Succession – the Russian Way

When a tsar died there was a line of succession to his son, right?

Not exactly, in fact not until the death in 1796 of Catherine II – the Great – born Princess Sophia in a minor German principality. She was not a member of the ruling Romanov family. She married one and purportedly gave birth to another.

Within the Romanov dynasty, primogeniture, the rule of succession of a male heir to the throne, came into being only by deceree of Tsar Paul I, the son of Tsar Peter III and Catherine the Great. Except Paul might not have been a Romanov, he might have been the son of Catherine and the first of her many, many, many paramours. That being said, history has him a Romanov and views the line, however piecemeal, as unbroken

Catherine had been brought to Russia to mary Peter III by his aunt, Empress Elisabeth, second daughter of the second marriage of Peter the Great. Peter III was the son of Elisabeth’s sister Anna. Elisabeth chose him to be her heir.

In Romanov history there were many marriages, many affairs, many children born in and out of wedlock. In all that confusion, Peter the Great, whose namesake son Peter II died before him, had three succesors in the time between his death in 1725 and 1740.

So in 1740, when Peter’s other successors had all expired, including possibly by murder, Elisabeth declared herself Empress on the strong claim of being his daughter.

A childless widow, she installed her nephew, the future Peter III, as heir apparent and married him off to Sophia, who upon her marriage took the Russian name Yekatarina (Catherine) – destined to become Catherine the Great.

Somewhere in all that is the bloodline of Peter the Great – accepted as continuing when Catherine gave birth to Paul I nine years after her marriage to Peter III, who because of an infantile, foolish personality had failed to consumate their marriage that long (if he ever did). She more than managed, she took numerous lovers.

But history and the Romanovs said Paul was indeed the son of Peter III. When Elisabeth died in 1762 her chosen heir, Peter III, husband of Catherine, took a turn, a bad one, and suddenly – and conveniently – died.

Catherine as his widow became empress with expectation she would step aside in favor of her son Paul when he reached majority age. She barely knew him because Elisabeth had taken him away from Catherine immediately after his birth and kept him from Catherine while raising him as the tsar in waiting.

Catherine ignored that expectation. She reigned supreme with vast historical sweep and universal remembrance of her as Catherine the Great until she died in 1796. She presided over the first two partitions of Poland by Russia in combination with Prussia and Austria, which incorporated the greater part of the Polish kingdom into Russia, including modern Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and some of modern Ukraine.

At last then, Paul I became tsar. If you are keeping a scorecard, he was Peter the Great’s great grandson. Paul had nine children, two of whom became tsars. Alexander I, his eldest, became tsar in 1801. His brother, 18 years younger, succeeded him in 1825 as Tsar Nicholas I when Alexander died, leaving two daughters but no sons. Recall that since the reign of their father, Tsar Paul I, only men could succeed to the throne, so tsardom passed to brother Nicholas.

Somehwere in all of that murk, madness, murder, plotting, family dystopia and fasinating history made by some of them, amidst great historical changes in Russia and Europe during the reigns of the two “greats” among them, the mechanism of heredity always operated to legitimize the succession. There was heredity and heredity meant legitimate continuity.

Continuity continued. Nicholas I begat Alexander II who after being assassinated in 1881, was succceeded by his son, Alexander III. When he died unexpectedly of illness in 1891 his son, Nicholas II, became Tsar. Famously he said he was not ready to be. He was prophetically, ominously right.

In all these successions there were of course marriages. Tsars had affairs with Russian noblewomen but did not marry within the nobility to avoid creating factions. Romanovs like other European royals looked elswhere for wives, usually to the lesser German principalities, or to Denmark -places where were found, among likely dukes, princes and kings, suitable husbands for the many daughters and grandaughters of Queen Victoria of England.

By dint of this network of intermarrying and begetting, Tsar Nicholas II married a favorite grandaughter of Queen Victoria and was himself a 3rd cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, himself the son of Victoria’s first child and eldest daughter. To one another, the tsar and kaiser (the titles mean emperor in their respective languages) were Cousin Nicky and Cousin Willy.

Further, both were nephews of Prince Edward, eldest son of Victoria who upon her death in 1903 became King Edward VII. Upon Edward’s death in 1910, his son became King George V – another cousin. George was indeed cousin to Cousin Nicky and Cousin Willy. You could call WWI the cousins’ war, a war in which millions literally died in the names of the three cousins.

Then came 1917, the unraveling chaos of WWI, the total failure of the army of the last of the tsars, Nicholas II, in his ruinous war allied with Cousin George’s England against Cousin Willy’s Germany.

By February 1917 Nicholas, the great, great, great, great, great grandson of Peter the Great, faced overthrow because of unending defeats in battle, speading military mutinies, massive casualties, and ensuing chaos, unrest, strikes and famine at home.

He abdicated in favor of his uncle, the grand duke, who wanted no part of it. He turned down the title and handed rule in Russia over to a provisional government of the Duma – the parliament that had been created with limited powers after the failed 1905 Revolution. The mechanism was abdication.

So the dynasty ended, by an act of state and statesmanship. There was continuity in that the dynasty had given way to a provisional government. But, foolhardidly, the new government kept Russia in the war, sowing its own destruction.

The Provisional Government lasted less than a year, overturned in October by the radical socialist element who called themselves the Bolsheviks preaching peace and bread and sowing massive upheaval in all the fertile ground of Russian anger and discontent. But even in this violent overthrow there was order of sorts in the assertion of power by Bolshevik elites claiming to speak for soviets – councils – of the workers and peasants of Russia from within their nascent political structure.

Their leader, in many ways self-selected over decades in the wilderness of tsarist prison camps and a nomadic existence in other European countries, preaching on the edges of Russian socialism and socialist plotting against the tsars, was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Inserted into Russia in a sealed train by the German army with leading compatriots, Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power. In a sense then, the mechanism of this change of power in Russia was foreign intervention.

Cutting to the chase, during the ensuing six years Lenin ended Russia’s participation in the war, and drastically reduced its European terrtory in the Brest Litovsk Treaty in return for peace with Germany; led it through a victorious civil war; changed statist economic policy in midstream to accommodate incentive and profit; and retained and vastly expanded the model of the secret police that once had worked for the tsars pursuing him and other Bolsheviks.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not believe in a democracy of the people but of a democracy of the vanguard of the people – their faction of the Socialist Party in its radical-most form and system. In time it came to be called the Communist Party.

In the satire “Animal Farm” onetime British Communist George Orwell summed it up this way: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Above all, Lenin established principles and mechanisms of organization, leadership and succession in the party and through the party in government.

When Lenin died unexpectedly in 1924 what was the succession to be? What mechanism of transition would the revolution legitimize? It came in the form of the Politburo, in effect the executive of the party within the party structurally designed by Lenin and his cohorts.

In time the Soviet Union had a national government with legislative and executive authority ostensible lodged in the Supreme Soviet and its Presidium. But not so in actuality. In actuality the Communist Party and its structure reigned supreme. It could endorse or undo anything the Supreme Soviet or Presidium did or require it to take an action like pass a law. No one doubted where the real power lay.

The Leninist party structure was a pyramid with the Party Congress at the base, a Central Committee resting on the base, and the executive Politburo atop that. At the pinnacle stood the party general secretary. After Lenin, leadership came down to an internecine struggle among a half dozen longtime Bolshevik leaders, especially between Joseph Stalin (born Josip Dugashvili) and Leon Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein), neither a Russian – one a Georgian, the other a Jew. Trotsky, the man who organized and directed the Red Army in the civil war that cemented revolutionary power, against Stalin, decades-long party operative and schemer.

They say nature abhors a vaccuum and a multi-headed leadership is that politically. Cutting to the chase, it took but five years for one member of the Politburo to rise, to plot and plan, and consolidate power and emerge by 1929 as the undisputed leader after Lenin. It was not Trotsky,forced into exile ultimately in Mexico City, where he was assassinated in 1940 by an agent of his nemesis.

Joseph Stalin held among his titles that of General Secretary of the Communist Party. It was not exalted. It was functional. But it placed him at the center of the party, all its personnel and doings. With that as his his base he emerged by 1929 as Lenin’s successor, as first among equals. For the next 24 years until his death, he had no equals.

Russia once again had a tsar, chosen not by heredity but by party mechanisms.

Stalin led the country through his purges, imposed the Hlodamar (the great killer famine) on Ukraine to subordinate its Kulak peasant class to collectivized agriculture, industrialized Russia, and recreated tsarist terror on an historically monumental scale. Millions died, millions more were imprisoned in the Gulag Archipelago, the name the writer Alexander Solzhynitsyn gave to the network of prison camps set up throughout the far reaches of the geographically immense territory of the Soviet Union.

Stalin led Russia and the 14 other “socialist republics” it gathered from the former imperial territories into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics through “The Great War”, the one we call WWII.

In the war 26 million Soviet citizens died in battle, as prisoners of Germany, victims of the Holocaust, among the immense civilian casualties like the 900,000 starved to death by the German blockade of Leningrad, or fighting as partsans and in the Red Army. Ultimately Stalin took Russia into the nuclear age, stealing some of its first secrets from us.

When he died in 1953 there could have been a void. For 25 years he had taken, consolidated and ruthlessly used singular power that suppressed so much as a thought to challenge his rule.

The tsars had the mechanism of heredity succession. Now with Stalin gone, the USSR and its ruling party had a mechanism as well, albeit one not used for 25 years. It had the Politburo as agent and executive of the Central Committee of the party, Lenin’s vanguard.

With lessons learned from the Stalinist era, the Politburo elevated member functionaries named Nikolai Bulganin and Georgy Malenkov to leadership, then saw another member, Nikita Kruschev push them aside legally, at least legally within terms of how the party operated, to emerge as number one. When in time he over-reached Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev succeeded him in 1964 in another Politburo coup, again one within the boundaries of the mechanisms of Soviet succession.

Ultimately General Secretary Breshnev bested Kosygin in becoming most powerful though Kosygin remained as Soviet premier and in government until just before his deagth. Like all the others from Stalin forward- Brehznev consolidated his power by dint of being the party General Secretary. On his death in 1982 two others came and went in quick succession, each dying. In 1985, the Politburo raised one of its newer members, Mikhail Gorbachev, to the post of General Secretary. He would be the last.

The system was by then rotten to the core and notwithstanding his efforts to open and reform it, rebellion came from recalcitrant Communists against Gorbachev’s reforms that had produced a new form of government in which he emerged as the first President of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of their failed rebellion, Gorbachev resigned. His first deputy, Boris Yeltsin, succeded him.

But the die were cast and the changes created the political framework for a new Russian state that asserted its independence. It suplanted the USSR, which disappeared as its Republics broke apart into separate nations – Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldava, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Khazikstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan,Turkmenistan and Kyrgisatan.

In all of that, legal mechanisms flowing from and linked to Gorbachevian reforms operated to frame and legitimize the transition.

Russia remained. It adopted a new democratic constitution and elected Yeltsin president. This constitution thus became a new mechanism to institutionalize transition to the new government and for that government to move from one administration to another going forward.

Yeltsin failed. Drunk and inept he was persauded (forced?) to resign, ostensbily by the new democratic parliament but as likely by the men he had allowed to take over entire sectors of the former Soviet state economy. They came to be called oligarchs. Many were former officials of the former KGB secret police or former Soviet administrators and Communist Party functionaries.

In Yeltsin’s government a onetime secret policeman from Leningrad/St. Petersburg with consumate bureacractic skill managed and connived his way from obscurity to the top to become Yeltsin’s chief deputy as executor of the government.

Vladimir Putin moved into the Yeltsin vacancy using the mechanism of the new Constitution. He is still there but has had the constitution changed so that he can be elected and reelected until 2036. He is 71 years old. If he gets there he will be 84 years old – if he gets there.

From 2000 he accumulated absolute power reminiscent of Stalin, bringing back Stalin-like oppression and repression in Russia with cunning use of modern tools like the Internet and satellites. In 2014 he seized the Crimean. In 2022 he began his war in Ukraine.

Then came the very recent rebellion by Putin’s chief bully boy, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army the Wagner Group. We know the denoument at least to date: The intervention of Belarus President Alexsandr Luykashenko, a subservient Putin vassal, Prigozhin’s apparent removal to Belarus, Putin’s chest-beating reemergence.

Now come stories swirling in the news of U. S. intelligence agencies gaining prior knowledge of the Wagner rebellion, of tying it to elements of the Russian high command disastisfied with the conduct of the war in Ukraine. Just as our intelligence apparatus revealed Putin’s war plans, it has revealed details of the uprising such as it was, again with the seeming aim to weaken him.

In all of this, the world asks will Putin, can Putin survive?

Is it the right first question or perhaps the question to be asked first is this:

What is the mechanism to remove Putin? Whose hands, collectively or singularly, hold that mechanism? Who can pull the levers that will engage it? On whose behalf could or would it be engaged? On what excuse, on what legal pretext would or will power be taken or transferred in the nation with the largest nuclear arsenal.

It is not tsarist hereditary succession, that is long overturned. It is not the machinations of the Politburo. They are done. Can it be the Russian constitution? But isn’t that now malleable instrucment already in the hands of the tyrant himself?

Then what? What mechanism, what device is there in Russia to remove him and replace him and then by whom and with what? Is it by yet another revolution left afterward to pivot to its own explanations and after-the-fact legitimazation?

Winston Churchill called Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

So too, now, is the means – the mechanism – of its next succession.

If and when we divine that, we can know what comes after Putin.