Remarks on the Essence of Russian Power

Włodzimierz Bączkowski

Remarks on the Essence of Russian Power

 

Wschód–Orient; Kwartalnik poświęcony sprawom Wschodu, Warsaw (October‒December 1938).

 

I

Vsevolod Ivanov, a deep Russian thinker,1 wrote: “Zavoyevaniya vsiegda byli dla nas ekvivalentom gosudarstvennoy sily.” In his diary, General Kuropatkin calculates that in her recent history Russia has waged a long series of wars that lasted a total of 128 years, of which the wars aimed at expanding Russia’s borders lasted a total of 101 years. During that period there were only 4 defensive wars that lasted only 4.5 years in total. These data, supported by a map of the Russian territorial expansion, preliminarily suggest that Russia’s wars of conquest are the most characteristic manifestation of that state’s power, and an analysis of these wars must necessarily lead to an identification of those elements that embody the essence of Moscow’s power. But when one analyzes Russia’s wars of conquest, one discovers that Moscow usually conquered nations that were either in a state of complete collapse or offered little resistance. Let us take a look at a few examples.

The Kazan Empire fell when it was internally weak, diplomatically isolated, and unable to offer resistance other than defending the walls of Kazan (1551). The Astrakhan Empire did not constitute an organized state organism at all (1556). Siberia was conquered by packs of volunteers commanded by pioneer Yermak (1581). Chulkov, another “Siberian Pizzaro,” completed the conquest of Siberia to the middle areas of the river Yenisei without encountering resistance like that faced by the American conquistadors (1584‒1598). Subjugated in the same way were: the land of the Bashkirs (1586), the land of the Samoyeds, the land of the Tatars, scattered between the River Ob and Yenisei, and that of the Tungus and the Yakuts. At the same time, in the west, the left-bank Ukraine, which was fighting both sides against the middle and was in a state of anarchy, was captured with the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667). A little later, in 1703, Kamchatka was annexed using a method of a light hunting expedition and so was the land of the Koryaks in western Finland, and in 1772 captured was the first part of the weakened, anarchized Poland, whose elite had been bribed.

Georgia was the next one to fall, completely powerless, divided and threatened by the Muslim part of the Caucasus (1801). It was not difficult for Russia to take control of Bessarabia either, at the price of the distant power of Islam and weak Wallachia and Moldova (1812). Conquering the northern colonies of China, located 1,200 kilometers from the metropolis, was no military heroism either. The list goes on.

At the same time, the most puzzling fact is that any resistance stopped Moscow’s victorious march of conquest for a long time, and that the smallest but resilient and morally healthy state-national center was able to hold Moscow in check even though Moscow was much more powerful. The Golden Horde of the 14th and early 15th centuries dominated the mighty Principality of Moscow. Later, for 150‒200 years between the 14th and 17th centuries, tiny Crimea threatened the state that was 10 times larger in terms of population and 20 or 30 times larger in terms of the territory. The famous victory of Peter the Great at Poltava was nothing more than Goliath’s victory over David who had been deprived of his sling. Charles XII, cut off from reinforcements and lacking ammunition, commanding an army of 17,000 men with 4 cannons without a supply of gunpowder, faced Peter’s army of 50,000 rested men with 72 cannons. Moreover, a fatal coincidence — the wounding of the heroic king and the poor organization of Mazepa’s revolt, etc. — reduced the chances of the Swedish victory to a minimum.

Interesting is the history of Russia’s struggle against the North Caucasus. The Empire’s army of 150,000‒200,000 soldiers was fighting against an army of 8,000‒10,000 highlanders, who were not bound by strong bonds of national unity and had no state organization. Nevertheless, the highlanders’ resistance lasted 25 years and was quite bothersome to Russia. Russia also suffered defeats during her conquest of Turkestan’s desolate terrains in the middle of the previous century. Russia’s Pyrrhic victory in the war of 1877‒1878 is a similar phenomenon. To the same category one should include the Russian defeat in 1905, which was only partly caused by spatial difficulties.

On the other hand, in the territory of Russia all expeditions against Russia ended in the invader’s retreat or dispersal. Żółkiewski quit before completing his tasks, which resembled the retreat of the great army of Napoleon in miniature. Thanks to his halo of invincibility, the great god of war avoided Sedan. The Kiev Expedition is the only example of a retreat carrying in itself the seeds of a defeat of the temporarily victorious enemy. Intervention expeditions during the revolution were repelled or they withdrew from Russia. The English retreated from Arkhangelsk and the same happened to the Odessa coalition. The Japanese retreated from Transbaikal and the Amur region with their tail between their legs, leaving behind the legend of Ataman Semyonov and the Volochayevskiye dney blown up by propaganda. It is a kind of a miracle that Russians maintained the state unity of the Russian Empire during 1917‒1921.

The role of the Russian armed forces in all those events was relatively insignificant and marginal. Though it was always weak, at the same time it was able to win thanks to the highly beneficial side circumstances, the most important of which were: choosing the right moment and intentionally building convenient relations. Hence, we are faced with the phenomenon of Russian power, which lies somewhere outside formal military force. Trotsky’s saying that Russia is neither a nation nor a state, but a continent does not explain the whole issue; it is only one of the details that make Russia’s situation easier. In addition to the spatial and occupation-garrison difficulties, there are forces that can push off the enemy even in times of great internal difficulties such as Smuta and expand their political influence in times of the greatest intensification of the internal contradictions, which was the case during the era of war communism with taking political control of Outer Mongolia and later, under different circumstances, of Chinese Turkestan.

 

II

But to explain the essence of Russian power we cannot remain on the surface of facts and not reach deeper into the Russian spirit. At first, we must comprehend the following facts.

When it comes to the state culture (but not exclusively) Russia, whose main state-forming processes took place east of Moscow, is an Asian state, only superficially and externally tainted by Europeanism. From Russia’s Asian character originates the Russian people’s peculiar materialism with overtones of mysticism. And this is the source of two characteristics of the Russian collective life: the inability to sacrifice one’s life in a struggle for national or state ideals and the seeking of alternative methods of struggle while avoiding armed struggle, which requires blood and the greatest sacrifice. This alternative method of fighting is political action. Carried out using various methods, it is extremely perfidious and ready to use mass acts of violence of all kinds which reduce political action to a special kind of irregular war. Moscow’s cultural ties through Mongolia with China and India support this kind of method of fighting with the vast legacy of the classical Orient, which could surpass any other center of world culture when it comes to this field of creativity.2 The semi-mythical Kauṭilya’s work Arthashastra, dating back to the Vedic period, teaches extremely perverse methods of governance, in comparison to which Machiavellianism, their European counterpart, seems like naive attempts at Christian ethics using the method of intentionalism. There must be a goal that justifies the means. In Kauṭilya’s work, attainment of any goal, provided that it is set by a man’s will, sanctifies the means. Ethical considerations are immaterial. In addition to this source of Russia’s Asiatic Machiavellianism in political action, there are also its Chinese sources, which advance a tactic for disorganization so sophisticated that it is unattainable to Europeans. It utilizes, for instance, sensual music as a means for moral disarmament of the enemy.

One Chinese writer says that all that is good in the enemy must be disorganized. Representatives of the highest strata are to be forced to commit shameful misdemeanors, unbecoming of their positions, and then their crimes are to be exposed when necessary. Contact must be made with the most corrupt men among the enemy. The enemy government must be disturbed, discord and discontent must be sown among its subjects, and the younger subjects are to be turned against the elders. It is also necessary to try to ensure that the enemy army is always short on provisions and uniforms. Music is to be played to soothe the enemy and debauchees are to be sent to bring about his ultimate fall. Suggestions, gifts, and courtesies are not to be skimped on. Cheating is allowed when necessary in order to find out about the enemy’s situation. Money is not to be spared, for the more one spends, the greater the benefit — this money is invested at a great interest. Last but not least, spies should be present everywhere.

According to the Chinese writer, he who possesses such instruments of action, who knows how to use such methods and sow discord and strife everywhere, only he actually has the right to govern; he is a treasure to the ruler and a support to the state.3

It should be added, however, that the potent injections of the state culture and of the classic Far-Eastern Orient which Moscow received in the era of the Mongol yoke do not exhaust the sources of Moscow’s sophisticated arch-Machiavellianism. The lack of strong influence of the Latin West, coupled with the semi-oriental influence of the rapidly collapsing Byzantine Empire, created a kind of a cultural void in Moscow, which could not be filled completely by the Far East of India and China. It was filled by Moscow’s spontaneous cultural creativity, which followed the path set by the impulse of the magnificent, enormous, but also highly mechanical culture of the hyper-empire of Genghis and Tamerlane.

 

III

 

The history of the great armies of Genghis and his successors operating in the territory of present-day Russia can be considered an expression of the armed forces of the Eurasian inland. The following reflections will show the dependency of Russia’s military methods on the Mongol-Tatar ones as well as fully support the general statements made so far.

The armies of the world’s greatest warriors, Genghis and Tamerlane, almost never suffered defeats. Partly because the army was put into action at the final stage, when the troops were given the relatively easy task of completing the pacification of the country to be conquered. The Mongols and Tatars would enter the arena of the military operations only after very long reconnaissance coupled with sabotage and disorganization. That reduced the army’s task to just confirming the actual state of affairs. In his newly published book Major Zatorski writes that long before the beginning of the hostilities, information about the enemy was collected to analyze his situation. The physiographic, military, political, economic, social, and religious factors were studied in detail so that the Mongols could begin to act on the basis of concrete data. That top-quality preliminary reconnaissance gave the Mongol commanders thorough knowledge on the overall conditions, means, and resources in the area of their operation, and at the same time familiarized them with the enemy troops’ organization, armament, tactics, and mood. That awareness of the opponent’s actual situation gave them plenty of opportunities for success and emboldened them. In addition to the military intelligence, there were also merchants, either placed permanently in the field and supplied with cheap and good merchandise, or traversing the enemy’s land as traveling merchants. They would go to all places and establish relations with the locals and the enemy army. Scouts drew sketches and terrain descriptions, which were supplemented by fugitives and deserters. Mongol emissaries worked in contact with the headquarters. They fomented tribal, district, national, and religious feuds to provoke unrest among the population and revolts within the army. At the same time, Mongol diplomats sought to isolate the enemy by separating him from his allies.4

Soviet General Svechin discussed the topic of the Mongols’ strategy. He observed that the Asian strategy required a far-sighted and perfidious policy. Any measure was considered good insofar as it led to military success. The Mongols did not skimp on bribes or promises; they used every means to cause a clash of different dynastic interests. Last but not least, Svechin states that probably any larger military expedition was undertaken only when there was certainty that deep cracks had appeared in the neighbor’s state organism.5

The relationship between the Mongols’ strategy and Russia’s war tradition is quite clear and can be retraced in the history of the Russian guard at the court of Kublai Khan, the Russian khans’ detachments of the Golden Horde and of the Muscovite detachments in Tokhtamysh’s army.

Prince Golitsyn, a member of the war scientific committee at the general staff in Saint Petersburg, writes in his introduction to General Ivanin’s book (O voyennom iskustvie i zavoyevaniyakh Mongolo-Tatar i sredne-azyatskikh narodov pri Chingiz-Khanie i Tamerlanie [Saint Petersburg: 1875]) that Ivanin’s work explains how the Russians partly adopted Genghis’s war system and how it became their military custom during the two centuries of Tatar captivity during the period before the reforms of Peter I.

In his discussion on this topic, General Svechin writes that the Russians came to deeply respect the eastern shooting technique; the waging of the war from the inside; and the division of the army into large regiments, the right flank regiment and the left flank regiment, the avant-garde, and the reserve; and the organization of the light cavalry, which also fought in the capacity of the infantry. They learned to pay great attention to the intelligence service and protection.

Moscow’s adoption of the Mongol methods was confirmed in a slightly different way by Milukov, a historian of Russian culture, who in his discussion of the pre-Peter times, wrote that if the Muscovite dukes had been asked what they would do once they were free (of Mongol captivity) they would probably have been unable to come up with any program other than the old, traditional one that had become their instinct: to seek and acquire even more, to deceive and use force, with only one goal in mind — to gain as much power and money as possible.6

As a matter of fact, the times of Peter the Great and his successors did not bring anything new into Russia’s customs or tactics. The old methods were just thinly veiled in European forms. The old content remained, which, according to Milukow, had become an instinct. Peter the Great attached great importance to operating on the enemy’s communication routes. For that purpose, he created special detachments of top soldiers. Peter I’s maxim was that seeking armed combat was a dangerous thing as everything could be lost in an hour and that therefore it was better to retreat than to engage in an all-out gamble.

The same tendency to avoid putting the army at the mercy of fate and to instead focus on good intelligence, sabotage, disintegration, and political action was manifested in 1785 in Potemkin’s demand to avoid fighting against Frederick William, to use light cavalry, to cut off the rolling stock transporting provisions, etc.

The huge increase in the number of spies, political police ranks, and sabotage instruments in the Russian state structure was discussed by, for instance, the communist historian Pokrovsky. According to him, during the Romanov Dynasty, the prikaz taynykh del (ministry of secret affairs) and all kinds of secret offices and expeditions that followed its orders throughout the 18th century were almost at the helm of the entire state. In the 19th century, all those secret offices were handed over to the gendarmerie corps and the police department. The tayny prikaz had been given great power at the very beginning, during the reign of the first Romanovs. Even members of the boyar duma, that is members of the Council of State, stayed clear of that prikaz and did not deal with its affairs. Thus, that prikaz was beyond the Moscow Council of State’s control. It was subordinate directly to the tsar, and its officials had in fact more power than members of the Council of State.

We know from Russian history about the role and character of the oprichnina in the era of Ivan the Terrible. Together with the prikaz taynykh del, it constitutes one continuous chain of the centuries-long history of the Russian GPU — that ancient institution of Mongol origin which was a large and effective cell of the military intelligence of the greatest warrior in the world — Genghis. One cannot overestimate the role of this institution in the Russian state’s structure. In fact, it is a kind of an independent, partly covert premiership divided into a number of state administration cells and constituting the main pillar of the white and red tsarism and a source of its power.

The history of Muscovite diplomacy clearly proves the use of extremely cunning tactics. The surviving instructions given by Ivan the Terrible to Aleksei Mikhailovich and delivered to the latter by Muscovite messengers commanded the envoys to lie about the power and possessions of the Muscovite tsar. The history of that diplomacy and the operations conducted abroad abound in examples of kidnappings of people from abroad.

In 1660, “liquidated” abroad was the son of the Moscow boyar Ordin-Nashchokin who had escaped from Moscow to Europe. In the early 18th century, Tsarevich Alexei, son of Tsar Peter, was kidnapped by Russian spies and diplomats. He was brought to Saint Petersburg and murdered there by his father’s order. In 1709, there was an attempt to secretly assassinate Charles XII. About a dozen years later, Colonel Wojnarowski was murdered abroad. During Catherine’s reign, Princess Tarakanova, a pretender to the Russian throne, was kidnapped from abroad and drowned in the casemate of the Peter and Paul Fortress. During the reign of Nicholas I, Russian snoops with diplomatic passports kidnapped and murdered Russian revolutionaries, including General Kotzebue, who was murdered in Paris. In accordance with the same tradition and customs, Simon Petlura was murdered in Paris in 1926, Generals Kutepow and Miller were kidnapped, and Wrangel was poisoned. In different locations and under different external circumstances, the GPU inspired the assassination of T. Hołówka, killing two birds with one stone by setting the Poles at variance with the Ukrainian minority and liquidating the dangerous expert on Russia and advocate of anti-Russian activism. But the most interesting in this respect is the Polish-Muscovite history. Abductions of Polish senators and other ways of liquidating people inconvenient for Russia have a long and mysterious history in Poland.

One should bear in mind that the Muscovite sabotage plans were an important factor also in the history of the Polish-Russian and Polish-Cossack conflicts in old Poland. Twenty years before B. Khmelnytsky’s uprising against Poland, Patriarch Theophan, on his way from Moscow to Constantinople, of Moscow’s initiative, took oaths from the Russo-Cossack chieftains who swore that they would not fight against monoreligious Moscow and would turn their weapons against Latin Poland. The same applies to the history of the Haydamaka movements, inspired and subsidized by Moscow and even led by Moscow agents. Peter the Great used the Haydamakas for political purposes. The fact that Jaworski (Melchizedek) was an instrument of the Russian court is evidenced by Catherine’s appeal to the general public to start the slaughter and by virtue of which Zheleznyak became the leader of that movement. Herrman, who is most unfavorable to the Polish cause, does not hesitate to accuse the Russian government of using that criminal measure to achieve long-term political purposes.

Characteristic here is the history of the sabotage conquest of Poland by Saint Petersburg in the late 18th century. That conquest had nothing to do with a military action — decisive there were the large-scale sabotage operation and the disintegration of the Polish ruling class. Obtained from the Igelstrom Archive by Kościuszko insurgents, the receipts confirming payments to Russian agents and dignitaries and representatives of the then Polish aristocracy and parliamentary circles reveal the immensity of the moral corruption of the then Polish elite and the skillful and large-scale campaign conducted by the Russian ambassadors to Warsaw. The approximately 110 names on the receipts from the Russian Embassy’s archive include the king, Prince Czartoryski, Primate Łubieński, Ogiński, Father Antoni Czetwertyński, Province Governor Dzierżbicki, Bishop Kossakowski, Raczyński, Radziwiłł, Potocki, Primate Poniatowski, Castellan Ossoliński, etc. To these 110 names one should add an entire galaxy of lower-rank functionaries of the police and general administration offices that were in Russia’s service and received regular monthly payments for many years.7

Equally educational is the history of using sabotage to fight off Napoleon’s invasion as well as of the disintegration of the German ranks in the French emperor’s army. As early as in 1910, Russian spies recruited the Prussian Minister of the Police, Gruner, who carried out pro-Russian and anti-French propaganda in Germany. Clausewitz had been a Russian agent since 1812‒1814. Major von der Goltz organized a large anti-French conspiracy in Yorck’s corps and throughout Germany. At that time, most prominent German scholars and writers were paid by Russia to publish books, pamphlets, and a periodical that refuted the war bulletins issued by Napoleon’s headquarters. The Russian propaganda called Napoleon the enemy of humanity and the Antichrist. The decrease in grain prices in northern and eastern Germany was used at that time by Russia to ignite anti-French German nationalism. [The other forms of sabotage included?] tampering with the locks on the canals which were used to float the rolling stock of the great army, setting depots on fire, organizing mass desertions, outfits of agitators, the German committee in Moscow headed by Stein, etc. Last but not least, the Berezino Operation, namely the encircling of the Latin nucleus of the great army, was planned based on the effects of the sabotage operation. At the same time, a secret alliance was made with Metternich to spare each other in combat. The invincible god of war was defeated thanks to the destruction of the communication routes, the looting of the area occupied by Napoleon, the fire of Moscow, the peasant uprisings, and the transformation of regular war into guerilla warfare. The climate and the large distances were actually secondary factors. It should be added that in the fight against Napoleon, the Russian sabotage also covered the area of former Poland and affected the Poles and the Southern Slavs.

Svechin makes interesting remarks on the source of Napoleon’s failures. The French Emperor, who was clearly getting on in years during the invasion of Russia, forgot to use in his fight against Russia the Russian peasants’ rebellion against serfdom. According to other sources, Napoleon also abandoned the plan of triggering an uprising in Ukraine, which the French agents and the French ambassador in Istanbul had been working on extensively.8

In a similar manner, the Russians defeated an incomparably weaker enemy, who was not even aggressive, namely Shamil in the North Caucasus. According to Svechin, the clever ethnic and class policy carried out by the Russians in the Caucasus since 1847 destroyed the Highlanders’ sense of unity and the strength of their opposition.

During the Crimean War, the Russians also triggered anti-Turkish unrest in Greece by granting 300,000 rubles to the Greek war party. The Kurdish chieftains were bribed too. Russian agents operated in Bulgaria, burning down Varna warehouses storing supplies along with the entire city. Back then, the Russians were preparing to “let the Poles free” in order to gain their favor. But the most interesting is the desire to turn the English and the French against one another. Before the eyes of the English, solemn funerals of the Zouave were organized near Sevastopol, frequent ceasefires were announced in the French section, and fraternization between Russian and French officers was staged. In the end, the English became convinced that the French were seeking to sign a separate peace with Russia.

The Russian war of 1877‒1878 was based on sabotage and disintegration assumptions. The Russians hoped that Turkey would disintegrate as a result of sabotage conducted by the Balkan Slavs and Turkish Christians and that that would turn the Russian army’s march toward Istanbul into a triumphal one. The resistance of the Turkish garrison in Plewno caused a total collapse of the morale of the Russian army and commanders.

From the vast number of examples of Russia’s sabotage activity in Europe and around the world, let us select the example of Russia’s bribing the French press. The Russians were extraordinarily generous and perfectly comprehended the effectiveness of [that form of] propaganda. In the documents publicized by the Bolsheviks to discredit tsarism, one can read that the Russian financial agent in Paris, Raffalovich, wrote in 1904 that over the first months, the monstrous scale of the corruptibility of the French press was going to cost 600,000 francs. According to the 1906 Russian Ministry of Finance, the subsidies to the French press cost over 2,000,000 francs in 1905 alone.

 

IV

The year 1920 is a continuation of the history of Russian sabotage, behind which lags the mediocre army, which is merely an addition, a kind of a large pacification pack. B. Shaposhnikov, who very discreetly argues with Tukhachevsky’s idea of the “march beyond the Vistula,” quite clearly attacks the naive, European views of the defeated Red Napoleon. The 1920 defeat did not stem from the army’s weakness or poor equipment, which is what Tukhachevski blamed it on, but from the insufficient revolutionization of Poland. According to Shaposhnikov, the Soviets had overestimated the level of the revolutionization of the internal situation in Poland at that time. That overestimation of the situation in Poland was manifested in the excessive (overwhelming) offensive operation.9 This opinion is shared by L. Trotsky. In Shaposhnikov’s attitude one can easily sense the conviction that one should not look for the source of the defeat in the army’s condition, which is of secondary importance. The crux of the matter is what should precede the war and almost completely predetermine its outcome. Also symptomatic is the cult of Clausewitz visible in Shaposhnikov’s work. A student of the Moscow doctrines during the watershed years of 1812‒1814, Clausewitz was shaped by the Moscow-Mongol war tradition.10 His views on the integral connection between politics and war and between political slogans and armed struggle gained full recognition not in Germany, but in Russia. Paul Rohrbach criticizes the 1914 German war against Russia for its lack of ideals.11 On 7 November 1938, Krasnaya Zvezda wrote that Clausewitz’s formula was properly appreciated by the Marxist classics. It was in light of Marxism-Leninism that it was rightly elevated from the realm of dogmatics to the realm of statutory action.

The enemy is to be disorganized to such an extent that he can be defeated with bare hands or shapkami zakidat. And vice versa — this is also the source of the eternal weakness of the Russian army.

The USSR’s ethnic policy is based on the Mongol tradition that runs deep. Historical sources give interesting examples of how the Mongol-Tatar authorities approached the religious life of the nations which they conquered. In the Khans’ capital of Beijing, in Karakorum, or even in the Golden Horde, temples of all faiths did just fine and enjoyed full freedom, while at the same time, in all probability, succumbing to spiritual and state assimilation. Published in 1543, Stoglav contains an interesting regulation, namely that the Muscovite common folk had to take their hats off as entering a Christian temple with a hat on was considered a “damned legacy of Muhammad.” The Mongol law provided for severe punishments for thieves of church property and for priest-offenders. In Polish history, only Casimir the Great adopted a similar approach toward the Cherven Cities. In light of this tradition, the Leninist ethnic policy is a clever trick to save the great empire falling apart in the heat of the revolution by assuming the duty of representing the ethnic form of the peoples of Russia, which are attached primarily to this folkloristic form. At the same time, that policy aimed — through the creation of union republics on the Empire’s border, which had their ethnic majorities outside the USSR — at sucking these foreign majorities into the Russian state organism.

In addition to the phenomenon of the Russian ethnic policy, special attention should be paid to the ubiquity of the Comintern, which is following an old Russian principle: Moskva vsemu miru galava, which was beautifully put by the august Derzhavin: “O Ross, shagni i vsa vselennaya tvoya.” The essence of the Comintern’s tactics is to, while bearing in mind the main idea, try to achieve it by means of most extreme compromises. Catholics are to fraternize with communists and Freemasons with the Pope — as long as this brings them closer to the goal. One of the founders of the Comintern, L. Trotsky, spoke in a very characteristic way to the young agitators sent to Ukraine in 1919.

“Comrades!” he addressed them and went on to say that what was being discussed completely openly in Russia could be said only in a whisper in Ukraine, or better still, should not have been discussed at all. The ability to be silent is also a form of elocution. He urged the young comrades going to Ukraine to remember that no agitating job was more difficult than that in Ukraine. That was the third time that strong cadres were being sent there, and each time with ever new tactics and tricks. Specifically, the agitators’ work was to consist in following the following principles: 1. Not imposing communes on the Ukrainian peasant until the Soviet authority had solidified there. 2. Careful introduction of communes in former estates but under the name of cartels or associations. 3. Maintaining that there was no communism in Russia. 4. As counterbalance to pro-independence Petlura and others, the agitators were to claim that Russia also recognized Ukrainian independence, but on condition of the presence of Soviet authority in Ukraine, and also that Petlura was selling Ukraine to bourgeois states. 5. Only an idiot or a provocateur would nonsensically say everywhere and on every occasion that the Soviets were fighting Petlura. Sometimes, until Denikin’s complete defeat, it was better to spread rumors that the Soviet authorities were in alliance with Petlura. It should be added that Trotsky gave that speech to a group of young female students.12

Completely in line with Russian history and strategy, the Russian politicians are trying to avoid a war in the Far East and entangle Japan on the Chinese mainland. The Chinese are like the Balkan Slavs, who are to blow up Japanese imperialism, flank it from the south, drown it in a sea of blood, and start the period of the Far East Poltava. By taking the initiative in the fight against the Japanese, the naive heroes of Changkufeng were trying to destroy those clear, simple principles based on age-old traditions and many examples. Those “fools” could have involved the Soviet Union in major military games in which Russia would most naturally suffer a defeat. Stiffened by the influence of the Western military theories, Blucher, like Tukhachevsky, did not understand the subtle, unfounded Russian tactic and got lost in simple deliberations on the frontal attack (tarannoy taktika), which was very fashionable in the Middle Ages, when people still believed in God’s judgment. Also, reading Shaposhnikov’s 1924 critique of Tukhachevski, one could predict Tukhachevski’s fall — without, of course, denying the existence of other reasons for his liquidation.

There is also the issue of the mass purge in the Red Army, which is difficult to fully explain. But it seems that this phenomenon can be explained, at least partly, with the genesis of the communist revolution in Russia, presented as a reaction to the economic backwardness of tsarist Russia, to the covert disintegration of the Empire under the influence of ethnic separatisms and as a reaction to the 1905 and 1914 war defeats. In this light, the restorative tendencies exhibited by Tukhachevsky and his supporters — former tsarist officers, the ideological influences of the Russian émigré community, and, last but not least, the inertial persistence of the remainders of pseudo-Russianness in Russia (all of which manifested themselves in the restitution of a number of elements of the military life characteristic of tsarist Russia or European armies) had to make the Kremlin rulers concerned about the danger of a return to the old, bankrupt sources of defeats.

The Kremlin seems to understand that what is generally considered an expression of military power and order, is not fully that in the case of Russia. The period of order and of the great and uniform tsarist authority in the era of Nicholas I was a period of incredible weakness of the Russian army, not only because of the poor organization of the sanitary service and food provision, which resulted in the death of two-thirds of the conscripts, but predominantly because of the great uncertainty of the officer cadre, which made it necessary to use the German element on a mass scale. In 1862, Germans constituted 5.84 percent of the lieutenants and 27.8 percent of the generals. What is more, in the war history of Russia there is the wonderful period of Suvorov, and above all the period of Potemkin. In the mid-18th century, during the heyday of the Prussian drill, the latter introduced civic education into the ranks and ordered officers to be friends to their soldiers instead of personifications of strict discipline. Corporal or severe punishments were forbidden. During drills, the soldiers were to stand calmly and at ease, and instead of rifle drills — skoravo zarada i vernavo priklada. Precisely in despotic Russia, the democratization of the relations in the army is in a way and to a certain extent the only way to create a minimal degree of an atmosphere of agitation and to justify the liberation theme under the banner of which Russia has always carried out her conquests and achieved military successes. Berson Otmar was also formally right when he wrote that the propaganda of peace was carried out sui generis in the Russian army, from which he drew far-reaching conclusions. But there is no doubt that Ryszard Wraga rightly attacked Otmar for spreading the harmful conviction about Russia’s peaceful tendencies. The source of the whole dispute is that one should judge whether Russia is preparing for a fight or is ready to fight at a given moment not according to her army’s moral and physical condition, but according to her capability for disorganizing her neighbors.

The history of Napoleon’s army or the purges carried out in France during 1792‒1793 are examples of the sometimes positive influence of the democratization of the relations in the army.13 It seems that the changes taking place in the Red Army are not chaotic madness, but phenomena that are justified and inseparable from the very ground on which they are occurring. The appointment of Voroshilov’s deputies (Shchadenko, who specializes in disorganization operations and is an expert on irregular warfare, and the Jew Mekhlis, who is a representative of “fine work” rather than the tarannoy taktika — both of them politruks at that), is in full harmony with the nature of things in Russia. The processes taking place in Russia are processes of crystallization which testify to Russia’s rapid preparations for combat and war. They are processes of eliminating all sources of internal differences.

Of course, the cost of the temporary (and perhaps long-lasting) disorganization of the army is great.

 

V

 

The great Polish Romantic thinkers were well aware of the essence of Russia and her power. Adam Mickiewicz clearly saw Russia’s Asian character, the rudiments of the planned economy, etc. Krasiński went deeper and farther. According to him, Russia was a product of the most sinister and destructive elements in history. The sophisticated corruption of the late Byzantium filtered into the Russian church and diplomacy. The Mongol khans’ merciless and cold ferocity became the springboard of the Russian administration. The communal organization of the first Slavs survived among her peoples. Russia is an immense communism, ruled by both theocratic and military authorities. And these authorities are on a par with the 1793 terror in terms of the level of ruthlessness, but it is infinitely superior to it in terms of their organization and ability to persevere. Danton, Marat, and Robespierre pale in comparison to such revolutionaries as Ivan the Terrible, Peter I, or Nicholas I. If Russia is to stop being a scourge ready to fall on the Church, civilization, and the world, there is only one way that this can happen: she has to be rendered completely powerless. According to Krasiński, any peace made before this final result will only worsen the situation and push the enemy to new and more terrible actions. Humiliated and unmasked but not weakened, it will grab a different weapon and before repeating its failed attack on Constantinople, it will prepare other paths for himself, darker and more effective. It will shake hands with all secret societies, conspiracies, and colluders. It will pay for it with its gold and support it with its intrigues. In short, Krasiński sums up, it will bestow all its power to the social revolution to overthrow the dynasties which have recently broken their covenant with it or spurned it.14

In 1856, Mierosławski wrote that the clearest symptom of Russia’s supremacy is the fact that her destructive thought is constantly and gradually penetrating the spheres most unfavorable to her rule and the most irritated peoples which are most watchful for her incursion.

According to Mierosławski, that almost complete impotence of all the material efforts of France and England against the state three times weaker technically than either of them should be ascribed to that principal disorganization, that invisible malaria spread by the Russian doctrines through all the upper social classes of the West until they finally reach the deepest layers of the Western society. The only option is to contradict these doctrines, and this is what makes them so dangerous. The Russian idea, in its essence, is a Mongol Ceasarship of the old world, that is, a denial by way of absorption of all the laws of humanity. According to Mierosławski, it is too cunning to act openly so it settles for implanting its own hatreds and revulsions into the heart of the nations whose souls it is reaching for. How many evil instincts, how much dark envy, how much spiritual renunciation, and, predominantly, how many weaknesses have unknowingly began to serve this tempter, who at the same time is casting aspersions on everything that stands in his way.15

In reborn Poland, only J. Piłsudski neared Z. Krasiński’s level of understanding the essence of Russian power and Russian means of action. When he talked about foreign agents at the 1927 Kalisz Congress, he had predominantly Russia in mind. He observed that foreign agents were a constant, daily phenomenon, year after year and day after day. He said that foreign agents were such a big part of the life of [Poland?] and so carefully arranged in relation to her that [she?] had to act, so to speak, concurrently with those foreign agents.

Described by D’Abernon, J. Piłsudski’s attitude toward Weygand, which Piłsudski justified with the peculiar nature of the war against Russia, where even the experience of the greatest European General from the Franco-German front would be of little use and where a colonial commander would sooner achieve something, confirm J. Piłsudski’s awareness of the special nature of Russia’s methods of fighting.

 

VI

This is how our reflections on the essence of Russian power could be summarized: The main Russian weapon, which has determined her durability, strength, and possible future victories, is not the factor of military strength, which is usually what counts in Europe, but a deep political action consisting in sabotage, disorganization, and propaganda. On this aspect of Russia’s defense focus the efforts of most Russian minds, those efforts which in Europe are mainly limited to deliberations on the topic of maneuvers and operations.

The Russian army is in fact Russia’s secondary weaponry. Although assessing Russia’s strength based on the condition of her army at a given time can often be the right thing to do, it is erroneous in principle and in the long run. Even though quantitatively the Russian army is an equivalent to the Western European armies (universal military service, etc.), in fact, its task is to only protect the defensive and offensive operations of the Russian state, usually carried out on its flanks, in the avant-garde of the avant-garde, or deep behind the lines, and aimed at disintegration of the enemy’s defensive capabilities. After all this, comes the triumphant march of the horde, which, murdering the defenseless (like Suvorov slaughtered inhabitants of Praga), gives the impression of a disciplined army of the classic type. In Russia, the armed forces and their condition do not fully translate to military successes and territorial acquisitions. Hence, the current repoliticization of the army and the removal of the military technicians lacking political culture from top positions should be considered a phenomenon natural for Russia.

Having said that, one should bear in mind also the spatial conditions in Russia, which, same as in the era of Genghis, do occasion certain phenomena in the life of the Russian defense force, moderating its decisiveness and the consequent effectiveness of its small action teams, such as guerrilla units and sabotage centers, stabilized abroad and forced to act in isolation from the main forces, without reserves and independently. Also important here is Russia’s lack of an established spiritual center. Deep down, Russia is a nomad — her capital could be moved into kibitkas and handed over to the enemy for decades without triggering those moral-political upheavals to which any Western European agrarian nation would be prone in such a situation.

Russia can only be threatened by a kind of weapon that: a) is an equivalent to the Russian sabotage methods of action, b) is a weapon consisting in great political slogans and great ideas, of which to the fore should come the idea of freedom, which has the most disorganizing effect on Russia. Combining the content of the great idea of freedom of the peoples conquered by Russia with the technique of political decomposition of Russia, Prometheism is a weapon that is the only right response to the Russian-Soviet methods and tactics. Therefore, it is no wonder that the campaign conducted by Russian agents in her neighboring countries, predominantly in Poland, seeks to discredit the Promethean idea and to isolate it in anti-Soviet societies. The assassination of S. Petlura, Ramishvili, and T. Hołówka is one kind of the destruction of this defensive and offensive weapon, which is most dangerous for the Soviets. Disintegration from within, bribery, and organization of opinions hostile to Prometheism among the Slavophile circles, or exertion of influence through former organic groups which had a conciliatory approach toward Russia — this is the second method of destroying Prometheism. The anarchization of the ethnic relations within the states surrounding Russia perfectly matches the goals and objectives of the Russian sabotage. How deeply such methods can and must run should be judged by the reader on the basis of this study, which briefly illustrates Russia’s most essential method of operation — sabotage, disorganization, and secret blows.

 

AFTERWORD

 

At the end of the article, the reader deserves some clarification so as not to wrongfully accuse the author of attributing to Russia and her fighting methods features that either adorn most imperial states in the world or are skillfully used by other states distant from Russia, both culturally and geographically. It should be added, however, that the old Roman principle of divide et impera is of Eastern origin. It dates back to the period of Rome’s fighting in the Middle East. The Jewish Talmud or the Jewish cunning — a proverbial phenomenon inherited by many nations — is an oriental phenomenon. The English colonial policy is a result of years of experience gained in India, etc., at a great price and brought [to England] by such talents as Kipling, who, like no one before him, sensed the antinomy between the Eastern and Western worlds:

 

West is West, and East is East

And they will never meet.

 

In light of this general principle formulated by the great and brilliant synthetist and expert on the East, any tendency to level the East with the West, to equate the Eastern strategy with the Western strategy seems to be a product of ignorance or total incomprehension of the classical Far East, which is radically different from the East of the Turks, who are culturally young and, in their straightforwardness, more European than Europe.

General Baden-Powell, with his kindergarten for the colonial empire’s Intelligence Service in the form of the scouting movement, is a product of India, the Oriental colonies, and the needs of the British Empire in the cunning Asian strategy.

How different is the European tradition in this regard! The Middle Ages with God’s judgment and the attack of all forces concentrated in one point without keeping any units in the reserve. The Teutonic Knights at Grunwald, chained and attacking the Polish forces in one great mass, faced the strategy pursued by the Polish-Lithuanian king and the Tatar cavalry, that is, the [initial] absence [of troops] and the later attack from the flanks. The Schlieffen Plan and the Grandmaison-type strategy were based on the European tradition. An operational maneuver is a combination of strategies, with the emphasis laid on the frontal attack, with a large degree of movement and the moment of surprise being the only things that distinguish it from the classic medieval encounter.

In real life there are no combats of a pure type. In fact, the Eastern and Western strategies are often roughly similar to each other, but the increase in certain phenomena in the former where there is a decrease in the rival strategy — this is what can be seen in reality. The East and Moscow suffer from the elephantiasis of the sabotage, the disorganization action, and so on. The West carries the hump of straightforwardness and action directe, which Russia comments on with the following unflattering proverb: Prostota khuzhe vorovstva.

But both these organisms, the eastern and the western one, resemble each other in all that is represented by the unity of the human race and the community of cultural pragenesis. So it is about determining the number and size of the increases — the fighting methods characteristic of Russia. Undoubtedly, the intensity of these phenomena characteristic of Russia differs depending on the period. The current period is a period of the greatest intensification in Russian history of the element of sabotage, disorganization of the neighboring states, and resorting to the disorganizing methods of using the spoken and printed word. Today’s Russia is the Russia from the vision of Z. Krasiński. It is an unmasked Moscow aware of her weakness and inability to quickly overcome internal difficulties and problems, and which counts on maintaining her state unity and resisting her enemies and external interventions solely by means of disintegrating her more distant and closer neighbors. In fact, on 17 November 1938, the most communist and official [periodical] Pravda, published in Moscow, clearly states that all working men in the world are vitally interested in fostering the ties between the great Soviet nation and the working class on the one hand and the nations of the capitalist countries on the other hand. Pravda also claims that without curbing the reactionary imperialist cliques and defeatists in their own countries, it will be impossible to curb the activity of the disheveled fascist bandits; it will be impossible to effectively fight in defense of the freedom and independence of peoples and in defense of world peace or to firmly oppose the reaction rearing its head in the capitalist countries.