Professor Acton began his lecture with a warning to beware of historians who tend to interpret Russian history through western eyes. The vastness of the country, a huge plain of infertile soil and short summers populated by a backward peasantry kept in serfdom long after the practice had been abandoned in Europe, make comparisons nugatory. The difficulties of communication before the electric telegraph made any organised resistance all but impossible. The tsars, the nobility, and the church survived in an autocracy of mutual self-interest, ignorance, and when necessary by brutal force. The country's military was so numerous that in spite of Russia's backwardness, it defeated both Bonaparte and Hitler albeit at the cost of almost unimaginable suffering.
The reforms of the nineteenth century were not in response to enlightened thinking. They were economic necessities. The huge factories, which were hurriedly built in the last days of the tsars were hothouses for the poisonous seeds of the radical socialism which germinated in the rancid soil of St Petersburg in 1905 and 1917. Once the process of modernisation had begun revolutionary change was inevitable. However, the precise nature of the change and which of the many socialist parties rising from the ashes of war and from starvation in St Petersburg would triumph depended on a mutinous army and some chance opportunities taken by the Bolsheviks in October 1917. Their ruinous policies, driven by extreme interpretations of Marxist theory, brought new suffering to the people of Russia for the greater part of the twentieth century.
Despite generations of constant turmoil, beginning in the eighteenth century, a small intellectual class survived producing great works of Russian art, literature and music. But we are mistaken if we are tempted to think that a small flouring of culture and enlightenment centred mainly on St Petersburg might have been representative of crude repressive regimes.
What of Russia now? Does Putin see Russia returning to a tsarist type of empire? Is it possible that people will forget the horrors of Stalin's long regime and look for stability and material comforts in a dictatorship? Is corruption in Russia too endemic for reform? With the help of Professor Acton's analysis, our guesses will at least be better informed.
Jeffrey Bonas