[Jay Winik's new book, "The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800," will be published next month. He is the author of "April 1865."]

... The conventional wisdom is that Putin's background in the KGB is what ultimately drives his more notorious actions, leading foreign policy commentators to raise the specter of a renewed Cold War.

But if the West is truly going to come to grips with Putin and a resurrected Russian state, it would do well to see him not as something relatively new but as something old, drawing on historical roots stretching back to the 18th century and Catherine the Great. Indeed, it is far more likely that Putin and his allies are following not the ghosts of Stalin and Khrushchev but spiritual masters such as Empress Catherine in seeking to reestablish Russia as a great nation on the world stage.

Like Putin, Catherine II was a curiosity in her day, alternately bewitching and confusing her critics and supporters. From early on she was the liberal idol of the great Enlightenment philosophes of Europe. She corresponded with the eminent Voltaire, drew upon Montesquieu in governing Russia (nearly 20 years before the American Founders did), published Helvetius when he was being burned in effigy by Paris's public hangman, and subscribed to Diderot's famed Encyclop?die when it was banned in France. "What a time we live in," Voltaire enthused, "France persecutes the intellectuals while the Scythians protect them!"

Catherine even took the remarkable step of not only corresponding with Thomas Jefferson but helping midwife America's independence through her League of Armed Neutrality, which diplomatically isolated Britain during our Revolutionary War. King George III first approached Catherine, not the Hessians, to request her hardened Cossacks to fight George Washington and the upstart colonials; she turned him down. American-Russian ties thus go way back.

Yet, with eerie echoes for today's world, the once-heralded liberal empress became, within a few years, a reactionary. Though John Adams thought Russia and the United States would be natural allies, Catherine did not even deign to meet with the envoy of fledgling America, Francis Dana, who lamented that he knew "less of the empresses comings and goings" than did her groomsman. And when the French Revolution broke out, Catherine turned her back on decades of Enlightenment and unleashed modern authoritarianism.

She ruthlessly repressed intellectuals in Russia and, short of committing her armies, did everything she could to destroy the "democratic" Jacobin menace emanating from France. "What do cobblers know about ruling?" she barked, having decided that representative government was ill-suited to such a large nation as Russia. Then, in still one more about-face, she openly derided George Washington and condemned the American Revolution she had once professed to admire.

The current carnage in Iraq, along with Russia's latest overtures to Syria and its rising belligerence toward the old Soviet territory of Georgia, bring to mind how deftly Catherine took advantage of the French-led chaos that swept Europe in 1795. She acted to wipe the ancient Kingdom of Poland off the map and carve up its lands. (Ironically, the Polish insurrection against her was bravely spearheaded by Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a hero of America's Revolutionary War.)...

So what should we conclude? It would be a great mistake to see Russia's actions as inevitably heralding a new Cold War. But it would be an equal mistake to ignore the fact that Vladimir Putin has learned well how to play Catherine's impostor game. Just as Catherine became a master of playing the budding democrat abroad while being a despot at home and of professing pacifism while beating the drum of bellicosity across the globe, so too has Putin. He should be viewed accordingly.

david maclaren mcdonald - 9/19/2007

I've let this column lie fallow for a week, but can't overcome the urge to comment, if only for archival posterity. I don't know about the rest of Winik's scholarship--I certainly haven't read his latest work or its predecessor on 1865. As a specialist, though, I do know a little about Russian imperial history and can find no plausible reason--beyond the sort of straining at apparent analogies that one associates with papers written during sophomores' all-nighters--why Winik would want to hold up Catherine II as a guide to interpreting Putin. Or, to modify the statement some, I fail to fathom the bases Winik chooses for his groping analogy. Putin himself has mentioned Catherine as an interesting predecessor [this is the sort of evidence one might adduce in support of one's main argument, at least by the hidebound and troglodytic conventions of Russian history]; but far more often, he has cited P. A. Stolypin as his model. Winik might have discussed philosophies of statecraft as espoused by these two figures, or Russian traditions of statehood doctrine--but he settles instead for the tired canards of sham enlightenment and performative equivalents of the Potemkin village. His characterization leaves wide open questions about the conceptual content of "enlightened despotism;" it also leaves wide open the almost qualitative differences in the domestic and international contexts facing Russian leaders in the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.


Geez, I don't go around telling Americanists about how to read their political leaders and their possible predecessors--but Americanists seem uninclined to return the favour. Winik forms part of a tradition reaching back to Eric Foner who, after a whole year in Russia--and innocent of the language or much historiography in the area--delivered himself of the apercu that Gorbachev was the Abraham Lincoln of the Soviet Union. To quote the famous Gumby brothers, digesting that analytical leap made my brain hurt. Winik's contortions have not brought fresh comfort.