Ivan Vazov: Under the Yoke. William Morfill translation. London: JiatHu Books, 2015. 

 

Peoples newly conquered by the Romans were forced to pass ‘under the yoke’—spears held by the victors over the path of the defeated. In 45 A.D., the Romans subjected several of the erstwhile warring tribes in the Balkans to just that ceremony of submission, bringing order to the region now known as Bulgaria. Tribal wars and foreign invasions renewed after Rome fell; in the late seventh century, the Bulgarian khan, Asparuh, led his people into the region, founding an empire in 681 A.D. after fending off the Byzantines under the command of Emperor Constantine IV. The word ‘Bulgar’ may derive from a Turkic word for rebels, disturbers, and so they were viewed by Byzantium, which eventually conquered them early in the tenth century, only to lose their grip after a revolt in 1185, followed by the establishment of the Second Bulgarian Empire. Two centuries after that, the Ottomans moved in, ruling the restive Bulgars for the next five centuries. As the Ottoman Empire weakened throughout the nineteenth century, both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires sought influence there, with the Russians eventually winning the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. Two treaties aimed at establishing an independent Bulgaria were attempted in 1878. The first, the Treaty of San Stefano, established a ‘Greater Bulgaria,’ and quickly met with challenges from the other major European powers, suspicious of Russian ambitions, especially Russia’s interest in securing access to the Aegean and Mediterranean seas.  The second, the Treaty of Berlin, saw the recognition of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro as sovereign states and the reduction of Bulgaria’s boundaries. Bulgaria was split into the Principality of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia, which was returned to the Ottomans. This arrangement satisfied Great Britain and the other Europeans but left many ethnic Bulgarians out of the new homeland, as sixty percent Eastern Rumelia’s population was Bulgarian. After defeating an attempted Serbian encroachment in 1885, Eastern Rumelia united with the Principality, this time with the approval of Great Britain and France—by now less concerned, perhaps, with Russia than with Germany. In 1908, Bulgaria would achieve its formal independence from the still-enfeebled Ottomans.

Born in 1850, Ivan Vazov joined a line of Bulgarian revolutionaries active in the wake of the 1848 European “Springtime of the Nations.” Animated by sentiments of Romantic nationalism, the “Springtime” consisted of predominantly democratic-republican revolutions against monarchic empires. The closest these came to the Balkans was in the Austrian Empire, but that was near enough to inspire the Bulgarian poet, Georgi Rakovski (née Popovich) to organize the nucleus of a Bulgarian resistance movement. He was joined by Vasil Levski (née Kunchev) of Eastern Rumelia, who became head of the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee and has since been honored with the title “Apostle of Freedom” by his countrymen. For his efforts, Levski was executed by the Turks in 1873. His colleague, Hrista Botev, another poet-revolutionary, was killed by an Ottoman sharpshooter during the April Uprising of 1876, which occurred a year before Russia’s intervention. A mountain has been named in his honor.

Vazov understood that achieving independence through revolutionary action would not suffice to establish the modern Bulgarian nationality he and his associates fought for. What regime would Bulgaria have, after independence? Emperor Boris I abolished pagan religions in 864, bringing Bulgarians to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. But Vazov espoused a combination of Romantic and Enlightenment notions, which he brought to life in a series of poems, novels, and plays beginning in the 1870s while also serving on the Permanent Committee of the Provincial Assembly of Eastern Rumelia. Just as urgently, if Bulgarians were to become a coherent nation, they needed to have the wherewithal to speak with one another. The Bulgarian language, a mixture of Bulgar, Greek, Turkish, had never been regularized. In his literary work Vazov set out to do that, succeeding to the point where he is now called “the Patriarch of Bulgarian literature.” Winning a war for independence is one thing, winning the peace another. By the time of his death in 1921, Vazov could think that he had contributed to winning the peace, to founding a modern Bulgaria.

It thus makes sense for him to set his novel not in the Russo-Turkish War but in the April Uprising. While the war actually cut the Turks down to size, and Vazov was a firm Russophile (he wrote Under the Yoke in Odessa in 1886), the Uprising was a purely Bulgarian effort, if a failed one. As a nationalist, he wants to depict a national movement, showing both the virtues and vices of Bulgarians and presenting the best characters as both noble and imprudent—worthy of admiring memory but not of blind emulation. He presents characters embodying Bulgarian ‘types’ while occasionally intervening with observations on human nature generally, teaching his countrymen things they will need to know as citizens in a language they can use.

He begins with a description of dinner in the household of the head, the Chorbaji, of the village of Bela Cherkva, said to be modeled on Vazov’s native Topol. Chorbaji Marko, “a thoroughly practical man” and a product of “the old regime,” in which Bulgarians were granted only modest public education by the ruling Turks, rules his household with “his natural common sense,” which has led him to “understand human nature well.” He thus knows the lesson of the first chapter of Genesis, that “people always hanker most after what is forbidden,” and he uses this knowledge to keep his children honest, entrusting them with the key to his money-chest “so as to prevent any inclination to theft.” Like many slightly educated men, he “loved learning and the learned,” being “one of those numerous patriots whose eager zeal for the new educational movement has in so short a time filled Bulgaria with schools.” Bulgarian patriotism will require Bulgarian literacy to become civically effective; Vazov himself had been forced to seek education in Romania and Russia. It is Marko who rescues the young hero of the novel, Ivan Kralich, the son of an old business acquaintance, who arrives in his courtyard at night, a fugitive from prison, seeking shelter from the Turkish police officer, who is looking for him. Ivan has just escaped a local patrol, through sheer luck: “At moments of unavoidable danger a man’s presence of mind deserts him, like a coward, and only a blind instinct of self-preservation takes the place of all his moral faculties.” He could have escaped the patrol simply by walking quietly in the other direction, into the darkness, but instead he ran through them; their bullets missed him only because “the darkness saved him” as he fled. 

Prudent yet genial Marko offers him hospitality for the night, but when the police show up, looking for the fugitive, Ivan takes off again. A Romantic stylist indeed, Vazov has a thunderstorm come up (“there was a wild beauty in the strife of the elements—in the conflict of the horizons”); “in storms nature attains themes of the sublimest poetry.” The Stürm und Drang conflict of horizons in nature mimics the conflict of horizons in Bulgarian politics. Ivan is a revolutionary, while Marko is a patriot who knows how to deal with the Turks without getting himself jailed or killed. Ivan’s character quickly emerges, as he seeks refuge in a mill, then saves the miller’s daughter from being raped by two Turks, killing both of them. “But there are thousands and thousands more such monsters,” Ivan tells the miller; “the Bulgarian nation can only free itself and live in peace if all seize their axes and cut down the enemy.” The miller brings him to a nearby monastery for safe haven. There, a previous storm had uprooted an ancient pine and knocked over the tower, now replaced by a new one, which “made a strange contrast to the dilapidated old remains of a past age.” Bulgaria is modernizing: “henceforth the monastery has become somber; the eye no longer follows the towering pine to the clouds” and “the soul no longer draws inspiration from the paintings of the walls representing saints, archangels, holy fathers, and martyrs.” The young Deacon Vikenti, a patriot, welcomes Ivan; the monastery also shelters a “harmless idiot,” Mouncho, who had seen Ivan and the miller bury the Turks. The elderly Father Yerote, a kindly “relic of the past,” rules the monastery, very much in contrast with Deacon Vikenti, who “represented the future, towards which he looked with the same confidence as did the old man towards eternity.” In a new regime in an independent country, can the Orthodox Church adapt?

Back at Marko’s house, young Doctor Sokoloff, a veterinary surgeon who had served in a Turkish regiment and “acquired a thorough knowledge of the language and customs of the Turks,” is the best practitioner of medical care for humans in the tiny village; he treats his patients with the assistance “of his two faithful assistants—the healthy Balkan air and nature.” It was he who had given Ivan directions to Marko’s house, the previous night, and the two men discuss the ongoing revolt against the Turks in Herzogivina. Marko wonders why we Bulgarians cannot “do something of the kind”; the younger man confidently says that we have never tried. Prudent Marko tells him not to try, as “we’ve only to move to be cut down like sheep” and “there’s nowhere we can look to for aid.” He will prove correct, this year; the nascent Bulgarian resistance is indeed doomed, without the Russian intervention that will come too late to save the revolutionaries of April.

Sokoloff is soon arrested, falsely accused of shooting and wounding a Turk; more, incriminating papers are discovered in his coat pocket, suggesting that he is part of a revolutionary plot. He had given his coat to the threadbare Ivan, who stuffed revolutionary tracts in the pocket, then shed the coat later, as he fled his pursuers. The Turkish authorities easily traced the coat back to Sokoloff.

When Ivan Kralich learns of the arrest, he realizes that the papers had been his; somehow, they had been planted on Sokoloff, he supposes. He nobly determines to give himself up to the Turks in order to save his benefactor: “I won’t owe my life to the sufferings of others,” he tells the deacon, who understands that Kralich is right; “this self-sacrifice was imposed on [Kralich] by feelings of justice and humanity.” 

There is another chorbaji, Yordan Diamandieff, whose character and family contrast noticeably with those of Marko. The chorbajis as a class are “odious” to the other Bulgarians, many of them rightly perceived as self-serving toadies of the Turks. Yordan’s married daughter, Ghinka, dominates her husband, Simeon; his sister, a nun, Hajji Rovoama, “was lame, malicious, and a thorough mischief-maker,” the village gossip. His daughter, Lalka, is being courted by one Kiriak Stefchoff, the son “of a man of the same stamp as Yordan Diamandieff”—young, like the revolutionaries, “but his ideas were old-fashioned,” the “new and absorbing current liberal thought [having] left him untouched.” The Turks like him; the true Bulgarians despise him not only for his Turkish leanings but for “his haughty, spiteful character and his deceitful and cowardly nature.” Yordan wouldn’t mind having him for a son, but his daughter would very much mind having him for her husband, having fixed her affections upon the handsome, outgoing young doctor Sokoloff, whose arrest torments her. 

As suddenly as he had been arrested, however, Sokoloff is released, to the dismay of Stefchoff and Hajii Rovoama.  As it turns out, Marko had managed to switch out the revolutionary materials for some harmless stuff when the man assigned to carry the incriminatory materials to the office of the Bey, the provincial governor, carelessly left the envelope containing them in a cafe. The novelist’s lesson is clear: the young revolutionaries, patriotic, romantic-idealistic, noble and self-sacrificing, survive thanks only to chance and to the prudence of the older man.

At the convent ruled by the loathsome Sister Hajji Rovoama lives an orphan girl, Rada Gospojina, taken in at birth and being prepared to become a nun. She teaches the youngest children at the religious school, having “grown up in the pernicious and suffocating atmosphere of convent life, under the severe unsympathetic supervision of the old mischief-maker,” a “despotism [which] was daily becoming more felt and insupportable to Rada, in proportion as the girl’s nature developed and her self-respect increased.” That is, Rada symbolizes Bulgaria under Turkish rule, as reinforced by an Orthodox Christian Church partially by the way of life prevailing under that regime. Under the pseudonym Boicho Ognianoff, Kralich has taken a teaching job in the village. In this capacity, he intervenes during a public examination of Rada’s pupils by Stefchoff, who is on the school committee. Rada having rejected Stefchoff’s advances, the questioning has been stern, his questions above the heads of the children. In rephrasing the questions fairly, in terms they can understand, Ognianoff enables the students to pass the exam, making him a hero to the village mothers and most particularly to Rada. As he teaches in both the boys’ and the girls’ schools, he sees Rada often: “Two such pure and honest natures were fated to understand each other without need of a lengthy acquaintance.” He soon tells her that he has come to the village to organize a revolution in the spring and confesses to killing the two Turks, to which she simply responds, “You’re the noblest man living.” In peace or in revolution, he is a man of justice. 

Most Bulgarians, Vazov shows, can hardly be so good or, for that matter, so bad as the likes of Hajji Rovoana and Stefchoff. He takes his readers to a festival in late autumn in a meadow outside of town to show the souls of Bulgarians under despotism. “An enslaved nation has a philosophy of its own which reconciles it to its lot”: “Where the arena of political and scientific activity is closely barred, where the desire of rapid enrichment finds no stimulant, and far-reaching ambition has no scope for its development, the community squanders its energy on the trivial and personal cares of its daily life, and seeks relief and recreation in simple and easily obtainable material enjoyment.” To understand the national spirit, “look at the poetry of the nation.” Bulgaria’s poetry has consisted mostly of songs about roasted lambs, red wine, and dances. But even on such an occasion, a serious conversation can occur, so long as a few revolutionaries gather on the margins. Ognianoff talks quietly with two of the younger men, one of whom is “imbued with all the utopias of Socialism.” To the argument for Bulgarian “political freedom,” independence from the Turks, the socialist objects that this will only result in “new masters in place of the old”; you will only “replace one tyrant by another,” thereby “annihilat[ing] every idea of equality” and “consecrat[ing] the right of the strong to despoil the poor, of capital to oppress labor.” He commends reading Herzen, Bakunin, and Lassalle as preliminary to “rais[ing] the standard of rational modern humanity and sober science.” Here, it is Ognianoff who is the prudent one. “Bulgarian common sense rejects” the “principles of Socialism to which you have treated us”; “we cannot stomach them,” and “they will never find a field in Bulgaria, either now or at any other time.” Bulgarians instead need “to protect our homes, our honor and our lives,” relying not on “obscure theories” of “social science” but “only upon the nation,” including the Chorbaji class and the clergy. “The discussion continued to rage hotly” while the festivities proceeded, and (it must be added) would continue to rage during Bulgaria’s turbulent twentieth century, under the then-unimagined yoke of Soviet Russia. Russia would return not as Bulgaria’s liberator, as in the 1870s, but as its imperial oppressor, worse even than the Turks.

Kralich-Ognianoff will have few opportunities for such debates, from now on. Stefchoff begins to suspect that he may have had something to do with the disappearance of the Turks and orders an inspection of the mill property, where their bodies are soon located. Ognianoff again flees and, for her part, Sister Hajii Rovoana turns Rada, the “shameless hussy,” out of the convent. As the Turks widen their net, they pick up Mr. Kandoff, the young socialist, who vainly fulminates about “the inviolability of my person, which is the most precious of human prerogatives” and the violation “of all legality and every principle of justice.” He is chastened when informed by a friend that there is no point in translating his protest into Turkish, since “the very words don’t exist” in that language. Vazov’s attention to his own nation’s language is thereby underscored.

Stumbling through the winter snow in the mountains, hoping to reach Romania, Ognianoff is wounded by Turkish gunmen who may have been hunting him or only wild game. A Bulgarian friend comes across him and delivers him to a kindly and patriotic monk in the village of Verigovo. The villagers take to him; “heroism is of all the virtues the one that strikes the public fancy the most,” perhaps because the ordinary person treasures life itself beyond all else, and the willingness to risk one’s life seems to them extraordinary. Revolutionary sentiments already run high in Verigovo and Ognianoff’s speeches do nothing to discourage them, but he has his best conversations with an old schoolteacher, Father Mina. Father Mina “had outlived his generation, his old-world learning was of no use at the present day, his only occupation was to sing, without remuneration, in the church choir: there, at least, modern education had not penetrated.” But in this “living relic of a past epoch” the “hot and impetuous nature” of Ognianoff finds comfort. “When a man is in affliction, be it moral or physical, his soul turns to religion; he finds at once a consolation in the words of the great book,” which “assuage[d] his pain like a magic balsam.” “Ognianoff was now for the first time experiencing the soothing effects of the Scriptural language which the old man mingled with his own.” Poetry, again: Father Mina has him read the Psalms and assures him that “God Himself has chosen you to serve the nation” and adjures him to “hope in God,” who “will not desert the suffering that trust in his mercy.” The poetic songs of King David speak across the centuries to the modern Bulgarian revolutionary, their Spirit animating the kind of priest a free Bulgaria can revere. 

Word from Bela Cherkva arrives: Dr. Sokolov has been arrested, the deacon is in hiding, another revolutionary has died under torture, and the villagers believe that Ognianoff is dead, killed by the hunters. Rada was sent by prudent Marko to live with one of his relatives. Ognianoff determines to proceed not to Romania and safety but back to Bela Cherkva, again to rescue someone caught up in his revolutionary actions. Disguised as an imam, he stops at a café frequented by Turks, learning that the authorities know he’s still alive and continue to pursue him. Moving on, he links up with some revolutionaries who want revenge against Turks who have murdered the father of one of their comrades. When the men kill the Turks, the son slashes the corpse “like a wild beast thirsting for blood” in “a frenzied thirst for vengeance.” Ognianoff considers this “savage revenge” to have been “justifiable before God and one’s own conscience,” a “good sign.” “The Bulgarian’s been a sheep for five centuries, it’ll be well if he becomes a wild beast now,” inasmuch as “men respect the wild goat more than the tame sheep.” His Old Testament reading prevails: “Let philosophy flourish, human nature remains always the same. Christ has said, ‘If they strike you on one cheek, turn unto them the other.’ That is divine, and I bow before it. But I prefer Moses with his ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ That’s the natural law, which I followed,” the “inexorable, sacred principle, on which must be based our struggle against the tyrants. To show mercy to the merciless is as base as to expect it from them.” After the men leave the corpses in the snow, wolves circle in; “nature and the wild beasts united to blot out all traces of the terrible deed.” When the Turks discover the remains, they assume the wolves killed their brethren.

In the village, Rada requests to leave “this black town”—black in the sense of a place in which she is persecuted by the Muslim Turks, whose women dress in black, and their Bulgarian collaborators—and to join him in the struggle. “No,” Ognianoff replies, “you can do nothing” because “the revolution demands a man’s strength, bloodthirstiness, merciless ferocity, and you’re a perfect angel.” If he is a man of the Old Testament, she is a woman of the New Testament; the future Bulgaria will need both. He will, however, bring her to the town of Klissoura, which is near his base of operations and, more importantly, will marry her. “We’re in God’s hands” and “whatever happens, I want to have a clear conscience.” He acknowledges that she has “sacrificed for me something dearer than your life—your good repute.” Confirming the piety he had not exhibited until the last few weeks, he says, “Above us is God, the great and just God of Bulgaria, the God of crushed and broken hearts, of suffering humanity. He sees and hears us.” Expecting to be killed (and rightly so, as it will happen), he sets his soul in the just order: his life belongs to Bulgaria, his soul to God, his heart to his future wife. She prays with him for God’s blessing of “our holy union.”

The Ottoman Imperial Government officials know very well that a rebellion is imminent. Their agents know the names of the revolutionaries and the structure of their organization, an alternative or shadow regime: “They’ve established a kind of government, which issues decrees, judges, and condemns to death,” one of their operatives reports to the Bey. The feebleness of the revolutionaries’ preparation may be seen in the fact that they are attempting to use hollowed-out cherry tree trunks as cannons. Even “the sober but honest Bulgarian soul” of Marko contracts the “revolutionary effervescence,” and he contributes a cherry tree from his garden to the cause. Test-fired, it will split, and the victorious Turks will jail him for his contribution to the rebel cause. Marko “represented the moderate element in the national party, an element worthy of respect everywhere save in revolutions, which see to their ideal by violence and extremes. Sometimes [this element] may act as a brake on the wheel, but too often its effect is unfelt.” He kneels before the household icon: “For the first time in his life he was praying for Bulgaria!” Throughout the country, “even the Chorbajis, who formed a close caste opposed to all national development, even these fell under the sway of the idea with which every brain was on fire,” as “the revolutionary spirit, like a flaming seraph, spread its wings over peasant and university student—kalpak and fez, priest’s cap and tall hat alike. As in all the progressive struggles of Bulgaria, science and the cross were in the front rank. The martyrology of modern Bulgarian history proclaims this truth.” Vazov exclaims that “Posterity will be astonished—nay, the very contemporaries of the age, with a whole series of historical examples before them, stand aghast before this moral intoxication, this sublime infatuation of a people preparing to contend with a mighty empire still great in its military resources—preparing with the hope, too, of victory, and with such means, ineffectual even to a point of ridicule, ready to take the field in the very ‘jaws of hell,’ as Marko Ivanoff had said not long before, without seeking for any ally save its own enthusiasm—a will-o’-the-wisp, which flames and dies out, a phantom, an illusion. History has but rarely furnished an example of such self-confidence—verging on madness. The Bulgarian national spirit has never risen to such heights, and never again will reach them.” The April Uprising “may be taken as the example of a great idea fostered in a fertile and favorable soil,” but “the struggle itself by which it was followed was unworthy of the very name.” The Turks, dilatory in their reaction to the plot, will crush the rebels with ease.

A Russian student, Gospodia Kandoff, enamored of Rada, follows her to Klissoura, and when Ognianoff finds them at her hostess’s house he assumes she has betrayed him, urged to this false conclusion by an anonymous letter he has received, “hinting that this was so,” a letter surely written by Sister Hajii Ramoana. He returns to preparing for the revolution against the Turks, averring that “Bulgaria is not broad enough to contain the two races side by side! Well, so be it, no retreat!” The Turks have hesitated only because they fear Russian intervention, but that does not occur, and now that they have mobilized against the revolutionaries, the revolutionaries are finished. Ognianoff readies himself for death, now that “everything in this world” is dead to him, telling himself that he has seen his “two great idols in the mire, your beloved ideals trampled on—Love and Revolution!” Vazov tells his readers, “The revolution ended in capitulation,” a “tragically inglorious” event he likens to “a still-born child, conceived under the impulse of the most ardent love, and stifled by its mother in horror at its birth.” It is “a terrible awakening” not only for Ivan Kralich/Ognianoff but for Bulgaria.

This seems to point to the God of the Bible as the only trustworthy one. But yes and no. In the end, Kralich learns that Rada has been faithful to him, and she will die with him (“love has only one thought—self-sacrifice”), along with his friend Sokoloff, in a firefight with the Turks. She is killed by a Turkish bullet, spared from the rape and torture she would have endured had she survived, and as the doomed Kralich weeps over her body, “perhaps—who knows?—there were mingled also a warm feeling of gratitude to Providence.” As for the Bulgarians, the revolt “raised up for us Alexander II,” Czar of Russia, whose army would win independence for most of Bulgaria in the following year. If the revolutionary movement “had not brought on the war of liberation, then it would have been pitilessly condemned on all sides; common sense would have stigmatized it as folly; nations would have set it down as a disgrace, and history—a meretricious harlot that bows only before success—would have branded it as a crime. Poetry alone might have forgiven it and crowned it with the laurel of the hero.” The revolution “was a poetic folly, for young nations, like young people, are poetical.” In the unpoetic reality, Bulgarians soon turned on one another, betraying the revolutionaries to their Turkish oppressors. The villagers of Bela Cherkva have made Stefchoff as “the wisest, the proudest, most respected man in the town now,” “the savior of the city” since he persuaded the Turks not to destroy it. Kralich himself nonetheless comes to see that although “we can’t destroy Turkey by force of arms, we can gain the sympathies of the world, at least, by our frightful sufferings, by our martyrdom, by the rivers of blood that are now flowing in Bulgaria. We have nothing to be ashamed of.”

The Turks sever Kralich’s head, stick it on a pole and march triumphantly into the village, “set[ting] up the trophy in the marketplace.” The only one outraged, the idiot Mouncho, once protected in the monastery, witness to Ivan’s killing of the two Turks, “broke out into a colossal and appalling blasphemy against Mohammed,” for which he is summarily hanged. 

Under the Yoke can hold few charms for readers who have drunk from the wells of literary ‘modernism.’ Vazov’s younger contemporary, James Joyce, would have viewed its romanticism, its purple patches, and its patriotic passion with cool irony and distaste. But Vazov isn’t writing for James Joyce. He writes to provide his fellow Bulgarians with a political education. By addressing them in the Romantic style, invoking the nationalism of the Romantics, he draws his readers in to a consideration of both the nobility and the limitations of Romanticism and nationalism. He shows that genuine Romantic love, if infused with the self-sacrificing and faithful love of Christianity, deserves the honor it sometimes receives, against the selfish love of a Stefchoff, even as genuine patriotism deserves the honor it sometimes receives, against the sycophancy of a Stefchoff. But patriots and lovers alike must understand that the nation always contains its Stefchoffs, and even when the nation is united in revolutionary fervor, that fervor will turn to bitterness in defeat. ‘The people’ are not moral heroes. Nor are they military superheroes, capable of defeating a powerful enemy by actions animated by intense, evanescent moral fervor alone. They need prudent and courageous leaders in war, statesmen in peace, men who know they may need allies. Those allies must include God, the Ruler of nations, since ‘History’ is a harlot, no lover of human progress toward political liberty. And even prudent men need to know that their prudence may falter when swept along by democratic passions. 

 

 

Paul Dragos Aligica and Simona Preda: The Institutionalization of Indoctrination: An Exploratory Investigation Based on the Romanian Case Study.  Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022.

 

Thanks to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the grimmest of Soviet-bloc ruling institutions, the Gulag, stands revealed as both symbol and instrument of modern tyrannies. The purposes of such regimes are also well known, having been elaborated by Marxist-Leninist ideologues for many decades. But the institutions the regimes designed to purvey that ideology in an attempt to build an inescapable framework of thought and feeling in their subjects, ‘correct’ habits of mind and heart, remain much more poorly understood. In this “exploratory study,” University of Bucharest sociologists Paul Dragos Aligica and Simona Preda have begun the task of better understanding these institutions of indoctrination, and their work has noteworthy implications for the understanding of institutional ‘capture’ efforts by Leftists in the United States and Europe.

They ask: “How should we conceptualize and theorize about the social and political instrumentation of ideologies in regimes or systems that assume that historical missions of salvation or radical transformations are the stringent organizing and legitimization principles of their very existence?” Ideologists, they answer, “operate by penetrating and planting their units within other existing organizations,” enabling them to monitor and eventually to censor and manage such organizations “from the inside.” “Thus, the entire institutional configuration of the political and social system is pervaded and altered” by “political commissars.” “Universities were among the first targets of any Communist, collectivist regime,” but in the Communist regimes, not only schools but factories, hospitals, and “almost all organizations” saw “a special ideological office or agent, by now defined as ‘ideological worker,'” a person distinct from the political police and informers working for the police. While all regimes seek to transmit their would-be ruling principles to citizens or subjects, “there are some systems” in which this task “grows and spreads to become the defining feature of the system” in a deliberate attempt to establish absolute rule over the horizon of human aspiration.

The authors choose Communist Romania as their ‘case study,’ since the regime there provided such a clear and striking example of the phenomenon in question. But they begin with observations about Communist “ideocracy,” generally. “Ideocracy” was coined by the Swiss economist Peter Bernholz, who defined it as a regime “in which the ideological factor is institutionalized as a supreme principle of government.” (1) An ideology is “a combination of ideas, images, and doctrines claiming absolute truth and historical validity.” It might be added that the claim of historical validity is crucial, inasmuch it brings what might otherwise be a simple assertion of universal principles into play as determinative of practice, past, present, and future. It is one thing to say that all human beings have unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that these rights should guide political practice, to the extent possible; it is quite another to say that all of human history is somehow determined by those principles and further to claim that rulers shall assume the task of advancing that history in the role of its ‘vanguard.’ This is why ideocratic regimes usually propound “a message promising a better life in the future” and also why they share “the objective to convert all people to the ‘true creed,'” and finally why “force may be needed in order to achieve these goals.” That way leads to ‘historicist’ tyranny or ‘totalitarianism,’ which awaits only “the power of the state” to be “mobilized in support of the ideology in question.” Bernholz distinguishes mere ideocracies—Saudi Arabia, Iran, even the Massachusetts Puritans—from totalitarian regimes—the Soviet Union, Communist China, Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, North Korea, the Eastern European states during the Cold War, Cuba, and the (thankfully) short-lived regime of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). To this, Aligica and Preda add that all such regimes hold up a model of the ideal human being as one which can be realized in practice by the population generally. Again, all regimes have their heroes; not all regimes expect and demand that their subjects be reshaped into that heroic mold. 

This implies that ideocratic and especially totalitarian regimes share “certain broad beliefs about human nature.” Unlike, for example, Publius writing in The Federalist or indeed the American Puritans, such regimes regard human nature as malleable by means of humanly designed institutions. Publius esteems institutions designed to take human nature as it is and not to transform it but to channel such natural and persistent human characteristics as selfishness, acquisitiveness, and even rapacity into good behavior (rather in spite of ourselves); the Puritans expected the “New Man” to appear only with divine intervention at the End of Days. But “in the end, all plans for radical social change (i.e., Communist, Socialist, totalitarian) move very fast from ideas about social order and institutions (institutional design) to concentrate almost instinctively and obsessively on the problem of indoctrination, mindsets, and the creation of a ‘New Man'” by means of institutionalized indoctrination. Indoctrination is “pivotal to the social engineering of the process of social change and the logic of the government of the system,” which aims to “induce changes of human nature” itself. V.I. Lenin, for example, demanded what he called the “most rigorous control through society and the state” not only to establish and consolidate the new, Communist regime but, in the authors’ words, “to socially engineer and maintain in the citizens’ mindsets, perceptions, and values those adjustments that are deemed necessary for the creation of the ‘new man’—the “new socialist human being”—”and, by implication, the ‘new system.'” 

In order to achieve this goal, ideocrats often found the modern-tyrannical or totalitarian regime. The authors take their definition of totalitarianism from Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who define totalitarianism as comprehensive “control of the everyday life” of the population ruled by the regime, especially control of “their thoughts and attitudes as well as their activities.” (2) In practice, this entails not only an ideology but “a single Party typically led by one man, a terroristic police, a communication monopoly, a weapons monopoly, and a centrally directed economy.” All of these characteristics find support in modern technology. Since non-totalitarian regimes may see one or a couple of these features (economic centralization, for example), Aligica and Preda remark that totalitarianism can be imposed all at once or as “a creeping social phenomenon”; “a social or political system may move in a totalitarian direction in a sequence of stages, starting from different sectors of the society in small and partial steps and extending to the level of taking over the entire system.” Friedrich and Brzezinski also take Tocqueville’s point: that a new form of despotism can arise out of “modern democracy,” by which Tocqueville means the civil-social equality that had replaced the old ‘aristocratic’ or oligarchic civil societies. Without any firm social hierarchy embedded in civil society itself, a centralized and despotic regime might be constituted as readily as a federal and republican one. Under such a tyranny, “the entire vocabulary of democracy is taken over and its semantics are twisted” with the deployment of “a rhetoric based on formulaic utterances and conceptual dichotomies” seen in such phrases as “enemies of the cause.”  

With regard to the Communist tyrannies, the Aligica and Preda identify four “logics” at work: Marxism, the manipulation of the ruling doctrine or ‘Party line,’ the careful management of incentives, and the equally careful management of steps toward the construction of the New Socialist Man. Marxism holds that the plasticity of human nature makes the forming of this new human being possible and that both indoctrination and “protection” from heterodox ideas number among the means for doing so. As an example of this, they cite the rather sinister formulation of Soviet ideologist A. S. Makarenko in a 1949 article published in Soviet Studies: the New Socialist Man “must be happy.” (3) Following from this Marxist logic, and in particular from the Marxist emphasis on the ‘dialectical’ twists and turns of ‘history,’ frequent changes in the slogans and announced policies of the regime, the latest often contradicting the one immediately prior, yields a sense of insecurity in the population that induces more ready compliance to the rulers’ edicts. More, the malleability of the Party line is intended to knead the supposedly formless dough of human nature by disorienting the minds of the subjects, giving them few if any fixed convictions—what sociologists call ‘anomie.’ Thus ‘totalitarianism’ means not only total control over the lives and beliefs of the people but “the ‘total’ destruction of the human personality” by “the insertion of a structural uncertainty and insecurity in the system, under an overarching arbitrary power.” Thus, “the entire system operates in undermining any sources of initiative outside the range approved by the Communist leaders at multiple levels.” Like human nature, “doctrine is malleable,” and doctrine is malleable “because its interpretation is malleable.” The two claims are connected, since “a certain alertness to these shifts becomes second nature.” Not only “subservience to leadership” but “a cultivated opportunism and duplicity” prevail. 

The third “logic” of Communist Party tyrannies consisted of a regime-specific version of ‘public choice theory,’ which attempts to show that not only private (and especially economic) choices but also public choices are largely determined by the self-interest of the person or persons making them. Under tyranny, ordinary incentives (material and social rewards such as income, safety, and honor) combine with pervasive coercion and preference manipulation. Not only is “some form or another of violence and conflict…an unyielding ever-presence in those systems” for the ruling class and the ruled alike, but “members of the elite have to be co-opted and kept in a closed and monitored condition.”  This is how “regimes that are authoritarian or even totalitarian may survive using relatively limited coercion and violence,” although it must be said that in practice they have not hesitated to test and surpass those limits.

Finally, Communist strategy, precisely as a form of historicism, recommends that its practitioners proceed in phases, “each phase having its own parameters, constraints, objectives, and dynamics.” The first phase, when the Party is out of power, consists of “a logic and strategy of subversion, generating an organizational structure aligned with the objective of overthrowing a social order from the inside”; once the Party has taken power, the next phase consists of “building and defending” the new regime. In both phases, organizing is the key to Communist success; “effective organization was one of the key strengths of Communist parties and movements in comparison to their competitors and adversaries”; Communist leaders “place[d] their political practice at the forefront of the organizational revolution taking place in the twentieth century.” That is, when Communists said that dialectical practice included taking over the institutions of ‘bourgeois capitalism’ they meant adapting the managerial techniques of corporations to ‘state socialist’ purposes. Instead of manufacturing and selling cars and bars of soap, however, Lenin’s professional revolutionaries, the “vanguard of the proletariat,” were “instruments for an institutional structure targeting the entire polity and society.” They were ‘manufacturing’ the New Man, in part by the means a comprehensive form of advertising, namely, propaganda. Marxism was the tool of the propagandist-manufacturer, who “must go behind surfaces to demonstrate to the masses what the true realities are and how to interpret them once they are demystified,” that is, reduced to the terms of ‘the dialectic,’ socioeconomic class struggle. 

In designing their (pseudo-)science of social engineering, Communists followed a classification system introduced by Georgi Plekhanov, one of the earliest Russian Marxists (albeit a social democrat and sharp critic of Lenin and the Bolsheviks). Plekhanov distinguished between propagandists and agitators. Propagandists “inculcate many ideas to a single person or to a small number of people,” functioning more or less as writers or teachers. Agitators inculcate “a single idea or a small number of ideas” to “a whole class of people,” functioning more or less as orators. But propagandists and agitators will never fully succeed if the persons propagandized and agitated are not then organized, “molded in ways congruous with the Communist designs.” Lenin understood that to do this, “the entire fabric of the social system of the country needs to be penetrated,” not only to shape opinions but to “see and understand the internal springs of the state mechanism,” the better to weaken and coopt it. In so doing, Communist operative should not restrict themselves to speech alone. There is the propaganda of words, but there is also the “propaganda of deeds”: Party operatives “need to manufacture concrete acts as examples to support [the Party’s] claims.” If, for example, propaganda cites the ‘brutality’ of the ‘capitalist police,’ it is surely useful to provoke the police into committing acts that can be presented as specimens of such brutality.

Having “construct[ed] an unprecedented system of propaganda and agitation penetrating state institutions and targeting the proletariat, the peasantry and the army,” Communists could adapt, amplify, and intensify it, once their regime was in place, sending its “political commissars” or “ideological workers” into all institutions from villages to cities, factories and professional associations and, above all, into the educational system, “the core of this enterprise.” “The education system becomes a cradle of propagandists and activists who start to operate in official capacities” in all the other civil-social organizations, now answerable to the socialist state.

Romania was a case in point. As elsewhere within the Soviet empire, Romanian Communists combined Marxist-Leninist internationalism with nationalist themes, the latter to distract Romanians from the fact that they were subordinates within that empire by denouncing the ‘imperialism’ of the United States and its West European allies. This task was helped along by a “conspiracy mindset” and a “blatant Machiavellian and Byzantine spirit.” “There was no room for individualism in this new type of society.” As explained satirically by the novelist and sociologist Alexander Zinoviev in his 1982 book, Homo Sovieticus, all the ‘I’s’ must be unified “into one huge ‘We.'” [4] The Romanian Communist Party, initially consisting of only about a thousand members, “rapidly grew to become a massive party,” ruling a nation of twenty million people while itself being ruled from Stalin’s Moscow. “Stalinization was a radical program: it aimed to annihilate civil society and to control the intellectual life and culture” by means of repression (political police, regular police, and the army) along with a program of indoctrination undertaken by “a massive propaganda apparatus, which maintained constant sociopsychological pressure on the citizens” or, more precisely, subjects.

The Romanian Communists accomplished their revolution in stages, first taking control of the executive branch of the government in March 1945, then the legislature by the means of “rigged elections” a few months later, then forcing the king into exile, “finally proclaiming the Romanian People’s Republic” at the end of 1947. Rival political parties were made to disband. The following year, the Agitation and Propaganda Department (yes, they actually called it that) was instituted within the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers’ Party, “from the very beginning” designed to be “one of the key institutions of the Communist architecture of power”—what Aristotle calls the politeia or ruling offices of a regime. Since “the problem of legitimacy was central” to the founding and perpetuation of the new regime, the Department set about “creat[ing] the New Man and implement[ing] the materialist-dialectical ideology” by “controlling and policing the Romanian cultural scene, recruiting cadres, and deploying them under its direction to implement political ideological lines that reflected the tactical objectives of the party-state.” It was a “cultural revolution” two decades before Mao invented the term. “This structure of the Party apparatus would remain essentially unchanged until the fall of the Communist regime in December 1989.” The main refinement came in 1965, when “the Party believed that society had reached a certain level of understanding…and could do without” the agitators, establishing “lecturers” as “the new elite propaganda workers.” This was during the rule of Communist Party boss Nicolae Ceausescu, who wanted propaganda to focus more narrowly upon the valorization of himself, a “cult of personality” following one of the regime’s brief periods of liberalization, or at least quasi-independence from Moscow. Nationalism came more into the foreground, ‘internationalism’ (the euphemism for strict subordination to the Soviet Union) into the background. The problem with promoting nationalism and Ceausescu at the same time was that the ‘I’ of the ruler could never quite be squared with the ‘We’ of the Romanians, despite the propagandist-lecturers’ best efforts. “The 1989 developments leading to the collapse of the regime demonstrated how large the gap was between the official propaganda and reality.” Nationalism comported well with independence from the Soviets, less well with continued allegiance to the head of a Communist Party that everyone knew to have been directed from Moscow.

Not that the regime’s core source of legitimacy, Marxism-Leninism, was abandoned. “The requirement was that each lecture be clear and concise, shedding light on the core ideas of a text and giving a systematic exposition to Marxism-Leninism as a science of societal development, a science of the oppressed and exploited masses, a science of the coming victory of Socialism in all countries, as well as a science of constructing Communist society.” Unfortunately for the regime, Marxism-Leninism proved no better in explaining Romanian reality than nationalism or the much-proclaimed wisdom of Mr. Ceausescu. All this, despite requirements of liveliness and sincerity in the lecturer, his “tactfulness and solicitude,” his avoidance of contradicting known facts, his mastery in “making appeals to human emotions,” his “transparent and accessible language,” his ability to relate matters to “the problems of regular folk,” his dramatic “unmasking” of “international imperialism and class enemies within the country,” his timely use of current events—each aimed at what Machiavelli had long ago called “the effectual truth,” that is, the desired results in the audience.

While the regime lasted, “the propagandist’s duty was to execute the orders received from the political center through the ideological-political chain of the Party.” “The physical presence of the propagandist was thought of as the symbolic presence of power,” especially since he not only laid down the current Party line but conveyed “information from the field” back up the chain to the Party hierarchy. This “informational double flow” served as a ruling instrument “inherent to the systemic effort of the regime to achieve total control” and to “improve its functioning and stability, based on endogenous feedback.” 

Propagandists and agitators received training beyond that on offer in the public education system. “Party Education” paralleled state education in Romania as well as in the other Soviet bloc countries. In the words of General Secretary Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in a speech before the Romanian Workers’ Party Congress of February 1948, “we should grant the appropriate attention to Party education, in order to elevate cadres who are at once honest and vetted, with a solid ideological training.” Nearly three decades later, the rector of the inspirationally-named Gheorghiu-Dej Academy elaborated: “Any leadership cadre, no matter what specialized domains he may be active in, is primarily a revolutionary militant, a political man tirelessly engaged in the execution of RCP internal and international policy, and will prove himself to be boundlessly devoted to the Party to our socialist nation, as well as applying in his life the principles of socialist ethics and socialist fairness, of socialist humanism.” The numbers of such militants increased as the decades wore on, perhaps in an attempt to shore up that widening gap between the Party line and the inglorious social and economic realities faced by Romanians. 

Propaganda campaigns followed a set formula. First, the Department defined the group or group to be targeted for the message (“for instance, preschoolers, high school and university students”); then determining the most effective “psychological approach” for target audience; preparing media for each group (“written materials, meetings, public manifestations, and mobilizations”); and, finally, supervising the campaign. Propagandists understood that each group consisted of subgroups, and “active minority” of about ten percent and the remaining “passive majority.” Activists were carefully evaluated for possible promotion within the Party, in which “the development of a critical and self-critical spirit” would serve as a model for the school children. Despite all of this, reality stubbornly resisted “official rhetoric,” inasmuch as “the very core of the ideological myths and wishful thinking around which the Communist regime had been built” consisted of, well, ideological myths and wishful thinking. Tested, Marxist ‘scientific socialism’ proved unscientific and anti-social.

The authors pay particular attention to the universities, which “were at the forefront of this process” of institutionalization. From 1948 on, “propagandist professors were assigned to all area of higher education,” with mandatory courses in “scientific materialism” in every field and during every semester. For example, the Mihai Eminescu School of Literature, named after Romania’s national poet, was founded in order to “train the new generations of prose writers, disconnecting them from the past and national history tradition”—a nationalism separated from all previous generations of the nation, including Mihai Eminescu, who survived in name only, as a sort of vague invocation of patriotic sentiment. Meanwhile, over at the University of Bucharest, students were required to write autobiographies fact-checked and otherwise vetted by supervisory “ideological workers” in the school’s administration. Any “deviation to the Right,” “real or imaginary,” could then be corrected. Peer pressure was added by the Union of Working Youth, whose members were on “a fast track to the higher levels of the social ladder,” with “opportunities for comfortable job in the administration, education, or the army.” The Union became “a genuine lever for control and surveillance of young persons, its alumni including four future Communist Party heads, including Ceausescu—not one a slouch when it came to controlling and surveilling. 

In keeping with the spirit of self-criticism, or at least criticism of their subordinates, Party elites never judged these attempts at institutionalizing Marxist-Leninist ideologies to have been adequate. “The ‘New Man’ did not seem to be able to emerge and function autonomously and required an ongoing effort of the apparatus.” Rather than criticizing the ideology itself, the regime’s raison d’être, they inclined to assume that there must be something wrong with the means in which the ideology was being delivered. And indeed there were several things wrong. Teacher competence was dubious. The crisis of 1956, when Hungarians rebelled and had to be disciplined with Soviet tanks, and the crisis of 1968, when students imitated the protest movements ongoing in the United States and Western Europe, rattled Party leaders. A 1968 Party report admitted that “discrepancies continue to exist between the demands of our developing socialist society and the activity of the Marxist-Leninist teaching staff, between the scientific, ideological and educational resources available to these chairs and their actual contribution to solving social, economic and political problems, as well as to the intellectual life of institutes and universities on the national ideological front.” Horror of horrors, “leftover religious ideas” were still discernible. Universities displayed a tendency, as the authors put it, “to foster views that clashed with scientific materialism” more than any other set of educational institution in the country. Eventually, no less a figure than “Nicolae Ceausescu himself” would chair the Protocol of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party’s Secretariat, which he had charged with the task of improving such things. “Measures will be taken,” the eventual report solemnly intoned, “necessary steps” to reform education, particularly in the social sciences. “Yet, despite all these efforts, things never seemed to get aligned to the was intended and desired by the authorities and the indoctrination apparatus.” Passive resistance often prevailed, as when teachers assigned with political education at the Institute of Art History lingered on the ancient Greeks and never quite got to Marx’s place on the syllabus.

In sum, the “process of ongoing institutional change and never-ending tribulations” was “never fully successful, even by the self-congratulatory standards used by the agents and leaders of the Communist Party” in Romania. The triumphant march of Socialism toward a regime of Communism populated by New Men never made it to its appointed destination. “How difficult it is to implement and maintain a program of indoctrination geared toward social change, even when one controls the entire apparatus of the modern state and ruthlessly runs it on totalitarian principle,” the authors drily remark. Although the RCP’s strategy was more sophisticated than an attempt merely “to indoctrinate the masses or to take control of the government in the traditional revolutionary style” but aimed also to control civil-social groups in order to transform them into “influence bases in society”—mirroring the emphasis on intraparty organization during the pre-revolutionary period—it transpired that individuals “do not act purely based on the scripts and expectations of their formal roles.” In their recalcitrance, they cause “conflicts, dilemmas, and trade-offs” which throw sand into the machine constructed by the ‘social engineers.’ Ruling institutions take on “a life of their own,” despite the intentions and the actions of their founders and overseers. This, despite the fact that the regime established “a special group of people that had their social identities and their careers tied to their places and roles in the system,” and which “defined their social life and structured their relationships with the rest of the society.” To borrow a familiar phrase from the Leninist lexicon, what is to be done?

Why the failure? “The problem was that the interactions generated” among the rulers, their subordinates, and the many groups within Romanian society “incentives, identities, and aspirations that clashed profoundly with the motivation and mission of the organizational units that ideological workers were part of.” A modern state is simple too big and complex for the comprehensive rule the RCP attempted to exert. Longstanding social structures formed a pre-existing system “more resilient than the Marxist ideology was expecting and predicting it to be,” possibly at least in part because human nature is more resilient than Marxism takes it to be. And the failure of the regime to deliver on its promises of increased prosperity made the sacrifices it exacted (the “radical censorship of the late 1980s” being only one example) increasingly unpalatable to ordinary Romanians, detaching even those who had been indoctrinated by the regime from the regime. “People do not see themselves as mere instruments of organizational structures, even if those organizations may be defined in relationship with missions that claim to have historical magnitudes, such as to create a ‘new society’ or a ‘New Man.'” This put the propagandists in an exceedingly awkward position between the Party bosses and the people, neither satisfied with them. The bosses subjected them to regular regulation and assessment while the people regarded them as professional liars in the service of tyranny, a regime of “control, surveillance, suspicion, double talk, and manipulation.” That is, “the need for monitoring, control, and top-down authoritarian management” in such a regime “comes to clash with and undermine the very organization and functioning of the propaganda and indoctrination institutions.”

A “striking question” remains: “Whether the presence of any of the traits associated with ideocracy in a liberal democratic (or simply nonauthoritarian) system denotes the existence of a potential trend toward totalitarianism.” On that, time will tell.

 

 

Notes

1. Peter Bernholz: Totalitarianism, Terrorism, and Supreme Values. New York: Springer International Publishing, 2017.
2. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski: Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956.
3. Such an impulse is not confined to Communist regimes in particular, or even tyrannies generally. The public elementary school attended by your reviewer, not so many years after Makarenko’s article was published, had students sing the ‘school song,’ which contained the lines, “We are students of Forrestdale School, and we all like it very well. / We are to be happy, in our work and play.” That “are to be” phrase always struck him as a bit ominous, even at the age of six.
4. The term Homo Sovieticus was itself invented as an ironic counterpart to “the New Soviet Man,” and the impish Zinoviev sometimes abbreviated it into a slang term meaning, simply, “Homo.”

 

How the Stars at Churchill’s Birth Formed the Constellation of His Life.

Speech at the Birthday Dinner for Sir Winston S. Churchill, The Right Honourable Winston Spencer Churchill Society of Alaska, Anchorage, Alaska, November 30, 2023.

 

The stars I’m talking about tonight have nothing to do with the ones in the sky—with neither astronomy nor astrology. You will be relieved to know that I’m also not talking about the ‘stars’ held up to us by the entertainment industry. I am talking about some prominent individuals born in the year 1874: Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover, Guglielmo Marconi, Carl Bosch, and Chaim Weizmann. Of these men, all but Weizmann became Nobel Laureates.

That year saw Great Britain at or near the zenith of its long imperial history. Queen Victoria’s empire ruled nearly 25 percent of the land on earth with some 33 percent of its population. And of course, Britannia ‘ruled the waves,’ keeping open the sea lanes in a worldwide commercial as well as military and political empire. It was the newly elected prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who had Victoria named Empress of India, a move that rather endeared him to her.

Disraeli was a founder of the modern British Conservative Party. The Conservatives were animated by an aristocratic sense of noblesse oblige. In response to the rise of modern democracy in America and elsewhere, Conservatives implemented the second of the two Reform Acts that widened the electoral franchise. Disraeli himself had been instrumental in the passage of the 1867 Reform Act, which doubled the number of British voters in Parliamentary elections. This began what would later be called “Tory Democracy,” a phrase coined by none other than one of Disraeli’s successors in the prime ministry, Randolph Churchill. Under Disraeli, Tories also began, albeit in piecemeal fashion, another characteristic feature of modern politics, the welfare state, which was intended to stave off the more extreme forms of socialism—a strategy Winston Churchill, as Liberal Party Home Secretary prior to the First World War, would continue. Nor would Conservatives move seriously to cut it back until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s tenure, more than a century after Disraeli.

The dominant foreign policy crisis of Disraeli’s term in office derived from what was called the Eastern Question: Who would benefit from the ongoing decline of the Ottoman Empire? Disraeli wanted to make sure it wasn’t Russia, whose czar would invade Ottoman territory in 1877, hunting in wild mountains of the Balkans, where the Bulgarians and the Serbs had revolted against weakening Turkish rule. Russia won that war; Bulgaria and Serbia got out of the empire. Russia’s push southward alarmed the British, for whom the Mediterranean served as the geopolitical buckle between their island and their own imperial holdings in the East. The Disraeli government’s purchase of the Suez Canal in 1875 was one major piece of British strategy in the region, which also included pressuring the Turks to cede Cyprus to Great Britain. These moves all instantiated a strategy aimed at containing Russia in the south. Disraeli had used the British navy to prevent Russian entry into the Dardanelles, and it is arguable that Churchill’s interest in the Dardanelles during both world wars flowed from similar geopolitical considerations, now centered on Germany but very much with an eye on Russia, too. 

One last thing to recall about Disraeli: He was Jewish—thoroughly ‘assimilated,’ to be sure, but a sort of marker for a man like Churchill, who enjoyed cordial relations with British Jewish leaders throughout his career. Would or could Jews be assimilated into British society, and into European society generally? Disraeli’s example said ‘yes’; the Russian czar and, a few decades later, the French Right and then the Hitlerites would say ‘no.’ Churchill supported both Jewish rights in Great Britain and the right of Jews to a homeland of their own. In a 1920 article, “Zionism versus Bolshevism:  As Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” he quoted Disraeli as saying, “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.” Churchill commended Zionism for providing an alternative to both democratic socialism and communism, movements in which Jewish leaders had gained prominence, following Marx. While Russian czars and, later, the Nazis, would kill Jewish bodies, Churchill worried that Marxism would kill Jewish souls.

In 1874, Herbert Hoover’s America was still recovering from the devastation of the first fully modern war, that new trial of American souls. The French Revolution had begun, and Napoleon had perfected, the democratization of war, following the democratization of civil society, with the mass mobilization of armies that also fought en masse, but the American Civil War had added the devastating power of modern weaponry—long-range rifles, exploding bullets—weapons capable of killing en masse. As it happened, German military strategists denigrated this New-World lesson of slaughter. Americans were incompetent, they said, amateurs at war. When we Germans fight, it is different, as we proved in the Franco-Prussian War, only three years earlier. The German debacles of 1918 and 1944 would prove otherwise, and not only Churchill and Hoover but Marconi, Bosch, and Weizmann would all figure in the world constellation that formed in the twentieth century, as a result of the geopolitical alignment that had crystallized in the last quarter of the nineteenth.

By 1874, however, America was teaching itself another lesson, namely, that the political aftermath of a costly military victory is as important as the victory itself. You must win the peace, too, and Reconstruction of the former rebel states of the South was failing. Churchill would write one of his greatest books on exactly this topic: The Aftermath, part of his monumental history of The Great War. In it, he argued that the aftermath of the Allied victory in World War I left the Eastern Question reconfigured but not resolved—even worsened, given the Bolshevik Revolution—and what might be called the Western Question—What will become of Germany?—resolved, but unsatisfactorily. That is, the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the new regime in Russia menaced Germany, Great Britain, and France immediately, given the Soviet network of Communist Party members in those countries, while Germany remained a potential menace to Russia, Great Britain, and France, given Germans’ resentments over the postwar settlement.

When asked what his strategy was for winning the Second World War, Churchill reportedly said, in an uncharacteristically laconic way, “Drag the Americans in.” A dedicated Quaker whose greatest achievement was to organize the American relief effort in Europe during the aftermath of the Great War, hoping to see that the reconstruction of Europe had a chance not to end as the American Reconstruction had done, Herbert Hoover devoted a decade of his life attempting to present Americans from getting dragged into another cataclysm an effort he chronicled in his long-suppressed memoir, Freedom Betrayed. His great work aiming to win the peace began to falter during his presidency, with the ever-increasing weakness of German democratic republicanism and the beginning of the Great Depression, as Stalin’s Russia hovered to take advantage and the Hitler movement marched on in Germany.

Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany: Both Churchill and Hoover understood the greatest moral and political threat of their careers as statemen: the perverse yoking of modern technology with ideologies purporting to justify aggressive war by mass, mechanized militaries, ideologies that justified the tyrannical form of mass politics—taken together, ‘totalitarianism.’ Both men immediately saw the Soviet Union for what it was: a lethal threat to the lives and liberties of citizens, to all human beings who refused to be subjects of a self-styled “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Churchill equally saw Nazi Germany for what it was, the twin brother of Bolshevism, organized not around hatred of a social class, the bourgeoisie and its ‘capitalism,’ but around the hatred of a race, a race Hitler charged with surreptitiously ruling the United States, Great Britain, and all the republics—ruling them from the banking houses of the capitalism Hitler despised as much as Lenin and Stalin did.

Hoover understood Hitler as a threat, as well. Unlike Churchill, he met the man, describing how certain topics would ‘trigger’ him into a rage. His thumbnail portrait of Hitler in the pages of Freedom Betrayed is a telling description of what a later writer would call Germany’s “insane tyrants.”

Why, then, did they diverge in their strategies in the 1930s? Hoover hoped and expected that the two brother tyrants would commit fratricide, deadlock militarily over Eastern and Central Europe. If so, America’s best course was to stay out of any future European war, as George Washington had recommended. What Hoover didn’t anticipate, and never fully saw, was the close collaboration of Hitler and Stalin in the years immediately prior to the war; nor did he foresee that Stalin and his generals could do to Hitler what Czar Alexander I and his generals had done to Napoleon—allow the winter to wear down his army, then counterattack with a larger army backed by initially shorter supply line. In a way, Hoover’s hope was the photographic negative of Stalin’s who expected, in good Marxist-Leninist fashion, that the capitalist republics of France and Britain and the supposedly capitalist tyranny of Hitler would finish off each other, giving his Soviet Union the opportunity to sweep up the spoils. That is, Hoover and Stalin both indulged in wishful thinking. With his far more realistic analysis of the geopolitics of his time, Churchill frustrated his well-intentioned American rival and his malign Russian enemy—to say nothing of the Axis powers.

A citizen of the least of those future powers, Italy, the class of 1874’s Guglielmo Marconi won a Nobel Prize in 1909 for inventing the first technology that could use radio waves for long-distance communication—radio the only intimate means of mass, democratic communication, the only means by which a stateman can speak to every citizen, every family, one-to-one. Radio enabled Churchill to hold English spirits firm as the RAF and the Luftwaffe fought it out in the English skies. Marconi had acquired funding for his research in London, where he obtained a British patent in 1896 and not incidentally got in touch with the Admiralty, an institution the young Churchill would eventually oversee. The capacity of British naval vessels to communicate over long distances with each other and with bases on shore contributed substantially both to British military preparedness in the years prior to the First World War (in which Italy was an ally) and to the maintenance of the Empire.

Unfortunately, in 1923 Marconi would join the Italian Fascist Party. Mussolini made him president of the Royal Academy of Italy and thereby a member of the Fascist Grand Council. In that post, Marconi went so far as to compare his joining of electric rays into a bundle with the fasces, the joining of rods symbolizing, as Marconi put it, “all the healthy energies of Italy into a bundle, for the future greatness of Italy.” What he didn’t know was that Churchill’s (genuinely) Great Britain and Mussolini’s pseudo-Roman Italy would collide some twenty years later, and that his own discovery would be used by the British statesman to help prevent the future greatness of Italy.

In Germany, the weightier of the Axis powers in Europe, Carl Bosch, another member of the birth-class of 1874, also became a Nobel laureate, in honor of his work in high-pressure industrial chemistry. In the years before World War I, working for the BASF corporation, he figured out how to produce mass quantities of synthetic nitrate, used in manufacturing many products to this day, including the nitrogen fertilizers that helped to feed a substantial portion of the world population. After that war, he extended these techniques to the production of synthetic fuels, which would power German tanks in the next war. Founding and heading the I. G. Farben corporation in 1925, of which BASF became one component, he initially collaborated with the Nazis when they came to power in 1933, receiving a contract to expand production of synthetic fuel. But Nazi anti-Semitism repelled him—a number of his engineer colleagues were Jewish—and this led to his dismissal a few years later, in 1937, after which he descended into depression and alcoholism. He died in 1940. A few years later, I. G. Farben would supply, through a subsidiary firm, Zyklon B gas for the death chambers of the Reich.

The Hitler genocide spurred worldwide support for the Zionist movement, which Churchill had supported for decades. Still another man born in 1874, Chaim Weizmann, became the first president of modern Israel in 1949, after almost exactly a half century’s work on behalf of the Zionism. Born in Russia, Weizmann was a Ph.D. biochemist, an expert on industrial fermentation, especially the process that produces acetone, which is used in the manufacture of cordite explosives. This brought him to the favorable attention of British officials. Churchill, who encouraged Weizmann to mass-produce acetone for use by the Navy in the First World War, had already met Weizmann in 1905 while Churchill was campaigning for a seat in the House of Commons in Manchester, opposing the Conservative Party’s Aliens Bill, which would have excluded Russian Jews fleeing Czarist Russia from Great Britain. Five years later, as Home Secretary, Churchill signed Weizmann’s citizenship papers. More important in Zionist terms, Weizmann became friendly with Arthur Balfour, persuading him to select Palestine as the Jewish homeland in a conversation that occurred in the fateful year of 1914; the Balfour Declaration was issued three years later. The British pushed the Ottomans out of Palestine. In effect, the “Jewish Question” of the twentieth centuries came out of the “Eastern Question” Disraeli had addressed in the previous century. For his part, in a White Paper prepared in 1922, Churchill declared that Jews live in Palestine “of right and not of sufferance,” a right resting upon their “ancient historic connection” to the land.

During the 1930s, anticipating war with Germany, Weizmann wrote a letter assuring British leaders of his firm support in any future conflict, and in 1944 he met with Churchill to discuss the partition of Palestine in the aftermath of that war.

England’s Disraeli, America’s Hoover, Italy’s Marconi, Germany Bosch, the future Israel’s Weizmann: the stars at Churchill’s birth formed the constellation of his life.

 

Postscript

Had Churchill not been Prime Minister during the Second World War, he would be remembered today primarily as a literary figure, author not only of major histories of the world wars but of The River War and The Life of Marlborough. Two other important writers were also born in 1874: G. K. Chesterton and Gertrude Stein, a pair who could scarcely have been more distant from one another in conviction and sensibility. Churchill met Chesterton, although they were never close; the two men concurred in their sympathies with Zionism and their antipathies for Hitler, but Chesterton was a ‘Little Englander,’ not an imperialist, and they took opposite positions on the eugenics controversy that roiled English politics in the years before the First World War. As a Catholic Christian, Chesterton firmly opposed forced sterilization of mentally handicapped persons, whereas Churchill endorsed legislation (which failed) in its favor. The American expatriate Stein, who spent most of her life in Paris, never met Churchill, who traveled in rather different circles. During World War II, Stein became an ardent admirer of Marshall Philip Pétain, head of the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Nazi occupation. She escaped arrest and detention in a concentration camp because she was friendly with one of the French Nazis, who protected her from persecution. One might be forgiven for suspecting that she liked the Vichyites not for any political reason but simply because she would do anything to remain in her beloved France.