Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 160

William Schryver: In for a Pound

By William Schryver, Substack, 12/23/22

I have been following the excellent war historian Michael Vlahos for a good portion of the ongoing Ukraine War. I have benefited from his perspectives on history and his well-considered geopolitical insights. Dr. Vlahos’ formal credentials and subject matter expertise are unimpeachable – and unquestionably shade the autodidactic musings of an obscure voice speaking from a rural backwater at the southern rim of the Great Basin.

But with that deservedly flattering preface, I shall now presume to critique and rebut his latest hypothesis in relation to what he seems to believe would be a mutually acceptable resolution to that war on the part of the United States (ostensibly “NATO”) and the Russian Federation.

I will be responding to the latest brief discussion in a podcast series featuring John Batchelor and Dr. Vlahos.

The discussion begins with Mr. Batchelor articulating a series of hypotheticals apparently founded on an assumption that Vladimir Putin is operating from a tenuous position of power and full control over both his generals and the fundamental strategic aims driving the prosecution of this war.

In my studied opinion, there is emphatically zero basis for the assertion that Vladimir Putin is not securely in control of both the Russian military and Russian foreign policy. Nor is there any credible evidence that powerful elements within the Russian military oppose Putin and have even remotely contemplated the idea of deposing him. Indeed, to the extent these notions have any traction in the west, I attribute it entirely to the #EmpireAtAllCosts cult, the arms industry-funded think tank propagandists, and the unbridled intrigues of quasi-supranational western intelligence agencies.

Nevertheless, parting from the premise described above, Batchelor and Vlahos proceed to hypothesize a “peaceful solution” to the war in Ukraine founded in a Russia/NATO partition of Ukraine, with an undefined NATO-controlled western portion juxtaposed against what they indeterminately denominate “Novorossiya” in the east.

Frankly I was shocked by the proposition. In my judgment, it is not only geopolitically incoherent, but inexplicably naïve.

To their credit, both Mr. Batchelor and Dr. Vlahos appear to acknowledge that the only meaningful parties to this war (and its eventual cessation) are those of the waning American Empire (“NATO”) and a Russian Federation that long-resisted and has now decisively rejected assimilation into the hegemon-dictated “rules-based international order”; a Russia that is convinced the brief epoch of American global hegemony has ended, and that a return to a balance-of-powers multipolar world is both inexorable and imminent.

But I am thoroughly persuaded that the “solution” Batchelor and Vlahos propose would be utterly unacceptable to both parties – and would represent not only an unearned victory for NATO, but an unmitigated defeat for both Russian geostrategic interests and Vladimir Putin’s domestic political support.

Many geopolitical analysts have commented to a limited degree on Putin’s bold address to the world delivered even as Russian forces had commenced their “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, but few, if any, have focused their attention on the equally portentous address Putin delivered three days earlier.

In his February 21, 2022 speech, Putin meticulously recounted the relevant history of the region dating back multiple centuries, and focused specifically on the events that followed in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. (see End Note below)

In addition to Putin’s history lesson, he makes particular reference to a detailed proposal Russia delivered to the United States and its NATO allies in mid-December 2021 – a proposal that effectively amounted to a “final warning”; a last-ditch effort to avoid war in Ukraine.

Consider his words carefully, and particularly in light of how Russia has unswervingly adhered to the three primary war objectives Putin articulated in his February 24th speech.

Last December, we handed over to our Western partners a draft treaty between the Russian Federation and the United States of America on security guarantees, as well as a draft agreement on measures to ensure the security of the Russian Federation and NATO member states.

The United States and NATO responded with general statements. There were kernels of rationality in them as well, but they concerned matters of secondary importance and it all looked like an attempt to drag the issue out and to lead the discussion astray.

We responded to this accordingly and pointed out that  we were ready to follow the path of negotiations, provided, however, that all issues are considered as a package that includes Russia’s core proposals which contain three key points. First, to prevent further NATO expansion. Second, to have the Alliance refrain from deploying assault weapon systems on Russian borders.   And finally, rolling back the bloc’s military capability and infrastructure in Europe to where they were in 1997, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed.

Vladimir Putin, Address by the President of the Russian Federation, February 21, 2022

(emphasis added)

I submit we can confidently assume Putin was as deadly serious on February 21, 2022 as he was on February 24, 2022; that he was not bluffing; that he was resolved to “raise the stakes” commensurate to whatever was required to achieve the objectives he had so carefully articulated.

I submit that his domestic popularity AND the support of his generals correlates closely to the perception that he will not waver from those objectives, and that it has only been the misplaced sense that he might be failing, or at least stumbling, or that he might even pull back from his stated objectives that has resulted in meaningful criticism arising from his domestic supporters, be it in government, the military, or the general public.

I further submit that, in my estimation, it is precisely the burgeoning faith that Putin will resolutely pursue and achieve his stated objectives that has resulted in the unprecedented willingness of China, Iran, India, and other geostrategically important Eurasian and Global South nations to not only openly support Russia in this conflict, but to also, in many instances, openly defy imperial decrees forbidding military and commercial relations with Russia.

Indeed, I submit that a large proportion of the support Russia continues to command in Europe is directly correlated to a pervasive perception that the Russians “really meant it” when they solemnly, formally, and explicitly informed the United States and NATO that peace would henceforth be contingent on them “… rolling back the bloc’s military capability and infrastructure in Europe to where they were in 1997, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed.”

Now, of course, many will automatically retort that it is one thing to demand such a thing, and another altogether to be able to “make it happen”. But I would argue (as I have since January 2022) that the folly of arrogantly dismissing Russia’s legitimate security demands, and the cynical act of using Ukraine as a proxy army to harm Russia – and ultimately attempt to effect its dismemberment – would, in the end, result only in the end of American hegemony, the end of NATO, and the rebirth of a multipolar world.

It has been my observation that many “veterans” of the empire’s peak period (1991 – 2003) cannot grasp the cold hard reality that we are well into the story arc of an irreversible historical hinge-point.

The lucre-drunken bankers are now gnawing at the carcass of the goose that laid the golden eggs: the hegemonic global dollar system which permitted the US to conjure ex nihilo unlimited amounts of “money” which they then used to purchase and consume the products of the world, and thereby export the inflationary monetary consequences across the globe.

The imperial legions – both on the ground and in the air – never really were the Nephilim warriors of popular legend, and now the severely depleted force has its remaining strength diluted in hundreds of foreign bases dotting the planet.

The imperial navy is an anachronistic relic – a surface fleet not meaningfully dissimilar to the one that sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1945 … except in terms of its radically reduced numbers.

Speaking in the context of the vulnerability of surface ships to 21st century missile capabilities, one US Navy admiral is reported to have observed, “We have two kinds of ships in the navy: submarines and targets.” I discuss the issue at length in this essay from July 2022: Dinosaurs of the Deep Blue Sea.

And yet a great many still cling to the fond delusion of American military supremacy, and are unshakably convinced that, were the US to directly employ its conventional forces against Russia, it would overwhelm their defenses in a matter of days.

I address this American exceptionalist fantasy in another essay from July 2022: The United States Could Not Win and Will Not Fight A War Against Russia.

And yet three decades of flying effectively unopposed strike missions against vastly inferior adversaries have imbued most of the western world with the belief that American air power is impregnable – a myth that ought to have already been dispelled by the unprecedented demonstration of Russian air defense capabilities in Ukraine.

Even so, it is clear the Russians are fully cognizant of both American weaknesses and the capability of Russian defenses to defeat perceived American strengths.

It is for this reason I am convinced Putin’s Russia would never consider for a moment a proposal to bring this war to an end on the basis of a partition of Ukraine into NATO-controlled and Russian-controlled sections. Quite to the contrary, it is clear to me and a great many observers that Russia is now poised to win this war in a decisive fashion, and to then dictate to Ukraine and its western handlers the terms of surrender, the disposition of territories, and the conditions upon which peace in the region can be maintained going forward.

There is also very good reason to conclude Russia “really meant it” when they demanded that NATO pull back to its pre-1997 borders in Europe, and that they will not accede to any agreement with NATO that does not meet that precondition. That said, Russia need not reconquer the Warsaw Pact nations in order to achieve this objective. They need only to refuse to do business with them and the rest of Europe until they themselves shake off their vassal chains, exert their sovereignty, and construct a pan-European security structure independent of American hegemony.

End Note:

In relation to Putin’s description of the events of the last three decades, I would strongly recommend this essential recent interview of former US ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock, wherein he recounts these matters from his uniquely authoritative vantage point, and thereby confirms most of Putin’s perspectives on those same events.

I would however note that, although Matlock’s interpretations of events in which he participated are essential pieces of the larger puzzle, I disagree with several of his interpretations of recent and current events, and consider most of his remedial proposals to be effectively impossible.

Visit Schryver’s Substack site for more insightful analysis.

Volodymyr Ishchenko: UKRAINIAN VOICES?

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By Volodymyr Ishchenko, New Left Review, November/December 2022

Recently there has been much talk about the ‘decolonization’ of Ukraine. This is often understood as ridding the Ukrainian public sphere and the education system of Russian culture and language. The more radical decolonizers, also to be found in the West, would like to see the Russian Federation disintegrate into multiple smaller states—to finish the process of the collapse of imperial Russia that began in 1917 and was not completed in 1991, with the dissolution of the ussr. In the university context, it may also mean ‘decolonizing’ the thinking of the social sciences and humanities, whose approach to the whole post-Soviet region is seen as having been penetrated and distorted by a long-term form of Russian cultural imperialism.

When the biggest wave of decolonization in modern history took place after the Second World War, the focus was different. At that time, decolonization meant not just the overthrow of the European empires but also, crucially, building new developmentalist states in the ex-colonial countries, with a robust public sector and nationalized industries to replace the imbalances of the colonial economy through import-substitution programmes. The contradictions and failures of such strategies were explored in broadly Marxian terms in theories of under-development, debt-dependency and world-system analysis. Today, ‘decolonization’ is proposed for Ukraine and Russia in a context in which neoliberalism has taken the place of state-developmentalist policies and post-structuralist ‘postcolonial studies’ have displaced theories of neo-imperialist dependency. National liberation is no longer understood as intrinsically linked to social revolution, challenging the basis of capitalism and imperialism. Instead, it happens in the context of the ‘deficient revolutions’ of the Maidan type, which neither achieve the consolidation of liberal democracy nor eradicate corruption. If they succeed in overthrowing authoritarian regimes and ‘empowering’ the ngo representatives of civil society, they are also liable to weaken the public sector and increase crime rates, social inequality and ethnic tensions.footnote1

It is not surprising, therefore, that talk of Ukraine’s ‘decolonization’ is so much about symbols and identity, and so little about social transformation. If what is at stake is the defence of the Ukrainian state, what kind of state is it? So far, Ukraine’s ‘decolonization’ has not led to more robust state-interventionist economic policies but almost precisely the opposite. Paradoxically, despite the objective imperatives of the war, Ukraine is proceeding with privatizations, lowering taxes, scrapping protective labour legislation and favouring ‘transparent’ international corporations over ‘corrupt’ domestic firms.footnote2 The plans for post-war reconstruction did not read like a programme for building a stronger sovereign state but like a pitch to foreign investors for a start-up; or at least, that was the impression given by Ukrainian ministers at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano last summer. Some naively hope that ‘war anarchism’ founded on the cherished horizontal volunteerism that has flourished since the Russian invasion, will substitute for the time-proven ‘war socialism’.footnote3 More sober assessments warn of the conditions being created for state fragmentation and a political economy of violence. It remains to be seen what the Ukrainian government will do with the recently nationalized industrial assets of selected oligarchs—return them to their former owners, pay compensation or re-privatize them to transnational capital—but it is highly unlikely that they will form the backbone of a stronger post-war public sector. In all probability they will remain rather limited measures responding to the crises in specific industries.footnote4

Ukrainian ‘decolonization’ is thus reduced to abolishing anything related to Russian influence in culture, education and the public sphere. Against this, it amplifies the voices articulating Ukrainian distinctiveness. This is combined with attacks upon—or, as in Zelensky’s banning of eleven political parties in March 2022, the repression of—the voices of those who oppose this process or are simply labelled, usually misleadingly, as ‘pro-Russian’. In this way, Ukraine’s ‘decolonization’ becomes a version of (national-)identity politics—that is, a politics centered around the affirmation of belonging to a particular essentialized group, with a projected shared experience. Here—thanks to the increased global interest in Ukraine, but also to the physical relocation of Ukrainians to Western countries where they can enter more actively into international debates—Ukrainian scholars, intellectuals and artists face a dilemma. Either we allow ourselves to become incorporated as just another ‘voice’ in a very specific field of institutionalized identity politics in the West, where Ukrainians would be just the latest addition to a long queue of a myriad of other minority voices. Or instead, starting from the tragedy of Ukraine, we set out to articulate the questions of global relevance, search for their solutions, and contribute to universal human knowledge. Paradoxically, this requires a much deeper and more genuine engagement with Ukraine than happens now.

Recognition for whom?

The critics of contemporary identity politics point to a fundamental contradiction: ‘Why do we look for recognition from the very institutions we reject as oppressive?’footnote5 The oppressive situations faced by women, black people and others involve complex social relations, institutions and ideologies, reproduced within the warp and weft of capitalist relations. The black, gay and women’s liberation movements that arose in the 1960s and 70s fought to challenge the oppressive social order as a whole. While those oppressive relations persist, the question of universal emancipation has long since disappeared; instead, contemporary identity politics serve to amplify the particular voices that are deemed to require representation solely on the basis of their particularity. Instead of social redistribution, this politics calls primarily for recognition within the institutions which are not themselves put into question.footnote6 Moreover, because the groups that identity politics tends to essentialize are always internally diverse, it inevitably amplifies the more privileged voices who are legitimated to speak on behalf of the oppressed group that they may not really represent. In this way, it tends to reproduce and even legitimate fundamental social inequalities.

Needless to say, it is not Russian recognition that Ukrainian identity politics is seeking. The idea of talking to Russians, even unambiguously anti-Putin and anti-war Russians, is constantly under attack. As one Ukrainian politician put it, ‘good Russians do not exist’.footnote7 Instead, Ukrainian identity politics primarily targets the West, which is held to be culpable for allowing the Russian invasion, trading with Russia, ‘appeasing’ Putin’s regime, providing insufficient support for Ukraine and reproducing ‘Russian imperialist’ narratives about Eastern Europe.footnote8 Yet if the West is to be blamed for Ukraine’s suffering, it could relatively easily redeem itself by providing unconditional support for ‘the Ukrainian’ and unconditional rejection of ‘the Russian’. For this politics, the problem is Russian imperialism, not imperialism in general. Ukraine’s dependency on the West tends not to be problematized at all.

Ukrainians, then, should be accepted as an organic and indispensable part of the civilized Western world. Indeed, Ukrainians turn out to be not just the same as Westerners, but even better than them. Defending the frontier of Western civilization, dying and suffering for Western values, Ukrainians are more Western than those who live in the West.footnote9 However, if Ukrainians are valued primarily for being on the front line of the war with Russia, what positive contribution might the country make, beyond being more consistently anti-Russian? Is it only about recognition within the same unchallenged Western structures, trying to be more of the same? Is there anything else, besides occasionally beating Russia on the battlefield? There are hints to be gleaned from both directions: the West looking at Ukraine and Ukrainians looking at the West. Notably, they talk about different things. The Western gaze on Ukrainian politics usually takes a dichotomizing form. The bad aspects, when they are not perceived as a direct result of Russia’s malicious influence, mostly derive from the local elites and ‘corruption’. The good sides come from Ukraine’s civil society, which (surprise!) is usually strongly supportive of ‘the West’ while often being generously supported by Western donors and, of course, contributing to Western self-esteem.

Some even claim that the Russian invasion has had a positive democratizing effect on Ukraine.footnote10 Before, the talk was usually precisely the opposite: the repressive tendencies in Ukrainian politics were recognized, but the Russian threat was to blame. What could one expect from a country that suffered from external aggression? If only the story of wartime democratization were true. There is some survey evidence that more Ukrainians support democratic values in the polls; there is no less extensive evidence that Ukrainians still prefer a strong leader rather than a democratic system and do not tolerate wartime dissent.footnote11 Ukrainians responded to the invasion with a burst of mutual help and horizontal cooperation, but is that untypical for a society under an existential threat? Whether and how Ukrainian volunteerism will be institutionalized after the war is a big question; the previous wave of volunteerism at the start of the Donbass war in 2014 turned out to be driven by informal personalist initiatives and did little to sustain an organized civil society.footnote12 Meanwhile, Ukrainian politics carries on in the background, shutting down opposition parties, monopolizing television broadcasts, vigilantism that typically goes unpunished, expanding databases of ‘traitors’—some funded by us donors—and attacks on those dissenting from the patriotic consensus. Are we really now in a position to give lessons on democracy and civic activism? Some Ukrainian oligarchs have been weakened, as rockets, drones and artillery rain down on their property, their tv stations broadcast government content and their loyal mps vote in unison with the pro-presidential party. But even if they don’t regain their power after the war, it seems much less likely that their place will be taken by the self-organized Ukrainian people than by transnational capital, Zelensky’s personalized regime and the thin gratin of ngo civil society.

Or should the world learn from our economy? This is actually a view arising from the Ukrainian gaze on the West. The middle-class Ukrainian refugees who have been starting new lives in the eu this year circulate scathing stories on social media about old-fashioned European bureaucracy and ‘poor’ service. But what stands behind the ‘better’ Ukrainian service sphere are the lowest wages in Europe and ever-poorer protection of labour rights. Ukraine’s digitalization has advanced, but this is a typical laggard’s advantage: Ukraine was forced to digitalize because the state institutions have been so inefficient—another reason why so much volunteerism and international aid is needed. However, emergency responses are hardly a long-term solution.

That’s about it. These are not Ukraine’s unique advantages; this is not why the Western elite currently cares so much about Ukraine. There has indeed been something of a legitimacy deficit there, increasing over the past decade; its symptoms include declining rates of support for the traditional parties, the rise of populist movements and new direct-action protests—Black Lives Matter, MeToo—by the oppressed. In a sense, all are responses to the crisis of representation. All are saying: ‘You—politicians, global elites, whites, men—do not represent us. You cannot speak for us.’ Historically, the major Western states have been quite successful in neutralizing these criticisms through the formalistic inclusion of selected members of the marginalized groups, a ‘solution’ which excluded any larger challenges to the existing order. From the universal viewpoint of the oppressed, this tokenistic solution was always deficient; it alleviated the representation crisis without solving it. Today, the Ukrainian resistance is exploited in a broadly similar way, to give greater credibility to Western superiority. Ukrainians are presented as fighting and dying for what too many Westerners do not believe anymore. The noble fight brings (literally) new blood to its crisis-ridden institutions, wrapped in increasingly identitarian ‘civilizational’ rhetoric. The Western leaders repeatedly call for unity against the Russian threat. Substantive differences with political regimes in Russia, China or Iran obviously exist. However, the representation of the war in Ukraine as an ideological conflict—of democracy against autocracy—works poorly. The inconsistencies of the treatment of Russia, on the one hand, and Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, on the other hand, are too great. And Putin too has been trying to instrumentalize the ‘decolonization’ narrative, presenting the September 2022 annexation of south-eastern regions of Ukraine as a righteous struggle against Western elites who robbed most of the world and continue to threaten the sovereignty and ‘traditional’ cultures of other states. But what can he offer to the Global South beyond recognizing its ‘representatives’ as equal to the Western elites, on the basis of their self-proclaimed identities? The Western elites are trying to save the fraying international order; the Russian elite is trying to revise it to get a better place in a new one. However, neither can clearly explain how exactly the rest of humanity wins from either outcome. This is what ‘multipolarity’ may look like—the multiplication of national and civilizational identities, defined against each other but lacking any universal potential.

Ukraine’s universal significance

The question for Ukrainians is whether being a part of this self-defeating escalation of identity politics is really what we need. This year, there has been a huge surge of events, panels and sessions related to Ukraine, Russia and the war, and a high demand for ‘Ukrainian voices’ in these discussions. Certainly, Ukrainian scholars, artists and intellectuals should be included in international discussions—and not just about Ukraine. The problem, however, is not the quantity but the quality of such inclusion. We have seen how outdated arguments—not least those of primordial nationalism, weirdly combined with teleological claims for the superiority of liberal democracy—are legitimated.footnote13 We can already see the tokenism phenomenon, typical of contemporary identity politics, when a symbolic inclusion of ‘Ukrainian voices’ does not mean revising the structures of knowledge aligned with Western elite interests, beyond sharpening their guilt for appeasing Russia. Furthermore, the formalistic representation of tokenized ‘Ukrainian voices’ helps silence other ‘voices’ from Ukraine that are not so easy to instrumentalize. Are we really to believe that the English-speaking, West-connected intellectuals, typically working in Kiev or Lviv, and who often even personally know each other, represent the diversity of the 40-million-strong nation?

The solution is obviously not to include even more ‘voices’ but to break with the fundamentally flawed logic of escalating national-identity politics. Earlier, a distinctly colonial relation emerged between Western and East European scholars, including Ukrainians. We used to be typically the suppliers of data and local insights to be theorized by the Westerners, who would then reap most of the fruits of international intellectual fame. The sudden interest in Ukraine and the ‘decolonization’ moment offers an opportunity to revise this relationship.

Identity politics is a self-defeating game. Being recognized just for our ‘Ukrainianness’ means we are going to be marginalized again with the next geopolitical realignment. Instead of claiming to be the ‘voices’ of a people we cannot truly represent—that is, be held accountable by them—we should aim to be included on the basis of the contributions we can make to the universal problems facing humanity, in escalating political, economic and environmental crises. In-depth knowledge of Ukraine and the whole post-Soviet region can be especially helpful here because some of the most detrimental consequences of these crises have manifested themselves in our region, in the sharpest and most tragic forms.

For example, how can we discuss the contemporary civic revolutions that are breaking out around the globe at an accelerating speed without Ukraine—the country where three revolutions happened during the life of one generation and brought hardly any revolutionary changes? They embody the contradictions of poorly organized mobilizations with vague goals and weak leadership in the sharpest form; the same problems that populist responses to the Western crisis of political representation have encountered.footnote14 Oppositionist parties come to power amid high expectations of change but typically fail even to start any major reforms. For decades, Ukraine was dominated by the cynical politics of the rival ‘oligarchs’, with record-low levels of trust in government that eventually led to a staggering 73 per cent vote for a tv star, a complete novice in politics. Does it sound familiar? Or what about the relevance of the notorious ‘regional cleavage’ between Ukraine’s ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ regions to the concerns about the growing polarization in the United States or post-Brexit Britain? Ukrainians—and, of course, East Europeans in general—have been living with systematically underfunded public-health institutions long before the Covid pandemic made this a widely recognized problem.

These are just some of the topics that would allow a more productive deprovincialization of discussions of Ukraine. It should not make us vulnerable to charges of ‘Ukrainesplaining’—the ungrounded expansion of regional-specific frameworks to contexts which they fit only poorly. During the formative years of the classical social sciences, a handful of countries served as paradigmatic cases to explore fundamental processes. England was a model for discussions of the emergence of capitalism, while France was the foremost example of the dynamics of social revolution. The concepts of Thermidor and Bonapartism helped to illuminate the dynamics of political regimes in many other countries. Italy gifted us with concepts of passive revolution and fascism.

These were the models for the period of capitalism’s progressive expansion and modernization. If now, however, the world is experiencing a multi-sided crisis with no way out, shouldn’t we look for the paradigmatic cases in other parts of the world—those that have been experiencing similar crisis trends, earlier and deeper? For example, the country that jumped from the European agrarian periphery to the cutting edge of space exploration and cybernetics in the space of just two generations—and then, in the life of the next, turned into the northernmost country of the Global South, with the sharpest decline of gdp and a devastating war; the country that flew to the stars and may now be bombed into the Middle Ages. Thirty years ago, we believed that post-Soviet countries would catch up with Western Europe and that Ukraine would be like Finland or France. By the mid-1990s, we tempered our ambitions and aimed rather to catch up with Poland or Hungary. It would be an exaggeration to say that the West may yet be catching up with the self-destruction of the post-Soviet countries; but we could turn out to be your future, not the other way around.

The call to see Ukraine as a paradigmatic case of the far-reaching global crisis requires a completely different perspective on the country itself. It means abandoning the typical post-Soviet teleological liberal-modernization story—which, in the guise of ‘decolonization’, requires us to interiorize a far inferior colonial position. Instead, we need to recognize that we could be proud of once being part of a universal movement. Ukraine was crucial to the greatest social revolution and modernization breakthrough in human history. Ukraine was where some of the most significant battles of the Second World War took place. Millions of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers in the Red Army contributed huge sacrifices to defeat Nazi Germany. Ukraine was a world-renowned centre of vanguardist art and culture. The mass murders and authoritarianism of the state-socialist regime are universally acknowledged; but to exploit them to depreciate the scale of Soviet achievements is to cast Ukrainian labour, blood and suffering as meaningless. Moreover, it allows Putin to continue instrumentalizing Soviet history not only for domestic but for global audiences, who watch the ongoing war not through the eyes of the Western elites but of those whom they have oppressed for centuries. We should claim our past in full to claim a better future. The narrow ‘decolonization’ agenda, reduced to anti-Russian and anti-communist identity politics, only makes it more difficult to voice a universally relevant perspective on Ukraine, no matter how many Ukrainians would sympathize with it.

1 As Mark Beissinger has established on the basis of a mass of quantitative data; see The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion, Princeton 2022. For ‘deficient revolutions’, see Volodymyr Ishchenko and Oleg Zhuravlev, ‘How Maidan Revolutions Reproduce and Intensify the Post-Soviet Crisis of Political Representation’, ponars, 18 October 2021.

2 Anna Jikhareva and Kaspar Surber, ‘Ukraine Shouldn’t Become a Neoliberal Laboratory’, Jacobin, 17 September 2022; Peter Korotaev, ‘Ukraine’s War Economy Is Being Choked by Neoliberal Dogmas’, Jacobin, 14 July 2022; Luke Cooper, ‘Market Economics in an All-Out-War?’, lse Research Report, 1 December 2022.

3 Aris Roussinos, ‘Did Ukraine Need a War?’, UnHerd, 1 July 2022.

4 Cooper, ‘Market Economics in an All-Out-War?’.

5 Chi Chi Shi, ‘Defining My Own Oppression: Neoliberalism and the Demand of Victimhood’, Historical Materialism, vol. 26, no. 2, 2018.

6 Nancy Fraser, ‘From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a “Post-Socialist” Age’, nlr i/212, July–August 1995.

7 Iryna Podolyak, ‘Why Russians Are to Blame for Putin’, Visegrad/Insight, 16 March 2022.

8 Olesya Khromeychuk, ‘Where Is Ukraine?’, rsa, 13 June 2022.

9 George Packer, ‘Ukrainians Are Defending the Values Americans Claim to Hold’, The Atlantic, October 2022.

10 Nataliya Gumenyuk, ‘Russia’s Invasion Is Making Ukraine More Democratic’, The Atlantic, 16 July 2022.

11 us National Democratic Institute, ‘Opportunities and Challenges Facing Ukraine’s Democratic Transition’, August 2022; Iryna Balachuk, ‘Majority of Ukrainians Want Strong Leader, Not Democracy during War—kmis’, Ukrainska Pravda, 18 August 2022.

12 Anton Oleinik, ‘Volunteers in Ukraine: From Provision of Services to State- and Nation-Building’, Journal of Civil Society, 18 September 2018.

13 Alexander Maxwell, ‘Popular and Scholarly Primordialism: The Politics of Ukrainian History during Russia’s 2022 Invasion of Ukraine’, Journal of Nationalism, Memory and Language Politics, vol. 16, no. 1, October 2022.

14 Mark Beissinger, ‘Revolutions Have Succeeded More Often in Our Time, but Their Consequences Have Become More Ambiguous’, ceu Democracy Institute, 8 April 2022.

Blog Update for 2023

Dear Readers,

I’d like to wish you a happy new year and to thank you for reading my posts regularly.

Due to the demands of my day job and caregiving duties to a family member, the volume of posts to this blog will be lower than in 2022. I will continue to post to the best of my capacity and will hopefully be able to even write an original piece here and there.

-Natylie

Glenn Greenwald: The Career-Advancing Lies of Corporate Journalists

Link here.

George D. O’Neill Jr. – Western leaders can no longer hide the truth about Ukraine.

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By George D. O’Neill, Jr., The American Conservative, 12/19/22

George D. O’Neill, Jr., is a member of the board of directors of the American Ideas Institute, which publishes The American Conservative, and an artist who lives in rural Florida.

Recently, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen carelessly revealed the devastating cost of the Ukraine war.

“It is estimated that more than 20,000 civilians and 100,000 Ukrainian military personnel have died to date,” she said. The comment drew sharp backlash and the E.C. later deleted the comments from video recordings of the address. The censorship was left unexplained and demonstrated the confusion of the purveyors of the approved narrative.

If Von der Leyen’s estimate is true, that is nearly ten times the number of dead Ukrainian soldiers reported by the Ukrainian government. The E.C. president’s remark shows that even the strongest backers of this bloody and unnecessary war can no longer hide the truth: Ukraine is at risk of losing. 

The mainstream media and the Biden administration insist ad nauseam that Ukraine is winning against Russia. But the facts on the ground do not fit the narrative and the administration and media know it. The war hawks know their cynical Ukraine policy has not succeeded in driving Russia out of Ukraine. Tragically, the Ukrainians are the ones who suffer the immense cost of this foreign policy failure. Their nation is ruined for the sake and at the instigation of the globalist American empire.

As Ukraine loses its grip on heavily defended and important crossroads around the city of Bakhmut, the Western press has commenced a campaign to downplay the importance of the loss. Defense Express reports: “UK Defense Intelligence States [t]hat Bakhmut’s capture becomes primarily a symbolic, political objective for Russia.” Last week, the Financial Times published an article entitled: “Hell Just Hell: Ukraine and Russia’s war of attrition over Bakhmut.” As the subtitle of the piece reads, “Soldiers say fighting in and around eastern Donetsk city is reminiscent of first world war-style trench conflict.”

The following information is an indication of the nature of the Ukrainian “victory” over the previous six months.

Ukraine has lost an estimated 20 percent of its territory. At least 22 percent of Ukrainian farmland is under Russian control. These areas are a large part of the territory identified in the Minsk II agreement that were to be governed as autonomous districts. Due to the failure of the Minsk II agreement, Russia declared its Special Military Operations to free these areas from the grip of the Ukrainian government. As of today, it appears Russia has come close to achieving some of its initial goals.

In May 2022, the United Nations Refugee Agency reported that nearly eight million Ukrainians have been internally displaced, with another six million registered as refugees. That number is likely to rise even higher this winter. As a result of the recent Russian missile attacks on the Ukrainian power grid, even more people are fleeing Ukraine. Europe expects hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees this winter due to the nation’s ruined cities. Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko may urge an evacuation of his city due to its failures to provide basic services to its population.

CNN reported a month ago that at least 30 percent of Ukrainian power stations are destroyed. BBC reports that six million Ukrainians are without power. EuroNews recently reported that two-thirds of Kiev is without power. An estimated 80 percent of Kiev is without water. News reports declare that Kiev is getting ready to survive without power, water and heating. Ukraine has evacuated cities that have become uninhabitable without heating or power. The World Health Organization warns millions of lives are “under threat” this winter.

Forbes Magazine reports that nearly half of Ukraine is without power. Newsweek reports that Ukraine’s energy giant is running out of equipment to fix power outages. How long is the Ukrainian capital going to function without power?

The Ukrainian Central Bank estimates the nation’s 2022 GDP will decline by 32 percent, inflation will hit 30 percent, and unemployment will reach 30 percent. The New York Times reported Ukraine’s agriculture industry has lost an estimated $23 billion from the war. The International Monetary Fund reports the Ukraine war has led to the worst food shortage since 2008. CNN reports that Ukraine’s communications are entirely dependent on Elon Musk’s Starlink system. If there are troubles with the system, the country goes dark.

Brookings reports: “The war has destroyed at least $127 billion of the nation’s buildings and other infrastructure, according to the Kyiv School of Economics.” The Washington Post reports the Ukrainians are asking for $700 billion in addition to the over $100 billion we have sent.

On the ground, Ukraine has had difficulty taking any territory actively defended by Russia. The recent “victory” of Ukraine capturing Kherson has evaporated. Ukraine is evacuating Kherson due to Russian shelling. The Ukrainian military machine is unable to maintain control of a city their opponent had evacuated. All the September and October Ukrainian offensives have stalled, and the Russians appear to be solidifying their lines of defense and dramatically increasing their forces in the field while Ukraine is drafting sixty-year-old men.

Ukraine is also losing its access to the resources it needs to continue the war. The U.S. and Europe are running out of weapons to send Ukraine. In addition, CNN reports weapons supplies for Ukraine are running low. Ukraine’s military equipment, especially its artillery, is crumbling and the West can’t replace much of what is breaking down.

Foreign Policy reports that NATO officials are very worried by the shortages. Even neocon Frederick Kagan admits NATO isn’t prepared for a conflict like Ukraine. “NATO doesn’t really plan to fight wars like this, and by that I mean wars with a super intensive use of artillery systems and lots of tank and gun rounds,” Kagan told Foreign Policy. “We were never stocked for this kind of war to begin with.” According to the CEO of Raytheon, Ukraine has used thirteen years of Javelin production in ten months.

It didn’t have to be this way. Ukraine and Russia could have made a lasting peace deal if it weren’t for the meddling of the Globalist American Empire. In March of 2022, the two sides appeared to be close to agreeing on terms to settle the conflict. It appeared that the agreement would assure Ukraine would never join NATO. The NATO issue is the biggest in this whole affair. The United States and United Kingdom thwarted this deal and the war has continued since, killing tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Russians, and others. Their blood is on the hands of U.S. and U.K. leaders.

U.S. defense contractors, politicians, and think tanks are profiting at the expense of Ukraine and its unfortunate citizens. The rest of Europe is suffering from the “maximum sanctions” aimed at Russia while Ukrainians continue to flee their own country. None of this suffering appears to concern the people in charge of American foreign policy. They don’t care about Ukraine’s ruin–they only care about sticking it to Russia. This is the inevitable product of a D.C. worldview that sees humans as cattle.

No doubt, the cost of the war to Russia has been high as well. They have miscalculated and made errors throughout this whole tragedy. But the narrative purveyed to the American people has not been honest or accurate. What does Ukraine gain by losing tens of thousands of lives and significant portions of its infrastructure? Many Ukrainians have lost their loved ones and face a brutal winter all for the sake of people like Ursula von der Leyen, Joe Biden, and their neocon handlers. It’s time for Western leaders face the truth, and pursue negotiations to save the Ukrainians from this human tragedy.

Ted Snider: Did Russia and China sign a secret defense pact?

By Ted Snider, Responsible Statecraft, 12/13/22

At the end of November, reports that Russia and China had secretly signed a defense agreement started to appear. 

A November article on the website of Russia Matters of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center reported that, when Putin went to Beijing on February 4, prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he and Chinese President Xi Jinping secretly signed an agreement “that their countries would come to each other’s aid militarily, but only in the case of a foreign invasion.” The article cites “long-time Russia watcher Owen Matthews.”

Matthews subsequently reported in a November 26 article that,  in a “confidential annex” to their February 4 agreement, was “a mutual security guarantee that Russia had sought from China for decades but hitherto been unable to obtain. . . . Like Nato’s Article 5 — that an attack on one member is an attack on all — Beijing and Moscow pledged to come to each other’s aid militarily in the case of a foreign invasion of their territory and if special conditions were satisfied concerning the cause of such an invasion.” Matthews cited “a source with longstanding close ties to the top levels of China’s political and military leadership.”

The Washington Post amplified that story a bit by including it parenthetically in a December 2 opinion piece by Robert Wright. The article said that “every day there is some risk of a fluke turning this into a wider war, featuring direct NATO involvement. Even if such a war didn’t go nuclear, the devastation could be vast. ‘World War III’ might be an overstatement — but it might not (especially in light of a recent report that China and Russia have a secret mutual defense agreement).” The Post op-ed linked to the same story by Matthews.

The existence of such a confidential agreement would be an unexpected development in the relationship between the two countries, which have long eschewed Cold War-style alliances and blocs. 

And it may not be true. Alexander Lukin, a leading expert on Russia-China relations, told RS that “There is no proof. It’s probably mere gossip, and, as any gossip, it may be true or false.” He said that some Chinese authors have argued for such an alliance. But he added that they do not claim it is “an official posting” of the Chinese government. Lukin has, in the past, been critical of western analysts who do not sufficiently differentiate “between the official and dominant views that both reflect and determine [China’s] foreign policies, and the unofficial and even marginal opinions that have little influence on official policy.”

Lukin says the idea may have come from a May interview given by Yan Xuetong, a well-known Chinese foreign policy expert who has supported forming an alliance with Russia, but who, Lukin adds, “does not represent an official position.” Yan told the South China Morning Post that “China should consider providing security guarantees for neighbouring countries. This is not to help them invade others, but to provide security guarantees when others invade them.”

In a portion of the interview that was not included in the English translation, Yan went on to explain that “there is a misinterpretation of the concept of alliance in society. Many people think that alliance is when your allies go to war, you automatically participate in the war. This is wrong. ‘Alliance’ means that when your ally is invaded by others and he conducts an anti-aggression war, you are automatically involved in the war. The alliance treaty is “I help you protect you”, not “I help you invade others.”

But he did not say that there was such a treaty.

The distinction made by Matthews and Yan between an obligation that is triggered by being invaded but not by invading is consistent in tone with other Chinese partnerships. Even before China cemented its close partnership with Russia, it had an exceptionally close relationship with Pakistan. But while Pakistan has more than once been at war with India, China has not once intervened with troops.

The reason is because China drew the very distinction Yan emphasizes. According to Andrew Small in “The China-Pakistan Axis,” China would never rescue Pakistan from conflicts it brought on itself. But, according to Small, Chairman Mao Zedong (ruled from 1949-76)  said China could intervene. Sources interviewed by Small said that China could intervene if India attacked Pakistan. In other words, China might  come to the aid of its partner if its own existence was threatened by a foreign invasion; China would not come to the aid of its partner if it was the cause of the crisis.

In the case of the Ukraine crisis, China has not blamed Russia for causing it but rather has consistently pointed the finger  at the U.S. and NATO.  Xi told Biden personally that “the crux of the Ukraine crisis” included “the security concerns of both Russia and Ukraine.” He told Biden that, U.S. provocation had caused the problem. On June 23, XI again stressed the need to “reject the Cold War mentality and bloc confrontation” as well as “hegemonism.” 

The Kremlin spokesperson said on December 13 that Xi and Putin are “in constant communication.” The two leaders are reportedly scheduled to hold talks in late December to “discuss the events of 2022.”

Nevertheless, both Russia and China have disavowed Cold War-style alliances. Though their extraordinarily close strategic partnership approaches a quasi-alliance relationship, it falls importantly short of a military alliance. 

Only weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Xi said that the relationship between Russia and China “even exceeds an alliance in its closeness and effectiveness.” A February 4 joint statement issued by Putin and Xi asserted, perhaps for the first time officially, that “Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.” The statement adds that it is “a new kind of relationship” that is “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War.”

This “ironclad” friendship has included Russia and China carrying out military exercises that have employed a joint command and control system that gave each other levels of access that are unprecedented for either country, indicating a very high level of strategic and military coordination.

As recently as October 27, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that “China will firmly support the Russian side, with the leadership of President Putin, to unify Russian people to overcome difficulties and interruptions, to realize the strategic goal of development, and to further reinforce the status of Russia as a major power.” He promised that “China and Russia will deepen exchanges at all levels.”

But, as far as is known, there is still no mutual defense obligations.

The question of the existence of a confidential mutual security guarantee may not, in practice, change much. An attack on Russian territory that existentially threatened Russia could trigger China’s own security interests: China has no desire to face a U.S. and NATO challenge stripped of Russia. China could be motivated to come to Russia’s aid in the event of an invasion, not by an agreement with Russia, but out of concern for its own security interests.

And, importantly, there is the little-discussed Article 9 of the Sino-Russian Treaty of 2001 known as the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation. It states that “When a situation arises in which one of the contracting parties deems that peace is being threatened and undermined or its security interests are involved or when it is confronted with the threat of aggression, the contracting parties shall immediately hold contacts and consultations in order to eliminate such threats.”

Whether or not there is a confidential mutual security guarantee between Russia and China, there is a close and still evolving quasi-alliance relationship that has “no limits” and that already has a treaty to aid each other in eliminating threats to each other’s security interests.

Global economic crisis & the geopolitical reaction – The Duran Interviews Jeffrey Sachs

Link here.

Who’s doing Kiev’s dirty work: RT looks into Neo-Nazi ‘Aidar’ Battalion

Link here.

“RT examines the notorious Neo-Nazi ‘Aidar’ Battalion which was initially founded by nationalist activists supporting the Euro-Maidan anti-govt protests and coup 8 years ago, as it’s accused of seeking to oppress pro-Russian individuals in Donbass.”

We Told You So: Twitter Files Validates MintPress Reporting on Power of National Security State

Link here.

The Postil Magazine: Of Collective Security: An Interview with Michael Jabara Carley on Soviet Western Relations Before & During WWII

Postil Magazine, 12/1/22

Michael Jabara Carley is a specialist in 20th century international relations and the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. His research focuses on the Soviet Union’s relations with Western Europe and the United States during the years 1917 and 1945. This research has come together in a three-volume study, first of which, entitled, Stalin’s Gamble: The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930–1936, will be published by the University of Toronto Press.

He is the author of 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II, Silent Conflict: A Hidden History of Early Soviet-Western Relations, and Une Guerre sourde: l’émergence de l’Union soviètique et les puissances occidentales.

Professor Carley has also written many essays on French intervention in the Russian Civil War (1917-1921), on Soviet relations with the Great Powers between the two world wars, on questions of “appeasement,” the origins and conduct of the Second World War, and on major current issues. He is a Professor of history at the University of Montreal. It is a great pleasure and honor to discuss his work with him in this interview.

The Postil (TP): You have written a trilogy on the Great Patriotic War, that is the Second World War as experienced by Soviet Union. The first part of this magisterial study will be published soon. What is your overall aim?

Michael Jabara Carley (MJC): My trilogy, as I call it, deals with the origins and early conduct of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War (Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina). The VOV is the name given to the war in Soviet and Russian history arising from the German invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941. My work runs from January 1930 to December 1941. My project was first entitled “A Near-run Thing: The Improbable Grand Alliance of World War II,” supported by an “Insight” research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My initial objective was to write a narrative history of how the USSR, Britain, and the United States, powers hostile to each other during the interwar years, became allies against Nazi Germany and the Axis. The work evolved from an envisioned single volume into three dealing with Soviet relations with the great and lesser European powers and the United States.

TP: Is there a difference between a Western historiography of WWII and a Russian one?

MJC: Oh yes, the difference is enormous. During the war, it was clear to all who had eyes to see that the Red Army played the key role in smashing the Nazi Wehrmacht and winning the war in Europe. The United States and Britain played supporting roles. After 1945 the war became an important object of propaganda in the Cold War. The new narrative was that the United States or Churchill single-handedly won the war in which the USSR was practically invisible.

In the western media, histories, iconography, Hollywood films, comic books, more recently video games, the Red Army is invisible. The key moment in the war was operation Overlord, the Normandy landings, when in fact, they were an anticlimax, grand to be sure, in a war whose outcome had already been determined by the Red Army. In the context of the Cold War, it was normal that the United States would seek in various ways to rub out the memories of the Soviet role in the war, for otherwise how could you portray the USSR as a menacing communist enemy.

TP: Would you tell us about the other two volumes in the trilogy?

MJC: Volume 1: Stalin’s Gamble: The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930–1936, explores the Soviet Union’s efforts to organize a defensive alliance against Nazi Germany, in effect rebuilding the anti-German Entente of the First World War.

Volume 2: Stalin’s Failed Grand Alliance: The Struggle for Collective Security, 1936-1939 covers the period from May 1936 to August 1939. These were the last three years of peace in Europe during which occurred the great crises of the pre-war period (the Spanish civil war, Anschluss and the Munich sellout of Czechoslovakia) and the last Soviet efforts to organise an anti-Nazi alliance.

Volume 3: Stalin’s Great Game: War and Neutrality, 1939-1941 covers the first phase of the war in Europe, notably the disappearance of Poland, the Winter War between the USSR and Finland, the fall of France, the battle of Britain, and the Nazi build-up and invasion of the USSR. All this occurs within the broader framework of Soviet diplomacy and intelligence operations and Stalin’s failures to interpret correctly the signs of Hitler’s intention to destroy the Soviet Union.

TP: Your work has focused on Russian archival records. Were there any surprises, which made you rethink your position(s)?

MJC: My work has focused on Russian archival sources and western archival sources (inter alia French, British, US, etc.). The Russian sources indicate—and this will be a surprise for some people—that Soviet foreign policy as conducted by the Commissariat for foreign affairs (NKID) functioned like that of any other foreign ministry. It sought to define and protect Soviet national interests, as perceived by the NKID, and promoted amongst the Soviet leadership, especially in the Politburo (in effect the Soviet cabinet), which over time became synonymous with a single person, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. In the 1920s this meant seeking to improve political and economic relations with the main western powers. No country was too small to escape NKID attention and wooing. In the 1930s it meant seeking to build an anti-Nazi alliance to contain Hitlerite Germany or to defeat it in war if containment failed. The first generation of Soviet diplomats were well-educated (or self-taught), multilingual, sophisticated, and good at their jobs.

So? What is so surprising about these “discoveries?” Several generations of western historians have maintained that Soviet foreign policy was made by the Communist International or Comintern and intended to pursue world socialist revolution and not the protection of Soviet national interests. These did not exist. My previous book Silent Conflict deals with the complicated interaction of the NKID, Comintern, Stalin, and the Politburo in the 1920s. Suffice it to say that traditional western historiography requires revision based on the study of Russian archives. We now have histories before the opening of Soviet archives and histories after their opening.

TP: The Soviet era is largely dominated by Joseph Stalin. Are there aspects about him that are ignored or misconstrued by Western historians?

MJC: People have been writing books about Stalin since the interwar years. His recent biographer Stephen Kotkin reminds us that he was a “human being.” He was that, but of course human beings can also be serial killers. Stalin was what he was, amongst other things, crude, cynical, vengeful, murderous. He placed little value on human life and freely dispensed with it.

In the realm of foreign policy, he had a more or less normal relationship with the NKID and its leadership until the purges. In the 1930s his principal NKID interlocutor was Maksim M. Litvinov, the commissar or narkom for foreign affairs. Stalin’s interactions with Litvinov were those of a head of government with his/her foreign minister. There was give and take on both sides, but most of the time until 1939 Stalin supported Litvinov’s policy recommendations. Not always but most of the time. It is a “normal” side of Stalin that we sometimes miss because of his ruthlessness and the purges.

TP: In the years leading up to WWII, how did the West view, or understand, Stalin and Soviet Russia? And, likewise, how did Stalin view the West?

MJC: The “west” did not have a uniform view of Stalin. There was the mainstream media view of him as bloodthirsty communist. In some government circles, in the British Foreign Office, for example, he was perceived as a ruthless “realist” looking to secure his own power. Western iconography, political posters, cartoons, etc., are rich in their portrayal of Stalin, amongst other roles, as a vampire feeding on the blood of innocents. This was a consistent view of him during the interwar years with some moderation in the 1930s when western realists—Winston Churchill is the best known of these people— recognised the need to cooperate with the USSR against Nazi Germany. The “realists” were always a minority amongst western governing elites and were never able to impose this policy in government until the Nazi invasion of the USSR. Of course, western communists were more disposed to recognise Stalin as the great leader of the USSR. They had to or were expelled from European parties or purged when Stalin got his hands on them. There were however exceptions to the rule when communists (in France for example) could initiate policy changes accepted in Moscow.

As for Stalin, he remained a communist, but he was willing to cooperate with the western powers against Hitler both in the 1930s and after June 1941. We operate under different social systems, he often said, but this should not prevent us from recognizing common interests and cooperating against common foes.

TP: Then, there is the notorious year, 1932, with its Great Famine, in which 5 to 7 million died. Was this famine “political strategy,” ethnic cleansing (Holodomor), a natural disaster, or something else?

MJC: I only deal in passing with this issue in my work because the famine did not affect foreign policy, but the best recent treatment of the famine is in the second volume of Kotkin’s biography of Stalin. Kotkin argues that the famine was the result of various factors, political, economic, weather, and insect infestations. It was not aimed at the Ukraine as a form of genocide or “ethnic cleansing.” The famine affected the entire Soviet grain belt with Kazakhstan being the hardest hit.

TP: The next year, 1933, brought Adolf Hitler to power. How did Stalin and the Soviets view Hitler?

MJC: The initial Soviet reaction to Hitler’s assumption of power in early 1933 was to try to maintain the “Rapallo” policy of tolerable relations with Germany. Nazi hostility to the USSR in 1933 was so intense that the maintenance of Rapallo became impossible and in December 1933 the Politburo approved a shift in policy to collective security against Nazi Germany. This meant in effect the rebuilding of the World War I Entente against Wilhelmine Germany. Litvinov became the great Soviet spokesperson for this policy, but it was not his personal policy, it was that of Stalin and the Soviet government. Stalin was the Soviet government. No policy, large or small, could pass without his approval.

TP: The years leading up to 1939 are complex and often little understood, especially in regards to the motivations and concerns of Soviet Russia. Did the Soviets see a war coming?

MJC: There is not the slightest doubt that the Soviet leadership saw war coming. Nazi Germany was the great danger to European peace and security. Litvinov and other Soviet diplomats liked to quote to their western counterparts Mein Kampf, Hitler’s best-selling book, outlining his plans for European conquest. France and the USSR were identified as targets of German conquest. Germany needed Lebensraum, additional living space in the USSR. Slavs, Jews, Roma were lower species of human being good only for slavery or death.

TP: What was the role of Britain and France in this regard? Were they more suspicious of Hitler or of Stalin, or of both equally? And why could they not form an alliance with Stalin against Hitler?

MJC: The answer to this question is complicated and is the subject of Stalin’s Gamble, vol. 1 of my trilogy. In France and Britain anti-communism was a driving force, though its intensity fluctuated from time to time during the interwar years. Political and economic elites were largely anti-communist, but not entirely, as I have noted above. This was especially true during the 1930s after Hitler became German chancellor. One Soviet diplomat noted that the great question of the 1930s was who was enemy no. 1, Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union? Western elites, with important exceptions, got the answer wrong to this question. Fascism was the great bulwark against communist or socialist revolution, the ideology arising from the crisis of capitalism during the interwar years. Remember, Germany was not the only fascist state, the Duce Benito Mussolini had taken power in Italy in 1922. In France and Britain there were tolerant attitudes toward Italian fascists. If only Hitler would soften the hard edges of Nazism and adopt the “softer” fascism of Mussolini, it would be easier to accept him. For numerous European conservatives Hitlerite Germany was not an enemy but a potential ally against the left.

When Soviet diplomats tried to warn of the Nazi danger, many western counterparts did not buy the argument that Hitler was the problem. This was especially so after the eruption of the Spanish civil war in July 1936. It looked to many conservatives that communism might take root in Spain and then spread to France. What a catastrophe! So, when Soviet diplomats warned of Hitlerite Germany, conservatives, the political right, but also spreading into the political centre and centre-left, saw this as a ruse de guerre to spread communism into Europe. Collective security and mutual assistance against the common foe, did not work as an argument, because European elites did not see or did not want to see Hitler as a common foe. The British Foreign Office was against collective security and against anti-fascism as arguments for unity. Anti-communism was a major impediment to an Anglo-Franco-Soviet alliance against Hitler, even in 1939 when war looked increasingly inevitable.

TP: Then there is Poland. How would you characterize the Polish view of Hitler, especially given that Poland was allied with Nazi Germany until 1939 (a little-known fact)? What were Poland’s ambitions and motivations?

MJC: Yes, then there was Poland. I call it the skunk in the woodpile of collective security, but it was not the only one. A Polish state reappeared on the map of Europe in 1918 at the end of World War I. It was intensely nationalist. During 1919-1920 Poland sought to reestablish its frontiers of 1772, as a great European power. This led to war with Soviet Russia and a white peace, signed in early 1921 which satisfied neither side. Poland did not re-establish its 1772 frontiers, but obtained important Ukrainian and Byelorussian populated territories, which Soviet Russia saw as lost because of military weakness.

The Polish leadership saw itself situated between two potentially hostile great powers, and so explained its foreign policy as neither one or the other. But when push came to shove the Polish leadership always leaned toward Germany. In January 1934 Poland signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. Soviet offers of rapprochement were rejected. In following years Poland acted as a saboteur of collective security and worked against Soviet diplomacy. Everywhere in central and eastern Europe, diplomats warned that Poland was marching toward its ruin if it continued to pursue a pro-German, anti-Soviet policy. I would not say Poland was a Nazi “ally” but it was certainly an accomplice in 1938 when it cooperated with Germany to bring about the dismemberment of the Czechoslovak state. For its troubles Poland got a small portion of Czechoslovak territory. Incredibly, in 1939 it continued to sabotage attempts to conclude an Anglo-Franco-Soviet alliance. It did so until the very day the Nazi Wehrmacht invaded Poland on 1 September 1939.

TP: Was the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 the Soviet attempt to thwart war, or was it a reaction to the Munich Conference of 1938, in which the West thought it had won “peace in our time?”

MJC: The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was not a Soviet attempt to thwart war, it was an attempt to stay out of the war and to remain neutral. Yes, in part, it was a reaction to the Munich accords, but it was more than that. It was the direct result of six years of failed Soviet attempts to construct an anti-Nazi grand alliance. One by one, the prospective members of this failed grand alliance fell away: the United States in the spring-summer 1934, France paradoxically in late 1934 (in a more complicated process), Italy, yes, fascist Italy in 1935, Britain in February 1936, and Romania in August 1936. One after the other they fell away; and Poland of course, the spoiler of collective security, the proverbial skunk in the woodpile, never contemplated an alliance with the USSR against Germany. Moscow was always the undesirable ally, the greater enemy, even though, paradoxically, it was Poland’s only option for salvation.

The Soviet Union could not, on its own, organise mutual assistance against Nazi Germany. Collective security had to be a grand political coalition from left to centre-right, a World War I union sacrée, of all-in national defence of all political parties against a common foe. In the west no one wanted it; no one wanted the Soviet Union as an ally (with the exception of communists and “realists”; a Soviet ambassador called them “white crows”) in a potential war-fighting alliance, in a situation where there was no agreement on the common foe. Even Czechoslovakia, the most needy potential ally, would not go all-in with the USSR. No eastern European country would without France and Britain, but France would not march without Britain, and Britain would not march at all.

This is a complicated story related in volumes 1 and 2 of my trilogy. In the great cover-up of the genuine history of the origins of World War II after 1945, it was the necessary corollary of Cold War propaganda to rub out the primary role of the Red Army in the destruction of the Wehrmacht. Early on, revisionist historians began to put the story together, starting with the “Guilty Men,” the appeasers, who prepared the way to catastrophe. It was the release of Soviet government papers in the 1990s, however, which has allowed the emergence of a more complex narrative, constructed with the assistance of Soviet eyes. In this narrative Stalin, the “human being,” understandably could not trust the British and French governments, conniving, manipulative, unwilling, to be all-in allies against Nazi Germany even in August 1939.

As it was, the British and French left their ally Poland to blow in the wind when Germany invaded it. Stalin correctly assumed that France and Britain would sit on their hands while Germany and the USSR fought it out in the east. Would they have been more loyal to the USSR than they had been to Poland? Of course not, if you asked Stalin. However, war is full of the unexpected. The USSR ended up fighting a ground war practically alone against Nazi Germany from June 1941 to September 1943 and even after the Normandy landings still carried the main burden of fighting on the ground. That of course is another story.

TP: World War II, when it broke out, was the result of diplomatic failure on the part of Britain, France, and Poland. Is this a fair assessment?

MJC: I have answered this question in my above responses, but yes, Britain, France, and Poland bear a large responsibility for the failure to organize an early grand alliance in Europe against Hitler.

TP: Could the Allies have defeated Hitler without the Soviets?

MJC: No, and this is not a conclusion made in hindsight. The main argument of western “realists” was that without the USSR, France and Britain could not win a war against Nazi Germany and would certainly lose it. Britain had no army to speak of, two divisions could at once be sent to France in the event of war. The French army could not alone fight off a German invasion. On the other hand, the Red Army could at once mobilise 100 divisions, in fact, more, against Nazi Germany. Churchill and former prime minister David Lloyd George said it plainly in the House of Commons during the spring of 1939. Victory was impossible without an alliance with the USSR. Do the math of relative contributions to boots on the ground: Britain, two divisions; the USSR, 100. This is not to mention 35 Czechoslovak divisions prior to the Munich betrayal. The French and British governing elites liked to count every enemy twice over and potential allies not at all.

TP: In your book, Silent Conflict: A Hidden History of Early Soviet-Western Relations, you discuss Soviet relations with the West. How would you categorize these? And did these early years set the tone for the Cold War?

MJC: With the notable exception of Soviet-German relations and the conclusion of the treaty of Rapallo (spring 1922) which regularised Soviet relations with Weimar Germany, Soviet-western relations were poor. Anti-Communism was an insurmountable obstacle to better relations even though there were “realists,” notably in France, who advocated rapprochement. The Comintern was active in China where a great revolutionary movement was underway. Britain especially had important commercial interests in China threatened by the revolutionary movement. I see this period as the early (or stage 1 of the) Cold War which ended in 1941. Western-Soviet hostility in the 1920s was an impediment to building an anti-Nazi alliance in the 1930s.

TP: The West has long had deep-seated Russophobia. What accounts for this?

MJC: Russophobia is not really a subject directly treated in my work. It is a form of western racism against Russia, motivated these days by the Russian threat to US world domination. This is a topic for another discussion.

TP: Are there other projects that you are researching?

MJC: I am getting on in years, and the publication of my trilogy will take up my time, inshallah, for the next couple of years. I see the trilogy as the capstone of my work as historian and author. After the trilogy is published, as I hope it will be, who knows?

TP: Professor Carley, thank you so much for your time.