Since the end of the Cold War the causes for tsarism’s collapse have received greater scrutiny. Studies by Peter Gatrell, Rex Wade, and Orlando Figes, for example, address numerous factors besides the autocratic turpitude or revolutionary deviance traditionally emphasized.^[1] Through his analysis of two notorious trials and their complicated antecedents, Fuller now adds fantasies of treason to these factors. He begins his book with a dramatic account of the March 1915 field court-martial and conviction of Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Nikolaevich Miasoedov, which he links to the second judicial travesty these treasonous fantasies produced – a kangaroo court’s September 1917 conviction of war minister General Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sukhomlinov. Each man was charged with treason: the former immediately hanged; the latter sentenced to penal labor for life but pardoned in mid-1918 by the Bolshevik government. Wasting no time basking in the Communists’ provisional largesse, Sukhomlinov escaped to Germany, where he lived in poverty until freezing to death on a Berlin park bench eight years later. These dramatic episodes form the center of a sticky ball Fuller proceeds to unravel. This is no mean feat, since the evidential trail wends through memoirs, letters, second-hand accounts, contemporary newspaper stories, and archival memoranda to acquaint us with scoundrels, nymphomaniacs, double agents, lotharios, lesbians, desperate businessmen, still-more-desperate gamblers, mistresses, back-stabbing politicians, the weak-willed tsar himself, and the self-aggrandizing Alexander Kerenskii, all with something to hide and none completely forthcoming in their relationships with either Miasoedov or Sukhomlinov.
Of this pair, Miasoedov is the more interesting. A natural risk-taker, he was victim to both his own hubris and forces of circumstance. After joining the gendarmerie he was posted in 1894 to Verzhbolovo, a railroad stop on the border with East Prussia through which goods and intelligence passed and where foreign dignitaries briefly paused. Miasoedov was therefore well-placed to acquire the information necessary for his job, to meet the contacts he needed to further his private business schemes, and to fкte Russian and foreign bigwigs to heighten his self-importance. Among other coups he got himself invited to Wilhelm II’s annual hunt (which Fuller reminds us consisted of the kaiser and his party standing on a wooden deck and blasting away at fauna chased towards them by servants), and in so doing acquired a reputation beyond both his social and geographical station in life. This particular “friendship,” alongside those with other Germans and, notably, Jews, figured prominently in the circumstantial case that led to his execution. Miasoedov was by then further tainted by charges made in 1906 that he was dealing in contraband. This charge did not stick, but it did force him into resigning his commission. He began working for a Jewish-owned steamship company but money was tight, not least because he was supporting a mistress who incidentally plied her time as a prostitute while urging him to leave his wife. The Miasoedovs’ misery only increased when their eight year-old son was crushed to death by an elevator.
Miasoedov’s fate soon intertwined with that of Sukhomlinov, who “by late 1906… had consolidated a reputation as a philo-Semite and something of a liberal, making him an object of loathing on the extreme nationalist right” (P. 46). Like so many of Fuller’s protagonists Sukhomlinov led a kind of double-life writing short-stories and essays under the pseudonym “Ostap Bondarenko.” But his mйtier was as a politician, his official promotions due largely to his charm and convivial hospitality. Fuller adds that he was a womanizer like Miasoedov, but offers little evidence of this. Nevertheless, the sexagenarian general took extraordinary measures to win the much younger Ekaterina Viktorovna Butovich away from her husband. This beauty, supposedly one of only two women to steal Rasputin’s heart, initiated divorce proceedings against her husband which dragged on for years and embroiled her suitor in a scandal damaging his reputation. Also damaging was Ekaterina’s prodigal spending which, after 1909, when Sukhomlinov left the Kiev governor-generalship to become war minister and had to accept a substantial pay cut, enmeshed him in financial difficulties that eventually led to his taking bribes. Ekaterina shared a mutual friend with Miasoedov’s wife, Klara, and thanks to this their husbands met that year. Sukhomlinov became the younger man’s patron and casual friend.
The war’s arrival at first seemed opportune for both: Miasoedov’s return to military service provided respite from personal and financial woes; Sukhomlinov’s responsibilities as war minister made him one of the country’s most powerful figures. Yet by mid-1915, with the military situation unraveling, Sukhomlinov was especially vulnerable to finger-pointing from the Duma and Council of Ministers because he already had several strikes against him: he had been friends with a man just executed for treason; the acute shortage of ammunition and weapons was ultimately his responsibility; his personal expenditures did not correspond to his income; many anti-Semites noted his friendships with Jews; and a cabal led by Octobrist leader A. I. Guchkov was plotting to destroy him. After a member of a commission investigating the military supply crisis foreshadowed the Stalin era by screaming about “Miasoedovism” and “Sukhomlinovism,” opponents found in Sukhomlinov the fall-guy they were looking for. Despite the fact that the “case against the general for treason actually rested on a foundation not of rock but air” (P. 221), both Sukhomlinov and Ekaterina went on trial.
Fuller argues that “by cheapening and debasing the authority and prestige of the dynasty” the Miasoedov/Sukhomlinov affair “helped lay the groundwork for the February Revolution” (P. 7). However, the evidence he presents does not fully support this. Certainly, these men’s persecution was symptomatic of social ills including anti-Semitism, rumor-mongering, conspiracy theories, and sexual hypocrisy (though Fuller shies away from stressing the latter). But during 1915-1917 the majority of Russians had many more concerns than this “affair,” such as getting enough food and fuel and hoping their male relations returned from the front alive. Besides, the dynasty was doing plenty more sensational things to cheapen and debase itself. As for the Sukhomlinov case in particular, few outside the government would have learned about it before the actual trial, and the general’s conviction came nearly seven months after the February Revolution. Similarly unpersuasive is Fuller’s assertion that “the government’s handling of the Miasoedov case had been the essential foundation for the association of defeat and treachery in the popular mind” (P. 190), given that his supporting evidence consists of brief passages from just two soldiers’ postwar memoirs. Lacking is a broader assessment of the general public’s reaction. Fuller’s realization “that much of Russian politics in the era of the so-called constitutional experiment was actually an utterly ruthless and completely unprincipled struggle for power” (P. 8) is by contrast fully substantiated. But does this tell us anything new? Studies by Dominic Lieven, Anna Geifman, and others have revealed depredations along all points of the political spectrum.^[2] Moreover, can anything better be said for politics under Empress Anna (to say nothing of Ivan IV)? And if Fuller imagines that constitutionalism should somehow mitigate political cannibalism, he needs to think again, as his description could easily apply to the “experiment” politicians are now waging against the United States Constitution.
Somewhat paradoxically, Fuller also suggests this period was not so unique, and in some way presaged the Soviet era. But this supposed continuity is not clearly delineated. He draws comparisons between tactics by tsarist counter-intelligence (CI) and the NKVD, calls Sukhomlinov’s “the first important show trial” (P. 243), and suggests late imperial “spy mania” foreshadowed that of the Stalin period. But the CI tactics described are comparable to those of most states’ secret police, not just the Soviet Union’s; and Fuller undermines the show trial analogy by acknowledging the 1917 trial succeeded in “evoking sympathy for the disgraced ex-minister” (P. 254), and noting that the gallery applauded Ekaterina’s defense counsel’s summation speech. As for “spy mania,” this fits into a much longer continuum than he indicates, which is the necessary reliance upon rumor and word-of-mouth under a censorious regime. In the absence of transparency and a free press rumors about everything – including spying – have gained national currency from the earliest days of the Russian court through to the present. One of my favorites is that Konstantin Pavlovich would arise from the dead and lead an insurrection of the Poles exiled to Siberia. “Spy mania” naturally flourished during wartime – but tsarism’s final years were hardly unique in this regard as well.
I nevertheless strongly recommend this book, not least because it is an engaging, informative read. Fuller’s wit is on full-throttle here, with many passages laugh-out-loud funny, such as his descriptions of a certain Captain Mikhailov, “a man of such questionable ethics that he makes everyone we have encountered to this point seem a model of rectitude and self-restraint” (P. 87), and one Countess Magdalena Nostits, “an American adventuress with a very healthy libido, whose first husband had been a Prussian officer by the name of von Nympsh” (P. 157). These quotations point to another of this book’s charms, which is the author’s skill at situating this bricolage of individual existences amid truly epochal events. The result is a Tolstoian reminder that we continue to pursue our petty (yet, for us, so important) affairs despite being swept up by forces beyond our control. Whether or not one personally identifies with Miasoedov, Sukhomlinov, Ekaterina, or any of the other characters in this book, Fuller deserves credit for fashioning from the past a mirror into which we may gaze with new eyes upon ourselves.