FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
Hard lessons on regime change from a century-old revolution
A hundred years ago this week, a protest about food shortages in the Russian capital Petrograd turned into the violent revolution that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and brought the Romanov dynasty to an end. The liberal-minded provisional government that assumed power did not last long, succumbing to another revolution eight months later, which inaugurated 70 years of communist rule.
It was not meant to be like that. The initial revolution of March 1917 succeeded not so much because the mass of the Russian population wanted to overthrow the Tsar but because very few were willing to defend him. Three years of war had thoroughly tainted the government’s reputation and it was widely believed that the state was in the hands of pro-German traitors who were deliberately sabotaging Russia’s war effort.
In the eyes of many, the purpose of the revolution was not at all to shatter the existing economic or social system, let alone to take Russia out of the war; rather, it was meant to strengthen the system and revitalize Russia’s military struggle in order to bring the war to a victorious conclusion.
The democratically inclined politicians who led the provisional government believed the Tsarist administration had weakened the country’s ability to wage war by failing to fully involve Russian society. Liberalizing the state and freeing people from autocratic rule would unite the country behind the army and release the people’s energy, they believed.
Instead, Russia rapidly descended into anarchy, the army disintegrated, and finally the fanatical Bolsheviks took over.
The reason was simple. Once the Tsar was gone, people no longer felt under any obligation to obey authority. In liberal thought, legitimacy derives from elections, the state’s respect for its citizens’ human rights, open and transparent government, a free press, and so on. According to these criteria, the provisional government ought to have been more legitimate than the unpopular monarchy it replaced. But it wasn’t.
The legitimacy of the state proved to be inseparable from the person of the Tsar.
To understand why, one must look to an alternative concept of legitimacy. This sees legitimacy as deriving from history, tradition, nationalism and religion, as well as from force rather than from popularity and individual freedoms. Russians had regarded the Tsar as legitimate because the monarchy embodied centuries of Russian history, a sense of the Russian nation, and the idea of Orthodoxy. The monarchy was also feared.
When it was gone, all that was left was an abstract commitment to liberal values. This was not sufficient. The result was the eventual triumph of Bolshevism.
This story continues to be repeated in countries across the globe today: Again and again, regime change leads not to liberal democracy but instead to civil war.
Despite this, many in the West continue to believe in the value of overthrowing what they consider to be corrupt or autocratic regimes, without in many cases taking due regard of the ways in which existing regimes have a form of legitimacy which is not easily replaced. Too often, a mere public commitment to Western values proves to be an insufficient replacement for power, tradition, religion or nationalism. Unless we can redefine our understanding of legitimacy in order to take such factors into consideration, our efforts to reshape the world are all too likely to continue to end up creating only chaos.
Russians are acutely aware of this. In opposing Western-led efforts at regime change in countries like Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine, they are showing a preference for stability over revolution. This is a preference grounded firmly in the experience of their own history.