Devant la guerre: On E. H. Carr's "The twenty years' crisis 1919-39"

There is no better time than now to read E. H. Carr’s The twenty years’ crisis 1919 39. It could have been written last month. The similarities of the situation that Carr describes (the first edition of the book was published in 1939) and today are striking. Not solely in the most recent events including the disregard of international law by the signatories of the Rome Statute which would not have surprised Carr since he believed that such a law cannot exist, or can exist only when it is supported by force, but more importantly and more ominously in the structural characteristics of the international system then and today: those that have led to the World War II and that seem to lead us to a new war.

Both systems were badly structured at their very inception (Versailles and the end of the Cold War). Both contained within themselves the seeds of destruction. The Versailles system began as a utopian and seemingly principled endeavor. The greatest responsibility for that is rightly laid by Carr and many others (including memorably by Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace) on the doors of Woodrow Wilson. When we say “responsibility” it seems strange to blame somebody for the utopian or seemingly idealistic ways in which the international system should be organized. But at the very first step the application of the principles that were brought from Princeton and Washington D.C. to the world stumbled. It exposed hypocrisy more strongly than had the principles been less idealistic. The right of self-determination was doled out inconsistently to some nations while denied to others. As Harold Nicolson writes in his beautiful The Peace-Making 1919:

The most ardent British advocate of the principle of self-determination found himself, sooner or later in a false position. However fervid might be our indignation regarding Italian claims to Dalmatia and the Dodecanese it could be cooled by a reference, not to Cyprus only, but to Ireland, Egypt and India. We had accepted a system for others which when it came to practice, we should refuse to apply to ourselves. (p. 193).

Colonies, protectorates, trusteeships (with open-ended period of such trusteeship) were given to the lesser nations. Racial equality was rejected even as a rather benign formal principle despite the lofty rhetoric about equality of men. That rejection, bad in itself, was accompanied by the most cynical transfer of German-controlled possessions in China to Japan, thus leading to the May 4 movement and the beginning of modern Chinese nationalism.

The Carthaginian peace of Versailles created two types of nations according to Carr. The satisfied Anglo-Saxon nations and to some extent France (although France not feeling herself strong enough always had trepidation about its status) and the trio of large unsatisfied states of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The latter two were Western allies unhappy with the division of the spoils at Versailles. Germany tried in the twenties to change or invalidate some of the covenants of the Treaty by extracting herself from the obligation to pay the rather exorbitant sums in the form of reparations (which it indeed never paid in full) and surreptitiously initiated military cooperation with Soviet Russia thus trying to avoid the limits on the type and size of its army. But overall it led to very little gain and dissatisfaction increased. When Germany began to overturn, with gusto, the letter and the spirit of Versailles, it was done through military force and intimidation. “Our enemies are little worms”, opined Hitler. The irony, as Carr notes, is that the more Germany was able to overturn the rules imposed on her, and the more those like Carr who disagreed with inequity of the Treaty in the first place thought that this would satisfy her, the more angry Germany was getting. Thus German (by then Nazi) anger increased in proportion to its success in overturning Versailles. What could have been given peacefully and would have been met with gratitude was now given under the threat of the gun and received with contempt.

In retelling of this well-known story although Carr never assigns the blame for the collapse of the system directly, he implicitly splits the responsibility between the two sides. He blames the satisfied nations for not being willing to share some of the gains obtained from having won the war. Carr often compares international with domestic relations. For the domestic relations to be stable the rich have to give up little bit more than in proportion to what they have. In other words, if a political system is to be stable—whether domestically or internationally—the strong have to be willing to make sacrifices, to accept “some give or take” as Carr calls it. To create a sustainable international system, the satisfied powers have to share the spoils with other powers or impose relatively equitable (‘balance of power”) peace so that others have a stake in the system. If they do not, the unsatisfied powers will have no stake. This is exactly, Carr writes, what happened between 1919 and 1939.

Any international order must rest on some hegemony of power. But this hegemony, like the supremacy of a ruling class within the state, is in itself a challenge to those who not share it; and it must, if it is to survive, contain an element or give or take, of self sacrifice on the part of those who have, which will render it tolerable to the other members of the world community. (p 168)

Even the peacefulness of the satisfied power is explained by Carr by analogy with domestic politics. The rich promote domestic peace because the maintenance of the current order is beneficial to them. “Just as the ruling class in a community prays for domestic peace, which guarantees its own security and predominance, and denounces class-war, which might threaten them, so international peace becomes a special vested interest or predominant Powers” (p. 82).

Calls for peace are not explained by varying morality of powers or classes but by the difference in their positions. Calling for peace is not per se something that may be considered morally superior. Should have American revolutionaries in 1776 followed the calls for peace?, Carr asks. Moralizing, sometimes made by the powers that want to maintain peace, is devoid of ethical superiority. It is simply based on the interest of such powers to maintain the status quo.

As this brief description makes clear similarities with today’s situation are many. Whereas the conclusion of the Cold War did not have an official ending similar to Versailles, its main contours reproduced Versailles. The satisfied powers, the winners of the Cold War, were the US, UK, France and foremost Germany that regained unity. On the other hand, the “New World Order” produced one large power (Russia) that was from the very beginning unsatisfied with the outcome, especially since Russia, like Germany in 1918, did not at all feel defeated. From the very beginning when under Yeltsin the country was half-destroyed and internationally behaved more or less like a US vassal, Russia was resentful of one aspect of the victors’ policies: the extension of their military alliance to Russia’s borders. As in the collapse of the system of Versailles we see the same dynamic here. Russia objected to the expansion throughout even when it reluctantly reconciled itself with NATO membership of its former East European satellites and the inclusion of Baltic republics but could not, or didn’t want to, accept more.

The complaints, like in the German case, lasted for a very long time. They started under Yeltsin, continued during the first and the second Putin administrations and produced nothing. The by-now famous Putin’s 2007 Munich speech brought no results. The message was very similar to the message that was absorbed by Germany in the 1930s: the structural features of the system cannot be changed peacefully and they cannot be changed by entreaties or complaints of the dissatisfied power. The dissatisfied power took more or less the same course of action that Germany took in the 1930s: the inequities, in its view, could not be set aright by conversations, discussions and negotiations but only through the sheer exercise of military power. The war with Ukraine was a way to overturn some of the implicit covenants of the end of the Cold War in the same way that for Germany the Anschluss and the occupation and the division of Czechoslovakia were the ways in which Germany took it upon herself to implement the principles of self-determination proclaimed by Wilson but denied to Germany.

Despite such similarities one would hope that the outcome would not be the same. It is nevertheless interesting to reflect on the fact that the book was written in 1938 and published in September 1939. Let us hope that we are not at the same historic point now as Carr was then.

Would Lenin have approved of the IMF?

 A simple-minded answer to the question is, No. The IMF is entirely dedicated to  preserving the world capitalist system and any socialist must disapprove of it.  I think this answer is wrong. But before I explain it, I have say a few words about the Fund.

Recently, I have been involved more with the IMF and have witnessed how keen they are to remain an influential player in the 21^st century. Moreover, to do that as a truly international organization under the conditions of extraordinary high worldwide tensions, threats of wars, and mercantilist trade policies.

My relations with the Fund go back to my early years in the World Bank. In those days, the Fund missions would ask the World Bank to provide one of their (junior) economists to join the Fund ostensibly to maintain communication and give to the World Bank the appearance of some decision-making role regarding social sectors and public expenditures. I thus went, very young, to about five or six Fund missions to Turkey.  

The Fund missions were impressive. They benefited from an unparalleled access to government officials and to the data, but they also had excellent people to study these data. Their great advantage was (and is) access to government knowledge and information; their great disadvantage was/is lack of contact with the rest of the country. Yet, as I will argue, this was never Fund’s mission—nor should it be.

The Fund’s  mandate was, and I hope stays, narrow, In that I am interestingly I am in full agreement with Adam Posen from the Peterson Institute in Washington who at a recent conference at the IMF called on the Fund to remain focused on its core mission and avoid both politization and the “mission creep” into the areas for which the Fund is neither the best vehicle nor has the expertise. Adam wrote eloquently about the difficulties of doing so under the present extremely politicized conditions:

The increasing politicization of international finance and commerce by China, the European Union, and the United States has, however, put at risk the IMF’s ability to assist member countries and limit exploitative behavior by the governments of the three largest economies. For the sake of global economic stability, the IMF must get out in front of these dangers.

The core mission of the International Monetary Fund is so simple that can be understood by any high-school student.

Make sure that the borrowed money is paid back;

Do not spend (over a cycle) more than you have collected in taxes;

Maintain macroeconomic stability.

Most of the critique of the Fund comes from the failure to understand its core mission. It is a mission of disciplining  people and countries. That particular mission is, given the capitalist world system, meant to reinforce the capitalist system and discipline workers. Austerity, often brought about by Fund’s policies is not, as Clara Mattei in The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism and Mark Blyth Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea have rightly reminded us, politically neutral.  But that mission, if the system were different, would be equally needed. Socialism is not general irresponsibility. What Lenin most emphatically stressed in his 1922 speech to the Eleventh Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), at the time of New Economic Policy, was the need for fiscal responsibility, discipline and orderly international trade:

We are going to Genoa [a conference on post-War rebuilding of Europe—a Bretton Woods that failed] as merchants for the purpose of securing the most favourable terms for promoting the trade which has started, which is being carried on, and which, even if someone succeeded in forcibly interrupting it for a time, would inevitably continue to develop after the interruption.

We must start learning [economic management] from the very beginning. If we realise this, we shall pass our test; and the test is a serious one which the impending financial crisis will set—the test set by the Russian and international market to which we are subordinated, with which we are connected, and from which we cannot isolate ourselves. (See the whole text here)

The organization that enforces this discipline is needed in any system. If the world has gone Leninist, and Lenin had found the IMF around, he would have taken it entirely as is and the Fund  would have played exactly the same role that it has played in the past eighty years.

That role is both ideologically neutral and not. It is ideologically neutral because the three key rules mentioned above are the rules of discipline that must exist in any coherently organized system of governance; the role is not ideologically neutral once the overall context (the world capitalist system) is given. But the issue there is not the organization that is enforcing the rules, but the system. Thus if the critique be, it should be directed at the system, not at the enforcers.

Sun Yatsen had argued that there should be four branches of government. In addition, to the well-known three, he thought that there should be a control branch of government (the control Yuan) that would check the legality and transparency of the other three branches. The roots of the fourth Yuan go back deeply in Chinese history. Its quasi equivalent may be seen in the US Government Accounting Office, but the Yuan would be endowed with greater political and even some judiciary power. Within the Chinese Communist Party the same function is fulfilled by the Central Committee Disciplinary Commission.

Project the fourth Yuan to the global level. This is what the International Monetary Fund is. It checks whether the three simple rules are observed and thus makes the smooth functioning of the system possible.

Lenin, the old-fashioned supporter of discipline and order (the son of a school inspector), would have loved it. It would serve his purposes, but the approach, the seriousness with which questions are examined, the narrow-minded dedication to the three top issues, would be all the same. Lenin would have kept the same people and the same approach. Whether the IMF  would have been located in Washington D.C., is difficult to say because Lenin never thought much beyond Eurasia. But if the Fund even moves to Beijing, it will remain the same. Because it fulfills the function that the world needs.

The ideology of Donald J. Trump

 Does Donald J. Trump have an ideology, and what it is? The first part of the question is redundant: every individual has an ideology and if we believe that they do not have it, it is because it might represent an amalgam of pieces collected from various dialogical frameworks that are simply rearranged, and thus hard to put a name on. But that does not mean that there is no ideology. The second part is a million-dollar question because if we could piece together Donald J, Trump’s ideology, we would be able to forecast, or guess (the element of volatility is high) how his rule over the next four years might look like.

The reason why most people are unable to make a coherent argument about Trump’s ideology is because they are either blinded by hatred or adulation, or because they cannot bring what they observe in him into an ideological framework, with a name attached to it, and to which they are accustomed.

Before I try to answers the question, let me dismiss two, in my opinion, entirely wrong epithets attached to Trump: fascist and populist. If fascist is used as a term of abuse, this is okay and we can use it freely. But as a term in a rational discussion of Trump’s beliefs it is wrong. Fascism as an ideology implies (i) exclusivist nationalism, (ii) glorification of the leader, (iii) emphasis on the power of the state as opposed to private individuals and the private sector, (iv) rejection of the multi-party system, (v) corporatist rule, (vi) replacement of class structure  of society with unitary nationalism, and (vii) quasi religious adulation of the Party, the state and the leader. I do not need to discuss each of these elements individually to show that they have almost no relationship to what Trump believes or what he wants to impose.

Likewise, the term “populist” has of late also become a term of abuse, and despite some (in my opinion rather unsuccessful) attempts to define it better, it really stands for the leaders who win elections but do so on a platform that “we” do like. Then, the term becomes meaningless.

What are then the constituent parts of Trump’s ideology as we might have glimpsed during the previous four years of his rule?

Mercantilism. Mercantilism is an old and hallowed ideology that regards economic activity, and especially trade in goods and services between the states as a zero-sum game. Historically it went together with a world where wealth was gold and silver. If you take the amount of gold and silver to be limited, then clearly the state and its leader who possesses more gold and silver (regardless of all other goods) is more powerful.  The world has evolved since the 17^th century but many people still believe in the mercantilist doctrine. Moreover, if one believes that trade is just a war by other means and that the main rival or antagonist of the United States is China mercantilist policy towards China becomes a very natural response. When Trump initiated such policies against China in 2017 they were not a part of the mainstream discourse, but have since moved to the center. Biden’s administration followed them and expanded them significantly. We can expect that Trump will double-down on them. But mercantilists are, and Trump will be, transactional: if China agrees to sell less and buy more, he will be content. Unlike Biden, Trump will not try to undermine or overthrow the Chinese regime. Thus, unlike what many people believe, I think that Trump is good for China (that is, given the alternatives).

Profit-making. Like all Republicans, Trump believes in the private sector. Private sector in his view is unreasonably hampered by regulations, rules, taxes. He was a capitalist who never paid taxes which, in his view, simply shows that he was a good entrepreneur. But for others, lesser capitalists, regulations should be simplified or gotten rid of, and taxation should be reduced. Consistent with that view is the belief that taxes on capital should be lower than taxes on labor. Entrepreneurs and capitalists are job-creators, others are, in Ayn Rand’s words, ”moochers”. There is nothing new there in Trump. It is the same doctrine that was held form Reagan onwards, including by Bill Clinton. Trump may be just more vocal and open about low taxes, but he would do the same thing that Bush Sr, Clinton and Bush Jr. did. And that liberal icon Greenspan deeply believed.

Anti-immigrant “nationalism”. This a really difficult part. The term “nationalism” only awkwardly applies to American politicians because people are used  to “exclusive” (not inclusive) European and Asian nationalisms. When we speak of Japanese nationalism, we mean that such Japanese would like to expel ethnically non-Japanese either from decision-making or presence in the country. The same is true for Serbian, Estonian, French or Castellan nationalisms. The American nationalism, by its very nature, cannot be ethnic or blood-related because of enormous heterogeneity of people who compose the United States. Commentators have thus invented a new term, “white nationalism”. It is a bizarre term because it combines color of the skin with ethnic (blood) relations.  In reality, I think that the defining feature of Trump’s “nationalism” is neither ethnic nor racial, but simply the dislike of new migrants. It is in essence not different from anti-migrant policies applied today in the heart of the socio-democratic world, in Nordic and North Western European countries where the right-wing parties in Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, and Denmark believe (in the famous expression of the Dutch right-wing leader Geert Wilders) that their countries are “full” and cannot accept more immigrants. Trump’s view is only unusual because the US is not, objectively by any criteria, a full country: the number of people per square kilometer in the United States is 38 while it is 520 in the Netherlands.

A nation for itself. When one combines mercantilism with anti-immigrant nationalism, one gets close to what US foreign policy under Trump will look like. It will be the policy of nationalist anti-imperialism. I have to unpack these terms. This combination is uncommon, especially for big powers: if they are big, nationalist and mercantilist, it is almost intuitively understood that they have to be imperialist. Trump however defies this nostrum. He goes back to the Founders’ foreign policy that abhorred “foreign entanglements”. The United States, in their and in his view, is a powerful and rich nation, looking after its interests, but it is not an “indispensable nation” in the way that Madeleine Albright defined it. It is not the role of the United States to right every wrong in the world (in the optimistic or self-serving view of this doctrine) nor to waste its money on people and causes which have nothing to do with its interests (in the realist view  of the same doctrine).

Why Trump dislikes imperialism that has become common currency for both US parties since 1945 is hard to say but I think that instinctively he tends to espouse values of the US Founding Fathers and people like the Republican antagonist to FDR, Rober Taft who believed in US economic strength and saw no need to convert that strength in hegemonic political rule over the world.

This does not mean that Trump will give up the US hegemony (NATO will not be disbanded), because, as Thucydides wrote: “it is not any longer possible for you to give up this empire, though there may be some people who in a mood of sudden panic and in a spirit of political apathy actually think that this would be a fine and noble thing to do. Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go”. But in the light of Trump’s mercantilist principles, he would make US allies pay much more for it. Like in Pericles’ Athens, the protection will no longer come for free. One should not forget that the beautiful Acropolis that we all admire was built with gold stolen from the allies.   

 

 

Russia’s apocalyptic messianism

 

Having recently read Kropotkin’s memoirs (reviewed here), reminded me, in his description of intellectual history of Russian revolutionary movements, of Berdyaev’s book, “The origin and the meaning of Russian Communism”. Berdyaev wrote it in 1935-36; it was published in 1938. The only contemporary events referred to in the book are the Moscow trials (in one sentence), and a single mention of Hitler. The book presents an intellectual history of Russian revolutionary thought from the beginning of the 19^th century until the October Revolution, with an interpretation (relatively new at the time) of the Bolshevik policies.

 

Nassim Taleb has written that books that have been around for a  long time, are likely to remain with us for a long time.  If Plato is being read almost two-and-a-half millennia after he wrote, we can sure he  will be read in another two-and-a half millennia. The same is true for Berdyaev.  The book is, as I mentioned, ninety years old; I read it almost forty years ago. But it is still the book “d’actualité”. And has recently become more so.

 

The ideological background to the Russian thought is, according to Berdyaev, the belief in “apocalyptic messianism”. It is the subterranean ideology shared, Berdyaev writes, by Slavophiles, nihilists, anarchists and communists. Its main ingredient is a belief that, for some mysterious reason, Russian people (and that literally means “ordinary people”, peasants) has been selected to suffer and through its suffering to bring universal salvation to the world: “The mission of the Russian people is to realize social justice within human society, not just in Russia but in the entire world” (my translation). The salvation is accompanied by destruction.  The two elements, as in John’s apocalyptic writings, go together. There can be no salvation without the destruction of all that is false, rotten and built on lies. Apocalyptic thinking is, Berdyaev writes, the most important part of the Russian idea. It is characterized by asceticism, dogmatism, and acceptance (or perhaps, search?) of suffering.  

 

Berdyaev’s recounting of the 19^th century intellectual history has two objectives, I think. First, to situate Communist millenarism precisely within the doctrine of Russian messianism. The attractiveness of the Bolshevik revolution for the ordinary people in Russia was that it could be easily fitted into that age-old mold. The fact that the original belief was tightly linked with Christianity was not a problem. The same belief can be held with entirely different ideologies, even with an ideology like Marxism that is explicitly anti-religious. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek Berdyaev writes that Russia failed to become the Third Rome, but created the Third International. This leads Berdyaev to the discussion of the “russification” of Marxism, that “extreme Westernizing doctrine” when it appeared first in Russia.

 

The second objective is what may be of more interest today: the plasticity of apocalyptic messianism. We indeed hear of it almost daily, in a coarse form of threats of nuclear annihilation that are, it is averred, needed to preserve ‘conservative values” embodied by Russia. Berdyaev, himself a philosopher of Orthodox Christianity, does use class analyses throughout his discussion of 19^th century Russian ideological journey. Every messianism took place within given historical and social framework and appealed to different classes: Slavophiles found support among the clergy, high bureaucracy and the Court; anarchists were born in, and supported by, the parts of nobility and idealistic students; social-revolutionaries and the movement of “Black partition” (agrarian reform) relied on enfranchised peasantry; support for Bolsheviks was the strongest among impoverished intellectuals and national minorities.

 

Reading Berdyaev today thus necessarily raises the question, What classes are today the supporters of “apocalyptic messianism”, if there is indeed such a vision? We are not entirely sure that it really exists beyond somewhat crazed daily statements by the deputy head of the Security Council and a few TV commentators, but I do not think that its existence can be entirely discounted. Sergei Karaganov, in his recent writings, tries to give it some rationale by presenting Russia’s struggle (that is, its “messianism”) as built on two pillars: the creation of a polycentric world that much better fits the reality of political preferences today and is more egalitarian, and a struggle for “generally recognized” (conservative) values of family, religion, gender etc. Karaganov, being a political scientist and an international relation scholar, is much more at ease in bringing out the first element which indeed, I think, has much validity (the world cannot be ruled by a hegemon and be peaceful), although it is not clear how Russia by breaking international rules is contributing to them being observed by others. 

 

The second objective (“conservative values”) is dealt in only one sentence. “Objectify speaking”, there is nothing in that area that Russia can offer to the world, given that it exhibits some of the highest numbers for suicides, homicides, family violence, alcoholism and almost all other “generally recognized” social pathologies. Prudently, Karaganov avoids the topic.

But my question is, What social classes can support the version of “apocalyptic messianism” today? Russia’s social structure is entirely different from what it was in the 19^th century or in the period described by Berdyaev. Communist system has industrialized and urbanized the country. It has created a new ruling class, the red bourgeoisie, that has, when it conveniently decided to liquidate the system, become a true capitalist bourgeoise now, even an oligarchy. A large middle class of “technical” and “humanistic” intelligentsia has been created. The young and middle-aged market-dependent middle class has developed in many cities, even if its numbers are the highest in the two capitals. Aristocracy has been eliminated. Peasantry has shrunk. Thus, within the entire new social structure, it is not clear (at least not to me) who may be “the carriers” of the new apocalyptic messianism. It could be that what we hear are just the individual voices of anger or despair—not a reflection of a more deeply-seated ideology or class interests.  These are things which the contempories are not apt to judge well: history can prove that “apocalyptic messianism” has entirely lost its ideological hold on Russia, but, it is not impossible to believe that it is emerging right now under a different ideological form that we cannot fully grasp.

Cultural revolution in the land of Kafka and Borges

 

Famous anarchist theorist, revolutionary and a renowned explorer of Siberia, Peter Kropotkin’s memoirs were published in 1898, written in Russian but originally printed in English in The Atlantic Monthly. They were later slightly revised and expanded, and this final version is what we currently have and which I have just read.

 

It is a very clearly and, I think, objectively written book. Kropotkin begins with his privileged childhood.  He was born into the house of Prince Kropotkin, one of the most influential aristocrats, close to the emperor, living in a palace in Saint Petersburg. Kropotkin tends to underplay the privileged environment into which he was born, but he does not deny it. The book then moves chronologically: his years at the elite page academy of the Court, decision not to go into the expected military service but to move to Siberia which he explored and about which he wrote several seminal geological and geographical treatises; and then onto the political activity, prison in Russia, escape to western Europe, forty years of life in exile… Since the book ends much before the October Revolution and even before the split between social-democratic and communist wings, these issues are obviously not treated. But the schism between the Marx-dominated faction of the First International and Bakunin’s anarchist faction is discussed. And attacks on state socialism, propagated by Engels and Marx (this was written before the codification of Marxism, so the two famous names are written in an unusual order) are sustained and frequent.  

 

Kropotkin returned to Russia after the October revolution. The role of anarchists in the Revolution was not negligible but their later fate was not pleasant. Kropotkin however was too old, and died in Moscow in 1921, just days before the Kronstadt rebellion. He was buried in Moscow and it was the last time that anarchists’ black flags were freely unfurled in the Soviet Union. Today, one of Moscow’s metro stations bears Kropotkin’s name.

 

Politically, the most interesting period treated in The Memoirs is the one after the Crimean War and emancipation of serfs in 1861. He writes about the contradictory nature of Alexander II who oscillated between being the Tsar—liberator and the Tsar—reactionary, and whose very death at the hands of Russian revolutionaries exhibited the conflicting strivings of his soul. Alexander was killed when, after the initial assassination attempt failed, he, alone among all, jumped out of his car to help the injured guard; that provided an easy target for the second assassin, and he did not miss.

 

Kropotkin’s descriptions of the revolutionary life in the Russia of the 1860s are hyper-realistic. But to the reader today, the entire Russian existence seems to be that of a land of wonders. The relationship between political offenses and punishments meted out is not only a product of arbitrariness (for which a nice Russian word proizvol’ exists) but the outcome of an almost infinite randomness.

 

To visualize it, assume that your political sin (emancipation of labor, printing of non-authorized literature, attendance of anti-government rallies, violent attacks on police, assassination of the dignitaries) is written on a piece of paper which is then put into an enormous machine that produces the sentence. The machine is geared to produce harsh sentences; sentences that are often written before the crime is committed. Next, let this piece of paper with your crime move to a second, attached, machine which is managed by a capricious God. That second machine revises the sentence; the sentence of exile can become one of being hanged, or, differently, of immediate freedom; it can lead you to a decade in jail or to be released and feted by liberal intelligentsia today. The first machine was described by Kafka in his Penal Colony (inspired by Dostoyevsky); the second is from Borges’ short story in which every individual passes through all possible positions in life, from a ruler to a homeless, entirety at the will of capricious gambling chance. Thus, the Russia of the 1860s, and perhaps the one of today, appears as a blend of Kafka and Borges. 

 

For a rational mind, it is very difficult to see not only how such punishments help the government, but not to notice that the capriciousness, randomness, and indeed 

sloppiness  with which punishments are executed become entirely counterproductive from the point of view of the rulers’ own interests.

 

Take Kropotkin’s case. He was followed by the secret police for “going to the people”, i.e., organizing lectures on socialism and anarchism among workers in St. Petersburg and several other cities in Russia. He would move from his home (probably dressed in the fineries), change into mud-stained boots, short coat (that we learn distinguished the workers from the rich), rough shirt, and move through dark St Petersburg alleyways until he reached a badly-lit warehouse where twenty or thirty workers and a couple of young intellectuals (camouflaged like Kropotkin in people’s attire) would meet to discuss George Berkeley, David Hume, Chernyshevsky, Jesus Christ and human freedom in general. Kropotkin was eventually arrested—but even that arrest had several unusual moments, including being foretold to the potential prey which led Kropotkin to hide and destroy all incriminating evidence; and where the arrest, perhaps because of his family background, needed a clearance from the top powers. Kropotkin is thrown into the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress, in a tiny cell (whose sketch is provided in the memoirs) where he is held for a year in solitary confinement: able to make eight paces only and to see a tiny piece of St Petersburg translucent Nordic-blue or entirely dark sky. But in such a room, he is, after a while, allowed to have his family send him food daily and is visited by the Grand Duke (the brother of the Emperor) who, according to Kropotkin, tries, through apparent amicability, to extract confession from him.

 

Kropotkin is afterwards, because of his loss of weight and general weakness, sent to a prison hospital that is so poorly guarded that he is able to plot his daring escape with a dozen of revolutionaries, some of whom are also in jail and others free. The plans are made and remade almost daily as if the plotters had access to the modern internet and were totally free to write and then revise various escape scenarios. Finally, in a rocambolesque way, Kropotkin escapes, and while the Klondike-like police chases him, he and his accomplices decide to spend the evening in the plushest restaurant of St Petersburg where police does not do razzias.

 

What was the crime for which he and his comrades, among whom women played an extraordinary important and brave role (as Kropotkin repeatedly mentions), were accused of? Creating a cultural revolution in the Russian countryside by telling the liberated but indebted peasants that they are no different from the nobles, that they have the right to a free life, and that they should rebel, burn the aristocratic estates and disobey the Emperor. The young educated people of St Petersburg and Moscow who went “to the people” (similar to those sent by Mao into the peasant communes a century later) numbered, according to Kropotkin, only some 3,000 individuals. They gave up all comforts of their previous lives. Many moved to villages, working there as ordinary journeymen or toiling the land, with the goal of bringing Russian peasants out of their millennial turpitude and teaching them how to be free. They, and again particularly so the women, did it with an unbelievable self-abnegation, dedication, courage and seriousness.  

 

They did not shy of “direct action”. While Kropotkin does not explicitly endorse assassinations, he underlines the reasons that lead to them. The line between the tyrannicide and terrorism was always thin. Kropotkin approves of the assassination of his own relative who was governor of Kharkov and enacted some harsh measures against the revolutionaries.

 

The West European part of the memoirs is interesting even if less exciting. It takes place after the suppression of the Paris Commune, in an atmosphere of police persecution, hangings, semi-legal printing presses, contraband of revolutionary tracts from Switzerland into France.  Kropotkin is most of the time, living (like Lenin later) in Switzerland, working on political agitation with the famous Association des Horlogers Jurassiens. He criticizes state socialism of German social-democrats whom he accuses of  aiming only at political power while disregarding moral transformation, indeed the cultural revolution, needed to save humankind.

 

Kropotkin’s ideas regarding the societal organization that would be built in concentric circles from the lowest to the highest level, would abolish the state, and organize production among the publicly-owned cooperatives that would not compete with each other but labor in free association and self-help looks irremediably naïve. It is not surprising that Marxists, and later Leninists, thought it was a fairy tale.

 

But perhaps that humans, at times, need visionaries, the selfless individuals who produce fairy tales and reading Kropotkin may be a way to try, at least for a moment, to believe in them. A young friend to whom I mentioned reading Kropotkin’s memoirs, and not expecting she would know of him, immediately replied: “We are reading him now to fight climate change and to help self-organization of society.”