Documentary film “Death of an Empire”

The key to Vladimir Putin’s remarks in his televised address following the suppression of the Prigozhin mutiny on avoidance of civil strife as the highest state priority

This past Sunday the Kultura channel of Russian state television re-launched a documentary film that it first broadcast a year ago, probably with little fanfare then, because it had completely escaped my attention.  And over the last year, the film, entitled “Death of an Empire: the Russian Lesson,” was hiding in plain view: it had been posted on youtube.com, where it is still accessible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-OUSnBYZRg  

However, this time state television went to great lengths to ensure the widest possible audience on air. It was pre-announced on the Saturday evening prime time news, which showed excerpts that were compelling for their drama and relevance to latest events in Russia.

The producer and narrator of the documentary is a certain Russian Orthodox clergyman, bishop Tikhon (Georgy Aleksandrovich Shevkunov; born July 2, 1958, Moscow), whose hierarchical responsibilities go beyond pastoral duties for the region of Pskov, given that he is also the abbot of the Pskovo-Pechersk Monastery. From 1995 to 2018, he oversaw the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow. His Wikipedia entry includes a characterization of Tikhon as “one of the ideologists who has shaped the image of the West as an enemy of Russia and of Orthodoxy.”

It is pertinent to his wider influence across Russia that he is the chairman of the Patriarchal Council on Culture. He is the editor in chief of the internet portal Pravoslavie.ru and in the course of Q1 2023 he became the most widely published author of books in the Russian language. It is pertinent to his role as producer and narrator of the documentary film to note that as a young man Bishop Tikhon had received an undergraduate degree in cinematography. He is a full professional in this métier.

Though I have regularly dismissed the influence of the chattering classes and academics in particular on Vladimir Putin, here I am obliged to make an exception. It is beyond doubt that that the Russian president has taken on board the “lesson” of this film.  Or, if we may go beyond the title to the substance, he has taken on board the several lessons. 

And what may these lessons be? They come from the logical structure of the film, which does not just focus on causality within the February 1917 Revolution but gives us an overview of Russian society, its standard of living at all levels in 1913, before the distortions introduced by the strains of World War. He then proceeds to tell us about the leading classes in that society, which were riddled with self-absorbed bon vivants indifferent to the fate of their country and with ambitious politicians who were ready to move heaven and earth to overthrow tsarism and introduce West European style parliamentary democracy. They were the ones who used setbacks in the war to discredit the authority of the tsar and his ministers in public and to establish privileged relations with the top generals of the Army who would execute the coup. After laying these foundations, Tikhon walks us through the events surrounding the forced abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in February 1917, formation of the Provisional Government and put the empire on the slippery path that ended with the Bolshevik takeover in October 1917 and the destructive civil war that ensued.

The deep culpability of precisely the Anglophile, or more broadly speaking, the liberal elements of Russian society in all spheres of life for the coup d’état of February 1917 is, of course, highly relevant to any discussion today of post-Communist Russia, where these same elements took power and stood behind the presidency of Boris Yeltsin from the earliest days following the dissolution of the USSR.. It is relevant to the ongoing purge of “fifth column” personalities that has gathered speed from the start of the Special Military Operation. These “cockroaches coming out of the woodwork,” as Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko described them in a televised speech this past week, came particularly under the spotlights following the Prigozhin armed insurrection. There is also a necessary connection in all this with the identification on Russian state television of “Anglo-Saxons” as the national enemy number one.

This historical discussion of antecedents to the February 1917 Revolution may be new to the broad Russian public, but in terms of historiography, it is not really new.  The eminent Russian émigré historian George Katkov who was a Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford at the time, in 1967 published his magisterial work Russia 1917: the February Revolution in which he described in great detail the leading role in preparing the way for the February Revolution played by Russian legislators and organizers of Voluntary Organizations that united the local self-administration bodies in the countryside (zemstvos) and municipalities across Russia, together with new War Industry Committees that relied on Russia’s wealthiest industrialists to provide assistance to the army and to the war effort as well as to mitigate the problems of massive refugee flows following the initial advances of the German forces into Russian territories.

 Among the most important personalities in these nominally patriotic formations that were in effect pursuing at the same time seditious objectives were, per Katkov, the liberal, Anglophile politician Pavel Miliukov, head of the Kadet party in the State Duma and his colleague, member of the upper house of the legislature and leading figure in the Voluntary Organizations, A.I. Guchkov, founder of the moderate Octobrist Party. Not surprisingly, these names come to the fore in Tikhon’s documentary. However, Katkov’s work was more narrowly focused on the “how” of the February Revolution and much less so on the “why,” which is the strength of the new documentary.  Moreover, Katkov’s work, appearing when it did, was completely ignored by Soviet historians. It was ignored as well by historians in the West, because its implications for the democratic movement in tsarist Russia ran against the prevailing historiography that was written by the protégés and descendants of precisely the actors responsible for the treasonous acts of February 1917.  For those so interested, Katkov’s book is still in print and may be ordered from amazon.com 

From my perspective, the most astonishing and valuable contribution of this documentary film is in the initial third or so of running time when the narrator offers an excellent, I would say unparalleled survey of Russian society, economy, medical care, the educational system, science and innovation, among other themes.  All that he says is backed up by very impressive memoir literature of outstanding Russians and foreign visitors, as well as by state statistics from tsarist and Soviet times. Notwithstanding the underlying deep research, what is presented is entertaining as well as informative.

Tikhon offers a vision of Russia under Nicholas II that turns upside down every generalization about Russian society before WWI that you are likely to have heard. Russia as we all “know” was always primitive, poor, illiterate and oppressed. 

Before giving us the facts, Tikhon turns to two points of reality check that will resonate with his audience, the Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev that were first published in the West and a memorandum on the living conditions of the father of Alexei Kosygin.

 Khrushchev wrote that in his childhood before the Revolution workers lived much better than they did under Soviet rule. Moreover, in 1932 when he was already a rising star among Communist Party functionaries he acknowledged that his income was less than that of pre-1917 workers.

The memo from the archive of Kosygin, who was Head of Government in the USSR alongside Party Secretary Brezhnev, was prepared in the 1960s upon his orders to check the accuracy of a text that officious Party hacks were preparing for him to read at a Party congress. He had his own doubts about figures showing that Soviet workers were earning eight times what workers made in tsarist times. The memo he received back explained how his father, newly married at age 20, took a job in one of the many metalworking factories in Petrograd and was able to afford to rent a three room apartment in a repectable building of a nearby residential neighborhood and could as his family grew hire a domestic helper and take the family to the theater on Sundays. And his place of work was not as highly paid as the Putilov Works, where workers’ wages were on a par with their peers in Germany or France.

Tikhon overturns the falsehoods by introducing a factual record which you won’t find reflected in the histories of Russia in your bookstore or library. He is careful also to explain that much of the amazing progress that he found in the reign of Nicholas II followed the Revolution of 1905 when the government sought to prevent any repetitions by introducing social reforms that put Russia on a par or above European standards in terms of public health, education and other critical measures of the good life. As a result of these reforms, the percent of cultivated land held as private property by the peasantry was well over 90% in European Russia, and it was 100% in Asiatic Russia. By comparison, Tikhon tells us, zero percent of cultivated land in England was owned by those farming the land; it was all the property of wealthy landowners who rented it out to farmers.

In the past, I had some idea of agricultural successes of Russia in the last years of the Empire from perusing a copy of the The Russian Year-Book for 1912 published in London likely in 1913 that I obtained at a used book store in the 1970s.  This 800 page book in miniscule typeface has a wealth of information which, as I now look, for example, at the pages devoted to the literacy rates, seems to point to what the documentary film tells us. However, this book was skewed to the interests of British business people and was organized as a resource, without any overarching interpretation to make it attractive or useful to the general reader.  The only thing that caught my attention in it was the vast quantity of butter that Russia was exporting to the U.K. in 1912.

Let us return to Tikhon and his documentary film. He tells us that the length of the working day in Russia was mostly nine and a half hours during WWI, whereas it was eleven or more in Western Europe. The surpluses of grain harvests were so great that even in wartime Russia had no rationing, whereas in Western Europe food rationing cards were nearly ubiquitous due to scarcity.

In the final decade of the Empire, there was a vast expansion of health care which was provided free to two thirds of the population. This led to a dramatic fall in childhood and infant deaths, in turn raising the population by 50 million in the years of Nicholas’ reign.  Literacy rates, which were researched by Soviet officials at the start of the 1920’s, showed that 90% or more of adolescents in towns and villages across Russia were able to read thanks to universal primary education that was introduced after 1905.

There was amazing growth in manufacturing across all industrial sectors. In 1913 the Russian Empire already accounted for 10% of global GNP. The rate of increase was so evident to Western expert visitors, that they predicted a doubling of Russia’s global share by 1950.  And indeed by 1950 the USSR did account for 20% of global GNP, but that was achieved only thanks to terrible sacrifices of two generations, thanks to the Gulag and to the virtual enslavement of the peasantry.  Tikhon relates this without bitterness, but with great regret.

That Russians never heard this view of the tsarist past during the 70 years of Communism is self-evident. But why did we not hear this in the United States, or elsewhere in the West?

The answer is not hard to find and it lies in the same historiography that I alluded to above with respect to the story of the February Revolution. Most everything that was ever said about Russia in American universities and in the textbooks used for course work followed the line of the first professors dedicated to the area at Harvard in the 1950s, whose students and their protégés were instructing there in my college years to 1967, straight through my graduate years at Columbia in the 1970s.  And all of this is the distant background for the present-day hatred of Russia by our professorate and foreign policy community today.

Let me briefly explain.  The most important historian of Russia’s thousand year history in the second half of the 19^th century, Vasily Kliuchevsky, was also a principal contributor to what became the liberal historiography of Russia with its negative view of the country’s past and of tsarist autocracy in particular. To those professional historians in the West who may be taken aback by this assertion, I have in mind specifically the study of Russian history in a vacuum, as if the rest of the world did not exist, so that the warts and unattractive points in the national history were unique and not, as was the case, largely commonplace in the greater world. This group of historians wrote as if the whole burden of serfdom was not a fundamental feature of the ancien régime everywhere, including Russia’s closest neighbor, the Habsburg Empire, where it was ended only at the turn of the 19^th century, i.e., just 60 years before Russia.

The negative view of Russia’s past was picked up by Miliukov and his generation of professors and historians. This was continued by their students, including  A.A. Kizevetter, who carried it with them into the emigration to Prague, which was, like Berlin, a major center of the White Russian emigration. It was finally carried to the United States by several outstanding historians, among them Michael Karpovich, who was appointed professor of Russian history at Harvard, one of the first such experts in the country.  Karpovich had among his students Richard Pipes, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

In case the reader thinks I may be giving undue attention to my undergraduate alma mater, where I studied under Pipes, allow me to explain that after I finished writing what I consider to be my most important book, Great Post-Cold War American Thinkers About International Relations, I found, to my surprise, that nine of the ten most influential thinkers whom I critiqued in my book had all had some relationship to Harvard, as students or as professors or as Fellows.  Their understanding of Russia and its rightful place in the world was, of course, influenced by that Harvard connection going back through Karpovich to the likes of Miliukov.

I left a career in university teaching in 1975 because my message about the Russian imperial bureaucracy being among the best educated and even most enlightened in Europe, a conclusion I reached after doing my archival research on the introduction of parliamentary institutions in Russia in 1905-07, was NOT welcome among faculty, even if they awarded my degree with honors.  In the years since, I know of only one courageous and brilliant historian of Russia, Dominic Lieven, in the U.K. who has done monumental archival research in Russia and wrote about who was who in the top levels of the tsarist bureaucracy in what I would call a positive light.     

I am not aware of anyone who collected and set out the overview of Russian society and sources of its prosperity in 1913 as this documentary film put on air yesterday has done. The main second stream of Russian historiography in the United States was a transplant of Soviet interests and political views onto American territory. What our graduate students in Columbia were doing during my doctoral program was guided by a senior professor with Menshevik sympathies. And his graduate students were assigned to study of peasant revolts in the Russian provinces based on reports of arson or study of the nobility to prove its harmful influence on societal evolution. These topics were as useless at the time as current Area Studies are and will be under the movement to “decolonize” Russian history or to shift all attention from Russia proper to the about to disappear Ukrainian state and its culture.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

NB: for an English translation of the movie, I am told that this works:

tap cc tap gear icon (settings) tap subtitles tap auto-translate scroll down menu to English.