What Is Russian Civilization?

By Edvard Radzinsky

Updated July 10, 2006 12:01 am ET

Russia is an exceptional place. In the 20th century, over a single lifetime -- 70 years -- it saw three
civilizations. Each of the first two was rejected by its successor, forcing people to renounce their
convictions. You can imagine the chaos of ideas and beliefs in their hearts.

The era of Muscovite czars and the following 300 years of Romanov reign was one of ruthless autocrats.
The opportunity to destroy the autocracy appeared rarely, but it did appear. For example, in the early
1540s, the boyars (or nobility) ruled the country as regents of an infant czar. They could have
established an aristocratic republic. Instead, they squabbled furiously, without forgetting the main
occupation of Asiatic bureaucracy -- stealing. The military governor in Pskov robbed the city so
thoroughly that, as a chronicler recorded, "There were no rich or poor left -- everyone became
impoverished." While the boyars argued and stole, the fledgling czar grew up. Teenaged, he set his
hounds on the most highborn boyar before the boyars' own eyes. And the people sighed in relief, for
stealing by officials in Russia could only be limited by the choke-leash of a czar. But amazingly, the
boyars themselves sighed in relief because their habitual servility before the czar was restored. As an
historian wrote, "It is easier to imagine Russia without the people than without a czar." The teenage czar
grew to be Ivan the Terrible.

The Time of Troubles

The suppression of the dynasty of Muscovy czars led to the Time of Troubles (from 1598 to 1613). But
upheavals and chaos, even as they take away the people's well-being, are supposed to give rise to new
ideas. One would think that Russia, having lived through years of turmoil, would start building a new
order when the old collapsed. But it ended the way it began. Muscovy gave birth, again, to an Asiatic
autocracy -- the Romanov dynasty. The foreshadow of 1917 lay in the 17th century.

The reign of Alexander II was another of those rare times when autocracy could have been transformed.
This Russian Lincoln not only emancipated the serfs in 1861; he became the father of perestroika,
reforming all parts of Russian life. But he was a typical Russian reformer, a Janus with one head facing
forward, the other looking back. The reforms stopped in the first half of his reign. A contemporary wrote
what could serve as the epigraph to all Russian perestroikas: "For some reason everything good in Russia
is fated to start but not conclude. With one hand we create . . . improvements, with the other, we
undermine them . . ."
The czar was hated by liberals for stopping reforms, and by conservatives for starting them. Russia was
still an autocracy, and the young -- seduced by the reforms -- felt deceived. They thirsted for a
parliament and a constitution, but were repressed. Alexander II, as did Gorbachev a century later, came
to understand a bitter truth: If starting reforms is dangerous, it is much more so to stop them. An
unprecedented terrorist organization was born in Russia, and in some measure, the czar was to blame.
The nihilists called terrorism "the strength of the powerless." The most insightful realized that the child
they had created was long-lived. "When we are gone, there will be others," wrote their leader. The
"young people pure of heart," as a contemporary called them, gradually turned into cold killers,
assassinating Alexander II in 1881. When the prosecutor spoke -- at the regicides' trial -- of the innocent
bystanders who were killed, the terrorist leader laughed. The prosecutor's response, repeated
throughout Russia, was: "When people weep, they laugh."

"Balancing on the edge of the abyss" was Dostoyevsky's description of Russia then. After Alexander II's
death, society was persuaded that the way forward was the way back. His son, Alexander III, returned
Russia to the ruthless autocracy so dear to the hearts of its rulers. He dreamed of reverting to the times
of his grandfather, Nicholas I (1796-1855), who had said, "Despotism exists in Russia because only it is in
accordance with the spirit of the people." But toward the end of his reign, Alexander III asked his
adjutant-general: "[T]here is still something wrong in Russia, isn't there?" The reply should be
memorized by all of Russia's rulers: "Your majesty, imagine an enormous steam boiler filled with
simmering gases. But there are people with hammers around it diligently riveting the smallest openings.
One day the gases will break though a section that they will not be able to rivet back." The czar,
according to accounts, "groaned, as if in pain."

His son, Czar Nicholas II, became the victim of the explosion. That is how the first Atlantis, the autocracy
of the Romanovs, perished.

***

Astonishingly, it was members of the ruling class, the intellectual nobility who would not accept
autocracy, who fomented the revolution. A poet wrote in the 19th century: "In Paris the cobbler revolts
to become a landowner -- that's understandable. In Russia, when the nobility makes a revolution, is it
because they want to be cobblers?" In Russia, poets are often prophets. The son of a shoemaker, Joseph
Stalin, became the first Bolshevik czar, and the No. 3 man in his government was a former shoemaker.

The fantastical came to pass as a result of the Russian Revolution. In pious Russia, unknown radical
Bolsheviks took power. Lenin seized power with the dream of destroying the state, only to create the
most ruthless state, and of destroying the bureaucracy, only to create the most powerful bureaucracy.
The Romanov Atlantis drowned, but autocracy was immortal. The essayist Alexander Herzen predicted
back in the mid-19th century: "Communism is merely Nicholas I's barracks transformed." The Bolshevik
state created by Lenin became ridiculously similar to Nicholas I's ruthless monarchy. The barracks were
completed by Stalin, child of the Russian Thermidor, an Asiatic Napoleon come to consummate the new
Bolshevik civilization.

This civilization was astounding. It had a Nocturnal Life and a Daytime Life. In the Daytime, the
population awoke to the unsilenceable radio, zealously rushed to work, enthusiastically attended daily
rallies where they condemned the enemies of the USSR, and attentively read the thin newspapers with
reports on the trials of the enemies of the people, which proved the reliability of the NKVD, the
Bolshevik secret police. Deprived of freedom, not daring to have their own opinion, leading miserable
lives with several families to a communal flat, they sincerely pitied the exploited workers in the West,
the oppressed Negroes and everyone else who did not have the fortune to live in the USSR.

On Bolshevik holidays, they went with their families to Red Square and joyously recounted how they had
seen Stalin. Did they fear the NKVD? They would have been outraged by the question: The NKVD was
feared only by enemies. Did they know about the arrests, the hundreds of thousands of their fellow
citizens in the camps? Of course! Many of their acquaintances had been arrested. But they were obliged
to believe, and did believe, that they had been enemies. They were surrounded by enemies! Anyway,
arrests usually took place after midnight, in the Nocturnal Life. They did not affect them.

The Daytime Life was like the one William Shirer described in Nazi Germany: "The observer would be
surprised to see that the Germans did not consider themselves victims of threats or pressure from a
heartless and cruel dictatorship. On the contrary, they supported that dictatorship with unfeigned
enthusiasm." Stalin worked at creating a sense of conquest in the people. The radio blared cheerful
marches, as it should in the land of conquerors. They had conquered czarism and the monarchists. Now
they were conquerors in their Daytime Life: In the course of two or three Five-Year Plans they were
going to surpass the rest of the world. At every trial, they conquered enemies and spies. And they had
conquered religion: All that was left of Holy Russia were beheaded churches.

But Stalin had studied in a seminary, and said that Russia needed god and czar. He gave it a new religion:
Asiatic Marxism. As befitted medieval religions, dissent was heresy, punished ruthlessly by death. The
greatest temple was the Mausoleum, where, following the model of the imperishable saints, lay the
body of imperishable Lenin. Many in the West did not believe in the "eternally living Lenin" and insisted
that there was a wax dummy in the Mausoleum. In the 1930s, Stalin decided to prove the great power
of the party that had conquered death to a group of Western journalists. Louis Fischer, a biographer of
Lenin, was among them. He wrote: "Zbarsky [the biochemist who mummified the body] opened the
glass case, and . . . pinched Lenin's nose and then turned his head right and left. We all could tell that it
was not wax. It was Lenin." The passionate atheist and iconoclast had been turned into a holy relic. The
Mausoleum workers felt like priests, keeping watch over that horrific parody of the Lord's Coffin.
(Zbarsky recounted: "I was on call to the Mausoleum 24 hours a day. I taught the workers there: If even
a fly gets into the sarcophagus, I categorically forbid you to get rid of it without me. All my life I had this
nightmare -- they call from the Mausoleum: 'Comrade Zbarsky, there's a fly in the sarcophagus!?' And I
jump up and rush over like a madman… Then I would wake up in a cold sweat.")

***

Parks turned into centers of collective merrymaking, and Stalin personally oversaw the religious
propaganda there. Every path had posters quoting the Bolshevik New Testament -- the words of God
Stalin and God Lenin. Through the trees glistened the mandatory white statues of holy martyrs: the
pioneer Pavlik Morozov, who had informed on his father, a kulak (or wealthy peasant), and was then
murdered by other kulaks; and party functionary Sergei Kirov, who was also murdered (allegedly by
Trotskyites). A great number of statues of these martyrs were required and sculptors worked round the
clock. Sometimes their efforts ended in tragic farce. The sculptor Viktoria Solomonovich, who specialized
in Pavlik Morozov, was let down by a carelessly made skeletal frame. One of her plaster Morozovs
collapsed on a poor woman, who was killed by Pavlik's plaster bugle.

Carnivals for Labor

The collective, the masses, were everywhere, as befits a barracks: The collective at work and at home
(since most apartments were communal). The collective at rest: All the professions had their own
holiday (Day of the Miner, Day of the Construction Worker, Day of the Metallurgist, etc.), so that the
collectives could have a day to drink and be merry (together, of course). At the height of the terror, in
1938, there were carnivals for labor collectives in Moscow's Central Park of Culture and Rest. Millions
relaxed insouciantly, happily. This constant massivity, this dissolution of the individual in the collective,
brought about the most valued attribute of Bolshevik civilization: collective conscience. Personal
responsibility died out and collective responsibility remained. Woe to those who felt the stirrings of
personal conscience. The writer Arkady Gaidar ended up in a psychiatric ward and described his
symptoms to a friend: "I am tormented by a thought -- I've lied too much… Sometimes I feel close
to the truth… sometimes it's ready to leap from my tongue, but some voice harshly warns me:
Beware! Don't say it! Or you'll be lost!" He left the hospital only when he stopped hearing that call of the
truth.

Stalin gave the country a new religion and he gave it czar and god in one person. Lavrenty Beria, chief of
his security apparatus, explained the task of the film, "The Vow," to its director during production: "'The
Vow' must be an exalted film, where Lenin is the biblical John the Baptist and Stalin is the Messiah
Himself." Stalin's name was repeated all day on the radio. "Stalin this and Stalin that. You can't go to the
kitchen or sit down on the toilet, or eat lunch without Stalin pursuing you: He got into your guts, your
brain, he filled in all the holes, he ran nipping at your heels, called into your soul, got under the covers
with you, and shadowed memory and sleep," wrote a woman in her diary. At the end of his life, Stalin
signed a resolution to create a statue which could be compared only with the Colossus of Rhodes.
Almost 50 meters tall, it was erected on the Volga-Don canal, built by convicts. One day, the keeper
discovered that birds liked to rest on the head. You can imagine what the new god's face would look
like. You couldn't punish birds, but the local authorities, smelling danger, found a solution: high-tension
electricity passed through the giant head. Now the statue stood surrounded by a carpet of dead birds.
Every morning the keeper buried the little bodies, and the earth, so fertilized, flowered.

This was the symbol of the Bolshevik civilization built by Stalin, the second Atlantis, which drowned in
1991.