Real War (10 page)

After thirty-five years of intermittent warfare the two sides finally agreed to hold peace talks. The Russians sent a negotiating party of 2,000 soldiers, diplomats, and servants to the faraway border. But the Chinese, being much closer, arrived with 15,000. When the talks bogged down, the Chinese delegates resolved the impasse by threatening to attack their Russian counterparts. Faced with superior force, the Russians backed down and withdrew from the disputed lands, leaving the Chinese in peace for the next 150 years.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, China had weakened. The Russians seized two huge chunks of land from China—about 650,000 square miles, an area as large as all the states of the East and West coasts of the United States combined. In 1860 the Treaty of Peking gave them undisputed title to a seaport in their new territory, which they named Vladivostok—meaning Rule of the East. The chief foreign affairs counselor to the Emperor of China warned that “Russia, with her territory adjoining ours, aiming to nibble at our territory like a silkworm, may be considered a threat at our bosom.” At the turn of the century the Finance Minister of Russia agreed, declaring that “The absorption by Russia of a considerable portion of the Chinese Empire is only a matter of time.” By the eve of the Russian Revolution Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, estimated that the Russian sphere of influence in his country included 42 percent of its territory.

After the Russian Revolution the Chinese looked with hope to the new communist regime which repudiated the expansionism of the Tsars and promised to treat all nations with a new respect. In 1919 the young Soviet state issued the Karakhan Declaration, which “renounced the conquests made by the Tsarist Government, which deprived China of Manchuria and other areas,” promised to annul all unequal treaties that the Tsars had made, and pledged to “return to the Chinese people everything that was taken from them by the Tsarist Govern
ment. . . . ” China was ecstatic, but soon the Soviet commissars showed that they were no more generous than the Russian Tsars had been.

In 1921, Russia's encroachments on China resumed in a way that foreshadowed its invasion and satellization of Afghanistan in 1979. The Russians sponsored a few Mongolians who formed a Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, proclaimed a Provisional Revolutionary Government, and “appealed” to Moscow for “help.” The Red Army marched in, and Mongolia, which had been part of China for centuries, became the first Soviet satellite. The Karakhan Declaration was repudiated. In 1929 the Soviet Union and China fought an undeclared war in Manchuria in which 10,000 Chinese were killed. Farther to the west, the Chinese province of Sinkiang became, in the words of one observer,
“virtually a Soviet colony” during the 1930s.

The brief period of friendship between China and Russia in the 1950s was the exception rather than the rule; through the centuries their relations have been characterized by rivalry, hostility, and Russian territorial expansion.

The “visible hand” of history not only shows the directions in which we are traveling. It also points to what might have been, if at critical junctures those who had the power to make a difference had used that power differently.

The most costly failure in history was the failure to prevent Lenin's seizure of power in Russia in 1917. That failure was as much a tragedy for the people of Russia as it was for the world. Long before the last Tsar was overthrown, the forces of liberal change were powerfully at work and Russia was beginning to absorb more from the West than military technology. If the process had not been interrupted and diverted, Russia might, like Japan, have become a free and prosperous part of the Western world.

Early in the nineteenth century the ideals of the French Revolution penetrated Russia as Napoleon's army marched to Moscow and the Russian army pursued it back to Paris. Western
ideas stirred the Russian soul, bringing a flowering of culture and an era of enlightenment to this hitherto sullen land. A liberation of the mind occurred, leading to outstanding accomplishments in science, literature, the arts, and industry. Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov took their place among the greatest writers in the world. One student of the era wrote that
“long-mute Russia found her voice,” and “suddenly full-throated, it astonished the world.”

In politics far-reaching changes began ushering in a new era. Tsar Alexander II, the Liberator Tsar, abolished serfdom in 1861. Censorship was eased, trial by jury was introduced, and representative self-government at the local level was begun. The term of duty in the army was shortened from twenty-five years—a virtual life sentence—to six. The seeds of a new society had been planted in Russia. The first spring shoots of a new order began to crop up, but tragically, they were soon plowed under.

•  •  •

The first breaths of freedom are the most exhilarating—and the most intoxicating. As liberalization began in Russia, so did revolution. Along with those who wanted to build a new society were those whose only thought was to destroy the old one. In the process the revolutionaries destroyed the budding new one as well.

In 1881 Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a group calling itself Narodnaya Volya—the People's Will. Then, in 1887, several young dissidents plotted the assassination of the new Tsar. They were discovered and one of them nobly stepped forward at their trial and attempted to take the blame for all. He was a twenty-one-year-old named Alexander Ulyanov. Officials were impressed by his courage and suggested that he petition the Tsar for mercy. Alexander refused, and was hanged; his family was shamed and thereafter shunned by the liberal society of the day. Alexander Ulyanov had a sixteen-year-old brother who was seared by these events and especially stunned by his family's sudden ostracism by respectable society. That younger brother was named Vladimir—Vladimir Ulyanov. Years later he took another name: Lenin.

The experience, Bertram Wolfe writes, opened “an unbridgeable gulf between [Lenin] and the regime that had taken
his brother's life. And it inoculated him with a profound contempt for the ‘liberal society' which had abandoned the Ulyanov family in its time of trouble.” When Lenin came to power, all the impressive gains that the liberalizing forces had made in the final days of tsarism—a parliament, land reform and extensive individual land ownership, the economic and political building blocks of a new society—were swept away.

Lenin's Bolsheviks abandoned what was best in Russia and embraced the worst. Russia's liberalization, its frail new democracy, its brilliant new culture, and its willingness to learn from the world were all jettisoned. The communist rulers reached back to the terrorism of Ivan the Terrible, the despotism of Peter, and the ruthless expansionism of Catherine to create their new society. They uprooted all the liberal changes that had taken hold in the century between Napoleon's invasion and World War I, turning the clock back a hundred years or more for the Russian people.

The Spanish painter Goya once said, “The dream of reason produces monsters.” So it was with the dream of Marxism. The monsters it produced did things the old Tsars would never have dreamed of doing, and the techniques they adopted have been copied by every Communist party that has come to power since.

The suffering the Russian people have undergone under communist rule is staggering. Citing an official document published in 1920 by the Cheka, the forerunner of today's KGB, Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimates that the communists executed more than 1,000 people per month in 1918-1919—before Stalin came to power. Twenty years later, at the height of the terror in 1937 and 1938, Stalin executed 40,000 people per month—over 1,000 a day for two full years.
Robert Conquest, a renowned expert, estimates that executions during the first fifty years of Soviet rule—under Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev—“were at least fifty times as numerous as over the last half century of Tsarist rule.”

These figures tell only part of the story. There were many more deaths in the
forced-labor camps, which held an average 8 million people during the 1930s, and between 12 million and 15 million after World War II. In addition, during the artificially created famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s, 3 million to 5 million people are believed to have died, perhaps more. While millions starved, the communist leaders shipped grain abroad to pay for their industrial trade with the West.

In one personal account a former Communist Party official recalls entering a village where people were cooking horse manure and weeds to survive, where the bark had been stripped from the trees for food, and where all the cats, dogs, birds, and field mice had been eaten. In this town he found a state butter plant in which milk was hoarded so that butter stamped “U.S.S.R. Butter Export” could be shipped overseas. In the same town the Soviet official discovered a granary of “State reserves” stocked with thousands of pounds of grain from the previous year's harvest—all in a village where in the mornings the wagons rolled to pick up the dead.

A man who heard V. M. Molotov, later Stalin's Foreign Minister, explain the reasons for initiating the “collectivization” drive that created the famine recalled:

Comrade Molotov called the activists together and he talked plainly, sharply. The job must be done, no matter how many lives it cost, he told us. As long as there were millions of small land-owners in the country, he said, the revolution was in danger. There would always be the chance that in case of war they might side with the enemy in order to defend their property.

During the 1930s, 70 percent of the senior officers in the Russian Army were executed. No one was exempt from Stalin's terror, not even those on the highest levels of the Communist Party; 98 out of 139 Central Committee members in 1934 were later killed. After World War II millions of former POWs were sent directly to forced-labor camps because they had seen the West. Stalin, the student of Russian history, was taking no unnecessary chances. He knew his two greatest enemies were the same enemies the Tsars had fought—Western armies and Western ideas—and he was as determined to shut out the latter
as he was to defeat the former. It is conservatively estimated that he killed 20 million Russians, and the killing did not start or stop with him.

In addition to the destruction wrought by their communist leaders, the Russian people have also suffered two great German invasions in the twentieth century. In World War I the Russians lost half their men under arms—1,650,000 were killed, 3,850,000 wounded, and 2,410,000 captured. In World War II half were lost again—this time 5 million were killed and 11.5 million wounded. Total Russian deaths in World War II are estimated at 20 million.

The combat on the Eastern Front in World War I, and again in World War II, was cataclysmic.
Winston Churchill wrote of the first war:

In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertion of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, [the struggle on the Eastern Front] far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes. . . . Here all Central Europe tore itself to pieces and expired in agony, to rise again, unrecognizable. . . .

Both in war and in peace merciless slaughter has been an ever-present part of the Russian experience. Together, the capacity to endure slaughter and the capacity to endure suffering can make a nation both ambitious and formidable. The Marquis de Custine visited Russia in the 1830s and remarked,
“An inordinate, a boundless ambition, the kind of ambition that can take root only in the soul of an oppressed people and be nourished only on the misery of an entire nation is astir in the hearts of the Russians. . . . To cleanse himself of his impious sacrifice of all public and personal liberty, the kneeling slave dreams of world domination.” And he went on to prophesy,
“The Russian people will surely become incapable of anything except the conquest of the world. I always return to this expression, because it is the only one that can explain the excessive sacrifices imposed here upon the individual by society.”

In his book
Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics,
Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote:

The triumphant assertions that the Soviet leaders are abandoning their Marxism or Communism, voiced in the West with such monotonous regularity and persistent ignorance,
might possibly be dismissed more quickly if the usual image of an abstract and arid Marxist dogma were to give way to a better appreciation of the inextricably close linkage between the Soviet social environment and the Soviet ideology. It is precisely because the ideology is both a set of conscious assumptions and purposes and part of the total historical, social, and personal background of the Soviet leaders that it is so pervading and so important.

What threatens the world is not theoretical “communism,” not philosophical “Marxism,” but rather an aggressive, expansionist totalitarian force that has adopted those names for an ideological fervor it has grafted onto the roots of tsarist expansionism and tsarist despotism. Karl Marx died in 1883, thirty-four years before “Marxism” became the official religion of the Russian state. The authors of the
The Communist Manifesto
never saw their teachings “interpreted” into a rationale for Soviet conquest: Marx and Engels had no idea that the red flag would fly over the Kremlin, or that the armies of the Russian empire would march into battle under its colors.

The doctrines of Marx are to today's communist regimes what Christianity was to the secular rulers of the Holy Roman Empire: convenient as a banner, but irrelevant as a guide. Marx would not recognize “Marxism” today, but Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great would be at home with it. And it was from Lenin's and Stalin's Kremlin fortress, not from Karl Marx's London garret, that communism spread across the world. The tightly controlled Communist parties of other nations answered to the living Stalin, not to the ghost of Marx: they served the interests of the twentieth-century Soviet empire, not the teachings of a nineteenth-century German philosopher.