To paraphrase Dr Johnson, Russian culture is great and original. The trouble is, where it’s original it isn’t great. And where it’s great it isn’t original.
Russian culture rose to greatness when it began to borrow heavily from the West towards the end of the 18th century. That worked wonders: within a single century, the country’s artistic culture reached at least parity with any other, certainly any contemporaneous with it.
Alas, when it came to politics, philosophy and political philosophy, Russian culture remains puny and epigonic. To be sure, being derivative isn’t necessarily bad in itself. It all depends on what’s held up as a worthy model to emulate.
The thing is that Western political thought isn’t monolithic. For example, Burke’s exegesis of the French Revolution is diametrically opposite to Paine’s, de Maistre’s constitutional ideas to Jefferson’s, the Whig interpretation of history to the conservative one.
The trouble with anti-totalitarian Russians is that, perhaps understandably, they borrow only from the West’s liberal strain. That intellectual fallacy isn’t doing particularly well even in its native habitat, where it has been cultivated for centuries. In Russia, where no such tradition exists, that kind of thought leads to an intellectual fiasco – but, to us, a useful one.
Russia is like a convex mirror held up to the West to enlarge its failings into a grotesque caricature. That should enable us to see them clearly, although few of us are willing to focus our eyes for long enough.
Enter Tamara Eidelman, a Russian historian who looks like everybody’s favourite aunt and sounds the way a Russian Easter cake would sound if it could talk. Dr Eidelman has her own YouTube channel she uses to stream popular accounts of history.
Most of her effort to carry history to the masses is highly commendable. Her erudition can’t be faulted, and neither can her integrity, which is more than one can say for many modern historians.
However, when she flies too close to the sun of modernity, she does an Icarus by just rehashing views one can read in The Guardian, The New York Times or Le Monde. That makes her sound as intellectually bankrupt as those publications.
Her latest programme is about Franco, who, says Dr Eidelman, makes her feel “chilling horror”. In that she is no different from any leader writer at the papers I’ve mentioned. But I did tell you that, unlike them, Dr Eidelman possesses laudable integrity.
That’s why, having shared with us her innermost feelings, she proceeds to explain that the infernal Franco wasn’t as black as he is painted.
To wit: “he prevented Spain from being dragged into the Second World War.” All he did was “allow volunteers… to form the Blue Division that was sent to the Eastern Front”. That’s why “Hitler was enraged, saying he’d rather have his teeth pulled than ever talk to Franco again.”
“He wouldn’t let Hitler move troops through Spain in 1942, after the Allies had landed in North Africa.”
“He declared several amnesties for political prisoners” and paved Spain’s way to democracy “by appointing Prince Juan Carlos as his successor.”
Oh well, on balance I’d suggest that’s pretty good going, especially for a man described in the aforementioned papers as a fascist dictator. Dr Eidelman confirms that: “I know he was far from being the scariest of Europe’s 20th century dictators… Franco can’t be put into the first rank of cannibals.”
So what’s the source of the “chilling horror” Dr Eidelman feels whenever Franco’s name is mentioned? She kindly explains: “I am scared by his complete coldness, total self-control, absence of sentiments. He had neither Hitler’s hysterical fanaticism nor Mussolini’s temperament.”
Most of us would say “and a good job too”. Franco indeed managed to keep his head when all around him were losing theirs (yes, I know Kipling used that phrase first). That’s a job requirement for a leader, especially at crisis time. What’s the problem then?
Well, you see, Dr Eidelman is appalled at the cold-bloodedness Franco showed when ordering people to be executed. Would she prefer him throwing a hysterical fit every time he issued such an order?
Apparently not. After all, “He had neither Hitler’s hysterical fanaticism nor Mussolini’s temperament.” One gets the impression Dr Eidelman is horrified that any such orders had to be issued. Franco should have treated the communists’ attempt to deliver Spain to Stalin the way a Guardian-reading social worker treats a drug addict in his care.
Had he done so, Spain would have suffered the kind of terror Stalin’s other dominions suffered. The number of people executed in cold blood or otherwise would have exceeded Franco’s score by orders of magnitude.
Historical figures must be viewed not from the lofty height of humanitarian ideals but in the context of the alternatives available under the circumstances. The only alternative to Stalin in Spain circa 1936 was Franco, not a typological precursor of Dr Eidelman – praiseworthy as her humanitarian impulses may be.
She should take her cue from her colleague Adolphe Tiers (d. 1877), the great historian turned statesman, who suppressed another communist power grab, the Paris Commune. Thereafter the liberal press invariably referred to him as a Bloody Cur, with Tiers just shrugging: “Somebody had to be”.
Dr Eidelman hates communism as much as I do. I’m sure she detests Putin’s Nazism with equal passion. That part is easy, or at least should be for any decent person, which Dr Eidelman undoubtedly is. What’s hard is coming up with a realistic alternative – and ways of realising it.
Alas, many extreme situations can only be resolved by a Francisco Franco, not an Albert Schweitzer. And when a Franco-type figure (Pinochet comes to mind as a similar man in a similar situation) does resolve the situation, he should be hailed as a hero and saviour of his nation. Not panned for being unlike Dr Schweitzer in his methods.
I’ve seen hundreds of photographs of Franco, and never once did I spot a pair of wings on his back. He was no angel, and any normal person should deplore some of his methods. But a scholar can’t afford being just a normal person. The job calls for dispassionate – coldblooded! – analysis and a rational weighing of all relevant factors.
Dr Eidelman has learned from the West, but the wrong kind of the West. Yet in the process she, along with her whole country, teaches the West a lesson – in how not to think of complex events and complicated historical figures.
One hopes we don’t play truant at such classes. Every day of her life Russia teaches us what not to do, how not to approach public affairs. And the academic faculty includes decent people like Dr Eidelman alongside a full complement of monsters like Putin. Let’s learn from them.
Sadly, the roads of politics are paved with the bones of its victims.
The alternative to Franco was a communist dictatorship. And Franco was no idealist but a practical trimmer whose foreign policy was paid for, at least in part, by UK and other anti-Nazi sources.
Does this history teach us anything of lasting value?
Any wartime leader with “humanitarian ideals” will be easily crushed by ruthless competitors, as you have pointed out many times in this space.
Imagine if Hitler had come away from Munich feeling about Daladier and Chamberlain as he did about Franco – would there have been war on such a scale?
“He prevented Spain from being dragged into the Second World War….. And didn’t allow Hitler to move his troops through Spain”. Perhaps my knowledge of WW2 is paltry, but I have trouble finding anything special about this when millions of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and even Russians were killed actually fighting Hitler.
One may be reluctant to praise Franco on account of his fascist politics and its effects on political freedom. But I tend to agree with Eugenio’s assessment of his foreign policy, which was realistic, if not wise. Spain’s geographical position was in some ways central and in other ways peripheral, though the country was industrially and agriculturally weak.. Franco was thus in a strong position to bargain with both Hitler and the Allies and had far more to gain from bargaining than from joining wholeheartedly in the hostilities.