Russia as the “weakest link” in the international order at the beginning and end of the 20th century? – a comparative analysis
There has been a lot of debate over whether or not recent Russian history has been somewhat cyclical in nature. Successive collapses in the 20th century offer potential insights into the Kremlin’s behaviour today.
January 28, 2025 -
Leonid Luks
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Articles and Commentary

A view of the Kremlin from the Zaryadye Park in Moscow. Photo: Oleg Doroshin / Shutterstock
Lenin repeatedly described the tsarist empire as the “weakest link in the chain of imperialism”. The events of 1917 seemed to confirm this thesis. In February 1917, the tsarist monarchy was the first regime in Europe, as it existed then, to collapse under the challenges of the First World War. Eight months later, the “first” Russian democracy built on the ruins of the tsarist monarchy suffered a similar fate. In turn, the first totalitarian regime of modern times was built in its place. In August 1991, the Bolshevik annihilators of the “first” Russian democracy were disempowered themselves. Nevertheless, the Russian state that emerged after the dissolution of the Soviet regime once again developed into the “weakest link” of the international order. The country returned to being a place to experiment with utopian ideals of all kinds. In this respect, one cannot avoid the impression that Russian history has, in certain respects, a cyclical character.
The erosion of the tsarist regime
In the second half of the 19th century, Russia was one of the European countries where social and political conflicts were intensifying at a rapid rate. This occurred despite the revolutionary reforms of Tsar Alexander II (1855-1881), which led, among other things, to the abolition of serfdom and the creation of independent courts. The polarization of society that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had predicted for the West occurred in Russia at the end of the 19th century. That is where the revolutionary centre of the continent shifted as a result. At that time, three conflicts that had already been largely resolved in the West came to a head in the tsarist empire. These were constitutional, labour and agrarian issues that deprived the tsarist autocracy of its social roots. The frightening emptiness that surrounded the government became apparent during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.
Instead of arousing national enthusiasm, the Russo-Japanese War caused a general uprising of the people against the existing system. The majority of the population was largely indifferent to the devastating defeats suffered by the Russian army. The revolutionary groups even noted these defeats with a certain satisfaction. Lenin declared in 1905 that it was not the Russian people but their greatest enemy – the tsarist government – that had been defeated in this war. With this extremely defeatist attitude, the leader of the Bolsheviks (a “party of a new type”) was by no means alone at the time.
Being completely isolated, the tsarist autocracy could not be maintained in its previous form. It had to ask society for cooperation. Thus, at the suggestion of the then Prime Minister Sergei Witte, the tsar’s manifesto of October 17th 1905 was issued. In this document, the tsar promised his subjects basic rights and the convening of a parliament. This marked the end of unrestricted Russian autocracy. In April 1906, Russia received a constitution (“Basic Laws of the State”) – the first in its history.
The Russian historian Viktor Leontovich says that the constitution of 1905/06 was forced through by forces that were not interested in the constitution. Instead, their real aim was to consolidate the revolution. Regardless of this, following the liberal Russian politician Vasily Maklakov, the constitution gradually began to have an educational effect on both the government and the public.
However, all these developments primarily affected the Russian educated classes. The others hardly participated in them. They were scarcely interested in the political objectives of of the political elites. Thus, the Russian peasantry – the overwhelming majority of the population, even after the adoption of the constitution – was not interested in the establishment of the rule of law in Russia. This group was more concerned with the unresolved agrarian question. They dreamed of a complete expropriation from landowners, of a so-called “black redistribution”, and therefore did not want to recognize the principle of the inviolability of private property that the constitution guaranteed in Article 77.
The gulf between the Russian educated classes and those below them became particularly apparent after the outbreak of the First World War. Only loyalty to the tsar could motivate the Russian peasants to show exceptional endurance in the protracted conflict. However, this loyalty had been wavering since the turn of the century. The Russian lower classes – until then the most important pillar of the Russian autocracy – became its most dangerous opponent. More and more they began to transfer their hopes for the establishment of a socially just order from the tsar to revolutionary parties.
Just a few months after the start of the war (in December 1914), the Russian General Kuropatkin said that all of Russia had only one wish – peace.
The “National Renaissance” within the Russian educated classes
Kuropatkin’s statement, however, primarily referred to the Russian lower classes, who bore the brunt of the war. The Russian educated classes, or at least many of their representatives, were in an entirely different mood at the time. After the outbreak of the war, except for the Bolsheviks and a few other radical left-wing groups, they were gripped by a nationalist euphoria that did not differ too much from the mood that accompanied the outbreak of the conflict in countries such as Germany, France or Great Britain. Considering the indifference with which the Russian public had accepted the devastating defeats of the tsarist army in the Russo-Japanese War just a decade earlier, the change of mood that had taken place in the country within a very short space of time is surprising. However, this national renaissance contributed little to the popularity of the Romanov dynasty among Russia’s political class, as nationalist circles in Russia at the time suspected the tsarist family of not identifying sufficiently with the war. The fact that the tsarina’s favourite, Grigory Rasputin, who was assassinated in December 1916, played such a prominent role in governing the country contributed particularly strongly to discrediting the tsarist family. At the end of 1916, the opposition’s conflict with the regime reached its climax. The leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party, Pavel Milyukov, describing the incompetence of the government at the time, asked: “What is this? Stupidity or treason?”
Not only the liberals and socialists but also some conservative groups turned their backs on the government. Even some court circles were planning a palace revolution at the time. The erosion of trust in the tsar deprived the monarchy of its legitimizing foundations. At the time, Russia could indeed be described as the “weakest link” in the chain of belligerent powers.
Lenin’s defeatism
The fact that the Paris Commune followed the collapse of the French army, and the Russian Revolution of 1905 followed the downfall of the Tsarist army, led Lenin to the conviction that a revolutionary party during an “imperialist” war should above all work towards bringing about the defeat of its own government. Thus, unlike Rosa Luxemburg and many other representatives of the left-wing Socialist International, for example, he did not see the outbreak of the First World War as a cause for despair or as an unprecedented tragedy. On the contrary, he saw this war as a tremendous opportunity to accelerate revolutionary processes, calling it the “greatest manager of world history”.
Lenin had nothing but contempt for the pacifists who wanted to end this war as quickly as possible. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, he wrote to his party friend Shlyapnikov, stating that “The era of the bayonet has begun. This means that one has to fight with this weapon.”
When Lenin formulated this idea, he had no bayonets of his own. He therefore had to cooperate with the forces that had them and were pursuing the same goal as him. This was namely the destruction of the tsarist army, with Russia’s opponents in the war aiming for this above all. Lenin by no means saw this action as a betrayal of Russia. In his article on the national pride of the Russians, published in December 1914, he wrote: “The Russian Social-Democrats loved their fatherland like other Russians. But for this very reason they wished the tsarist regime a devastating defeat in every war. Helping to destroy the tsarist monarchy was the best service that any Russian patriot could render to his fatherland.”
Lenin saw the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1917 also as a result of the unusual destabilization of the tsarist monarchy by the war. This was of course seen as a confirmation of his tactics. In March 1917, he wrote:
“The revolutionary crisis was accelerated by a series of defeats inflicted on Russia and her allies… Those… who shouted and raved against “defeatism” are now faced with the fact that the defeat… of tsarism is historically connected with the beginning of the revolution.”
Lenin and the “Revolutionary Defence of the Fatherland”
After the fall of the tsar in February 1917, Lenin said in his “April Theses” that Russia was now “of all the belligerent countries, the freest country in the world”. Nevertheless, he continued his defeatist course unabatedly, this time against the “freest country in the world”. His cooperation with the German Reich reached its peak at this time. Lenin poured particular scorn on those political groups in Russia who believed that after the overthrow of the unpopular tsar, the Russian Revolution now had to be defended from external enemies. Lenin contemptuously referred to these groups as “revolutionary defenders of the fatherland” and said that they were the “(worst enemies) of the further development and success of the Russian Revolution”. To the war-weary Russian soldiers, who had been freed from the shackles of military discipline as a result of the revolution, Lenin made this very effective appeal: “End the imperialist war immediately.” The tsarist army, which numbered around nine million soldiers at the beginning of the February Revolution, was almost completely disbanded in the following months. However, Lenin’s peace propaganda had nothing to do with pacifism. For Lenin’s aim was by no means to end the world war, but to transform it into a worldwide revolutionary civil war that would eliminate the most important cause of all wars – the so-called “world capitalist system”. In Russia – the “weakest link in the imperialist chain” – with its weak bourgeoisie, the proletarian revolution conceived by Lenin was to triumph first. The spark of revolution was then to spread to the highly developed industrialized countries of the West. That was the plan. In Lenin’s view, the most important prerequisite for the victory of the proletarian revolution in Russia was the destruction of the bourgeois state and all its institutions, not least the army. In his polemic with Karl Kautsky in 1918 (already after the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution), Lenin wrote the following: “No great revolution has ever succeeded without the “disorganization” of the army… For the army is the most ossified tool with which the old regime sustains itself, the firmest bulwark of bourgeois discipline.”
The erosion of the “second” Russian democracy
In August 1991, the Bolsheviks, having ruled Russia autocratically since the October Revolution, was disempowered. The Russian democrats, who had been relegated to the “dustbin of history” by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, returned to the political stage. Nothing seemed to stand in the way of Russia’s return to Europe, something that the Russian democrats had dreamed of for years. Nevertheless, this triumph of the “second” Russian democracy did not last very long. The euphoric mood of August 1991 waned very quickly. Soon after came the shock of December 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union viewed by many imperial-minded circles in Russia as a kind of apocalypse. This was followed by the trauma of January 1992, as economic shock therapy almost halved the population’s standard of living. Not least because of all this, the term “democracy” was largely discredited in the eyes of many Russians. The journalist Leonid Radsikhovsky wrote in mid-1992 that “Democratic values were now experiencing an erosion similar to that of communist values in the past.” The term “democracy” was gradually becoming a dirty word. As a result, post-Soviet Russia, like the Weimar Republic at the time, was transformed into an “aggrieved great power” striving to restore its lost hegemonic position. Similar to the tsarist empire at the beginning of the 20th century, Russia once again became the “weakest link” in the European order.
The 1994 census showed that 46 per cent of the Russian population described the collapse of the USSR as a “catastrophe” or a “calamity”. At the time, many democratically minded Russian politicians also believed that the borders of the Russian Federation, created in 1991, were not final and that the entire post-Soviet area was a “vital sphere of interest” for the country.
For the most militant representatives of imperial revenge, however, the aforementioned quest to restore Russia’s former greatness was far too modest a project. They regarded the West’s victory in the Cold War as an unprecedented disgrace, which they wanted to undo with all the means at their disposal. Their aim was not to restore a balance in East–West relations but to completely defeat the western “globalists”. Like the right in the Weimar Republic, they demonized the values associated with the West. First and foremost, liberalism was attacked and described as a deadly enemy of the entire world outside the West. Liberalism was defined no differently by one of the most important representatives of the German Conservative Revolution, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, in 1923.
The magazine “Elementy” was founded in 1992 by the right-wing Russian publicist Alexander Dugin and served as the mouthpiece of these ideas. The magazine considered a compromise between the liberal advocates of the “mondialist” ideas and their opponents to be unthinkable. In the editorial of the seventh issue of the magazine (1996), one could read the following:
“Between them there is only enmity, hatred, the most brutal fight according to rules and without rules, the fight for destruction, to the last drop of blood… Who will have the last word? Finally it will be war, the “father of all things” that will decide.”
In another passage, Dugin referred to this conflict as the “final battle” and used this term in the original German (“Endkampf”). Dugin’s tirades of hatred towards the Western “globalists” are certainly reminiscent of Lenin’s invective against world financial capital. In Lenin’s view, the conquest of “world capital” should enable a new just world order without wars and exploitation. For Dugin, the conquest of the West, or so-called “mondialism”, was the indispensable prerequisite for the creation of a patriarchal idyll on this planet. Neither Lenin nor Dugin considered the struggle for power in Russia to be an end in and of itself. Russia was merely to become a launch pad for the realization of ideas that went far beyond concepts that were specifically Russian.
Dugin and Putin
One of the most important concerns of Dugin, who, unlike Lenin, did not have a “new type of party”, was to convey his “ideology of the final struggle” to representatives of the political establishment in Russia. Especially after the establishment of Putin’s “controlled democracy”, Dugin’s extremist ideas began to influence internal Russian discourse more and more. It was then that Russia was transformed from the “weakest link” of the European order, as it was established at the end of the 20th century, into its radical adversary. Putin’s demonization of the West, which became more and more evident, particularly after his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, was very much in line with Dugin’s intentions. The same could also be said of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014. Putin’s adventurism ignored the entire international order. Dugin, however, was incensed that Putin took only Crimea at the time and did not annex the entire south-east of Ukraine. Anyway, shortly before the “turning point” on February 24th 2022, Dugin and Putin were already in the same boat. Immediately after the NATO debacle in Afghanistan in August 2021, Dugin published a pamphlet that can be seen as a kind of anticipation of the war against Ukraine. In the document, he talks of the looming “final battle of humanity against liberalism”. Lenin had announced a similar “final battle”, albeit against the “world capitalist system”, shortly after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Lenin’s plans for world revolution were to suffer a total failure, as is well known. Dugin’s vendetta against the so-called “collective West” will probably be no different. But what will be the price to be paid? We do not know, just like we do not know what impact Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in November 2024 will have on Russia’s future position in the international order. It seems that the cards have been reshuffled. The US could now, at least for the next four years, cease to be a factor in the global political order. This could give the emerging alliance of autocrats from Moscow to Beijing a unique opportunity to shape the international order according to their own ideas. But one thing must be borne in mind. The autocratic alliance is anything but stable, and this applies above all to Russian-Chinese relations. The fact that Putin has turned his country, which had supposedly “risen from its knees”, into a junior partner of Beijing irritates some imperial-minded circles in Russia. These irritations are likely to deepen if traditional rifts and tensions, which have accompanied Russian-Chinese relations for generations, resurface. The recently deceased Henry Kissinger predicted as much in one of his last interviews. He could be right here, as in some of his other prognoses. In that case, the Putin regime would once again have to rely primarily on its own resources in its conflict with the West, and these are certainly limited. In this context, I would like to recall the words of the Moscow historian Alexei Kiva, who said the following in 2018: “Russia’s share of global GDP is 1.5-2 per cent, while that of the USA and the EU is 20 per cent each. Taking into consideration this imbalance of power, Russia cannot afford a prolonged confrontation with the West.” Kiva’s words are reminiscent of those of the German Russia expert Boris Meissner, who described the balance of power between East and West in the mid-1980s as follows: “The Soviet Union’s existing economic base is far too narrow to fully realize its claim to world power.”
Shortly afterwards, Perestroika began in the USSR. Will history repeat itself again this time?
This article is an extended version of a column that appeared in the online debate magazine “Die Kolumnisten” on November 11th 2024.
Translated by Eva Schulz-Jander
Leonid Luks is professor of history at the Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany
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