Follow the embankment where the steel rails used to run. Climb down into the 40-foot canyon. Find the marking on the washed-out culvert.
This is your first clue of what happened on this land, an epic failure that paved the way for incredible opportunity. The story of Omaha’s new sports landmark begins with an extraordinary tale of an abandoned railroad — a doomed project that would’ve made the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts cringe.
The history goes back to 1907 when railroads were Nebraska’s economic engine. They accelerated Omaha’s growth. From this urban hub, tracks sprawled like spider webs across the prairie. But it’s a track that didn’t come through Omaha that drew the ire of local merchants.
Burlington had built its Great Northern line from Sioux City to Ashland, not Omaha.
That made it more convenient for trains to go through Lincoln than Omaha. To businessmen of Nebraska’s largest city, that was unacceptable.
The Omaha Chamber raised a fuss until Burlington made a promise: We’ll build a shortcut from Yutan to Chalco, reducing the path from Yutan to Omaha from 49 miles to 22 miles. Problem solved.
The single track would stretch 12 miles and cross two rivers, but revenue in freight would make up for it. Construction began in February 1914 and was 1/4 complete when a bad economy stopped it. Work resumed in 1916, much of it by shovel.
By 1918, the project was almost finished. Grading done. Rails down. Crews even completed the Platte bridge. Then all hell broke loose.
With U.S. soldiers in the French trenches, the government ordered immediate removal of rails and material. America needed the steel elsewhere. How do you dismantle 10 miles of railroad you just laid? Locals protested and litigation stopped all action. For two years. In 1920, farmers sought again to open up the track for trade.
“I gave Burlington right of way through my farm 4 years ago for $1,” Harry Cowles said. “The officials promised to open the road within two years. … Our farms have been cut up and we are deriving no benefit.”
Finally, Burlington completed the Yutan-Chalco cutoff. And on May 7, 1923, it established regular passenger and freight service. For about eight months, the track worked fine. Passengers could go from Omaha to Fremont — or even Kansas City to Sioux City.
But maintenance issues emerged. Service suffered. Because of the steep 1.25% grade, Burlington actually saved money going around Ashland, despite the distance. What remained were gravel and sand shipments from the pits east of Yutan. Not enough.
Burlington argued that maintenance and operation imposed “unnecessary burden” on its business since the track had no public necessity or use. The railroad wanted to salvage its material.
In 1926, the year that Nebraska railroad miles peaked at 6,428, the protestors gave up. Burlington began tearing up the 12 miles between Chalco and Yutan, nailing the coffin of a financial catastrophe.
“This line never should have been built,” the Burlington GM said.
Now, nearly a century later, a clever cynic might look at this history and conclude that a boondoggle is a bad omen for any project on the land, let alone one named after the railroad.
But you have to walk that old railbed stretching 500 yards across the property. You have to look at an Omaha golf market craving someplace new, bold and special. A throwback to golf in its purest form.
You have to look at the 25-year relationship of architect Scott Hoffman and developer Bill Kubly. And finally you have to look at Lost Rail’s relationship with Marleen Muenster, the 75-year-old who lived on this land for 18 years after her husband’s death, only agreeing to sell after Dirk Chatelain cold-called her and sold the vision. Secluded and spectacular. Destination golf on the city’s edge. She loved it.
Walk around Lost Rail and the silence nearly lifts the stress right off your shoulders. Places like this are good for the soul, especially so close to home. If Burlington had succeeded, a world-class golf club wouldn’t even be an option. You’d hear train whistles. Instead, these 155 gorgeous acres laid here quietly for 100 years as metro Omaha crept closer and closer.
100 years. Hiding in plain sight.
100 years. Waiting to be found.
Omaha World Herald published as Morning World Herald - Oct 24, 1919
Omaha World Herald published as Morning World Herald - Dec 3, 1921


Closure: How the flagship Albany Midwifery Practice, at the heart of its south London community, was demonised and dismantled
Published 11th May
In 1997 the Albany Midwifery Practice in Peckham, South London, negotiated a pioneering NHS contract with King’s College Hospital Trust. The Albany model of midwifery care was loved and respected not only by those who experienced it first-hand, but also by the wider midwifery profession. Founded to serve one of the most disadvantaged populations in London, its innovative approach led to improved outcomes for mothers and their babies. Why, then, was the practice suddenly shut down in 2009?
Although it was widely acknowledged that the Albany model offered gold-standard care, the hospital trust claimed that since March 2006 this care had been ‘unsafe’. But both the data and the methodology used to condemn the practice were flawed, and the real reasons for the closure remained obscure. Despite extensive protests by mothers and families, midwives, and many high-profile supporters, the Albany was forced to close its doors and one of the midwives was subjected to a punitive investigation by the Nursing and Midwifery Council, which eventually found that there was no case to answer.
Midwives and campaigners have long pushed for answers about what really happened to this flagship midwifery practice. In this damning assessment, based on years of careful research and interviews, the authors reveal how a hugely successful healthcare project was undermined and dismantled, to the detriment of mothers and babies, the wider community and the midwifery profession as a whole.
As maternity services are scrutinised once more, and as the NHS struggles to implement its policy of continuity of midwifery care, this hard-hitting account of the fate of the Albany could not be more relevant or more timely.


Submitted by Enszer on July 14, 2012 - 2:58pm
1930s’ Emily Dickinson
Genius. Recluse. War Poet. Woman Poet. By 1930, the 100th anniversary of Dickinson’s birth, critical scholarship, from formalist Allen Tate’s ‘New England Culture and Emily Dickinson’ (1932) to communist poet Genevieve Taggard’s The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson (1930), set out to claim Dickinson. To what extent were the 1930s battles between high modernism and populist poetics fought, bridged, or played out in the earliest days of Dickinson scholarship? Send 250-300 word abstracts and brief bio to firstname.lastname@example.org
by October 15, 2012.


The site is currently being rebuilt, so please bear with us if you find some aspects not working as expected.
If you spot any errors or have any data/information to include to this site, please contact us.
Wherever possible ANY data/information on this site should be checked with original records.
I have included some information on here that I have NOT yet proven and is waiting to BE proven.
I must mention the contacts that I have so far made, and that have provided me with some family information that has helped dot i's and cross t's,
you know who you are, Thank you!!
To search the genealogy database, enter a name below.
I am researching my family history including the names and variants:
This has so far resulted in searches through the counties of Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Devon, Nottinghamshire and Warwickshire with traces of the family also being found as far afield as Poland, the East Indies and even Australia!!
[View all Most Wanted]
I also have been slowly transcribing some parish records. Somerby is an ongoing project, and there will be other parishes in Leicestershire as and when I get them transcribed. Hopefully they will be of use to some of you.
The new Parish Records section is now live and will be hosted via the Geneapedia link below.
|People: ||2941 (323 Living)|
|Males: ||1478 (50.26%)|
|Females: ||1447 (49.2%)|
|Unknown: ||16 (0.54%)|
|Number of Surnames: ||502|
|Average Lifespan: ||63 years 71 days|
|Earliest Born: ||Henry Waldram|


Ponce City Market
Ponce City Market, Atlanta, GA
Originally, the old Sears Roebuck & Company building in the Old Fourth Ward, the property's history dates back to 1928 in Atlanta. After years of neglect, a group of visionaries bought the property and began renovation in 2014. Part of the main focus was to be five openings in the second level, making an atrium for visitors to see and enjoy their favorite store or restaurant. These openings were no easy feat.
B&D provided the shoring, cutting and removal of elevated concrete in five locations, two of which were 30 feet wide by 90 feet long, seen here. B&D continued to do work for other contractors such as J.M. Wilkerson and various speciality subcontractors. During the height of work at Ponce, it was not unusual to see more than one B&D truck on any given day.
General Contractor: Gay Construction
Project Value: $400,000


What does BMWW stand for in cars? – BMW is a German distributor, motorbike, engine manufacturing company established in Munich, Bavaria, Germany in 1916.
BMW owns a mini car and is the parent company of Rolls Royce motor car. BMW produces automobiles under the BMW Motorsport division and motorcycles under BMW Motorrad, and plug-in electric vehicles of the BMW i sub-brand and the “iPerformance” model of the usual BMW lineup. It is one of the world’s best-selling luxury car manufacturers.
The company is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock index.
BMW was established as a business entity established in 1917 after the reorganization of the Rapp Motorenwerke aircraft manufacturing company. After the end of the First World War in 1918, BMW decided to stop manufacturing aircraft engines under the conditions of Versailles Armistice Treat.
As a result, the company began lifting the limitation of the treaty in 1923,
The car continued in 1928-29.
The first car that BMW successfully produced and the car that launched BMW on the road of automobile production are based on Austin 7 and were licensed Dixie from Austin Motor Company in Birmingham, England.
BMW’s first important aircraft engine, and all kinds of commercial products, was a 1918 BWW IIIa inline 6 liquid cooling engine, known for its good fuel economy and high altitude performance.
With German disarmament in the 1930s, the company again began manufacturing Luftwaw’s aircraft engines. The factory in Munich made full use of forced labor. Foreign civilians, war prisoners, incarceration concentration camp Dachau . Among the successful engine designs of the Second World War were BMW 132 and BMW 801 air-cooled radial engine, and a pioneering BMW that powered “Emergency Fighter” equipped with a compact jet engine from 1944 to 1945 003 axial flow turbojet engine Heinkel He is 162 Spatz. The BMW 003 jet engine was first tested as the primary power plant in the first prototype of Messerschmitt Me 262 (Me 262 V 1), but in 1942 it replaced the standby Junkers Jumo 210 nose mounted piston engine Move to safe landing.
In the example of some Me 262 A – 1b tests built, a more highly developed 003 jet was used and recorded the official maximum speed of 800 km / h (497 mph). The first four aircraft flying so far used the BMW 003 jet as a power source in the sixth and eighth prototypes of the Arado Ar 234 jet reconnaissance bomber. In 1944 the reliability of 003 improved and became a power plant suitable for air frame design competing with Jägernotprogramm’s light fighting production contract. Heinkel He 162 Spatz design won. The BMT 003 aircraft turbojet was also considered as a basic starting point for the German armored vehicle pioneer turbo shaft power plant in 1944 – 45 as GTT 101.
Towards the end of the Third Empire, BMW developed a military aircraft project of Luftwaffe, BMW Strahlbomber, BMW Schnellbomber, BMW Strahljäger, none of which was constructed.
[In 1958, the automobile division of BMW was difficult financially, and it was decided whether the general meeting of shareholders will be held and whether to enter liquidation or find an alternative plan. We decided to continue this by trying to cash the current economic car boom that German front airplane manufacturers such as Messerschmitt and Heinkel developed so successfully. BMW bought the right to manufacture Iso Isetta in Italy. The BMW version of the small car was supposed to be powered in a modified form of the BMW motorcycle engine. It was moderately successful and helped the company return to its footsteps.
Since 1959, the dominant major shareholder of BMW Aktiengesellschaf was the Quandt family, which owns approximately 46% of the stock. The rest is open to the public.
In 1966 BMW acquired Hans Glas, based in Germany’s Dingolfing. Glas cars were easily badged until fully absorbed as BMW. It was said that this acquisition was to access the development of the timing belt Glas using the overhead camshaft, mainly in automotive applications.
The Glas’ Dingolfing factory was seen as another incentive. However, this factory became obsolete, BMW’s biggest direct benefit, according to itself, was highly qualified engineers and other personnel.
The Glas plant was able to keep building a limited number of existing models closer to BMW while adding BMW’s front and rear axle manufacturing.
In 1992, BMW acquired a major stock of Industrial Design Studio Design Globals USA based in California, which we completely acquired in 1995. In 1994 BMW British Rover Group.
(At the time, TheRover, Land Rover, MG brand, the right to abolish brands including Austin and Morris), it had been owned for 6 years. By 2000, Rover had suffered great losses, so BMW decided to sell combines. The MG and Rover brands were sold to the Phoenix Consortium and became MG Rover, and Land Rover was taken over by Ford. BMW, on the other hand, had the right to build a new Mini that was released in 2001.
Chief designer Chris Bangle announced that he left the BMW in February 2009 after working for the design team for about 17 years.
He was superseded by Adrian Van Hooydonk, a former right-hand man of Bangle. The bangle was known for its innovative designs, such as the 7 series in 2002 and the Z4 in 2002. In July 2007, the production rights of Husqvarna Motorcycles were purchased by BMW and reported as 93 million euros. BMW Motorrad will continue to operate Husqvarna Motorcycles as another company. All development, sales, production activities, and the current labor force remain at the current site of Varese.
In June 2012, BMW was selected by Forbes as number one in the world’s most popular enterprise.
The ranking is based on aspects such as purchasing motivation, recommendation, motivation to work, enthusiasm for investing in companies, only 60% in recognition of companies, 40% in recognition of products.


The idea of forming a national organization of state agencies emerged in the early 1960s as a by-product of efforts by President John F. Kennedy. Suddenly the needs of persons with lifelong cognitive disabilities were removed from the shadowy recesses of individual family struggles and thrust into the spotlight of national attention.
Services provided by states were confined largely to overcrowded and understaffed institutions. Some states subsidized day activity centers for children and adults which typically were operated by nonprofit community organizations. The subsidy levels, where they existed at all, were extremely modest in most states.
In 1961, President Kennedy appointed a panel of experts to prepare a national plan for "combating mental retardation." The President's Panel on Mental Retardation offered 97 recommendations for improving research, training, income maintenance, and service programs. In November 1963, the president signed legislation aimed at building a federal-state partnership in improving services to children and adults with "mental retardation and related disabilities."
Recognizing "the rapid developments taking place … in the field of mental retardation services," a group of state officials with responsibility for "mental retardation" services within their states met in Columbus, Ohio on February 28, 1963, to discuss establishing "an organization …. to take advantage of the tremendous national interest presently developing as a result of the support of the President of the United States and the work of his Panel on Mental Retardation."
The initial meeting of the "Coordinators of State Programs in Mental Retardation" was held in Portland, Oregon on May 23, 1963. Seventy-five individuals from 38 states attended the meeting, with 24 of the participants self-identifying themselves as their state's coordinator of mental retardation programs.
The minutes of the first meeting record that "… the new organization would provide a vehicle for effective communication between the federal agencies and the various states concerned with research, training, programs and finance."
The association was formally incorporated in the state of Washington on January 31, 1964.
In 1970 the association hired the first executive director, Robert M. Gettings who had worked at the National Association of Retarded Children in government affairs and then for the President's Committee on Mental Retardation prior to taking over at the association where he served until 2007.
50th Anniversary of the National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disabilities Services. Historical video highlights watershed events in history of the developmental disabilities movement. Written and narrated by Robert Gettings.


On Thursday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation from the Red Fort, declaring that India has never posed a danger to any country or society and that the country upholds the ideals of Sikh gurus.
In 1675, the Mughal monarch Aurangzeb assassinated Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru.
“This sacred Gurudwara reminds us how great was Guru Tegh Bahadur ji’s sacrifice to defend our rich tradition,” Modi added, referring to the Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib, which was built on the site where he was beheaded. There was a religious fanaticism storm raging in the country at the time. People who had committed violence and atrocities in the name of religion confronted India, which saw religion as a subject of philosophy, science, and self-reflection.”
According to Ministry of Culture authorities, the Mughal-era monument was chosen as the event’s location since it was from here that Aurangzeb issued orders for Guru Tegh Bahadur’s execution. Modi is the first prime leader to speak after sunset at the Red Fort.
“In the face of Aurangzeb’s tyranny, Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji, who later became known as ‘Hind di Chadar,’ stood like a rock,” Modi added.
“The Red Fort bears witness to the fact that Aurangzeb and other tyrants slaughtered many people, yet our faith could not be torn from us,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi remarked.
“The Sikh Guru’s sacrifice has inspired generations of Indians to live and die for the dignity, honour, and respect of their culture,” Modi remarked.
Every year on November 24, the Guru’s death anniversary is observed as ‘Shaheedi Divas.’
“Big powers have disappeared, big storms have calmed down, but India still stands immortal and is moving ahead,” Modi asserted.
“India has never posed a threat to any country or society. Even today we think for the welfare of the whole world. When we talk about a self-reliant India, we keep the progress of the whole world in front of that goal,” he added.
PM Modi commemorated the anniversary by issuing a commemorative coin and postal stamp.
400 Sikh musicians performed at the occasion, which also included langar.


...established in 1879, our journey from past to present, and into the future.
YESTERDAY. TODAY. TOMORROW. Remembering The Past. Honoring The Present. Looking Towards The Future.
The Hebrew Cemetery of Reno was established in 1879 when the Reno Hebrew Benevolent Society purchased land near the Hillside Cemetery on Angel Street located West of the University of Nevada. While the Benevolent Society folded in 1907 (the result of a floundering mining industry and economic downturn), burials continued at the Hebrew Cemetery under the supervision of a few select families.
By the 1970’s Reno boasted two Jewish congregations, Temple Emanu-el (conservative) and Temple Sinai (reform). The two congregations oversaw cemetery operations until 2003, when a new, non-profit religious corpora tion was formed. Six years later both Temple Sinai and Temple Emanu-el transferred their cemetery holdings to the Hebrew Cemetery Inc., which was able to clear up the many issues of title, some of them harkening back to the days of gold and silver bonanzas.
* A Special Thank You To Amy Sky
For The Use Of Her Beautiful Song In The Making Of Our Video.


Historic Real Estate
The Gorlaeus Laboratoria, room S0.08a is since many years the official place of the board of the CDL. Well, since many years? Spektaculair is the 12th board that is fully located in the ‘hok’ (boardroom). A lot of other rooms have been occupied by the CDL board over the years. This is also the case for the course Chemistry. Here, we will provide a short history of the rooms and buildings that the CDL and Chemistry Students have studied/lived in since our establishment.
Kamerlingh Onnes Gebouw
The old church at Rapenburg was the first permanent housing for Leiden University shortly after its establishment. This building is still in use to this day by the University and we know it as the ‘Academiegebouw’ (Academic Building). The University grew from here and expanded throughout the city. Until the middle of the 19th century, all education and research buildings were centered around the Rapenburg. The pharmaceutical research was done at the Papengracht, number 4. The chemical research concentrated itself since 1856 in the current Kamer Ohnes Building, which was then called “Fysisch, Chemisch, Anatomisch en Fysiologisch Laboratorium” (Physical, Chemical, Anatomical and Physiological Laboratory). This building was established by a Chemistry professor, Van der Boon Mesch. Encouraged by unhappy students that complained about the poor working situation in the old buildings in the city, he made sure the minister financed a new laboratory at the Kleine Ruïne (established during the ‘Kruitramp’ [gunpowder disaster] of 1807). This building was the first laboratory that was designed with the requirement that science experiments could be conducted which required a specific design.
Hugo de Grootstraat
Antione Paul Nicholas Franchimont (1844-1919) became the first extraordinary professor in Organic Chemistry in 1873. Due to his perseverance a new ‘paleisachtige’ (like a palace) laboratory was built in 1901 on the Hugo de Grootstraat. Franchimont found it very fitting for the ‘zeldzame vereeniging van uitgebreide kennis, combinatievermogen, logischen zin, scherpzinnigheid, handigheid en wat goed geluk’ (rare association of broad knowledge, combination ability, logical sense, sharpness, dexterity and some good luck): science.
By the end of the century, the views were already changed and they decided that they wanted to place the chemical branch just outside of the busy city. That is why they started building a new Laboratory for Organic Chemistry in 1896 on the Hugo de Grootstraat. This building, completely built in neo-gothic style, was doubled in size in 1910 to a complex with more than 6000 squared meters. The University and the course Chemistry grew so much during the 50s and 60s that a new accommodation had to be sought. A new gigantic complex was built in 1963 even further from the city, in the upcoming neighbourhood Leeuwenhoek, easily accessible along the Rijksweg A44. The building on the Hugo de Grootstraat was left for good in 1968. It is not even a property of the University anymore since a couple of years ago and it has been renovated to hold luxe apartments.
...In de eerste jaren vond ik het plezierig dat de colleges op verschillende plaatsen in de stad waren: scheikunde in de Hugo de Grootstraat, natuurkunde in het Kamerlingh Ohnes Laboratorium, wiskunde in het Academiegebouw en mineralogie in het Geologisch en Mineralogisch Instituut aan de Garenmarkt…
…Niet alle chemisch afval dat wij tijdens de chemische practica produceerden mocht door de gootsteen. Voor de agressieve chemicaliën was een eenvoudige oplossing: “het putje”.
Het putje bevond zich op de binnenplaats van de gebouwen aan de Hugo de Grootstraat, een gat in de grond met een deksel erop. Sterke zuren, basen, giftige stoffen, alles in het putje. Soms vloog enige tijd na de lozing de deksel meters hoog de lucht in. Of het putje aangesloten was op het stadsriool of rechtstreeks in verbinding stond met het water in de Jan van Goyenkade, weet ik niet. Natriumresten gingen meestal niet in het putje, maar direct in de Jan van Goyenkade. We leefden gevaarlijk in die tijd en de buurt wist ervan mee te praten…
Jan Cornelisse, student ’54-‘61
The Gorlaeus Laboratoria were the base for what later became the Bio Science Park. It was the aim to have six towers with laboratoria that were accessible via a circular lecture building. The current situation shows what they realized. Only one of the towers was built for Chemistry and another for Physics. This is presumably the building where the CDL got her first room, but the archives are not very clear about this.
It is not very clear when the CDL got her very own boardroom. In the 70s and 80s, we were situated on the tenth floor. They even held General Members Meetings here, dressed in a chic turtleneck. The CDL moved at one point to a new location, closer to the ground and the students. We do not know when that exactly happened, but what we do know for sure is that in 1996, during our 14th lustrum (Rob van Waarde was praeses then), the CDL was located in LCP19. Nowadays we know this room as our archive, tucked away deep in the chambers of the Gorlaeus. The tradition to leave hand prints on the walls was originated here. This tradition, now at rest, can be seen on the two filing cabinets in the current boardroom. The hand prints of the 90s can still be found in the basement.
Because the basement did not conform to the strict fire safety regulations, the faculty wanted to move S.V. LIFE (also our neighbours at that time) and the CDL. The bar also had to be more safe and professional. The small lecture rooms beneath the canteen would be changed to boardrooms. Major Line was the first board that was situated above the ground in a room that is now a part of the Science Club. When the plans again changed for the bar, the CDL, and in particular the board Sas Chaos, had to move again. This time they moved to a location that we now know as the CDL ‘hok’.
This was not the last time the CDL had to move. In 2008, when Hatchikidee was the board, the wing was made clear of asbestos. The CDL had to move back ‘temporarily’ to the old boardroom in the basement. Eventually, the board would be located here for more than a year, Kharma moved back to the ‘hok’.
In a few years, we will move to the new building (‘nieuwbouw’).


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Siwagi Argento decorative material is a thin layer of plaster with squartz sand. The texture of such decorative paint is totally determined by different application techniques. The thickness of the layer is about 2.5 – 4 mm.
After processing the surface’s color and shade may differ. This type of decorative plaster is widely used in contemporary redecoration industry. Wooden and acrylic bindings are used as a main component of Siwagi material.
Modern Siwagi decorative paint is supplied with two different types of filling: with golden filling (Siwagi Oro) and silver filling (Siwagi Argento). Plasters with pearl effect and quartz filling are a more modern type of material than other decorative and Venetian plasters used for interior design. We can trace the development of this material if we take a deeper look into its history. Its roots may be found in XVI century, whilst modern types of decorative plasters can give you a picture of these times.
Archeological data states that decorative plasters and paints were born in ancient, tribal times. Scientists suppose that most of the plaster items were crafted in old Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. Simultaneously, the understanding of brick and its solution came out. Plaster and sea sand were used as a base for their production; it was boiled and became homogenous sticky mass. This mass was applied to the decorated object.
This Mesopotamian practice was picked up by Egyptian artisans and decorators, improving the quality of the solutions. You can still observe the leftovers such ancient materials on the buildings. Here comes the conclusion that decorative materials are not only used for artistic purposes, but also they protect the walls from unwanted atmospheric influences and temperatures.
How beautiful are Moscow city buildings, palaces of St. Petersburg, Venice! You should consider that this beauty had been created by artisans of past centuries. Even though the buildings are quite aged, they still are in exceptional condition and there is no need for their redecoration today. Decorative materials’ application technology has initially been intended to protect the buildings from unwanted impacts. Only many years later, decorative plasters and paints started to be used as an artistic tool.
Mural decorative materials are an ancient invention of humankind, which contains the picture of past times, our history and an entire epoch of human legacy.


THE GRANDEUR AND THE FALL OF EMPIRES
You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it —Talleyrand
In the first century B.C., the formation of a professional army and the resulting decline of the system of universal military service for free peasants undermined the republican institutions of ancient Rome and prepared the way for a regime in which the army served the ruler in power. The new state structure was called an empire (the term comes from the Latin imperium, power). Since Rome’s power in those days extended over most of the known world, another meaning of the word developed: in Europe “empire” came to mean a multiethnic state created through conquest. After the fall of the western Roman Empire, its mores and traditions continued to influence what happened in the territories that had been part of the empire and were geographically close to the metropolis. These same influences were reflected in the ensuing course of European history.
Modern Economic Growth and the Era of Empires
The idea of empire—a powerful, authoritarian, multiethnic state, uniting numerous peoples, like the Christian Church—is part of the legacy inherited by medieval Europe from antiquity. James Bryce, a well-known scholar of the Holy Roman Empire, wrote: “Dying antiquity willed two ideas to later centuries: the idea of a universal monarchy and the idea of universal religion.”1 Aphorisms usually oversimplify. That is the case here. The influence of the institutions and Roman law was much more significant for European development than the idea of universal monarchy. However, the connection of the imperial ideal with Roman tradition is indisputable.
Many rulers tried to acquire the title of emperor. But through the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, only Byzantium was perceived by other European states as the heir to the Roman imperial tradition.2 Byzantium referred to both the eastern and western parts of the Roman Empire. The rulers of Byzantium believed that they had only temporarily lost control over part of the empire’s territory. When Charlemagne was crowned in 800 as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, gaining recognition by the Byzantine authorities was a serious problem for him.3
The gradual weakening of Byzantium made its pretensions to the imperial title over the post-Roman space ever less convincing. After the Turks took Constantinople, the question of who held those rights became an issue again. The pretensions of the Russians to Moscow’s role as the Third Rome, heir to the traditions of the Roman and Byzantine Empires, was in the spirit of the period, the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. However, Russia was too far from the center of development to be taken seriously by Europe.
By the late fifteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire, which had been transformed many times in the ninth through fourteenth centuries and was in many ways ephemeral, was perceived by European royal courts as the only state with the legal right to call itself an empire. However, the idea of empire lives on and even today continues to exert an influence on European events.
Philip II sometimes called himself Emperor of India. We can see in the political polemics of the late sixteenth century the ideas of Spain’s predestination as an empire and its holy mission to rule Europe. The Castilian elite in the late fifteenth century regarded the Roman Empire as a model to emulate and itself as its heirs. They were part of the chosen whose holy mission was to recreate a world empire.4 Outside that context, it is difficult to understand why the Spanish kings needed to spend vast human and financial resources on wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, trying to expand Spain’s dominance in the world.
By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the economic and military growth of Europe and its supremacy over surrounding countries was indisputable. European nations began expanding to other continents. A powerful stimulus was the hope to replenish supplies of precious metals, a resource that permitted financing wars. It was only when the path to America’s precious metals was laid that the continent became valuable for Spain.
That was the start of the European empires. It was a period of mercantile trade policies. States limited the import of refined and manufactured goods and stimulated the export of domestic products. Ownership of colonies expanded the controlled customs zone. Conquered countries could not regulate access to the products from the metropolis. The metropolis could have a limited trade policy toward its colonies. The expansion of colonial territories occurred simultaneously with a fierce struggle among empires, the redivision of holdings, and competition among trading companies that dealt with the colonies.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, China, Japan, and the Ottoman Porte (also known as the Sublime Porte) were not formally European colonies; however, after an agreement between Britain and Turkey on January 5, 1809, the opium wars of 1840-42, and the arrival of Commander Perry’s squadron in Japan in 1853, the policy of low import tariffs was imposed on those countries as well.5
Even apologists for empires admit that the use of administrative force over conquered nations in that era was intended to support industrial development in the metropolis. In 1813 the textile and silk industry of India could have sold its products profitably on the British market at prices 50 to 60 percent lower than those commanded by English goods. But the customs duties (70 to 80 percent of the price) or direct bans of imported goods from India made it impossible. Had India been independent, it could have introduced prohibitive tariffs on British goods in response. India was the birthplace of the textile industry, which had existed there for six thousand years. Millions of people were employed in it. After it was colonized, hundreds of thousands of people lost work, people whose families had been weavers for generations. Cities such as Dacca and Mushirabad, formerly centers of the textile industry, went into decline. Sir Charles Trevelyan reported to a parliamentary committee that the population of Dacca shrank from 150,000 to between 30,000 and 40,000 over the twenty-year period 1813-33. Between 1814 and 1835, exports of British textiles into India grew from 1 million yards to 51 million yards annually. In that same period, Indian textile exports were reduced by approximately 400 percent, and by 1844 by another 500 percent.6
The start of simultaneous economic growth at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries increased the economic, financial, and military gap between Europe and the rest of the world (with the exception of European immigrant colonies in the United States, Canada, Australia, and some other countries). The defeat of Russia, one of the largest agrarian powers in the world and close to Europe, in the Crimean War was visible proof of that.
The world in the middle of the nineteenth century was a harsh one, with no room for sentimentality. A rule known by the Romans operated here: Vae victis, woe to the vanquished. The treatment of vanquished peoples could not be called gentle by any stretch. In order to prove that, it is not necessary to cite the catastrophic population loss of the Americas after the Spanish conquest or the annihilation of the North American native Indians. We can recall the existence in the liberal British Empire of a ban on Indian nationals in government service.
The creation and collapse of the European empires is a component part of the process of unprecedented economic growth and socioeconomic change that began in northwestern Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Those changes opened the way to the economic, financial, and military expansion of the metropolis and the extension of its territorial control. Simultaneously, new connections increased the risk that the bases of any state’s economic and political power could be undermined in a changing world.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the leading European countries, especially Britain, had no equals in using military power thousands of kilometers from their own borders. That ability is the basis for the formation of imperial policies. The British prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party William Gladstone wrote: “The imperial feeling is innate in every Englishman. It is part of our legacy, which appears with us and dies only after our death.”7
By 1914, England controlled territory with approximately one-fourth of the world’s population.8 Its empire, backed by long-standing tradition, seemed indestructible to most contemporaries. But the preconditions for its collapse had been formed by the late nineteenth century in the new world order. Simultaneous economic growth and the large-scale concomitant changes in the relationships of economic power among nations made it inevitable.
Developing nations that embarked on the process of economic growth after England can use what A. Gerschenkron called the “advantages of backwardness.”9 In terms of population they often surpass states that began modern economic growth before them; and as they move along the path of industrialization, they can mobilize financial and human resources to form powerful armed forces. The economic, financial, and military rise of Germany and Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are telling examples.
In my book Long Time, I focused on the fact that, for the past century and a half, Russia has lagged approximately half a century, or two generations, behind the most highly developed countries that are leaders of modern economic growth.10 In discussing Russia’s problems today, it is useful to remember that the era of decline for world empires began approximately half a century ago.
All the countries that called themselves empires at the start of the twentieth century have rid themselves of their colonies, voluntarily or by force, and given them freedom. This would be difficult to explain as a coincidence. This experience is important for Russia. If Russia learns from it, it may be able to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to political defeat.
In the early twentieth century, contradictions between the harsh structure of control over territories that formed during British financial and military- naval hegemony in the nineteenth century, and the growing economic and military might of countries that had been left out when the world was being divided up, became an important factor in international politics. Peaceful regulation of this problem was not easy. Solving it by force would mean starting a chain of bloody wars. And that is what came to pass from 1914 to 1945.11
Crisis and the Dismantling of Overseas Empires
The empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the product of the rise of Europe, the modern economic growth that created an asymmetry for decades in the financial, economic, and military forces in the world. But they were fragile formations that had difficulty adjusting to other concepts of rational political structure, to another system of forming armies, and to new forms of using force.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the world became a different place. The dominant ideology, within which the “white man’s burden” was a given, was replaced by a picture of the world in which the separation of nations into masters and slaves is unacceptable. The relations between the metropolis and colonies that were organic for the nineteenth century became untenable in the mid-twentieth century. In the intellectual atmosphere of the 1940s to the 1960s it was impossible to explain why Britain should rule India and its other colonies.
Over time, ideas about what the metropolis can do to preserve its supremacy were transformed. The harsh world of the early nineteenth century had no sympathy for the weak. But the changing sociopolitical reality of the twentieth century dictated new rules of behavior. When Britain used harsh measures in Malaya in the early 1950s to suppress rebellion—taking hostages, destroying crops in intransigent villages—these practices were condemned in parliament and called crimes against humanity. What was acceptable in the early nineteenth century was no longer tolerated in the middle of the twentieth.
Russia was the only territorially integrated empire to survive World War I. After World War II, overseas empires began to fall, one after another— British, French, Dutch, Belgian, and Portuguese. At the start of the 1990s the last territorially integrated empire—the Soviet Union—collapsed, and so did Yugoslavia, a country that was not an empire in the literal sense of the word but that faced problems similar to those that bring about the collapse of territorially integrated empires.
The crisis of 1914-45 radically changed the world. The myth of the invincibility of Europeans, deeply rooted in the public mind in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but undermined by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05,12 was completely discredited by the collapse of the European colonial empires in Southeast Asia during World War II. Europeans could no longer hope that their conquered peoples would continue to believe in the divine right of their conquerors to rule them.13
From the late 1940s to the early 1950s the very words “empire” and “imperialism” became unfashionable. In 1947, Clement Attlee, prime minister of England, said, “If at the present time imperialism, by which I mean the subjugation of some nations to the political and economic mastery of others, does exist somewhere, then such imperialism definitely does not exist in the British Commonwealth of Nations.”14
A characteristic trait of empires is the lack of universal suffrage for its subjects.15 Adam Smith wrote about the wisdom of offering the vote to the North American colonies. It did not become a topic of serious discussion among British politicians. But “no taxation without representation” was a key slogan of the American Revolution.
In the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary, of the almost 11 million people over the age of 21, only 1.2 million could vote. The question of whether soldiers mobilized during World War I from non-Hungarian parts of the kingdom should be allowed to vote was hotly debated. The government was unable to make a decision. The Hungarian prime minister, Count Istvan Tisza, categorically refused to give the right to vote to soldiers who were not Hungarian. Attempts to federalize Austria-Hungary in order to save the monarchy came up against the stubborn refusal of the Hungarian political elite to make any concessions to Slavic peoples.16 World experience shows that empire and political freedom—that is, the real democratic right to vote for all subjects—are incompatible.17
In the early 1950s, when France considered Algeria to be one of its departments, France refused to give Algerians a vote equal to that of Europeans. With voting controlled by two different electoral colleges, it took eight Muslim votes to equal one European vote. In 1954-58, the position of the French authorities changed. They recognized at last the inevitability of granting universal suffrage, understanding that they would not be able to hold on to Algeria without it. By then, however, nothing less than total independence was acceptable to the leaders of the liberation movement.18
Limiting suffrage in colonies was in line with the realities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when European empires were forming, and of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the conditions for modern economic growth were being established. However, it contradicts the perceptions of rational state order characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century. By that time, the conviction was entrenched that a regime that was not formed on the basis of universal suffrage and fair competition among political forces was illegitimate. The metropolis trying to save its colonies and the colonial elites was aware of that. There was only one way to preserve an empire: force the people living in the colonies to accept the regime as a given. But the empires kept confronting the problem that the statesman Talleyrand expressed to Napoleon in the following way: You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.
In the second half of the twentieth century the political rhetoric of those who favored maintaining colonies stressed not the advantages for the metropolis but the benefits to the colonies, arguing that the metropolis helped them create a legal system and a developed infrastructure. What also changed was the financial context of an empire’s functioning. Before the end of World War I, the generally accepted perception was that the colonies should support themselves and pay for the colonial administration. Under the influence of the changing intellectual atmosphere in developed countries, that tradition had become obsolete by the 1920s. In the new paradigm, the metropolis had to expend financial resources to hasten the economic development of the colonies.19 The authorities who wanted to prove that the empire was beneficial for its subjects had to invest even more in infrastructure and social programs in its territories.20 This was done at the expense of metropolis taxpayers, who were dubious about this practice. The upkeep of the empire cost them more every year. Societies became convinced that solutions to many problems were being postponed in order to help the colonies. By the second half of the twentieth century, the elites and the public in empires realized that empires were too expensive to sustain. The moment that the political elites of the metropolis and the colonies stop believing that the situation is a given, the empire’s fate is sealed. The only question is the form and time frame of its dismantling.
After World War II, an important factor in the dismantling of the colonial system was the opposition of the Soviet Union and its satellites on one side and NATO headed by the United States on the other. The Soviet Union, itself an empire, had reason to give financial, political, and military support to nationalist movements against traditional empires of European states. The
United States, as the leader of the military alliance against the Soviet Union, often treated Latin American countries the way European powers treated their colonies, but it never declared itself an empire or sent its representatives on a permanent basis to run dependent states.
For different reasons, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union liked traditional empires. At least they were not prepared to support them. Sometimes they directly encouraged their dismantling. That alone made maintaining empires impossible.21 During the Suez Crisis of 1956, the British and French assumed that they could invade Egypt and restore control over the canal on their own without consulting the United States or the Soviet Union. They were wrong. They had to retreat and accept the fact that the canal would remain under Egyptian control.
A process is under way in the postwar world similar to one seen many times in history: a quick dissemination of military technology by wealthy states among their neighbors and potential enemies, giving them broad mastery of partisan warfare. Enormous human and financial resources are required for the metropolis to stand up to this challenge.
In the sixteenth century, for example, with Europe’s obvious superiority in military technology, it took only several hundred conquistadores to conquer America. In the second half of the twentieth century, 400,000 French soldiers sent to Algeria were not enough to suppress a rebellion of 20,000 people who had the support of the civilian population. Likewise, Portugal’s defense spending, which in 1971 constituted 43 percent of its budget, was untenable for the country. In the period from 1961 to 1974, 110,000 young Portuguese emigrated to avoid the draft. A 1967 decree increased the mandatory military service to four years. Unable to graduate enough officers from their military schools, the Portuguese authorities were forced to recruit junior officers who were promoted upon graduation from military departments in civilian universities. They became the nucleus of the movement that prepared the way for the overthrow of the authoritarian regime and the end of the colonial war.22 And although Vietnam had never been a U.S. colony, America was pulled into the Vietnam War against the background of the collapse of the French colonial empire and the Cold War. By the time the United States was actively involved in the war, it was clear that controlling the territory and fighting off the partisans would require ten times their number in soldiers. The socioeconomic and political price for maintaining the colony was too high.
National pride is one of the most powerful tools for political mobilization in societies that do not have democratic traditions. Konstantin Leontiev knew very well that a feeling of national solidarity was a threat to an empire: “The idea of nationalities … in the form that it appears in the nineteenth century is an idea … with a lot of destructive force and nothing constructive.”23
Appealing to the juxtaposition of the white exploiters and the abused and humiliated indigenous inhabitants of the colonies is an effective political ploy. When the myth of European invincibility was demolished, violent forms of struggle against colonialism became widespread. The participants could count on financial and military support from the Soviet bloc. The nascent independent states were a dependable rearguard for the partisans in countries that were still European colonies.
After World War II, the inevitability of the disintegration of colonial empires became self-evident. The only question was which metropolis would be quicker to realize it and manage to make the decolonialization process easier and less painful.
The British elite, unlike the French, did not survive the capitulation of 1940. Great Britain, which emerged as one of the victors in war, was prepared for the crisis that came with the disintegration of its empire. In 1945, England was one of the three world powers with an army of 4.5 million and held overseas territories scattered over many continents. The sun never set on the empire. But by the end of 1961 there was practically nothing left of it. Nevertheless, the British government, unlike the Russian one, does not see the loss of its empire as a geopolitical catastrophe. In most of the works devoted to the dissolution of colonial empires, England, which understood how the world worked in the second half of the twentieth century, is considered a model to emulate.24
The India Councils Act of 1909, even though it did not create radical changes in the organization of imperial rule, was an important milestone on the road to Indian independent statehood.25 The decision on Indian independence was made during World War II, which in fact marked the end of the history of the British Empire. Further developments were merely an extended postscript. However, in the early 1950s the exploitation of nostalgia for empire was a strong political move, at least by the supporters of the Conservative Party, which identified itself with imperial grandeur. Discussion of the traditions of the past, the significance of empire for England, the inability to give it up, and the “treacherous policies” of the Laborites who were ready to dissolve it were important political components of conservative propaganda. The ideological basis for that policy was Churchill’s statement of November 10, 1942: “We intend to hold on to our property…. I did not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”26 He frequently expressed similar thoughts after his return to government in 1951.
Themes relating to the necessity of preserving the empire, the malign intentions of those who wished to dismantle it, and appeals to post-imperial nostalgia and anti-Americanism predominated in the policies of the Conservative Party in the early 1950s.27 Many British politicians of the period saw the United States, not the Soviet Union, as their country’s main foe. In 1951 it would have been impossible to explain to the majority of the Conservative Party, which had just won the election, that the empire’s days were numbered.28 But time has a way of putting things in perspective. The failure of the Suez campaign in 1956 and the efforts required to retain control on Cyprus in 1956 demonstrated that the dreams of maintaining the empire were romantic and unrealistic. In 1959 the Conservative government, which had sworn fidelity to the imperial ideal just a few years earlier, began forcing the dismantling of the empire. Iain Macleod, minister of colonial affairs, characterized the situation this way: “It has been said that after I became Colonial Secretary there was a deliberate speeding up of the movement towards independence. I agree, there was. And in my view any other policy would have led to terrible bloodshed in Africa. This is the heart of the agreement.”29
In letting go of its empire, Britain had to deal with a decades-long and difficult terrorist war with Northern Ireland. The parallels with Russia, which in 1991 gave up the next-largest empire without bloodshed and then encountered the difficult Chechen problem, are obvious. No one has ever decolonial- ized painlessly.
An orderly, planned dismantling of empires corresponding to the metropolis’s strategic plans is the exception, not the rule.30 More often we see situations where the metropolis, unprepared to send soldiers to defend imperial holdings, finds itself in a political crisis, unable to elaborate a policy for the peaceful restructuring of its relations with former colonies. Here Portugal is a striking example: after the revolution of April 25, 1974, the army sent to the colonies lost all desire to fight, and the soldiers and junior officers could think of nothing but getting home quickly. In such a situation, long and complex negotiations about the transfer of power are beyond the government’s capabilities.31
In France, because of the heavy legacy of its loss in 1940, the public adaptation to the new reality was slower than in England, and nostalgia for empire was stronger. The French political elite were certain that only their empire would allow the country to retain its status as a major power in the world.32 The number of people who died in the fight for this was greater than in other European metropolises. But their struggle did not change the result, the dismantling of the empire.
As the European empires declined, the crisis of universal military service unfolded.33 France expended the greatest effort to hold on to its colonies in the late 1940s and early 1950s; it spent more money and lost more lives. In Indochina between 1945 and 1954, 92,000 soldiers and officers of the expeditionary corps were killed, 140,000 wounded, and 30,000 captured. The war ended in defeat. Nevertheless, the French government did not send a single conscript from France to Indochina. It was politically impossible. French families were totally opposed to sending their sons to die in Indochina.
After the capitulation of the French at Dien Bien Phu, when 10,000 soldiers and officers surrounded them, the majority of the military leaders preferred to blame the civilian politicians for stabbing the army in the back. The loss in Southeast Asia, caused in part by France’s refusal to send conscripts there, was an enormous factor in the independence movement in other French colonies, especially in Algeria. If the metropolis could not keep its territories in Asia, what guarantee was there that it could do so in northern Africa?
One of history’s paradoxes is that the prime minister of France who concluded the war in Indochina with Ho Chi Minh in 1954 also initiated the large-scale increase of French forces in Algeria—Pierre Mendes-France. During parliamentary debates on November 12, 1954, he said, “Let no one expect any compromises from us, we will not compromise when it is a question of defending internal peace and the integrity of the republic. The departments of Algeria are part of the republic and have been France for an extended period of time. No separation is possible between Algeria and the main territory of France. Neither France nor any parliament nor any government will ever give up this fundamental principle.”34 The minister of internal affairs, later president of France, François Mitterrand, was just as adamant. He said, “Algeria is France.”35
The number of Algerian rebels was smaller than the partisan forces in Vietnam. Algeria is geographically closer to France. More than a million French colonials lived there. They had an influential lobby in the metropolis. The country had significant oil and gas resources.
In May 1955, the French government took a step that the cabinets of ministers who were responsible for running the war in Indochina had not dared to take. They called in 8,000 reservists and announced their plans to extend the tour of duty of 100,000 recruits. In August of that year, they limited the allowable reasons for exemptions from the draft. In 1955, the number of French troops in France almost doubled, from 75,000 in January to 180,000 in December. In the fall of 1956, one-third of the French army was located in northern Africa. By the end of 1956, there were 400,000 French troops there.
Most of the young men drafted in accordance with the decree of August 22, 1952, were older than 23; many were married with children and embarking on careers. In 1914, when large numbers of middle-aged men had been drafted, it was done in an organized way without public resistance. The homeland was in danger; people understood that. In the mid-1950s, the French public and the world saw the war with Algeria as colonial and unjust. Never before had a conscript army been sent to fight such a war during peacetime. In September 1955, recruits being sent to Algeria started to riot. Mass protests took place in Vincennes, Nantes, and Marseilles.
Recruits as a rule did not take part in military action. That was done by the Foreign Legion and military professionals. The basic task of the recruited contingent was to protect the farms of the French colonists. Nevertheless, once recruits were sent to Algeria, public opinion about the war changed in France. Citizens of a democratic country, even those feeling nostalgic for former grandeur, did not want to send their children to fight for the phantom of empire. In 1960-61, polls showed that two-thirds of the French supported the independence of Algeria. In a referendum on January 8, 1961, 75.2 percent of the population voted to give the country’s leadership freedom of action in solving questions of its implementation.36
In fact, neither France in 1960-61 nor Portugal in 1973-74, both of which had sent large contingents of drafted soldiers to their colonies, was confronted with the threat of direct military defeat. There was nothing like Dien Bien Phu in 1954 in the offing. The decision to dismantle their empires had other causes. Those included the domestic consequences of a long, expensive, and bloody war, the reason for which was becoming less apparent to the public. In the second half of the twentieth century, empires fell out of fashion. Modern society did not deem it necessary to die or to send its children to war in order to preserve the attributes of former grandeur.
The decision to reject the empire, supported by more than two-thirds of the voters, was not easy even in France with its long-standing democratic traditions. The minority, made up of former French colonials and professional soldiers who had fought in the war and felt betrayed by the civilian authorities, posed a serious threat to the stability of French democratic institutions in the period 1958-62. When in 1958 radical nationalists took control of Corsica, an official of the Ministry of Defense was asked if France intended to restore order through the use of force. “What force?” he replied, making it clear that the civilian authorities had no armed forces that could stop a rebellion.37
The fact that France managed to retain democratic institutions in the metropolis after the collapse of its empire was the result of several factors: the high level of development that makes authoritarian regimes that ignore the will of the majority seem archaic; the plans for European integration, in which France participated fully; and the authority and will of General de Gaulle, a man who could dissolve an empire and maintain control over the army and police.
In 1960-62, when the question of ending the war and granting independence to Algeria was being discussed, many observers expected a long period of political instability and disorder. They were disappointed. The country’s continued dynamic economic growth and European integration removed the potential for a dangerous post-imperial syndrome. In France, as in Russia today, the peak of the post-imperial syndrome occurred in the years when the economy was booming. Experience shows that the illness can be cured.
Problems of Dissolving Territorially Integrated Empires
In agrarian states, many of which were not ethnically homogeneous, national differences were usually unimportant. What was fundamental was the division of society into the peasant majority and the privileged minority, specializing in force, state administration, and religion. The Habsburg monarchy in the middle of the sixteenth century included not only Castile and Austria but also such disparate components as Hungary, Czechia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia, the Netherlands, Burgundy, and the Spanish colonies in America. The ethnic diversity of Russia, which had declared itself an empire in the early eighteenth century, needs no commentary here. Linguistic issues make it hard to determine whether the Ottoman Porte called itself an empire, but at the very least, European contemporaries referred to it as one.
Some agrarian monarchies had consistent policies of national unification. During the early Middle Ages, England and France were ethnically diverse countries. It took several centuries for each to create a single national identity. But the Austro-Hungarian Empire had subjects from very different language groups, and this strategy was not feasible.38
The beginning of modern economic growth and the radical changes it brought transformed society. New employment structures and higher educational attainment became entrenched. The bases of legitimacy for traditional political regimes were being eroded. Multiethnic, territorially integrated empires encountered more complex problems.
The spirit of the rising national consciousness in the early nineteenth century was nicely expressed by Johann Gottfried Herder, who wrote, “Providence has divided people by forests and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climatic zones, but first of all it divided people by language, tendencies, and character…. Nature brings up people in families, and the most natural state is one in which a single nation with one national character lives…. Thus it appears that nothing is as antithetical to the very goals of ruling as the natural growth of the state, the chaotic mix of various human breeds and tribes under one scepter…. Such kingdoms … are like the symbols of monarchy in the prophet’s vision: lion’s head, dragon’s tail, eagle’s wings, and bear’s paws.”39 The rise of national consciousness and the demands for federalization based on nationality made the situation of territorially integrated empires particularly difficult.
An overseas empire created with the help of cannon can be abandoned. Problems remain with settlers who have to repatriated, but they touch only a narrow segment of society. One of the most serious complications for France in liquidating its overseas empire was the fate of a million French settlers in Algeria. Yet that was only some 2 percent of the population of France.
When the Portuguese empire was dissolved in the mid-1970s, the repatriated settlers in the metropolis made up approximately 10 percent of the total population, more than in any other overseas empire.40 But the arrival of those outsiders did not become an explosive issue for the young Portuguese democracy and did not interfere with stabilization. In territorially integrated and multiethnic empires the issues relating to the resettlement of ethnic groups in the course of the empire’s disintegration are more acute. This was seen in the empires that collapsed during World War I: the Russian, German, Austro- Hungarian, and Ottoman. Arming millions of peasants who were not necessarily loyal to the empire and sending them into the trenches for years without explaining why war was necessary made retaining the empire difficult. Military defeat, the collapse of the old order, and territorial disintegration were related processes.
The picture of anarchy born of the collapse of territorially integrated empires is well known from books and films about the Civil War in Russia (1918-20). But it is not a specifically Russian phenomenon. Here is a contemporary account of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: “The green units (bands of deserters) have turned into bands of robbers. They took villages, castles, and railroad stations by storm and robbed them. They destroyed railway tracks. They kept trains in queues in order to rob them. The police and armed forces either joined the robbers or were unable to stop them. The new-found freedom rose in the smoke of burned houses and villages.”41 The most important argument for capitulation in the declaration by the State Council of Austria-Hungary was the fact that the army was multiethnic and its units, being neither Austrian nor Hungarian, were not prepared to fight for the empire.
The experience of dismantling empires after World War I is important for understanding the problems faced by the world in the late twentieth century. After the collapse of an authoritarian regime, a political and social vacuum forms. The policeman of the old regime is gone, and the new one has not yet arrived. Those who want power have no legitimizing tradition behind them, and there are no generally accepted rules of the political game. Conditions characteristic of great revolutions take shape: a weak government that is unable to collect taxes and pay people on the state payroll, maintain order, or guarantee that contractual obligations will be met.42
In those circumstances the exploitation of the simplest social instincts is a sure path to political success. Talking about national grandeur, about the injustices suffered by one’s own ethnic group in history, or about territorial demands by neighbors will guarantee political success.43 With weak democratic traditions and political parties, dependable weapons in the power struggle are radical nationalism, appeals to national self-identification and national injuries, and seeking out ethnic enemies. Austria-Hungary in 1918 provides a classic example of the use of such political tools by the leaders of the empire’s ethnic elites.
Even on the eve of the empire’s collapse, pan-Germanic circles in Austria were categorically opposed to its transformation into a federation. The Neue Freie Presse, which expressed their views, wrote a few days before the regime fell: “Germans in Austria will never permit the state to be pulled apart like an artichoke.”44
The Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz wrote a century before its collapse that the Austro-Hungarian Empire had 34 million inhabitants, of which only 6 million were Germans who kept the remaining 28 million in subjugation. In 1830 the Austrian poet Franz Grillparzer noted that if the world were to confront unexpected trials, only Austria would fall into pieces as a result. The Austro- Hungarian elite understood the fragility of the empire and tried to protect it by engendering contradictions among the peoples it controlled, creating a situation in which the Hungarians hated the Czechs, the Czechs hated the Germans, and the Italians hated all of them. When collapse was inevitable, the mutual hostility made national problems in the successor states difficult to regulate.45
The attempts made by metropolis elites to make national identity the basis of statehood in multiethnic empires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries actually radicalized anti-imperialist feelings among the national minorities. A leading Russian demographer, Professor Anatoly Vishnevsky, wrote:
Ukrainian separatism in its argument with more moderate federalism had the same strong ally as the other separatists in the Russian empire—imperial
great-power centralism. Its harsh unitarist position, which permitted no deviation, constantly encouraged equally harsh demands from Ukrainian nationalists. Ukrainian nationalism objectively was incited by a sense of the subordinate position on the imperial economic and political stage of the new Ukrainian elite and generally of the stratum of the Ukrainian populace that had joined the movement. When Russian patriots, who recognized Ukrainians as part of the Russian people, refused to hear anything about the Ukrainian language, they were signing on to impose that disadvantaged and second-class position forever.46
One of the most important themes of Hungarian political propaganda in 1918 was the danger of losing privileged-nation status in Austria-Hungary. The main subject of Croatian propaganda was the unacceptability of Hungarian dominance and its territorial pretensions toward Croatia. For Austrian Germans the greatest problem at that time was the fate of the part of Czechoslovakia settled by Sudeten Germans, and for Czechoslovakia it was the preservation of territorial integrity.
These conflicts are hard to resolve rationally. From the point ofview of reason it is difficult to explain which is more important—the preservation of Bohemia’s integrity or the right of Sudeten Germans to join Germany. What should be done with Hungarian minorities in Yugoslavia and Romania? The occupation by Entente troops of the territories in question played an important part in the relatively peaceful resolution of these issues. But still there were armed conflicts. Things were much bloodier when other territorially integrated empires collapsed.
By 1870, on most of the territory of the future Bulgarian state, the Orthodox Bulgarians were almost outnumbered by Muslims, Turks, Bulgarianspeaking Pomaks, and the Crimean Tatars and Cherkessians who had moved there from Russia. Several million Turks from Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Trakia moved into Western Anatolia during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. By 1888 the percentage of Muslims in Bulgaria had shrunk to approximately 25 percent, and by 1920 it was only 14 percent. Similar processes took place in 1912-24 in Macedonia and Western Trakia.47
The final dismantling of the Ottoman Empire came with its defeat in World War I. In January 1920, the leaders of the Turkish nationalists were forced to acknowledge the right to self-determination of the territories of the empire where the Arab population predominated. But they insisted on preserving the integrity of the Turkish metropolis. The Greco-Turkish War followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It resulted from disagreements over the borders of states forming in the post-imperial space. Victory in the war was a significant factor in the legitimization of the new Turkish state and made liquidation of the Muslim caliphate in 1924 relatively painless. However, even then, with the first attempts at democracy in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the legal opposition immediately exploited nostalgic feelings for the caliphate, Muslim values, and the lost empire.48
The imperial mission in Asia was a critical element in Russia’s selfidentification in the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky wrote: “In Europe we are spongers and slaves, but we will arrive in Asia as masters. In Europe we were Tatars, but in Asia we too are Europeans. Our mission as civilizers in Asia will entice our spirit and take us there, as soon as the movement starts…. A Russia would be created that would revive the old one and with time would resurrect and define its own paths.”49 But territorial expansion, the annexation of territories inhabited by peoples with fundamentally different traditions and languages, created risks at the first sign of a crisis in the regime.
The Civil War in Russia was not purely nationalistic; it had powerful ideological and social components. The question of land andprodrazverstka, the seizure of food from peasants for redistribution by the state, played no less a role than the nationality factor. Nevertheless, the nationality issue in Russian history from 1917 to 1921 must not be underestimated.50
Alain Besançon noted that the Russian Empire before World War I had a good chance of regulating social contradictions and problems of economic development, but it could not solve the nationalities question. This circumstance severely constrained the regime’s evolution. The liberal, democratic, and modernizing alternative—the key to solving the issues of sociopolitical development—increased the probability of the empire’s collapse.51
Russia is unique in restoring a failed empire, which it did in the period 1918-22. This required an unprecedented use of force and violence. But that was not the only factor in the Bolsheviks’ success. Messianic Communist ideology shifted the center of political conflict from a confrontation between ethnic groups to a struggle among social classes. That struggle garnered support from people in the non-Russian regions, who fought for a new social order that would open the way to a brilliant future, and played a large role in forming the Soviet Union within borders resembling those of the Russian Empire. Russia succeeded owing to a unique combination of circumstances. No one else in the twentieth century managed to do it.
Austrian socialists, forced to adjust to the realities of political competition in a multiethnic empire, understood the potential of the national question for destabilizing the regime and saw that the active exploitation of ethnic issues was a bomb that could destroy its foundations.52 V. I. Lenin’s thesis of the right to self-determination to the point of secession radicalized the logic of the Austrian social democrats, who had wanted to undermine the imperial regime in order to restructure it as a federation.
After World War I, the European establishment accepted the idea that nations had the right to self-determination, and the principle was incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles. It was a way of dismantling the German, Austro- Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires. The document’s authors had clearly not considered the long-term consequences of the propaganda associated with its ideas for other European empires.
In October 1914, Lenin spoke in Zurich to a social democratic audience on “war and social democracy,” comparing the situation of Ukrainians in Russia and in Austro-Hungary. He said, “Ukraine has become for Russia what Ireland was for England; it was ruthlessly exploited, getting nothing in return.” Lenin felt that the interests of the Russian and international proletariat required Ukraine to win state independence.53
He did not reject the principle of self-determination with the right to secession even after seizing power, when much of what he had preached before the revolution (freedom of speech, convening a National Assembly) had been forgotten. Why this remained part of Lenin’s political catechism is the subject of much debate and will probably never be resolved completely. Probably the key is that he always regarded events in Russia in the context of preparation for world socialist revolution and understood what a powerful means of destabilization radical nationalism could be.54
I have already spoken of the most important difference between the collapse of territorially integrated empires and overseas empires: in the latter, colonial settlers can return to the metropolis, and the ensuing problems can usually be solved in a civilized manner.
The situation was more complex in territorially integrated empires. There the people were not colonial settlers who moved to the overseas colonies a generation or two earlier, but people whose ancestors had lived in the same place, next to other ethnic groups, for centuries. These were millions of people who considered themselves to be at the least equal citizens of the country and occasionally even the privileged stratum. When an empire collapses, the representatives of the metropolis sometimes become the ethnic minority and are discriminated against. More than 3 million Hungarians found themselves to be a minority in neighboring successor states: 1.7 million in Transylvania, which had seceded from Romania; around 1 million in Slovakia and trans-
Carpathian Russia, which joined Czechoslovakia; and approximately half a million in Vojvodina, which joined Yugoslavia. Almost 5 million Germans went from being representatives of the ruling nation in the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and a number of eastern regions of the German Empire to being the ethnic minority in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Italy.55
Questions inevitably arise: should it be possible for arbitrarily created borders of imperial regions to become the natural borders of new independent states? Should ethnic minorities have a say about where they live, as new states form after empires fall? The concept of self-determination has no answers for these questions. Understandably. It was created not to solve questions related to the fall of multiethnic empires but as a bomb to place beneath their foundations. Its creators were not particularly worried about what would happen once the socialist revolution came to pass. But these questions became real and often bloody.
The basis of the political ideology of movements for national independence and the destruction of empires is often hostility toward the formerly dominant ethnic group. That is not a political construction from which to expect political correctness toward the formerly privileged nation. This explains the support for radical nationalism among minorities, once representatives of the metropolis, in newly independent countries.
The Yugoslav Tragedy
In the late twentieth century, Yugoslavia became one of the states that illustrate the problems of dismantling a territorially integrated empire.56 It fell apart almost simultaneously with the Soviet Union. What happened there is important for understanding the developments in the USSR in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Yugoslavia, naturally, was not a great power or empire in the classic sense of the word. But some features of the country’s state structure, beginning with its creation in 1918, made it resemble an empire. Both under the Karageorgevic dynasty and under Communist rule, it was a state with an authoritarian regime composed of ethnically heterogeneous but territorially integrated parts.
The idea of creating Yugoslavia as a commonwealth of Southern Slavic nations was first discussed in the late 1830s and early 1840s.57 After World War I, both the southern Slavic national leaders and the heads of Entente countries concluded that the way to guarantee stability in the Balkans and prevent local wars was to create a state based on the Serbian monarchy.58 The fragile balance of the national interests of the peoples living in Yugoslavia was destroyed in 1929 by political changes that limited the rights of non-Serbs and turned the country into a Serbian micro-empire.59
After World War II, Yugoslavia was reestablished. It had a relatively mild authoritarian Communist regime with an unusual construction. The Serbs were the largest ethnic group. The country’s capital was also the Serbian capital. This led to the inevitable dominance of Serbs in the government and the army. For decades the head of the country was a Croatian who understood the need to struggle against Serbian nationalism in order to retain stability in a multiethnic country. He incorporated the struggle against Serbian nationalism into the constitution, appreciating that the preservation of the state’s integrity depended on the reality of the federative structure.
Josip Tito’s policy was directed at minimizing the risks of attempts to transform Yugoslavia into a Serbian empire. The authority and will of the leader who stood up to Hitler in 1941-45 and to Stalin in 1948-53 was needed to ensure this construction. S. L. Woodward, a perceptive scholar of the Yugoslavian crisis, wrote: “Yugoslav society was not held together by Tito’s charisma, political dictatorship, or repression of national sentiments but by a complex balancing act at the international level and an extensive system of rights and of overlapping sovereignties. Far from being repressed, national identity and rights were institutionalized—by the federal system, which granted near statehood to the republics, and by the multiple rights of national self-determination for individuals.”60 This is true, but it is not all. This system could have worked only under strict control over any manifestation of political dissent. A crisis of legitimacy of the authoritarian regime would make the construction impossible.
As soon as the linchpin vanished—that is, the central authority’s willingness to use whatever force was necessary to preserve power and the state’s territorial integrity—Yugoslavia became ungovernable. The restraints that would have worked in a strong authoritarian regime, including the purely formal veto power of the republics and autonomous regions over decisions made by the federal government, never used under Tito, were unacceptable for running the country with a weakened government.
External problems added to the domestic ills. The most important element in Yugoslavia’s stability after 1945 was the guarantee in the Yalta Agreement that it would not be under the control of either the Soviet Union or the West. Tito deftly used the advantages this conferred. After the reestablishment of relations between Moscow and Belgrade, which had been suspended during a conflict in the late 1940s and early 1950s, access to the Soviet and East European market and a clearing agreement with the Comecon countries helped boost the Yugoslav economy. At that time Yugoslavia was able to secure low- interest loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Yugoslavia’s foreign policy is best described by the old Russian proverb: “A gentle calf can suckle two cows.”
Beginning in the late 1940s, Yugoslavia’s national defense was based on using the conflict between the two military and political blocs in Europe. The Yugoslav leadership understood that they would not win a war if attacked by NATO or Warsaw Pact forces. However, by organizing partisan resistance, they could create problems for the attacking side and use the support of the opposing bloc. This led to military training for reservists as part of the plan to have an armed populace as the basis of national defense, which played a big role in the development of the Yugoslav crisis.
In 1989, informed analysts regarded Yugoslavia as a socialist country with the highest level of readiness to create a full-fledged market economy. In 1949 the Yugoslav leadership began consulting the IMF and implemented reforms designed to shape a “socialist” market economy. In 1955 it opened its borders to foreign travel by its citizens and to relatively free foreign trade. By 1965 negotiations were completed for the conditions of Yugoslavia’s membership in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The country had a cooperation agreement with the European Community and with the European Zone of Free Trade before other socialist states even began discussing the possibility of concluding such agreements.
Even after the difficult decade of 1979-89, Yugoslavia’s high living standard, the people’s ability to work abroad, and its cultural pluralism seemed to make it the obvious leader (among states that had gone through a period of socialist development) to join the club of wealthy European states. The collapse of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe, which began in 1989, meant a shakeup in its unique position in the balance of power in the Balkans. Added to this was the erosion of communism as the basis for a legitimate regime.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies, the end of the Cold War, and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon in the late 1980s changed Yugoslav foreign policy and the economic basis for Yugoslavia’s existence. It lost its advantages as a state in a key region that was independent of both the Soviet Union and NATO. The collapse of the clearing trade within Comecon, into which it was integrated, was a blow to the Yugoslav economy. Another challenge was the loss of privileged-borrower status in international financial markets: it could no longer get inexpensive loans for political reasons. And domestic economic problems led to an economic crisis. Economic problems grew after the late 1970s. The rate of inflation increased and the rate of GDP growth fell (see table 1-1).
TABLE 1-1. GDP Growth Rate, Inflation, and Unemployment in Yugoslavia, 1978-90
|Year||GDP growth rate||Rate of inflation||Share of unemployed in the workforce|
Source: UN Statistics Division (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/cdb); B. R. Mitchell International Historical Statistics. Europe 1750-1993 (London: Macmillan Reference, 1998).
It was becoming clear that the Yugoslav model of market socialism, based on labor self-management, did not work well in industrialized societies, and the well-known economic arguments against its viability reflected real problems in the Yugoslav economy.61 Tito’s death paralyzed the decisionmaking process related to taxes, the budget, and foreign trade. But the accumulated problems, including the growing foreign debt, demanded action from the federal authorities, who assumed the republics would agree to share the burden of adapting to worsening foreign economic conditions. But the republics could not agree on which belts to tighten or how much.
In 1989 the Ante Markovic government attempted to implement a package of economic reforms focused on an institutional transformation of the Yugoslav economy and on financial and monetary stabilization. An element of this program intended to integrate the Yugoslav market was the plan to repeal limitations on property rights for foreigners and on the right to repatriate income. On January 19, 1989, the premier introduced a bill in parliament that would liquidate the property rights system inherited from socialism. It did away with limits on the size of landholdings and their sale and expanded the rights of managers in hiring and firing workers. The Union of Communists of Yugoslavia lost the prerogative of approving the appointment of enterprise directors. The inflation rate, which in December 1989 was 50 percent a month, fell to almost zero by May 1990.62
The concentration of power on the federal level was a necessary prerequisite of this program. However, Tito’s federal construction, which was intended to prevent Yugoslavia from turning into a Serbian empire, did not allow this to happen. The ability of the federal authorities to impose their decisions on the republics was minimized by the constitution.
Although intended to deal with the harsh economic reality and to save the country, the actions of the Markovic government led to the political crisis that brought about Yugoslavia’s collapse. Two years later the country no longer existed. Its territory became a bloody battlefield of ethnic wars that took tens of thousands of lives and created millions of refugees. In the conflict between Serbia and Croatia, 20,000 people died, 200,000 became refugees, and 350,000 received displaced-person status. During the Bosnian war 70,000 died and 2 million became refugees or were resettled.63
The history of the 1990s Yugoslav crisis is well documented and is not the subject of this book.641 use it to demonstrate that in the collapse of an authoritarian regime in a multiethnic country, the topic of nationalism, both in the metropolis and in the parts of the federation that consider themselves oppressed, becomes predominant.
After the Balkan wars of 1912—13, there was an informal moral ban on discussing territorial claims. This taboo was violated only in the years preceding World War II. In an authoritarian regime, this ban was often strengthened by harsh political sanctions.65 The liberalization of the regime and the democratic elections to the republican parliaments of 1990 made use of that weapon inevitable. It is too effective to ignore if one wants votes.
The Serbian leadership was the most important participant in the political process that exploited the ideas of radical nationalism. The Serbian Communist Party was led by Slobodan Milosevic: talented, charismatic, well educated, and with experience in market economics. Since Communist ideals no longer attracted voters, his only hope to retain control over the political situation in Serbia was to exploit the theme of Serbian nationalism, the oppressed situation of Serbs in Yugoslavia, and the problems of the Serbian minority in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Croatia.66 It was not difficult then to garner political capital in Belgrade by talking about the artificiality of the republic’s borders established by the Croatian Tito and the need to unite all Serbs in a single, territorially integrated state.
A draft document prepared by the Serbian Academy of Sciences in 1986 dwelled on the suppression of Serbs in Yugoslavia and set forth principles that could be used by politicians in a multiethnic country undergoing a crisis in its authoritarian regime. Excerpts, under the title “The Situation of Serbia and the Serbian People,” appeared in the Belgrade newspaper Evening News in September 1986. The article’s authors noted even then that this was a collection of ideas that would lead to a “fratricidal war and new bloodshed.”67 Appeals to national grandeur and national oppression are fuel for an atomic bomb in the political process of a country where the old regime is fading but there is a developed system of democratic institutions.68
The problem of young democracies that arise in multiethnic countries is that the slogans that are easiest to sell to unsophisticated voters are dangerous if implemented. It was a losing position politically in Belgrade in the late 1980s not to agree that “Serbia must be great” and “that we will not permit Serbs to be beaten anywhere.” It was easy to sell the idea on the political market that Serbia was and would be great and that the leadership would never allow Serbs to be hurt in the other republics and autonomous structures. If a Serbian leader did not fill that niche, some other politician would do so to serve his own interests. In May 1989 the Serbian parliament elected Milosevic president. A referendum in December of that year showed 86 percent of the voters supported him.69
It would not have been difficult to predict that politicians in Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Sarajevo would latch on to those slogans enthusiastically, merely substituting “Croat,” “Slovene,” and “Bosnian Muslim” for “Serb.” The moment the Serbian leadership agreed to accept the program of exploiting Serbian nationalism as a political ideology, the fate of Yugoslavia was sealed. In making territorial claims on their neighbors, the Serbian leaders opened the way to victory by nationalist leaders in the other republics who used the fear of Serbian domination and territorial expansion. Wars with Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo were inevitable. A process was set in motion that would cost tens of thousands of lives and lead to the forced resettlement of millions of people.
Political agitation based on pitting against one another people who had once lived together within borders arbitrarily imposed by a nondemocratic regime was the prologue to a bloody conflict. Twenty-five percent of Serbs in Yugoslavia lived outside Serbia. The propaganda of Serbian greatness influenced the treatment of Serbs in the republics where they were the minority. The response to the rhetoric and territorial claims on Croatia was repression of the Serbs living in that republic. The response to the repression was military action by the Yugoslav National Army (most of the junior officers were Serbs) to protect the Serbian minority. After that came war.
The political processes involved in the disintegration of an authoritarian regime affected the quality of economic policy. The democratic elections that began in the 1990s in the republics gave rise to what Rudi Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards called economic populism.70 Rival parties competed to promise the voters the best economic future, leading to the erosion of federal control over the budget and monetary policy. The inflation that had been stopped by spring 1990 took off again that fall. Of course, in view of the growing political chaos, this was a secondary factor.
The dissolution of empires in the twentieth century is a component of the process of global change that is called modern economic growth. That does not make it any easier for people caught in the mill of history. Appealing to their emotions is a powerful political tool. Think of Stalin’s address to his “brothers and sisters.” Coming from a man who killed millions of his fellow citizens, the words were blasphemous. And yet it was an astute political move, just like exploiting the problems of Russians who found themselves beyond the borders of Russia or appealing to post-imperial consciousness.
Historians and writers who incite radical nationalism and hostility toward neighboring peoples and who rehash long-ago injuries must realize that they are setting the stage for ethnic cleansing and the suffering of millions. Unfortunately, people rarely learn from their own experiences and almost never from the experiences of others. But if we do not draw lessons from what happened to our country and to other twentieth-century empires, we may become a threat to the world. That is the worst thing that could happen to Russia.