Before the Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe: Part Six

    Before the Age of the Donald - Part Six



        "Russia," Winston Churchill once pointed out, " is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Churchill was talking about the Russian Empire or the U.S.S.R. as it was known under communism.
     Yet perhaps Churchill continued, there was a key to understanding Russia. "That key is Russian national interest." Churchill here told the truth. Russia's national interest trumped all of its other concerns. And to survive throughout its long history, Russia was and is ruled by tyrants.
    So far this story of the world before the rise of Donald Trump has focused on the United States and some of it bad deeds. Yet Russia's rulers have also done some terrible things. Russia first pops up in the history books in the 9th century as the Kievan Russ. Here in what is now the Ukraine, a Slavic duchy was founded. It soon cleaved to Orthodox Christianity.
     For the next 900 years it spread eastward, conquering, absorbing and subduing one ethnic group after another. By the 19th century it had reached the Pacific Ocean. As the U.S. and Canada moved westward, crushing one First Nations group after another, Russian soldiers did the same on the other side of the world.
    As a result, Uzbeks, Tartars, Kirghiz, and many other peoples ended up living under the Russian heel. Russia also sometimes moved westward. In the 18th century it sliced off part of Poland too and absorbed many Polish people into the Russian Empire. Yet unlike the U.S. and Canada, Russia never developed into a democracy. The czars ruled Russia with an iron hand and often tyrannized their subjects. Many times their subjects rose in revolt, led by people like Stenka Razin, Bolotnikov and Pugachev. Yet the czars crushed all these uprisings in blood. Czars like Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great were not warm and fuzzy rulers. They were tyrants whose word was law.
    One exception to these rulers was Alexander the Second who in  the 19th century freed the serfs. He did this at about the same time that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln freed the African American slaves. Yet like Lincoln, Alexander received no thanks for this. He was killed just like Lincoln was. Yet his killers unlike the killer of Lincoln, namely John Wilkes Booth, the czar's killers were not pro-serfdom. They belonged to an anarchist terrorist group called the Zemlya Volya, or the People's Will. They wanted a revolution in Russia. They were caught for their crime and then executed. By the end of the 19th century the czars still ruled the roost.
      Yet then came the First World War.