Vulf Plotkin

© Vulf Plotkin

The whys and wherefores of the trials

that Russia went through in the 20th century

Volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt.

1. SOCIETAL ORDERS

The query in the title above may sound superfluous, for it is common knowledge that what happened in Russia was a failed attempt to build communism. This, however, is true only in part: it was indeed an attempt to build something, and something was really built and functioned in a large country for most of the century. What exactly was it, after all? Granted that it was not the promised communism, despite the builders' claim that they had succeeded in erecting socialism as the foundation for the lofty edifice of communism. But unbiased historical research should beware of adopting the vocabulary of those whose actions it investigates, especially if they are strongly motivated ideologically, regardless of whether they are zealous protagonists of ideals they truly believe in or demagogues knowingly deluding the proselytes (cf. F. A. Hayek, The fatal conceit: The errors of socialism, Chicago, 1988, Ch. 7). In order to grasp the full import of what befell Russia as well as a number of other nations in the past century, it is essential to determine what kind of societal order the self-styled "communists", alias bolsheviks, did manage to establish and maintain for seven decades.

The terms "communism" and "communist" belong to the domain of ideology, and in historical research their rightful place is in the study of utopias. Since no society has ever existed that could be characterized in these terms, they are irrelevant to the analysis of actual societal changes constituting the principal concern of historical research. The reality that was called "communist" in the past century had obviously nothing to do with the proclaimed ideal. As for so-called "primordial communism" at the earliest stage in the evolution of mankind, it is merely a romantic myth about the Golden Age of yore. Relations between people in a society differ radically from those between members of a family. Since a tribe is in fact an extended family, intratribal relations are familial, not societal. The notion of "tribal society" is predicated on normal intertribal relations, but these were for all practical purposes non-existent in those times or embryonic at best, because other tribes were often not even perceived as humans. The earliest stage in history can therefore be characterized as pre-societal.

It is customary in Marxist theory to distinguish three societal orders: slavery, feudalism and capitalism. The distinction between them is based on the nature of the propertied class - slaveholders, feudal lords or capitalists, but their common feature is private property, which Karl Marx stigmatized as the ultimate cause of human inequality and exploitation. This classification ran into what seemed at first a minor snag: slavery and feudalism were inseparably intertwined in the earliest known societal order, which functioned for several millennia in the great river civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China, where slave labour was used to accomplish grand projects like river dams or the pyramids, while the land was tilled by serfs. As this phenomenon did not quite fit into the traditional classification, it was somewhat clumsily termed as the "Asian mode of production" in Marxist literature and regarded as a complication which could somehow be accommodated within the canonic theoretical framework. But when theoretical debates were held on this topic among Marxist historians in the late 1920s, the bolshevik rulers of Russia intervened not only to stop the discussion, but to proscribe any mention of the moot phenomenon itself. What could have alarmed them in a seemingly innocuous debate about a problem relating to the remote past in faraway lands?

The answer is that the discussion threatened to lay bare the bolshevik practice and to undermine the very foundations of Marxism. The debated proposal to recognize the "Asian mode of production" as a distinct societal order, with slavery and feudalism as its combinable features, would require its inclusion into all school curricula and textbooks. But widespread knowledge of it would inevitably evoke comparison with the reality of Russia under bolshevik rule. Indeed, by the late 1920s a ramified system of slave labour had been created, known as the Gulag Archipelago, and by the early 1930s the entire peasantry of the country had been turned into serfs. The servitude of industrial and intellectual workers, who remained personally free, was somewhat less harsh, but they had practically no choice of employer after the state had become the sole owner of the entire economy and of all the housing in cities, leaving them free only to choose a subsidiary of the mammoth nation-wide monopoly. In later years other remnants of freedom were curtailed, as laws were introduced making it a crime punishable by a term of slave labour to avoid being employed, to leave one's job without permission from the manager, even to come late to work. The societal order established by the bolsheviks in Russia thus became very similar to the earliest societal order that had existed several millennia before.

There is no reason to surmise that the anachronistic revival of the ancient societal order was intentional. But it was the inadvertent consequence of the abolition of private property and its replacement by all-embracing public ownership, which was hailed as the only remedy against human inequality and exploitation. Herein lies the other, perhaps even more damaging corollary to the revelation of the striking similarity between 20th-century Russia (or, for that matter, the present-day North Korea) and Egypt under the pharaohs. The fact is that there was no private property in any of the river civilizations, where the vital sources of life - land and water - could not belong to any particular person, for they were believed to be the inalienable property of the gods, whose plenipotentiary representative was the emperor. Absence of private property is the common determinant in both societal orders under comparison here, which turn out to be chronologically distant varieties of the same order. The inescapable conclusion is that human exploitation, including slavery as its most vivid manifestation, is quite compatible with the absence of private property.

Karl Marx, a lawyer's son, put legal possession in the foreground, although in socio-economic matters it is generally less important than actual control over production and distribution of produce. Under certain conditions legal possession becomes a mere fig leaf behind which the real master tries to hide, who might be nominally penniless, but whose unrestricted control over what does not belong to him by law stems from his position as the sole interpreter of the absent owner's will. Such a situation, by the way, was depicted by H. G. Wells in When the Sleeper awakes: the legal owner of everything in the world in an age-long lethargy. In the ancient river civilizations the possessors were mythical beings. Public ownership of everything, including slaves and serfs, was practiced by the ancient Spartiates, who were forbidden to own anything personally. It is inconceivable that Karl Marx, a well-educated historian, should have been unaware of slaveholding having been common practice in ancient times in the absence of private property. Why he overlooked what refuted the very foundation of his theoretical construction is anybody's guess. His avowed adherents in Russia invented a new version of the old trick - ownership by the entire nation, whose will, however, could be interpreted only by themselves. Whereas any Spartiate could have a say in the management of the public property, an ordinary Russian risked his life by trying to voice his opinion on how to manage the allegedly national property. Abolition of private property in favour of public ownership thus enabled the actual manager of the property, who neither had nor claimed a legal title to it, to ignore the nominal owner completely.

At the subsequent stages of societal evolution private slaveholding became dominant, notably in Greece and Rome. Later slavery was phased out and replaced by serfdom in the societal order known as feudalism. These developments should be regarded as having taken place within the same societal order. Focusing on private ownership, Marxism based the classification of societal orders on the nature of its subject, i. e. the owner. However, the other side, i. e. the owned object, should also be taken into account. Of course, when the latter is an inanimate thing or an animal, the owner is the only relevant side in the possessive relationship, but ownership of human beings makes the relationship bilateral, with its object no less worthy of attention than its subject. The crucial criterion for the distinction between societal orders is whether humans are legitimate objects of possession. Slavery and serfdom are united by that criterion as varieties of one societal order. The considerable difference between a slave and a serf in their legal status is of course significant, but from the socio-economic viewpoint the right of their owner to make both work for him and to appropriate the products of their labour is much more important.

The societal order that replaced the feudal variety of the above-discussed order bans all forms of owning humans as property and is thus directly opposed to its predecessor by that touchstone. Its traditional designation as capitalism, stemming from the Marxist focus on the private owner's person, fails to reflect the epochal change in the nature of the object of ownership. The only two historically attested societal orders ought to be designated by correlated opposite terms reflecting the crucial distinction between them. The antonyms enthralment and disenthralment appear to be optimal for the purpose and will be used hereinbelow.

The transition from enthralment to disenthralment starts with the abolition of anyone's right to own humans as slaves or serfs, but it is not over as long as the personally free worker still has to assert his right to enter into mutually beneficial contractual relations with the employer, who is often backed by the state. Serfdom was abolished in Western Europe by the late 15th century, but legal restrictions on the worker's rights survived well into the 19th century. The transition thus took about four centuries to accomplish. In the USA the transition began with the abolition of slavery in 1865 and lasted for several decades. At present the transition is under way in many countries around the world. In Russia the process was started by the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and progressed rather slowly till 1917, when it was abruptly stopped by the bolshevik takeover. The country was thrown back to the enthralment order, not just to its pre-1861 form, but to its crudest ancient variety. After the collapse of bolshevik power in 1991 the interrupted transition was resumed, but progress seems to be no faster than before 1917.

2. THE HISTORIC EXPERIMENT: PREDISPOSITION AND GOAL

Transition from one societal order to another naturally entails a confrontation between camps that support or oppose one of the orders. In Russia, however, a peculiar disposition of forces emerged: the revolutionary camp, while rejecting serfdom, was overwhelmingly against the transition to the disenthralment order, regarding it as an evil no better than the detested serfdom. The reluctance to accept the new order was in part due to the inevitable hardships concomitant with any social upheaval. But in Russia it was aggravated by the age-old tradition of Europhobia, which aroused distrust to whatever came from the West.

Rejection of the impending advent of the new order confronted the revolutionary camp with the problem of finding an alternative goal to fight for. It should be noted that there was a point on which the conservatives and the revolutionaries tacitly agreed - Russia was presumed to be too unique to be measurable by alien yardsticks, and its historic destiny could not follow alien paths. Since, however, both real societal orders were rejected, an alternative could only be found in the realm of theoretical hypotheses. The bolshevik faction of the revolutionaries who opted for the Marxian hypothesis offered their compatriots the fascinating prospect of blazing the trail to communism for all mankind to follow. As a result, neither side in the civil war that followed the 1917 revolution fought for the establishment of the disenthralment order in Russia. At the historic crossroads the country thus faced a choice between the familiar evil past and an unknown, yet alluring future. The real historic alternative, however, was quite different from the choice presented to the nation by the bolsheviks: the country could either continue its faltering transition to the disenthralment order, if the "whites" had won the war, or be thrown by the victorious "reds" several millennia back into the slavery-cum-serfdom variety of the enthralment order. The eventual victory of the latter marked the start of a historic experiment, which engulfed Russia, where it lasted for seven decades, then spread to a number of other countries, in some of which it is not over yet.

An experiment of such colossal scope is triggered by social forces pursuing their particular goals, which may be quite different from the underlying historic purpose of the experiment. The objective pursued by the bolsheviks differed not only from that purpose, which was beyond their comprehension, but also from their avowed intention to build a communist society. Indeed, there is not a shred of evidence that the realization of the Marxian ideal was ever seriously considered by the bolsheviks as a practical project. All their efforts were focused on a single goal, namely to build a powerful state under their absolute dictatorship.

The quintessential purpose of the experiment was to test the feasibility of a realistic alternative to the disenthralment order. Since, however, there is no alternative but the enthralment order, the experiment could only assess whether that long outdated order was viable in the contemporary world and able to compete successfully with the disenthralment order.

3. THE COURSE OF THE EXPERIMENT

The enthralment order in its erstwhile variety lasted for several millennia and passed through two major phases - the ancient slavery-cum-serfdom order and later feudalism. The Russian experiment in the 20th century ran through the same two phases in 70 odd years, after which the anachronistic order imposed on the nation collapsed just like feudalism did several centuries before.

The order revived after such a long time gap could certainly not be an exact replica of the ancient variety. The most notable peculiarities of the recent variety mainly refer to the characteristics of the ruling class. It was a managerial class running the gigantic nation-wide monopolistic concern. Its composition was strictly circumscribed by the so-called nomenclature - a roster of posts assignment to and dismissal from which was the exclusive prerogative of the bolshevik rulers, and a roster of persons eligible for these posts (hence the Russian term nomenklatura for the bolshevik ruling class). The structure of the class was hierarchical, every unit in the pyramid being headed by a top official, rather modestly designated as "secretary" ("general" or "first"). Such humbleness had certainly not been observed in the ancient variety of the enthralment order, because in those days the managers were believed to be servants of the gods or of the emperor naturally entitled to partake in the glory of their superior, whereas the new managerial class, pretending to be in the service of the people, had to fake modesty not only in their official titles - while enjoying much higher living standards than ordinary people could attain, they tried to conceal this, which was not easy.

The structure of the ruling class was immeasurably more complex than in the ancient variety, as the objects to manage had grown enormously in numbers and diversity. This led to the formation of numerous specialized subdivisions within the class, which in its turn necessitated the creation of a central body empowered to oversee all the subdivisions and to coordinate their activities. That body became known as the "apparat" - the core of the bolshevik organization officially called the Communist party. All its members ("apparatchiks") belonged to the ruling class. Besides them the party comprised two other groups. One consisted of professional managers directing every sphere of economic and social activities, who were all members of the ruling class and, with few exceptions, of the party. Finally, the party also included its rank and file, who, despite making up to 90 percent of its membership, did not belong to the ruling class and only served to create an appearance of mass participation in governing the country.

Since communist ideology provided the only justification for the bolshevik rule, it became in fact the official religion of the country with all the pertinent paraphernalia - canonized prophets, martyrs, saints, embalmed mummies, pilgrimage to holy places, temples for worship and sermons designated as "houses of political enlightenment". The "agitprop" department of the "apparat" was the clergy, while the top "secretaries" also acted as high priests. The creed of the new religion - "There is no god" - is not very different, after all, from a monotheistic creed like "There is no god but Allah". Speaking in terms of the mathematical theory of sets, a polytheistic religion worships a set of several gods, in a monotheistic religion the number of elements in the set is unit, while in an atheistic religion the set of gods is a null set with zero cardinality.

This was the shape which the societal order established by the bolsheviks after 1917 had assumed by the early 1930s and preserved till the mid-50s. That period bears the imprint of Stalin, the ruler notorious for his reign of terror. True, mass terror had been rampant in Russia ever since the bolshevik takeover in 1917, so that Stalin's reign was not peculiar in that respect. The first waves of bloodletting had been directed at the propertied classes of industrialists and landlords, at the adversaries in the Civil war, at priests of all religions - in short, against the open opponents of bolshevik ideology and policies. But by the late 1920s, when Stalin was firmly established as supreme ruler, those enemies had mostly been exterminated or suppressed. New, carefully planned and executed waves of terror were launched under his direction, but this time the victims were not enemies of bolshevik ideas or policies. In the early 1930s millions of peasants were dispossessed, exterminated or exiled to remote regions for actual or potential opposition to being turned into serfs on "collective farms". The next wave, which started in 1934 and reached its peak in 1937-38, had a threefold target. First, it was a clear case of the revolution devouring its children: the bolsheviks purged their ranks of those who still clung to the Marxian ideas and were likely to question the party line as a deviation from them. Also targeted were the professional elites in all spheres, which were systematically weeded to remove anyone who might harbour untoward ideas and prove difficult to manipulate. Finally, the reign of terror had an economic motivation as well - millions of slaves were needed for the Gulag. Quotas were set for the number of prisoners to be sent to the labour camps, and as the two above-described groups of victims were not sufficient, the third group included huge numbers of people who simply had the bad luck and never knew what they were punished for.

After 1938 the mass terror never ceased until Stalin's death in March 1953, but its intensity was regulated to suit his purposes and whims. The long reign of terror brought about a significant shift in the balance of power between the major parts of the bolshevik organization: the NKVD-KGB security service grew in power at the expense of the party "apparat", which the absolute ruler tended to sideline. Subordination of the managerial class to the repressive body had a detrimental effect on the quality and results of managerial performance in the country. In the pervasive atmosphere of rampant despotism managers, permanently fearful of unwarranted persecution, avoided showing initiative or taking any risks, but were inclined to exaggerate their successes and belittle their failures. Discussion and adjustment of directives that came from above, even if they were blatantly erroneous, was unthinkable. As this paralysis spread from the lower echelons upwards, the power to take decisions inevitably concentrated at ever higher rungs of the managerial hierarchy, while the function of the lower echelons was restricted to automatic execution of decisions taken far above the stage of their actual implementation. This created a delusion typical of excessive centralization - the upper echelons felt their power growing, although it was in fact weakened, because they had to base their decision-making on distorted information from below, on enthusiastic reports about the brilliant results achieved by strict adherence to the invariably wise directives. Lacking reliable feedback as the indispensable condition for effective management, the ruling class became ever less efficient in performing its main function.

In the mid-1950s, in the interregnum after Stalin's death, a fierce battle raged within the ruling class over the political line of the new leadership. The pivotal question was the relationship between the supreme ruler and the managerial class, which naturally wanted to become the ruling class in the full sense of the word and to curtail the power of the supreme ruler accordingly. This objective was achieved - the security service was placed under the supervision of the "apparat", whose members got immunity from persecution unless it was sanctioned by their own authorities. The new supreme rulers were made to comply with the collective will of the "apparat". It is indicative of the changed balance of powers that the supreme ruler Khrushchov, who was supported by the "apparat" in his successful fight against the adherents to Stalin's policies, was ousted a few years later by the same body for trying to increase his power at the expense of the "apparat". His successor Brezhnev learned the lesson and kept his post for almost two decades by not overstepping the tacitly accepted limits to his power.

As a result of these changes the enthralment order in Russia passed into its second phase, which was similar to mediaeval feudalism. Although the managers were of course not granted titles to their fiefs, they were now allowed to keep their posts for decades, often for life. The principle was adopted (tacitly of course) that a vassal is subordinate only to his immediate suzerain, and a suzerain has no direct power over his vassal's vassals. That made it harder for the highest managerial echelons to get information about what went on in the vast country and to influence the course of events on the ground. Typical feudal fragmentation started to erode the highly centralized bolshevik state.

Slavery in the Gulag was not abolished, but the number of slaves dropped significantly as the reign of terror came to an end, and the economic role of slave labour was diminished. A radical change took place in the targeting of repressive measures - the practice of summary executions without trial was given up, and political persecution was retained as punishment for anti-bolshevik acts or public utterances, but no longer as a preventive measure against putative disobedience. It was of course still a far cry from civic freedom and civil rights, the state remained a dictatorship, but it began to show more tolerance of minor transgressions that did not threaten the mainstays of bolshevik rule. The Draconian laws infringing on the rights to choose a job or place of residence were gradually repealed.

The managers, emboldened by their growing autonomy from the top of the hierarchy and by the newly-won stability of their posts, began doing what had been mortally dangerous during Stalin's rule - namely, enriching themselves. One must keep in mind that the managers of immense material assets were presumed to be paupers with absolutely no property of their own, as all the amenities were provided to them by the state that was their nominal employer, and dismissal from the nomenclature could actually leave them with no livelihood. This was intended to ensure their loyalty to their class, and enrichment was their way to a measure of freedom. Besides the traditional method of soliciting and taking bribes, there was now a much quicker and more rewarding way to wealth - namely, involvement in the underground private businesses which began to appear in growing numbers all over the country and were willing to pay for blind eyes and helping hands in managerial offices. The role of the emergent shadow economy in eroding the recent version of feudalism in Russia is quite similar to the erosive effect of towns on its earlier European version.

By the 1980s Russia had at last reached a stage at which transition could start from enthralment to disenthralment. The decisive factor in it was the growing realization that the bolshevik experiment had failed, that the nation could no longer hope to catch up with the dynamic disenthralled countries in any significant sphere, to ever rival them on the global arena or in living standards. As access to information was strictly rationed in accordance with one's rank in the bolshevik hierarchy, the top echelons were the first to come to that conclusion. When they began to travel abroad, they realized not only the bankruptcy of the regime they served, but also their own misery in comparison with the condition of their executive counterparts in the West. Whereas the latter were quite well off in their own right, owning what they managed at least partially or being paid huge salaries, the bolshevik managers were totally dependent on the goodwill of their superiors. Quite a few of them started thinking of ways to free themselves, to legitimize their precarious status and to become lawful owners of the property they managed. The only way to attain these goals was to put Russia back on the road to disenthralment.

In the mid-1980s influential groups in the top echelons of the ruling class started what became known as perestroika (reconstruction) - a revolution of, by and for the managerial class, aiming to dismantle the enthralment order step by step and to replace it by the disenthralment order. They began by creating conditions favouring the legitimization of private property and private enterprise, thus opening the way for the privatization of state-owned property, first and foremost by its former managers. It was a carefully planned operation to dismantle the colossal monopolistic concern that belonged to the state nominally, but to the managerial class in fact, so as to enable its individual members to legally appropriate the parcels they could lay their hands on. A manager usually grabbed the parcel which he had managed before. But the wide differences between the diverse managerial subdivisions in the amount and value of the respective property - from zero to multibilliard assets - resulted in the fragmentation of the formerly centralized hierarchical class into a host of coteries fighting for pieces of the rich spoils. Plainly speaking, the plunderers abandoned and got rid of both the legal and factual owners of the concern - the enthralment state (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and the organization of the managerial class (the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), which were officially disbanded in 1991 - 74 years after the bolshevik takeover in October 1917.

As the experiment spread to a number of other countries and thus became global in scope, its termination in Russia is not, strictly speaking, its final conclusion, but its complete failure is not in doubt even where it still drags on. The countries on which participation in the experiment had been imposed by Russia ended it as soon as the Russian imperial rule over them collapsed. In the countries which went on with the experiment a remarkable dependence of its course and results can be seen on the size of the country. The fact is that the enthralment order can function only in complete economic isolation from the world market, practicing rigid autarky, which is feasible in a large country with vast resources. But even in China the ruling class, while still paying lip service to communism, has in fact abandoned it long ago as a practical goal and has started the slow but sure transition to the establishment of the disenthralment order. As for smaller countries like North Korea, Cuba and pre-1990 Albania, the zealous continuation of the manifestly failed experiment plunged them into stagnation and decline.

4. A PRECEDENT AND THE AFTERMATH

The attempt in the 20th century to find a viable enthralment alternative to the Western disenthralment path was not the first in Russian history. Two centuries before it began Tsar Peter I did the same. The widespread view of him as a Europhile intent on westernizing his backward country is grossly mistaken. Although he introduced a very wide range of Western innovations into many spheres of Russian life, he completely ignored the most significant aspect of the contemporary European societal structure, namely the accomplished abolition of serfdom and the ongoing transition to disenthralment. On the contrary, the state-of-the-art factories set up under his direct supervision were manned by serfs, which was certainly not a solution imported from Europe.

Since, however, the strength and effectiveness of a societal order, like in any working system, large depend on the consistency and harmony of all its aspects, accelerated progress in a selected sphere combined with stagnation in the others can produce only partial and short-lived success, in the long run it is doomed to failure. Tsar Peter's reforms did help Russia in the 18th century to defeat Sweden, Poland and Turkey, thereby opening up the land and sea routes to the West and making Russia a power on the European geopolitical arena. But in the 19th century the country suffered significant setbacks. The first alarm bell rang in 1812, when Emperor Napoleon thrust deep into Russia and captured Moscow. True, France lost that war because it obviously overstretched the limits of its real military power, making Russia the dominant force in Europe. The then rulers of Russia exploited this victory as proof of the viability of enthralment and thereby managed to delay the overdue societal reforms. But the defeat suffered by Russia in the 1853-56 war against Britain and France demonstrated the urgency of the reforms, which started in 1961.

Nevertheless, the pace and scope of the reforms were too slow and hesitant, resistance to them was deeply entrenched, and the transition to disenthralment failed to produce the expected positive effect. In particular, Russia suffered further military defeats in trying to defend and even extend its vast empire, losing two wars against major powers - with Japan in 1904-05, with Germany and Austro-Hungary in 1914-18. The February 1917 revolution overthrew the last tsar and brought about the disintegration of the Russian empire into about a dozen national states and a multitude of separatist fiefdoms.

The bolsheviks took power in October 1917 with the firm intention to reverse the disintegration and to resurrect the empire, albeit under a different name and on a different ideological foundation. As for the geopolitical direction of the reborn state, it became much more ambitious, aiming not just at the aggrandizement of the empire, but at world domination. Tsar Peter's line of confrontation with the West combined with learning from it in order to beat it was fully adopted by the bolsheviks. The outstanding Russian poet Maximilian Voloshin thus had every reason to describe Tsar Peter I as "the first bolshevik in Russia". A vivid illustration: the bolsheviks followed the example set by Peter I, who used serf labour in arms factories, and created research institutions (called sharashkas) within the Gulag, where forced intellectual labour was used to develop new armaments.

The early results of the bolshevik endeavour proved encouraging - most of the empire was back in the fold by the early 1920s, except a belt along the Western border, which was reincorporated two decades later, in 1939-40. The successful repulse of Hitler's invasion and the subsequent thrust deep into Europe, just like Napoleon's defeat more than a century before, were used as vindication of the viability of the bolshevik rule.

After 1945 the bolshevik empire was administratively structured in three layers. Its inner core was the Russian federation (RSFSR). A belt of 14 ethnically distinct satrapies ("union republics") adjoined it on the West and the South. The third layer was nominally outside the bolshevik-ruled "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" and was made up of protectorates occupied in W.W.II. The countries of the outer belt regained their full independence from Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as did the three Baltic satrapies. The other 11 former satrapies have also proclaimed independence, but retain more or less close ties with Russia.

The collapse of the huge empire for the second time within a century is convincing proof, if any were needed, of the inexorable force of societal evolution. Clinging or reverting to individual enthralment long after this societal order has outlived its effectiveness is fraught with a host of disasters, but resorting to it as a means to attain military superiority over other countries and thus enthral entire nations has twice been self-defeating for Russia. Let us hope there will be no third attempt.