Empires Apart
Authors: Brian Landers
EMPIRES APART
A HISTORY OF AMERICAN AND RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM
BRIAN LANDERS
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK
âThere are now two great nations in the world which, starting from different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and the Americans. Both have grown in obscurity, and while the world's attention was occupied elsewhere, they have suddenly taken their place among the leading nations, making the world take note of their birth and of their greatness almost at the same instant. All other peoples seem to have nearly reached their natural limits and to need nothing but to preserve them; but these two are growing.⦠Their point of departure is different and their paths diverse; nevertheless, each seems called by some secret desire of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.'
Alexis de Tocqueville,
De la Démocratie en Amérique
(1835â40)
âThe one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it'.
Oscar Wilde,
Intentions
(1891)
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
BY ANDREAS WHITTAM SMITH
Russian History: True or False?
Spanish Exploration and Conquest
CHAPTER 3:
LEGACY OF THE MONGOL TERROR
CHAPTER 4:
LEGACY OF THE MYSTIC MASSACRE
CHAPTER 5:
RUSSIA BETWEEN WEST AND EAST
Yermak Timofeyevich: King of the Wild Frontier
CHAPTER 6:
AMERICA BETWEEN EAST AND WEST
Thomas Paine and Tadeusz Kosciuszko
CHAPTER 7:
THE EMPIRES GET GOING
Enlightenment: Russian and American Style
Tadeusz Kosciuszko and the Polish Question
CHAPTER 8:
DETERMINED OPPORTUNISM AND CONQUEST
Manifest Destiny: Chechnya to Cuba
To the Little Bighorn and Anadyrsk
Territory Belonging to the United States
CHAPTER 11:
COMMUNISM AND CORPORATISM
CHAPTER 12:
EMPIRES OLD AND NEW
The New Tsars: Lenin and Stalin the Terrible
The Invisibilisation of Empire
CHAPTER 13:
HOT AND COLD RUNNING WAR
Russian Regime Change â The Death of the Ultimate Tsar
CHAPTER 14:
WINNING THE WAR THAT WASN'T
The End of the Russian Empire?
From Invisible Empires to the Neo-Empire
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It may seem perverse to start by thanking a rival publisher but this book would never have seen the light of day without the support, advice and practical assistance of my colleagues at Penguin. So many of them have contributed in so many ways that I cannot begin to thank each of them by name - thank you all.
Despite the numerous introductions my colleagues provided I have no agent to thank. With the exception of the one who considered this book âapproaching the wild borders of Chomskystan' all the agents who read my manuscript came out with the same response: love the book but as you're not a celebrity, politician or academic the big bookselling chains won't stock it. I hope they are wrong and feel incredibly lucky to have stumbled across a publisher, Corinne Souza at Picnic Publishing, who responded so eagerly to my manuscript. Corinne has patiently guided me through the intricacies of an industry I quite erroneously thought I knew. My editor Simon Fletcher was equally patient in making me completely rewrite the middle third of the book to produce a far more coherent narrative as well as stripping away the distracting footnotes and obsessive capitalisations with which I had littered my original text. John Schwartz produced a cover I love and Judith Antell and Alex Hippisley-Cox helped ensure that once produced the book hopefully will have an audience.
My greatest debt must be to all those writers whose works I have devoured and regurgitated in forms that they may or may not recognise. I have listed all the sources at the back of the book and comment on some of the most influential texts on the website
www.empiresapart.com
. I especially appreciate permission to quote from the following verbatim: Niall Ferguson,
Empire
(Penguin Books Limited, copyright © Niall Ferguson, 2003); Samuel Eliot Morison,
The Oxford History of the American People
(Oxford University Press, 1965, by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.); Peter Neville,
Russia, the USSR, the CIS and the Independent States
(published in the UK by the Windrush Press, a division of the Orion Publishing Group and in the US as
A Traveller's History of Russia
by Interlink Books, an imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.; text copyright © Peter Neville, 2001); and Richard Pipes,
Russia Under the Old Regime
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a division of The Orion Publishing Group).
Finally for far too long my wife and family have put up with me spending weekends and holidays buried in my notes. My thanks to my wife Sarah, son Joseph and daughters Catherine and especially Alex, who obliterated my own feeble attempt at a website and substituted her own creative flair.
Writing is a thoroughly selfish pursuit, I hope that some readers feel as challenged as I have been by the prospect of encountering new ways to interpret the past, understand the present and prepare for the future.
FOREWORD
BY ANDREAS WHITTAM SMITH
Brian Landers has written a piercing account of American history from its colonial beginnings to its present role as an unacknowledged empire that bestrides the world. Concerned as he is to expose the myths that nations create about themselves, he bases his analysis upon a revealing comparison of American and Russian expansion through the centuries. This technique forces the observer to recognise similarities, identify differences and question why both similarities and differences exist. In a sense, then, the reader gets two books for the price of one, Russian history as well as American.