What did Lenin do for us? The welfare state, that’s what,

January 21, 2024February 14, 2024Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He is widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century. Yet whilst his embalmed body still lies in Red Square, the real Lenin has been buried by decades of dictatorship and Cold War, and a century of sanctification and vilification.

Lenin speaking to a crowd in Moscow’s Sverdlov Square with Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev beside him, May 1920

In That Howling Infinite has written often about Russian history. So, we couldn’t resist commemorating the centennial of Lenin’s death.

I first became acquainted with him in the fall of 1968 whilst reading politics at Reading University under the tutorship of émigré academic and historian of Russian and Soviet politics Tibor Szamuely. For a while,

Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naïve communist sympathizer and fellow traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him, and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened, and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life). I nevertheless retained an active interest in the history and politics of Eastern Europe.

Szamuely would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, The Russian Tradition, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.

He believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917 – there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure. See The Russian Tradition – Russia, Ukraine and Tibor Szamuely.

Studying Soviet politics, I read quite a few of Lenin’s writings – the mercifully short paperbacks like What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement (1901), Imperialism, the highest state of Capitalism (1917), and The State and Revolution (1917), and Leftwing Communism, an Infantile Disorder (1920), the best title of them all. They cost very little at a Communist Bookshop, in Soho, I think – a source also, of posters from the Revolution and the Russian Civil War. In my Russian phase, I’d even bought a balalaika – though admittedly my purchase was inspired more by its use by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull in a great concert in our hall of residence. I never did much with it and saw it last on the sideboard of my late mother’s house in Birmingham.

I still have those books, in addition to the panegyric 1942 edition of The Truth about Soviet Russia, by famous British socialists (and Stalinist apologists) Sydney and Beatrice Webb, which was everything but the truth, posing the rhetorical question “Is Soviet Communism a New Civilization based on the ethical principle of ‘From each man according to his faculty to each man according to his need’.

Better Read than Dead

Vladimir Lenin has a way of confounding Marxist and indeed other historians for he was that rare thing – an individual and singular instigator of historical change. A hundred years after his death, hagiographies and obloquies continue to pouring off printing presses as once did concrete to erect statues of Uncle Volodya. Even his most hostile critics would be churlish to dismiss his outsized role during the heady months leading to Red October.

The principal protagonist of the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and the brutal and bloody civil war that followed, Lenin served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his additions to the ideology earned their own title: Leninism.

There is near universal consensus that Lenin had no use for “liberalism” in any form, or democracy which he regarded as a bourgeois delusion. He closed down the elected Constituent Assembly, when elections to it rejected his party, at gunpoint. He then proceeded to ban all other parties. He instigated the Red Terror via setting up the Cheka, the prototype KGB and brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands, establishing the apparatus and mechanisms of terror so definitively exploited by Stalin. His administration laid the framework for the system of government that ruled Russia and the USSR for seven decades and provided the model for later Communist-led states that came to cover a third of the inhabited world in the mid-20th century.

As a result, Lenin’s influence was global. A controversial figure, he remains both reviled and revered, a figure who has been both idolized and demonized. Even during his lifetime, Lenin “was loved and hated, admired and scorned” by the Russian people. This has extended into academic studies of Lenin and Leninism, which have often been polarized along political lines.

Back in the day, I admired him for the smooth operator that he was, though I was shocked by his cold-bloodedness. No matter what his sophisticated musings in exile or during 1917 told his readers, he conducted the civil way to à l’outrance. See: Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war. Today, I come not to bury Vladimir nor to praise him – Wikipedia provides a good overview of his life and times, and his legacy. It’s a good source for further reading: HERE

Detail of Man, Controller of the Universe, a fresco by Diego Rivera in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City

I republish below and interesting article from Unherd, my favourite e-zine, on the debatable influence of Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in British politics.

In the immediate wake of World War One, and the outbreak of civil war, Western Allies’ ideological perspective of the conflict was ambivalent. Many, politicians and military alike, were viscerally opposed to Bolshevism and what it stood for, and feared a Red contagion infecting their own countries, a fear that was not unfounded. After the Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in.

Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something, whilst strikes and demonstrations proliferated to be violently put down by the police and army. Winston Churchill alone of his cabinet colleagues wanted a full-on allied intervention and dreamed – some believed he was indeed dreaming but others claimed that he fantasized – of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats.

The concern of His Majesty’s Government with the the Bolsheviks is the theme of series three of the superlative British crime saga Peaky Blinders. It is set in 1924, three years after the civil war, and not long after the fabricated Zionoviev Letter implicating the British communist party and by association, the Labour Party in a seditious plot, instigated a “Red Scare” that saw Britain’s first Labour Government defeated in a general election. Home Secretary Mr WS Churchill employs the services of Thomas Shelby and his Brummie brethren in a devious plot to fit-up and compromise the Soviet regime. The White Russian èmigrés, a cabal of revanchist aristocrats that Tommy has to do business with are an unsavory, unprincipled, bigoted and amoral crew.

The fear of this “Red contagion” after Revolution, saw conservative British governments preempt insurrection by mollifying, co-opting even, and caring for the workers and the disadvantaged. The interwar years saw major strides in universal education, healthcare, and insurance Post-war, all that was left for Labour to do was to extend it to one and all. Already covering some 80% of the population, welfare was brought to the remaining one-fifth of Britain by Clement Attlee and William Beveridge.

I qualify this by noting that the article ignores the trends that emerged in the UK during the 19th century, such as the Poor Law Amendment Act, the Factory Acts and the 1870 Education Act which were built upon during the 20th century.

Historian Anil Pratinav’s writes how paradoxically, Soviet communism unwittingly fortified British capitalism. The unintended upshot of Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests. The same went for the welfare state. Peace was preserved between the classes. Redistribution took the edge off class conflict. What’s more, an educated and healthy workforce proved good for business. Moderately progressive taxation was a tiny insurance premium to keep the workers in working condition and the barbarians at bay.

Lenin might’ve said there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happens – but “these days, barring a few libertarian crackpots, Tory radicals, nostalgics, and campus Marxists, nearly everyone is united in confirming the wisdom of this arrangement. The simple fact is that most Brits like their politics dull.

Lenin’s funeral, as painted by Isaac Brodsky, 1925

Other articles on Russian and Soviet history is In That Howling Infinite has written often about Russian history: Ghosts of the Gulag; The Death of Stalin is no laughing matter; Stalin’s Great Terror; Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism:The Roots and Fruits of Putin’s Irridentism

How Bolshevism built modern Britain

Lenin still haunts our welfare state

Pratinav Anil Unherd, 15th January 2024

Vladimir Lenin has a way of confounding Marxist historians, many of whom generally — and with good reason — attach odium to Great Man History. For he was that rare thing: an individual instigator of historical change. A hundred years after his death, hagiographies and obloquies continue pouring off presses as once did concrete to erect statues of Uncle Volodya. But even his most hostile critics would be churlish to dismiss his outsized role during the heady months leading to Red October.

Yet there is another achievement that Lenin was inadvertently, indeed perversely, responsible for: the Western welfare state. That we rarely recognise this owes to a common misperception. Very many of us regrettably buy that Labour conceit, hawked by spin doctors and court historians, that celebrates Clement Attlee and William Beveridge as the co-fathers of our welfare jstate. But as the historian David Edgerton reminds us, it is in fact the Liberal-Tory coalition of David Lloyd George in the immediate aftermath of the First World War that we ought to be thanking. These were the years when the major strides in education, healthcare, and insurance were made. Post-war, all that was left for Labour to do was to extend it to one and all. Already covering some 80% of the population, welfare was brought to the remaining one-fifth of Britain by Beveridge.

More importantly, it was neither paternalism nor prodigality that prompted these early stirrings of dirigisme. Rather it was red contagion. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in. Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something. That nothing came of it was down to Lloyd George’s unsentimental pragmatism. Many of the workers’ demands were duly conceded, taking the sting out of union radicalism, even as many leaders were put behind bars.

Two years later, Lloyd George’s Bolshevik bugbear was to return with a vengeance, when shipbuilders stormed the Glasgow City Chambers. With hindsight, it is obvious that “Red Clydeside” was never, in any meaningful sense, a harbinger of “Red Britain”: the radicalism of Glaswegian trade unions on either side of the River Clyde was never going to spread to the rest of the country. Yet at the time, the red threat was all too real. “This country was nearer to Bolshevism that day than at any time since,” Lloyd George would later recall of the police and prison officers’ strike. London and Birmingham were spared, but Merseyside had rocked to the sound of rioting and looting. Violence was brought to a halt only when the army was brought in.

It is difficult for us to conceive what the “peace” after the armistice actually looked like. Yet Simon Webb’s 1919: Britain’s Year of Revolutions reconstructs a society teetering on the brink of collapse: soldiers roughing up workers; martial law in Luton; tanks cruising the streets of Liverpool. The Italians call the two years immediately following the war the biennio rosso, and it seems fair to speak of a red biennium in Britain as well. For one thing, it would be impossible to understand British domestic and foreign policy without reference to that singular neurosis of the interwar ruling class. While cavorting with the antisemitic Whites to crush the Reds in Russia, Westminster and Whitehall were at the same time crushing the unruly bolshies back at home. Churchill, then minister for war, put forward the government line with characteristic crassness: “kill the Bolshie, kiss the Hun.”

As it must in democracies, with the stick also came the carrot. Yes, the workers were brutally put down. But they hadn’t protested in vain. Gone were the Gladstonian days of cheese-paring Liberalism. Lloyd George’s Liberals were an altogether different beast: by turns technocratic, interventionist and ambitious. They were, no doubt, building on pre-war precedent, in particular the health and insurance schemes of 1911, and making good on wartime promises, but they were above all trying to make peace with the bad, mad and dangerous Brits on the streets.

To begin with, they gave a great many people a greater share in government, shepherding them from the barricades into polling stations. Universal male suffrage in 1918 enfranchised unpropertied men — that is, two in five men — as well as propertied women over 30. The same year, the Education Act, lobbied by Lancashire unionists, raised the school-leaving age from 12 to 14 to forestall cotton bosses from battening on benighted boys. And in 1919, the Housing and Town Planning Act put in motion the construction of what became that instantly recognisable feature of the British urban landscape: the council estate.

Bettered by Attlee and Harold Wilson, battered by Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron, the early interwar consensus around the welfare state survives to this day. Both under Labour and the Tories, truculent workers with ideas above their station have been shown their place: from Ramsay MacDonald’s disciplining of the “communistic” trade unions in 1924 through Thatcher’s thwarting of the miners in 1984 to Keir Starmer’s disavowal of organised labour in 2024. Likewise, since 1945, both parties have shown a general commitment to public spending around the 40% of GDP mark. Creaking, underfunded, “our NHS” continues nevertheless to be spoken of only in hallowed whispers.

Time and again, our rulers have let slip the real reason why welfare matters. Here’s Attlee in Margate in 1950: “our policy of democratic socialism is the only dynamic alternative to totalitarian communism.” Is it any surprise that two of the most robust welfare states across La Manche were created in societies that boasted a formidable communist presence? The Parti Communiste Français in 1946 counted some 800,000 members, and the Partito Comunista Italiano nearly two million. It is true that the Communist Party of Great Britain never had much to recommend it, but the strength of the post-war British Left — independent of Labour — is undeniable. It was the miners who brought down Edward Heath in 1974.

As with the British welfare state, so with British intellectual life. Our republic of letters would have been a dreary landscape of conformity were it not for the Russian Revolution, which fired three generations of Anglo-Marxists. The interwar years were a time when communists could rise to the very top of the cultural establishment. E.H. Carr, for example, became a leader writer and deputy editor of The Times, a perch from which he preached the gospel of collectivist planning and conciliation with Stalin. His monumental History of Soviet Russia — running to 7,000 pages and 14 volumes — remains the best account of the early years of the revolutionary regime.

Even such a sceptic of the state as George Bernard Shaw was swept away by Russomania. By 1931, with Britain reeling from the Depression, he was singing Stalin’s praises. Fabian gradualism, his old creed, wasn’t going to cut it in the 20th century. MacDonald’s Labour had evidently failed, he reflected in a new preface to Fabian Essays in Socialism. What was needed was “swift effectiveness” — Soviet-style. A trip to Moscow was written up in glowing terms in The Rationalisation of Russia.

In a manner of speaking, the remoter reaches of the ivory tower, too, succumbed to the Soviets. G.E.M. de Ste. Croix inaugurated what was by far the most arresting development in classical studies. A child of empire born in Macau, “Croicks” turned his back on his “thoroughly Right-wing upbringing” on the “lunatic fringe of Christianity” — as he later put it — in the Twenties. A romp across the Soviet Union in 1937 with Intourist, the Soviet travel agency, left him critical of Stalinism but committed to Marxism, on the strength of observing the peasants of the Caucasus. Thereafter, he became a “thoroughgoing Marxist”, tutoring a generation of students at New College, Oxford, who, in their own writings, were to remain alert to class in the classics. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World appeared in 1981.

Such profiles can be indefinitely multiplied. Suffice it to say that most of the smartest minds of the interwar period were on the Left. This would soon change with the emigration of Eastern and Mitteleuropean conservatives to Britain — Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Lewis Namier, Ernest Gellner — producing a more balanced intellectual division of labour. But before that, Left hegemony was unrivalled. John Strachey was undoubtedly among the most important political commentators of the Thirties. His father was the editor of The Spectator for nearly 40 years, and Strachey’s best man was Oswald Mosley, then still on the Left. When Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists, Strachey led some of the largest demonstrations against him.

As it was, the Marxist Strachey lost the battle of ideas to the Liberal John Maynard Keynes, who famously had no truck with communism: “How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and intelligentsia who, with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?” Yet Keynes could do little to prevent one of his Cambridge protégés, Maurice Dobb, from taking up the cudgels for the boorish proletariat.

Communism gained a bridgehead in Cambridge thanks to Dobb, who edited The Plebs, a Marxist magazine, in the Twenties. He extolled Lenin as a “stern realist” blessed “with all the Jesuit’s sincerity and idealism”. By contrast, “non-Marxists” were “as silly as pre-Darwinian biologists”. He helped found the Communist Party Historians Group, and set up Kim Philby — of the Cambridge Five ring of spies — with the NKVD. Later students included Amartya Sen and Eric Hobsbawm, whose own Oxbridge appointments were blocked by Tory dons.

Paradoxically, then, Soviet communism unwittingly fortified British capitalism. The unintended upshot of Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests. The same went for the welfare state. Peace was preserved between the classes. Redistribution took the edge off class conflict. What’s more, an educated and healthy workforce proved good for business. Moderately progressive taxation was a tiny insurance premium to keep the workers in working condition and the barbarians at bay. These days, barring a few libertarian crackpots, Tory radicals, Bridesheady (Saltburny?) nostalgics, and campus Marxists, nearly everyone is united in confirming the wisdom of this arrangement. The simple fact is that most Brits like their politics dull.

Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

Other articles by Anil: The Marxism of Horrible Histories, and Gandhi hasnt aged well. Both are good reads.

I wrote on Facebook regarding his article Horrible Histories, a Marxist plot?,:

“I am a lifelong history tragic and I’ve degrees in history and politics. Now I’ve heard about horrible histories, I’ll have to look further. All history is, in a manner of speaking, storytelling, its validity and verification changing with the perspectives, perspicacity and prejudices of the storyteller. And on a potentially controversial tangent, all history is political – exhibit one is the proliferation of the culture wars and their corollary, the history wars.

If HHs can bring young folk to history and encourage them to learn more, so much the better. From what I read here, the histories are a more detailed and graphic version of that old, corny chestnut 1066 And All That. Which I still dip into now and then, for its perspective on what we’re owecievd back in the day as “good kings” and “good things”. Bad kings were more often than not the stuff of Shakespeare, whilst there were remarkably few bad things. I share the view of one commentator – that Deary is probably no Marxist, but was taught by a history teacher with Marxist leanings. History can and should be fun as well as serious, and not just the bailiwick of crusty academics and history snobs and culture warriors.

There’s a Canadian writer who tells similar stories about world history called Sweary History or The Day Shit Went Down – I’m sure you get the drift. By the way, I highly recommend Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland’s excellent podcast The Rest is History – a gift that keeps on giving. Solid and well researched stories from history’s back pages with bad impersonations , lots of friendly banter, and loads of humorous irreverence regarding assorted shibboleths and sacred cows”.

Sleeping still, in Red Square

Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war

November 14, 2023January 17, 2024Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

… as a policeman, I would say, get hold of a man’s brother and you’re halfway home. Nor was it admiration for a better man than me. I did admire him, but I didn’t think he was a better man. Besides, I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol.

She’d come to Moscow to look for her child. I helped her as best I could, but I knew it was hopeless. I think I was a little in love with her. One day she went away and didn’t come back. She died or vanished somewhere, in one of the labor camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid. That was quite common in those days.

Yevgraf Zhivargo, in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965)

Some books can be unrelentingly bleak and brutal, so grim and graphic in fact that you have to push yourself to finish them. Cormac McCarthy’s odyssey tale The Road is one such. But one doesn’t often say that about history books. Usually it is time, ennui or both that cry “enough, already!” You set it aside, promising to return to your bookmark – but you never do. I persevered with English author and historian Anthony Beevor’s latest foray into Russian and Soviet history, a veritable catalogue of the horrors that men can inflict upon their fellow humans (and yes, the perpetrators are apparently exclusively male and the victims are males and females of many ethnicities). His previous, highly acclaimed books Stalingrad and Berlin 1945 are chilling, but Russia – Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 takes top prize. And finish it I did …

The following is not a review of Beavor’s grim opus as such, but rather a thematic compendium of thoughts and observations derived from or inspired by the book.

Most academic accounts and university courses focus on the ideological and geopolitical dimensions of the origins, rise and consolidation of the Soviet Union, and its ultimate disintegration seventy years later. General public knowledge of the Russian Revolution and the civil war which followed it is relatively limited and cursory, often derived and books like Mikail Sholokhov’s saga of the Don Cossacks, Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home To The Sea, and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Indeed, it was these novels and David Lean’s powerful adaptation of Doctor Zhivago that first attracted my interest in Russia as a school student in Birmingham. I majored in Politics at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, and Soviet history and politics were an important part of my studies. Between those days and today, I’ve read widely about Russia’s history, past and present, and I am familiar with the events, ideas and personalities, their role in the broader and longer tableau of history, and the reverberations that are still felt today.

I have written often in In That Howling Infinite on Russian and Ukrainian history. Although I am no expert, and profess an amateur interest only, I do possess a short and humble pedigree. My tutor in Soviet Studies at Reading was exiled Hungarian academic and historian Tibor Szamuely, Like many refugees from Communism, he was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919 and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers and was called “Butcher Szamuely”. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where Tibor was born, and where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. Young Tibor served in the Red Army, and he too was arrested and sent to a labour camp. Rehabilitated, he served as Chancellor of Budapest University. In 1964, then nearing 40, he was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England.

He would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, The Russian Tradition, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.

Szamuely believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917 – there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure.

You – Bolshevik recruiting poster 1918

Contemplating civil wars

A civil war can emerge from the ashes of a wider, ongoing conflagration when factions or parties dispute the nature and terms of the post-bellum status quo and fracture along political and ideological lines. Many civil wars have arisen from the ashes of a prior war when there are what are perceived as existential issues unresolved and the availability of weapons and materièl and experienced and discontented men to use them.

There is a view that civil war can retrospectively be seen as a crucible of nation, a fiery furnace through which the righteous must walk – an ex post facto rationalization of the Nietzschean paradox of “that which does not kill us makes us strong”. Abraham Lincoln verbalized this in his Gettysburg Address in 1863 on a battlefield where the fallen had been only recently interred. Franco made a similar play as he laid claim to the wreckage that was Spain in the wake of three years of carnage, but then petrified his riven, country in autocratic stone until his death many decades later. The Russian Civil War was not accorded such a nation-building ethos as it was viewed by the Bolshevik victors as the crushing of a counter-revolution against a new world already being born.

Given Russia’s vast expanse, long history of restive regions, and large non-Russian ethnicities – all a result of centuries of imperial conquests – there is always the potential for the disintegration of centralized control and fragmentation. There is a rich history of state collapse following wars, revolutions, system breakdowns, economic crises, and other epochal events. Napoleon’s empire collapsed after his disastrous march on Moscow and subsequent defeat at the Battle of Leipzig. In 1918, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires all collapsed in military defeat. Of course, people, decisions, and policies played a role, but ultimately it was war and the attendant economic and social crises that pushed these states over the edge into political chaos and often violence.

Once thing for sure, civil war, the Hobbesian “war if all against all” (Hobbes was thinking England’s) is undoubtedly the saddest, bloodiest and most visceral of all conflicts. I leave the last words to WB Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

See: In that Howling Infinite, A House Divided – the Nature of Civil War

All fall down …

Revolutions are unpredictable. They never run in straight lines. They reverberate, the shockwaves expanding and impacting on their vicinity, and way beyond. The shots ricochet, like drive-by shootings and crossfires, and you never know who will be hit, where the bullets will come to rest, and who will be damaged or destroyed. Many people will be liberated, and many enslaved. Many peoples will prosper, and many, many will perish. As TS Elliot wrote, “between the idea and the reality falls the shadow”.”

When the Tsarist Russian empire collapsed halfway through the First World War, it was the first of four great empires to disintegrate. By war’s end, the conflict had destroyed the German, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. But unlike these three, though the imperial house perished, the empire it ruled did not disintegrate. A handful of national movements, Finnish, Polish, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian succeeded in breaking free, but most of murdered Tsar’s realm emerged from the convulsions of world war, revolution and civil war within a new Soviet empire, one that still ruled millions of square miles and a multitude of peoples.

The Russian Revolutions – the two in 1917, and a failed rising in 1905 in the wake of the disastrous (for Russia) of Russo-Japanese War – and the civil war that followed can be said to have defined the contours of modern European geopolitics, setting the stage for the Cold War and also, the current Ukraine war. The 20th Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”.

The USSR was officially declared in the Bolshoi Theatre on 30th December 1922. Most people find this slightly surprising, because we assume that the Soviet Union must have been proclaimed immediately after The Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917. In fact, it only came into existence after a horrendous civil war that killed an estimated 10 million people, in which the deep national and ethnic tensions inside the old Russian Empire had been laid bare for all to see.

Historian Orlando Figes says in his seminal book about the Bolshevik revolution, A People’s Tragedy, that the failure of democracy in 1917 was deeply rooted in Russian culture and social history and what had started as a people’s revolution contained the seeds of its degeneration into violence and dictatorship.

In Russia, the revolution of February 1917 did not provoke a counterrevolution. The initial absence of any attempt to fight back was illustrative not so much apathy, as a feeling that there was very little of the ancien regime left that was worth defending. The overthrow of the czarist regime prompted a variety of reactions amongst the former ruling class: a resignation to events, bitterness at the incompetence and obstinacy of the Imperial Court, yet also an initial optimism among its more liberal and idealistic members. Most of the nobility and bourgeoisie supported the Provisional Government in the hope that it would at least restrain the worst excesses and keep the country together.

Soon after the November 1917 revolution, Lenin made it clear to the Bolsheviks that civil war was necessary to cleanse Russia of reactionary forces and old ways and to rebuild as a communist state and society. Moreover, he was confident that the Bolsheviks’ example would ignite revolution in the countries of Western Europe. German and Hungarian communists obliged, establishing people’s republics, which in turn invited counter revolution, the ousting of the revolutionaries, and reactionary military and police exacting bloody revenge on any leftists that could find.

The determination to resist only crystallized when the Bolshevik programme in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 polarized opinion. The question is important when it comes to the origins of the Civil War itself, which led to the deaths of up to 12,000,000 people, the impoverishment of the whole country, and suffering on an unimaginable scale.

In June 1918 the Bolshevik regime was enjoying a brief respite from the rigors of revolution and civil war. Although surrounded on all sides by hostile forces, the Bolsheviks were in no immediate military danger. This welcome hiatus, lasting from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) to the collapse of the Central Powers at the end of the year, allowed the Bolsheviks to consolidate their political and military strength.

In an uneasy alliance with the Bolsheviks were leftwing Socialist Revolutionaries who still dreamed of a constituent assembly and the anarchists who regarded Brest-Litovsk represented the watershed of the Revolution. In coming to terms with the Central Powers, the Bolsheviks had paid a staggering price in territory and resources. But, more importantly, they had preferred to make a pact with the imperialists rather than attempt to propagate the Revolution through popular initiatives, in particular, by partisan warfare.

Shortly after Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks turned against their erstwhile allies. The Cheka (the successor to the Czar’s Okrana secret police and the precursor to the NKVD, the KGB and the FSB) ostensibly created to suppress counterrevolutionaries, was unleashed on the Bolsheviks’ critics on the left. There were fierce battles between Chekists and anarchists in Petrograd and many other Russian cities.

It was game on.

It is difficult to comprehend to scale of the civil war that broke out in Russia in terms of its territorial extent, the numbers of nations and would-be states engaged in the conflict, and the destruction and carnage it wrought to soldier and civilian alike. Nor the ongoing relentlessness. Western European invaders had been defeated in the past (and indeed, the future) by what Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general who defeated Napoleon, called General Winter, but within the empire and its Soviet successor, weather did not stop play. Certainly, it complicated military operations, played havoc with logistics and supply-chains, and inflicted indescribable suffering upon soldiers and civilians. And the war went on …

The last of the Romanovs – Tsar Nicholas and his family, murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918

Revolution and reaction

If Lenin was politically flexible with foreign powers, he was ruthless with his own people, including rival parties on the left. He grabbed power when the hapless provisional government lost its way in setting up a constituent assembly that was intended to be a democratic representation of all Russians. Lenin initially paid lip service to the assembly, while calling for power to go the “soviets” – people’s councils. In reality he had no intention of allowing any diminishment or oversight of his control of the Bolshevik party and, through its Council of People’s Commissars, the battered Russian state.

But no sooner had the Bolsheviks cemented their rule than they were fighting a civil war on multiple fronts against a mind-boggling array of enemies, stretching from revolutionary socialists and anarchists to unreconstructed “White Russian” tsarists, nostalgic for a corrupt and flagrantly unjust regime and in between the Reds and Whites were the Greens or Partisans, mainly deserters from all sides who hated both Reds and Whites and attacked both, increasingly so as the war continued. And a range of foreign powers dealt themselves into the game to further their own strategic and ideological interests. [the featured picture of this piece is an idealized manga depiction of charismatic Ukrainian anarchist and Green Nestor Makhno, a larger-than-life figure who miraculous survived the civil way and died in his bed in exile]

The Whites were a confused, fractured and often dysfunctional coalition with rapid changes of command occasioned by personal ambitions and fluctuating military fortunes. White generals were committed to restoring the integrity of the Russian Empire, a self-defeating handicap that alienated potential allies on the fringes, like Finland, the Baltic states and Poland. Churchill underestimated this imperial obsession which prevented the alliances he wanted to defeat the Bolsheviks. The Greater Russia obsession also hampered efforts in the Caucasus where Georgians stirred regions like Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan, giving Britain nightmares of Bolshevism spreading through Central Asia towards India, an obsession that continued through the twenties as described in Peter Hopkirk’s Setting the East Ablaze – Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia.

Out on the edge of the old empire, White warlords endeavoured to carve out kingdoms for themselves. Many commanders spent more time terrorizing locals than fighting the Red partisans who were operating behind enemy lines across the war zone, creating a legacy and tradition the persist to this day.

The diffusion of opponents played into the Bolsheviks’ hands, as their differences were so extreme that a unified opposition fighting force was never a viable option. But if the battle lines were often blurred, the hatred felt by the combatants for each other was nightmarishly vivid.

The White’s defeat in the civil war wasn’t for lack of outside moral and materiel support. It was due largely to their inflexibility, including their refusal to contemplate land reform until it was far too late, and their refusal to grant any autonomy to nationalities of the Czarist Empire. Their administration was so useless that it’s barely existed. Paradoxically, they lost for reasons very similar to the way the Republicans lost the Spanish Civil War two decades later. In Spain, the antifascist alliance of the Republic could not prevail against Generalissimo Franciso Franco‘s disciplined and militarized regime. In Russia, the utterly incompatible alliance of socialist revolutionaries and reactionary monarchists didn’t stand a chance against the single-minded Communist dictatorship.

A leftist libertarian with St. George’s Cross, and a Sister of Mercy nurse, 1916.

World War 1.2

It in many ways it became World War 1.2. The idea of a purely Russian Civil War is misleading simplification, prompting one historian recently to describe it instead as ‘a world war condensed’.

It was waged across European and Asian Russia, including present day Belarus and Ukraine and the successor states of the Soviet Union in the Baltic, the Caucasus, and Central Asia – from Warsaw and Eastern Europe to the Urals and eastwards through the vastness of Siberia’s forests, deserts and tundra to Vladivostok in the Far East, from the arctic north to Crimea and the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the borders of what in 1918 ceased to be the Ottoman Empire. Fronts stretched for thousands of miles and advances and retreats likewise. The Trans-Siberian Railway, stretching the length of the former empire from Moscow to Vladivostok, was almost six thousand miles long, and it’s tributary lines served as strategic and logistical thoroughfares for all protagonists who weren’t mounted like the innumerable Cossacks tribes and the nascent Red Cavalry, bringing to prominence the armoured trains that became a symbol of the revolution.

It drew in most of Russia’s contemporary neighbours and more far-flung nations, including The USA, Britain, France, Germany Italy and Japan – the latter providing the largest contingent, estimated by British Intelligence as some 85,000 soldiers, more than many of the various White armies. Combatants included soldiers from these countries, the British dominions of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and India, and Chinese and Mongolian troops. And a multitude of ethnicities fought for their own warlords, their national place in the sun or else their very survival. Caught up in the transcontinental maelstrom were Slavs, Cossacks, Tartars, Turkmen, Arabs, Azeris, Persians, Turks, Armenians, Chechens, Kazakhs, Buryat Mongols, Kalmyks (Europe’s only Buddhist nation) and Jews. White divisions were augmented in Siberia by Mongolian, Chinese, Uighur and Kirghiz mercenaries.

Various nationalist movements arose, successfully and unsuccessfully in all parts of the former Russian Empire. The aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Russian Empire saw Polish, German, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, and myriad other nationalities fighting for disparate sides, and Beevor skillfully frames the bizarre impact of this on the ethnic nationalist dimensions of the conflict.

The scale of military manoeuvres was unprecedented, as were the physical and supply difficulties over vast distances, and the extremities in climate, particularly the bitter Russian winter. The conflict became very much a cavalry war and indeed, a “railway war” notable for its armoured trains and the logistical lifeline of the Trans-Siberian Railway, protected for much if the conflict by the Czechoslovak Legion, a force of Czech and Slovak nationalists who having fought in the Czarist army, joined the Whites who controlled many towns in Siberia.

In addition to the Czechs, there was also a Polish Legion operating in the Far East. The commanders of both forces became increasingly disenchanted with the White officers who refused to countenance the independence of the border states and who shocked many with their brutality towards prisoners and civilians, and though thousands of miles from Europe, demanded repatriation – ostensibly by sea from Vladivostok.

Western Allies’ ideological perspective of the civil war was ambivalent. Though many, politicians and military alike, were viscerally opposed to Bolshevism and what it stood for, and feared a Red contagion infecting their own countries, a fear that was not unfounded. In the wake of the Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in. Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something, whilst strikes and demonstrations proliferated to be violently put down by the police and army. Winston Churchill alone of his cabinet colleagues wanted a full-on allied intervention and dreamed – some believed he was indeed dreaming but others claimed that he fantasized – of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats.

British regiments were nevertheless deployed in Siberia and in the Far East as well as the Arctic and Caspian Sea. Royal Navy flotillas blockaded Petrograd in the Baltic, floated up the Volga in the south and down the Dvina in the arctic north, and controlled the Caspian Sea and the waters around the Crimean Peninsula. The Royal Air Force deployed Sopwith Camels and sea planes in surveillance and surveillance missions against the Red forces, who British officers called the “Bolos”. And artillery units and armoured car squadrons were attached to the various White armies.

Wider imperial concerns were in play too. Churchill rang alarm bells as the Reds pushed the Whites back in Siberia and Central Asia, alarming even his reticent cabinet colleagues with prospect of Reds on the borders of the Raj. The Great Game still had over a quarter of century to run before the final whistle blew. In the Far East, Britain and the US, and Reds and Whites alike, were nervous about the designs imperial Japanese was revealing with regard to the resources and the empty lands of eastern Siberia, the island of Sakhalin, the pacific littoral and Manchuria. Intelligence reports revealed that Japanese forces in the region exceeded all others involved, including the warring Russians.

Pogrom

Fratricidal wars are bound to be cruel because of the lack of definable front lines, because of their instant extension into civilian life, and because of the terrible hatreds and suspicions which they engender. The fighting ranged right across the Eurasian landmass was violent beyond belief, especially the unspeakable cruelty of the Cossack atamans in Siberia. Even that archconservative politician VV Shukgin believed that one of the major reasons for the failure of the whites what is a “moral collapse” – that they behaved as badly as their enemy.

There was nevertheless one subtle yet important difference. All too often, whites represented the worst examples of inhumanity, yet on that score, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable. It has been said that their ruthlessness has few parallels in recorded European history up until that time – believing that history was on their side, and that a new world was being created. The almost religious zeal with which they brutalized and killed combatants and innocents alike could be likened to the Albigensian Crusade in the early thirteenth century. [The Crusaders were accompanied by an official representative of the Pope, a French Cistercian monk named Arnaud Amalric. According to accounts written decades later, as the attack began, a soldier asked Amalric how they would be able to tell which Beziers townspeople were Catholics and which were Cathars. Some sources give the alleged quote as “Kill them all, for the Lord knows his own” or as “Kill them all. The Lord knows his own.”]

The focus on ordinary people also means their suffering is brought to the fore. And Beevor is unsparing in showing the chaotic violence of the conflict, and unrelenting in showing the sheer violence of both sides. Reds and Whites are both revealed as more than comfortable burning villages, shooting traitors, suspected or real, and torturing and massacring prisoners, and men women and children caught in the crossfire.

There were many instances of racist violence mainly on the White side – particularly towards Jews. The Whites’ antipathy towards Jews was to some degree due to their perception that most senior Bolshevik were Jewish, but mostly it was that old devil that never went away, antisemitism. The fall of the Romanovs and the ancien regime and the anti-Semitic pogroms they perpetuated continued. Retreat from the major cities brought out the worse in the Whites, with terrible massacres of Jews – although they were not the only perpetrators. Playwright And author Isaac Babel, attached as a correspondent and propagandist to the Red Cavalry on the Polish Soviet front in late 2020 posed the question: “what sort of person is our (Red) Cossack? Many layered: looting, reckless daring, professionalism, revolutionary spirit, bestial cruelty. The population await their saviors. The Jews look for liberation – and in ride the Kuban Cossacks”.

It is estimated that there were some 1300 anti-Semitic pogroms in the Ukraine during the civil war, with some 50000 to 60000 killed by both sides. There were pogroms in Belarus also, but these were not nearly as murderous as in Ukraine. A Soviet report of 1920 mentions 150,000 dead and as many again badly injured.

Churchill was well aware of the effect of the pogroms on public opinion in the West and sought in vain to exert pressure on white leaders to restrain their forces.,

Terror begat terror, leading to greater acts of conspicuous cruelty. After a particularly hard-fought battle in early 1919, a young White horse artillery officer recalled “for the first time since the start of the civil war, prisoners were not shot. There were too many of them”. This did not happen often – and such was the brutality meted out to captives on both sides, shooting was actually a blessing. An Odesa women witness after the fall of the city to the Whites, “Urrrraaa! Four and a half months under these five-pointed star oppressors”. Two days later, Beevor notes, she noted that all the Jews were in hiding. When a city held by the Reds fell to the Cossacks, a a female surgeon observed that fearing a program, two Jewish doctors in her hospital wisely ran to hide in the attic.

Bolshevik leaders and commanders on the field eventually realized that brutality did not endear their cause to the general populace and moderated their behaviour. Some Whites too came to that conclusion, and sought to prevent it at least limit atrocities, but reactionary officers and uncontrollable Cossacks persisted in burning, looting, torturing and murdering, inflicting irreparable damage to the anti-Bolshevik cause. Beevor reports instances when allied forces actually fired on Cossack perpetrators.

The End

As the whites retreated, support for the red army amongst the populace grew, as did its numbers as deserters returned to its ranks encouraged by the announcement of an amnesty and as defections from the White forces grew. Peasants grew less reluctant to serve in the Red Army Fear that with white advances and victory, old landlords would reclaim their land. Success bred success. The Whites’ ranks thinned with desertions defections and the need to transfer troops to defend its rear from attacks by partisans and freelance militias units. The Cossacks, disappointed and tired of war, turned about and headed home to their stanitsas laden with loot. The size of the frontline Red Army was eventually twice that of the Whites, as it eliminated the White armies in the north and east and closed in on the last remaining area under White control, Crimea, where rearguards held out long enough to ensure the evacuation of 150,000 soldiers and civilians by sea protected by the British and French navies.

In the aftermath of total Soviet victory, starvation struck the towns and cities across the land. Food requisitioning detachments scoured the countryside for supplies, their rapaciousness and brutality igniting peasant rebellions from Belarus to Siberia; tens of thousands of peasants rose in revolt, dealing brutally with any Bolshevik that came into their hands. The Red Army and Cheka reciprocated in spades with burning and looting, rape and torture, execution and exile to the emergent Gulag. Workers went on strike in the starving cities, and with the Whites vanquished and the civil war won, the call for democratization of Soviet rule grew louder.

And then, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet at the Kronstadt naval base, who’s guns had heralded the fall of the Romanovs, and whom Trotsky had called “the pride and glory of the Russian Revolution”, rebelled. The regime responded with lies – that the sailors had been suborned and were now Whites – and that White forces in Finland would be crossing the ice to help them. When this didn’t work, I resolved to crush them without mercy, dispatching trustworthy forces against them.

At the end, of 16000 sailors and their families, most were able to cross that ice to final and. But some 3000 fought a last stand and died by assault or firing squad. One of the last cries of protest by the Kronstadt sailors was “All of Soviet Russia has been turned into a Russian penal colony”.

Thus ended the Russian Civil War in November 1920.

… all wars come to an end. And that’s where history restarts.
British war and foreign correspondent Robert Fisk

Evacuees board ship in a Crimean portEpilogue

Epilogue … history repeats

Whilst there were many active fronts during the civil war, often simultaneously, extending for thousands of kilometers, around Archangelsk and Murmansk in the arctic, along the great rivers the Volga, the Don and the Dniester in the south, in the Baltic provinces, and in Belarus, and along the length of the Trans-Siberian Railway. And as during WW2 and the present-day Ukraine war, opposing armies advanced and retreated across Ukraine. Kiev was occupied, often several occasions, by Reds, Whites and Greens, and finally, the Polish Army which invaded Russia and Ukraine in 1920 to reclaim and defend the independence of the onetime Polish state, long divided between the now destroyed Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires. The names of the war-torn cities are today tragically familiar. Mariupol and Melitopol, Karchiv and Kherson. Kiev, Odessa and Lvov are now Kyiv, Odesa and Lviv.

Posts in In That Howling Infinite, about Eastern Europe:

Большой террор … Stalin’s Great Terror

February 27, 2023February 28, 2023Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

You were taken away at dawn. I followed you
As one does when a corpse is being removed.
Children were crying in the darkened house.
A candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God…
The cold of an icon was on your lips
A death-cold sweat on your brow –
I will never forget this; I will gather
To wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy
Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.
Anna Akhmatova, Moscow 1935

I have written often in In That Howling Infinite on Russian and Ukrainian history. Although I am no expert, and profess an amateur interest only, I do possess a short and humble pedigree. Once in another lifetime, I read politics at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. My tutor in Soviet Studies was exiled Hungarian academic and historian Tibor Szamuely, Like many refugees from Communism, he was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919, and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers, and was called “Butcher Szamuely”. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where Tibor was born, and where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. Young Tibor served in the Red Army, and he too was arrested and sent to a Labour camp. Rehabilitated, he served as Chancellor of Budapest University. In 1964, then nearing 40, he was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England.

Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naive communist sympathiser and fellow-traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life). I nevertheless retired an active interest in the history and politics of Eastern Europe.

A few years back, I retrieved from my archive a dissertation I wrote under Szamuely’s supervision in 1970, entitled How Rational Was The Great Purge? Reading it fifty years later, I was surprised to observe that my writing style, the content and the conclusions I drew have changed little over the years. In retrospect the tenor is somewhat naïf but it foreshadows a perspective that I’ve developed over the years of “walking in the shoes of others – contemplating what might be going through the heads of the protagonists, be they the Old Bolsheviks who became the sacrificial victims or Stalin himself. Fathoming the mind of “Uncle Joe”, as the Allied PR departments dubbed him during WWII when he was deemed a friend and indeed a bulwark against Nazi aggression, was a bit of a pretentious stretch for a twenty one year old, even though I did only have an audience of one – and did earn a “first” in Soviet Studies.

A couple of days ago, I pulled it out again to show Adèle, and discovered to my horror that the handwritten foolscap roneo had faded almost to the point of vanishing. In a bright light, I managed to recite it into iPad notes and transcribe it into a fresh document and have now the privilege to publish it in Into That Howling Infinite.

Privilege not pleasure, I must note. It does not make for easy reading.

When it was conceived, my dissertation was written with academic grades in mind, and particularly for Szamuely’s assessment alone. There is little explanation of context and of the events and personalities referred to therein (ironically, in the light of contemporary events, many of whom were Ukrainian and many, Jewish), and chronology was less important than argument. There was a word limit and also no need for explanation as my tutor knew, from his own academic and personal history, what had happened, who was what and who was who – and what became of them.

Most, sadly, did not die comfortable in their beds surrounded by family and friends, and more often than not in dark execution cells or in fields and forests beside their own graves. He was was also very much aware of the victims of the Great Purge and it’s many siblings, so many of them nameless, who perished during the Soviet Union’s two decades of terror, and for the millions – from the Baltic to the Crimea – who were deported en masse from ancestral lands to the Siberian or transported to the labour camps of the distant Gulags, to work, to starve, and to die.

The ordinary reader, of this blog and of world affairs generally is not very acquainted with the history and politics of Russia and the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Much of what casual observers know is learned from wide reading and often filtered through the distorted lenses of unreliable and potentially misleading and false analogies and partisan preconceptions, or worse, uninformed and prejudiced certainties. We see these in full flight in mainstream media commentary and particularly in social media with respect to the current conflict between Ukraine and its powerful neighbour. This article does not discus that conflict, although the reader will certainly see patterns, hear echoes and feel reverberations, for the consequences of events which occurred down the foggy ruins of time do indeed ricochet through history to strike us today.

And so, then, to my resurrected dissertation, which I have edited to include the full names of the principal actor. But first, some historical background to put it into perspective.

‘I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol, Yevgraf Zhivago”

The Great Terror

By strange symmetry, when I retrieved my now faded dissertation, I’d recently reread historian Robert Conquest’s tombstone of a book, The Great Terror, a relentless and harrowing narrative of arrests, trials, fabricated confessions, hostage-taking, deportations, torture and executions as Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Josef Stalin consolidated his rule, eliminated enemies real and imagined, and created his own model of a twentieth century socialist state.

It commenced with the elimination of the Old Bolsheviks, his former comrades in arms in the Russian Revolution of October 1917 (there were two revolutions that year) and the bloody civil war that followed, and then expanded to embrace all in the party and society at large who may or may not have shared his vision. Intellectuals, philosophers, writers, poets, musicians, priests, scientists, academics, teachers, civil servants, workers and peasants, and the Red Army’s Officer Corps – the latter being a contributing factor to the Soviet Union’s need to make a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 and its disastrously slow response to Hitlers invasion in June 1941.

An estimated death toll is difficult to determine. In those dark days, people simply disappeared, and the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB and present day FSI) covered its tracks well. The official number for the “Great Purge” of 1936-38, or “the Yezhovchina”, named for Victor Yezhov, head of the NKVD and Stalin’s lord high executioner, stands at 1,548,366 detained persons, of whom 681,692 were shot – an average of 1,000 executions a day. Various historians claim that the real number of victims could be twice as much.

But the the arrests, executions, and deportations commenced as early as 1930 and continued right up until Stalin’s death in 1953. Conquest, in his The Great Terror: A Reassessment does the gloomy math: 1930-36, 7 million; 1937-1938, 3 million; 1039-53, 10 million. The number of deaths in the Soviet Union that were explicitly ordered by someone – in other words, the number of executions – is actually relatively low at around 1.5 million. The majority of the deaths were caused by neglect or repressive policies – for example, those who died in the Soviet gulags, those who died while being deported, and German civilians and Prisoners of War are believed to have perished while under Soviet guard.

The numbers who were transported, exiled, displaced, and scattered to concentration camps or far-eastern towns and villages were likewise incalculable. as the Yevgraf, the brother of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago comments in the final scenes of David Lean’s beautiful but flawed movie):

“Indeed, as a policeman, I would say, get hold of a man’s brother and you’re halfway home. Nor was it admiration for a better man than me. I did admire him, but I didn’t think he was a better man. Besides, I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol”

… and

“She (Lara) had come to Moscow to look for her child. I helped her as best I could, but I knew it was hopeless. I think I was a little in love with her. One day she went away and didn’t come back. She died or vanished somewhere, in one of the labor camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid. That was quite common in those days”.

There are a myriad of books and films about these events. Wikipedia is as good a place as any to start. Robert Conquest’s is the most acclaimed – and rightly so. Then there is Arthur Koestler’s chilling novel, Darkness at Noon, published in 1940, which recounts the thoughts of an Old Bolshevik as he awaits death in the execution cells:

A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh leather of the revolver belt: but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder-straps of its uniform – and in whose name did it raised the dark pistol barrel?

Both books are cited often in my dissertation.

As for movies, there’s always David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, which realistically albeit melodramatically portrays the choices and compromises confronting ordinary, intellectual Russians in the years of revolution and civil war. And I would highly recommend the poignant but powerful Burnt by the Sun, a 1994 film by Russian director and screenwriter Nikita Mikhailkov and Azerbaijani screenwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov. The film depicts the story of a senior officer (played by Mikhalkov) and his family during the purge of the Red Army.

And there was the poet Anna Akhmatova, whose words open this piece, bearing sad witness to the imprisoned, the deported, the disappeared and the dead – including in their number, two husbands and her only son – memorializing the suffering of herself, her family and millions of her compatriots in her tortured testament, Requiem. Unlike so many of her contemporaries, she died of natural causes in March 1966. Russian born philosopher amd historian Isiah Berlin described the impact of her life:

“The widespread worship of her memory in Soviet Union today, both as an artist and as an unsurrendering human being, has, so far as I know, no parallel. The legend of her life and unyielding passive resistance to what she regarded as unworthy of her country and herself, transformed her into a figure … not merely in Russian literature, but in Russian history in (the twentieth) century”.

Anna Akhmatova, by Amedeo Modigliani

Russia’s Stations of the Cross did not cease with the end of the Terror. Three years later came Operation Barbarossa and the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the rapid blitzkreig that took the Wehrmacht to the gates of Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, and the bloody clawback that brought the Red Army to Berlin and to take captive the peoples of Eastern Europe.

Over twenty five million Soviet citizens died during the Great Patriotic War, of which just under ten million were military. Most died as a direct result of the military conflict that ranged from the Baltic to the Caucasus. But miilions also perished at the hands of the NKVD and in the forced mass deportations of “suspect” peoples, including the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tartars.

At wars’ end, the Terror rolled on, albeit at a lower setting. Josef Stalin remained suspicious, vengeful and paranoid, and the purges continued right up until the moment he departed this mortal coil (as depicted in dubious slapstick in Armando Iannucci‘s recent The Death of Stalin).

Many, many Red Army soldiers who had been taken captive by the Nazis were arrested on their return from captivity. Many were shot for ‘desertion’, and thousands sent to the Gulags. Whether they had surrendered or had been subdued and taken captive, often as fast-moving battle fronts left them stranded, abandoned and entrapped behind enemy lines, they were deemed cowards, traitors and enemies of the Soviet Union and its people. They were moreover doubly damned. Whether from behind the wire of concentration camps or as slave labourers in German mines, fields and factories, they had witnessed, come into contact with, and had been contaminated by the world outside.

In one of his most cited poems, The Caucasus, written in 1845, Ukraine’s national poet, the 19th-century bard Taras Shevchenko, who’d helped build national identity through his verse, which he composed in both Russian and Ukrainian, ridicules Russian expansionism and mourns the immense loss of life it had already wrought. He could have been writing about tyranny, repression and violence all around the world and through the ages:

“We groan beneath the yoke of hangmen while drunken justice sodden sleeps”.

How rational was the Great Purge?

Paul Hemphill, Reading, 17 June 1970

When veteran Bolshevik leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev had demanded reprisals against their comrade Leon Trotsky, party secretary Josef Vissarionovich Stalin replied: “a policy a lopping off heads is fraught with danger … you chop off one head today, another one tomorrow, still another one the day after – what in the end will be left of our party?” (Deutsche, Stalin, 344). Lenin himself and warned “let not blood flow between you” (Ibid 377). Yet in 1932, Stalin was forced to back down when having advocated the death sentence for oppositional activities, he met the opposition of Sergei Kirov and the party. And in 1938, Trotsky was to proclaim that “Stalin is like a man who wants to quench his thirst with salted water” (Fainsod 356j). But not, in Stalin’s view, without reason.

Old Comrades Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev

“We are a country surrounded by capitalist states … The internal enemies of our revolution are the agents of capitalism of all countries. In fighting against enemies at home….fight the counterrevolutionary elements of all countries”. Thus, Stalin attempts to rationalize terror. In his grim novel Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler described “how there were two elements in our party. One consisted of adventurers who wanted to risk all we had won to promote the revolution abroad. We recognized this current to be dangerous and have liquidated it … We stand alone … We have only one duty: not to perish”. The survival of the week and embryonic socialist state in a hostile world depended upon the strictest unity within that state, and no oppositional tendencies could be tolerated. “We have only one duty: not to perish”.

Victor Hugo once wrote: “ Mr Bonaparte’s crime is not a crime it is called a necessity. Mr Bonaparte’s robberies are not robberies, they are called measures of state. Mr Bonaparte’s murders are not murders, they are called public safety”. Here then was Machiavellian rationalism in action. “As long as the capitalist encirclement costs, there will be be wreckers, deviationists, spies, terrorists” (Stalin in Fainsod ibid 356 … and an endless host of counterrevolutionaries, bourgeois nationalists, kulaks or German and Japanese agents plotting the demise of socialist Russia.

Before 1917, the purge been excepted within the party. “Unity of Will” and submission to central authority being vital in the face of Czarist repression. Compromise was comparable to treason, obedience, the highest virtue. After 1917 the need remained in order to overcome inertia, suspicion and ignorance, hostility, subversion and sabotage. Lenin had stressed “better fewer and better”, and the consolidation of the party by the constant self purging of fellow travellers. The class struggle did not cease with Red October.

Indeed, as Lenin had prognosticated in “State and Revolution”, it intensified, as external enemies would find allies in the party. Every step towards socialism met with fierce resistance from within: the trade union dispute, the polemics of Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev. When “enemies” infiltrate into the ranks of the vanguard itself, their suppression is not so easy as envisaged by Lenin’s ideals. In the years subsequent to the Civil War, therefore, constant vigilance and battle was all important. Yet the gradual liquidation of the old Bolsheviks in the years 1936 to 1938 pointed to less exalted motives, those of Stalin, using terror as a means for maintaining a monopoly of party leadership. The problem of reconciling this with the class struggle was solved by identifying any form of opposition to his rule with counterrevolution and espionage.

He effectively wrote the script that others followed. At his trial in August 1936 Kamenev confessed how “we have become fascists, we have organized counter-revolution against socialism. Zinoviev likewise: ”my defective Bolshevism was transformed into anti-Bolshevism, and through anti-Bolshevism, I arrived at fascism. Trotskyism is a variety of fascism and Zinovievism is a variety of Trotskyism” (Deutsche, The Prophet Outcast 333).

Having seized power after Lenin’s death, Stalin had to reconquer it again and again. Endless struggle will be terminated by the physical elimination of all whose party past or present attitudes made them potential opponents. Expulsion, Lenin’s penalty for “factionalism”, had been ineffective. Men who represented the potentiality of an alternative government of rival power centres had to be destroyed, be they active leaders or impotent symbols of opposition like Kamenev and Zinoviev. Reason justified the swift, merciless and all embracing preemptive strike to paralyse and to deter. Potential leaders, the men they influenced or were likely to influence, and an ever- widening circle of associates, friends and relative, who by the very nature of design were implicated. Vengefulness could engender opposition. Oppositional leaders had trained or promoted party man administrators and soldiers – in short, numberless alternative power centres.

The determining reason for Stalin‘s decision on his “final solution” lay perhaps in the realization that the mood of the Old Bolsheviks was one of hostility towards him, having remain unreconciled to personal dictatorship since the Kirov purges. Hostility could erupt into open challenge , and both he and his old comrades remembered the dying Lenin’s s pronouncement: “I propose to the comrades that they consider a means of removing Stalin from his post and appointing to it another person more patient, more loyal, more polite, and (relevant in this context) more considerate to his comrades” (Conquest 537)

When the “Trial of the Sixteen began in August 1936, Trotsky wrote how “Stalin is staging this trial in order to suppress discontent and opposition … (he) treats every criticism and every form of opposition as a conspiracy”. (Deutsche, Outcast 322). Yet, in 1932 Trotsky himself had recognises the need for “unity of will”, “the upsetting at the bureaucratic equilibrium would benefit the forces of counter revolution” (Deutsche Stalin 344). But times had changed, and for the type of man Trotsky represented, there was no place in the party.

The reason for hostility perhaps lay in the basic psychology of the Old Bolsheviks. Nikolai Bukharin told historian Boris Nicolaevsky in 1936 that “we had all been trained in the psychology of oppositionalists … we are critics, destructionionists not builders” (Nicolaevsky 60) Soviet Russia wanted builders, not idealists. Stalin needed therefore to eliminate this millstone, to bring a new ruling class aimed at positive construction and not schismatic criticism. The theorist and the visionary were being supplanted by the young , hard and ambitious New Soviet Man, sincere communists holding key posts which merged political and professional leadership. The integration and stabilization of the regime necessitated increased centralization and the concentration of power in the hands of a select elite. The growing stability called for greater efficiency and control, the crystallization of totalitarianism demanding authority and obedience, and the accountability of the citizen for his inability to adjust to the new pattern.

Economic and social change that was not spontaneous as a product of attitudes and social relationships needed terror as a motive force. The men of the old revolution with the old ideas and ideals were liabilities to the new revolution. The “new man” created by Stalin’s regime, without a revolutionary past or tradition, ignorant and suspicious of intellectual arguments propounded by the oppositions, they were Koestler’s “Neanderthalers”, the generation “that started to think after of the flood … a generation without an umbilical cord”. Provided by Stalin with guidance, nurtured on Stalin’s Marxism- Leninism, and on the concrete achievements of the Five Year Plan.

Bukharin, in Nikolaevsky’s interview, and Koestler’s Rubachov see the new man as their creations, inevitable to socialist progress. They realise that survival depends upon success, and if they fail, they can no longer serve the revolution. History absolves those who are right – but those who are wrong must pay. Tthey understand the mechanics of the system. They share to some extent the values of the rulers. The process of selection is vital to stability and progress. And they are fatalistically determinist, agreeing to fabricated confessions because there was no existence outside of the party. Stalinism was the acceptable alternative to the counter-revolution.

“In a war which may be only a few months away”, Gletkin tells Rubachov in Darkness at Noon, “such currents (that is disaffection and popular dissatisfaction) could lead to catastrophe … the party must be cast in one mold, filled with blind discipline and absolute trust”. In 1936 the chances of agreement with Germany were slim. Cases such as “the homosexual conspiracy” of 1933-34 gave substance to fabricated charges of treason and espionage.

The threat of war and undoubtedly heightened Stalin’s fears for his political survival. He remembered how the Bolsheviks has seized power in such conditions after 1914. It certainly gave him a pretext, and legitimacy sanctioned by popular patriotism, for what Deutsche called a “perverted psychological truth” which instigated a pre-emptive strike to prevent instability and collapse during a national emergency. Yet, wouldn’t a conciliatory policy aimed at creating voluntary, popular and national cooperation and solidarity have been more logical than the disorganisation and demoralisation which Stalin had invited? Purges are deliberate and planned, and Stalin in no doubt realised their consequences if not their scope.

The motive for the Yezhovchina, named for Victor Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, does not hold its own independently. Neither does that of protecting the revolution. Bukharin in 1936, and Nikita Khrushkev in his groundbreaking Secret Speech to a closed plenum of the Central Committee in February 1956 claimed that Stalin had used too extreme means when the economy had been strengthening, the exploiting classes destroyed, and the party consolidated ideologically and numerically. Stalin himself would not have downplayed his achievements merely to attack his enemies. In reality, the new range of the charges brought against the “enemies of the people” avoid the question of a specific motivation, whilst not once did the chief victim of so many conspiracies. and yet the author, manager and producer, appear in court as a witness. Once again therefore, Machiavellian motives appear to predominate – those of Stalin consolidating his personal power. Potential opponents must be kept in a state of permanent insecurity so that all embracing terror by the “lopping off of heads” of possible alternatives to the regime. The party is cleansed of infiltrators and careerists, opening channels for new blood more loyal and more efficient. Individuals, uncontrolled and undirected, were susceptible to intrigue, and hence the unreliable need to be replaced.

The Nikolaev case following the assassination of Kirov by Leonid Nicolaev in December 1934. Nikolaev and several suspected accomplices were convicted in the Moscow Trials and executed less than 30 days later, with complicity as a common charge for the condemned. Kirov’s assassination remains controversial and unsolved, with varying theories regarding the circumstances of his death., and provided a blueprint for discovery of accomplices and instigators, and the investigation of “ideologically undisarmed oppositions”, for “capacities for mischief” (Nicolaevsky 60), and for the punishment for the negligence of security and party organs for tolerating oppositional circles in their midst. In 1934, harmless Leningrad dissidents became terrorists; and in 1934, “Trotskyists” and ”Zinovievites” were tried, being told that by admitting complicity and condemning terrorism, they would check their own supporters.

The trials of 1936-38 merely keynoted the purge, the grand design finding full realisation in prisons and camps. The slaughter of the Old Guard showed that their day was gone, that resistance and opposition to the new regime was futile. Their fall, in a power struggle which had been waged since Lenin’s death, had been completed after Kirov’s murder, yet they were now called upon to justify the purge, to vilify the victims to publicise and popularize the forthcoming purges.

The trials of “the sixteen (August 1936 – Kamenev and Zinoviev, and others), of “the seventeen” (January 1937 – Pyatkov, Sokolnikov and the so-called anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre), and of “the twenty one (March 1938 – Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, and the so called anti-Soviet Bloc of the Rightists and Trotskyists), saw the extermination of the Old Guard, and with it, the reputation of Trotsky, the arch-instigator and defendant in absentia. In colluding with Trotsky, the greatest “enemy of the people”, they were accused of treason, espionage, diversion, terrorism, and wr cling. They had plotted disrupt the economy to betray the Soviet state; they had plotted Kirov’s death, and had conspired to assassinate Stalin himself, together with others of his inner circle.

The case was different with popular national figures, and hence trial and publicity gave way to secrecy and speed trial “in camera”, illustrating Stalin’s determination bypassing even superficial legality. Hence, in secrecy, the party itself was purged by “electoral defeat” and arrest, by vigilance and police infiltration. 4434 Of 11,017 Moscow committee members were in 1937 new replacements, whilst elsewhere, 50 to 70% renovation was quite common, introducing new and ideologically pure cadres (Z Brzezinsky The Permanent Purge 94). Public trials would have strained loyalty and discipline.

This was also the case with the military, a fair accompli being necessary. In June 1937 civil war hero General Mikhail Tukachevsky and seven others were executed for treason and sabotage. Only by purging potentially disloyal or unduly independent commanders like Tukachevsky, who opposed politicisation, could be army be absorbed into the totalitarian system, and hence removing its strength as an alternative source of power while simultaneously developing its efficiency and its potency as a subordinate weapon. Whether a conspiracy existed or not is questionable, but but facility of suppression suggests the negative. Elimination would have been inevitable in order to insure full control in the event of war.

The purge of the Nationalities shows similar motivations. Nationalism had been contrary to the socialist ideals of international totalitarianism and international economics. Growing national resentment towards Russian central control had led Moscow to believe that national cadres and local leaders were responsible, whilst the atmosphere was highly conducive it the wide discovery of plots and conspiracies among the Nationalities. More objective reasoning saw the necessity of solidifying central control by removing sources independent national leadership, and hence, throughout the USSR bourgeois nationalists, deviationists, White Guards, kulaks and spies were exposed, the purges extending from the elimination of identifiable opponents to the impersonal elimination of thousands of suspects.

“Unity of Will” was all important, and all subsidiary elements had to be subordinated. Even the Comintern had to be cleansed to provide uniformity of policy in accordance with Soviet national interests, as opposed to Communist international interest. Soviet diplomats were removed. German, Hungarian, Polish, and Italian communists domiciled in the Soviet Union including former Hungarian strongman Bela Kun) were liquidated. Even in Spain, the KGB successfully purges the extremist left wing. Not even the KGB remained immune, Genrich Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov both falling to their own terror.

Stalin and Yezhov

In the industrial and agricultural sectors, also. the politically unreliable became scapegoats for failure, and inefficiency, to be replaced by the new generation of graduates in technical and professional fields. Technicians holding key posts in the economic structure, and intellectuals – natural critics – had to be submissive. Socialist competition being achievement orientated meant that failure to produce and to fulfill norms was tantamount to wrecking and sabotage. Failure demanded retribution: to deter, and to provide additional stimuli for greater endeavours. Yet, Stalin’s prime aim was total control – imprisonment have have been deterrent enough to encourage efficiency, whilst a general improvement in the standard of living was beginning emerge, giving little cause for such repression. Physical liquidation was primarily a means of control and not of production … as Lazar Kagonovich failed to note when, at the 18th Congress, he proclaimed: “ we have now cadres which carry out every directive of the party, of the Central Committee of the Soviet power, every directive of Comrade Stalin” (ibid 90).

Isaac Deutsche describes “Trial of the Sixteen”as “so hallucinatory in its masochism and sadism that it seemed to surpass human imagination” (Deutsche Outcast 332)…The defendants were made to crawl to their deaths amidst denunciation and self-derision. Although this justifies the character rather than the reason behind the Great Purge, it’s illustrates an all important function of the Purge as an institution – what Fainsod calls prophylactic and preventative.

The first Five Year Plan had brought a degree of stability, but the regime could not afford to let stability lapseinto inactivity. The messianic and totalitarian nature of the regime, demanded further goals, and further fervour and enthusiasm, to avoid the degeneration of party and the state. The internal emigration of the silent majority was synonymous with negation and opposition; and hence participation was vital. The policy of critique had originally been intended as an instrument of improvement, of exposing inefficiency, and error, but now, Kritika was associated with denunciation and Samokritika, with confession (often false), mutual suspicion, and fear of denunciation for lack of fervour, providing mass participation, synthetic enthusiasm, and Revolutionary, Watchfulness”… Legitimacy and consensus was thus created whilst also serving to crystallise and dramatise the policies of the government… The success of propaganda campaigns was shown during the public trials when frequent and hostile emotional outbursts often provided an ex post facto rationale for physical liquidation. State Prosecutor Andrev Vyshynski was symptomatic of the popular hysteria generated… “These mad dogs of capitalism, tried to tear limb from limb the best of the Soviet land… I am joining my angry indignant voice to the, rumbling voices of millions… I demand that dogs gone mad should be shot, every one of them … “ (Conquest 335)

Propaganda campaigns were aimed at dehumanising the enemies, and developing an atmosphere of hostility that stifled resistance. The supreme correctness of the regime was asserted and failings were attributed to the accused, who would be charged with conspiring with hostile powers (Germany, in particular) planning to destroy the fruits of the revolution … their fate was pragmatic; resistance was useless; the system is unchallengeable; the leadership is in fallible. Confession, wrote Koestler in Darkness at Noon, is “to gild the right to blacken the wrong … to make the opposition appear contemptible, to make the masses understand that opposition is a crime… Sympathy and pity for the opposition are danger to the country…The can be no martyrs or heroes – no potential focii for factionalism … they must die as degenerate traitors, and this must be impressed upon the uninformed, easily influenced masses … Hence the victim is often called upon to collaborate in his own moral and physical destruction, often willingly, as a final service to the party and to the revolution …his duty is “to gild the right, to blacken the wrong” … his wrong – he must pay!

To Soviet leaders, the purge is an instrument employed in a rational and predetermined fashion, cleansing the system of undesirable elements, and streamlining organisation, revitalising the system and eliminating alternative power centres. Such motives, provide rationalism enough – but Stalin perhaps sinned in his excess … If his fear of war and collapse had precipitated his actions, then disaster of 1941 revealed his folly. In advancing and preserving the revolution, at face value, the immediate consequence was of detriment. The liquidations had outstripped available replacements, whilst privation and hardship, damage and hatred amongst the influential sectors, severely hampered the development of Soviet society … Yet, the dynamic momentum of industrialisation had been maintained, and “new men” quickly adapted to their new responsibilities, whilst fear of an rest had led many to great endeavours in all fields of production … Yet, the economic and social needs of the Soviet state could not justify the bloodshed … When Stalin told the 18th Congress that “we shall have no further for resorting to the method of mass purges” (Deutsche Stalin 381), he was, perhaps primarily reviewing his own position, firmly established at the apex of a hierarchy of power of his making. Frederick Engels may have told Karl Marx that “terror consist mostly of useless cruelties, perpetuated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves” – and Stalin was certainly in need of reassurance in 1934: but on the eve of the great purge, Stalin had held a position of strength, his opposition defeated, his Politburo hand-picked. Yet, the very nature, personal dictatorships necessitated control at all levels of the system – supreme control, unlimited and in divided. His aim was total control, the vanguard of the revolution personified – and all other aims, all other motive were subordinate and indivisible from this. It is therefore rational to secure complete personal power? Khrushchev condemned Stalin as a mad man – but was not Stalin his teacher, and the teacher and mentor of the Soviet leadership after his death – and no one would obviously seriously admit that his creator (for this was just what Stalin was) was a madman …

The question invites to consideration whether the acquisition and the maintenance of power is rational, or whether, in Stalin’s case, it was a men’s to an end escapes explanation, whether power was his aim – and this he had achieved – or whether power was a necessary means of strengthening the Soviet state and economy, for despite failure and setback he did create a major industrial power. Totalitarian purges are unnecessarily carefully planned, and controlled from the centre. In Stalin’s case the purge was perhaps carried too far, and with detrimental consequences, by the sheer force own momentum, but the fact that Stalin had maintained control was demonstrated by the facility and efficiency which the purgers themselves, and in particular, Yezhov, of were also purged after 1938, Stalin’s targets within the party, the nationalities, the economy, the intelligentsia in the army, were categorised and identified. Potential enemies and obstacles to his total control were officially eliminated. From the Machiavellian standpoint, this was more rational than Hitler’s “Final Solution”, although in both cases, pretexts were created, whether sabotage or treason or “lebensraum”. But once again, subjectivity is strong when a word such as rational is employed. “Expedient” would perhaps be more applicable. Innocent victims were numberless as the circle widened, yet even then, the psychological and deterrent effect on the population was beneficial to the regime. The toll and ensuing atmosphere of insecurity in the wasteland called peace induced submission and facilitated control, necessitating only occasional and selective terror, such as employed during 1939-41 in the newly sovietised Baltic states… In its way, the Great Purge was in fact a “final solution”, ridding the regime of opposition, and the disunity it brought. To Stalin, unity was essential to progress, and perhaps, like Peter the Great, it was necessary to employ barbaric means to modernise a backward, and perhaps in western eyes, barbaric state, and to ride roughshod over all obstacles to achieve this end …

The Old Bolsheviks. Most perished

Bibliography

I Deutsche, Stalin
I Deutsche, The Prophet Outcast
M Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled
A Koastler, Darkness at Noon
H Finer, The Man in Horseback
R Conquest, The Great Terror
H Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite
Z Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge

The Russian Tradition – Russia, Ukraine and Tibor Szamuely

January 2, 2023January 3, 2023Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

In a televised address on September 30th last year, Vladimir Putin said: Russia is a great, 1000-year-old power, a whole civilisation, and it is not going to live by such makeshift, false rules … What, if not racism, is the West’s dogmatic conviction that its civilisation and neoliberal culture is an indisputable model for the entire world to follow?”

Now, one might not agree with Putin, and today, he is certainly persona non grata in Western forums, but one thing is for sure: Russian history mines its own unique seamWe republish below an article by American author, journalist and editor Christopher Caldwell. He advocates that we adopt a cautious and open minded perspective on historical memory, contemporary perceptions, lexicological differences, the dangers of making assumptions, and coming to conclusions and adopting opposing positions on the basis of incomplete and inadequate knowledge of other countries than our own with their distinct but not hermetically sealed histories and cultures.

Caldwell’s central focus is the colourful life and legacy of exiled Hungarian academic Tibor Szamuely.

Like many refugees from Communism, Szamuely was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919, and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers, and was called “Butcher Szamuely”. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where Tibor was born, and where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. Young Tibor served in the Red Army, and he too was arrested and sent to a Labour camp. Rehabilitated, he served as Chancellor of Budapest University. In 1964, then nearing 40, he was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England.

He taught at the University of Reading in England and befriended Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and Anthony Powell, among other literary anti-Communists. His book, unfinished when he died of cancer in 1972, was edited into its final form by Conquest and published two years later.

Szamuely taught me Russian and Soviet history and politics at Reading University. Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naive communist sympathizer and fellow-traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life).

He he would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.

From medieval times, autocracy has coexisted with a revolutionary traditionalism – a contradiction in terms as only Russia could sustain, a unique Russian capacity to seek revolution and discover regression, to invoke liberty merely to reinforce repression. if he were with us today, Szamuely would explain that the Soviet Union under Lenin and his successors and the Russia of Vladimir Putin bears so disconcertingly close a resemblance to Russia under the most savage of its tsars. His people, it turned out, had wanted freedom but wanted to retain the idea of their old Russian empire more. They ended up with the would-be czar, Vladimir Putin. And so the world turns.

Posts in In That Howling Infinite, about Eastern Europe: The Roots and fruits of Putin’s irridentism; Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism; Ghosts of the Gulag, The Death of Stalin is no laughing matter, Tanks for the memory – how Brezhnev changed my life, 2nd September 1939 – the rape of Poland (1), 17th September 1939 – the rape of Poland (2)

You – Bolshevik recruiting poster 1918

You Are Needed In Kiev 2014

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin divide Europe at the Yalta Conference in Crimea, 1945

Why is Russia obsessed with slavery?

Tibor Szamuely: ‘The Russian Tradition’

Christopher Caldwell, UnHerd, 23rd august 2022

There’s nothing wrong with being cautious. Since 1709, when Peter the Great routed the troops of Swedish King Charles XII at Poltava, smack-dab in the middle of modern-day Ukraine, Europeans have understood Russia as a military threat. Never has this required us to close our minds to the glories of Russian culture or to forget that Russia’s strategic posture always has an explanation — and sometimes even a rationale.

But what was intellectually possible for Westerners in the winter of 1943, when Hitler’s troops and Stalin’s were killing each other by the millions on the Eastern front, is apparently beyond our powers today. In the wake of Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, many Europeans will not be content with anything less than wiping Russia and its culture off the map. In April, novelist Oksana Zabuzhko, writing in the TLS that it was the morality of Tolstoy and other Russian writers that “wove the camouflage net for Russia’s tanks”, urged us to “take a long, hard look at our bookshelves”. In early August, the Russian-language novelist Wolodymyr Rafejenko declared he now felt a “revulsion” when he conversed in Russian, and vowed never again to write in it.

These are Ukrainians — one can understand their anguish and rage. But Western Europeans, who are not even at war, have been even more zealous. A Milan university cancelled its Dostoevsky class last spring. The EU and UK have blacked out the Russian internet channel RT. Russians have been declared unwelcome at venues from Wimbledon to Estonia.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, when Russia was capable of far worse, the Russian-born historian Tibor Szamuely wrote an extraordinary book. The Russian Tradition explained how Russian political behaviour (about which Szamuely was wary to the point of hostility) arose from Russian history and culture (about which Szamuely was respectful to the point of reverence). This is the right balance. It has not been struck so well since. Too bad the book is out of print, because it is strangely relevant to a lot of this decade’s preoccupations: slavery, political correctness and Ukraine, for starters.

Like many refugees from Communism, Szamuely was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919, and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers, which is really saying something. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. In 1964, Szamuely, then nearing 40, was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England. He taught at Reading and befriended Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and Anthony Powell, among other literary anti-Communists. His book, unfinished when he died of cancer in 1972, was edited into its final form by Conquest and published two years later.

The simple question that animates it is how Russia came to be the centre of Marxist revolution and late 20th-century totalitarianism. Did aggressive Communism subvert blameless Russia? Or was aggressive Russia using blameless Communism as a pretext?

The beginnings of an answer lie in geography. Lacking frontiers, Szamuely writes, Russia has faced “a history of armed struggle against invaders that, for length, intensity and ferocity has no parallel in the annals of any other nation”. That is a large claim. Russia is always vulnerable someplace — at least for as long as it takes to gather and concentrate its killing power. And it is always fighting for its life, which tends — at least in domestic Russian debates — to empty of meaning our concepts of just and unjust war. “Despotic government,” Szamuely writes, “was the instrument she shaped to cope with the everlasting emergency.”

For Szamuely, the central problem in Russian history is slavery. Yes, slavery. Using the word “serf” to describe its put-upon agricultural workers leads us to think of the society as merely backward, quaint, feudal. But this is wrong. Russian slavery was a creation of modernity. Once-free agricultural labourers somehow got buried under debt about 500 years ago, and in the mid-16th century the government bound them to the land, the better to tax them. The owner of the serfs was the state, not the notables on whose land they toiled. There was an equality in this, for the notables were beholden to the state, too. The upper crust owed the tsar military service. Until recent centuries, Russia was one of the rare countries where nobles could be publicly flogged.

But this changed, as Peter the Great tried to modernise the system — Russia got rum, minuets, a navy and of course St. Petersburg. For aristocrats it meant Western connections and new opportunities, for serfs an overload of labour and hard discipline. That was an end to society’s old “mystic unity” and the mumbo-jumbo that had surrounded it. Serfs could now be sold or lost at cards. Russia now had not one people, Szamuely writes, but two: “the Westernised upper classes, and the masses, whose way of life became ever less distinguishable from that of the population of the great Asian empires.” As middle classes in America and France were forging republics, aristocrats were living a Golden Age under Catherine the Great (1762-95). “The most striking feature of 18th-century Russian social history,” Szamuely writes, “was the great expansion and intensification of peasant bondage at the precise moment when, with the emancipation of the nobility, it finally lost any vestige of moral, political or legal justification.”

Szamuely’s preoccupation with slavery anticipates a lot of the “woke” discussion of our own time. If slavery warped the development of the United States (which was one-eighth slave at the start of its civil war in 1861), Szamuely asks, then why has there been so much less soul searching about Russia (which was seven-eighths slave at the time of emancipation that same year)? He may misunderstand the parallel: The difference lies not in the size of the enslavement but in the identity of the rememberer. Progressive white America is wracked by guilt over what it did to “them”. Russia feels no such guilt because the misdeeds were done to “us”. The moral tenor of its soul-searching is more like that of Sicily, or Ireland, or black America.

But it is not as if Russia had no reckoning with serfdom. As access to higher education and newsprint spread, “gradually the idea began to sink in that every Russian of education and leisure was an accomplice in a crime unparalleled in its enormity”. This was the cause around which a revolutionary and often violent intelligentsia arose in the late 19th century, a class unique in Europe until the rise of political correctness. “The Russian intelligentsia was an instrument of destruction,” Szamuely writes. “Unlike the European bourgeoisie it had no constructive purposes, neither was it equipped to fulfil any such tasks.”

There was something Messianic in the intelligentsia’s role. Szamuely recognises that it used others’ suffering as a rationale for autocracy. But he never entertains the idea that the intelligentsia was an outright racket. He even praises the “intellectual honesty” of the critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who saw that equality would be won only at a very steep price in liberty: “What a contrast he provides to certain Western ‘progressive’ intellectuals, who worship at the altar of egalitarianism yet refuse to recognise that their dream… can only be realised by an arbitrary dictatorial government. Chernyshevsky and his followers, down to the present day, have never harboured any illusions about this.”

He is nonetheless struck that the great 19th-century Russian novelists (“men of sensibility, compassion and humanity”) were almost unanimously contemptuous of the intelligentsia (“with their joyless utilitarianism, their dogmatic intolerance, their fanatical devotion to a messianic vision”).

The modern enslavement of Russia’s peasantry was not, strictly speaking, a capitalist project. But it felt like one. More than the exploitation undergone in advanced industrial countries, it resonated with the exploitation Marx described. In the end, the Russian revolution was a matter of adjusting Marx’s teaching to powerful Russian folk-institutions, above all the autonomous peasant cooperative known as the obshchina. Marx himself wound up backing peasant “populists” against his own more orthodox followers. It actually turned out to be a piece of good fortune for the revolutionaries that the Marxist spark caught in what Szamuely considers the most conservative country on earth.

That is where Szamuely’s book ends. It is a shame he was never able to write at book-length about the 20th century, of which he was a passionate chronicler. He considered Lenin “the supreme political genius of the century”, and was impressed with the way he and his followers allied Russia’s interests abroad to Asian and African nationalism, not Communism. It was, in a way, the same judgment Marx had made in backing the populists.

Szamuely was fascinated with Ukraine. “Perhaps no other historical experience,” he writes in The Russian Tradition, “has left as lasting an impression on the folk-memory of the Russian people as the horrors of [the] interminable struggle against the slavers and killers of the south. For centuries the steppe remained a source of constant menace, a land of terror, death, destruction and degradation. It was called the Wild Plain, or, as we would say today, the Frontier; the greater part of this region is now called the Ukraine…”

He was highly sympathetic to Ukraine’s modern struggles. In 1968 he wrote a fascinating and well-informed account of the nationalist protests and ensuing prosecutions that had then been going on in Ukraine for much of the decade. While granting that the Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis as liberators in June 1941, he wasn’t surprised by this nationalist sentiment, given the decade of famine and purges they had endured. He noted, too, the “methodological dilution” of Ukraine’s ethnic composition by Russia, insisting that Russian dominance of the country’s high culture was a recent and unnatural phenomenon. Only 41% of books published in Ukraine were in Ukrainian, it is true, but in 1930, before Russification and famine, that figure had been 84%.

Szamuely never let justified fear of Russia drive out justified fascination. Vastly well read in the country’s history, he still found it ambiguous, describing the policies of Ivan the Terrible at one point as “a strange mixture of farsightedness and paranoia — a combination frequently reproduced by his successors through the centuries”. Few historians have been better equipped than Szamuely to understand the paradoxes of Russia, where the novelists are sublime and the politics are unendurable, and often for the same reasons.

Tsar Nicholas the Last

The last of the Romanovs – Tsar Nicholas and his family, murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918

That was the year that was – don’t stop (thinking about tomorrow)

December 27, 2022December 31, 2022Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

The prophet’s lantern is out
And gone the boundary stone
Cold the heart and cold the stove
Ice condenses on the bone
Winter completes an age
WH Auden, For the Time Being – a Christmas Oratorio, 1941

I considered using a line from the above as the title of this retrospective of 2022. It was written during 1941 and 1942, though published in 1947, when the poet was in self-exile in the United States and viewing the war in Europe from afar – although the long poem from which it has been extracted does not in itself reflect such pessimism. A more fitting title could be taken from another long poem that was published in another (very) long poem published in 1947 – Auden’s often overlooked masterpiece The Age of Anxiety, a meditation on a world between the wreckage of The Second World War and of foreboding for the impending armed peace that we now look back on as the Cold War, with its oft-repeated mantra: “many have perished, and more most surely will”.

The year just gone was indeed a gloomy one, meriting a dismal heading. There are few indications of where it might take us in ‘23 and beyond, and my crystal ball is broken. Pundits reached for convenient comparisons. Some propounded that it was like the 1930s all over again when Europe constantly teetered on the brink of war. Others recalled 1989 with the fall of the aneroid Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But, beware of false analogies. In 2022, things were more confused. The tides of history have often resembled swirling cross-currents.

Things, of course, might have been worse. There are, as I’ve noted in successive posts on my own Facebook page, many qualified “reasons to be cheerful”. The year could have ended with Ukraine under Russian control. An emboldened China might have been encouraged to launch an assault on Taiwan. A red wave in the midterms would have buoyed Trump. And here in Australia, Scott Morrison might have secured another “miracle” election victory. The West could have retreated on all fronts.

Instead, therefore, I have selected a title that hedges its bets, because, to paraphrase the old Chinese adage, and the title of an earlier retrospective, we certainly live in interesting times and in 2023, and a lot of energy will be spent endeavouring to make sense of them – or, to borrow from Bob:

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn that he not busy being born
Is busy dying
B Dylan

The year in review

Christine McVie, longtime and founder member of Fleetwood Mac departed the planet on 30th November this year. And contemplating this year’s posts in In That Howling Infinite, I could not help thinking about one her most famous songs. I recalled that it featured on newsreels of the revolution that ousted the Shah of Iran in 1979.

Why not think about times to come?
And not about the things that you’ve done
If your life was bad to you
Just think what tomorrow will do
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here
It’ll be better than before
Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone

The song seemed quite apposite as the soundtrack of a revolution that had overthrown one of America’s many friendly autocrats. At the time, no one could predict what would happen, but, as with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was a time optimistic expectation. And yet its shock waves have reverberated and ricocheted in ways unimagined at the time.

As 2022 ends, with blood flowing on the streets of Iran and in the mullahs’s torture cells as young people rise up against a hypocritically brutal theocratic tyranny, we see again and again how that which goes around comes around.

Women, Freedom, Life

If the malign hand of history has literally reached out and gripped Iran’s young women and girls by their hair, it has also endeavoured to strangle the thousand year old Ukrainian nation in the name of an atavistic irredentism. Russian troops invaded the Ukraine on February 24, causing what has since become the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. Out if the spotlight of the world’s easily distracted attention. intractable conflicts lumbered mercilessly on – in Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, the Congo and many other “far away places with strange sounding names”.

On the far side of the world, the USA continued to struggle with the reverberations of January 6th 2021. Donald Trump, like Dracula, has not gone away, and whilst his 2024 presidential run is looking increasingly shaky, he continues to poison the atmosphere like radioactive dust. The unfortunate folk of the United Kingdom endured three prime ministers during the year, including the shortest ever in the history of the office, and after two years of pandemic, are facing a bleak economic winter as well as a frigid actual one.

In Australia, it was the year of the teal – at least according to those who study the evolution of language, the year we lost a queen, our long-serving foreign head of state, and a king of spin, the down-fallen and disgraced Scott Morrison. And a sodden La Nina saw incessant rain drown large swathes of eastern Australia, visiting misery on thousands. COVID-19 mutated, the Omicron variant surging from beginning of the year, ensuring no end to the pandemic – today, it seems like everyone we know has had it, including ourselves (and we were soooo careful for a full two years!). As restrictions were cautiously lifted, we as a nation are learning to live with it.

Politically, it’s been a grand year for the Australian Labor Party. With our stunning Federal election win in May and in Victoria in November, the Albanese government’s star is on the ascendant and it’s legislative record in six months has out run nine years of Tory stagnation on climate, integrity and equality – a neglect that saw the rise of a new political force in the shape of a proto-party, the aforementioned “teal”, named for the colour of the candidates’ tee shirts. The opposition has been reduced to a bickering and carping crew, and whilst Labor continues to ride high in the polls, the Coalition bounces along the bottom of the pond.

Lismore, northern NSW, March 2023

Flooded house aflame, Lismore March 2022

Christine McVie was just one of many music icons who checked out this past year. The coal miner’s daughter, Loretta Lynn, crooned her last, as did rock ‘n roll bad boy Jerry Lee Lewis and Ronnie “the Hawk” Hawkins, who gave the boys in The Band their big break. Rock heavyweight (literally) Meatloaf took off like his bat out of hell and keyboard evangelist Vangelis boarded his chariot of fire.

Acclaimed British author Hilary Mantel, whose Wolf Hall trilogy inspired back to back posts in In That Howling Infinite in 2020 found “a place of greater safety”, and French author Dominique Lapierre also joined the choir invisible. I had first learned about Israel’s war of independence and the Palestinians’ al Nakba in his O Jerusalem, and about the bloody tragedy that accompanied the birth of India and Pakistan, in Freedom at Midnight, both books featuring in past posts.

Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis as Tom and Hal

One could argue that the most significant departure was that of Britain’s longest serving monarch. Queen Elizabeth II had been on the throne for almost all of my life, as has the now King Charles III who was born four months before me, and of whom, as a nipper, I was jealous. I recall how I watched the queen’s coronation on a tiny black and white television in the crowded and smokey parlour of the boarding house run by a friend of our family. By happenstance, Netflix served up two over the top regal sagas to binge on: the penultimate season of The Crown, which whilst entertaining, was a disappointment in comparison with earlier seasons, and Harry and Meghan which was whilst excruciatingly cringe-worthy, was nevertheless addictive viewing. The passing of Her Maj reminded me that in my lifetime, I have witnessed three monarchs and eighteen British prime ministers (and incidentally, eighteen Australian prime ministers). The public outpouring of grief for the Queen’s ascent to the choir invisible was unprecedented – the picture below demonstrates what the Poms do best …

The Queue along the Thames to pay respect to Her Maj

There were farewells much closer to home. My mediation colleague, aspiring author and friend John Rosley, and Beau Tindall, the son of my oldest Bellingen friend Warren, took off on the same day in May. Peter Setterington, my oldest friend in England – we first met in 1972 – died suddenly in London in March, and our friend and forest neighbour, the world-famous war photographer Tim Page, in August, after a short but nasty illness. Pete is memorialized in When an Old Cricketer Leave His Crease whilst Journey’s end – Tim Page’s wild ride,is an adaptation of the eulogy I gave for Tim in September, one of many on that sunny afternoon day in Fernmount. It is a coda to Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey, a story we published a year ago.

Tim Page by Joanne Booker

What we wrote in 2022

The ongoing Ukraine War has dominated our perception of 2022, from the morning (Australian time) we watched it begin on CNN as the first Russian missiles struck Kyiv, to the aerial assault on infrastructure that has left Ukrainians sheltering through a cold, dark winter. Two posts in In That Howling Infinite examined the historical origins of the conflict: Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism and The Roots and Fruits of Putin’s Irridentism. “Because of …” Iran’s voice of freedom looks at the song that has become the rising’s anthem. None can predict the outcome – whether it will be a doomed intifada, the Arabic word that literally means a shaking off – historically of oppression – and figuratively, a rising up, like that in Ireland in 1798 and 1916, Warsaw in 1943 and 1945, and Hungary in 1956, or an Inqilab, another Arabic word meaning literally change or transformation, overturning or revolution.

The run up to May’s Australian elections inspired Teal independents – false reality in a fog of moralism.; and Australia votes – the decline and fall of the flimflam man.

More distant history featured in Menzie’s Excellent Suez Adventure, the story of the Suez crisis of 1956 that historians argue augured the end of the British imperium, and the role played therein by longtime Australian prime minister Sir Robert Menzies. Johnny Clegg and the Washing of the Spears is a tribute to the late South African singer, dancer and songwriter, and a brief history of the war that destroyed the great Zulu nation, setting the scene for the modern history of South Africa. And journeying further back in time to sixteenth century Ireland, there is O’Donnell Abú – the Red Earl and history in a song, a discussion of the origins of a famous and favorite rebel song.

Then there are the semi-biographical “micro-histories” in In That Howling Infinite’s Tall tales, small stories, obituaries and epiphanies. In 2023, these included: Folksong Au Lapin Agile, the evening we visited Montmarte’s famous folk cabaret; Ciao Pollo di Soho – the café at the end of the M1, the story of a café that played a minor part in my London days, as described in detail in an earlier travelogue, Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days; Better read than dead – the joy of public libraries; The quiet tea time of the soul, an ode in prose to a favourite beverage; and The work, the working, the working life recalling the many jobs I took on in the sixties to keep myself in music, books, travel and sundry vices.

We cannot pass a year without something literary. We celebrated the centenary of three iconic literary classics in The year that changed literature, and with the release of The Rings of Power, the controversial prequel to The Lord of the Rings, we published a retrospective on the influence of JRR Tolkien. One ring to rule us all – does Tolkien matter? – a personal perspective with an opinion piece by English historian Dominic Sandbrook, an informative and entertaining chronicler of postwar British history and society which featured, in Unherd, an online e-zine that became a “must read” in 2022. A Son Goes To War – the grief of Rudyard Kipling recalls the death in battle on the Western Front in 1917 of the poet’s only son, it’s influence upon his subsequent work, whilst Muzaffar al Nawab, poet of revolutions and sorrow is an obituary for another poet, who seen a lifetime speaking truth to power.

And that was that for what was in so man ways a sad year. Meanwhile, In That Howling Infinite already has several works in progress, including a review of historian Anthony Beevor’s Russia – Revolution and Civil War, what King Herod really thought about the birth of baby Jesus, and the story of a famous and favourite British army marching song.

Best wishes for 2023 …

Death of a Son

That was the year that was – retrospectives

Life in Wartime – images of Ukraine

David Kilcullen’s 2021 wrap up – a weak US emboldens its rivals

December 20, 2021December 20, 2021Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Commentator and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen is always worth reading – and below is his latest piece for The Australian.

As the time of the year would have it, I read his review of 2021 as I was completing my own for publication in the That Was The Year That Was series. Here is mine. Kilcullen’s follows.

As for the world at large, COVID19 continues to dominate the news, with more contagious variants popping up all over the place lake a game of “whack a mole”. As does the ongoing struggle to reach global consensus on the need to confront climate change. Tackling both looks a little like the story of Sisyphus, the Greek King of old who was condemned by Zeus to spend eternity rolling a huge boulder to the top of a hill only to have it roll back down as soon as he reached the top.

The year kicked off to a fine start with the January 6th Insurrection in Washington DC as Donald Trump endeavoured to cling on to office by inciting his supporters and sundry militias to storm the Capitol to stop the count of electoral votes that would cede the presidency to Joe Biden. Though he failed, and was impeached for a second time, and the Biden administration sought to calm America’s troubled waters, the Orange One haunts The US’ fractious and paralyzed politics and the prospect of a second Trump term is not beyond imagination.

Trump’s bestie, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving Prime’s minister, also got the push in the wake of the third election in just over a year. The unique coalition that emerged from torturous negotiations spanned the political, social and religious spectrum – left and right, secular and orthodox, Arab and Jew, and promised little more than maintaining the unsatisfactory status quo, that pertaining to the occupation and the settlements, illegal migrants, and the disproportionate influence the Haredim, none of which are morally, politically, socially or economically sustainable.

China under would-be emperor Xi Jinping continues to aggressively build its military and economic power, determined to take its rightful and long overdue place at the top of the geopolitical ladder, causing consternation among its neighbours and also other powers and fears of war in our time. With Xinxiang’s Uighurs and Hong Kong firmly under its autocratic boot, it continues to expand its nautical footprint in the South China Sea and signals loudly that Taiwan’s days as a liberal democracy are numbered. It’s belligerency is increasingly meeting blow-back as other nations react in various ways to what they perceive as clear and present danger. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

Russia under would-be czar Vladimir Putin continues to aggressively rebuild its military power and influence, determined to revive the glory days of the defunct Soviet Union, whist channeling memories of its former imperial glory. Whilst in no way as powerful as China, it is taking advantage of the the world’s preoccupation with the ascendancy of the Celestial Kingdom Redux to reassert its influence in its own backyard – including the veiled threat to reconquer Ukraine – and also in the world, particularly in Syria and also, through the use of shadowy proxies and mercenaries, in Africa. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

America finally ended its “endless war” in Afghanistan, in a chaotic, deadly scramble that left that country’s forever unfortunate people in the hands of a resurgent and apparently unreformed and unrepentant Taliban. It’s over a 100 days since the last evacuation plane took off in scenes of chaos and misery, leaving behind thousands of employees and others at risk of retribution, and the new regime has yet to establish a working government. Meanwhile professionals, human rights workers, officials of the former regime, members if the old government’s security forces, and especially women and girls wait, many in hiding, for the worst. Meanwhile, winter is coming and th country is broke and on the brink of of starvation. A major humanitarian crisis is imminent. What happens next, everybody does indeed know. As St. Leonard said, “We have seen the future and it’s murder!”

Whilst the war in Afghanistan ended, there are still plenty to go around for the weapons manufacturers and arms dealers, the mercenaries and the proxies. The year began well for Azerbaijan when it emerged victorious from a vicious 44 day drone and missile war against Armenia for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave that saw Turkish and Syrian proxies engaged each side of the conflict. An old War was rekindled in Ethiopia as a Nobel Peace Prize winner sent his troops to rake pillage and conquer a fractious province which turned the tables and is now poses to seize his capital. Hubris extremis? Meanwhile, war went on in the usual places – Syria, Libya, Mali, the Central African Republic, and places too obscure to mention.

Meanwhile, back home DownUnder, the story that dominated political news – apart from COVID19 and the total fuck-up of the vaccine roll-out, was the delinquent behaviour of politicians and their staffers in Parliament House – commentators have likened the goings-on in there to a school yard or frat house, and more bluntly, to a Roman orgy, with tales of bullying and sexual harassment, drunken parties, mutual masturbation sessions, and even rape. The prime minister huffed and puffed and asked his wife how he should deal with the situation; commissions of inquiries were set up; and reports handed down. The motto is “we must do better – and we shall!” But as with most things these days, nobody believes what politicians say anymore.

And not just here in Australia, but all over the world. Trust is in short supply, and indeed, people’s faith in democratic traditions and processes is shaking as populism and a taste for autocracy spreads like … well, a coronavirus. The US was recently named a “backsliding democracy” by a Swedish based think-tank, an assessment based on the attempted Capitol coup and restrictions on voting rights in Red states. In the bizarro conspiracy universe, American right wing commentators and rabble-rousers are urging their freedom-loving myrmidons to rescue Australia from totalitarianism. Apparently we have established Covid concentration camps and are forcible vaccinating indigenous people.

In early December, US President Joe Biden held a summit for democracy, and yet his administration are still determined to bring Julian Assange to trial, a case that, if it succeeds, will limit freedom of speech. The conduct of the trial also poses a threat to the US’s reputation because it could refocus attention on the ugly incidents during the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were exposed by WikiLeaks. There is a strong humanitarian and pragmatic case to look for a way out of Assange’s Kafkaesque nightmare, but the bastions of freedom, America, Britain and Australia show no interest in doing so notwithstanding the harm it does to their democratic credentials.

Uncustomary for him – it must be the season of goodwill – Kilcullen ends his review on a note of cautious optimism:

“Given the events of 2021, all this suggests that in 2022, despite the darkening international threat picture, a more independent, self-reliant, resilient and capable Australia, stepping up to confront the challenges of great-power competition – amid a rising threat from China, declining US influence and an increasingly complex and dangerous security environment – will be necessary and achievable. We should all hope for a sense of urgency and commitment in the face of the new environment’.

I am more sanguine. To quote the famous American coach Yogi Berra. As we leave 2021:

“Predictions are always very hard, especially when they’re about the future”

Other articles by David Kilcullen featured in In That Howling Infinite: : One, two, three, what are we fighting for?; The Man with the Plan; and Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow – judgement in KabuL

Over to David Kilcullen …

.Weak US emboldens China, Russia and Iran

The security picture for Australia has never been darker or more complex. But several key events this year offer clues into the challenges we’ll be facing in the year ahead.

David KilCullen, Weekend Australian 18th December 2021

Afghans struggle to reach the foreign forces to show their credentials to flee the country outside the Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul.

Afghans struggle to reach the foreign forces Hamid Karzai International Airport,Kabul.

As we look forward into next year, the geostrategic and security picture for Australia has never been more complex and rarely more challenging. In security terms, this year was one of American weakness, Afghan betrayal, rising Russia-NATO tension and the emergence of space warfare and advanced technologies as domains in a new Sino-American Cold War.

But it was also the year of AUKUS and the year Australia found its feet despite increasingly belligerent bullying from Beijing. Several key events shaped 2021, and these in turn give us a clue as to how things might develop next year.

US weakness

The year began in chaos as Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol, seeking to stop what they saw as a stolen election. Belief that an election has been stolen is one of the most well-documented triggers for revolutionary unrest.

Many Republicans, independents and even some Democrats still see the election as rigged – and, by extension, the Biden administration as illegitimate – boding ill for US stability into next year. The unrest that peaked during deadly riots in 200 US cities and all 50 states through the summer of 2020 seems to have subsided. But this is an illusion, since last year’s tension was stoked by the media and anti-Trump politicians.

Now back in charge, establishment institutions have an interest in damping dissent and, as a result, media amplification of unrest has been more subdued this year. But the underlying issues remain: riots continue in places such as Portland and Seattle, racially charged trials have triggered deadly protests, extremists are active on left and right, and murder rates are at levels not seen for 30 years. All of this is likely to come to a head next year around the US midterm elections. The worst inflation in four decades, supply-chain disruptions, labour disputes, retail shortages, soaring fuel prices, persistent Covid-19 restrictions (800,000 Americans have now died during the pandemic) and the most illegal border crossings since records began in 1960 complete the picture of a superpower in decline whose domestic weakness encourages its international adversaries.

Afghanistan: a triple betrayal

US feebleness was evident in August when, without bothering to consult his allies, President Joe Biden insisted on the rampantly incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan that prompted apocalyptic scenes at Kabul airport. The botched evacuation was not only a betrayal of our Afghan partners – in whom the international community, at Washington’s urging, had invested unprecedented effort since 2001 – but also a betrayal by Biden of NATO and non-NATO allies, including Australia.

Afghans climb atop a plane at the Kabul airport in Kabul,lAugust 16, 2021,

It was a defeat on the scale of Saigon in 1975, though the comparison is unfair to that withdrawal, which was more professional and less self-inflicted than this one. The resulting contempt in coalition capitals (and military headquarters) has been quietly intense, even as Americans’ trust in the armed forces plummeted to its lowest level this century, reflecting the military’s recent inability to win wars and its failure to hold anyone accountable when it loses.

It was a triple betrayal: Afghan leaders from president Ashraf Ghani down abandoned their people in the moment of truth, fleeing to safety while leaving them to the Taliban and the prospect of famine. The UN estimates that more than 20 million Afghans are at risk of starvation this winter, meaning 2022 may well turn out to be an even worse year for Afghans than 2021. Even while many of us continue working frantically to help evacuate his people, Ghani is calmly writing a book in Abu Dhabi – perhaps a sequel to his well-received Fixing Failed States – while his henchmen live large on money squirrelled away in advance of the collapse or carried with them as they fled. Some, such as the leaders of the National Resistance Front, Amrullah Saleh and Ahmad Massoud, fight on, while others (including former president Hamid Karzai) proved courageous in the crisis. But with these few exceptions, never was a people so ill-served by their own leaders or so badly left in the lurch by their self-styled friends.

Russia: playing a poor hand well

America’s enemies, and not only the terrorists emboldened by the Taliban victory, have noticed its weakness. Vladimir Putin moved quickly to fill the vacuum in Afghanistan’s Central Asian borderland, partnering with China on several military and economic initiatives, deploying troops to the Afghan-Tajik border and signing a weapons deal with India, a move that parallels his efforts to win Turkish support through arms sales. In the Pacific, Indian, Atlantic and Arctic oceans Russian ships, submarines and aircraft are more active than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years ago next week.

Putin always has been brilliant at playing a weak hand well, and this year has been no exception. In the early months of 2021, with Biden distracted after the Capitol riot, and congress impeaching Trump for the second time, Russian forces pressured Ukraine with a troop build-up and threatening deployments on its border. The result was a conciliatory summit meeting between Putin and Biden in June, seen in Europe as mostly benefiting the Russan side.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping toast with vodka during a signing ceremony in Shanghai, China.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping toast with vodka during a signing ceremony in Shanghai

After the Afghan fiasco, Russian activity in the Baltic States and Ukraine ramped up, and Russia’s ally Belarus tested the frontier defences of Poland and Lithuania with a manipulated flood of refugees, copying a Russian technique pioneered in Norway in 2015 and repeated several times since. Now Russian forces, including missile, tank and artillery units – perhaps 175,000 troops in all – are again massing within striking distance of the Ukrainian border, prompting urgent concern in Kiev.

Again, the US response reeked of appeasement, with Biden allegedly urging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to offer formal autonomy to the eastern region of his country that has been under de facto Russian occupation since 2014, while assuring Russia and NATO that the US has no plans to fight for Ukraine’s freedom. These assurances were given the same week Biden hosted the Summit for Democracy, posing as leader of the free world. Neither Ukraine’s elected leaders nor Afghan parliamentarians – now on the run for their lives – commented, though Russia and China issued stinging critiques.

With winter approaching, Russian energy exports remain essential for Europe, while Russia – as a side effect of US policies targeting domestic energy production in pursuit of the Green New Deal – is the second largest source of US petroleum imports, giving Putin yet another card to play. The northern hemisphere winter of 2021-22 is thus likely to see Russia making use of its “energy weapon” within a broader suite of coercive tools.

China’s uneasy rise

If Russia played a weak hand well this year, China continued strengthening its hand. Beijing’s navy is growing at an astonishingly rapid pace while the modernisation and professionalisation of its land, air, cyber and rocket forces continue. The regime’s nuclear arsenal is undergoing substantial expansion, with hundreds of new missile silos discovered in remote desert areas. Cyber attacks, economic coercion and diplomatic bullying remain core elements of the Chinese repertoire, even as Western business leaders and sports stars (again with honourable exceptions) turn a blind eye to its crackdown in Hong Kong, bullying of Taiwan and oppression of the Uighurs.

China’s completion last year of its BeiDou satellite constellation, equivalent to the US Global Positioning System, threatened the dominance of GPS for the first time since 1993, with implications for every aspect of Western society, from EFTPOS transactions to infrastructure and transportation. Then in mid-October China tested a fractional orbital bombardment system, a shuttle-like spacecraft moving at hypersonic speed, able to evade missile defences and deliver a nuclear warhead anywhere in the world with limited chance of interception.

The Chinese test demonstrated how far US technology is lagging in this area, while marking the emergence of space warfare as a domain of conflict. Russia’s demonstration of a counter-space capability, destroying one of its own satellites in orbit (and creating a debris cloud that threatened the International Space Station) showed China is not the only adversary in space. Moscow and Beijing have announced joint plans for a permanent moon base, while China’s space station appears to include military modules.

More broadly, hypersonic technology – missiles moving at more than five times the speed of sound that can manoeuvre to avoid defences – are proliferating.

The so-called tech war among the superpowers includes these technologies alongside directed-energy weapons, robotics, nanotechnologies, bioweapons, quantum computing and human performance enhancements. These are among the most important areas of competition in the new cold war, along with the contest to control commodities (rare earth metals, copper, cobalt, lithium and uranium) and assets such as silicon and gallium nitride semiconductors that sustain them.

The first big event for China next year will be the Winter Olympics in February. Australia has joined a US-led diplomatic boycott of the Games, with Britain, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Lithuania. Others may follow, but a diplomatic boycott – where athletes still participate – will have limited impact.

The Olympics are important for another reason: Admiral John Aquilino, newly appointed chief of US Indo-Pacific Command, has argued that Beijing is holding back on any move against Taiwan until the Games are over, meaning that from next March the risk of war in the Taiwan Strait may rise significantly.

Reservists of the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces line up during military exercises at a training ground outside Kharkiv, Ukraine December 11, 2021.

Reservists of the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces Kharkiv, Ukraine, December 11, 2021.

Beijing may be emboldened towards any future conflict by US failure in Afghanistan, of which China is the biggest beneficiary. China’s control of mineral resources in the country (and its de facto recognition of the Taliban) gives it leverage, while Beijing’s alliance with Islamabad allows the currently dominant Taliban faction in Kabul, which is heavily influenced by Pakistan’s intelligence service, to draw on Chinese support to consolidate control.

Indirectly, the failure of two decades of intervention in Afghanistan is seen as discrediting Western attempts to meddle in the internal affairs of other countries, vindicating China’s transactional approach.

Beijing’s 25-year strategic co-operation agreement with Tehran, signed in March, lets China import oil directly from Iran, helping to draw Afghanistan into a Chinese-dominated regional economic and security order.

It also reduces China’s reliance on seaborne petroleum imports through the Malacca Strait and South China Sea, making it less vulnerable to US action in the Pacific.

Iran: further than ever from a nuclear deal

For its part, Tehran has made great strides in developing its nuclear capability since 2018, when Trump suspended US participation in the multilateral deal signed by Barack Obama in 2015. This prompted severe concern about Iranian nuclear weapons in Israel and in the Sunni Arab states of the Middle East, while European diplomats warn the 2015 deal will soon be beyond saving. Iran suspended its involvement in talks to rescue the deal, conducting an internal review after its presidential election in June. Though talks have resumed, and Tehran seems willing to co-operate with UN monitoring, a return to the previous deal appears further away than ever. The fact Iran is revising its stance largely because of pressure from Russia and China, rather than in response to US sanctions, underlines American impotence and Sino-Russian influence, even as the two US rivals meet this week to discuss joint responses to what they describe as increasingly aggressive US rhetoric and sanctions threats.

Iran’s dominance in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon (and Lebanon’s ongoing humanitarian and security crisis) has helped cement Tehran’s influence across the Middle East and Levant while reinforcing the regional role of Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, and the Russia-Iran and China-Iran partnerships that made that position possible. This will persist next year. After the Afghan withdrawal it is hard for Washington to justify its troop presence in Iraq (where the anti-ISIS combat mission has officially ended) or eastern Syria, where US forces are deployed without approval from congress or any clear mission or end state. Something to watch in the coming year will be whether progress towards any resumption of the nuclear agreement coincides with further US withdrawals across the region.

AUKUS: doubling down on a weak partner?

As this overview shows, Australia’s environment this year has been more threatening and less predictable than at any time since the 1930s, as recognised in last year’s strategic update and cyber-security strategy, and underlined by the AUKUS agreement in September. Much has been made of the nuclear-powered submarines to be acquired under the agreement, a truly transformational move for Australian naval capability, though one that will take a long time to implement. Much sooner, indeed starting next year, long-range strike capabilities including Tomahawk and JASSM-ER missiles for the navy and air force, Apache attack helicopters for the army, and self-propelled artillery (under a separate deal with South Korea) will represent an immediate step up in Australia’s military posture. A new national critical technologies strategy, part of the broader technological component of AUKUS, is another important element of the new, more assertive stance.

As 2022 unfolds, AUKUS will represent an important indicator of the way ahead. If the agreement becomes a broadbased framework on which to build expanded co-operation with like-minded players – particularly Britain, which is rediscovering a role East of Suez and partnering with Australia on more issues than ever – then it will strengthen our leverage in the face of this new era of conflict.

If, on the other hand, AUKUS becomes another way to double down on the US relationship, increasing our reliance on a declining partner, the agreement could quickly become a net negative.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announces the AUKUS pact with the President of the United States Joe Biden and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson in Canberra. Picture: Newswire/Gary Ramage

Scott Morrison announces the AUKUS pact oe Biden and Boris Johnson

The alienation of France (given that the French have more citizens and more capable military forces than any other European power in the Pacific) carries significant risks, as the South Pacific increasingly looks like a new theatre of conflict with China. Likewise, as India’s recent weapons deal with Russia illustrates, AUKUS can neither replace the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – the informal partnership between the US, Japan, India and Australia – nor should it.

Encouragingly, 2021 seems to have been the year Australia found its feet despite bullying by Beijing since Canberra’s call for accountability on Covid-19 last year. China’s diplomatic high-handedness, shrill anti-Australian propaganda, economic coercion, cyber attacks, political interference and aggressive deployment of intelligence assets near our coastline were designed to teach us a lesson and show every Western-allied power what happens to those who step out of line. This backfired badly, pushing Australia into closer relations with allies, helping Australia’s economy diversify away from a damaging dependence on China, and prompting a sharp decline in Australians’ perceptions of China.

As a global energy shortage began to bite in late 2021, and China’s growth slowed, Chinese dependence on Australian iron and coal revealed itself as a key aspect of economic leverage – naturally prompting Beijing to threaten Australia over it.

Given the events of 2021, all this suggests that in 2022, despite the darkening international threat picture, a more independent, self-reliant, resilient and capable Australia, stepping up to confront the challenges of great-power competition – amid a rising threat from China, declining US influence and an increasingly complex and dangerous security environment – will be necessary and achievable. We should all hope for a sense of urgency and commitment in the face of the new environment.

Sawt al Hurriya – remembering the Arab Spring

February 17, 2021Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

Ten years ago, people across the Middle East and North Africa rose up in protest against their corrupt, autocratic and repressive rulers, demanding freedom and democracy. Tyrants were toppled or feared that power was being torn from their grasp as millions of demonstrators surged through the streets, chanting that “the people demand the fall of the regime”.

Myth and memory often embellish the stories and the glories of oppressed people rising up against the power, but when we recall these oft-times forlorn hopes, from Spartacus to the Arab Spring, it is difficult to imagine ourselves, in our relatively comfortable, free and democratic countries, in the position of people desperate and passionate enough to risk life and limb and to face the terrible consequences of heroic failure. We can but sense, vicariously, the ache and the urge behind Lord Byron’s passionate couplet:

Yet, Freedom! thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.

As Patrick Cockburn writes in a gloomy opinion piece in The Independent,

“There was nothing phoney about this mass yearning for liberty and social justice. Vast numbers of disenfranchised people briefly believed that they could overthrow dictatorships, both republican and monarchical. But …the dream of a better tomorrow expressed by herself and millions during the Arab Spring in 2011 was to be brutally dispelled as the old regimes counter-attacked. Crueler and more repressive than ever, they reasserted themselves, or where they had fallen, they were replaced by chaotic violence and foreign military intervention.

… none of the kleptocratic powers-that-be intended to give up without a fight. They soon recovered their nerve and struck back with unrestrained violence. … across the Middle East and North Africa, rulers used mass imprisonment, routine torture and summary executions to crush dissent. Repression not only affected places where the Arab Spring had been at its peak, but spread throughout the region, which is home to 600 million people, as frightened rulers sought to stamp out the slightest hint of dissent in case it could become a threat to their regimes …

… Could could the Arab Spring have ever succeeded against such odds? The question is highly relevant today because oppression by regimes, aptly described as “looting machines” on behalf of a tiny elite, is no less than it was in 2011. Even more people now live crammed into houses with raw sewage running down the middle of the street outside while their rulers loll on yachts anchored offshore.”

We published the following piece just over a year ago. Little has changed since them – if anything, with the world distracted by the pandemic and the US and its allies – and also adversaries, indifferent if not complicit, the situation has gotten much worse.

In Egypt, the grip of Egyptian strongman Abd al Fattah al Sisi has tightened. Civil wars rage still in Yemen and Libya exacerbated by outside interference (see Tangled – a cynic’s guide to alliances in the Middle East). Syria’s misery continues with the regime almost but not quite on the verge of victory, and the Kurds betrayed by the Trump administration and defeated by Turkish forces and their Syrian mercenaries. Lebanon, which avoided the fate of other Arab countries a decade ago, although enduring the influx of millions of Syrian refugees, in the wake of a winter of protests, economic meltdown and political paralysis, and the explosive destruction of Beirut’s port and environs, is on the edge of an abyss (see our Lebanon’s WhatsApp Intifada).

All is, as Kent lamented in King Lear, “cheerless, dark and deadly”.

Sawt al Hurriya – Egypt’s slow-burning fuse

In That Howling Infinite, 9th October 2019

Déjà vu

Last month saw the death in exile of former Tunisian strongman, dictator and kleptocrat Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and the resurgence on 20th September of Friday street protests in Cairo and smaller Egyptian towns – and around the world – against the corruption and oppression of Egyptian strongman Abd al Fattah al Sisi and his military cronies. Predictably, some three thousand people have been arrested – protesters, prominent activists, journalists, lawyers and politicians, including Islamist and leftists alike and dissenters in general. These have now been added to the tens of thousands that have already been incarcerated on conspiracy and terrorism charges, largely without trial.

it appears to be an indiscriminate backlash, The Independent’s Bel True writes: “… according to rights groups and people I’ve interviewed, among those haphazardly rounded up are children who were out buying school uniform, tourists holidaying in Cairo, human rights lawyers going to court to represent clients, confused bystanders, young men popping out for evening strolls, visiting foreign students and street vendors. All are now swallowed up in Egypt’s notoriously opaque justice system”.

The protests have for the moment been contained, but with a third of Egypt’s population below the poverty line (and that’s a government figure – it’s very likely much higher), about one-third of the total under age 14 and sixty percent under 30, one can’t help feeling a hint of déjà vu. It is hard to keep one hundred million people down with just a strong arm up your sleeve.

Meeting with al Sisi in New York, US President Donald Trump praised him for restoring order to Egypt. At this year’s G7 summit in Biarritz, Trump had referred to the Egyptian president as his “favourite dictator”, a comment that was met with stunned silence from American and Egyptian officials. Boris Johnson has likewise found a friend in Al Sisi. Tru quotes a British-Egyptian filmmaker: “There is a misconception that Sisi is a partner in stability which allows governments, particularly in Europe, to turn a blind eye to his behaviour: as long he keeps buying weapons and submarines and power stations”.

The Voice of Freedom

In our relatively comfortable, free and democratic countries, it is difficult to put ourselves in the position of people desperate and passionate enough to risk life and limb and to face the terrible consequences of potentially heroic failure. We can but sense, vicariously, the ache and the urge behind Lord Byron’s passionate couplet:

Yet, Freedom! thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.

The courage of the of the Egyptian protesters – for brave they are indeed For having experienced six years of brutal and vengeful military regime, they are fully aware of the consequences of their actions – reminded me of an exhilarating song and video created by a young Egyptian and his friends, celebrating the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that precipitated the fall of practically president-for-life Hosni Mubarak eight years ago last February. Sawt Al Huriya (The Voice of Freedom)), went viral on YouTube after its release on 11 February 2011, the day before Mubarak’s departure.

Bur first, let us revisit those heady days and the doleful years that followed.

Remembering Tahrir Square

The self-immolation in December 20111 of young Tunisian Muhammed Bouazizi was the catalyst for the pent-up popular outrage that led to the heady days of January and February 2011, with the green of the Arab Spring fresh sprung from the soil of the economic and political bankruptcy of the Arab Middle East.

The fall of longtime dictators Zine el Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, was precipitated by the yearning of their oppressed and impoverished people, and particularly the young, for freedom, justice, dignity and employment, and an end to endemic corruption, nepotism and brutality; for a society in which there were jobs and a decent living, where you could save up enough money to get married, where you didn’t have to bribe corrupt officials for everything from traffic fines to court decisions to business permits to jobs, where you could be arbitrarily arrested and/or beaten up or worse for speaking out against the government, the system, or just…speaking out.

Egypt had only known a handful of military rulers until Mubarak was ousted in February 2011, following weeks of protests centred around Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

When elections were held a year later, Mohammed Morsi, standing for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, emerged as president. After decades of repression of the Muslim Brotherhood under Egypt’s military rulers, Morsi promised a moderate agenda that would deliver an “Egyptian renaissance with an Islamic foundation”.

A year later, he was gone, replaced by Abd al Fatah al Sisi, his own defense minister, who threw him in jail and cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, putting hundreds of its members in front of courts that sentenced them to death in mass trials.

His year in office was turbulent, however, as Egypt’s competing forces struggled over the direction the country should go in. Opponents had accused him of trying to impose an Islamist agenda on the country and mass protests began on the anniversary of his election. After more than a week of spreading protests and violence and talks with Sisi in which Morsi reportedly was prepared to make concessions to the opposition, the army announced it had removed Morsi and taken control on 3rd July 2013.

Morsi’s supporters had gathered in Cairo’s Rabaa Square before he was toppled, and there they remained, demanding he be reinstated. On 13th August, the army moved in, clearing the square by force. More than a thousand people are believed to have been killed in the worst massacre of peaceful demonstrators since China’s Tienanmen Square in 1999.

Whereas Hosni Mubarak died in pampered confinement, Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s only elected president, was held in solitary confinement for six years, and died in June 2019 after collapsing in a courtroom, the place where his face has been seen most often, behind metal bars, since he was removed from power. See: Nowhere Man – the lonesome death of Mohamed Morsi

Morsi’s fall led to a military regime more brutal and corrupt than any that preceded it, and with full support from the US and it’s European allies, and of the Egyptian elites, has consolidated the rise and rise of the new pharoah. Al Sisi and other US supporterd and armed Arab autocrats have transformed an already volatile Middle East into a powder keg.

Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s only elected president died in June 2019 after collapsing in a courtroom, the place where his face has been seen most often, behind metal bars, since he was removed from power in 2013

The Arab Spring failed because its youthful vanguard were not prepared for the next stage. In reality, it only occurred in Tunisia and in Egypt. Like the Occupy movement in the west, it lacked coherent leadership and purpose, and in the end, unity against the forces of the establishment that were mobilized against them. But the young, inexperienced idealists were no match for the experienced activists of the Muslim brotherhood, the apparatchiks of the established political parties, and the cadres of the mukhabarat, the military, and the “deep state” that were able to hijack and subvert the revolution.

The Arab Spring was effectively over once the Tunisian and Egyptian dictators had departed and the counterrevolution had already begun – in Egypt particularly with the electoral success and later putsch of the Ikhwan, and finally the “tamarrud” or “rising” of the fearful and conservative middle classes that ushered in military rule.

The great unravelling

The Tunisian and Egyptian risings were followed rapidly by the outbreak of insurrections in Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. These were more sectarian and tribal based, with less reliance on social media, and while media chose to consider them as part of the Arab Spring, in reality, they were not.

This was transformed into a long, hard and bloody winter., and eight years on, the wars of the Arab Dissolution have dragged the world into its vortex. Great Power politics and proxy wars are taxing intellectual and actual imaginations.

And they led to the virtual destruction and disintegration of these countries, the ongoing dismantling of Iraq, and an expanding arc of violence, bloodshed and repression from Morocco to Pakistan, extending southwards across Africa into Mali, Nigeria, Somalia and the Sudans, and their unfortunate neighbours.

Tunisia alone has held on to some of the gains of its “Spring”, but there it is often a case of two steps forward one step back. Nevertheless, the country is holding ostensibly free and fair elections as I write. Elsewhere, the misnamed Arab Spring entered into a cycle of protest and repression little different from earlier unrest, and also, as in the past, foreign intervention. And the story has still a long way to run…

Civil war and economic desperation propelled millions of refugees across the Mediterranean and the Aegean into Europe, threatening the unity and stability of the European Union. Islamic fundamentalism filled the vacuum created by crumbling dictatorships and vanishing borders, unleashing atavistic, uncompromising and vicious Jihadis against their own people and coreligionists, and onto the streets of cities as far apart as Paris, Istanbul, Beirut, Djakarta, and Mogadishu. In Syria particularly, but also in Iraq, Libya and Yemen, outsiders intervened to further complicate the chaos, rendering an early end to these wars a forlorn hope.

All is, as Kent lamented in King Lear, “cheerless, dark and deadly”.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, A Middle East Miscellany

The voice of freedom

Against this a back-drop of the revolution despoiled, hijacked, and betrayed, I share the song created by Seed Mostafa Fahmy and his friends and the video they shot in Tahrir Square during the demonstrations. “In every street in my country, the voice of Freedom is calling!”

Sawt al Hurriya

I went (to go protest), vowing not to turn back.
I wrote, in my blood, on every street.
We raised our voices, until those who had not heard us could.
We broke down all barriers.

Our weapon was our dreams.
And we could see tomorrow clearly.
We have been waiting for so long.
Searching, and never finding our place.

In every street in my country,
The voice of freedom is calling.

We raised our heads high into the sky.
And hunger no longer mattered to us.
Most important are our rights,
And that with our blood we write our history.

If you are one of us,
Stop your chattering,
Stop telling us to leave and abandon our dream.
Stop saying the word, “I”.

In every street in my country,
The voice of freedom is calling.

Brown Egyptian hands
Are outstretched amidst the roars (of the crowd)
Breaking barriers.

Our innovative youth
Have turned autumn into spring.

They have achieved the miraculous.
They have resurrected the dead,
Saying: “Kill me,
But my death will not resurrect YOUR country.
I am writing, with my blood,
A new life for my nation.
Is this my blood, or is it spring?
In color, they are both green.”

I do not know whether I smile from happiness,
Or from my sadnesses.
In every street in my country,

The voice of freedom is calling.

(Translated by Egyptian Seed Mariam Bazeed.)

Sout al-Hurriya
صوت الحرية

Nezelt We qolt ana mesh rage3
نزلت وقلت انا مش راجع
I went out and said I would not return

we katabt bedamy fe kol share3
وكتبت بدمي في كل شارع
And I wrote on each street with my blood

Sama3na elli makansh same3
سمعنا اللي ما كمش سامع
We heard what was not heard

we etkasaret kol el mawane3
واتكسرت كل الموانع
And all the barriers were broken

sela7na kan a7lamna
سلحنا كان احلامنا
Our weapon was our dreams

we bokra wade7 odamna
وبكره واضح قدمنا
And tomorrow was clear ahead of us

men zaman benestana
من زمان بنستني
We’ve been waiting a long time

bendawar mesh la2een makkanna
بندور مش لاقيين مكانا
Seeking but not finding our place

fe kol share3 fe beladi
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country

sout el houriya beynadi
صوت الحريه بينادي
the voice of freedom is calling
……………….
rafa3na rasna fe elsama
رفعنا رسنا في السما
We lifted our heads high (in the sky)

we elgo3 maba2ash beyhemna
والجوع مبقاش بيهمنا
And hunger no longer bothered us

aham 7aga 7a2ena
اهم حاجه حقنا
What’s most important are our rights

wenekteb tarekhna be damena
ونكتب تاريخنا بدمنا
And to write our history with our blood

law kont wa7ed mnena
لو كنت واحد مننا
If you were really one of us

balash terghi we t2ol lena
بلاش ترغي وتقولنا
don’t blather and telling us

nemshy we neseeb &elmna
نمشي ونسيب حلمنا
To leave and abandon our dream

we batal te2ol kelmt ana
وبطل تقول كلمه انا
And stop saying the word “I”

fe kol share3 fe beladi
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country

Sout El-7ouria beynadi
صوت الحريه بينادي
the sound of freedom is calling
……………..
spoken poetry at 2:14:
ايادي مصريه سمره
Dark Egyptian arms
ليها في التمييز
knows how to characterize (against discrimination)
ممدوده وسط الذئير
reached out through the roar
بتكسر البراويز
breaking the frams
طلع الشباب البديع
the creative youth came out
قلبوا خريفها ربيع
turned it’s fall into spring
وحققوا المعجزه
and achieved the miracle
صحوا القتيل من القتل
awakinging the murdered from death
اقتلني , اقتلني
kill me , kill me
قتلي ما هايقيم دولتك تاني
killing me is not going to build up you regime again
بكتب بدمي حياه تانيه لوطاني
I am writing with my blood another life for my country
دمي ده ولا الربيع
is this my blood or the spring
اللي اتنين بلون اخضر
both seem green
وببتسم من سعادتي ولا أحزاني
am i smiling from my happiness or my sadness
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country
صوت الحريه بينادي
the sound of freedom is calling
في كل شارع في بلادي
In every street of my country
صوت الحريه بينادي
the sound of freedom is calling

Tangled! – a cynic’s guide to alliances in the Middle East

February 17, 2020February 17, 2020Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

The paradox of piety observes no disconnect
Nor registers anxiety
As the ship of fools is wrecked
So leaders urge with eloquence
And martyrs die in consequence
We talk in last and present sense
As greed and fear persist
E Lucevan Le Stelle, Paul Hemphill

At a recent conference in Berlin, Germany’s prime minister Angela Merkel and and UN Special Representative Ghassan Salamé managed, at least on paper, to cajole the external actors guilty of super-charging Libya’s misery to sign onto a unified agenda. Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Boris Johnson, and Egypt’s pharaoh (and Donald Trump’s “favourite dictator”) Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, joined a dozen or so others (with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo representing the United States) in declaring an intention to end foreign interference in Libya’s internal affairs: “We commit to refraining from interference in the armed conflict or in the internal affairs of Libya and urge all international actors to do the same,” states the communiqué, in language one hopes all participants endorsed in (what would be uncharacteristic, for some) good faith.

This corroboree of hypocrites acknowledged that the increasingly violent and globally tangled Libyan civil war could only be ended if outside powers backed off and ended their meddling. They made altruistic and totally disingenuous declarations about a conflict that they themselves have incited, exacerbated and perpetuated for nine years. And yet, explicitly excluded Libyan participation, contradicting the 2012 UN Guidance for Effective Mediation and its insistence on “inclusivity” and “national ownership” as fundamental elements for peaceful conflict resolution. It’s focus at this point was on the on the external, rather than the Libyan, actors and for reviving the world’s attention on the Libyan conflict.

A follow-up conference in Munich was convened in mid-February to renew its pledges to quit meddling. Stephanie Williams, the UN deputy special envoy for Libya reported zero progress and declared the agreed-upon arms embargo to be a joke. A sick joke, indeed – plane after plane land in Benghazi loaded with weapons from the UAE and other arms-suppliers destined for self-anointed warlord Khalifa Haftar‘s self-styled Libyan National Army.

Unfortunate Libya is neither the first nor the last pawn to be used and abused by outsiders in the new Great Game as the following guide demonstrates.

But first, there’s this letter to a British daily from Aubrey Bailey of Fleet, Hampshire (where hurricanes hardly happen):

Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain.

We (she’s talking if Britain and us generic “good guys”) support the Iraqi government in the fight against Islamic State. We don’t like IS but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia, whom we do like. We don’t like President Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting against him. We don’t like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government against IS.

So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, whom we want to lose, but we don’t want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win. If the people we want to defeat are are defeated, they might be replaced by people we like even less.

And this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out. Do you understand now? Clear as mud!

It casts new light on that thorny old aphorism “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”!

A cynic’s guide to alliances in the Middle East

Libya

We begin with Libya, the “beneficiary” of the Berlin talk-fests.

On the side of the internationally recognized government in Tripoli, Libya’s capital there’s: Not many … Italy (former colonial oppressor, in it for the oil, who’d just love to see an end to those refugee boats that wash up on its shores); Turkey (former Ottoman oppressor now ruled by a wannabe Ottoman sultan Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and eager for offshore oil and gas leases); and potentially, Qatar (who fell out with Egypt, Saudi and the United Arab Emirates over its tepid support for the Sunni grand alliance against Shia Iran). Turkish soldiers fly the government’s drones whilst Turkey’s Syrian jihadi mercenaries provide military muscle – Turkey would like to move them out of Kurdish Syria on account of their murderous behavior).

On the side of the self-anointed warlord Khalifa Haftar, based in Benghazi in the east, whose sharp uniform is festooned in medals for this and that act of service and heroism), there’s: Egypt, (the US’ impecunious, brutal “partner in Freedom” – strange bedfellows in this amoral “new Middle East” that is just like the old Middle East); Saudi Arabia, and the UAE (see above, re. Qatar, whom they blockaded for several years); Jordan (perennially cash-strapped and dependent on rich Arab relatives), France and Russia (arms, oil, and influence); plus Russian mercenaries (plausibly deniable, capable and reliable, and familiar with the Middle East – see below); and Sudan’s murderous Janjaweed Arab militias (broke Sudan seeks Saudi favour).

And on the sidelines, a disinterested and divided UN, the UK and the US – although Britain, with France, helped wreck the joint by ousting longtime dictator Gaddafi; arguably, the US, although Donald Trump has confused matters by phoning Haftar and then saying that he’s a great bloke (he has a thing for dictators actual and potential, including Putin, Erdogan, Al Sisi, and the thuggish Saudi crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman); and in the middle, and against all of the above, the ever-opportunistic and troublesome Da’ish and al Qa’ida..

As American baseball wizz Yogi Berra once said, “It feels like déjà vu all over again”.

Syria

On the side of the internationally recognized government in Damascus headed up by Bashar al Assad, there’s: The Islamic Republic of Iran (Iran’s Shia Muslims are related to Syria’s heterodox Alawi minority, whose elite happen to have rule the country for half a century, and Iran is consolidating it’s Shia axis across the Middle East); Russia (oil, pipelines, and restoring Soviet greatness); Lebanese Shia Hezbollah (de facto ruler of Lebanon) and its soldiers; the Iranian Quds brigade (the expeditionary arm of the Revolutionary Guard, a military-industrial complex that virtually runs Iran); sundry Iraqi and Afghan Shia militias beholden to Iran for cash, weapons, training and ideology); Russian and Chechen mercenaries (see above – deniable, reliable and capable); and, quite surreptitiously, Turkey (former Ottoman oppressor) which is ostensibly opposed to Assad, but needing Russian pipeline deals, runs with the hares and hunts with the hounds – but see below, and also, above with respect to Libya. As the song goes, “I’m so dizzy, my head is turning” already!

On the side of “the other side”, which is not really a “side’ at all, but a grab bag of sundry rebels who were once supported by the US and are predominantly Islamist, with some indeed linked to al Qa’ida, which, of course, we all love to hate (Twin Towers, Osama bin Laden and all that), there’s: the US, Britain and France (why do they persevere so in what Donald Trump has called these forever, endless wars?); Saudi Arabia (Salafi Central and banker for all the bad guys) and the United Arab Emirates (also a financier for the foe); Israel (of course – mortal foe of Iran and of Hezbollah (“the enemy of my enemy” fair-weather friend – anything that distracts its perennial enemies is good for Israel); Hamas, the Islamists who rule the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, and oppose the Alawi oppressor of Sunni Muslims and of Palestinian refugees in Syria; and Turkey (see above – hares and hounds, on the outer with Saudi and the UAE and pals with outcast Qatar, and engaged in an ongoing blood feud with Syrian Kurds ostensibly allied with Turkey’s outlawed separatist Kurds), and as we write, ominously trading blows with the Syrian Army and its Russian allies; and Turkey’s Syrian jihadi mercenaries – erstwhile former rebels and al Qa’ida and Da’ish fighters who are in it for the money, for vengeance against the Kurds and the Assad regime, and, for many, good old blood-lust.

And stuck in the middle: Those Syrian Kurds, of formerly autonomous Syrian enclaves Afrin and Rojava (betrayed by America, invaded by Turkey, and forever abandoned by the rest of the world, they have been forced to come to terms with the Assad regime which has discriminated against them forever; sundry Bedouin tribes who work to a code of patronage and payback; the scattered remnants of Da’ish which was at the height of its power a veritable “internationale” of fighters from all over the world, including Europeans, Australians, Chechens, Afghans, Uighurs, Indonesians and Filipinos – the remnants of whom are still in the field and hitting back; and sundry die-hard jihadis from constantly splintering factions. Da’ish and the jihadis have been dubiously aided and abetted by money and material from allegedly unknown patrons in the Gulf autocracies, as evidenced by those long convoys of spanking new Toyota Hi Lux “technicals” – which have now curiously reappeared in Haftar’s Libyan National Army (see Libya, above).

Yemen

On the side of the internationally-recognized government of Yemen, there’s: Saudi Arabia, the US, and Britain; plus sundry mercenary outfits from Australia and Brazil; and Sudan (its militias paid by Saudi, as in Libya). The UAE was formerly on this side, but now supports a breakaway would-be Yemeni government Opposed to the present one. On the side of Houthis, a rebel Shia tribe in the north of the country, there’s: Iran and ostensibly its Iraqi and Lebanese auxiliaries – see above, the Shia ‘Arc” of Iranian influence. And in the middle, and against all of the above, the ever-opportunistic and troublesome Da’ish and al Qa’ida.

Afghanistan

Its America’s longest ever war – ours too …

On the side of the UN recognized government there’s: NATO, including the US, Canada, Britain, Germany, Denmark and Norway; and also, Australia and New Zealand – though why antipodeans want to get involved in the faraway Afghan quagmire beats me … Oh yes, the US alliance, and our innate empathy for the poor and downtrodden.

On the other side, there’s: The ever-patient, ever-resilient Taliban, aided and abetted by duplicitous Pakistan (an ally of the US – yes!), and al Qa’ida and Da’ish, both dubiously aided and abetted by money and material from Gulf despots.

And on the sidelines, miscellaneous corrupt and well-armed Afghani warlords who take advantage of the ongoing turmoil and grow rich on bribes, option and smuggling; and the rest of the world, really, which has long ago zoned out of those “forever, endless wars”.

So, what now?

More of the same, alas. Great Power politics and proxy wars are taxing intellectual and actual imaginations. It is business as usual in the scattered killing grounds as a bewildering array of outsiders continue to wage their proxy wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen. Bombs still explode in Afghanistan and Somalia, and whilst Islamists terrorise the countries of the Sahel, and even distant Mozambique, warlords rape and pillage in Congo. As usual in these proxy conflicts the poor people are stuck in the middle being killed in their thousands courtesy of weapons supplied by the US, European, Israeli, Russian and Chinese arms industries.

As outsiders butt each other for dominance, and the Masters of War ply their untrammelled trade, we are condemned, as Bob Dylan sang in another time and another war, to “sit back and watch as the death count gets higher’. I am reminded of WH Auden’s September 1, 1939, a contemplation on a world descending into an abyss: “Defenseless under the night, our word in stupor lies’. All is, as Kent lamented in King Lear, “cheerless, dark and deadly”.

In That Howling Infinite, see also; A Middle East Miscellany

A postscript from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

‘What I was going to say,’ said the Dodo in an offended tone, ‘was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus–race.’

‘What IS a Caucus–race?’ said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.

‘Why,’ said the Dodo, ‘the best way to explain it is to do it.’ (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)

First it marked out a race–course, in a sort of circle, (‘the exact shape doesn’t matter,’ it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no ‘One, two, three, and away,’ but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out ‘The race is over!’ and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, ‘But who has won?’ This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, ‘EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.’

17th September 1939 – the rape of Poland (2)

September 17, 2019September 17, 2019Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

On 17 September 1939, sixteen days after Germany invaded Poland from the west in an sudden and unprovoked assault [see our post 2nd September 1939 – the rape of Poland (1)], the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east in accordance with the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, ,forever know as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. a neutrality pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively.

The Red Army vastly outnumbered the Polish army and the undeclared war lasted 20 days and ended on 6 October 1939 with division and annexation of the entire country territory by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Some 320,000 Polish soldiers became prisoners of war and a campaign of mass persecution in the newly-acquired territory began immediately with a wave of arrests and summary executions targeting Polish figures of authority such as military officers, police and priests. In May and June 1949 alone, some 22.000 polish officers, politicians, intellectuals and professionals were murdered in the Katyn Forest.There were other such massacres as the NKVD endeavoured to eliminate the Polish elite. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were transported from eastern Poland to Siberia and other remote parts of the Soviet Union in four major waves of deportation between 1939 and 1941.

In November 1939 the Soviets annexed the eternity under its control and some 13.5 million Polish citizens became Soviet subjects following sham elections. Soviet forces occupied eastern Poland until the summer of 1941, when they were expelled by the German army in the course of Operation Barbarossa, and the area was under German occupation until the Red Army reconquered it in the summer of 1944.

This was but the beginning.

Around six million Polish citizens perished during the Second World War about – one fifth of the pre-war population. Most were civilian victims of the war crimes and crimes against humanity during the occupation by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and half of them were Jews.

An estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during The Great Patriotic War that was to come, including as many as 11 million soldiers. Some seven million were killed in action and another 3.6 million perished in German POW camps.

And then there were the deportations. Some 2 million people were transported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics – ostensibly for treasonous collaboration with the invading Germans and anti-Soviet rebellion. Mere suspicion was sufficient to attract collective punishment. The Crimean Tartars were deported en masse, whilst Volga Germans, settled in Russia for centuries, and other non-Slavic nationalities of the strategic Crimea, Black Sea coast lands and northern Caucasus were also dispatched eastwards. Whilst many were permitted to return to their homelands in the years and sometimes decades after the war, we’ll never know how many perished in exile from violence or privation.

On the other side of the ledger, the Wehrmacht suffered three-quarters of its wartime losses fighting the Red Army. Some four million died in action and another 370,000 in the Soviet camp system. Some 600,000 soldiers of Germany allies, mostly Eastern Europeans, died also. In Stalingrad alone, the total Axis casualties (Germans, Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians) are believed to have been more than 800,000 dead, wounded, missing, or captured.

Having sowed the wind, Nazi Germany reaped the whirlwind when the tides of war changed and the Red Army retreated, recouped, stood firm and finally advanced, pushing onwards ever onwards until it reached Berlin. As the Soviets exacted revenge for the carnage and devastation wrought by the Wehrmacht, German citizens paid a heavy price. Civilian deaths, due to the flight and expulsion of Germans, Soviet atrocities and the transportation Germans for forced labour in the Soviet Union range from 500,000 to over 2 million.

These melancholy statistics are but a portion of the millions of lives lost or changed utterly by the events of September 1939.

Lest we forget …

They crossed over the border, the hour before dawn
Moving in lines through the day
Most of our planes were destroyed on the ground where they lay
Waiting for orders we held in the wood
Word from the front never came
By evening the sound of the gunfire was miles away
Ah, softly we move through the shadows, slip away through the trees
Crossing their lines in the mists in the fields on our hands and on our knees
And all that I ever was able to see
The fire in the air glowing red
Silhouetting the smoke on the breeze
Al Stewart, Roads to Moscow

Worldwide, over seventy million souls perished during World War II. We’ll never know just how many …

DEATHS BY COUNTRY

COUNTRY	MILITARY DEATHS	TOTAL CIVILIAN AND MILITARY DEATHS
Albania	30,000	30,200
Australia	39,800	40,500
Austria	261,000	384,700
Belgium	12,100	86,100
Brazil	1,000	2,000
Bulgaria	22,000	25,000
Canada	45,400	45,400
China	3-4,000,000	20,000,000
Czechoslovakia	25,000	345,000
Denmark	2,100	3,200
Dutch East Indies	—	3-4,000,000
Estonia	—	51,000
Ethiopia	5,000	100,000
Finland	95,000	97,000
France	217,600	567,600
French Indochina	—	1-1,500,000
Germany	5,533,000	6,600,000-8,800,000
Greece	20,000-35,000	300,000-800,000
Hungary	300,000	580,000
India	87,000	1,500,000-2,500,000
Italy	301,400	457,000
Japan	2,120,000	2,600,000-3,100,000
Korea	—	378,000-473,000
Latvia	—	227,000
Lithuania	—	353,000
Luxembourg	—	2,000
Malaya	—	100,000
Netherlands	17,000	301,000
New Zealand	11,900	11,900
Norway	3,000	9,500
Papua New Guinea	—	15,000
Philippines	57,000	500,000-1,000,000
Poland	240,000	5,600,000
Rumania	300,000	833,000
Singapore	—	50,000
South Africa	11,900	11,900
Soviet Union	8,800,000-10,700,000	24,000,000
United Kingdom	383,600	450,700
United States	416,800	418,500
Yugoslavia	446,000	1,000,000

WORLDWIDE CASUALTIES*

Battle Deaths	15,000,000
Battle Wounded	25,000,000
Civilian Deaths	45,000,000

*Worldwide casualty estimates vary widely in several sources. The number of civilian deaths in China alone might well be more than 50,000,000.

Postscript

Former Soviet spy, former Ukrainian government minister and author Viktor Suvorov kick-started a historiographical battle royal in the early eighties when he presented controversial evidence that contrary to long-held opinion, Stalin had planned to actually attack Germany in 1941, only to be preempted by Operation Barbarossa. Read more about it here.

See also, in In That Howling Infinite: Ghosts of the Gulag, The Death of Stalin is no laughing matter, and Thermidorian Thinking

2nd September 1939 – the rape of Poland (1)

September 6, 2019September 16, 2019Paul Hemphill 7 Comments

As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War, with Germany’s unprovoked invasion of Poland on 2nd September, and Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany the day after, let us bow our heads for the victims of Nazism.

The term ‘Holocaust’ generally refers to the systematic and industrialized mass murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe – called the Shoah or ‘catastrophe’ by Jews. But the Nazis also murdered unimaginable numbers of non-Jewish people considered subhuman – Untermenschen (the Nazis had a way with words!) – or undesirable.

Non-Jewish victims of Nazism included Slavs who occupied the Reich’s ostensible lebensraum – living space, or more bluntly, land grab (Russians – some seven million – Poles, another two – Ukrainians, Serbs and others in Eastern Europe caught in the Wehrmacht mincer; Roma (gypsies); homosexuals; the mentally or physically disabled, and mentally ill; Soviet POWs who died in their tens of thousands; Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians who defied the regime; Jehovah’s Witnesses and Freemasons; Muslims; Spanish Republicans who had fled to France after the civil war; people of colour, especially the Afro-German Mischlinge, called “Rhineland Bastards” by Hitler and the Nazi regime; leftists, including communists, trade unionists, social democrats, socialists, and anarchists; capitalists, even, who antagonized the regime; and indeed every minority or dissident not considered Aryan (‘herrenvolk’ or part of the “master race”); French, Belgians, Luxemburgers, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Albanians, Yugoslavs, Albanians, and, after 1943, Italians, men, women and young people alike, involved with the resistance movements or simply caught up in reprisals; and anyone else who opposed or disagreed with the Nazi regime. See below, Ina Friedman’s The Other Victims of the Nazis and also, Wikipedia’s Victims of the Holocaust

The Nazis, with a little help from their allies and collaborators, murdered (there is no other word) an estimated six million Jews and 11 million others In camps and jails, reprisals and roundups, on the streets of cities, towns and villages, in fields and in forests, and in prison cells and torture chambers. And in the fog of war, the dearth of accurate records, and the vagaries of historical memory, the actual number is doubtless higher – much higher.
Lest we forget …

Worldwide, over seventy million souls perished during World War II. We’ll never know just how many …

DEATHS BY COUNTRY

Country	Military Deaths	Total Civilian and Military Deaths
Albania	30,000	30,200
Australia	39,800	40,500
Austria	261,000	384,700
Belgium	12,100	86,100
Brazil	1,000	2,000
Bulgaria	22,000	25,000
Canada	45,400	45,400
China	3-4,000,000	20,000,000
Czechoslovakia	25,000	345,000
Denmark	2,100	3,200
Dutch East Indies	—	3-4,000,000
Estonia	—	51,000
Ethiopia	5,000	100,000
Finland	95,000	97,000
France	217,600	567,600
French Indochina	—	1-1,500,000
Germany	5,533,000	6,600,000-8,800,000
Greece	20,000-35,000	300,000-800,000
Hungary	300,000	580,000
India	87,000	1,500,000-2,500,000
Italy	301,400	457,000
Japan	2,120,000	2,600,000-3,100,000
Korea	—	378,000-473,000
Latvia	—	227,000
Lithuania	—	353,000
Luxembourg	—	2,000
Malaya	—	100,000
Netherlands	17,000	301,000
New Zealand	11,900	11,900
Norway	3,000	9,500
Papua New Guinea	—	15,000
Philippines	57,000	500,000-1,000,000
Poland	240,000	5,600,000
Rumania	300,000	833,000
Singapore	—	50,000
South Africa	11,900	11,900
Soviet Union	8,800,000-10,700,000	24,000,000
United Kingdom	383,600	450,700
United States	416,800	418,500
Yugoslavia	446,000	1,000,000

WORLDWIDE CASUALTIES*

Battle Deaths	15,000,000
Battle Wounded	25,000,000
Civilian Deaths	45,000,000

*Worldwide casualty estimates vary widely in several sources. The number of civilian deaths in China alone might well be more than 50,000,000.

Read also, in In That Howling Infinite: Righteous Among the Nations and Las Treces Rosas – Spain’s Unquiet Graves

The Other Victims of the Nazis

Ina R. Friedman

Fifty years after the end of World War II, few people are aware that Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis. In addition to six million Jews, more than five million non-Jews were murdered under the Nazi regime. Among them were Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, blacks, the physically and mentally disabled, political opponents of the Nazis, including Communists and Social Democrats, dissenting clergy, resistance fighters, prisoners of war, Slavic peoples, and many individuals from the artistic communities whose opinions and works Hitler condemned.1
The Nazis’ justification for genocide was the ancient claim, passed down through Nordic legends, that Germans were superior to all other groups and constituted a “master race.”

Who constituted this “master race?” Blue-eyed, blond-haired people of Nordic stock, or “Aryans.” As such, they had the right to declare who was worthy of life and who was not, who was to be maimed by sterilization or experimented upon in the interest of attaining racial purity, and who was to be used as slave labor to further the Nazi empire.

In the world the Nazis wished to create, Jews and Gypsies were to be eliminated as racially, socially, and physically defective. The deaf, the blind, the physically disabled, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and alcoholics were either to be sterilized or killed simply because they were viewed as “genetically defective.” Slavic people, though labeled racially inferior by the Germans, would be allowed to exist as slaves in order to supply the Nazis with free labor. Criminals, political enemies of the state, and homosexuals were pronounced socially undesirable and subject to the will of the Nazis.

Barely two months after attaining power, the Nazis laid the constitutional foundation for Hitler’s dictatorship with the passage of the Enabling Act on March 24, 1933. This legislation was subtitled “The Law to Remove Stress from the People and State.” It gave Hitler the right to pass any law without the approval of the Reichstag. In effect, the implementation of this law allowed the Nazis to completely ignore the civil and human rights previously guaranteed by the German constitution.

In addition to passing laws legalizing their denial of human rights, the Nazis began a press and radio propaganda campaign to portray their intended victims as rats, vermin, and Untermenschen (subhumans). Inmates of concentration camps were listed as Stuecks (pieces), with assigned numbers, rather than being permitted the dignity of a name. If a German gave these victims a thought, he was to think of them as animals.

Although belief in the theory that one race was superior to others was not unique to Hitler and the Nazis, the enthusiastic support given to Nazis by all facets of German society, particularly the scientific community, was unique.2 Geneticists, scientists, doctors, and anthropologists from the internationally acclaimed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute cooperated in the process of experimenting on human beings to prove the theory of a master race. Spurious experiments to “show” the inferiority of non-Nordic groups such as blacks, Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and others were conducted. Teachers embarrassed Jewish and Gypsy children by directing so-called scientific efforts that included measuring the sizes of their heads in order to prove so-called “mental deficiencies.” Other efforts by the scientific community included certifying that sterilization or annihilation was necessary for “undesirable groups.”

In 1943, Professor Eugen Fischer, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics, wrote to a German newspaper: “It is a rare and special good fortune for a theoretical scientist to flourish at a time when the prevailing ideology welcomes it, and its findings immediately serve the policy of the state.”3 Professor Fischer’s “good fortune” included creating an environment that allowed Dr. Mengele and others who took the Hippocratic oath the right to experiment on human beings and to murder them in the “interest” of science. This included the experiments Mengele performed on Jewish and Gypsy twins in Auschwitz, injecting them with chemicals and germs. If one twin died, the other twin was murdered to compare their physiognomy.

In efforts to breed a master race, more than 300,000 German Aryans were sterilized and countless numbers were gassed, under a law passed on July 14, 1933, the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring.” In his book Murderous Science, Dr. Benno Mueller-Hill notes that the aforementioned statute provided for compulsory sterilization in cases of “congenital mental defects, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy . . . and severe alcoholism.”4 This included the blind and the deaf, even those who became deaf or blind from illnesses such as scarlet fever or from accidents.

A few years ago, on a trip to Germany, I interviewed deaf people who had been sterilized by the Nazis. In one case, a nine year-old girl had been removed from her school and taken to a hospital by the principal for sterilization. “When I came to,” she said, “I found my parents by my bed weeping.” To prevent them from protesting, the state had not notified them beforehand.

The Nazis also had a significant impact on the lives of black children, who were the offspring of German women and African soldiers stationed in the Rhineland after World War I. Many of these so-called “Rhineland Bastards” were picked up from the streets or from classrooms and sterilized, often without anesthesia. Due to the application of the “Law for the Prevention of Off-spring with Hereditary Defects,” which was passed in 1933, approximately 400 of these children were deprived of their right to reproduce.

Homosexuals were often given the choice of sterilization, castration, or incarceration in a concentration camp. This treatment was “legaquot; because of a law passed in 1871, under paragraph 175 of the German penal code, making homosexuality a criminal offense.5 Under the Nazis, thousands of persons were persecuted and punished on the charge of homosexuality. Many were sent to concentration camps, where they had to wear a pink triangle (rosa Windel).

When the war broke out in 1939, Hitler ordered the elimination of the severely retarded because they were “useless eaters.”6 Operating from headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin, the “T-4” program took the retarded to extermination centers and gassed them with carbon monoxide. In two years, from 1939 to 1941, more than 50,000 persons were killed in this program. In 1941, the Bishop of Muenster protested these gassings, and they were stopped. However, the victims had served their purpose as guinea pigs in the refinement of the use of gas for the mass killing of Jews and Gypsies. The lessons learned in these earlier executions were used in the death camps.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler had made known his antipathy toward Christianity. Reverence would be shown to Hitler and not to the traditional symbols of Christianity. Statues of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary would be banished and, in their place, the Fuehrer’s photographs would be displayed. The Old Testament was to be discarded as “a Jew book full of lies,” and Mein Kampf would supersede the New Testament. In place of the banished cross would stand the swastika.

Both the priests and ministers who spoke out against the Nazis were labeled “political opponents,” and “enemies of the state.” Many of these dissenters were sent to Dachau concentration camp, where a special barracks was set aside for religious leaders. This isolation was to keep the clergy from giving solace or rites to the rest of the prisoners. In the camps, the clergy, like other inmates, were used as slave laborers and in medical experiments.7 Of the 2,270 priests and ministers from nineteen occupied countries who were interned in Dachau, 1,034 perished.

The handful of Catholic priests in Germany who protested the actions of the Nazis was also punished. For example, Provost Bernard Lichtenberg of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin was arrested, imprisoned for two years, rearrested at the end of his sentence, and shipped to Dachau. He died en route.

In 1938, when Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich, a leader of the Catholic hierarchy, protested the persecution of Jews, the Nazis attempted to burn down his house.

Most clergymen either did not read Mein Kampf or ignored its foreshadowing of things to come, and thus the majority of Germany’s religious leaders supported Hitler’s nationalistic ambitions. Yet there were those among the religious community who did challenge the Nazis. Out of 17,000 Protestant clergy, three thousand were Evangelical Lutherans who opposed the Nazis. Some of the members of the group were arrested and sent to concentration camps-never to return. Others worked quietly in their opposition. Some spoke out because of Hitler’s attacks on the church, and a few because of his actions against the Jews.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, though few in number, also were seen as a threat to the Nazis. Not only did they oppose war and refuse to fight, but they also urged others not to serve. In addition, Witnesses refused to salute the flag or to say “Heil Hitler.” To a Jehovah’s Witness, saluting the flag or any authority other than Jehovah God is the same as worshipping idols.

Along these lines, my book The Other Victims: First Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis relates the story of the Kusserow family. Not only the parents, but also their eleven children, were punished for being Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1936, when the father, Franz Kusserow, refused to renounce his religion, he was put in jail until the end of the war. Two sons were executed because they refused induction into the army. Another son was incarcerated in Dachau, where he contracted tuberculosis and died shortly after the war. The three youngest children were sent to reform school for “re-education.” Mrs. Kusserow and the older girls were taken either to prison or to concentration camps.

The Gypsies, like the Jews, were condemned by the Nazis to complete annihilation for being racially impure, socially undesirable, and “mentally defective.”8 The persecution of Gypsies was not new in Germany. A “Central Office for the Fighting of the Gypsy Menace” had been established in 1899. In 1933, a plan to put thirty thousand Gypsies aboard ships and sink the ships in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean was abandoned, but many Gypsies were sterilized under a law that permitted the sterilization of “mental defectives.” In Dachau, Gypsies were used in experiments to test the amount of salt water an individual could drink before death occurred. At least half a million Gypsies were murdered by the Germans in the gas chambers, in experiments, or in general round-ups.

Although the Nazis declared Polish people Untermenschen, or subhumans, thousands of Polish children who were blond haired and blue eyed were separated from their families and sent to Germany to be raised in German homes as Aryans. The dark-haired, dark-eyed sisters and brothers remaining in Poland were to be taught only simple arithmetic, to sign their names, and to offer obedience to their German masters. Their purpose in life was to serve as slaves for the German empire. Anyone caught trying to give further instruction to Polish children was to be punished. Despite the ban on education, secret schools flourished in attics and basements.

Because of the ideological and racial antipathy toward Russian Communism, between two and three million Russian prisoners of war were purposely starved to death by the Nazis. Others were shipped in cattle cars to concentration or extermination camps. Most died of disease, exhaustion, or starvation.

No article on the non-Jewish victims would be complete without mentioning the first opponents of the Nazis: Germans who happened to be Communists or Social Democrats, judges and lawyers, or editors and journalists who had opposed the Nazis. They were the first to be arrested.

As soon as the Nazis came to power, the goal of eliminating all opposition took primacy. Trucks and police vans raced up and down the streets arresting any threat to Nazi rule, including those members of the artistic community who demanded cultural freedom. Books were burned. Authors and artists were either imprisoned or purposely denied the ability to earn a livelihood.

Even telling a joke about Hitler could lead to a death sentence. The evening before he was to give a concert, pianist Robert Kreitin remarked to the woman with whom he was staying, “You won’t have to keep Hitler’s picture over your mantle much longer. Germany’s losing the war.” The woman reported him to the Gestapo. The day of the concert, he was arrested and executed.

A few years ago, I conducted interviews in Germany for a biography, Flying Against The Wind: The Story of a Young Woman Who Defied the Nazis. The young woman, Cato Bontjes van Beek, was one of the few Germans to resist the Nazis. While she opposed the regime, her favorite cousin, Ulrich, supported Hitler and joined the Storm Troopers. Everyone I talked to described her blond-haired, blue-eyed cousin as “a sweet and sensitive person, an artist and a poet.”

“How was it possible,” I asked Cato’s mother, “that Ulrich was so fanatical about Hitler? He came from the same background as Cato.”

“When Ulrich looked in the mirror,” she said, “he saw the Master Race.”

It was people like Ulrich, along with the scientists and the judges who administered Nazi “justice,” who gave Hitler the manpower and the consent to murder six million Jews and five million non-Jews.

Although Hitler is dead, the theories that he espoused remain alive. With the modern tools being developed by biologists and other scientists, it is important for young people to be made aware that knowledge can be manipulated and turned into tools of destruction.

In every generation, educating the young is an awesome task. Today, with new scientific advances, the rapid spread of knowledge through computer networks, and the ability to alter the material being transmitted, it is more important than ever that students learn to think for themselves. Part of that learning process should include the devastating effects of prejudice. A true understanding of the history of the Holocaust would make that lesson clear.

Notes
1Susan Bachrach, Tell Them We Remember: The Story of the Holocaust (Boston: Little Brown, 1995), 20.

2 Nora Levin, The Holocaust. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), 11-15

3 Eugen Fischer, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany) March 28, 1943.

4 Benno Mueller-Hill, Murderous Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 28.

5 Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (New York: Holt, 1986), 211-19.

6 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 46.

7 Barbara Distel, Dachau (Bruxelles: Comité International de Dachau, 1985), 11.

8 Ian Hancock, The Pariah Syndrome (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Karoma Publishers, 1987), 63-6

9. BibliographyBethge, Eberhard. Costly Grace: An Illustrated Biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.Forman, James. The Traitor. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1970.Friedman, Ina. The Other Victims: First Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.—–. Flying Against the Wind: The Story of a Young Woman Who Defied the Nazis. Brookline: Lodgepole Press, 1995.Hancock, Ian. The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution. Ann Arbor: Karoma, Inc., 1986.Hanser, Richard. A Noble Treason: The Revolt of the Munich Students Against Hitler. New York: Putnam, 1979.Kanfer, Stefan. The Eighth Sin. New York: Random House, 1978.Lukas, Richard C., ed. Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989.Mueller-Hill, Benno. Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others. Germany 1933-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals. New York: Holt, 1986.Ramati, Alexander. And the Violins Stopped Playing: A Story of the Gypsy Holocaust. New York: Watts, 1986.Snyder, L. Louis. Hitler’s German Enemies: Portraits of Heroes Who Fought the Nazis. New York: Hippocrene Press, 1990.Wise, Robert. The Pastors’ Barracks. Wheaton, Illinois: Victor Books, 1986.

Ina R. Friedman is the author of The Other Victims: First Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), which was cited in 1991 as one of the “Best Books” of the American Library Association-Young Adult Division. Her latest book, Flying Against the Wind: The Story of a Young Woman Who Defied the Nazis, is a biography of a German Christian who resisted the Nazis (Brookline, Massachusetts: Lodgepole Press, 1995).

Howlinginfinite.com

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Contemplating civil wars

All fall down …

Revolution and reaction

World War 1.2

Pogrom

The End

Epilogue … history repeats

The Great Terror

How rational was the Great Purge?

Bibliography

Tibor Szamuely: ‘The Russian Tradition’

The year in review

What we wrote in 2022

Life in Wartime – images of Ukraine

US weakness

Afghanistan: a triple betrayal

Russia: playing a poor hand well

China’s uneasy rise

Iran: further than ever from a nuclear deal

AUKUS: doubling down on a weak partner?

Déjà vu

The Voice of Freedom

Remembering Tahrir Square

The great unravelling

The voice of freedom

Sawt al Hurriya

Sout al-Hurriya صوت الحرية

A cynic’s guide to alliances in the Middle East

Libya

Syria

Yemen

Afghanistan

So, what now?

A postscript from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

WORLDWIDE CASUALTIES*

Postscript

WORLDWIDE CASUALTIES*

The Other Victims of the Nazis

Sout al-Hurriya
صوت الحرية