The past beats inside me like a second heart
John Banville, The Sea
Why is this blog called In That Howling Infinite? It refers to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a magnificent study in mania and obsession:
“But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!” Moby–Dick, Chapter 23
In a figurative sense, it speaks of the themes and schemes that are addressed in the thoughts, ideas, songs, poems and stories that feature in this blog. We are, as Bob Dylan sang, “condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting”. And we like to hope that, as the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho said, “someone will remember us, I say, even in another time”
Here are the most recent articles in In That Howling Infinite.
Smyrna 1922 and the Ottoman endgame. The expulsion of the millennia long Greek presence in Anatolia was one of the last chapters in the extraordinarily violent disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
Beside Strange Waters. The dark side of former Pink Floyd front man and currently, controversial political activist
Rasputin and the downfall of the Romanovs. To admirers he was a man of God; to his enemies, a charlatan, sexual predator, political manipulator and symbol of everything rotten within Russia’s last royal dynasty.
The featured picture at the head of this page is the interior of St George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Madaba, Jordan, home of the sixth century Madaba map, discussed in Maps, memory, and the myth of fingerprints
Sydney Sweeney has good jeans
Ten favourites:
A Short History of the Rise and Fall of the West. In one of the first essays published in In That Howling Infinite, we walked down what Welsh poet RS Thomas called ‘the long road of history”, beginning with the usual suspects: power and pride, greed, and aggrandisement, and as accessories after the fact, dolour, devastation, and death.
Blood and Brick … a world of walls. Hadrian’s Wall, the Theodosian Wall, the Berlin Wall, Northerm Ireland’s Peace Wall, Israel’s Separation Wall, George RR Martin’s Ice Wall, the wall you can see from space, and walls that most people have never heard of. If walls could talk, what take they woukd tell. While walls are destined to fall one day, people like them. They project a language of security – but they stem from a sense of insecurity, a fear of losing what you have.
One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance. The history of Israel and Palestine does not yield to forensic neatness. This land holds layered attachment; Jewish longing and Palestinian dispossession; British imperial design and Arab nationalist pride; secular aspiration and religious revival; survival strategy and ideological fervour. None alone explains the whole. Together they form the sediment of a century.
The Twilight of the Equine Gods. An illuminating canter through the story of the “Centaurian Pact” between humans and horses. it is at once a ride and revelation. The horse, as German academic and cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff’s tells us, “has been man’s most important companion – forget cats and dogs – and the most durable of historical alliances – against which every other covenant into which we have entered has been fragile and ephemeral – not even our relationship with our gods has shown a comparable degree of stability”.
The Sport of Kings. CE Morgan’s “great American novel” is not a history book – nor is it an historical novel. But it is most certainly about history. And about identity. As Morgan puts it: “You would never escape the category of your birth”. It is also about memory and myth: “Repeated long enough, stories become memory and memory becomes fact”.
Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment. “Nostalgia”, literally the pain associated with the thought of home, or homesickness, is derived from the Greek “nostos” – a theme used in Ancient Greek literature most notably in the recently reimagined Odyssey, involving an epic hero returning home after a long time away. Nostalgia reveals the deep longing for a home that our younger selves took for granted, and bittersweet return to people and places that have changed forever. But it isn’t all it’s cracked out to be, and, indeed, can bring out the worst in us, becoming a millstone of bitterness and regret strung about the necks of discontented souls who drift off into a maze of memories, meanings and emotions.
A cowboy key – how the west was sung. My riding days are over, but I have been into westerns all my life, and the songs inspired by them – in films, musicals and popular song, from ghostly herds to outlaw chic, Frankie Laing to Leonard Cohen and Taylor Swift. And, as a onetime musician myself, I have, back in days gone by, penned songs in a cowboy key.
McGoohan’s Blues – sunbathing in the rain. How an eighteen minute digression from the concept if not the plot of an iconic if indecipherable ‘sixties’ television series made an indelible impression on an impressionable twenty year old who remains mightily impressed with this song by Britain’s high priest of angst.
The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir. “Fast forwaranother century, and I was “on the Holy Ground once more” attending the wedding of an old pal held in an old pub in the heart of Ireland. Getting there, we’d done a whistle-stop tour of the south, including Inis Córthaid (my mother’s hometown), Wexford and Ross, the heartland of the ‘98 rebellion … I was best man at that wedding, and in a speech largely devoted to the groom and our mutual, lifelong appreciation of Bob Dylan, I was able to relate to guests young and old tales of my Irish childhood, taking us all “down the foggy ruins of time”, and sang extracts from songs I actually did learn at my mothers knee, the song-lines of my Celtic twilight.
About the creator of this blog
Paul Hemphill is a British-born Australian songwriter, poet, and blogger.
Once upon a time, he was an accountant by profession, a manager, mentor and mediator. A long-time resident of Sydney, he is now living in the middle of the forest on the mid north coast of New South Wales, Australia, where he spends much of his time in the great outdoors.
His interests include music, poetry, politics and history. He has had a lifelong passion for the history, politics and people of the Middle East. Over the years, through study and travel, he has acquired a working knowledge of standard and colloquial Arabic.
Listen to some of Paul’s songs on SoundCloud and YouTube. Search under Paul Hemphill or HuldreFolk (but ignore the Flemish death metal band of the same name). He has assembled seven volumes of poetry and verse, and these can be read on this blog.
For our old friend and co-founder of HuldreFolk, the acclaimed bandurist Victor Mishalow, Ukrainian composer Hryhory Kytasty’s Echo of the Steppes (Гомін Степів) was much, much more than a piece of music; it was an evocation of a lost homeland.
It was Victor’s signature piece, and when introducing it in our concerts – an eclectic combination of stories, songs and music – he would describe the boundless Ukrainian steppe: waves of tall grass bending beneath an endless wind, and beneath it all the legendary black chernozem, among the richest soil on earth, so deep it seemed almost without end. In his telling, the bandura was “the soul of Ukraine”, its shimmering strings giving voice to the wind, the grasses, the little creatures that dwelt within them, and the immenseness of the plains.
The music also carried folk memory: of open frontiers where the Kozaks once found refuge from oppression, where freedom could still be breathed beneath an enormous sky, and where the landscape itself became part of the nation’s identity. Listening to Victor play, one did not simply hear an instrument; one heard the echo of the steppes – a vast, living landscape in which earth, wind, history and people were bound together in a single, resonant voice.
Fingerprints, ghosts and the long arm of History
In an illuminating essay in the e-zine Unherd, republished below, former war-correspondent Aris Roussinos begins an extensive and expansive review of Australian archeologist Warwick Ball’s The Eurasian Steppe with three mute stone figures – Cuman balbals – standing beside the road between Sloviansk and Bakhmut in Donetsk, watching the endless movement of armies across what is now Ukraine’s disputed and devastated Donbas. They are ancient witnesses in a landscape where Russians and Ukrainians now fight over ground that, for most of human history, belonged to neither, and yet, for countless people over millennia, became pasturelands and polities, battlefields and burial grounds.
This is history as I like it: the historian as storyteller, where landscapes become characters and the past refuses to remain buried.
Long before Slavic speech reached these plains, the steppe was the domain of nomadic peoples: Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Turks, Mongols and many others whose empires rose and vanished like storms over the grasslands. They left few cities and fewer written records, but their fingerprints are everywhere: in languages, military traditions, political institutions, myths and identities. The grass remembers what libraries often forget.
Roussinos’ central argument is that we have misunderstood Europe by looking too exclusively westward, towards Rome. The steppe was never merely a barbarian wilderness beyond civilisation, waiting to burst through the gates. It was one of the great engines of European history. Europe was shaped not only by the legacy of Rome and Christianity but also by repeated encounters with the peoples of Inner Asia. The old frontier between “Europe” and “Asia” dissolves under closer inspection. What appears on a modern atlas as a dividing line was, for centuries, a vast zone of movement, exchange, conquest and adaptation.
The present war in Ukraine unfolds across precisely this ancient geography. The early Russian thrust towards Kyiv moved through forests and marshes that belonged historically to the old Slavic world. The grinding war of attrition in the east is being fought across the open “Wild Fields”, the immense Eurasian grasslands where mounted nomads once travelled with astonishing speed and where empires repeatedly collided. Roussinos draws parallels with the mechanised battles of the twentieth century – Kursk, Kharkiv, Stalingrad – where tanks replaced horses, but the strategic significance of the landscape remained unchanged. Geography, as Napoleon is said to have observed, is often the most enduring ally in war.
It is an enticing argument because it encourages us to look beneath the familiar surface of European history. Perhaps Europe itself carries far more of the steppe within it than we usually acknowledge. Hungary and Bulgaria were founded by peoples of the steppe. The Polish nobility cultivated a proud Sarmatian ancestry. The Magyars’ memory of their eastern origins helped shape nineteenth-century nationalism. Even the nation state, so often presented as an entirely European invention, may owe something to political traditions carried westward across the grasslands by mounted confederations whose influence extended far beyond the horizon they inhabited.
There are historical echoes scattered throughout this story. The Sarmatians and Alans revolutionised warfare with armoured cavalry, heavy lances and mounted tactics that would eventually blossom into the chivalric traditions of medieval Europe. Even the Arthurian legend may preserve a distant resonance of the steppe in the enduring image of the sword planted in the earth, waiting for the rightful king to draw it forth.
Filmmakers, naturally, could not resist. The 2004 film King Arthur, for example, stitched together Romans, Celts, Sarmatians, Picts and enough historical liberties to make any medievalist wince. Clive Owen wandered through a fictional Northumbria Britain as a brooding half-Roman, half-Sarmatian Arthur, while Keira Knightley appeared as an improbably glamorous and scantily clad Guinevere whose Pictish origins seemed less convincing than her plummy English accent. It was glorious nonsense, but enjoyable, nonetheless. The Irish landscapes were striking, the horses magnificent, the ‘Knights’ (the picture at the head of this essay) with their “Rus! Rus!” war cry (and they actually do sit at a round table) improbably photogenic. A battle fought across a frozen lake owed as much to Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky as it did to any surviving historical source. Ridley Scott later recycled much the same visual conceit in his disappointing Napoleon. History often survives in cinema not because the facts are accurate but because certain images possess extraordinary emotional truth.
The Cossacks offer a far more convincing example of the cultural blending that characterised the frontier. They emerged not from ethnic purity but from mixture. Runaway serfs, adventurers, escaped peasants and soldiers settled the borderlands, adopting the customs, military practices and vocabulary of the Turkic peoples who had occupied the steppe before them. Even the word “Cossack” derives from a Turkic root meaning “to roam”. The frontier was never a wall separating civilisations. It was a workshop in which entirely new identities were forged.
It is here that Roussinos, following Warwick Ball, arrives at his most provocative claim. Muscovite Russia, he argues, cannot be understood without recognising the formative influence of the Mongol world. Moscow’s rise was anything but inevitable. The Golden Horde required dependable tributaries capable of collecting taxes, maintaining order and supplying troops. The princes of Moscow proved remarkably efficient servants of the khans and, in doing so, transformed what had once been a relatively insignificant Rus’ principality into the nucleus of a future empire. The irony is delicious. Mongol domination helped create the very Russian state that would eventually conquer the steppe itself.
The fingerprints remain visible today. Administrative practices, institutions of government, systems of taxation and even elements of the Russian language bear traces of Mongol influence. Yet fingerprints are curious things. They tell us that contact occurred; they do not tell us everything that followed.
That question lies at the heart not only of Ball’s thesis but also of historian Orlando Figes’ The Story of Russia, which, by happenstance, I am reading at the moment. It is one of those literary coincidences in which two writers, approaching the same landscape from different directions, find themselves asking precisely the same question. What made Russia, Russia?
Figes is, in many respects, the perfect companion to Roussinos because he shifts our attention from inheritance to interpretation. He readily acknowledges that the Mongol conquest of the Rus’ principalities in the thirteenth century was one of the defining ruptures in Russian history. It destroyed Kyiv’s political centrality, subordinated the northern principalities to the Golden Horde and created the circumstances in which Moscow could eventually emerge as the dominant power. Like Roussinos, he recognises the profound irony that Mongol domination did not simply interrupt Russian state formation but helped shape its eventual character.
Yet Figes is ultimately less interested in what Russia inherited than in what Russia chose to become. The Mongols bequeathed methods of rule: taxation, military organisation, communications and a conception of authority that differed markedly from Western feudalism. Russia’s imagination, however, was nourished elsewhere. Orthodox Christianity, Byzantine political theology, the doctrine of Moscow as the “Third Rome” and the almost mystical conception of the Tsar as God’s anointed gave Russia a vocabulary through which it understood itself. Its civilisation emerged not from a single source but from the convergence of many.
This distinction is important because it rescues history from determinism. Fingerprints reveal contact; they do not reveal intention. They cannot tell us why someone picked up the knife, wrote the letter or opened the door. Likewise, cultural inheritance explains possibilities, not inevitabilities.
Figes presents Russia as a civilisation assembled from multiple traditions: Slavic, Byzantine, Mongol, European and imperial. The country’s enduring paradox is that it has persistently imagined itself as both European and somehow apart from Europe. Peter the Great attempted to drag Russia westward, shaving beards, importing European science, founding St Petersburg (a German name, which was changed to Petrograd during World War I for the same reasons the British royal house changed its German name to Windsor) embracing Enlightenment ideas. Yet beneath these reforms older structures of autocracy survived. Later generations reversed the argument entirely. Slavophiles celebrated Russia’s uniqueness while Westernisers lamented its failure to become sufficiently European. The debate has never really ended. It merely changes its vocabulary.
Maps have always encouraged these arguments. A glance at any atlas suggests that Russia occupies an almost impossible position: a European power that expanded across Asia until it became the largest contiguous empire on earth. The geography itself tempts us into historical mythology. Is Russia European? Asian? Eurasian? The answer has varied according to who was asking and what political purpose the answer was intended to serve. Geography creates opportunities, constraints and temptations. It does not dictate outcomes.
Figes’ also explores of recurring Russian archetypes: the Holy Tsar, the Holy Fool, the suffering nation, the belief that Russia possesses a unique historical destiny. These are not immutable characteristics embedded in some mystical national DNA. They are stories Russians have told about themselves across the centuries – including Vladimir Putin’s house ideologue, philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. Stories matter because people act upon them. Nations, no less than individuals, become attached to narratives that explain who they are and why they exist.
Juxtaposed against Ball, Roussinos and Figues is a comment on Roussinos’ essay by Alexander Morrison, a historian of Russian history at Oxford University. Every grand historical narrative requires its sceptic. Elegant theories are seductive precisely because they reduce complexity to a single organising principle. Morrison accepts much of Ball’s argument while quietly resisting its more deterministic conclusions. It is an exemplary piece of historical criticism because it neither dismisses nor genuflects. Instead, it refines.
He readily acknowledges that Muscovy inherited important administrative practices from the Mongol world and points out that Russia was far from unique. The Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals and Qing all incorporated Chinggisid or Timurid political traditions alongside older local institutions. Borrowing across Eurasia was commonplace. Civilisations have always learned from their neighbours, even while claiming absolute originality.
Where Morrison parts company with Ball is over the temptation to confuse influence with destiny. Muscovy borrowed bureaucratic structures connected with taxation, communications and administration. Indeed, the Russian language still preserves Mongol echoes in words such as kazna for treasury, den’gi for money and yam for the postal relay system. Yet the ideological foundations of the state remained overwhelmingly Byzantine and Orthodox. Ivan IV became Tsar by invoking the legacy of Caesar and the vision of Moscow as the Third Rome, not by presenting himself as the heir of Genghis Khan. Administrative inheritance did not erase cultural identity.
That distinction becomes even more important when considering the modern world. It is tempting to explain Putin’s Russia by reaching back to the Mongols, Ivan the Terrible or some timeless Russian soul. Such explanations possess an undeniable elegance because they transform political choices into historical inevitabilities. Morrison rejects this outright. Contemporary Russia, he argues, is shaped above all by decisions made by particular elites drawing upon nineteenth-century nationalism, memories of the Soviet collapse, selective readings of Russian history and modern political ideology. The past provides the vocabulary; it does not dictate the speech.
His discussion of Ukraine is equally persuasive. Southern and eastern Ukraine were settled comparatively recently by a remarkable mosaic of peoples: Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Bulgarians and many others. The region’s history is therefore extraordinarily layered. Yet historical complexity does not undermine modern sovereignty. Ancient settlement patterns explain why memories remain contested, but they do not invalidate internationally recognised borders. History illuminates’ claims; it does not automatically legitimise them.
This strikes me as one of the most important lessons historians can offer our own age. We are living through a period in which politicians, nationalists and activists increasingly seek legitimacy by reaching deeper into the past. Ancient kingdoms, medieval battles, archaeological discoveries, linguistic survivals and genetic studies are all recruited into contemporary arguments about identity and territory. History becomes less an investigation than a courtroom brief.
Yet the past is a notoriously unreliable witness.
Landscapes accumulate memories without issuing verdicts. The Donbas bears the fingerprints of Scythians, Greeks, Sarmatians, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Mongols, Tatars, Cossacks, Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Armenians and countless others. None of those fingerprints constitutes a title deed. They testify to presence, movement and encounter. They remind us that almost every place we imagine possessing an eternal identity has, in reality, been shaped by successive waves of migration, conquest, adaptation and coexistence.
Perhaps that is why I find Roussinos’ essay so compelling. Like the best historical writing, it restores movement to landscapes that modern maps often freeze into static national colours. It reminds us that frontiers have rarely been fixed and that civilisations have always been more entangled than their later myths would admit. Europe did not simply civilise the steppe. The steppe helped create Europe.
Equally, Morrison reminds us that historical explanation should never become historical imprisonment. Institutions endure, languages preserve old borrowings, myths outlive empires and landscapes retain astonishingly long memories. But people still make choices. Nations inherit the consequences of the past without becoming its captives.
The three weathered balbals still stand beside the road to Bakhmut. They have watched Scythians ride westward, Huns descend upon Europe, Mongol tumens disappear into the distance, Cossacks patrol the frontier, imperial armies march beneath Romanov eagles, Wehrmacht panzers advance across the wheatfields, Soviet tanks return in triumph and, today, drones circle silently above the same ground. Every generation has believed its struggle to be unique, its empire enduring, its victories permanent. The stones know otherwise.
History leaves fingerprints everywhere. It leaves them in words, in institutions, in ruined cities, in forgotten roads, in songs, in legends and in the memories of peoples who continue to argue about what happened centuries before they were born. Those fingerprints deserve to be studied because they tell us where we have come from and how our worlds were made. But fingerprints are not destiny. They record contact, not ownership; inheritance, not inevitability; memory, not command. The ghosts of the steppe still whisper across Eurasia, but they do not write the future. That task, as it always has been, belongs to the living.
Coda. The myth of fingerprints.
History leaves fingerprints.
That may seem an odd metaphor, but I have found myself returning to it again and again. Archaeologists brush them from shards of pottery, linguists discover them buried inside forgotten words, historians recognise them in institutions, laws, customs and myths. They are the traces left behind whenever peoples encounter one another, whenever empires rise and fall, whenever civilisations borrow, conquer, imitate or remember.
Fingerprints fascinate us because they appear to promise certainty. In a criminal investigation they identify who touched the weapon. Yet they tell us remarkably little about what actually happened. A fingerprint cannot reveal motive, explain intention or determine guilt. It records contact, not consequence.
History is much the same.
Every landscape is covered with fingerprints. They survive in place names and languages, in ruined cities and forgotten roads, in religions, legal systems, songs, frontiers and collective memory. The three ancient balbals still standing beside the road to Bakhmut are surrounded by them. For nearly a thousand years they have watched Scythians ride westward, Huns descend upon Europe, Mongol tumens disappear into the distance, Cossacks patrol the frontier, imperial armies march beneath Romanov eagles, Wehrmacht panzers cross the wheatfields, Soviet tanks return in triumph and, today, drones circle silently overhead. Every empire believed its moment would endure. Every generation imagined itself to be the culmination of history. The stones know otherwise.
And this is where I arrive at what I have come to think of as the Myth of Fingerprints.
The fingerprints themselves are not mythical. They are real. History leaves them everywhere. The myth begins when we misunderstand what they are telling us.
A fingerprint is evidence that someone was here. It cannot tell us why they came, whether they belonged, whether they acted justly or what rights their descendants may possess centuries later. In a court of law, a fingerprint may place someone at the scene; it cannot, by itself, decide the case. History works in much the same way. It explains how we arrived here, but it cannot by itself determine who ought to possess the future.
Too often we ask it to do precisely that.
Ancient maps become modern borders. Archaeological discoveries become political manifestos. Genetic inheritance becomes moral entitlement. Historical suffering becomes an enduring licence for vengeance. We confuse explanation with justification, inheritance with ownership, memory with legitimacy. That confusion – the transformation of historical evidence into historical entitlement—is what I mean by the Myth of Fingerprints.
It is a myth because it is one of the oldest stories nations tell themselves. Every people constructs narratives from the traces left by earlier generations. Sometimes those stories preserve genuine memory; sometimes they simplify; sometimes they become propaganda. But they all begin with the same temptation: to believe that because history explains the present, it therefore authorises it.
This question lies beneath far more than the current war in Ukraine. It echoes through the history of Palestine and Israel, through Australia’s History Wars, through debates over monuments, migration, frontiers and national identity. Again and again we encounter the same temptation: to search the past not for understanding, but for permission.
That is why Aris Roussinos’ essay on Warwick Ball’s The Eurasian Steppe struck me so forcefully. Ball demonstrates how profoundly the Eurasian steppe shaped Europe. Orlando Figes traces the inheritance of Byzantium, the Mongol world and the frontier in the making of Russia. Alexander Morrison reminds us that inheritances are never destinies. Together they illuminate a larger truth. Geography creates opportunities. Culture bequeaths inheritances. Myths provide meaning. Only human beings make choices.
The ghosts of the steppe still whisper across Eurasia, just as the ghosts of every civilisation whisper through the landscapes they once inhabited. Historians should listen carefully to those whispers, for they reveal how the world came to be. But they should resist the temptation to mistake echoes for commands. The past deserves understanding rather than obedience.
History leaves fingerprints everywhere. They are among our most valuable clues to the human story. They reveal connections, influences, migrations and memories that would otherwise be forgotten. Yet they are not title deeds, nor verdicts, nor chains binding the living to the ambitions of the dead. They explain inheritance without dictating destiny.
That is the real lesson of the Myth of Fingerprints.
Paul Hemphill and In That Howling Infinite, August 2026
This essay was written in conversation with books I’ve read, ideas formed and half-formed, and, more recently, in sustained dialogue with an AI language model, which contributed to drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation.What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: selected, tested, revised and revised again, and owned.
I highly recommend Ukrainian scholar Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe, a well told and fascinating story of the origins of Ukraine and Belarus, and how their histories were intertwined, and entwined with those of of Poland, Lithuania (which was a large and powerful state once) and Russia. Ukraine has historically been the border between the catholic west and the orthodox east, the division running virtually down the middle. The name Ukraine is Slav for border land. Its geopolitical location and natural resources have led to the land being inflicted by invaders, civil wars, man-made famine and repression. See, in In That Howling Infinite, Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism
And, finally, who or what were HuldreFolk? Named for the mythical and mystical ‘hidden people’ of Icelandic legend, for two years in the early nineteen eighties, they played throughout Australia. Their fame was short-lived; after two years they pursued their own paths and projects. But during the following decades, they would pop up in unexpected places, like their namesakes, in ones, twos, threes, and on occasions with guest HuldreFolkies. Their last outing as a trio was in October 2007 at the North By Northwest Poetry And Folk Club. Google the videos on YouTube. See also, Yuri The Storyteller … We’ll sure miss the old bastard!
Roussinos’ essay follows, and also, for readers with time on their hands, more on Figes’The Stiry of Russia and on Morrison’s critique.
The fate of Europe lies in the steppes Warwick Ball: ‘The Eurasian Steppe’
Aris Roussinos, Unherd 28 July 2022
Genghis has won (Dean Conger/Corbis via Getty
On the road between the frontline cities of Sloviansk and Bakhmut, in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, three stone statues stand mutely by the side of the road, observing the coming and going of military traffic with impassive detachment. Known as balbals, they are funerary monuments erected by the Cuman Turks, known in Russian archaeology as the Polovtsians, who once ruled this vast sea of grass, long before Russian or Ukrainian speech was ever heard in this region.
For thousands of years, the empty, spreading steppe, stretching from Hungary to Mongolia, was the home of nomadic peoples, speakers of Iranic, Turkic and Mongolic languages, who drove their herds across the vast plains in search of fresh pastures. They founded great empires, which time and the steppe grasses would soon swallow up, leaving barely a trace. Their constant irruptions into Europe sounded the death knell in turn for other, settled civilisations, part of the endless cycle of growth, invasion and collapse that has shaped our continent’s history.
The war in Ukraine has taken place in two very different climatic and cultural zones: its initial phases saw Russian armour wend its way through the dark forests and marshes of northern Ukraine, the ancient homeland of the first Slavic peoples, to be destroyed in close fighting on the narrow wooded roads in a stunning and unexpected Ukrainian victory. Yet the gruelling war of attrition in the country’s east is taking part in a very different landscape, in the open steppe that was once the home of nomadic peoples.
The expansion of Slavic peoples, both Ukrainians and Russians, into the open steppe was a very recent historic event, broadly contemporaneous with the European settlement of the Americas, its fertile plains, now the breadbasket of the developing world, Europe’s equivalent of America’s Midwest. These open plains, the “Wild Fields” of local historiography have always been a contested space, where great empires wrestled for control: in the great Second World War battles of Kursk, Kharkiv and Stalingrad, Europe’s entire fate hinged on the battle between the two great tank armies wheeling and clashing like nomad hordes.
But then, as The Eurasian Steppeby the archaeologist Warwick Ball makes clear, rather than a semi-wild anteroom to the continent, “the history, languages, ideas, art forms, peoples, nations and identities of the steppe have shaped almost every aspect of the life of Europe”. Europeans from further west have for centuries been prone to viewing the steppe as the haunt of wild tribes, and the source of occasional, fearsome destruction.
But what if the Europe of today is in fact the product of steppe dynamics? As Ball argues, rather than being a product of 19th century nationalism, some historians trace the origin of Europe’s oldest nation states to the steppe, observing that “Peoples newly arriving from the east were also among the first to create nationally defined states, such as kingdoms of the Bulgars or Magyars”. “In some ways,” Ball argues, “the incipient idea of a nation state might have been stronger with the nomadic groups from the steppe, who were bound more closely by tribal loyalties” than among the polyglot peoples of the imperial Roman successor states they conquered.
Did the steppe peoples then create the fractious patchwork quilt of nationalities that we understand as Europe? Ball cites the archaeologist Hyun Jin Kim who claims that: “The political and cultural traditions of Inner Asia brought to Europe by Central Asian immigrants, the Huns and the Alans, were just as fundamental to the formation of western Europe as the rich legacy left behind by the Roman Empire. The political and cultural landscape of early medieval Europe was shaped by the fusion of Roman and Inner Asian influences.”
While Hungary and Bulgaria were directly founded by steppe nomads, the influence of steppe rulers also helped shape the political forms taken by Poland (whose szlachtanobles claimed Sarmatian descent well into the 19th century), Bohemia, Denmark and even, it is claimed, France. Even into the 19th century, as Ball notes, it was the Hungarian awareness of their steppe Magyar ancestry that helped bring about the rise of nationalism which shook apart the great Austro-Hungarian empire. “In the long evolution of the idea of the nation state,” then “from their beginnings in late-antique Europe to their emergence in the nineteenth century, we must look east as well as west”.
Viewed in this light, the war in Ukraine, a battle between a European nation-state and a vast Eurasian empire, is resonant with all manner of strange echoes of the steppe’s dimly-understood history. The colossal earthern ramparts of the “serpent walls” outside Kyiv, erected by early Slavic kingdoms to guard against invasion by steppe nomads from the Huns to the Mongols, fulfilled their ancient role admirably earlier this year when they prevented the movement of Russian armour towards the capital’s suburbs, corralling the latest wave of invaders into killing zones to be picked off at leisure by guided missiles.
The Cossack heritage both sides claim is the result of earlier Slavic peoples, runaway Ukrainian and Russian serfs, claiming the freedom of the open steppe and adopting the customs, lifestyle and much of the vocabulary of their nomadic Turkic predecessors. The very word Cossack, Ball notes, “derives from the Turk root qaz, ‘to roam’”, and is cognate with the ethnonym Kazakh further east, as the Cossacks “comprised mainly Russians — usually renegades, escaped serfs or criminals — but they also included Turks, Tatars and remnant Polovtsi.” Even now, Ukrainian is sprinkled with Turkic words, a legacy of the two cultures’ long history of interaction and competition. One Ukrainian commander I met went by the nom de guerre “Duman”, or fog, deriving from the Turkic word for smoke or mist. Even now, Ukrainians refer to Russians with the dismissive Turkic epithet Katsab, or butcher.
On the Russian side, the war effort has been marked by the use of steppe peoples as infantry, with many of the heaviest casualties borne — and apparently some of the worst war crimes committed by — the Buryat Mongols of the Russian steppe, along with the Kalmyks of the lower Volga, Europe’s only Buddhist nation, who once watered their horses as far west as Paris following the defeat of Napoleon. Similarly, among the many subject peoples of the Russian empire deployed to Ukraine are Ossetians from the Caucasus, a tiny Iranic-speaking nation who are all that remain of the Alans, who once fought the Romans across Central Europe, settling as far west as France and Spain: some of their descendants, now Magyarised, still live in Hungary as the Jasz people. Their Iranic speech is now heard in Ukraine’s steppe for the first time in a thousand years, dragged along into a war of European conquest by another great Eurasian empire.
The very concept of chivalry which defined Europe’s medieval history was the product of Iranian-speaking steppe peoples like the Sarmatians and the Alans, whose innovations in the use of cavalry — stirrups, lances and long chainmail coats — changed the face of late Roman warfare and set the stage for the knights of the High Middle Ages. Even our own medieval romances may owe something to their distant steppe traditions, after the border forts of what is now northern England became the garrison home of Sarmatian levies in Roman service. As Ball notes: “Sarmatian warrior worship of a sword fixed in the ground has been suggested as furnishing the origin of the Excalibur legend. This appears to have been a long steppe warrior tradition: Ibn Rusta in the tenth century, for example, describes how the Viking Rus ruler — whom he calls by the steppe title of Khagan or khāqān — would plant a naked sword in the earth pointing towards his newborn son.” Perhaps it is not mere coincidence, then, that the Azov Regiment’s torchlit ceremonies in the southern steppe city of Mariupol took place beneath three giant swords embedded in the ground, a striking symbol that has now become the group’s emblem.
Again and again, these strange resonances between the steppe’s ancient nomad past and its bloody present swim to the surface like long-forgotten memories. The great statue to Mother Russia, sword in hand, that rises above Stalingrad’s Hill 102, where tens of thousands of Soviet and German soldiers were ground into the soil by artillery possesses the grim grandeur of some ancient steppe monument. And indeed, Hill 102, the crucial position of the battle that decided the war’s outcome, is perhaps better viewed by its alternate name as the Mamayev Kurgan, the burial tumulus of a long-forgotten Tatar khagan. From the ancient past to now, Russia’s history was written on the steppe, and without the steppe Russia’s imperial past and present is simply impossible to understand. Indeed, as Ball observes, without the historic domination of steppe nomads, there would be no Russia as we understand it.
As Ball observes: “The future of Russian greatness was both a response to and a legacy of the Mongols… Indeed, to a large extent Muscovite power was a creation of the Golden Horde: the khans required a stable central authority as a client state which could be relied upon to raise auxiliaries for the khan’s armies and to collect and deliver taxes and tribute. Moscow fitted the bill, so the Golden Horde deliberately strengthened it against the other Russian cities and appointed its prince as their chief tax collector.” Without the Mongol-enforced primacy of Muscovy, the land that is now Russia may well have remained a series of disunited kingdoms and city states, just like medieval Italy or Germany: “The Mongols, in other words, brought about the emergence of Russia.”
Even the great king Sviatoslav of Kyivan Rus, whose legacy is claimed by both Ukraine and Russia, extended his rule across the steppe by defeating the great Jewish Khazar kingdom and in doing so, “adopted the techniques and warfare of the steppe nomad: in other words, Kievan Rus was at first simply another steppe nomad state, albeit with a Scandinavian element. Sviatoslav never decisively defeated the Pechenegs and was killed by them in 963, and his skull was made into a cup in steppe tradition.” Medieval Russia was, then, as much a steppe polity as a European state, perhaps more so. After all, “up until 1480 Muscovite coins still carried inscriptions in Arabic. As late as 1531 Vasili III of Moscow was still paying tribute to the successors of the Golden Horde: Crimea, Kazan and Astrakhan”, and the eternal symbol of Russian power, Moscow’s St Basil’s Cathedral, was modelled on Kazan’s Great Mosque, in thanks for the conquest of the great Tatar capital.
Tracing Muscovy’s traditions of governance, and then those of imperial Russia, to the Mongol and Tatar customs of the inner steppe, Ball observes that “Even by the fourteenth century the civil and military institutions of Muscovy ‘were overwhelmingly Mongol in origin’… Ivan IV, the first Russian to proclaim himself Tsar (in Russian the title is actually Tsezar), added Ulugh Khan, ‘Great Khan’, to his titles.” Though he dismisses the “Mongol Yoke” hypothesis of Russian historiography, Ball nevertheless traces Russia’s unique and terrible form of autocratic rule to steppe customs, deep into the modern period: “Ivan also adopted the Mongol policy of ‘collective guilt’ where all male relatives and retainers of a guilty man would be executed, a policy even extended to entire communities. Stalin’s similar policy was a continuation of this.” The steppe’s long influence stretches deep into the cultural DNA of our modern world: even such a giant 20th century figure as Lenin, destroyer of one great Eurasian empire and founder of another, was of part-Kalmyk descent, after all.
Imperial Russia’s second largest minority after the Ukrainians, whose post-independence relationship with their giant neighbour is today a source of such bloodshed, was the Muslim Tatars, from whose Russified nomad aristocracy some of the greatest names in Russian culture — Rachmaninoff, Turgenev, Nureyev and Akhmatova — claimed descent. “The list [of Tatar surnames] covers all walks of Russian life: artistic, religious, scientific, literary, military, political and royal. The list is virtually endless,” Ball notes, and even today “the descendants of the Mongol ‘hordes’ — the Tatars — are the second-largest minority in Russia after the Russians themselves, and the Republic of Tatarstan is the second-largest republic in European Russia.”
Written for a general audience, Ball’s book nevertheless synthesises the latest archaeological research and historical debate on the steppe’s ancient and modern peoples, archaeological research on the steppe’s history, delving back into the deepest mists of time. The burgeoning community of esoteric archaeology and anthropology posters on Twitter will surely appreciate his summarising of the latest research on the origins of the Indo-Europeans, the fate of the Khazars and the birth and decline of the great Scythian kingdoms, who’s exquisite goldwork was the highlight of the British Museum’s recent blockbuster exhibition.
Noting that St Petersburg’s great Hermitage Museum was founded primarily as a place to store the newfound Scythian treasures unearthed by Russian colonists in Crimea, Mariupol and the rest what is now Ukraine’s contested southern steppe, and alert to the theft of Scythian treasures from Ukrainian museums by their new-old Russian conquerors, we realise that the relentless cycle of history has brought a new relevance to Ball’s book, even since its publication last winter. Just as in the Middle Ages and in the bloodiest battles of the Second World War, the fate of Europe is once again being written on the endless, grassy steppe.
Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.
Orlando Figes’ The Story of Russia
That is a very happy coincidence, because Roussinos’ essay and Figes’ The Story of Russia are really circling the same enormous question from different directions: what made Russia Russia?
Figes is, in many ways, the antidote to the more sweeping “fingerprints of the steppe” argument. He certainly does not deny the Mongol inheritance – quite the opposite. The Mongol conquest of the Rus principalities in the thirteenth century was one of the decisive ruptures in Russian history. It destroyed Kyiv’s old political centrality, subordinated the northern principalities to the Golden Horde, and created the conditions in which Moscow could eventually rise. The irony, as both Roussinos and Figes emphasise, is that the Mongols did not simply delay Russian state formation; they helped create the particular form of state that emerged.
But Figes is interested less in what Russia inherited than in what Russia made of those inheritances. The Mongols supplied mechanisms of rule – taxation, military organisation, hierarchy, a relationship between ruler and subject that was very different from Western feudalism. Yet Russia’s self-understanding was built around other ideas: Orthodox Christianity, Byzantium, the idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome”, and the notion that the Tsar was not merely a monarch but a sacred figure.
This is where it links beautifully with Morrison’s critique. The danger is that we see the Mongol “fingerprints” and assume they explain everything. But fingerprints do not tell you why the person picked up the knife, wrote the letter or opened the door. They tell you something about contact and inheritance; they do not reveal intention.
Figes’ Russia is a civilisation built from multiple inheritances: Byzantine, Slavic, steppe, European and imperial. The great Russian paradox is that it has often defined itself simultaneously as both European and apart from Europe. Peter the Great famously tried to drag Russia westward — shaving beards, building St Petersburg, importing European science and manners — yet the deeper structures of autocracy, hierarchy and imperial expansion remained. Later Slavophiles rejected the West and celebrated a distinct Russian path, while Westernisers argued that Russia’s tragedy was precisely its failure to become sufficiently European.
This also connects with our earlier discussion of maps and historical memory. Russia is, geographically, an extraordinary historical anomaly: a European state that expanded across Asia until it became a continental empire. The map itself creates the tension. Is Russia Europe? Asia? Eurasia? The answer has shifted depending on who was asking and what political argument they wanted to make.
One of the things I suspect you will appreciate in Figes is his attention to recurring Russian archetypes: the Holy Tsar, the Holy Fool, the tension between obedience and rebellion, the recurring belief that Russia has a unique destiny. These are not “genes” or immutable cultural DNA; they are traditions — stories Russians told about themselves. And stories matter enormously because people act upon them.
That brings us back to Roussinos’ evocative phrase, “the echo of the steppes”. Echoes are fascinating precisely because they are not the original sound. They are altered, refracted and carried forward. The Mongol conquest echoed through Muscovy; Byzantium echoed through the Tsars; Soviet power echoed through Putin’s Kremlin. But each generation chooses which echoes to amplify.
There is also a pleasing connection with your earlier fascination with maps and atlases. A physical map of Russia looks almost inevitable: the enormous landmass stretching from Europe to the Pacific. But Figes and Morrison both remind us that geography creates possibilities, not destinies. The Russian Empire was not simply “there” waiting to happen. It was built by choices — by princes, tsars, revolutionaries and commissars who made decisions within particular historical circumstances.
So perhaps the combined lesson of Figes, Roussinos and Morrison is this:
Russia is not merely a European country contaminated by Asia, nor an Asian empire wearing European clothes. It is a civilisation formed in the meeting place of worlds. The tragedy is not that it has a complicated past; all great civilisations do. The tragedy comes when a complicated past is reduced to a single myth of inevitable destiny.
Which, interestingly, brings us back to your recurring theme: the power – and danger – of maps. Every map is an argument about the past. Every empire is a story it tells about itself. And every story leaves fingerprints. The historian’s job is to work out which ones are real, which ones are imagined, and which ones have been deliberately placed there.
Alexander Morrison’s critique
Alexander Morrison, a historian of Russian history at Oxford University, specialising in the Russian conquest of Central Asia, commented on Roussinos’ essay in Unherd. Here it is in full.
Roussinos, seems to have made good use of Ball’s research. Some of these arguments are completely uncontroversial when applied to the Asian neighbours of the Eurasian steppe in the early modern period: the Ottomans, the Safavids of Iran and the Qing all made use of Chinggisid and TImurid political repertoires in building their states alongside other elements (Byzantine heritage for the Ottomans, the existing Chinese imperial tradition in the Qing case, Sufi religious charisma for the Safavids). The Mughals were of course actually of Timurid (and in the female line of Chinggisid) descent, and it was at the core of their dynastic ideology in India.
However the steppe political tradition seems to have produced ever larger polities in Asia, which makes it hard to explain why it would instead produce political fragmentation in western and Central Europe – I think that part of Ball’s argument is a bit overstretched.
The Muscovite example seems to fit the Asian pattern better, and Roussinos is spot on in saying that it was the willingness of the Princes of Moscow to act as particularly loyal and effective satraps and tax collectors for the Golden Horde that allowed what had previously been a minor Rus’ princedom to rise to pre-eminence.
However we need to be clear about what it was that Muscovy took from the Mongols: it was largely bureaucratic structures linked to taxation or communication. This why key Russian words such as kazna (treasury), den’gi (money) and yam (postal service) are of Mongol origin. On the cultural side the ruling ideologies of the state were all to do with Orthodox Christianity and the semi-mythical link to Byzantium (the ‘Third Rome’), which was what Ivan IV (the Terrible) was evoking when he took the title of Tsar (Caesar) – he may have added the title of khan for good measure but this was largely for the purposes of communication with steppe peoples.
Many Tatar nobles of Chinggisid descent did become incorporated into the Muscovite aristocracy after the fall of Kazan in 1552, but you need to be careful about 19th and 20th-century claims to this ancestry, which are often bogus (it was fashionable at the time). In the case of Akhmatova it was her nom de plume (she was born Anna Gorenko – in fact a Ukrainian name). In any case Chinggisid descent did not give you any kind of claim to the throne of Muscovy, which had its own dynastic legend in the Rurikids. A better guide to the relationship between Muscovy and the Mongols than Ball is Donald Ostrowski.
There is also a bit too much cultural determinism in all of this to my liking – it suggests that neither Russia nor Ukraine can ever shake off this bloody past etc. etc. Nowhere in the world is simply a prisoner of its past. What is happening now is a result of very specific political choices made by Vladimir Putin and Russia’s ruling elite. Their thinking is rooted partly in their reading of 19th-century Russian historians (who first came up with the idea that Russians and Ukrainians were the same people), vicious forms of anti-semitic Russian nationalism of the early 20th century and the emigration (the Black Hundreds, Ivan Il’in), a particular, tendentious interpretation of both Soviet history and their own memories of the Soviet collapse.
What is perhaps more relevant is that this steppe past means that most of southern and eastern Ukraine was only relatively recently settled – not just by Russians and Ukrainians, but by the whole range of peoples of the empire (Greeks, Jews, Bulgarians, Armenians…probably also some Ossetians). They are certainly not ‘ancient Russian lands’ as Putin has claimed, but they are part of Ukrainian territory under international law and the Budapest memorandum assuring the country’s territorial integrity which Russia signed.
A couple of other corrections – the Buryats are not a steppe people, they live East of Lake Baikal. I am a bit queasy about the implication that they and the Kalmyks are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the Russian army because of their ‘savage’ steppe nature – it is simply because these are some of the poorest parts of the Russian Federation, and because the Russian regime is very deliberately trying to avoid recruiting troops from metropolitan regions of European Russia whose families might cause political trouble or have ties to Ukraine.
The ethnic Russians who are fighting are also disproportionately from Siberia or the Altai. The regiment which committed the atrocities at Bucha was from Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, and its commander appears to have been originally from Karakalpakstan. Most Ossetians speak Russian these days, and have long identified with Russian rule. A good piece though – not many outlets would allow as thorough and as thoughtful a review of a work on Eurasian History.
Morrison’s comment stands apart from most of the thread because it does what the best scholarly criticism should do: it accepts the broad thesis where the evidence supports it, corrects errors where necessary, and resists the temptation to replace one grand narrative with another.
The essence of Morrison’s critique is this:
He accepts the central proposition that Muscovy inherited important features from the Mongol world. Indeed, he strengthens it by pointing out that similar borrowing occurred across Eurasia. The Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals and Qing all incorporated Chinggisid or Timurid political traditions into their own states. Russia was therefore not unique in absorbing institutions from the steppe.
Where he parts company with Ball is over determinism. Ball appears to argue that steppe political culture explains not only Muscovy’s rise but much of Russia’s subsequent history and perhaps even Putin’s Russia today. Morrison thinks this stretches the evidence too far. Administrative institutions can endure for centuries; they do not imprison nations forever. Modern Russia, he argues, is the product of choices made by a particular elite, drawing on nineteenth-century nationalism, Soviet memories and contemporary ideology, rather than the inevitable flowering of Mongol political culture.
He also introduces some valuable nuance. Muscovy borrowed bureaucratic techniques—taxation, communications, administration – from the Golden Horde, but its ideological heart remained Orthodox and Byzantine. Ivan IV’s claim to be Tsar rested on the idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome”, not the successor of Genghis Khan. Even the Russian language preserves this administrative inheritance in words such as kazna (also in Arabic,treasury), den’gi (money) and yam (postal relay), all of Mongol origin, illustrating that institutional borrowing need not imply cultural subordination.
Morrison is equally careful about ethnicity. He rejects romanticised claims of Chinggisid ancestry, notes that many were fashionable nineteenth-century inventions, and cautions against portraying Buryats or Kalmyks as somehow naturally warlike. Their prominence in today’s Russian army is explained far more convincingly by economics and recruitment policy than by any inherited “steppe mentality”. That is a useful reminder that socio-economic factors often explain what cultural stereotypes merely decorate.
His discussion of Ukraine is similarly restrained. Southern and eastern Ukraine were indeed settled comparatively recently by a mosaic of peoples across the imperial period, making simplistic claims of ancient ethnic ownership difficult to sustain. Yet that historical complexity does not undermine Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders or Russia’s commitments under the Budapest Memorandum. History explains; it does not necessarily justify.
Finally, Morrison performs the historian’s essential task of distinguishing influence from destiny. States inherit institutions, myths and habits, but they are not condemned to repeat them. This is perhaps his strongest point. It is tempting to explain Putin’s Russia by reaching back to the Mongols, Ivan the Terrible or the “Russian soul”, just as earlier generations invoked “ancient Balkan hatreds” to explain Yugoslavia. Such narratives are elegant because they reduce contingency to inevitability. Historians, however, are generally suspicious of elegant explanations.
His recommendation of Donald Ostrowski is also telling. Ostrowski’s work has long argued that Muscovy’s relationship with the Mongol world was one of selective adaptation rather than wholesale inheritance. That is a subtler – and probably more persuasive – account than one that sees Russia as simply Europe’s most successful steppe empire.
In short, Morrison doesn’t demolish Ball’s thesis. He refines it. He accepts that the steppe mattered enormously, but insists that institutions are not destiny, that cultures borrow selectively, and that political choices remain more important than historical determinism. It is precisely the kind of intervention that lifts an online discussion from polemic into genuine historical
What Unherd Readers had to say about Roussinos’ essay
The comments divide into several broad themes rather than converging on a single interpretation, and in many ways become a debate about contemporary Russia as much as about history.
Many readers found the article fascinating and praised it for opening an unfamiliar chapter of Eurasian history. Several immediately ordered Christopher Ball’s book, while others supplemented the discussion with examples ranging from the Kalmyks’ influence on Austrian costume to the chess capital of Elista, the legacy of the Mongols in Central Europe, and the wider political traditions of the Eurasian steppe. A number of contributors recommended additional works, notably Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads and Donald Ostrowski’s scholarship on Muscovy.
A second group challenged aspects of the historical argument. Critics argued that the article overstated the influence of steppe culture on later European political development, confused mythology with history in discussing Poland and Hungary, and oversimplified the origins of the Cossacks and the Azov Regiment’s symbolism. Others objected to what they saw as cultural determinism: the suggestion that Russia’s present behaviour is somehow an inevitable product of its Mongol inheritance. Several historians in the discussion -Morrison particularly, stressed that Muscovy certainly inherited administrative and fiscal practices from the Golden Horde, but that its religious ideology and dynastic legitimacy remained fundamentally Byzantine and Orthodox. They argued that modern Russian policy reflects political choices by Vladimir Putin and his circle, not an inescapable historical destiny.
As often happens, the historical discussion quickly became a proxy for arguments over the war in Ukraine. One camp maintained that Ukraine is an artificial state whose disputed regions deserve internationally supervised referendums, criticising NATO expansion and Western military support while advocating diplomacy. The opposing view rejected these claims as Russian propaganda, pointing to Ukraine’s overwhelming vote for independence in 1991, insisting that no genuine referendum is possible under military occupation, and arguing that Russian aggression – not Western policy – is the central issue. A more extreme minority advanced familiar pro-Kremlin narratives, portraying NATO as the true aggressor and Russia as a defensive victim, provoking vigorous rebuttals from other commenters.
There was also a meta-debate about free speech. An inflammatory remark describing Russians in derogatory terms prompted accusations of hate speech and counter-accusations of “crybullying”, illustrating how discussions of Russia often slide into arguments over acceptable language as readily as they do over history.
The most substantial contribution came from historian Alexander Morrison, whose lengthy critique was widely praised by other readers. Morrison broadly accepted the article’s central insight – that Muscovy’s rise owed much to its role within the Mongol imperial system – but argued that the thesis was pushed too far. He emphasised the distinction between administrative inheritance and cultural identity, corrected numerous historical inaccuracies, warned against deterministic readings of history, and reminded readers that modern events stem from contemporary political decisions rather than immutable civilisational characteristics. His intervention effectively became the intellectual centre of the comment thread, with several readers declaring that it improved upon the article itself.
Overall, the discussion reveals both the appeal and the risks of grand historical narratives. Most readers accepted that the Eurasian steppe profoundly shaped Russia’s development. Where they diverged was over the extent to which that past explains the present, and whether history should be read as a story of enduring civilisational patterns or of contingent political choices. The resulting debate ranges from thoughtful historiography to contemporary geopolitics, with occasional excursions into conspiracy theory and internet polemics.
As a longtime student of русские вещи (russkiye veshchi or things Russian) – I have written about Russia long and often in In that Howling Infinite. And I have only seen Sydney Sweeney in her controversial jeans ad and in the new series Americana (she’s gorgeous). But I found this article by English journalist Richard Godwin in the British e-zine Unherd, republished below, an absolute hoot.
This witty article about a Russian philosopher raging over a pulchritudinous American actress becomes an exploration of the deeper currents shaping Putin’s Russia. Beneath the absurdity lies an old and dangerous idea: that Russia is not simply a nation, but a sacred civilisation with a providential mission, locked in a metaphysical struggle against a decadent West.
The result is a reflection on mystical nationalism, the enduring patterns of Russian history, and why understanding Putin requires more than headlines about geopolitics. As Dostoevsky recognised, the West’s excesses are real enough – but Russia’s historical answers have too often been empire, repression and violence.
Sometimes a pair of blue jeans can reveal more about competing visions of civilisation than a thousand diplomatic communiqués.
Godwin’s piece is, in one sense, a very English performance: clever, arch, amused by its own wit, delighted that Alexander Dugin – apostle of Eurasian apocalypse, prophet of the “Third Rome”, self-styled metaphysician of Russian destiny, often referred to as Russian president Vladimir Putin’s philosophy – can be reduced to a furious old man rage-posting about a pneumatic American in denim.
The article toggles between HBO, geopolitics, and philosophical anthropology. The juxtaposition itself is the joke. Dugin, who dreams of civilisations finds himself triggered by Euphoria, a very popular television series – which I have not watched.
And yet, Godwin actually stumbles onto something real, something many Western commentators still fail to grasp about Russia, and especially about the ideological ecosystem around Putin. Namely: that this is not merely nationalism in the ordinary sense. It is eschatological nationalism. Mystical nationalism. A civilisation-sized grievance narrative infused with theology, imperial memory, humiliation, and metaphysical longing.
Godwin traces the intellectual genealogy well. Dugin is presented not simply as “Putin’s brain” (a lazy cliché Western journalism loves) but as a mutant synthesis of older Russian currents: Slavophilism, Eurasianism, Orthodoxy, anti-liberalism, anti-modernism, and what my old tutor Tibor Szamuely long ago identified as the Russian tendency to transmute suffering into destiny. Russia, in this worldview, is never merely a country. It is always a mission. A vessel. A redemptive civilisation standing athwart decadence and chaos.
Which brings us to Sydney.
Sydney Sweeney has good jeans
But first, that advertisement.
The image captures why even before Dugin weighed in has become such a cultural Rorschach test. A fashion advertisement featuring a conventionally attractive blonde woman wearing denim. The campaign’s wordplay – great jeans”- was intended as a marketing pun. But for critics, the combination of the pun with a blonde, blue-eyed model evoked older ideas about beauty, heredity, and genetic desirability. Some argued that, whether intentionally or not, it echoed themes historically associated with eugenics and racial hierarchy.
Supporters of the campaign saw the backlash as wildly overblown – an ordinary denim ad, using a common advertising trope (attractive people selling clothes), while critics read ideological meaning into something fundamentally mundane. The controversy therefore became less about the advertisement itself than about competing assumptions. One side asked, “How could a ‘great genes’ slogan attached to this image not carry historical baggage?” The other asked, “How could anyone look at a jeans ad and immediately see eugenics?”
In that sense, the image is indeed the controversy in a nutshell: a glamorous denim advertisement that some people see as completely ordinary and others see as freighted with cultural and historical symbolism. The argument is not really about the jeans. It is about what people bring with them when they look at the picture.
Back to Dugin and Euphoria.
As Godwin puts it (I cannot comment) it is not just television. It is civilisational evidence. The series – with its atomised sexuality, fluid identities, drug culture, commodified intimacy, and aestheticised despair – appears to him not as critique but confession: the West displaying its own spiritual decomposition in public. Hence his fury. Hence the almost medieval language of pollution, nihilism, perversion, and annihilation.
What Godwin understands is that Dugin’s horror is not primarily racial, though race lurks around the edges of his rhetoric, nor merely political. It is metaphysical. Liberal modernity itself is the enemy. The autonomous individual severed from church, nation, family, hierarchy, and historical continuity is the enemy. The “postmodern West” becomes, in Dugin’s imagination, a civilisation of non-being.
In That Howling Infinite been circling precisely this terrain for years: the strange fusion of Russian spiritual grandeur and Russian historical trauma. The sense that Russia oscillates eternally between monastery and prison camp, icon and tank, Dostoevskian compassion and Ivan-the-Terrible brutality.
Godwin captures fragments of this, but we approach it from a deeper historical melancholy rather than fashionable bemusement. Putin’s worldview is not Soviet nostalgia in the simplistic Western sense. He is not trying to resurrect Marxism-Leninism. If anything, he sees the Soviet Union as one historical vessel of Russian power among many – Tsarist, Soviet, Orthodox-imperial, Eurasian. The constant is not communism but empire, sacred geography, and strategic depth.
Hence Kyiv.
Kievan Rus is not merely history to Russian nationalists; it is sacred ancestry. The baptism of Vladimir in 988 functions almost like a Russian civilisational nativity story. Which is why Ukraine’s independent identity is experienced by men like Putin not merely as geopolitics but as metaphysical amputation. If Kyiv is “the mother of Russian cities”, then Ukrainian sovereignty becomes, in this fevered imagination, an ontological rebellion against history itself.
This is where Dugin becomes useful to Putin – not because Putin is his puppet (that has always been overstated), but because Dugin articulates, in exaggerated mythic form, impulses already embedded deep within Russian political culture: the siege mentality, the cult of suffering, the suspicion of liberalism, the idea of Russia as spiritually unique and perpetually humiliated by the West.
To Godwin, the irony is that Dugin himself is a creature of the very decadent global culture he condemns. He doom-scrolls X. He watches HBO. He rants about Marvel films. Like many reactionaries, he is parasitic upon the civilisation he despises. He requires Western decadence as both enemy and spectacle. One suspects, Godwin infers, that he consumes Euphoria with the same horrified fascination medieval monks reserved for demons in illuminated manuscripts.
And here the article becomes unexpectedly revealing about the West too.
Because Godwin is right that Americans, especially, often underestimate the degree to which Russia possesses its own universalist narrative. Americans assume universalism belongs to liberal democracy. But Russia has long imagined itself as universal in a completely different register: not the end of history, but the resistance to history’s dissolution. Not liberal pluralism, but sacred continuity. Not the autonomous self, but sobornost – the mystical organic unity of the people.
That tradition runs from the Slavophiles through Dostoevsky to Solzhenitsyn and into Putinism, albeit increasingly vulgarised.
But there is another irony here – one Dostoevsky himself understood better than Dugin. The Russian critique of Western atomisation is not entirely wrong.
Walk through parts of Los Angeles, London, or indeed Sydney – the loneliness, the commodification, the performative identities, the endless monetisation of the self – and one can understand why Russian conservatives see pathology. The Crystal Palace frightened Dostoevsky for a reason. He sensed modernity’s capacity to flatten the soul into consumer mechanism long before algorithms and influencer culture existed.
The problem is that Russia’s answer to this crisis has historically involved autocracy, censorship, mystical nationalism, and redemptive violence. The village commune too easily becomes the mass grave. The sacred empire becomes the Donbas. The organic unity becomes enforced conformity.
As Tibor Szamuely emphasised and elaborated in his posthumous opus The Russian Tradition, in Russia there was indeed nothing new under the sun. The forms change – Tsars, commissars, oligarchs, Eurasianists – but the pattern recurs: humiliation transmuted into destiny; suffering elevated into proof of moral superiority; expansion justified as spiritual necessity.
Which brings us back, absurdly enough, to Sydney Sweeney in jeans: the philosopher of a nuclear-armed civilisation denouncing HBO actresses as emblems of the Antichrist while simultaneously inhabiting the digital architecture of the global capitalism he claims to despise. One can imagine those iconic Russian authors smiling grimly somewhere in the background.
Yet beneath the farce lies something dangerous and deeply old: the conviction that liberal civilisation is spiritually illegitimate and therefore expendable. That history itself is a holy war between “being” and “non-being”. Once politics becomes metaphysics, compromise becomes heresy.
And that, other essays in In That Howling Infinite repeatedly suggest, is where mystical nationalism ceases to be merely eccentric – and becomes lethal.
Paul Hemphill, In That Howling Infinite, and an AI language model, May 2026
Sydney Sweeney has upset a lot of people in her short career. Since rising to fame playing “crazy Cassie” in the edgy Gen Z drama, Euphoria, the 28-year-old American actor has been variously accused of degrading the morals of a generation (passim), spreading Nazi propaganda (she appeared in a jeans commercial), supporting genocide (she wore a dress by an Israeli designer) and worst of all, disrespecting Taylor Swift (she was briefly involved with pop uber-villain, Scooter Braun).
Now, should the worst come to pass – should Western civilisation be erased from the face of the earth – then those of us who make it to the fallout shelter will be able to add another crime to the list. Annihilation will also be Sydney Sweeney’s fault. A culture that can produce a scene like the one in Euphoria season three — in which Sweeney’s character performs sex-cam work while dressed as a baby — apparently deserves all the hydrogen bombs coming to it.The HBO drama appears to have been the final straw for the influential ultra-nationalist Russian “philosopher” Alexander Dugin, who earlier this month launched into an extraordinary rant on X, apparently inspired by his late-night TV viewing. “Look: is there at least one argument why the US shouldn’t be erased from the face of the earth?” he asked.To those who might respond: “Sydney Sweeney in American Eagle jeans”, Dugin offered short shrift. Sweeney may be a MAGA darling — she is, after all, blonde haired and blue-eyed and comes from a Republican-coded family — but to a committed Russian nationalist, this is irrelevant. “You are not the people,” he wrote. “You are stupid slaves on the Epstein’s menu of cruel cannibal elites. You are eaten, your brains are. It is why you watch Euphoria. Because all of you are perverts. Disgusting civilization. No reason to exist. Please, die.”Thanks – we’ll take that on board. It’s not too hard to see why Euphoria — with its interracial, intersex, into-absolutely-anything cast — would be a particular trigger for the Kremlin’s on-off court philosopher. Born in the Khrushchev era, Dugin spent his youth vaguely agitating against communism before the break-up of the Soviet Union deeply wounded his national pride. Like every fascist before and since, he became obsessed with the idea of humiliation. He co-founded the National Bolshevik Party — the “Natbols” — with Eduard Limonov in the Nineties. The party’s flag was a Nazi-style white circle on a red background — only instead of a swastika, it had a black hammer and sickle. Russians aren’t generally fans of the Nazis; Dugin admired both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks for their Nietzschean will to power. It was the liberal West, with its dangerous ideas like human rights and free speech, that he regarded as the true evil. A hairy ogre of a man, Dugin conveyed his ideas with charisma and force. He was a hard drinker and a rich storyteller with a deep resonant voice in which he delivered mesmerising monologues about the destiny of Russia to the eager young jackbooted Natbols.
“It’s not too hard to see why Euphoria – with its interracial, intersex, into-absolutely-anything cast — would be a particular trigger for the Kremlin’s on-off court philosopher.”
For all his mad array of influences – Hitler, Stalin, Guy Debord, Terminator, Lao Tzu, Mishima, Rosa Luxemburg, René Guénon — and his fondness for terms like “rhizomatic” and “hermeneutic circle”, Dugin’s philosophy is actually pretty simple. In Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), he argues that Russia must reverse the humiliation of the Soviet collapse by rebuilding itself as the core of a new Eurasian empire that is destined to challenge and ultimately dismantle Western (i.e. American) hegemony. America and the EU in this vision are not merely political rivals like China, India or Iran, say — but decadent forces, intent on dissolving Russia’s identity and historical purpose. Beneath the book’s strategic language lies a messianic strain: a wounded civilisation is redeemed through expansion, action, spiritual renewal and permanent struggle. Only Russia, with its spiritual depth, its powers of endurance, its capacity for hard action, is capable of saving the world from the liberal antichrist. The book has become a set text for Russian military leaders and seems to have guided Vladimir Putin’s strategy in Ukraine. Asked what policy Russia should take towards its Western neighbour as early as 2014, Dugin’s response was: “Kill! Kill! Kill! There can be no other discussion.”
Dugin’s pronouncements became more deranged following the assassination of his daughter Darya in a car bomb in 2022, and his targets have become a little more scattergun. He has a particular hatred of the popular Russian cartoon character, Cheburashka, for example — “the concentrated expression of that very feeblemindedness against which I have battled my whole life” — and frequently rails against Marvel movies, McDonalds, and various other symbols of American cultural power.
But Euphoria — in which literally every character is performing sex work to support their crystal meth addiction and/or gender reassignment surgery — would strike Dugin as a representation of everything evil and degrading in Western culture. And the fact that America permits this depiction of itself— indeed, that Euphoria has launched the careers of some of its most lauded stars, including Sweeney, Jacob Elordi and Zendaya — is further evidence of the moral degeneracy of a culture. In his fawning interview with that useful American idiot, Tucker Carlson, Dugin declared that the dystopian futures depicted in Hollywood movies like The Matrix and Terminator were not warnings, but actual visions of where the West was heading. Why do American filmmakers never depict happy families or thriving communities in their future visions, he asked. It’s because Americans are willing on this apocalypse. Thus Euphoria’s self-loathing, atomised, narcotic, nihilistic, multi-racial hell is basically a warning — this is what America would impose on the rest of the world, a staging post on the way to Skynet.
What’s interesting about all this — and what Russocurious American conservatives like Carlson often seem to miss — is the strain of messianism in Russian thought. Americans are so accustomed to thinking of their culture as the envy of the world and their eccentric conception of “freedom” as the universal absolute that the idea Russia might have its own global vision seems not to have occurred to them. They are more comfortable patronising Russia as a backward, violent, pitiful place — much of which goes back to those images of Russians in the Eighties queuing for Big Macs in Red Square and going crazy for Levis (which clearly made Dugin furious). Thus Carlson could tour a Moscow supermarket in 2024, simply amazed that they have affordable groceries. But this cultural complacency frequently leads non-Russians to miss Russian critiques of the West (say, of American racism) and to underestimate the very real strain of messianism in Russian thought — that is, Russia’s own mission to save the world.
So as ludicrous as Dugin often appears, there is a coherent set of ideas behind his philosophy — and in any case, recent history tells us that it is the ludicrous people we need to take most seriously. To understand where Dugin is coming from you need to understand the Eurasianist tradition of which he is a mutant 21st-century outgrowth, as well as Russia’s dual conception as both an Asiatic and Christian civilisation. There are many ways this dichotomy manifests. You can see it in the rivalry between the two capitals: St Petersburg, constructed by Peter the Great as a “window onto Europe”, and Moscow, the older Slavic centre of Orthodoxy and imperial memory. But there are two key moments in Russian history that the Eurasianists have drawn upon to lend grandeur to their vision.
The first is the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, when the forces of the Russian principalities defeated the Tatar army of the Golden Horde and began to free their lands from their Mongol oppressors. In the Russian cultural memory, this event has mythic significance: the point at which Russia begins to define itself through resistance to, and absorption of, the steppe world. “Our path runs through the steppe – and boundless anguish / Your anguish, O Russia!” wrote the symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok in his cycle On the Field of Kulikovo(1908), which conjures a “holy banner” and the “Khan’s sabre” rising against a blood-red horizon. The idea this animates is Russia as a land formed of Mongol violence and Christian redemption — with a destiny of, hurrah, “boundless anguish”.
The influential Central Asian scholar (and virulent antisemite) Lev Gumilev — son of the appallingly persecuted poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, both acquaintances of Blok — built an entire civilisational theory from this image. He argued that the Mongol period had not merely been an occupation but a formative synthesis. Rather than seeing Tatar horseman rampaging through Russian villages, raping Russian women, burning Russian crops as a catastrophe, he reframed it as a creative ethnogenesis. The Russian “ethnos”, in Gumilev’s formulation, emerges from a fusion of Slavic and Turkic elements, formed through long cycles of what he calls “passionarity” — a kind of heroic fusing of land, soul and idea. Gumilev developed an entire theory around this “ethnos”, arguing that this was no mere abstract theory but a “biophysical reality”.
From here comes the notion that it is actually the liberalising, secularising, Enlightenment Europeans who are actually the dangerous ones — since they want to flatten out all ethnoi into one rainbow coalition of consumerism. Or as Dugin had it in his rant on X: “Whites? They are destroyed the world and themselves. To be white means to be nihilist. It is self hatred race. It caused so meany troubles to others and to itself. It lost the right to be something. No arguments to support their existence.” (He is said to speak 15 languages, and you have to wonder if his grammar is as bad in the others.)
The second foundational moment was the fall of Byzantium in 1453, when Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks. From this rupture emerges one of the most consequential ideas in Russian political theology — of Moscow as the “Third Rome”. As Philotheus of Pskov argued in the 16th century: “Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and there will be no fourth.” Rome itself had fallen into heresy (i.e. Catholicism), Constantinople to conquest, which meant that Moscow remained as the final guardian of true Orthodoxy. This notion would guide Russia’s self-conception not only as a state, but as a providential civilisation — the nation destined to preserve and ultimately redeem Christendom itself and, certainly, its near neighbours like Ukraine and Georgia. So, Russia is no mere country but a vessel of sacred history, a restraining force against chaos — a katechon holding back dissolution; the dissolution of Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya, Jacob Elordi and friends.
This is the deeper ideological field upon which later debates about Russia’s destiny take place. Whenever “Westernisers” have argued that Russia should reform itself along liberal, democratic, secular lines (Dugin would say “white” lines), there are always “Slavophiles” to argue that this is not the Russian way. In the 19th century, Slavophile philosophers like Aleksey Khomyakov and Ivan Kireevsky argued passionately against European modernity, insisting instead that Russia’s strength lay precisely in what Europe had lost: Orthodoxy, communal life, and a form of spiritual wholeness they called sobornost — a notion of organic unity in which truth emerges not from isolated individuals but from a living moral community.
There are traces of this in many of the great 19th-century Russian novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky, indeed, had his own Euphoria moment when he visited London in 1862 and was appalled by what he saw. “Everyone is drunk, but drunk joylessly,” he wrote. “Everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility…” But what unsettled him most was not vice but order — or rather, the promise of a new kind of world order. He was one of millions of international visitors to the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, which featured 28,000 exhibitors from dozens of nations showcasing steam engines, telegraphs, leech barometers, machine tools, Japanese prints, American cocktails — the whole world assembled in one glass pyramid. Forever after, the “Crystal Palace” recurred in Dostoevsky’s work as a horrifying hallucination of mankind forced into rational order through science, commerce and industrial progress. Where Western visitors might have seen a vision of global harmony, Dostoevsky saw spiritual erasure: atomisation, loneliness, the reduction of human beings to interchangeable units in a vast rational machine. If you have ever toured the shopping malls of Los Angeles or Dubai, you may have experienced a similar shudder.
“All Europeans try to attain one and the same goal,” Dostoevsky later wrote — that is, “the universally human ideal”. But in striving toward this abstraction they dissolve the very cultures that give human life meaning. Only Russia, he concluded, had the spiritual vigour to withstand such a fate. Russia possessed “a distinct peculiarity of its own” — a “talent for universal reconciliation, universal humanity”. This is the essence of sobornost: a paradoxical unity that preserves difference within a shared spiritual whole. This idea is the great theme of Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech of 1880, where he presents the Russian national character as uniquely capable of absorbing and reconciling all cultures while remaining spiritually intact. It is also a theme Dugin resumes in his X commentary: “To be on the side of Russia, of Iran, of China, of multipolarity is to be on the side of the being against the non-being. The (post)modern West is the citadel of the non-being, of nihilism.” Liberalism, in his reading, is a project to liberate the individual from any form of collective identity — be it Church, family, nation, empire, even gender (trans-related scare stories are a particular source of horror).
So Russia’s mission is to save the world from all this — and especially its near neighbours in the so-called Russkiy Mir, a telling phrase. Mir in Russian means “world” and also “peace” — but it also has a connotation of a peasant village community (as opposed to svet, which means “light” but also high society). So when Putin appeals to the Russkiy Mir he is not merely referring to the Russian-adjacent peoples of Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, etc — but harking to an idea of organic peasant communal life. Come back to the village-empire! (Mir is, of course, also what Russians call the International Space Station. The progenitors of the Soviet space program often referred to the idea that the USSR, owing to its enormous spiritual depth, was the most suitable nation to represent Earth in the cosmos.)
All of this would be wonderful if Russian peasant life were not famously brutish, miserable and subject to ultraviolence from on high. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha recounts the story of an eight-year-old peasant boy who accidentally injures his master’s favourite hunting dog while throwing stones. The landowner orders the child to be stripped naked and spend the night in a miserable hovel. In the morning, he is torn apart by hunting dogs in front of his mother and the whole village. For Alyosha the story represents the failure of any kind of system — Christian, political, philosophical — to account for human suffering: “If the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him!” In other words, any system or theory that tries to justify or excuse the suffering of the innocent is obscene. The realism of Dostoevsky’s depiction of this horrific event — and the social hierarchy that permits it — serves as a convincing repudiation of any argument that could be used to justify it.
Indeed, it is never entirely clear what the Russian Utopia actually looks like — beyond “eternal anguish”, that is. Nor have I ever seen any of these thinkers truly spell out what those in the Russkiy Mir are supposed to get from their spiritual communion; the millions of Kazakhs who starved during collectivisation, for example, or the Siberian tribes slaughtered as the Russian Empire marched eastward; or for that matter the more than 350,000 young men (predominantly from the Muslim-dominated monotowns of the South) who have died fighting to impose brotherhood on the disobedient Ukrainians. A vision of nationhood that promises redemption through suffering is quite useful when you want to explain away millions of dead. The hardest pill to swallow for many following the Soviet collapse was the idea that all of that suffering meant nothing — hence the ever-escalating need to put all the famines, all the wars, all the purges and sieges and atrocities into the service of some higher ideal.
Still, rather like the oligarchs of America who romanticise honest blue-collar work but have no idea what it actually consists of, the great romantics of ordinary Russian life tended to be from the svet as opposed to the mir. Most of the Slavophiles were serf-owning aristocrats. Putin’s legitimacy, such as it is, is largely predicated on his ability to provide shopping malls and farmers’ markets for a Moscow elite who are quite happy to shuttle back and forth to their villas in Dubai, Zurich, London, Nice and Cyprus when it suits them. Dugin himself seems to spend an awful lot of his time watching HBO and scanning social media — and, I would suggest, not enough time reading Dostoevsky.
It seems outside of Dugin’s philosophy that Euphoria might itself be a critique of precisely the kind of societal atomisation that capitalism produces — and that this capacity of Western democracies to critique themselves might indeed be a source of strength. Putin has been careful to provide modern capitalist comforts to Russian elites, but he has meanwhile cranked up the state censorship machinery to pre-Glasnost levels, so any Russian who attempts anything like an honest depiction of Russian life will soon be censored, banned, banished, imprisoned, or voluntarily exiled, like the recent Cannes Grand Prix winner, Andrei Zvyagintsev. It’s not as if Russian youths are all happily singing patriotic songs as they march towards the drones of the Donbas.
Meanwhile, the third season of Euphoria does gesture towards redemption. After she winds up in the home of a family of Texan true believers, the character of Rue (played by Zendaya) experiences a growing religious obsession — culminating in an epiphanic vision of God and a hint that there is, in fact, a higher meaning, beyond lonely pleasure-seeking. As Dostoevsky wrote: “Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.”
Revolution, civil war and the horseman of the Steppe
The Russian Civil War was one of the great catastrophes of the twentieth century, although it is often overshadowed by the world wars that framed it. Between 1917 and 1922, across the vast territories of the collapsing Russian Empire, perhaps ten million people died from combat, famine, disease, terror, and reprisal. Reds fought Whites, Whites fought Greens, and Greens fought everyone. Autocrats fought anarchists, nationalists fought internationalists, peasants fought cities, and villages fought armies.
The conflict stretched from Poland to Vladivostok, from the Arctic Ocean to the Caucasus, and drew into its vortex Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Cossacks, Tatars, Armenians, Greeks, Mennonites, Germans, Czechs, Poles, and dozens of other peoples caught between competing visions of the future. and foreign powers inserted themselves into the chaos including Britain, Australia, the United States, and Japan.
As I wrote in an earlier essay, Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war, this was not one war so much as many wars occurring simultaneously. It was less a civil war than a kind of World War 1.2: a continental struggle in which the old order died, and several incompatible new worlds attempted to be born.
The civil war was infamous for its cruelty, 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.
All too often, whites represented the worst examples of inhumanity, yet on that score, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable. 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. Retreat from the major cities brought out the worse in the Whites, with terrible massacres of Jews – although they were not the only perpetrators. 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.
Among the prophets, executioners, bandits, ideologues, adventurers, warlords, saints, opportunists and dreamers thrown up by that upheaval, few were more remarkable than Nestor Ivanovych Makhno: charismatic Ukrainian anarchist insurgent, peasant revolutionary, cavalry commander, military opportunist, libertarian idealist, and larger-than-life folk hero.
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he survived. He survived the firing squads, the battlefields, the prisons, the epidemics, and the purges. Survived the tuberculous contracted in jail before the revolution and the many wounds inflicted throughout the war. The man who fought Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Ukrainian nationalists, Cossacks, White armies, Red armies and assorted local warlords eventually died not with a rifle in his hand but in a Paris hospital bed, impoverished and tubercular, an exile far from the black-earth steppe that had made him famous.
Or perhaps infamous – because Makhno belongs to that category of historical characters who stubbornly resist classification. The Whites hated him because he was a revolutionary peasant insurgent. The Bolsheviks hated him because he was a revolutionary peasant insurgent who refused to obey them. Ukrainian nationalists distrusted him because he placed anarchism before nationalism. Landowners feared him. Foreign occupiers hunted him. Even fellow anarchists sometimes regarded him with suspicion. Yet somehow this peasant from Huliaipole (now in the Zaporizhzhia Oblastof Ukraine) acquired an almost mythological stature.
A century later, artists still paint him, films are made about him, rock bands commemorate him. political activists still claim him, and historians still argue about him. Wikipedia’s entry about Nestor Makhno, is long, thorough, and extensively detailed, but makes for exciting reading with its comprehensive account of his colourful career during, before and after the civil war, and even, beyond the grave.
The two manga-style illustrations that prompted these reflections are themselves evidence of that enduring fascination.
Nestor Makhno, the Legend
The first thing one notices is that the artists are not attempting strict historical realism. The Makhno of these images is tall, windswept, and handsome, somewhere between a Cossack ataman, a samurai, and a western gunslinger. The black banner streams dramatically behind him. His gaze is fixed on some distant horizon. One expects a swelling Russian chorale to surge in the background panning across limitless grasslands.
The real Makhno was another man. Contemporary photographs show a relatively short, compact man, often clean-shaven, intense rather than imposing. His contemporaries remembered not his stature but his energy. He seemed perpetually in motion. Charismatic, restless, impulsive, brave, reckless, idealistic and pragmatic in equal measure. The sort of man who appears during periods of social collapse and seems almost generated by the turbulence itself.
Yet the artists understand something important: historical memory rarely preserves people as they actually were. It preserves them as they are remembered. The artwork therefore depicts not so much the historical Makhno as “Makhno the Legend”, the anarchist rebel rider of the Ukrainian steppe. And legends tell us as much about those who create them as they do about their subjects.
The flag in the first picture identifies his force as the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine. One speech bubble proclaims: “My ne khochemo zavoyovaty vladu – my khochemo zruynuvaty yiyi nazavzhdy!” – “We do not want to seize power- we want to destroy it forever!” A poster declares: “No to authority! No to the Party! No to the State! Long live the free community!” Another slogan advocates “Free councils of free people.”
One can almost hear every bureaucrat in history grinding their teeth. For Makhno was that rarest of political creatures: an anarchist who genuinely seemed to mean it. Here was one who would have signed to Denearys Targaryen’s vow not to join the wheel but to break it.
A Kaleidoscope of Lost Futures
The popular memory of the Russian Civil War tends to reduce it to a struggle between Reds and Whites. Bolsheviks versus monarchists. Revolution versus reaction. Reality was considerably messier. The conflict resembled a kaleidoscope more than a chessboard.
The collapse of the Romanov Empire unleashed a bewildering array of competing visions. Monarchists wanted restoration. Liberals hoped for constitutional government. Socialist Revolutionaries dreamed of a peasant democracy. Bolsheviks sought proletarian dictatorship – with themselves as it unchallenged ruler. National movements emerged across the empire’s periphery. Foreign powers intervened. Countless local strongmen pursued their own ambitions. Entire regions changed hands repeatedly.
The lands between the Dnieper and the Don were particularly complex. They were never inhabited solely by Russians and Ukrainians in the neat modern national sense. These were borderlands in the deepest historical meaning of the word. Cossacks rode the steppe. Mennonite farmers cultivated colonies founded generations earlier. Jews lived in market towns and cities. Greeks inhabited settlements along the coast. Tartars maintained ancient communities. Armenians traded. Germans farmed. Merchants, smugglers, soldiers, pilgrims, revolutionaries and dreamers moved constantly through the landscape.
Every modern nation prefers neat origin stories. But history seldom cooperates.
Makhno emerged from this world of overlapping identities and competing loyalties. His Free Territory in southeastern Ukraine represented perhaps the most improbable political experiment of the entire Civil War: an attempt to create a libertarian society amidst one of the bloodiest upheavals in modern history.
Whether it could ever have survived is doubtful. The twentieth century belonged to states, bureaucracies, standing armies, intelligence services, and industrial administration. It rewarded those who could organise railways, requisition grain, count factory output and maintain prisons. Anarchism, though long part of Tsarist Russia’s political kaleidoscope, was a forlorn hope.
Makhno the Anarchist war lord had a precarious relationship with the ultimately ascendant Bolsheviks. Vladimir Lenin at one time looked upon him favourably. Leon Trotsky, commanding the Red Army, regarded him as a dangerous adventurer, an undisciplined partisan commander whose independence threatened revolutionary unity. Makhno regarded Trotsky as a would-be dictator masquerading as a liberator. Both men were, in their own ways, correct.
Their uneasy alliance against General Wrangel’s White Army in Crimea remains one of those moments when history briefly forces bitter enemies onto the same side before restoring them to mutual hostility. The Makhnovists helped defeat the Whites, but once that task was accomplished, the Bolsheviks turned on their troublesome allies.
The logic was almost inevitable. The Bolsheviks sought power. Makhno sought freedom from power. Those two projects could coexist only temporarily.
My old tutor Tibor Szamuely would undoubtedly have seen the episode as another illustration of what he called the Russian Tradition. Revolutions changed slogans and symbols, but the underlying gravitational pull of centralised authority remained remarkably constant. The old autocracy vanished. New forms emerged. Yet power continued to accumulate at the centre. The names changed. The structure endured. [See, in In That Howling Infinite, The Russian Tradition – Russia, Ukraine and Tibor Szamuely]
Yet for a brief moment Makhno’s movement offered a glimpse of a different possibility. That possibility was ultimately crushed, first by necessity, then by power, and finally by history itself.
Makhno and Anarchism
Makhno did not emerge from a vacuum. Like so much in Russian and Ukrainian history, he was both a product of his time and the inheritor of a much older tradition. The black banners that fluttered above the villages of southern Ukraine during the Civil War carried ideas whose roots stretched back decades, even centuries, nourished by peasant rebellion, intellectual dissent, and a deep suspicion of distant authority.
Russian anarchism emerged in the nineteenth century as a radical critique of both Tsarist autocracy and the centralising tendencies of socialism. Its two great theorists were Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, figures who remain among the most influential anarchist thinkers in history. Bakunin, the aristocratic revolutionary who spent years in prison and exile, rejected all forms of state power, arguing that liberation could never be achieved through a dictatorship, even one claiming to act on behalf of the workers. Kropotkin, the geographer and scientist, developed a more constructive vision, emphasising voluntary cooperation, mutual aid, and federations of free communities. Against the harsh Social Darwinism fashionable in his day, Kropotkin argued that cooperation was as important to survival as competition. Human beings, he believed, were capable of organising society without kings, bureaucrats, or party commissars.
These ideas found fertile ground in the Russian Empire. The vastness of the state, its bureaucratic inefficiency, and its often brutal methods of rule encouraged a culture of resistance. Anarchism attracted intellectuals, workers, and, perhaps most significantly, peasants. Long before Marxism became dominant, populist movements such as the Narodniks had romanticised the peasant commune as a foundation for a more egalitarian society. Although not anarchists in the strict sense, they helped create a political culture in which local self-government and suspicion of central authority were deeply valued.
The revolutionary years between 1905 and 1921 provided anarchism with its greatest opportunity. Across the empire, workers established councils, peasants seized land, and local militias sprang up with little regard for official authority. In the great cities anarchist groups were active among factory workers and sailors. The Kronstadt sailors, who would later revolt against Bolshevik rule in 1921 under the slogan “Soviets without Bolsheviks,” reflected many anarchist principles even if they were not uniformly anarchist in ideology.
It was in this turbulent environment that Nestor Makhno emerged. Born in 1888 into a poor peasant family in Huliaipole, a town in the steppe lands of southeastern Ukraine, Makhno encountered anarchism as a young man. Arrested for revolutionary activities after the 1905 Revolution, he spent years in Tsarist prisons where he came under the influence of anarchist intellectuals and immersed himself in the writings of Bakunin and Kropotkin. Prison served as his university.
When the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, Makhno returned home and transformed theory into practice. His achievement was remarkable. Amid the chaos of civil war he helped create what became known as the. Makhnovshchina (loosely translated as “Makhno movement”), a vast anarchist experiment encompassing large areas of southern Ukraine. Villages elected their own councils. Land was redistributed. Local communities enjoyed a degree of autonomy rare in wartime. Makhno’s Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine ,often called the Black Army, defended these territories against a bewildering array of enemies: German occupiers, Ukrainian nationalists, White armies, and eventually the Bolsheviks themselves.
Military historians continue to marvel at Makhno’s campaigns. His forces perfected the use of the tachanka – a machine gun mounted on a horse-drawn cart – which allowed extraordinary mobility across the open steppe. His army repeatedly outmanoeuvred larger and better-equipped opponents. In 1919 and 1920, Makhno’s forces played a crucial role in defeating General Anton Denikin and later Baron Wrangel, two of the most formidable White commanders. Ironically, these victories helped secure the survival of the Bolshevik regime that would ultimately destroy the anarchist movement.
Makhno was not alone. Other anarchists left significant marks upon the revolutionary era. Volin (Vsevolod Eikhenbaum), an intellectual and organiser, sought to develop anarchist theory and worked closely with the Makhnovists. Lev Chernyi advocated individualist anarchism and was later executed by the Bolsheviks. Grigori Maximoff became a leading anarcho-syndicalist thinker in exile. Internationally, figures such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, both born in the Russian Empire, carried anarchist ideas to global audiences and later became disillusioned critics of Bolshevik authoritarianism.
Yet none combined military leadership, mass peasant support, and revolutionary vision quite as successfully as Makhno. His closest parallels are perhaps not found in Russia but elsewhere: Emiliano Zapata in Mexico, Buenaventura Durruti in Spain, or even the medieval peasant rebels who periodically erupted across Europe. Like them, Makhno embodied a recurring historical phenomenon: the attempt to create freedom from below rather than impose it from above.
The tragedy of Russian anarchism was that it found itself squeezed between two powerful forces. The Whites regarded it as revolutionary chaos; the Bolsheviks regarded it as a rival source of legitimacy. Both sought centralised authority, disciplined armies, and hierarchical control. Anarchism offered something messier and more elusive: local autonomy, voluntary association, and a belief that ordinary people could govern themselves. In the brutal arithmetic of the Civil War, such ideas proved difficult to defend.
Yet the legacy endured. Makhno became a folk hero to some, a bandit to others, and a symbol of resistance to authority for generations of radicals. His black flag bearing the slogan “We wish for freedom” represented more than a military movement. It expressed a persistent current in Russian and Ukrainian history – a stubborn refusal to accept that power must always flow from the centre, from the capital, from the party, or from the state. In a land famous for tsars, commissars, and strongmen, that may have been the most revolutionary idea of all.
Makhno (centre) with other Insurgent command staff in Huliaipole (1919)
The Black Banner and the Long Shadow of Empire
Makhno’s story emerged from one of the great turning points of modern history: the collapse of empires. The Russian Civil War was not simply a struggle between Reds and Whites. It was also a struggle over what would replace the Romanov Empire. Across the former imperial territories, peoples sought to determine their own futures. Finns, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians and many others attempted to carve nation-states from the wreckage of imperial collapse. Some succeeded. Others failed. All became caught up in the wider maelstrom.
The tragedy of the twentieth century is that many of those hard-won freedoms proved fleeting. The new states born from the ruins of the Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Ottoman empires found themselves trapped between larger and more powerful forces. First came the Nazi storm. Then came the Soviet one. Much of Central and Eastern Europe spent decades living under one form of domination or another. The promise of national self-determination so evident in the years immediately following the First World War often ended in occupation, dictatorship or subordination.
Yet history did not stop there.
The Soviet Union eventually followed the Romanov Empire into the graveyard of failed political systems. One by one, nations that had disappeared behind the Iron Curtain re-emerged as sovereign states. Flags long hidden returned to public squares. Languages once marginalised regained official status. Historical memories suppressed for decades resurfaced. The old imperial map dissolved once again.
Seen from this perspective, the present war in Ukraine is not simply a dispute over territory. It is part of a much longer historical argument about empire, sovereignty and identity.
A century after Reds, Whites and Greens fought across the same black-earth steppe, war once more rages in the lands where Makhno made his name. Huliaipole itself has found itself close to the front line. Mariupol, Melitopol, Berdyansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson appear both in histories of the Civil War and in contemporary battlefield reports. The same landscape that once carried cavalry columns, tachanki those iconic horse drawn machine gun wagons )and, as this is Russia, sleighs), and armoured trains now carries tanks, drones, missile batteries and mechanised brigades.
The present conflict is not a replay of the Russian Civil War. Historical analogies are useful servants but dangerous masters. Yet the recurrence is striking. Once again Ukraine finds itself at the centre of a struggle shaped by the afterlife of empire.
At its heart lies a question that has echoed through East European history for more than a century: who has the right to determine Ukraine’s future?
An increasingly irredentist Russia, drawing heavily upon imperial memory and historical grievance, has launched an assault upon a former imperial possession that insists upon its own sovereignty and right to choose its own path. The arguments are framed in terms of security, history, ethnicity and geopolitics. Beneath them lies a much older issue. The Russian Empire fell. The Soviet Empire followed it. Must Ukraine forever remain part of another state’s historical imagination, or may it exist fully as itself?
It is impossible today to read about the Russian Civil War without occasionally experiencing moments of historical déjà vu. The geography is hauntingly familiar. Kharkiv. Kherson. Mariupol. Melitopol. Odesa. Kyiv. A century ago, armies advanced and retreated across these landscapes. Reds, Whites, Greens, nationalists, foreign interventionists and local militias fought for possession of the same territory. Entire populations found themselves trapped between competing visions of political destiny.
The circumstances are very different today and historical analogies always have limits. Yet the persistence of geography and geopolitics is striking. The lands between the Dnieper and the Don remain what they have long been: a frontier between competing narratives of the past and competing visions of the future.The same rivers flow. The same cities endure. The same questions of identity, sovereignty, memory and belonging continue to reverberate across the region.
History does not repeat itself exactly. But it often revisits old addresses.
One suspects Makhno would have found the question both familiar and irritating.He was never a nationalist in the conventional sense. Unlike Bandera and later Ukrainian nationalists, Makhno did not fight for a Ukrainian nation-state. He fought for something simultaneously larger and smaller: local autonomy, peasant self-government and anarchist freedom. He distrusted all states, whether Russian, Ukrainian, Bolshevik, White, German or otherwise.
This has made his legacy awkward for modern Ukraine. States generally prefer heroes who wanted states. Makhno wanted free councils of free people.
As a consequence, he occupies an unusual place in Ukrainian memory. Unlike Bandera or Shukhevych, he has never become a central pillar of official state mythology. Unlike the controversial legacy of the OUN-UPA or the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, debates surrounding Makhno are not primarily about nationalism. Instead, he exists in several overlapping forms at once: the historical insurgent commander, the libertarian icon celebrated by anarchists across the world, the regional folk hero of southern Ukraine, and increasingly, the son of Ukraine who resisted domination from distant centres of power.
None of these versions fully captures the man.
The historical Makhno remains elusive. His movement opposed antisemitic pogroms more consistently than many contemporary forces and included Jews within its ranks, yet it operated amidst the appalling violence and carnage of the Civil War and was never entirely untouched by it. His Free Territory represented one of the most ambitious anarchist experiments in modern history, yet it was also shaped by the brutal necessities of war. Admirers romanticise him. Critics emphasise the contradictions. Both have evidence on their side.
Perhaps that ambiguity explains his enduring fascination.
The unknown artist who created the image at the head of this essay gave his Makhno a modern Tryzub or trident belt buckle, a symbol of today’s Ukrainian resistance and resilience. It is a striking touch and a thoroughly anachronistic one. The symbol derives from the seals of Volodymyr the Great and modern Ukrainian statehood. Makhno himself never wore it.
The artist is making a statement. This is not merely Makhno the anarchist. This is Makhno the Ukrainian hero. The image therefore fuses three different figures into one. There is the historical insurgent Makhno of the 1918-21 Civil War. There is the anarchist her of libertarian mythology. And there is the modern Ukrainian patriot Makhno recruited into the story of national identity – retrospectively enlisted into a national story that he himself might have regarded with considerable scepticism. He spent much of his life rejecting national labels in favour of anarchist ones.
The anachronisms are historically dubious but symbolically powerful. But history rarely asks permission before appropriating its characters in an ongoing contest over memory.
Makhno in Red Army uniform, 1919
Twilight in Paris
And then there is the final act.
What happens after the war is over? Most stories conclude when the hero rides away. Real life begins afterwards. Makhno’s cavalry charges, victories, defeats and escapes belong to legend. The more intriguing question is what became of the dream once the banners were lowered.
Defeated but not destroyed, Nestor Makhno escaped the fate that overtook so many of his contemporaries. Unlike countless White and Red commanders, he did not perish on a battlefield, before a firing squad, or later in Stalin’s Great Terror. Unlike John Brown, Custer, and Davy Crockett or the Australians Ned Kelly and another horseman Harry “the Breaker” Morant, he did not die with his boots on. Miraculously, given the odds against him, he survived.
And improbably, the horseman of the steppe ended his days in Paris.
One imagines him there during the 1920s and early 1930s, sitting in smoky cafés among White émigrés, ex-Bolsheviks, anarchists, monarchists, refugees and stateless wanderers arguing about futures that had already vanished. The thunder of cavalry had faded into memory. The revolutionary epic had dissolved into reminiscence.
Nestor Makhno died on 25 July 1934 at the age of forty-five, worn down by tuberculosis, old wounds and years of hardship and, latterly, poverty. He was cremated and his ashes placed in the columbarium of Père Lachaise Cemetery. Not beneath a black banner. Not in the black earth of the Ukrainian steppe. Not in the town where his rebellion began. His ashes were placed not in the Ukrainian black earth but in niche 6686, a small compartment among thousands of others.
There is something wonderfully ironic, literary even, about that. The anti-clerical anarchist who spent his life fighting states, hierarchies and institutions, who once commanded tens of thousands of insurgents and rode across southern Ukraine pursued by enemies on every side, ends his journey among the famous dead of France, surrounded by poets, musicians, revolutionaries and dreamers.
History possesses a sense of humour.
Yet perhaps the final irony belongs to memory itself. For the world has turned another circle since his death.
The Black Army vanished and the Free Territory of the Makhnovshchina disappeared. They survive only in memory. Stalin’s Soviet Union rose and fell. The nations that struggled for freedom amidst the ruins of empire endured decades beneath first Nazi and then Soviet domination before re-emerging as sovereign states. The world that produced Makhno passed into history, and now, in the lands where Makhno once rode beneath a black banner, another war is being fought over questions of empire, identity, memory and self-determination.
What would Nestor Makhno make of it all? We cannot know. But one suspects he would recognise the landscape immediately. And perhaps that is why he refuses to stay buried. The ashes remain in Père Lachaise. The legend still rides the steppe.
There is a Russian word, toska, which Nabokov famously described as a spiritual anguish without precise object. A longing for something absent. A yearning that cannot quite be named. One suspects Makhno understood it. So did Chekhov. So did many of the exiles who haunted Paris in those years. For what is exile if not a prolonged conversation with vanished possibilities?
The revolutionary epic dissolved into memoirs, arguments and recollections. The thunder of cavalry became stories told over coffee and cigarettes. The dream survived. The dreamers grew old.
Yet Makhno remains. Not exactly as he was. Not exactly as he would have wished to be remembered. But alive nevertheless in paintings, songs, novels, political arguments, historical debates, and manga-inspired artwork.
The artist who gave him a Tryzub belt buckle and the physique of a cinematic hero understands something essential. Historical memory is not an archive. It is a conversation between past and present. Each generation creates the figures it needs. And so the anarchist who rejected states has become part of a national story. The peasant insurgent has become a folk hero. The historical man has become a legend.
The ashes rest quietly in Père Lachaise. The legend still rides the steppe. And somewhere beyond the horizon, beneath a black banner snapping in the wind, Nestor Makhno continues his endless charge toward a freedom that history never quite allowed him to reach.
For the dear departed, Père Lachaise is the best address in Paris. Some 300,000 people reste ici. A cavalcade of French cultural and political history, with a few foreign entombments, including the playwright Oscar Wild and Doors front-man and zeitgeist icon Jim Morrison.
I have always loved the place. I have wandered its avenues among the celebrated and the forgotten, the visited and the unvisited. It occurs to me that perhaps there is a verse yet to be written about those whose names draw no pilgrims and whose flowers have long since withered. Next time I find myself there, I think I shall seek out niche 6686 and offer a quiet dobryi den to the old anarchist.
The singers, and the dancers, and the actors, and the chancers,
The rebels and the statesmen, and the fallen communards,
Napoleonic Generals and politicians’ wives.
The poets and the dreamers, all those other famous lives.
Paul Hemphill, Chanson – living next to Jim
Coda: The Wall
History occasionally produces coincidences so perfect that a novelist would be accused of over-writing them.
Nestor Makhno spent his final years in Paris and today rests in the columbarium of Père Lachaise Cemetery. Visitors come to see Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Édith Piaf, Chopin, Proust and a host of other luminaries. Few seek out the old anarchist from Huliaipole. Yet not far from where his ashes lie stands one of the most potent revolutionary monuments in Europe: Le Mur des Fédérés, the Wall of the Federals.
It was here, on 28 May 1871, that the last defenders of the Paris Commune made their final stand. After a week of savage street fighting- the Semaine Sanglante, the Bloody Week – surviving Communards retreated through the eastern districts of Paris, fighting among the tombs and avenues of Père Lachaise itself. Cornered among the graves and monuments, they were overwhelmed. One hundred and forty-seven prisoners were lined up against the wall and shot. Thousands more would be executed in the days that followed.
The image possesses an almost unbearable symbolism. Revolutionaries making their last stand in a cemetery, fighting among the dead before joining them.
For later generations of socialists, communists and anarchists, the Paris Commune became something far greater than its brief seventy-two-day existence. Marx regarded it as the first example of proletarian government. Lenin studied it obsessively. Trotsky drew military lessons from its failure. Bolshevik revolutionaries saw in the Commune both an inspiration and a warning. It represented what revolution could achieve, but also what happened when revolution hesitated.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 they consciously invoked the Commune’s memory. Lenin famously noted with satisfaction when the Soviet regime survived longer than the Commune’s seventy-two days. Soviet propaganda elevated the Communards into secular saints of the revolutionary tradition. Streets, factories and institutions were named in their honour. Their red banner became one of the sacred relics of international socialism.
The symbolism endured even into the Space Age. The Soviet Union, which liked to present itself as the culmination of all previous revolutionary struggles, repeatedly invoked the Commune as a precursor to October 1917. A banner associated with the Paris Commune was ceremonially carried aboard an early Soviet space mission – a remarkable journey for a symbol born in the barricades of nineteenth-century Paris. One could scarcely imagine a more dramatic arc: from the cobblestones of Belleville to orbit around the Earth.
And here, perhaps, lies the final irony.
The Commune inspired the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks built the Soviet Union. Makhno spent much of his life fighting the Bolsheviks. Yet in death he came to rest within walking distance of the Wall of the Federals, among the ghosts of the very revolutionaries whose memory helped shape the revolutionary tradition that ultimately hunted him into exile.
The layers fold into one another like a Russian matryoshka doll. Open Makhno and one finds the Civil War. Open the Civil War and one finds the Revolution. Open the Revolution and one finds the Commune. Open the Commune and one finds the old dreams of liberty, equality and fraternity that first burst forth in revolutionary France. Each generation inherits the visions of those who came before, and each generation remakes them, sometimes beyond recognition.
One wonders what Makhno would have made of the Wall. He might have admired the courage of the Communards while distrusting those who later appropriated their memory. He might have reflected that revolutions, like nations, are often most attractive in defeat. Victors build institutions. Martyrs become legends.
And perhaps there is another lesson in Père Lachaise itself.
The cemetery gathers together monarchists and republicans, communists and anarchists, believers and atheists, poets and soldiers, dreamers and executioners. The quarrels that once seemed world-shattering now coexist in uneasy silence beneath the trees. The dead no longer argue.
Yet their stories continue to speak.
So when I eventually return to Père Lachaise and seek out niche 6686, I shall also walk to the Wall of the Federals and salute the ghosts of the old revolution. Between them lies much of the history of the modern age: revolution and reaction, hope and disappointment, dreams of freedom and the realities of power. The Communards fell there. Makhno rests nearby. The Soviet Union that claimed their inheritance has itself vanished into history.
And still the questions remain. The wall stands. The ashes remain. The legend rides on.
Le Mur des Fédérés, Pere Lachaise
Epilogue. Midnight in Paris (with apologies to Woody)
There is one final irony to Nestor Makhno’s story that deserves mention, because it reminds us how strange history can be.
When one thinks of Paris in the 1920s, one tends to think of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, that charming fantasy in which a modern writer wanders the streets of Montparnasse at night and stumbles into the city’s golden age. There are Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter at the piano, Salvador Dalí being magnificently Salvador Dalí, and a parade of artists, poets and dreamers whose names would come to define the twentieth century.
The film is whimsical, nostalgic and perhaps a little romanticised. But the extraordinary thing is that it is not entirely wrong. Paris really was like that.
The city into which Nestor Makhno arrived in exile was arguably the most intellectually crowded place on earth. Somewhere in Montparnasse, Ernest Hemingway was learning how to write short sentences and long silences. F. Scott Fitzgerald was turning glamour and self-destruction into literature. James Joyce was wrestling with language itself. Gertrude Stein was hosting salons where painters, writers and poets mingled late into the evening. Picasso and Matisse were redefining art. Stravinsky and Ravel were reshaping music. Josephine Baker was electrifying audiences. André Breton and the Surrealists were busy dismantling reality and rebuilding it according to dream logic.
And scattered among them were thousands of exiles.
The collapse of empires had turned Paris into a gathering place for the displaced. White Russian aristocrats who had fled the Revolution. Former tsarist officers reduced to driving taxis. Poets, philosophers and theologians trying to reconstruct vanished worlds. Jews escaping pogroms. Political refugees from every corner of Europe. Revolutionaries who had won and revolutionaries who had lost. Monarchists, liberals, socialists, anarchists, nationalists and stateless wanderers all sharing the same cafés, boulevards and boarding houses.
One can almost imagine the scene.
At one table sits Ivan Bunin, the future Nobel laureate, lamenting the Russia that had vanished. At another, the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev debates faith and freedom. Across the room a young writer named Vladimir Nabokov quietly works on stories that few people yet read. Somewhere nearby Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman are arguing about anarchism. Victor Serge is reflecting on the revolution’s betrayal. Trotsky occasionally passes through the émigré world like Banquo’s ghost, carrying with him the memory of power and the certainty of future assassination.
And then there is Makhno.
Not the manga hero with the flowing coat and trident buckle. Not the legendary ataman galloping across the steppe beneath a black banner. Just a tired, impoverished former insurgent commander, his lungs damaged by tuberculosis, surviving on odd jobs, writing memoirs, arguing politics, and trying to make sense of a world that had moved on without him.
It is difficult not to feel a touch of svetlaya grust’ – that luminous melancholy the Russians understand so well – in contemplating the image. Somewhere in the city Hemingway is inventing modern prose while Makhno is remembering cavalry raids across the Donbas. Picasso is dismantling perspective while former White officers reminisce about the Crimea. Joyce is transforming literature while exiled revolutionaries debate futures that have already vanished.
The worlds scarcely intersect, yet they coexist in the same city.
And perhaps they were not as far apart as they appear.
For all their differences, many of these figures were grappling with the same underlying question. The old world had collapsed. What would replace it? The question haunted the artists as surely as it haunted the revolutionaries. Some sought answers through politics, some through nationalism, some through religion, some through art. All were living among the ruins of certainties.
History often encourages us to imagine neat compartments: politics here, literature there, art somewhere else. The reality is usually messier and more interesting. The horseman of Huliaipole, the author of Ulysses, the creator of Cubism, the composer of The Rite of Spring, the future Nobel laureates, the forgotten exiles, the dreamers, the drunks, the philosophers and the refugees all inhabited the same city at the same moment.
Paris was large enough to contain them all.
Which means that somewhere, perhaps on a damp evening in Montparnasse, while jazz drifted from a nearby club and rain glistened on the pavement, Nestor Makhno may have walked past Hemingway on his way to a café argument, or crossed paths with Picasso without either man recognising the other.
Woody Allen would have appreciated the coincidence.
History, after all, often writes better stories than novelists.
Author’s note: Paris has a myriad of attractions for history tragics. For me, there are three ‘must sees’ that are at the top of the ‘out there’ list. Les Catacombes de Pariss are one. The folk cabaret Au Lapin is another. and the third is La Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, the most famous cemetery in the world.
President Donald Trump has described the US bombing campaign against Iran as “a little excursion,” then a “skirmish,” then a “mini-war” – ostensible breaches of a subsequent ceasefire are called “trifles”. He was doing something powerful men have always done: reach for a word small enough to sit comfortably in a sentence while the fires it describes are still burning, without actually committing to the potential political consequences calling the conflict a war. The gesture is familiar. Vladimir Putin called his invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation.” History, in the end, has usually insisted on its own vocabulary. What begins as euphemism tends to end as a chapter heading.
The US-Iran conflict – a sustained bombing campaign, a naval blockade constricting a fifth of the world’s oil supply, and an increasingly fragile ceasefire – is, by any honest accounting, a war. That we have not yet fully agreed to call it one is itself revealing. Language shapes the choices we are willing to contemplate; the choices we refuse to contemplate have a habit of being made for us, usually at greater cost and on someone else’s timetable.
But naming the war is only the first act of reckoning. The second – and more treacherous – is understanding it. And here, almost instinctively, we reach backwards. Before the first campaign has properly unfolded, the analogies arrive.
For this is what nations do when confronted with uncertainty: they search the past for usable maps. Yet wars are not equations, and analogies illuminate only by partial light. Gallipoli warns of overconfidence and the fantasy of the decisive stroke. Crimea evokes mismanagement and systemic incoherence. Vietnam and Iraq conjure the slow dread of entanglement – wars that move, expensively and violently, without ever quite arriving at conclusion.
We rarely encounter a new war on its own terms. Before the first campaign has properly unfolded, it is already being narrated through the past – the Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – names invoked less as history than as instruments of comprehension. This reflex is not mere intellectual laziness. War, in its immediacy, is too vast, too contradictory, to grasp without scaffolding; analogy supplies the frame. It tells us where to look for overconfidence, where to suspect mismanagement, where to anticipate drift. Yet it also does something subtler, and more dangerous: it invites us to believe that the present can be read off the past, that by matching patterns we might master outcomes.
The essay that follows proceeds from that tension. It does not treat these conflicts as competing verdicts on America’s confrontation with Iran, but as different lenses trained on different moments of a war’s life: conception, execution, and duration. Each captures a recognisable failure mode – the decisive stroke that overreaches, the system that cannot align means to ends, the conflict that persists beyond its rationale. To “refight” these wars in argument is not simply to indulge historical memory; it is to reveal how deeply our strategic thinking remains shaped by unresolved experiences. The past, in this sense, is not behind us. It is the grammar in which we continue to write the present.
Seeking storylines to explain the present
The quest begins, as these often do, reaching backwards in search of a usable past, a storyline that suits the present and what is now unfolding between America and Iran.
No war arrives naked; it comes draped in analogy. War is too large, too chaotic, to apprehend all at once; analogy shrinks it to something graspable. Analogies, like maps, tell you where to look, but also, just as often, where not to. Gallipoli (1915–16) is summoned, and Crimea (1853–56), and then, inevitably, Vietnam (1955-75, the war of my generation, though one that we British chose not to join) and Iraq (2003-11), those twin lodestars of modern American unease. Each is offered up as a key. Each, in its way, fits a lock. None, taken alone, opens the door.
Start with the British campaign during WWI to seize the strategic Dardanelles straits with the aim of threatening Istanbul and taking the Ottoman Empire out of the war. That analogy tends to be invoked by those who see overconfidence at the top: a belief that a bold stroke – decapitation strikes, limited escalation, a sharp application of force – can produce a decisive political outcome in a complex theatre. Gallipoli was conceived as a shortcut around stalemate; it became a lesson in underestimating geography, logistics, and the enemy’s will. If the critique is that Washington imagined a controlled, almost surgical confrontation with Iran that would bend reality to its design, then Gallipoli fits – particularly in its early optimism curdling into stubborn, costly entanglement.
There is something almost aesthetic about the Gallipoli temptation. It promises clarity. A narrow strait, a defined objective, a hinge upon which the whole great mechanism might turn. Strategy reduced to geometry. Yet wars have a way of refusing such elegance. The Turkish defence stiffened; the terrain asserted itself; the timetable dissolved into dust and flies and blood. The decisive stroke became an extended ordeal. And here the analogy deepens: not merely in the initial miscalculation, but in the dawning realisation that what was meant to be quick has become something else entirely – sticky, resistant, unyielding.
The Crimean War comparison is subtler, and in some ways more damning. Ostensibly a campaign by Britain and France (ironically, the architects of the Dardanelles venture) to challenge Czarist Russia’s design on the ailing Ottoman Empire – the so-called Eastern Question. Crimea was not just a military muddle; it was a war of misaligned systems: unclear objectives, poor coordination, inflated rhetoric masking administrative incompetence, and a media environment that amplified both heroism and absurdity (the Charge of the Light Brigade as both myth and indictment). If the Iran conflict appears strategically incoherent – multiple actors, shifting goals, allies pulling in different directions, public narratives outpacing operational reality – then Crimea begins to look uncomfortably familiar. It’s less about one disastrous decision and more about a system that cannot quite align means with ends.
Here the failure is quieter, but more pervasive. Not the single grand error, but the accumulation of smaller ones: supply chains that falter, commands that overlap, allies who agree in principle but diverge in practice. Crimea is what happens when the machinery of war – bureaucratic, logistical, political – fails to mesh. The guns fire, the troops advance, the dispatches glow with rhetoric, but somewhere beneath it all the connection between effort and outcome frays. One might say, borrowing that withering line in the 1960 Encyclopedia Britannica, that it becomes “perhaps the most ill-managed campaign in English history” – and the sting lies precisely in that word managed. Not conceived, not fought, but managed: as though war were an administrative exercise that has slipped its clerical bounds.
And then, inevitably, we arrive at America’s misbegotten wars in Indochina and Iraq. When people reach for these, they are usually pointing to something deeper: not the opening moves, but the trajectory. Vietnam is the archetype of gradual escalation into a conflict that cannot be cleanly won because its political premises are flawed. Iraq (particularly post-2003) adds another layer: the illusion of quick victory followed by insurgency, fragmentation, and the long tail of unintended consequences. If Iran becomes a drawn-out contest of proxies, asymmetric retaliation, and domestic fatigue – where tactical successes accumulate but strategic clarity recedes – then Vietnam/Iraq is the more predictive analogy.
Vietnam was once called “chaos without a compass,” and the phrase endures because it captures the feeling of the war more than its formal doctrine. There was, in fact, a compass – containment, credibility, dominoes – but it spun uncertainly, pointing in several directions at once. Washington oscillated between coercion and restraint, escalation and negotiation, measuring progress in tonnage dropped and bodies counted, even as the political centre of gravity drifted further out of reach. The war moved, violently and expensively, but it did not arrive. It accumulated.
Iraq echoes that pattern but begins differently – with a burst of clarity that dissolves into ambiguity. The regime falls; the statue topples; the map is redrawn in a matter of weeks; victory is declared. And then the afterlife begins. Insurgency, sectarian fracture, proxy entanglement- the slow discovery that winning the war is not the same as securing the peace. Iraq is what happens when the end state is assumed rather than constructed. It is, in that sense, less a campaign than a condition.
Set beside these, the earlier analogies sharpen. Gallipoli was not “chaos without a compass” at the outset; it had a very clear aim. Nor was it quite Crimea’s administrative farce, though elements of mismanagement crept in as the campaign stalled. Its distinctive flaw was the belief that a bold, limited stroke could shortcut the hard arithmetic of war – geography, supply, enemy adaptation. When that belief failed, the campaign slid, almost reluctantly, toward something more protracted, more wearing, with flashes of Crimean dysfunction flickering at the edges.
And this is the point at which the analogies begin to overlap, to blur into one another. The opening may be Gallipoli: confident, compressed, persuasive in its apparent simplicity. The conduct may drift toward Crimea: systems straining, coordination fraying, rhetoric outrunning reality. The trajectory may lengthen into Vietnam or Iraq: time stretching, purpose thinning, the war becoming less an event than an environment.
So which is most apt? If you’re judging initial strategic conception: then it is Gallipoli. If you’re judging systemic dysfunction and coalition incoherence: it’s Crimea. If you’re judging likely long-term dynamics and risk of quagmire: look to Vietnam and Iraq.
Forced to choose one, the most useful analogy is probably Iraq (with a Vietnam shadow). It captures both the confidence of the opening act and the chronic instability that can follow when political end states are ill-defined. Gallipoli was a failed gamble; Iraq became a condition. And it is the risk of becoming a condition – open-ended, absorbing, resistant to tidy resolution – that should trouble policymakers more than the memory of any single historical blunder.
For there is something peculiarly modern in that transformation. Nineteenth-century wars could be mismanaged; early twentieth-century campaigns could be disastrously conceived; but late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century conflicts have a habit of enduring. They slip their temporal bounds. They resist conclusion. They persist in the form of insurgencies, proxy struggles, regional destabilisations, so-called “forever wars” – echoes rather than endings.
History, in this sense, does not repeat so much as it offers a set of recurring traps, each labelled in a different hand. The names change – Lone Pine and The Nek, Balaclava, Khe Sanh, Fallujah – but the pattern is recognisable: ambition outruns understanding; institutions struggle to keep pace with intention; time erodes clarity; and strategy discovers, too late, that the map was never the territory.
The past, obligingly, provides the metaphors. The present decides which of them it is willing to become.
Forever wars and the persistent Eastern Question
Ironically, the repercussions and ricochets of the Crimea and Gallipoli linger still in the “forever wars” of the Ottoman Succession that continue to be fought in the Levant. Though the “sick man of Europe” has long gone, so-called “Eastern Question” that he precipitated is with us still. And the irony is not merely poetic, it is structural.
The Crimean War and Gallipoli were not just episodes in the long decline of the Ottoman Empire; they were moments in which the European powers tried, and failed, to manage that decline without resolving it. The Eastern Question – what to do with a weakening empire whose territories sat athwart trade routes, faiths, and ambitions – was never answered. It was deferred, patched, internationalised, moralised, and, when necessary, fought over. But never settled.
Crimea was, in essence, a war about containment without clarity. Britain and France fought not to destroy the Ottoman Empire, nor to reform it decisively, but to prevent Russia from exploiting its weakness. The result was a kind of geopolitical holding operation – costly, confused, and inconclusive. The patient survived, but the illness deepened. The war did not solve the Eastern Question; it ensured that it would return, more complicated than before.
Gallipoli, sixty years later, was almost the inverse: an attempt at decisive intervention that miscarried. Where Crimea sought to stabilise the system, Gallipoli tried to break it open – knock the Ottomans out of what became known as The Great War, reorder the strategic map, and force a resolution. It failed, and in failing, prolonged the life of the very problem it aimed to solve. When the Ottoman Empire did finally collapse in 1918, it did so not through elegant strategy but through cumulative exhaustion – and the settlement that followed (the infamous Sykes–Picot agreement, the Treaty of Lausanne that ended the Great War and shaped the modern Middle East, the mandates, improvised borders, and the legacies inherited by Israel and Palestine, by Syria and Lebanon, and by Iraq carried within it the seeds of future instability.
And here is the connective tissue to the present: the “forever wars” of the Levant are, in a very real sense, the afterlife of those unresolved choices.
The Ottoman system, for all its inequities, provided a kind of imperial coherence – a loose, often improvised order that managed diversity through hierarchy rather than uniformity. Its removal created a vacuum that external powers attempted to fill with lines on maps and imported state structures, often indifferent to local realities, including religious and ethnic divisions. The mandates were not solutions; they were transitional fictions that hardened into permanence. The Eastern Question did not end; it metastasised.
Thus the region becomes a palimpsest of earlier interventions:
The Crimean instinct persists in modern coalition warfare – external powers seeking to contain instability without fully committing to its resolution, managing symptoms rather than causes.
The Gallipoli impulse reappears in periodic attempts at decisive intervention – strikes, invasions, regime-change strategies – each promising to reset the board, each discovering the board is more complicated than imagined.
And over all this hangs the long shadow of Vietnam and Iraq: the recognition that once engaged, these conflicts do not conclude cleanly, but evolve into layered, persistent struggles involving states, militias, proxies, and narratives.
What we call “forever wars” are, in this sense, not aberrations but continuations – the modern form of an old, unanswered question. The Ottoman Empire is gone, but the strategic problem it embodied remains: a region where internal fractures intersect with external interests, where no single power can impose order, and where every intervention alters the conditions for the next.
There is a quiet, almost melancholic symmetry in this. Nineteenth-century statesmen spoke of the “Sick Man of Europe” as though the problem were a patient to be diagnosed and treated. But the illness was never confined to the patient; it was embedded in the system around him. Remove the patient, and the condition does not disappear – it redistributes itself.
So when modern observers reach for Gallipoli, or Crimea, or Vietnam, or Iraq, they are not merely searching for analogies of method. They are circling, perhaps without quite naming it, the persistence of a problem without closure.
The Eastern Question was never answered. It simply changed its language.
Challenging the analogies
You can’t really make sense of the analogies – Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – without restoring Iran itself to the centre of the frame. Otherwise the country becomes a backdrop, a stage upon which other powers replay their historical anxieties. But Iran is not the Ottoman Empire in decline, nor Iraq in 2003, nor Vietnam in 1965. It is an old state with a long memory of being acted upon – and that memory shapes how it acts now.
What changes, once you bring Iran back in, is the direction of the analogy. The earlier comparisons mostly describe how outside powers misjudge wars. Iran’s history reminds you how those same powers are often experienced from the inside – as intrusion, manipulation, or existential threat.
Iran enters the story not as an abstraction – “the enemy,” “the regime,” “the theatre” – but as a historical actor formed in the crucible of the very system the earlier analogies describe.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Persia was itself entangled in a version of the Eastern Question, pressured by Russian and British imperial competition, its sovereignty compromised, its politics penetrated. The First World War and its aftermath did not dismantle Iran as they did the Ottoman Empire, but they confirmed its vulnerability to external design. The Second World War made that vulnerability explicit: Anglo-Soviet occupation in 1941, the removal of Reza Shah, and the installation of his son – an early demonstration that great powers could, when required, rearrange Iran’s internal order.
From there, the pattern sharpens. The 1953 coup against the democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh – engineered by Britain and the United States – lodges itself in Iranian political consciousness as a defining moment: not simply a change of government, but a lesson about the limits of independence in a world of larger powers. The Shah’s subsequent rule, modernising yet authoritarian, Western-aligned yet domestically brittle, becomes the next act in this long drama of externally entangled sovereignty.
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 then reads, in part, as a rupture with that pattern- a violent reassertion of autonomy, clothed in religious language but grounded in political memory. “Neither East nor West” was not just a slogan; it was a rejection of the very dynamics that had shaped Iran’s modern history. Yet revolutions do not escape geography. The new regime inherits the same strategic environment, the same pressures, the same suspicions.
The Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) is crucial here. For eight years, Iran fights a brutal, attritional conflict against Saddam Hussein – largely isolated, facing external support flowing to its adversary. This is Iran’s Vietnam, one might say, but with a different lesson drawn: not the futility of war, but the necessity of endurance. The war entrenches a doctrine of asymmetry, resilience, and proxy capability – precisely the features that later confound American strategy in the region.
From that point on, the Islamic Republic is not simply surviving; it is adapting. It builds networks – Hezbollah, militias, regional alliances – not as ideological ornaments but as strategic depth. It becomes, in effect, a state that has internalised the lessons of the very wars others use as analogies. Where outside observers see Vietnam or Iraq looming, Iranian planners see something else: a long game in which time, patience, and indirection offset conventional inferiority.
To reinsert Iran into the narrative is to complicate every analogy. Gallipoli assumes an opponent who will react predictably to a decisive blow; Iran’s history suggests otherwise. Crimea assumes mismanagement on one side; Iran’s experience reminds us that what appears as dysfunction externally may be met by coherence internally. Vietnam and Iraq warn of quagmires; Iran has, in many respects, built its strategy around drawing others into them.
In that sense, the question is not only which past war America risks refighting, but which past experiences Iran believes it is reliving – or avenging. The 1953 coup, the isolation of the 1980s, the long memory of foreign interference: these are not background details, but active ingredients in the present.
And so our frame subtly shifts. It is no longer simply about the hazards of analogy, or the repetition of strategic error, but about the collision of historical memories. One side reaches for Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq- warnings drawn from its own past misjudgments. The other carries a different archive: intervention, resistance, survival.
Between those two archives lies the present conflict – less a replay of any single war than a convergence of many, each side reading from a different script, each convinced, in its own way, that history has already shown it how this story goes.
Conclusion
To refight old wars in the mind is, at one level, an act of prudence. It reminds us that others have stood at similar thresholds, armed with confidence, intelligence, and good intentions – and have nonetheless misjudged the terrain, the enemy, or themselves. But there is a fine line between learning from history and being governed by it. Analogy can clarify; it can also constrain. It can sharpen perception, or it can trap us in inherited scripts, seeing Gallipoli where the problem is administrative, or diagnosing Vietnam when the flaw lies in the opening wager.
The deeper unease running through these comparisons is not simply that wars go wrong, but that they linger – that they slip their boundaries and become conditions rather than episodes. From the mismanaged campaigns of Crimea to the failed gambles of Gallipoli, from the disorientation of Vietnam to the long aftermath of Iraq, one sees not repetition but recurrence: ambition outrunning understanding, institutions straining to keep pace, time eroding clarity. And beneath it all, especially in the Levant, the longer echo of an older, unanswered question – how to order a region where external power and internal fracture are perpetually entangled.
History does not offer a single, authoritative mirror. It offers a cabinet of them, each slightly warped, each catching a different angle of the present. The task is not to choose one reflection and mistake it for reality, but to recognise the distortions for what they are – and to ask, with some humility, whether we are illuminating the path ahead or merely retracing, with greater eloquence, the steps that led others into the same uncertain ground.
The Western cabinet of mirrors – Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – captures recurring pathologies: the overconfident opening stroke, the misaligned machinery, the war that lingers beyond its logic. Yet these are, inescapably, insider narratives. They describe how campaigns look from the bridge, the штаб, the situation room. They are diagnoses of our own errors.
What the Iranian story, set against the longer afterlife of the Eastern Question, forces back into view is the perspective from the other shore. The Young Turks, confronting encroachment and dismemberment, did not experience Gallipoli as a misjudged Allied gamble; they experienced it as a defence of survival. Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese did not inhabit “chaos without a compass”; they pursued a coherent, if costly, struggle against a foreign presence. Iraqi insurgents, and later ISIS in its own brutal and aberrant way, did not parse the war as a case study in post-conflict planning; they resisted, adapted, endured, and exploited.
They did not conduct war games about us. They fought.
Iran belongs in that lineage – not as an analogue, but as an heir to a particular historical consciousness: one shaped by intervention, by imposed settlements, by long wars of attrition, and by the conviction that time can be turned into a weapon. From that vantage, what appears to Western observers as drift or dysfunction may look like opportunity; what is feared as quagmire may be cultivated as strategy.
And so the question shifts. It is no longer simply which past war America risks refighting, but whether the very act of choosing among Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, and Iraq obscures the more important reality: that the other side is not reading from the same book – or as many commentators are reminding us today, “the enemy has a vote”. One side searches its history for warnings about overreach; the other draws from its own past a repertoire of resistance.
History, then, does not just offer competing analogies. It offers competing memories. And where those memories diverge – where one side analyses and the other endures – there lies the most persistent danger: not that we will repeat the past, but that we will misunderstand the present, even as we describe it with perfect historical fluency.
And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Mathew Arnold, Dover Beach
We called 2024 a “year of everything, everywhere, all at once”, and it earned the name. Crises collided, news arrived faster than we could process it, and the world seemed to exist in a state of constant shock. 2025 did not bring relief. Instead, the chaos began to settle. Wars dragged on, political divides hardened, social tensions deepened, and technology reshaped how we saw and understood it all.
It was the year the world stopped exploding in real time and started being what it had already become: messy, uneven, morally complicated, and stubbornly persistent. A year, indeed, in a world of echoes, refrains and unfinished business. And we spent the year watching power bargain brazenly in plain sight, trying to describe what was happening while it unfolded around us.
From Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Syria, from America’s self-inflicted fracture to Australia’s sudden wake-up call on Bondi Bondi, 2025 forced a reckoning: the world did not pause, but it did sort itself – deciding what we would notice, what we would ignore, and what we would learn to live with. Alongside human crises came the continuing advance of AI and chatbots, and the dominion of the algorithms that now govern attention, proving that disruption can be structural as well as geopolitical.
Gaza: War, Then “Ceasefire”
The war in Gaza dominated the year internationally and here in Australia, even as attention ebbed and flowed. Military operations continued for months, followed eventually by a “ceasefire” – a word doing far more work than it should or even justified. Fighting paused, hostages living and dead were returned and prisoners released, but the devastation remained: tens of thousands dead, cities demolished, humanitarian catastrophe unresolved. And the causes of the consequences standing still amidst the ruins and the rubble.
Western governments continued to back Israel while expressing concern for civilians, a contradiction that grew harder to defend, while street protests and online anger seethed all across the world. At the same time, antisemitism surged globally, often hiding behind the language of anti-Zionism. Two realities existed together, and too many people insisted on choosing only one.
By the end of the year, the war had not been resolved – merely frozen. Trust in Western moral leadership had been badly damaged, and Israelis and Palestinians remain in bitter limbo.
Long-simmering tensions between Israel and Iran spilled into open conflict. What had once been indirect – proxies, cyberattacks, covert strikes – became visible. A brief but destructive war of missile exchanges ended with the United States asserting ordinance, deterrence and control.
The episode was brief but telling. It showed that America still reaches for its guns quickly, even as it struggles to define long-term goals. Another line was crossed, then quickly absorbed into the background of “normal” geopolitics.
Russia, Ukraine and Trump’s “Peace”
Ukraine entered 2025 mired in stalemate. Front lines barely moved. Casualties continued to mount. Western support held, but with clear signs of fatigue. And Donald Trump’s re-emergence reshaped the conversation. His promise to deliver instant “peace” reframed the war not as a question of justice or sovereignty, but of exhaustion. Peace was no longer about what Ukraine deserved, but about what the world was tired of sustaining and what the “art of the deal” could deliver.
The war didn’t end. It simply became something many wanted to stop thinking about. Not Ukraine and Russia, but. The carnage continues.
Donald Trump’s one-way crush on Vladimir gave us the one of the+most cringeworthy moments in global politics – Trump greeting the Russian president in Alaska: As the US president rolled out the red carpet for the world’s most dangerous autocrat, Russia’s attack on Ukraine accelerated. Trump got precisely nothing out of the meeting, except for the chance to hang out with a gangster he so obviously admires and of whom he is embarrassingly in awe.
Syria: Free, but stranded at the crossroads
A year after Assad’s fall, Syria remained unstable and unresolved. The regime was gone, but the future was unclear. Old sectarian tensions resurfaced, often in bloodshed, new power struggles emerged, powerful neighbours staked claims and justice for past crimes remained distant.
Syria in 2025 was neither a success story nor a collapse – but suspended between heaven and hell, a country trying to exist after catastrophe with the rest of the world largely moving on.
Women in Damascus celebrate the fall of the Assad regime
Sudan: what genocide actually looks like
Sudan’s civil war continued with little international attention. Mass killing, ethnic cleansing, famine, and displacement unfolded slowly and relentlessly. This was genocide without spectacle. No clear narrative. No sustained outrage. It showed how mass atrocity can now occur not in secrecy, but in plain sight – and still be ignored.
The United States spent 2025 deeply divided, with no sign of healing. Pew Research polling showed that seven out of ten republicans think that the opposite side is immoral while six of ten democrats thinks the same of their rivals.
Trump’s return to power sharpened those divisions. His administration governed aggressively: mass deportations, punitive tariffs, the dismantling of foreign aid, political retribution, and pressure on democratic institutions. The country looked inward and outward at the same time – less cooperative, more transactional, more openly nationalist. Democratic norms eroded not overnight, but through constant stress and disregard. With three years still to run and the tell-tale midterms approaching, allies and cronies are adjusting, bickering rivals are taking notes, and uncertainty has become the defining feature of American leadership. Meanwhile, #47 is slapping his name on everything he can christen, from bitcoins to battleships.
US foreign policy took on a blunt, old-fashioned tone. Pressure on Canada and Mexico increased. Talk of annexing Greenland resurfaced. Venezuela, caught in the maw of Yanqui bullying and bluster, waits nervously for Washington’s next move. The administration promised imminent land operations – and then bombed Nigeria! The revival of the old Monroe Doctrine felt, as baseball wizz Yogi Berra once remarked, like déjà vu all over again, not as strategy, but as instinct. Influence asserted, consultation discarded. The “ugly American” was back, and unapologetic.
Europe in 2025 didn’t collapse, as many pundits suggested it might, but it shifted. Far-right ideas gained ground even where far-right parties didn’t win and remained, for now, on the fringes albeit closer to electoral success. Borders tightened; policies hardened; street protests proliferated – against immigration and against Israel, Support for Ukraine continued, but cautiously. The continent stood at a crossroads: still committed to liberal values in theory, but increasingly selective in practice.
Uncle Sam’s cold-shoulder
Rumbling away in the background throughout year was the quiet but cumulative alienation of America’s allies. Not with a single rupture, but through a thousand small slights. transactional diplomacy dressed up as realism, alliances treated as invoices rather than covenants, multilateralism dismissed as weakness. Europe learned that security guarantees come with a mood swing; the Middle East heard policy announced via spectacle; Asia watched reassurance coexist uneasily with unpredictability.
The new dispensation was illustrated by the Trump National Security Strategy. It is at once candid and contradictory: it outlines a narrower, realist vision of American interests, emphasising sovereignty, burden-sharing, industrial renewal, and strategic clarity, yet it is riddled with silences, evasions, and tensions between rhetoric and likely action. Allies are scolded for weakness while the document avoids naming Russia’s aggression, underplays China, and projects American cultural anxieties onto Europe. These contradictions expose both strategic incoherence and the limits of paper doctrine against presidential temperament, leaving Europe facing an irreversible rupture in trust and revealing a strategy as much about America’s insecurities as its actual global posture.
The post-WW2 order has not so much been dismantled as shrugged at, and indeed, shrugged off. Trust eroded not because the United States has withdrawn from the world, but because it has remained present without being reliable, and presumed itself to be in charge. Power, exercised loudly but inconsistently, has discovered an old truth: allies can endure disagreement, but they struggle with contempt.
Australia in 2025 … high flight and crash landing
Though beset by a multitude of crises – the cost of living, housing, health and education services – the Albanese Labor government was returned comfortably in May, helped by a divided, incoherent, and seemingly out of touch opposition. For the rest the year, federal politics felt strangely frictionless with policy drift passing for stability. The Coalition remained locked in internal conflict, unable to present a credible alternative. The Greens, chastened by electoral defeat and in many formerly friendly quarters, ideological disillusionment, treaded water.
But beneath the surface, social cohesion frayed. Immigration debates sharpened. Antisemitism rose noticeably, no longer something Australians could pretend belonged elsewhere. Attacks on Jewish Australians forced a reckoning many had avoided and hoped would resolve once the tremors of the war in Gaza had ameliorated. Until 6.47pm on 7th December, a beautiful evening on Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach. Sudden, brutal and in our summer playground, sectarian violence shattered the sense of distance Australians often feel from global disorder. At that moment, politics stopped feeling abstract. The world, with all its instability, barged in and brought the country down to earth.
Lifesavers on Bondi Beach, 20 December 2025. Edwina Pickles
Featured photograph and above:
A handful of bodies on Bondi Beach, and behind them, the howling infinite of expectation, obligation, and the careful rationing of human empathy. The smallness of the beach against the vastness of consequences. On December 20, 2025, Bondi’s iconic lifesavers formed a line stretching the entire length of the beach -silent, solemn, a nation visibly in mourning. Similar tributes unfolded from Perth to Byron Bay, gestures of unity in the face of a shock that touched the whole country.
The Year of the Chatbot: Promise, Power, and Risk
And now, a break from the doom and gloom …
2025 was the year when artificial intelligence became part of daily life. Chatbots ceased to be experimental and became integral, transforming from novelty to utility seemingly overnight. People used it to write, research, translate, plan, argue, comfort, and persuade; institutions and individuals adopted it instinctively. Setting tone as much as content, the ‘bots have lowered barriers to knowledge, sharpened thinking, and helped people articulate ideas they might otherwise struggle to express. Used well, they amplified curiosity rather than replace it.
The opportunities are obvious – but so are the risks. Systems that can clarify complexity can also flatten it. Chatbots sound confident even when wrong, smooth over disagreement, and made language cleaner, calmer, and more persuasive – but not necessarily truer. They reinforce confirmation bias, outrage, and tribal certainty, generating arguments instantly and flooding the zone with plausible-sounding text. As information has became faster, cheaper, and less reliable, Certainty has spread more easily than truth, so truth has to work much harder.
Dependence is subtler but real. Outsourcing thinking – summaries instead of reading, answers instead of wrestling – did not make humans stupid, but less patient. Nuance, doubt, and slow understanding became harder to justify in a world optimised for speed. Yet conversely, man people still seek context, history, and complexity. Used deliberately, AI could slow the pace, map contradictions, and hold multiple truths at once.
By the end of 2025, the question was no longer whether AI would shape public life – it already had. The real question is whether humans would use it as a shortcut, or as a discipline. The technology is neutral. The danger – and the promise – lies in how much thinking we are willing to give up, and how much responsibility we are prepared to keep.
Alongside the chatbot sat a quieter, more insidious force: the algorithm itself. By 2025 it no longer simply organised information – it governed attention. What people saw, felt, and argued about was shaped less by importance than by engagement. To borrow from 20th century philosopher and communication theorist and educator Marshall McLuhan, the meme had become the message. Complex realities were compressed into images, slogans, clips, and talking points designed not to inform but to travel. The algorithm rewarded speed over reflection, certainty over doubt, heat over light. Politics, war, and grief were all flattened into content, stripped of context, and ranked by performance. What mattered most was not what was true or necessary, but what disseminated.
Passion without Wisdom
I wrote during the year that we seemed “full of passionate intensity” – Yeats’ phrase still apt in the twenty first century- but increasingly short on wisdom and insight. 2025 confirmed it. Anger was everywhere, empathy highly selective, certainty worn like armour. People felt deeply but thought narrowly. Moral energy surged but rarely slowed into understanding. The problem was not indifference; it was excess – too much feeling, too little reflection. In that environment, nuance looked like weakness and patience like complicity. What was missing was not information, but judgement – the harder work of holding contradiction, of resisting instant conclusions, of allowing complexity to temper conviction. Passion was abundant. Insight, increasingly rare.
Looking Toward 2026
Looking back on 2025, it seems that there were no endings, neither happy or sad. Just a promise, it seems, of more of the same. The year didn’t solve anything. It clarified things. And if it clarified anything, it was that the world has grown adept at managing, ignoring, or absorbing what it cannot fix. It revealed a world adjusting to permanent instability. In this year of echoes, refrains, and unfinished sentences.
Passion, intensity, and outrage were abundant, but patience, wisdom, and insight remained scarce. Democracies strained under internal and external pressures. Wars lingered unresolved. Technology reshaped thought and attention.
Some argue that hope springs eternal, that yet, even amid the drift and the fractures, glimpses of understanding and resistance persisted, that although the world has settled into its chaos, we can be riders on the storm. But, I fear, 2026 arrives not as break, a failsafe, a safety valve, but as continuation. It looms as a test of endurance rather than transformation. In my somnolent frame of mind, I’ve reached again for my Yeats. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed …”
After the chaos of 2024 and the hardening of 2025, the question is no longer what might go wrong. It’s what we’re prepared to live with.
And so we come to what In That Howling Infinite wrote in 2025.
What we wrote in 2025
It was a year that refused neat endings.
It began in a wasteland – Gaza as moral ground zero – and moved, restlessly, through revolutions real and imagined: Trump as symptom and accelerant, Putin as a man racing his own shadow, Syria forever at the crossroads where history idles and then accelerates without warning. Gaza returned, again and again, sunrise and false dawn, as spectacle and strategy; Sudan burned in near silence; Venezuela re-entered the frame as empire’s backyard as the US disinterred its Monrovian legacy. In That Howling Infinite featured pieces on each of these – several in many cases , twenty in all, plus a few of relevance to them, including an overview of journalist Robert Fisk’s last book (The Night of Power – Robert Fisk’s bitter epilogue). A broadranging historical piece written in the previous year and deferred, Modern history is built upon exodus and displacement, provided a corrective of sorts to the distorted narratives that have emerged in recent years due to a dearth of historical knowledge and the partisan weaponisation of words.
It was almost as light relief that we turned to other subjects. Of particular interest was AI. Approaching remorselessly yet almost unrecognised in recent years, it banged a loud gong and crept from curiosity to condition, from tool to weather system, quietly rewriting the newsroom, the internet, and the idea of authorship. ChatGPT and other chatbots appeared not as saviours but as promise and peril in equal measure. By year end, we were fretting about using ChatGPT too much and regarding it as something to moderate like alcohol or fatty foods. We published three pieces on the subject in what seemed like rapid succession, and then pestered out – sucked into the machinery, I fear.
What with so much else attracting our attention, we nevertheless managed to find time for some history – including a particularly enthralling and indeed iconoclastic book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire; the story of an Anzac brigade lost in Greece in 1942; “the Lucky Country” revisited after half a century; and a piece long in the pipeline on the iconic singer and activist Paul Robeson.
In August, as on a whim, for light relief, we summoned up a nostalgic old Seekers’ song from the mid-sixties, a time when the world was on fire with war and rage much as it is today, but for us young folk back in the day, a time of hope and hedonism. For us, the carnival, clearly, is not over. The machinery is still whirring, the music still loud, and the lights still on. History is insisting on one more turn of the wheel, and the dawn, so often promised, so frequently invoked, has not yet broken.
January
The Gaza War … there are no winners in a wasteland
The way we were … reevaluating the Lucky Country
February
Let’s turn Gaza into Mar e Largo
Trump’s Second Coming … the new American Revolution
Cold Wind in Damascus … Syria at the crossroads
March
Trumps Revolution… he can destroy but he cannot create
Where have all the big books gone?
Putin’s War … an ageing autocrat seeks his place in history
April
The Trump Revolution … I run the country and the world
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye
Let Stalk Strine .. a lexicon of Australian as it was spoken (maybe)
May
The phantom of liberty … the paradoxes of conservativism
Shadows in search of a name … requiem for a war
The continuing battle for Australia’s history
July
A mighty voice … the odyssey of Paul Robeson
August
109 years of Mein Kampf … the book that ravaged a continent
High above the dawn is breaking … the unlikely origin of a poo song
September
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Trump’s peace plan
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Spectacle or Strategy
Will there ever be a Palestinian state?
Why Osana bin lost the battle but won the war
The Night of Power … Robert Fisks bitter epilogue
The promise and peril of ChatGPT
Who wrote this? The newsroom’s AI dilemma
October
AI and the future of the internet
Danger Angel … the ballad of Laura Loomer
November
A forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history
The most nihilistic war ever … Sudan’s waking nightmare
Answering the call … National Service in Britain 1945-1963
Tales of Yankee Power … at play in Americas backyard
December
Delo Kirova – the Kirov Case … a Soviet murder mystery
Between heaven and hell … Syria at the crossroads
This Is What It Looks Like
Tales of Yankee power … Why Venezuela, and why now?
Marco Rubio’s Venezuelan bargain
It is our custom to conclude our annual wrap with a particular song that caught our attention during the year. Last year, we chose Tears for Fears’ Mad World. It would be quite appropriate for 2025. But no repeats! so here is something very different. An outwardly melancholy song that is, in the most ineffable way quite uplifting. that’s what we reckon, anyway …
The Ticket Taker is on the surface a love song for the apocalypse; and it’s it’s one of the prettiest, most lyrically interesting songs I’ve heard in a long while. I could almost hear late-period Leonard Cohen and his choir of angels.
The apocalypse is both backdrop and metaphor. We’re not sure which. Is it really about a world ending, or just about the private ruin of a man left behind by love and fortune. The lyrics are opaque enough to evade final meaning, but resonant enough to keep circling back, like the ferry itself, between hope and futility. A love song, yes, but also a confession of entrapment: the gambler’s hope, the ark one cannot board.
The “Ticket Taker” song was written by Ben Miller and Jeff Prystowsky and is featured on The Low Anthem’s album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin. It features on Robert Plant’s latest foray into roots music – this time with English band Saving Grace. This flawless duet with Suzi Dian is mesmerising and magical.
Jeff will tell you that the song is “pure fiction,” that Ben “just made it up one day” – but fiction, as we know, has a way of smuggling deeper truths than fact dares admit.
Tonight’s the night when the waters rise
You’re groping in the dark
The ticket takers count the men who can afford the ark
The ticket takers will not board, for the ticket takers are tied
For five and change an hour, they will count the passers-by
They say the sky’s the limit, but the sky’s about to fall
Down come all them record books, cradle and all
They say before he bit it that the boxer felt no pain
But somewhere there’s a gambling man with a ticket in the rain
Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm
Many years have passed in this river town, I’ve sailed through many traps
I keep a stock of weapons should society collapse
I keep a stock of ammo, one of oil, and one of gold
I keep a place for Mary Anne, soon she will come home
Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm
Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark
It is three years since Australian songstress Judith Durham took the Morningtown Ride.Dusty Springfield’s brother Tom followed soon afterwards.
Judith might not have been my teenage crush – that was Dusty – but The Seekerswere a significant part of my adolescent soundtrack. Aussies were an exotic species back then in Britain, and to me, more associated with now-disgraced Rolf Harris with Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport and Sun Arise, but there was also Frank Ifield and Patsy Ann Noble. More Aussies followed them to Britain – the Easybeats and Bee Gees entering the pop charts soon afterwards, while soon to be famous actors, artists, authors and activists had already steamed back to Old England’s Shores and were busy making names for themselves.
The Seekers were “discovered” by Tom Springfield and were marketed as the new Springfields, the natural heirs to that wholesome folksey trio (he had written their greatest hits or adapted them from folk standards). When the Seekers folded in 1969, group member Keith Potger gave us the New Seekers, a bunch of pretty blonde Brits who most people now believe wanted to buy the world a coke! For trivia fans, that song was (spoiler alert!) the happy hippie finale of that fabulous series Madmen.
The Seekers released their smash hit, the allegorical song of farewell The Carnival Is Over in 1965. It is forever associated with this well-loved trio, but Tom had actually based it on a traditional Russian song about a brutal Cossack rebel [read all about him below]. A natural linguist, he’d learned Russian whilst undergoing compulsory national service in the fifties. Apparently, those few conscripts who graduated from the Ministry of Defence’s Russian Language School as interpreters and translators were regarded as the crême de la crême of conscripts. Often, trainees would put on concerts of Russian songs and plays for their own amusement.
Stenka Razin
Tom Springfield borrowed the melody of The Carnival is Over from Stenka Razin a traditional folk tune set to music in the 19th Century by Dimitry Sadovnikov. It told the tale of a drunken seventeenth century Cossack rebel who threw his Persian bride of one night over the side of his boat into the Volga River when his men accused him of going soft. Tom changed the story entirely though he retained a nautical riff and cast the star-crossed lovers as the theatre characters Pierrot and Columbinerather than casting them overboard.
Stepan Razin on the Volga (by Boris Kustodiev, (1918) State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
Tom’s song was an ironic mid twentieth century reimagining in which a tragic, violent and mythic saga of patriotism, loyalty, and patriarchal authority illustrative of national an revolutionary folklore was reinvented into wistful pop as a saccharine song of romance, emotion, loss, and a meditation on the impermanence – how the joys of love are fleeting. No such maudlin melancholy on the part of the preening old riverboat pirate. Over the side she goes!
The lyrics and the sentiment couldn’t have been more different:
From beyond the wooded island To the riverbank he came, On his breast he held a maiden, And his comrades called her name. Then he flung her to the waters, Crying, ‘Thus I make my vow, I will have no foreign woman As a wife to me now.’
Say goodbye, my own true lover As we sing a lovers’ song How it breaks my heart to leave you Now the carnival is gone High above the dawn is waiting And my tears are falling rain For the carnival is over We may never meet again
Pierrot and Columbine
The shift from revolutionary folklore to wistful pop is emblematic of the 20th-century repurposing of folk traditions – filtering political anthems through modern, personal, and emotional frameworks. The lyrics and the sentiment couldn’t have been more different:
If you watch the hoary old Hammer horror film Rasputin, about the sinister Svengali who enchanted the last Czarina of Russia – portrayed herein by that eminent old frightener Christopher Lee – you will recognise the tune as a recurring leitmotif.
There is a clunky film reenactment of the story, sung by the famous Red Army Choir immediately below the Seekers‘ song.
The real Stenka Razin
“Stenka” is simply the affectionate or diminutive form of the Russian name Stepan, much as “Johnny” is for John. His full name was Stepan Timofeyevich Razin (c. 1630–1671), the Don Cossack leader who led one of the greatest popular uprisings in Russian history.
The historical Razin and the legendary Stenka quickly diverged.
Historically, Razin was a charismatic Don Cossack at a time when Muscovy was tightening its grip over the frontier. His revolt (1670–71) began as a Cossack expedition on the Caspian Sea, descended into piracy against Persian shipping, and then evolved into a vast peasant and Cossack rebellion against the Tsar’s officials, landlords, and the expanding system of serfdom. His forces captured major towns along the Volga, including Astrakhan, Saratov, and Samara, and for a time seemed capable of threatening Moscow itself. Eventually, however, the rebellion was crushed. Razin was betrayed, captured, taken to Moscow, and publicly executed in 1671 by drawing and quartering.
In folklore, however, he became Stenka Razin, the Robin Hood-like champion of the oppressed and the embodiment of Cossack freedom. Songs, poems, and legends transformed him into a larger-than-life figure who defied both Tsar and aristocracy. The most famous of these is the nineteenth-century folk song borrowed by Tom Springfield (also known as “From Beyond the Island to the Midstream” or Iz-za ostrova na strezhen).
Whether this episode ever happened is highly doubtful. Most historians regard it as legend rather than fact. Yet it became inseparable from Razin’s popular image, inspiring paintings, operas, and one of Russia’s earliest narrative films (1908).
Orlando Figes’ The Story of Russia, gives Razin an important part in the recurring Russian pattern of revolt against autocracy. He was the first in a line of great Cossack rebels that included Kondraty Bulavin (1707–08), Yemelyan Pugachev (1773–75), who claimed to be Peter III during Catherine the Great’s reign, and, in a very different way, later revolutionary movements. In Russian memory, these figures symbolize the perennial tension between the centralized state – the “Holy Tsar” – and the fiercely independent frontier spirit of the Cossacks.
In that sense, Stenka Razin is not merely a historical rebel. Like Robin Hood in England or William Wallace in Scotland, he became a national folk hero whose legend often overshadowed the man himself.
The Cossacks
The word Cossack derives from the Turkic term qazaq (Kazakh: qazaq), meaning “free man,” “wanderer,” “adventurer,” or “one who lives independently of established authority.” Long before it became associated with the frontier warriors of Russia and Ukraine, it described those who had left settled society to seek freedom on the open steppe. The same linguistic root gives rise to the name of the Kazakhs, although the Kazakh people and the Cossacks evolved into quite different historical communities. The name itself captures the essence of the Cossack ideal: men who lived by their own laws on the frontier, owing allegiance first to their comrades and only later, and often reluctantly, to the state.
The Cossacks emerged from the vast frontier lands south and east of Muscovy between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their very name, from the Turkic qazaq, means “free man,” “wanderer,” or “adventurer.” They were not a distinct ethnic people but a frontier society, composed of escaped serfs, adventurers, displaced peasants, Tatars, and others who chose a life beyond the reach of princes and landlords.
They lived in self-governing military communities along the Don, Dnieper, Ural and Terek rivers, electing their own leaders (atamans) and priding themselves on their independence. As Orlando Figes observes, they existed “beyond the laws of the state,” inhabiting the liminal zone where settled civilisation gave way to the Eurasian steppe.
Yet the relationship between the Cossacks and the Russian state was always deeply ambivalent. They were at once rebels and servants. The same men who periodically rose in bloody revolt against the Tsar under leaders such as Stenka Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev were also employed as some of Russia’s finest irregular cavalry. In return for privileges, land and a degree of autonomy, they guarded the empire’s long southern frontier against the raids of the Crimean Tatars and Ottoman forces. Ironically, much of this frontier lay in what is today eastern and southern Ukraine, where the Cossacks were both defenders and colonists.
As the Russian Empire expanded, so too did the Cossacks. They rode with Yermak in the conquest of Siberia in the late sixteenth century, helped carry Russian rule across the Urals to the Pacific, established fortified settlements throughout the Caucasus, and became indispensable agents of imperial expansion into Central Asia. Wherever Russia’s frontier advanced, Cossack hosts were usually not far behind.
By the nineteenth century they had become both a romantic symbol of freedom and a feared instrument of imperial authority. Their cavalry distinguished itself in the Napoleonic Wars, but they also acquired notoriety for suppressing strikes, peasant uprisings and revolutionary demonstrations. The image of mounted Cossacks charging crowds with sabres became one of the enduring symbols of Tsarist repression.
The Revolution of 1917 split the Cossacks. Many remained loyal to the White armies during the Civil War, while others sided with the Bolsheviks. Stalin later pursued a policy of “de-Cossackisation,” treating them as a potentially disloyal military caste. Thousands were executed, deported or dispossessed, and many Cossack traditions were deliberately suppressed.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a striking revival of Cossack identity. Modern Cossack organisations celebrate their military heritage, religious devotion and patriotism, although they bear only an indirect relationship to the semi-independent frontier communities of earlier centuries. Under Vladimir Putin, many Cossack groups have been encouraged as auxiliaries to the state, policing demonstrations, patrolling borders, assisting the security services and providing volunteers for conflicts including Crimea, the Donbas and, more recently, the war in Ukraine. Once famed as men who lived beyond the state’s authority, many have become among its most visible defenders.
The Cossacks thus encapsulate one of the enduring paradoxes of Russian history: It is a story rich in irony. Forged in freedom, they became instruments of autocracy; champions of the frontier who helped build one of history’s greatest land empires; rebels against the Tsar who so often ended their days fighting for him. Their story mirrors Russia’s own: restless, expansive, contradictory, and forever balanced between independence and authority.
Say goodbye, my own true lover
As we sing a lovers’ song
How it breaks my heart to leave you
Now the carnival is gone
High above the dawn is waiting
And my tears are falling rain
For the carnival is over
We may never meet again
Like a drum, my heart was beating
And your kiss was sweet as wine
But the joys of love are fleeting
For Pierrot and Columbine
Now the harbour light is calling
This will be our last goodbye
Though the carnival is over
I will love you ’til I die
Like a drum, my heart was beating
And your kiss was sweet as wine
But the joys of love are fleeting
For Pierrot and Columbine
Now the harbour light is calling
This will be our last goodbye
Though the carnival is over
I will love you ’til I die
Though the carnival is over
I will love you ’til I die
Stenka Razin
From beyond the wooded island
To the river wide and free
Proudly sailed the arrow-breasted
Ships of Cossack yeomanry.
On the first is Stenka Razin
With his princess by his side
Drunken holds in marriage revels
With his beauteous young bride.
From behind there comes a murmur
“He has left his sword to woo;
One short night and Stenka Razin
Has become a woman, too.”
Stenka Razin hears the murmur
Of his discontented band
And his lovely Persian princess
He has circled with his hand.
His dark brows are drawn together
As the waves of anger rise;
And the blood comes rushing swiftly
To his piercing jet black eyes.
“I will give you all you ask for
Head and heart and life and hand.”
And his voice rolls out like thunder
Out across the distant land.
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Wide and deep beneath the sun,
You have never such a present
From the Cossacks of the Don.
So that peace may reign forever
In this band so free and brave
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Make this lovely girl a grave.
Now, with one swift mighty motion
He has raised his bride on high
And has cast her where the waters
Of the Volga roll and sigh.
Now a silence like the grave
Sinks to all who stand and see
And the battle-hardened Cossacks
Sink to weep on bended knee.
“Dance, you fools, and let’s be merry
What is this that’s in your eyes?
Let us thunder out a chantey
To the place where beauty lies.”
From beyond the wooded island
To the river wide and free
Proudly sailed the arrow-breasted
Ships of Cossack yeomanry.
… Robeson’s extraordinary career intersects with some of modernity’s worst traumas: slavery, colonialism, the Cold War, Fascism. Stalinism. These are wounds covered over and forgotten, but never fully healed. Not surprisingly, the paths Robeson walked remain full of ghosts, whose whispers we can hear if we stop to listen. They talk to the past, but they also speak to the future.
Jeff Sparrow, No Way But This. In Search of Paul Robeson (2017)
I read Jeff Sparrow’s excellent biography of the celebrated American singer and political activist Paul Robeson several years ago. I was reminded of it very recently with the publication of a book about Robeson’s visit to Australia in November 1960, a twenty-concert tour in nine cities. I have republished a review below, together with an article by Sparrow about his book, and a review of the book by commentator and literary critic Peter Craven. the featured picture is of Robeson singing for the workers constructing the Sydney Opera House.
I have always loved Paul Robeson’s songs and admired his courage and resilience in the face of prejudice and adversity. Duriung his colourful and controversial career (see the articles below), he travelled the world, including Australia and New Zealand and also, Britain. He visited England many times – it was there that my mother met him. She was working in a maternity hospital in Birmingham when he visited and sang for the doctors, nurses, helpers and patients. My mother was pregnant at the time – and, such was his charisma, that is why my name is Paul.
Paul Robeson was a 20th-century icon. He was the most famous African American of his time, and in his time, was called the most famous American in the world. His is a story of political ardour, heritage, and trauma.
The son of a former slave, he found worldwide fame as a singer and an actor, travelling from Hollywood in the USA to the West End of London, to Europe and also Communist Russia. In the sixties, he visited Australia and is long remembered for the occasion he sang the song Old Man River for the workers building the famous Sydney Opera House.
He became famous both for his cultural accomplishments and for his political activism as an educated and articulate black man in a white man’s racist world.
Educated at Rutgers College and Columbia University, he was a star athlete in his youth. His political activities began with his involvement with unemployed workers and anti-imperialist students whom he met in Britain and continued with support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and his opposition to fascism.
A respected performer, he was also a champion of social justice and equality. But he would go on to lose everything for the sake of his principles.
In the United States he became active in the civil rights movement and other social justice campaigns. His sympathies for the Soviet Union and for communism, and his criticism of the United States government and its foreign policies, caused him to be blacklisted as a communist during the McCarthy era when American politics were dominated by a wave of hatred, suspicion and racism that was very much like we see today,
Paul Robeson, the son of a slave, was a gifted linguist. He studied and spoke six languages, and sang songs from all over the world in their original language.
But his most famous song was from an American musical show from 1927 – Show Boat, by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein – called Old Man River. The song contrasted the struggles and hardships of African Americans during and after the years of slavery, with the endless, uncaring flow of the Mississippi River. It is sung the point of view of a black stevedore on a showboat, and is the most famous song from the show.
It is a paradox that a song written by Jewish Americans from the Jewish villages of Eastern Europe, the targets of prejudice and pogrom, should voice the cries of America’s down-trodden people.
When the song was first heard, America was a divided country and people of colour were segregated, abused and murdered. The plot of the musical was indeed about race, although it pulled its punches with the romantic message that love is colour-blind
It reflected America’s split personality – the land of the free, but the home of the heartless. Robeson sung the words as they were written, but later in his career, as he became more and more famous, he changed them to suit his own opinions, feelings, sentiments, and politics. So, when he sang to the workers in Sydney, Australia, his song was not one of slavery but one of resistance.
The Big Voice of the Left … Paul Robeson Resounds to this Day
Mahir Ali The Australian November 9, 2010
FIFTY years ago today, more than a decade before it was officially inaugurated, the Sydney Opera House hosted its first performance by an internationally renowned entertainer when Paul Robeson, in the midst of what turned out to be his final concert tour, sang to the construction workers during their lunch break.
Alfred Rankin, who was at the construction site on November 9, 1960, recalls this “giant of a man” enthralling the workers with his a cappella renditions of two of his signature songs, Ol’ Man River and Joe Hill.
“After he finished singing, the men climbed down from the scaffolding, gathered around him and presented him with a hard hat bearing his name,” Paul Robeson Jr writes in his biography of his father, The Undiscovered Robeson. “One of the men took off a work glove and asked Paul to sign it. The idea caught on and the men lined up. Paul stayed until he had signed a glove for each one of them.”
Workers had the best seats when Robeson sang at the Sydney Opera House, 9 November 1960
The visit, Rankin tells The Australian, was organised by the Building Workers Industrial Union of Australia and the Australian Peace Council’s Bill Morrow, a former Labor senator from Tasmania.
In a chapter on Robeson’s visit in the book Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, which will be launched in Sydney tomorrow, Ann Curthoys quotes the performer as saying on the day after his visit to the Opera House site: “I could see, you know, we had some differences here and there. But we hummed some songs together, and they all came up afterwards and just wanted to shake my hand and they had me sign gloves. These were tough guys and it was a very moving experience.”
In 1998, on the centenary of Robeson’s birth, former NSW minister John Aquilina told state parliament his father had been working as a carpenter at the Opera House site on November 9, 1960: “Dad told us that all the workers – carpenters, concreters and labourers – sang along and that the huge, burly men on the working site were reduced to tears by his presence and his inspiration.”
Curthoys, the Manning Clark professor of history at the Australian National University, who plans to write a book about the Robeson visit, also cites a contemporary report in The Daily Telegraph as saying that the American performer “talked to more than 250 workmen in their lunch hour, telling them they were working on a project they would be proud of one day”. [Curthoy’s book, The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand, was published at last in 2025]
According to biographer Martin Duberman, Robeson wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the offer of a tour of Australia and New Zealand from music entrepreneur D. D. O’Connor, but the idea of earning $US100,000 for a series of 20 concerts, plus extra fees for television appearances and the like, proved irresistible.
Robeson had once been one of the highest paid entertainers in the world, but from 1950 onwards he effectively had been deprived of the opportunity of earning a living. A combination of pressure from the US government and right-wing extremists meant American concert halls were closed to him, and the US State Department’s refusal to renew his passport meant he was unable to accept invitations for engagements in Europe and elsewhere. Robeson never stopped singing but was able to do so only at African-American churches and other relatively small venues. His annual income dwindled from more than $US100,000 to about $US6000.
At the time, Robeson was arguably one of the world’s best known African Americans. As a scholar at Rutgers University, he had endured all manner of taunts and physical intimidation to excel academically and as a formidable presence on the football field: alone among his Rutgers contemporaries, he was selected twice for the All-American side.
Alongside his athletic prowess, which was also displayed on the baseball field and the basketball court, he was beginning to find his voice as a bass baritone. When a degree in law from Columbia University failed to help him make much headway in the legal profession, he decided to opt for the world of entertainment, and made his mark on the stage and screen as a singer and actor.
An extended sojourn in London offered relief from the racism in his homeland and established his reputation as an entertainer, not least through leading roles in the musical Show Boat and in Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft’s Desdemona.
(He reprised the role in a record Broadway run for a Shakespearean role in 1943 and again at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959)
Robeson returned to the US as a star in 1939 and endeared himself to his compatriots with a cantata titled Ballad for Americans.
In the interim, he had been thoroughly politicised, not least through encounters in London with leaders of colonial liberation movements such as Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru.
He had sung for republicans in Spain and visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
Robeson’s refusal to reconsider his political affiliations once World War II gave way to the Cold War made him persona non grata in his homeland: his infatuation with the Soviet Union did not perceptibly pale in the face of horrific revelations about Stalinist excesses, partly because he looked on Jim Crow as his pre-eminent foe. It is therefore hardly surprising that exposure in Australia to Aboriginal woes stirred his passion.
On the day after his appearance at the Opera House site, at the initiative of Aboriginal activist and Robeson fan Faith Bandler he watched a documentary about Aborigines in the Warburton Ranges during which his sorrow turned to anger, and he vowed to return to Australia in the near future to fight for their rights. He made similar promises to the Māori in New Zealand.
But the years of persecution had taken their toll physically and psychologically: Robeson’s health broke down in 1961 and, on returning to the US in 1963, he lived the remainder of his life as a virtual recluse. He died in 1976, long after many of his once radical aspirations for African Americans had been co-opted into the civil rights mainstream. His political views remained unchanged.
It’s no wonder that, as writer and broadcaster Phillip Adams recalls, Robeson’s tour was like “a second coming” to “aspiring young lefties” in Australia.
Duberman cites Aboriginal activist Lloyd L. Davies’s poignant recollection of Robeson’s arrival in Perth on the last leg of his tour, when he made a beeline for “a group of local Aborigines shyly hanging back”.
“When he reached them, he literally gathered the nearest half dozen in his great arms.”
Davies heard one of the little girls say, almost in wonder, “Mum, he likes us.”
She would have been less surprised had she been aware of the Robeson statement that serves as his epitaph: “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”
Left for Good – Peter Craven on Paul Robeson
The Weekend Australian. March 11 2017
What on earth impelled Jeff Sparrow, the Melbourne-based former editor of Overland and left-wing intellectual, to write a book about Paul Robeson, the great African American singer and actor?
Well, he tells us: as a young man he was transporting the libraries of a lot of old communists to a bookshop and was intrigued by how many of the books were by or about Robeson.
All of which provokes apprehension, because politics is a funny place to start with
Robeson, even if it is where you end or nearly end. Robeson was one of the greatest singers of the 20th century. When I was a little boy in the 1950s, my father used to play that velvet bottomlessly deep voice singing not only Ol’ Man River — though that was Robeson’s signature tune and his early recording of it is one of the greatest vocal performances of all time — but all manner of traditional songs. Not just the great negro spirituals (as they were known to a bygone age; Sparrow calls them slave songs) such as Go Down, Moses, but Shenandoah, No, John, No and Passing By, as well as the racketing lazy I Still Suits Me.
My mother, who was known as Sylvie and loathed her full name, which was Sylvia, said the only time she could stand it was when Robeson sang it (“Sylvia’s hair is like the night … such a face as drifts through dreams, such is Sylvia to the sight”). He had the diction of a god and the English language in his mouth sounded like a princely birthright no one could deny.
It was that which made theatre critic Kenneth Tynan say the noise Robeson made when he opened his mouth was too close to perfect for an actor. It did not stop him from doing Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun’ Got Wings or The Emperor Jones, nor an Othello in London in 1930 with Peggy Ashcroft as his Desdemona and with Sybil Thorndike as Emilia.
Robeson later did Othello in the 1940s in America with Jose Ferrer as Iago and with Uta Hagen (who created Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) as his Desdemona. He toured the country; he toured the south, which was almost inconceivable. When he was told someone had said the play had nothing to do with racial prejudice, Robeson said, “Let him play it in Memphis.”
Southern white audiences were docile until Robeson’s Othello kissed Hagen’s Desdemona: then they rioted. Robeson also made a point, at his concerts and stage shows, of insisting the audience not be segregated. James Earl Jones. who would play Robeson on the New York stage, says in his short book about Othello, “I believe Paul Robeson’s Othello is the landmark performance of the 20th century.”
Robeson would play the Moor again in 1959 at Stratford-upon-Avon. By that time, though, he had fallen foul of 1950s America. He had been called before the McCarthyist House Un-American Activities Committee. You can hear a dramatisation of his testimony with Earl Jones as Robeson, which includes an immemorial reverberation of his famous words when senator Francis E. Walter asked him why he didn’t just quit the US and live in Russia.
“Because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”
It’s funny how it was the real communists such as Bertolt Brecht and Robeson who handled the committee best. Still, in an extraordinary act of illiberalism, they took away his US passport and it took two years for the Supreme Court to declare in 1958 in a 5-4 decision that the secretary of state was not empowered to withdraw the passport of any American citizen on the basis of political belief.
When Paul Robeson sang at the Sydney Opera House
It was this that allowed Robeson to do his Othello in Peter Hall’s great centenary Stratford celebration along with Charles Laughton’s Lear and Laurence Olivier’s Coriolanus. It also allowed him to come to Australia. Very early on Sparrow tells the story of watching the clip of Robeson singing Ol’ Man River to construction workers in Sydney with the Opera House still a dream in the process of meeting impediments. The version Robeson sings is his own bolshie rewrite (“I must keep fightin’/ Until I’m dyin’ ”).
Well, fight he did and bolshie he was. I remember when I was a child my father telling me Robeson was a brilliant man, that he had won a sporting scholarship for American football (to Rutgers, in fact), that he’d gone on to receive a law degree (from Columbia, no less) and that he was so smart he had taught himself Russian.
But the sad bit was, according to my father, that he’d become a communist. Understandably so, my father thought, because of how the Americans treated the blacks. My father’s own radical impulses as a schoolboy had been encouraged, as Robeson’s were on a grander scale, by World War II where Uncle Joe Stalin was our ally in the war against Hitler’s fascism.
But this was the Cold War now, and a lot of people thought, with good reason, that it was behind the Iron Curtain that today’s fascists were to be found. Even if others such as the great German novelist Thomas Mann and Robeson thought they were encroaching on Capitol Hill.
Sparrow’s book No Way But This is circumscribed at every point by his primary interest in Robeson as a political figure of the Left rather than as a performer and artist.
It’s an understandable trap to fall into because Robeson was an eloquent, intelligent man of the Left and his status was also for a while there — as Sparrow rightly says — as the most famous black American on Earth. So his radicalism is both pointed and poignant.
His father, who became a Methodist minister, was born a slave and was later cruelly brought down in the world. But, unlike the old Wobblies whose bookcases he transported, Sparrow is not inward with what made Robeson famous in the first place and it shows.
No Way But This is a great title (“no way but this / killing myself, to die upon a kiss” is what Othello says when he’s dying over the body of Desdemona, whom he has killed) but Sparrow’s search for Robeson is not a great book.
As the subtitle suggests, it is a quest book but Sparrow is a bit like the Maeterlinck character cited in Joyce’s Ulysses who ends up meeting himself (whether in his Socrates or his Judas aspect) on his own doorstep. Sparrow goes to somewhere in the US associated with Robeson and meets a black-deaths-in-custody activist full of radical fervour. She introduces him to an old African-American who was in Attica jail for years. There is much reflection on the thousands of black people who were slaves on the plantations and the disproportionate number of them now in US prisons.
Yes, the figures are disquieting. No, they are not aspects of the same phenomenon even though ultimately there will be historical connections of a kind.
And so it goes. But this is a quest book that turns into a kind of travelogue in which Sparrow goes around the world meeting people who might illuminate Robeson for him but don’t do much for the reader except confirm the suspicion that the author’s range of acquaintance ought to be broader or that he should listen to people for a bit more rather than seek confirmation of his own predilections.
There are also mistakes. Sparrow seems to know nothing about the people with whom Robeson did Othello. There’s no mention of Thorndike, and when Ashcroft comes up as someone he had an affair with, Sparrow refers to the greatest actress of the Olivier generation as “a beautiful glamorous star”. Never mind that she was an actress of such stature, Judi Dench said when she played Cleopatra she could only follow Ashcroft’s phrasing by way of homage.
Sparrow also says “American actor Edmund Kean started using paler make-up for the role, a shift that corresponded with the legitimisation of plantation slavery”. Kean, who was the greatest actor of the later romantic period, was English, not American. His Othello would, I think, be more or less contemporary with William Wilberforce lobbying to have slavery made illegal. Sparrow seems to be confusing Kean with Edwin Booth, the mid-century Othello who happens to have been the brother of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. But it’s still hard to see where the plantations fit in.
A few pages later — and it’s not important though it’s indicative — we hear of the rumour that Robeson was “romancing Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma”. Well, whatever she was called in the early 1930s, it wasn’t Countess Mountbatten of Burma because her husband, Louis Mountbatten, the supreme allied commander in Southeast Asia during World War II, didn’t get the title until after the Japanese surrendered to him — guess where?
Such slips are worth belabouring only because they make you doubt Sparrow’s reliability generally. It’s worth adding, however, that his chapter about the prison house that the Soviet Union turned itself into is his most impressive. And the story of the last few years of Robeson’s life, afflicted with depression, subject to a lot of shock treatment, with recurrent suicide attempts, is deeply sad.
He felt towards the end that he had failed his people. He just didn’t know what to do. It was the melancholy talking as melancholy will.
It’s better to remember the Robeson who snapped back at someone who asked if he would join the civil rights movement: “I’ve been a part of the civil rights movement all my life.”
It’s to Sparrow’s credit that he’s fallen in love with the ghost of Robeson even if it’s only the spectral outline of that power and that glory he gives us.
Peter Craven is a cultural and literary critic
The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and NZ
Australians of a certain age know all about Paul Robeson’s magnificent voice. They know, too, that on a warm November day more than 60 years ago, the bass-baritone sang to 250 construction workers on the Sydney Opera House building site as the workers sat on scaffolding and stacks of timber and ate their lunch. Fewer know of Robeson’s Pro-Communist and pro-Soviet views and of how those beliefs damaged his career at home and abroad. And that’s not so surprising – as historian Ann Curthoys points out, the Cold War suppression of Robeson’s career and memory has been very effective.
Recovering the story of a man who was once the most famous African-American in the world and his equally impressive wife, Eslanda, is the task Curthoys, who grew up in an Australian communist family in the 1950s and 60s, sets herself in a new book, The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand.
It follows the couple’s tour – a mix of his concerts and their public talks and media interviews – to Australia and New Zealand over October, November and December 1960. Curthoys goes further, using the seven-week tour by this celebrated singer to explore the social and political changes just beginning in post-War Australia. Her interest is “the slow transition from the Cold War era of the late 1940s and 50s, to the 60s era of the New Left, new social movements and the demand for Aboriginal rights”.
Curthoys is 79 now, but when Robeson toured she was 15 and living in Newcastle, a city the singer did not visit. Her mother, Barbara Curthoys, a well-known activist and feminist, was a fan of the singer but the trip passed the teenager by.
It was only decades later, as she researched her 2002 book on the 1965 Aboriginal Freedom Ride through regional NSW, that Curthoys connected with the story. As a university student she had taken part in the ride and moved from communism to the New Left. When she approached the subject as a historian, she realised that for some riders, their attendance at Robeson’s concerts five years earlier had been a defining moment in their “understanding of racial discrimination and Aboriginal rights”.
Curthoys has had a long career in research and teaching at the Australian National University and the University of Technology, Sydney. She’s part of a remarkable family, and not just parents Barbara and Geoffrey, who was a lecturer in chemistry at Newcastle University. Her sister Jean is a leading feminist philosopher and her husband, John Docker, has written several books on cultural history, popular culture and the history of ideas.
Curthoys began researching The Last Tour in 2007, but put it aside for another project on Indigenous Australians before resuming work on it during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Post-Robeson, she has worked with two scholars on a forthcoming book on the history of domestic violence in Australia.
The tour, she says, was really several tours rolled into one with the Robesons covering many bases – from music to Cold War politics to feminism to Aboriginal rights. It was a conservative era: Robert Menzies’ Liberals ruled federally and five of the six Australian states had conservative governments. Robeson’s presence went unremarked by governments but for fans of his music – and his ideals – the tour was a significant event that was well covered by the press, even those opposed to his views on the Soviet Union.
For some fans, it was a music tour – 20 concerts in nine cities in Australia and New Zealand, at which Robeson sang his show-stoppers, including Deep River, Go Down, Moses; We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, and the song with which he is always identified, Ol’ Man River. The 62-year-old with the extraordinary voice also delivered “recitations” – a monologue from Shakespeare’s Othello, an anti-segregationist poem Freedom Train, and William Blake’s anthem, Jerusalem.
What a thrill for Australian audiences, some of whom had followed the handsome, 1.9m singer and actor since the 1920s. Even in an age of limited communications, Robeson was well-known here through films; records and radio. Curthoys notes that one indicator of his fame was the way promising Aboriginal singers in the 1930s were dubbed “Australia’s Paul Robeson”.
He was famous – and controversial. Unlike many other supporters of communist ideas, Robeson refused to break from the Soviets after the invasion of Hungary in 1958 and continued to defend Moscow. The “anti-communist repression and hysteria” that gripped the US in the McCarthy era had a profound effect on his life and career, Curthoys writes. He was cited in 1947 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as “supporting the Communist Party and its front organisations”.
A 1949 US tour was destroyed “after mass cancelling of bookings by venue managers either vehemently opposed to his politics or afraid in such a hostile climate of being classed as communist sympathisers themselves”. Then in 1950, he lost his passport. Over the years, he would “become for communists an emblem of defiance in the face of adversity, and one of the communist world’s most prominent speakers for peace,” Curthoys writes.
Unable to travel until his passport was restored in 1958, Robeson was steadfast in his support for communist ideals. That commitment was evident in Australia when the “peace tour” – built around a series of public meetings – was as important to the singer as the popular concerts where he reached a different audience. Curthoys details a related strand – the “workers’ tour”, which involved seven informal concert performances to groups of railway workers, waterside workers and those at work on the Opera House on that November day.
She says the events revealed much about the “the nature of class in Australia and New Zealand” at a time when “strong and confident trade unions” were interested in “broad cultural concerns”. Over several weeks Robeson attracted people who loved his music alongside those who loved his politics. Far from being shunned for his pro-Soviet views, Curthoys suggests, there was support from two different audiences – music people and “left-wing people who were either pro-Soviet or not”.
Even so, the Cold War anxieties over the Soviets meant a positive reception was not necessarily assured when Paul and Eslanda flew into Sydney at midday on October 12, 1960. They were greeted by several hundred fans carrying peace banners but they faced pointed questions about the Soviet Union at the 20-minute press conference at the airport.
Robeson refused to condemn the suppression of the Hungarian uprising and media reports suggested a torrid exchange. Curthoys reviewed a tape of the press conference and says while the questioning was “a little aggressive”, the event was not as bad as reported in the media. Indeed it was “fairly friendly” albeit for a “bad patch” when Robeson refused to budge on Hungary.
That tape and others, along with newspapers and Trades Hall documentation, yielded rich material but so too did the ASIO files on the couple. At the Palace Hotel in Perth on December 2 an ASIO operative appeared to be among those at a reception organised by the communist-influenced Peace Council. Among guests were the writer (and well-known communist) Katharine Susannah Prichard and “two women by the name of Durack, who were writers and/or artists”.
Curthoys sees Robeson as a “very courageous, very intelligent, intellectual person, very thoughtful about music, about folk music, about people”, but says his commitment to the Soviet Union was a costly mistake. He had embraced Moscow when he and Eslanda visited in 1934 at the invitation of Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein. Later, Robeson, a fluent Russian speaker, would say it was in the Soviet Union that he felt for the first time he was treated “not through the prism of race but simply as a human being”. Curthoys writes: “The excitement and validation he received during this visit would create a loyalty that later events would not dislodge and the public expression of which would damage him politically, commercially and professionally.”
The couple made several trips to the Soviet Union and accepted its political system completely. Curthoys notes: “They made no public comments about Stalin’s forced collectivisation policies that were in place during the 1930s and led to famine and the loss of millions of lives.” In Sydney Robeson was careful, but on November 5 he celebrated the forthcoming anniversary of the Russian Revolution at the Waterside Workers Federation in Sussex Street. Two days later, during his first public concert in the city, he paid tribute to the Soviet Union as “a new society”.
The Soviet Union had been a great influence but so too was the Spanish Civil War, which Curthoys says helped define his view of the political responsibilities of the artist.
“Increasingly famous as a public speaker, on 24 June, 1937, he made a huge impression at a mass rally at the Albert Hall in London sponsored by prominent figures such as WH Auden, EM Forster, Sean O’Casey, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf, held to raise financial aid for Basque child refugees from the war. In what became his most well-known and influential speech, he stressed how important it was for artists and scientists and others to take a political stand: ‘Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide NOW where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights.’”
After World War II, Robeson was deeply involved in radical and anti-racism politics in the US but in 1947, as the Cold War worsened, he had had enough. He announced he intended to abandon the theatre and concert stage for two years to speak out against race hatred and prejudice. In fact he stopped stage acting for 12 years but continued to perform as a singer, often in support of political causes.
It was another 13 years before Australian audiences heard that glorious voice “live”. Australians, it seemed were primed for Paul. The tour may have been ignored by governments but during her research, Curthoys was “overwhelmed” by people “ready to assist, donating old programs, photographs, pamphlets, records, cassette tapes, invitations and other documents”.
Today, much of the Robeson image is defined by his Opera House performance on November 9 – high culture delivered, without condescension, to a building crew by a champion of the workers. Robeson, in a heavy coat, despite the warm weather, sang “from a rough concrete stage”. A PR expert could not have dreamt up a a better way to “democratise” an opera house than having the “first concert” delivered in its half- built shell. Curthoys shows how the event, no matter how memorialised now, was a small part of a tour that proved a financial and political success for the Robesons, who left Australia on December 4.
A few months later, depressed and exhausted, Robeson tried to commit suicide in Moscow. Over the next three years he was treated but could no longer perform or engage in public speaking. Curthoys notes that though his affairs with other women had strained their marriage, he and Eslanda had a common political vision and were together until her death in 1965. Robeson died on January 23, 1976 at the age of 77.
Helen Trinca’s latest book is Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of
Elizabeth Harrower (Black Inc.)
The featured image of this post is a profile in crystal of Kemal Atatürk that sits on my bookshelf as a reminder of my late friend and academic colleague Mehmet Naim Turfan. Naim, like millions of his compatriots, harboured a deep affection and respect for the legacy of Atatürk, the founder of modern Türkiye and its first president. It was gifted to me by His wife soon after his passing by his wife Barbara. His doctoral thesis was published posthumously in 2000 as Rise of the Young Turks: Politics, the Miliary and Ottoman Collapse. He is cited several times in the book that is the subject of this article. I thought of Naim often while reading the book and writing what follows.
Enver Pasha, soldier, politician and member of the troika that ruled the Ottoman Empire before and during WW1
Ottoman Endgame
Many believe that prior to the outbreak of World War 1 in August 1914, Europe had been at peace. In matter of fact, brutal and bloody little wars had raged in Eastern Europe three years prior, whilst Italy fought the Ottoman Empire for Tripoli and Cyrenaica, both now modern Libya and yet also presently two warring parts of a fractured whole and now being triggered by the aftermath of equally nasty little wars in the same lands in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. The Ottoman Empire’s entry into alliance with the Central Powers in 1915 against the Entente of Britain, France and Russia was the direct outcome of what we know refer to generically as The Balkan Wars – which aided and abetted by Russia, saw the emergence of Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. In retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, they were the beginning of what we might now refer to as The Wars of the Ottoman Succession. They are not over.
The empire’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers against the Entente of Britain France and Russia was a devious, drawn-out business as it sought to take advantage of its potential allies in recovering why it lost in the preceding Balkan Wars that had deprived it of its European provinces,
Few have told the story of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of modern Türkiye as well as English historian Sean McMeekin in his geographically sprawling and historically enthralling book The Ottoman Endgame. He juxtaposes military operations in the empire with those on Europe’s eastern and western fronts, demonstrating how, in the shifting fortunes of war in Europe, each impacted the other from the first offensives in France and on the eastern front to the Russian Revolutions of 1917.
Author and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue sets the scene well in a brief but compelling review (published in full below with some excellent pictures, along with a article by the author himself):
”For the historian of the first world war, the Ottoman theatre is a blur of movement compared to the attrition of the western front. Its leading commanders might race off to contest Baku and entirely miss the significance of events in the Balkans, while the diffuse nature of operations tended to encourage initiative, not groupthink. The war of the Ottoman succession, as Sean McMeekin calls it, was furthermore of real consequence, breaking up an empire that had stifled community hatreds, and whose absence the millions who have fled sectarian conflict in our age may rue …
For the Ottomans, the “great war” of western historiography was part of a much longer period of conflict and revolution, and arguably not even its climax. The process started with the collapse of the Ottomans’ Balkan empire – encouraged by Russia, moderated by Britain – and it brought to power the militaristic regime of the Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP. When Turkey entered the European war on 10 November 1914, Ottoman innocence was long gone, the army fully mobilised, the people benumbed by loss and refugees and the empire hanging in the balance. And yet, for the CUP and its triumvirate of leading pashas, the Young Turk troika of Enver, Talat and Djemal, the moment was as fraught with opportunity as it was with danger. On the opportunity side of the ledger was the prospect of riding Germany’s coat tails to victory, overturning the Balkan reverses and winning back provinces in the east from the old enemy, Russia. Enver, the CUP’s diminutive generalissimo, even spoke of appealing to Muslim sentiment and marching all the way to India.
For the Russians, the game was about winning Constantinople (or Tsargrad, as they presumptuously called it) and with it unimpeded access to the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus; it was with “complete serenity”, Tsar Nicholas II informed his subjects, that Russia took on “this ancient oppressor of the Christian faith and of all Slavic nations”
The European war on the eastern and western fronts was characterized by attrition and stalemate, but that waged by the Ottomans and the Russians, and soon, the British and French, was in contrast, highly mobile and constantly shifting, with the exception perhaps of the allied assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula which very soon resembled the trench warfare and brutal but futile offensives that characterized the Western Front. It is difficult to comprehend to scale of the war fought in the Middle East in terms of its territorial extent. From Baghdad to Baku, Gallipoli to Gaza, the Black Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Caspian Sea. It was waged across European and Asian Ottoman lands including present day Greece, Bulgaria and Romania in the west, in the Caucasus in the east, in present day Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan and Iran, and in the south in present day Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Palestine.
Though the Sultan departed, and with him, the Islamic Caliphate, and most of the empire’s non-Turkish lands – were lost, under the leadership of former Ottoman commander and war hero Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the Anatolian heartland resisted and ultimately repelled invading foreign armies, and the Turkish state he created endures today as an influential participant in world affairs.
Casting new light on old narratives
McMeekin, writes de Bellaigue, is an old-fashioned researcher who draws his conclusions on the basis of the documentary record. In the case of a conflict between Ottoman Turkey and Germany on one side, and Russia, Britain and France on the other, and involving Arabs, Armenians and Greeks, this necessitates linguistic talent and historical nous of a high order. McMeekin is at home in the archives of all major parties to the conflict and his accounts of some of the more contested episodes carry a ring of finality. Access to previously closed Russian and Turkish archives has provided new and potentially controversial insights into accepted narratives regarding the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Challenging long accepted narratives, he addresses three of the most enduring shibboleths of the First World War.
He jumps right in even before he begins his wide-ranging story, leaves hanging in the air like a predator drone until he returns to it in chronologically due course. The Sykes Picot Agreement of 1916 – the bête noir of most progressive narratives of the modern Middle East, and to many ill-informed partisans, the causus bello of the intractable Arab Israeli conflict – was not the brainchild of perfidious Albion and duplicitous France, but rather a plan for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire concocted by the foreign minister of Imperial Russia. France’s Monsieur François-George Picot and Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes played second and third violin to the “third man” Sergei Sazonov. Both Russia and France had for decades sought to establish their political, strategic and economic interests at the expense of the so-called “sick man of Europe”, an ostensibly terminal invalid who throughout the nineteenth century, had experienced many deathbed recoveries. Czar Nicholas II, in common with his Russian Orthodox predecessors, dreamt of bringing Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, the heart of the orthodox patriarchate, or Tsargrad into the empire. It was no coincidence that the infamous Sykes Picot pact was outed by Russia’s Bolshevik regime after the collapse of the Czarist regime to discombobulate the revolution’s foremost European enemies.
The second icon of “received history” in McMeekin’s sights, is one Australia’s foundation stories – the ill-starred Dardanelles Campaign of 1915 and particularly, the the ANZAC’s Gallipoli legend. It was, from McMeekin’s perspective, a misconceived, poorly planned endeavour to capture the Ottoman capital, to relieve pressure on Russian forces engaged in bitter fighting in Eastern Anatolia, and potentially, to knock the Ottomans out of the war. Contrary to popular conceptions, the British were not exactly enthused by the idea. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill’s preference was for an assault on the “soft underbelly” of the empire – the port of Alexandretta in Ottoman Syria (now Turkish Antakya), with its strategic and logistic proximity to the Hijaz railway and the hinterland of the Levant. One indisputable fact about Gallipoli is that it assured the ascent Mustafa Kemal, a key commander who had already distinguished himself in the Balkan Wars, who would go on to conduct a fighting retreat of Ottoman Armies through what is now present-day Palestine and Syria, lead Turkish forces to victory in the war of liberation that followed, and, as Kemal Atatürk, would become the founder of modern Türkiye.
The third widely held narrative concerns the Armenian Genocide. Unlike the rulers of modern Türkiye, McMeekin does not deny its occurrence. Nor does he downplay or even ignore it, as does Israel for the idiosyncratic reason that it potentially minimises the horrors of the Shoah. Rather, he places it in the context of events in the empire’s Anatolian heartland. Two predominantly Armenian provinces in Eastern Anatolia were home to active nationalist independence movements, and these gave tacit and actual support to the Russian forces encroaching on the empire from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea (in present day Azerbaijan and Georgia). Armenian militias fought alongside Russian forces on the Caucasian front whilst partisans operated behind ottoman lines, and cities, town and villages were actually “liberated”, fostering fears in the Istanbul government of an treasonous” fifth column”. McMeekin acknowledges the death toll of what we now recognise the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity which was spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and implemented primarily through the mass deportation and murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children. Whilst most probably died of inhumane treatment, exposure, privation and starvation, unknown numbers were murdered.
Kemal Pasha and Ottoman offices at Gallipoli
Parallels
Reading The Ottoman Endgame, I was reminded often of his compatriot Anthony Beevor’s harrowing tale of the Russian Revolution (reviewed in In That Howling Infinite’s Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war. That Revolution and the end of the Ottoman Empire converged. McMeekin notes that with regard to the war in Anatolia and the Caucasus, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the war between Czarist Russia and the Central Powers, was poisoned chalice for both Russia and Turkey and as significant as any of the treaties that followed the end of the war.
I found it fascinating that many individuals who were to play a significant part in the Russian Civil war also feature in Ottoman Endgame. Admiral Alexander Kolchak, commander of the imperial Black Sea fleet and General Anton Deniken, commander of Russian forces on the Caucasian front, became leaders of the Tsarist cause and were to command the counter-revolutionary White forces against the Red Army with the Siberian People’s Army and the Volunteer Army in Ukraine.
None were more prominent or as controversial in western narratives, however, as Winston Churchill. As noted above, McMeekin lays to rest the notion that the Dardanelles campaign and Gallipoli were Churchill’s sole doing and his folly – though he did blame himself later on and has been pilloried for it ever since. Ironically, once disgraced, and having volunteered to serve on the Western Front, at the end of the war, he was brought back into Lloyd George’s cabinet as Secretary of State for War. There, he advised against military intervention against Kemal’s nationalist forces and indeed mused about the option of dumping the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot dispensation imposed on the moribund empire’s Arab provinces after the armistice and of restoring the prewar territorial status quo, a kind of circumscribed Ottoman Redux. And yet, as civil war broke out and spread in the nascent Soviet Union, he was alone of his cabinet colleagues in advocating for a full-on allied intervention. Critics claimed that he dreamt, – though some believed that he fantasized – about 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. It is not without reason that admirers and critics alike would agree that Winston had more positions than the Karma Sutra.
The Russian Revolutions – there were two, in February and October 1917 – and the Civil War that followed it, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire followed by foreign intervention, the war of liberation, and the creation and endurance of Türkiye can be said to have defined the contours of modern Middle Eastern geopolitics, setting the stage for many if not most of the conflicts that have inflicted the region since, including three Gulf wars, the rise and fall of the Islamic State, the Lebanese, Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, and the Arab-Israel conflict, arguably the most intractable conflict of modern times. Cold War and also, the current Ukraine war.
In the wake of the fall of the Russian Empire, the Twentieth Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”. Nor was it kind to the heirs and successors of the Ottoman Empire. Though the tyranny and oppression and the death and destruction wrought by rulers and outsiders upon the lands and peoples of the Middle East has been significantly less than that endured by the people of Eastern Europe and Russia, the region would fit Snyder’s sombre soubriquet.
TE Lawrence, General Allenby, Kemal Ataturk, and Ben Gurion
Clone of Russia returns to a Middle East it never really left
Sykes and Picot have taken the blame but actually it was a Russian who drew the map of the Middle East, writes Sean McMeekin
The World Today, 7 December 2018
To judge from press coverage, the emergence of Islamic State has brought about a cartographic revolution in the Middle East. With the borders of Syria and Iraq in flux, journalists have resurrected the legend of Sykes-Picot, wherein Britain and France are said to have divided up the Ottoman empire between them in an agreement signed 100 years ago, in May 1916. Russia’s intervention in Syria, by upstaging the United States and her allies, seems in this view to be completing the rout of western influence in the Middle East, putting the final nail in the coffin of ‘Sykes-Picot’.
Rarely has history been more thoroughly abused. In reality, none of the contentious post-Ottoman borders of the Middle East was settled by Sykes and Picot in 1916: not the Iraq-Kuwait frontier notoriously crossed by Saddam’s armies in 1990, not those separating the Palestinian mandate from (Trans) Jordan and Syria, not the highly contested and still-in-flux Israeli/Palestinian partition of 1948, nor, in the most relevant example from today, those separating Syria from Iraq.
To take an obvious example from recent headlines, Mosul, the Iraqi city whose capture in June 2014 led Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of Islamic State to proclaim himself Caliph Ibrahim, was actually assigned to French Syria in the 1916 agreement.
Journalists are even more spectacularly wrong in describing the Ottoman partition agreement as exclusively (or even primarily) a British-French affair, omitting the driving role played by Tsarist Russia and her Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov.
The final terms of what should more accurately be called the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot agreement were actually hashed out in the Russian capital of Petrograd in the spring of 1916, against the backdrop of crushing Russian victories over the Turks at Erzurum, Erzincan, Batum, and Trabzon (the British were reeling, having been humiliated at Gallipoli and in Iraq, where an expeditionary force would shortly surrender).
The conquest of northeastern Turkey in 1916 left Russia, unlike her grasping allies, in possession of most of the Ottoman territory she was claiming – barring only Constantinople (called ‘Tsargrad’ by the Russians), which still needed to be taken.
At the dawn of 1917, Tsarist Russia was poised to inherit the crown jewels of the Ottoman empire, including Constantinople, the Straits, Armenia, and Kurdistan, all promised to her in the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot Agreement. Along the Black Sea coast, Russian engineers were building a rail line from Batum to Trabzon, with the latter city a supply base for the Caucasian Army, poised for a spring assault on Sivas and Ankara. With Russia enjoying virtually uncontested naval control of the Black Sea, preparations were underway for an amphibious strike at the Bosphorus, spearheaded by a specially created ‘Tsargradskii Regiment’.
After watching her allies try, and fail, to seize the Ottoman capital during the Dardanelles/Gallipoli campaign of 1915 (when Sazonov had first put forward Russia’s sovereign claim on Constantinople and the Straits), Russia was now poised to seize the prize for herself – weather permitting, in June or July 1917.
Of course, it did not turn out that way. After the February Revolution of 1917, mutinies spread through the Russian army and navy, including the Black Sea fleet, just as it was poised to strike.
In a remarkable and little-known coincidence, on the very day the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government, Pavel Milyukov, first aroused the anger of the Petrograd Soviet and the Bolsheviks by refusing to renounce Russia’s territorial claims on the Ottoman empire – April 4, 1917 – a Russian naval squadron approached the Bosphorus in ‘grand style’, including destroyers, battle cruisers, and three converted ocean liner-carriers which launched seaplanes to inspect Constantinople’s defences from the air. The amphibious plans were not abandoned until fleet commander Admiral AV Kolchak threw his sword overboard on June 21 during a mutiny. Even after ‘revolutionary sailors’ had taken control of the Black Sea fleet, a Russian amphibious strike force landed on the Turkish coastline as late as August 23, 1917, in one last sting by the old Tsargrad beast.
After the Bolsheviks took power, Russia collapsed into civil war, which left her prostrate, at Germany’s mercy. By signing a ‘separate peace’ with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, Russia forfeited her treaty claims to Armenia, Kurdistan, Constantinople, and the Straits, throwing the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 into chaos, even as new claimants were appearing on the scene, such as Italy and Greece – not to mention local actors: Jewish, Arab, and Armenian troops were attached as national ‘Legions’ to General Allenby’s mostly British army as it rolled up Palestine and Syria. These forces, along with French, Italian, and Greek expeditionary forces sent after the war, and the Turkish nationalists who regrouped under Mustafa Kemal in Ankara to oppose them, would determine the final post-Ottoman borders in a series of small wars between 1918 and 1922, with scarcely a nod to the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot Agreement.
While Russia’s forfeiture of her claims in 1918 was welcome, in a selfish sense, to the other players vying for Ottoman territory, it was not necessarily a positive one for the region. In the absence of Russian occupying troops to police the settlement, the
Allies, in 1919, offered Russia’s territorial share, now defined (in deference to Woodrow Wilson) as mandates, to the United States – only for the Senate to vote down the Versailles Treaty, rendering the arrangement moot. Lacking Russian or American troops as ‘muscle’, the Allies leaned on weaker proxies such as the Italians and, more explosively, local Greeks and Armenians, which aroused the anger of the Muslim masses and spurred the Turkish resistance led by Kemal (the future Atatürk). Armenians, Greeks and Kurds, too, could only lament the vacuum left behind by the departing Russians, which left them to face Turkish wrath alone.
Soviet Russia re-emerged as a player in the Middle East fairly quickly, not least as Mustafa Kemal’s key diplomatic partner during his wars against the West and its proxies from 1920-22. In a reminder of the enduring prerogatives of Russian foreign policy, the Cold War kicked into high gear when Stalin made a play for Kars, Ardahan, and the Ottoman Straits in 1946: these moves, along with the British withdrawal from Greece, Turkey, and Palestine, inspired the Truman doctrine.
In an eerily similar replay of the history of 1917-18, the collapse of Soviet power in 1991 led Moscow to turn inward, withdrawing from the Middle East and inaugurating a period of US and western hegemony in the region, which turned out no less well than the Middle Eastern free-for-all of 1918-22. A prostrate and impoverished Russia put up no objection during the First Gulf War of 1991, and did little more than sputter during the Iraq War of 2003. Russia’s recovery of strength and morale in the Putin years led, almost inevitably, to her return in force to the Middle East – from which, in reality, she never truly left.
The Russian return to the region, along with Turkey’s increasingly overt hostility over her Syrian intervention, resurrects historical patterns far, far older than Sykes-Picot. For centuries, the Ottoman empire was the primary arena of imperial ambition for the Tsars, even as Russians were the most feared enemies of the Turks. In many ways, the Crimean War of 1853-56, which saw western powers (Britain, France, and an opportunistic Piedmont-Sardinia) unleash an Ottoman holy war against the Tsar to frustrate Russian ambitions in the Middle East, is a far more relevant analogy to the present crisis in Syria than the pseudo-historical myths of 1916. It is time we put the Sykes-Picot legend in the dustbin where it belongs.
Diplomatic carve-up: the third man
In David Lean’s 1962 film, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, a cynical British official explains how the carcass of the Ottoman Empire was to be divided at the end of the First World War under the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
‘Mr Sykes is an English civil servant. Monsieur Picot is a French civil servant. Mr Sykes and Monsieur Picot met and they agreed that after the war, France and England would share the Turkish Empire, including Arabia. They signed an agreement, not a treaty, sir. An agreement to that effect.’
This summary of wartime diplomacy has proved long-lived. It encapsulates the less than honest dealings of the British government with the Arabs – who wanted independence after being liberated from Turkish domination, rather than rule by the European colonial powers – but it leaves out the key figure in the deliberations, Sergei Sazonov, Russian foreign minister, 1910-1916.
Sazonov was one of the most significant diplomats both before and during the Great War. It was thanks to his adroit manipulation that Britain and its allies came to accept that Russia would gain the Ottoman capital Constantinople, in the event of an Allied victory, an outcome that Britain had tried for decades to prevent.
At the talks in the Russian capital Petrograd in 1916, the British and French emissaries were far lesser agents of empire than their host.
Sir Mark Sykes was a gifted linguist, travel writer and Conservative politician, but no top-flight diplomat. As for François Georges-Picot, he was an experienced diplomat and lawyer and noted advocate for a greater Syria under French rule.
But with France having no troops in the eastern theatre of war, he had to accept Russia’s demand to swallow up large parts of what is now eastern Turkey, but which Paris had set out to claim.
Sykes died of influenza in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, where Sazanov represented the White Russians. He died in Nice in 1927
Legal Legacy, WordPress August 6, 2016 by rhapsodyinbooks
Czar Nicolas I of Russia is sometimes credited with coining the phrase “Sick Man of Europe” to describe the decrepit Ottoman Empire of the mid-nineteenth century. By the early 20th century, there could be little doubt that the disparaging sobriquet applied in spades. The Ottoman Empire was soundly defeated in two Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913 by the comparatively pipsqueak countries of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia. One result of the wars was that the Empire lost all of its European territories to the west of the River Maritsa, which now forms the western boundary of modern Turkey. Then, when World War I broke out, the Ottomans made the disastrous decision to side with the Central Powers against the Triple Entente, ending up on the losing side of that cataclysm.
A popular theory is that the carving up of the Ottoman lands after the war, pursuant to the Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain, is the source of many of the problems of the current Middle East. In The Ottoman Endgame, Sean McMeekin concedes that it is not wrong to look to the aftermath of the war for the roots of many of today’s Middle Eastern problems, but the “real historical record is richer and far more dramatic than the myth.” For example, the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement was sponsored primarily by Russia, whose foreign secretary, Alexander Samsonov, was the principal architect of the agreement. McMeekin’s retelling of the demise of the Ottoman Empire and its recrudescence as modern Turkey is a fascinating and complicated narrative.
Among the interesting facts McMeekin points out is that according to an 1893 census only 72% of the Ottoman citizens were Muslim, and that in the middle of the 19th century the majority of the population of Constantinople may have been Christian. The Balkan Wars started a trend, exacerbated by World War I, toward ethnic cleansing, with hundreds of thousands of Christians leaving the Empire and similar numbers of Muslims moving from territory lost by the Empire to areas it still controlled.
We in the West tend to think of World War I as a static slugfest conducted in the trenches of northern France. But the war in the East, particularly as it applied to the Ottoman Empire, was a much more mobile affair. In fact, the Ottomans ended up fighting the war on six different fronts, as the Entente Powers invaded them from many different angles.
Winston Churchill in 1914
At the outbreak of WWI, the Ottomans allied themselves with Germany out of fear of Russia, which had coveted control over the straits connecting the Black and Mediterranean seas for centuries. In 1914 the Russians invaded Eastern Anatolia and met with initial success. However, Russia feared its early success was quite precarious, and so it inveigled its ally, Britain, to launch a diversionary assault on the Gallipoli peninsula. The “diversion” became one of the most deadly killing grounds of the war, as the British poured hundreds of thousands of men into the battle in hopes of breaking the stalemate on the Western Front. The author credits Russian prodding more than Winston Churchill’s stubbornness for the extent of the British commitment. The Ottomans, led by Mustapha Kemal (later to be known as Ataturk, the “father of modern Turkey”), prevailed in this hecatomb, showing that there was still plenty of fight left in the “Sick Man.”
Turkish General Mustafa Kemal, Gallipoli, 1915
The Ottomans also soundly defeated the British in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in late 1915, but they were less successful against the Russians, who invaded across the Caucasus and held much of eastern Anatolia until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 caused them to withdraw voluntarily. The British ultimately prevailed against the Ottomans in 1918 by invading from Egypt through Palestine, with a little help from the Arabs of Arabia.
The Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war in Europe in 1919, did not end the war for the Ottomans. The victorious Allies were ready to carve up much of the Empire for themselves. The Ottoman armies were to disband; England was to keep Egypt and to get Palestine and Mesopotamia; France was to get Syria, Lebanon, and parts of modern Turkey; and Greece was to get a large swath of western Turkey. All might have gone according to that plan, but Mustapha Kemal (Attaturk) was still in charge of a small but effective fighting force in central Anatolia. Attaturk husbanded his forces and fought only when he had an advantage. In a war that lasted until 1923, he was able to expel the Greeks from Anatolia and to establish the boundaries of modern Turkey.
McMeekin deftly handles this complexity with a lucid pen. His descriptions of the various military campaigns are riveting. This is not to say that he shortchanges the political machinations taking place. He gives more than adequate coverage to the “Young Turks,” a triumvirate that ruled the Empire from 1909 until they eventually brought it to its ruin in 1919. He also covers the Armenian massacres as objectively as possible, given the enormity of the events described.
Evaluation: This is a very satisfying book and an excellent addition to the enormous corpus of World War I literature. The book includes good maps and photos.
Published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2015
In That Howling Infinite’ has written often about Russian and Ukrainian history, not only because personally it has been of long-term academic interest, but also, because of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
“Like many countries on the borders of powerful neighbours, Ukraine has long endured the slings and arrows of outrageous history. Its story, like that its neighbours, is long and complex. In competing national narratives, Russians and Ukrainians both claim credit for the creation of the Russian state, though others attribute this, with some credence, to the Vikings. The historical reality of Ukraine is complicated, a thousand-year history of changing religions, borders and peoples. The capital, Kyiv, was established hundreds of years before Moscow, although both Russians and Ukrainians claim Kyiv as a birthplace of their modern cultures, religion and language.
I highly recommend Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe, a well told and fascinating story of the origins of Ukraine and Belarus, and how their histories were intertwined, and entwined with those of of Poland, Lithuania (which was a large and powerful state once) and Russia. Ukraine has historically been the border between the catholic west and the orthodox east, the division running virtually down the middle. The name Ukraine is Slav for border land. Its geopolitical location and natural resources have led to the land being inflicted by invaders, civil wars, man-made famine and repression.
Eastern European countries, Ukraine included, have with good reason no love for Russia, be it Czarist, Soviet or Putin’s. Hungarians, Czechs, Poles and East Germans have seen Russian “peacekeeping” troops and tanks on their city streets, as have the Baltic countries, Afghans and Chechens. Millions of Ukrainians died under Stalin’s rule (and many, many millions of fellow-Soviet citizens). The 20th Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”.
We republish below a recent article in The Australian by Melbourne historian and academic Mark Edele. It gives the uninformed but interested reader a short but comprehensive history of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine from the ninth century to the present day.
Here are posts in In That Howling Infinite, about Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe:
Donald Trump’s bullying ‘peace plans’ to end the Ukraine war will only embolden Vladimir Putin, who fancies himself a leading a great power with historical rights beyond his borders.
Mark Edele, The Australian, 8 March 2025
Last weekend, the United States vacated the post of leader of the free world. Supporters of democracy the world over watching in disbelief as the US President and Vice-President berated, belittled, and bullied the leader of a democracy at war. On Monday, then, followed what this “great television”, as Donald Trump called it, was all about: a pretext to halt military aid to Ukraine, followed soon by the end of intelligence-sharing. The end goal: force Ukraine to the negotiation table with no security guarantees included in a “deal” with Vladimir Putin.
Four things will come out of an emboldened Russia now: more air raids on Ukraine’s civilians; a renewed push at the frontline; praise for the US administration and its visionary leader; and a disinformation campaign to convince the democratic world that black is white, up is down, left is right, Ukraine the aggressor and Russia the victim in this war. Astonishingly, we can also expect the White House to parrot such propaganda. Welcome to the era of strategic chaos.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov noted the obvious: The US’s shift from supporting its allies to courting Moscow “largely coincides with our vision”. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova ladled on now familiar Russian propaganda. Volodymyr Zelensky, she claimed, was the head of a “neo-Nazi regime”, a “corrupt individual who lost his grip on reality”, whose “outrageously rude behaviour during his stay in Washington … reaffirmed his status of the most dangerous threat to the international community”. Zelensky was an “irresponsible figure”, a “terrorist leader” who had “built a totalitarian state” and is “ruthlessly sending millions of his fellow citizens to their deaths”.
Sigmund Freud would have classified these statements as “projection”: they are true, but apply to Zakharova’s boss, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Born in 1952, Putin grew up in St Petersburg, then called Leningrad. Surrounded with stories of World War II, in which his father served and his brother perished, he came of age on the rough streets of Leningrad during the heydays of Soviet superpower. In 1975 he joined the KGB, an organisation that deeply formed his world view and behaviour. His sport is judo, a deeply tactical martial art focused on exploiting the opponent’s weaknesses and redirecting the adversary’s momentum.
After the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1991, he served in the city administration of St Petersburg. Later he moved to Moscow to make a career in the administration of the first president of post-Soviet Russia. When Boris Yeltsin looked for a successor who would guarantee his own and his family’s safety, Putin’s name came up. He was seen as competent but unthreatening to the oligarchs running Russia at the time. In 1999, Putin became premier. Later the same year, he was appointed acting president. His tenure was defined by the brutal second Chechen War, which he prosecuted with utter ruthlessness. In 2000, he was elected President. He remained in this post until today, with a stint stepping back to the prime ministership in 2008-12, to get around term limitations in the constitution (subsequently changed).
In the quarter-century he ruled Russia, Putin broke the power of the oligarchs, rebuilt the state as a security organisation run by former KGB officers, suffocated free speech, pluralism and the opposition, and built one of the most unpleasant electoral dictatorships of the post-Soviet space. Despite an economy still only a quarter of that of the EU or the US (to say nothing of China’s), Putin fancies himself as leading a great power with a right to a sphere of influence and a major say in shaping the international order.
By the end of the second decade of his rule, however, the ageing dictator in the Kremlin began to worry about his legacy. His track record was mixed. The Russian population had been declining steadily until the 2010s. The following uptick was mostly undone again during and after the Covid pandemic, fuelling longstanding apocalyptic fears that the Russians would be dying out. The economy had grown significantly, but social inequality had exploded alongside, while political liberties continually atrophied. The Covid crisis was handled extremely poorly. Great-power status remained an aspiration. Putin worried what the history books would say about him. The answers respectable historians gave him when asked were evasive. And he was turning 70 in 2022.
History, and his place in it, obsessed Vladimir Vladimirovich. During his, quite extreme, Covid isolation, he read history books, immersing himself in the Russian imperialist tradition. Such historians had long denied that Ukraine was anything but a part of Russia. He summarised this traditional Russian view “on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” in an essay of that title, published on July 12, 2021. It read like the musings of an ageing Russian imperialist. A bit over seven months later, it revealed itself as the ideological justification of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine and Russia: histories entangled but separate
At the heart of Putin’s worldview is that Russia continues to be a great power with historical rights on Ukraine. It thus bears repeating that Russia and Ukraine are separate nations, which trace their heritage back to a common origin: a collection of principalities centred on Kyiv, known as the Rus of the ninth to 13th centuries. After the Mongol invasions of the 1220s and 1230s, however, the southwestern and the northeastern parts of this civilisation developed in different and quite separate ways, eventually leading to Russia and Ukraine as we know them today. As a result of such divergence, Russian and Ukrainian have developed as separate, if related, languages.
Putin attends the Victory Day military parade in Moscow on May 9, 2024. AFP
Overlapping histories and linguistic similarities are not unique among nations. Both Germany and France claim the Frankish empire under Charlemagne (French) or Karl (German) as part of their deeper history. Yet nobody would suggest (any more) that therefore France should be part of Germany or vice-versa. Likewise, French and Portuguese have related grammatical structures and some overlap in vocabulary. And yet nobody would argue that Portuguese is a French dialect.
Ukrainians formed a state twice: once in 1649, the Cossack-led “Hetmanate” fighting for its independence from Poland; the second time in 1917-21, after both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires had collapsed in World War I. Both were defeated militarily, but both were important inspirations for a democratically minded national movement.
Ukraine’s lands and peoples came into the Russian orbit in stages. First was the disastrous Treaty of Periaslav of 1654, when the Hetmanate joined a temporary military alliance with Muscovy against Poland, which the Muscovites read as a subjugation under the autocrat instead. After much fighting and diplomatic manoeuvring, Poland and Russia agreed in 1667 that Moscow could control the lands east of the Dnipro (“left bank Ukraine”) as well as Kyiv on the “right bank”. When Poland was partitioned at the end of the 18th century, what was left of Ukraine came partially under Habsburg and partially under Romanov rule. At the end of World War I, Ukraine emerged as one of the successor states of the Romanov empire, alongside Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Poland and Bolshevik Russia. In contrast to these states, however, it did not survive the wars and civil wars that followed the disintegration of the empire in 1917.
In 1921, it was divided between the newly resurrected state of Poland and the emergent successor of the vast majority of the lands of the Romanov empire: Bolshevik Russia. Within the latter, Ukraine was granted a pseudo independence as one of the Union republics making up the newly formed “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, or USSR.
The Ukrainian SSR was a Bolshevik ploy to disarm national sentiment while reasserting imperial, and increasingly totalitarian, control by Moscow. In the long run, however, it allowed not just the maintenance but even the growth of national culture and national self-awareness. Ukraine also grew geographically. During World War II, the Soviets gobbled up the rest of Ukraine from Poland and Romania. In 1954, the government transferred Crimea to Ukraine, to ease the economic development of a region with no geographic connection to Russia. Thus Ukraine acquired its current, internationally recognised borders. Eventually, they provided a ready-made demarcation of post-imperial Ukraine, once the Soviet empire collapsed in 1989-91.
After the Soviet Union
Of the 15 successor states of the Soviet Union, Russia is the largest in terms of territory (17.1 million square kilometres). Ukraine, with 0.6 million square kilometres, comes third after Kazakhstan (2.7 million square kilometres). In a comparison of population sizes, Ukraine occupies the second position, with 37.7 million in 2023, according to the World Bank, quite a way behind Russia with 143.8 million. By comparison, the most populous country of the EU, Germany, has 83.3 million, while the EU as a whole counts 448.8 million.
As the largest country in the post-Soviet region, in 2023 Russia had the largest GDP adjusted for purchasing power ($US6.5 trillion), followed by Kazakhstan ($US0.8 trillion) and Ukraine ($US0.6 trillion). Again, compare this to Germany ($US5.7 trillion) or Australia ($US1.9 trillion), to say nothing of the EU ($US26.4 trillion), the US ($US27.7 trillion) or China ($US34.7 trillion).
As far as the political system is concerned, between the breakdown of the Soviet empire and today Russia has been on a steady downwards slope, from some early democratic promises to ever darker authoritarianism. Ukraine, meanwhile, evolved in three waves of democratic surges followed by counter movements: the 1990s, the second half of the 2000s, and from the middle of the 2010s. While not the freest country in the post-Soviet space (that privilege belongs to the three Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all members of EU and NATO), it is in no way comparable to Russia. Zelensky was elected President in 2019 with 73 per cent of the vote. As of late February 2025, he had an approval rating of 52 per cent.
Zelensky was elected president in 2019 with 73 per cent of the vote. AFP
The latest report on Ukraine from a Washington-based independent watchdog, Freedom House, notes that both the President and the current legislative were elected in free, competitive, and fair elections. Since 2022, there was some deterioration of political freedoms because of the war, including the suspension of elections due to martial law, new restrictions against parties that support Russia’s aggression, and greater control of the reporting in the main news channels. However, opposition parties continue to sit in parliament and their political activities “are generally not impeded by administrative restrictions or legal harassment”. Communication channels outside the official network, such as social media platforms, remain available and used freely.
All of this contrasts sharply to the repressive nature of Russian rule, not just in the occupied territories of Ukraine, but also in Russia itself. For 2025, Freedom House categorised Ukraine as a “transitional or hybrid regime”, while Russia was a “consolidated authoritarian regime”.
The war
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 after a popular revolution in Kyiv had ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. Russia illegally annexed Crimea and fostered a proxy war in Ukraine’s east, the Donbas, at times fought with regular Russian troops; at others by Russia-sponsored rebels. Most observers at the time assumed that this was the endgame: taking over Crimea was popular among Russians who saw it as their own Riviera; the frozen conflict in Ukraine’s east served as a festering wound keeping the recalcitrant democracy down.
Ukrainian firefighters putout a fire after a strike in Zaporizhzhia in 2022. AFP
Two ceasefire agreements, Minsk I (September 5, 2014) and Minsk II (February 12, 2015), failed. After the first, Russia sent troops across the border to defeat Ukraine’s armed forces in the Second Battle of Donetsk Airport (September 2014 to January 2015) and the Battle of Debaltseve (January to February 2015). After the second, the frontlines remained frozen, but shelling and sporadic fighting continued. No part of the agreement was ever fully implemented and soldiers kept dying. The world, however, moved on.
Who had not moved on was Putin, dreaming of great power and empire. While convincing himself of the righteousness of his position by reading Russian imperial historiography, he observed “the West” move from crisis to crisis. In Europe, the liberal consensus was challenged by new-right populist movements. The UK was in political chaos. The US could not even execute an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan, unlike the Soviet army in 1988. And that army, now Russia’s, had been modernised significantly under Putin’s watch. It was time to strike.
Preparations for the invasion started shortly after the fall of Kabul in August 2021. By October, the US had conclusive evidence that Russia planned an assault with the goal of controlling all of Ukraine and eliminating its President. Between then and the start of the war, the US tried repeatedly to create diplomatic off-ramps for the Kremlin. Putin was not interested.
On February 24, 2022, Putin unleashed his war of conquest. Within 10 days, Ukraine’s military was supposed to be disabled, the country’s leaders arrested or executed, pro-Russian popular support mobilised, and resisters detained. By mid-August, all of Ukraine would be occupied, the plan went. Then, it could be either annexed or given over to a puppet regime.
The plan failed. There were few collaborators and much resistance. The battle for Hostomel airport was lost by the Russian airborne forces sent in at short notice; two groups of assassins sent to kill Zelensky were hunted down and eliminated; the columns advancing towards Kyiv were stopped by the fire of artillery and main battle tanks, both of Ukrainian origin. While social media was obsessed by the David-versus-Goliath spectacle of US-made shoulder-launched missiles taking out Russian tanks, the real damage was done using Ukraine’s own resources. Victory in the battle of Kyiv was achieved by late March 2022.
Over the next three years, the war changed from a battle of movement to position warfare and a war of attrition. Russia began to rely on massed use of artillery and the liberal sacrifice of manpower. This looked like WWII: the frontal assaults, the artillery barrages, the utter disregard for human resources. But there was a new element as well: terror attacks on civilians and their infrastructure. This was not a Soviet tradition: during WWII, it was British and US air forces that had flattened German and Japanese cities. Such bombing was not part of the Red Army’s military repertoire. Its air forces were geared towards support of ground troops, not “strategic” bombing of civilians.
In its changed focus on hurting civilians from the air, Putin’s army drew on the neo-imperial wars he had overseen: Chechnya and Syria. It was here that the Russian air force first flattened cities (Grozny in 1999-2000 and Aleppo in 2015-16) and it was this experience that now came to bear on the war in Ukraine. Except that here they did not control the airspace and did not face defenceless civilians they could simply “de-house” at will. Instead, they had to deal with an enemy capable of shooting down not just bombers, which as a result were not sent into Ukraine’s airspace, but also many of the missiles and drones sent from a safe distance.
While air assaults on civilian targets became part of the normalcy of Russia’s changing way of war, tactics on the ground also evolved: rather than mass assaults after preliminary artillery preparation, increasingly Russia used surprise attacks by small groups of storm troopers to conduct reconnaissance by force. If they encountered major resistance, they would then call in airstrikes or artillery barrages. They also stopped frontal assaults on fortified positions, bypassing and encircling them instead.
But none of this led to major breakthroughs. The war bogged down.
Russia was better prepared than Ukraine for a war of attrition. It had long built a food system that could withstand international isolation, demonstrating that a major war had been on the minds of the planners in the Kremlin for a very long time. The discrepancy in the size of both the economy and the population also meant Russia had the edge in the long run. And while the militarisation of the economy came with increasingly serious economic imbalances, they were not serious enough to force Putin’s dictatorship to back down. Instead, military salaries and the growing investments in military industries led to economic mini-booms in several of the regions that supplied the volunteers and the weapons to fight in Ukraine. To many Russians, this continues to be a profitable war.
Putin’s overall strategy thus shifted from a lightning war of conquest to outlasting the democratic world. Having the Soviet experience of extreme suffering and endurance in mind, and construing “the West” as weak, effeminate and degenerate, he had every confidence that Russia would be successful in the long run. With Trump’s election victory, this confidence grew. With his behaviour in the first six weeks in office, it must have soared. Putin has less reason than ever to compromise. And he can achieve much by playing Trump diplomatically.
What now?
After the spectacular dust-up in the Oval Office a week ago, doom and gloom have descended over Ukraine and its supporters. A pouting US President seems to assume that if he pulls the plug on Ukraine, the war will simply end: “Zelensky better move fast or is not going to have a Country left,” he wrote a week before he ambushed him in front of the cameras.
The withdrawal of US support is a serious setback for Ukraine. The US and Europe have provided about equal amounts of money to Ukraine. If Europe were to try to replace US contributions, it thus would have to double its financial commitments at a time when the economy is not exactly booming and will soon be further hit by Trump’s trade wars.
The withdrawal of US support is a serious setback for Ukraine. AFP
The major victims of Trump’s retreat will be Ukraine’s civilians. The US air defence systems currently protecting cities cannot be replaced easily. An increase in civilian deaths is the inevitable result. The withdrawal of intelligence is also a serious blow and difficult to substitute.
However, the EU’s economy is big enough to replace US contributions. An increase equal to 0.12 per cent of Europe’s GDP would suffice. Germany’s taxpayers spend three times more on domestic subsidies for diesel fuel than they devote to military aid to Ukraine. And production capacity is growing. At the start of the war, most military aid came from quickly depleting stockpiles. By 2024, the vast majority of materiel fuelling Ukraine’s war effort are newly produced weapons and equipment.
More than half of Ukraine’s weaponry is produced in Ukraine, a further 25 per cent comes from Europe. The 20 per cent the United States contributes is particularly valuable and high-quality, but it is not the backbone of Ukraine’s capacity. In a war of attrition heavily dependent on artillery, Europe will produce some two million artillery shells for Ukraine this year. The US, before Trump pulled the plug, was expected to deliver less than one million. Elon Musk’s Starlink, providing communications at the frontline, can be replaced with alternatives.
Thus, Ukraine’s defences are unlikely to collapse. Russia has been advancing recently, but progress was slow. By the third anniversary of the invasion, Russia controlled about 20 per cent of Ukraine’s territory, including some 4000 square kilometres gained in 2024. However, Ukraine is a big country. Russia’s 2024 gains represent a mere 0.6 per cent of Ukraine’s territory. Russia has not taken major cities in 2024 and urban life continues everywhere.
Meanwhile, Russia lost parts of the Kursk region to a counteroffensive the Russian military was unable to reverse. Russia has likely enough materiel for at least another year of fighting, but not enough for a major breakthrough.
In an assessment of the war written at the end of 2024, one of the most perceptive analysts of the military side of the war in Ukraine, exiled Russian historian and former civil rights activist Nikolai Mitrokhin, developed four possible scenarios for what could happen in 2025. None of them included a complete breakdown. His “catastrophic” scenario was a “partial collapse of the front due to the reduction of Ukrainian forward units”, leading to a “rapid advance of Russian units to the left bank of the Dnipro”. He predicted that this might lead to a leadership change, but also a further rallying around the flag and a continuation of the fight.
Less catastrophic would be a return to a grinding Russian offensive, as in 2024. “At the current rate of advance,” wrote the Institute for the Study of War in its Ukraine Fact Sheet of February 21, 2025, “it would take Russian forces over 83 years to capture the remaining 80 per cent of Ukraine, assuming that they can sustain massive personnel losses indefinitely”.
This outlook explains why Putin is so enthusiastic about Trump’s “peace plans”. They might achieve diplomatically what he cannot achieve on the battlefield: the subjugation of Russia’s democratic neighbour to neo-imperial domination.
Mark Edele is a historian of the Soviet Union and its successor states, in particular Russia. He is Hansen Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. His latest book is Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (Melbourne University Press, 2023
Trump and Vance ambush Zelensky at the White House
In That Howling Infinite 