July 18, 2008
Is Stalin or Nicholas the Greatest Russian?
Via normblog, the Russians are having a national poll on who's the greatest Russian of all time. The first of the two front runners, Nicholas II, was a racist and a bigot who regularly blamed Jews for his governments failings and incited pogroms throughout the empire. The other, Joseph Stalin, developed the model for a totalitarian regime that murdered countless millions.
[B]y 2000, when Mr Putin was elected president, the Russians were sick of humiliation, poverty and insecurity. Now they saw in Stalin a stern glory: he was a world conqueror who expanded the empire from Berlin to Ulan Bator, defeated Hitler, built and thought in imperial style and industrialised his country, leaving a nuclear superpower. To the West, he was a murderous monster, but without Stalinist Russia we would have lost the Second World War. Stalin appreciated this: when the US envoy Averell Harriman complimented him for taking Berlin, Stalin answered: “Yes, but AlexanderI made it to Paris.” Stalin loved running his pipe over his empire on maps: “Yes we haven't done badly...”
But he would have been bemused by the presence of Nicholas II - and so would Nicholas himself. If Stalin wins the poll, it's a crime; if Nicholas, a farce. Nicholas and Alexandra have won an absurdly good press because they had a loving marriage, an ill son, a tragic death. Nicholas is being canonised by the Orthodox Church.
But Nicholas was not romantically unlucky: he was a rigid autocrat, bigoted racist, clumsy warlord, an enthusiastic anti-Semite who sponsored, organised and financed the Black Hundreds and Cossacks in their pogroms that killed many thousands of Jewish women and children. Savage to those helpless victims, he was too lenient to revolutionaries. During both his disastrous wars - the Russo-Japanese and the First World War - he was callously inept. Alexandra was worse: foolish, hysterical, deluded, yet in the last years Nicholas allowed her far too much power. When they were in Bolshevik captivity, he and Alexandra read primitive anti-Semitic literature. A more capable Tsar would have avoided the tragedies of the Bolshevik terror.
In Russia, history is real and the blood is fresh: in the archives one can virtually smell it on the deathlists. The truth is a golden privilege; the past in Russia is still a secret place. The Russians have a Janus-like amnesiacal view of history: they acknowledge the killing as “mistakes” then they celebrate the triumph and
Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:32 PM | Permalink
Comments
Ah thanks a lot for this one. Do they have to choose from amongst "political" type characters? If so, I'm not sure they have many to choose from. "Greatest Russian of all time"? How 'bout Dostoevsky?
Posted by: hysperia | Jul 18, 2008 10:50:25 PM
The truth is a bit less exciting. The first stage in the poll was conducted door to door across Russia. Stalin and Lenin came 2nd and 3rd respectively, with Peter the Great in the lead.
A sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences explained it in very simple terms.
He said communists, and those who continued to see communism sympathetically, would naturally vote for Stalin and Lenin while the remainder of those polled, and in any case the vast majority, would spread their votes along a much wider range of candidates.
And when the choices were narrowed down to 50 and selection opened online to unlimited voting, hackers staged a DDoS attack on the servers while simultaneously organizing a mass vote for Stalin and folk-singer Vladimir Vysotsky.
I spoke to the show's producer and he said something to the effect that either people were staying up all night and repeatedly clicking enter or else 3,000 Brazilians had come to the simultaneous and unanimous conclusion that Stalin was the most influential figure in Russian history.
Because that's what the poll is setting out to determine. Who is the most influential? Not the best, not the coolest, not even the greatest. Just the one who left the biggest mark.
Arguably it is in truth Lenin, or even Stalin, as the sad fact of so many deaths and a visible demographic blip is surely a measure of influence.
But that's not all. The producer, Alexander Lyubimov, also told me that to counter Stalin's destructive influence on Russia's history, he called upon a 'flash-mob' to rally around Nicholas II, shot by Bolsheviks 90 years ago and a bit of a nascent martyr these days, to show the world that any number of hack attacks by hooligans could be offset by right-thinking Russians committed to showing the world that those stereotypical articles in the Times are about as deftly researched as most Hollywood blockbusters.
And so Mr. Montefiore is reacting hysterically, although with much erudition and a clear view of historical truth. I'm sure his editors are no less proud of his work than mine are of mine.
Posted by: Chris Baldwin | Jul 19, 2008 3:45:41 AM
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