AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY From an Orthodox Christian Point of View VOLUME IV: THE AGE OF EMPIRE (1861-1914) PART 2: from 1894 to 1914 Vladimir Moss © Copyright: Vladimir Moss, 2017. All Rights Reserved. The system worked, throughout Europe, with an extraordinary success and facilitated the growth of wealth on an unprecedented scale. To save and to invest became at once the duty and the delight of a large class. The savings were seldom drawn on, and accumulating at compound interest, made possible the material triumphs which we now all take for granted. The morals, the politics, the literature and the religion of the age joined in a grand conspiracy for the promotion of saving. God and Mammon were reconciled. Peace on earth to men of good means. A rich man could, after all, enter into the Kingdom of Heaven - if only he saved. John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923). It is impossible to conquer Russia, we have convinced ourselves of that in the course of hundreds of years. But it is possible to inoculate the Russians with false values, and then they will conquer themselves. Count Otto von Bismarck. Oh, we shall all still have to drink of his [Nietzsche’s] blood! Not one of us will be spared that. Franz Servis (1895). Russia, if you fall away from your faith, as many intelligenty have already done, then you will no longer be Russia or Holy Rus’. And if there is no repentance in the Russian people, the end of the world is near. God will remove the pious tsar and send a whip in the persons of impious, cruel, self-appointed rulers, who will drown the whole earth in blood and tears. St. John of Kronstadt (1905). After God “died”, man himself became the supreme person, the only divinity… With the field thus cleared of supernatural encumbrances, the true approach to the divine came to consist in man’s probing of his own innermost states. For this century everything from dream analysis to the perception of relativity, became self-knowledge as the first stage to self-assumption. The ancient sin of hubris, man’s too-great arrogance in the face of the cosmos, disappeared when divine powers no longer existed outside man. Evil was confined to failure in confronting oneself. Robert Shattuck, The Banquet Years (1968). The roots of the need for religion are in the parental complex; the almighty and just God, and kindly Nature, appear to us grand sublimations of father and mother. Sigmund Freud. A leap in the dark has its attractions… Theobald von Bethmann-Hellweg, Chancellor of Germany (July 1914). And over Russia I see a quiet pall, A Far-spreading fire consuming al. Alexander Blok. The opponents of statehood would like to take the path of radicalism, the path of liberation from the historical path of Russia, of liberation from cultural traditions. They need great upheavals, we need a great Russia. Peter Arkadievich Stolypin. III. THE WEST: “LA BELLE EPOQUE” (1894-1914) 6 36. THE FOUNDING OF ZIONISM 7 37. MASONRY, SPIRITUALISM AND THEOSOPHY 16 38. THE PSYCHOLOGISTS’ ASSAULT ON RELIGION: (1) FREUD 25 39. THE PSYCHOLOGISTS’ ASSAULT ON RELIGION: (2) JAMES AND JUNG 35 40. AMERICAN IMPERIALISM 41 41. THE FALL OF THE CHINESE EMPIRE 54 42. GERMANY ON THE ROAD TO WAR 58 43. THE NIETZSCHE GENERATION AND THE EURO-NIETZSCHEAN WAR 66 IV. THE EAST: SOWING THE WIND (1894-1914) 74 44. TSAR NICHOLAS II 75 45. RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY 80 46. THE LIBERATION MOVEMENT 91 47. "PROTO-ECUMENISM" AND THE ORTHODOX CHURCHES 96 48. FERMENT IN THE RUSSIAN CHURCH 106 49. THE NATIONALITIES POLICY 112 50. THREE RUSSIAS: PETERSBURG, KISHINEV AND SAROV 123 51. PEASANTS AND SOLDIERS 133 52. THE KOSOVAN AND MACEDONIAN QUESTIONS 145 53. SERBIA CHANGES COURSE 153 54. THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR 156 55. ST. NICHOLAS, APOSTLE OF JAPAN 161 56. THE PRESS AND THE LIBERALS 164 57. BLOODY SUNDAY 169 58. TOWARDS THE RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF SYMPHONY 174 59. THE 1905 REVOLUTION 183 60. THE STOLYPIN REFORMS 197 61. THE PRECONCILIAR CONVENTION AND GEORGIAN AUTOCEPHALY 204 62. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION 210 63. YOUNG TURKS AND YOUNG BOSNIANS 219 64. NAME-WORSHIPPERS, SYMBOLISTS AND FUTURISTS 227 65. THE BEILIS TRIAL AND THE JEWISH “BLOOD LIBEL” 233 66. THE ROOTS OF THE REVOLUTION 243 67. THE BALKAN WARS 250 68. THE POLISH AND UKRAINIAN QUESTIONS 263 69. THE LAST YEAR OF PEACE 268 70. ORTHODOXY AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR 277 III. THE WEST: “LA BELLE EPOQUE” (1894-1914) 36. THE FOUNDING OF ZIONISM “In the second half of the nineteenth century,” writes Peter Mansfield, “there was a steady movement of Jews from eastern Europe to settle in Palestine. Supported by Jewish [especially Rothschild] philanthropy, they went mainly to found colonies to work the land. They were the pioneers of ‘practical Zionism’. They were very much fewer than those who went to western Europe and the United States, but by 1914 there were about 80,000 Jews (including the indigenous communities) in Palestine, compared with about 650,000 Jews. “’Political Zionism’, or the concept of turning Palestine into a national Jewish state, was founded by Theodor Herzl…”1 As Daniel Barenboim writes, Herzl was a successful Austrian journalist who, "confronted by the increasing anti-Semitism in Austria and France, was initially in favor of complete assimilation of the Jews. Interestingly, Herzl's choice of words was not fundamentally different from that of Wagner's in describing the situation of Jews in German society. In 1893 he wrote that 'to cure the evil' the Jews would have to 'rid themselves of the peculiarities for which they are rightly reproached.' One would have to 'baptize the Jewboys' in order to spare them excessively difficult lives. 'Untertauchen im Volk!': go underground amongst the people was his appeal to the Jewish population. Richard Wagner also spoke of the 'Untergang,' the sinking: 'consider that only one thing can be the deliverance from the curse that weighs on you: the deliverance of Ahasuerus -- sinking! (der Untergang)'. Wagner's conclusion about the Jewish problem was not only verbally similar to Herzl's; both Wagner and Herzl favored the emigration of the German Jews. It was Herzl's preoccupation with European anti-Semitism that spurred him on to want to found a Jewish state. His vision of a Jewish state was influenced by the tradition of European liberalism. In the novel Altneuland (1903), he describes what the settled Jewish community in Palestine might look like; Arabic residents and other non-Jews would have equal political rights."2 However, Herzl's views began to change on 5 January 1895, when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jew serving in the French army general staff, was publicly degraded. Paul Johnson writes that he "had been accused, tried and convicted - on what subsequently emerged to be fabricated evidence - of handing secrets to the Germans. Watching the ceremony, one of the few journalists allowed to attend, was Theodore Herzl (1860-1904), the Paris correspondent of the Vienna liberal daily, Neue Freie Presse. Two weeks before he had attended the courtroom and heard Dreyfus pronounced guilty. Now he stood by as Dreyfus was brought before General Darras, who shouted: 'Alfred Dreyfus, you are unworthy to bear arms. In the name of the French people we degrade you!' Immediately, in a loud voice, Dreyfus shouted: 'Soldiers! An innocent man is being degraded! Soldiers! An innocent is dishonoured! Long live France - long live the Army!' A senior non-commissioned officer cut off Dreyfus' badges and buttons. He took out his sword and broke it across his knee. The prisoner was marched round the courtyard, still shouting that he was innocent. An 1 Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, London: Penguin, 2003, p. 160. 2 Barenboim, "Wagner, Israel and the Palestinians", http://www.danielbarenboim.com/index.php?id=72. immense and excited crowd, waiting outside, heard his cries and began to whistle and chant slogans. When Herzl left the building, it was beginning to scream 'Death to Dreyfus! Death to the Jews!' Less than six months later, Herzl had completed the draft of the book which would set in motion modern Zionism, Der Judenstaat.”3 The Dreyfus affair had an enormous impact on Herzl.4 It demonstrated to him that for various reasons - envy at Jewish success, the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe, the increase of racialist theories - the Jews would never be assimilated into the existing system of European statehood, and would have to seek a homeland, a territorial State, of their own if they were to survive. "It was against this threatening background that Herzl began to abandon his assimilationist position. He had previously considered all kinds of wild ideas to get the Jews accepted. One was a huge programme of social re-education for Jews, to endow them with what he termed 'a delicate, extremely sensitive feeling for honour and the like'. Another was a pact with the Pope, whereby he would lead a campaign against anti-Semitism in return for 'a great mass movement for the free and honourable conversion of all Jews to Christianity'. But all these schemes soon seemed hopeless in face of the relentless rise of anti-Semitic hatred...”5 In 1895 Karl Lueger became Mayor of Vienna. At a time when Vienna was the home of some very cultured and famous Jews, such as Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud, Lueger launched into a ferocious invective against them. He “once referred to the Jews as ‘beasts of prey in human form’, said that ‘wolves, leopards and tigers were closer to humans than Jews, and agreed that a good solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ would be to put them all on a big ship and sink them at sea.”6 In view of this invective, it is not surprising that Herzl was alarmed and feared what influence by Lueger might do (a certain Adolf Hitler came to Vienna in 1908, while Lueger was still Mayor).