TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111191/1111640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 102

Why Not Bring Back the Czars?


By Richard Brookhiser


    When they are not worrying about whether they will eat
this winter, the people of the former Soviet Union must be
wondering how they will be ruled. Postcommunist government is
bound to be democratic. But democracy takes many forms, from the
checks and balances of House, Senate and President in Washington
to the checkmates of the Knesset in Israel. Russians and other
ex-Soviets should consider a democratic variation on a theme
from their own past: a constitutional monarchy headed by a
restored czar.

    From 1613 to 1917, the Russian empire was ruled, sometimes
disastrously, sometimes rather well, by the Romanov family. From
1917 until 1991 it was ruled, always disastrously, by the
Communist Party. Bringing back the Romanovs now would certainly
be poetic justice. As the historian Richard Pipes wrote, the
1918 massacre by communists of the last Czar, Nicholas II, and
his family was "uniquely odious . . . a prelude to 20th century
mass murder." Now that communism has been outlawed, who better
to help replace it than the relatives of its first victims?

    Since the French Revolution, crowns (and crowned heads)
have rolled across the Western world. Yet monarchies that
adapted to democracy still survive in most of the countries of
northwestern Europe -- Britain, Belgium, Holland, Denmark,
Norway, Sweden -- plus Spain. They have lasted up to the eve of
the 21st century because their subjects find them useful, even
in a democratic age.

    A democracy with a king as head of state draws on a source
of legitimacy beyond parliamentary politics and popular will.
The extra institutional support comes in handy in moments of
crisis. With complicated and turbulent histories, during World
War II Norway's King Haakon and the Netherlands' Queen
Wilhelmina gave their occupied countries an additional symbol
of resistance. In Spain the modern monarchy's services to the
constitution have been more than symbolic. In 1981, when
gun-toting, right-wing officers seized parliament and held it
hostage, King Juan Carlos went on Spanish television in full
uniform and used his royal prestige to rally the army around the
constitution. Boris Yeltsin isn't the only living leader to have
quashed a coup.

    Monarchs minister to the psyche as well as the polity;
they give a focus for a country's collective libido. Americans
don't need kings to stir our souls because we have attached our
deepest feelings to the myths and documents of our founding:
Paul Revere's ride and George Washington at Valley Forge; the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Democracies
that lack such myths can be emotionally naked. A constitutional
monarch supplies the mythic dimension in a convenient package.
Winston Churchill, who was both a partisan pol and an ardent
monarchist, believed that if defeated Germany had had a
constitutional monarch after World War I, the Weimar Republic
might have withstood the seductions of Nazism.

    Both these factors are relevant to the former Soviet
Union. The peoples that made it up are heading for sweeping
political changes, which will coincide with hard economic times.
A constitutional czar would provide an element of continuity,
while the politicians do the dirty work and make the hard
choices. He would also offer emotional security when things get
grim, as they inevitably will.

    Restoring the Romanovs could help the dissolving Russian
empire deal with its own special problem: nationalism. European
kings and queens traditionally exacted loyalty to themselves as
representatives of a royal family, not embodiments of an ethnic
or cultural type. Czardom was rough on some minorities, notably
Jews and Muslims. But it was surprisingly tolerant of most of
the non-Russians who made up its quilt of an empire. Czarist
indulgence extended even to the Mennonites, German-speaking
Protestant pacifists, the boat people of 18th century Europe,
whom hardly any other country would tolerate. As long as the
Mennonites in Russia kept to themselves, the Romanovs didn't
care how they spoke or prayed.

    The next Romanov, should he get the job, must understand
that he has been commissioned to reign, not rule. His
usefulness to his country, and to the future of his family,
depends on his being above politics -- a symbol, not an
autocrat. The first post-Soviet parliament could audition all
living Romanovs (of whom Grand Duke Vladimir, now living in
France, is the most prominent) and pick the one who seems most
amenable to these goals -- just as the English Parliament, in
1688, replaced a king it didn't trust (James II) with his
daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange.

    Establishing a post-Soviet monarchy in such a utilitarian
spirit may seem to undermine the emotional aura that would be
the new czar's chief benefit. But that aura can coexist with
practical considerations. Shakespeare's tragedy of kingship,
Richard II, contrasts Richard, an immoral and incapable king,
yet one who believes he was divinely appointed, with his deposer
and successor, Henry Bolingbroke, who, for all his cunning and
competence, is haunted by the knowledge that he is a usurper.
Shakespeare presents the shift from Richard to Henry as a
changing of the guard, a clean break from one style of kingship
to another. And yet the "divinity ((that)) doth hedge a king"
(a Shakespeare phrase from another play) still clings to the
British monarchy 600 years and innumerable tabloid gawkfests
after the events Shakespeare described.

    For 74 years the Soviet Union was a society in which the
sense of the sacred was either extirpated or grotesquely
transferred to communist relics like Lenin statues and Lenin's
corpse. The post-Soviet state, embarking on democracy, could use
an infusion of an older and more honorable form of the sacred
about now.