THE TYRANNY OF STUPIDITY

By John Skow

In a mood of high exasperation some years ago, after a life spent trying to explain human history, Barbara Tuchman wrote a book whose thesis was that the nearly invariable tendency of leaders and governments is to choose courses of action that are demonstrably idiotic. Her ringing title, The March of Folly, is almost too widely useful (it could serve as the motto of the U.S. Congress or the name of a newsmagazine), but what it fits best in recent experience, so that it should be inked in as a subtitle, is a brilliant and appalling new history of the Russian Revolution.

A People's Tragedy (Viking; 923 pages; $39.95), by Orlando Figes, a historian at Trinity College, Cambridge, deals vividly with starvation, disease, tribal hatreds, sociopathic blood lust, religious mania, governmental terrorism and most other sources of human misery. But the author's predominant diagnosis of what went wrong, on all sides and without letup, is that stupidity ruled--quite literally in the case of the last Czar, Nicholas II (who comes across here as dull-minded and weak), and his wife Alexandra (dull-minded and forceful). At a time when Russia might have been transformed by shrewd and humane reforms into a parliamentary democracy with a figurehead monarch (a role that would have suited a Czar whose only talent was that he sat on a horse well), Nicholas saw himself as a stern 17th century autocrat. Liberalization was dangerous; had not his grandfather, the cautious reformer Alexander II, been assassinated by populists? The Czarina enthusiastically egged on his autocratic posturing, and when her grandmother, Britain's Queen Victoria, wrote tactfully to suggest that a queen must work hard to win the love of her subjects, she replied, "You are mistaken, my dear grandmama...Here we do not need to earn the love of the people. The Russian people revere their Czars as divine beings, from whom all charity and fortune derive."

Figes is no monarchist, and no Marxist either, and his account respects none of their several sides. (It will be interesting to see whether leftist or rightist scholars lambaste his book more angrily.) After Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, four years of floundering civil war began, with folly in command of both the Red and White armies. Both used summary executions of soldiers and peasants to stop desertions and provision armies, and each permitted bloody pogroms against Jews as recreation for troops. Figes tells the story well, in a very long volume that never becomes unwieldy. He lets Lenin's friend and tolerated critic, the poet Maxim Gorky, make the most telling observation, in a 1919 letter to his wife: "Only the Commissars live a pleasant life these days. They steal as much as they can from the ordinary people in order to pay for their courtesans and their unsocialist luxuries."

--By John Skow