor or a chivalrous savior, but always a spark lit from France’s soul, and always representing an aspect of France herself. As Russia became less “exotic” and France lost much of her tradition, this “invented Russia” of the French political imagination could not survive.

And yet, as World War One was raging, and the brilliant youth of Russia and France were brothers in arms once again, the great Léon Bloy (himself an admirer of Barbey d’Aurevilly) could still put down in his diary a dream of salvation: I await the Cossacks and the Holy Spirit7.

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00:02:00 - Iran war again?

00:10:00 - War destroying myths

00:12:00 - Gasoline Crisis in Russia

00:32:00 - Humanitarian aid to Russia?

00:39:30 - Russian political mores, Feminism and elections

00:50:00 - “Spirit of Anchorage” is done. Once again

00:55:00 - Putin’s plan for refineries & Crimea situation

01:00:30 - Mobilization in Russia?

01:07:00 - Roskosmos vs Starlink. Yandex GPT vs Chat GPT

01:10:00 - How it really feels

Few remember those events in detail; they are covered in a thick veil of propaganda and mythology (from all sides). We have scoured long-forgotten blogs, defunct news websites, talked to participants and checked out many other archival sources, all with one goal: reconstructing the history of those events — the Spirit of 2014!

We are attaching every individual episode in this series and also the full, almost 9 hours as a mega-episode as that may be more convenient for some.

The episodes should all be downloadable.

In 2014, the Russian Spring rolled through the eastern and southern Ukraine, leading to the reunification of Crimea with Russia. The new government in Kiev, having just taken power through the Euromaidan coup d’etat, decided to crush the pro-Russian protests by force, leading to the War in the Donbass. I dare to say that there is no other English-language treatment of the Crimean secession and the uprising in the Donbass with this level of detail.

Part II of this series focuses on the summer — and the carnage it brought. Low-level civil conflict turned into combined arms warfare, protestors with hunting rifles turned into mechanized battalions. Both Kiev and the Donbass put their energy into creating war-ready armies, which would soon clash on battlefields that had last heard the thunder of artillery in World War 2. The first summer campaign of the Donbass War was marked by the Ukrainian army’s audacious attempt to cut off and encircle the rebel republics, and the latter’s desperate maneuvers to counteract this.

We reconstructed Strelkov’s fortification of Slavyansk, Givi’s rise to glory, the Saur-Mogila meat grinder and the AFU’s failed gambit that led to wholesale slaughter at Izvarino and Ilovaisk — the famous “cauldrons”.

Almost three hours of carefully reconstructed Donbass War lore, covering April through September 2014.

This episode is a short interruption from battle plans and maps — we discuss the heroes of the Donbass Revolution; both the famous and the forgotten ones — where they came from, what they contributed and what became of them. The Donbass War, like so many revolutions, devoured its own children, and too many heroes of the Russian Spring found an early grave. To remember the Donbass War is to remember its warriors — and to be a warrior, as we know, is to live forever.

We carefully researched their backgrounds, achievements and, in some cases, the sketchy circumstances surrounding their deaths.

After the Summer Campaign of 2014, a fragile ceasefire, the “Minsk Protocol”, slowed down the Donbass War. Fierce fighting would soon resume and peak at two colossal struggles — the battles of Donetsk Airport and Debaltsevo. The finale of the latter coincided with the second ceasefire, known colloquially as “Minsk-2”.

We reconstruct these battles in detail and zoom out from the battlefield, putting the combat in the context of negotiations, and the whole war in the context of geopolitics. With this episode, our series on the Donbass War concludes. We end with a discussion on what the war actually meant, and what, ultimately, Russia’s stake in it was.

This is the first in-depth study of the 2014 War in the Donbass in English. The almost 9 hours in this series will give you an understanding of the origins of the most important European conflict of the 21st century.

Here’s the full series in one file:

00:00:00 - Smoking Q

00:04:20 - Topics overview

00:12:30 - On the increasing Ukrainian attacks

00:25:00 - Rear strikes & Moscow attack

00:37:30 - Death of Anchorage & Iran war

00:45:40 - Crimea troubles

00:50:00 - Russia’s rollback on censorship

00:54:30 - Crimea’s new rules

00:59:30 - SITREP

01:02:00 - Mobilization in Russia & Protests in Ukraine?

01:07:45 - On Jay & British woes

01:14:00 - Zelensky denied some Polish award

We talked about his life, his career, Russian culture and soft power in Africa. Of course, we also touched on military and security matters.

Ever wondered what’s playing on the radio in Bangui, or what the weather’s like there? Tune in to find out.

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00:06:00 - Latest Oreshnik

00:20:00 - Starobelsk & Land corridor strikes

00:28:00 - On Alex Karp & Palantir

00:39:40 - Kiev & Moscow drone strikes

00:48:00 - SITREP

00:54:00 - Relocant real estate confiscation bill

01:00:00 - Losses and trauma

01:06:00 - Infinity Indians

01:15:00 - Immigration restrictions & Traditional value…

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“The Battle of Konotop is a brand, a victory that ought to receive all-Ukrainian and world-wide recognition.”

Vasiliy Vovkun, former Minister of Culture of the Ukraine

On July 8th in 1659 a Polish-Tatar host defeated the army of Prince Trubetskoy, which was supported by the Cossacks of Hetman Bespaly. The fact that modern Ukrainian nationalism takes this engagement for one of the foundations of their national myth is quite interesting and warrants a closer look. First, we shall look at the historical background of the event itself, and then I shall attempt to derive some theoretical implications for the study of Ukrainian nationalism and “petty nationalisms” more generally.

In 1654, at Pereyaslav, the Cossack Hetman Bogdan Khmelnytsky — having raised a great revolt against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth six years before — swore an oath of allegiance to the Russian Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, placing the lands of the Zaporozhian Host under Muscovite suzerainty, once again reuniting the lands of what 19th century historians called “Kievan Rus”, or simply the medieval Russian state. The act triggered another Russo-Polish war that would drag on for thirteen years; the events related below fall in its middle.

Russian troops took Vilnius and Pinsk; the Cossacks stood under the walls of Lvov. Sweden, sensing the moment, mobilised her armies and declared war on the Poles; and faced now with the threat of a partition of the Rzeczpospolita between Russia and Sweden, Moscow and Warsaw concluded the Truce of Vilna.

In the summer of 1657 Khmelnytsky died, and the Zaporozhian cossacks elected Ivan Vygovsky as their new hetman. Of Vygovsky’s early life almost nothing is known, which, of course makes him a fantastic candidate for “founding father”. The freshly-minted hetman held pro-Polish views, which provoked a certain coldness among the Left-Bank Cossacks and the Little Russian commons. The Greek Metropolitan Michael of Kolasia, writing in 1657, put the Cossack attitude toward their hetman thus:

Vygovsky then betrayed the Russian throne and concluded with the Poles the Treaty of Hadiach (Gadiach) — in effect, a treaty of accession to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The Treaty of Hadiach (Gadiach) September 1658 would in theory have transformed the dual Commonwealth into a three-nation federation, by adding a Ruthenian — that is, Cossack — member alongside the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, with Orthodoxy restored to legal parity. As ratified by the Polish Sejm, however, nothing of substance survived.

On paper the treaty sounded very fine: noble privileges for the Cossacks, expanded rights for the Orthodox, political equality of Little Russia with the other constituent parts of the Commonwealth. In reality, the Poles never dreamt of granting equality to Little Russians, whom they regarded as bydło: the Polish word for “cattle”; that’s where the derogatory word for lower-class people in several Slavic languages comes from. The Polish Sejm struck from the treaty practically every positive provision (positive, that is, for the Cossacks and the Little Russians), after which Vygovsky lost any semblance of political support.

The other Cossacks rose against Vygovsky, and a civil war began. “Hetman” Vygovsky, being a democrat and a patriot — at least, Ukrainian historiography holds the Zaporozhian Host, that band of landlocked pirates, to have been a Ukrainian ethnostate and the elder democracy of Eastern Europe — took the proper decision: he resigned and handed power back to “the people”. Oh, pardon me. In fact, he swore allegiance to the Crimean Khan Mehmed IV Giray, that the Tatars might protect him from the angry “Ukrainian people”.

The Tatars suppressed the peasant and Cossack risings, and there began the so-called Ruina — “The Ruin” — a period of anarchy and war-of-all-against-all.

In the summer of 1658 Vygovsky began attacking Russian lands, burning Russian fortresses, and giving the Tatars leave to plunder Russian towns. The treasury of the Zaporozhian Host, accumulated by the great Hetman Khmelnytsky, Vygovsky spent on Tatar, Lithuanian, Polish, and German mercenaries. The Chronicle of the Most-Illustrious, Most-Serene Hetmans describes these events with admirable clarity:

In the autumn, Boyar Romodanovsky was dispatched into Little Russia at the head of the Belgorod Regiment, whereupon Vygovsky’s appetite for war against the Russians subsided, and he proclaimed his ever-lasting loyalty to the oath he had sworn to the Tsar. By the winter the ill-starred hetman had joined himself once more with the Tatars and the Poles and reopened hostilities against Russia. There began the next hot phase of what the world calls the “Russo-Polish War” and what the Ukrainian state calls a “Russo-Ukrainian War”.

Prince Trubetskoy marched on the Hetmanate and laid siege to Konotop. He was shortly joined by the forces of Romodanovsky and by those of Bespaly, declared Hetman by the Tsar until further instructions. The citizens of Konotop, having no particular wish to die for Poles and Tatars, began to protest and to demand the surrender of the town. Surrender did not come, because the Crimean Tatar army of Khan Mehmed had arrived.

The Horde brought thirty-five thousand men to Konotop. Of Poles, mercenaries of various sorts, and treasonous Cossacks there were about twenty-five thousand. The Russian regiments comprised thirty-five thousand soldiers. It must be remarked that these figures are likely inflated: neither the logistics of the period nor the demography of the region permitted battles on such a scale. Nevertheless, we shall keep to the traditional numbers for the sake of narrative.

Vygovsky’s detachment fell upon Trubetskoy’s army, forcing him to retreat; but Trubetskoy soon collected himself, went over to the counter-attack, and drove the treasonous hetman back toward his own camp. Trubetskoy then continued the siege of Konotop with the lion’s share of the Russian army and dispatched Princes Pozharsky and Lvov in pursuit of Vygovsky, in the direction of Sosnovka.

Pozharsky encountered the Tatar warband of Adil Giray, the Khan’s younger brother, forced it into retreat, and began a pursuit to the south-east. The Tatar band broke, unable to withstand the frontal charge of the boyar cavalry, and Pozharsky wished to finish them off. To his great misfortune he had sent no scouts ahead, and suddenly found himself in an ambush. His modest detachment was surrounded by the main host of the Khan. Tens of thousands of Tatars (here again we keep to the figures of the chronicles, improbable though they be; I suppose a reduction by an order of magnitude would be in order) threw themselves upon Pozharsky’s cavalry and Bespaly’s Cossacks. Arrows blotted out the sun and sowed death among the Russian force; then came the assault — wave upon wave of Tatar cavalry pressing in upon the small mounted detachment.

The Russian force was utterly defeated: every man was either killed or captured. Pozharsky himself fell prisoner. He spat in the face of the Crimean Khan, cursed Vygovsky, and met a noble death. In honour of the prince a folk song was composed, the Song of the Death of Prince Semyon Pozharsky:

It is worth noting that this whole engagement was felt, by Russians and Tatars alike, as a purely Russo-Tatar affair — of any, God forbid, “Ukrainians” there is not a trace.

On learning the fate of Pozharsky’s detachment, Trubetskoy sent Romodanovsky to the field. Romodanovsky, finding the detachment annihilated, began to organize a defence on the river Kukolka. He was reinforced by the boyar sons and a cavalry regiment. Vygovsky with his Cossacks assaulted Romodanovsky’s positions, relying on his numerical superiority, and accomplished nothing. The Cossacks had not the slightest desire to fight against their brothers in faith and in blood, and most of them had been driven into Vygovsky’s army by Tatar whips. Vygovsky was obliged to pull the Cossacks back and to throw his Lithuanian and German mercenaries against Romodanovsky. The mercenaries, no more able to break through the Russian defences, also failed to seize the crossing — the positions on the Kukolka fell only when the Crimean Tatars struck from the rear. Even then Romodanovsky’s forces were not routed, and the boyars returned to Trubetskoy.

Vygovsky’s traitor Cossacks and the Tatars resolved to fall upon Trubetskoy’s camp, but by this point the latter had gathered his troops and dealt the Tatar-Lithuanian force a decisive rebuff. The attempted assault came to nothing: Trubetskoy’s soldiers broke the enemy line, Vygovsky himself was wounded, and the Tatars, mercenaries, and Cossacks were thrown back upon the positions they had held before they had taken the crossing at Sosnovka. Trubetskoy, recognising the strategic futility of continuing the siege, turned his army toward Putivl. After he left the camp, the enemy attempted one more attack, and again had to abort after suffering heavy losses.

Trubetskoy had no cavalry — his horsemen had fallen with Pozharsky to a man —, far less artillery than Vygovsky, and was pursued by the vast army of the Crimean Khan. Nevertheless, the Russian infantry retreated in good order and even managed to save all of their field guns. All Tatar attacks were held off and the Polish-Tatar forces suffered painful losses.

As we can see, the construction of the Battle of Konotop as a “Ukrainian victory” is… a very liberal interpretation, to say the least. The destruction of Pozharsky’s detachment was indeed a vexing loss; Konotop was indeed never taken; but the whole episode had little impact on the Russian army as a whole — for that matter, even Trubetskoy’s force survived mostly intact. The sum of Mehmed’s and Vygovsky’s achievements: the death of Pozharsky, the destruction of a single cavalry detachment, the lifting of the siege of Konotop, and the bestial murder of Russian prisoners (Vygovsky handed them over to his Tatar friends). A complete peremoha!

The Russian troops withdrew; the Tatars set joyously to plundering, killing, and carrying off Little Russians into slavery; and Vygovsky became a dead man walking. While the Tatars abused the Little Russians, the Poles continued sucking them dry. Hatred for the occupiers and the pans grew into hatred for Vygovsky, and more and more Zaporozhians began to switch sides and swear allegiance to Moscow. Ataman Ivan Sirko set to conducting brutal raids against the Tatars, forcing the Crimean Khan to abandon his favorite Vygovsky (who else would willingly give up so many of his own subjects into slavery?) and to return to the Crimea.

Vygovsky never managed to take Kiev; his army melted away; and at a Cossack rada near Kiev the Zaporozhians cut down Vygovsky’s men for having dealings with the Polish. Yuri Khmelnitsky, Bogdan’s son, was named new Hetman, and Vygovsky himself fled to his lords in Poland. The Poles, in the course of some intrigue or other, put him to death. The new hetman concluded a treaty with the Russian Tsar and renewed his oath; the Russo-Polish war ended in a Russian victory and the Truce of Andrusovo.

What is left of the Battle of Konotop, this “glorious victory of Ukrainian arms” [sic]? The traitor Vygovsky, having broken multiple oaths and treaties, goes to war against the Russians — including, if one follows Ukrainian mythology, the “Ukrainian Cossacks” of Bespaly. He achieves no significant successes; the only victories over the “Muscovites” are won by Crimean Tatars and Poles. The Crimean Tatars are the bulk of the Polish-Lithuanian army at Konotop, and in fact the principal beneficiary of this glorious peremoha. They burned and plundered dozens of Russian towns and drove twenty-five thousand persons into slavery — though if one is to remain within the framework of Ukrainian historiography, of course, those carried off into Tatar slavery were Ukrainians. Vygovsky himself, naturally, did not know the words “Ukraine” or “Ukrainians”.

So much for the history. But why do the Ukrainians celebrate the anniversary of this battle with such pomp? Why does it play such a crucial role in the nationalist historiography of the modern Ukraine state?

The answer is that the Ukraine has no “history”, if we are speaking in the sense of a national canon. It is an artificial identity, and worst of all, it is a very late and a very clumsy artificial identity. Consider it: in essence, a minor skirmish that altered nothing in the course of the war, that brought about only political chaos in the victorious country and the slavery of tens of thousands of its subjects. This is the cornerstone of the national myth of a state of what used to be forty million. Such a battle would not suffice even for the national myth of some little Balkan country (the foundation of the Serbian myth, the Battle of Kosovo Polje, is ten times more important, both for the Serbs themselves and for world history); and here it is a matter upon which millions are supposed to be raised, their Lexington and Concord, their Teutoburg Forest.

The study of nationalism is a vast field, and I do not pretend here to give a comprehensive account of it. One could discuss Hobsbawm, Smith and Anderson and dozens of other names and still only scratch the surface; but my purpose here is not to drop names, or rehearse familiar arguments about primordial vs modern, natural vs constructed, civic vs ethnic, emancipatory vs pathological and other such great debates of the field.

What is of interest to me here — and hopefully to the reader — is a narrower and more generally unpleasant phenomenon, namely the peculiar psychology of what one might call “petty nationalism”. By this I do not simply mean the nationalism of small nations. Small nations can possess deep historical memory, serious political traditions, and a coherent sense of civilizational dignity. Petty nationalism is something more specific: a nationalism marked by insecurity, resentment, belatedness, a scarcity of symbols, and a heavy dependence on negative identification.

I propose that these petty nationalisms are collectively suffering from Konotop Syndrome — the transformation of marginal, ambiguous, failed, or morally compromised historical material, discarded by the full-fledged nations adjacent to it, and taken into the national myth of a group going through the leftovers of others. The Ukraine is a brilliant example of this, and the one I am most intimately familiar with.

The Ukrainians appeared not so very long ago, and began constructing their national myth at a moment when the era of national-myth construction was long since past. Everything was already accounted for. The whos, the wheres, the whens, the whys. There exist generally accepted assessments of friendships, enmities, victories, betrayals. And all of this was done without the Ukrainians. They are therefore obliged to construct their national myth out of what the other nations have refused — chiefly out of what the Poles and the Russians have rejected. Vygovsky was an ordinary breaker of a feudal oath, and a Polish subject. A Russian traitor; a Polish pawn. The Russians are ashamed of him; the Poles killed him. Thus is a Ukrainian hero born. Such a “Birth of a Nation” can only be traumatic.

The Ukraine is a country in which men like Mazepa and Vygovsky are accounted national heroes, although they belonged to other nations and were, at bottom, merely turncoats and careerists. The Ukraine is a country in which Taras Shevchenko is reckoned a great writer and the spiritual prophet of the Ukrainian nation, although he was a peripheral phenomenon of Russian literature out of the Little Russian village, perhaps comparable to the Félibrige movement in southern France that aimed to “restore” the Provençal language. Mazepa and Vygovsky are wanted neither by the Swedes, nor by the Poles, nor by the Russians. Shevchenko did not enter the pantheon of Russian literature. Exclusively for this reason did these men find themselves in the Ukrainian pantheon.

This point is not exclusive to Ukrainian nationalism, and it is not merely polemical (though I am happy to admit that it is polemical, too). There is a real theoretical problem in the study of nationalism: what happens when a nationalist movement must construct a full myth-symbol complex from materials that are simply too thin, too late, too derivative, or too compromised to bear the weight placed upon them?

The concept of ethnosymbolism as introduced by Anthony D. Smith is especially useful here, because it reminds us that nations require myths, memories, symbols, heroes, sacred territories, and narratives of continuity. But Smith’s framework also invites a further question: what happens under conditions of what we might call symbolic scarcity? What happens when the mythic raw material is insufficient, already claimed, or exists only in the margins of someone else’s history?

The conceptual answer I propose is salvaged tradition. Hobsbawm wrote on “Invented Tradition”, and this phenomenon, too, makes up a large portion of what is now Ukrainian nationalism (one need only think of the vyshyvanka, the Ukrainian peasant embroidery, popularized and symbolically constructed by Archduke Wilhelm of Austria as well as St. Petersburg-based soap companies looking to decorate their packaging).

The modern nation is more than a population, a language and a territory; it is also a symbolic economy, a well-structured field of shared memory, of victories and calamities, of prophets and founding fathers, martyrs, heroes and grievances, of sources of moral superiority and ritualized humiliations. The success of nationalism requires the mobilization of ethnic or cultural memory into a usable hierarchy of meaning: even nationalisms that are built upon rejection of myth operate by selection of myth. They all elevate some names and bury others, they rename cities and streets, they change school curricula and build or destroy monuments; they create heroes, rehabilitate villains and assign destiny to men who would not have comprehended the concepts and ideologies under which posterity would conscript them.

But what happens when symbolic resources available to a nationalist project are too weak? What happens when the medieval kingdom already belongs to another national canon, when the lullabies are sung in another language, when the church is already part of a broad civilizational identity and the battlefield victories are already accounted for in another nation’s history books? The nationalist project is still in need of mythic capital. The absence of such material does not abolish the demand; on the contrary, it intensifies it.

This is the point at which history becomes a market of symbolic scarcity. The distribution of prestige in the history of various groups is inherently unequal. Some nations might inherit empires and saints; others nothing but borderland ambiguities and peasant folkways. Konotop Syndrome arises precisely when the latter is pressed into the service of a nationalist project to perform the mythic labor of the former.

Earlier, I said that the Ukrainian national project does not have a history. Obviously, in some sense this statement is false; no human community, even if it was made up out of thin air last week, lacks a material and spiritual past in the broadest sense. What the Ukrainian national project lacks, structurally, is historical material that can be converted into a high-prestige, load-bearing national canon. It lacks an obvious and continuous national history. Without drifting off too far, this is connected to how and when the Ukrainian national identity was constructed — initially, as an Austrian weaponization of its Galician possessions in response to Russian dabbling in Panslavism; later imposed by the Soviet fiat of korenization ideology.

In any case, we may disregard the reasons here, but we can establish that Ukrainian nationalism suffers from symbolic scarcity. Miroslav Hroch, in Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, looked at the way various smaller European nations constructed their national mythology. His work shows that many national movements began not as “mass awakenings” or anything of that sort, but as pet projects of small circles of intellectuals engaging in scholarly, linguistic, and cultural labor. These activists had to create the nation before it could be mobilized politically. The very necessity of such work indicates that the nation was not simply waiting in finished form. It had to be assembled from heterogeneous materials. Symbolic scarcity is a struggle when it has to be dealt with on behalf of a pre-national population; a people that is, historically, an object, not a subject, and has little to present other than village folklore (such as was the case with e.g. the Slovaks or the Estonians). It becomes acute when the population in question is already part of another nation and has to be constructed out of ephemeral differences of region or dialect, such as is the case with Ukrainians.

Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of “invented tradition” is a favored, if often overstated, instrument in analyzing nationalism. The gist is that modern nations often artificially “age” things; some cultural, institutional or other phenomenon is declared to be a bridge between a glorified past and a present to be molded. A simple example would be the Scottish Tartan, which is often taken to represent medieval if not ancient traditions of clannishness, but was actually developed, like so many national traditions taken for granted, in the 19th century. The modern state routinely converts creative invention into identity, particularly through modern institutions — the bureaucracy, the military, the educational system, and so on.

Konotop Syndrome belongs in this general family, but it requires a more specific term: salvaged tradition. Invented tradition emphasizes the manufacture of continuity — the nationalist comes up with something neat, then claims it is actually centuries or millennia old. Salvaged tradition, on the other hand, emphasizes the revaluation of discarded or marginal material. The late nationalist is not always inventing ex nihilo. Often, he is searching through the refuse of neighboring canons: the traitor nobody wants, the provincial poet nobody ever read, the failed rebellion.

Salvaged tradition is a second-order symbolic operation. It depends on either prior exclusion, usually external, or on a peripheral narrative that was not actively excluded, but still didn’t end up figuring in a canon because of its banality. The late nationalism performs an act of scavenging, or of counter-valuation. The rejected object is either rescued, and then its rejection becomes part of its value, or it is found on the trash heap. It might also be simply stolen — a narrative is reinterpreted, a salt tax rebellion becomes a nationalist uprising, and so forth.

Ambiguous figures, or figures retroactively endowed with ambiguity, can be easily claimed because their meaning is unstable. Vygovsky is a perfect example of this. Was he an opportunist, or was he a clever strategist? Was he an oath-breaker, or a sovereign actor? Vygovsky already is a part of the Polish and Russian, and possibly Tatar, narratives, and he has a place there: a renegade, and a loser. Salvaged tradition is, almost by necessity, always dishonest to a degree, often in ways that non-petty nationalism doesn’t have to be.

Much of what we understand to be the modern “nation”, indeed, stems from the 19th century and institutional modernity; but Benedict Anderson et al overstate the artificiality of the modern nation as such. There are very real and very organic ways in which e.g. the Germans, the Italians, the English, the Russians and the French can trace their nationhood to the Middle Ages. This is emphatically not the case for petty nationalists.

Petty nationalism is a recurring pathology; it exists in a mode of anxious overproduction of myth under conditions of historical lateness, and a certain semantic emptiness. It may operate under superficially similar conditions, but there is a sharp divide between ordinary national myth-making and the more desperate process by which petty nationalism constructs itself from symbolic scarcity, salvaged tradition, and negation.

A mature national canon asks the question, what shows best who we are? The petty nationalist canon created under conditions of symbolic scarcity instead asks, what proves best that we are not them? This shift from expression to opposition is central to Konotop Syndrome. The value of a symbol no longer lies primarily in its intrinsic prestige, cultural fecundity, or historical consequence. It lies in its ability to mark a boundary against a neighbor. The minor skirmish is elevated beyond reason not only because it is there and nobody cares, but also because it can be narrated as a victory over the imperial center.

This process produces what we might call an anti-canon: a pantheon organized by negative selection. Its implicit rules are measured by opposition. It prefers the episode that embarrasses the neighbor, the rebel, the defector. A national canon organized around positive achievement can afford variety. An anti-canon tends toward monotony because all symbols must perform the same boundary-making function.

Nationalism can seldom afford the luxury of being an entirely self-contained doctrine; it is often forced to operate within a complex field of competitors and various internal and external actors. The petty nationalism in particular defines itself not on its own terms — the inability to do this is, indeed, one of its main attributes — but only through interaction with rival claims. Not only historical memories, but even monuments and surnames have to be litigated permanently.

The anti-canon is thus marked by both dependence and hostility. It denounces the larger neighbor but is defined by his presence. It speaks — it speaks a lot — but all it says boils down to, we are not you, we are special. In everything the petty nationalist proclaims, the hated center, the neighbor, remains the foundational structure of the national self. Identity is only available as a form of negative dependency. The nation secures itself by repetition of separation ad infinitum. One may, offensively but not inaccurately, compare it to the satanist’s Black Mass, which would be entirely meaningless without a Christian Mass to defile and parody.

A nationalism that suffers from symbolic scarcity cannot easily say: we built this city, we conquered that land, we defeated this enemy, we wrote that book. It has to convert absence or exclusion into a virtue; the universal language of petty nationalism is that the great nation oppressed us, but the petty nation preserved authenticity; the great nation forgot their traditions, they are mongrels, but the petty nation is pure and rustic. It is a sort of romantic revenge of the periphery. The basic structure of romanticism can produce genuine cultural renewal, but it can also trap the nation inside a permanent adolescence of complaint, and the structural petrification of the latter is what constitutes petty nationalism.

Petty nationalism may be understood, in this sense, by analogy with Carl Schmitt’s critique of romantic occasionalism. Its distinctive character is that it subjectifies the principal term of nationalism: the nation. In the classical expression of mature nationalism, the nation figures as an objective historical reality, a continuity of shared memory, language, territory and such; all phenomena which precede the individual and actively command him. In petty nationalism, by contrast, the nation becomes less a historical form than a mood to be expressed. The wounded collective ego is the center, the court of last resort. Whatever confirms its never-ending grievance is right and true; whatever diminishes its grievance is falsification, “propaganda”, a vile theft of its patrimony.

This is why the historical content of petty nationalism is so often opportunistic and expressed in the most unstable form. Lacking firm social and intellectual foundations, it yields itself to every powerful narrative in its vicinity that can be weaponized: peasant embroidery, vernacular song, half-mythical rebellions. These things need not belong to one another organically, as long as they may be arranged against the hated center. The nation is not discovered in petty nationalism; instead, it is formed as dictated by the demands of a mood.

Petty nationalism always suffers from a peculiar lack of proportion. It cannot ever afford the lazy imperial indifference of the great nations. Since the available material is too weak to bear the weight placed upon it, everything must be defended with a theatrical intensity. Petty nationalism is the romanticism of a people that missed the heroic age. It mistakes the objects of national sentiment for national substance itself.

The anxiety of recognition — the daily fight of the petty nationalist — leads to the well-known moral alchemy of ressentiment; the pettiness of the petty nationalist’s narrative cannot be overcome outwardly, so it has to be overcome internally by turning its deficits into expressions of superiority. Nietzschean ressentiment also explains why the petty nationalism exhibits a particular tone, a particular shrillness that borders on hysteria. The symbols being elevated are unstable, if they are real at all. Their greatness is not self-evident. It must be asserted and ritualized. The most insignificant of figures or events simply must be commemorated with excessive solemnity because its mythopoetic burden far exceeds its historical weight. This disproportionate commemoration is one of the most visible symptoms of Konotop Syndrome. The more doubtful its self-evident significance, the more insistently it must be ritualized, leading into a vicious cycle of hypocrisy and forceful pedagogy. This is why doubt is tantamount to treason.

Petty nationalism is not synonymous with the nationalism of any small nation. A nationalism becomes petty when its symbolic life is dominated by envy, mimicry, grievance, status anxiety, and obsessive comparison with a larger neighbor. Petty nationalism is obsessed with recognition but resents the standards by which recognition is granted; it wants a great literature, like the great nations, but it lacks the writers. It can only survive by convulsing between imitation and denunciation, that is, by copying the form of the greater national canon while accusing that very same greater canon of oppression, theft and whatever else. It is addicted to external validation — it needs UNESCO listings, it needs the peasant beet soup to be recognized as the best peasant beet soup. It needs certification from outside that its stolen or salvaged symbols are universal facts to be admired. Again, Ukrainian nationalism is the best example. You may remember Ukrainian activists successfully convincing art museums in the US and Britain to change Ilya Repin’s nationality from Russian to Ukrainian; objectively, an absurd demand, but within the framework of petty nationalism suffering from severe symbolic scarcity, it makes perfect sense.

They fear that their myth will be seen as provincial, as third-rate, since it consists of things that are either not theirs, and obviously so, or that were found wanting by others and discarded, only to be picked up by the petty nationalist. Since the national myth is disproportionate, this obsessive quest for recognition only deepens the embarrassment it seeks to overcome.

Konotop Syndrome, then, is not merely the falsification of a historical episode, or a symptom of self-aggrandizing nationalism as such. It is the pathology of a nationalism that lacks any sort of “real” foundation and is forced to construct itself from the “leftovers”. Petty nationalism comes late, too late; all the prestige available is already incorporated into one national myth or another. Its tragedy and its sickness is not just that it has to lie about its past in an attempt to steal together some narrative.

Operating under conditions of symbolic scarcity — the absence of viable ethnosymbolist raw material to forge a national identity from —, it continually demands from those historical leftovers a grandeur they cannot hope to provide. Its salvaged tradition — marginal historical material discarded by others and inflated by the petty nationalist into load-bearing national myth — has to be forever litigated in an anxious, never-ending process of begging for recognition. Its anti-canon can never afford silence or indifference; it is constantly agitated, always coping and compensating because nothing is self-evident. It has to shout, always, because its symbols can’t speak for themselves.

This is the curse of petty nationalism.

Russia’s most famous Hearts of Iron gamer defeated half a dozen Western enemies in a 6v1 playing one of the weirder mods. Dozens of clips from the stream are being posted all over. Kids are talking about it at school. Certainly one of the most entertaining events in the map game world in a long time.

We talked to our friend Grisha about the match, the E…

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So far, there are about 8 hours of content for you to listen to. Enjoy, and be assured that we will finish it.

The episodes should all be downloadable, too.

Conquest after conquest, heads on pikes, slave raids, and centuries of low-intensity frontier race war: the history of the Caucasus is written in blood. The chain of events that led to the Chechen Wars began in the Mesozoic Era, when the Iranian and Eurasian tectonic plates collided and folded a bunch of rocks into a mountain range that was destined to become one of the strategic flashpoints of history.

We did not go back quite so far, but the introductory episode to our series on the Chechen Wars briefly covers the history of the Caucasus region (as well as the Chechen people) from antiquity to the modern period.

A cruel geographic necessity pushed many empires to conquer the Caucasus, and Russia was no exception. We cover the early Russian colonization and settlement of the area, the stubborn resistance from locals and how it was eventually broken after half a century of war… Or was it? Tension remained, blood was still spilled, and after a brief respite of several decades the Revolution of 1917 made the region explode again. Chechen-Soviet relations were complicated and, at times, quite schizophrenic.

Trade routes, Sufi mysticism, North Russian pirates, Cossacks, insane Soviet ethnopolitics, “literally Hitler” – all of that formed the background for what would become a horror show of ethnic cleansing and war after the collapse of the USSR.

By the late 80s, the winding down of Soviet repressions breathed new life into Chechen separatism. They remained in the shadows, hiding behind clubs and movements, and timed their strike exceedingly well – by allying with the Yeltsin coup in 1991, they bought themselves time & goodwill.

What followed was not just a nightmare, but a national humiliation: hundreds of thousands of Russians ethnically cleansed from their homes; tens of thousands murdered, raped or enslaved. Government officials making deals with terrorists, dozens of Soviet weapon depots surrendered to separatists without a fight. Chechnya turned into a vicious tumor of crime & violence, threatening the entire Russian South.

Dudayev ruled Chechnya at gunpoint, but even the alpha wolf, a former Soviet General, could not reign in the myriad of gangs and warlords that were seizing their piece of the pie. The Russian government was indulging in crippling apathy – the oil kept flowing, shady deals made at the highest levels prevented anything from being done, all while thousands upon thousands of refugees fled Chechnya with nothing but the clothes on their back.

Part 2 of our Chechen Wars series tells the story of the blackest depths of modern Russia, our national disgrace, our forgotten martyrs. The Yeltsin regime tolerated Dudayev’s reign of terror until it couldn’t anymore – not because of any humanitarian or patriotic feeling, but because they “loved Russia” as a resource to exploit, and the pie shouldn’t get any smaller.

By the end of 1994, the Russian Army, collapsing of rot and bled dry by budget cuts, embarked on their desperate mission, never knowing whether there were more enemies at the front or in the rear…

The First Chechen War began with the Yeltsin government’s hollow promise of a “restoration of constitutional order”. What followed was a mechanized pilgrimage to slaughter: military convoys being ambushed before even reaching Chechnya, maps that were so old they lacked the designated rendezvous points, rebels armed with RPGs sold to them by the corrupt oligarchs living in the antechambers of the government that sent the army in.

Yet the conscripts bled forward anyway, dragging wounded through flame‑gutted stairwells, storming the city of Grozny house‑by‑house, holding shattered bridges against waves of enemies... This episode is not very hopeful. Yet it covers an extremely important period in Russia’s modern history that is absolutely crucial to understand its transition from the 90s to the 00s.

rozny was captured, but the war did not end. From the ruined city, the conflict moved into the forests and foothills, the villages and ravines, the frozen passes. Argun and Bamut became places where men disappeared into smoke and returned changed.

Then came the terror... The horrors of Budyonnovsk and Kizlyar swept over Russia, breaking the will of a country trying to survive its own collapse. Dudayev was vaporized — but his death changed nothing. The shameful Khasavyurt agreements of 1996 ended this chapter, but not the war. War would come back.

Everyone knew that the shameful Khasavyurt agreements of 1996 could only be a pause, not a real peace. Chechnya quickly degenerated into a complete failed state, run by competing warlords, each with their own militia. Foreign agitators kept spreading the most radical forms of jihadist ideology, and terrorists from all over the Muslim world flooded the mountainous scar on the face of the Caucasus.

“Ichkeria” did not have an economy: the remnants of Soviet industry were quickly looted. Other than subsistence farming, the only ways to make money were drug trafficking, hostage-taking, oil theft, and the slave trade. Clearly, this enclave could not exist forever. The metastases of terror and crime spread across southern Russia and reached even Moscow.

The situation came to a boiling point. Bombs were shaking Russian cities, the corrupt Yeltsin regime was in its death throes, and the jihadists were sure the Caucasian underbelly of Russia was ripe for conquest.

At the same time, a certain former KGB officer appeared on the scene, promising to solve the problem once and for all...

In the previous chapter, “Colonel Peters”, Turkul gives us the exceptional warrior: Greek in a Homeric sense; blessed with divine calm in battle, a bronze-clad hero possessed by a martial daemon, existing for the duration of the war and then undone by the loss of war and love. Where Colonel Peters is the icon of solitary virtue, “Captain Ivanov”, the hero of this chapter, is the ordinary Russian man elevated into a type: cheerful, rustic, pious in the most unpretentious sense, beloved by his soldiers. He is the embodiment of communal Russian martial valor; no lone hero shining against the sky, but the captain as father of his men; household, discipline, service, burial rite — the salt of the Russian earth.

It is not only I, but all my comrades in battle, who have this feeling: through all our waking life there pass before us, before our spiritual sight, always and everywhere, as though flooded with clear light, the people, events, places, and pictures of what has already become memory.

So I always see Captain Ivanov before me; I see his black-haired head, wet from his morning washing, his dazzling smile, his ruddy face, and I hear his pleasantly burred speech.

How young he is, how well put together. Freshness seems to come from him. I see him, short, with a blade of grass in his teeth, tapping his riding crop against his dusty boot, walking beside me in the marching column; I hear the sound of his carefree laughter. The image of Captain Ivanov is inseparable for me from Russian morning coolness, from the air of our campaigns.

The blue, disheveled clouds of early morning before battle, when you wake up chilled in the wet grass — who among us did not then feel, in every outlined branch, in the dew playing on the grass, in the light sounds of morning, even in the way the regimental dog shook itself off, the living unity of the whole world?

I remember, it seems to me, every horse-track filled with water, and the smell of green grain after rain, and how the light mists trailed near the distant wood, and how they sang far behind me in the ranks. They sang dashingly, yet for some reason I felt sad, and I felt again that everything in this world is one, but could not say in what that unity consists. Probably in love and suffering.

And Captain Ivanov now seems to me some kind of Russian unity. I must confess that I have forgotten his patronymic. His name was Pyotr, but we nicknamed him Grisha. Here was the true Ivanov No. 71, with the stress on the “o,” a man from that great crowd of nameless extras against whose background operatic or operetta heroes play out their roles.

There was precisely nothing remarkable about him, if one does not count his fresh youth, his shining smile, his dry, dark hands, and the fact that he burred his r’s quite classically, in the manner of War and Peace, pronouncing “r” as “g.”

But this very army captain, simple and modest, with his perfect truth in everything he did and thought, is the true “hero of our time.” One might say that the writers had even foreseen him; for instance, Tolstoy’s Captain Tushin, barefoot, with his short pipe by his tent on the field of Austerlitz, is undoubtedly a forerunner of Captain Ivanov, just as Maxim Maximych, walking behind the creaking Caucasian arba, or Lieutenant Grinyov from The Captain’s Daughter, are forerunners too2.

Army Captain Ivanov is the hero of our time. While other schools produced loose men, without any inner axis, our military school always produced men who were precise, gathered, who knew what was permitted and what was not, and above all possessed a true feeling for Russia which had never grown clouded. This feeling was the consciousness of constant service to her. For Russian military service-men, Russia was not merely a piling-up of lands and peoples, one-sixth of the earth’s landmass, and so on, but was for them the fatherland of the spirit. Russia was such an extraordinary and beautiful totality of spirit, such a spiritual order, such a manifestation of Russian genius in its greatness, honor, and truth, that for Russian military men she was Holy Russia.

Captain Ivanov, like all his comrades in battle, went into the fire of the Civil War precisely because Holy Russia had been sacrilegiously profaned, whether by her own or by strangers made no difference.

Like all the rest, Ivanov was a poor officer from among those Russian infantrymen, those unknown provincial staff captains who not only owned no country estates or factories, but often did not know how to conceal the traces of time and bad weather on a worn little officer’s greatcoat, or how to pay for new boots.

Captain Ivanov was utterly remote from Petersburg society and from high society, not to mention, of course, court circles, which likewise had precisely nothing to do either with the provincial army man Ivanov or with the whole White Army. In peacetime, in some backwoods place, devil knows in what godforsaken hole, where you could ride for a month and never arrive, in a small army garrison, the unknown Captain Ivanov would have spent his simple army life, just like thousands of his namesakes with the stress on the “o.”

He would occasionally have allowed himself to buy a riding crop or cologne somewhere in Slutsk or Rovno; in Warsaw, boots with soft patent-leather tops. He would have read insatiably, in binges, until first cockcrow on whatever came to hand in the dusty town library, and likewise until cockcrow, or even later, he would have sat up nights over a small-stakes game of Preferans3. Sometimes he would have been more cheerful and noisy than permitted in the officers’ club, and would have spent his evenings in solitary walks along the little town river marked on no geographical map.

Over the evening dampness of the river, with a young man’s pity for himself, he would have thought that he was lonely, that there was still no beloved, and with gratitude he would have remembered the last kiss that had happened at the regiment’s quarters, some fifteen hundred versts from this unknown little river.

Captain Ivanov’s unpretentious life in peacetime would have been shaken, and then only partly, by reprimands from his superiors, and above all by affairs of the heart and of cards. So he would have grown old together with the old soldiers of that same 4th Company of God knows what, the last in the army rolls, the 208th Lori Infantry Regiment4 of our army, and peacefully have given up his soul to God, firmly believing in Holy Russia.

Ivanov came from one of those families only just risen in the world, who by their own backs and blameless service had made their way into society. Most of these captains were the children of minor officials and officers, of military and veterinary doctors, telegraphists, old soldiers, provincial feldshers5, just as Kutepov was the son of a clerk in a provincial treasury chamber.

For other peoples, the fatherland is vain pride, and with posing besides, or admiration for a flourishing trading station; but for Russian Captain Ivanovs the fatherland meant service, in all truth, to the Motherland-Russia even to the final breath. Captain Ivanov knew ingenuously that Russia was the most just, the kindest, and the most beautiful country in the world, and believed just as ingenuously that if something in her was not yet arranged, not yet set in order, then in its own time all would be arranged and set in order justly.

Someday in Russia they will understand that between the former “old-regime” Russia, fallen in the Time of Troubles, and the Bolshevik darkness which displaced in Russia all that is divine and human, there passed like a vision of extraordinary light, in fire and blood, the White Russia of the Captain Ivanovs, the Russia of truth and justice.

The first Russian militia of the Captain Ivanovs was defeated. So too, in the Time of Troubles, the first militia of Prokopy Lyapunov was defeated, though it already stood before Moscow itself. But nothing and no one except that same Russian militia, the second militia of Minin and Prince Pozharsky, freed Moscow from the turmoil.

And in all the wide world, for army Captain Ivanov, his native 4th Company was a living part, a breathing image of Holy Russia. What young officer did not love his company or platoon, those village soldiers’ eyes, which before the revolution knew neither good nor evil, those strong and kind hands of young peasants, the soldierly smell of rye bread and damp greatcoats, clean shirts and bathhouse birch-brooms?

Captain Ivanov loved his countrymen so much, and lived so closely with them, that imperceptibly he himself came to share the simple tastes and habits of old service-men, though he was hardly over thirty.

Like all our long-service soldiers, he loved to steam himself in the bathhouse and have someone shake a hot birch-broom over him. I remember how he rejoiced in that furnace and laughed, hanging his wet head from the bathhouse shelf, and how on his chest, on a wet cord, there gleamed a simple silver cross, worn smooth and thin, exactly like the crosses of the old soldiers. He valued a little kvass, sauerkraut, and a small glass of vodka, with a good satisfied grunt.

In this, Captain Ivanov repeated all the army Ivanovs, that simple army kind of ours, in which there lived the simple and eternally young soul of Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov6 himself. However, unlike the habits of the glorious field marshal, Ivanov, probably on account of his youth, was, how shall one put it cautiously, a considerable womanizer.

When the occasion arose he liked to make advances, and in his affairs of the heart he was simple in the extreme. He liked women; I mean that he liked real village women, preferably on the stout side, tall widows with a bold, strong stride and with such a ringing patter of speech that under its fire not only a captain, but any general with all his staff, could not have held out.

Captain Ivanov liked women exactly as his soldiers did, and the whole 4th Company respected the romances of its commander and protected their peaceful course from unnecessary interference. Captain Ivanov would take a village. His soldiers would quarter themselves in excellent huts, while the captain himself would slip into such a remote little shack on three legs that it was almost embarrassing. But then one could be sure that in those crooked-legged mansions there lived some tall widow.

To find Captain Ivanov in a village, one did not need to look for the house where he was quartered, but to call over the first soldier encountered and ask:

“Where does a young widow live around here?”

How many times did I go to Captain Ivanov when he was occupied with affairs of the heart; and one had to see how the soldiers of the 4th Company, those eccentrics, winked at one another and gave other tried-and-true signals, while the orderly, headlong, was already tearing at full speed through the backyards to warn the captain, lest, God forbid, Colonel Turkul find him in combat position at a rendezvous.

I must say that I never did catch Captain Ivanov unawares. Forewarned, he would come out to me on the porch with a dazzling smile, with slightly disheveled black hair, perhaps only the collar of his white Russian shirt unbuttoned at the neck, and would burr cheerfully and slyly:

“Good health to you, Colonel, sir.”

And his smile, in truth, was charming.

I especially loved watching him when, after a successful battle, on a field just trampled by the attack, the prisoners were sorted and questioned.

Among his countrymen in worn gray greatcoats, with dark or broken red stars on crumpled caps, among faces of the Russian common people, resembling one another, often high-cheekboned, snub-nosed, and somehow sleepy, we recognized the Communists at once, and always without error. We recognized them by the eyes, by the gaze of their whitish eyes, by some inexpressible fold at the mouth.

It was something like how, by one black little spot, the young lady in “May Night” recognized the witch-stepmother among the rusalkas. The Communists had faces like all the others, soldierly, high-cheekboned, but this black spot showed through on them: something hidden and at the same time repellent, a mixture of servility and baseness, insolence and ravenous license, bestiality. That was why we recognized the Party men without error: such extinguished and bestial faces had not existed before among Russian soldiers. Besides, the prisoners themselves also pointed out the Communists.

The Red Army prisoners stood and sat on the torn-up field, and the transparent steam of their breath trembled above them. Captain Ivanov, with his riding crop, thoughtfully stroking the very tip of his sharp black beard, walked among them. Without hurry he looked them over from every side. He circled a prisoner just as attentively and cautiously as a connoisseur at a horse fair circles a stallion that has caught his eye.

The prisoner, some of them barefoot, in a crumpled greatcoat, would rise from the grass, fearfully glancing from under his brow at the White officer.

“What province are you from?”

A tall fellow, gray in the face, shivering from fear and from waiting for his fate, answered dully. The captain questioned him in a half-voice. Probably these were the simplest questions: about his village, the land, his woman, his old people. And then the Red Army man’s face would change, grow lighter; the same kind light that was on the captain’s face would slip across it, and the prisoner would already be answering the officer, smiling with all his even white teeth.

The captain would lightly touch his shoulder with the riding crop, as though initiating the prisoner into the dignity of an honest soldier, and say:

“To the Fourth, brother, to the company...”

And not once was he mistaken in his selection: from the 4th Company there was not a single deserter. He sensed and understood the Russian man, and the soldier sensed and understood him.

Not only in our Drozdovsky Regiment, but perhaps in the whole Volunteer Army, Captain Ivanov’s 4th Company was a company of true soldiers. He replenished it exclusively from former Red Army prisoners. While among us whole regiments had to be formed from officers alone, and in any other company there were no fewer than fifty officers, in Captain Ivanov’s all the platoons, to the last man, were soldiers’, and the company command staff were soldiers too, from those same prisoners. All the lads were fine fellows, big healthy brutes.

Sometimes I sent Captain Ivanov reinforcements from cadets and gymnasium boys — our dashing young canteens7, as we called them — and students, but Captain Ivanov always refused politely, yet flatly:

“What kind of soldier is that?” he would say, not without irritation. “That, begging your pardon, is no soldier, but the Russian intelligentsia...”

And into that word “intelligentsia” he put such contemptuous disdain that one simply felt ashamed for it.

“No, thank you; I’ll replenish myself with my own countryman...”

And the countrymen in his company soon became broad-faced, well-fed fellows. Captain Ivanov was a good householder; he contrived to feed his company on a real army ration as in peacetime. No one had such rich cabbage soup, playing with all the colors of the rainbow; no one’s soldier was so properly, neatly, and warmly clothed, so firmly and dryly shod.

Captain Ivanov managed to procure for his countrymen in winter even mittens and some kind of padded belly-warmers, like saddlecloths; no one had so much tobacco and sugar as the 4th Company, and in no company did it smell so good and so familial as in the large soldier family of Captain Ivanov. All his men were solid, strapping, snored in their sleep like draft horses, and with strangers were arrogant and proud. Eagles.

The discipline in the 4th was iron, brilliant. The soldiers felt the strong hand of their commander and his straight soul; they knew there was no injustice or untruth in him. The soldiers understood him just as he understood them, and they lived with him soul to soul.

Captain Ivanov was a simple Russian man, and despite his village transgressions with tall widows, in his simplicity there shone the light of a Russian righteous man. Perhaps it was for his righteous simplicity that we nicknamed him Grisha. He had, however, another rather strange nickname: Joshua8.

And here is why. For all his modesty, Captain Ivanov liked to cut a figure. But only in battle. In battle he was always on horseback, ahead of his skirmish line9. On foot he never went into the attack, and a new Rocinante was unfailingly brought to him. No one has counted how many horses were killed under him.

In a soldierly way, if you like, in a lubok10 way, he felt the beauty of battle: in the fire, a brave commander must cut a figure ahead of his dear soldiers on horseback, that is all. After all, a soldier’s love for a commander is childishly cruel: the eagle-commander must be such a brave man that no bullet can take him, and he is charmed against the saber. Probably that is why Captain Ivanov pranced in the fire before the skirmish lines. I think, had he been allowed, he would have brought back in the old manner drummers opening the bayonet attack with the beat of drums, and that too only for beauty.

I see him galloping in the skirmish lines on a horse wounded by bullets, drenched in blood. Mounted, he was a true Joshua. Yet all his mares and horses were terribly poor: old, bony, like those Jewish nags on which small-town Os’kas and Shlemkas11 drag themselves to the peasant fair in rickety carts tied with ropes, or else on horseback.

Captain Ivanov parried our cheerful remarks about his battle horses with proper bearing.

“I do not like fast horses, I am not cavalry,” he would say, and then add with a charming smile: “I am an infantry officer.”

He especially remains in my memory in the battle near Bogodukhov. This was in July 1919. I was then commanding the Officers’ Battalion. We were advancing on a sugar factory, Koenig’s, I think; I was on horseback ahead of the battalion.

We advanced in a pouring rain. Everything ahead merged indistinctly in the noisy downpour, as in a muddy aquarium. The road was instantly washed out; clayey streams came rushing down it. Wet poplars shone by the road. The earth smoked, breathed moist warmth; in the downpour commands, the clang of movement, the groans of the wounded became duller; as though dampened, too, were the blows of gunshots. From the sugar factory the Reds’ frequent fire knocked dully and wetly.

The 2nd Company, with which I was, soaked to the bone, in heavy boots caked with mud, began rather awkwardly to deploy from the road into a skirmish line, and through the boiling water-ruts went into the attack on the factory. The “hurrah” was carried away by the rain.

We took the factory. I remember its looming structures, its gleaming roofs. Heated by the attack, loudly calling to one another, not recognizing one another in the mist of the downpour, the men began to form up in the factory yard. Behind the 2nd Company, somewhere in the rain, the 4th was advancing with Captain Ivanov, but it could not yet be seen.

Suddenly, in the rear, beyond the poplars by the road, frequent fire began to hammer, hotter and hotter. In the rain, close by, was the enemy. I jumped down from my horse into the mud and called over the commander of the machine-gun team, Captain Trofimov. He ran up to me, wiping his face with his sleeve; his tunic, darkened with water, shone like oilcloth.

“Ride to the 4th Company; deliver to Captain Ivanov my order to advance on the enemy to the right of the poplars.”

Captain Trofimov silently saluted and ran to his horse.

I was the only thing representing the staff of my battalion: everyone had been sent out with orders. My orderly Makarenko — in the rain his dark face gleamed — was holding my Galka by the reins behind me. The young bay mare, with white stockings on her legs and a white star on her forehead, had become glossy and slippery from the rain. She danced in place — she always danced — and anxiously drew the damp air into her nostrils. The shooting thundered in gusts. But where was the 4th?

The wounded machine-gunner of the 2nd Company, Lieutenant Gamaleya, came up to me with a carbine over his shoulder. The sleeve of his leather jacket had been cut open; blood was seeping through the bandages.

“They’re pressing us, and pretty hard, Colonel, sir...” Gamaleya smiled, at once grimacing from pain.

“Where has the Fourth got to?”

The fire was so strong it seemed we were being shot at from the road too, where Captain Ivanov was supposed to be going. I peered into the running rain on the highway. At last it seemed to me that I saw there a long skirmish line stretching out like dim ghosts, and before the line the shadow of a horseman.

There he is, Joshua. He is not hurrying; he is pushing straight down the highway, despite my order to advance to the right of the poplars. His clumsy march angered me. I drew in as much air as I could and shouted an insulting command:

“Lengthen stride, Fourth, lengthen stride...” and ran to meet them, Gamaleya behind me.

Hail began hammering our backs. I leapt over a puddle and heard a horse snorting above me. Now Captain Ivanov would hear me — with complete satisfaction I began, from the depths of my soul, to curse out the late 4th, and saw above me in the rain an unfamiliar gray face in a pulled-down cap with a dark five-pointed star.

A shot clanged; the bullet pierced the crown of my cap. I shuddered from the wind of the bullet, snatched out my Browning, but there was no cartridge in the chamber: the orderly had cleaned it yesterday, had taken the cartridge out. A cartridge, chamber a cartridge...

The horseman took aim. But by my cheek a shot thundered. The horse and rider were thrown to the side; the horse reared up on its hind legs. Someone near me was breathing hard and fast. I looked around: behind me stood Gamaleya, teeth bared, pale. It was he who had managed, with one hand, to raise the carbine and shoot the horse. I chambered a cartridge and brought down the rider with a shot; he hung from the saddle head downward. The wounded horse heaved its forelegs heavily from the road into the ditch. It stuck there. The Red commander’s cap, bottom-up, floated in a dark puddle, and the hail beat upon it.

The Red skirmish line was moving down on us. Dull voices in the mist, coughing, the clink of canteens. The Red commander I had shot down had been three hundred paces ahead of the line. In the line they noticed us and opened disorderly fire.

They fired at us in bursts as they came on, while we, struck dumb, both stood in a puddle before the whole Red skirmish line. To run under volleys along the advancing men, overtake them, and break out to our own was certain death. I understood that we had produced a “layer cake,” as often happened on the front: the Red skirmish line had slipped in between our 2nd and 4th Companies. I turned and ran with all my strength back toward the 2nd Company. Gamaleya came after me. No Nurmi12, ever, ran at such a pace as the lieutenant and I did under that downpour, hail, and gunfire.

I remember Gamaleya falling; I remember Makarenko’s gleaming face emerging from the mist:

“Colonel, sir, into the saddle...”

He brought Galka up; I jumped into the saddle and raced without stirrups away from the Red skirmish line. There was our 2nd Company; along the company I rode around the Red skirmish line and burst out behind it, into the rear on the left flank. I knew that behind the Reds were our own.

Soon, on the road before me, a horseman appeared, behind him a rapidly advancing skirmish line which, as it moved, was taking to the right of the poplars. Captain Ivanov rode into me, soaked; behind him came the soaked Captain Trofimov.

“What the devil are you crawling so slowly for?”

I shouted at Captain Ivanov with such satisfaction that he blinked in surprise.

“It’s not me crawling slowly,” he answered, trying to pull back the reins of his latest horse.

Despite its quite venerable age, his horse had laid its head on my Galka’s neck and was already whispering some courtesies to her, scarcely moving its soft lips.

“It’s the Second Company crawling slowly ahead of me...”

“To the devil with your Second Company! Those are Bolsheviks there.”

“Bolsheviks?”

Captain Ivanov understood everything in an instant. He rose slightly in the stirrups, glanced around somehow like a falcon, a charming smile flashed over his face, and he commanded with joyful bravado:

“Fourth Company, with God, charge!”

We galloped forward with the skirmish lines. Gusts of a strong “hurrah” drove the horses on. The 4th Company crushed the Reds with one blow. The Red Army men, bunched in herds in the rain, raised their hands and drove their rifles butt-up into the wet earth13. As the saying goes, everything was taken.

On the highway, having had his fill, as it were, Lieutenant Gamaleya was sitting in a puddle. We surrounded him; he nodded to us with his blood-covered head. Strange to say, we could not look without a smile at Gamaleya’s close-cropped head, with bullets sticking out of it in every direction. In delicatessens they sometimes display such faience heads sprouting grass.

The Red skirmish line, before our attack, had reached the fallen Gamaleya, and someone had begun shooting him point-blank from the cheapest Lefaucheux revolver14, from that tin thing; the bullets now sticking in his head had barely pierced his skin. From the Lefaucheux, by questioning the prisoners, we found its owner, a bandy-legged Red commander, a Communist boy. The Red commander was shot.

Gamaleya soon recovered from his extraordinary wounds, of which he himself spoke with a smile. But death had been appointed for him on the field of honor: Lieutenant Gamaleya of the machine-gun team of the 1st Battalion of the Drozdovsky Regiment was killed in Crimea.

And after the battle near Bogodukhov the downpour quieted, the transparent air began to shine. The wet grasses breathed strongly — mint, caraway — and above the distant hills and poplars, over which the rain-smoke was still curling, a tenderly bright rainbow rose in the sky.

Captain Ivanov, tapping his riding crop against his wet boot, was already walking among the prisoners. His face, and all the faces around him, shone with the rainbow. From the summer battle near Bogodukhov, this precisely is the memory that will remain with me forever.

Now I understand that Captain Ivanov’s simplicity was that Suvorovian simplicity which transformed our army into a completely special and miraculous spiritual being, marked by features of extraordinary, family-like intimacy, into that great army family of ours, where there were not a few such Captain Ivanovs, for whom the soldiers were living, breathing Russia, and where there were many such soldiers for whom their Captain Ivanovs were the fairest and most honest, the bravest and most beautiful people in the whole wide world.

The Suvorovian light shone in the righteous Russian simplicity of Captain Ivanov. His last days too are flooded with Suvorovian light. This was at the very end of October 1919. Wet blizzards rushed past. We were retreating. Captain Ivanov, even then, often over black ice, on horseback, led his 4th Company into the fire.

On October 29, near Dmitriev, he attacked a Red battery. The 4th Company came under shrapnel fire. Yet another mare was killed under Joshua in the attack. Then he led the skirmish line on foot into the shrapnel. The 4th Company took eight guns.

In Dmitriev the 4th Company went into reserve. At night the Reds began advancing from Sevsk. Colonel Peters ordered the 4th Company to move up to the battalion. Captain Ivanov led the company toward the station. In the cold darkness the Bolsheviks were shelling us with shrapnel. Soon I too arrived at the station with my staff.

In the square, in the darkness, I was surprised by a quiet, oppressive howl. A crowded mass of soldiers seemed to be howling with their mouths clenched shut. It was the 4th Company. The soldiers looked at me from the darkness with emptied, wild eyes, not recognizing me, not saluting. That indistinct sound which had surprised me was suppressed weeping. That is how our common folk weep, without opening their mouths. The 4th Company was crying.

Captain Ivanov, mounted, had already begun leading it toward the station when shrapnel burst above him. A chance shell, filled with dozens of bullets, instantly swept away him and his last battle horse. That night our only loss was the commander of the 4th Company, Captain Pyotr Ivanov.

At night I ordered a counterattack. The 4th’s night attack on the Reds in the village just outside Dmitriev was silent and terrible. They bayoneted everyone; they brought back not a single prisoner.

A zinc coffin was found in the town; I ordered Captain Ivanov buried with military honors. Everything was ready for the funeral when I was told that a deputation from the 4th Company was coming. They were Ivanov’s old soldiers, former prisoners, and with them Ensign Soroka.

They walked across the station square heavily and firmly, gray with frost, with stern high-cheekboned faces, looking sullenly at their feet and, as it seemed to me, swinging their arms with fury.

“What is it, brothers?” I asked when they had thundered over the station tiles.

For a moment they stood silent, then breathed out; all at once they began speaking indistinctly and angrily, their faces darkening. I did not understand what they were rumbling about, and stopped them:

“You speak, Soroka.”

“It can’t be done. The lads don’t want to leave the captain here. So the Red bastards can mock him? The lads won’t have it, not at all. We’re leaving ourselves, and to leave him behind — how can that be...”

Soroka fell silent. I saw the skin moving over his cheekbones, how with all his strength he clenched his teeth to stop the tears, while still they ran down the soldier’s hard, pockmarked cheeks.

“Very well, Soroka, I understand. But you know yourself, we are retreating. The captain must be buried.”

“Yes, sir. But when we retreat, then he’ll go with us. Where we stop, there we’ll bury him with honor. Permit us, Colonel, sir, to take our commander with us.”

I permitted it.

Dmitriev was abandoned by us on October 31 after a stubborn battle with fourteen Red regiments. In the crossing over the railway we were helped greatly by our armored train Drozdovets under Captain Ripke.

It was a cruel and dark winter. It is difficult for me to convey this, but from that time there remains with me a feeling as though eternal darkness and eternal cold — the very breathlessness of evil — had risen against Russia and against us. Piece by piece Russia sank into darkness, and we retreated.

From the retreat, one heroic, terrible picture the Drozdovites will never forget. In blizzards, when the desolate wind thundered and drove herd upon herd of snowy murk; in heavy thaws, from which everything blackened and smoked damply; by day and by night, always four sentries, soldiers of the 4th Company, often in ice-coated greatcoats, walked through snow and mud beside broad peasant sledges on which the zinc coffin of Captain Ivanov rose high, half-buried in snow, packed about with blocks of ice.

We retreated. We marched for weeks, months, and by night and by day the sealed coffin moved with our column, surrounded by four sentries with fixed bayonets.

I said to Ensign Soroka:

“We are all retreating. Why carry the coffin with us? He ought to be buried, even if in the field.”

Each time the ensign answered sullenly:

“Permit me to report, Colonel, sir: when we stop firmly, then we’ll bury him...”

At night, when I saw the four sentries by the coffin, silent, whitened by snow, I understood, just as I understand now, that if Russia is to be, then only such a Russia can be: Captain Ivanov and his soldiers.

For almost two months, all the way to Azov, the 4th Company kept guard at the coffin of its commander. Captain Pyotr Ivanov was killed on the night of October 31, and we buried him only at the end of December 1919, under the farewell salute of the 4th Company.

Many of his soldiers remained in Russia, and I think that before them, as before us, always and everywhere, piercing the dark waking world, there pass the bright visions of our common honest service to Russia. Before them passes their ghostly commander, Captain Ivanov, who has yet to be embodied again on the soil of our common fatherland.

This chapter opens in winter and spring 1919. The Whites are holding the Donbass (you may recognize some of the towns mentioned) after one of the cruelest winters of the war. Around Gorlovka, the mining villages have been worked over by Bolshevik agitators; White mobilization here means dragging sullen miners into the ranks of an army they don’t trust nor believe in. Captain Yevgeny Borisovich Peters, a former Moscow University student and reserve ensign of the 268th Novorzhevsky Infantry Regiment, commands the 2nd Company. The chapter opens on the night six of his newly mobilized miners bayonet their officer at a field outpost and run for the Red lines. What follows is the most famous portrait in the book.

Colonel Peters

We outlasted the cruel winter of 1919 in the Coal-Mining District1. At last the sun returned. With it we could once again maneuver and beat the Reds by sheer skill alone. From spring on we began preparing the offensive.

Near Gorlovka my battalion took the village of Gosudarev Bayrak. A large village, dirty, drunken, long since worked over by Red promise-peddlers. We declared in that village what was, I believe, one of the very first White mobilizations. Far from all the miners’ lads turned out for the call-up. For non-appearance we had to threaten arrests, even courts-martial.

In winter we had pulled back from the village, but with the spring offensive we returned to it. Then two of those who had dodged the draft were caught. They were given a thorough thrashing, and after that Gosudarev Bayrak came pouring in to mobilization in droves. The mining workers — a tall, sullen lot, the coal-dust seeming to have eaten into them, strong young fellows — joined our ranks not exactly of their own free will and not, of course, with exactly friendly feelings, going over to the “Kadets”2, to the “gold shoulder-straps”.

Shortly before Easter we were stationed at Krinichnaya. From there I sent the commander of the 2nd Company of the Officers’ Regiment, Captain Yevgeny Borisovich Peters, to Rostov to buy sausages, eggs, and Easter cakes in the city, so that we might give the battalion a proper feast for breaking the fast. Peters left, and his company — which had up to seventy mobilized miners in it — was temporarily taken over by Captain Lebedev. It had already happened that miner lads would slip off to the Reds at night, one by one or two by two.

On the night Peters left I went out to inspect the picket line, and in the dark, in the wet grass, I stumbled across an officer of the 2nd Company. The officer had been bayoneted. He had gone out to a field outpost with six soldiers from Gosudarev Bayrak. All six had run, having stuck their officer with the bayonet first. I immediately pulled the 2nd Company off picket duty and sent it to the rear. Other men took over the field outposts — not a single miner was to be trusted any more.

Peters, pleased with his trip, returned from Rostov with a heap of sausages and Easter cakes. The battalion was then quartered in the echelons3, in heated freight cars. Peters had not yet reached my car when they told him about the officer’s killing and the soldiers’ desertion.

“You know?” I said when he came to me to report.

“Yes. Permit me to put the company in order.”

“Not only do I permit it, I require it.”

Peters turned sharply on his heels and walked out. Soon the command rang out:

“Fall in.”

I watched the men of his company line up against the red walls of the cars. Everyone felt the strangeness of this nocturnal inspection. Peters stood before the company, severe, head lowered. He did not greet the men. Slowly he walked along the line. His footsteps creaked on the sand.

He gave the calm command:

“Officers, old soldiers, and volunteers, ten paces forward — march.”

With a heavy step they came out of the ranks.

“Gentlemen, you may go to your cars.”

A thinned-out row remained at the cars — only the captured Red Army men and the miners. The men were frozen still. Peters stood before them, stroking his shaved chin. Calmly he looked at the men, considering something. It was full night by now. In the silence one could hear the anxious breathing in the line.

“Company — load rifles.”

The bolts clicked. What had Peters thought up — why are his sixty miners loading clips of live ammunition?

“Shoulder arms. Right turn — march.”

And they went. They vanished into the transparent night, soundlessly, like ghosts. This was on the night of Holy Thursday.

We were lost in guessing where Peters had led his miners. Soon I was told that he had taken his soldiers out toward the front. It seemed he was going over to the Reds. But then he turned along the front and walked with the company across the soft, churned-up field. The Reds were several hundred paces off; everything on their side was silent that night.

Nagant revolver in hand, head down, Peters walked at the head of the company. They marched two versts4 along the very line, then Peters ordered them to turn back. In that transparent night it might have looked as though a band of ghost-soldiers, their rifles and gear faintly gleaming, were moving along the front behind a phantom officer.

In total silence, back and forth, Peters marched his company along the front the entire night. He walked them until they began breathing heavily, stumbling, trembling with exhaustion, and still he turned them around again and went on, marching as though under a spell.

At dawn he brought all sixty of them back. His hardened, strong face was covered in dew. The men of his company, gone gray with exhaustion, pressed in close behind him. A day or two after that extraordinary night inspection he reported to me:

“Captain, sir, the 2nd Company is in order.”

“And just what witchcraft did you work on them, Yevgeny Borisovich?”

“I worked no witchcraft. I simply took them out into the field, to the front, and started marching them. I decided: either they would kill me and all run off to the Reds, or they would walk after me. I marched them and marched them, and finally I halted, turned to face them, and said: ‘Well — since you kill officers, all that remains is to shoot the lot of you,’ and I fired into the air. Then I said: ‘Out there is the Communist scum, who’ll all be hanged sooner or later. Here is Russia. Go that way — and you’re the same scum. Stay here — and you’re true Russian soldiers.’ I said it and I walked off.”

A happy smile flashed across Peters’s closed face.

“And all sixty of them tramped after me like children. Now they’ll be loyal. They’re all right, the miner lads — they’re good soldiers.”

Yevgeny Borisovich was not mistaken. The miners of Gosudarev Bayrak stood honestly and valiantly in our fire for Russia. Our miners came to be reckoned the best Drozdovsky soldiers — they were worth their weight in gold to us — and from that time until the very end Peters’s orderlies and his entire signals detail were always miners.

Soon after Easter Peters was wounded in the arm, but did not give up command of the company. At the end of April pay finally came through to the battalion for distribution. I called the company commanders to my freight car. Peters came too, his arm in a sling.

It was, I remember, a fine summer day. Just as we were all laughing at something, young and merry, I was told that the Reds had gone over to the offensive and that the regiment’s left flank was being turned. Some of the commanders left their packets of long-awaited “bells” on my plank table, in such a hurry was everyone to get to their companies. Peters too made to leave. I stopped him:

“And where do you think you’re going, Yevgeny Borisovich? You’re wounded — be so good as to go to the train.”

“Yes, sir.”

Peters turned and went out.

On the left flank a heavy fire was rolling. My battalion was forming up to attack. In the field, not far from the echelons, dense Bolshevik skirmish lines came into view. We too deployed in skirmish lines and went at them in the attack.

More and more wounded came back our way. Suddenly I noticed two of our miners, drenched in sweat, carrying Peters. His legs were bloody. They carried him by quickly, and only after the successful attack did I learn that he, refusing to sit out a battle in the train, had literally dived in among his 2nd Company, crouching low behind the tall men so I would not notice him, and led them into the fire.

A terrible force, an irresistible movement, an astonishing impetuosity — these were always in Peters’s attacks. Wounded in the leg, he again refused to leave the regiment, but lay there in the train, in the cramped little closet of the regimental aid post, and as soon as he felt better he began inviting us over. Half-reclining on his cot, content with everything in the world, he played us at battered, greasy cards.

Such was Peters. This modest young officer was a true warrior. The son, I believe, of a gymnasium teacher, a student at Moscow University, he had gone off to the Great War as a reserve ensign of the 268th Novorzhevsky Infantry Regiment. Had it not been for the war, he too would probably have ended up a gymnasium teacher somewhere, but the fire of battle revealed Peters’s true nature, his genius.

In the Great War, when he had returned to the front after his first wound, the Novorzhevsky men were lying in trenches under some height which they could not seem to take: they would take it, then be thrown off again.

The regimental commander said to Peters:

“Now then — we just can’t take that height. It would be a good thing, you know, to send a reconnaissance party up there.”

“Yes, sir.”

That night, exactly as he later did with us before Holy Thursday, Peters lined up his company and led it off somewhere in total silence. Suddenly — shots, choice swearing, shouts — and Peters appeared, with his company and a crowd of prisoners. Instead of a reconnaissance, he had taken the height, and this time taken it for good. For that night battle he received the Order of Saint George5.

Now, when I remember this officer from among the Moscow students, it seems to me that there was a kind of copper gleam on his hard, extraordinarily strong face with its broad round chin, and on his moulded body. Dark-haired, not tall, with stubborn gray eyes, he was handsome with a strange, slightly Asiatic, masculine beauty. He was hardly thirty. I remember his light, mincing gait.

When telling of the fire in which the Drozdovsky men stood, of the attacks, of the most difficult moments of battle, one always has to remember him — company commander Captain Peters or battalion commander Colonel Peters. Peters took upon himself every heaviest blow of battle, and it was as though he really did have a chest of copper, against which the enemy was dashed to pieces with a ringing sound.

Bogodukhov, Kharkov, Vorozhba, Sevsk, Komarichi, Dmitriev, the Don, Azov, Khorly, the whole of Crimea — everywhere, in fire, the copper face of the unshakable warrior Yevgeny gleams.

There was something ancient in him; perhaps because the blood of our Krivichi6 and of Latvians, of Germans and Tatars, was mingled in him. In his enigmatically calm face there was a magnetic intensity. He seemed always to be contemplating before him some vision accessible to him alone.

He had one trait which I have not encountered in such measure in anyone else. Peters had no fear. With others, self-possession in fire is the result of acute internal struggle. One has to fight with all the human powers of the spirit against the fear of death and the animal agitation, one must conquer them. But Peters simply did not know fear, did not feel it. In fire he had perfect calm, and in his calm there was something Asiatic, frightful. There was something inhuman in his calm. Something divine.

But in life this young, modest officer from the Moscow students was a rare eccentric. The old soldier Larin was his orderly. The whole meaning of life, for the elderly, lonely, gray-templed Larin, was the safekeeping of Yevgeny Borisovich’s lares and penates. With Larin, Peters was severe, but he loved him sincerely. Our usual sport was to tease Larin:

“Larin, what a calamity — all the tobacco’s run out.”

“A calamity it is, sir.”

“Take some cigarettes, my friend, from the captain.”

“By no means, sir.”

“What do you mean, by no means? One cigarette.”

“Not even one. When Yevgeny Borisovich finds out, he’ll certainly shoot me.”

Cigarettes were one of Peters’s eccentricities. In the Volunteer Army — and, I think, anywhere on earth — no one was the possessor of such tobacco treasures as he. He had a special suitcase for cigarettes and tobacco. There were stored boxes of a hundred and a thousand of the most extraordinary brands, dating from before the revolution. There were Shapshals and Lafermes, Asmolov’s splendid brown “cannons,” the excellent yellow tobaccos of Stamboli. Suffice it to say that he had such a stock of tobacco that even in Bulgaria Peters was still smoking Asmolov No. 7 and other Russian brands.

In no gentleman bachelor’s establishment, I think, could one have found such fastidious cleanliness and perfect order as in his — and he and Larin always had everything in plenty. The rest of us would have nothing in our larders, but at theirs there was sugar, and tea, and a treasured cordial in a wicker flask with a silver cup.

I sometimes had to borrow tea and sugar from Peters. He always sent his gifts with the most courteous note. But if I asked him for tobacco for my officers, an equally exquisitely polite refusal always followed.

Only for me alone did Peters break his tobacco taboo. We would be riding ahead of the regiment. The march is long. A drizzle is falling, the kind that makes you want to doze, or to drag out some monotonous little song. Peters suddenly clears his throat, his face cracking into a sour-pleasant grin:

“Colonel, sir, allow me to offer you a cigarette.”

This used to come so unexpectedly that I would look at him in mute astonishment, while Peters was already opening his leather cigarette case, shielding the cigarettes from the rain with the sleeve of his greatcoat, and gallantly offering me a light. The cigarette was always strong, delicious, but Yevgeny Borisovich would listen to my praise with such a sour, wary smirk, flicking off the ash with a triangular fingernail, that I feared he was already regretting his tobacco generosity.

I recall, too, how during a rest, when I was in command of the regiment, I was summoned to staff in Kharkov. I handed the regiment over to Yevgeny Borisovich. At staff I was held up several days, and when I came back the regiment was quartered at the village of Tsapovka. In the village itself the wagon train was billeted. I rode up; the command “attention” rang out, and the wagon-train men shouted “hurrah” like men possessed.

“What’s going on, why such extraordinary delight?”

The wagon men shifted, exchanged glances. One said cryptically:

“Begging your pardon, sir, for three days now we’ve been doing nothing but driving.”

“Why driving?”

“Couldn’t say, sir... Captain Peters worries we’ll be captured.”

I rode on into the regiment. Peters seemed to me to have grown thin — even worn out. He began to make his report:

“In the regiment under your command, no incid—”

He suddenly broke off, flushed in an instant. His firm face went the color of dark copper:

“Pardon. There has been an incident. I gave up a gun.”

He fell silent and went over to the window of the cottage. He stood there, looking out into the field, then said, dully and calmly:

“I have covered the First Regiment with indelible disgrace. This I shall not survive. I shall shoot myself.”

I knew: if Yevgeny Borisovich said it, so it would be. When I had left for Kharkov, thick fogs had been hanging over the front. In the fog, soon after my departure, Peters had run into the Reds and given up one gun. He had never been seen so furiously calm, so furiously fearless. He led the regiment in a desperate counterattack on the Red battery and took not one but eight whole guns. But all the same, the loss of our gun seemed to have cut him down.

I went over to the window of the cottage, stood beside him, looking out into the damp field:

“But you took eight, Yevgeny Borisovich.”

“Yes, eight. But not that one.”

“Are you sure?”

“That number isn’t there.”

For a very long time, two hours I think, we stood at the window and looked out into the field. It had grown completely dark. I argued with this strange man that one cannot shoot oneself over the lost number of a cannon, that the loss of a gun is not a disgrace but a misfortune, that an officer such as he cannot refuse to fulfill his duty, and that suicide is a refusal of our soldier’s duty — that if he despised his life, he could only give it in fire.

Two good battles’ worth of strain those two or three hours cost me, while we stood with him at the window, talking without raising our voices, as though about the most ordinary things. At last I extracted his word of honor that he would not shoot himself. And Peters’s word was everything.

At a festive supper in the regimental mess I thanked Yevgeny Borisovich for his brilliant command of the regiment. Only then did he brighten, and once again on his face there gleamed that copper light I so loved to see.

Over supper, from the officers’ talk, I also learned the reason for the wild “hurrah” of the wagon men in Tsapovka. After the unhappy loss of the gun, Peters seemed to have begun mistrusting himself. He grew anxious, and apparently feared he might lose not only guns but the entire wagon train. That was why he had ordered the wagons, as soon as they had fed the regiment, to set off each time for the rear. And the rear was twenty versts off. Our wagon men were having to do up to fifty versts a day. Horses and men were worn out: round the clock, they were either galloping or stirring the cooking like devils. That was why I had been deafened by such a “hurrah.”

The young officers had noticed other eccentricities in Peters during his command of the regiment. They told the most extraordinary tales about him. He never slept at night, but went to bed late in the morning and woke up at about four in the afternoon. Until four o’clock the staff officers went hungry, though those who could made shift at their own cost and had a bite of something. Everyone had to gather for the late dinner. Peters was met with the command “Officers!”

At dinner no one could eat more than Peters. He takes one cutlet — and they all take one. But here someone’s fork reaches for a second helping. At once the sour remark:

“Lieutenant Gichevsky, why are you eating so much today?”

“Not at all, sir. By mistake.”

And the fork would calm itself on the table.

But there were days of special appetite for Peters: two plates of borscht, three cutlets. Then everyone, even those who had already eaten their fill during the day, willy-nilly had to follow their commander’s example.

But all this, perhaps, are tall tales. Yet here is something I myself saw more than once. In some little village the artillery has been pushed out into what is called a hopeless position. Everything in the open. The battery commander is offended at the whole world, and angry; the soldiers’ faces are gloomy. Everyone is sure the battery will be knocked out. An infantry battalion passes by toward its position. The artillerymen call out:

“Whose battalion?”

“Why, Peters’s.”

“What — Peters’s?”

“Whose else? Peters’s, of course.”

And Peters’s name is now declined in all the cases: everyone has cheered up. The artillerymen laugh:

“You’ll do some marching with him before he lets a gun be lost...”

And the battery commander’s mood suddenly changes — he lights up a cigarette with pleasure.

Where Peters is, no one wavers; where Peters is, there is victory. His attacks are always swift, crushing. In the skirmish lines he walked at full height. And his copper face was unmoved. I do not remember Peters ever joking with us. But in the evenings, alone, he sometimes sang. It was always unexpected and touching. He sang in a pleasant bass, and unusually shyly. In no one else have I heard such words as in his Moscow student songs — something about wild steppes, about kurgans.

I remember, however, one strange witticism of his. It was during the retreat, by then near Azov. The damnable blizzard was howling, screaming. As though all of Russia had been swallowed up in the snow-whirl, as though both the mercy of God and the mercy of men had departed Russia for ever.

In that kind of blizzard, on the eve of my name day, the regiment was given a combat task: to swoop down on the Reds in the stanitsa of Yelizavetinskaya. The blizzard rages. Everyone is white. Hoarfrost on faces. The 1st Battalion, through the snow drifts, descended onto the Don, smoke from the blizzard slanting overhead. At the head of the 1st Battalion — Peters. All machine guns and field pieces have been left on the bank.

“Yevgeny Borisovich” — I just managed to call to Peters through the howl of the blizzard — “we must try without firing a single shot. You hear, not a single one...”

Peters silently saluted and disappeared into the blizzard.

On the Don the cold was fiercer; the wind tore at the skirts of greatcoats and knocked men off their feet. The dark ice rang underfoot. To stand, to walk, men leaned on the ice with their bayonets, and under the bayonets the ice cracked into stars. Out of the blizzard we came onto the other bank of the Don like enormous white phantoms, all of us with hair encased in ice. The 2nd Battalion, without a shot, moved on Yelizavetinskaya; the 1st formed a column along the bank.

In the slanting snow by the bank, a large wagon train was making its way somewhere. Horses, two-wheeled carts loomed dimly. Whitened men were bent double. Peters, revolver in hand, sinking into snowdrifts, set off to cut the wagon train off. The wind brought us his muffled cry; the carts halted, jammed up, began to turn back. They moved off along our column. Peters came back through the snow.

“What’s going on, Yevgeny Borisovich?”

“Look at this — the bastards driving around here,” cried Peters, hoarse, wiping the rime from his face. “Order them stopped...”

They were stopped. They were two Red machine-gun teams with machine guns on the carts. To questions and congratulations Peters answered drily:

“What’s so wonderful about my taking their machine guns alone? I came up to them with my Nagant and said, ‘About-face, right wheel, march.’ And they turned about...”

I ordered Peters to attack Yelizavetinskaya to the left of the 2nd Battalion. The battalions burst into the stanitsa7. Only by dawn, with prisoners and trophies, had we made it back across the Don, into Azov.

And on the morning of my name day I was woken by remarkable visitors of congratulation. They were soldiers of the 1st Battalion, with a huge wooden platter on which a boiled piglet, intricately wound about with the regiment’s crimson-and-white ribbons, was set in pride of place. With the soldiers came Peters, in full dress, gleaming. He delivered me a brief speech of congratulation, saying that here, on behalf of the riflemen, was a piglet to me for my name day.

I thanked them, but could not refrain from asking, in surprise:

“But, my dear Yevgeny Borisovich, why precisely a piglet?”

Peters, evidently, had been waiting for the question. He bared his teeth, struck a dashing pose, and answered:

“Because last night we played the Bolsheviks a dirty trick. In token of which, the piglet.”

Such comparisons, in truth, could only have come into the head of an eccentric like him.

War gives birth to remarkable men, but Peters was, I think, the most remarkable of all whom I knew. What was particularly striking was his complete contempt for death and his utter fearlessness — those two eternal traits of the true warrior. In one of the battles already in Crimea he became fixed in my memory as an antique warrior, of an age not ours.

Among all his eccentricities, Peters loved comfort — and especially a shower. Taking some forsaken little village, he would always take the best house for himself; on the march, water and a well were absolutely necessary for his quarters. Sometimes he would even spend the night out at the picket line, alone with Larin against the Reds, but at a well, where he could take his shower at night.

On campaign he carried about with him an old, carefully darned little rug — darned by that same Larin — on which Peters performed his ablutions. The dawn would barely have come up when he was already pouring icy water over himself. I remember him at his morning bathings, splashing in the water and snorting joyfully, while a rosy steam rose above him.

Near Askania-Nova8, after a battle, at the end of a hot summer day, Peters, in command of the picket, posted the sentries, and Larin spread out the patched rug. Peters, anticipating the freshness of the bath, was puffing on a cigarette and slowly stripping off his sweat- and dust-soaked gear. In the grass, the men of his battalion were also resting and smoking, sensing the cool evening to come.

Suddenly a quick cloud of dust appeared in the field; an alarmed cry rang out:

“Cavalry...”

Machine-gunners ran past with a machine gun. The cloud of dust is rushing toward us. Red cavalry.

At the first confusion, at the first cries of “cavalry,” Peters, completely naked, was standing on his rug, carefully soaping his back and chest. He listened, threw the bath sponge into the grass, and stepped off the rug. Beside it, on a snow-white towel, lay his watch, his cigarette case, his cap, and his Nagant. Peters took the Nagant and put on the cap, putting his cigarette case and watch into it. He took the most important thing.

Naked, with his black Nagant and his crimson cap, in the drying soap-foam, he strode across the stiff grass toward the alarmed, humming battalion, took up his place near the formation, peered intently at the cloud of dust, and gave the imperturbable command:

“Battalion — volley fire at the cavalry.”

The naked Peters was lit up by the flash of the volley. The battalion, wreathed in smoke and dust, beat back the attack. I rode up. In the sky, behind the crimson caps, in pillars of dust, a yellow sunset was burning. Peters, seeing me, commanded:

“Battalion — attention! Officers.”

Eight hundred bayonets gleamed and slightly clashed. The men were breathing hard and quick, as men breathe in fire; fifteen hundred darkened, severe eyes followed me, and I looked at Peters. He seemed to be made of hot copper. The naked commander before the battalion.

In this there was such an extraordinary, virile, and ancient beauty that the eight hundred men whose breathing I heard executed his commands with particular severity, and no one smiled.

The attack was beaten off. The dust in the field settled. The battalion moved off back. All faces were lit by the fleeting light of the sunset. In a crimson cap, with a black Nagant, against the background of the sunset, walked the naked Peters.

Then came a transparent evening. Everything grew lighter, easier. The men, lying in the grass, laughed together, chatted. And by the well, until the very dead of night, the water splashed loudly, and Yevgeny Borisovich snorted, giving himself over now without disturbance to his evening showers.

By the end of the Crimean campaign, after his second or third injury — a bad one, with painful operations, with sleepless nights for weeks on end — Yevgeny Borisovich formed a morphine habit in the hospital. I was then taking over the division, and I summoned him to me. He came pale, gaunt. I did not believe it, could not get used to the thought, that he had suddenly become a morphinist.

“Yevgeny Borisovich,” I said, “I have no doubt that there is no commander more worthy of the First Drozdovsky Regiment than you. But give me your word to give up morphine.”

He went over to the window, as he had once done in Tsapovka, thought it over, then smiled faintly:

“Very well. On my word of honor — I shall give it up.”

I gave him leave, and he went off to Yalta with a doctor and Larin. In Yalta the last chapter of his life began. Yevgeny Borisovich found himself loved, and answered that love with his own. I think it was his first love. I know that he was, as it were, ashamed of his accidental feeling, and struggled with it.

After a month and a half he returned to the regiment. The luminous tenderness in his eyes surprised me.

“I have given up morphine, Your Excellency. But permit me a little more leave.”

I permitted it. Two weeks or so later he was at my place again. His romance, of which I knew so little, had been very difficult at first. The woman he loved was the wife of another man — more, she was the wife of his comrade in arms. His love was a hard thing.

Now Peters had returned to me with some sort of dull, gray face. I asked him about the morphine.

“Have you given it up?”

“By no means. I’ve started again.”

“Then I cannot give you the regiment.”

“Yes, sir...”

I come to the last pages of his life. Peters was with us in the fire to the end. He had been destined for war, and he fulfilled his destiny — but love intervened and changed his fate. His companion — she never did become his wife — was a charming woman, a good and intelligent person. She was an actress, and a great future was promised her.

Already in Bulgaria, after our evacuation, Yevgeny Borisovich came to me by old habit to sit with me at twilight by the window. Sometimes he sang something shy. He was unusually happy in his love. I think now that love, life, and death are the same thing as battle.

In Bulgaria, Yevgeny Borisovich’s companion fell gravely ill. We watched over his sleepless nights. Nothing and no one helped — she died. She had been beaten in an inevitable battle. After her, he too had been beaten. He took the loss terribly. Truly terribly. And in complete silence.

Everyone involuntarily fell silent around poor Peters when he came in. We understood that we could not console him with any words. In the barely perceptible movement of a hand as he took a cigarette, or in the slight movement of an eyebrow, was the unbearable muteness of suffering. We noticed that he was going more and more often to the cemetery. Several times a day he would visit her grave.

We were then living together, in one house — I in one half of the apartment, he across the corridor. With him lived faithful Larin, his stern old nursemaid. One rainy autumn evening Peters stood at my window and looked into the street. I came up to him. We both, I think, loved these conversations in undertones, in the twilight.

“I am tired of everything,” Yevgeny Borisovich said suddenly. “I have decided to shoot myself.”

I began to say to him the simplest, the most friendly words I knew, but I felt that all my words were small and trivial before his silence. He had lost his genius; he had lost war and love — there remained only death.

After midnight Larin, troubled that Yevgeny Borisovich was not lying down but kept pacing in his room, came in to him with a candle. Peters was sitting on the cot. On the floor by the open suitcase a candle was burning. Yevgeny Borisovich, bent over the candle, was loading a clip into a Browning.

“Colonel, sir, what are you doing?” the old soldier called out to him.

Peters lifted his head, looked at him, and said quietly:

“Go, go...”

It became frightening to Larin — the way Yevgeny Borisovich was sitting, the way he was looking. The soldier began to weep:

“What are you doing?”

“Get out,” said Yevgeny Borisovich with bitterness and irritation, and rose from the cot.

Larin ran across the corridor to me. I had already gone to bed. He began knocking at the doors, calling. I opened to him. Suddenly a muffled shot rang out. We understood that this was death, and rushed into Peters’s room. Yevgeny Borisovich had shot himself in the mouth. His head had been blown off.

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The Greek has a subtle and difficult character, not to be recognised in the picture that popular students of the fifth century BC like to paint. The Byzantine complicated this character with the strains of eastern blood in him. The result was full of paradox. He was highly practical, with an aptitude for business and a taste for worldly honours; yet he was always ready to renounce the world for a life of monastic contemplation. He believed fervently in the divine mission of the empire and the divine authority of the emperor; yet he was an individualist, quick to rebel against a government that displeased him. He had a horror of heresy; yet his religion, most mystical of all the established forms of Christianity, allowed him, priest and layman alike, great philosophical latitude. He despised all his neighbours as barbarians; yet he easily adopted their habits and their ideas. Despite his sophistication and his pride his nerve was unsteady. Disaster had so often nearly overwhelmed Byzantium that his confidence in things was sapped. In a sudden crisis he would panic and would indulge in savagery that in his calmer moments he disdained. The present might be peaceful and brilliant; but countless prophecies warned him that some day his city would perish, and he believed them to be true. Happiness and tranquillity could not be found in this dark transitory world, but only in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Thus says Steven Runciman in “A History of the Crusades”; and it is difficult not to nod your head while reading this passage as a Russian — yes, that is me, that is us — we are these very Byzantines. Through some mystical translatio imperii, we inherited not merely a liturgy and a double-headed eagle for our banners; the entire psychological architecture we inhabit was passed along with them. Most striking perhaps is the eternal tug of war of worldly shrewdness and sudden renunciation. The man entirely competent in worldly affairs and secretly contemptuous of them, who may close a favorable if somewhat immoral business dealing today and walk off to Optina tomorrow. It is unnerving, and others are justifiably unnerved by it.

The West speaks of the Roman East, this “Low Empire”, with contempt; she forgot her Latin and sullied her Greek; a thousand years of theology and art and poetry and triumph and tragedy are naught, it is the empire of the afterthought. We took our Christianity from this “low” empire. We took it late, in the 10th century, when The City was already counting her days (she always was). And with this Christianity we took so much else… We are decadents of decadents, are we not?

He was highly practical, with an aptitude for business and a taste for worldly honours; yet he was always ready to renounce the world for a life of monastic contemplation. The merchant Morozov endows an Old Believer skete and out-negotiates a Lyon silk exporter the same afternoon. The peasant haggles an hour over a kopeck and presses his last ruble into a wandering pilgrim’s hand. The Protestant cannot live with this; for him, the hand that signs the ledger must also pray, and the two must agree, or one of them is a hypocrite. With us, the two need not agree. Prayer is prayer, the ledger is the ledger. Our Lord is great; we are all little; somewhere above our heads it all works out, perhaps. — Here, below, it need not work out at all. Here it is enough to light a lamp, buy a loaf, press a ruble into a grimy hand, and never be too certain whether the whole account closes in profit or in loss.

He believed fervently in the divine mission of the empire and the divine authority of the emperor; yet he was an individualist, quick to rebel against a government that displeased him. Konstantin Leontiev spoke of this first, poor brilliant Leontiev, who understood the Byzantine spirit because he lived inside its nerves. The Russian reveres the Tsar and takes an axe to the landowner, kisses the imperial mantle and burns the bailiff’s grange, and sees no contradiction — because there is none. Sacred power and petty power are two different substances, as different as gold and tin. Pugachev calls himself Peter III: of course he does. Stenka Razin drowns the princess in the name of freedom, to fulfill an odd pagan fealty. Berdyaev came back to this quite often. The Russian’s natural ideology is anarcho-monarchism; yes, we despise the bureaucrat, the governor, the gendarme on the corner, even. But we worship the Tsar. The liberal never understood this. The liberal thought the throne and the gendarme were two links of a single chain.

He had a horror of heresy; yet his religion, most mystical of all the established forms of Christianity, allowed him, priest and layman alike, great philosophical latitude. Here the Byzantine note is loudest. No people has ever anathematized with the precision of the Orthodox. Read the Stoglav, read the Old Believer polemics. Two fingers or three? Round the church with the sun or against? Two alleluias or three? Questions worth splitting a people over, worth burning archpriests for, worth self-immolating in village wooden churches on the Ob. And yet — within the frame, inside the anathema — what wandering! Palamas and Fyodorov, Hesychasm and Sophia. The yurodivy smearing himself with filth in the name of Christ, and the starets in silk vestments blessing the Tsar the same week. A Rozanov may write scandalously against the celibacy of the Church inside the Church; the Church will punish him, and yet tolerate her beloved child’s antics, and Rozanov may conclude: “I will hereticize, but I will not be a heretic”, and it is understood.

He despised all his neighbours as barbarians; yet he easily adopted their habits and their ideas. Ah! The uniform is Prussian, the court tongue is French, the drill is Swedish, the country house is English, the bureaucracy is German, the wife may be Polish or Baltic or Georgian — and the contempt for each of these peoples is as sincere and fierce as anything else the Russian believes. The Cossack looks more like a Circassian than the Circassian himself, he even excels at the Caucasian dances, which, however, does not diminish his bloodlust in the slightest. The Russian artilleryman may be listening to Ukrainian Post-Punk while reloading his howitzer. This infuriates the German. The German does not grasp that one may put on the coat of another without becoming him. For the German, costume is identity (Kleider machen Leute), and to wear another’s costume is to apostatize from oneself. We Russians have our universalist vsechelovechnost’, as Dostoevsky put it, our all-humanity, and what is humanity without contempt. Our beloved Emperor Alexander spoke as fine a French as Napoleon, finer perhaps; this did not stop him from entering Paris on a white horse.

In a sudden crisis he would panic and would indulge in savagery that in his calmer moments he disdained. The Poles, certainly no friends of either, have the saying that Russians are animals, because they enjoy violence, are sadistic, moralistic about it; and the Germans are machines, because German violence is not even sadistic, it just happens. From the Russian point of view, the German detachment from the violence they commit is what makes it appear outrageous and sadistic; you have to morally confront what you are doing to the very core of your being, and affirm it, otherwise it’s evil. “Closing your heart to pity” is cowardice; you must feel every pain you inflict, you must forgive as you vanquish, you must condole in your cruelty & absolve while meting out punishment; only this sanctifies the sword, be it literal or figurative.

And the last note — the deepest, perhaps. Countless prophecies warned him that some day his city would perish, and he believed them to be true. Filofei wrote in the early sixteenth century that two Romes had fallen, that a Third stood, and that a Fourth there would not be. It is a warning and a consolation. All is temporary, all is fleeting. A people saved from the edge of annihilation so many times by nothing but God’s direct intercession does not, in its bones, believe the floor is solid. The city was always going to perish. The last of the Romanoi climbed the walls on 29 May 1453 having taken Communion for the last time the night before, having believed for two centuries that the hour was coming, and died at their post almost calmly. The Russian, after surviving 1917, 1941 and 1991 within one human lifespan, hold their vigil the same way. He does not believe in the solidity of the world. He believes in the Kingdom of Heaven. And between these two immovable facts is packed, compressed, preserved everything else, everything that is, at this hour, still us.

There will be no Fourth.

— Sergey Mamontov, Campaigns and Horses

The so-called “February Revolution” is one of the most inexplicable, and unexplained, events in all of Russian history. A core reason for this is that all participants, active and passive, had the utmost incentive to lie and falsify the events, and those who had motive to tell the truth were either killed or spent the rest of their lives as anonymous émigrés, often under assumed names. The Tsar himself was murdered.

Popular understanding of 1917 ranges from “Lenin led peasants with pitchforks to overthrow the Tsar” at the bottom to a more intricate understanding of parliamentary politics and such at the top. However, I have never encountered a full accounting of the February coup that does not dissolve into a black box at some point, either vaguely pointing at “structural factors” or just taking for granted that the participants of a major conspiracy had told the truth.

The perpetrators of the coup lied because they had engaged in a traitorous conspiracy against their own country. The beneficiaries of the coup, who went on to stage their own coup, the Bolsheviks, lied because they were even worse and needed a self-aggrandizing revolutionary mythology. The World War One allies of Russia lied because they, too, were involved in the coup and were not particularly eager to be publicly outed as traitors to the Entente. Some participants in the “revolution” would go on to fight against its consequences in the Civil War and they, too, were uninterested in unnecessarily publicizing their involvement.

Many people who were innocent of the conspiracy were lukewarm towards it and made common cause with the guilty in the common fight against the Bolsheviks. Monarchists and loyal officers and government officials were either imprisoned, killed or couldn’t know the actual extent of what had occurred. That leaves us with… not much. I am not claiming a full, definitive accounting of the “February Revolution”, but I will try to shed some light on the events leading up to the coup and the coup itself. A full, truthful history of the coup may be impossible.

The first big question is: why?

An obvious factor often cited is the war itself: World War One was raging in its third year. The war was, of course, a decisive factor in the “event” itself, but not in the sense usually meant (the often-claimed “war-weariness”, “unclear goals” and so on). In 1905 there was no “weariness” at all, yet a revolution happened all the same; in fact, the revolutionary terror of 1905 should be viewed as a second front of the Russo-Japanese War1. The “aims” of the war were no more or less clear in 1914 than in 1917, and this posed no problem. And as for the supposedly unbearable “hardships” and the claim that “the Tsar lost the war” — these are frankly absurd.

Russia was not “losing” World War One. She simply did not live to see victory, having ceased to exist, destroyed by internal upheaval. Meanwhile, by 1917 the Russian front was in perfectly good order; the situation there was in no way worse than in the West, and there existed not the slightest grounds, whether military or economic, to suppose that Russia could not have held out until the end of the war (all the more so given that, had Russia not been knocked out, the war would have ended far sooner). Russian industry, naturally, was slower to adapt to wartime production than its German counterpart, but by the summer of 1916 the crisis had been overcome; the infamous “shell shortage” was a thing of the past, the troops were fully supplied with arms, and no shortages in military production were felt — indeed, the stockpiles were large enough to last all sides for another three years of Civil War.

Even after the bitter retreats of 1915, the frontline never stood east of Pinsk, and gave not the slightest cause for concern that the enemy might break through to the country’s vital centers (whereas in the West, the front still lay in dangerous proximity to Paris). Even by October 1917, after half a year of deliberate destruction of the Russian army, the front in the north ran through Russian territory, but in the south it ran through the enemy’s — and in Transcaucasia, deep inside Turkish territory altogether. Russian casualties (estimated, depending on the source, at between 775,000 and 908,000 combat deaths) matched those of the Central Powers on the Eastern Front at roughly 1:1 (Germany lost approximately 300,000 on the Russian front, Austria-Hungary around 450,000, and Turkey some 150,000). Russia was waging the war with far less strain on her resources than either her enemies or her allies.

The much-invoked “hardships” of the war are a highly relative matter. Having fielded the largest army of any belligerent, Russia, unlike the others, experienced no manpower shortages. On the contrary, the number of men called up was excessive and only inflated non-combat losses (moreover, the enormous reserve units, sitting idly in the rear, greatly contributed to degenerative processes both in the army and in society at large). Even accounting for substantial non-combat casualties and deaths in captivity, Russia’s total losses were incomparably less keenly felt than those of the other belligerents. It is worth noting that the bulk of losses to disease occurred as a result of the revolutionary processes that destroyed the army; they could not have been the reason. The average monthly number of soldiers evacuated due to illness was under 17,000 in 1914, just over 35,000 in 1915, 52,500 in 1916, and reached a staggering 146,000 in 1917 after the February coup.

The share of men mobilized in Russia was the smallest of all: only 39% of all military-aged males, compared to 50% in Britain, 72% in Italy, 74% in Austria-Hungary, 79% in France and 81% in Germany.

For every thousand men mobilized, Russia lost 115 VS Austria’s 122, Britain’s 125, Germany’s 154 and France’s 168.

Overall losses were far less painful for Russia than for any other combatant nation2.

Under such conditions, talk of spontaneous “popular discontent” with the “hardships” of war, or of “objective preconditions” for collapse, looks strange at the very least: in any other belligerent country, these preconditions should have been several times greater. Under normal political conditions, the question of whether Russia could “hold out” would not even have arisen.

On the contrary, for 1917 the Russian command was planning decisive offensive operations, including a planned amphibious landing to seize Constantinople (which was to become Russian, along with the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, according to the Constantinople Agreement of March 18, 1915, in exchange for Russian recognition of British and French claims in the wider region) and knock Turkey out of the war for good. By late 1916, Admiral Kolchak had begun forming a dedicated “Black Sea Naval Division” from handpicked soldiers and officers, and the Turkish fleet had been effectively swept from the Black Sea. The operation was scheduled for April 1917. Keep in mind the British obsession with preventing Russian control of the Bosphorus (“and while we’re Britons true, the Russians shall not have Constantinople”) for later.

There have been attempts to tie the “revolutionary unrest” to the “objective factor” of food shortages. Here the situation becomes interesting. There were no food shortages in Russia, indeed, Russia was the only country in the war not experiencing them, and the nightmare fuel that passed for “bread” in wartime Germany was unthinkable in Russia. Germany was in an especially difficult position, but even the British had all essential goods distributed strictly by ration cards, whereas in Russia the only rationed product was sugar. Nevertheless, the spark which lit the flame of revolt was a bread problem — more precisely, rumors of a bread problem.

It is commonly accepted that heavy storms prevented the deliveries of fresh bread to Petrograd, which caused rumors of an impending famine, leading to masses of people rushing to buy up bread, creating chaos. There is, however, a theory that the supply disruptions were orchestrated deliberately by one of the key figures of the February Revolution: Yuri Lomonosov, a man largely unknown to the general public, then Deputy Minister of Transport. Not very much is known about Lomonosov, and he is seldom mentioned, except in the context of stopping the Tsar’s train at a pivotal moment.

Lomonosov came from a minor noble family. He made a career of trains, and in 1899 he had become chief inspector of railways in Russia. He traveled to international exhibitions, joined the Engineer Council of the Ministry of Transportation and in early 1917 was appointed Deputy Minister. At the same time, he was a committed Bolshevik since before 1905. As a member of the “Combat Technical Group” of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, led directly by the Central Committee, Lomonosov participated in planning acts of terrorism, gun running, smuggling and other “technical” needs of the revolution. Mind you, he was not formally a member of the party.

He would play a key role in the February Revolution by seizing the Ministry of Transportation, preventing troops loyal to the Tsar from reaching Petrograd, blocking the Tsar himself from entering Tsarskoye Selo, and redirecting him to Pskov, where the “abdication” took place. In his memoirs, he boasted of personally supervising the printing of the act of abdication of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, in whose favor Nicholas had abdicated.

The Provisional Government sent Lomonosov to the United States, where he set up shop at 120 Broadway — the building housing J.P. Morgan’s Guaranty Trust, the American International Corporation, and other Wall Street firms interested in the Russian market; he also had some dealings with US Steel Corporation. After the Bolshevik coup, the “October Revolution”, he became “technical advisor” to the Soviet Bureau in New York and lobbied for diplomatic recognition of the USSR3.

In 1919, he returned to Moscow. Lenin appointed him plenipotentiary for foreign railway procurement, and he proceeded to spend 240 million gold rubles — a full quarter of the entire Russian Imperial gold reserves — on a locomotive deal with Sweden and Germany. Russia ordered 1,000 locomotives, but received only 500. The prices were roughly double the going rate, the contracts contained no meaningful penalty clauses for late delivery, Lomonosov “forgot” to include provisions for refunds if the deal fell through, and the Swedish company used some of the Russian gold to expand its own factories.

Some of the funds went to accounts Lomonosov described as “not subject to open reporting”. When an economist pointed out the absurdity of the deal in a newspaper in 1922, Lenin personally ordered that paper shut down. Lomonosov received only a reprimand, defected to Britain a few years later, became a British citizen, sent his son to Cambridge, and died peacefully in 1952 — never touched by the Soviet state. The so-called “Locomotive affair” was almost certainly not about buying locomotives, but primarily a mechanism for transferring Russian gold abroad, perhaps as repayment to the Bolsheviks’ creditors.

Is it far-fetched to suspect that the crypto-Bolshevik Lomonosov (who never joined the party, even as Soviet Railway Commissar) had a hand in ensuring that the bread deliveries to Petrograd were delayed at just the right moment?

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Though it must be said that it was the Provisional Government that flung open the prison gates with a general amnesty, riding the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm. Simultaneously, they disbanded the police; thousands of pre-revolutionary gendarmes were lynched by mobs of newly-freed criminals. And this was the nice, civilized Kerensky-liberals! Predictably, Russian cities were immediately flooded with an army of thieves and pickpockets, and armed robbers began organizing into gangs. In the revolutionary chaos, arrests and searches were carried out left and right on the basis of so-called “revolutionary legality” and many a bandit gave himself a badge and a license to steal, rob and extort.

However, not every career criminal who walked out of prison due to the amnesty went back to the old trade. Many had a vision that went further, and ambitions that went beyond lifting wallets at the train station.

The most famous thief to enter Soviet service was Moishe-Yakov Vinnitsky, better known as Mishka Yaponchik, the “King of Odessa”, mentioned in our previous post on criminals working for the Soviets, and immortalized by Babel as Benya Krik in the Odessa Tales. There are two theories on how he acquired the nickname “Yaponchik” (“Little Japanese”): according to the first one, it was due to the slant of his eyes. The more colorful theory states that he heard or read something about the Yakuza and would tell everyone who’d listen that Odessa’s criminals needed to emulate them. In his youth, Yaponchik, like any upstanding Jewish boy, studied at the cheder. But then 1905 came along and he decided to explore new opportunities.

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First, Yaponchik joined a so-called “Jewish self-defense unit”. In the era of “pogroms”, these existed in every Pale of Settlement city. Many of them were quite transparent cover for either Socialist or Zionist paramilitaries, or straightforward criminal gangs. Yaponchik took to fighting and shooting, but he wanted more — and before long, Moishe-Yakov fell in with a gang of anarchist bandits, robbing wealthy businessmen. The gang didn’t last long: after the murder of a policeman, everyone was arrested and sentenced to death. Yaponchik, still a minor at that point, got off with twelve years. He spent the next decade in prison and was freed by the Provisional Government.

Yaponchik returned at once to the old trade, but he was no longer a teenage punk. He was now a made man. He formed something he called “Jewish Revolutionary Self-Defense Brigade,” whose self-defense mainly consisted of armed robbery. By 1918 he was the unquestioned shadow king of Odessa’s criminals, with dozens of heists to his credit. Moreover, the “Jewish Revolutionary Brigade” had graduated from simple armed robbery to racketeering, extortion, smuggling and various other pursuits. The gang’s headquarters was located in a brothel.

By 1919, Odessa was getting a little small for Yaponchik, and he decided to offer his services to the Bolsheviks, hoping to acquire new territories to loot. He already had a history with the Bolsheviks, running guns to the early Red Army at a hefty discount, in the hope of future favors. These favors were granted, as Yaponchik’s gang operated with virtual impunity. He had bought the most expensive restaurant in Odessa and ran several brothels and casinos, all quite in the open.

He was so untouchable that rumors were circulating in the city that Yaponchik was the head of the Odessa Cheka, the Bolsheviks’ dreaded secret police. The rumors were so persistent that the Cheka had to issue a public statement in the official Bolshevik newspaper confirming that the head of the local branch was Mikhail Grinberg, and not Yaponchik.

In any case, the Bolsheviks accepted the criminal assistance, and Odessa’s street gangs became the “54th Soviet Revolutionary Regiment”. The regiment was part of the 45th Rifle Division, led by Red Army commander Iona Yakir. Yakir was a brutal Bessarabian Jew with an uncanny natural talent for military matters, who would go on to commit savage massacres against peasants and Cossacks, but also play a significant role in reforming the Red Army in the Interbellum period.

A banquet and something resembling a military parade were arranged to mark the gangster regiment’s departure for the front, where it was to fight the forces of Simon Petliura. Yakir later described the scene:

Iona Yakir, a cruel but intelligent man, had doubted the regiment’s fighting capacity from the beginning. As a precaution, he assigned Sasha Feldman, a scrawny anarchist, to the regiment as a special commissar. Several Bolshevik commissars had refused the assignment. The regiment also did not have a dedicated officer for political education, as Bolshevik party members refused to be associated with the gangster detachment.

Yakir turned out to be right. The bandits, after their decadent send-off party, got so drunk they missed their train. What’s more, once they sobered up and realized they were actually going to war, many simply ran off. By the time Yaponchik’s “regiment” reached the front, it was down to a third of its original strength. The first combat engagement of the Odessa bandits was actually successful; they pushed Petliura’s forces out of a village and even took some prisoners. The next day, however, a counterattack completely routed Yaponchik’s forces. They left behind all heavy weapons and fled the battlefield. The survivors, Yaponchik among them, hijacked commandeered a train bound for Odessa, intending to go home.

The Bolsheviks were not particularly amused by the behavior of their revolutionary allies and decided to instill some discipline by dispatching a punitive detachment to intercept said train. The circumstances of Yaponchik’s death are not quite clear: he was shot either while fleeing, while resisting arrest or he was simply executed on the spot. Members of his gang would later murder Commissar Feldman, blaming him for Yaponchik’s death.

The Bolsheviks, fully aware of Yaponchik’s reputation as a rogue of the highest order, did their best to make sure he was really dead; Yaponchik’s grave was exhumed twice, first by Commissar Feldman a few hours after his burial, and then again two days later by Nikolai Podvoisky, People’s Commissar of Military Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR.

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Listen to five of our most recent episodes down below. Seven hours back to back. Please be patient as we learn the ropes of this platform before becoming local superstars. RWA never dies!

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