The Scientist as Rebel (14 page)

The diorama of Vladimir gives visible form to the dreams and fears which have molded the Russian people’s perception of themselves and their place in history. Central to their dreams is the Mongol horde slicing through their country, swift and implacable. It is difficult for English-speaking people to share such dreams. The Russian experience of the Mongol invasions is so foreign to us that we gave the word “horde” a new and inappropriate meaning when we borrowed it into our language. English-speaking people came to Asia as traders and conquerors protected by a superior technology. Our view of Asia is mirrored in the image which the word “horde” conveys to an English-speaking mind. A horde in our language is a sprawling, undisciplined mob. In Russian and in the original Turkish, a horde is a camp or a tribe organized for war. The organization of the Mongol horde in the thirteenth century was technically far in advance of any other military system in the world. The Mongols could travel and maintain communications over vast distances; they could maneuver their armies with a speed and precision which no other power could match. It took the Russians 150 years to learn to fight them on equal terms, and three hundred years to defeat them decisively. The horde in the folk memory of Russia means an alien presence moving through the homeland, ravaging and consuming the substance of the people, subverting the loyalty of their leaders with blackmail and bribes. This is the image of Asia which three centuries of suffering
implanted in the Russian mind. It is easy for us in the strategically inviolate West to dismiss Russian fears of China as “paranoid.” If we had lived for three centuries at the mercy of the alien horsemen, we would be paranoid too.

British prime ministers, soon after they come into office, customarily visit Washington and Moscow to get acquainted with American and Russian leaders. When Prime Minister James Callahan made his state visit to Moscow he had two amicable meetings with Chairman Leonid Brezhnev. At the end of the second day he remarked that he was happy to discover that there were no urgent problems threatening to bring the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union into conflict. Brezhnev then replied with some emphatic words in Russian. Callahan’s interpreter hesitated, and instead of translating Brezhnev’s remark asked him to repeat it. Brezhnev repeated it and the interpreter translated: “Mr. Prime Minister, there is only one important question facing us, and that is the question whether the white race will survive.” Callahan was so taken aback that he did not venture either to agree or to disagree with this sentiment. He made his exit without further comment. What he had heard was a distant echo of the Mongol hoofbeat still reverberating in Russian memory.

After the Mongols, invaders came to Russia from the West—from Poland, from Sweden, from France, and from Germany. Each of the invading armies was a horde in the Russian sense of the word, a disciplined force of warriors superior to the Russians in technology, in mobility, and in generalship. Especially the German horde invading Russia in 1941 conformed to the ancient pattern. But the Russians had made some progress in military organization between 1238 and 1941. It took them three hundred years to drive out the Mongols but only four years to drive out the Germans.

During the intervening centuries the Russians, while still thinking of themselves as victims, had become in fact a nation of warriors. In order to survive in a territory perennially exposed to invasion, they
maintained great armies and gave serious study to the art of war. They imposed upon themselves a regime of rigid political unity and military discipline. They gave high honor and prestige to their soldiers, and devoted a large fraction of their resources to the production of weapons. Within a few years after 1941, the Russians who survived the German invasion had organized themselves into the most formidable army on earth. The more they think of themselves as victims, the more formidable they become.

Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
is the classic statement of the Russian view of war. Tolstoy understood, perhaps more deeply than anyone else, the nature of war as Russia experienced it. He fought with the Russian army against the British and French at Sevastopol. He spent some of his happiest years as an artillery cadet on garrison duty in the Caucasus. In
War and Peace
he honored the courage and steadfastness of the ordinary Russian soldiers who defeated Napoleon in spite of the squabbles and blunders of their commanders. He drew from the campaign of 1812 the same lessons which a later generation of soldiers drew from the campaigns of World War II. He saw war as a desperate improvisation, in which nothing goes according to plan and the historical causes of victory and defeat remain incalculable.

Tolstoy’s thoughts about war and victory are expressed by his hero Prince Andrei on the eve of the Battle of Borodino. Andrei is talking to his friend Pierre:

The battle was duly fought, and Prince Andrei was mortally wounded. The Russians lost, according to the generally accepted meaning of the word “lose”: half of the Russian army was destroyed; after the battle the Russians retreated and the French advanced. And yet, in the long view, Prince Andrei was right. Russia’s defeat at Borodino was a strategic victory. Napoleon’s army was so mauled that it had no stomach for another such battle. Napoleon advanced to Moscow, stayed there for five weeks waiting for the Tsar to sue for peace, and then fled with his disintegrating army in its disastrous stampede to the West. “Napoleon,” concludes Tolstoy, “is represented to us as the leader in all this movement, just as the figurehead in the prow of a ship to the savage seems the force that guides the ship on its course. Napoleon in his activity all this time was like a child, sitting in a carriage, pulling the straps within it, and fancying he is moving it along.”
¹

I have been lucky to have had as a friend and colleague for forty years George Kennan, who spent the first half of his life as a diplomat serving in Russia and other countries of Eastern Europe, and the second half as a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He died in 2005 at the age of 101. His fate, throughout his long
double career as government servant and independent scholar, was to be a teller of complicated truths to people who prefer simple illusions. Sometimes he has been driven close to despair by the inability of the American political system to pay attention to people with expert knowledge of the world outside. In 1944, when he was a member of the American embassy staff in Moscow, deeply troubled by the gap between American perception and Russian realities, he wrote a thirty-five-page essay summarizing his firsthand view of Russia, for the benefit of his superiors in Washington. Kennan afterward described the concluding sentences of this essay as “a melancholy, but for me personally most prophetic, passage”:

For sixty years after those words were written, Kennan continued, as diplomat and historian, to bring us his reports from the mountaintop. At the end he knew that his efforts had not always been unappreciated.

My own view of the mountaintop has been derived partly from conversations with Kennan, partly from brief scientific visits to Russia, and partly from readings in Russian literature. The readings in
Russian literature began earliest and have left the deepest impression. As a teenager I worked my way through
The Oxford Book of Russian Verse
, guided by Maurice Baring’s magnificent introduction. I found there, among other things, the poem “On the Field of Kulikovo” by Alexander Blok, which tells more about the Russian view of war than a whole library of strategic analysis. The Battle of Kulikovo was fought a century and a half after the destruction of Vladimir, but Blok’s poem carries the same haunting message as the diorama in the Vladimir museum. Blok is riding over the steppe with the Russian horsemen the night before the battle:

At Kulikovo the Russians for the first time defeated a Tartar horde. The battle was a turning point in the centuries-long struggle of Russians against Tartars, not the end of the struggle but a new beginning. Blok wrote his poem in the year 1908, at a time of peace and prosperity, but he felt already the shadow of approaching storms:

Ten years later, in January 1918, three months after the Bolshevik seizure of power, amid the chaos and cold of revolutionary Petrograd, Blok wrote his greatest poem, “The Twelve,” which told us more about the nature of Soviet power than a whole library of Kremlinology. The twelve are a group of young soldiers of the Red Guard,
marching through the city in a snowstorm, rough and tough and profane and trigger-happy:

In the final scene of the poem, the twelve are chasing a shadowy figure who lurks in a snowdrifted alleyway. They shout at the figure to surrender, then open fire. The echoes of their gunshots die away. The howling of the storm continues:

Blok remained in Russia until his death in 1921. Shortly before he died, he reaffirmed the vision which “The Twelve” had recorded:

My own personal encounter with the armed forces of the Soviet revolution occurred in a later and more tranquil time. It was in May 1956, when the Russians organized the first postwar international meeting of high-energy physicists in Moscow. Russian experimental work in high-energy physics had previously been kept secret, for reasons which had little to do with military security. The last years of Stalin’s life had been years of terror and silence for Russian intellectuals; even in the nonpolitical domain of physical science, publication had been severely restricted and contacts with foreign scientists almost nonexistent. When Stalin died, the icy grip of secrecy slowly weakened. In 1954 Ilya Ehrenburg was allowed to publish his novel
The Thaw
, which described the fresh stirrings of Russian life after the long winter. By 1956 the physicists were ready to celebrate the return of spring with a big conference to which colleagues from all over the world were invited. The conference was a joyful occasion for the Russians and for us too. Old friendships were renewed and new friendships established. The Russian newspapers gave us front-page coverage, and proudly described how the great leaders of international
science were now coming to Moscow to learn about the great achievements of Soviet scientists.

After the Moscow meeting ended, I went with a group of foreign scientists to Leningrad. Accompanied by two Intourist guides, we went sightseeing along the shore to the west of the city. We walked by mistake into a coast guard station, evidently a restricted military area. An ordinary Russian seaman came out to shoo us away, shouting
Nelzya
, which means “forbidden.” At that moment we noticed that our guides, afraid of being held responsible for our error, were walking rapidly away in the opposite direction. So we stayed and had a friendly chat with the seaman in our broken Russian. When I said we were foreign scientists, he broke out into a broad smile and said, “Oh, I know who you are. You are the people who came to the meeting in Moscow, and you know all about pi-mesons and mu-mesons.” He pulled out of his pocket a crumpled copy of
Pravda
which contained a report of our proceedings. After that, he invited us into the station and proudly introduced us to his comrades. We sat with them for some minutes and did our best to explain to them what we had learned in Moscow about pi-mesons and mu-mesons. When we said good-bye, our host shook our hands warmly and said, “Why do you not come to our country more often? Be sure to tell the people in your countries, and your wives and children, that we would like to see more of them.” As I walked back into Leningrad and reflected upon this encounter, I found myself sadly wondering whether an average American coast guard sentry, confronted unexpectedly with a group of Russian physicists speaking broken English, would have greeted them with equal friendliness and understanding.