The Shadow of the Winter Palace

...And Crankshaw leaves no doubt of his own contempt for Lenin, a political genius with the "killer instincts of the power-seeker...

...One remembers the words of the essayist Chaadyev, who in 1830 wrote: "[Providence] seems not to take the slightest interest in our destiny...

...How to compare this millenial and in some sense humble fantasy with the raw lunacy of a man who, denying God, inheriting no burden of responsibility, singles himself out and unforgivably proclaims that be and he alone can succeed where all other men in the history of the world have failed ? The scope of this book exceeds its length...

...But Crankshaw has his own version of this somber story, and he tells it with a novelist's narrative ability, sense of drama, and eye for the significant detail...

...The rebellion failed, but the scene set a pattern for the next century--a diverse crowd of citizens on one side, demanding an end to absolutism but uncertain what to replace it with...

...Alexander III, dullwitted but cynical and pragmatic, ruthless in responding to his father's assassination by establishing a thoroughgoing police state...

...In Crankshaw's words, "The central government with its tightly organized provincial apparatus extending over unimaginable distances was, in so far as it affected the governed, less the administrative nexus of a unified nation than the colonial service of an occupying power, having no organic connection with the subject people...

...Whatever the Tsar's formal authority, most power was exercised by provincial officials, often with callous and brutal force, and with a peculiarly Russian result that foreshadowed the "revolutionary" creations of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: When these [provincial officials] are neither vested with a defined measure of responsible autonomy nor bound by any precise code covering all contingencies, the opportunities both for passing awkward decisions back to the centre and for arbitrary action must between them create that ambience of uncertainty which is far more favourable to the development of tyranny than the harshest code of laws: for with a precise code of laws, no matter how repressive, the subject knows where he is and can take evasive action...

...Crankshaw's superb portraits of the four Tsars during this period combine sophisticated, often critical judgments with a genuine sympathy for their common determination to preserve what they sincerely saw as a divine inheritance...

...The Shadow of the Winter Palace is a lucid, intelligent piece of work, beautifully written and impressively literate...

...The Mensheviks, who shared the Social Democratic Party with the Bolsheviks for a decade and a half, were not the humanitarian reformers of popular myth: Their differences with Lenin's followers grew not out of fundamental philosophical or even tactical disagreements, but out of their distaste for Lenin...

...as a result, the author skims over the last decade of the imperial system, neglecting such matters as the devastating effects of World War I on the Russian people and their confidence in the government...

...This is a fine way to begin my reign...

...Society literally had no place in politics, which is best illustrated by the legal prohibition not only of criticism of the state, but of praise as well...

...Petersburg, the rebels rebuffed the pleas of the Tsar's messengers to disperse, even going so far as to shoot two of the defenseless envoys...

...We have contributed nothing to the progress of the human mind, we have only disfigured it...

...Absolute repression was thus imposed with a minimum of statutory prohibition...

...we have given nothing to the world, we have learned nothing from the world...

...Alexander II, the "Great Emancipator" of the serfs, sensitive and humane, torn between his conflicting beliefs in reform and absolutism...

...It is also a saddening testament to the failures, shortcomings, and sins of those on both sides of the struggle who helped to deliver Russia into Bolshevism...

...Under the Russian system nobody knew at all where he was: nobody therefore moved...

...scious clergy, or a strong and selfinterested bourgeoisie...

...Crankshaw's attention to the Tsars tends to magnify their many errors, but he accords plenty of criticism to their enemies...

...Similarly, he largely ignores the long-term problems that underlay the 1917 Revolution, principally the agrarian crisis...

...He paints each in rich colors: Nicholas I, inflexibly committed to the principle of autocracy, but personally insecure and erratic in judgment...

...As evening drew near, a reluctant Nicholas finally ordered the crowd fired on with artillery...

...Gathering on the Senate Square in St...

...the Tsar and his soldiers on the other side, answering the demand with reluctant but uncomprehending violence...

...The Russian monarchy was strikingly different from its Western counterparts in both its premises and its role in society...

...Unlike Western kings, the Tsar ruled unhindered by the nuisances of a constitution or a constricting system of law, a representative assembly, powerful interest groups, or in fact legal opposition of any kind...

...It would seem that we have lived, still live, only to serve as a great lesson of some kind for a remote posterity which will know how to profit by it...

...Russia never had an independent nobility, a politically con...

...all to culminate in revolution...

...The country was run for the most part by Stephen J. Chapman is a free-lance winter living in Washington...

...The valiant efforts of most liberals to effect change through the zemstva and the wartime committees receive too little attention, as do Stolypin's reforms...

...He ruled, in theory at least, as a supreme autocrat and was accepted as such by his subjects...

...Comparing the beliefs of Nicholas and Lenin in their own infallibility, Crankshaw writes: ...at least Nicholas inherited a long-established and widely shared delusion: he believed he was the obedient instrument and regent of God on earth...

...the peasants, who made up four-fdths of the population, had no political impulses beyond a fervent allegiance to the Tsar...

...the bureaucracy, which had hardly anything in common with the people it ruled...

...He notes the observation of one foreign observer in 1549: "It is a matter of doubt whether the brutality of the people has made the prince a tyrant, or whether the people themselves have become thus brutal and cruel through the tyranny of their prince...

...40 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977...

...said the distraught new Tsar...

...The rebellion took place on the day of Nicholas I's ascension to the throne of his dead father, and was fired mostly by the fiction that Nicholas was a usurper...

...The generation that will know how to profit from Russia's history is still to be born...

...Crankshaw declines to place the greater blame on either the Tsars, who had the power to alter the existing order and failed to do so, or the opponents of the autocracy, whose obsessive refusals to accept anything less than the whole of what they wanted cost them every chance for progress...

...The liberals--mainly the Kadet deputies in the first and second Dumas-too often fell into irresponsible demagoguery and refused to compromise when they should have--in 1906, for instance, when they flatly refused to have anything to do with Count Witte's government or to accept anything less than a formal constitution...

...Nicholas II, weak and easily dominated by his hysterical wife, ignorant of the volcanic social forces that would ultimately swallow him, who against his deepest instincts allowed the country to move far toward Western-style liberalism...

...That has been the fate of modern Russia even more than it was of Chaadyev's Russia...

...BOOK REVIEW The Shadow of the Winter Palace: Russia "s Drift Toward Revolution, 1825-1917 EdwardCrankshaw / Viking / $12.95 Stephen J. Chapman The Russian Revolution began with the Decembrist uprising of 1825, a mutiny of some three thousand soldiers and a few civilians organized by a group of Imperial Army officers intent on ending autocracy in Russia...