Simon Sebag Montefiore: In Russia, Power Has No Heirs
[Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of the novel “Sashenka” and the biography “Young Stalin.”]
... Russia has had a functioning system for handing over power for only 121 years in its entire history: during the later years of the Romanov autocracy. Before Emperor Paul I established a legal structure in 1797, there was no law of succession: Czars simply chose their heirs. Both Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible undermined their own achievements by killing their sons and chosen heirs. After Peter’s death in 1725, the succession was decided through 70 years of palace coups and regicide, a system oft described by the witty phrase “autocracy tempered by assassination.” Strong, intelligent empresses like Elizabeth and Catherine the Great seized power, creating an age of omnipotent petticoats.
Catherine, a German with no claim to the throne, in 1762 overthrew her own husband, Peter III, who was subsequently strangled by two courtiers, Aleksei Orlov and his brother Grigory (who was also Catherine’s lover) in a drunken frenzy. The official announcement was that he had died of piles — prompting the French philosopher d’Alembert to joke, when invited by Catherine to visit, that he couldn’t go since he suffered from hemorrhoids, potentially fatal in Russia.
Catherine’s heir, Paul I, so hated his mother that he created his law of strict male succession. He was a despotic, half-mad emperor with a fixation on military parades, and in 1801 was strangled and brained with an inkwell by his own courtiers. Yet his decision to codify the turnover of power ushered in an era of stable successions that lasted until 1917.
There was no succession rule in the Soviet state, an empire ruled by a murderous clique, men who met in paranoid secrecy as if they were still scruffy conspirators plotting in a room above some provincial tavern. Sovereignty in this institutionalized conspiracy was meant to rest in the Central Committee, but actually five or six magnates decided everything.
Regarding themselves as irreplaceable, both Lenin and Stalin tried in different ways to destroy their successors — Lenin through a testament that attacked Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin through purges culminating in the Doctors’ Plot of 1953. The aftermaths in both cases were grim: all Lenin’s potential heirs were killed by Stalin, and the struggle after Stalin’s death in 1953 was described by Winston Churchill as “bulldogs fighting under a rug.” At first the sadistic secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria emerged as strongman, until he was overthrown and shot in a plot hatched by Nikita Khrushchev....
If the Russians are happy with it, should their peculiar semi-modern, semi-medieval system concern us? A superb book called “Flawed Succession,” edited by Uri Ra’anan in 2006, examines four 20th-century Russian successions and suggests it does: “The absence of a transparent, consistently implemented, non-arbitrary transfer of power mechanism,” writes Professor Ra’anan, means that power is “transferred inevitably by coups, whether through covert opaque manipulations ... or physical elimination.” Without such a mechanism, “a democracy cannot be established,” nor can rule of law or a civic society....
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... Russia has had a functioning system for handing over power for only 121 years in its entire history: during the later years of the Romanov autocracy. Before Emperor Paul I established a legal structure in 1797, there was no law of succession: Czars simply chose their heirs. Both Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible undermined their own achievements by killing their sons and chosen heirs. After Peter’s death in 1725, the succession was decided through 70 years of palace coups and regicide, a system oft described by the witty phrase “autocracy tempered by assassination.” Strong, intelligent empresses like Elizabeth and Catherine the Great seized power, creating an age of omnipotent petticoats.
Catherine, a German with no claim to the throne, in 1762 overthrew her own husband, Peter III, who was subsequently strangled by two courtiers, Aleksei Orlov and his brother Grigory (who was also Catherine’s lover) in a drunken frenzy. The official announcement was that he had died of piles — prompting the French philosopher d’Alembert to joke, when invited by Catherine to visit, that he couldn’t go since he suffered from hemorrhoids, potentially fatal in Russia.
Catherine’s heir, Paul I, so hated his mother that he created his law of strict male succession. He was a despotic, half-mad emperor with a fixation on military parades, and in 1801 was strangled and brained with an inkwell by his own courtiers. Yet his decision to codify the turnover of power ushered in an era of stable successions that lasted until 1917.
There was no succession rule in the Soviet state, an empire ruled by a murderous clique, men who met in paranoid secrecy as if they were still scruffy conspirators plotting in a room above some provincial tavern. Sovereignty in this institutionalized conspiracy was meant to rest in the Central Committee, but actually five or six magnates decided everything.
Regarding themselves as irreplaceable, both Lenin and Stalin tried in different ways to destroy their successors — Lenin through a testament that attacked Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin through purges culminating in the Doctors’ Plot of 1953. The aftermaths in both cases were grim: all Lenin’s potential heirs were killed by Stalin, and the struggle after Stalin’s death in 1953 was described by Winston Churchill as “bulldogs fighting under a rug.” At first the sadistic secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria emerged as strongman, until he was overthrown and shot in a plot hatched by Nikita Khrushchev....
If the Russians are happy with it, should their peculiar semi-modern, semi-medieval system concern us? A superb book called “Flawed Succession,” edited by Uri Ra’anan in 2006, examines four 20th-century Russian successions and suggests it does: “The absence of a transparent, consistently implemented, non-arbitrary transfer of power mechanism,” writes Professor Ra’anan, means that power is “transferred inevitably by coups, whether through covert opaque manipulations ... or physical elimination.” Without such a mechanism, “a democracy cannot be established,” nor can rule of law or a civic society....