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Astolphe de Custine’s Letters from Russia and the Defense of the West:
Patterns of Prejudice from Henri Massis to Walter Bedell Smith
Article in Russian History · June 2016

DOI: 10.1163/18763316-04302003
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russian history 43 (2016) 142-180
brill.com/ruhi
Astolphe de Custine’s Letters from Russia

and the Defense of the West
Patterns of Prejudice from Henri Massis to Walter Bedell Smith
Mircea Platon
Centre for Philosophy, Religion & Social Ethics, ics,
University of Toronto, Canada
mircea.platon@utoronto.ca; mircea.platon@gmail.com
Abstract
Astolphe de Custine’s collection of letters La Russie en 1839, first published in France

in 1843, was rediscovered by Henri Massis in 1946. Massis re-introduced Custine’s by
then long forgotten letters on Russia to the French public. Once American Cold War-
riors such as George Kennan and General Walter Bedell-Smith discovered the book,
they promptly promoted it to the status of the most prophetic book on the “Russian
soul.” Denounced as “fictional,” by many nineteenth-century writers and by a host of
twentieth-century scholars, Custine’s book was accepted as canonical by a large read-
ing public and, more importantly, by successive generations of us policy makers. This
article contributes to the historiography of Cold War propaganda by looking first at the
context in which the book was initially resurrected by Massis, and then by analyzing
the ways in which Cold War propaganda constructed its “relevance,” “actuality” and
“prophetic” character. The article begins by taking a look at the way in which Massis,
the first popularizer of the book, fitted it into his own ideological pattern. In a second
movement, the article analyzes the ways in which the book functioned in the post-
wwii ideological context, seeking to discover if the alleged relevance of the book had
anything to do with the survival into the postwar world of the European Right’s inter-
war tangle of received ideas and patterns of prejudice.
Keywords
Cold War – Fascism – Anti-Communism – Christianity – civilization – Orientalism
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/18763316-04302003

Astolphe de Custine’s Letters from Russia 143
1 Introduction
Astolphe de Custine’s collection of letters La Russie en 1839, first published in

France in 1843, sold very well in the nineteenth century. The book was trans-
lated into English,1 Danish,2 and German,3 and elicited worthy rebuttals from a
host of Russian officials, noblemen and writers,4 the most brilliant one, penned
by count Xavier Labenski, being published in French and in an English transla-
tion undertaken by Henry J. Bradfield,5 who dedicated it to the conservative
politician George Hamilton-Gordon, then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
in Peel’s cabinet, and who as Prime Minister between 1852–1855 would involve
Britain into the Crimean War.
A second wave of interest in Custine’s book came during the Cold War when
the bowdlerized edition first published by Henri Massis in 1946 re-introduced
Custine’s by then long forgotten letters on Russia to the French public. The cia-
backed Cold War journal Horizon popularized Custine’s book as a primer in
“Russianness” in a September 1948 issue, that is three years before its publica-
tion in Phyllis Penn Kohler’s translation.6 Once American Cold Warriors such
as George Kennan and General Walter Bedell-Smith discovered the book, they
promptly promoted it to the status of the most prophetic book on the “Russian
soul” and therefore on that “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”
that was, according to Winston Churchill and his fellow Cold Warriors, the So-
viet Union. George Kennan privately criticized Custine’s book, writing to Phyl-
lis Penn-Kohler in January 1951 that the French Marquis had overlooked the
“vigorous and hopeful fermentation” in progress “under the imposing crust of
1 Astolphe Custine, The empire of the Czar or, observations on the social, political, and religious
state and prospects of Russia, made during a journey through that empire (London: Longman,
Brown, Green, and Longmans, Paternoster-Row, 1843).
2 Astolphe de Custine, Rusland i Aaret 1839 (Copenhagen: Steen, 1844).
3 Astolphe Louis Léonor de Custine, Ein Blick auf Russland, das wirkliche, und Russland des
Marquis Custine im Jahre 1839 (Dresden and Leipzig, 1844).
4 Mikhail Ermolov, Encore quelques mots sur l’ouvrage de M. de Custine: la Russie en 1839. Par
M*** (Paris: Ferra, 1843); Yakov Nikolaevich Tolstoi, La Russie en 1839 rêvée par M. de Custine,
ou lettres sur cet ouvrage écrites de Francfort par J. Y. (Paris, 1844). See also Vera A. Milčina, and
Aleksandr Ospovat, “Le cabinet de Saint-Pétersbourg face au marquis de Custine : une réfuta-
tion inédite de La Russie en 1839,” Romantisme : Revue Du Dix-Neuvième Siècle 92 (1996): 9–22.
5 H. J. Bradfield, A Russian’s reply to the marquis de Custine’s "Russia in 1839" (London: T. C.
Newby, 1844).
6 Adam Sorensen, “The Importance of the Marquis de Custine,” Horizon 18: 105 (September,
1948), 212–220, 215.

144 Platon
tsarist authority.”7 However, Kennan’s Puritanism, his quasi-Jansenist figurism8

and moraliste pessimism strengthened his penchant for historic analogies and
biographic parallelisms such as that between himself and his distant uncle, the
traveler and journalist George Kennan (1845–1924), one of the most trenchant
critics of Tsarist autocracy at the end of the nineteenth century.9 Kennan was a
political realist of a very peculiar kind, one whose detached assessment of the
Cold War realities still allowed him to look at certain situations as “exemplary”
reiterations of providential equations pointing out in the direction of a mille-
narian solution. Thus, astute researchers have highlighted Kennan’s religiously
motivated confidence that the Cold War allowed the Western Christian civiliza-
tion to “redeem” the Russian masses plagued by a succession of false religions
going from the superstitious, half-pagan Byzantine Russian Christianity to the
political religion of atheist Communism.10 Kennan was one of the us foreign
policy experts who thought that there was a chasm between “Asiatic” leaders
such as Stalin and the Soviet people, whom he considered to be of European
extraction and the depositary of a certain wisdom that would be allowed to
shine once the Western light pierced the darkness of despotism that enveloped
it.11 Thus, Kennan’s own brand of realism, that transmuted certain specific his-
torical contexts or events into larger providentialist paradigms, allowed him to
promote Custine’s Letters as a bad book about Nicholas I’s Russia, but an excel-
lent book about Stalin’s Soviet Union.12
In a way, Kennan’s Old Regime conservatism helped him read empathically
Custine’s book. Paradoxically, Custine’s survival into the twentieth century was
secured not by his nineteenth-century “modern” romantic elements – such
7 Kennan quoted in David S. Foglesong, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire” (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 113.
8 “Figurism suggessted a cyclical history in which events in the Old Testament ‘prefigured’
or prophesied the history of the Church both in the past and in the immediate present.
For adherents of figurism, events and individuals […] were neither random nor trivial;
both informed each other within the larger history of the church” (Mita Choudhury, Con-
vents and Nuns in Eighteenth-century French Politics and Culture, Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 2004, 35).
9 David S. Foglesong, “Roots of ‘Liberation’: American Images of the Future of Russia in
the Early Cold War, 1948–1953,” in The International History Review 21:1 (March, 1999),
pp. 57–79, 60.
10 Foglesong, “Roots of ‘Liberation’”, 65.
11 Foglesong, The American Mission, 112–113, 120–121.
12 George F. Kennan, The Marquis de Custine and His Russia in 1839 (Princeton University
Press, 1971 – the lectures collected in this volume were first delivered at Oxford in 1969);
John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011), 619–621.

as the Byronian stories about a doomed Baltic nobleman who tricked sailors
into crashing their ships into a rocky shore in order to rob them – but by his
old-fashioned penchant for moraliste generalizations and sharp wit. Custine’s
book resembled so much a “sentimental journey” that Bradfield suggested
Custine take Lawrence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
as a guide for the tone and as an antidote against French feelings of superi-
ority, seeing that Sterne depicted the depredations to which French Old Re-
gime custom officers subjected foreign travelers.13 Indeed, Custine sketched
moral portraits with the verve of a seventeenth-century moraliste, such as La
Bruyère, and reduced any situation to a pun like the eighteenth-century wit,
Chamfort. Only, La Bruyère drew abstract moral, not national, types, and stood
as far away from personalities as the bienséances of French neoclassical litera-
ture required. The collections of Chamfortiana, on the other hand, contained
personalities, and in many instances named names, but Chamfort’s famous
put-downs were never intended to serve as general truths. Custine combined
these two Old Regime styles – the habit of creating typologies of Louis xiv-
age moralistic, Jansenistically-inclined writers, and the sharp, cynical wit of
Louis xvi’s late Enlightenment writers – and came up with an irresistible book
chock-full of dark, sententious, moralizing witticisms about a human type he
chose to call “Russians.” Whereas La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld or Vauvenar-
gues wrote about the effect of despotism on French courtiers, Custine wrote
about the effect of despotism on the Russian nobles and people. Whereas the
generic neoclassical solution of the Old Regime moralist involved abandoning
the Court and its hypocrisies and retreating to the countryside, Custine’s book
left him with no ideal solution, just with a half-hearted embrace of political
liberalism (as half-hearted as that of his contemporary Tocqueville, who also
feared that liberalism would end up in massification and leveling) and an abid-
ing horror of Russian despotism. Custine’s analysis of Russia was influenced
by Joseph de Maistre, whose deep Catholic Ultramontane distaste for Eastern
Orthodoxy he shared. Eastern Orthodox churches are national autocephalous
churches administered by a Holy Synod whose head is a patriarch, but Peter
the Great abolished the Russian Patriarchate in 1718 and established, in 1721,
an Ecclesiastical College, renamed the Most Holy All-Ruling Synod, to man-
age all the administrative and religious affairs of the Church. The Synod was
stuffed with the tsars’ appointees and marked the absorption of the church
administrative apparatus by the state.14 While Eastern Orthodox theologians
13 Bradfield, A Russian’s reply to the marquis de Custine’s “Russia in 1839”, xxi–xxii.

14 James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great (Stanford, ca: Stanford University
Press, 1971), 306.

146 Platon
deplored what they perceived to be a “Protestantization” of the Church, Catho-

lic theologians denounced it as a revival of the Byzantine Caesaro-Papism that
moved the Russian church even further from the Pope’s authority. According
to Custine, separated from the West by its religion, Russia was more Asian than
European. Moreover, the theologico-political despotism exercised by the tsars
over the barbarian peasant masses found its strongest support in the desire of
the masses to conquer the West, which they hated.
Kennan’s enthusiasm for Custine was shared throughout the Free World,
where the book was published, in an abbreviated version, in Ukrainian
(by the émigré Ukrainian community in Toronto), Dutch, Spanish, Italian,
German, and Polish (in London). In the us, the book was first published in
an abbreviated version in 1854, at the beginning of the Crimean War, but it
struck a chord only almost a century later, at the beginning of the Cold War,
when Phyllis Penn Kohler translated it in an abbreviated version published
in 1951 by the right wing publishing house Henry Regnery.15 Framed by an
introduction from General Walter Bedell Smith, then head of the cia, this
edition would be kept in print for half a century by various British and Ameri-
can publishing houses. After the fall of the Communist regimes in Eastern
Europe, Custine’s book has been published in Moldavia, Romania, Poland,
and Bulgaria.
Denounced as “fictional,” or as the result of “dreams,” by many nineteenth-
century writers and by a host of twentieth-century scholars, Custine’s book was
accepted as canonical by a large reading public and, more importantly, by suc-
cessive generations of us policy makers. Zbigniew Brzezinski endorsed a 1987
edition of Custine’s letters from Russia by claiming that: “No Sovietologist has
yet improved on de Custine’s insights into the Russian character and the Byz-
antine nature of the Russian political system.”16 Many of the Cold War trans-
lations (Ukrainian, German, Spanish, English) stressed in the title the “pro-
phetic” character of Custine’s book, which allegedly offered “the truth” about
“the eternal” Russia, the same “yesterday and today.” Yet, the merits of Custine’s
original book have received more scholarly attention than the role it played
in Cold War anti-Soviet literature. This article contributes to the historiogra-
phy of Cold War propaganda by looking first at the context in which the book
was initially resurrected by Massis, and then by analyzing the ways in which
Cold War propaganda constructed its “relevance,” “actuality” and “prophetic”
15 Astolphe de Custine, Journey for our times, the Russian journals (Chicago: H. Regnery Co.,
New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1951).
16 Quoted in Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the
Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 365.

character.17 In the following pages, I will begin by taking a look at the way in
which Massis, the first popularizer of the book, fitted it into his own ideological
pattern. In a second movement of the article, I will analyze the ways in which
the book functioned in the post-wwii ideological context, seeking to discover
if the alleged relevance of the book had anything to do with the survival into
the postwar world of the European Right’s interwar tangle of received ideas
and patterns of prejudice. In conclusion, I will look at the type of reason that
would find the “si non e vero e bene trovato” argument satisfying enough to
proclaim the particular relevance of Custine’s Letters from Russia for waging
the Cold War and ask if the pertinence of the book did not depend upon ac-
cepting at face value cultural stereotypes that betrayed deep-seated prejudices
rather than insight. If the spurious “Testament of Peter the Great” was the first
Western document to successfully present Russia as an avatar of the “yellow
peril,” Custine’s letters developed the Orientalist take on “Russian despotism”
in a Western European-Catholic direction. If both of them achieved a huge de-
gree of popularity among certain twentieth-century defense intellectuals who
considered them “masterpieces” of prescience or, respectively, of hindsight,
this is perhaps something that says more about Cold War patterns of prejudice
than about the history of Russia.18
2 Custine’s Letters from Russia and Henri Massis’s Defense of the West
The first twentieth-century editor of Custine’ Letters from Russia was the
French Catholic rightwing essayist Henri Massis (1886–1970), who initially
published his abridgment of the book in 1946.19 Since Massis’s interwar sup-
port for Fascism and his intellectual leading role under the Vichy regime left
him open to charges of collaborationism after the Liberation – when he went
through a month of “internement administratif” followed by a prudent, self-
imposed and brief “retirement” which helped him escape a proper “epuration”
– Massis published anonymously this 1946 edition.20 However, by 1951, when
17 See Robert Nisbet, “Has Futurology a Future?,” Encounter November 1971, 19–28, 26.
18 L. R. Lewitter, “The Apocryphal Testament of Peter the Great,” in The Polish Review 6: 3
(Summer, 1961), pp. 27–44.
19 Astolphe-Louis-Léonor de Custine, Lettres de Russie (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle France,
1946).
20 Robert Speaight, “The French at Bay,” in The Tablet, 25 September 1971, p. 9. For M assis’s
role under Vichy, see Daniel Lee, Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the
Vichy Regime, 1940–1942 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 53.

148 Platon
Plon re-published Massis’s 1946 edition of Custine, with an introduction by

Massis, he was well on the road toward postwar literary glory, confirmed by his
election in the French Academy in 1960. So popular proved to be this edition,
that it was re-published in 1957 and 1960 by the Club Français du Livre, ensur-
ing thus that Custine’s letters and Massis’s introduction gained an extremely
wide audience. This popularity prompts us to ask why would Massis, a journal-
ist particularly adept at developing obscure popular prejudices into intellectu-
ally respectable public orthodoxies, choose Russia or the Soviet Union as the
subject of his last book published under Vichy, Découverte de la Russie (Lyon:
Lardanchet, 1944, with a Canadian edition published in Montreal by Editions
Variétés in 1945), and of his first book publication after the Liberation, the 1946
edition of Custine’s letters? Was Massis’s preoccupation with Russia one of
the constants of his thinking, or was it something contingent upon the anti-
Soviet policies of the conservative Vichy regime allied with the Nazis, or of the
broadly anti-communist elites of the Fourth Republic eager to secure France a
prominent place in the us-dominated “Free World”? The answer is that Russia
was one of Massis’s earliest and permanent bogeymen, and that throughout
his career he made continuous efforts to fit his anti-Russian obsession into
whatever discourse the French alliances of the moment required.
Massis made his name as a defender of the “young generation” in the pre-
wwi years, when he published, together with Alfred de Tarde, under the
pseudonym of “Agathon,” two books, L’Esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne: la crise
de la culture classique, la crise du français (Paris, 1911), and Les Jeunes Gens
d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1913). The volumes launched the generationalist topos of
the opposition between the “decadence,” “corruption” and “positivism/mate-
rialism” of the “old generation” and the “purity,” “spiritualism,” “idealism” and
striving for “renewal” of the “young generation,”21 a theme that would become
extremely influential in the interwar years, particularly in fascist or “Third Way”
circles. By 1925, the now thirty-nine years old Massis abandoned the theme of
the “young generation” “renewing” the West for another one, with more staying
power: that of the “defense of the West” against both the irrationality and dubi-
ous mysticism of old Asia, and the immaturity of adolescent states such as the
United States or Russia/the Soviet Union.
The West defended by Massis was the mature, classical, rational but
traditionalist, royalist or authoritarian and Roman-Catholic West of Action
Française thinkers such as Charles Maurras or Pierre Lasserre. It was, above all,
a Latin realist Western civilization opposed to the hazy mysticism emanating
21 Paul Mazgaj, “Defending the West: The Cultural and Generational Politics of Henri
Massis,” in Historical Reflections 17:2 (1991), 103–123.

from Asia, or to the Russian and German Asiatic “irrationality” or Romanti-

cism menacing to corrode the Latin realist, dogmatic structure of the Western
civilization. Like Pierre Lasserre, who criticized German Romanticism from
the positions of French classicism, Massis called in his Défense de l’Occident
(Paris: Plon, 1927) for the preservation of the Western civilization, intrinsi-
cally Roman-Catholic and Classical-Mediterranean, against an Orient repre-
sented not only by the religious doctrines of India or China, but also by the
Russian Bolshevism, by German culture, by Japanese imperialists seeking to
eliminate the Western powers from Asia, or by Mahatma Gandhi. What united
all these movements and figures was their rejection of Western civilization or
their hypocritical, tactical embrace of it. For, as Massis wrote: “The fates of the
Western Civilization, the fate of man itself are today under menace,”22 and the
“crisis of the Western spirit is the crisis of the spirit itself.”23 “Slavic mysticism”
and “German idealism” were rife with an “Oriental poison” that attacked in the
name of “fluidity,” immanentism and incoherent massification the fundamen-
tals of Western anthropology, which rested on the idea of personal autonomy,
as well as the fundamentals of Western culture and politics resting on ”unity,
stability, authority, continuity.”24 Whereas Latin (Roman-Catholic) realism was
concerned with “things,” and Massis would later describe fascism as a “dicta-
torship on things,” that is as a firm grasp of reality,25 Asia dealt in illusions,
in counterfeit mysticisms (“contrefaçons spirituelles”) such as those of Asian
liberation movements, of Soviet Bolshevism or of German imperialism and
National-Socialism.
In his Défense de l’Occident, Massis reduced Bolshevism to “Slavism,” and
Slavism to Asiatic barbarism. Moreover, according to Massis, the main danger
of Russian Communism was that it taught the Asian and African peoples how
to fight against Western civilization. For Massis, the “West” was a state of mind,
a culture rather than a precise geographical expression. This understanding of
“the West” allowed Massis to defend its global projections such as the French
colonial possessions as places where the Western civilization was hard at work.
The West that Massis tried to preserve included the French, Portuguese, Span-
ish, and Italian colonies, whose existence was merely another expression of
the Latin “grasp” of concrete – geographical – realities. His idealism, rather like
the German idealism he denounced, translated into a very sturdy political real-
ism and sense of colonial entitlement. The “defense of the West” he proposed
22 Henri Massis, Défense de l’Occident (Paris : Plon, 1927), 1.

23 Massis, Défense de l’Occident, 175.
24 Massis, Défense de l’Occident, 15–16, 115, 205.
25 Henri Massis, Chefs (Paris: Plon, 1939), 8.

150 Platon
was mainly against the ideas or movements that allowed the “Orient,” that is
the colonies, to challenge the Western European occupation of one third of
the world. Massis’s denunciation of the non- and anti-Christian doctrines of
teosophists, of German idealists, or of Japanese, Indian and Chinese thinkers,
was prompted by their anti-Western European/Latin colonial implications: it
was their political value as weapons against the self-confidence and the sense
of entitlement of the Western colonial powers that spurred Massis to reject
them. According to Massis, Russia was the main manipulator and generator
of these anti-colonial heresies and vague spiritualisms because Russia was al-
ready a country accustomed with living in a heretical and immoral religious
swamp, full of crawling heresies and creepy sects. This happened because of
the alleged lack of interest of Russian Orthodoxy in dogmatic formulations
and expositions of Christian dogma, which Massis explained by the fact that
the Russian Oriental mind tired of generating so many heresies and decided to
preserve its dogma by simply not talking about it.26 The rising of Russia, from
Peter the Great to Lenin and Stalin, signaled the “return of the barbarians, that
is a new triumph of the less conscious and less civilized layers of humanity
over the more civilized and conscious parts.”27 Massis wrote that, kept out of
Europe after the Crimean War and the Berlin Conference, Russia and then the
Soviet Union expanded into Asia in order to use Asia as a key to open the doors
of Europe, a theme that would have a huge resonance during the Cold War,
when it was revived by very influential us defense intellectuals.
The Défense de l’Occident would be republished by Massis in his book La
Guerre de trente ans. Destin d’un Age 1909–1939 (Paris: Plon), published in Janu-
ary 1940, and in L’Occident et son destin, a collection of Massis’s writings on the
same theme published by Grasset in 1956. In that 1940 edition, the Défense de
l’Occident was sandwiched between articles published by Massis before and af-
ter the publication of the original edition of the Défense. These articles concen-
trated on the “eternal German danger,” and on the ways in which Hitler’s racist
particularism challenged Catholic universalism and thus subverted the West-
ern civilization based on universal values. At this point, neither in the Défense
de l’Occident, nor in La Guerre de trente ans, Massis did not mention Custine.
But Custine would pop up in the third massive recycling of the materials
from the Défense de l’Occident, in a book called Découverte de la Russie pub-
lished by the Lyonnais publisher Lardanchet in April 1944. In his brief fore-
word, written in January 1944, Massis presented the book as a “supplement”
of the Défense de l’Occident, as a collection of studies explaining the economic


and political structures underpinning the extraordinary resilience of Soviet

Russia during World War ii. Massis also acknowledged that Découverte de la
Russie contained “certain pages” from the Défense de l’Occident, namely those
pages discussing the “general truths” founded on “the psychology and on the
history of the Russian people,” the only ones able to throw a light on the phe-
nomenal Russian stamina that, according to Massis, had “surprised so many
Westerners.”28 The ideological key of the book was evident from its very begin-
ning, when Massis stated that “anarchy, no less barbarian than the invasions”
had always fermented beyond the horizon of the Eastern plains from where it
periodically erupted to “disrupt” Western institutions and morals. In fact, what
Découverte de la Russie offered was a version of the Défense de l’Occident purged
of all the chapters denouncing the German danger and complicity with the
Slavic Asianism. The remaining Russian chapters were adapted to the needs of
German propaganda and were supplemented by new chapters on the econom-
ic developments that had allowed the Soviet Union to resist the German-led
attack. The chapters tracing the economic development of the Soviet Union
under Stalin – the massive industrialization, the opening of diamond, gold and
other rare metals mines, the development of the oil industry, the opening up
of Siberian airplane routes, the way in which the Soviet Union had imported
Western specialists and American methods in order to build their heavy indus-
try and increase productivity – read like a wistful look upon what Germany
and its allies missed by not managing to conquer the Soviet Union.
These economic chapters also helped Massis to move away from his previ-
ous jeremiads against the twin Germanic-Slav irrationalism, a theme hard to
take up in that particular context, and focus on proving that the enemies of
Nazi Germany, that is the United States and the Soviet Union, were the en-
emies of the Western civilization. Of all three countries – Germany, the United
States, and Russia –, Russia or the Soviet Union is the only one that figured
as “barbarian” in both Massisian meanings of the word: either as primitive,
savage, Tartar or as technocratic, modern barbarity.29 Elaborating upon the
theme of the universalistic developmentalism common to both the usa and
the Soviet Union, Massis wrote that both countries shared the same mystique
of productivity, and a cult of the machine and of concrete.30 Both the Soviet
28 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 7–8.

29 See Henri Massis, “Allemagne 1932,” in his Au long d’une vie (Paris: Plon, 1967), 116–147, 136.
30 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 86, 128–129. For how this shared developmentalism
shaped the Cold War, see Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives
and America’s Civilizng Mission (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap, 2006), 246–251.

152 Platon
Union and the United States of America were, according to Massis, “predator
and migratory” peoples.31 In fact, the Soviet Union was a “new America.”32
Massis also explained Soviet industrialization by the Soviet desire to conquer
Europe33 and by the Russians’ proclivity for war and their living in a militarized
society since the days of Peter the Great, the tsar who had hastily copied the
West in order to disguise the Asiatic features of Russia and thus to conquer
Europe more easily. These observations came on top of the older passages
from Défense de l’Occident denouncing Bolshevism as a mask of Slavophilia
and Slavophilia as a disguise of Asian irrationalism and anti-Westernism. Com-
munism was, for Massis, just a way for those “dark/obscure” Russian “masses”
who had never embraced the Westernizing ideas imported by the tsars start-
ing with Peter the Great to return to their Asian mold. The Russians, Massis
proclaimed, “these Asiatics have never felt themselves to be connected to the
historical destiny of the other races of the West.”34 Russian Bolshevism was in
fact “Tartar absolutism,”35 as Russian “nomadism,” their “need to change place,”
allegedly indicated.36 Both communism and despotism were sought for by the
“instinct of the race,” eager to embrace collectivism and a despot disposing
arbitrarily of the fate of the community.37
This murky, masochistic collectivism existed in symbiosis with a murky,
masochistic religion, the Russian Orthodoxy of the hirsute, coenobitic, and
ascetic Russian monks being merely a savage, barbarian distortion of the al-
ready corrupted Christianity of the Byzantine Empire. Whereas the West
owed its civilization to the Roman-Catholic Church, Russian Orthodoxy con-
tributed nothing to the Russian civilization, but on the contrary it isolated
Russia from the benefits of the Western civilization.38 Beyond the civiliza-
tional illiteracy of the Russians, which according to Massis left them babbling
in the language of a “superstitious” and “morbid” Christianity devoid of any
“truly vivific doctrinal light,”39 religion was important because it is the key to
31 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 156–157

32 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 20.
38 In the 1927 (Défense de l’Occident), 1940 (La Guerre de trente ans) and 1956 (L’Occident et
son destin) editions of the same material, Massis also attacked Luther and the national
churches produced by the Reformation, which he accused of laying the racist egg hatched
by the Nazis.
39 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 39, and Guerre de Trente Ans, 121.

the history of any society, and the corrupt, debased Asiatic-Byzantine Christi-
anity of the Russians explained the debased, barbarian Russian society since
“there were no absurdities or immoralities that did not have apostles and fol-
lowers among this ignorant and unhappy people.”40 In order to support his
thesis that the Russian Orthodox Church was a “source of stagnation and hos-
tility to development,” Massis quoted French Catholic Ultramontane writers or
Russian Catholic converts such as Joseph de Maistre, Anne Sophie Swetchine,
or Pyotr Chaadaev, whose first “Philosophical Letter,” published in 1836, stated
that Russia was backward compared with the West and found the source of
this civilizational gap in Russia’s refusal to embrace Roman Catholicism. Chaa-
daev borrowed arguments from Catholic traditionalists and Romantics to de-
plore the fact that Russia missed the intellectual and chivalrous adventures of
the Middle Ages. The lack of a proper chivalrous, crusading age had, according
to Chaadaevs’s first letter, prompted Russia to go from barbarism to supersti-
tion to humiliation under the Tsars and left it an unsettled country, in constant
movement, full of “strangers on the land,” without a past or the civilization
born out of tradition and contact with the rest of humanity.41 The theme would
survive the nineteenth-century to reappear in the writings of Catholic intellec-
tuals such as the us ambassador William C. Bullitt, whose article, “The World
from Rome,” published in Life on 4 September 1944, popularized the image of a
Western civilization centered on Pontifical Rome and perpetually “threatened
by hordes of invaders from the East.”42
Massis recycled these motifs and went even further to suggest that Russia’s
lack of dogmatic unity in religious matters had a correspondent in its lack
of racial unity. Citing the American prospector John D. Littlepage, who had
worked as the Deputy Commissar of the Soviet Union’s Gold Trust in the 1930s,
and who noted that the Soviet Union had one “colored individual” for every
two white ones, Massis found that “the extraordinary variety of races, the dif-
ferent levels of civilization, the coexistence of very different ways of life on a
territory as vast as a continent […] created a state of affairs very little compat-
ible with the unity of thought and of action that any great empire or simple
nation cannot exist without.”43 However, the Soviet peoples were united by
40 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 40, and Guerre de Trente Ans, 121.

41 Franklin A. Walker, “Peter Chadaev and Catholic Unity,” Report, 26 (1959), 43–56.
42 William C. Bullitt, “The World from Rome,” Life 4 September 1944, 94–109, 95. For the
many Catholic avatars of this theme, including its Custinean treatment and the Cold War
revival, see Dennis J. Dunn, The Catholic Church and Russia: Popes, Patriarchs, Tsars and
Commissars (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 5–53, 133–152.
43 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 81, Littlepage cited at 84.

154 Platon
the cult of “production for conquest,” by Stalin’s desire to “rearm the empire
of the steppes” in order to mount a new Mongol invasion and conquer “little
Europe.”44 According to Massis, citing the apocryphal “Testament of Peter the
Great,” the aims of the Soviet Union, like those of the tsars, were to conquer
Constantinople and India in order to “conquer the world.”45 Massis believed
that Great Britain, the United States and Russia were all Asian-centered em-
pires. Therefore, their conflicts had less to do with any fundamental differenc-
es between their cultural, political and moral values, and more with their race
for Asian space. The Russians’ advantage over the British and the Americans
was that, according to the Victorian imperialist British Secretary of State for
the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, quoted approvingly by Massis, Russia was,
more than any other state, “capable of assimilating Asians.”46
Whereas in the 1927 and 1940 versions of this material Massis warned about
the danger coming from both the Soviet-Asian and the German-Asian blocks,47
in the 1944 Découverte de la Russie he eliminated the passages regarding the
German-Asian compatibility, and focused only on the Soviet, the British and
the us interests in Asia. Massis expressed his conviction that both the British
and the us were bound to realize sooner or later that not Nazi Germany was
their competitor in Asia, and therefore their enemy, but the Soviet Union. In
order to prove his point, Massis paraphrased only half of Harold Mackinder’s
geopolitical dictum according to which: “Who rules East Europe commands
the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who
rules the World-Island controls the world.”48 Since for much of the war Nazi
Germany had controlled Eastern Europe, Massis left out that part of Mack-
inder’s axiom, and stated that, since Americans were “obsessed” with the idea
that “who will gain supremacy in Asia would control the world,” and since
“the Reich will never dispute the Pacific to the Americans,” the Americans
will have to realize that the Japanese but above all the Soviet Union was their
real enemy.49 The British were in the same position, and Massis expressed his
confidence that it was only the effort of the Third Reich to keep the Soviet
Union out of Europe and far from the borders of Great Britain that allowed the
British to be allies with the Soviets. A decisive victory of the Soviets on Vistula

46 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 147, 177–178.
47 Massis, La Guerre de Trente Ans, 148.
48 Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962 [1919]),
150.

or the Oder would have consequences for the fate of the British colonies in
Asia and therefore would affect the Anglo-Soviet alliance.50 Once escaped
from “the German grip,” “Stalinist Russia” would turn its attention toward the
Asian “sources of its empire” and would push its “monstrous tentacles” across
the entire East.51 Massis warned Great Britain and the United States that they
could hope to defend the Soviet Union only by attacking not its “enormous”
Asiatic “body,” but its European head, the only one possessing vital centers.52
But then, in order to defeat the Soviets, Great Britain and the United States
would need all the help they could get from Germany in Europe, and from
Japan in Asia. In his concluding remarks Massis noted that, unfortunately, the
real interests and affinities that united the two great Anglo-Saxon powers and
Germany were obscured by the Jewish elites ruling not only in Moscow, but in
London and Washington as well. Quoting Charles Maurras, Massis found that
the unnatural alliance between Great Britain and the United States could be
explained only by the fact that the Jews “waved off many natural divergences,”
and “artificially” created “many ideological convergences” between Moscow,
London and Washington.53 For the sake of the future of the Western civiliza-
tion, Massis hoped that the petty quarrels among the Western nations would
cease in order to allow them to unite against the “great invasions” looming in
the menacing East.54
It is in the context of this work, dominated as it was by the idea of a West
ready to fall into the hands of the Asian Bolsheviks who were crafty enough
to advance their own conspiracy (as laid out in the Testament of Peter the
Great) for conquering the world by way of the Jewish conspiracy that disori-
ented the Western powers into not recognizing their true, German, friends,
and their real, Soviet, enemies, that Massis quoted Custine. In the first, long
appendix of the book, under the title “Peter the Great, forerunner of Bolshe-
vism,” Massis launched into an overview of the Russian history which he saw as
being the illustration of one single principle, namely “the will to power of the
Muscovites.”55 The Petrine modernization and the Stalinist industrialization,
as well as the entire history spanning the centuries between these two rulers
were all just a manifestation of the despotism of the Russian rulers, which in
itself was merely a symptom of the will to power of the Asiatic Russians: “Any


156 Platon
enterprise of industrialization and of developing Russia leads, in fact, to an

enterprise not less vast of universal domination.”56 If Peter the Great trans-
formed Russia into a danger for the West, the Bolshevik modernization opened
the way of the Red Army onto the heart of the Western civilization.57
Even though the Nazis attacked “Asiatic Bolshevism” as early as the be-
ginning of the 1920s, the anti-Comintern Pact concluded first with Japan
(25 November 1936), and then the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (23 August 1939)
muffled this discourse. Even after attacking the Soviet Union Hitler was unwill-
ing to present his war as a crusade on behalf of the Western civilization. In the
first place, Hitler claimed he was fighting for Germany, and for nobody else.58
Secondly, he had a better opinion of some Asian peoples, such as the Chinese
and the Japanese, than of many “mongrel,” “mixed” white European “races.” So
it was only after the Stalingrad disaster and the subsequent reversal of fortune
for the German Wehrmacht, pushed Westward by the Red Army, that Nazi pro-
paganda started to frame the war on the Eastern front as an international cru-
sade led by Germany to defend Western/European civilization against “Asiatic
Bolshevism.”59 On the one hand, this allowed Nazi Germany to seek a better
peace from the Allies. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that, in fact,
it was precisely what Omer Bartov identified as the “demodernization” of the
German army, that is the weakening of the esprit de corps and military hierar-
chies of the Wehrmacht combined with the loss of weaponry, that led to this
strengthening of the ideological component of the German soldier’s identity.
The less “modern” the German soldier became, because of the worsening con-
ditions on the Eastern Front, the more he needed to be convinced that he was
the embodiment of a superior civilization fighting against an inferior one. This
allowed the German soldiers to have less scruples about living off the land or
venting their anger on Soviet civilians. Bartov concluded that only during the
Russian campaign did the German army mature to become “Hitler’s army.”60
Massis’s Découverte de la Russie answered the needs of Nazi propaganda,
but Massis also intuited correctly the main lines along which the United States
and its Western European allies would develop their foreign policy during the

58 Walter Z. Laqueur, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (New Brunswick, nj:
Transaction Publishers, 1990 [1965]), 280.
59 Aristotle A. Kallis, Nazi Propagada and the Second World War (Houndmills, Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2008), 78–83; Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperi-
alism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 288.
60 Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992), 28–33.

early decades of the Cold War. The subterranean conflict between Great Brit-
ain and the United States on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other,
for control over Asia had indeed begun even as they were still allied against
Nazi Germany. Control of the oil fields of Iran and fear that the Soviet Union
attempted to gain access to the Persian Gulf soured the relations between
the Allies and the Soviets as early as the end of 1944. By the end of 1945, the
United States joined Great Britain into opposing the Morgenthau plan or any
other project seeking to weaken the military-industrial power of Germany, and
tried to reintegrate West Germany as soon as possible in their line of defense
against the conventional military might of the Soviet Union.61 Germany be-
came the European key of nato, and with it the problem of the reunification
of Germany and of Bonn’s Ostpolitik became central issues of the defense of
the “Free World,” much to the chagrin of Hans Morgenthau. Morgenthau’s as-
sessment of the way in which Germany’s desire for reunification would push
West German elites to seek an understanding with the Soviet rulers, who had
the “key” to the German reunification, sounded eerily like Massis’s warnings
from during and after the war.62 Massis, too, feared that the desire for unity
would push Bonn to negotiate with the Soviet Union, a task that was facilitated
by Germany’s irresistible and continuous fascination for Asia since the days of
the alliance between Frederick Barbarossa and Genghis Khan until the 1939
German-Soviet Pact. Appealing to the ideas of the National Bolshevik Nazi
leader Gregor Strasser, and citing Ernst Jünger’s lines regarding a metaphysical
level where the "German man" and the "Russian man" would meet. Massis ad-
vanced the idea that the “Fourth Reich” would be a “national-communist one,”
since nationalism and communism were the two most powerful constants of
the German people.63
Moreover, the beginning of the Cold War saw the Belgian Minister of
Foreign Affairs, Paul Henri Spaak, speaking in front of the General Assembly
of the United Nations in September 1948, and telling the leader of the Soviet
delegation, Andrey Vyshinsky, that the basis of the Western policy toward the
Soviet Union was “fear”: “fear” of the Soviet government, policy and identity.
Indeed, that fear was the reverse of the patronizing contempt that quite a few
career American diplomats manifested towards the Soviets during the last
61 Carolyn Woods Eisenberg, Drawing the Line : The American Decision to Divide Germany,
1944–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 69–70.
62 Massis, L’Occident et son destin (Paris: Gresset, 1956), 312–313; Hans J. Morgenthau, “The
Problem of Germany,” in his Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade, 1960–70 (New York:
Praeger, 1970), 340–46.
63 Massis, L’Occident et son Destin, 300–316, Jünger quoted at 307.

158 Platon
stages of the war (1944–45) and in its immediate aftermath. Confronted with
the harsh realities of the Soviet liberation cum occupation of Eastern Europe
in 1944–45, many members of the foreign services of the us and Great Britain
wrote home that the Soviet behavior was, in the words of one such diplomat,
not “malicious but merely primitive.”64 If the propaganda services of Nazi Ger-
many started attacking “Asiatic Bolshevism” only after their initial sentiment
of superiority turned into fear for the last three years of the war, Western fear
generated the acrid discourses against the “Asiatic Bolshevism” of their former
Soviet allies. Indeed, as Curzio Malaparte noted in 1951: “The slogan Europe
against Asia, the slogan of the German war against the Soviet Union, has today
become the slogan of the Atlantic pact.”65 And one of the main contributors to
the survival of this paradigm was Massis, whose first postwar publication was
the edited version of Custine’s Letters from Russia which, according to the evi-
dence presented above, he seems to have discovered during the middle years
of the war (1942–43), since his first reference to Custine was in Découverte de la
Russie, sent to print in January 1944.
In 1946, Massis published anonymously his abbreviated version of the four
volumes of Custine’s letters from Russia. By 1951, nato had been already cre-
ated, France was fighting the war in Indochina, which started in December
1946, and lasted until August 1954, and the United States was involved in the
Korean War (1950–1953). That is, the “Asiatic Bolshevik” danger was more pres-
ent than ever. In 1951, Plon, one of Massis’s longstanding publishers, published
a new edition of Custine’s letters from Russia, accompanied by Massis’s public-
ly acknowledged (on the cover) introduction, reprinted in all the subsequent
editions, including the book club one.66 On the back cover of this 1951 edition,
Plon advertised another book in the same vein, Le Monde Russe, by Gonzague
de Reynold, a Swiss Conservative Catholic admirer of Salazar and of l’Action
Française who, in the words of his blurbers, had the merit of pointing out that
the 1917 Revolution marked Russia’s “return” to the “asiatisme intégral,” and
64 Hugh De Santis, The Diplomacy of Silence: The American Foreign Service, The Soviet Union,
and The Cold War, 1933–1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 143.
65 Curzio Malaparte, The Volga Rises in Europe (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1951), 13.
66 Marquis de Custine, Lettres de Russie. Introduction par Henri Massis (Paris: Plon, 1951). The
title page of this edition says: “Marquis de Custine. Lettres de Russie. Avec une introduc-
tion de l’Editeur,” and the “Paris, Librarie Plon” acknowledgment is printed on a half-sheet
of paper glued over the lower half of the original title page, covering the name of the ini-
tial publisher: Paris, Les Editions de la Nouvelle France, which is the 1946 publisher. So it
seems that the Plon 1951 edition of the book was merely a repackaging of the unsold 1946
edition. That would explain why Massis’s name appears on the cover (printed by Plon),
but never in the body of the book, printed by enf in 1946 and recycled in 1951.

that the Soviet Union was “tormented’ by its Asian vocation and gave the entire
world one of the “most terrifying spectacles of history.” Similarly, Massis’s cuts
reduced Custine’s rambling and repetitive four-volume travelogue through
Russia to its Orientalist Russophobic barebones.
According to Massis, Custine appealed to him as a counter-revolutionary,
liberal Catholic thinker who denounced despotism and presented his contem-
poraries with an unvarnished portrait of Russia, a country single-mindedly
dedicated, since the days of Peter the Great, to “one single desire, one single
idea: to devour Europe.”67 The fundamental sickness of the Russian society
was despotism, and despotism was the fruit of a decayed, degraded Russian
Orthodox Church refusing to return to the fold of the “mother Church,” that is
of the Roman Catholic Church. Russian despotism was thus the sign of what
the interwar rightwing writers called a “spiritual crisis.” The perverse effects of
a troubled relationship with the Catholic truth were evident in the Russians’
abjectly masochistic submission to despotism accompanied by the militari-
zation of the Russian society for the purpose of sadistically dominating their
European superiors. From this perspective, the entire history of Russia became
nothing more than a clinical observation chart of a psychological pathology.
Whereas other nations might “suffer” slavery, the Russians “loved” it so much
that they were “drunk on slavery.”68 Unhinged because of a troubled relation-
ship with mother Church and Father Sovereign Pontiff, the Russian personality
developed a sado-masochistic compulsion that on the one hand made Rus-
sians degrade themselves in front of their tsars, and on the other made them
seek to compensate for this degradation by putting on the masks of civilization
(that is, Peter the Great’s forced modernization of Russia) in order to “devour,”
or to “rape” Europe, an expression Massis used in L’Europe en question (Plon,
1958), a book he co-authored with Marshal Alphonse Juin and that was quick-
ly translated into English and published in Great Britain as The Choice before
Europe (1958).69 Custine’s portrayal of Russia amounted to nothing else than
the description of a mechanism of historic compensation (expansionism) for
spiritual deficiencies (despotism) arising from great sins (refusal of Roman-
Catholic orthodoxy). Massis quoted Custine’s opinion that the Russian socio-
political order, based on “oppression disguised as love for order,” produced a
nation of mentally deranged, of pathological types, with no middle class to
67 Massis, “Introduction” to Marquis de Custine, Lettres de Russie (Paris: Le Livre Club du

Libraire, 1960), 10.
68 Custine quoted in Massis, “Introduction,” 41.
69 Marshal Juin, Henri Massis, The Choice before Europe (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode,
1958).

160 Platon
bridge the wide gap between the economically or psychologically elevated and
and the inferior classes.70
Custine’s book was published while French public opinion was enthusiasti-
cally digesting the apocryphal Testament of Peter the Great, and his opinion
regarding the Russian foreign policy was very close to the Testament.71 Thus,
where in the Testament the ghost(writer) of Peter the Great urged his followers
on the throne of Russia to “take part in the affairs of Europe” and to “participate
in the advantages of the other nations without losing any of its own” in “the
interest of aggrandizement and increasing prosperity of Russia,” Custine wrote
that Russia saw Europe as a “prey” weakened by its “dissensions” which the
Russian actively fostered and encouraged: “She is fomenting anarchy amongst
us hoping to profit from a corruption encouraged by her.”72 Custine returned
from Russia convinced of the superiority of the liberal model over the despotic
one, but his Ultramontane Catholicism made him resent the multiplicity of
voices, the corruption, and the pacifism which he associated with democracy.
In this, Custine resembled many us Cold Warriors who would write, one cen-
tury later, about the ideological discipline and the unity of purpose of the So-
viet enemy in comparison with the endless debates, minority discourses and
utopian pacifism or one-worldism hampering the Free World’s fight against the
worldwide “communist conspiracy.”73 Similarly to these mainstream Atlanti-
cist Cold Warriors, Massis’s interest in “defending the West” made him sympa-
thetic to Custine's lines that stressed the need for Western unity in front of the
Russian subversive actions and conspiratorial methods.74
Custine claimed that the principles of order, reason, freedom and authority,
that is the fundamentals of the Western civilization, were inaccessible to the
Russians, who were only “Chinese in disguise.”75 Russia, on the other hand, was
“an empire of sixty million people, most of them, Asiatics who are surprised
at nothing and who are by no means disgruntled to find a great Lama in their
Czar.”76 Massis, whose fear since Défense de l’Occident was that barbarians, that
70 Custine cited in Massis, “Introduction,” 43.

71 See Simone Blanc, “Histoire d’une Phobie: Le Testament de Pierre Le Grand,” Cahiers du
monde russe et sovietique 9 (1968), pp. 265–293 ; Albert Resis, “Russophobia and the "Testa-
ment" of Peter the Great, 1812–1980,” Slavic Review 44: 4 (Winter, 1985) , pp. 681–693.
72 Custine cited in Massis, “Introduction,” 45.
73 See William R. Kintner, The Front is Everywhere. Militant Communism in Action (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press,1950), 172; Robert Strausz-Hupé, William R. Kintner, James
E. Dougherty, Alvin J. Cottrell, Protracted Conflict (New York: Harper, 1959), 22–26.
74 Custine quoted in Massis, “Introduction” 45.
75 Custine, Lettres de la Russie, 222.
76 Custine, Journey for our Time, 44.

is the “less conscious” part of humanity, would come to rule over the civilized
West, that is over the conscience-enhanced part of humanity, quoted approv-
ingly in his introduction Custine’s dark intimations about the fact that “Provi-
dence” must have a plan when it “amasses so many inactive forces in the East
of Europe.”77 The Soviet Union was therefore the twentieth century expression
of the eternal Russian soul, tortured by its religious, cultural and civilization-
al inadequacies, and trying to make up in conquests conducted with “Asian”
cunningness and cruelty, what it lacked in substance. Quoting in extenso the
nineteenth-century conservative journalist and literary critic Émile Montégut,
who found in 1854 – during the Crimean War – that Western civilization was
threatened by the “Asian,” deceptive maneuvering of Russia, the harbinger of
a form of universal democratic tyranny that Montégut tagged as a “materialist
Islamism,” Massis wrote that the Soviet Union was a “Soviet Mecca,” an idea that
would be circulated in the context of the Algerian War by Jacques Soustelle,
who called Moscow the “second Mecca” and who, during during the 1960s, in
his publications against Algerian independence, attacked Soviet Communism
as the “new Islam,” and defended the Eurafrican project by opposing it to the
specter of the Soviet-Muslim-Pan Arabic alliance subverting the West at home
but especially in its civilizing mission in the colonies.78
By 1956, Massis was re-established enough to confidently return to his
1925–27 positions. In a fourth (the first three being Défense de l’Occident in 1927,
La Guerre de Trente Ans in 1940, Découverte de la Russie in 1944) reworking of
the same material, in L’Occident et Son Destin (1956), Massis eliminated the pas-
sages added in 1944, about the way in which the Germans would help the West
overcome Asiatic Bolshevism and the Jewish plot. The long (49 pages) introduc-
tion to L’Occident et son Destin recycled Massis’s introduction to Custine’s Let-
ters from Russia, with some added material on the American danger, an even
longer (98 pages) final chapter in which he surveyed the first ten years of the
Cold War in an attempt to explain why the Americans had already lost the “third
world war,” and some warnings about the German danger. Massis reverted to
his initial defense of Latin realism and Roman-Catholic Europe, disparaging
the Soviet Union, the United States and Germany for their various cultural af-
finities such as the cult of productivity and of machines, common to the Soviet
Union, Germany and the United States, all worshipping the drop hammer, high
furnaces and gigantic machineries.79 Massis also expatiated upon the deep
77 Custine, Journey for our Time, 42; Massis, “Introduction” 46.

78 Jacques Soustelle, Sur une route nouvelle (Paris: Editions du Fuseau, 1964), 234–239.
79 Massis, L’Occident et son Destin (Paris: Grasset, 1956), 308.

162 Platon
correspondences between the Soviet Union and a Germany that saw the tri-
umph of Communism in Russia as the triumph of a German idea and the his-
tory of the Soviet Union as the development of a “German experience.”80 West
German elites were also aware that the German reunification required the ap-
proval of the Kremlin.81 Germany was a very problematic ally in the fight for
the defense of the West against Asiatic Bolshevism since Russia, according to
Massis, knew that it needed the cooperation of Germany in order to dominate
Europe, while the Germans were ready to contract a “marriage of convenience”
with the Soviet Union in order to have access to the Russian territory and thus to
combine German technology with the Asian landmass.82
Massis feared that history proved him right, and that the West is under threat
from – with a formula borrowed from the Introduction to Custine’s Letters from
Russia – the “immense states” of “America and Russia,” both of which had huge
resources and were populated by a mixture of races.83 Civilization was under
attack from the “two global empires” caught in a fierce struggle, Massis wrote,
juggling again his old phrases and stock citations on the Russian danger from
Montégut, Donoso Cortés, Henri Frédéric Amiel, Thiers and, of course, Cus-
tine.84 To these, he added quotations from Joseph Arthur Gobineau, Proudhon,
Baudelaire and the German conservative émigré Hermann Rauschning, all of
whom criticized the United States’ emergence on the global scene, as well as the
American Puritanism, commercialism, cult of efficiency, and technocracy.85
Massis believed that the Russians and the Americans were very similar in their
utilitarianism: thus, if the Soviets had Communist materialism and the Stakha-
novist cult of the working-man, the American idealism was utilitarian, seeking
to increase productivity, treating Jesus Christ as a team leader or honest busi-
nessman. From this perspective, both the Communist East and the American
West sought to standardize peoples and ways of life, and in this they presented
the world with twin totalitarianisms, each of them attempting to spread its
own gospel (of communism, or of democracy), and to stifle the individual in
the name of “all,” of the entire mankind, whose march towards the future each
of them claimed to represent.86 In fact, both of them were devoid of any “spiri-
tual content,” and shrunk the individual to fit the size of homo oeconomicus.87
80 Massis, L’Occident et son Destin, 309, n.1.

81 Massis, L’Occident et son Destin, 311–313.
82 Massis, L’Occident et son Destin, 310.
83 Henri Massis, L’Occident et son Destin, 10.
85 Massis, L’Occident et son Destin, 11, 17–18.
86 Massis, L’Occident et son Destin, 21–22, 34–35.

According to Massis’s analysis, the United States and the Soviet Union were
not just similar, they managed to symbiotically live off fighting with each other
and ruining the Western European civilization, that is the Western civiliza-
tion. If the Americans were naïve or inexperienced enough to trust the Soviet
leaders during wwii, they had a rude awakening at the end of the war against
Nazi Germany. Yet, their errors benefited the Soviets, who grew in size by gob-
bling up the inheritance of the Western civilization. If us Cold Warriors always
stressed that European nationalism (à la De Gaulle) or pacifist isolationism
(mostly left-wing) played right into the hands of the Soviet Union, and thus
could argue that De Gaulle was doing Moscow’s work, Massis turned the ta-
ble on the us and pointed out that, whenever the United States denounced
European colonialism, the Soviets reaped the benefits. Printed on 26 March
1956, two years into the Algerian War that France was fighting without the sup-
port of the us or nato, and exactly four months before the growing political
tensions between Egypt, France and Great Britain would prompt the Egyptian
President Gamal Abdel Nasser to nationalize the Suez Canal Company and
thus to trigger the Suez Crisis, Massis’s words surely stroke a chord among
French conservatives and Republican imperialists still clinging to the idea of
France’s “civilizing mission”: “When the Americans denounce colonialism up
to the point of tolerating or even aiding the indigenous rebellions, Russia dares
to provoke these rebellions and to benefit from them.”88 Writing in a Custinian
vein, Massis argued that the “naiveté” of the leaders of an American nation
“still adolescent” made them, and the whole world with them, fall prey to the
devious and cynical machinations of the Soviets hiding behind slogans about
world peace and opened the way to Marxism-Leninism and ultimately to anar-
chy in Africa and Asia.89
3 The American Connection
Like Russia, Massis’s United States was a straw-country which he stabbed with
the pins of his wit and prejudice. The United States was a society developing
for generations “far away from the historical sources of the Western civiliza-
tion […] bereft of secular traditions and of a culture that would have enlight-
ened them on the peoples, the ways of life, the past, and the spirit of other
peoples,” and therefore unable to cope with the Byzantine menace posed by

89 Massis, L’Occident et son Destin, 260, 267.

164 Platon
the Soviets.90 Like Russia, the United States was the defective nation produced
by a strain of Christianity, Puritanism, refusing to return to the Roman fold.
Massis noted that the real choice was not between Americanism and com-
munism, but “between the modern world and the Christian world,” between
the “totalitarian spirit and the Christian spirit.”91 Since he defined the West
as “a region of the human spirit” rather “than a region of the world,” that is
as a spiritual region whose main characteristic was its Christianity, that is its
Catholicism, it was a priori impossible for the United States and for the Soviet
Union to be anything else than menaces to the West, as Massis understood it.
This helps explain why, despite Massis’s anticommunism, his works were not
very popular in the United States and Custine’s translators pretended to have
nothing to do with his edition from Custine. Massis’s works could get into cir-
culation only after being filtered and pasteurized according to the Cold War
cultural priorities and public orthodoxy of the United States. Thus, while the
reviewer of Foreign Affairs found Découverte de la Russie useful for pointing
out “in Soviet policies plenty of things for ‘Westerners’ to worry about,”92 the
fbi analysts considered that Massis was actually spreading Soviet propaganda.
This is, at least, the picture that emerges from the fbi files on the Romanian
industrial tycoon Nicolae Malaxa, who came to control de heavy, railway, and
armament industries in interwar Romania. He was also president of the Ford
Motors Romania, and financed the Iron Guard. During the war, he collabo-
rated with Hermann Göring’s Reichswerke, serving the war efforts of a Roma-
nia allied with the Axis Powers. Following the rigged elections that brought to
power in March 1945 Petru Groza’s Soviet-controlled government, Malaxa tried
to escape from Romania and, on 29 September 1946 he arrived in New York as
part of an unofficial delegation of the us Chamber of Commerce in Romania.
Once in New York, Malaxa was denounced by the lawyer Pamfil Rioșanu, Petru
Groza’s former private secretary and the former counselor of the Romanian
legation in Washington, as the financial backer of the “Communist members
of the Romanian Mission in the United States.”93

92 Robert Gale Woolbert, “Recent Books on International Relations,” in Foreign Affairs 24:
3 (April, 1946), 550–564, 559. The same reviewer noted that Massis’ Allemagne d’Hier et
d’Après-demain was a “warning that the spirit of aggressive German nationalism is any-
thing but dead, in part thanks to divided councils among the occupying Powers” (Wool-
bert, “Recent Books on International Relations,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Jul., 1950),
pp. 676–692, 683).
93 SpecialCollection/nwcda6/152/malaxa, nicolai vol. 1/malaxa, nicolaI vol.
1_0042.pdf, Document Type: SPECIALCOLLECTION [1], Collection: Nazi War Crimes

Writing the society column for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal
American under the pseudonym of “Cholly Knickerbocker,” the Russian-Italian
émigré count Igor Cassini informed his readers with newsreel voiceover shrill-
ness and gossip column accuracy that Romanian “Reds” such as Viorel Tilea
and Malaxa worked for the “Reds” in Bucharest under the very nose of the
American authorities: “Here in New York Tillia renewed old acquaintances and
associations with Nikola Malaxa, his former boss. Both characters are engaged
in financial deals with the Romanian Red Govt. Their main task is to procure
u.s. dollars for the Reds in Bucharest and both seem to be doing very well.
How long is Uncle Sam going to be a sap and let things of this sort go on under
his very nose?”94 In fact, Tilea was an Anglophile National Peasant politician,
an anti-fascist with an impeccable democratic pedigree and strong bipartisan
connections at the top of the British political world.95 Malaxa, for his part, had
to buy his entire family’s way out of Romania with various gifts made to Ana
Pauker, Mihai Ralea and other leaders of the Soviet occupied R omania. After re-
settling in the United States, Malaxa started to finance various a nti-Communist
publications, such as Luceafărul (1948–1949), edited by Mircea Eliade, a literary
journal that specialized in denunciations of the “Russification” of Communist
Romania and in cultural essays on the ontological opposition between the “Ro-
manian soul” and “Slavism,” the latter being described not as an expression of
Eastern Europe, but as a violent manifestation of the “unknown steppes” and
of the “unbridled avalanches of the Asian world.”96 Malaxa also established
contacts with us anti-communist circles, and Allen F. Dulles would even con-
template in 1947 becoming Malaxa’s lawyer.97 Malaxa also entered in busi-
ness with Richard Nixon, who would be attacked later, during his presidential
campaign against jfk, for his connections with “fascists” and “Nazis” such as
Malaxa.
But in 1948, Malaxa was scrutinized by J. Edgar Hoover’s men for his alleged
subversive activities in favor of the Bucharest “Reds.” Thus, even Malaxa’s de-
sire to pay for the translation and publication of Massis’s strongly Russophobic
and anti-Communist Découverte de la Russie was regarded by the fbi not as an
eclassification Act [2], Document Number (foia) /esdn (crest): 519b7f9d-

D
993294098d513a06, 45 pages, 1–6.
94 New York Journal American, January 6, 1947, p. 6.
95 Sidney Aster, "Viorel Virgil Tilea and the Origins of the Second World War: An Essay in
Closure," Diplomacy and Statecraft 13:3 (September 2002), 153–74.
96 See Mihaela Albu, Presa literară din exil; Recuperare și valorificare critică 2 vols (Iași: Tim-
pul, 2009), 1:159.
97 Raoul Bossy, Jurnal (2 noiembrie 1940–9 iulie 1969) (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică,
2001), 344.

166 Platon
Eastern European émigré’s desire to publish materials that, in his opinion, may
help enlighten the American public about the danger of Communism, but pre-
cisely as Soviet propaganda: “It is reliably reported that during the early part of
February, 1948, Malaxa caused a translation to be made of the French language
book, ‘Discovering Russia,’ by Henri Massis, which was originally published in
Canada by Lardanchet. The theme of this book is anti-Russian and deals with
a third World War to be fought between the u.s.s.r. and the United States as
the principal contenders. There was no known reason for Malaxa’s desire for
the translation other than an expression of an opinion on the part of Malaxa
that such a publication reflected the recurrent imperialism in Russia with new
masters in place of the old, but in effect it amounted to Soviet propaganda
in that it reflects their achievements since the revolution.”98 As this example
suggests, in the early stages of the Cold War, anti-Sovietism could not exist by
itself, independently from a larger American patriotic paradigm. Even if anti-
Soviet, Massis’s book smacked to the vigilant fbi agents of defeatism and So-
viet subversion when put in circulation by somebody like Malaxa, suspected of
sympathies for the “Reds.” Even if Massis’s opinion that Soviet expansion was
merely another stage in the unfolding of the eternal Russian imperialism – with
new, ideological, masters taking the place of the old, landowning, ones – would
become a staple of the American Cold War literature on the Soviet Union, the
American authorities considered it suspect in 1948.
Yet, these same ideas would be reinforced on a wide scale among the us
public opinion by the publication of Phyllis Penn Kohler’s translation of Cus-
tine’s letters from Russia under the title Journey for Our Time. The Russian Jour-
nals of the Marquis de Custine (1951). Far from being the work of a dubious East-
ern European émigré, the enterprise bore the stamp of the wife of Foy Kohler,
director of the Voice of America and Dean Acheson’s undersecretary, and of
General Walter Bedell Smith’s, that is, of the chief of the cia at the time of the
publication of this book. Kohler was responsible for the editing and the trans-
lation of the book, while Smith was responsible for its promotion. In terms of
editing, Kohler purged seventy-eight percent of Custine’s text, including most
of the Catholic content, inserted chapter titles that were not there and which
read like headlines from Hearst’s Red-baiting press, and carefully ended each
chapter with the most terrifying passage she could find in the original text.99
This re-packaging of Custine’s book served the book well with the popular
98 “malaxa, nicolai” Vol. 1, 17.

99 See Mary Carol Matheson, “Tartars at Whose Gates? Framing Russian Identity through
Political Adaptations of Nineteenth-Century French Works by Astolphe de Custine and
Jules Verne,” m.a. Thesis, University of British Columbia, December 2007, 9–21.

press, Life Magazine featuring in 1951 “both the Rosenberg trial and substantial
excerpts from the Kohler book, along with a full-page color advertisement en-
couraging enlistment in the American forces, placed amidst the passages tak-
en from Custine.”100 The list of chapter titles concocted by Kohler transformed
Custine’s book into a B-movie script outline, appealing to all the clichés of the
genre, from the titillating horror of Cold War sf movies with alien invaders,
“body snatchers,” or faux-sf Evangelical movies such as Red Planet Mars to the
lurid, fbi inspired docudramas on the double life of us Communist spies and
saboteurs: “My first forebodings,” “I laugh off the warnings of an innkeeper,”
“The dead seemed freer than the living,” “A world of illusion,” “The customs of
the nomadic races will prevail for a long time among the Slavs,” “The secret life
of Russia,” “A nightmare of things to come,” “Asia stomped the earth and out of
it came the Kremlin,” “The citadel of specters,” and so on, in the same vein.101
After listing up in such a “spooktacular” way the contents of the book, Kohler
introduced a short note (dated 15 February, 1951), in which she claimed that she
did not use Massis’s edition (although according to Matheson’s comparative
analysis of the two editions, she did), and that she discovered the book while
being assigned to the American Embassy in Moscow between February 1947
and January 1949, partly under Smith’s ambassadorship there (1946–1948). In
1950, while at General Smith’s “with a few of our old Moscow companions,”
the conversation reverted again to Russia and to Custine, and somebody asked
why is the book not translated into English. In fact, in that same year, Smith
published his autobiographical account of his three years as us ambassador in
the Soviet Union, My Three Years in Moscow (1950), in which he repeatedly cit-
ed Custine in order to explain the characteristics of the Russian behavior and
the inner workings of the Soviet society.102 Kohler claimed that she undertook
the translation while trying to answer one of her friends’ questions about the
Soviet Union and found that Custine’s book prophetically offered a “century-
old analysis of our current experiences” with Soviet Russia.103
Smith’s introduction reinforced these ideas, that the book was a gem hith-
erto known only to insiders (diplomatic personnel, intelligence officers) and
that it was being made available to the general public only because it answered
so well the questions and explained so well the experiences that those insiders
had while living in the Soviet Union. Bedell Smith translated Custine’s book
100 Matheson, “Tartars at Whose Gates?,” 14.

101 Kohler, ed., Journey for our time, v–viii.
102 Walter Bedell Smith, My Three Years in Moscow (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1950), 70,
177, 183, 306–307.
103 Kohler, ed., Journey for our time, 3–5.

168 Platon
in language the readers were familiar with from tv and newspaper headlines.
Thus, in the unrelenting rhythm of a newsreel or propaganda short, Bedell
Smith introduced the author to its readers in a shamelessly anachronistic way:
“The readers of this journal are about to share a most thrilling and enlighten-
ing experience – acquaintance with the Marquis de Custine. Here are colour-
ful, dramatic, and accurate accounts of Russia and the Russians. Here is the
first ‘fellow-traveler’s’ confession of disillusionment with a god that always
failed.”104 Smith took care to mask the contradictions of his text by careful
editing, by hitting the reader with a succession of powerful presentist clichés
presented in close-ups, tightly cropped, in order to enhance their emotional
power and to keep the reader from noticing that the overall effect is that of
nonsense. Indeed, Custine as a “fellow traveler” made sense, as Bedell Smith
explained on the next page, only “in a sort of reverse sense,” as long as Cus-
tine went to Moscow as a conservative religious counter-revolutionary, and
returned as “a partisan of constitutions.”105 But Smith did not stop to ponder
these differences, since what he was getting at was that the story of fellow trav-
elers such as Custine, André Gide, Arthur Koestler (who endorsed the book),
and Ignazio Silone ‘demonstrate that Russian despotism, whether viewed from
the right or the left, is repugnant to the ideas and ideals of our civilization.”106
It looks as if Bedell Smith introduced the theme of the radical otherness of
the Soviet population, leadership and “mind” only because it was the only way
in which he could cast the Russians as absolute enemies. Speaking of Stalin’s
“Oriental mind,” he could safely oppose it to the “Anglo-Saxon tolerance of op-
position and temperate approach to the solution of major national and inter-
national problems.”107 In theory, both the us and the Soviet Union claimed to
want to achieve happiness for the common man and world peace. Therefore,
Bedell Smith derived the moral superiority whose monopoly the Free World
led by the u.s. could not claim on political grounds from the ontological con-
flict between two types of “minds” or “souls” or ethnic psyches: the Western
one, and the “Oriental” one. In the end, Bedell Smith appealed to the argu-
ments of a psycho-analyst, Ernest Jones, to prove that the “violent” behavior
of the Soviet leaders toward the West was the result of a psychosis.108 Bedell
Smith explicitly talked about the “analogy” between Custine – who himself
“psychoanalyzed” the sado-masochistic relationship between the Tsar and the
104 Walter Bedell Smith, “Introduction,” in Journey for our time, 7–20, 7.
105 Smith,’Introduction,” in Journey for our time, 8.
106 Smith,’Introduction,” in Journey for our time, 8.
107 Bedell Smith, Mission to Moscow 1946–1949, 51.
108 Bedell Smith, Mission to Moscow 1946–1949, 298–299.

Russian masses – and Jones to point out that the Russians were “inexorably”
driven by “their ancient heritage and their modern anxieties toward the abyss
of war and conquest.”109
More than a battle of ideologies then, the conflict between the Soviet Union
and the West was a cultural and civilizational clash that had little to do with
the political divisions between right and left, and everything to do with onto-
logical differences between the West and the alien Soviet Union. Practicing a
sort of amateurish, civil servant/imperial official anthropology that was clearly
a throwback to the nineteenth-century heydays of European colonial expan-
sion and American “manifest destiny” ideology, Smith proposed to underscore
the Russian specificity not in order to understand how that specific way of
dealing with life made the Russians similar to the West, but in order to onto-
logically insulate them in a debased, impure otherness, very low on the ladder
of cultural evolution. Thus the Russian people were “different because wholly
different social and political conditions have retarded and perverted their de-
velopment and set them apart from other civilizations.”110 The Russians were
thus not merely “retarded” from a cultural evolutionary point of view accord-
ing to which everybody had to go through the same stages of development as
the West, they were “perverted.”
While Custine deplored the cultural poverty of Russia, which he attributed
to the fact that Russians had missed the Middle Ages, the Crusades, and the
chivalric ideal, Smith, writing for a generally Protestant public, skipped the
reference to the Catholic Romanticism of the Middle Ages, and argued that
Russians were the result of “slavery” and “abject ignorance” because they
missed the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Exploration and Dis-
covery, and the Industrial Revolution.111 Since they did not go through these
stages, the Russians “had a completely different cultural background from
that of the Western world.”112 They were devoid of the “ideas and ideals” that
formed the cultural backbone of the West, such as the Greco-Roman “respect
for the individual and the concept of the state as his servant,” the Judeo-
Christian heritage, or, in Smith’s words “the ethical heritage derived largely
from the recorded experience of an ancient and advanced civilization in
the Holy Land incorporated in the teachings of our dominant religions,” and
the “traditions of individual initiative and independence acquired through the

110 Smith,’ Introduction,” in Journey for our time, 10.
111 Smith,’ Introduction,” in Journey for our time, 10.
112 Walter Bedell Smith, Moscow Mission 1946–1949 (Melbourne, London, Toronto: William
Heinemann, 1950), 276.

170 Platon
exploration and settlement of the world frontiers.”113 In other words, colonial-

ism was, in Smith’s view, constitutive to the Western sense of identity and in-
dividual freedom. Only, whereas Massis saw in colonialism an expression of
Catholic universalism, Smith saw it as the embodiment and training ground of
Protestant individualism. Although neither Custine, nor Massis had any sym-
pathy for what they considered Protestant individualism or national churches
living outside the Roman-Catholic pale, Smith assimilated this Protestant in-
dividualism to the Western civilization. Indeed, as the interwar experience had
proved it, Southern European Catholic corporatism (Italy, Spain, Portugal) and
the Protestant-Catholic social theology that informed Roosevelt’s New Deal
left open the question of the differences between the basic social teachings
of the different strains of Christianity, between Russian Orthodoxy and “our
dominant religions.” It was hard to discern in what ways the American colo-
nization of the West, or the Belgian, French and British penetration of Africa
or Asia, were more favorable to individualism than the Russian colonization
of Siberia. According to us Cold Warriors and European colonial apologists
such as Juin, Soustelle, Kohn, and Strausz-Hupé, the only difference was that
Russia managed to assimilate Asians, and to acquire Asian possessions without
upsetting China or Persia, who looked upon Russia as a polite Asian neighbour,
not as a “white devil” European invader.114 However, Smith was content to use
Custine in order to pit the allegedly typical Asian Russian disregard for the
individual against what Charles Beard had already called the “myth of rugged
American individualism,” reinforced by Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism, a work of perennial popularity among North American
neoliberal and anti-communist Cold War defense intellectuals.
Smith noted that if in Custine’s time all the foreign diplomats in Russia were
regarded as spies, a century later, the Soviet Major General Sarayev, from the
Soviet Military Mission in Moscow, admitted “to us quite frankly that all for-
eign officials” in the Soviet Union were considered “potential spies.”115 Smith
underlined here the continuities between Custine’s Tsarist Russia and Stalin-
ist Soviet Union, but missed the irony of his own progress from ambassador
to Moscow to head of the Central Intelligence Agency that put the cia on
113 Smith,’ Introduction,” in Journey for our time, 10–11.

114 See Hans Kohn, “Reflections on colonialism,” in Robert Strausz-Hupé, Harry W. Hazard,
eds., The Idea of Colonialism (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959, 2–16, 6), and Mircea
Platon, “ ‘Protracted Conflict’: The Foreign Policy Research Institute ‘Defense Intellectu-
als’ and Their Cold War Struggle with Race and Human Rights,” Du Bois Review: Social
Science Research on Race 12:2 (Fall 2015), 407–439.
115 Smith, “Introduction,” in Journey for our time, 11.

the map by restructuring it along military lines, by creating the Directorate

of Plans, and especially by strengthening the involvement of the cia in poli-
cymaking. (International) Communism was, according to Bedell Smith, noth-
ing but “Great Russianism”116 Thus, taking his cue from Custine, Bedell Smith
wrote about Stalin as the “combination of demi-god and loving parent which
the Russian national psychology seems to require,”117 and about the members
of the Politburo as isolated from the outer world and deeply shrouded in their
conspiratorial politics.118 Bedell Smith also appealed to Custine to talk about
the way in which the Soviet government managed to discredit foreigners visit-
ing or residing in the Soviet Union by “playing upon a centuries-old Russian
characteristic” of looking “upon the diplomatic corps, and Westerners in gen-
eral, as envious and malevolent spies.”119 Bedell Smith managed to find fault
even with the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church by noting, in a rather in-
voluntary humorous tone, that, as much as he admired the Byzantine splendor
of the Russian Orthodox liturgy, he “could not help thinking what would hap-
pen if someone, fainting, should drop his candle and ignite the draperies or
the pine boughs with which the [Moscow] Cathedral was decorated.”120 The
continuity was more at the level of the clichés with which American diplomats
operated in, and on the outside world.
After adorning Custine’s book, already boiled down by Kohler to a few pages
of strident B movie titles or tabloid headlines, with an introduction that pro-
claimed the radical ontological alterity of the Russians, whom Smith asked
them to change or face extermination, the cia chief promoted the book in a
very efficient way. On 11 June 1951, the cia deputy director William H. Jackson
sent a list of books on Russia to two visiting Australian newspapermen who, it
seems, required such a bibliography. The two newspapermen in question were
Colin Bednal and Sir Keith Murdoch, the anti-Communist, anti-Labour Aus-
tralian media mogul who created the first media conglomerate in Australia,
owning radio stations, newspapers, and paper mills. Lt Colonel C. B. Hansen,
Smith’s assistant, put together, with the help of the cia librarians, a list of books
on Russia that, beside a few works of popular propaganda - such as Herrymon
Maurer’s Collision of East and West (1951), Salwyn J. Shapiro’s World in Crisis!
(1950), or Walter B. Smith’s own My Three Years in Moscow (1950) –, includ-
ed mainly academic, area studies monographs such as Thomas A. B ailey’s


172 Platon
America Faces Russia (1950), David J. Dallin’s The Rise of Russia in Asia (1949),
Louis Fischer’s standard two volumes The Soviets in World Affairs (1950 [1930]),
Theodore Shabad’s Geography of the ussr: A Regional Survey (1951), the Hand-
book of Slavic Studies edited by L. I. Strakhovsky (1949), Solomon M, Schwarz,
The Jews in the Soviet Union (1951), or George Vernadsky’s A History of Russia
(1951).
Smith found the booklist too academic, and noted that if he were to “lead
someone by the hand to an understanding of the Soviet Union, the path would
be as follows: 1. Three Who Made a Revolution – Bertram D. Wolfe, The Dial
Press. Read only Chapter One, ‘The Heritage’. Then put the book aside and turn
to – 2. Journey for Our Time – (The Journal of the Marquis de Custine, 1839) Pel-
legrini & Cudahy, 1951. 3. Quiet Flows the Don – Sholokhov […] 4. At this point
finish Three Who Made a Revolution, Chapter One of which is the introduction
to the series. 5. Stalin – Leon Trotsky […].” The list was completed by two books
by David J. Dallin (The Real Soviet Russia and Soviet Russia’s Foreign Policy-
1939–1942), together with Smith’s own book of memoirs. The final version of
the recommendation merged the two lists, starting with Smith’s recommenda-
tions: “The following reading is recommended by General Walter B. Smith to
provide a series of accurate impressions curing the epochal periods of Russian,
and particularly Soviet Russian, development. He calls it an unconventional
approach”. The academic books remained on the other list as “excellent,” “if
deeper study is wanted.”121
In other words, Smith replaced the academic literature with books written
mainly by disgruntled fellow-travelers (he regarded Custine as one) and anti-
Stalinist Communists such as Trotsky and, up to a point, Wolfe, who finally
abandoned Communism in 1948. Wolfe was hired in 1950 by Foy Kohler to work
for the Voice of America’s International Broadcasting Unit, as member of the
Ideological Advisory Unit whose assignment was to write radio scripts to be
broadcast by Voice of America in 46 languages in order to counteract Soviet
propaganda.122 Wolfe’s understanding of the history of Tsarist Russia and of the
Soviet Union was shaped by the theory of Oriental despotism, first put into cir-
culation by the anti-Communist Marxist Karl Wittfogel in a 1950 article, before
121 LETTER TO<Sanitized>FROM WILLIAM H. JACKSON, 1 June 1951, Document Type: crest
[1], Collection: crest: 25-Year Program Archive [2], Document Number (foia) /esdn
(crest): cia-rdp80R01731R003100090085-0, Original Classification: K, Document Page
Count: 9
122 Robert Hessen, ed., Breaking with Communism: The Intellectual Odyssey of Bertram D.
Wolfe (Stanford, ca: Hoover Institution Press, 1990), 21–22.

developing it into his magnum opus in 1957.123 According to Wittfogel, the stark
contrast between the democratic West and the totalitarian East was the result
of the vast irrigation systems built by the agrarian societies of the East. These
systems spurred the development of vast state bureaucracies topped by a des-
potic ruler, by an “the agromanagerial despot” that exercised “unchecked con-
trol over the army, the police, the intelligence service; and he has at his disposal
jailers, torturers, executioners, and all the tools that are necessary to catch,
incapacitate, and destroy a subject.”124 According to Wittfogel, the Mongolian
invasions had transferred this model to Russia, where it consolidated itself over
the centuries, from the Tsars to the Soviet Union.125 This reliance on the theory
of “oriental despotism” as a “key” (to use Custine’s word) to the Russian history
is nowhere more evident than in the first chapter of Bertram Wolfe’s Three Who
Made a Revolution. Recommended by Smith as the prolegomena to any study
of Russian history together with Custine’s book, that chapter offered, under the
title “The Heritage,” Wolfe’s survey of the entire Russian history reduced to its
essences, a philosophy of Russian history that professional historians called “a
series of generalizations […] illustrated with a modest number of facts, not all
of them scrupulously verified.”126 Among those unwarranted generalizations
criticized by historians were exactly those explaining the Russians’ love for des-
potism by appealing to Orientalist tropes. Marc Szeftel pointed out that the
cult of the Soviet leaders had more to do with the cult of Il Duce or the Fuhrer,
that is with modern totalitarian practices and means of mass mobilization
than with any backward looking Asiatic/Mongol impulse.127
The publication of Custine’s Letters for our Time met with the lonely dis-
senting voice of George Fischer, a Harvard historian who had lived in the
Soviet Union. Fischer warned against those who treated Custine’s book like
a storehouse of “foolish analogies,” and criticized the mainstream take on
123 See Karl August Wittfogel, “Russia and Asia. Russia and Asia: Problems of Contemporary
Area Studies and International Relations,” World Politics 2:4 (June, 1950), 445–62, and Ori-
ental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1957). See also Marcel Van Der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of
Critical Theories and Debates since 1917 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 171–172.
124 Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, 420–423.
125 See Wolfram Eberhard, “Oriental Despotism: Political Weapon or Sociological Concept?”
in American Sociological Review 23 (1958), 446–48.
126 Marc Szeftel, “Facts of Russian History and Its Philosophy as Viewed by Bertram D. Wolfe
in Three Who Made a Revolution. (A Case Study of Historical Methodology),” American
Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Feb., 1956), pp. 71–85, 78.
127 Szeftel, “Facts of Russian History,” 79.

174 Platon
Custine insisting that: “The vast technological and political changes of the
past century, and they alone, made possible the totalitarian ism of Stalin—a
despotism uniquely modern and tragically closer to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-
Four than it is to Nicholas I, the most authoritarian of Russia’s modern
Czars.”128
Fischer’s cautious tone was swamped by the enthusiasm of defense intellec-
tuals such as Wolfe and Hans Kohn, both of whom wrote for the popular press
very positive reviews of Phyllis Kohler’s translation of Custine’s letters from
Russia.129 For the academic public wrote Bruce Hopper, a professor of Govern-
ment at Harvard, who had served as a Russian specialist in the o.s.s. and who
would go on, under the aegis of Bedell Smith’s Operations Coordinating Board,
to lecture in various European countries and at the nato Defense College on
topics such as “What has the West to Defend.”130 Writing for the American His-
torical Review, Hopper recommended Massis’s introduction to his 1946 edition
as “extremely useful,” and noted that, despite its somehow dated approach to
Russia, Custine’s book was an essential reading “for the historical clues which
may throw light on three major questions of compelling interest today: Russia’s
role between East and West; the permanent significance of religion; and the
"acceptance" by the Russian people of despotism.”131
In other words, Smith, Kohler, and the entire cultural apparatus they con-
trolled, did not look for a political, economic, historical answer to political
economic or historical questions, but sought instead cultural answers to po-
litical, economic or historical questions. This led them to further redefine the
question: the cultural answer asked for a cultural question, and thus the So-
viet “question” became a cultural one, one that could be answered by pitting
two philosophies of history/two anthropologies (the Western Greek/Roman-
Judeo-Christian individualist ethics versus the Asian/Mongol restlessness and
massification) or two types of society (the Western free/“open society” versus
the Eastern or generically “Other” tribal/anthill or closed society), or two types
of economies (the free market versus the “Asian mode of production”). But in
framing the Soviet question as an eminently cultural one, the Cold Warriors
128 George Fischer, “Russian Visit – 1839,” The Saturday Review 14 April, 1951, 42–43 and 56, 56.
129 Hans Kohn, “Eternal Russia,” The New Republic 21 May 1951, 19, Bertram Wolfe, New York
Herald Tribune, 1 April 1951.
130 Document Type: crest Collection: crest: 25-Year Program Archive Document Number
(foia) /esdn (crest): cia-rdp80R01731R003000050001-7, Original Classification: S Doc-
ument Page Count: 18 Sequence Number: 1 Publication Date: November 1, 1953, p. 10.
131 Bruce Hopper “Review: Custine and Russia--A Century After: A Review Essay. Reviewed
Work: Journey For Our Time: The Journals of Marquis De Custine by Phyllis Penn Kohler,
Walter Bedell Smith,” in The American Historical Review 57: 2 (Jan., 1952), pp. 384–392, 391.

joined the interwar fascists and rightwing thinkers who explained everything
as a “spiritual crisis” requiring a cultural/spiritual answer.132 The cocktail of
biographical anecdotes and ominous generalizations that characterized the
writings of Trotsky, Wolfe and Custine recommended by Smith, by focusing
on the personality of the leader (the tsars or Stalin) and on his rapport with
the “masses,” reduced the history of the Soviet Union to a history of a certain
human type (the Oriental despot) and of the symbiotic relationship between
the Sadistic oriental Ruler and the Masochistic masses whose love of suffering
was just a symptom of their love for military expansion at the expense of the
stable and civilized Western civilization. This reduction of the Soviet history
to a mere stage in a history of Russia understood in psycho-sociological terms
fit very well the paradigm of “area studies” developed during the Cold War,
one that coupled cultural evolutionist theories about certain universal “stages
of modernization” with self-serving ideas about cultural patterns that predis-
posed to backwardness or to modernization, and with the constant pathologi-
zation of any resistance to us or Western interference in the domestic affairs of
Latin American, African or Asian nations.133 By stressing the importance of in-
dividual psychological characteristics Cold War defense intellectuals recycled
the arguments of a modernization theory that both confirmed the exemplarity
of the American society and path to development and denied the responsibil-
ity of Western colonialism for the poverty of former colonial areas, including
Asia with its “Asiatic despotism” and “Asiatic mode of production” allegedly ad-
opted by Russia.134 Like Custine and Massis, many Western European and u.s.
Cold Warriors would fear and mistrust the “peasant masses” – Russian, Asian,
African, Latin American, and even American, such as the Southern Blacks or
the Appalachian whites – and would always talk about the “obscure,” violent,
primitive, tribal, shifty peasant masses, a viscous human, or rather biologi-
cal, continuum posing a threat to the law and order of the very humane and
individual-worshiping West.135
132 See Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and
Hitler (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-
Enlightenment Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Presss, 2010).
133 See Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy. Culture and Politics in the Military-
Industrial Complex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Harry Harootunian,
The Empire’s New Clothes. Paradigm Lost, and Regained (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press,
2004).
134 Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy, 4–10.
135 See, for example, Léo Moulin, “The Europeanization of Mankind,” Orbis 10:4 (Winter
1967), 1091–1102.

176 Platon
4 Conclusion
Divorced from history, Custine and Massis’s generalizations about Rus-

sia could be adapted to us Cold War aims only by severing them from their
Catholic theological roots as well. Indeed, Catholic theologians lost no time
to point out the blatant politicization of Catholicism operated by Massis. In
1928, the Belgian abbot Bruno de Solages, editor-in-chief of La Revue Apologé-
tique mounted a thoroughly orthodox theological critique of Massis’s Défense
de l’Occident (1927).136 Solages pointed out that Massis’s Défense de l’Occident
dabbled in vague generalizations concerning the “Latin heritage,” the “unity,
stability, authority, and continuity” that constituted the intellectual matrix
(“les idées mères”) of the West instead of dealing with concrete historical el-
ements. Bruno de Solage noted that Massis “describes the West by abstract,
extra-temporal qualities, and not by analyzing from a historical perspective
the concrete elements that had, bit by bit, formed it.”137
Yet, Cold War anti-Communist intellectuals and area studies thrived on
vague generalizations about ethno-psychology, on modernization theories
based on presentist and teleological studies of “cultures” intrinsically sympa-
thetic or adverse to industrialization, and on geopolitical speculation. There-
fore, they found in Custine an alleged key to the “real Russia,” to the eternal,
immutable Russia. For example, according to Édouard Krakowski, a Franco-
Polish conservative writer, in order to defeat Communism, the Western world
had to understand “the real” China or Russia.138 Or, “the real” Russia, as Kra-
kowski argued in Chine et Russie: L’Orient contre la Civilisation Occidentale
(1957), a book that won the prize Véga et Lods de Wegmann of the French
Academy, was more “Oriental” than China, because Russian civilization was
the least “classical” or “universal” or “humanistic” of all civilization, that is the
least Western.139 Krakowski found that, had Russia lost its independence in
favor of Poland in 1612–1613, Russia would have had a chance of becoming truly
136 Bruno de Solages, L’Eglise et l’Occident in Irenikon 4:9 (1928). Irenikon was a Catholic
monthly published by the priory D’Amay sur Meuse (Belgium).
137 Bruno de Solages, L’Eglise et l’Occident, 13.
138 Edouard Krakowski, Chine et Russie: L’Orient contre la Civilisation Occidentale (Paris : La
Colombe, 1957), 14. Krakowski published on this topic in scholarly journals, such as Kra-
kowsky Edouard, “Le mystère russe et le secret chinois,” in Politique étrangère 19 : 3 (1954),
pp. 309–316. Some French area studies academic publications took seriously enough Kra-
kowski’s work. See Jean Chesneaux “La Chine contemporaine : État des travaux,” in Revue
française de science politique, 8: 2 (1958). pp. 384–411, 390; Anonymous, “Ouvrages récem-
ment parus concernant les relations internationales,” Politique étrangère 19: 5–6 (1954),
pp. 622–634, 628.
139 Krakowski, Chine et Russie, 49, 22.

Western, since, “dominated by the Poles, Russia would have rejoined Western
Europe,” whereas regaining its independence marked “a regression in its Euro-
pean culture.”140 Not surprisingly, Krakowski attributed the “Oriental” nature
of the Russian civilization not only to the “Asian elements” making up part of
the Russian population,141 but above all to the fact that Russian civilization
was molded by the “sleepy,”142 that is “Oriental,” civilization of the Byzantine
Empire, whose degraded offspring the Russian civilization became.143 Russia,
in its Tsarist or Soviet guise, inherited from the Byzantines the mantle of “Ori-
ental despotism,”144 the “Russian soul” was “oriental because it was shaped by
despotism.”145 As such, Russia became, under the Tsars as well as under the
Comissars, the main embodiment of the “yellow peril” menacing the West.146
Krakowski warned that the “well-known proliferation of the yellow race,” har-
nessed by the crafty Russian or Soviet leaders, could end up by submerging the
West.147 Krakowski played on both the Bergsonian and the Popperian sense of
the words to argue that the Cold War was a battle between the “open society”
of the West and the “closed” society of the East, between Western universality,
best represented by the French culture,148 and Eastern xenophobic national-
ism. If Massis quoted Montegut, Krakowski cited Jules Monnerot to argue that
Russian Communism was similar to Islam, in that any action had to be justified
by the appeal to theological principles.149
Unsurprisingly, among the most important sources of Krakowski’s cultural
philosophical musings was, first, the Russian Catholic convert Vladimir Solovy-
ov, who gave a striking expression of the myth of the “yellow peril” in his testa-
mentary book War, Progress, and the End of History Including a Short Story on
the Anti-Christ (1899–1900).150 Another major influence permeating Krakows-
ki’s 1950s books on Russia was Custine, whose Letters from Russia Krakowski
described as a book that was “loyal, sincere, conscientious, having nothing of
a pamphlet.”151
140 Krakowski, Chine et Russie, 191.

143 Krakowski, Chine et Russie, 18–19.
148 Krakowski, Chine et Russie, 19, 350.
150 Krakowski, Chine et Russie, 327–331.
151 Edouard Krakowski, Histoire de Russie: L’Eurasie et l’Occident (Paris : Deux Rives, 1954),
275. This book was translated in Spanish as Historia de Rusia (Barcelona : Surco, 1956, and

178 Platon
The Custine-Massisian essentialist understanding of the Russian “soul”

paved the way for dangerous misreadings of Soviet policy. For example, the
idea that Russian/Soviet industrialization was always geared toward war and
had as ultimate aim the conquest of Europe prompted Western politicians
and analysts to condemn Soviet attempts in the wake of wwii to rebuild
their industrial base – destroyed by the German invasion – as, in the words of
Walter Lippmann quoting Stalin, “‘a new mighty upsurge’ of power for mili-
tary ends.”152 Based on this apprehensive take on Stalin’s industrial policies,
Lippmann asked the us government to make the development of American
military power their first objective. As Edgar Snow recalled back in 1947, such
“asinine” logic, which confused legitimate national economic reconstruction
with an assertion of military power, was endemic among us diplomats who,
returning from Moscow after the end of wwii, reported that the Soviet Union
was “feverishly preparing for war,” but asked to explain could add nothing more
“except Russian emphasis on increased steel production.”153 Bedell Smith too
assured his readers that “all Soviet economic planning is geared to the pos-
sibility of war; therefore the greatest emphasis is placed on further develop-
ment of heavy industry, much of which is centered in the harder-to-bomb
Urals region,”154 as if Custine’s nineteenth-century theory could have said more
about the industrialization of the Urals than the fact that the Ural region was
very rich in minerals and coal, oil and natural gas, all essential to the develop-
ment of heavy industry.
This brand of politico-theological dogmatism justified the essentialism that
stood at the heart of Smith’s and Massis’s cultural take on history. The argu-
ment is self-propelling, but unfortunately does not lead anywhere. And that
is, in fact, why Custine’s letters were so successful: not because they explained
anything about Russia, but because they explained nothing, because they
allowed the “Russian enigma” to remain untouched, a wide, dark canvas
against which some Cold War luminaries could project the lights of their
spurious knowledge and apocalyptic politics. Although Kennan opposed the
1960). Some academic critics berated Krakowski’s reliance upon “speculative hypotheses
and superficial generalizations” largely “disproved” by events. See : J. L. H. Keep “Historie
de Russie: L’Eurasie et l’Occident. by Edouard Krakowski. Review,” International Affairs 31:
3 (Jul., 1955), p. 388, and L. Genet, “Krakowski (Edouard). Histoire de Russie, l’Eurasie et
l’Occident,” in Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 33: 4 (1955), pp. 945–948.
152 Lippmann quoted in Edgar Snow, Stalin Must Have Peace (New York: Random House,
1947), 63.
153 Snow, Stalin Must Have Peace, 64.
154 Walter Bedell Smith, Mission to Moscow 1946–1949 (Melbourne, London, Toronto: William
Heinemann, 1950), 123.

militarization of containment and sought a political solution to the confronta-

tion with the Soviets, the way in which his own Long Telegram and X-Article
were metabolized by the Washington Cold War elites precluded any such polit-
ical solutions.155 In the end, Kennan himself was accused by hawkish converts
to anti-Communism such as James Burnham of lacking the required degree of
visceral hate of Communism.156
Whereas Kennan’s critique of Communism was considered too pale or ratio-
nal, books such as Custine’s could, with the proper editing, stoke the fire in the
belly of the us crusaders against the Soviet Union and the monolith of “interna-
tional Communism,” which Cold Warriors such as Bedell Smith believed to be
completely manipulated or controlled by the crafty, “Asiatic” Soviet leaders.157
The evil monolith could be successfully confronted, as defense intellectuals
have repeatedly stressed in the first two decades of the Cold War, only by an
equally unified ideological front of the “Free World.” Since democratic debate
over some of the ways and means of waging the Cold War could not be always
openly eschewed, the domestic propaganda was as important for the us Cold
War elites as the foreign one since, as Bedell Smith put it: “We have been too
preoccupied in the past with feeding the stomachs of people while the Soviets
have concentrated on feeding their minds.”158 Feeding the minds of the people
with multiple bowdlerized editions of Custine could not only strengthen their
anti-Russian/Soviet sentiment, but also help defining the “Free World,” a rather
loose coalition of democratic, authoritarian, corrupt, rich and poor Western
European, American and Asian states. The identity of this coalition could be
constructed only ideologically, as opposition to the Communist World reduced
to its “Asian despotic” essences by Custine and his editors.
The game was not new, since even Enlightenment and nineteenth-century
Western European writers and political thinkers used Orientalized images of
Eastern Europe in order to better define the West.159 In this context, Western
European Russophobia has been since the seventeenth-century an organic
part not only of European identity formation, but also of European security
155 Walter L. Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1989), 73–98.
156 Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996), 33–34.
157 Marc J. Selverstone, Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and Inter-
national Communism, 1945–1950 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009), 47.
158 Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The us Crusade Against the Soviet Union, 1945–56 (Manches-
ter: Manchester University Press, 1999), 48.
159 See Wolff, Inventing Easter Europe, and Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 89–115.

180 Platon
discourses. The “Russian other” lurked in these discourses as the “Mongol

barbarian at the gates” of Europe. A second characteristic of these discourses
was that they saw no epistemological flaw in assuming that, when discussing
Russia, historical analogies are not only legitimate, but actually the only ones
that could enlighten the West about the inner mechanisms of Russian politi-
cal life, diplomacy, culture or even economic development.160 As Martin Malia
observed, during the Cold War, not satisfied with the “Oriental” character of
Russia that could be extracted from “Communism alone, some commentators
pursued the roots of the Soviet Union’s otherness back to distinctively Russian
institutions and national traits of character.”161
The theme of the Russian-Asiatic despot seeking to obtain hegemony
over the entire European continent was popularized at the beginning of the
nineeteenth-century by French writers preparing Napoleon’s invasion of

Russia, and then, after Napoleon’s defeat, seeking to delegitimize Russia as part
of the European concert of powers.162 And, since Tsarist Russia was already a
de facto pillar of the European balance of power, French writers such as the
liberal Marquis de Custine or the conservative Viscount de Bonald reconcep-
tualized the balance of powers in cultural terms, thus excluding the “nomadic,”
“Asiatic” Russia, or the Tsarist Europe, from Europe.163 If French Catholic con-
servatives such as Massis inherited this tradition of representing Russia and
revived it in the twentieth century in order to exclude both Russia and the
United States from the ranks of the Western civilization, American Cold War-
riors such as Bedell-Smith used this discourse in order to exclude the Soviet
Union from Europe and make place for Europe into a Free World semantically
dominated by the us.
160 Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: The ‘East’ in European Identity Formation (Minneapo-
lis: Universoty of Minnesota Press, 1999), 65–66.
161 Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press,
2009), 5.
162 Neumann, Uses of the Other, 89–90.
163 Neumann, Uses of the Other, 92.
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Article in Russian History · June 2016

Mircea Alex Platon

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Astolphe de Custine’s Letters from Russia

Astolphe de Custine’s collection of letters La Russie en 1839, first published in France

Cold War – Fascism – Anti-Communism – Christianity – civilization – Orientalism

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/18763316-04302003

Astolphe de Custine’s collection of letters La Russie en 1839, first published in

russian history 43 (2016) 142-180

tsarist authority.”7 However, Kennan’s Puritanism, his quasi-Jansenist figurism8

russian history 43 (2016) 142-180

13 Bradfield, A Russian’s reply to the marquis de Custine’s “Russia in 1839”, xxi–xxii.

russian history 43 (2016) 142-180

deplored what they perceived to be a “Protestantization” of the Church, Catho-

russian history 43 (2016) 142-180

russian history 43 (2016) 142-180

Plon r­e-published Massis’s 1946 edition of Custine, with an introduction by

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from Asia, or to the Russian and German Asiatic “irrationality” or Romanti-

22 Henri Massis, Défense de l’Occident (Paris : Plon, 1927), 1.

russian history 43 (2016) 142-180

26 Massis, Défense de l’Occident, 95.

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and political structures underpinning the extraordinary resilience of Soviet

28 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 7–8.

russian history 43 (2016) 142-180

31 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 156–157

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40 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 40, and Guerre de Trente Ans, 121.

russian history 43 (2016) 142-180

44 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 96–98.

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50 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 144.

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enterprise of industrialization and of developing Russia leads, in fact, to an

56 Massis, Découverte de la Russie, 214.

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67 Massis, “Introduction” to Marquis de Custine, Lettres de Russie (Paris: Le Livre Club du

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70 Custine cited in Massis, “Introduction,” 43.

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77 Custine, Journey for our Time, 42; Massis, “Introduction” 46.

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80 Massis, L’Occident et son Destin, 309, n.1.

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3 The American Connection

88 Massis, L’Occident et son Destin, 39.

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90 Massis, L’Occident et son Destin, 268.

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­eclassification Act [2], Document Number (foia) /esdn (crest): 519b7f9d-

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98 “malaxa, nicolai” Vol. 1, 17.

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100 Matheson, “Tartars at Whose Gates?,” 14.

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109 Bedell Smith, Mission to Moscow 1946–1949, 300.

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exploration and settlement of the world frontiers.”113 In other words, colonial-

Plon re-published Massis’s 1946 edition of Custine, with an introduction by

eclassification Act [2], Document Number (foia) /esdn (crest): 519b7f9d-