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The Kremlin Conspiracy
1,000 Years of Russian Expansionism
By Douglas Boyd The History Press
Copyright © 2014 Douglas Boyd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6275-9
CHAPTER 1
GENGHIS KHAN, UNCLE JOE AND VLAD THE GASMAN
On 4 March 1936 William Bullitt, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, sent an unusual cable to Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Washington. He listed what he called 'personal observations' about life in Russia: the climate was harsh; government officials were suspicious and secretive; accurate information was hard to obtain; the censorship was rigorous; the constant surveillance was oppressive; Russian diplomacy was adept at worrying a diplomat without even insulting him; and the overall conditions of life were disagreeable and tyrannical. Bullitt ended with the comment that the despatch presented 'an accurate picture of life in Russia in the year 1936'.
The observations, however, were those of his predecessor Neill S. Brown, who served as US Minister to Russia 1850–53. In the intervening eighty years, bloodshed and famine had ravaged the country in the Russian revolution of 1905, the two revolutions in 1917, and the First World War. Although more than 100 million Russians had died violently and/or prematurely in these eight decades, the essentials of life in their country were unchanged. Political repression, perpetual surveillance by ubiquitous legions of spies and informers and the suspicion and hostility with which Western diplomats were treated even during the Second World War, when they were Russia's allies in its hour of great need, were not Soviet phenomena but Russian. They were not imposed on the Russian people by their Soviet masters with whom Bullitt had to deal, but on the Soviet system by its Russian creators.
Ambassador Bullitt had been given copies of Neill Brown's despatches by a secretary in the embassy named George Kennan after they were discovered among refuse in a building that had served as stables for the American legation in St Petersburg during the mid-nineteenth century. The United States then being the only major Western nation that did not have a professional diplomatic service, Brown had started life, in his own words, 'as poor as any man in Tennessee'. He worked as a farm labourer to finance his studies, qualified as a lawyer, fought as a sergeant major with the Tennessee Volunteers in the Seminole Indian Wars and was governor of his state before being made Minister to Russia as a reward for supporting the campaign of President Millard Fillmore. Speaking no language other than English, Brown communicated with the Russian authorities through his French-speaking secretary, French being the language of the Tsar's court and the educated classes.
In contrast, George Kennan was a career diplomat – a fluent Russian speaker who had studied in Berlin and served his country in Germany and the Baltic states before his first posting to Moscow. He was also perceptive enough to appreciate the historical value of Brown's despatches. The two diplomats shared not only similar experiences in the daily execution of their duties, but also a similar lack of appreciation by their masters in Washington. On one occasion Brown was driven to lament that he had not heard from his Secretary of State in over a year. Similarly, while acting as chargé d'affaires in the absence of an ambassador during 1946, Kennan complained that President Truman's administration seemed not to care what its representatives in Russia were doing. Near despair drove him to compose what he called his 'long telegram' as a desperate plea for someone in Washington to pay attention to what was going on in post-war Moscow.
Since the establishment of diplomatic links between the US and Russia in 1808, the two countries based their relationship on a mutually profitable trading relationship, the avoidance of conflicts of interest and a common wariness of British sea power and French continental ambitions, which culminated in an Anglo-French fleet bombarding Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka peninsula in 1855. As Tsar Nicholas I said to a predecessor of Neill Brown, 'Not only are our interests alike, our enemies are the same.' But there were also areas of conflicting interest when Brown arrived in St Petersburg on 23 July 1850. American whalers had bases on Siberia's Pacific coast; Russian fur-trappers worked out of Kodiak in Alaska, a Russian possession until 1867. America's Pacific seaboard had seen other incursions as far south as California, where the Russian colony at Fort Ross, just north of San Francisco, was only sold off in 1841. Russia was suspicious of American designs on Sakhalin Island and had recently annexed from China the estuary of the Amur River; America was uneasy about Russia's designs on Japanese territory.
Presented three weeks after his arrival to the Tsar and royal family at the Peterhof Palace, built by Peter the Great, Neill Brown found Nicholas I friendly, praising Maj George Washington Whistler of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, who had just died of cholera in St Petersburg after constructing the railway between the capital and Moscow. While commending the Tsar's exceptional energy, Brown also deplored his inability to delegate – and his 'relentless hostility to democratic institutions'.
All the problems Brown encountered in carrying out his duties in Russia can therefore be seen as normal parts of life there and not acts intended to make life difficult for the representative of a potential enemy state. Had he arrived before the Decembrist uprising of 1825 and the several European revolutions of 1848, after which Nicholas I introduced additional repressive measures, he would have found the atmosphere slightly less oppressive, but the pages of Russia's history are splattered with episodes of bloody repression by paranoid rulers and nothing Nicholas had done was new.
Neill Brown's assistant Edward H. Wright came from affluent New England stock. He frequented the beau monde of St Petersburg society – an endless round of glittering balls, private receptions and elegant parties. He, too, commented on the soldiers and police everywhere, and wondered at the crowded streets where people moved about silently. 'There is,' he wrote, 'no noise, no busy hum of life – no laugh, no hearty salutation.' He also noted that the common people worshipped their autocratic ruler and blamed the cruelties of his rule not on Nicholas, but on his underlings.
At the time of Brown's mission to the Imperial Court, the European colonial powers proudly proclaimed their destiny to civilise the world with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. Even in the anti-colonial United States there was a convenient belief that Protestant Europeans had what they called 'the Manifest Destiny' to expand the boundaries of their Christian civilisation westward to the Pacific and beyond. Implying a divine mandate and concomitant absolution for the genocidal violence and greed involved, the Manifest Destiny was used to justify extermination of Native American peoples and the acquisition of Texas, Oregon, New Mexico, Northern California, Hawaii and the Philippines.
Most people in the developed Western countries today like to believe that we have moved on from the philosophy of the colonial era. Yet in Russia, what Neill Brown called in his despatch of 28 January 1852 the 'strange superstition' still lives on. It has motivated Russia's rulers from the beginning, was the most important single cause of the Cold War, and flourishes still.
'A religious belief founded on fear or ignorance' is how the dictionary defines superstition, its etymology indicating that such belief has the power to overcome rational thought and defy logical analysis. Yet, is it possible that fear and ignorance of the outside world are an intrinsic part of the mindset of Russia's past and present rulers? For most English speakers, whose countries were historically protected from hostile neighbours by sea or ocean until the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles and ocean-going nuclear submarines, it is hard to appreciate the world-view of a people surrounded from time immemorial by enemies who may attack at any time, simply by marching or riding for a few days across the empty spaces that separate them from us. Yet for peoples dwelling on a continental landmass without any natural barriers like mountain ranges or great rivers to protect them from sudden attack, paranoid fear is both so natural and sensible that it becomes an ingrained characteristic.
But ignorance? Can ignorance of the outside world be an evolutionary advantage? The answer is yes, because it enables such peoples to demonise their neighbours, making retaliation and first-strike, allegedly pre-emptive, aggression against these neighbours a knee-jerk reaction to contact, executed swiftly, ruthlessly and without scruple time and again.
No modern ruler of the Russian people epitomises these characteristics better than Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili. Under his revolutionary name of Stalin, meaning 'man of steel', he directed for three and a half decades a regime of state terror that held in thrall a population of 250-plus millions – a third of whom were not ethnic Russians. Like fellow dictators Hitler, who was not German, Napoleon, who was not French, and Herod, who was not a Hebrew, Stalin was not Russian. He was a Mingrelian-speaking Georgian from the Caucasus, who came to power after the 1917 October Revolution by sheer cunning, and held onto that power by ruthlessly eliminating any rival, killing millions of his innocent subjects and exiling millions of others to forced labour in sub-human conditions for no crime at all. Yet, because he was elevated by the professedly atheistic Communist Party to the status of living god, it used to be said by his long-suffering subjects that all the crimes committed against them were the work of his minions, acting without the personal knowledge of the man they called 'the little father of his people' or simply vozhd, meaning exactly the same as der Führer.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Among the women in his immediate entourage who hero-worshipped him, Stalin imprisoned and had tortured the wife of his faithful, long-serving personal secretary Alexander N. Poskrebyshev. Equally well known to Stalin was Polina Molotova, the wife of his foreign minister, who fell victim to his paranoia and went overnight from being the privileged head of the state perfume industry to the wretched status of a political prisoner, whose whereabouts were concealed by Stalin from her anxious husband.
The best-read ruler of Russia since Catherine the Great, Josef Stalin was a bibliophile with a personal library of 20,000 beloved books. When Shalva Nutsibidze was imprisoned simply because his wife had aristocratic connections, Stalin discovered that this famous Georgian poet spent the hours in his cell translating into Russian the medieval epic Knight in a Panther's Skin. Each day, the current pages were removed by guards, brought to the Kremlin and edited anonymously by Stalin. After being released, the incredulous Nutsibidze was invited to the Kremlin to meet his mysterious editor, who asked the poet's wife, 'Did we torture you too much?' as though there were a limit up to which torture was decent. Diplomatically, she replied, 'The past belongs to God.' On one day in 1940, Stalin personally signed 329 death warrants. Oh yes, he knew.
But few inhabitants of the USSR knew anything about the flesh-and-blood man who terrorised them all. For the last two decades of his life, Stalin lived almost entirely in the Kremlin fortress, emerging from time to time in a heavily armed convoy that sped through Moscow cleared of all other traffic to one of his two dachi outside the city boundaries, each guarded by several cordons of security troops. On his trips to the Crimean Riviera for winter sunshine, he travelled, as did the others of the Soviet elite, in a personal armoured train that sped non-stop for 1,200 miles along similarly cleared tracks, every mile of which was closely patrolled by armed security troops.
During much of the Second World War, for propaganda reasons the Western media dubbed the Red Army 'our gallant Russian allies'. Hailed as 'Man of the Year 1942' by Time magazine's edition of January 1943, Stalin was given the affectionate nickname of 'Uncle Joe' and pictured with suitably avuncular smile on the cover. He could afford to smile. In its March 1943 edition Time described the Soviet Russians as people 'who look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans'. To Winston Churchill's horror, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed all his own propaganda and fell completely under Stalin's spell, which was all the more dangerous for the postwar world because the American president arrogantly declared that he could handle the Soviet leader 'better than (the British) Foreign Office or my State Department'. He also repeatedly tried to cut Churchill out of the decision-making circuit by meeting Stalin alone, expecting Churchill to take this in good part as the junior partner in the Atlantic Alliance. The British bulldog did not take it in good part, and said so, at which Roosevelt lied barefacedly by pretending that this was all Stalin's doing.
Only a handful of other foreigners ever met Stalin, to make an assessment of the Soviet dictator undistorted by the continual terror in which he kept even his closest associates. One who did was George Kennan, whose US Foreign Service years included two long periods in Moscow. He described the vozhd for Washington's guidance when the Second World War neared its end in autumn 1944 as, 'courageous but wary; quick to anger and suspicion but patient in the execution of his purposes; capable of acting with great decision or waiting and dissembling as circumstances may require; outwardly modest and simple, but jealous of the prestige and dignity of the state he heads; not learned, but shrewd and pitilessly realistic; exacting in his demands for loyalty, respect and obedience.'
Reading between the lines of Kennan's tempered diplomatic language, he could have been describing such despots as Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great. Yet Kennan was far from being hostile to the Russian people. An astute observer of them and their leaders, he experienced both pre-revolutionary and Communist regimes at first hand and was later to make himself unpopular in Washington at the height of the Cold War by arguing that the tendency of Western political leaders and especially the Western military elite to demonise the whole Communist bloc was dangerous because it failed to take into account that decisions and actions taken in London, Paris, Bonn or Washington affected the other side's moves in the great confrontation of the twentieth century, which threatened to exterminate all human life.
Short, stocky, with one arm shorter than the other, Stalin walked with a curiously uneven gait from injuries to his legs sustained in two childhood street accidents. His face was heavily pockmarked by smallpox in infancy, the whites of his eyes yellowish, his teeth bad. He spoke Russian with a thick accent that betrayed his origins as the son of a Georgian washerwoman. His father was either her illiterate alcoholic husband or, more likely, his unpriestly drinking companion, Father Charkviani. Young Josef grew up a kinto, or street-urchin, nearer in spirit and geographically to Teheran and Baghdad than Moscow or St Petersburg. His hometown Gori lay 50 miles from Tiflis, capital of the ancient Georgian people, finally subdued by Russian arms in 1879, the year of his birth.
In Father Charkviani's school at Gori, the street-urchin taught himself to read ahead of the other pupils and graduated early to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, where he was an exemplary student, attending services and singing enthusiastically in the choir. He then discovered the writings of Karl Marx, and took to the clandestine world of terrorists and revolutionaries of all political hues like a fish to water. Under the revolutionary name 'Koba' and a succession of false identities, by 1900 Stalin was fomenting industrial unrest all over the Caucasus with such callous disregard for the workers in the front line who were the targets of police bullets and the sabre slashes of mounted Cossacks that even his fellow conspirators were appalled. Arrested seven times and exiled to Siberia by the Okhrana – the Tsarist secret police – Stalin escaped so easily each time that many Old Bolsheviks suspected he was a double agent, playing the situation both ways.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Kremlin Conspiracy by Douglas Boyd. Copyright © 2014 Douglas Boyd. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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