The Books: “Eastward to Tartary : Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus” (Robert Kaplan)

My history bookshelf.

Next book on this shelf is called Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus by Robert Kaplan.

This book was published in 2000 – and in it, Kaplan goes back to the Balkans – to see what has happened in the 10 years since he went there and wrote Balkan Ghosts. He then travels down into Turkey and then further down into the Caucasus – and then goes through Syria, Lebanon, Israel …

Another good one. And it’s another kind of scary book where you read about some of these places, and you think: “Now … how the hell will THIS sort itself out??” Kaplan, again, is not an optimist. He’s not a bleak nihilistic pessimist either – he obviously has a lot of faith in human ingenuity (his chapters on the slums and shantytowns in Turkey are great examples of that) – but the future, according to Kaplan, is going to get worse – before it gets better.

I’ll post from the section where he travels through Georgia, Stalin’s homeland.

Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus by Robert Kaplan.

According to one noted writer, the difference between Aleksandr Kerensky, the enlightened social democrat who took power after Russia’s 1917 revoltuion, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Joseph Stalin was the difference between the West, the semi-West, and the East. Kerensky and the Menshevik social reformers were extreme westernizers; Lenin, a Great-Russian from the Middle Volga, was a “blend of Westernizer and Slavophile”; while Stalin was a Georgian from the Caucasus Mountains, where Russia ends and the Near East begins. In April 1941, when Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Japan, freeing the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka raised his glass to the treaty’s success, and, with the institution of hara-kiri in mind, declared that if the treaty were not kept, “I must give my life, for, you see, we are Asiatics.”

“We are both Asiatics,” Stalin replied.

Of course, Stalin’s despotism had many roots and cannot be reduced simply to the culture and geography of his birthplace. (Upon the death of his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, Stalin told a friend at the funeral, “She is dead and with her have died my last warm feelings for all human beings.”) But to say that the Oriental influence was merely incidental to his character is to ignore its essentials. The monumental use of terror, the very grandeur of his personality cult, and the use of prison labor for gigantic public works projects echo the ancient Assyrian and Mesopotamian tyrannies. The liturgical nature of Stalin’s diatribes, which became the standard for official Communist discourse, bore the influence of the Eastern Orthodox Church, in one of whose Georgian seminaries Stalin studied as a youth.

Someone as evil as Stalin could have come from anywhere, but many of the methods he employed, such as playing one nationality against the other until all were devastated, bore the influence of his early life in the Caucasus. What ultimately differentiated Stalin from the others among Lenin’s inner circle (Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev), and what allowed him to destroy them all, was that they — all Jewish except for Bukharin; all from European Russia and the Ukraine — were cosmopolitan idealists and westernizers, however savage and cynical their methods, whereas Stalin saw the world anthropologically: For him, a Jew was a Jew, a Turk, a Turk, a Chechen, a Chechen; and so on. Such thinking was far more common to the Near East than to the West, for in the Caucasus the tribe and clan — not formal institutions — have always been the key to politics. That was, in part, an expression of Stalin’s early life in the Caucasus: a Toynbean laboratory of history and ethnic identity that makes the Balkans look transparent by comparison. Trotsky writes:

The frequent bloody raids into the Caucasus of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane left their traces upon the national epos of Georgia. If one can believe the unfortuante Bukharin, they left their traces likewise on the character of Stalin.