Empires Apart: America and russia from the vikings to iraq

Brian Landers

Penguin

Rs 499

Pp 604

When you think of 19th century America and Russia, do the images that spring up come from textbooks or from Gone with the Wind and The Cherry Orchard? If history books, rather than fiction and films, are your preferred prism of the period, if you are already educated in the arcana of these two nations?centuries of struggles into birth and their march into industrialisation and then the Cold War?then maybe this is not the book for you. Maybe you can?t stand yet another person telling you that Russia emancipated serfs and America freed slaves in the same decade. Maybe comparisons of America?s westward expansion in the 19th century to Russia?s territorial march across Asia beginning with the 17th century feel like someone is forcing the alphabet down your gullet for the billionth time. If so, avoid Brian Landers? Empires Apart. But it gave my cranial box a serious upgrade. I found it educational and interesting.

But it is also very provocative, arguing that a) America?s road to Iraq was laid as soon as the first Englishman stepped ashore on Roanoke Island, b) there is as clear a continuity of the imperialist project from George Washington to George Bush as from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin, c) this continuity between the American and Russian empires will become clear as soon as some of the past that has been interred by popular history is resuscitated, d) but this resuscitation will be lopsided because while the idea of America had become the de facto idea of the world by the time the age of the microchip arrived, Russian attempts to export its ideology remained ham-handed and unsuccessful, e) these different destinies are rooted in the difference between bullet and ballot, between what an autocracy couldn?t command and what a democracy could co-opt.

As they recovered from their first horrified paralysis after 9/11, millions of Americans were persuaded to rediscover their countrymen?s long history of imperialist misadventures, including a bombardment of Libya in 1805. That particular exercise saw the US enforce the treaties it desired in Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli in the short term, but also set off long-standing animus in the region that is giving it so much grief today. Most Americans were, of course, already aware that the US Constitution had held that a slave be counted as two-thirds of a ?person? for congressional apportionment and tax purposes.

But Landers draws the shame line further back. He suggests Americans read 9/11 against 5/27, which is the 1637 date on which English militia surrounded a Pequot township of Mystic, Connecticut and killed all but five of the (sleeping) women, children and elderly?most men were away hunting. Considering the populations in proportionate terms, Landers says the Mystic Massacre was equivalent to more than a million New Yorkers being killed on 9/11. He has blogged that this is meant to be thought-provoking, to underline all that America has forgotten to become the extraordinary moral crusader, the world?s champion of freedom and democracy. Many are understandably repelled, saying that Landers stretches imperialism?s definition so wide that it loses all practical, plausible substance.

Lady Macbeth cried, ?Here?s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little.? And perhaps Landers would have America act like the lady, become stoop-shouldered with guilt.

But you can?t say this author didn?t anticipate the brickbats coming his way. He says as much, that using Russia to understand America is like seeing the world through an Afghan villager?s eyes. Not something a typical reader would expect to do: ?To a villager in Afghanistan whose family is accidentally killed by an American bomb, American imperialism must seem as oppressive as the Russian imperialism his country experienced not long before. But to the outside world ideological preconceptions tint the actions of the two powers quite differently.? Landers is doing what the typical writer won?t do, insist that (many) Russians remembering Stalin for bringing electricity rather than for suppressing elections is comparable to (most) Americans remembering George Washington for being a freedom fighter rather than a slave owner. Whatever you may think of Lander?s interpretation, his facts don?t appear suspect and his theory is sound: nations do not use their histories as photographs, but as mirrors doctored to show how they would like to see themselves. Here, I am thinking of Hayden White and Metahistory.

Plus, Landers recognises that however much the Russian and American empires may have overlapped, they were not identical. Gregory Peck could finance a film about the persecution of those who burnt their draft cards to oppose Vietnam and the CIA, and screen it at Cannes. All that the administration?s opposition helped ensure was that the film didn?t become big. By contrast,Chaplin?s The Great Dictator was simply banned in Russia. The difference between the two repressions is significant. On the one hand, a democratic openness to debate, a possibility of new interests and philosophies emerging. On the other hand, an autocracy that even today appears to underpin corporatism and democracy in Russia.

Landers ends Empires Apart with the reminder that all empires eventually suffer from ?imperial overreach? and decline.

Speculation about whether the US has reached this stage is rife at present. You could call this the Lady Macbeth effect as well, but Landers points to scholarship showing that as the Spanish, Dutch and British empires approached their nadir, their richest and brightest citizens switched from ?exploring and conquering, trading and manufacturing, inventing and creating? to finance! They started living on interest, dividends and capital appreciation, until wealth could no longer be sucked in from abroad. The empires collapsed at this point. Sounds like any country you know?