Link here.

By Robert D. English, The National Interest, 10/29/22

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV’S death has prompted a torrent of commentary confirming the old adage that “the history we write tells more about the present than the past.” Some pay fitting tribute to the former Soviet leader’s remarkable accomplishments in overcoming decades of Cold War confrontation and overseeing a peaceful retreat from empire, in humanizing and democratizing a ruthless command system that ultimately could not be reformed. But others denigrate or ignore his achievements in distorted, ahistorical, churlish accounts that cherry-pick their facts or simply get them wrong. Characterizations of Gorbachev as a “quintessential apparatchik” or a blood-stained “totalitarian” who hadn’t sought “to end tyranny” and couldn’t imagine Russia as anything but “an empire” are truly bizarre—and tell us more about the present biases of their authors than they do about the past dramas of perestroika and the Cold War’s end. Those biases go so far as to compare Gorbachev with Vladimir Putin or even blame him for Putin’s war on Ukraine. It will be unfortunate indeed—bad history of the past, and even worse lessons for the future—if such cynicism comes to predominate and turns audacious, principled, globally-minded leadership from an object of admiration into one of ridicule. Russia is not the only country that could use another Gorbachev right about now.

COMMON TO much misremembering is a condescending dismissal of Gorbachev’s leadership under perestroika, of his efforts to reform and liberalize the sprawling, stagnant Soviet system. Is Gorbachev to blame for failing to revive the economy because he was “bewildered,” because he “never understood” the system’s problems and had no plan for “orderly economic reform” as Anne Applebaum claimed in The Atlantic? Several things should be noted in reply, the first being to recall the colossal magnitude of the task—and the vast, entrenched, antiquated bureaucratic monster that was the Soviet economy in 1985. Of course, perestroika proceeded by trial and error, and of course, Gorbachev lacked a detailed plan for something that could not have been “orderly” even in the best circumstances, let alone those he inherited: a weary society and stagnant economy slammed by the one-two punch of plunging oil prices and a raging arms race. Nobody had such a plan, because nothing of such enormity had ever been tried before. Compared to the ossified Soviet economy under state control since 1917, reform of Poland (which had retained private farming and much entrepreneurship, since communism was only imposed after 1945) or the Baltic states (small, agile, with key cultural and financial ties to the West) were child’s play. Crucially, Polish and Baltic reformers also benefited from a lack of concerted resistance since their transitions began after Gorbachev’s push for democratization and his acquiescence in the collapse of Communist Party rule. Nobody cleared the way for Gorbachev, whose initial economic reforms stumbled as he simultaneously struggled to liberalize the Soviet political system—first via glasnost, and then through competitive elections, from city councils and regional legislatures all the way up to a new national parliament.

A common cliché of Gorbachev’s detractors in the Soviet intelligentsia was that “Perestroika is like a plane that took off without knowing where it would land.” Well, look to China if you seek “orderly economic reform” in a vast, centralized, single-party system (and China’s agricultural economy was still easier to liberalize than the USSR’s complex industrial behemoth). In fact, even Deng Xiaoping did not quite know where China’s reforms would land, and to the extent that they were more or less steered to a desired destination, it was with much political violence and zero political liberalization. This deserves emphasis: Gorbachev’s reforms not only faced opposition from senior Central Committee officials and some Politburo members, but even when initiatives were agreed and laws passed they languished due to bureaucratic resistance and outright sabotage by local officials. In a ruling party where power had devolved and corruption metastasized, Gorbachev lacked the levers for implementation and enforcement available to his Chinese counterparts. Thus, another contradiction of Gorbachev’s critics is that they fault him for not exercising enough control over economic reforms while retaining too much control over political reforms. How do they imagine that more rapid democratization, with the paralyzing polarization and national separatism that it engendered, would have facilitated more “orderly” market reforms? This highlights yet another intelligentsia platitude of the 1990s that Gorbachev’s critics have resurrected upon his death, namely that he wrecked the old system but “put nothing in its place.” How do they explain this failure? According to Applebaum, “he knew that Soviet society was stagnant and Soviet workers were unproductive [but] he had no idea why.”

Anders Åslund, one of the West’s leading experts on transition economics who analyzed Gorbachev’s reforms firsthand from Moscow, disagrees. Midway through perestroika, he judged Gorbachev a “radical reformer” struggling against “top-level political resistance” to introduce key market mechanisms into the Soviet economy. Moreover, he emphasized that Gorbachev had led a no-holds-barred review of the country’s socio-economic problems in 1983, two years before taking power, and outlined a market-oriented reform agenda shortly thereafter, leaving no doubt that “Gorbachev had perceived the depth of the problems Soviet society was facing.” A large body of research since has amply confirmed Åslund’s early assessment. It details—in many articles, books, interviews, and documentaries—how even as Gorbachev rose through the Soviet system as an outwardly conventional member of the nomenklatura, he consistently supported reformist innovations and grew increasingly frustrated with the cruelty of that same system—from the oppressive conditions on collective farms, to the arrogance and corruption of party officials. Particularly notable was the breadth of Gorbachev’s (and his wife Raisa’s) early-1980s outreach to critical experts and liberal intellectuals in all aspects of politics—including reformist sociologists and economists. No doubt he was still more socialist than social-democrat, far from the radical reformer he would become in just a few years. But the open-minded and innovative Gorbachev was intensely studying a wide range of problems and attendant proposals for reform, belying the caricature that he was “bewildered” and “had no idea” what was wrong with Soviet society.

BUT WHATEVER his intentions, is it still true that Gorbachev undermined the old system yet “put nothing in its place?” In fact, over a few years, Gorbachev legalized private enterprise; he gave state enterprises broad autonomy from suffocating central planning; he opened the doors to foreign investment and even majority foreign ownership of joint ventures; he ended the state monopoly on foreign trade; he permitted long-term private leasing of state farmland; he even legalized the creation of private commercial banks. As someone who worked for a new private enterprise (a news agency, in 1989) and then in a U.S.-Soviet joint venture (consulting on foreign investment in manufacturing, over 1990–1991) I observed at close range both the sweeping nature of these reforms and the tremendous difficulty—chiefly, bureaucratic resistance and bribe-seeking officials—that they faced in implementation. No wonder conservatives opposed them; these were astonishing steps that had seemed inconceivable right up until the moment they were announced.

Yes, Gorbachev was slow to accept the need for broad marketization of the Soviet economy and some of his partial market steps backfired badly in a system that retained much central planning and state ownership. He shied away from large-scale privatization during his time in office, hence his vacillation over the 500 Days program devised by a team of economic reformers in 1990. Because it was ultimately shelved, 500 Days has acquired mythical status in hindsight for many Gorbachev critics. Yet insofar as it aimed to do in under two years what went so terribly wrong under his successor Boris Yeltsin in five—and would have attempted this not only in Russia but across the entire USSR, where it would have unleashed cutthroat property battles among the Soviet republics—500 Days would most assuredly have failed. While a “valiant effort” at rapid marketization, it was also “ill-defined,” “unworkable” and “riddled with inconsistencies.” Had Gorbachev tried it, he likely would have faced a hardline coup in 1990 instead of the one he did face in 1991. (Indeed, an “administrative coup” seeking to transfer his presidential powers to a conservative prime minister was also tried in 1990.) As his former advisers remind us, Gorbachev was never free of the threat of sudden ouster by hardliners in the senior leadership.

Still, Gorbachev did lay a foundation for market reforms. Instead of claiming that he didn’t, wouldn’t it be better to ask why his successor Yeltsin failed to build on it in an “orderly” way? While Gorbachev’s final year saw deep popular disillusion and crippling polarization of the ruling elite, Yeltsin became the unchallenged leader of Russia in 1992 with a broad popular mandate, special emergency powers, and the Communist Party banned. With those advantages—and tens of billions in Western aid that Gorbachev had been denied—why didn’t Yeltsin build on his predecessor’s steps to complete “orderly” market reforms? For example, why was regulation of a booming private banking sector earlier legalized by Gorbachev subsequently neglected until Russia’s disastrous financial collapse of 1998? Why did Yeltsin ignore the urgency of small-business loans and agricultural credits, instead allowing Russian banks to morph into the tools of oil oligarchs and money-laundering machines of organized crime? Why did he do the oligarchs’ bidding in excluding foreign competition from the financial sector, thereby abetting their parasitic practices? Why, over nearly a decade in power, did Yeltsin fail to legalize full private ownership of land? Yeltsin’s one major “market” reform was a process for privatization of state property that was so thoroughly corrupt, in a society so deeply impoverished, that it soured a generation of Russians on free-market capitalism. If anybody should be faulted for wrecking the old system and “putting nothing in its place”—except misplaced faith in the magic of the unfettered free market—it is Yeltsin.

IT IS unfortunate that the manifest failures of the 1990s have not prompted some reflection on the challenges of the 1980s and at least modest appreciation of what Gorbachev faced. It is an odd kind of “presentism”—exhibiting both the bias of hindsight yet a confused picture of the past—that can be traced in part to prejudices of the Soviet intelligentsia that had hardened by 1991. One of these prejudices was a haughty disdain of Gorbachev simply for who he was—a party official who spoke with a distinct southern accent, definitely not one of them. Another was broad ignorance of economics; beyond their own experience of a corrupt command system, the basics of agriculture and industry, or money and trade, were alien to most. (In one year, I visited more factories and farms than most intelligenty would see in a lifetime.) Hence the frequency with which one heard such bromides as “What we need is real self-management” and “You can’t cross an abyss in two leaps” or “Why are we trying the Yugoslav model? The Swedish one is clearly better” gravely intoned as if such keen insights were beyond the ken of dullards like Gorbachev. Perhaps most important was that, by 1991, most of the cultural intelligentsia—writers, filmmakers, historians—had abandoned the “indecisive” Gorbachev for the “bold” Yeltsin and have since found it difficult to say “Maybe we were wrong.”

Their paradigm of prejudice is so strong that, for some, it literally scrambles memory of basic facts and key events. As Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker in late August:

“Andrei Sakharov, a dissident who was elected to the Supreme Soviet after Gorbachev released him from internal exile, argued against the monopoly of the Communist party. Galina Starovoitova, an academic ethnographer turned politician, argued that the empire must be dismantled, and proposed a union treaty to replace the Soviet colonial structure. Gorbachev rejected both notions.”

Sakharov was actually elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, the largely democratic new legislature that Gorbachev created in 1989 (a fact that some might find salient in recalling how the USSR was democratized). As for the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, it was actually Gorbachev who in March of 1990 proposed to that same Congress—and overrode fierce Party opposition to pass—a constitutional amendment ending that monopoly. Four months later, in July of 1990, it was actually Gorbachev who declared in a nationwide address that the country must decentralize under a new Union Treaty, and devoted enormous effort to pushing the project through arduous negotiations until a draft was agreed by nine of the fifteen Soviet republics in 1991 (and it was precisely the formal signing of this decentralized new Union Treaty that the coup plotters of August 1991 sought to prevent).

If one really believes that “Gorbachev rejected both notions”—of ending the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, and of negotiating a new union treaty—then scorn for Gorbachev’s democratic, anti-imperialist reputation is understandable. The problem is that he didn’t, and it’s not the only such problem. Gessen continues:

“In March 1991, after not only the Baltics but also Russia and Ukraine—the largest Soviet republics—voted to secede from the Union, Gorbachev staged a referendum on preserving the USSR.”

But Russia never held a vote on secession from the USSR, ever. (Belief that it did, and that Russians voted to leave the USSR, represents a misunderstanding of Russian politics akin to the belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 U.S. presidential election; opinion polls conducted immediately after the breakup showed that, by a three-to-one margin, Russians regretted the end of the USSR.) By contrast, Ukrainians did vote overwhelmingly for secession in a 1991 referendum. But they only did so on the eve of the USSR’s collapse in December, not March, and only after several critical events intervened—most dramatically, the August coup attempt. Given this jumble of errors over what happened and when, it is difficult to understand the conclusion that follows: “Gorbachev used violence and rigged votes” in an effort to preserve the USSR.

WITH NO evidence offered for his “rigging” of votes (until Gorbachev there were no real votes!) what about his use of violence to save the USSR? As with the Soviet economy, so with the Soviet Union’s breakup, a short primer helps place events in context. The first major incident under Gorbachev was a mass protest—and its brutal suppression—in the republic of Kazakhstan in 1986. One version of events has Kazakh students angry that Gorbachev appointed a party secretary who was ethnically Russian. Another has those same students, inspired by Gorbachev’s call for perestroika, protesting against miserable living standards and official corruption. In either case, those responsible for violently suppressing the protests—taking dozens of lives—were local party and security officials.

Every subsequent outbreak of interethnic violence was different, yet similar in two respects. One was their origins in long-smoldering grievances rekindled by Gorbachev’s unleashing of glasnost and democratization; second is that local officials took key decisions, with no evidence that Gorbachev ever ordered the use of deadly force. Armenian political mobilization began in 1987 with environmental protests, followed by demands for unification with Karabakh (an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan), when people were permitted to rally, the press to report, and the Karabakh and Armenian parliaments to vote. In 1988, interethnic clashes escalated into vicious anti-Armenian pogroms. Gorbachev certainly fumbled the diplomacy of Karabakh, vacillating between pro-Armenian and pro-Azerbaijani policies and eventually infuriating both sides. But it’s also clear that he tried to avoid violence, and was afraid that granting historic justice for Karabakh would spark far more bloodshed by legitimizing demands to redraw many other disputed borders.

Interethnic disputes, aggravated by economic disparities, flared in the Ferghana Valley shared by Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in 1989–1990. In Georgia, free elections empowered extreme Georgian nationalists who in turn curtailed the rights of their Abkhazian and Ossetian minorities. The dissident and human-rights defender Sakharov, who championed the Armenian underdog, saw things differently in Georgia and faulted Georgian nationalists for dominating “a mini empire” of their own. Over 1988–1991 Georgia would be rocked by violent interethnic clashes and one brutal military crackdown in Tbilisi (taking twenty-one lives) that was ordered by local party bosses.

Best remembered in the West—and frequently recalled in the denunciations of Gorbachev published since his death—were the January 1991 clashes between Soviet security forces and pro-independence protestors in the Baltic republics of Lithuania and Latvia. Twenty died when a Soviet army detachment (in Vilnius) and Interior Ministry troops (in Riga) deployed bullets and tanks in an effort to re-take government buildings under separatists’ control. Here too, Gorbachev himself first empowered the Baltic independence drives—by sanctioning the elections that created democratic parliaments, and by encouraging the glasnost that shed light on a bitter past, including the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 that sanctioned Soviet annexation of the Baltics. Here too there is no evidence that Gorbachev ordered use of deadly force—and much evidence that it was the decision of local commanders in concert with hardliners of the local Latvian and Lithuanian “Committees of National Salvation” and the national Soyuz (union) parliamentary faction. The latter, led by reactionary military officers, had called for Gorbachev’s ouster and, by provoking violence, hoped to prompt the imposition of martial law. Gorbachev can certainly be faulted for raising tensions with the Baltic republics as he sought to obstruct their drive for independence, and for not doing enough to prevent the attacks. But he must also be credited with moving quickly to halt the cascading violence, replacing officials and pulling back forces.

Some twenty lives lost in the Baltics, twenty-one in Georgia, and perhaps 2,000 overall in the disintegration of a vast empire—where many of the casualties were victims not of Moscow’s efforts to preserve imperial control, but of local interethnic hatreds. What are these numbers in perspective—do they justify calling Gorbachev a bloody imperialist? Perhaps 200,000 died in the final decades of British rule in India, and 500,000 in the Algerian war for independence from France—two hundred and fifty times more than in the USSR. And these were the mid-twentieth century decolonization struggles of two mature democracies, neither of which were simultaneously struggling to overhaul their entire political-economic system. Gorbachev eventually accepted that reforms meant to revive the multinational Soviet state had failed, that it could not be saved without major violence. The imperial sinews of the Soviet ideological and military-industrial complexes never accepted it at all, and in the chaos of surging nationalism and crumbling central authority—with hardliners’ defiance turbocharged by the loss of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe—it is certain that under any other Soviet leader the bloodshed would have been many times greater.

IT IS flatly wrong to assert as Applebaum does that Gorbachev “did not help design democratic institutions” when he proposed or promoted all of them—freedom of speech and the press, freedom of assembly, and multi-candidate elections from city councils up to a new national legislature—against fierce party opposition. To describe Gorbachev as a bloody “totalitarian,” as Peter Dickinson does, is positively Orwellian. And to claim as Gessen does that “he wasn’t able to imagine what his country would be if it wasn’t an empire” is a gross distortion. Early and often he warned Eastern European party leaders that they needed to reform, that Moscow would not intervene to save them, and they must win popular support. The winds of glasnost blew from east to west, and when free elections were held and the communists voted out, Gorbachev stood by. So much for the external empire, and as for the internal one—the Soviet Union itself—Gorbachev tried mightily to convert it from a repressive empire to a prosperous, consensual, democratic union. When economic reforms failed, nationalism flared, and separatist demands gained overwhelming popular support in the non-Russian republics, Gorbachev stepped aside.

Adam Michnik, the longtime Polish dissident and human-rights activist, certainly understood the reflexive cruelty of the communist system and the tenacity of Soviet imperialism better than most—from beatings, jailings, and the 1981 crushing of the Solidarity movement that he helped found and lead. Thus he reveled in Gorbachev’s encouragement of democratization in Eastern Europe and marveled at the emergence from this system of a leader so liberal and audacious—describing him as a “genetic error.” Andrei Gromyko—the longtime Soviet foreign minister who helped craft that imperialism from the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia through the suppression of Solidarity and beyond (until Gorbachev fired him shortly after taking power in 1985)—saw the same traits but characterized them somewhat differently: Gorbachev, he said, was like a “Martian.” From their diametrically opposing perspectives, Michnik and Gromyko agreed on one thing with absolute certainty: Gorbachev was anything but a “quintessential Soviet apparatchik.”

Could he have designed better economic reforms? Yes, absolutely. But try as you might, you will not find a practicable plan for wholesale reform and rapid market transition from either Soviet or Western economists in the early-mid 1980s. (And in any case, Western economists were rarely found among the ex-collective farm chairmen and factory managers who made up the Politburo.) Such proposals as existed were either impractically vague and utopian, or offered what are now denounced as “half measures.” Which goes to say that Gorbachev did the best he could with limited analytical resources, and only in looking back is it “obvious” what he should have done at this or that crossroads—or even that this or that was a crossroads. Even with 20/20 hindsight we still haven’t found a feasible alternative to Gorbachev’s piecemeal approach. Those most frequently touted either ignore the powerful vested interests of the old USSR and assume that legions of military-industrial managers would meekly retire to an imaginary new private sector (and they also assume massive hard-currency reserves to cushion years of dire austerity and a lost social-safety net). Or they follow some variant of the Chinese path and impose extremely painful, wrenching reforms in the absence of any democratization. The former was obviously impossible, and the latter clearly unacceptable.

Couldn’t he have just announced in 1989, as separatist currents grew strong and some republics declared independence, that the USSR was indeed a “hateful and oppressive” empire, that he apologized for the decades of communist rule and now demanded “a full reckoning with the Soviet past,” and that the republics were now all free to leave the USSR? This is wildly unrealistic, and needs no counterfactual analysis to demonstrate; the hardline forces that arrayed against Gorbachev—those that demanded he “restore order,” that called for imposition of martial law, that repeatedly sparked violence, and that twice tried to oust him—were driven by the singular imperative of preserving the Soviet Union. Yet this is exactly what Applebaum suggests Gorbachev should have done. And the explanation for this incredible argument lies less in what was possible in 1989, and more in trying to blame him for Putin’s attack on Ukraine in 2022.

The fact that Gorbachev approved Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea was, according to Applebaum, “an action that helped catalyze the wave of imperial nostalgia that has now brought us the war in Ukraine.” This is ludicrous, both for claiming that Putin was swept along by a popular “wave” in deciding to invade Ukraine, and also for blaming this apparently irresistible force on the aged Gorbachev’s influence over Russia—when he was actually scorned and ignored in his own country. In fact, this scorn stemmed precisely from belief that “He gave in to the West, and gave up the Soviet empire, without a fight.” Far from a precursor to Putin, Gorbachev was in every respect the anti-Putin. And the bloody consequences of Putin’s imperial nostalgia today should serve as a reminder of what the Soviet hardliners arrayed against Gorbachev were fully prepared to do to preserve the Soviet empire.

But Gorbachev “never spoke out” against the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, critics complain, overlooking that as he struggled with his final illness the ninety-one-year-old Gorbachev spent most of his final months in and out of the hospital (and so was incapable of catalyzing waves of anything). But what Gorbachev had done repeatedly, and for over twenty years, was to criticize the expansion of NATO, something that apparently makes him a virtual accomplice to Putin. Simply by being the main witness to the broken promises of 1990—that if Moscow assented to German reunification and membership in NATO, then the alliance “would not expand one inch Eastward”—Gorbachev was a constant reminder that, if anything, it was the West’s continual expansion of military power directed at Russia that “helped catalyze a wave of imperial nostalgia.”

This argument is radioactive in today’s climate, as anyone who suggests that Western policies such as NATO expansion—along with America’s “export of democracy” through regime change, or abrogation of key arms control treaties—have contributed to the souring of Russia-Western relations will quickly learn. There can be absolutely no crediting of the Russian perspective—or risk being branded Putin’s dupe—since Russians are inveterate imperialists, from Gorbachev, to Putin, to the general population wallowing in “imperial nostalgia.” As conservative columnist George F. Will once claimed in arguing for NATO enlargement, “expansionism is in Russia’s national DNA”—an argument now essentially echoed by many Western liberals.

WILL, AN unabashed Russophobe, is incensed at tributes to Gorbachev that place a Soviet apparatchik alongside an American hero—President Ronald Reagan—as statesmen who worked together to end the Cold War. Echoing the “he didn’t know what he was doing” sneer, Will argued in the Washington Post that “Gorbachev’s reputation rests on the world’s amnesia,” namely that he “stumbled into greatness by misunderstanding where he was going.” Maybe it is Will’s reputation that rests on his readers’ amnesia, since in 1988 it was Will who denounced the Cold War-ending nuclear arms control agreements hammered out by Reagan and Gorbachev as a “chimera” that reflected the “incoherence” of Reagan’s foreign policy.

Personal animus rings through these postmortem denunciations of Gorbachev, which are extraordinarily petty when they turn to Gorbachev’s life after leaving office. “He was invited [to Cold War anniversaires] as a trophy, a living, breathing souvenir” and “He started a think tank called the Gorbachev Foundation. He did charity work. He tried and failed to start [a] museum of Stalinist terror.” Such descriptions are not just mean, but ignorant. More accurate would be:

He supported independent media, particularly the newspaper Novaya Gazeta which he launched with his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize winnings. He founded and supported Green International, an NGO dedicated to environmental protection and education. He raised money to build a state-of-the-art hospital for the treatment of childhood leukemia in St. Petersburg. He sustained the Gorbachev Foundation, which not only maintains a presidential archive and runs an active program of political seminars and historical conferences in Moscow, but also collaborates with Western research groups such as the National Security Archive to translate, edit, and publish hundreds of documents and memoirs. And even if largely ignored in both Russia and the West, he continued to advocate international cooperation on pressing global issues, to lament the squandering of the opportunities created by the Cold War’s end, and to decry both unilateralism abroad and the fraying of democracy at home—whether in Russia or the West.

Ignoring most of this, Gessen instead mocks the elderly Gorbachev as somebody who “rambled,” “went off on tangents,” and “who could never finish a sentence or get to the punch line—and whose accent marked him, to the end, as a country bumpkin.” Yes, shockingly, as he neared the end of life Gorbachev failed to improve his diction or elevate his accent (though I can attest that he certainly finished sentences and told jokes with sardonic punch lines). And that apparently is what galls most of all—that he wasn’t a cultured Russian intelligent but a hayseed apparatchik who soared high above his humble origins, accomplished historic deeds and gained international acclaim, and then had the temerity to look at us and say: “You have become arrogant, a danger not only to the world but to yourself. America needs perestroika too.” As psychologists tell us, an angry, disingenuous, ad hominem attack is often simply confirmation that the criticism has hit home.

By Big Serge, Substack, 10/28/22

It has been several weeks since I last posted in this space – while I could apologize for the hiatus, I actually believe that one should only write when they have something to say – I do not believe in content simply for the sake of content (call that the Disney model). Events on the ground in Ukraine have been subdued for the past few weeks. This, so far at least, is in keeping with the predictions I made in previous posts that the front would stabilize towards the end of October as Ukraine’s offensive capability degraded and Russian reserves began to enter the theater. We’ll talk on that more in a bit – the real impetus for writing now is to take stock of some of the agitation (both nuclear and conventional) that has occurred in recent weeks and discuss the risks of escalation, with some other minutia and tangential content thrown in.

Straight off the top, I will state that my overall view of the war’s trajectory remains the same. I do not believe nuclear use is likely, and I do not believe outside actors will formally enter the war on behalf of Ukraine. I still think that direct kinetic action will remain contained to the conventional war between Russia and Ukraine, with western support remaining confined to armaments, command and control assistance, intelligence sharing, and economic measures against Russia. NATO personnel are certainly on the ground in Ukraine, but operating in a “volunteer” or informal capacity to keep the veneer of plausible deniability. This veneer will remain intact, and preclude the formal deployment of NATO units to the battlefield.

While I remain attached to this conventional sketch of the war and do not anticipate the conflict to escalate out of control, the nuclear talk is certainly concerning enough to merit a bit of a think – so let’s take a look.

Signifying Nothing

One of the idiosyncrasies of the discourse in the age of the internet is the great difficulty involved in trying to keep timelines straight. I presume this is because the digital space makes information available simultaneously, creating a sort of temporal distortion for the reader. All that is simply to say that it might be useful to hammer out a timeline of events (or really, statements) to figure out how we ended up with nuclear use talk circulating.

The beginning of all this was a September 30th speech by Putin in which he pledged to defend Russia – including the four newly reunited oblasts – using any necessary methods. He did not explicitly use the world nuclear, but this was clearly implied in the scope of his expression “all the forces and resources we have.” This statement amounts to little more than a restatement of Russia’s nuclear use doctrine, which is well understood and a matter of public record.

Russia’s nuclear use doctrine has actually narrowed over time. A previous articulation of the doctrine, promulgated in 2000, stipulated that nuclear weapons could be used in situations “critical to the National Security of Russia” – a very open ended requirement that really places no restrictions at all, given the track record of great powers defining all manner of sundry minutia as critical matters of national security.

The newer version of the nuclear use doctrine, revised in 2010, is more narrow and reads as follows:

“Russia reserves the right to utilize nuclear weapons in response to the utilization of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and (or) its allies, and also in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation involving the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is under threat.”

It is the last sentence that is the most important. This can be read fairly simply: Russia may use nuclear weapons to avoid losing a conventional war with existential stakes. A 2020 memorandum titled “On Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence” articulated this further, and clarified that Russia’s nuclear deterrence:

“is aimed at maintaining the nuclear forces potential at the level sufficient for nuclear deterrence, and guarantees protection of national sovereignty and territorial integrity of the State.”

The use case is fairly straightforward. Nuclear use would be authorized in cases where Russia is losing a war that threatens to either destroy the state or strip its territories. Putin’s statement is entirely consistent with this and does not reflect any sort of revision or escalation of Russia’s approach to nuclear weapons – his statement represents little more than a reminder that Kherson, Zaporozhia, Donetsk, and Lugansk Oblasts are now, in the eyes of the state, subject to that territorial integrity clause. It does not raise the prospect of nuclear weapons use unless Russia was irretrievably losing the conventional war.

This, of course, did not stop western media from spinning Putin’s statements as a “threat” to use nuclear weapons. The narrative that Putin was making threats almost immediately prompted people to put words in his mouth and deduce that he was intimating at the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine.

Tactical nuclear weapons tend to be a bit of an obfuscation. Alternatively termed battlefield nukes, or simply nonstrategic nuclear weapons, all this really means is a lower yield nuclear weapon deployed against the enemy’s conventional military assets and bases. Furthermore, that term – “lower yield” – is highly relative. A nonstrategic warhead these days may pack a blast yield of between 10 and 50 kilotons – nothing compared to modern strategic weapons (the American B83 clocks in at 1,200 kt), but still in the range, if not higher, than the bombs that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which came in at around 15-20.

In short, a “tactical nuke” is still an unbelievably destructive weapon, but it sounds just benign enough for people to believe that Russia might actually try it. This is just silly. To begin with, nobody on the Russian side made reference to nonstrategic weapons – the entire concept is a western interpolation. Using low yield nuclear weapons would be more than just counterproductive, it would completely smash important elements of Putin’s overarching political framework for the war. Russia aims to retain the support of key Eurasian powers like China and India, keep the United States and NATO from becoming directly involved in the Ukraine War, and maintain the attritive tempo of the war by preventing the transfer of weapons like ATACMs to Ukraine. Deploying a tactical nuclear weapon would shatter all these objectives. It also strains credulity to presume that Russia, which began the war with a very light hand, sparing critical infrastructure at the onset and generally handling the Ukrainians gently, would skip multiple escalation rungs and resort directly to a very blunt instrument.

The question of Russian nuclear use dovetailed with newer claims (which really accelerated in the last week) that Ukraine plans to detonate a dirty bomb, which would then be blamed on Russia as a pretense to bring the west directly into the conflict. Ukraine has countered with that most classic of argumentative devices: “No, you.” A dirty bomb is a very different sort of device from a nuclear weapon. Whereas a nuclear warhead uses nuclear fission to generate explosive energy, a dirty bomb uses a conventional explosive device to spread radioactive material. A nuclear bomb generates tremendous explosive power, of which radioactivity is a byproduct – a dirty bomb has conventional explosive power, with the spread radioactive contamination as the intentional effect.

I do not believe a dirty bomb will be detonated in Ukraine.

Russia will not use a dirty bomb because there is absolutely no reason to do so. A dirty bomb lacks the direct explosive power of a nuclear weapon – the only thing it does that a conventional weapon does not is to spread radioactive material, poisoning the landscape and the people. This, very simply, has little to no military utility for Russia (and even military downside because it irradiates the battlefield) while bearing the same political downside as a tactical nuclear weapon: collapse of global support for Russia and NATO intervention.

That leaves only Ukraine itself, and in this case we are asked to believe that Ukraine would irradiate its own territory simply to try and bluff NATO into entering the war on its side. However, with NATO more or less running the Ukrainian state at this point, this amounts to claiming that NATO itself is seeking to use a dirty bomb as a false flag so that it can enter the war.

Phew. Lots going on, clearly.

Let’s take a step back and look at the broader context – using the destruction of the Nordstream Pipeline as a lodestar. The thing that was perhaps the most striking about the pipeline explosion was the fact that nobody really reacted to it. Of course, words and accusations were thrown both directions, but there was no discernable shift either from the west or from Russia in their handling of the situation. That the destruction of the pipeline was simply tolerated is strong evidence of a mutual commitment to avoid escalation. Compare this to the terrorist attack on the Kerch Bridge, which prompted a ferocious punitive barrage by Russia and intensified strikes on Ukraine’s energy grid.

Both Russia and NATO have shown a strong desire to keep the conflict quarantined to the Ukrainian theater at an acceptable intensity, and it seems they are determined to stay the course as nuclear rumors have gained intensity. Significantly, Russian Defense Minister Shoygu had a phone conversation with his American counterpart Lloyd Austin, after which the US government stated that it has seen no evidence that Russia intends to use nuclear weaponry. Putin followed up on this with his own statement that Russia has no plans to use nuclear weapons and that it would make neither military nor political sense to do so.

My broad understanding of all this is that the narrative got away from the parties involved. Putin reiterated Russia’s established nuclear use doctrine, which prompted a media spiral in the west that created a Russian “nuclear threat” whole cloth, before both parties began a climbdown. A nuclear incident would benefit nobody. Both NATO and Russia possess the ability to escalate without irradiating the Ukrainian steppe, and both parties would like the situation to remain controlled.

In the end, while the idea of nuclear war should always be taken seriously, the idea that a mushroom cloud is soon to rise over Kiev was, as Macbeth said, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Force Generation and Order of Battle

Let us shift gears from the nuclear realm back to the conventional, and talk about two different force deployments to Ukraine – one fictional, and one that is occurring right now.

One cause of alarm recently was the news that units from the famed 101st Airborne Division had been deployed to Romania, just miles from the Ukrainian border. Imaginations ran wild and concluded that the “Screaming Eagles” were going to cross the border and start World War Three. Putting aside the fact that this is only a partial deployment that was planned months ago, the idea that the USA could get involved in the war this quickly is a bit detached from reality.

It actually takes a huge amount of effort to start a war. The infrastructure and logistics that need to be in place are truly enormous. Military rear areas and logistics are more complicated and involved than people commonly understand – from ammo dumps, to fuel and vehicle depots, to command and control infrastructure, to the truck and air lifts that connect it all. This is to say nothing of the need to stage the requisite number of troops to actually achieve something. None of this occurs overnight, or even in secret. Military buildups are highly visible, and have to be obfuscated with diplomatic uncertainty.

US deployment to Saudi Arabia began in August 1990, a full six months before the ground campaign in Operation Desert Storm actually got underway. For the second American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the buildup similarly took months. In the case of the current Russo-Ukrainian War, Russia’s military staging began fully a year before the shooting started (I told some friends in June 2021 that Russia was going to attempt to annex everything east of the Dnieper).

The deployment of airborne units (and not even the entire division) to Romania simply does not constitute anything like the buildup needed for the United States to enter the war. These are not meaningful force deployment levels, nor do they have the infrastructure in place to support them. We’re instead seeing a fairly mundane show the flag exercise, of the sort that occur with regularity around the world and which virtually never precipitate war.

But while we’re on the subject of force generation and deployment, I thought it might be apropos to talk about the Russian mobilization and force structure, and discuss an idiosyncrasy of the Russian military – the Battalion Tactical Group.

Let’s take a step back. Much of military organization depends on what we can call the base maneuver unit. This refers to the smallest level of organization that is capable of effective combined arms operations (cooperative use of armor, artillery, and infantry). Another way of putting this would be to ask, what is the smallest unit in the army that has comprehensive capabilities? This, alas, is where we get into those horrid order of battle diagrams, which are worse than gibberish to the layman.

This sort of organization began with Napoleon, who divided his army into corps. A corps was a combined arms unit, with its own cavalry, infantry, and cannon. However, the units *within* the corps – like an infantry division or a cavalry brigade – were not combined arms. Therefore, a corps had a comprehensive combat capability that made it suitable for any battlefield task, but the sub-units of the corps did not. This made the corps Napoleon’s base maneuver unit – the lowest level unit that could operate independently.

By the time of the World Wars, the division had become the base maneuver unit (a German infantry division had a sizeable organic artillery component). Later, the Panzer Division became the universally adaptable maneuver unit par excellence, with tanks, motorized infantry, artillery, and engineering. These were units that, assuming they were at full strength, could be assigned virtually any combat task.

Fast forward to the modern day – the basic needs remain the same. How does one organize an army around appropriately sized combined arms units that can take on a wide variety of tasks? For most armies, the regiment or brigade (a unit of a few thousand men) is the base combined arms maneuver unit. Russia, however, was forced to experiment due to a variety of unique factors.

Russia’s force generation model is unique, as I mentioned in my last post, utilizing a mixture of conscripts and contract professionals. This mixture, combined with fiscal austerity, creates a unique challenge. Suppose you have a brigade which is kept at only 80% strength during peacetime. Of that remaining force, a substantial fraction are conscripts, who legally cannot be deployed except to defend Russian territory. You are left with a sort of rump brigade that is actually deployable at any given moment. The solution for Russia was to create the 700-900 man Battalion Tactical Group – a smaller, derivative combined arms formation from the larger parent unit (the brigade).

This is key to understanding Russia’s performance in the war to this point. The BTG was devised as a temporary solution to the problem of being legally unable to readily deploy the entire parent brigade. The resulting formation is very high on firepower, with plenty of artillery and armor, but low on infantry. It is a powerful unit in short, high-intensity action, but it lacks the manpower to engage in protracted campaigns with full strength enemy units. A BTG will lack the ability to quickly regenerate combat power without cannibalizing other units.

What we have seen from Russia so far is entirely predictable given the type of force it generated at the beginning of the war. There has been a strong preoccupation with conserving infantry, because this is the arm that the BTG is most lacking. A unit that is overweight on ranged fires and low on infantry is not going to try to defend a tricky forward line – it’s going to pull back and impose a cost on the enemy with its fires. Is this ideal? No, clearly it would be better to have sufficient infantry so that it was unnecessary to hollow out portions of the front. However, the manpower fragility of the BTG necessitates this methodology – the BTG would prefer to retaliate with ranged fires from behind a proxy tripwire force – exactly like the national guard and militia that were manning the frontline in Kharkov Oblast. This leaves front lines vulnerable to penetration, especially when the Ukrainians use dispersed points of contact – but Russia’s tube and rocket advantage give it the ability to impose a foreboding cost when Ukraine pushes into those hollowed regions.

Why is this relevant right now? Well, Russia is in the process of a large mobilization drive which will radically alter the force deployment and organization scheme. The BTG is likely to disappear from the battlefield entirely, with mobilized personnel empowering a shift back to the parent formations (brigades and regiments) that do not have the infantry shortages that proved problematic for the BTG.

The Battalion Tactical Group was a novel attempt to solve a tricky force generation problem, which allowed Russia to keep potent combined arms formations in a ready state. They are high firepower units that proved capable of dishing out horrific punishment – but they are (and always were) temporary derivatives that are simply not designed for a war of attrition or manning a wide front. With mobilization underway, it seems that the time of the BTG has come to a close.

Link here.

By Pepe Escobar, The Cradle, 11/2/22

So, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan picks up the phone and calls his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin: let’s talk about the “grain deal.” Putin, cool, calm and collected, explains the facts to the Sultan:

First, the reason why Russia withdrew from the export grain deal.

Second, how Moscow seeks a serious investigation into the – terrorist – attack on the Black Sea fleet, which for all practical purposes seems to have violated the deal.

And third, how Kiev must guarantee it will uphold the deal, brokered by Turkey and the UN.

Only then would Russia consider coming back to the table.

And then – today, 2 November – the coup de theatre: Russia’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) announces the country is back to the Black Sea grain deal, after receiving the necessary written guarantees from Kiev.

The MoD, quite diplomatically, praised the “efforts” of both Turkey and the UN: Kiev is committed not to use the “Maritime Humanitarian Corridor” for combat operations, and only in accordance with the provisions of the Black Sea Initiative.

Moscow said the guarantees are sufficient “for the time being.” Implying that can always change.

All rise to the Sultan’s persuasion

Erdogan must have been extremely persuasive with Kiev. Before the phone call to Putin, the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) had already explained that the attack on the Black Sea Fleet was conducted by 9 aerial drones and 7 naval drones, plus an American RQ-4B Global Hawk observation drone lurking in the sky over neutral waters.

The attack happened under the cover of civilian ships and targeted Russian vessels that escorted the grain corridor in the perimeter of their responsibility, as well as the infrastructure of the Russian base in Sevastopol.

The MoD explicitly designated British experts deployed in the Ochakov base in the Nikolaev region as the designers of this military operation.

At the UN Security Council, Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzya declared himself “surprised” that the UN leadership “failed not only to condemn, but even to express concern over the terrorist attacks.”

After stating that the Brit-organized Kiev operation on the Black Sea Fleet “put an end to the humanitarian dimension of the Istanbul agreements,” Nebenzya also clarified:

“It is our understanding that the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine agreed on under UN supervision on 22 July, must not be implemented without Russia, and so we do not view the decisions that were made without our involvement as binding.”

This means, in practice, that Moscow “cannot allow for unimpeded passage of vessels without our inspection.” The crucial question is how and where these inspections will be carried out – as Russia has warned the UN that it will definitely inspect dry cargo ships in the Black Sea.

The UN, for its part, tried at best to put on a brave face, believing Russia’s suspension is “temporary” and looking forward to welcoming “its highly professional team” back to the Joint Coordination Center.

According to humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths, the UN also proclaims to be “ready to address concerns.” And that has to be soon, because the deal reaches its 120-day extension point on November 19.

Well, “addressing concerns” is not exactly the case. Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia Dmitry Polyansky said that at the UN Security Council meeting western nations simply could not deny their involvement in the Sevastopol attack; instead, they simply blamed Russia.

All the way to Odessa

Prior to the phone call with Erdogan, Putin had already pointed out that “34 percent of the grain exported under the deal goes to Turkey, 35 percent to EU countries and only 3-4 percent to the poorest countries. Is this what we did everything for?”

That’s correct. For instance, 1.8 million tons of grain went to Spain; 1.3 million tons to Turkey; and 0.86 million tons to Italy. By contrast, only 0,067 tons went to “starving” Yemen and 0,04 tons to “starving” Afghanistan.

Putin made it very clear that Moscow was not withdrawing from the grain deal but had only suspended its participation.

And as a further gesture of good will, Moscow announced it would willingly ship 500,000 tons of grain to poorer nations for free, in an effort to replace the integral amount that Ukraine should have been able to export.

All this time, Erdogan skillfully maneuvered to convey the impression he was occupying the higher ground: even if Russia behaves in an “indecisive” manner, as he defined it, we will continue to pursue the grain deal.

So, it seems like Moscow was being tested – by the UN and by Ankara, which happens to be the main beneficiary of the grain deal and is clearly profiting from this economic corridor. Ships continue to depart from Odessa to Turkish ports – mainly Istanbul – without Moscow’s agreement. It was expected they would be “filtered” by Russia when coming back to Odessa.

The immediate Russian means of pressure was unleashed in no time: preventing Odessa from becoming a terrorist infrastructure node. This means constant visits by cruise missiles.

Well, the Russians have already “visited” the Ochakov base occupied by Kiev and the British experts. Ochakov – between Nikolaev and Odessa – was built way back in 2017, with key American input.

The British units that were involved in the sabotage of the Nord Streams – according to Moscow – are the same ones that planned the Sevastopol operation. Ochakov is constantly spied upon and sometimes hit out of positions that the Russians have cleared last month only 8 km to the south, on the extremity of the Kinburn peninsula. And yet the base has not been totally destroyed.

To reinforce the “message,” the real response to the attack on Sevastopol has been this week’s relentless “visits” of Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure; if maintained, virtually the whole of Ukraine will soon be plunged into darkness.

Closing down the Black Sea

The attack on Sevastopol may have been the catalyst leading to a Russian move to close down the Black Sea – with Odessa converted into an absolutely priority for the Russian Army. There are serious rumblings across Russia on why Russophone Odessa had not been the object of pinpointed targeting before.

Top infrastructure for Ukrainian Special Forces and British advisers is based in Odessa and Nikolaev. Now there’s no question these will be destroyed.

Even with the grain deal in theory back on track, it is hopeless to expect Kiev to abide by any agreements. After all, every major decision is taken either by Washington or by the Brits at NATO. Just like bombing the Crimea Bridge, and then the Nord Streams, attacking the Black Sea Fleet was designed as a serious provocation.

The brilliant designers though seem to have IQs lower than refrigerator temperatures: every Russian response always plunges Ukraine deeper down an inescapable – and now literally black – hole.

The grain deal seemed to be a sort of win-win. Kiev would not contaminate Black Sea ports again after they were demined. Turkey turned into a grain transport hub for the poorest nations (actually that’s not what happened: the main beneficiary was the EU). And sanctions on Russia were eased on the export of agricultural products and fertilizers.

This was, in principle, a boost for Russian exports. In the end, it did not work out because many players were worried about possible secondary sanctions.

It is important to remember that the Black Sea grain deal is actually two deals: Kiev signed a deal with Turkey and the UN, and Russia signed a separate deal with Turkey.

The corridor for the grain carriers is only 2 km wide. Minesweepers move in parallel along the corridor. Ships are inspected by Ankara. So the Kiev-Ankara-UN deal remains in place. It has nothing to do with Russia – which in this case does not escort and/or inspect the cargoes.

What changes with Russia “suspending” its own deal with Ankara and the UN, is that from now on, Moscow can proceed anyway it deems fit to neutralize terrorist threats and even invade and take over Ukrainian ports: that will not represent a violation of the deal with Ankara and the UN.

So in this respect, it is a game-changer.

Seems like Erdogan fully understood the stakes, and told Kiev in no uncertain terms to behave. There’s no guarantee, though, that western powers won’t come up with another Black Sea provocation. Which means that sooner or later – perhaps by the Spring of 2023 – General Armageddon will have to come up with the goods. That translates as advancing all the way to Odessa.