In this episode of Trigonometry, we re joined by Anthony Biver, a Russian-American historian, to talk about why Russia is the way it is, and why it is so different from the rest of the world.
00:03:43.340Well, there's been a considerable debate, obviously, amongst historians about where the Russian method of warfare has originated.
00:03:51.740Some will say that it goes back to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, with the sweeping in from the Stiep, from coming from the Far East and the way that the original Rus settlements were then attacked.
00:04:08.740And in many ways, this was the start of a continual warfare, which lasted for a long time.0.76
00:04:16.980The Mongols certainly were the ones who believed that fire and sword, laying waste, mass rape was an element, a natural element of warfare.0.74
00:04:29.480And this actually became almost a central element in the Russian view of warfare, of conspicuous cruelty, I think one can call it.0.78
00:04:41.860And the interesting thing is, of course, Europe was just as bad in the 17th century.0.68
00:04:47.560One thinks of the horrors of the wars of religion, as bad as anything that had happened in Russia up till that time.
00:04:54.080But the difference came really because afterwards there was the Enlightenment in Europe in the 18th century.
00:05:00.680There was also in the 19th century very much more a codification of warfare,
00:05:06.460which attempted to make it not necessarily more civilized, but at least following certain rules.
00:05:11.740And then the invention of the Red Cross and Geneva Conventions and so forth.
00:05:16.800That did not affect Russia nearly so much, specifically in its expansion towards the east and towards the south.0.67
00:05:24.080into the Caucasus, and above all, the conquest of Siberia, which was savage. So there is this
00:05:31.560difference very much between the Russian attitude and the European attitude, which has gone on.
00:05:39.540But Russia itself is this extraordinary mixture. And one of the reasons of writing about
00:05:44.640Rasputin was that he summoned up so many of these contradictions himself. And I found it
00:05:52.200fascinating the way that, for example, in the 19th century, the great poet George Kutchev saying
00:05:57.720Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone. And I think there's a lot of truth in that. There1.00
00:06:03.920is all of these elements, as I say, contrasting themselves. In the case of Azhar Putin, the deep
00:06:09.800spirituality mixed in with lasciviousness, corruption mixed in with incredible generosity,
00:06:17.360all of these sort of coming together in the same person0.96
00:06:22.800very much sort of represented not so much an archetypal Russian
00:06:27.660but if you like the potential conflicts within what might be talked about
00:06:35.420as say the Russian soul, the Russian mind
00:06:37.840and I think it's intriguing one can, there is no DNA, a national DNA
00:06:43.500but there is a certain self-image in all countries I think
00:06:46.960that they try to live up to a certain reputation, a certain tradition.
00:06:55.820And this is what one can not necessarily generalize about,
00:07:00.380because certainly with Russia, with so many different nationalities,
00:07:03.680you cannot say that a Buryat is the same as somebody from the extreme Far East
00:08:46.720which one sees particularly in the 18th century and onwards.
00:08:50.780I mean, when one goes to the Tretiakov
00:08:54.460or some of the great galleries in Moscow,
00:08:59.660you see a sudden development which comes.
00:09:04.140And I think this is very much more when Russia started to escape from being the prisoner of its own past.0.54
00:09:10.980And it was a prisoner of its own past.
00:09:13.500And as you say, it was an occupied, oppressive past for many centuries indeed.
00:09:21.740But it was also something which is still to this day, they cannot quite escape.0.98
00:09:26.980So although the Orthodox Church, the whole idea of holy, slavophil Russia, was a vital element in escaping from that Tatar, non-Christian past,0.85
00:09:45.280It's become so deeply embedded that we see today that Vladimir Bedinsky, Dugan, some of the ideological influences on President Putin have this reaction of believing that, you know, Europe should be come under basically an orthodox Russian orthodox influence all the way from Vladivostok to Dublin, they even said, which is sort of an astonishing idea.
00:10:13.180But it is somewhere sort of deep, again, in the Russian psyche,
00:10:39.480But it's interesting you say something,
00:10:40.780because I've been thinking about this for a long time.
00:10:43.180How much is it just like a time lag between where the West is and where Russia is in the sense that, you know, 150 years ago, there's quite a lot of countries around the world who thought, actually, you know, we have the right idea and we should spread this idea around the world.
00:10:57.620The British Empire did it and lots of others. Is it just maybe that Vladimir Putin is acting in an 18th century way in the 21st century world? Is that what's happening here?
00:11:06.040Well, I was very struck. I was very struck by when the Duke of Marlborough went to, I think this was in 1902, went to Moscow and Petersburg and at a reception with the Tsar, with Nicholas II, his wife asked Nicholas II, you know, why is democracy not possible in Russia?
00:11:28.640And he said Russia has to be 200 years behind Western Europe.
00:11:32.960And this was very much of an idea that to protect Russian tradition, to protect Russian culture, this time lag was essential.
00:11:43.640But it was also part of the idea that, you know, as soon as you loosened the chains, then chaos would break out.
00:11:50.920And in a sense, when you have such a landmass, such a vast landmass, how do you maintain control?
00:11:58.900So you could say that the expansion in some ways is also the element slightly of the anxious billionaire mentality.
00:12:10.900You know that unless I get more money, I'm going to lose the whole lot.
00:12:14.320And this is very much, again, the attitude of seeking more external, near abroad territory all the way to the Far East.
00:12:26.400And even then, the Tsar was interested in the disastrous Japanese war of 1904, 1905, of again, seizing more territory there.
00:12:37.400Now, part of that is an expansionist mentality, like, as you rightly say, with other European colonial powers expanding.
00:12:56.700And this has obviously been one of the problems of warfare with, as Paul Kennedy, the rise and fall of the great powers.
00:13:05.800If you keep on pushing and expanding too much, you're going to overstretch.
00:13:09.940And, Seranti, we've seen the history of Russia, and we're talking about it at the moment.
00:13:16.580And people in the West look at their attitude to casualties and are, quite frankly, horrified.0.93
00:13:21.920The way that Russians seem almost nonchalant is probably not the right word, but a kind of nonchalant when it comes to the casualties, etc.0.89
00:13:31.660Does that come from their history, or is there something else tied to that?0.93
00:13:36.900Well, I think there are two things there, but most of it comes from the history.
00:13:42.720There has always been this case whereby the attitude of meat for the cannon,
00:13:48.760in the Russian phrase, is regarded, is assumed, because of the size of their population.
00:13:57.980I mean, the whole notion, the Russian steamroller, etc., the idea that simply out of sheer weight of numbers, they can crush any enemy.
00:14:06.800And that has certainly been why the French were so desperate to have the alliance with the Russian Empire for the First World War.
00:14:16.700and again to a certain degree later on feeling that sort of only the sheer size and scope of it
00:14:24.640would save the West in the Second World War. But the real problem is that they have often
00:14:32.620treated their own people as badly as the enemy. I mean I remember being horrified when researching
00:14:38.940in Moscow in the 90s at the scale of suicides amongst the Russian conscripts simply because
00:14:45.900and the way they were treated and bullied and all the rest of it.
00:14:49.440I mean, there were up to 5,000 a year.
00:14:52.040And I remember the British ambassador was absolutely appalled
00:14:55.040when he went to see General Lebed, who made a joke about it.
00:14:58.780He thought it was terribly funny that in Siberia they had to make sure
00:15:02.780that they were digging enough graves for all the suicides for the next winter
00:15:05.880because otherwise they wouldn't be able to bury them.
00:15:08.320In the Second World War, we see the way that,
00:15:12.440and I think this is a crucial element,
00:15:14.440But the soldiers had so often been treated so badly, and in fact, not as individuals, when, for example, at Stalingrad and, in fact, really through the whole of the advance towards Berlin afterwards, if there were any casualties or any desertions, an officer was expected to just grab any civilians they could and say, right, you're in the army now or whatever.
00:15:35.240They'd never recorded their names. Their names were only recorded if they were suspected of treason or desertion and then investigated by Smirsch or the earlier before that, the NKVD special detachment.
00:15:48.880This meant that actually there was a burning resentment. And this, in fact, is one of the major explanations for the mass rapes of 1945 in Poland, in Hungary and above all in Germany.
00:16:02.400And it's also one of the explanations for the cruelty to Ukrainian prisoners of war and Ukrainian civilians in the war that we're seeing at the moment.
00:16:12.140But also then don't forget the treatment of their own soldiers when, and especially the foreigners who've been guffed and tripped or press ganged into the Russian army fighting in Ukraine,
00:16:24.060where we've seen Africans who've had landmines strapped to their chests and are being forced forward as suicide bombers.
00:16:30.920I mean, this is a form of inhumanity, which obviously in the West we find incomprehensible.0.56
00:16:41.240But it's still something which Russia has not been able to get an attitude, which they have not been able to get rid of.
00:16:50.080And how much do you think, if we go back to the Second World War, but also the Soviet Empire, how much of that was exacerbated by the communist mindset?
00:16:57.980I think the communist mindset raised the idea of ruthlessness as almost a romantic, admirable heroism.
00:17:10.340The idea of Zazinsky and the Cheka, the idea that, you know, you have to crush your enemy totally.0.83
00:17:20.340I mean, the poems about sort of crushing bones and all the rest of it written by members of the Checa in their own sort of magazines are simply unbelievable.0.94
00:17:31.940You know, even the Spanish Inquisition, I don't think that their torturers sort of wrote poems in that particular way.0.92
00:17:39.160It is a very special mentality, but it was something which was, shall we say, there in the background and then which the mentality of romantic communism, of achieving the future through total ruthlessness.
00:17:55.800And one has to remember, at the Battle of Stalingrad, Russian snipers were ordered to shoot down starving Russian orphans who'd been bribed by German infantrymen with a crust of bread to fill their water bottle in the Volga.
00:18:09.160And, you know, it didn't matter who you were, what your origin was, whether you were innocent or not.
00:18:15.620That made no difference whatsoever when it came to what were regarded as the interests of the state.
00:18:21.820And that being the case, do you think, in a way, it's a slightly gruesome question,0.83
00:18:26.960is it an effective mindset to have, particularly in warfare, particularly if you have the numbers that Russia does,0.80
00:18:32.460just to treat your own citizens and your own military with utter callousness?
00:18:38.800I mean, in terms of morale, the way that the Ukrainians offered their telephones to prisoners so that they could ring their parents, their mother at home or whatever, was a very effective propaganda device.
00:18:59.060I mean, not just foreigners who had been tricked to join up being told, oh, we'll train you up as bodyguards or whatever it might be with some of the promises.
00:19:07.840But many of the ordinary conscripts who were not supposed necessarily to go to a front line
00:19:15.640found themselves every single promise was broken.
00:19:19.820And although they'd been bribed quite often with an up front for some,
00:19:23.380they then found they had no further control over their fate.
00:19:26.880And I think it was this feeling that they had completely lost any form of control over their own fate
00:28:57.160But, I mean, what one also needs, I think, to remember is how clever Putin was in bringing together the two sides, if you like, from the Russian Civil War.0.65
00:29:09.440He was the one who brought back various white generals to be reburied.0.55
00:29:13.460The way that you won't see a hammer and sickle, really, anywhere around the Kremlin anymore.0.55
00:33:26.840He was different to his wife in a certain way.
00:33:32.280He believed that they should never show any emotion at all.
00:33:36.620And, for example, there was a German prince staying in Petrograd who'd been invited to dinner.
00:33:43.820And he suddenly heard that the Tsar's uncle had been blown up in Moscow.
00:33:51.920So he immediately rang the palace to say, I assume that the dinner has been cancelled or whatever.
00:33:58.360And he said, oh, no, no, no, it's going ahead. It's going ahead.
00:34:01.380And he arrives and finds that the Tsar and a cousin are having great fun trying to push the other one off the sofa.
00:34:11.860I mean, playing sort of childish games.
00:34:14.780So it's the question of blocking out anything that is uncomfortable to their worldview.
00:34:22.040But the idea that people have died in huge numbers, if you describe, in their defense or under their orders, is not something which troubles them. They regard that as part of the natural world.
00:34:37.220And Rasputin says at one point to the Empress, when she is genuinely concerned at the casualties,
00:34:44.800he says, oh, you know, think of them, each one of them as candles lit at the throne of God.
00:34:53.980Well, it was a brilliant phrase to the point of view of sort of calming her down,
00:34:57.960of saying, you know, all of the sacrifices perfectly.
00:35:01.780It's a tribute. It's a tribute to the Almighty.
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00:36:01.580And what's interesting is that that overt religiosity or attitude to the spiritual,
00:36:09.140it leaves leaders potentially vulnerable to people like Rasputin, but not just Rasputin,
00:36:15.120others of his ilk who can come in and be incredibly manipulative for their own ends.
00:36:20.520Yes. I mean, it is fascinating that you can have that sort of contrast within the same person. But again, you know, this is one of the fascinating contradictions, partly with, as I say, Rasputin and the relationship with the royal family, but also within the royal family itself, because there were other members of the royal family who were simply appalled.
00:36:43.400I mean, the Tsar's mother was horrified.
00:36:48.020Now, she had actually been influenced by the fact of having this traumatic dream
00:36:52.920when she was pregnant with him and about a peasant chopping off the head of her baby.
00:36:59.080And then 38 years later, she finds that her son and daughter-in-law
00:37:03.680have become completely besotted with the Siberian peasant.0.82
00:37:06.500And she is absolutely certain that they will die in a revolution killed by peasants.
00:37:14.400And you mentioned the Russo-Japanese War,
00:37:17.080something very few people outside the history world know anything about.
00:37:32.420This is a period when Germany and Russia interested in seizing parts of the Chinese territory.
00:37:42.060One has to remember, you know, the way that the great Chinese resentment against the West is very much the unequal treaties which were forced on China when it was at its weakest in the 19th century.
00:37:56.680And the Russians even imposed a railway which they built to accelerate the Trans-Siberian Railway right across Mongolia.
00:38:14.940So the Chinese had a lot to resent.0.82
00:38:18.460But the Japanese also were in this period of expanding population0.90
00:38:23.620and wanting to colonize Vernia abroad, which basically meant Manchuria.
00:38:30.320And therefore, there was an imbalance, if you like,
00:38:37.020certainly in power in that particular region.
00:38:40.080And the Tsar had been persuaded by a forerunner of Rasputin,
00:38:44.380There's another mystic con man basically called Philippe, a Frenchman, saying that you should be the emperor of the east.
00:38:54.400And actually, the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, was saying from the center signal at sea to the Tsar, saying from the emperor of the Atlantic to the emperor of the Pacific.0.58
00:39:06.740Now, Nicholas at that particular moment thought, well, that's ridiculous.
00:39:10.200But then he was encouraged by one of his ministers, particularly by Pleva, that, you know, a war against the Japanese would be a huge advantage because it would be a quick, easy war.1.00
00:39:22.020They're just Orientals. You know, they can't take on a modern Russian army.0.99
00:39:31.800And others were much more skeptical, but the Tsar rather liked the idea.
00:39:37.200And so on the ambassadorial reception in 1904, in January, the New Year reception, he was pretty insulting to the Japanese ambassador who bowed and said nothing, not realizing, in fact, that the Japanese were about to send huge numbers of troops across the sea to the Korean peninsula.
00:40:27.060and then as I mentioned there was the utter disaster
00:40:31.700of sending the Baltic fleet, really, all the way around the world,
00:40:35.740and they were destroyed in the Battle of Tsushima,
00:40:39.000one of the greatest naval victories, which the Japanese won easily.
00:40:44.740So it was a vast humiliation to Russia, especially to Nicholas II himself,0.59
00:40:51.960and it forced him into accepting basically a constitution in October 2005,0.60
00:41:01.700At a time when 1905. Sorry, I don't know. Yeah, I know one easily skips the century. Yeah. And this, of course, was because the war had created such anger that being the march of Father Gapon, the protest in St. Petersburg in that January of 2005, where they were gunned down by the Imperial Guard and the Cossacks.
00:41:31.700and all the rest of it, and terrible repression in the countryside
00:41:36.680when houses, manor houses, were set on fire.
00:41:40.180It was very much a prelude to the later revolution, the 1905 disturbances.
00:41:45.780And you also then get, of course, the battleship for Tjemkin
00:43:09.960Yes, but there are two versions of that.
00:43:12.240There are also those who will argue that the collapse of regime
00:43:16.020is accelerated when they start making compromises.
00:43:19.100So, you know, it can work both ways. In his particular case, of course, it wasn't just the repression. Stolipin, the prime minister, had been known to repress as strongly as he could.
00:43:42.460And that was an effective repression. But for the time being, I mean, the hangings, everybody referred to him as Stolipian's necktie because of the mass executions.
00:43:55.920But it wasn't just the mass executions. The way the army was sent into the countryside and any rebellious peasants were sort of beaten with an inch of their life with the cleaning rods of their rifles.
00:44:07.440And this, of course, created vast anger and bitterness and so forth.
00:44:11.820All of these elements were some form of preparation, but the real collapse in the authority of the Tsar Nicholas II came very much actually from the way that rumour, and false rumour, because of Rasputin and his relationship with the emperors.
00:44:37.800One of his letters to the Empress was stolen and then was circulated
00:44:42.300in which he said that she wanted to fall asleep forever on his shoulder.
00:44:46.960Well, this was interpreted automatically as the fact that she was sleeping with him.
00:54:09.520It skipped a generation going on to Alexandra,
00:54:16.040the empress Alexandra, and the daughters, the four daughters, were absolutely fine.
00:54:23.840And then Alexis, when he was born, they realized that he had haemophilia.
00:54:29.780Haemophilia is when your blood doesn't clot, basically.
00:54:31.640If you get a cut, you're going to bleed out.
00:54:33.760It's obviously a disease entirely of the blood, which produces appalling pain in the joints, particularly.
00:54:42.340And, of course, this is what gave Rasputin his power.
00:54:46.040He didn't really have any power or influence at the beginning, but the moment that he started to be able to relieve the symptoms, mainly by the voice and by the touch and his eyes, some people say he was a hypnotist, but I'm not so sure about that.
00:55:02.360I mean, he did use those eyes in a sort of powerful way.
00:55:06.440But as far as the children were concerned, it wasn't just Alexei.
00:56:37.300Anthony, well, thank you so much for coming back on the show.
00:56:40.020As we wrap up, I have two questions for you.
00:56:42.020We always have the same question at the end, but before that,
00:56:44.680if you look at the history of Russia's relations with Europe,
00:56:48.220in particular in the West more broadly,
00:56:49.640there have been times when european countries have been at war with russia there have been times when
00:56:54.680russia has been a participant with other european countries and wars against other european countries
00:56:58.920etc so those relationships the relationship with russia is up and down and flows in different
00:57:05.480directions for a time do you think there will be a time certainly in our lifetimes when the
00:57:13.640relationship that we have with Russia will shift in a more constructive direction? Or do you think
00:57:20.280the impact of the war in Ukraine is such that it will be a tarnishing force for a very, very long
00:57:25.640time? I fear very much the latter, yes. I think there will be such bitterness after the war.
00:57:32.680It's impossible to predict, obviously, at the moment how it's going to turn out. But I think
00:57:37.560that uh the the suffering in russia will be uh considerable partly not just because of the
00:57:45.640economic consequences i mean how will they be able to readapt their economy back to a uh should we
00:57:53.960say a more civilian economy and demilitarize it uh will be very very hard and that will cause
00:57:59.960vast suffering in the countryside and certainly outside the main cities but even in the main
00:58:04.840citizens themselves, I suggest, but also what we talked about earlier about the
00:58:10.520traumatized and brutalized soldiers coming back from the war and what effect they will have on
00:58:18.280the whole place. So without going into any sort of predictions, I don't think Russia will split
00:58:25.320into different parts or anything like that, as some have tried to predict. But I do think that
00:58:31.960It will be a center of resentment and will be dangerous in that particular way.
00:58:40.520But a lot will depend on other elements of to what degree China will help Russia
00:58:46.120or to what degree China will actually exploit Russia's vulnerability at the end of the war
00:58:51.880with its own interests in Siberia and other areas.
00:58:57.200The Chinese are taking over the Far East of Russia, just demographically speaking, already.0.99
00:59:00.920Absolutely. Demographically already. But they're even changing the maps, as you've seen, with the names of Vladivostok and others now in Chinese. So there's little doubt about Putin being in need of the Chinese, but I think probably underneath afraid of them as well.1.00
00:59:19.440Well, and of course, the big question is what happens when Putin goes.1.00
00:59:41.320Well, no, what I enjoyed was, I mean, because we were talking in the large
00:59:45.060rather just in the specific, and I think that the problem has been
00:59:49.440that sort of you know people have just given away the whole story of their book and for many people
00:59:54.160they think well why do i bother to go and buy it now um but i mean when one can actually have a
00:59:58.880really great discussion um that's a different matter uh so no as i say we look forward to
01:00:04.960having you back is what i'm saying hold on hold on before you run uh our final question as as is
01:00:11.840always is the same which is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be
01:00:15.360could be in the context of this could be in the context of something else
01:00:19.620um what do you mean well said about contemporary politics could be about anything at all anything
01:00:25.340that's on your mind that you think why doesn't anyone talk about this um
01:00:29.620well uh well at the moment you know what are going to be uh the environmental consequences
01:00:38.440let's face it war is one of the worst environmental disasters you can imagine
01:00:43.140And here we are with more wars around the world at the moment, more conflicts going on, whether in Africa or elsewhere, where already people are suffering water wars and climate disasters of one form or another.1.00
01:00:57.720So the biggest issue really is, I'm afraid, going to come back again to immigration because of the side effects of everything else going on.0.92
01:01:08.300And, you know, there's no way that Europe can be the lifeboat.0.95
01:01:11.560And I remember, actually, funny enough, in a book that I wrote and was published in 1990,
01:01:18.200I remember predicting there that the possibility that perhaps the role of armies in the future
01:01:23.100are simply going to be to prevent mass immigration.
01:01:28.400So, Anthony Beaver, thanks for coming on.