Dominic, the ‘other’ Lieven and the opposition of White Russian noble descendants to the Ukraine War
Once again I make reference to the Comments section of my website on which some readers have pointed to journalist, think tank associate Anatol Lieven’s older brother Dominic as the true academic in the family. Anatol is put down as merely the careerist in the family who writes what is demanded by his publishers and promoters.
From my experience, things are not that simple, not in the Lieven family, not more generally among descendants of the nobility who emigrated in the waves of White Russians after the 1917 Revolution when we consider on which side of the barricades they are now planted with regard to the Ukraine-Russia war.
I agree with readers who have directed attention to Dominic Lieven’s seriousness as a scholar of Russian history. To my estimation, he is the greatest living historian of Imperial Russia in the West. His book on Russia’s war with Napoleon broke new ground and will not easily be surpassed for decades to come. He was the first Western historian of the period to make extensive use of Russian sources, as opposed to British and French sources which were all that his predecessors used. He was the first to break with the tradition established by Lev Tolstoy in the novel War and Peace, which ended the description of the conflict with the expulsion of the invading Grande Armée in 1812. Lieven took the narrative straight to the end in 1815, and, as a consequence, he reevaluated in an entirely new manner the role of Alexander I in arranging the decisive victory thanks to his brilliant personal direction of the diplomacy which made the winning alliance of forces possible. He is the historian who rejected the simplistic explanation of the French defeat inn 1812 by General Winter, meaning by the climatic conditions for which their army was not properly prepared and which they faced after the pointless taking and destruction of Moscow led to looting and breakdown of discipline in their ranks. He is the historian who documented how the massive Russian superiority in cavalry horses, the tanks of the day, favored Russian victory.
In short, this one book, which was prepared in time for celebrations of the two hundredth anniversary of the 1812 war, established Dominic Lieven as a worthy heir to the traditions of his forebears, the Baltic barons, who loyally served the House of Romanov for three centuries or more. Other books by Dominic Lieven used extensive archival research in Russia to tell us who constituted the ruling officialdom of the Empire.
In acknowledgement of Dominic’s well earned reputation as a fair-minded reader of Russian history to Western students and academics, he was several years ago invited to participate in one of the annual gatherings of the Valdai Club in Sochi in the presence of President Putin.
Regrettably, that invitation is just one more proof of how Putin’s assistants misjudge who is who in the West. It ranks with the utterly foolish annual invitations extended to Georgetown University’s house Russophobe professor, Angela Stent.
Why do I say this? Because a couple of months ago Dominic Lieven came out publicly with a harsh condemnation of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. He could have just remained silent, but he did not do so.
What motivated Dominic to take this stand is hard to say. Perhaps he understood that failure to do so would do irreparable damage to his standing in British academic society which is almost entirely anti-Russian
However, Dominic Lieven’s public stance against the Kremlin highlights the schism among the descendants of noble White Russian families. During Soviet days, they were nearly all aligned against Moscow. Following 1991, many returned to Russia to inspect what was left of their family estates. Some few among them actually were given rooms in surviving manor houses for their use in perpetuity. And the claimant to the Romanov throne, a certain Grand Duchess Leonida Georgievna Bagration, was flattered to receive the attentlon of Moscow mayor Luzhkov while rumors swirled in the 1990s about a possible restoration of the monarchy. I had a personal connectlon with this issue insofar as one of my early accomplishments as Managing Director of one of the world’s leading wine and spirits companies in 1998 was precisely to cut the sponsorship funds the company had been paying to sustain this fraud.
In essays which I published on my website in the two years before the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic, I wrote about one of the most important events of the French-speaking royal social club where I am a member, their annual dinner early in January in honor of Russian Christmas. These dinners had as their honorary patrons the RF Ambassador to the Kingdom of Belgium and the head of the society of Russian noblemen in Paris, Prince Trubetskoy.
As I mentioned in 2019, these Russian dinners were well attended by the cream of Belgium’s French-speaking monarchists, who, to my understanding, were sympathetic to the traditions of Russian-Belgian cultural and economic ties going back to the times of Peter the Great. The Tsar had famously visited the waters of Spa during his travels in the Low Countries.
Now, under conditions of the Russian-Ukraine war, I see a cardinal shift in the thinking of these social and business elite members of my Cercle. As table mates have explained to me, the democratic world is now engaged in a life or death struggle with the forces of autocracy led by Mr. Putin. And this new ideologically driven thinking seems to have captured the minds of descendants of the White Russians who are counted among our Cercle’s leading members.
This year’s celebratory dinner on 5 January was dedicated to Orthodox Christmas and all the entertainment which enlivened the dinners past was renamed in Ukrainian. And so the former Kuban Cossack singers were this year Zaporozhye Cossack singers and their songs are called Ukrainian national songs. Of course, all that changed was the names, not the content. But at the head of this farce we had the very same Prince Trubetskoy from Paris!
In short, White Russians stood against the Soviet regime. Now all too many of them stand against the Russian Federation. These are the sad facts of a country that has had a centuries-long problem with its identity.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023