The Emperor Nicholas was alone in his accustomed writing-room in the Palace of Czarskoe Selo, when he came to the resolve. He took no counsel. He rang a bell. Presently an officer of his Staff stood before him. To him he gave his orders for the occupation of [the Danubian] Principalities. Afterwards he told Count Orloff what he had done. Count Orloff became grave, and said, “This is war.” Alexander William Kinglake The Invasion of the Crimea, 1863 Alexander William Kinglake, the nineteenth-century British travel writer and historian who published a history of the Crimean War in eight volumes, could hardly have known how and in what surroundings Nicholas I made the fateful decision that caused the declaration of war by the Ottomans. In the imagination of nineteenth-century historians and writers, wars were the products of high politics, and the Crimean War, one of the most senseless, ridiculous, and tragic defeats in Russian history, was commonly blamed upon the Russian tsar and his abysmal vanity, arrogance, religious fanaticism, and nationalism. Court historiographers spilled a lot of ink trying to exonerate Nicholas I and shift the blame for launching the bloody war onto Russia’s treacherous allies and insidious rivals. It is therefore even more surprising that Nikolai Chernyshevsky — Russia’s first revolutionary democrat, who apparently read Kinglake’s volume in his prison cell at the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1863 — also thought that the tsar was not the guilty party: “Who shed these rivers of blood? … Who? Oh, if only conscience and facts had allowed us to think ‘the late sovereign,’ how good this would have been! The late tsar is long dead, and we would not have to worry about Russia’s future…. But, my dear reader, neither the dead tsar nor the government is guilty of the Sevastopol war.” According to Chernyshevsky, the main suspect was the Russian educated “public,” who had laid the blame on the dead tsar and continued to dwell without punishment or remorse: “The public is immortal; it does not resign, and there is no hope that this persona that caused the Crimean war ceases to represent the Russian nation and to have great influence upon its fate.” Without due respect for the greatness of Russian poets and writers, including Pushkin, Chernyshevsky blamed them for impressing on the minds of light-minded Russians the fantasies of taking control over Constantinople and beating the Ottomans on their land. Nobody, for sure, wanted the war, and only when they kissed their loved ones farewell did the same people who had carelessly joked about the “Russian Bosporus” understand what the war was about. Russia suffered a humiliating defeat, senselessly wasting thousands of lives and millions of rubles. Yet the horrors of the Crimean war, even if only seen through the eyes of Russian soldiers and not their Turkish (or British and French) counterparts, were soon forgotten. Not long after the shameful debacle, the government approved the establishment of a “Slavic committee” in Moscow that aimed to “prevent” and anticipate Western influence upon the Southern Slavs of the Ottoman Empire. Twenty years later, Nicholas’ son Alexander II waged another war against the Turks, claiming to protect the Christian population of the Ottoman Empire. The second Eastern war in 1877–1878 was a military success, but most importantly, it was a propagandistic triumph that took off the table the question of responsibility for another imperialist adventure. Clearly the government had learned the lesson of the Crimean embarrassment: dealing with the questions of causality and responsibility had to be an integral part of the war effort and strategy. The catastrophic war against Ukraine that started in 2014 and entered a bloodier phase in February 2022 has already produced heated debates about its causes. The question of whether this is “Putin’s war,” or “Russia’s war,” or “the Russians’ war” echoes Chernyshevsky’s dilemma, but the answers, usually emotional and spontaneous, express the incomprehensibility of violence rather than a serious attempt to understand the roots of the disaster. Writers habitually compare Putin’s Russia to Hitler’s Germany, drawing parallels between the lethargic character of the Germans’ denial of Nazi crimes and the Russian public’s support of war in Ukraine. While this comparison points to a plausible diagnosis — a peculiar intellectual antibiosis of society — the causes of the disease in its respective settings are most likely different. In any case, current debates about whom to blame often simplify the issue, operating with imprecise categories and ignoring the context. Scholarly analysis will have to frame the problem as broader and punchier, considering the role and responsibility of the autocrat and the ruling clique not only in waging the war but also in turning the majority of the population into his supporters and accomplices. While a cold and dispassionate analysis of the genesis of the current war may seem improbable at the moment, there is one thing that we can do: look back at past conflicts and analyze how Russia’s wars usually began. This comparison suggests that the formulas discussed above — “one man’s war” or a “nation’s war” — are themselves the products of the rhetorical attempts to either celebrate or exonerate rulers and to shift responsibility for waging the conflicts, either successful or failed, onto society. Wars belong to a particular category of events that are always shrouded in mythology: state propaganda doubles its efforts when it deals with armed conflicts. In the panoply of myths, one persistent trope stands out. It describes the archetypal scenario of a war’s outset; and Russia’s failed wars were not only those that Russia lost militarily, but also those that did not follow the prescribed scenario, the ones that laid bare the ruler’s personal role. To deal with the problem of causality and responsibility, however, it is important to distinguish the rituals of launching wars from the actual political mechanisms of their enactment. As the war in Ukraine grinds on, it is illuminating to consider the precedents of Russia’s imperial wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence