"'...an active underground, a resistance movement, does exist. People who don't just daydream about bringing the Avantists down and setting up a free country again, but will risk their necks for it. They're not many, and in public they are impeccable citizens, but they're well disciplined and little by little they've accumulated weapons.'" (p. 99)
This is a very strong link back to Robert Heinlein's Future History where, in Volume III, the Angels of the Lord rule the United States but are secretly opposed by the Cabal and by other revolutionary groups like the Onward Christian Soldiers. In Volume I of Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars future history, the Avantists rule North America but are secretly opposed by the Chaotics.
One difference is that the Cabal is bigger and better organized with, IIRC, a literally underground headquarters. Heinlein's narrator comments that revolution has to be run like a business. The Cabal leads the Second American Revolution, followed by a conference to set up the Covenant. What results from Chaotic resistance to Avantism we will remember as we continue to reread Harvest Of Stars.
22 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
As summarized here, I think Heinlein was wrong. If the regime they oppose is reasonably efficient, I don't think revolutionaries can have a single fixed and permanent HQ. Their opponents would be trying to infiltrate the revolutionaries, and any information they discovered or were told might well lead back to that HQ being discovered. Anderson was more realistic about what resistance fighters/revolutionaries can do, both in HARVEST OF STARS and HUNTERS OF THE SKY CAVE.
Ad astra! Sean
Yup. For a revolution to succeed, you need certain conditions -- the government has to be completely incompetent, or to suffer a collapse in morale, usually associated with defeat in war (or in the Cold War, for the USSR) or bankruptcy, or the armed forces have to switch sides, or you need strong external backing from a government that's on your side.
There is an amazing story from the 1917 Russian Revolution. Cossacks marching down a street one way met workers marching the other way. Cossack captain ordered his men to point their rifles at the workers. They obeyed. He ordered them to fire. They hesitated. Captain pointed his pistol at the head of one of his own men and repeated the order. One person on the workers' side was armed and killed the captain. Immediately, the Cossacks fraternized, embraced the workers and handed their rifles over to them. One guy with a gun prevented a massacre.
(I am glad I was not that one worker with a gun. I'd have missed the captain and hit someone else.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: Incompetence and a collapse of morale seems to have been what brought down both Nicholas II and the Provisional Gov't in the Russia of 1917.
Paul: Considering how hideous Lenin and Stalin were, I have zero sympathy for the revolutions of 1917. I would far rather either Nicholas II or the Provisional Gov't had been competent enough to survive.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Indeed you do but I still think that that one worker did a good job shooting that murderous Cossack captain.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I believe that sometimes you have to use force, but more intelligently than how that captain behaved.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I don't know if you have read it, but in AUGUST 1914, one of the characters, Colonel Vorotyntsev, seems to be Alexander Solzhenitysn's model of a nearly ideal Tsarist Army officer. Intelligent, able, all too well aware of the blundering and foolishness within both the army and the state. We see many reflections by a frustrated Vorotyntsev on what he believes would have prevented catastrophes like the March and November Revolutions of 1917. A man very unlike this blundering captain.
Ad astra! Sean
One reason the Russians were defeated at Tannenberg in 1914 was that the generals in charge of the 1st and 2nd Armies in East Prussia hated each other. They’d had a fistfight on a railway siding in the Russo-Japanese War, and on 1914 they refused to talk to each other directly.
Occasionally revolutions work out well. Usually they’re disasters; you exchange King Log for King Stork and he eats you.
So when you don’t like the status quo, consider the alternative. Napoleon and Robespierre made the worst Bourbons look like pussycats, and that’s typical.
Try for heaven on earth and you get hell; given unalterable human nature, that’s the way to bet. Remember what the -road- to hell is paved with, too.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I don't think I knew of how two Tsarist army commanders personally loathed each other! But I can see how that would get in the way of simple cooperation. I thought a major problem for the Russians in 1914 was invading East Prussia at least ten days too soon, before they were truly ready to do that.
Amen! Revolutions almost never work out well. And poor kindly, well meaning Louis XVI was by no means one of the worst Bourbons. And I agree that political Utopians will only end up creating a hell on Earth, not Heaven. So, I'm sick of "good intentions." I'll settle for realism and effectiveness!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Oh, that rivalry between Samsonov and von Rennenkampfwasn't the only problem.
For example the Russians had only enough field telephone wire to connect the corps commanders with Army HQ -- so none of the corps commanders could stay in real touch with their divisions, and none of them could communicate laterally.
That's just one example.
And of course, the Russians were just out of their league with the Germans, who beat them like a drum every time they put in a major effort. They could fight the Austro-Hungarians on equal terms, and they outclassed the Turks. The Germans were another story.
The German forces which beat the Russians so badly in East Prussia weren't even the A-team; most of them were overage reservists, less well equipped than regular divisions and previously confined to fortress duty because they were too elderly to move as fast as the younger age-cohorts.
Gorlice-Tarnow in 1915 was even more of a disaster, on an even bigger scale... and if it had gone just a little differently might well have put the Russians out of the war by 1916. (As happened in my BLACK CHAMBER series.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Either I hadn't known of (or forgot) about the Russians problems with line of command and communications. Another problem I recall from AUGUST 1914 was of there being too many elderly generals out of touch with changes in military technology and tactics, men who should have been retired years earlier.
While I agree the Germans outclassed the Russians, Berlin made a very bad mistake in withdrawing two corps from the offensive in France to send east to defend East Prussia. they arrived too late to really help defeat the Russians and deprived the German offensive in the west of the strength needed to WIN there, instead of getting bogged down in deadlocked trench warfare.
Really, the smart thing Nicholas II could have done in 1914 was to declare neutrality and refuse to go to war, never mind what the UK or France thought. Russia had nothing to win and risked losing VERY badly by going to war with the Central Powers.
I think the Austro-Hungarians did better on the Eastern Front than most give them credit for. The need to defend against Italy compelled Vienna to focus on Italy as well as Russia.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: in WW1, the Germans tended to overestimate the Russians, at least for the first year or two.
In WW2, they correspondingly underestimated them.
In 1914, German generals were afraid of Russian 'depth', both demographic and geographic -- that the Russians could retreat and retreat, and raise army after army as they were destroyed, until the attacker exhausted himself and laid himself open to counterattack.
What happened to Napoleon, in essence.
In reality, the Russians couldn't do much of that in WW1 because the Tsarist regime had become too brittle to endure the repeated blows such a strategy demanded, and had lost too much legitimacy to get the people to go along with so much suffering or to force them to do so.
In WW2, they -could- follow such a strategy, if they had to, and they did.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree! Tsarist Russia had become too brittle for such a boneheaded policy to work. ALL the more reason Nicholas II should have declared his neutrality in 1914 and refuse to enter the war.
I think I read in NOVEMBER 1916 that as late as the autumn of that year, the Central Powers were trying to persuade Russia to agree to a separate peace with them. If I had been in Nicholas' place I hope I would have been smart enough to snatch at this heaven sent lifeline and extricate Russia from the bear trap!
The Soviets were vastly more brutal and wasteful of human lives than any Tsar ever dreamed of being! They expended millions on million of Russians in WW II. AND were continuing the purges, massacres, and system of slave labor camps described in THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. From being one of the most populous peoples in Europe in 1914 it ended with the Russians now seemingly in an irreversible demographic death spiral.
Ad astra! Sean
When discussing the Stalinist regime, I do not call it "the Soviets" because that word originally meant "democratic workers' council," not "bureaucratic dictatorship." Of course, words change their meanings and we will use words differently but we need to be aware of different meanings in different contexts and also of the history of terminological changes. "Social Democratic" originally meant "Marxist." In the Roman Republic, a "dictator" was someone temporarily appointed to a public post by the Senate, not a dictator!
Sean: the problem with Russia staying neutral in 1914 or making a separate peace later can be summed up: "Germany".
There was no doubt that without Russia, France would be crushed -- and then Russia would be alone with Germany.
Not a great place to be.
That put the Tsar's government between a rock and a hard place: they couldn't deal with the hammer blows the Germans were inflicting, but that was when the Western Front was tying down most of Germany's force.
How much worse would the situation be when Germany could turn all its force on Russia"?
The Carthaginian peace the Germans inflicted at Brest-Litovsk wasn't a special product of 1917-18; it was what they'd had in mind since the beginning -- see BH's "September Program" of 1914.
Germany's aims in WW1 were radical, if not quite as much so as in 1939.
They wanted to destroy the European state system and eliminate all the other European Great Powers as independent actors.
That made any sort of separate peace profoundly unattractive.
Paul: Social Democratic in pre-1914 speak had come to mean -revisionist- Marxism; which was, as Lenin pointed out quite correctly, in the process of becoming non-Marxist.
Correct.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: First, a few comments about terminology: it should not be the STALINIST regime, rather it was the LENINIST despotism. All the horrors Stalin is rightly condemned for had their origins in LENIN'S ideas and policies. All that Stalin did was to extend and complete what Lenin started: purges, massacres, mass arrests and imprisonments, gulags. They all started under Lenin, by his wish and command. Dismiss all lingering wistfulness about a noble Lenin, there never was such a person!
And why this fixation on "soviets"? They never amounted to much and never would have lasted in forms you would have liked. To say nothing, of course, of how Lenin crushed them, to prevent them from becoming centers of power in rivalry with him.
"Soviets" is legitimately used for the ruling party and the nomenklatura who staffed and ran the USSR from 1917 to 1991.
Mr. Stirling: One possible caveat I have about your otherwise mostly convincing comments is that the Germans were also afraid, in 1914, of Russia's industrial and economic potential. Given even just a few more years of peace, the October Manifest of 1905 and the reforms of Peter Stolypin would have transformed Russia, making her far more stable and enormously more powerful. And therefore much harder for Germany to fight.
What you said about German ambitions and hopes seems fantastic! Was Germany actually hoping to, in effect, conquer everything from France in the west to at least the Ural Mountains in the east? I know that is what we see in your BLACK CHAMBER books, but for real?
All that said, I can see why Russia felt compelled to ally with France, even if some thought all Russia needed to do was stay strictly neutral. The classic dictum comes to mind: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Not a fixation but a preference for democracy. That element was present in 1917 but was crushed but we needn't go back again through the forces that crushed it.
Paul.
Sean: yeah, that was about their aim.
In 1914, the "September Program" outlined taking away everything Russia had acquired since about 1500 and turning it into either puppet states (with German monarchs) or direct colonial annexations, with the remnant "Muscovy" a tributary state.
Later in the war, they got more ambitious in the East. At Brest-Litovsk, they detached Poland, the Baltic, White Russia and the Ukraine from Russia, had troops as far as the Kuban Valley and Baku, and had by 1918 they had started "ethnic cleansing" of Poles and others from territories they intended to settle with German colonists.
The Germans -were- afraid that exactly what you outline would happen with Russia: that was why the Supreme General Staff pressed so hard for war in 1914 -- they thought if they waited, beating Russia would be impossible. And once they'd beaten Russia, they intended to damage her so profoundly and permanently that there could never be another challenge from that direction.
They did even worse to Romania, in the Treaty of Bucharest. The ruling junta in WWI Germany (Hindenberg and Ludendorff and their supporters) were not "conservatives" in the usual sense of the word; they were radical revisionists/nationalists who wanted to remake Europe. And they had no concept of how to deal with a beaten opponent other than stamping a boot on their neck, which is one reason later complaints about the "harsh" peace of Versailles are so ironic and (unintentionally) funny.
They really did intend to destroy any independent power-center between the Atlantic and the Urals; and to turn the Ottoman Empire into a puppet so they'd dominate the Middle East as far as the Gulf too, and they had ambitions in Persia and Central Asia, though less well-defined.
The September Program also indicated an intention to annex Belgium (partly as a puppet Walloon state and partly directly, for the Flemings) and by implication the Netherlands, and chunks of the French borderlands depriving France of its industrial areas and iron-ore resources, and then imposing German control of military bases, naval bases and other spots throughout the remnant of "independent" France, plus imposing -permanent- reparations payments equivalent to the entire French military budget pre-1914.
Hitler's plans for "Lebensraum" were basically a radical version of what Germany already had in the East by 1918, with fanatical hatred of Jews thrown in.
As I've said, the Kaiserreich gets an undeserved good press because it wasn't as bad as the Third Reich... but that's a -very low bar-.
The portrayal in BLACK CHAMBER isn't far off, IMHO -- it's what I thought they'd do given increased opportunities.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: But that "element" for democracy already existed in Russia, before 1917, starting with the October Manifesto of 1905, by which Nicholas II assented to establishing of the State Duma, a two chamber parliament. No matter how limited it might have been at first, its very existence was an enormous concession and PRECEDENT, because with time its powers would grow. And by 1914 two parties of the moderate right and left had emerged: the Octobrists and Cadets.
There was no NEED for either of those two catastrophic revolutions Russia suffered in 1917, esp. Lenin's seizure of power from the Provisional Gov't. Given some intelligent leadership and steadiness of will, either the Tsarist regime or the Provisional Gov't should have survived.
Mr. Stirling: the September Program you outlined of German ambitions in WW I still seems fantastic to me, and I like to think big! MY thought was that LASTING empires are usually those whose leaders have the patience to think in terms of generations, who don't try to achieve too much too fast. And who also try to RECONCILE the conquered to the new regime, even if that means making concessions and accepting compromises.
REAL conservative would be appalled by the September Program, because of the sheer irresponsibility of gambling the fate of the Reich on such reckless throws of the dice. And they would be aware of how, more likely than not, things can go wrong. Some would have moral scruples over assenting to the brutalities needed to make such a plan actual.
It was defeat on the Western Front, of course, which reversed Germany's triumph in the east. Agree, the Wilhelmine Reich would not have been much better than Hitler's regime if the Germans had won on the Western Front.
Ad astra! Sean
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