Real War by Richard Nixon Page B

Russia’s struggle with the Tartars, historian Tibor Szamuely argues, “comes nearer to the modern concept of total war than anything else in pre-twentieth-century European history.”
    The brutal exercise of total power, the subjugation of the individual to the state, the ruthless marshaling of all resourcesfor the purposes of the state, the idea of constant, unremitting war—these all have their roots deep in the Russian past, in the terrors of Mongol rule and in the bitter necessities of fighting the Tartar hordes.
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    Constant expansion also has roots deep in the Russian past. The Duchy of Muscovy spent two centuries expanding its power over its neighbors before Ivan the Great was able to throw off the Tartar yoke in 1480. He more than tripled the lands under Moscow’s rule, extending its reach from the Baltic Sea to the Ural Mountains.
    It was another Ivan, Ivan the Terrible, who a century later was crowned the first “Tsar of all the Russias.” Tsar is the Russian word for Caesar; his reign marked the beginning of Russian imperial rule.
    In the seventeenth century Russia conquered Siberia. Cossacks and fur traders swept 2,500 miles across the wilderness in fifty-five years, reaching the Pacific in 1639. From the frozen north, the Russians pushed south across the steppes of Central Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries toward China, Persia, India, and Afghanistan. Millions of Moslems fell under the sway of the Tsars as the ancient cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, and Ashkhabad felt the alien hand of a European conqueror for the first time.
    But two continents were not enough; Russia raced to occupy a third: North America. In 1741 Captain Vitus Bering, a Danish navigator in the service of Russia who gave his name to the Bering Straits, led an expedition which sighted Alaska. Russian settlements were established in Alaska. Until 1867, when the United States bought it, Alaska was known as Russian America. The local authority, the Russian-American Company, had been chartered in 1799 and empowered to discover and occupy new territories for Russia. Venturing south, the company established a settlement and built a fort sixty miles from present-day San Francisco, near what is now called the Russian River. Fortunately the fort was sold to John Sutter only seven years before the discovery of gold on his land launched the great California gold rush. The Russian-American Company also tried to gain a foothold in the Hawaiian Islands, but failed.
    Meanwhile, Russia was pressing its expansion in two other directions. In the nineteenth century it conquered the Caucasus,the gateway to Persia, Turkey, and the Middle East. It also pushed westward against Europe, where it encountered its most sophisticated and formidable foes.
    In terms of territory Russia dwarfs the countries of Europe, but for centuries it has found itself threatened and at times overwhelmed by these smaller but technologically more advanced powers. Russia was invaded by Poland in the seventeenth century, by Sweden in the eighteenth, by France under Napoleon in the nineteenth, and twice by Germany in the twentieth. Against each foe the Russians suffered staggering defeats, but they held on, regained the initiative, and eventually triumphed.
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    Just as the Tartar conquest led Russian rulers to adopt Oriental political techniques, the threat from the West led them to “Westernize.” This has chiefly meant the industrialization and modernization of Russia’s military.
    Italian architects had been imported to build the Kremlin. German military engineers helped Ivan the Terrible capture the Tartar city of Kazan by blowing up its walls, thereby clearing the way for the conquest of Siberia. But it was Peter the Great, the Tsar from 1682 to 1725, who systematized the importation of modern techniques from the West and made Russia a modern power on a par with