The importance of Russia can scarcely be underestimated. China and Russia signed a strategic partnership agreement in April, 1997. Russia's Boris Yeltsin and China's Jiang Zemin jointly celebrated the execution of this agreement, together with the presidents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgistan, and Tajikistan, who also signed an agreement that did nothing more than reduce the number of troops close to their common borders. A month later, Yeltsin and Leonid Kuchma, President of Ukraine, signed a friendship treaty. China and Russia are big bruising powers who share the neighborhood with the small fry, but only let them live on the street if they have commodities needed by both, such as oil. The military shake out since 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union hasn't helped either China or Russia. Russia hasn't paid its armed force for months except in devalued rubles, and China has armed itself with obsolete weapons of Soviet origin. So, as two scholars have noted, China is an empty fortress surrounded by the Great Wall.. However, both China and Russia have nuclear weapons so they cannot be moved on to the back shelf for examination at some later time for policies capable of mass destruction. Both need to be looked at on a continuing basis, in Russia's case here back to 1890 or thereabouts to trace its Communist origins from the Tsar of all the Russians to Lenin and Stalin. For an excellent link to Tsarist Russia. See the Alexander Palace Time Machine.

In early February, 1913 St.. Petersburg celebrated three hundred years of Romanov rule over Russia. Only four years later, the monarchy had ended and a bloody revolution converted the government to Soviets ruled by V.I Lenin and Alexander Kerensky until 1924. In that year, Lenin died only to be replaced by Joseph Stalin. The speed at which so momentous a change had occurred was due to a number of factors. Tsar Nicholas II succeeded to his position in 1896 when Tsar Alexander died. Nicholas admitted he had no knowledge of what it took to rule Russia and, in fact, had no interest in being ruler. He was utterly incompetent, and believed in autocracy. His wife, Alexandra, was Queen Victoria's granddaughter and disliked by the Russians. She lived in a manner that did not allow for contact with lesser mortals except for Rasputin, a mad monk who, from time to time, helped with the bouts of illness suffered by the little Tsarevich, a hemophiliac. Orlando Figes, who wrote a massive work on Russia entitled A People's Tragedy, offered a few thoughts on the tercentenary jubilee.

In the mind of the ordinary peasant the Tsar was not just a kingly ruler but a god on earth. He thought of him as a father-figure who knew all the peasants personally by name, understood their problems in all their minute details, and, if were not for the evil boyars, the noble officials who surrounded him, would satisfy their demands in a Golden Manifesto giving them the land....But in general the myth of the Good Tsar worked to the benefit of the crown, and as the revolutionary crisis deepened Nicholas's propagandists relied increasingly on it.....In fact, the jubilee took place in the midst of profound social and political crisis -- some would say even a revolutionary one. Its celebrations were set against a backdrop of several decades of growing violence, human suffering and repression, which had set the Tsar's people against the regime.

In 1861, Tsar Alexander II had emancipated the serfs, just as President Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves a few years later. This Emancipation was perhaps the beginning of the peasant revolution. With freedom from serfdom, the landed gentry had no labor to work on their estates. Thus, the landed gentry or squires began accumulating debt and continuing to live in style and at great expense. Over time, the squires sold off portions of their land to the peasants. Between 1861 and 1900 more than 40 percent of the gentry's land was sold to the peasants whose growing land hunger led to a sevenfold increase in land values. There was a similar rise in rental values. By 1900, two-thirds of the gentry's arable land had been rented out to the peasants. A depression between 1880 and 1890 forced the peasants to increase the land they ploughed. . This made it more profitable for the squires to rent out or sell the land rather than cultivate it. With a very few exceptions, the gentry had absolutely no idea of how to operate a farm, grow food. The home of the gentry, once filled with expensive furniture and European art gradually fell into decay. A few of the landed gentry were unwilling to see their enterprises go under. Prince Georgii Lvov was one of them. He and his family were neighbors of Count Lyof Tolstoi and capable of work. With his sons, Lvov turned a failing agricultural enterprise around and made a profit from this point on. Lvov and others like him became the liberals of the rural areas of Russia. Prince Lvov belonged to the elected local assembly -- Figes calls them zemsvtos -- and the local rural volost was a smaller unit comprising one or two villages. The peasants resented the local assemblies, because they were never elected to such an office, and the Tsar, together with his ministers saw these assemblies as hot beds of liberalism.

While the monarchy relied on the military, it did not treat it at all well. In fact, the mostly conscript army was overwhelmingly peasant, and officers merely perpetuated the feudal system within the ranks. All this led to poor morale. And the demoralization of the army was also connected to its increasing role in the suppression of civilian protests. The defeat of the Russian army during the Crimean War was followed by a humiliating and costly campaign against Turkey in 1877. They left the Russian military fare down on the list of bureaucratic priorities. So even the officer class sometimes had to spend its own money of equipment not considered by the Duma. For various reasons, many peasant migrated to the urban areas and lost touch with the primarily oral culture of the village and the accessibility to the church of those who remained in the rural areas. In the urban setting there were not enough churches to serve so many rootless peasants.

The younger peasants aspired to own property themselves; they saw no future in the rule of the elders. The growing literacy of these younger peasants was a source of individualism. Literacy in Russia rose from 21 percent of the Empire's population in 1897 to 40 percent on the eve of World War I in 1914. By building more schools outside the urban areas, the government was hastening its own end. The role of the peasant was to live and work in utter poverty. Without enough capital to modernize their farms, the peasants had to reduce the size of the fallow land. This only made matters worse; the soil was exhausted by being overworked while livestock herds (the main source of fertilizer) were reduced. By 1900, a third of the peasant households did not even own a horse. These peasants had to cultivate the land by attaching themselves to a plough. There was a growing resentment to the Tsar's tax collectors; the peasants invented ways of avoiding the payment of even insignificant taxes. Many peasants migrated to the cities, where they found the Tsar reluctant to better the lot of the worker through factory legislation.Even when it did enact laws, employers ignored their application with impunity.

Radical intelligentsia of this period included many writers, including Karl Marx. In 1872, his Das Capital was submitted to the Tsarist censors. In German, the language of this book was so dense, the censors approved its publication. The first censor noted that "very few people in Russia would read it, and even fewer would understand it." The second censor, noting the book attacked the British factory system, read that the capitalist exploitation Marx described had never been experienced in Russia. The book was an instant success, and its print run of 3000 was sold within the year.

In January, 1904 the Japanese attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in Manchuria. The Tsar and his advisers saw victory as around the corner. However, the Russian army turned out to be poorly armed with obsolete equipment, and the sheer incompetence of the military commanders stuck literally to the military doctrines of the previous century. The government autocracy had shown that it was incapable of defending the national interest, and Russia had to sign a humiliating treaty with Japan in 1905. This was the year in which Russia had its Tiananmen Square massacre but in St.. Petersburg. Some 150,000 workers marched toward the Winter Palace to petition the Tsar to do something about poor working conditions. These unarmed marchers were mowed down by the guns of the Tsar and the sabres of the Tsar's Cossacks. Bloody Sunday followed by strikes throughout the country and student protests closing all the schools of Russia marked the beginning of the Russian Revolution. A national strike in October, 1905 should have alerted the Tsar. Instead, he spent the month hunting. Count Sergei Witte requested an audience with the Tsar, but it was not granted until October 9. Witte had brought with him the outline of a constitutional monarchy, an elected Duma and Cabinet government. Tsar Nicholas signed the agreement presented by Witte, but nothing really was accomplished; the Tsar waited only to the end of what he saw as a crisis and then junked the agreement. The Tsar was unrelentingly hostile to any idea of constitutional reform and remained so until 1917 when events forced him to abdicate. Soon after the violence of 1905, the Jews were retroactively blamed, a charge without evidence but supported by the Tsar and his police throughout Russia. During the post-Bloody Sunday period, V. I. Lenin wrote from Zurich encouraging the rebellious to unite. Alexander Kerensky was one of those who listened and acted in 1917 as did Leon Trotsky.

The threat of war in Europe had increased after the events of 1905. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires were both breaking apart under pressure from nationalism. By 1914, the Tsar himself was of the view that the time had come for a firm stand against Austria. If it became essential to protect Russia's vital interests, a war was certain, and Russia was too weak to withstand a long war of attrition which the Anglo-German rivalry was likely to produce. Thus, a violent social revolution was bound to be the result in Russia. The government did not have the trust of the largely peasant army. The Tsar ordered Russian mobilization on August 1, 1914, and the die was cast. In the first few weeks of bloody fighting, the Russians advanced some 140 miles, but a combination of tactical surprise and poor communications forced the Russians to retreat at two key battles, where Russia lost some 250,000 trained professional soldiers. Thereafter, the new conscript army, badly trained and poorly led produced one military disaster after another. Once again the Russian army was ill fed and poorly clothed during the cold winter of 1914. It was not long before the army was ridden with disease. Unexpectedly, the high rate of casualties decimated the troops and placed unsustainable burdens on medical attention and evacuation. The government had dragged conscripts into a war they could not win, and morale sank to new lows to be replaced by anger and revolutionary conduct. The Tsar announced he would take command of the troops at the front, but he had no experience in military command and by leaving St.. Petersburg -- renamed Petrograd -- he allowed his ministers to conspire behind him.

In the winter of 1916, desertion of the soldiers began and turned into a torrent. However, when they returned from a rapidly changing front, a combination of cold and strikes led to a bread shortage. In Petrograd, these and other conditions led to a mutiny of the soldiers. The Tsarist authorities lost all military power in the nation's capital. Soldiers and civilians fought side by side and raided depots storing arms. Chaos had to be ended and order restored. It was and on March 3, 1917 the Tsar abdicated. A vacuum at the top was the result, and Prince Sergei Lvov tried to fill it with appointments to a Provisional Government. This body moved like a snail, and it was not at all what Lenin had in mind. He arrived in Petrograd via the Finland Station, presenting his April Theses on the next day. "The Russian bourgeoisie was too feeble to carry out a democratic revolution; and that this would have to be carried out by the proletariat instead.....the whole of Europe was on the brink of a socialist revolution, the Russian Revolution did not have to confine itself to bourgeois democratic objectives. But the practical implications of the Theses -- that the Bolsheviks should cease to support the February Revolution and should move directly towards the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat -- went far beyond anything that all but the extreme left-wingers in the party had ever considered before." The Provisional Government, however, approved sending a delegation to Brest-Litovsk to discuss an armistice with the Germans. After stalling for time, the Russian delegation agreed to sign this treaty which left the Ukraine to the Germans. At last, Lenin was free impose his revolution from Moscow. The capital had been moved there from Petrograd to signify Russia's Asian orientation. Lenin and Trotsky both approved of this move in early 1918

The White Russians -- these were the conservatives fighting a rearguard civil war with the Red Bolsheviks -- tried to save what they could, and General Anton Dennikin led the so-called Volunteers until his death. As Figes put it:

The State Unity Council and the National Centre were the only two groups with any real influence, sharing the posts in the Dennikin government. The former was monarchist and denied the legitimacy of the February Revolution. The latter was Kadet and pledged to restore the Constituent Assembly.....The White leaders...failed to adapt to the new revolutionary world in which the civil war had to be fought. They made no effort to develop policies that might appeal to the peasants or the national minorities, although the support of both was essential. They were too firmly rooted in the old Russia.

The defeat of Germany in 1918 was probably the only development that could have allowed the civil war to continue with the Allied forces supporting the Whites.The Whites also undermined whatever legitimacy they possessed. Peasants deserted in droves, and when caught, they were publicly flogged. This repression only drove more of them into the arms of the Reds. However, in the summer of 1918, the Reds were facing defeat on all fronts. Lenin introduced mass conscription which produced an army of peasants. This had useful consequence; it reduced or ended the domination of the working class in the military, a consequence not unwelcome to Lenin. However, the Reds needed all the men it could get. By 1920, the Red army had grown to five million men, but not all of them were dedicated Bolsheviks. In fact, the army had grown so rapidly, Russian production could not keep up the military's needs. As a result, desertions increased; most of them were peasants who had to grow food for their own families as well as for the army which normally requisitioned food. According to Figes:

Half a million Red Army soldiers joined the Bolshevik Party during the civil war. These were the missionaries of the revolution. They carried Bolshevism, its ideas and its methods, back to their own towns and villages, where they flooded into the Soviet institutions during the early 1920s. The whole of the Soviet apparatus was thus militarized... The success of the Red Army increasingly led to the application of military methods throughout the Soviet system.

This may not have been what the peasants wanted, but they really had no choice. The urban crisis of this period in 1920 was only partly caused by the breakdown of Russian infrastructure. The railway system had virtually collapsed, a wartime casualty that slowed the delivery of critical food to the cities. The rest of it began with reluctance of the peasants to sell food for paper money; it was worthless. As a result, millions of people fled from the cities and tried to settle in the countryside Lenin himself recognized it might have been better for the Bolsheviks had they established a market economy rather that the Stalinism of the planned economy.

In 1918, the situation of the royal family took a turn for the worse. Trotsky had planned a show trial for the Tsar with Trotsky himself as prosecutor. Instead, the Tsar and his entire family were moved to Ekaterinberg where he and all members of the family were executed on July 17, 1918. Since this date, evidence has surfaced that Lenin ordered the execution himself.The bodies were later found where the local Cheka had buried them. A 1992 DNA test done in Great Britain showed conclusively that the bodies were of the Romanov family.

Historians are not uniformly in agreement that this execution was the first step in the direction of the Red Terror; Trotsky has said "we must put an end once and for all to the Papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life." This is entirely consistent with Felix Dzerzhinsky's conduct as head of the Cheka, later renamed the KGB. He spent half his adult life in Tsarist prisons and labor camps and learned the system from the inside. It was not surprising if he supported infliction on his victims of the same cruelty he had suffered all those years.

Maxim Gorky was by far the most outspoken critic of the Red Terror. Indeed, he wrote both plays and books still available in paperback translations. After his death in 1936, Gorky was practically canonized as the father of Soviet literature and ranked with Anton Chekhov, Leonid Andreyev, and Lyof Tolstoy. Gorky's political sympathies are annoyingly obvious, but he couldn't resist a little preaching on his radical opinions. Still, there is something horribly fascinating about watching Gorky's characters in The Summer People brood and argue away the summer as, in the distance, the revolution that will end their way of life may be seen on the horizon.

Under Lenin's name, not Stalin's, the Cheka was made immune from criticism and became a vast police state. The Cheka made terror an integral part of the Bolshevik system in the civil war and later. The Cheka, and later the KGB, was the last stop on the road to a Siberian labor camp or death on the part of those who were charged with counterrevolutionary activities. Lenin failed to understand the nature of the party's bureaucratic problem; it was corruption. With a centrally planned economy, the corruption existed at the center as well as at the periphery. Lenin undertook party purges to weed out the undesirables who gravitated to the Bolsheviks as a way of advancement in the party. Lenin often did not understand the chaos and reduced morale of what he had done. He had, for example,organized a People's Commissariat to inspect the apparatus. It combined the two functions of state inspection and workers' control. Lenin believed this apparatus would make the state democratically accountable. It had the opposite effect, creating a huge new bureaucracy accountable only to Stalin.

In retrospect, the Bolsheviks really extemporized as time passed. Communism may have begun as the party of the Bolsheviks, but neither Lenin nor Marx played much of a role shaping party policies based on what they had written years before the revolution. Improvisation produced terror to enforce the plan of the day. At the center of this workers' paradise, was control of the food supply.

Smallholding farms produced little for the market, and in the present climate [1920]when there were no consumer goods to buy and any food surplus was claimed by the state, withdrew further into subsistence production and the autarchic nexus of the village. The Bolsheviks believed that the future of Soviet agriculture lay in gigantic collective and Soviet farms.....producing directly for the state. The troublesome peasant -- with his petty proprietary instincts, his superstitions, and his attachment to tradition -- would be abolished by these socialist farms since all those who worked in them would be recast as kolkhoz workers.....Here again, the Bolsheviks were carried away by their utopianism, believing they could create socialism by decree.

This rule by decree could not possibly work efficiently or at all. In 1921, the peasants broke out in open revolt against the collective farm system. A heavy-handed requisition brigade was the spark that fired this revolution. The farmer rebels took advantage of the Reds' weakness in their district by marching on the provincial capital. Typically, the Reds unleashed a campaign of terror which spread rapidly to the point where Lenin himself acknowledged the revolt was the greatest threat his regime had ever had to face. The rebel brigades operated like guerillas and succeeded in panicking the Bolsheviks into taking even more repressive steps. Lenin temporarily succeeded in slowing the peasants and the worker both of whom had been joined by the Kronstadt sailors who had been so successful in 1917. On March 16, 1921 Lenin submitted a resolution to the Tenth Party Congress outlawing the formation of factions independent of the Central Committee. As a result, the Central Committee was to rule the party on the same dictatorial lines as the party ruled the entire country. Another historic resolution replaced food requisition with the tax in kind. The farmers could now sell their surplus after paying a tax set eventually at 10 percent. of the harvest. At least five thousand rebels were executed on Lenin's orders after he had laid the foundation for dictatorial rule, first by Joseph Stalin. Lenin died in 1924. Lenin's almost final act was to create the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party. Stalin was the first to inherit it from the man he could not tolerate, V.I. Lenin.

The French Revolution began in 1789 and produced a constitutional government that continues today, albeit in a form some what different from its early outlines. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the form it had taken by 1923, produced a tyranny worse in all ways than the Tsarist rule it replaced. After Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin slowly became the absolute ruler of all the Russians. Stalin, born as Vasili Dzhugashvili took another name. Once again the peasants got the short end of the stick. Stalin wrote a memo describing the kulak. This kulak had an annual income of 200 rubles per month, engaged in trade, leased out farm equipment, machines and buildings. In short, the kulak was a capitalist exploiting those who worked. By January 1929 had prepared a draft decree to expedite the tempo of collectivization. Stalin would not tolerate any delays and constantly queried the farmers down to the village level. Any delay was considered counterrevolutionary and penalized by a term in Siberia's prison camps or gulags. During this period of enforced terror to drive the kulaks out, some estimates place the number of those executed at 10 million. Stalin admitted as much in a conversation with Winston Churchill. See Stalin Triumph and Tragedy by Dmitri Volkogonov published in 1992.

Nikolai Bukharin was a close personal friend of Stalin and quite popular with the party functionaries. Stalin relied heavily on Bukharin in economic matters, but he made a major mistake. In a heated argument on whether to slow the pace of collectivization, Bukharin agreed and Stalin though the pace was too slow. During the argument, Bukharin described Stalin as "a petty Oriental despot." At that point Stalin was reported to have said "I don't need that man anymore." Finally, seeing that opinion against him was gaining adherents, Bukharin recanted, acknowledging he had been wrong. Ten years later, Bukharin paid a terrible price for his recantation. He was expelled from the party as having sided with Trotsky's terrorists and tried in 1937, found guilty on the basis of fake evidence, and killed. So much for the onetime friends of Stalin. In one memo from Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, later the KGB, that in two year's time, "the military collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR ....that 30,514 [Russians] had to be shot." This only covered the period from October 1, 1936 to September 30, 1938.

One of his biographers felt Stalin was merely trying to get rid of those around him who might side with Hitler's Nazis. It was in 1939 that Stalin's Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav-Molotov signed an agreement with Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's Foreign Minister providing that Russia would not be attacked. Hitler wanted his rear defended as the Nazis struck France and England. In a secret protocol, Hitler agreed that the Soviet Union might freely annex the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Red troops did so in 1940. Almost fifty-five years later, the last Russian troops left Latvia and Estonia where they had lived long enough to be citizens of the Baltic states. All three, including Lithuania were independent states by 1991. The world knew the Soviet Union was led by monsters, but it took years to end the Soviet reign of terror.

On February 4, 1931 Joseph Stalin addressed the All-Union Congress of Managers in what became one of the few memorable speeches of his career. In fact, the speech was a clue to what would happen by way of brutality when the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany in 1941.

One feature of the old Russia was the continued beatings she suffered for falling behind, for backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her -- for her backwardness....We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. . We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.

The speech was prophetic. Stalin crushed internal dissent, executing those Russians expressing disagreement. He established the gulags throughout Russia. Stalin threw Russian soldiers against the Nazi army invading Russia and drove it back to Berlin. It appeared in Richard Overy's new book, Russia's War: Blood Upon the Snow (pp3839). Overy also described the terror of the 1930s. Most of its victims were peasants. The collectivization of agriculture led to deaths in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Entire villages in both provinces died of starvation. Some 7 million were killed in this manner, either by starvation or by 25year terms in a remote Russian gulag. Despite these savage acts of Stalin and the "show trials" of the mid1930s, where the professional military was sentenced to death, the Soviet Union almost caught up with the backwardness described by Stalin. During the war itself, Stalin ordered all industry to move east of the Urals where the military industrial complex was able to manufacture aircraft, tanks and weaponry used to drive Nazi division back to Berlin. When the war ended in 1945, at least 20 million soldiers on both sides had been killed. The persecution of Jews in Russia is another chapter of a book that needs to be reread: The illustrated history of Jews in Russia is a link to this history of Central Asia. See The History of Jews in Russia: Beyond the Pale.

It took exactly seventy years for this totalitarian government to collapse (1921 to 1991). While the Soviet Union lasted, it had deployed its military power to expand its political power. World War II was probably the beginning of its decline, even though it developed a nuclear capability, occupied East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary and collaborated up to a point with another Communist power, the People's Republic of China. In midMay, 1997 Russia once again announced it would not forswear a first use policy with respect to nuclear weapons. A number of books have explored the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. They include David Pryce-Jones author of the Strange Death of the Soviet Empire and Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Michael Dobbs. Afghanistan:Soviet Vietnam by Vladislav Tamarav was another. It was published by Mercury House in 1992. Mercury House also published Without Force or Lies: Voices from the Revolution of Central Europe in 1989-90, an anthology with essays by Vaclav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Norman Manea, and Adam Michnik to name a few. This anthology was edited by William M. Brinton and Allan Rinzler. Lenin by Dmitri Volkogonov was published in 1994. The World Cultures Report: Ecocide in the USSR offers the best analysis. It begins with a sobering paragraph.

When historians finally conduct an autopsy on Soviet Communism, they may reach the verdict of death by ecocide....No other great industrial civilization so systematically and so long poisoned its air, land, water and people. None so loudly proclaiming its efforts to public health and protect nature so degraded both. And no advanced society faced such a bleak political and economic reckoning with so few resources to invest toward recovery.

These and many other books described the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reasons for it. All writers are not in complete agreement on the reasons, but most of them look to the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1980 and the withdrawal of Soviet forces in 1989 under humiliating circumstances as a major reason. The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986 was not so much a cause of the collapse, but rather a predictable event showing Soviet incompetence. Then, events in Central Europe during 1989 and 1990 showed the beginning of the end. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany all collapsed after forty years of Communist rule. The Berlin Wall built in 1961 to prevent Germans from escaping Communism was breached in 1989, signaling the end of Communism in Germany.

Since World War II, some really distinguished authors have written books about Russia. One of these, The Gulag Archipelago, was published by St..Martin's Press and written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This author was a dissident writing within Russia and paid the price with a nine-year sentence to a prison camp in Kazakhstan. In January, 1998 St.. Martin's Press expects to publish a biography of this controversial writer, once awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The biography was written by D. M. Thomas who offered new evidence that Solzhenitsyn's first wife collaborated with the KGB against her former husband. He also describes a little-known assassination attempt on Solzhenitsyn's life by the Soviet secret police. In 1974, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from Russia and settled in Vermont. According to a story in the New York Times, his first wife may have had an editorial relationship with the KGB. There was even a suggestion that his first wife tried to censor The Gulag Archipelago. A friend denied the story. His second wife said it was "impossible to believe that such a question comes from such a paper." Other books by Solzhenitsyn include One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and The First Circle. For some time after he returned to Russia, Solzhenitsyn lectured audiences on the immorality of modern Russia, notwithstanding that he finally divorced his first wife to marry a younger woman who had a child by him before the divorce. On at least one occasion, she asked forgiveness from the first wife. Other postwar Russian authors include Andrei Sakharov who was invited by Mikhail Gorbachev to return to Moscow from the prison camp in which he was serving a long sentence for one of those undefined crimes like violating state security. My Country and the World was published in 1975 by Random House. Moscow and Beyond 1986 to 1988 was published by Arthur Knopf in 1988; Sakharov died in 1989. Dmitri Volkogonov wrote two books translated from the Russian, Lenin: The First Account Using All the Secret Soviet Archives was published by The Free Press. The same author wrote Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. It was published by Prima Publishing in 1992. Geoffrey Hosking wrote a more recent account of Russian history, Russia: People and Empire. This book was released in 1997. The author advised readers that the first Romanov, Mikhail, was elected Tsar in 1613 by a council of some five hundred electors. This group included boyars who were members of the old Russian nobility before Peter the Great made military service to the state mandatory.

In his chapter on Russian socialism, Hosking defined its nature in revolutionary terms:

If one regards Populism and Marxism as two separate traditions, Bolshevism must be seen as a synthesis of the two, Marxist in its original impulse, but borrowing from the Populists the ideas of the peasants as a revolutionary class, of leadership by a small group of intellectuals and of overstriding the bourgeois phase of social revolution to reach the socialist revolution directly. Actually, it would more sensible to regard Bolshevism as the form of revolutionary socialism best adapted to Russian conditions, where it was impossible in the long term to form a mass working party class without strong leadership where the peasants were extremely discontented with the existing state of affairs, and where the bourgeois were very weak. Marx himself had indicated the possibility of just such a revolution in Russia.

By 1917, the unstable amalgam of Russian nationalism and internationalism had probably foreseen the undoing of this revolution. Stalin and other General Secretaries of the Communist Party had engaged in the excesses of power that, with other factors, caused the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. One of those factors was elimination of the language spoken in Ukraine. The rulers in Moscow were determined to impose a separate identity on this state. As early as 1863, the Minister of the Interior in Moscow issued a circular prohibiting the publication of books in Ukrainian. Three years later, he prohibited the import of books in this language or its use in the theater. This variety of linguistic warfare occurred throughout Russia right up to 1945 and perhaps later. Even today in 1997, ethnic minorities speaking a language other than Russian occupy territory throughout Russia, or the Confederation of Independent States (CIS). Around the periphery of the CIS, individual republics seek their own identity and total independence from Moscow. The dilemma of the multinational, multiethnic and multilinguistic empires in an age of nationalism was fundamental and perhaps insoluble.

An outstanding writer and historian David Pryce-Jones wrote The Strange Death of the Soviet Union published by an imprint of Henry Holt & Co. in 1995. Pryce-Jones approach to the death of the Soviet Union was unique. "Once the satellites had melted like ice in the sun, an ultimate and even existential question faced the Soviet leadership: What was the point of absolute centralized power if not to defend the party-state? With the outer ring of client countries now escaped irretrievably from central control, the inner ring queued untidily for the exit." He was referring, of course, to the ring around the Soviet Union in Central Europe. The ring included Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Rumania. One by one, they melted and ejected their Communist rulers, replacing them with new leaders dedicated to freedom. Many of them did not understand the complexities of a market economy or the loss of authority, so the newly-freed nations had to experiment with new approaches to what would work. Gorbachev, however, believed to the end that the ideology of Communism to be independent from the mechanism of force without which that ideology was only one among other theories about human nature and society.

Today in 1997, Russia sees its inner ring to the South threatened by ethnicity and linguistics. In one relatively small area of Russia, there is a mixture of Caucasian, Indo-European, and Altaic peoples. Caucasians include Abkhaz, Circassian Adygey, Cherkess and Kabardin. Georgians fall into a slightly different ethnic group. In Dagestan, one finds Agul, Avar, Lak, Lezgin, Rutul, and Tsakhur peoples. The Caucasians also include Chechen and Ingush peoples. The Indo-European peoples include Armenian, Greek, Iranian-Kurds, and Slavic-Russian. The Altaic peoples include the Azeri, Balkar, Karachay, Kumyk, and Turkmen peoples. Even the Mongols are represented in this ethnic potpourri. The political status of all of these mini-states is critical.

Dagestan, for example, was annexed by the Tsar in 1802, and it's now considered an administrative state within Russia. It is located between Georgia and the Caspian Sea. This part of Russia is literally a linguistic stew. The Republic of Dagestan, for example, appears in only a very few maps. However, for the purpose of an oil pipeline, its political status is critical. If this republic is politically independent of rule from Moscow, the oil companies are probably free to negotiate with its administrative hierarchy. Russia has discovered the importance of a market economy. It allows capital investment in Russian enterprises. The most recent example of this is two huge oilfields in Sakhalin. Three consortia are now preparing to pump oil from fields off Sakhalin. Sakhalin Energy Investment plans to spend at least $10 billion to develop this field. Those close to the company say there are one billion barrels of oil and 400 billion cubic metres of natural gas. In the first consortium, Sakhalin Energy has two Japanese partners, Mitsui and Mitsubishi. American partners include Marathon. The British partner is Anglo-Dutch Shell. In the other field, Russia wants to join Sakhalin Energy with its partners, Exxon and Sodeco of Japan. Russia has approved production sharing agreements, but their status is not entirely clear. The Duma needs to end any ambiguity, but its members have not yet seen the value of a market economy. The money has to flow locally instead of flowing via Moscow.

Chechnya was the subject of a war with Russian troops and aircraft lasting about two years for the purpose of halting its drive for political independence, a status finally established in May, 1997. .President Yeltsin signed a treaty with Chechnya then, and now its people will begin rebuilding its shattered infrastructure. Oil maps of Chechnya show at least nine oil fields, a few refineries, and pipelines serving both. According to one Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger (19811987) writing in The New York Times, "Iran and Russia," he wrote, "[are cooperating] with regional states to prevent the United States from [developing power] in the Caspian Sea." In fact, Russia wants the United States to approve its use of more conventional forces in the Caspian Sea area. Iran sees the Azerbaijanis as a threat because they may provoke separatist sentiment among its ethnic Azeri population. Iraq may also see an opportunity to exploit its Kurd population and stir up trouble for Turkey; it also has a Kurd population.

In Paris, President Clinton signed the agreement expanding NATO on May 27, 1997. In July, all the powers now members of NATO gathered in Madrid to discuss the new nations invited to join. They are Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. At the first meeting of all those who approved the expansion of NATO, there were signs of friction. Some members wanted to expand the number of countries that would be invited to join NATO. Russia, while it may not have expressed its concern, would reject admission of the Baltic stares to NATO. These states are Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Their concern should be treated as irrelevant. In 1939, Stalin, with Molotov as Foreign Minister, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's Minister of Foreign Affairs signed a treaty. For years, however, Russia denied there was a secret protocol that allowed the Soviet Union to occupy the three Baltic States. Stalin announced the annexation of these three states in 1940, a year after this treaty. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia dealt summarily with the demands of the Balts for freedom from Soviet occupation. Finally, Russia acknowledged it had to leave Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The terms of departure and its timing were all negotiated in Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn and or Moscow. All three of the Baltic states are eager to join NATO, and they view Russia with understandable suspicion. Postwar relations between China and Japan were soured by the violent past.

Japan expanded into Chinese territory began in Taiwan, and this island nation was claimed in 1895 by Japan as the spoils of war with China. The Japanese were determined to create in China a model for a new Asia. In 1914 and again in 1931, two uprisings of the island's aboriginal inhabitants were suppressed by the Japanese using a combination of modern fire power and terror. The Japanese brought previously unthinkable ideas of representative government to Taiwan. They greatly improved Taiwanese agriculture and education; they also developed domestic industries and made other changes in Taiwanese culture gearing it to the needs of the Japanese home islands. In 1905, the Japanese defeated the Russian army and claimed sovereignty over parts of Manchuria. The Japanese began investing in the region between Port Arthur and Mukden and as far south as Korea. Many Russian refugees from the Soviet Union moved to the area around Harbin. All this was a provocation to the Soviet Union. In 1932, the Japanese installed the ex-Emperor Puyi as "Chief Executive" in the renamed Manchuria, Manchukuo. The Japanese were far from being benign occupants of either Manchukuo or Shanghai. The Nanking Massacre of 1937 may stand always as one of the most terrible events in the history of warfare. Japanese troops with armored cars, artillery, supported by planes and warships on the Yangtze smashed through the walls of the city and massacred any Chinese troops they could find. Unable to find officers with whom they might negotiate an armistice, the Japanese engaged in a virtual frenzy of slaughter. The killed and mutilated both adult and child civilians, leaving a trail of horror behind them. As the Japanese moved on to other cities, such as Wuhan, Stalin gave the Chinese some help, some 800 planes and pilots. Stalin believed at the time that it was in the Soviet interest to resist Japanese aggression.

Near the end of the 20th century, Russia and China both demanded some sort of relief from the atrocities of the 1930s. And Russia still claims the Kurile Islands as their territory after Soviet occupation during World War II. Moscow may be ready to discuss this dispute. In late 1997, Moscow and Tokyo issued a joint approval of a $10 billion project to develop a natural gas field in Irkutsk in Russia and build a pipeline to Japan via Mongolia, China and South Korea. Japanese censors seem still at work to make certain its past savagery against Chinese during the 1930s and its wartime atrocities. On three occasions, the Supreme Court of Japan has denied efforts to rewrite textbooks reflecting, for example, the Nanking Massacre. Anti-Japanese nationalism is alive and well in China.

When Chinese President Jiang Zemin's visit to the United States ended, he returned to Beijing determined to perpetuate Communism and incidentally his own power. Even though he is 71 years old, Jiang may last for at least 15 years as president. The photograph of Jiang, president of the world's largest Communist country about to ring the bell for the opening of the New York Stock Exchange, the free world's largest center of capitalist trading was surely an ironic symbol. It is this type of economic activity that Jiang sees for China, but free of the ideas that made it work. From Jiang's point of view, the genius of the economic reforms introduced under Deng Xiaoping has to be that they have produced prosperity while preserving the power of the Communist Party. Furthermore, Chinese Party officials seem determined not to follow the route taken by Mikhail Gorbachev. These same officials look across the border with Russia see a country where leaders can be removed from power by voters, where newspapers and television news openly question Kremlin policy, where the Communist Party itself is in eclipse and where the criminal economy outstrips legal enterprise. For his part, Jiang has no interest in any system that could reject him at the polls, a system that rests on human rights. It was crushed in Tiananmenn Square in 1989. Two years later, Gorbachev was ousted by democratic forces that have helped Boris Yeltsin remain in office with free elections. Over time, economic freedom and modern communications may bring new political life to China. But as Americans could see as Jiang traveled across the United States, it will not come easily, quickly, or from the top of this regime.

Democracy is not always easy to identify. In the West, because it has always meant liberal democracy -- a political system marked not only by free and fair elections with universal suffrage, but also by the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion and property. Foreign Affairs has identified this bundle of freedoms as constitutional liberalism. It is theoretically different from and historically distinct from democracy. Today, these two strands of liberal democracy, interwoven in the Western political fabric, have been coming apart in the rest of the world. Democracy is flourishing, says Fareed Zakaria, Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs; constitutional liberalism is not. A proper appreciation of constitutional liberalism has a variety for American foreign policy. First, it suggests a certain humility. While it is easy to impose elections on a country, it is more difficult to push constitutional liberalism on a society. The process of genuine liberalization and democratization is gradual and long-term; it is a process in which an election is only one step. Hence, the absence of free and fair elections should be viewed as one flaw, not the definition of tyranny. Economic civil and religious liberties are at the core of human autonomy and dignity. If a government with limited democracy steadily expands these freedoms, it should not be branded as a dictatorship. Today, Mr.. Zakaria writes, that in the face of a virus of illiberalism, the most useful role for the United States is to consolidate democracy where it has taken root and to encourage the gradual development of constitutional liberalism across the globe.

Democracy without constitutional liberalism simply not inadequate, but dangerous, bringing with the erosion of liberty, the abuse of [power], ethnic decisions, and even war.

Listen to the 1812 Overture by Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky; one of the most famous and celebrated Russian composers. This piece was written to celebrate the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812.

All contents © 1998 William M. Brinton