How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

by David Goldman

For a century the Russian Empire had strained its resources by pushing eastwards towards the Pacific, paying for its Siberian ambitions with tax revenues milked from its productive Western provinces—Poland, the Ukraine, the Baltic states. Expansion to the East opened up vast regions to the plough and the axe, but at a net cost to the Russian state. It depended on the enterprise and skills of its Western colonies, which rankled under Russian control. After Japan destroyed the Russian fleet and routed the Russian army in 1905, Moscow was compelled to send a quarter of a million troops—a force larger than had fought the Japanese—to crush rebellion in Poland. Russia’s humiliation at the hands of a new Asian power had exposed the folly of its imperial policy and the hopelessness of its predicament. Russia was stymied in the East and challenged in the West by Germany and Austria, and in continuous danger of losing its western colonies, the empire’s only pocket of economic strength. Traditional Russia was disappearing into a morass that had no outlet. The revolutionary terrorists of pre-war Russia were mad and bad, but not stupid. Russia stood on the cusp of a dizzying decline, and the Russo-Japanese War had revealed the fecklessness of its leaders. Suicide may seem just as reasonable to individuals trapped in a failing civilization as it does to a terminal cancer patient.