The Romanovs

  In 1991, the break-up of the Soviet Union was also the disintegration of the Romanov empire that Lenin and Stalin had held on to with cunning and force. The very slyness of their fifteen-republic federation rebounded on those Marxist imperialists for the republics were never intended to become independent. But Boris Yeltsin, the new leader of the Russian Federation, used the ambitions of the republics to outmanoeuvre Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and dismantle the USSR. Millions of Russians now found themselves in new countries while sacred Slavic lands – Ukraine or Crimea – were lost to the Motherland. The decadent liberal West dared to push its influence into the new republics, Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia, right up against the borders of Russia.

  Yeltsin created what was – apart from the elected Constituent Assembly of 1918 – the first real Russian democracy, with a free press and free market. Like the tsars before Paul I, he chose his own successor, Vladimir Putin, ex-KGB colonel turned politician, to protect his family and legacy.

  Putin’s immediate mission was to restore Russian power at home and abroad. In 2000, his Chechen War ensured that the Russian Federation would stay together. In 2008, a war with Georgia, one of the more Westernized republics, reasserted Russian hegemony over the Caucasus. In 2014, the West’s attempt to recruit Ukraine into its economic system led Putin to launch an opportunistic war that enabled him to support a war of secession in eastern Ukraine and to annex Crimea, which he saw as ‘our Temple Mount’. His intervention in Syria in 2015 restores Russia’s Middle Eastern aspirations from Catherine the Great to the Cold War.

  He called his ideology ‘Sovereign Democracy’, with the emphasis clearly on the sovereignty – Putinism blended Romanov authoritarianism, Orthodox sanctity, Russian nationalism, crony capitalism, Soviet bureaucracy and the fixtures of democracy, elections and parliaments. If there was an ideology, it was bitterness towards and contempt for America; nostalgia for the Soviet Union and the Romanov empire, but its spirit was a cult of authority and the entitlement to get rich in state service. The Slavophile mission of the Orthodox nation, superior to the West, and exceptional in its character, has replaced that of Marxist internationalism. While the Orthodox Patriarch Kyril has called Putin a ‘miracle of God’ for Russia, the president himself sees ‘the Russian people as the core of a unique civilization’. Peter the Great and Stalin are both treated as triumphant Russian rulers.* Today’s Russia is the heir of both, a fusion of imperial Stalinism and twenty-first-century digital authoritarianism. Putin rules by the Romanov compact: autocracy and the rule of a tiny clique in return for the delivery of prosperity at home and glory abroad. Alexander II’s minister Count Valuev joked ‘there is something erotic’ about adventures on exotic frontiers, and that is certainly true of Russia’s televisually spectacular military exploits in the Middle East. But as the later tsars discovered, this gamble depends on economic success. Unlike them, however, Putin has the final resort of nuclear weapons.

  Putin’s entourage call him ‘the Tsar’, yet it is not the great Romanovs who keep Putin awake at night but the memories of Nicholas II. One evening in his Nov-Ogaryovo Palace, his chief residence near Moscow, Putin asked his courtiers who were Russia’s ‘greatest traitors’. Before they could answer, he replied, ‘The greatest criminals in our history were those weaklings who threw power on the floor – Nicholas II and Mikhail Gorbachev – who allowed power to be picked up by hysterics and madmen.’ Putin promised, ‘I would never abdicate.’ The Romanovs are gone but the predicament of Russian autocracy lives on.1

  * In 1922, Lenin devised a federal structure of equal quasi-independent ethnic republics, instead of forcing them into a Russian federation. Its genius was to conserve the centralized and authoritarian Romanov empire behind the façade of a voluntary union of independent socialist peoples. Stalin devised the details and created the fifteen republics that made up the Soviet Union.

  † At his death, his comrades wished to treat him like a tsar. ‘The tsars were embalmed just because they were tsars,’ argued Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police. ‘If science can preserve a human body for a long time, then why not do it?’ The Romanovs were embalmed and lay in state, but were not exhibited like incorruptible Orthodox saints. Stalin, the seminarian, created a hybrid tsar–saint in Lenin, who is still exhibited in Red Square.

  * When he presented new official history textbooks, tsars and Bolsheviks blended into one another: Nicholas I combined ‘economic modernization with authoritarian methods’; Alexander II increased Russian power and territory; Alexander III achieved ‘politically conservative stabilization’, while the modernization undertaken by Stalin, ‘one of the greatest Soviet leaders’, whose Terror is scarcely mentioned, resembled ‘the reforms of Peter the Great.’

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