The Russian Syndrome: One Thousand Years of Political Murder

by Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Caroline Higgitt (Translator)

Today, as we confront the social and political upheaval that has led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a deeper understanding of Russia's turbulent past is more essential than ever. In this fascinating book, Russian history unfolds as a "continuous history of political murder" as the author, Helene Carrere d'Encausse, focuses on this dramatic theme from its origins in Kievan Rus to the threshold of the Gorbachev era.
Since the eleventh century - when dynastic murder was used to settle questions of inheritance and succession in Kiev - through the regimes of Stalin and Brezhnev, there has been a tragic relation between politics, violence, and terror. The Russian Syndrome's riveting narrative not only brings to life extraordinary personalities and events - Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Bakunin, Rasputin, Lenin, the Stalinist terror, for example - but also serves as the framework for comparing and contrasting Russian historical patterns with those of Western Europe. Demonstrating in vivid detail the continuity and force of recurrent historical patterns that link the Soviet era with its prerevolutionary past, d'Encausse shows how terror and political violence, used by the tsars to consolidate their power and to unify the state, became the instruments of totalitarian successors as well as of those revolutionaries who aimed to destroy the state and bring about radical social and political change.
Exploring the beliefs, ideology, and political culture of monarchs, dictators, revolutionaries, and reformers, this provocative and timely work illuminates the complex and traumatic course of Russian history as it sheds light on the Soviet state's enigmatic future.

Genres: Russia, History

Hardcover

First published September 28, 1988

About the author

Hélène Carrère d'Encausse (born Hélène Zourabichvili) was the permanent secretary of the Académie Française and a historian specializing in Russian history. She was a graduate of the elite Paris Institute of Political Studies (better known as Sciences Po).

In 1991, Goudji created the academician's sword for her.

Her son, Emmanuel Carrère (born 1957), is an author, screenwriter and director.

(Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

More than just a compedium of murder in Russia, covered a lot of Russian history in general. Here is an understated preview of the reign of Ivan IV, aka “the Terrible”. He earned the nickname:

In 1543, however, when he was still only thirteen, he took a first step toward power and revenge. He unexpectedly called together the boyars to rebuke them with great vehemence for their misdeeds. And he announced without hesitation that by way of example he was going to punish, if not the most guilty of them, then at least the most highly placed. On his orders, his huntsmen seized Prince Andrei Shuisky, the real head of government, and handed him over to the hunting dogs which tore him to pieces in view of the people of Moscow. With this veritable coup d’état, which taught the boyars that the hour for a return had struck, Ivan was able to assert himself: suddenly he was the master. Four years later, in 1547, he decided to have himself crowned, taking the title of tsar. After a period of ten years of bloody interludes, fourteen years after the death of Vasily III, the throne of Moscow had found a proper occupant, even if this occupant was not yet eighteen years old. These tragic beginnings, following on a tragic childhood, did not augur well for Ivan’s reign.

Rasputin is damn hard to kill. I have never heard this account of his death:

The murder itself was no less bizarre. Flattered by the idea of finally meeting Princess Yussupov, Rasputin was lured to Yussupov's magnificent palace where his host had prepared a somewhat unusual banquet for him with poisoned cakes and glasses coated in poison. Dr. Lazovert guaranteed that there was enough poison to kill a whole regiment. Yussupov has given a vivid description of that night of surreal horror. Alone with Rasputin, while the others waited upstairs for the moment to carry away the body, Yussupov’s amazement turned to terror as Rasputin took mouthful after mouthful of poison without turning a hair, begging Yussupov, who waited in vain for some sign of a death agony, to amuse him by singing to the guitar. Rasputin’s superhuman ability to survive the effects of strong poison, and the feeling of being alone with his victim in the silence of the night, proved to be too much for Yussupov’s nerves and his reason wavered. To save himself and it, in a last effort of will, he drew a gun and shot Rasputin who, far from dying, suggested that they go and finish off the evening in a gypsy cabaret. When death was eventually certified by Doctor Lazovert and the body wrapped in bearskin, the conspirators were at last able to relax. Where the poison had inexplicably failed, the gun fad succeeded. They had proved that Rasputin was only a man, perverse and threatening, but finally overcome. The shadows surrounding the monarchy seemed to recede.

Suddenly, in the midst of the joyful, uncontrollable, and almost hysterical excitement that inevitably follows a moment of such tension, the group of conspirators thought they were plunging back into madness and unreality: the dead man rose up and threw himself on his assassin, screaming and seizing him by the throat with a viselike grip. In an eerie nightmare it seemed as if Rasputin, poisoned, shot, and certified dead, had risen from the dead to strangle his killer who, though young, alive, and unharmed, could not tear his hands from his throat. When he finally succeeded, his victim fell groaning beneath his blows, only to rise again, leap to his feet, fight his way out of the room—though the door was locked—crawl up the stairs that led outside and run, staggering unsteadily, toward the outer door. Though pursued by five fit and healthy men, he almost managed to escape, shouting out as he ran: “Feliks, I’m going to tell the empress everything!” Purichkevich fired four more bullets, which all struck home, and then the five attacked the starets, beating him about the head with the butt of the gun and a club until he collapsed in the snow. Still not entirely satisfied that the body would not rise up again, they rolled the corpse in some curtains, tied it up, and threw it in the frozen Neva. Three days later, when the body was discovered, it was obvious that Rasputin had not died of the poison or the many bullets that had all penetrated the body, nor yet of the blows of all kinds that he had received. He had died from drowning and freezing, as if he had wished to prove that he was invulnerable to attacks by men and that Only nature—that is, the will of God—could overcome the man who had for so long proclaimed himself to be “the man of God.”

The prophecy of Rasputin…pretty incredible until it happened:

Since the disappearance of the “pious princes,” the common vision of what characterized Russia was centered on the peasant. Russia, Holy Russia, was that celebrated by the poet Blok, the motherland of legends, and the magic of the countryside. Rasputin was to bring all this with him from his birthplace in Siberia. Man of God or demon, in either case he was seen as a supernatural being and the expression of a distant world. As a man of God, he provided a substitute for a church that was moving away from the throne; as a demon, he took upon himself all the evil of the world, thus diverting it away from the tsar. He can be seen as representing both the role of the “good,” “true” tsar and that of the “false” tsar. The old tension between good and evil, true and false, went together in this case with the Dionysian aspects of the starets’s religion, recalling the semipagan cults of many religious sects. He was also the product of a Russia where the feeling of an imminent political apocalypse, hanging over the country since the turn of the century, encouraged a belief in the supernatural. He was the prophet of an extraordinary age, and it is no accident that shortly before his assassination, Rasputin wrote to the tsar:

I feel that I shall die before January 1.....If I am killed by ordinary assassins, and particularly by one of my brother peasants of Russia, you, tsar of Russia, will have nothing to fear for your throne and your power, nor for your children who will continue to reign for centuries. But if I am killed by boyars, by nobles, if they shed my blood, their hands will be stained with my blood that they will not be able to wash away for twenty-five years. They will have to leave Russia. Brother will kill brother, they will kill one another, and they will hate one another, and there will be no more nobles in the country. Tsar of the land of Russia, if you hear Grigory’s death knell, know that if it is one of your family who caused my death, none of your family, none of your children will live for more than two years more. They will be killed by the Russian people.

This decidedly prophetic message was to add further to the mystery of Rasputin. Quite apart from the threatening content of the message—which must have affected the sovereign a posteriori, if only because it concluded with the definite statement: “I must be killed, l am no longer in the world of the living”—murder itself was unacceptable to the imperial couple. The morality of the terrorists—‘a murder, whoever the victim, is still a murder”—was also that of these two passionate Christians, even if circumstances had led them to confuse the friendship of Rasputin with true mysticism. The idea that a murder could be committed by a member of their family—against a family friend, and furthermore a man of God was quite unacceptable. Since the murder of Paul I, the only deaths that had occurred in the circles of the nobility were in duels of honor or through the law in defense of the state. For the emperor, often irritated by Rasputin’s interference in military and state affairs—and who only “tolerated” them, according to Gilliard, tutor to the imperial children, because the empress thought her son’s life depended on it—the very idea of murder was insupportable. “I am filled with shame to think that my family could stain its hands with the blood of a simple peasant,” he was to say.

Russia was moving to integration with the West slowly but 1914 marked the beginning of a return to separation:

Russia was always a land of extremes and contradictions, and never more so than in the period between Alexander II and Nicholas II. On the one hand there was the march toward modernity. The path was never smooth, advances being followed by retreats or stagnation. Nevertheless, modernity was eventually to triumph. It meant not only industrialization and urbanization, but also a change in men’s attitudes, through education. But hand in hand with change, there developed a strongly apocalyptic mood. In this Russia was unique. At all levels of society, there was a confused awareness that the world men had known hitherto was about to be swallowed up and plunged into the unknown. All points of view had to be fitted into this extreme framework: Russia condemned like Sodom, Holy Russia in need of defense, a future through redemption, or a future of destruction. Russia was not alone in feeling that an uncertain future lay ahead; the whole of Europe was aware that the Belle Epoque might be coming to an end, but in these other countries, premonitions about a different time to come remained within the bounds of the rational.

In 1914, the whole of Europe was to see the disappearance of life as it had been known. The civilization of postwar Europe was unrecognizable, and was to produce many tragedies. But Russia, by contrast, had not come to the end of its individual path—quite the opposite. Having fought for so long to become integrated into Europe, it was once more, as in the terrible period of the Mongol domination, to cut itself off in order to set up a separate Europe.

The end of the aristocracy and the rise of the “common man” as the communists take over. Lenin has an idea how to employ violence:

The reign of the common man was about to begin. At the same time, Lenin's ideas follow a contrary direction: to this vision of the simplified state that would eventually wither away, he adds the party. This tension between a society governing the transitional state and the party, the avant-garde of the workers, implicitly underlies all Lenin’s theories, even at the time of greatest optimism, when he visualized the imminent takeover of power in Russia and the beginning of world revolution. The future he describes holds out a vision of a pacified universe from which violence has disappeared.

The February Revolution had already given rise to such dreams, despite the difficulties that had instantly materialized. The leaders had begun by abolishing the death sentence, a decision always symbolic of the end of violence. On October 25, 1917, the Second Congress of the Soviets, marking the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution, confirmed this abolition. Lenin, however, far from applauding, was indignant: “How can we carry out a revolution without shooting people?”

Stalin hands great power to the NKVD. No surprise that murder was the key state tool during this period:

Solzhenitsyn has said on this point that “where there is a law, there can also be a crime.” On the night of December 1-2, 1934, Stalin signed a number of documents known as the Kirov laws, intended in principle to ensure the preservation of law and order and which fact represented a jurisprudence of terror. The competent authorities—the NKVD which in that same year replaced the OGPU—were instructed to speed up the preparations for the trial of anyone accused of plotting or carrying out acts of terrorism, while appeals were abolished and punishments were carried out immediately after judgment. Originally, the investigative powers of the NKVD had limited authority, depending on the seriousness of the crime and the sentence given, while military tribunals dealt with the most serious cases. Gradually, this separation became blurred. In 1935, further measures gave the final touch to the legalizing of terror. The decree of March 30, 1935, announced severe punishments for anyone possessing a firearm or knife. Where would the definition of “weapon” end? On April 8, the powers of the criminal authorities, which could invoke the death sentence, were extended to include young people from the age of twelve. Finally, on June 9, 1935, a decree was issued extending the death sentence not only to spies and parasites, but also to those “who might know of such activities or related plans.” These decrees constituted a whole with enormous implications. They established the obligation to denounce not only a criminal act, but also a criminal intention. They instituted the principle of collective responsibility. The application of this repressive law to adolescents, psychologically so impressionable and dazzled by the “heroic” myth of Pavlik Morozov, shed light on the meaning of these decisions. The choice offered to adolescents was that of becoming either heroes or else “children of enemies of the people,” and thus accomplices of these enemies. That was also the choice for all, and particularly for families, who were supposed to know exactly what was going on within the family circle.

This book covers more than just killing. Some interesting discussion on various parts of Russian history. 3 Stars

[Alec Bullough · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a highly unique book: it is the history of Russia, but told almost exclusively through telling the stories of famous murders or assassinations. That seems ham-fisted on paper, but the author does this very well.

One of the most important things for any American to understand about Russia is that Russians don't think like Americans: they have their own cultural backgrounds that influence their thinking. In this respect, The Russian Syndrome does an excellent job through its assessment of how Russian attitudes towards murder have evolved over time. It sounds insane to an American to hear that Russians have a net positive view of a mass-killer like Stalin, but this book helps the reader understand why.

[Yves Panis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essai sur le meurtre politique en Russie. 11 siècles de « malheur russe » racontés avec brio. Superbe évocation de la terrible spécificité russe.