“Under the leadership of other leaders, the First World War could have been avoided. In 1914, Europe needed a Bismarck or a Churchill who would have the courage to resist pressure and the ability to see the broader strategic picture. However, the main superpowers had weak, divided, or negligent leaders. Now the US president is encountering a range of Chinese politicians who, much like the Germans a hundred years ago, are very concerned about their country being taken seriously. In the person of Vladimir Putin, Obama is dealing with a Russian nationalist who is both more crooked and stronger than the wretched Tsar Nicholas II.”

Margaret MacMillan, The New York Times, 13 December 2013

Well, say what you like about historians not liking the conditional mood. Margaret MacMillan is a fairly prominent representative of her profession, so she cannot be accused of violating professional ethics in any way. True, historians' talk about “what could have been” rather than “what was” is often treated unseriously. What if Charles I had avoided the Civil War? What would British America look like if the American War of Independence had been prevented? What would have happened if Kennedy had not been shot? What would modern Latvia be like if the Latvian national communists had not been crushed in 1959? These questions are certainly interesting, yet historians still consider them frivolous. Therefore, discussion of them is better suited to living room armchairs, over cigars and cognac – rather than university lecture halls and peer-reviewed journals.

However, such an attitude is not really justified. Let alone the fact that the ability to create more or less plausible versions of alternative history only confirms the level of professionalism of their authors and their grasp of the complexity of a given historical situation. Furthermore: the question of the relationship between “what was” and “what could have been” leads us into the depths of the philosophy of history itself – it is a question about the relationship between freedom, necessity, and chance. Could the different actions of a specific person in a particular historical situation have changed the course of history in the long term? How would we be living now if, after Chernenko, someone other than Gorbachev had been elected General Secretary? Would the USSR still exist? Or: what would have happened if Nicholas II had not abdicated in early 1917? Would an independent Latvia have been established? Most would be inclined to answer: yes, because that is determined by historical necessity. The inexorable logic of history acted through Gorby and Nicholas, so if it hadn't been those specific people, their work would certainly have been done by someone else. But this, in turn, raises the question of human free will. If we are carrying out some hidden plan of history in every action of ours, then what is the point of talking about free choice? And – why is it so difficult to make responsible decisions? Kant, Hegel, and Marx each grappled with attempts to combine this logic of historical necessity with freedom in their own way. In turn, the Marxist Plekhanov, widely read by Latvians, was naively direct about this, claiming something like: the individual is only an instrument of history; their character and peculiarities of will are determined by social background and class affiliation. Therefore, they cannot make a decision other than the one they actually make – and that, then, is the extent of their freedom. In short, history begins to look like a grand conspiracy theory in which people unconsciously play their roles in some all-encompassing drama.

But the trouble is that the opposite option is not much better. If one assumes that human history is formed by autonomous human decisions, it becomes a huge pile of arbitrariness in which it is useless to look for any internal logic. The historian can then only stack facts in a huge heap without any overall connection. In other words, we can collect and describe what “has been”. But we can neither say what “will be” nor what “could have been” – because everything is allegedly determined by human free will. Clearly, this position is no less absurd than the first. In practice, of course, historians end up operating between these two extremes. No matter how closely one might stick to the facts, it is impossible to do without assumptions and probabilities that run counter to the facts. One cannot avoid such assumptions even here in Latvia, where history is mostly still perceived as the “ascertainment of facts” rather than their interpretation. For instance, the late economist Modris Šmulders, who wanted to present Russia with a bill for the Soviet occupation as early as the beginning of the 90s and chose Finland as a reference point, asked the question – how prosperous would Latvia be today if it had experienced Finland's fate after World War II – and made the relevant calculations. In short, considerations of probability can have their meaning and benefit.

Regarding alternative history, good old Ranke has not lost his relevance. To understand a historical event, it is necessary not to evaluate it from the positions of today, but to understand the horizon of possibilities of its participants – what the specific historical character was even capable of imagining, thinking, and what they considered self-evident. If this principle is not observed, one can quickly fall into deep anachronism – for example, blaming Krišjānis Valdemārs for not advocating for an independent Latvian state, or Immanuel Kant for not defending women's suffrage. Such evaluations of the past are unfortunately common, but they are in glaring contradiction with the honest work of a historian. It is roughly the same as if, in two hundred years, someone were to blame today's Latvian politicians for not having solved the country's energy problems by inventing a perpetual motion machine.

In short, history that contradicts facts can also be written honestly and adequately. This can be achieved if we do not attribute our own values, knowledge, and experience to the heroes of the past, but try to understand them within the horizon of their own possibilities. In MacMillan's view, the First World War broke out due to a lack of strong leadership, and if there had been stronger men instead of Franz Joseph, Wilhelm, and Nicholas, it could have been avoided. However, one can argue about that. First, the security alliances of the time were to blame; second, everywhere the public greeted this war with immense patriotic enthusiasm; third, at that moment everyone was convinced that the war would be short and painless. All these things, not just the lack of strong leadership, initiated the massive catastrophe that casts a shadow over the entire 20th century. However, it is hard to blame MacMillan for anything: someone writing in the field of alternative history can always feel freer regarding the “essential” and “non-essential” aspects of historical events. Let us be honest: she does not really want to study the analogy between 1914 and 2014, but rather polemically point to the need for a new Bismarck or Churchill in present-day Europe. And that is a matter of political taste.
Article first published in the February 2014 issue of Rīgas Laiks magazine
Photograph by Benjamin Everett used