The Forgotten Premier 2: Konstantin Chernenko

 

Those of you who remember part one of this little instalment will know it was born out of a bad seminar earlier this year on the leadership of the Soviet Union from Stalin's death until the USSR's collapse in 1991. After the lecturer had talked in great detail about Brezhnev and the need to use heavy medication to keep him awake during meetings, a coffee-break was announced after which 'we shall start again when Gorbachev becomes leader'. I had to seriously fight the urge to stand up and say 'wooow easy tiger! just back up a minute - what about Yuri Andropov (leader: 12 November 1982 - 9 February 1984) and Konstantin Chernenko (leader: 11 April 1984 - 10 March 1985)? They were only in power a short time but they were significant -weren't they? But I held my tongue and as usual I regretted it, I have encountered this brushing over of Andropov and Chernenko before at undergrad level. So back in March I resolved to leave the seminar in a daze of defiant fervour and retire to my blog where I would correct this travesty of historic justice! Standing up in the name of overlooked history I began to write a profile of these men, starting with Andropov, whilst justifying why I think they should not be brushed off with such causality in postgraduate seminars - yes even in favour of a coffee break with rather excellent cookies containing fruit I couldn't identify. After thoroughly stating Andropov's case I finally move on t Chernenko, the shortest lived (literally) leader of Russia in history.

Early life:

Chernenko in 1933

Chernenko was born to a poor family in the village of Bolshaya Tes (now in Novosyolovsky District, Krasnoyarsk Krai) on the 24 September 1911 and was a mere 6 years old when Lenin seized power. His father, Ustin Demidovich (of Ukrainian origin), worked in copper and gold mines while his mother took care of the farm work.
Chernenko joined the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) in 1929, and became a full member of the Communist Party in 1931. From 1930 to 1933, he served in the Soviet frontier guards on the Soviet-Chinese border. After completing his military service, he returned to Krasnoyarsk as a propagandist. In 1933 he worked in the Propaganda Department of the Novosyolovsky District Party Committee. A few years later he was promoted head of the same department in Uyarsk Raykom. Chernenko then steadily rose through the Party ranks (thanks to regular purges as much as anything else), becoming the Director of the Krasnoyarsk House of Party Enlightenment then in 1939, the Deputy Head of the AgitProp Department of Krasnoyarsk Territorial Committee and finally, in 1941 he was appointed Secretary of the Territorial Party Committee for Propaganda. It was in the 1940s that Chernenko established a close-knit relationship with Fyodor Kulakov who would also rise to high office later in life. In 1945, he acquired a diploma from a party training school in Moscow, and in 1953 he finished a correspondence course for schoolteachers.
The turning point in Chernenko’s career was his assignment in 1948 to head the Communist Party’s propaganda department in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. There, he met and won the confidence of Leonid Brezhnev, the first secretary of Moldova from 1950 to 1952 and future leader of the Soviet Union. Chernenko followed Brezhnev in 1956 to fill a similar propaganda post in the CPSU Central Committee in Moscow. In 1960, after Brezhnev was named chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (titular head of state of the Soviet Union), Chernenko became his chief of staff.

Politburo career:

With Andropov and Brezhnev

In 1964 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was deposed, and succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev. During Brezhnev's tenure as Party leader, Chernenko's career unsurprisingly continued successfully. He was nominated in 1965 as head of the General Department of the Central Committee, and given the mandate to set the Politburo agenda, and prepare drafts of numerous Central Committee decrees and resolutions. He also monitored telephone and wiretapping devices in various offices of the top Party members. Another one of his jobs was to sign hundreds of Party documents daily, a job he did for the next 20 years. Even after he became General Secretary of the Party, he continued to sign papers referring to the General Department (when he could no longer physically sign documents, a facsimile was used instead).
In 1971 Chernenko was promoted to full membership in the Central Committee: Overseeing Party work over the Letter Bureau, dealing with correspondence. In 1976 he was elected secretary of the Letter Bureau. 1977 he became Candidate, 1978 full member of the Politburo, serving second to the General Secretary in terms of Party hierarchy. During Brezhnev's final years which were dominated by his failing health, Chernenko became fully immersed in ideological Party work: Heading Soviet delegations abroad, accompanying Brezhnev to important meetings and conferences, and was a member of the commission that revised the Soviet Constitution in 1977 and in 1979 he took part in the Vienna arms limitation talks.
After Brezhnev's death in November 1982, there was speculation the position of General Secretary would fall to Chernenko, however he was unable to rally enough popular support for his candidacy within the Party, and the posting fell to former KGB chief Yuri Andropov.
As Leader of the Soviet Union:

Yuri Andropov died in February 1984, after just 15 months in office. Chernenko was then elected to replace Andropov, despite concerns over his own ailing health, and against Andropov's wishes (he stated he wanted Gorbachev to succeed him). Yegor Ligachev writes in his memoirs that Chernenko was elected general secretary without a hitch. At the Central Committee plenary session on 13 February 1984, four days after Andropov's death, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, literally Premier, and Politburo member Nikolai Tikhonov moved that Chernenko be elected general secretary, and the Committee duly voted him in.

Arkady Volsky, an aide to Andropov and other general secretaries, recounts an episode that occurred after a Politburo meeting on the day following Andropov's demise: As Politburo members filed out of the conference hall, either Andrei Gromyko or (in later accounts) Dmitriy Ustinov is said to have put his arm round Nikolai Tikhonov's shoulders and said: "It's okay, Kostya is an agreeable guy (pokladisty muzhik), one can do business with him...." The Politburo failed to pass the decision for Gorbachev, who was nominally Chernenko's second in command, to run the meetings of the Politburo itself in the absence of Chernenko; the latter due to his declining health, began to miss those meetings with increasing frequency. As Nikolai Ryzhkov describes it in his memoirs, "every Thursday morning he (Mikhail Gorbachev) would sit in his office like a little orphan – I would often be present at this sad procedure – nervously awaiting a telephone call from the sick Chernenko: Would he come to the Politburo himself or would he ask Gorbachev to stand in for him this time again?"
To me, Chernenko has always been the personification of Soviet stagnation both politically, socially and economically in this period. At Andropov's funeral, he could barely read the eulogy. Those present strained to catch the meaning of what he was trying to say in his eulogy. He spoke rapidly, swallowed his words, kept coughing and stopped repeatedly to wipe his lips and forehead. He ascended Lenin's Mausoleum by way of a newly installed escalator and descended with the help of two bodyguards.

Chernenko represented a return to the policies of the late Brezhnev era. Nevertheless, he supported a greater role for the labour unions, and reform in education and propaganda. The one major personnel change that Chernenko made was the firing of the chief of the General Staff, Nikolay Ogarkov, who had advocated less spending on consumer goods in favour of greater expenditures on weapons research and development.
In foreign policy, he negotiated a trade pact with the People's Republic of China. Despite calls for renewed détente, Chernenko did little to prevent the escalation of the Cold War with the United States. For example, in 1984, the Soviet Union prevented a visit to West Germany by East German leader Erich Honecker. However, in the late autumn of 1984, the U.S. and the Soviet Union did agree to resume arms control talks in early 1985. In November 1984 Chernenko met with Britain's Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock -I'm sure he was thrilled.
In 1980, the U.S. had boycotted the Summer Olympics held in Moscow in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The 1984 Summer Olympics were due to be held in Los Angeles. On 8 May 1984, Chernenko's USSR announced its intention not to participate, citing security concerns and "chauvinistic sentiments and an anti-Soviet hysteria being whipped up in the United States",. The boycott was joined by 14 Eastern Bloc countries and allies, including Cuba (but not Romania). The action was widely understood as revenge for the US boycott of the Moscow Games. The boycotting countries organized their own 'Friendship Games' in the summer of 1984.

Death and legacy:

In the spring of 1984, Chernenko was hospitalized for over a month, but kept working by sending the Politburo notes and letters. During the summer, his doctors sent him to Kislovodsk for the mineral spas, but on the day of his arrival at the resort Chernenko's health deteriorated, and he contracted pneumonia. Chernenko did not return to the Kremlin until the late autumn of 1984. He awarded Orders to cosmonauts and writers in his office, but was unable to walk through the corridors of his office and was driven in a wheelchair.
By the end of 1984, Chernenko could hardly leave the Central Clinical Hospital, a heavily guarded facility in west Moscow, and the Politburo was affixing a facsimile of his signature to all letters, as Chernenko had done with Andropov's when he was dying. In what was almost universally regarded, even by his opponents, as a cruel act against Chernenko, Politburo member Viktor Grishin dragged the terminally ill Chernenko from his hospital bed to a ballot box to vote in the elections in early 1985 where he famously stumbled in front of the worlds media.
Emphysema and the associated lung and heart damage worsened significantly for Chernenko in the last three weeks of February 1985. According to the Chief Kremlin physician, Dr. Yevgeny I. Chazov, Chernenko had also developed both chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis. On 10 March at 3:00 pm he fell into a coma, and at 7:20 pm he died as a result of heart failure. He became the third Soviet leader to die in just two years' time, and, upon being informed in the middle of the night of his death, US President Ronald Reagan, who was seven months older than Chernenko and just over three years older than his predecessor Andropov, is reported to have remarked "how am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me?"
He was honoured with a state funeral and was buried in the Kremlin necropolis – the last person to be interred there.

The impact of Chernenko—or the lack of it—was evident in the way in which his death was reported in the Soviet press. Soviet newspapers carried stories about Chernenko's death and Gorbachev's selection on the same day. The papers had the same format: page 1 reported the party Central Committee session on 11 March that elected Gorbachev and printed the new leader's biography and a large photograph of him; page 2 announced the demise of Chernenko and printed his obituary.
After the death of a Soviet leader it was customary for his successors to open his safe and look in it. When Gorbachev had Chernenko's safe opened, it was found to contain a small folder of personal papers and several large bundles of money; money was also found in his desk.
Chernenko was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, 1976, in 1981 and in 1984 he was awarded Hero of the Socialist Labor: on the latter occasion, Minister of Defence Ustinov underlined his rule as an "outstanding political figure, a loyal and unwavering continuer of the cause of the great Lenin"; in 1981 he was awarded with the Bulgarian Order of Georgi Dimitrov and in 1982 he received the Lenin Prize for his "Human Rights in Soviet Society."
His first marriage produced a son, Albert, who would become noted in the Soviet Union as a legal theorist. His second wife, Anna Dmitrevna Lyubimova (1913), who married him in 1944, bore him two daughters, Yelena (who worked at the Institute of Party History) and Vera (who worked at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC) in the United States, and a son, Vladimir, who was a Goskino editorialist.

Getting into the history of Eastern Europe

I recently received an email from a dedicated blog reader who was very much enjoying the wonderful travel writings of Patrick Leigh Fermor (who in the 1930s decided he would walk the length of Europe) and asked for some advice on how to get an overview of the history of Eastern Europe. Embracing any opportunity to rummage through my bookshelf and yarn over old favourites, I picked out a few titles which I have found to be the best and most recent broad introductory reading on the History of Eastern Europe that would make a great accompaniment to the writings of Fermor. They are all markedly different in style, approach and content, and I hope this will be helpful to anyone seeking to get into this amazing history depending on what you want to get out of it.


The short and sweet introduction:

The Eastern Question, 1774-1923
By A. Macfie
Buy this book


Anybody starting out in Eastern European History across this period will inevitably encounter the term 'The Eastern Question'. This is term, coined by the British Government, is used to encompass the broad diplomatic and political problems across Eastern Europe posed by the decay of the Ottoman Empire. The expression does not apply to any one particular problem, but instead includes a variety of issues raised during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, including; the rise of Balkan nationalism and the independence movements of the Balkan states such as Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Rumania; the territorial ambition of Russia in the Balkans especially in the Strait and Constantinople; the responses; attitude and the vested interests of the Great European Powers especially Britain; France and Austria, and the international relationship and groupings of the Powers in each of the crisis.
The author of this short book, which part of the Seminar Studies series, provides a good, easy to follow, clear and concise introduction to all of these issues. The layout of the content also makes this a great quick reference guide to Fermor's travel writings.


The broadest of the comprehensive introductions:

The Making of the Modern East, 1792-1923 (A History of the Near East)
By M.E.Yapp
Buy this book


This is a well structured, almost textbook-like work and the broadest of background readings for anyone interested in the history of Eastern Europe.
It contains a general regional introduction, followed by a series of country-by-country analyses, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and the Baltic states, and a section which places the Near East in the international context.
The new, expanded edition, also covers some of the recent dramatic events including the end of the Cold War, the Kuwait Crisis of 1990/91, and the continuing conflict in Israel, as well as assessing the huge social and economic changes in the region, perhaps giving this book a leaning more towards a history of the Middle East rather than Eastern Europe proper.


More specific to the timeframe of Fermor's writings:

East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars (A History of East Central Europe)
By Joseph Rothschild
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This book has found its way onto pretty much all University reading lists that deal with the region and therefore its more academic in makeup and less reference or casual reading. It's scope however is focussed on the history of the region between the two world wars and the events which were happening while Fermor was actually travelling. It therefore goes into much more depth on the political cultures of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and the Baltic states.


My personal favourite:

The Balkans 1804 - 1999
By Misha Glenny
Buy this book


This book does a good job at everything from putting all the peoples of the Balkans in the context of their existence within the Ottoman Empire, to the experience and legacy of the Great War, the royal dictatorships of the interwar period, the occupation and genocides of World War Two, liberation and communism culminating in the new nationalism of the late eighties, civil war and the involvement of NATO.
I wrote a review on this last year and continue to find it recommendable to any reader seeking to obtain an understanding of all the essential dynamics that have shaped the region's past and present. For those already acquainted with Balkan history, Misha Glenny's book may still serve as a very useful chronological reference guide or to get a broad understanding before attempting to move on to works dealing with more specific issues in Balkan history.

The 1798 XYZ Affair -quite the Faux pas.

The XYZ Affair was a 1798 diplomatic episode during the administration of US president John Adams that Americans interpreted as an insult from France. It led to an undeclared naval war called the Quasi-War, which raged at sea from 1798 to 1800. The Federalist Party took advantage of the national anger to build an army and pass the Alien and Sedition Acts to damage the rival Democratic Republican Party.

A political cartoon depicting the incident

Three French agents, publicly referred to as X, Y, and Z demanded major concessions from the United States as a condition for continuing bilateral peace negotiations. The concessions demanded by the French included 50,000 pounds sterling, a $12 million loan from the United States, a $250,000 personal bribe to French foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, and a formal apology for comments made by President of the United States John Adams.

The demand came during a meeting in Paris, France between the French agents and a three-member American commission consisting of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry. Several weeks prior to the meeting with X, Y, and Z, the American commission had met with French foreign minister Talleyrand to discuss French retaliation to the Jay Treaty, which they perceived as evidence of an Anglo-American alliance. French privateers seized nearly 300 American ships bound for British ports in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Caribbean seas. Adams decided on sending Pinckney as part of the commission as Franco-U.S. relations had recently worsened by Talleyrand's rejection of Pinckney as America's minister to France. The French continued to seize American ships, and the Federalist Party, incited by Alexander Hamilton, advocated going to war. Congress authorized the build-up of an army.

The American delegates found these demands unacceptable, and answered, "Not a sixpence", but in the inflated rhetoric of the day, the response became the infinitely more memorable: "Millions for defence, sir, but not one cent for tribute!"

The United States offered France many of the same provisions found in the Jay Treaty with Britain, but France reacted by deporting Marshall and Pinckney back to the United States, refusing any proposal that would involve these two delegates, both key Federalists. Gerry (a Jeffersonian Republican added to the delegation to give it credibility) remained in France, thinking he could prevent a declaration of war, but did not officially negotiate any further.
Republicans in Congress, thinking Adams might be hiding the truth, demanded that he release the French proposals. After refusing to do so for some time, Adams then released the report of the affair resulting in a wave of passionate anti-French sentiment across the U.S. that seriously damaged the Republicans and helped the Federalists win the 1798 elections.  A formal declaration of war was narrowly avoided by Adams' diplomacy, specifically by appointing new diplomats including William Vans Murray to handle the conflict.

The so called 'Quasi-War' began in July, 1798. While there was no formal declaration of war, the conflict escalated with more French seizures of American merchant ships, American seizure of French merchant ships, and the abrogation of the Franco-American Alliance. Adams again sent negotiators on January 18, 1799, who eventually negotiated an end to hostilities through the Treaty of Mortefontaine. During negotiations with France, the U.S. began to build up its navy, a move long supported by Adams and Marshall, to defend against both the French and the British. In addition, in a speech delivered on July 16, 1797, Adams championed the formation of a navy and army, while emphasizing the importance of renewing treaties with Prussia and Sweden.

By the autumn of 1800, the United States Navy and the Royal Navy, combined with a more conciliatory diplomatic stance by the government of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, had reduced the activity of the French privateers and warships. The Convention of 1800, signed on September 30, ended the conflict. Unfortunately for President Adams, the news did not arrive in time to help him secure a second term in the United States presidential election, 1800.

Treaty of the month: What historic treaty has amused me this month?

This month: The Louisiana Purchase Treaty 

The Louisiana Purchase was indeed one hell of a purchase (and I think they got a bargain); the acquisition by the United States of America of 828,800 square miles (2,147,000 km2) of France's claim to the territory of Louisiana in 1803. The U.S. paid 60 million francs ($11,250,000) plus cancellation of debts worth 18 million francs ($3,750,000), for a total sum of 15 million dollars for the Louisiana territory ($219 million in 2010 dollars).

The Louisiana Purchase encompassed all or part of 15 current U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. The land purchased contained all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, parts of Minnesota that were west of the Mississippi River, most of North Dakota, nearly all of South Dakota, north-eastern New Mexico, northern Texas, the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide, and Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, including the city of New Orleans. (parts of this area were still claimed by Spain at the time of the Purchase.) In addition, the Purchase contained small portions of land that would eventually become part of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, comprises around 23% of current U.S. territory. The population of European immigrants was estimated to be 92,345 as of the 1810 census.
The purchase was a vital moment in the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. At the time, it faced domestic opposition as being possibly unconstitutional. Although he felt that the U.S. Constitution did not contain any provisions for acquiring territory, Jefferson decided to purchase Louisiana because he felt uneasy about France and Spain having the power to block American trade access to the port of New Orleans.

Negotiation:

Jefferson initiated the purchase by sending James Monroe and Robert R. Livingston to Paris in 1801, after discovering the transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France under the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso. Livingston was authorized to purchase New Orleans.
In 1803, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, a French nobleman, began to help negotiate with France at the request of Jefferson. Du Pont was living in the United States at the time and had close ties to Jefferson, as well as to the political powers in France. He engaged in back-channel diplomacy with Napoleon on Jefferson's behalf during a visit to France, and originated the idea of the much larger Louisiana Purchase as a way to defuse potential conflict between the United States and Napoleon over North America.

Jefferson disliked the idea of purchasing Louisiana from France as that could imply that France had a right to be in Louisiana. Jefferson believed that a U.S. President did not have the authority to make such a deal: it was not specified in the Constitution. He also thought that to do so would erode states' rights by increasing federal executive power. On the other hand, he was aware of the potential threat that France could be in that region, and was prepared to go to war to prevent a strong French presence there.

Throughout this time, Jefferson had up-to-date intelligence on Napoleon's military activities and intentions in North America. Part of his evolving strategy involved giving du Pont some information that was withheld from Livingston. He also gave intentionally conflicting instructions to the two. He next sent Monroe to Paris in 1802. Monroe had been formally expelled from France on his last diplomatic mission, and the choice to send him again conveyed a sense of seriousness.
Napoleon was faced with revolution in Saint-Domingue (present-day Republic of Haiti). An expeditionary force under his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc had tried to re-conquer the territory and re-establish slavery. But yellow fever and the fierce resistance of the Haitian Revolution destroyed the French army in what became the only successful slave revolt in history, resulting in the establishment of Haiti, the first independent black state in the New World. Napoleon needed peace with Great Britain to implement the Treaty of San Ildefonso and take possession of Louisiana. Otherwise, Louisiana would be an easy prey for Britain or even for the U.S. But in early 1803, continuing war between France and Britain seemed unavoidable. On March 11, 1803, Napoleon began preparing to invade Britain.

Napoleon had failed to re-enslave Haiti; he therefore abandoned his plans to rebuild France's New World empire. Without revenues from sugar colonies in the Caribbean, Louisiana had little value to him. Even though his foreign minister Talleyrand opposed the plan, on April 10, 1803 Napoleon told Treasury Minister François de Barbé-Marbois that he was considering selling the whole Louisiana Territory to the U.S. On April 11, 1803, just days before Monroe's arrival, Barbé-Marbois offered Livingston all of Louisiana instead of just New Orleans, at an expense of $15 million, equivalent to about $219 million in present day terms.

The American representatives were prepared to pay up to $10 million for New Orleans and its environs, but were dumbfounded when the vastly larger territory was offered for $15 million. Jefferson had authorized Livingston only to purchase New Orleans. However, Livingston was certain that the U.S. would accept such a large offer.

The Americans thought that Napoleon might withdraw the offer at any time, preventing the United States from acquiring New Orleans, so they agreed and signed the Louisiana Purchase Treaty on April 30, 1803. On July 4, 1803, the treaty reached Washington. The Louisiana Territory was vast, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to Rupert's Land in the north, and from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west. Acquiring the territory would double the size of the United States at a sum of less than 3 cents per acre.
Treaty signing

On Saturday April 30, 1803, the Louisiana Purchase Treaty was signed by Robert Livingston, James Monroe, and Barbé Marbois in Paris. Jefferson announced the treaty to the American people on July 4. After the signing of the Louisiana Purchase agreement in 1803, Livingston made this famous statement, "We have lived long, but this is the noblest work of our whole lives...From this day the United States take their place among the powers of the first rank." The United States Senate ratified the treaty with a vote of twenty-four to seven on October 20; on the following day, it authorized President Jefferson to take possession of the territory and establish a temporary military government. In legislation enacted on October 31, Congress made temporary provisions for local civil government to continue as it had under French and Spanish rule and authorized the President to use military forces to maintain order. Plans were also set forth for several missions to explore and chart the territory, the most famous being the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Why it has amused me:

The Federalists strongly opposed the purchase, favouring close relations with Britain over closer ties to Napoleon, and concerned that the U.S. had paid a large sum of money just to declare war on Spain. Both Federalists and Jeffersonians were concerned about whether the purchase was unconstitutional. Many members of the United States House of Representatives opposed the purchase. Majority Leader John Randolph led the opposition. The House called for a vote to deny the request for the purchase, but it failed by two votes 59–57. The Federalists even tried to prove the land belonged to Spain not France, but the papers proved otherwise. The Federalists also feared that the political power of the Atlantic seaboard states would be threatened by the new citizens of the west, bringing about a clash of western farmers with the merchants and bankers of New England. There was concern that an increase in slave holding states created out of the new territory would exacerbate divisions between north and south, as well. A group of northern Federalists, led by Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering, went so far as to explore the idea of a separate northern confederacy.
Another concern was whether it was proper to grant citizenship to the French, Spanish, and free black people living in New Orleans, as the treaty would dictate. Critics in Congress worried whether these "foreigners", unacquainted with democracy, could or should become citizens.

Most domestic objections were politically settled, overridden, or simply hushed up. One problem, however, was too important to argue down convincingly: Napoleon did not have the right to sell Louisiana to the United States. The sale violated the 1800 Treaty of San Ildefonso in several ways. Furthermore, France had promised Spain it would never sell or alienate Louisiana to a third party. Napoleon, Jefferson, Madison, and the members of Congress all knew this during the debates about the purchase in 1803. They ignored the fact it was illegal. Spain protested strongly, and Madison made some attempt to justify the purchase to the Spanish government, but was unable to do so convincingly.

That the Louisiana Purchase was illegal was described pointedly by the historian Henry Adams, who wrote: "The sale of Louisiana to the United States was trebly invalid; if it were French property, Bonaparte could not constitutionally alienate it without the consent of the Chambers; if it were Spanish property, he could not alienate it at all; if Spain had a right of reclamation, his sale was worthless."

France turned New Orleans over on December 20, 1803 at The Cabildo. On March 10, 1804, a formal ceremony was conducted in St. Louis to transfer ownership of the territory from France to the United States.

Effective on October 1, 1804, the purchased territory was organized into the Territory of Orleans (most of which became the state of Louisiana) and the District of Louisiana, which was temporarily under the control of the governor and judges of the Indiana Territory.

Napoleon Bonaparte, upon completion of the agreement, stated, "This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride.

Further Reading:

       

Book Review: Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

In the futuristic dystopia imagined in 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only colour to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea and Barbara Demick's book, Nothing to Envy, which won this year's BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, is filled with all such descriptions of the 'hermit state' they don't want you to know about:

There is almost no signage, few motor vehicles. Private ownership of cars is largely illegal, not that anyone can afford them. You seldom even see tractors, only scraggly oxen dragging plows. The houses are simple, utilitarian and monochromatic. There is little that predates the Korean War.

Buy this book
Price: £8:99
Publication Date: Granta Books 2010
ISBN: 978-1847081414

Demick, an American journalist, was a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, covering both North Korea and South Korea, in 2004. She was based in Soul, but made several trips to the North, and conducted extensive interviews with North Koreans who had defected. It is from these interviews that Demick shapes her book: a non-fiction account of six ordinary citizens living in the world's most secretive and repressive state. The author illuminated for us a nation where citizens are encouraged to spy upon one another; where they are forbidden from listening or watching any media other than those run by the state; where every household must keep a portrait of the president on display; where they are so cut off from the rest of the world they truly believe the motto that they have "nothing to envy".
When their great leader Kim Il-sung died in 1994, many North Koreans fell to their knees and, like malfunctioning robots, began banging their heads on the pavements. In the weeks that followed, hundreds killed themselves or died from grief and many children, dangerously dehydrated from crying in the sun, were admitted to hospital. For almost half a century the communist dictator had treated his people like slaves, executed the innocent and, following the country's economic collapse in the 1990s, allowed millions to starve to death.
Weaving together the accounts of six North Korean defectors, the author has created a fascinating portrait of a population bred from birth to be state automatons. Schoolchildren are taught songs such as "Shoot the Yankee Bastards" and bombarded with propaganda portraying Kim Il-sung as a god who "caused trees to bloom and snow to melt". In the face of such indoctrination, Demick asks, "Who could possibly resist?"
But the fact is that many did resist, and their gruelling, the daring prison breaks and midnight escapes through icy rivers to reach China, the tales of everyday love and loss make this book impossible to put down even when you really should turn the light of and go to sleep. For years, two young people, Mi-ran and Jun-sang, risked everything for their forbidden love but never dared confide their feelings of political disillusionment to each other. In a society where sexual relationships outside of marriage are allegedly  frowned upon and sex-education is non-existent, it took six years before they shared their first kiss. Mi-Ran says when she eventually fled North Korea she was "twenty-six years old and a schoolteacher, but I didn't know how babies were conceived". As the famine set in, mothers sacrificed everything to feed their families, prostituting themselves for bags of potatoes, while teachers watched helplessly as their malnourished pupils faded away "growing younger, like a movie reel run in reverse".
For most of Demick's interviewees, enlightenment came slowly. Jun-sang's gnawing feeling that North Korea was a corrupt regime was confirmed when he began illegally watching South Korean TV; it was, he says, "like looking in the mirror for the first time and realising you were unattractive". With an eye for the most minute detail, Demick holds this mirror up for the rest of the world, allowing the survivors' stories to unfold without judgment while revealing the trials they now face adjusting to freedom.

Viewed from space North Korea is invisible, a black expanse; when the economy collapsed in the 1990s, the lights literally went out. Electricity is in such short supply that the lights are switched off every evening, plunging the whole of North Korea into darkness, something chillingly illustrated through a satellite photo of North Korea at night in the introduction.
Nothing to Envy is an extremely valuable and truly astounding book, if you're intrigued, as I have always been, by a nation that seems to have fallen off the map of the developed world and want to know how ordinary citizens have endured such extraordinary circumstances for so long, then this book should not be missed. With Mao's Great Famine -another book I recently reviewed- there is an emerging literature illuminating very dark and unexplored areas of far eastern history that I hope we are going to see more of. If this madness is going to end, we need to know it exists.

The American Civil War in Global History

From the European perspective alone with a death toll of over 600,000 in a population of 40 million, the loss of life in the American Civil War was seen as proportionately less severe than that in other contemporary conflicts. However, the ramifications can be said to have been measurably much wider, because it occurred in a semi-industrial society, using the most modern weapons, and despite widespread sympathy for the southern Confederacy in conservative circles in Europe, it did not become a world war simply because neither Britain nor France had a direct interest in intervention.

The American Civil War had widespread consequences across Eurasia as well as Central and South America. This is a further testimony to the tightening connections within the world economy and diplomatic order. The distraction of the United States during the war, for example, allowed a brief independence in foreign policymaking to Mexico. The Civil War also encouraged France to make  its foray into the sacrosanct territory of the Monroe Doctrine with its ill-fated attempt to support the creation of a French-leaning Mexican Empire in 1862-3. The end of the Civil War, in turn, put pressure on the French invaders and saved the Mexican liberal republic. Blatant foreign intervention stirred peasant patriotism to a new bravado, which was still felt during the full-scale Mexican revolution of 1911. Meanwhile, the defeat of Napoleon's escapade's also gave France's European competitors, notably Bismarck, a strong sense of the limitations of French power. The Civil War may also have aborted the emergence of a more aggressive American expansionist policy in the Pacific and the Far East, where Japan was afforded a short, but critical respite from Western pressure.
In addition, the ripples of economic consequence can be seen extending outward from North America at this time. For example, the defeat of the South caused a commercial depression in Cuba, once American exports of raw cotton and tobacco resumed. This reinforced the demand of the Cuban Creoles for independence from exasperating Spanish rule. In turn the Cuban revolt contributed to the overthrow of the Spanish liberal regime, which had also been nurtured by Emperor Napoleon III of France. Cuban revolutionaries had  meanwhile carried the flame of war and revolution to the Dominican Republic.

Britain's dominance of the Atlantic carrying trade, which appeared to be threatened before 1861, was given a new lease of life by the Civil War. The country's cotton factories also boomed. After the period of temporary hardship that followed the abrupt loss of cotton supplies, the textile industry recovered, as overstocking of raw cotton was eliminated. Britain, the great consumer of American raw cotton, now turned to other sources of supply war blockaded the ports of the southern states. Long-staple Egyptian cotton was the best replacement, but short-staple Indian cotton wool also found itself in great demand across the world. Large fortunes were, therefore, made by Indian and Middle-Eastern cotton exporters. The Egyptian government of Khedive Ismail borrowed yet more heavily on the European money markets to sustain an ambitious program of military modernisation and public works. British entrepreneurs tried to initiate cotton cultivation in Ottoman Anatolia. The Civil War era, therefore, became the high point of the boom of the mid-Victorian British imperial economy. Growth was fuelled both by this sudden rise in cotton and tobacco prices and by the contemporary discoveries of gold in south Australia and western North America. Merchants built huge, neo-gothic palaces in Melbourne, Bombay and Alexandria. Newly rich cotton growing-peasants in India were rumoured to have shod the wheels of their carts with silver.

When the crash came, following the resumption of American production, it was a very severe one and began to propel the world economy into the despondency of the long depression of the 1970s and 1880s. The collapse of cotton prices after 1867 was a terminal wound for Egyptian finances and ushered in the constitutional crisis which racked the country throughout the 1870s. The simultaneous collapse of Indian cotton prices and concurrent famines in western India encouraged the growth of a new militancy in town and countryside. Though the links were indirect, the prevalence of rural poverty in the cotton tracts powerfully assisted the growth of the anti-British nationalism in western India. Even in distant Russia, the dangerous dependence on American cotton supplies revealed by the Civil War gave militarists a justification to seize the rich black soils of central Asia which were ideal for growing cotton.

The American Civil War can, therefore, be placed in a global context much in the same sense as the 1848 revolutions, because direct connections of trade, government and ideology spread its effects across the globe. Yet did its origins and outcomes have any generic connection with contemporary events in Europe and Asia? There do appear to be some distant comparisons. In crushing the emerging Confederate state, the Union was itself following, and contributing to, a much wider realignment in which large and unified nations and more centralised and economically sophisticated supremacies replaced the still loose and varied policies of the early nineteenth century. Across the northern states of America, a more self-conscious economic and political nation was emerging. Northerners feared the rivalry of a slave nation' to the south and west, because they might have been amenable to foreign influence. Like the denizens of emerging Germany, they were protectionists who wished to build up their nascent industries, and they were suspicious of the free-trading proclivities of the South and its links with the British.

Prior to 1860, the American federal government was a weak institution, even by the standards of contemporary European politics. This was one reason why the southern states were able to secede from the Union in the first place. To fight the war, Abraham Lincoln called on the northern states for armed support. The war itself brought into being, at least temporarily, a more powerful, armed, and centralised government with a distinct line of interventionist policy and an enlarged bureaucracy. Yet even after the power of the federal government had waned again, individual states retained some of the new forms of governance which they had developed during the war. Wider than this, something akin to American nationalism, though still fractured by loyalty to state and locality, began fitfully to emerge. In this sense again, the bloody birth of a stronger federal America was distantly related to the movements for Italian or German unification and the modernisation of Japan.  In the English-speaking world, the Canadian Consolidation (1868) and the consolidation of British New Zealand during the same era represented parallel developments. Economic change now seemed to demand the creation of larger, unified nation0states. More educated and self-aware middle classes raved the psychological protection that such states were believed to afford. There were exceptions, of course. The scattered British colonists in Australia did not finally pool their resources until the beginning of the next century. here, state building worked slowly from the bottom up, as colonists found they had more and more in common as they traded, legislated and worshipped together in the vast southern continent. Their pattern of development resembled what hat of the United States might have been had it not been for the explosive issues of slavery and expansion to the west.

The American Civil War also signalled the final demise of a core constituent of the Western arm of the old eighteenth -century British world economy. It was of symbolic importance that the great, and mainly British-founded, slave plantations of the southern American states disappeared within ten years of the demise of that other key institution of the British world of the eighteenth century, the East India Company. That corrupt old monopoly had finally been displayed as incompetent even in regard to its residual military and government functions.

Somewhat inevitably, the most enveloping and long-term effects of the Civil War were registered in the domain of war-making itself. In many respects, this was the first heavily mechanised war in history. Heavy guns devastated traditional large infantry formations and whole cities were devastated by the effects of long-term bombardment. Cameras were now on hand to record suffering and to stimulate patriotism. The commanders of European armies learned quickly. A huge increase in the production of war material spread new forms of weaponry, especially small arms, across the world. Legally traded or smuggled weapons found their way to Europe, Asia and Africa strengthening the forces of royal and colonial armies, but eagerly sought by revolutionaries, anarchists and peasant rebels.

The After Empire Series: Issue 5, After the Soviet Union. (PART 1)

It's July -the trees are bright green, the sun is shining and we can all head to the beach and hit the surf! "really, where which is the lucky country?" I hear you cry. Well summer in this country may be as intransigent as it is unyielding, but I tell you what isn't and that's the empire which I shall be throwing into the proverbial crucible of comparative thought in this the fifth instalment of my ongoing series of monthly comparative investigations into the impact of various empire's demises on their former peoples, the states that emerged from their ruins and on international order.

This month we focus on the most modern of all the empires compared in this series, an empire who's capitol city has changed name and location more than once and who's penchant for vodka combined with long-tem stagnation knows no bounds. This is of course the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, more commonly known as the Soviet Union, the constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991. As more empires are being thrown into the mix these posts get longer and longer so this is part 1 of 2 which will examine Russians themselves, next month in part 2 will move on to the people of the dependant republics.


Being the most modern empire in this series, in the post-imperial Soviet context, these are still relatively early days, the first years of independence are always important both for what does happen during this time and what does not. Not merely are millions of lives uplifted or destroyed in these years but events often cast a very long shadow. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, for example, we have still not escaped the consequences of the partition of Palestine and Kashmir in 1947-8.
In the last eight years we have seen significant violence in six of the fifteen former Soviet republics. These are Moldova, Tajikistan, the three Trans-Caucasian republics (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan), and Russia itself. Often this violence has been limited to  relatively small regions and sections of the population. By the standards of other collapsing empires the bloodshed has been remarkably small. We have seen no equivalent of the violence that killed or expelled the great majority of Muslims from much of the Ottoman Empire, and most Christians from the rest. The end of the Russian empire was not accompanied by world war, as was the case with the Habsburgs, Romanovs and Hitler's Reich. We have not seen bloodshed to match India's partition, let alone the wars in Vietnam and Algeria which brought the end of the French Empire. It is essential, then, to ask why not.
The most critical reason was that in the Soviet case it was Russia itself that played a key role in the empire's destruction. This does not mean that in 1990-1 the majority of the Russian people wished to destroy the Soviet Union. They were merely unwilling to make sacrifices to preserve it and anxious to secure for themselves a better deal within it. Nor even were Boris Yeltsin and his associates opposed in principle to the Union's survival. But their struggle with the all-Union government, their determination to take over its power and its assets, were key factors in the empire's collapse in 1991. Yeltsin was also the great obstacle which defeated the August 1991 coup, whose main aim was to save the empire. Subsequently Yeltsin took the lead in the December 1991 Belovezhe negotiations with Ukraine and Belorussia which led to the Unions dissolution. There are no true precedents for this among other empires, though the Portuguese metropolitan revolution of 1974 which led quickly to independence for the colonies is perhaps best parallel. In the Portuguese case, however, as in that of the French and Dutch after 1945, independence was preceded by many years of bitter warfare precisely because the metropolitan state was determined to maintain its empire. Even the British fought  long rearguard police actions, even a limited war in Malaya, either to postpone independence or to ensure that it came on terms acceptable to them. Other states launched world wars to retain or regain empire. Meanwhile Yeltsin's Russia dismantled the Soviet Empire, forcing independence on states such as Belorussia and the five Central Asian republics whose elites and populations had recently made clear their desire for the Union to continue. In the March 1991 referendum carried out in nine of the fifteen Soviet republics (admittedly with some confusion due to the asking of more than one question) 76.4 per cent of the voters favoured the Union's preservation on an 80 per cent turnout, which included very big majorities in Belorussia and Central Asia. Not surprisingly, independence donated by Moscow only nine months later came as a shock.

Russian diasporas

The policies of Yeltsin's Russia are also one reason for another great puzzle, namely the relative quiescence of the 25 million Russians who suddenly found themselves minorities in foreign states upon the Soviet Union's collapse.  In the British and French cases far smaller communities of Ulster Protestants and pied noirs (French settlers in Algeria) had fought a similar fate bitterly and in Ulster's case with success. Like many Muslim minorities in Europe the pied noirs had not merely opposed then end of empire with guns in their hands but suffered almost complete extinction as a community as a result. In the post-Soviet case almost no Russian civilians were killed or ethnically cleansed from any of the fourteen or other republics of the former USSR. Ironically, by far the highest Russian civilian casualties were the thousands of Russians in Grozny killed by the Russian army and air force during the campaigns to crush Chechnya's bid for independence. But in most of the ex-Soviet republics the Russians became second-class citizens, indeed in Latvia and Estonia the majority of them initially became not citizens at all, but merely residents. Moreover, as with the Germans in interwar Bohemia, the sectors of the economy in which most Russians worked -generally heavy industry and very often defence related- were those hardest hit by the collapse of the Union and the subsequent economic depression. Faced with these challenges and in some cases fearing native hostility, many Russians emigrated back to Russia, above all from Central Asia and from the younger, professional sections of the Russian population. But at the end of 1999 more than 90 per cent of Russians remained in the fourteen independent republics, and only in Moldova did a Russian community engage in a successful bid for secession. Today, the largest ethnic Russian diasporas outside of Russia live in the Ukraine (about 8 million), Kazakhstan (about 4.5 million), Belarus (about 1.2 million), Latvia (about 700,000), Uzbekistan (about 650, 000) and Kyrgyzstan (about 600,000).
One reason for the Russian diasporas quiescence was that they received no encouragement to intransigence from Yeltsin's Moscow, in sharp contrast to British conservative support of Ulster Unionism before 1914, or to Paris's backing for the pied noirs. Financial considerations was another cause for Russian reticence. Beset by economic and financial crisis, and dependant on IMF loans, Russia like interwar Hungary was constrained to hide its resentment of the post-imperial settlement. By 1995 any lingering dreams of forward policy in the Near Abroad were wrecked by the Russian army's debacle in Chechnya. Russia was exposed to all as extremely weak not only in financial but also now in military terms. The reality of what warfare meant both to young conscripts and civilian victims of bombardment was evident every day in the terrifying television coverage of Grozny: this was a great disincentive to imperialist dreams. In any case, once the Soviet Union had disintegrated into independent states recognised by the international community, attempts by Moscow to mobilise the Russian diaspora, still more to challenge sovereign borders, were bound to be very costly. They would inevitably infuriate all the republican governments, as well as the entire international community, for which the sanctity of borders was an absolute principle. Since Moscow itself was proclaiming this principle in relation to the Chechens, Tatars and other minorities within the Russian Federation, it would also expose Russia to international ridicule and domestic destabilisation. In any case Yeltsin and his ministers were not seriously interested in changing borders or aiding the diaspora. They had other much more pressing priorities within Russia. Economic stabilisation and reintegration into the world economy was one such priority, and would clearly be threatened by adventures or even instability in the Near Abroad. Yeltsin's governments were far too divided, obsessed by factional struggles and by the often corrupt pursuit of personal interest to worry much about policy, as distinct from politically convenient rhetoric, towards the Russian diaspora.
In other former empires a diaspora might have done much more on its own behalf to ensure that its voice was heard. The Russian diaspora, however, consisted of people inured over the centuries to powerless obedience to government, and traditionally denied the possibility of articulating their own interests and choosing leaders to defend them. In the Soviet Union there were no equivalents to the autonomous civic groups, the free press or the paramilitary institutions that had, for example, allowed Ulster Unionists to exert such a formidable political influence. Competitive party politics, allowing different nationalist movements to mobilise mass support and feed off each other's radicalism, had no place in the Soviet Union. Russians in the non-Russian republics of the Union did not even possess their own, theoretically autonomous, territorial institutions, unlike the indigenous minorities: in the Gorbachev era many of these small peoples used such local government institutions to stake out claims for real autonomy and defend their group interests. The closest the Russians outside Russia came to possessing such institutions were the big factories in which they worked; these so-called all-Union factories, subordinated directly to ministries in Moscow, very often had Russian managers and a largely Russian workforce. With their own community housing, schools and cultural institutions, they were in many ways a world unto themselves. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the link with Moscow was cut, and the factories themselves were crippled by economic collapse and in no position to rally Russians against republican governments.

Mobilising the Russian diaspora for effective political action was also complicated by other deeper factors. Russian nationalism and Russians' sense of their own national identity in the 1990s were confused. For obvious historical reasons a Russian political identity could never be built around French or English conceptions of citizenship, political participation or civil rights. Nor, however, was Russia's a typical East European ethnic nationalism, born out of a small people's resentment of empire and its determination to preserve a threatened language, culture and separate national existence. For centuries Russia had contained many peoples. A great high culture based on the Russian language had been created. This culture had always been cosmopolitan and imperial. The worldwide power and prestige of both the imperial state and the imperial high culture had become part of Russian pride and of what it meant to be a Russian. So too had the knowledge that many people not of Russian ethnic origin shared this pride and identity to varying degrees. The imperial state itself had played a much bigger and more autonomous role in defining national identity than could be the case in the West.
As we have seen, even in 1914 the Russians were not really a nation. The cultural gap between elite and peasantry was too wide, and the argument within educated society about what institutions, values and symbols truly defined Russianness was too bitter. Creating a stable Russian identity was complicated in the twentieth century by the fact that Tsarist and Soviet imperial visions were often in conflict: a Soviet identity could not simply be built on Tsarist foundations. After three generations of Communist rule a Soviet Russian identity was consolidating itself by the 1970s. This identity was, however, then directly challenged under Gorbachev by growing public awareness of the Soviet system's complete failure to compete in economic terms with the West, and by new revelations of the awful crimes committed in the past by the regime in order to create this failed vision of modernity. Partly for this reason, when conservative bureaucrats and managers tied to mobilise the Russian diaspora in a number of so-called 'international fronts' to defend the Communist regime and the Soviet Union they could seldom arouse any enthusiasm. Widespread hopes for a better life in a post-Soviet world of independent republics were shattered by economic collapse after 1991. Nostalgia for the old Soviet order blossomed even more in the Russian diaspora than in Russia itself. By then, however, the dissolution of the Union was irreversible fact. Even those who most regretted the Soviet Union's collapse often understood that its restoration was impossible.

Metropolitan Russians

In some ways Russian popular attitudes in the 1990s were rather similar to those of Austrians after 1945. The population had had enough of empires, enough of sacrificing itself in the name of History and great causes. The Second Austrian republic won its people's loyalty above all through the prosperity it provided. A post-imperial Russia could certainly do the same. If Russia experienced an economic boom to match Europe's of the 1950s and 60s then the democratic institutions, national borders and state institutions of the Russian Federation would gain great legitimacy in the hearts of a people exhausted by generations of sacrifice and privation, and devoted almost exclusively to the pursuit of private ends and a higher standard of living. As regards their impact on the metropolitan people, the collapse of the European and Soviet empires are, however, barely comparable. It is true that British elites were also to an extent disorientated by victory in war followed by a sharp decline in relative power and status. But to get the full measure of a comparison with the Soviet Union one would have to imagine the overnight collapse of the British Empire at a time when it had seemed stable, the simultaneous secession of Scotland (Ukraine) and Wales (Belarus), the disintegration both of the monarchy and of parliamentary government, and an economic crisis much worse than the great depression of the 1930s. Nor are comparisons with Turkey any more appropriate. More than a century of decline and defeat had bred a certain weariness of empire, not to mention a sense that collapse was more than possible. In any case disintegration followed defeat in war, whose verdict was clear-cut. For a brief period there did follow within Turkish society a conflict between Ottoman-Muslim-imperial and Turkish nationalist identities and commitments. Moreover, the bulk of the population longed only for a private life and bare material satisfaction.

In the Turkish case, however, everything was transformed by the fact that empire's collapse was immediately followed by the attempt of ancient enemies to invade and annex the nation's homeland itself. Against such a threat Turkish nationalism was able to coalesce and find both unity and heroic leadership. If the Americans seized Moscow, and the Poles, Chinese and Turks preceded to carve up the rest of Russia, the Russian elites and population might respond in similar fashion. But the 1990s have not offered Russian nationalism anything like so obvious a target against which to unify or define itself. Partly as a result, the end of empire in Russian had brought nothing like the Turkish experience of reinvigoration and rebirth, for which many of its opponents hoped so ardently in 1988-91.

The behaviour of Russia and Russians is beyond question the most important factor in the peculiar history of the collapse and the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Empire. However, other factors did also contribute to the empire's relatively peaceful demise. Above all, the federal system, which played so big a role in the collapse of the USSR, also helped to ensure that the end of empire was in most cases relatively smooth and nonviolent. Under Soviet federalism the fifteen union republics had a range of governmental institutions staffed largely by well educated native cadres. They also had clearly defined borders. The March 1990 elections had given the reality of democratic legitimacy to some republican governments and a veneer to others. In no case in 1991 was power in a republic seized by force or armed rebellion. In all cases independence was ceded by Moscow in December 1991 to the legally established government which also generally exercised full effective control throughout the republic's territory. The sudden last-minute demarcation of borders between newly constituted political units, so fatal in the Indian case in 1946-7, was avoided. The republican bureaucracies would inevitably face many problems in adapting to an independent post-socialist world. Nevertheless, the strength of institutions and the number of well-trained officials were usually much superior to the norm in most of the Middle East or Africa on the eve of independence.
Soviet federalism could not, however, ensure a peaceful transition to independence in all republics. In PART 2 of this edition we will look at individual cases, comparing them both to each other and to examples drawn from the collapse of other empires.

Further Reading:
I found the following books invaluable in compiling this months issue:

Book Review: Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62

By Frank Dikotter  

Well fellow history-types, we're starting July with a masterpiece of historical investigation. Frank Dikotter’s chronicle of how Mao's regime killed at least 45 million people in what he calls the greatest man-made famine the world has seen, will go a long way to ensuring that no one will have any more excuses for modish Maoism.

Buy this book
Price: £9.99
Publication Date: 2011
ISBN: 978-1408810033
Classification: Hob Nob



Dikotter, a professor at the University of Hong Kong on leave from the University of London, has broken through the lies and concealment surrounding Mao’s crazed attempt to vault over Soviet Russia and snatch the leadership of the socialist camp by achieving communism at one bound in the Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962. His sources -central and local Communist Party records he nosed out- are solid, and the result is a shattering book.

The basic narrative of the great famine that hit the People's Republic around 1960 has been known outside China at least since Jasper Becker's groundbreaking 1996 account, Hungry Ghosts. Its claims were doubted by those who could not accept the sheer monstrous scale of the calamity visited on the Chinese people as a result of the Great Leap Forward launched by Mao in 1958 to propel China into the ranks of major industrial nations. But now Dikötter's painstaking research in newly opened local archives makes all too credible his estimate that the death toll reached 45 million people.
Staggering though it is, the statistical total is only part of the story that this book tells. By digging into the records, Dikötter provides a detailed litany of the degree of suffering the Great Helmsman unleashed and the inhumane manner in which his acolytes operated. Horrors pile up as he tells of the spread of collective farms and the vast projects that caused more harm than good and involved the press-ganging of millions of people into forced labour. As the pressure mounted to provide the all-powerful state with more and more output, the use of extreme violence became the norm, with starvation used as a weapon to punish those who could not keep up with the work routine demanded of them. The justice system was abolished. Brutal party cadres ran amok. 'It is impossible not to beat people to death,' one county leader said.

In the draconian, top-down, militaristic system that ruled China, the harsh execution of orders was a way for officials to win promotion as they were set impossible targets for everything – even for the number of executions. The inefficiency, waste and destruction was enormous. The masses in whose name the Communist party claimed to rule were eminently disposable. From 1927 to their victory in 1949, Mao and his companions had waged ruthless warfare (against equally ruthless if less effective nationalist opponents); now the campaign was economic and the farmers and industrial workers were the fodder expected to sacrifice themselves for the cause dictated to them. Anybody not ready to lay down their life would have it taken from them in the name of the higher good of the cause.
The book's title is somewhat misleading. Horrific as it was, with its cannibalism and people eating mud in search of sustenance, the famine generated by the Great Leap's failure and the diversion of labour from farming was only part of a saga of oppression, cruelty and lies on a gargantuan scale. Initially launched to enable China to overtake Britain in steel production, Mao's programme took on a deadly life of its own. At the apex of the system, the chairman refused to recognise reality, spoke of people eating five meals a day, insisted on maintaining food exports when his country was starving and indulged in macabre throwaway remarks such as: 'When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.'

The depth of Dikötter's research is enhanced by the way in which he tells his terrible story. The book is extremely clearly written, avoiding the melodrama that infused some other recent broad-brush accounts of Mao's sins. He also puts the huge disaster that befell China into the context it needs – the Sino-Soviet split, Mao's ambitions for the People's Republic and the acquiescence of most of those around him until it was too late.

Finally, somebody had to confront the leader. As China descended into catastrophe, the second-ranking member of the regime, Liu Shaoqi, who had been shocked at the conditions he found when he visited his home village, forced the chairman to retreat. An effort at national reconstruction began. But Mao was not finished. Four years later, he launched the Cultural Revolution whose most prominent victim was Liu, hounded by Red Guards until he died in 1969, deprived of medicines and cremated under a false name.

The Cultural Revolution is widely remembered, the Great Leap much less so. Having gone through those two experiences, not to mention the mass purges that preceded them and the Beijing massacre of 4 June 1989, it is little wonder if the Chinese of today are set on a very different course that rejects ideology in the interests of material self-advancement.
But there is one enormous snag. The Communist party still holds that Mao was 70% good, 30% bad. The Great Helmsman's face stares out over Tiananmen Square and from the country's bank notes. If the bad things that happened under him are common knowledge, he has slipped into the time-honoured category of rulers who wished to do good but whose aims were traduced by evil subordinates.

Though some Chinese historians have bravely delved into the history of the period covered in this book, the truth is still too troubling to be acknowledged openly by the current rulers of China for one simple reason: Mao is the first emperor of the regime established in 1949 and they are his heirs. Dikötter's superb book pulls another brick from the wall.
To date this is the seminal study of the Great Leap Forward that both describes the horrors of the resulting famine and puts it in context rather than falling into the trap of only describing the horrors and sheer scale of the catastrophe. In addition, it also provides an illuminating insight into the workings of a totalitarian one-party dictatorship.