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On the Historical Record: Revolutions that shook the world

On the Historical Record: Revolutions that shook the world

J. BROOKS SPECTOR’s bookshelves host many curious coincidences and pairings, but perhaps none as much as on the one shelf that held Martin Luther’s ‘Three Treatises’, ‘The Selected Writings of Marx and Engels’, Leonard Shapiro’s ‘The Russian Revolutions of 1917’, John Reed’s ‘Ten Days That Shook the World’, and Solomon Grayzel’s ‘A History of the Jews’. Taken together, they help represent three remarkable anniversaries in history. Happening now.

In writing about international relations, it is common to identify big, overarching, transcendent geopolitical themes, and then massage the evidence to suit the model being offered up for contemplation. A sophisticated version of this approach might well be Prof Graham Allison’s new book, the provocatively titled Thucydides Trap, which argues that the US and China are almost certain to bump heads militarily unless something changes dramatically, in the manner of Sparta versus Athens nearly two-and-a-half-thousand years earlier. (It is a more nuanced version of the dangerous rising nation versus established power dynamic.)

Alternatively, among the political studies literature, there is the tendency to focus tightly on a major leader and describe or analyse his or her decisions in terms of their impact. This is something like the difference between the old adage that says: grave crises give rise to great men to deal with them, and its converse, the possibility that great men produce those grave crises.

Missing in all of this, of course, is a real focus on the power of ideas and their impact upon society, rather than just a simple roster of all those great figures worthy of those statues in public squares, or yet one more fight about whether a statue of a formerly revered and now-reviled autocrat should remain in place or be hoisted out of the park with a heavy lift helicopter and then taken off to be dumped at a retirement home for images of outmoded politicians.

Interestingly, these past two weeks give us important examples to contemplate in thinking about a rather different way of looking at the great machinery of history – the power and impact of ideas on great masses of men and women in their own time and well beyond. On 31 October 1517, the Augustinian priest, Martin Luther, nailed his epochal “95 Theses” on a door of the castle church in Wittenberg to protest against the selling of indulgences by the church to well-to-do sinners – and 94 other complaints. A hundred years ago, on 7-8 November 1917 (or, if you prefer, 24-25 October, if you are still clinging to the Gregorian calendar), the Russian Communist Party carried out a coup against the government in place that had already overthrown the old czarist order six months earlier. And in that same year, on 2 November, the wartime British cabinet issued its “Balfour Declaration” that announced its support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in what was then Ottoman Turkish territory, comprising parts of three vilayets (territorial jurisdictions like counties or magisterial districts) of that increasingly creaky empire.

This decision came as Britain and the Ottoman Empire were facing off in the midst of the First World War. And then, just 79 years ago, on 9-10 November 1938, the Kristalnacht attacks on Jewish property and places of worship, carried out by Nazi paramilitary groups, police and significant numbers of the general population, made quite clear the future trend for Europe. In each case, writings and public exhortations – for good or evil – were the core for the consequences that stemmed from these acts.

Photo: Martin Luther posting his 95 theses in 1517, by Ferdinand Pauwels, Belgian painter, ornamental painter and teacher. (Wikimedia Commons)

Let us start with Martin Luther, a fiery Augustinian priest with a predisposition towards complaining about everything from his indignation over those customary church indulgences, his increasingly violent anti-Semitism, and even to his state of indigestion. In describing the origins of Luther’s moment in history, The Economist wrote this past week,

Half a millennium earlier, a 33-year-old German monk experienced something similar. At some point between 1513 and 1517, Martin Luther had a direct encounter with God and felt himself ‘to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise’. His moment of being born again was private. [Italics added] The day on which he is said to have nailed a list of 95 complaints about ecclesiastical corruption to the church door in Wittenberg, Saxony – widely thought to have been October 31st, 1517 – made the (moment) private, public and, soon, political. A mixture of princely patronage, personal stubbornness and chance led what could have ended up as just another minor protest in a remote corner of Europe to become, instead, a global movement.

At the heart of this Protestant faith were, and are, three beliefs resting on the Latin word for ‘alone’: sola fide (that people are saved by faith in Jesus alone, not by anything they do); sola gratia (that this faith is given by grace alone, and cannot be earned); and sola scriptura (that it is based on the authority of the Bible alone, and not on tradition or the church). In a way that complemented the broader themes of the Renaissance, Luther wanted Christianity to go back to the ‘pristine Gospel’: the teachings of Jesus and the apostles. This return offered a new sort of freedom, one centred on the individual, which helped pave the way for modernity. ‘The separation of powers, toleration, freedom of conscience, they are all Protestant ideas,’ says Jacques Berlinerblau, a sociologist at Georgetown University.

Protestantism continues to change lives today; indeed, over the recent decades the number of its adherents has grown substantially…. According to the Pew Research Centre, Protestants currently make up slightly less than 40% of the world’s 2.3bn Christians; almost all the rest are Roman Catholics. The United States is home to some 150-million Protestants, the largest number in any country. In Luther’s native Germany roughly half the Christians follow his denomination. But today Europe accounts for only 13% of the world’s Protestants. The faith’s home is the developing world. Nigeria has more than twice as many Protestants as Germany. More than 80-million Chinese have embraced the faith in the past 40 years.

There are many ways to be a Protestant, from the quietist to the ecstatic. The fastest-growing varieties tend to be the evangelical ones, which emphasise the need for spiritual rebirth and Biblical authority. Among developing-world evangelicals, Pentecostals are dominant; their version of the faith is charismatic, in that it emphasises the ‘gifts’ of the Holy Spirit, held to be a universally accessible and sustaining aspect of God….”

And all of this has come to pass despite philosopher Frederick Nietzsche’s famous (or was it infamous) pronouncement from over a century ago that “God is dead”.

Moreover, Luther’s religiously revolutionary exhortations came along just as the social media of the 16th century had hit its stride in the form of printing with moveable type after its development in the mid-1400s in Mainz. Printers quickly took up Luther’s writings and they were distributed across much of Europe – where they were eagerly read by those who were already literate, and listened to by those who were not. Luther’s pronouncements on the established Roman Catholic Church, the centrality of the individual’s direct relationship to the deity and the importance of personal revelation, and the Bible as the core of belief, rather than all those other encrustations and elaborations, had come in tandem with an explosion of the publishing of that Bible in vernacular translations from the Latin, Hebrew and Greek. Luther, himself, had completed a German translation of it.

This development allowed almost anyone to draw their individual religious fervour from the holy words (and Luther’s missives), rather than the more obscure pronouncements of a priest or the corrupt practices of the clergy in selling forgiveness. Benedict O’Grady Anderson, the great cultural anthropologist, had dubbed this explosion in information accessibility as the sudden advent of “print capitalism” and termed the result occasioned by this great change as a longing for “imagined communities” where people would now draw upon the printed word to inspire their hopes for a new way of existence, unshackled from those old verities. Or, as Luther himself had written, the press was “the greatest and most extraordinary act of Divine Grace”.

Along the way, Luther’s revolution broke the spell of the universality (at least in the west) of there being just one true church, instead now allowing individual monarchs and other princes to select which pathway they and their subjects might follow. The papal decision issued at the end of the 15th century, which had airily divided the new worlds opened up by Columbus and the rest of the voyagers solely to Spain and Portugal, would have become unthinkable just a few decades later. And, of course, the revolution in religious thinking also led to a century of increasingly fierce religiously inspired struggles across Europe, culminating in the Thirty Years War. The conclusion of that war in 1648 gave birth to the modern nation state through the Westphalian treaties.

Even without getting into a debate over Max Weber’s argument about the centrality of the protestant revolution and the birth of modern capitalism, the world lives with the impact of Martin Luther’s legacy, as the newest “Great Awakening” of religious belief reaches across much of the third world – and beyond. It fuels Evangelical and Pentecostal churches in much of the US, Latin America, and East Asia; gives rise to Africa’s “money” churches; and supports the pitch of “good news” churches as exemplified by the teachings of the late Rev Norman Vincent Peale and the continuing popularity of his book, The Power of Positive Thinking. Just as a footnote, that work is much admired by – who else – but one Donald Trump.

Four hundred years after Martin Luther’s protest in Wittenberg, other new words have heralded great political, social and economic changes. Wearied by the terrible casualty lists and a long roster of lost battles and disastrous troop retreats, growing food and other goods shortages in the cities, and a real sense that the czarist regime under Nicholas II was unable to cope with the growing chaos, the anger led to a rebellion in February that forced the czar’s abdication and the establishment of a moderate socialist government under Alexander Kerensky. (It is one of those great historical coincidences that Kerensky’s father had been a teacher at the school attended by Vladimir Ulyanov – a.k.a. Lenin – in Ulyanovsk. And as Lenin, he would, of course, lead the successful coup against Kerensky’s own increasingly hapless government just six months later.

Kerensky’s government had insisted on continuing its participation in the fighting as an Allied government against Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans, even as the more radical socialists – the Communist Party – had formulated their own demands as simply, “Bread, Peace, Land”. It was a winning slogan and brand pitted against the rough equivalent of: “Let’s keep fighting to keep France and Britain happy – no matter how terrible things become here.” The simple set of promises naturally won out, regardless of their evident lack of fulfilment over the long haul.

Along the way, the resulting 25-26 October Revolution became the 7-8 November one, from the expedience of the Russians’ adoption of calendar reforms to take cognisance of astronomical realities that had already become the norm in the West nearly two centuries earlier.

From 1917 onward, through to the end of the Soviet Union under Boris Yeltsin/Mikhail Gorbachev, despite its real history as a shockingly repressive, authoritarian regime throughout its run, its leadership cadre had virtually no compunction about doing whatever seemed to be in the service of the creation of their secular utopia, as defined by the party. In practice, this often meant the death by starvation of millions of peasant farmers resisting collectivisation in the Ukraine and elsewhere. It also meant purging many thousands more from the ruling party and government after fictitious show trials, with verdicts usually delivered on specious grounds; and then sending an untold number of such people – plus many others who resisted authoritarianism in one way or another – off to that “Gulag Archipelago” of brutal prison work camps, mines and other punitive facilities. Whereupon, they usually died from hunger, disease, or overwork.

But along the way, this striving for that imagined socialist utopia – together with the apparent success of this Russian experiment – became a defining characteristic of and inspiration for many revolutionary social movements around the world, motivating Cubans, Chinese, Central Americans, the SA Communist Party and its friends, and miscellaneous socialist and communist parties in the West, along with many others. And, of course, it provided intellectual succour and inspiration to artists, writers, dramatists, filmmakers and other creative people around the world for many decades.

Nowadays, the new Russia doesn’t even celebrate that October Revolution. As Serge Schmemann wrote from Moscow in the New York Times the other day,

The end of the Soviet Union in 1990 set history adrift. The collapse of a totalitarian dictatorship that had overthrown an absolute monarchy forced Russians to confront a painful task of choosing what to glorify, what to condemn, and what to gloss over. Impassioned debates over what role of ‘liberalism’, ‘democracy’ or ‘elections’ might have had a century ago are really about today.

Those who pine for a powerful state, President Vladimir Putin among them, have come to blame Lenin for the territorial costs he incurred for quitting the war with Germany and to credit Stalin with putting it together again (until it was dismantled anew by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin). The last czar, Nicholas II, is alternately seen as a weak master who either foolishly allowed the autocracy to founder or who failed to ride with a democratising tide. The Russian Orthodox Church has canonised him as martyr of an idealised, God-fearing past.

The fall of Communism is the onset of freedom for some, the collapse of empire for others, and simply irrelevant to many Russians under 35, who, according to public opinion polls, simply don’t know much about 1917.

The revolution doesn’t fit comfortably into any of the competing narratives. The very concept of ‘revolution’, sanctified in Soviet mythology, changed radically after the chaos and impoverishment of the 1990s, until today the overwhelming majority of the Russian population, across all categories, declare that ‘whatever happens, a revolution in the country cannot be allowed’. That, too, is a sentiment Mr Putin fully shares, though his reason may be less a fear of chaos than of losing power the way his Ukrainian neighbours did in their ‘colour revolutions’.

The history Mr Putin has sought to write is one in which his Russia is a continuation of a great and powerful Russian state that has existed over the centuries, under the czars and the Bolsheviks. In this vision, revolution is a foreign-instigated setback. The chairman of the official Russian Historical Society, Sergei Naryshkin, who is also head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, said as much when he spoke to the organising committee charged with the 100th anniversary of the revolution about ‘those centres, primarily beyond the ocean, where the decisions to fund coup d’états are made’.

The Kremlin could not simply gloss over the Russian Revolution, so Mr Putin has played it down. The official government order for commemorations referred only to ‘the revolution of 1917 in Russia’ — not Great, or Russian, or Socialist, or October, or any other adjective that would imply glorification or disparagement. And the lesson Mr Putin stressed was the need for reconciliation — ‘the strengthening of the social, political and civic consensus that we have managed to achieve today’. No major national events were scheduled.”

And the holiday itself on 7 November is now called the “Day of Reconciliation and Agreement” and a holiday three days earlier is now “National Unity Day”. Neither speaks much to any revolution. That memory is now largely left to old folks who haven’t taken up the new Russian chase to a consumer nirvana – and for the global remnants in hereditary Communist nations such as North Korea or Cuba. Even China, half a century away from its Cultural Revolution, is trying to find a pathway between Deng Xiaoping’s “To be rich is wonderful” and current party and national boss, Xi Jinping’s ideology in which he is trying to re-centre the ruling party’s core legitimacy – but in a nation where the roll call of new dollar millionaires and billionaires grows ever larger, day by day.

Watch: October: Ten Days That Shook the World – Sergei M. Eisenstein

Meanwhile, 2 November 1917 also marks the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration by the British government in the midst of World War I. Locked in an increasingly desperate struggle against Germany and its allies, Britain was looking for ways to encourage more enthusiastic American participation in that war, once it had finally joined with the British, French and Italians. Believing that a proclamation establishing that British policy was in favour of a Jewish homeland in those Turkish Palestinian districts – in sync with the ideals of Theodore Herzl (the creator and populariser of modern Zionism after he had been appalled by the continuing pogroms in Eastern Europe against Jews) and a British chemist and ardent Zionist, Chaim Weizmann, whose energies in the allied struggle were also important – would spur American war resolve, the British cabinet issued a terse statement. This declaration effectively called the creation of a Jewish homeland – not a state, not a territory, per se – a war aim, as part of the final settlement of the then-current struggle.

Writing in The Guardian, historian Ian Black described this decision, saying,

That 1917 pledge – known to posterity as the Balfour declaration – had fateful consequences for the Middle East and the world. It paved the way for the birth of Israel in 1948, and for the eventual defeat and dispersal of the Palestinians – which is why its centenary next month is the subject of furious contestation. After 100 years, the two sides in the most closely studied conflict on earth are still battling over the past.

Controversy dogged the declaration from the moment that Arthur Balfour, then foreign secretary, sent it to Lionel Walter, Lord Rothschild, who represented the British Jewish community. Its 67 words combined considerations of imperial planning, wartime propaganda, biblical resonances and a colonial mind-set, as well as evident sympathy for the Zionist idea – embodied in the famous commitment to ‘view with favour the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people’ in the Holy Land. It ended with two important qualifications: first, that nothing should be done to prejudice the ‘civil and religious rights’ of Palestine’s ‘existing non-Jewish communities’. And second, that the declaration should not affect the rights and political status of Jews living in other countries.”

The latter was a veiled reference to the possibility that citizenship sometimes painfully acquired by Jews in many European nations might be challenged.

The results of the Balfour Declaration might not have been so extraordinary, save for two facts. First were the sometimes competing claims to territory of the soon-to-be-defeated Ottoman Empire by Western Powers and vague promises made by the British to Arabs increasingly in revolt against the Turks for a new Arab nation spread across much of the territory ruled by the Ottomans. But the second was the onset of World War II a generation later and the increasing persecution and near-extermination of European Jewry under the Nazi regime. The persecutions had been kicked off in earnest during the riots and looting against Jewish-owned stores and homes that became known as the Kristalnacht – by virtue of all the shattered glass from windows across the full extent of Germany. By coincidence, this week is also the 79th anniversary of those events that took place on 9-10 November 1938.

After World War II, among the hundreds of thousands of surviving European Jews, for many, any return to their homes had become impossible, given the economic scarcities, the destruction of their communities, and even the eruptions of pogroms against them after the defeat of Germany in places like Poland. Many of these survivors migrated to the US, but many others made for a potential home in Palestine. Their resolve turned that “homeland” into a new nation state, blessed by the UN’s partition plan after the UK resigned from its role as the mandatory power, and then a war for independence against invasions from several Arab nations and – in part – against the Arab Palestinian population. Prior to the Holocaust, of course, most Eastern European Jews who had left their European homelands left for the promise of the United States, although a smaller number chose to join the socialist movements building in their European homes, and as a still smaller number elected to make a problematic migration to a near-mythic Zion/Palestine.

But the controversy over the impact of the Balfour Declaration continues to animate many, amidst commemorations by Israelis of its effects and in more earnest discussions in Britain over its consequences. As Black adds,

In an age when the conflict is increasingly waged by volunteer armies of social-media warriors, it should come as no surprise that both sides are determined to press their competing claims. The Balfour Apology Campaign is demanding Britain make amends for ‘colonial crimes’ in Palestine. It is promoting a short film, 100 Balfour Road, which tries to explain the long-term effect of the declaration by showing the Joneses, an ordinary family in suburban London who are evicted from their home by soldiers and forced to live in appalling conditions in their back yard. Another family, the Smiths, take over their house and, supported by the soldiers, mistreat the Joneses and deprive them of food, medicine and their basic rights. The dissident group Independent Jewish Voices has produced a critical talking-heads documentary about Balfour – being circulated under the Twitter hashtag #NoCelebration….”

The battle over Balfour has much in common with other disputes over historic apologies or redress for the wrongs of the past. It may be seen alongside recent rows over the Cecil Rhodes statues in Oxford and Cape Town and Confederate memorials in the US, compensation for British mistreatment of Mau Mau rebels in Kenya and French atonement for atrocities in Algeria. But the Israel-Palestine issue is far harder to deal with. Its past is not another country. Truth and reconciliation, let alone closure, are remote fantasies. Unlike slavery, apartheid, the Irish famine and western colonialism – all, at least formally, consigned to the dust heap of history – the Arab-Jewish conflict between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan shows no signs of fading. Indeed, it remains as bitter as ever, stuck in a volatile status quo of unending occupation and political deadlock.”

Stretching across five centuries, anniversaries of the ideas of Martin Luther, of the political success of Russian communism’s leaders, and the Zionist idea and the beginnings of its practical implementation fall together in one two-week period. And lest we forget, 8 November also marks the one-year anniversary of the victory of Donald Trump in the most recent US election. And so a question: Will his successful harnessing of populist rhetoric together with the anger and angst of many American voters – and the worldwide popularity of other similar populist movements in other nations – have as important a legacy in the years to come as any of these three? DM

Main photo: Lenin returns to Moscow, April 1917.

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