Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals. Alexis Klimoff translation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century. Yermolai Solzhenitsyn translation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

 

Born a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, Orthodox-Christian Russian patriot Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived to see the much-welcomed demise of that tyranny. By 1990, when he published this Rebuilding Russia in his own beloved language, he saw that “Time has run out for communism,” although “its concrete edifice has not yet crumbled.” Russians therefore “must take care not to be crushed beneath its rubble instead of gaining liberty.” The tyrants had used human blood as mortar; “we have lost a full third of our population” in “labored pursuit of a purblind and malignant Marxist-Leninist utopia,” a body count including those killed in “the ineptly, almost suicidally waged ‘Patriotic War'” against Nazi invaders. With this physical devastation, a moral-political crisis has ensued; “a helplessless bred of the absence of rights permeates the entire country,” as “we cling to only one thing: that we not be deprived of unlimited drunkenness.”

Not quite one, only, however: “Human beings are so constituted that we can put up with such ruination and madness even when they last a lifetime, but God forbid that anyone should dare to offend or slight our nationality!” “Such is man: nothing has the capacity to convince us that our hunger, our poverty, our early deaths, the degeneration of our children—that any of these misfortunes can take precedence over national pride.” To begin reconstruction of Russia under a new and better regime, Russians need less to feel their nationhood than to think about it, to make it (as Marxists would say) conscious, thoughtful. Far from the dogmatic nationalist his enemies have called him, Solzhenitsyn wanted Russians to deliberate with him about what it means to be Russian.

“What is Russia?” The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics “will break up whatever we do.” Much of it has consisted of non-Russian peoples gathered under that regime, an ideological rather than a national construct. Russians should declare “loudly, clearly, and without delay” the independence of eleven of the Soviet ‘republics’: Moldavia (“if it feels drawn to Romania”) along with those in the Baltic area, in Transcaucasia, and in Central Asia (except Kazakhstan, which has a substantial Russian population). Without these peoples, who long for self-government according to the ethoi of their own nationalities, there would remain “an entity that might be called Rus,” consisting of “Little Russians” (Ukrainians), “Great Russians,” and Belorussians. Since those Russian peoples live in areas home to dozens of other nationalities and ethnic groups, “a fruitful commonwealth of nations,” a “Russian Union,” will require Russians to “marshal all the resources of our hearts and minds to the task,” in part by “affirming the integrity of each culture and the preservation of each language.” In his own way, Solzhenitsyn is a ‘multiculturalist.’

The American regime initially founded its ‘multicultural’ regime on natural rights; the Bolsheviks founded their regime on Marxism-Leninism. What does Solzhenitsyn offer as the foundation of a new Russian regime?

He addresses each Russian group in turn. To his fellow ‘Great Russians,’ he warns that “we don’t have the strength,” economic or moral, to sustain the existing, collapsing empire, “and it is just as well.” Unfortunately, “the awakening Russian national self-awareness,” no longer narcotized by Communist ideology, “has to a large extent been unable to free itself of great-power thinking and of imperial delusions,” continuing to take pride in a ‘superpower’ status that it is losing. Against this, Solzhenitsyn appeals to the example of Russia’s rival in the war that began to reveal the decline of the Czarist regime—Japan, which found “a way to be reconciled with its situation, renouncing its sense of international mission and the pursuit of tempting political ventures,” gaining prosperity in return. As Solzhenitsyn must know, Japan did this with the aid of a powerful American ‘prompting’ in the person of the American general, Douglas MacArthur, backed up by his occupying troops. Russians haven’t been conquered; they will need to write their own new constitution, then live by it. To do this, Solzhenitsyn would redirect Russian pride away from imperialism and toward the preservation and enhancement of Russianness, “clarity of what remains of our spirit,” a “precious inner development” that alone can reverse Russians’ harrowing demographic decline. “‘Taking pride’ is not what we need to do, nor should we be attempting to impose ourselves on the lives of others. We must rather, grasp the reality of the acute and debilitating illnesses that is affecting our people, and pray to God that He grant us recovery, along with the wisdom to achieve it.” Christianity in the form of Russian Orthodoxy would then replace atheism in the form of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.

To Ukrainians and Belorussians, he recalls that “our people came to be divided into three branches by the terrible calamity of the Mongol invasion, and by Polish colonization,” but originally “we all sprang from precious Kiev,” where “we received the light of Christianity.” It should be noted that the Russians originated in Scandinavia—probably from Viking stock, which would explain a certain battle-readiness as well as the incidence of red hair in the population (not unlike the Irish). It is also noteworthy that Kievan Rus didn’t extend very far east, not even to the Volga River. Nonetheless, “the Muscovite state” was “created by the same people who made up Kievan Rus,” and the Rus people who eventually fell under Polish and Lithuanian rule to the west “resisted Polonization and conversion to Catholicism.” That is, they maintained not only their ethnic but their spiritual identity.

This notwithstanding, Solzhenitsyn acknowledges that many Ukrainians or ‘Little Russians’ no longer feel any strong allegiance to their ‘Great-Russian’ brethren. What to do? Invite them to join the Russian Union, but do not force them in. Each locality within Ukraine should be allowed to vote themselves in or out. For himself, Solzhenitsyn exhorts them to come in: “Brothers! We have no need of this cruel partition. The very idea comes from the darkening of minds brought on by the communist years. Together, we have borne the suffering of the Soviet period, together we have tumbled into this pit, and together, too, we shall find our way out.” Insofar as Ukrainian Russians and Belorussians have indeed developed “cultures” distinct from that of ‘Great Russians,’ those cultures should enjoy “free manifestation,” “not only on their two territories but among the Great Russians as well.” Parallel schools should be established, with children attending in accordance with “the parents’ choice.” As for the dozens of smaller nationalities and ethnic groups, to grant sovereignty to each would lead to chaos, but they could find political representation in a Council of Nationalities in the Russian Union—”a forum in which event the smallest of national groups can have its voice heard.”

Once paths to separation of most major nations in the Soviet empire and the consensual union of Russians have been established, Russians must begin their inner reconstitution as a well-ordered nation. Materially, “a patriot and a true statesman” will eliminate such unnecessary expenses as aid to “the tyrannical regimes we have implanted the world over,” the manufacture of offensive weapons, the ‘space race,’ subsidies to Eastern European countries, and the Communist party and state bureaucracies. Above all, “our people must urgently be made aware of the meaning of work, after half a century when no one could see any advantage to putting forth an effort,” while recognizing that “Nature, disdained so ungratefully by us, is taking its revenge” by the pollution of Russian earth, water, and air by radioactive and other poisonous materials. “On top of all this,” Russians “must now prepare to resettle those compatriots who are losing their places of residence” in lands that will free themselves of the imperial grip.

Morally, “a public admission by the Party of its guilt, its crimes, and its helplessness would at least be the first step toward alleviating the oppressiveness of our moral atmosphere.” The political corollary to this moral statement would be the dismantling of the KGB. But political reform must be preceded by social reform. “There can be no independent citizen without private property”; lands now ‘owned’ by the Communist state must be leased or sold to individual Russians or Russian families (not to corporations and not to foreigners). Such privately-owned lands will easily feed the country, as indeed the few private plots permitted under the Communist regime had done. Small businesses, anti-monopoly and anti-usury laws, environmental laws, regulated foreign investment, and stable prices all will underwrite a decentralized governmental system, featuring “perhaps forty centers of vitality and illumination throughout the breadth of the land.” “The road back to health must begin at the grassroots”; Solzhenitsyn’s stays in Switzerland and rural Vermont, with their responsible local governing authorities, reminded him of Russia’s own practice of village self-government dating back to the Middle Ages. These governments and the small-scale economic structures that enable them to flourish, will require revival of “normal families,” which “have virtually ceased to exist in our country” because women were forced into the workplace and men lacked salaries sufficient to support a household. Further, underpaid local schoolteachers were required to teach “ideological gibberish” to the children. “All changes and all efforts to salvage true knowledge must begin with revamping the curricula at the teachers’ colleges.” As for the overall culture, the Soviet regime “gave our country superb protection against all the positive features of the West,” such as civil liberties, respect for the individual, and civil-social organizing, but it “permitted the continuous seepage of liquid manure,” that is, “the self-indulgent and squalid ‘popular mass culture” “mindlessly ape[d]” by Russian youth.

If Russians address these crucial matters in a measured and prudent way, they can avoid “repeat[ing] the chaos” of February 1917, which led to the ruinous Bolshevik Revolution in October. “A decisive change in regime calls for thoughtfulness and a sense of responsibility”—exactly what Russian intellectuals and politicians generally lacked during and in the years preceding the Great War. “There is no guarantee whatever that the new leaders now coming to the fore will immediately prove to be far-sighted and sober-minded.” Nonetheless—and this is the monumental risk Solzhenitsyn judges Russians must take to avoid such chaos and resultant tyranny, this time—Russians will need a “strong central authority” to undertake the transition to a genuinely federal and republican Russia at some time in the future. An immediate democratic-republican revolution will not work under current conditions of economic impoverishment, spiritual desolation, and political inexperience. “Beyond upholding its rights, mankind must defend its soul, freeing it for reflection and feeling.” Mankind cannot do that collectively, but only nation-by-nation and indeed village-by-village, family-by-family. “If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development: a tree with a rotten core cannot stand.” “That is why the destruction of our souls over three-quarters of a century is the most terrifying thing of all,” a destruction planned, carried out, and perpetuated by “the corrupt ruling class,” shamelessly hanging on to positions of power in government, business, and the universities. “West Germany was suffused with the feeling of repentance before the coming of their economic boom. But in our country no one has even begun to repent” Even the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy partakes in the corruption, unable thus far event to reform itself, let alone to undertake the moral reformation of Russians. Russians can only look to themselves, under God, in a spirit of “conscious self-limitation,” making a virtue out of material and political necessity.

As a writer, Solzhenitsyn can assist in one area to which he can indeed limit himself, in adherence to his own advice. “Before the [Bolshevik] Revolution, the bulk of our people had no experience with political concepts, and the ideas that were pounded into our heads by propaganda in the subsequent seventy years served only to cloud our minds. But not what our country has begun moving in the direction of real political life, and when the forms of the government-to-be are already being discussed, it is useful to focus on the precise meaning of some terms in order to prevent possible mistakes.” A writer can attend to his nation’s language, and Solzhenitsyn does that.

To talk sensibly of regimes, of governmental forms, he recurs first to Spengler and to Montesquieu, both of whom emphasized the need to fit the regime to the physical size of the country, its topography, history, traditions, and ethos. “The task is to set in place a structure that will lead to a flourishing of this people rather than to its decline and degeneration” (and not to worry so much about the flourishing of ‘that‘ people somewhere else, which has a very different territory, history, tradition, and ethos, and thus quite likely a different regime or variation of the same kind of regime suited to Russia). Solzhenitsyn cites Aristotle’s tripartite regime classification (rule of the one, the few, the many), noting that each type can have a good or bad version, and that the type chosen will survive only if prudent statesmen choose carefully. “Many new countries have in recent years suffered a fiasco just after introducing democracy; yet, despite such evidence, this same period has seen an elevation of democracy from a particular state structure into a sort of universal principle of human existence, almost a cult.” But democracy, whether defined politically as popular sovereignty or civil-socially (as by Tocqueville) to mean social egalitarianism, does not guarantee liberty. To be just, democracy needs individual freedom and a government of laws, what one of the 1917 Constitutional Democrats called “a certain level of political discipline among the populace,” “precisely what we lacked in 1917,” and what “one fears that there is even less of,” in the Russia of 1990.

Therefore, if republicanism is to be introduced gradually to Russia, to Russians as they are, statesmen must institute well-defined electoral procedures—procedures that do not merely express the popular will in direct elections (“in a country as huge as ours,” direct election of representatives can only means that voters won’t know the people they vote for), but also (as Madison famously wrote) refine and enlarge the public views. Once lost, self-government is hard to recover. “European democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have been gradually losing their force,” increasingly replaced by “the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests.” Unlike such Central European thinkers as Adam Michnik and Vacláv Havel, Solzhenitsyn doesn’t hope or expect that either elections or the political parties competing in them aim at “the search for truth.” More, even in democratic regimes the parties tend toward oligarchy, whether of party leaders or of administrative agencies with no enforceable responsibility to the people they rule. Political parties and other civil associations should “exist freely, propounding ay views and issuing publications at their own expense,” as long as their records are “open to public inspection,” are “registered”—as lobbyists are, in the United States— and make their “programs” public. No political parties could legally interfere in the workplace, in the service sector, or in the schools. Elected party candidates would be required to suspend their party membership for the duration of their term in office.

In many ways the zemstvo—a territory organized for self-government—serves as the centerpiece of Solzhenitsyn’s institutional structure. A zemstvo would exist on several levels of government, measured by size: a local unit (consisting of a mid-sized municipality, a district in a big city, or a group of villages); a large city; a region; and finally an all-Russian body, the All-Zemstvo Assembly. Western readers will recognize in such a system the embodiment of the principle of subsidiarity. “For us who have completely lost touch with genuine self-government, the task will be to assimilate this sequence step by step, starting from the bottom,” a sequence “useful for many in the population to acquire political skills.” Candidates for seats in the local zemstvo “normally will be well known to the voters,” and elections campaigns would consist only of the candidates’ programs, biographies, and “views.” Election to a larger zemstvo would be determined by a vote by the zemstvos within its territory. Bureaucracies would be curbed, although Solzhenitsyn gives no details on how to do it; he seems to envision a zemstvo veto on bureaucratic regulations. Meanwhile, a powerful head of state would be elected directly by national vote from a list of nominees provided by the All-Zemstvo Assembly. There would also be a second house of the legislature, its 200-250 members consisting of representatives of various “estates’ (soslovia)—persons with a common occupation, elected by members of each designated estate. This body could veto presidential candidates proposed by the All-Zemstvo Assembly and to interdict laws and actions proposed by a government institution or agency, but this would need to be a unanimous decision by the members. This means that the estates assembly would at most exercise a certain moral authority, inasmuch as it is nearly inconceivable that a 200-member body would deliver a unanimous vote on any matter.

Solzhenitsyn deliberately leaves his proposals incomplete, acknowledging that he has said nothing about the military or the courts. He wants Russians to act for themselves. “Building a rational and just state is a task of surpassing difficulty, and the goal can only be approached slowly by means of successive approximations and small, cautious steps.” Caution makes sense, as Solzhenitsyn shows in another brief and readable book, The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century, which amounts to a short history of Russia since the beginning of the Romanov Dynasty. That history illustrates “the numerous blunders in our past” from which “our plight today in many ways stems.” If initially Russians must work with the handicap of unfamiliarity with civic life, a history can at least give them some vicarious experience of what ruling entails—from the viewpoint of rulers, not only of the ruled (a viewpoint with which they are much too familiar).

The very young aristocrat Mikhail Romanov ascended to the Russian throne in 1613, elected by the Zemsky Sobor during the first of three ‘Times of Troubles’ identified by Solzhenitsyn—the others being the collapse of the czarist and Communist regimes in 1917 and 1991, respectively. An assembly organized around three social groups—aristocrats and top bureaucrats; Orthodox clergy; commoners (of course excluding the vast peasantry)—the Zemsky Sobor had been founded some three generations earlier, in 1549, by Ivan IV, a couple of years after his marriage to a Romanov. When Tsaritsa Anastasia died under suspicious circumstances in 1560, Ivan went on a rampage against the aristocrats, whom he supposed had poisoned her (hence “Ivan the Terrible”). When Ivan’s dynastic line ended with a childless czar, in 1598 the Zemsky Sobor elected Boris Godunov, the last Rurikid czar’s brother-in-law, he moved to ruin the Romanovs, who had contested his election. This succession crisis occurred during the desperate Polish-Muscovite War; as in 1917, foreign and domestic crises intersected, although ‘intersected’ is a painfully abstract term for describing such a crisis of blood and honor.

Solzhenitsyn takes a political lesson from this crisis, beyond an account of dynastic struggle over the monarchy. Citing historian Andrei Platonov, he writes that “the tortuous and enervative Time of Troubles brought also a beneficent change to the political outlook of the Russian people; even with no Tsar, with Russian no longer his ‘estate’ and its people no longer his ‘servants’ and ‘serfs,’ the State must not collapse, but must be salvaged and shaped by the people themselves.” Local authorities prospered and took charge of their own communities, linking themselves with one another to form a “council of the all the land.” “This testimony to the Russian people’s organizational abilities provides instructive examples for us, the descendants.” “Thus arose the zemstzo.” Solzhenitsyn adds, heuristically and patriotically, that “this entire system of State was not created under any Western influence, and by no means amounted to an imitative structure.”

It didn’t last. Mikhail Romanov’s son, Alexei, began to replace the zemstvo rule with bureaucracy. Although he won his war against Poland, recovering lands lost in the previous generation, Czar Alexei contracted the notion that Russia would need to modernize or Westernize the country, which project included a thus-far critical weakening of the Orthodox Church. After his son by his second marriage, Peter, won his own dynastic fight in 1682, Russia embarked on a thoroughgoing effort to ‘modernize.’ “Peter I was a man of mediocre, if not savage, mind. He could not grasp that one cannot transfer specific results of Western culture and civilization without the psychological atmosphere in which these results had ripened.” Russia did indeed require Western science and technology for survival in the modern world, Solzhenitsyn concedes, “but not at the cost of stamping out (in quite a Bolshevik fashion and with many excesses) her sense of history, her people’s beliefs, soul, and customs, for the sake of accelerated industrial development and military might.” And not only for technological prowess: Peter ‘the Great’ greatly centralized the Russian state, making it into a modern state with himself, an ‘absolute’ monarch, at its head, in the process destroying the Zemsky Sobor because it stood as a barrier to both the administrative structure of statism and the regime power of absolute monarchy. He also finished the task his father had begun, “bridl[ing] the Orthodox Church, [breaking] its spine.” And in a 1714 decree, he established gentry primogeniture and “turned the peasants into the direct property of landowners,” who in turn were firmly subordinated to himself, having been deprived of the assembly in which they had exerted some governing influence in Russia as a whole. Peter thus made himself not a reformer but a revolutionary, one who built up the state with these policies straight out of Machiavelli, adding to them the equally Machiavellian policy of attempting to unite the nation by embroiling it in foreign wars.

“Pausing at the end of the eighteenth century, one cannot but marvel at the string of errors committed by our rulers, at their concentration on matters superfluous to the life of the people.” A policy of offensive war and territorial expansion—imperialism—replaced the only right kind of war against the Western powers, defensive war. “Unfortunately for us, this mindset persisted long into the nineteenth century,” as Alexander I needlessly provoked Napoleon’s invasion, then, after devastating sacrifices, won that war only to return to ‘The Great Game’ of imperial meddling. At home, even the liberation of the serfs in 1861 granted only personal freedom, not the right to own land and the fruits of the peasant’s work on that land—the kind of liberty that makes personal freedom sustainable. As in the 1990s, the people were thrown into a market economy without the material resources or (above all) the moral and mental preparation for the rigors of market competition. Then as now (that is, the 1990s), usurers and speculators took charge. Solzhenitsyn cites the novelist and short story writer Gleb Uspensky, who understood that peasant “rule of the land” was indispensable to giving “our people patience, humility, strength, and youth; take it away and there is no people, no national world view, only a spiritual void” because “rule of the land held the peasant in obedience, developed in him a strong family and social discipline, kept him from pernicious heresies; the despotic rule of the earth-mother went together with her ‘love’ for the peasant, thus easing his labor and making it the prevalent task of life,” protecting him from the personal and exploitive rule of oligarchs. Because land is impersonal, its “rule” caused no resentment; the land is what it is, and those who live on it learn to work it or starve—a point not unfamiliar to readers of the New Testament.

One might add that the modern West, especially in Europe, garnered its power precisely from the fact that its philosophers, beginning with Machiavelli, but going along through Bacon, Descartes, and their followers, resented and rebelled against the personal but beneficent rule of the Creator-God and the impersonal ‘despotism’ of nature. For these forms of rule they substituted the human rule of the scientists, absolute monarchs in control of nationalized churches, and both aristocrats and smart commoners who made themselves into financial and industrial oligarchs. The American Founders may be said to have countered or at least moderated this project by the political revolution of federal republicanism founded upon nature—natural rights—and religious liberty. Although Solzhenitsyn sees that Russia cannot and indeed should not imitate America, he seeks a similar result. But on Russian terms, and in the (perhaps very) long run.

Oligarchs’ rule of Russian peasants, who unlike American yeoman farmers didn’t rule their own land, economically or politically, “flowed organically into a revolutionary mindset and rebellion” by the beginning of the twentieth century, as did the monarchy’s continued imperial, ‘great-power’ ambitions. (“Even Dostoevsky, despite his incomparable acumen, failed to resist this subjugating influence: the dream of Constantinople, ‘the East will bring salvation to the West.'”) One of the few Romanov czars Solzhenitsyn praises, Alexander III, did understand “the ruinous effect of both Russia’s service to the interests of others and her pursuit of new conquests,” rightly preferring to focus his rule “on the inner health of the nation.” But even he “failed to detect the worrisome deadening of the Orthodox Church,” the one institution that might have reset the nation’s moral compass. His successors went back to the same policies of imperial expansion and ill-judged foreign alliances that set the nation on the course for ruin in the second ‘Time of Troubles’ in 1917.

Solzhenitsyn needs to show that the people could and did do better than the czars, and not only in the distant past. He finds this demonstration (somewhat paradoxically) in one great effort of Russian expansion, the settlement of Siberia. There, the Russian people enjoyed “complete freedom for private economic activity,” as well as “freedom to select both occupation and place of residence.” And in Russia generally, the bureaucracy was opened to commoners of proven ability, an “independent and open courts system” was established, and the revived zemstvos provided “free, high-quality medical care to the population.” Briefly, between 1906 and the Great War, Russia even had “a true parliament and multi-party system (for both of which we pine today as a novel achievement).”

For reasons detailed in his novel, March 1917, the misjudgments of Czar Nicholas II, the follies of liberal politicians, and the pressures of the war enabled “the defeat of Russia by the Bolsheviks.” (In a rare display of injustice, Solzhenitsyn cynically remarks that this revolution “was quite advantageous for the Allies,” as “they would not have to share with Russia the spoils of victory.”) As for the new regime itself, its mass-murderous rage at its ‘class enemies,’ its initial relinquishment of territories inhabited by Russians, its subsequent return to an imperialism even more hubristic than that of the czars, its gross mismanagement of the national economy all need little description, as by the mid-1990s they were acknowledged by all but the most benighted Leftist ideologues. Far from joining in the chorus of accolades for the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, Solzhenitsyn dismisses him as an example of the “usual Bolshevik stupidity,” a bungling craftsmen of the oxymoronic “socialist market,” the “perestroika” or “restructuring” that merely replicated the old Leninist ploy of token liberalization, and the “glasnost” or “opening” of free speech by which “he was flinging the doors wide open for all the fierce nationalisms” of the components of the tottering Soviet empire. That empire “was not only unnecessary for us, but ruinous.”

At the time of Solzhenitsyn’s writing, “Russia has truly fallen into a torn state: 25 million have found themselves ‘abroad’ [in Ukraine and elsewhere] without moving anywhere, by staying on the lands of their fathers and grandfathers,” now relinquished by Moscow. To reverse this, Solzhenitsyn recommends three policies: evacuation of Russians who wish to leave the Transcaucasian and Central Asian countries, with resettlement in Russia; a call to the Baltic states to fully comply with “all-European standards of national minority rights”; and some degree of reunification with areas of Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan with Russian-majority populations. (He never advocates forceful reunification, however; in this, President Putin has quite outdone him.) He very sensibly warns Western politicians not to keen over Russian weakness, as “circumstances will arise… when all of Europe and the United States will be in dire need of Russia as an ally.”

As for Russian regime politics, Solzhenitsyn derogates the parliament-and-party system of democracy because it attempts to impose democracy undemocratically, “from above, from the central parliament,” “with the party deciding who shall represent a particular electoral district.” “Our ingrained and wretched Russian tradition” refuses “to learn how to organize from below,” leaving Russians “inclined to wait for instructions from a monarch, a leader, a spiritual or political authority.” In the mid-1990s, “such are nowhere to be seen, while small-fry bustle at the heights.” Economic ‘shock therapy’ in the form of abrupt introduction of free-market principles meanwhile has resulted in “the triumph of the frisky sharks of non-producing commercialism”; instead of following the example of postwar Japan, which “entered world civilization without losing her distinctiveness,” Russia has only aped the West. But “national consciousness must always and everywhere be respected”; for Solzhenitsyn, nationalism never means ‘blood and soil,’ but “a person’s”—and then a people’s—”orientation of preferences.” And this consciousness or orientation is never above criticism: “”Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins.”

Therefore, the three ‘Times of Troubles’ that have brought catastrophe down upon Russia “could not have just been accidents. Some fundamental flaws of State and spirit must be to blame.” The main purpose of Solzhenitsyn’s historical account of Russia since the founding of the Romanov dynasty is precisely to identify those flaws, just as the main purpose of Rebuilding Russia was to suggest some pathways toward mending them.

 

J. D. Crouch and Patrick J. Garrity: You Run the Show or the Show Runs You: Capturing Professor Harold W. Rood’s Strategic Thought for a New Generation. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

 

Harold W. Rood was a plain-spoken man who “wanted, above all, to instruct his students in the hard logic of power, especially as that logic played out in international politics.” The notion of international relations struck him as touchy-feely, and he never hesitated to strike back. But he neither worshiped political power nor supposed it to operate like electricity, He considered it as an instrument of strategy, that is, of prudential reasoning—reasoning that itself both served purposes but needed steady reminders that purposes must be navigated through a complex landscape. Part of that landscape is political, but much of it really is landscape—that is, geography. As a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, he could scarcely overlook the importance of terrain, physical resources, and logistics. He was a geopolitician, and proud of it.

The authors divide their book into three segments. The first three chapters present Rood’s understanding of nature: the nature of politics, the nature of international politics, and the nature of strategy. The final three chapters present the main strategic problem Rood considered in his career—the Russian problem—and the strategy Americans devised to address it; the last chapter shows that Rood did not think the Russian problem had disappeared with the disintegration of the Soviet empire; moreover, the Chinese problem had been added to it. The fourth, central chapter treats the “democratic strategic deficit,” that is, the limitations imposed upon democratic-republican regimes as such, apart from the territorial, demographic, and other material strengths and weaknesses a given democratic republic must work with and against. The strategic deficit such regimes characteristically suffer ensure that while they may embody ‘the end of history’ in Fukuyama’s sense of the best practicable regime under modern conditions, they will always have weaknesses other regimes can and will exploit, and therefore will never put a stop to historical conflict, never bring on an ‘end time’ of perpetual peace.

The chapter on the nature of politics is short. Rood did not elaborate on human nature in the direct manner of a political philosopher. One gets the sense he thought Aristotle had already done that, with Hobbes providing a useful supplement. Subtitled, “The Inherent Logic of Events,” this chapter shows Rood to have been anything but a Hegelian; the “logic” here amounts to a set of deductions from human nature, embodied in human individuals and groups living in physical places and ruled by “constitutional arrangements” or regimes “through which men seek to control and govern their environment,” that is, those physical places. The “inner logic of historical themes” derives from the nature of human beings, in their physical and political circumstances. Rood described themes, preferring not to attempt to track down causes, because “strategy involved an appreciation of human agency”; he was no fatalist, no historicist in the philosophic sense. In too many circumstances causation is too complex to account for. Attempts to do so usually lead to terrible simplifications wielded by terrifying simplifiers.

Rood saw what physicists came later to see: There is no such thing as chaos. “Organization and control are present even in what seem to be the most chaotic and violent of circumstances.” Spontaneous ‘uprisings’ and ‘riots’ are seldom spontaneous, and genocide doesn’t happen by accident. But strife does concentrate minds on the fact that “power is intrinsic to politics, something that intellectuals often forget.” Power, including technological power, serves purposes. In the early years of the Internet, when I told college students that warfare had moved from land and sea to the air and now to cyberspace (without moving away from land, sea, and air) they thought me a fool. Didn’t I know that networks of personal computers would bring peoples closer together, facilitating peaceful commerce and friendship? That the new technology would make war far less likely? No, I didn’t. Neither did Rood. In his opinion, power, including technological power, remains instrumental for any number of human purposes, not all of them pleasant. Ten years later, students treated my observation as ordinary; cyber-warfare was on, now noticeably. As Rood once wrote, politics is “the organization and application of power to accomplish purpose,” whatever that purpose might be. Worthy purposes include peace, justice, and defense, purposes and indeed “obligations” that “exist irrespective of the nature of the regime and whether its constitution is written or unwritten.” Unlike Machiavelli or Hobbes, “Rood drew a fundamental distinction between the position of the tyrant and that of the lawful prince” because tyrants effectively wage war against their own subjects, ruling by force alone and not by law. Tyrants invite faction and rebellion, and these make foreign intervention likely and also more likely to be effective. “When the weak, faction-ridden French government and people failed to defend France in 1940, there was no justice in France, save for that dictated by the occupying authorities.” Faction arises even in well-governed countries, and in large, diverse, democratic republics it poses a problem for foreign-policy strategists as well as for citizens and ordinary politicians. Rood never succumbed to the typical geopolitician’s prejudice: assuming that states are like billiard balls, caring only about the size, density, and velocity of each ball, ignoring its internal structure. He cared very much about size, density, and velocity in international politics, but those things did not add up to the whole of the matter.

Rood understood the nature of international politics in Hobbesian (but also Socratic-Platonic) fashion: “There is going to be a war.” International politics consists of conflict. “There are clashes of will between nations or communities of nations just as there are clashes of will within nations,” clashes “arising from profound differences in outlook and purpose,” some of them “irreconcilable short of war.” War isn’t pathological or anomalous; it “is the political means by which humans, to a first (if not final) order, determine who will organize things, and for what purpose they will be organized.” Accordingly, in international politics “there is either war, or the preparation for war,” and you had better be ready to fight if you don’t want to lose. Nuclear weapons, economic ‘globalization,’ non-governmental organizations, sensitivity to the need to protect human rights, the interdependence of peoples: none of these things has stopped warfare from continuing, although they have all altered the ways in statesmen fight wars. Therefore, “the bottom line of war—who rules in whose land—should never be ignored.” If you want to be ruled this way, not that way—by the way of (for example) British parliamentarism or the German tyrant—you won’t, or at least shouldn’t, ignore that bottom line. For all our technology, geography remains central to understanding international politics. Sitting at your computer, you may feel as if the screen links you to the whole world, and so it does. But to what is your computer linked, if not to an electric grid constructed on a particular topography, in this climate, on a territory of a certain size, featuring some resources but not everything you need to live as you sit in a safe space, tapping away on the keyboard?

“Geography conditions the distribution and configuration of the great powers, as well as their natural enemies and friends.” ‘Powers’ great and small being located somewhere, “international politics are characterized by certain persistent patterns of great power interactions despite apparent changes in political regimes.” The exact ‘whereness’ of those states will shift, given the continual struggle that animates international politics. In his long career, Rood considered five major topics, each illustrating this point. They were: the German problem; the problem of Asia; the Middle Eastern question; the Caribbean-Cuban salient; and, as mentioned, the Russian problem. The first and the fifth problems, taken together, might be said to form the European problem, which reflects the geographical fact that Europe “from the Atlantic to the Urals” (in de Gaulle’s phrase), and especially northern Europe, consists of a large, flat surface, well-suited for running armies through it.

Germany made itself a problem in Europe by the mid- to late 1800s, when Prussia overcame the divisions in which the 1648 Peace of Westphalia had left it. That settlement had been very much to the advantage of France, already united during the early modern period. Rood cited the Prussian General Staff’s history of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866: The war “must sooner or later have broken out,” the authors wrote. “The German nation could not forever exist in the political weakness into which it has sunk between the Latin West and the Slavonian East since the age of Germanic Emperors.” French statesmen saw that German unification spelled “disaster for France,” but Napoleon III made things worse by launching a premature war in 1870. His defeat cost him his throne, making the next war not only a war for territory but a regime war, a war setting republics against monarchies, with the French republic and the German monarchy at its center. Through 1945, in fact, “the logic of strategy dictated that it would be in united Germany’s interest to see that France was dismembered and removed from the ranks of European great powers. Otherwise, France would inevitably seek allies to encircle and redivide Germany.” This core conflict in turn troubled, and was troubled by, the weakening of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, European imperial rivalries outside Europe, European social revolutions, the stresses of industrialization, and even Japan’s defeat of China, on the other side of the now-interconnected international-politics world. The Great War occurred not because diplomats failed but because they had to: “the growth of German industrial, military, and naval power [was] nothing short of revolutionary, as German rulers could now hope to push hard against the western country, France, the eastern country, Russia, and, on the seas, the British navy which had effectively policed what Thomas Jefferson had called the great highway of the nations.

“The defeat of Imperial Germany in 1918 did not reset the German strategic agenda. This was as true of the Weimar regime as it would be for the Nazis, although the Nazis proved considerably more dangerous. It was the moderate president of the German Armistice Commission, Matthias Erzberger, who took care to tell the Brits, in the form of a 1920 letter to The Times of London, that “another war between Germany and the Anglo-Saxons [that is, the British and the Americans] is inevitable,” especially given the injuries sustained by the French during the war, making France a dubious shield for the Atlantic powers. At that time, Germans had already begun rearming, and Reich Chancellor Hitler described the next, complementary step: “We must never permit anybody but the Germans to carry arms!” The relatively modest re-dismemberment of Germany (into merely two, rather than some 300, independent states) was only reversed near the end of the Cold War because Americans saw Germany as an ally against the Soviets and, Rood argued, because the Russians considered it “necessary to weaken and eventually eliminate the U.S. presence from Europe”—a trend already visible by the beginning of the next millennium.

The problem of Asia consists of the rise of Japan in the twentieth century, Russian/Soviet expansion, and “the breakdown and recovery of a unified Chinese empire.” At the core of the Asian problem Rood saw “a China Problem—whether China is to be divided or unified,” who will rule the mainland, what the mainland’s boundaries and “strategic perimeter” will be, and what allies it will have. Rood pointed to The Problem of Asia and Its Effect on Modern Politics, published in 1910 by the great British geopolitician of naval power, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and the lesser-known 1936 book by Gregory Bienstock, The Struggle for the Pacific, as perennially useful guides to Asian geopolitics.

Rood identified the source of the “the modern manifestation” of Sino-Japanese conflict as the 1868 regime change in Japan, when a centralized modern state was established with the emperor as its head, replacing the feudal-warlord regime of the Shogunate. China at that time still suffered from the absence of a modern state, with oligarch/warlords vying for control. Just as French statesmen long intended to keep Germany divided, so Japanese statesmen intended to keep China divided; they also wanted it isolated from foreign powers that might use it “as a means of weakening Japan.” Accordingly, Japan fought wars against China in the 1890s and Russia in the 1900s, acquiring Korea and with it the means to take control of Manchuria when offered it by its fellow-allies at the end of the Great War. In the settlement they also acquired German island colonies which “made ideal bases from which Japan could sever communications between the United States and the Philippines and isolate America from China.” The Japanese also “used commercial enterprises to penetrate those places they would target later in wartime,” as strategy that the China of the twenty-first century may well be emulating. By the late 1930s, Japan had conquered China, establishing a vast empire. As for Russia, the Soviets were happy to sign a non-aggression treaty in 1941 because Japanese conquests in Asia would rid the area of the Western empires and “expose those territories to the rise of nationalist movements that the Soviets were prepared to abet through indigenous communist parties,” as indeed they did throughout the postwar period. American anti-colonialism aided Soviet purposes in that regard, too. “Newly independent nations were susceptible to Soviet influence in a manner not possible when imperial control was being effectively exerted,” whether by the Japanese or the Europeans.

The breakup of the Soviet empire left China with a freer hand in Asia, where its sole remaining ‘superpower’ rival is the United States. “Since 1949, Rood noted, the Chinese government has suppressed internal dissent, sought the unification of Chinese territory, and promoted loyalty to the regime in Beijing”; this in turn has enabled modernization, including industrialization and militarization, with a network of highways and railways to the borders and, after Rood’s death, beyond those borders. “Han Chinese, accompanied by Communist Party cadres, have been transferred to the outlying regions to ‘dilute’ the local population, despite resistance from the indigenous peoples.” They have re-taken the key commercial and financial hub, Hong Kong, and intend to recover Taiwan, as well. Recent Chinese political-economic inroads into the Philippines (to take but one example) would come as no surprise to Rood. Nor have they relinquished hopes of unifying Korea “under a friendly regime.” As Rood summarized it, China remains “a one-party, totalitarian regime where international politics is seen to be an arena of unending struggle for a world order in which Chinese interests are respected and deferred to by other powers,” and this will require the United States to respond, if it intends to line up with its allies in the Asia-Pacific region.

In the Middle East, peace has prevailed only when enforced by “ruthless application” of authority by an imperial power—a pattern Rood might easily have traced back to Biblical times. Even such well-removed powers as Great Britain, the United States, Russia, and China have involved themselves in the Middle East for one reason or another, ranging from the need to defend against Muslim encroachment, maritime trade and naval routes, the desire to secure routes for navies and maritime commerce, or the hunger for oil. From a military standpoint, Mesopotamia is central to the region; accordingly, the British founded modern Iraq, hoping to “render Iraq an independent nation, one that was self-governing and equipped to maintain internal stability and defend its borders.” Half a century later, the Americans were still attempting to do the same thing. Meanwhile, the Russians, once under the Soviet regime, now under Putin, continue to follow their own geopolitical imperative to establish warm-water access points; their thus-far successful intervention in the Syrian civil war follows from Rood’s analysis of a strategy pursued since the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. The regimes have changed on all sides, but the geography hasn’t. The Soviets may have been atheists in principle, following Marx, but their policy “aimed to array Islam against the West, just as the Kaiser and Hitler had once done,” and the well-trained geopolitician Vladimir Putin is no different. Thus Rood supported the 2003 United States war in Iraq not because he cared about changing its regime or worried about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the tyrant Saddam Hussein, but because the United States could use a military anchor in the region, just as it had one in Germany, against Russia.

Closer to home, Rood considered the Caribbean-Cuban salient indispensable to American security. (He was not alone; Thomas Jefferson called any country that controlled New Orleans the enemy of the United States). America must always defend the two main avenues of approach to its heartland: the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence; and the salient, whose gateway from the Atlantic is Cuba, commanding the sea routes into the Gulf of Mexico. The British proved that in the 1760s, when its capture of Havana “crippled Spanish power in the West Indies and cut the communications between Old and New Spain.” “Whenever Cuba has been in the hands of a weak regime or one hostile to the United States, American interests have been threatened,” whether from piracy in the 1820s, Confederate raiding ships that found friendly ports there in the 1860s, or potentially from any hostile European power. (Although Rood may not have suspected this, it seems likely that Theodore Roosevelt took a strong disliking to the young Winston Churchill because Churchill wrote articles for publication in 1896, suggesting that the British seize the island from Spain. Whether or not this is so, Teddy did beat them to the punch, a couple of years later.) Rood did recall the 263 U.S. merchant ships sunk by German submarines in the Gulf and the Caribbean during World War II, and the Soviet-sponsored communist coup in 1959 gave the Russians what he called “an unsinkable aircraft carrier, 90 miles from the United States”—a platform “for expansion into the Western Hemisphere.”

Throughout this chapter, Crouch and Garrity take pains to show that although the conflict of regimes is indeed a major consideration in international politics, geography—combined with existing, if temporary, circumstances—may override such differences. For example, although “Russia and Japan were mortal enemies in East Asia over the future disposition of China” they “shared a common interest in expelling the Western colonial powers from the region,” just as Russia and Middle-East jihadists shared an interest in ridding the Middle East of Americans and Europeans. In the 1940s, Soviet Russian gyrations—a peace treaty with Germany, then alliance with the ‘Anglo-Americans’—were products of shifting military circumstances; either way, Stalin wanted control of Eastern Europe.

From the nature of politics and the nature of international politics, the authors shift to Rood’s understanding of the nature of strategy, encapsulating in his mot, “You run the show or the show runs you.” As the authors remark, this is no time-bound, ‘historically relative’ principle but one that’s “been in operation since before Thucydides.” More formally stated, “the ultimate goal in strategy is to confront an enemy with such a preponderance of forces, and such superiority of strategic position from which to deploy those forces, that the enemy, however much he may resist, can only conform to one’s will.” General Lee, meet General Grant. Geography enters in because this goal usually requires occupying physical chokepoints such as the city of New Orleans, controlling the mouth of the Mississippi River; Gibraltar, controlling the western entrance to the Mediterranean; the Straits of Malacca, connecting the Pacific with the Indian Ocean. Even in the era when the British ‘bourgeoisie’ enjoyed unmatched ascendancy in the world, no less a personage than Queen Victoria understood that maintaining military power is “the true economy.” (Adam Smith would not have disagreed.) Pace George Kennan, but “diplomacy cannot substitute for military power or make up for its deficiencies.” Sooner or later, someone else will cut through your verbiage.

Different regimes incline toward different kinds of strategies. Although Carl von Clausewitz famously called war a continuation of politics by other means, Rood thought that modern tyrannies, “following Lenin,” consider politics “a continuation of war by other means.” So, for example, while “the United States thought it could seek a political solution in Vietnam as though it were an alternative to a military resolution of the war,” the Vietnamese communists “pursued a straightforward military victory, at the conference table as well as on the battlefield.”  Throughout the ‘Peace Talks’ held in Paris, the communists sought a settlement whereby they would “preserve their armed forces and… retain strategic positions in South Vietnam,” thus “set[ting] the stage for its eventual victory in the war, as American patience with the war waned.” In the words of an even more conspicuous tyrant, Adolf Hitler, after military victory has been achieved “the wise victor will, if possible, always impose his claim on the defeated people stage by stage, dealing with the people that has grown defeated, and this in every people which has voluntarily submitted to force. He may then rely on the fact that not one of these further acts of oppression will seem sufficient reason to take up arms again.”

In preparation for such a consummation, the tyrant may often rely on his enemy’s wishful thinking, “the tendency for the inferior, unprepared power” to, in Rood’s words, “rethink the enemy’s strategy until one comes up with one that is not threatening.” Between the world wars and after the second one, many influential citizens in the commercial republics did exactly that, readying themselves in some cases for a nasty military surprise. Israel was nearly obliterated in 1973 for that reason, and of course the conduct of French and British parliamentarians in the 1930s remains the best-remembered example of the syndrome. Such psychological defeat can be hastened by deception and subversion. It was no wonder (to those who notice such things) when some of the most persistent apologists for Soviet conduct suddenly fell silent when the Soviet Union went out of business, although they might easily have told us that they had been right all along in claiming the regime was incapable of harming the commercial republics.

If you want to run the show instead of letting it run you, and you also intend to avoid war unless necessary, the best strategy will rest on deterrence. “But, like peace, it can never be achieved directly.” You will deter your enemy only if he knows you can and will act in such a way as to do him insufferable harm. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover kept the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii beyond its usual annual stay, but this failed to deter Japan from moving against China because Hoover “had already made it clear that he would not fight for Asia.” Worse, in 1940 President Roosevelt supposed that the mere presence of the U.S. naval forces in Hawaii would restrain Japan, without ensuring that they were ready for war if it came. The Japanese military leaders figured that out, and moved accordingly. Shows of force only work if the enemy believes the force is real; bluffing a steadfast and well-informed enemy risks a lot.

The authors turn to the regime-specific “democratic strategy deficit” in their central chapter. In view of the catastrophic failures of tyrants in the twentieth century, twenty-first-century tyrants “may become more subtle without becoming more just.” The constitutional-democratic, commercial-republican way of life and the ethos it generates and reinforces commendably seek to protect the weak, but that principle does not “ordinarily operate within the international community.” Tyrannies, however, “constantly at war with their own citizens,” apply that mindset and the policies it generates to “free peoples outside of their borders,” although such warfare may not entail “a shooting war” at all times, any more than it entails the use of truncheons against all their own subjects at all times.

As a result of the regime ethos of the republics, foreign policy ‘realists’ in them often display little realism. For a man like George F. Kennan, for example, “war, not totalitarianism, was the enemy to be resisted.” The purely diplomatic means proposed by him when he wrote on ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union could not work because Kennan largely eschewed military action and even adequate military preparedness to back up his diplomacy. Kennan’s ‘political’ geopolitics was therefore in fact apolitical, assuming that no “fundamental conflict between totalitarianism and democracy” existed. Kennan’s ‘realism’ treated the state instead of the regime as fundamental to politics, but, like all organizations, states have regimes, and therefore characters, inclinations, sentiments that effect their actions, even if they do not simply determine those actions. Democratic-republican ‘idealists’ do see the differences in regimes, but, precisely because they are idealists, often fail to see the serious real-world difficulties in establishing congenial commercial republics in foreign countries, many of which have “never known” political liberty and don’t know what to do with it when they get it. And so in Iraq, United States policy should have been less ambitious—aiming at a regime that fostered “a stable and comfortable place for ordinary citizens to live and prosper,” which might well be a decent rule of ‘the one’ and/or ‘the few.’

Significantly, in searching for an instance of sound military planning in a modern republic Rood found it within a sort of a non-democratic, non-republican organization within that republic: the policy set down by the U.S. military between the world wars. Given that “war is an instrument of national policy,” and that “wars are won by attacking, disorganizing, and destroying the armed forces of the enemy,” the American military should be “capable of carrying war to an enemy.” An “isolationist” policy would have amounted to coastal defense, reinforcing a naval fleet restricted to home waters—the naval equivalent of France’s Maginot Line. No other agencies in the federal government were “prepared to accept war as a legitimate act of policy and not imply as an expedient for the defense of the physical borders of the country.” Interwar U. S. foreign policy was ideological, “not territorial, and devoted to goals that had the haziest definitions,” such as “peace, disarmament, world order, sanctity of treaties, and international law.” “It was not until the middle of 1941 that the services received a firm directive from the president concerning the kind of war for which they should plan.” Fortunately, the military officers already knew what they needed to do, having learned from the experience of the Great War and rejecting “the reliance on static or trench warfare” seen in that war. As early as 1919, an article in the Infantry Journal argued that “war is motion,” that “only the unlimited offensive brings decisive results.” This doctrine quickly got into the curricula at West Point and Annapolis. Indeed, future naval officers had been studying Mahan in the years before the Great War, and drew from him the determination to prevent attacks on the American coasts, not merely to respond to them. To his credit, Franklin Roosevelt, while serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the war, imbibed this doctrine, too, although he didn’t understand the need for an army expeditionary force until much later. Although Crouch and Garrity don’t mention it, the idea of ‘advance defense,’ of carrying the war to the enemy, animated American military policy throughout the nineteenth century during the Indian Wars and the Civil War. When American military planners decided that “the implacable logic of military doctrine” required preparedness to fight the country’s “nearest and most dangerous enemy,” they followed the practice of their predecessors.

For the United States and its allies after the Second World War, the nearest and most dangerous enemy was Soviet Russia. Crouch and Garrity turn to Rood’s analysis of “the Russian Problem” in the first chapter of the book’s third triptych. Since Peter the Great established the first modern state in Russia, the country’s grand strategy has consisted of “the persistent drive to open waters” on all sides of its huge territory. “If successfully accomplished, this strategy would have left Russia the dominant Eurasian power, given Russia’s long-standing ability to control or influence events in Eastern and Central Europe and Central Asia”—vast, mostly flat expanses that lend themselves to the movements of mass armies culled from a massive population. “The political-religious notion that [Russia] was destined to be the ‘Third Rome'” has reinforced this policy; the Marxist-Leninist ambition to serve as the cutting edge of ‘World History’ yielded the same policy, albeit on an atheist foundation. “Rood took seriously the statement of… Soviet officials that the end of their policy was to be the establishment of socialism and communism throughout the world.” Under their ideology, the world needed to be reorganized, wrested from the capitalists. “So long as the nations of the West continued to claim the right to rule themselves under the principles to which they adhered, Rood concluded that there was a high probability of war.”

Rood understood Soviet grand strategy to consist of five characteristics: in contrast to the Nazis, postwar Soviet rulers showed patience, relying on the security provided by their Eastern and Central European empire and the absence of any Asian power capable of launching a major invasion; Soviet rulers “played both sides against the middle,” often backing both sides in a conflict, thereby positioning themselves for influence over whichever side won; the Soviets always linked politics, economics, and military strategy ( beginning in the 1950s, in Afghanistan, they built roads and airports as an apparent means of improving commerce, then used that infrastructure to launch their 1979 military invasion); they established alliances with two or more countries that could serve one purpose, as when they allied with both Egypt and Libya in the late 1960s, reasoning that if one of those countries ‘turned’ on them or lost a major war, the other would still provide them with a foothold in the Mediterranean; and finally, the Soviets “sought to force the United States to defend areas away from the principal theater of war,” as for example in Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s, theatres far from the crucial European Plain. The 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia not only served to firm up the Soviet empire, it also “effectively served as a dress rehearsal for an invasion of Western Europe, without unduly alarming the United States and its NATO allies.” After the re-conquest, the Soviets took care to leave two tank divisions and three motorized rifle divisions behind, strengthening their in-place military capabilities near the border with the West Europeans, and doing so without provoking “any commensurate military response” from NATO. Meanwhile, in southern Europe, by the 1970s Yugoslavia “had become an advanced base for Soviet military power in the eastern Mediterranean,” serving as a point of transit for Soviet military supplies to Egypt during the 1973 Middle East War. By then, NATO would have been hard pressed to defend Greece or Turkey in a war with Warsaw Pact forces. The beauty of all this, from the Soviet perspective, was that “nowhere had the Soviet Union needed to wage war to change the strategic circumstances in its favors, although wars in the area had frequently opened opportunities for new strategic gains.” They employed a similar strategy in Asia, aiming at isolating the United States from such allies as Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines.

But what about deterrence based on U.S. nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles? The Soviets devoted substantial resources to civil defense, evidently not concurring with Western claims that such efforts must be useless against such weapons. “Rood thought that if the West acted upon the belief that the Soviets were not really serious about going to war, that they were only interested in security, the West would fall victim to the self-deception that characterized the democratic strategy deficit.” But if the nuclear standoff really was a standoff, if nuclear weapons were truly ‘unusable’ because a first strike by one side would provoke an obliterating counterattack by the other, why would a well-prepared ‘conventional’ war in Europe not make sense? What would the Americans do about it? “Americans had not toughed it out in Vietnam—why should it be any different in Western Europe, when the costs would be so much higher?”

In Rood’s judgment, the end of the Cold War left American more, not less vulnerable to Russian machinations, in the long run. “He wondered if objective conditions now rendered an alliance between Moscow and Beijing, based on their common anti-Western perspective, much more viable than it had been.” Nothing that has occurred since his death in 2011 has undermined that suspicion.

How would America’s rivals address their “America Problem”? “If there is to be a war, Americans will want to fight it abroad.” To avoid fighting on American soil, and to avoid fighting a large and costly war far from that soil, Americans will need to prepare “to fight a lot of little” wars; this requires a network of “bases and allies abroad, from which to conduct military operations.” Considered as targets, North and South America “are little more than continent-sized islands off the west coast of Europe and off the east coast of Asia”; taken together with Africa, they constitute what geopolitical strategist Halford Mackinder called “The World Island.” This ‘Old World’ is much bigger than the New World, making “the balance of power in Eurasia…of intense interest to Americans,” inasmuch as a country or coalition of countries that dominated the World Island would confront the United States with “an overwhelming material threat to its existence.”

American interests overseas are more than military and political. As a commercial republic, America has “far-flung commercial interests and the desire for open markets.” Both the Quasi-War with France and the Barbary Wars—the “first congressionally authorized uses of force” under the 1787 Constitution—aimed at protecting U.S. commerce.

The sheer size of the United States, along with the extent of its commercial and military interests, makes it both powerful and vulnerable in international politics. More, the very proliferation of factions that benefits American regime (as shown by Publius in the tenth Federalist) can prove a handicap in international politics because it provides foreign powers opportunities to play divide-and-rule, as Americans also saw early on, when French agent Edmond Genêt fomented dissent against the Adams Administration. Rood understood the American Civil War geopolitically, as a struggle by the United States to prevent disunion, which would have caused the North to deal “with endless coalitions between the confederacy and any European powers with territorial ambitions in North America,” a likelihood illustrated during the war itself, when France attempted to install an Austrian prince as the monarch of Mexico. It was not until a couple of years after the U.S. victory in the war that Great Britain finally accepted “the viability of the United States,” as signaled by the British North America Act of 1867.

A good thing, too, for both countries, as the twentieth century saw. “The imperatives of strategy would eventually overcome the American notion of political and military isolation from Europe,” as “Germany’s war aims in 1914 clearly included domination of the European continent, which meant controlling the maritime approaches to Europe and dictating the terms of peacetime commerce with powers like the United States.” Further, as Rood put it, “one of the invariable indications that the United States is in for trouble with a foreign power is when that power begins open or clandestine operations in the Western Hemisphere,” as Germany did in the run-up to both world wars. In both cases, the main political challenge came from the reluctance of democratically-elected political representatives to contradict the intense desire of their constituents to stay out of the war; the average citizen doesn’t think geopolitically, and usually doesn’t want to.

Competing European empires had buffered the United States for decades because none was able to dominate Europe, much less the World Island. The collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British, and French empires left only one empire standing there. Soviet ambitions compelled the United States “to man the distant ramparts itself.” As Rood acknowledged, Nicholas Spykman had anticipated this circumstance during the war, calling the attention of readers of his 1942 book, America’s Strategy in World Politics, to the need to prevent hostile powers from controlling the “Rimland,” that is, the borders of Eurasia—areas containing most the world’s population and natural resources. The strategy of ‘containment’ followed from Spykman’s insights; Rood recommended U.S. efforts “to defeat probes or aggression by the communist bloc in the Rimland; to threaten to escalate the conflict locally if circumstances warranted; and to roll back marginal communist gains in the Rimland whenever the opportunity presented itself.” Hence his support for the American military intervention on the side of the non-communist regime in South Vietnam against the communist North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong guerrillas operating in the south. “If the United States withdrew from Vietnam, Rood thought that the Philippines would be forced to reconsider its attitude toward China,” which is exactly what has happened. Rood also judged that withdrawal would risk “a later war with China when it had developed a full-sized nuclear arsenal, backed by the capacity to command the sea areas around the island shield of Asia”; the first has now happened, the second is in the works.

Since the Cold War never quite ended, as Russia regrouped and reprised many of its longstanding policies, Rood observed that “geography has not changed”: “Even a diminished Russia is still only a few hundred miles from the German border, while the United States will always be thousands of miles away.” Russia’s regime changed, but not into a commercial republic, ready to give up its extraterritorial ambitions and happily restrict its relations with the world to diplomacy, commerce, and cultural exchange. “Like Germany after 1918,” Russia “had not been occupied”; “in the mind of its leaders and people, it had not truly been defeated” but rather had been “cheated out of its rightful place in the sun by traitors and scheming foreign enemies.” Russia’s 2001 agreement to a “strategic partnership” with China underscored this point, a point underwritten not only by China’s growing military power but by the much-overlooked fact that “Russia remains the strongest military power in Europe,” as China does in Asia.

Rood’s welcome defense of the American 2003 intervention in Iraq reflects these concerns. Iraq was an ally of Russia; Russia wants the U.S. out of the Middle East. In defeating the Saddam Hussein regime, America had “accrued strategic advantages” by “remov[ing] a protégé of Russia” and a “disruptive force in the Middle East.” But although America “had neutralized Iraq,” it hadn’t “dealt with other hostile nations claiming leadership of the Arab world,” nor “resolved the terrible weakness of the Saudi regime in the face of Arab-Islamic terrorism.” The war in Syria illustrates this, although Rood did not live to see it.

Crouch and Garrity conclude their study of Rood’s strategic thought with a call for moral and political responsibility. “What if” America’s “apparent loss of direction is not merely the result of uncontrollable historical forces, and the limits of our power and human foresight, but at least in part is due to the strategic purposes and actions of others? What if these purposes are long-standing, going back not only to 1991 but well before that? What if others are patiently accumulating the sort of strategic advantages that will put us at grave disadvantage in a war, or at least in a major political crisis, while attempting to conceal those preparations. Are objective conditions bringing about an alignment of hostile powers?” Good questions, all. Who today is answering them?

Elzbieta Matynia, ed.: The Uncanny Era: Conversations between Vacláv Havel and Adam Michnik. Translated by Elzbieta Matynia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

 

Prophets and philosophers alike often doubt or deny that truth may be found in political life. The truth shall set you free, Jesus teaches, but attention to ‘this world’ will enslave you, block you from finding God. Socrates discharged his civic duties without enthusiasm, devoting his life to private conversations in which he dismissed even the great Pericles as a mere builder of walls.

Yet the Kingdom of God Christians seek is, after all, a kingdom, a regime. The God of the Bible chooses a particular people, establishing not one but several regimes for it, adjusting His political strategy to his people’s changing circumstances, and eventually exiling most of them to the Babylonian monarchy when he runs out of patience with their uncivil behavior. Universalizing Jesus denies the distinction between Jew and Greek, but nonetheless calls out His people for membership in His assembly or church—founding a regime, if not one ‘of this world.’ As for Socrates, he initiates not philosophy but political, dialogic philosophy, engaging citizens and foreigners in dialectic while eschewing the practice of previous philosophers, who had sought to behold the truths of nature directly, without regard to the opinions that prevailed in the polis.

From time to time, the late Vacláv Havel—Czech playwright, sometime dissident, eventual president of the Czech Republic—joined longtime friend and fellow dissident, Polish essayist and sometime politician Adam Michnik to discuss these and related matters. Both men preferred the Socratic direction. Havel had participated in the Prague Spring of 1968, when the political underground of dissidents in Czechoslovakia surfaced in street demonstrations against the Communist regime, installed two decades earlier by the Soviet Union. The Red Army rolled in and suppressed the uprising. In her informative introduction to this volume, New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty member Elzbieta Matynia (no stranger to political activism in her native Poland) recounts that Czech and Polish dissidents held a secret meeting in the mountains along the border of the two countries in August 1978, a decade after their early hopes for freedom had been disappointed. Havel and Michnik met at that time.

Their hopes had been disappointed, but not killed. At the meeting, they “plott[ed] democracy in both countries,” and not, as it transpired, in vain; eleven years later, in 1989, the Soviet empire collapsed and many of these same dissidents themselves took positions of authority as founders of the new, republican regimes of Central Europe. Revolution came first to Poland, where, “the principle of a nonviolent, self-limiting revolution, guided by an unrelenting commitment to create alternative institutions outside the state’s control, [had] led to the first solid promise of democratic change” in the states dominated by Moscow since the Second World War. When Michnik and several other newly-elected Polish parliamentarians visited Havel in the summer of 1989, Michnik told the incredulous Czech, “Before year’s end you’ll be President” of Czechoslovakia. And so, astonishingly, it was; not for nothing does Matynia consider the era “uncanny,” taking the term from Michnik’s own title for a published conversation with Havel held in Prague in 1991. But the term “uncanny” refers not to the peaceful overthrow of the old regimes—in Czechoslovakia, they called it the “Velvet Revolution”—but to the end of ‘post-communism,’ the end of the aftermath of those revolutions. Revolutions clarify; post-revolutionary conditions see the return of complexity, ambiguity.

As it happens, Americans are (or should be) quite familiar with many of the questions raised in this and the subsequent conversations recorded here. After the American Civil War, a victorious United States government attempted to ‘reconstruct’ republican regime in the states of the defeated Confederacy. Slaveholding plantation oligarchs had established their rule over the Southern states decades before the war; in firing on U. S. forces at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, they had asserted the independence of what had been an anti-republican (and therefore unconstitutional) regimes for a long time. Now that they had been defeated, what would become of these oligarchs? How would these states be returned to the American Union in conformity with the United States Constitution? The results of Reconstruction were to be mixed, as many ‘old South’ grandees re-established themselves, re-subordinating if not re-enslaving their former slaves. How would Czechoslovakia and Poland fare, as they attempted to consolidate regime changes of their own? We have six conversations between Michnik and Havel, from the years 1991 to 2007, followed by two pieces published by Michnik after his friend’s death.

Michnik opened the 1991 conversation by asking if there might be a restoration of the Communist ‘old regimes’ in Central and Eastern Europe. Havel considered this “out of the question.” He did, however, accurately predict the rise of former Communists “return[ing] under a slightly repainted banner,” namely nationalism. But the Soviet Union as an empire won’t return. The problems now were the huge state-owned enterprises and state bureaucracies, complemented by “the habits of normal average citizens” who “got accustomed to the fact that the omnipotent state towers over them,” like a father who doesn’t want his children to grow up. This has indeed proven to be a real problem, and not only in post-communist countries.

Michnik identified two approaches to consolidating regime change, one seen in Poland, the other in Czechoslovakia. Polish republicans drew “a thick line between the past and the present,” saying that “the only criterion for judging bureaucrats would be their competence and their loyalty to the new order.” Czech and Slovak politicians preferred the policy of lustration, a term derived from the Christian idea of penitence followed by purification. Havel advocated an in-between ground leaning toward lustration; penitence and purification, yes, but followed by forgiveness on the part of the victims of the former regime for those who served in that regime. There were gradations of guilt, ranging from genuinely evil characters to those who were forced to collaborate by the regime, and even some whose role in the underground organizations was precisely to collaborate, in order to gain access to information or to inflect regime policies in a liberalizing direction. “The boundary can be designated only by something intangible or something that does not lend itself to legal norms, such as feelings, taste, understanding, prudence, wisdom”—what Aristotle would immediately recognize as natural right. In his own case, “Shortly after I became president, I was given a list of all colleagues who had informed on me, but that same day I not only lost the piece of paper but on top of that I forgot who was on the list.” But that was on the personal level. “As president I have to take into account that society needs this kind of accountability, because they have a sense that the revolution has not been completed”; those who “terrorized the population and in obvious ways abused human rights” must be removed from office.

Ever the secularist, Michnik remarked that although the Catholic Church has a firm understanding of sin, forgiveness, and absolution, it also organized the Inquisition. Havel replied that “absolution is always connected with confession,” acknowledging sin, “whereas the Inquisition is about tracking down the hidden sins.” Michnik concurred, concluding as Havel had done that “we can absolve only those wrongs done to us, but to absolve the wrongs suffered by others is not in our power.” He worried that revolutionary revanchism may never end, as indeed it did not, in France, until the despot Napoleon redirected French hatreds outward, to the destruction of large swaths of Europe. Havel acknowledged that the pent-up hatreds were real, because Communism had the opposite effect its practitioners intended. Instead of accelerating ‘History’ or the course of events toward a benign and wondrous culmination, Communist regimes actually “postponed [history’s] natural development and movement,” interrupting what, by the early twentieth century, had looked like a gradual democratization of civil societies accompanied by republican regimes. “Here in Czechoslovakia, in every little town or county, one can see that people are reaching back for traditions were destroyed over forty years ago”—that is, in the 1930s, initially by the Nazi invasion. Long suppressed, both good “spirits” and bad “demons” are now “awakening,” the demons being both religious and ethnic hatreds, anti-Semitism among them. If such demons prevail, the political result will be not a return to communism but a return to fascism, which in the Czech region was secular, but in the Slovak region allied with elements of the Catholic Church. This ties in with the problem of democracy: “Democratic rule, when compared with the prior totalitarian rule, inevitably appears indecisive, uncertain, insufficiently strong or energetic,” a “feeling [which] constitutes fertile ground for those who yearn for rule with an iron hand” by “the so-called strong personality.” This notwithstanding, Havel rejected Michnik’s worry that “anti-Communism” by itself inclines toward fascism. “I think that if nothing intervenes in this normal development, then in time the political spectrum will stabilize” because “concrete political work will begin” under the new republican regimes. And Michnik himself, after all, remained a critic of Communism: Under such regimes, “It was enough to know a few formulas to be wiser than Plato, Heidegger, or Descartes.”

What will replace the Communist ideology? “Ideas,” Havel replied, by which he means a kind of post-modernist globalism—’post-modern’ in its rejection of the grand thought-systems produced by the likes of Hegel and Marx (exactly the sort of system easily vulgarized into the “few formulas” criticized by Michnik), globalist in a sense that he does not immediately make clear, but which seems to involve both a sense of international law fortified by international institutions along with the variation of natural right seen in environmentalism. Michnik challenged Havel on this point. “Is the era of ideology really ending? Isn’t that just wishful thinking, the yearning of humanists and intellectuals?” His concerns about the rise of nationalism were more intense than Havel’s. Havel conceded that national sentiments will remain strong, if only because they do not require mastery of even the most elementary philosophic doctrines: “Everybody knows his nationality.” Xenophobia arises from closed societies where people do not speak with one another, do not learn to live together, and from the desire to assign guilt for whatever troubles confront us. Xenophobia thus has both a ‘regime’ basis and a natural basis. “I think a lot of time must pass before civil society will respect all the dimensions of our ‘self’ will appreciate the matter of national belonging but not encourage a sense of superiority, and will not turn it into an ideology or the organizing principle of the state.” In this, perhaps without not knowing it, Havel took the stance of that Frenchman of the previous generation, Charles de Gaulle.

Michnik wanted to know what Havel thought of “the role of religion,” now that the Communist regimes are gone. “Under the Communist dictatorship it was for all of us a source of strength, whether we were religious or not. It was our only recourse to a natural law that we all had to answer to.” What now? Havel found in religion “two dimensions,” one indispensable to good politics, the other dangerous to it. Religion “puts things into perspective, as it directs human attention upward, reminding us of the metaphysical anchoring of our conscience and our responsibility, because it emphasizes brotherly love and unselfishness.” But it also may enter political life more directly—this “might be stronger in Poland than here”—and remains lethally strong in Muslim countries. A regime founded upon “seemingly” religious but actually “ideological and doctrinal principles” becomes “in its essence intolerant, because it reduces the human being to one dimension of his life, constrains him and manipulates him,” just as such secularist ideologies as communism and nationalism do. Havel suggested that “after the collapse of Communism religious or nationalist fundamentalism may come to the fore,” but the “force that acts against them, a force that I hope will succeed,” is “the power of the survival instinct of this planet.” In other writings, Havel refers to this as the “Gaia hypothesis”—that the earth itself, including the human beings living on it, has a sort of organic wisdom, which rebalances itself when some portion of it runs to any extreme. For example, he cited the international military response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, “which could be interpreted as a sign of those survival mechanisms.” So yes, fundamentalism endangers us, but it “fac[es] forces that are capable of withstanding it.” But those forces are not simply mechanistic or automatic; they will require statesmanship to “quickly strengthen democratic institutions, mechanisms, and the rules of the game. Democracy has to earn its authority quickly,” or it will have authority rested from it by ‘authoritarians.’

Such institutions will include a stronger executive branch of the Czechoslovak government (not popular election of the president, but veto power and the right to dissolve the legislature and call for early elections), an institution which can serve as “the most effective weapon against those who come in with the idea of rule by an iron hand” by imparting decisiveness to a regime in which the legislature, the ‘talkative’ branch, currently enjoys too much power. Political discussion, to be sure, but also political decision must be a hallmark of republicanism, lest more forceful ‘deciders’ persuade the people, unaccustomed to the republican way of politics, that republicanism itself must go. On the other side (and glancing at his own political rival, Vacláv Klaus), while a free-market economy underlies lasting prosperity, Havel denied that “the market mechanism is a magical key that will solve everything, nor do I think that the free market is a worldview or the meaning of life,” a conviction familiar to Americans who read Ayn Rand. Libertarianism makes such a sensible institution as private property and the law of supply and demand which follows from it into yet another ideology aiming at yet another utopia. The law of supply and demand should rather be understood “as something that has been tested for centuries,” something that “resonates with human nature, and functions in a natural way.” “This is not a religion.”

Havel and Michnik next met four years later, also in Prague. By 1995, Havel was no longer president of Czechoslovakia because there was no longer a Czechoslovakia; he had resigned in protest when Slovaks declared their independence in 1992. Promptly elected president of the new Czech Republic, he recalled that “with the collapse of Communism the structure of habits, values, and ways of life also collapsed”; “people had to organize their lives anew,” not fully understanding that they would need to do this, that it wouldn’t be done for them by rulers ‘from above.’ In democratic republics, “those who come to power will only be of a kind that the society is capable of generating,” and post-communist societies had suffered serious deformations. He marvels at the success of the American Revolution, attributing it to a situation in which people did not win “over others but rather that principles won.” (He was half-right: Principles did win, but the Tories left for Canada and their property was expropriated.) Principles or no principles, human nature remains the same, regardless of the regime, and human nature is a mixed bag. Given the experience in ruling large organizations and their extensive interpersonal networks built during their years in power, ex-Communist officials enjoyed political and economic advantages, leading to “some kind of Velvet Restoration,” in the years after the Velvet Revolution.

Unlike Czechoslovakia, Michnik observed, Poland entertained few such starry-eyed hopes. “Our revolution was a revolution without a utopia”; “we had no illusions like those of the Jacobins or Bolsheviks.” Accordingly, his concerns focus not on internal faction but on international military alliance. He awaited Polish accession to NATO, impatiently. Havel, with experience foreign policy, explained that the delay had occurred because “contemporary politicians are much more constrained” by mass-media pressures than the framers of NATO were. What is more, “Today there are no politicians as courageous and magnanimous as Adenauer, de Gaulle, and Gasperi after the war.” He worried that Americans especially tend to assume that now the revolutions have been accomplished, all will be well. But not so. Russia remains both insecure and ambitious, located as it is on the eastern part of the Great European Plain. Eastern and Central European countries will need protection from Russian irredentism, even if the full reconstitution of the Soviet empire under the new regime in Moscow remains improbable.

Meanwhile, and disturbingly, nationalist and religious factions had boiled up in the Balkans, in the form of exercises in ‘ethnic cleansing.’ The Kosovo War “can only be stopped by outside force,” but for the moment “there is no political will” to exert it because “Western politicians are not prepared to make quick decisions,” often lacking firm executive authority in their regimes but also, even with such authority, constrained by media scrutiny. “If the new European order is not created by democrats, nationalists will take care of it.” But if Czech and Polish democratic republicans can “notice the dangers lurking in the contemporary world and to articulate them in the right way thanks to the specific experience of Communism and our entire history,” this may spur West European and North American politicians take action. For Havel, this is what ‘thinking globally’ means: the defense of commercial republicanism against a new, ‘authoritarian’ nationalism, fueled by revenues from state-owned enterprises and fired by an ideology of ethnic triumphalism and domination. Medium- and small-sized countries like Poland and the Czech Republic can in this way take the lead in world affairs, even without the material resources of the major powers. In the event, the Czech Republic did support NATO’s intervention in the Balkans, the following year.

By November 1998, the time of their third conversation, Havel had been re-elected president. He was still “not worried about Russia” as a genuinely imperialist force in Europe. He now worried more about what he called “a fundamental issue for the future of our civilization,” challenged by politicians and intellectuals in Asia who argued that “democracy is a great thing but it has to stop somewhere, because democracy without limitations leads to a crisis of authority and sooner or later brings about chaos.” Havel wasn’t concerned about anarchy, but he did contend (as André Malraux had done, thirty years earlier) that “if our civilization does not somehow deepen spiritually, if it doesn’t realize anew its own spiritual roots, if it doesn’t start to respect moral principles, we are threatened with a disintegration of our human bonds, the loss of a sense of responsibility, and totally unbridled self-interest.” “To some extent, I’m a product of the sixties”—a product, that is, of a “decade of cultural, spiritual and social rebellion against all establishments.” True enough: unlike Malraux and de Gaulle, however, it’s hard to tell if he sees that the rebellions of the ‘Sixties lacked precisely the “spiritual roots” he saw missing from the West of the uncanny era.

In 2003, when they next met, this time in Poland, Havel had left office (his rival Klaus succeeded him) and was recovering from cancer. He continued to discuss the “crisis of civilization,” a crisis “deeper than the crisis of democracy.” He set himself resolutely against historical determinism. “I believe that all people are agents of historical events, except that there are many people, and they are different, and so history depends on lots of factors.” The overall trajectory of technological mastery over nature has yielded “a huge variety of benefits that make daily life easier” while it also threatens the environment and (with the prospect of modern weapons in the hands of terrorist gangs) “coexistence on this planet.” Such a civilizational contradiction stems from the contradictions of human nature itself; “a human being remains a creature full of contradictions, as he always was.” We are not only the first planetary civilization but “the first atheist civilization.” By what light can such a civilization illuminate its path?

Michnik replied, “You are on the same wavelength as John Paul II,” and “I don’t agree with this.” Atheism, no; secularism, yes. The West still has principles, an orientation towards ‘Being,’ even if they remain unstated or poorly stated. Further, religion isn’t enough; Muslim terrorists are religious. “As long as civilization exists, the need for metaphysics will endure.” For example, “nobody reasonable will accept the thesis that it’s a matter of moral indifference that there is a regime in Iraq which chops people’s hands off, plucks their eyes out, cuts off their ears, and the world is to look at that quietly in the name of the holy rule of sovereignty.” Neither he, nor Havel, nor the Pope partook of pacifism in such matters, even if they preferred velvet revolutions to violent ones. Havel didn’t dispute Michnik’s correction, except for one important caveat: “The state is the work of people, while the person is a work of God. There is some hierarchy here.” His metaphysics has religious dimension, albeit one consonant with the natural rights of individual persons. The media-driven, publicity-hound politics which prevents the formation of outstanding statesmen, reducing politics to “public relations” and thereby establishing a “cult of mediocrity” becomes possible when human beings keep their eyes on what is around and beneath them, and never on what, or who, is above them. The youth of the ‘Sixties has seen the crisis of civilization more clearly now, precisely because he has engaged in politics. In that sense, a man can indeed seek and find truth in political life.

Their next conversation occurred in October 2007, the year Havel published his memoir, To the Castle and Back. Havel asked Michnik about the political circumstances in Poland, where the Kaczynski brothers had been elected on a nationalist platform. Michnik said that a coalition of three right-wing parties had been “changing the system” in Poland “in a stealthy, creeping way”—attempting a revolution of the velvet glove, as it were, a garment that leaves no fingerprints behind. What he called the Polish “Fourth Republic,” with its “permanent ‘moral revolution'” backed by the security services and the Polish equivalent of the attorney-general’s office, used wiretaps and denunciations by informers to enforce a never-ending purge of regime ‘enemies,’ especially of anyone who could be accused of having had ties to the Communist regime. Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kacynski had been “able to persuade many people that Poland is ruled by a secret pact that ought to be tracked down and destroyed”—that is, he made use of a populist conspiracy theory to aggrandize his power. “The real model is the consistent and effective authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin” in Russia. “We should look at the practices of Putin to understand the nature of the threats to democracy in the countries of post-Communist Europe,” which amounts to a sort of Slavic Francoism. All this notwithstanding, Michnik remained guardedly optimistic. “Poland is a country where no nastiness ever wins out in the end. In Poland, everything is possible: even change for the better.”

The following year, Havel had returned to his first love, the theater, writing several plays before his death in 2011. They met in the offices of Michnik’s newspaper in Warsaw, the city in which Havel chose to stage the premiere of his first new play in many years. Recalling the Soviet invasion ending the Prague Spring of 1968, Havel recalled that the attack “opened the eyes of the Western left” to the character of the Soviet regime, an awakening that seemed to occur about once every decade or so, and needed to, given the somnolence of the Left when it came to threats from that quarter. Michnik and Havel worried that some former dissidents in Russia, Solzhenitsyn by far the most important, might now be the ones who have fallen asleep, when it comes to the depredations of Putin and other rightists. Havel remarked, “In Russian society there lurks a peculiar complex, an anxiety as to whether it will be taken seriously in the West. This, the biggest country in the world, appears to itself to be small, and that is why it glances at neighboring states as though it doesn’t know exactly where Russia begins and where it ends.” This anxiety has given us Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but also Stalin and Brezhnev and Putin—not to be confused, to be sure, when it comes to the amount of blood on their hands, but not to be trusted, either, when it comes to the independence of Eastern and Central Europe. “There are no totalitarian pressures any more, that doesn’t mean we have won.”

Shortly before Havel’s death, Michnik published “When Socrates Became Pericles,” an article marking his seventy-fifth birthday. Michnik recalls how Havel would bring drinks to the secret police agents who were freezing outside the door of his house on winter nights—a characteristic gesture of compassion and good-humored irony. “Theater of the absurd is Havel’s specialty.” But far more than a mere sense of the absurd: “I was struck by how he evaded all attempts at simplistic classification: he was not a mutinous Communist… nor was he a Catholic. He was neither a conservative nor a liberal, nor was he a Social Democrat…. Simply put, he was a democrat, a shy, gentle, and modest man with great courage, imagination, and determination.” He understood that it’s not enough to ‘stand on principle’ because most people can’t afford to do that; they need a way to survive. Michnik finds “as good an illustration as could be found of the historical legacy with which Havel wrestled throughout his life” in a 1938 essay by the novelist and playwright Karel Capek. At the time it seemed as if those living under Nazism could choose among “shared culpability, cowardice, or martyrdom.” “But there is a fourth way,” Capek wrote: “Refusal to betray one’s spiritual discipline, no matter how difficult the circumstances and no matter what pressures, refusal to deny the spirit of independence and conscious awareness,” a spirit which tells us “that reason can be universal, and experience, cognition, laws of the spirit, and laws of conscience can still have binding power.” The question of how to win the Cold War, how to secure a decent regime in its aftermath, had been preceded long before by the question, “How to lose?” In an open letter to Alexander Dubcek, who had wanted “Socialism with a Human Face,” Havel had warned that the Communists’ “desire to bring you to your knees will not be satisfied simply because you no longer have power; they need more; they need you to lose face.” The only thing that can be salvaged, for now, is self-respect. This was no situation in which political calculation would serve. Like Lincoln in 1861, de Gaulle in 1940, “the sudden assertion of human criteria within a dehumanizing framework of political manipulation can be like a flash of lightning illuminating a dark landscape.” Dubcek wasn’t up to such an assertion. Havel was.

In a letter to Dubcek’s Soviet-installed replacement, Gustáv Husák, Havel predicted the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire and of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. He was right, but also came to think that the modern project itself, especially the “technological society” it has produced, eventually would suffer collapse, as well, for the same reason: its denial of the human person. You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, the ancient Greek poet wrote, but she will return. That is, Havel concurred with Heidegger regarding technology and the conquest of nature it is intended to effect, but refused to follow Heidegger into radical historicism, much less suffering illusions about the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism. Closer to his Czech home, he is following the lead of Capek, who wrote extensively on the challenges technology poses to the human person, and indeed popularized the word ‘robot’ in a play first staged in 1920. For Capek and Havel alike, nature, not ‘History,’ will have the last word.

It was this intention to assert “human criteria” that guided Havel in his decision to remain in Czechoslovakia and go to prison instead of fleeing to the United States. The simple fact that by 1979 the regime preferred not to kill him but to offer him a choice between incarceration and exile proved that the regime itself was beginning to hesitate, by then, to question its ideology. By going to prison he could put his principles into practice, proving himself to his friends, to God, and to himself. As Michnik writes, the “dissident subculture had snares of its own”—”demonizing the enemy” and “angeliz[ing] oneself.” But for Havel, “the enemy was the Communist system, not the Communists”; a Christian would call that hating the sin, not the sinner.

On the matter of religion, too, Michnik provides a just assessment of his friend, who “rejected the atheist worldview”—possibly in part because it is a worldview, a too-confident system of ‘totalizing’ belief. Havel was rather a “philosophically inclined homo religiosus” who delivered himself of the extraordinary sentence, “I accept the Gospel of Jesus as a challenge to go my own way.” That doesn’t sound quite like what Jesus had in mind, but it does indeed bring Socrates to church. This “outlook” (not “worldview”) inflected his politics, Havel’s considerations on Machiavelli’s modern ‘state.’ Michnik quotes him as identifying the origin of lo stato to “a moment when human reason begins to ‘liberate’ itself from the human being as such, from his personal experience, personal conscience, and personal responsibility and so also from that to which, within the framework of the natural world, all responsibility is uniquely related his absolute horizon.” Understanding that ‘Machiavellian moment’ in Western thought enabled him to “unmask Marxism-Leninism as a para-religion offering ready-made answers to all questions”; against this, he (“in his own way”) upheld “a religion that demands humility in the face of Mystery.” Politically, such humility issued in a commitment to “political and economic pluralism, along with dialogue between democratic representatives and expert opinion”—the two components of modern republican government.

The choice for Havel, then, was between attempts to take an idea (or more usually a closed system of ideas) and institutionalize it and the attempt to live in the world of politics Socratically, “living in the truth.” Michnik observes that Havel never claimed to have coined that phrase, although it came to be identified with him. It was Jan Patocka, “an intellectual mentor and moral authority for the Czech dissidents,” who did so, associating it with Socrates and pointing out that Socrates eventually was put to death by the regime of his city. Havel “chose, like Socrates, uncompromising conflict with the authorities. And astoundingly, by happenstance, this time Socrates became Pericles.” And although his vocation ended less grimly than Socrates’, his move to abolish the death penalty (and, it might be added, to pardon most of the old-regime operatives) brought unwelcome grumblings from a less-than-Socratic public stuck in a “Czech small-mindedness” that Michnik perhaps too quickly associates with “petty bourgeois provincialism” instead of with democracy itself. There weren’t many bourgeois in Socrates’ Athens, and no Czechs at all, but there were plenty of democrats. In this, Michnik relies too much on the formulas of the nineteenth-century European ‘Left,’ insufficiently on Tocqueville.

The continued rise of rightist populism in Europe and elsewhere shows that concerns of Michnik and Havel were far from groundless. Some of the appeal of these groups may arise from hyper-nationalist sentiment, but one must also notice that it responds to the persistent moral flaccidity of many contemporary democratic republics, and also to the longstanding political problems raised by bureaucracy—especially by international and ‘globalist’ bureaucracy, which hardly deserves the name of either democracy or republicanism. Solzhenitsyn had pointed to the moral crisis of the West as early as 1978, in his much-misunderstood commencement speech at Harvard University. This must explain, at least in part, his late-life sympathy for Putin. Among European thinkers now, Pierre Manent may best articulate an answer to these concerns, and to these groups themselves, but how many are listening?