(Bloomberg Opinion) — The most famous words ever written about the nation of President Vladimir Putin were those of Winston Churchill in October 1939: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
The world shares an awe for the grandeur of that vast country, its mountains, great rivers and cities, remote villages and frozen wastelands. Its culture, the music of Tchaikovsky and Prokoviev, the poetry of Pushkin and prose of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, have inspired generations of literate people of many nations.
Yet through the centuries Russia has also displayed a power to inspire fear — a savagery that now, in the 21st century, once more casts a dark shadow over humanity. I wrote an account of the 1944-45 battle for Germany in which I described Stalin’s conquering horde that advanced upon Berlin: “This was a barbarian army, which had achieved things such as only a barbarian army could.”
A German army doctor, Hans von Lehndorff, studied those Russians as one of their prisoners. He observed with clinical fascination:
Today, many of us look with a shocked bewilderment at how such a remarkable nation should also be capable of inflicting mass suffering and death on the people of Ukraine to satisfy the mere whim of its leader. Yet this same mystification has for hundreds of years afflicted foreigners visiting Russia.
A French aristocrat, the Marquis de Custine, wrote a famous travel book entitled “La Russie En 1839.” As an arch-conservative himself, he had arrived in the country expecting to admire its autocracy. Instead, he found himself disgusted by its people’s indifference to truth and slavish obeisance to power: “Only good news can be told to a master — everything unpleasant must be hidden.” The Russians, he said, were “trained bears who made you long for the wild ones.”
“Russia’s government is characterized by meddling, negligence and corruption,” he continued. “An honest man is regarded as a fool. A wealth of superfluous and petty regulations breeds an army of bureaucrats, each of whom performs his duties with an exactitude and gravity designed to imbue with importance a mountain of trivial.”
The Marquis wrote this only three years after Nikolai Gogol, himself a Ukrainian, penned “The Government Inspector,” his classic satire on officialdom.
Custine denounced Tsar Nicholas I for his relentless secret surveillance of his own subjects, and for the brutal treatment of Poland. After meeting the ruler, he wrote that Nicolas seemed to feel a compulsion to govern cruelly: “If the Tsar has no more mercy in his heart than he reveals in his policies, I pity Russia; if, on the other hand, he is at heart a better man than his conduct suggests, then I pity the Tsar.”
In the 19th century, the Russian aristocracy became so captured by French culture that in noble houses French was the first language. Or sometimes English. A vogue developed for great families, including that of the tsar, to employ English governesses to teach their children.
In 1866, the Irish writer Mrs. Gaskell wrote in one of her novels, somewhat extravagantly: “To be a governess in Russia was the equivalent of taking the veil or a lady-like form of suicide.” Her heroine in that book, Cynthia Fitzpatrick, confides to a friend in despair: “I shall try my luck in Russia. I’ve heard of a situation as English governess at Moscow, in a family owning whole provinces, and serfs by the hundred.”
Some of the most vivid foreign accounts of Russia in that era were compiled by young women who took such work. Marie Russell Brown wrote of her fascination with how in St. Petersburg extreme wealth and poverty jostled each other, “where one section had the finest shops in the world with English- and French-speaking salesmen, and only a short distance away dark little shops selling bread, sausage or meat showed their awareness of the illiteracy of their customers by the gaily colored representations of their wares above the lintels. Hardly more surprising was finding that Prince so-and-so’s palace was entered through a door beside a chemist’s shop.”
Hannah Tracey, daughter of a gardener at Windsor Castle, became governess to Count Leo Tolstoy’s children, and introduced her own ideas on health and hygiene. To the horror of the Tolstoys’ old Russian nurse, she washed the children every day in cold water in the household’s sole bathtub, and took them for energetic walks in all weathers. The children adored Hannah, and when she felt homesick and sang “Home, Sweet Home” in English, little Tanya Tolstoy joined in. Hannah eventually stayed permanently, after marrying a Georgian prince.
Many of the greatest works of Russian literature, of course, portray epic sorrows, often without the consolation of happy endings. Anton Chekhov wrote: “Russian life bashes the Russian till you have to scrape him off the floor, like a 20-ton rock.” He described one of his own literary creations, the landowner Ivanov, in the context of the national character: “The present is always worse than the past.”
Russians take a perverse pride in their own emotional incontinence. In 1790, poet and artist Nikolai Lvov applauded his people’s spontaneity, contrasted with the obsessive orderliness that characterized dreary Western societies: “In foreign lands all goes to a plan/ Words are weighed, steps measured./ But among us Russians there is fiery life,/ Our speech is thunder and sparks fly.”
The principal standard-bearer of Russian conservatism in the late 19th century was Count Pobedonostsev, who repeatedly asserted that everything would go absolutely fine for his great country, if only people would “stop inventing things.”
A famous Scottish travel writer, Donald Mackenzie Wallace, wrote in 1877, “of course travelling in Russia is no longer what it was.” He meant that the creation of a vast and rapidly expanding rail network had destroyed the romance that accompanied horse-drawn troikas and sledges, padded coachmen with jingling bells. The Trans-Siberian Railway became a miracle of the age.
Yet just a year earlier, foreign minister Prince Gorchakov fumed to a colleague: “We are a great, powerless country.”
A Russian general, A.A. Kireyev, lamented in his diary early in the 20th Century: “We have become a second-rate power.” When Russia acquiesced in Austria’s 1908 annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which Russians considered part of their own Slavonic sphere of influence, Kireyev exclaimed bitterly “Shame! Shame! It would be better to die.”
Yet despite such morbid gloom about their national condition, common to successive generations in the final decades before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Russia advanced by giant strides economically and industrially. The socialist paradise of Lenin and Stalin struggled for decades thereafter to match the earlier achievements of Russian capitalism.
The last tsar, Nicholas II, is sometimes represented as a decent, well-meaning ruler and exemplary family man. Yet his government responded brutally to every kind of protest. On Bloody Sunday in January 1905, Cossacks slaughtered at least a thousand unarmed demonstrators on the streets of St. Petersburg, precipitating Russia’s first, unsuccessful revolution. Nicholas’s reign was characterized by a disastrous alternation of repression and craven political retreats.
World War I, which precipitated the fall of the Romanov dynasty, inflicted a ghastly blood toll. Nobody knows exact numbers, but at least 2 million Russians died. Within months of the Bolsheviks withdrawing from the conflict in March 1918, the country was plunged into a civil war which caused millions more deaths.
In 1919, a geologist travelled in eastern regions of the empire, where a Muslim revolt had been suppressed with terrible force. “I kept passing through large Russian settlements [in which] half the population was drunk,” he wrote. “Then Kirghiz villages completely ruined and razed literally to the ground. [Russian troops] made no distinction between the rebels and the peaceful Kirghiz who had remained true to the Russian allegiance. All were indiscriminately plundered and killed.”
By the time of World War II, most of the “haves” of Western societies hated and feared Russia’s communists as much as they disliked the Nazis. General Sir Henry Pownall, vice-chief of the British general staff, wrote in his diary soon after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his invasion of Russia in June 1941: “Would that the two loathsome monsters, Germany and Russia, drown together in a death grip in the winter mud.”
His colleague General John Kennedy remarked likewise, “Although we want the Germans to be knocked out above all, most of us feel that it would not be a bad thing if the Russians were to be finished as a military power too … The Russians doubtless feel the same about us.”
A middle-aged London woman diarist named Vere Hodgson wrote on June 22, 1941: “The Russians have not been very nice to us in the past, but now we have got to be friends and help one another.” She added: “Somehow I think Stalin is more a match for Hitler than any of us … He looks such an unpleasant kind of individual.”
In this, she was entirely right. It was never plausible that, in order to defeat Hitler, British — or American — people would have been willing to eat each other. But the Russians did so during the 1941-43 siege of Leningrad — cannibalism became widespread. Hitler marveled at the fortitude of “those pigs of Russians,” exemplified by their defense of the city. Hermann Goering displayed matching admiration, in the same conversation: “They let a million die of starvation.”
In the last months of the war, the Germans fought with the courage of despair on the Eastern Front, amid the avenging Red Army’s mass rape of their women and ruthlessness toward Hitler’s vanquished soldiers. This caused…
