When Harry Truman congratulated Stalin on the capture of Berlin in 1945, the Soviet leader responded that Alexander I had reached Paris. Reading John P. LeDonne’s most recent book leads one to believe that Stalin’s strategic thinking might have been formed in pre-Petrine Muscovy and continued more or less intact at least until the suppression of the Polish rebellion of 1830 – 1831. Subsequent volumes may make that connection more explicit, but on the last page of his text LeDonne tells us that “the history of the Soviet Union would mirror that of the empire: an ideology of conquest, the restoration of Russia’s hegemony in the Heartland; a new Fortress Empire…; the creation of client states…; and finally, collapse from within” (P. 233).
This list delineates the focal points of LeDonne’s argument about the imperial entity. Once Russia stabilized after the turbulent early half of the seventeenth century, it embarked on a deliberate, calculated grand strategy to dominate Eurasia, a plan governed by military, commercial, religious, and ideological imperatives. A repressive domestic political and social system dominated by military needs helped it maintain order and mobilize resources within a vast “fortress.” Its armies launched “deep penetrations” into enemy territory to defeat adversaries in a way that allowed Russia to dictate peace on its own terms. The adoption of a “client system” in the borderlands enabled it to employ an “economy of force” in achieving its strategic ambitions. By the reign of Nicholas I, this realm – in LeDonne’s opinion unique and distinctly non-European – bestrode Eurasia as a “Fortress Empire,” which despite its subsequent decline intimidated and dominated its neighbors.
LeDonne, whose earlier volume on Imperial Russia’s foreign policy relied on Halford Mackinder’s theory that geography determines strategy on a grand scale,^[1] attempts here to formulize Russia’s conduct over nearly two centuries. Regarding “facts by themselves” as “dead matter” (P. vii), he marshals a fair and well selected number of them to posit that the Empire’s strategy fit a discernible model that remained remarkably consistent over the long term. Alexander I and his brother and successor Nicholas I brought to its logical conclusion the work of Peter the Great and his father and predecessor Aleksei Mikhailovich. The building of the Russian Empire was not the haphazard result of reactive policies implemented by unstable regimes, but a conscious effort sustained by generations of rulers and elites.
LeDonne’s presentation makes a strong case for this “big picture” interpretation. Nevertheless, like many international relations theorists he tends to stretch the factual basis to fit the larger model. Sudden turnabouts in Russian strategy, such as those that followed the deaths of Empress Elizabeth and Tsar Paul, receive short shrift, perhaps because they would undermine his larger thesis that Russia pursued a consistent strategy over a period that included both of their reigns. LeDonne’s consistency argument also relies too heavily on the assumptions, hopes, and testimony of tsarist elites, all of whom had every reason to claim legitimacy from what had come before. Some, like Prince Adam Czartoryski and the Marchese Paulucci – nineteenth-century figures who evoked Peter’s legacy in reference to their own work (both quoted to that effect on P. 8), – were ethnic outsiders with something to prove. Regardless of the elite’s origins, for 114 of the 181 years under study (1689–1725, 1741–1761, 1762–1796, and 1801–1825), Russia was ruled by a master whose immediate predecessor had been forcibly removed from power. For seventy-eight of those years, the ruler’s immediate predecessor had been or was eventually murdered. For forty-four years (1682–1689, 1725–1727, and 1762–1796), the ruler was a woman with no legitimate claim to the throne. The final six years of the period followed a failed coup d’йtat aimed at a fundamental restructuring of the government. Of course Russia’s rulers and servitors wanted to create the perception of permanence and continuity, but both the source of their zeal and the practical implications for pursuing it in any area of endeavor should be obvious to a discerning reader.
LeDonne’s conceptual categories also run into trouble. Like every other modern great power, the Russian Empire vacillated between foreign expansion and domestic retrenchment. The timing depended on international factors largely out of Russia’s control, including wars, foreign political crises, and, perhaps most significantly over the long term, patterns of economic development. Domestic instability played a greater role in foreign affairs than LeDonne appears willing to admit. Factions advocating war and peace rose and fell both during individual reigns and as the direct result of “regime change” at home. Theoretical reductionism cannot explain how expansion and retraction represented a strategy more “consistent” than that of any other empire. Sometimes Russia could or wanted to pursue strategic aggrandizement, and sometimes it did not. Searching for a grand design, one which LeDonne freely admits “probably never existed” (P. 6) in written form, may not be the most germane path of inquiry.
The systematization of Russia’s “client system” is another problem, because it requires the reader to equate the Kings of Prussia and even Habsburg Emperors with Kalmyk khans, hapless Georgian and Armenian rulers, and ever weaker Cossack chieftans as mere supplicants of Muscovite power. Well documented Russian perceptions notwithstanding, not everyone will accept this schematic interpretation. As the work of Andreas Kappeler, A. V. Ignat’ev, Michael Khodarkovsky, Willard Sunderland,^[2] and others has established, these relationships were far more nuanced and ad hoc. Even LeDonne wavers in his description of Russia’s neighbors. Prussia, for example, morphed from “‘a repentant subordinate’” (P. 146) into “what it had always been, a recalcitrant client state” (P. 206). And the “client system” itself was in the author’s own words “inherently unstable” (P. 226).
Nor did “deep penetrations” of military power make Russia as unique as LeDonne suggests. Throughout the narrative he provides impressive metric measurements of the distances from Russia’s capitals to Stockholm, Warsaw, Paris, Tabriz, Tashkent, and other remote centers reached or threatened by Russian arms: observations meant to illustrate the “awesomeness” of Russian prowess and the sustained effort that it must have required. But as significant as these distant power projections were, they hardly made Russia exceptional. We are not told the number of kilometers separating London from Boston or Calcutta, Amsterdam from Cape Town or Jakarta, Madrid from Antwerp or Cuzco, Beijing from Huree or Kashgar, or Washington from San Francisco or Mexico City (nor, for that matter, from Constantinople to Orel, Stockholm to Poltava, Paris to Moscow, or London to Sevastopol’). The Russian Empire deployed armed force over long distances just as every other great power did and since has.
These deficiencies raise many valid questions. Perhaps the most important among them is whether Russia instinctively has and will continue to pursue a path of expansion and conquest. Although he does not address that subject in reference to Russia’s future, his conclusions suggest that it may. LeDonne’s clear purpose is, however, to initiate discussion. His arguments may or may not stand up to those of future studies, but whether one agrees with him or not, his work alters the way we think about grand strategy and presents Russia more systematically than one normally expects; and for this achievement LeDonne deserves praise.