Why Not Bring Back the Czars?

By Richard Brookhiser

When they are not worrying about whether they will eat this winter, the people of the former Soviet Union must be wondering how they will be ruled. Postcommunist government is bound to be democratic. But democracy takes many forms, from the checks and balances of House, Senate and President in Washington to the checkmates of the Knesset in Israel. Russians and other ex- Soviets should consider a democratic variation on a theme from their own past: a constitutional monarchy headed by a restored czar.

From 1613 to 1917, the Russian empire was ruled, sometimes disastrously, sometimes rather well, by the Romanov family. From 1917 until 1991 it was ruled, always disastrously, by the Communist Party. Bringing back the Romanovs now would certainly be poetic justice. As the historian Richard Pipes wrote, the 1918 massacre by communists of the last Czar, Nicholas II, and his family * was "uniquely odious . . . a prelude to 20th century mass murder." Now that communism has been outlawed, who better to help replace it than the relatives of its first victims?

Since the French Revolution, crowns (and crowned heads) have rolled across the Western world. Yet monarchies that adapted to democracy still survive in most of the countries of northwestern Europe -- Britain, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden -- plus Spain. They have lasted up to the eve of the 21st century because their subjects find them useful, even in a democratic age.

A democracy with a king as head of state draws on a source of legitimacy beyond parliamentary politics and popular will. The extra institutional support comes in handy in moments of crisis. With complicated and turbulent histories, during World War II Norway's King Haakon and the Netherlands' Queen Wilhelmina gave their occupied countries an additional symbol of resistance. In Spain the modern monarchy's services to the constitution have been more than symbolic. In 1981, when gun-toting, right-wing officers seized parliament and held it hostage, King Juan Carlos went on Spanish television in full uniform and used his royal prestige to rally the army around the constitution. Boris Yeltsin isn't the only living leader to have quashed a coup.

Monarchs minister to the psyche as well as the polity; they give a focus for a country's collective libido. Americans don't need kings to stir our souls because we have attached our deepest feelings to the myths and documents of our founding: Paul Revere's ride and George Washington at Valley Forge; the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Democracies that lack such myths can be emotionally naked. A constitutional monarch supplies the mythic dimension in a convenient package. Winston Churchill, who was both a partisan pol and an ardent monarchist, believed that if defeated Germany had had a constitutional monarch after World War I, the Weimar Republic might have withstood the seductions of Nazism.

Both these factors are relevant to the former Soviet Union. The peoples that made it up are heading for sweeping political changes, which will coincide with hard economic times. A constitutional czar would provide an element of continuity, while the politicians do the dirty work and make the hard choices. He would also offer emotional security when things get grim, as they inevitably will.

Restoring the Romanovs could help the dissolving Russian empire deal with , its own special problem: nationalism. European kings and queens traditionally exacted loyalty to themselves as representatives of a royal family, not embodiments of an ethnic or cultural type. Czardom was rough on some minorities, notably Jews and Muslims. But it was surprisingly tolerant of most of the non-Russians who made up its quilt of an empire. Czarist indulgence extended even to the Mennonites, German-speaking Protestant pacifists, the boat people of 18th century Europe, whom hardly any other country would tolerate. As long as the Mennonites in Russia kept to themselves, the Romanovs didn't care how they spoke or prayed.

The next Romanov, should he get the job, must understand that he has been commissioned to reign, not rule. His usefulness to his country, and to the future of his family, depends on his being above politics -- a symbol, not an autocrat. The first post-Soviet parliament could audition all living Romanovs (of whom Grand Duke Vladimir, now living in France, is the most prominent) and pick the one who seems most amenable to these goals -- just as the English Parliament, in 1688, replaced a king it didn't trust (James II) with his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange.

Establishing a post-Soviet monarchy in such a utilitarian spirit may seem to undermine the emotional aura that would be the new czar's chief benefit. But that aura can coexist with practical considerations. Shakespeare's tragedy of kingship, Richard II, contrasts Richard, an immoral and incapable king, yet one who believes he was divinely appointed, with his deposer and successor, Henry Bolingbroke, who, for all his cunning and competence, is haunted by the knowledge that he is a usurper. Shakespeare presents the shift from Richard to Henry as a changing of the guard, a clean break from one style of kingship to another. And yet the "divinity ((that)) doth hedge a king" (a Shakespeare phrase from another play) still clings to the British monarchy 600 years and innumerable tabloid gawkfests after the events Shakespeare described.

For 74 years the Soviet Union was a society in which the sense of the sacred was either extirpated or grotesquely transferred to communist relics like Lenin statues and Lenin's corpse. The post-Soviet state, embarking on democracy, could use an infusion of an older and more honorable form of the sacred about now.