Weapon of the Weak (Apologies to James Scott): Violence in Russian History

The essays gathered here offer case studies of violence in Russian history, without defining the term. Violence, we naturally assume, involves the use of force or, less dramatically, compulsion or constraint resulting in some kind of damage. The OED identifies it with "treatment or usage tending to cause bodily injury or forcibly interfering with personal freedom." Under certain circumstances, as in self-defense and wartime, violence is considered a justifiable choice. An essential attribute of the state, in Max Weber's famous definition, is its "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force." The speech that includes this formulation was delivered in Munich in 1918 and begins by citing Lev Davidovich Trotskii's remark at Brest-Litovsk, that "every state is founded on force." ¹ Soviet Russia was thus on Weber's mind when he made his general observations. This connection brings us back to the subject at hand.

Violence can be routine or extreme, lawful or abusive. Standards measuring atrocity, barbarity, or crime vary in time and across cultures, as the history of warfare and slavery clearly shows. Such variations surface in the examples considered here, which span three centuries. They include periods of crisis and war, but also relatively ordinary times, when violence played a role in the routine operation of state institutions. The autocracy applied violence in prisons and exile colonies, in the form of corporal punishment, as part of military discipline and on the battlefield, in colonial campaigns and administration. One might argue that the Soviet regime fostered a chronic state of emergency as a mechanism of rule, cultivating the sense of vulnerability as a reason preemptively to strike out. But even in periods of relative calm, when the state's existence was not in peril, policies were often characterized by brutal methods and highly damaging results, to say the least: among them collectivization, deportation, induced famine, camps, prisons, forced labor, and physical torture. Victims number in the millions; the suffering is incalculable. The relevant questions are not if, but how and why.

Is this, then, the usual story of Russian history through the ages, plagued by authoritarian rule and marked by a preference for brute force in political life? Has Russia always been "more violent" than other places? The gaps in coverage here, especially for the modern period, and the random choice of themes are no doubt accidents of selection, yet it is impossible to consider the problem of violence in Russian history with so little attention to the Soviet era. Indeed, for all the stereotypes about the Russians' alleged propensity for self-inflicted harm, the centrality of sheer violence in defining and sustaining the Soviet regime is often understated. ² Yet, despite the gaps, the essays in their different ways suggest a common theme: that power is abused when the institutions that wield it are not powerful enough to do the job. Violence, odd as it may sound, is a weapon of the weak.

Our episodic story begins not, as one might expect from the standard textbook narrative, with Ivan the Terrible (1533-84), a notorious symbol of the abuse of absolute power by a recognized sovereign, but with the Time of Troubles, a crisis of sovereignty itself. In this conflict, which Chester Dunning characterizes as a civil war, the contending parties fought for supremacy, but until the election of Mikhail Romanov in 1613 none was able to eliminate his opponents from the scene. With few exceptions, it seems, the competing forces resorted to levels of brutality perceived even by contemporaries as excessive. The methods they favored (impaling, dismemberment, torture, rape, pillage, flogging) were nevertheless common to rulers of their day.

What the Time of Troubles offers, however, is not a normative old regime, secure in its brutal operation (or as secure as any princely regime ever was). "Terror," in this context, is a strategy that establishes, rather...