Source A.

The role and image of Nicholas II has been subject to particular revision and scrutiny. Though reviled by Soviet historians as ‘Nicholas the bloody’, post-Soviet society has harboured popular nostalgia for the Nicholaevan era. The last tsar’s public rehabilitation was symbolically concluded by the ceremony held on Friday 17 July 1998, when Nicholas II’s remains were interred in the Peter Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg with full state pomp and ceremony. Russia’s then premier Boris Yeltsin described the tsar and his family, who had been murdered by the Bolsheviks on 17 July 1918, as the ‘innocent victims’ of the revolution. This description epitomises the casting of Nicholas II as a hapless bystander to Russia’s tumultuous revolution. Such an approach neglects the fundamental collision Nicholaevan Russia between the demands of a rapidly modernising state structure and Russia’s increasingly anachronistic style of government. Nicholas II remained true to his autocratic heritage and attempted to maintain personal autocratic power, which was unrealisable. The challenges laid down by very rapid industrial and economical change, alongside the weakness and vacillation of Nicholas II’s policies, left Nicholaevan Russia in a state of crisis. …. while Nicholas II failed to respond to the challenges of governing Russia, his failure can be explained by the context in which he operated as much as by his personal feelings.

Edited I. D. Thatcher, Late Imperial Russia: Problems and Prospects, (Manchester University Press 2005) p9

Source B.

The private letters and diaries left by Nicholas provide only the most limited assistance in analysing his political motivations. Students and some biographers have seized upon his diary entries as evidence of his naivety, stupidity and even cruelty. The tsar routinely commented on his day’s exercise, hunting triumphs and the weather at far greater length than his terse comments on issues of a political or national character. Expressions of emotion or of a political opinion were very rare. Diaries were not, however, a window into Nicholas’s soul. Their reserved and routine character may well be a reflection more of his methodical approach to diary-keeping than his emotional state and political thought. Nicholas was an intensely private and reserved individual, whose phenomenal self-control left little evidence for historians as to his mental state. More recent historiographical trends have anyhow moved away from interest in Nicholas II as an individual. The ground-breaking work of Boris Kolonitskii and Orlando Figes has focused on the ways in which the tsar’s image and popular standing were eroded in the public eye, and the enormous significance this was to have in Russia’s revolutions.

Edited I. D. Thatcher, Late Imperial Russia: Problems and Prospects, (Manchester University Press 2005) p10

Source C.

The institution of autocracy was itself anachronistic in the context of a modern and developing state. The personal control of one man over an empire whose governance required that the state take and ever-larger role was simply not possible. If the semblance of autocracy was to be retained, it required a large and highly effective bureaucracy to support it, and to implement its rulings. Despite Nicholas II’s theoretically untramelled autocratic power, he actually had very limited control over policy direction and political decisions, exactly because he lacked the sort of highly developed and proficient bureaucratic machine he. Needed. The absence of a sufficiently advanced and effective bureaucracy had it origins partly in Nicholas II’s own anachronistic view of his own power. He was unable to recognise that his will would not be magically visited upon his people, and maintained a hostile attitude towards the government apparatus taht should have allowed him to rule.

Edited I. D. Thatcher, Late Imperial Russia: Problems and Prospects, (Manchester University Press 2005) p24-25

Source D.

The heartless massacre in 1912 of 200 or more miners and some of their family members by tsarist police, is response to a strike in the British-owned Lena goldfields in Siberia, showed how hollow the concessions forced out of the autocracy in 1905 actually were. After being cowed by massive repression in which thousands died in 1906, the old forces were reasserting themselves, fracture lines were reappearing. On the eve of war, in July 1914, barricades were once again to be seen in the streets of St Petersburg. The autocracy was still proving itself to be its own worst enemy. Nicholas II continued to be the chief recruiter for the radicals and revolutionaries.

C. Read, War and Revolution in Russia, 1914 -1922. (Palgrave 2013) p13

Source E. The Okhrana: security policing in late imperial Russia – Iain Lauchlan

In the end it was the war and not the revolutionary movement that was the undoing of the tsarist regime. The Okhrana recognised that society and state had little chance of surviving a protracted military conflict. The so-called Durnovo Memorandum of Nicholas II in February 1914, which seemed to predict the cause and course of all the later disasters, is perhaps the most striking evidence that Okhranniki fully understood the gravity of their situation. Imperial Russia was teetering on the edge of an abyss and security police measures would be insufficient should the regime fall over the brink. The Okhrana zealously continued to do its job all the same and paralysed the organised opposition from 1914 -1917. The professional revolutionaries were, after all, conspicuously absent from the February revolution. ‘The development of mass revolutionary consciousness in the form of a commitment to a specific socialist party or political philosophies was fundamentally a phenomenon of the months after the fall of Nicholas II, when the politicisation of the masses began in earnest’. The Okhrana secured a futile victory: it had won the battle of wits against the revolutionary underground but lost the war.

Edited I. D. Thatcher, Late Imperial Russia: Problems and Prospects, (Manchester University Press 2005) p60

Source A

The view of Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov, writing in 1998.

Politics, to be sure, tends to be immoral, but in Lenin immorality was exacerbated by cynicism. Almost every one of his decisions suggests that for him morality was totally subordinated to political realities . . . and his main goal – the seizure of power.

Dmitri Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire (HarperCollins, 1998)

Source B

The view of Moshe Lewin, a historian based at the University of Birmingham, UK, writing in 1985.

By 1922 an older and wiser Lenin was proposing a new and final series of innovations known as his ‘testament’. . . . It does not mention revolutionary terror of any sort. Its message is very different: no violent measures as a way of transforming the social structures of the country! The cultural revolution first, an understanding with the peasants, and slowness as the supreme virtue. In addition, a new vision on Lenin’s part of socialism as a regime of ‘civilized co-operators’. It is well known that that set of ideas was disdainfully labelled ‘liberalism’ by Stalin himself.

Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (Methuen, 1985).

Source C

Extract from a speech by Stalin to local party and soviet workers in Siberia in January 1928, usually taken to mark the beginning of collectivization.

You’re working badly! You’re idle and you indulge the kulaks. Take care that there aren’t some kulak agents among you. We won’t tolerate this sort of outrage for long.

. . . Take a look at the kulak farms; you’ll see their granaries and barns are full of grain; they have to cover their grain with awnings because there’s no room for it inside. The kulak farms have got something like a thousand tons of surplus grain per farm. I propose that:

(a) you demand that the kulaks hand over their surpluses at once at state prices;

(b) if they refuse to submit, you should charge them under Article 107 of the Criminal Code and confiscate their grain for the state, 25 per cent of it to be redistributed among the poor and less well-off middle peasants.

Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (Phoenix, 2000 edition).

Source A

Extracts from Khrushchev’s speech at the Twenty-Second Party Congress, 31 October 1961.

In the current decade (1961–70) the Soviet Union will surpass the strongest and richest capitalist country, the USA, in production per head of population; the people’s standard of living and their cultural and technical standards will improve substantially; everyone will live in easy circumstances; all collectives and state farms will become highly productive and profitable enterprises; the demand of Soviet people for well-appointed housing will, in the main, be satisfied; hard physical work will disappear; the USSR will have the shortest working day. [There will be] active participation of all citizens in the administration of the state . . . and increased control over its activity by the people. Thus a Communist society will be built in the USSR.

Source: quoted in John Laver, The USSR, 1945–1990 (Hodder & Stoughton, 1991).

Source A

Extracts from the writings of Edgar Snow, an American journalist who lived in China for many years after 1928. His book Red Star Over China was first published in 1937.

I had to admit that most of the peasants to whom I talked seemed to support the communists and the Red Army. Many of them were very free with their criticisms and complaints, but when asked whether they preferred it to the old days, the answer was nearly always an emphatic ‘yes’. I noticed also that most of them talked about the soviets as ‘our government’. To understand peasant support for the communist movement, it is necessary to keep in mind the burden borne by the peasantry under the former regime [the Kuomintang]. Now, wherever the Reds went, there was no doubt that they radically changed the situation for the tenant farmer, the poor farmer, and all the ‘have-not’ elements. All forms of taxation were abolished in the new districts for the first year, to give the farmers a breathing-space. Second, the Reds gave land to the land-hungry peasants. Thirdly, they took land and livestock from the wealthy classes and redistributed them among the poor. However, both landlords and rich peasants were allowed as much land as they could till with their own labour.

Source: Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (Penguin, 1972 edition).

Source A

A statement issued in 1966 by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party about the Cultural Revolution.

Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, customs, culture and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavour to stage a come-back. The Proletariat must be the exact opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie and use new ideas, culture, customs and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. Since the Cultural Revolution is a revolution, it inevitably meets with resistance. This resistance comes chiefly from those in authority who have wormed their way into the Party and are taking the Capitalist road. It also comes from the force of habits from the old society. What the Central Committee demands of the Party Committee at all levels is to boldly arouse the masses, encourage those comrades who have made mistakes but are willing to correct them, to cast off their burdens and join in the struggle. A most important task is to transform the old education system.

Source: quoted in Peking Review, August 1966.

Source A

Extracts from Prince Sihanouk’s Memoirs.

John Foster Dulles had called on me in his capacity as Secretary of State, and he had exhausted every argument to persuade me to place Cambodia under the protection of the South-East Asia Treaty Organization [see Section 8.1(d)]. I refused.......I considered SEATO an aggressive military alliance directed against neighbors whose ideology I did not share but with whom Cambodia had no quarrel. I had made all this quite clear to John Foster, an acidy, arrogant man, but his brother [CIA Director Allen Dulles] soon turned up with a briefcase full of documents ‘proving’ that Cambodia was about to fall victim to ‘communist aggression’, and that the only way to save the country, the monarchy and myself was to accept the protection of SEATO. The ‘proofs’ did not coincide with my information, and I replied to Allen Dulles as I had replied to John Foster: Cambodia wanted no part of SEATO. We would look after ourselves as neutrals and Buddhists. There was nothing for the secret service leader to do but pack up his dubious documents and leave.

Source: Quoted in William Burchett, My War with the CIA (1974 edition, pp 75-6.

Source B

William Blum, a journalist and former member of the US State Department, writes about Prince Sihanouk.

Not only did Sihanouk continue to attack SEATO, but he established relations with the Soviet Union and Poland and accepted aid from China. He praised the latter lavishly for treating Cambodia as an equal and for providing aid without all the strings which, he felt, came attached to American aid.

Such behaviour should not obscure the fact that Sihanouk was as genuine a neutralist as one could be in such a highly polarized region of the world in the midst of the cold war. He did not shy away from denouncing China, North Vietnam or communism on a number of occasions when he felt that Cambodia’s security or neutrality was being threatened. ‘I foresee perfectly well’, he said at one time, ‘the collapse of an independent and neutral Cambodia after the complete triumph of Communism in Laos and South Vietnam’...... Despite all the impulsiveness of his personality and policies, Sihanouk’s high-wire balancing act did successfully shield his country from the worst of the devastation that was sweeping through the land and people of Laos and Vietnam.

In March 1969 the situation began to change dramatically. Under the new American president, Richard Nixon, and National Security Affairs adviser, Henry Kissinger, attacks across the Cambodian border became sustained, large-scale ‘carpet bombings’. Over the next 14 months, no less than 3,630 B-52 bombing raids were flown over Cambodia.

Source: William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Zed Books, 2003), pp.134-137.

Source C

Historian J.A.S. Grenville explains why Prince Sihanouk was overthrown.

Realising early on that North Vietnam was likely to prove the stronger in the war, Sihanouk abandoned America and the West to seek the friendship of China in the 1960s. He was powerless to prevent the North Vietnamese from using the Ho Chi-minh Trail in Cambodian border territories for moving troops and supplies from North Vietnam to South Vietnam. But his pro-Chinese, pro-communist stance was unwelcome to the United States, and while in Beijing in 1970 he was overthrown. With American support, Lon Nol took control of the royal government. This marked the end of any hope that Cambodia might achieve neutrality: she was invaded by American and South Vietnamese troops intent on destroying the Vietnamese communists bases and supply lines on the borders, which were also bombed. In Beijing, Sihanouk now threw in his lot with the Khmer Rouge communist opposition. American policy in Cambodia proved a disastrous failure, and after the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973 there was no possibility that Congress would have accepted a new military commitment in Cambodia. Deprived of US combat support, the Lon Nol regime could not survive the onslaught of communist forces, so when the Americans finally left, the Khmer Rouge easily captured Phnom Penh in April 1975 and took over the whole country. Had the Americans not turned against Sihanouk, one of the cleverest and wiliest of south-east Asian leaders, Cambodia might have been spared the almost unbelievable horrors that followed.

Source: J.A.S. Grenville, The Collins History of the World in the Twentieth Century (Harper Collins, 1994), pp. 625-26.