(http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/181924/how-stalin-fooled-world-and-why-it-matters-today-daniel-greenfield)

(http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-putin-poll-idUSKCN0W512D)

James Harris actually sounds like a very credible authority on the Stalin era of the Soviet Union in his July 28th article for The Conversation.  His insights about it, which comprise the first 80% of the piece,  are interesting and motivated me to put his book in my Amazon cart.  But in the home stretch, he trots out the same old tired – and mostly discredited – tropes about Putin and Russia, trying to somehow generalize out from Stalin to Putin.  And that’s when I started to sigh, shake my head and curse under my breath at my computer screen.

Harris jumps from the recalcitrant attitude and crimes of the KGB in 1954 to Putin having been employed by the agency from the 1970’s to approximately 1991.  No context or detail is provided about the nature of Putin’s actual job at the KGB, just innuendo that Putin, by virtue of having worked for the agency, is a really scary dude and somehow comparable to Stalin:

The Soviet political police, renamed the KGB in 1954, never recognised the monstrous crimes that they had contributed to under Stalin’s direction. They perceived themselves as heroes of the story, brilliantly anticipating and intercepting the evil deeds of the regime’s enemies.

Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, rose from the ranks of the KGB in the 1970s. He was trained in its methods and steeped in its mentality. While one should not leap to the conclusion that he is a prisoner of his early career, the echoes of KGB (and Stalin’s) thinking are present in the messages delivered relentlessly by the state-controlled media.

The population is told that the US and EU want to reduce Russia to the status of a third-rate power, to take control over her resources and subvert her values. Putin does not propose officially to rehabilitate the figure of Stalin, but he does little to challenge the public presentation of his predecessor as someone who made Russia a great power, and who stood up to the West.

Today we better understand the exaggerated fears that sparked the paroxysm of state violence that was the Great Terror. But in Russia, the echoes of those same fears prevent an open discussion of Stalin’s crimes, and serve to reinforce Putin’s authoritarianism.

In his early years at the KGB, Putin worked in counter-espionage and later served for several years in Dresden as a mid-level analyst.  He was not an assassin or torturer, and he turned down a promotion to the headquarters of the KGB’s foreign intelligence operations division in Moscow upon his return to the Soviet Union, finally resigning from the agency to work for the liberal reform mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, eventually serving as his trusted deputy.

While I have no doubt that Putin’s time in the KGB was influential for him, I tend to think it is overblown and obscures other major influences on Putin.  Everyone has heard of his KGB past ad nauseum.  However, how many people know that Putin is a lawyer whose expertise is in international law?  How many people know that Putin did considerable work toward a PhD in the realm of economics?  How many people know that Putin is highly skilled in judo, took it up as a child, and has stated in an interview that judo is not just a sport, but a philosophy?

I think it’s also a philosophy in a way, and I think it’s a philosophy that teaches one to treat one’s partner with respect. And I engage in this sport with pleasure and try to have regular practices still.

Might that comment warrant some significance in analyzing Putin’s mindset?  Is it possible that Putin might be somewhat of an intellectual with all of that education in law and economics?

Can we entertain the possibility that maybe Putin is a much more nuanced and complicated leader who has been doing his best to revive a sprawling country that was virtually a failed state in 2000 – in a leadership position that he didn’t ask for and didn’t want when Yeltsin approached him as his successor?

No, it’s all about the KGB all the time and the implication that he’s Stalin Jr.  This, despite the fact that Russia is a transitional society with elements of both democracy and authoritarianism and Putin, aside from Gorbachev and Medvedev, is the least authoritarian leader Russia has ever had in its 1,000 year history of authoritarian rule.

This is not to say that Putin has no faults or has never made any mistakes.  I don’t believe that Putin is the second coming, like a few people I’ve encountered seem to think.  But as far as matching Stalin’s viciousness, there is no actual evidence supporting claims that Putin puts out hits on anyone who looks at him funny, be they journalists or political opponents.  These are simply unsubstantiated claims that are repeated in the western media until they are taken as fact.  In the race to lock up as many of one’s own citizens as possible, Russia lags behind both the U.S. (#1) and China (#2).  Putin has even nixed popular requests to bring back the death penalty.

Does this really sound like someone who makes decisions based on What Would Stalin Do?  On the contrary, Uncle Joe would surely view Putin – presiding over no state executions or gulags and minimal overt censorship – as a total weenie.

As far as the claim that Putin does little to challenge a positive image of Stalin, perhaps Harris didn’t get the memo about Putin approving a monument that is currently being erected in Moscow to honor the victims of Stalin’s repressions (indeed all of the victims of political repression throughout Russian history).  Guess he never heard of the petition that the locals of Volgograd presented to Putin a couple of years back requesting that the name of their city be permanently changed back to Stalingrad.  Putin demurred.

As for the “alleged mistreatment” by the West that Harris implies is a myth that Russia invokes just to be a whiner, one would have to forget about Putin’s first term in office in which he made quite an effort to work with the West, despite the fact that the West had tried to ruthlessly exploit Russia in the 1990’s, before he was forced to realize that his attempts at cooperation got him no reciprocity with respect to Russia’s interests.  And as we all know, NATO is really just a merry club of democratic nations, flirting with Russia on its borders. Russia, like some coy maiden, is just pretending not to like it.

Perhaps Harris just couldn’t be bothered with these irrelevant details.  It might spoil that propaganda narrative we’re constantly being bludgeoned with – a propaganda narrative that serves neither the Russian people nor the American people in the long run.

It’s much the same from Stephen Kotkin, author of the acclaimed “Stalin” – a multi-volume biography of the demon from Georgia.  Volume I comes in at just under a thousand pages.  As with Harris, I have no doubt as to Kotkin’s encyclopedic knowledge of Stalin and his grand insights into the man and the era. But in a December 2014 interview with Strobe Talbot – an American exceptionalist and advocate of NATO expansion during the Bill Clinton administration – Kotkin veers off the same cliff toward the end of his interview.

But, in the end, you have a tragic history that’s very difficult to assimilate, but there were things that Stalin did that Putin cannot overcome.  And then there are behaviors that we see with Stalin that Putin is trying to learn from.  Putin is not a figure on the level of Stalin.  There is no figure in world history with fewer exceptions that are on the level of Stalin in terms of how long they ruled and what happened under their rule.

Kotkin does not elaborate on what exactly “Putin cannot overcome” with respect to the Stalin era history or what behaviors of Stalin that “Putin is trying to learn from.”  The comment obscures more than it clarifies.  Of course, Talbot jumps on the Putin tie-in by asking Kotkin the following semi-incoherent question:

This thing with the comparison and the contrast between Putinism and Stalinism, it seems to me, on the basis of what you’ve just said, that the most salient difference between the two isms is that Stalinism was based on the glorification of ethnic pluralism and subsuming all nationalisms into an internationalist ideology; whereas, Putin has substituted for that international ideology, Russian chauvinism with its companion piece, irredentism.  First of all, is that a fair characterization?  And as you extrapolate from that looking forward, do you see a danger for Russia?

To which Kotkin provides a truly bizarre answer:

One of the reasons Putin is very different from Gorbachev — there are many different reasons, okay, not just one reason. But one of the reasons is because Gorbachev was in charge of a multiethnic state, the Soviet Union, for which integration into larger structures could make sense. The country is 50-something percent ethnic Russian under Gorbachev. Now, today’s Russia is more than 80 percent ethnic Russian. It is a very Russian national state in composition. And so the idea of managing a multinational empire is not as salient as it was under Gorbachev. Instead, you’re dealing with a Russian national — something like this we have with Serbia and Yugoslavia. In some ways, Yugoslavia was an attempt to contain Serbia nationalism. And in some ways, the Soviet Union was a container of Russian nationalism. But here’s the thing that’s similar though. For all those differences, those are very, very important. And when you go down the Russian nationalist path, when you are conjuring a Russian national story, when you are playing to the Russian national crowd as Putin is doing, we’re not sure where this is going.

First of all, the question was to compare and contrast Putin with Stalin, not Gorbachev.  Since Kotkin says “Gorbachev” three times, it is not likely that he simply misspoke and said “Gorbachev” when he meant to say “Stalin.”  So, one has to ask:  why would Kotkin choose to shift the discussion from a comparison of Putin with Stalin to Putin with Gorbachev.

My guess is that Kotkin is aware that on some level he is expected to say that Putin is an authoritarian baddie with no redeeming qualities and, to some extent, he knows he must play to that expectation if he wants to be invited back to discuss his work at such prestigious venues as the Brookings Institution.   After all, mainstream western news networks and pundits are not busting down Prof. Stephen F. Cohen’s door with requests for interviews and presentations. Cohen is a preeminent expert on 20th and 21st century Russia, but he refuses to go against the evidence and say that Putin is Stalin, so he is persona non grata for most of the western mainstream media.

Kotkin must also must know that Putin is simply nowhere in the same league as Stalin and to discuss Putin’s governance and temperament in any honest detail would undermine the Putin is Stalin innuendo, so he shifted to comparing Putin to the most liberal and least authoritarian leader in Russia’s history, Gorbachev.*

From what I can ascertain at this point, there are complicated feelings about Stalin in Russia.  It is largely recognized, for example, that if Stalin had not brutally modernized the Soviet Union, the Nazis would probably have been able to overrun them.  For better or worse, Stalin is associated with being the strong leader that got them through WWII and beat back the Nazis.  I don’t think most Russians deny his brutality as many have family members who were victims of his rule in some way.  Putin acknowledges Stalin’s leadership in WWII, but has also publicly acknowledged Stalin’s brutality and condemned it on more than one occasion.  Bottom line:  it’s complicated.

For an enlightening discussion on the complicated legacy of Stalin in contemporary Russia, listen to John Batchelor’s May 31, 2016 interview with Professor Cohen (approx. 40 minutes).

*I’m open to correction or clarification on what Kotkin was really thinking during this peculiar exchange

 

I received a special email report yesterday from the OSCE about a bombing that damaged the car carrying LPR leader Igor Plotnitsky. But in the typical fashion of the OSCE’s email reports from the Donbass, it was vague on details.   In subsequent hours, RT and The Duran have done more in-depth reporting.

RT reports:

The head of the Lugansk People’s Republic, Igor Plotnitsky, has been injured after an explosion rocked his car on the morning of August 6. It is reported he is undergoing surgery due to the injuries he received.

The incident took place in the city of Lugansk, the capital of LPR, the headquarters of the LPR People’s Militia told RIA Novosti. Two other people were injured.

It is not clear at present whether the blast occurred inside the car or near the vehicle.

“Plotnitsky is in a grave condition and is undergoing an operation,” a source told Interfax.

The explosion also reportedly damaged the facades of nearby buildings and shattered surrounding windows. Police have cordoned off the area where the explosion took place.

….Plotnitsky received shrapnel wounds, which caused damage to his liver and his spleen, a hospital source told Interfax.

An advisor to the head of the Security Service of Ukraine Yury Tandit told the 112 Ukrainechannel that Plotnitsky was deliberately targeted, adding that the LPR leader was in serious condition. “My sources report that an assassination attempt has been carried out,” he said.

A source in LPR General Prosecutor’s Office told Interfax that saboteurs could be behind the attack.

Viktor Poplavsky, an expert from Russia’s Defence Ministry, told the Life.ru news portal that he believed more than a kilo of explosives were used to create the bomb. “If the bomb was planted in the car or under the car, there would have been practically no chance of survival,” he said, adding that the explosive device might have been placed somewhere near Plotnitsky’s car.

Alexander Mercouris, over at The Duran, has provided some more context of what might be behind the attack, including in-fighting within the LPR:

Whilst there is a strong possibility that the assassination attempt was the work of the Ukrainian secret service the SBU, it is by no means impossible that it is the result of factional infighting within the Lugansk People’s Republic.

Whereas the political situation in the neighbouring Donetsk People’s Republic has stabilised with its leader Alexander Zakharchenko apparently both effective and popular, the same has not been true of the Lugansk People’s Republic where Igor Plotnitsky is a controversial figure and where there has been a string of unsolved murders going back to the early part of last year.

The most notorious of these murders was the one in May last year when the popular militia leader Alexey Mozgovoy was killed in a roadside ambush.  Mozgovoy was a known critic of Plotnitsky’s and was opposed to the Minsk II peace process, which Plotnitsky, Zakharchenko and Russia have all backed.  Inevitably Plotnitsky was accused by some of Mozgovoy’s murder, though evidence for that is slight.  Others blame the Ukrainian SBU.  The Ukrainians, for their part, predictably blame Mozgovoy’s murder on Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU.

The continued instability in the Lugansk People’s Republic must be causing the Russian authorities serious concern.  Whatever their long term aims for Ukraine, the Russians need the two people’s republics to be politically stable if the Minsk II process to which they are committed is to have any chance of success. Almost certainly, in the aftermath of the assassination attempt there will be concerned discussions underway in Moscow about what can be done to stabilise the situation in the Lugansk People’s Republic. It is not impossible that the Russian authorities will take a hand in the investigation of the assassination attempt.

I will keep up with this story and post any substantive updates I find.

A couple of weeks back, I posted a link and excerpt regarding The Intercept‘s report that former NATO commander General Philip Breedlove’s personal emails had been hacked, including some exchanges with other hawkish academics and military leaders, such as retired General Wesley Clark, that revealed Breedlove’s active attempts to undermine president Obama’s relatively tempered approach to dealing with the Ukraine crisis by using mendacious public claims in order to escalate the crisis in support of the coup government in Kiev.

Der Spiegel has now published a more thorough investigative report with respect to those hacked emails.

The newly leaked emails reveal a clandestine network of Western agitators around the NATO military chief, whose presence fueled the conflict in Ukraine. Many allies found in Breedlove’s alarmist public statements about alleged large Russian troop movements cause for concern early on. Earlier this year, the general was assuring the world that US European Command was “deterring Russia now and preparing to fight and win if necessary.”

The emails document for the first time the questionable sources from whom Breedlove was getting his information. He had exaggerated Russian activities in eastern Ukraine with the overt goal of delivering weapons to Kiev.

The general and his likeminded colleagues perceived US President Barack Obama, the commander-in-chief of all American forces, as well as German Chancellor Angela Merkel as obstacles. Obama and Merkel were being “politically naive & counter-productive” in their calls for de-escalation, according to Phillip Karber, a central figure in Breedlove’s network who was feeding information from Ukraine to the general.

“I think POTUS sees us as a threat that must be minimized,… ie do not get me into a war????” Breedlove wrote in one email, using the acronym for the president of the United States. How could Obama be persuaded to be more “engaged” in the conflict in Ukraine — read: deliver weapons — Breedlove had asked former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Breedlove sought counsel from some very prominent people, his emails show. Among them were Wesley Clark, Breedlove’s predecessor at NATO, Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs at the State Department, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Kiev.

One name that kept popping up was Phillip Karber, an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC and president of the Potomac Foundation, a conservative think tank founded by the former defense contractor BDM. By its own account, the foundation has helped eastern European countries prepare their accession into NATO. Now the Ukrainian parliament and the government in Kiev were asking Karber for help.

Regular readers here need no introduction to Victoria Nuland and Wesley Clark , two dangerous warmongers.  Both the Der Spiegel and Intercept articles go into more about Phillip Karber and I encourage readers to follow the links to both articles and read them in their entirety.

Meanwhile, Russia has invited officials from NATO for discussions toward the goal of de-escalating tensions between the two.

RT reports:

Russia has proposed to NATO a “positive program” for developing relations, aimed at decreasing tensions between Moscow and the US-led military bloc, Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov said.

“NATO’s military experts have been invited to Moscow in September for consultations concerning military and political situation in Europe,” Antonov said in a statement to the media.

Russia is ready for a constructive dialogue with NATO despite differences in approach to the reasons and consequences of the decisions made at the bloc’s summit in Warsaw in July, Antonov stressed.

During the gathering in the Polish capital, NATO member states labeled Moscow “a source of instability” and ordered an increased military presence near Russian borders.

The decisions made at the summit have been thoroughly analyzed by Russian experts, Antonov said.

One of the issues to be discussed in September is military flights over the Baltic Sea.

According to Antonov, Russia is “considering the option of performing military flights over the Baltic only with ID transponders on,” but only if NATO does the same.

NATO’s military attaches have been informed of Moscow’s offer to review the earlier existing military programs in the format of Russia-NATO Council, Antonov said.

He noted that the renewal of the Cooperative Airspace initiative between NATO and Russia would be especially useful in the current situation.

Antonov said NATO states’ military attaches will also be invited as observers to Russian Army’s Kavkaz-2016 drills, which are planned for September.

“Russia’s Defense Ministry proposed to start exchanging assessments at a military level regarding the terrorist threat, primarily to counter the spread of IS [Islamic State, formerly ISIS/ISIL] and other terrorist organizations,” he said.

“Russia is also ready for cooperation to avoid incidents at sea and in the air, based on bilateral agreements and consultations with the defense ministries of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Sweden and Finland to address mutual concerns over military activities in the border areas,” Antonov said.

 

(Map of Ukraine and surrounding areas; http://www.globalresearch.ca/donbass-and-the-big-game-reformatting-ukraine-is-on-the-agenda-russia-will-not-remain-on-the-sidelines/5453465)

The Donbas Rift

By Serhiy Kudelia, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Baylor University

Russian Politics and Law (journal), Volume 54, No, 1, 2016

 

Professor Kudelia’s in-depth report on the evolution of the Donbas rebellion in the winter of 2013-2014 in Ukraine generally follows the basic outline set out in my previous writings about the nature of the Ukraine conflict.  However, it also provides some additional facts and nuance.

One valuable point that Kudelia underscores is that the oligarchs of the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine “hedged their bets” by trying to deal with both the coup government in Kiev and its representatives as well as the rebels in Donbas.  This was a contributing factor in how the Donbas rebels were able to establish their power, increasingly independent of Kiev’s governance.

After the Euromaidan victory, the Party of Regions’ [Yanukovich’s party] public statements were limited to demands that greater power be given to local authorities and that the rights of Russian-speaking people be protected. However, the sudden departure of Yanukovych and his supporters led the party to disintegrate into several factions associated with large business groups (e.g., Rinat Akhmetov, Dmitry Firtash, and Alexander Efremov). Each of these groups had its own interests in the Donbas; some were more insistent than others, and made tacit alliances with separatist leaders.

Another fact elaborated on is the role played by members of the security forces who lived in Donbas, many of whom had worked security on the Maidan, and considered the new Kiev government to have risen to power in a violent coup, in supporting the rebels:

If initially the majority of these groups were composed of activists of local pro-Russian organizations and “Cossacks,” by March they were joined by sympathizers that included former Afghan veterans and recently active Ukrainian law enforcement officers. Alexander Khodakovsky, future commander of the militia battalion Vostok, headed the Donetsk SBU special unit Alfa and took part in the storming of the Trade Union House, which was the headquarters of Euromaidan. His example was followed by many from the ranks of the Donetsk and Luhansk Berkut, who underwent more than one rotation at the Maidan- some were afraid of being prosecuted by of the new government, others were out for revenge. Local militias were being joined by former anti-Maidan activists, who returned from Kyiv with new experiences of violent struggle. As a result, a partisan core that would become the epicenter of the military phase of the confrontation began to form in the Donbas.

….Leaders of some Donbas cities assisted in organizing regular meetings under Soviet and Russian flags. Later these urban leaders helped to organize the May 11 referendum. These meetings and the “people’s guards” were financed by local businesses operating under the protection of bosses from the Party of Regions…. At the same time, the heads of local police departments and SBU offices (who were part of the patronage network of the Party of Regions) did not obstruct the development of the separatist movement. In fact, the majority of law enforcement authorities ceased to function, and seizures of law enforcement agencies were committed with their sanction or direct assistance. For example, during the storming of the Luhansk SBU, the police refused to protect the building, while the head of Internal Affairs insisted on the need to release the detained separatist leaders.11 According to Alexander Petrulevich, the former head of the Luhansk SBU, most police officers in the region came out of [working on the] Maidan “with resentment and bruised psyches, plus they were all threatened with criminal prosecution.”

Kudelia states that there were numerous “miscalculations” by the Kiev regime that created conditions conducive to rebels consolidating their local power.  Furthermore, Russia reacted to facts on the ground to support its own perceived interests but was not the cause.

Russia exploited these developments, but did not play a determining role in them….Kremlin and Russian agents did not act in a vacuum.  The space for these events was largely created by events inside Ukraine, which were not only outside the direct control of Moscow, but often ran counter to the interests of the Russian leadership.

The events referenced above include the hijacking of the Maidan movement by the ultra-nationalist forces who utilized violence, beginning on February 18^, 2014, with the march down Institutskaya Street in Kiev, which was initially billed as a “peaceful offensive” on the Rada (parliament); the inability or unwillingness of the rest of the Maidan movement to keep the protests peaceful; the rejection by those same violent extremists of the agreement negotiated by Poland, Germany and France with the Yanukovich government that called for early elections and a devolution of power; and, the subsequent violence against the rebels by the new government of Kiev.

Kudelia states that the new Kiev government did make an attempt to negotiate with the rebels.  However, one is left to wonder how seriously this was supposed to be taken by the rebels when one of the two men that Kiev sent for this purpose was Neo-Nazi activist Andrey Parubiy, who participated in the violence of the Maidan (The other was deputy prime minister, Vitaly Yarema).  This attempt at negotiation occurred only after the Donbas cities of Donetsk and Luhansk had successfully held a referendum calling for self-determination.  This was viewed as a bargaining chip to gain as much “home rule,” as Professor Stephen F. Cohen calls it, as possible.

Interestingly, Kudelia does not go into any detail about the violence of February 20th to the 22nd that directly led to the ousting of Yanukovich – the sniper attacks on the Maidan that killed nearly 100 people, both protesters and police.  The most thorough forensic investigation of the sniper attacks to date, has been the work of Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, a professor of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa.

Kudelia also explains that the Kiev government’s initial strategy of focusing its “Anti-Terrorist Operation” (ATO) on the city of Slavyansk also provided space for the development of what would become the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic.

Kudelia also reinforces what academic specialist Nicolai Petro, who was in Ukraine at the time of the upheaval in 2013-2014, pointed out:  that majorities of Donbas residents polled in April 2014 saw the new Kiev government as illegitimate and believed the Neo-Nazi Right Sector was a powerful and threatening organization.  These views, presumably along with reports of proposals in the Rada threatening the Russian language and anti-Maidan protesters being beaten and harassed on their return to southeast Ukraine and Crimea, culminated in the creation of local “paramilitary organizations” in the Donbas, similar to the ones formed in Crimea in order to defend their respective populations.

He also states that the rebellion originally called for federalization, with only a minority calling for an independent Novorossiya.  These calls would understandably increase later on, after months of  Kiev’s ATO against the Donbas, which included shelling civilian neighborhoods and unleashing vicious Neo-Nazi battalions to compensate for the lack of stomach many Ukrainian Army recruits had for attacking their fellow Ukrainians.

Rallies in support of federalizing Ukraine were held in most major cities in the Southeast. However, the Donbas was the only region where Kyiv was unable to regain control and prevent the outbreak of an armed movement to join Donetsk and Luhansk regions to Russia. This was facilitated by three factors.  First, the Donbas was significantly different from other regions in terms of its politics and its level of integration into the Ukrainian state. In contrast to all other regions, the majority has traditionally supported the unification of Ukraine with Russia (66 percent) and regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union (61 percent).7 In April 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, almost two-thirds of the region’s residents continued to express a positive attitude toward Russian president Vladimir Putin, while in other regions the level of support was no higher than 20 percent. With the exception of Crimea, the Donbas was the only territory where a majority (57 percent in 2013) stated that it would not support the independence of Ukraine in the case of a second referendum (i.e., the 1991 referendum, when nearly 84 percent voted in favor of independence).8 While before the revolution few people supported separatism (8 percent in 2012), recognition of the the Ukrainian government was conditional. This is evidenced by the prevalence among Donbas residents of a regional identity-in contrast to other Ukrainian regions, Donbas residents primarily identify themselves with their city or region, rather than with the state as a whole.

It is recognized that the historical ethnic ties of Donbas to Russia – since the 19th century, much of the area had been populated by Russian settlers after coal mining was established –  fueled its having the highest “animosity toward Ukrainian nationalists,” who are stridently, even violently, anti-Russian.  This made the Donbas population particularly sensitive to news reports from Russia of the actions taking place during and after the Maidan protests.

Kudelia’s analysis reinforces what I and other analysts have argued for some time: 1) there was broad and authentic native support for the Donbas rebellion, and 2) an independent Donbas would not be in the Kremlin’s interests as it would remove the block of the population of Ukraine that would serve as a counterweight to anti-Russian sentiment, right-wing extremism and NATO membership.  Moreover, it is unlikely that Russia would want to have to deal with an economically non-viable state on its border or to expend the resources necessary to bring the Donbas into Russia – not to mention the further aggravation it would create in Russia’s relations with the west.

In short, the coup government in Kiev seriously miscalculated the depth of resistance they would be facing in the Donbas and thousands of people have paid a horrible price.  Russia has provided military, political and diplomatic support to ensure the rebels are not defeated or wiped out by Kiev, but are granted sufficient autonomy within the Ukrainian state as is reflected in the Minsk Agreement. Russia did not create the problem, nor is there any evidence that Russia desires or supports actual separatism, which would not be in their interests.  In fact, their actions point in a different direction as is reflected in its facilitating the replacement of Igor Strelkov and Alexander Borodai, who advocated the Novorossiya project of an independent Donbas, perhaps eventually united with Russia, with leaders more amenable to negotiation with Kiev.

As reported at The Duran, James Clapper, Director of U.S. National Intelligence, has publicly acknowledged that the identity of the hacker of the DNC’s email server has not been definitively established and even expressed surprise at the hyperbolic characterization of the story by the press:

Clapper did not say Russia was behind the leak.  Though he did not clear Russia, he says US intelligence has not yet established the identity of the hacker.   He says that there was nothing especially difficult or complex about the hack, meaning that any of many parties could have done it.  He has pointed out that both the US and Russia routinely hack each other, and that they have been engaged in this sort of thing ever since the start of the Cold War, and that only “the tools have changed”.  He says he is “taken aback” by all the “hyperventilation” that has surrounded the story.

This reiterates some of the main points made by Glenn Greenwald in an interview last week with CNN:

This is all effectively serving as a classic and convenient means of misdirection, distracting attention away from the content of the hacked emails which cast a dark shadow on the Democratic Party’s antics during the primary.  And using the well-established bogeyman Putin, to boot.

The editors of The Nation have expressed concern at the McCarthyist era style of smearing at work in this manner of deflecting attention away from the real scandal implied in the emails:

Let us recall that McCarthyism impugned the loyalty of American citizens by accusing them of allegiance to the Soviet Union. This political defamation—often a joint undertaking of Congress and the media—suppressed democratic debate over alternative policies and ideas, and in the process destroyed lives by stigmatizing those whose views were deemed insufficiently loyal to Cold War–era orthodoxies. The overall effect was to poison, chill, and censor the political discourse of the nation.

….While Trump himself has hardly been damaged by today’s revival of McCarthyism, the same cannot be said for our national debate. Over the past month alone, establishment voices like Franklin Foer, Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Goldberg, Josh Marshall, and Jonathan Chait, among others, have Kremlin-baited Trump in lieu of reasoned argument and factual critique. On July 21, The Atlantic’s Goldberg informed readers that “The Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, has chosen this week to unmask himself as a de facto agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” Krugman followed this up on July 22 by asking in The New York Times: “If elected, would Donald Trump be Vladimir Putin’s man in the White House?” Krugman then answered his own baseless question: “Mr. Trump would, in office, actually follow a pro-Putin foreign policy, at the expense of America’s allies and her own self-interest.”

….This neo-McCarthyism now threatens to derail a vital debate over the substance of the 20,000-plus e-mails, made public by WikiLeaks on July 22, that reveal the purportedly neutral Democratic National Committee’s derision and contempt for Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign—as well as several aborted attempts to tip the scales against him. While the FBI has launched an investigation, as of press time, nobody has conclusively proven who hacked into the DNC’s network, much less demonstrated what their motives were. But that didn’t stop Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook from appearing on CNN on July 24 to allege that Russia was behind the hack. “Sources are saying the Russians are releasing these e-mails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump,” said Mook. To no one’s great surprise, he neglected to tell CNN who his sources were. Nevertheless, liberal-media elites have joined with the Clinton campaign in promoting the narrative of a devious Russian cyber-attack, which Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s Adam Johnson correctly points out “is being used to outweigh the damning substance of the leak itself.”

 

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, much has been written about “the Russian idea.”  Subsumed under this term are the very issues – moral, religious, and national/cultural – that [Dmitrii] Merezhkoskii treated in the works we have discussed.  In a replay of the fin de siecle, Russians are again discussing how to make Christianity relevant to life in this world, Christian attitudes toward sex, Christian art, and the proper relation of church and state.  They are trying to define a postcommunist Russian identity and to find the organizing principles by which they can reconstruct their world.

(page 143, Merezhkovskii’s Readings of Tolstoi by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal)

Russian Thought After Communism: The Recovery of a Philosophical Heritage is a book of essays by various contributors (edited by James P. Scanlan), published in 1994, elaborating on the work and thought of several Russian philosophers of the pre-Soviet era and how this heritage is influencing the post-Soviet era. Rosenthal’s essay is about Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, who was a philosopher, playright, historical novelist and literary critic.  He was active in the years just prior to and during Russia’s revolutions of the early 20th century and focused much of his attention on the thought and work of the great Russian literary writers, namely Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy.  However, the focus over the years would center on Tolstoy to the point of near obsession, representing a complex – often contradictory – assessment of whether Tolstoy was a prophetic saint or a nihilistic hypocrite.

Around 1900, he published a study and contrast of the two preeminent novelists, Tolstoi and Dostoyevskii, LIfe and Art.  A Study.  With a deep interest in morality and Christianity, Merezhkovskii believed that literature – which, at its best, can serve as a vehicle for exploring important moral and philosophical issues in all of their complexity and nuance – should be a guiding force in the inevitable choice between good and evil.  He was correct that Russians were about to face a momentous choice of paths to follow in the form of reform versus communist revolution.  Merezhkovskii believed that communism, particularly the Bolshevik manifestation, was the equivalent of evil, largely due to its atheism and repression of religion and spirituality.

Merezhkovskii’s apocalyptic Christianity was said to be a reaction to Nietzsche’s “God is dead” nihilism with Jesus serving in Merezhkovskii’s mind as the countervailing “Superman” who would return to earth offering a “Third Testament” that would reconcile paganism with Christianity and the spiritual with the earthly life.

In this study, Merezhkovskii held Dostoyevsky in high regard and “deconstructed” Tolstoy as having a “slave morality” and conducted a lengthy contrast between Tolstoy and the poet Pushkin, whom Merezhkovksii lionized, stating that where Pushkin represented harmony, successful integration of artist and intellectual, and reconciliation of the cultured man and the proud Russian, Tolstoy represented “rupture,” emotional and spiritual dearth, and advocacy of an “abstract cosmopolitanism” that rejected Russian patriotism.

He criticized Tolstoy’s characters for being passive contemplators and victims rather than heroes with a sense of agency.  He also expressed disdain for what he saw as Tolstoy’s “rational Christianity” lacking any sense of the mystical, mysterious or experiential, and attributed these shortcomings to a profound fear of death on Tolstoy’s part.  This fear, Merezhkovskii claimed, prompted him to view man’s relationship to God as “the criminal sentenced to death, and God is the executioner.” (p. 128)

Merezhkovskii also felt Tolstoy did not have a proper appreciation of the cause and effect patterns of history, stating “his Christianity did not grow from Russian or west European soil but fell from the heavens already prepared.” (p. 129)

Merezhkovskii’s views of Tolstoy would evolve over the years with Tolstoy’s excommunication by the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in 1901.  By 1905, Merezhkovskii’s religious and political views had changed in a way that made them compatible with a re-examination of Tolstoy.  Advocating “religious revolution,” Merezhkovskii now recast Tolstoy as “a prophet of Christian anarchism” but criticized his rejection of the 1905 revolution (which decreased the Czar’s rule from that of an autocrat, at least on paper), and Dostoyevsky was now “a prophet of the Russian Revolution” but open to criticism for his theocracy. (p. 131)

As disillusionment with the 1905 revolution in the areas of society and culture set in, Merezhkovskii saw Tolstoy’s doctrinaire moralism no longer with disdain but with qualified acceptance.

A common theme in Russian philosophy of the 19th and early 20th century involved trying to reconcile difference forces and influences.  To some extent, these are universal concerns for most cultures at various points in their development, but for Russia, it is perhaps even more so due to the nation’s particular geography, climate and history.  The country is vast, situated between the West (represented by Europe) and the East (represented by Asia), multiethnic and multiconfessional, with a history filled with foreign invasions, natural disasters, and social upheaval that creates a yearning for security and stability.

After 70 years of relative cultural and philosophical stagnation under the Soviet system, Russians find they are grappling with many of the same issues that their pre-Soviet thinkers did with respect to religion, culture and the nature of the state.  Consequently, they have been getting reacquainted with these thinkers over the past 25 years.  Much has been made among the usual western pundits who have little depth of understanding when it comes to Russia, yet sally forth onto the pages of western newspapers and magazines anyway, about Vladimir Putin’s assignment of the works of 3 pre-Soviet Russian philosophers to be read by all the regional governors during the 2014 Winter holiday.  Those 3 philosophers were Vladimir Solovyev, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Ivan Ilyin.  This book includes essays dealing with all 3 of those philosophers and, due to their contemporary relevance to Russian political thought, the remainder of this review will focus on them.

Vladimir Solovyev

Solovyev has been categorized as one of the early Slavophiles, along with Ivan Kirveevskii, Alexei Khomiakov, and Nicolai Fedorov who were considered trailblazers of Russian philosophy in general.  The basic elements that underpinned early Slavophile philosophy included being pioneers of a philosophy that was unique and original to Russia, fitting with its culture and experience.

Pre-Slavophile Russian philosophers are typically ignored or dismissed by the Slavophiles, according to Scanlan, as being too heavily influenced by external intellectual forces.

Scanlan cites Russian philosophy expert,  Zinaida Smirnova, in pointing out that Slavophiles accepted some “bourgeoisie tendencies” like free speech and free hired labor, but opposed bourgeoisie views of absolute private property ownership, condemned individualist orientation and alienation, and advocated social ties based on custom rather than contract, law or constitutionalism. (p. 38)

To some degree, these preferences can still be seen in contemporary Russia in which surveys reflect majorities supporting socioeconomic equality over individual success and a nuanced but prominent role for religion in society compared to the more strident secularism and relativist values of the West.

As Andrey Shirin, assistant professor of divinity at the John Leland Center for Theological Studies, recently explained:

Of course, by and large, Russians appreciate the newfound individual freedoms and opportunities afforded by the influence of Western values.  Nevertheless, to many in Russia these individual callings can find a sense of completion only in a larger communal context.

As a consequence of these values, Slavophiles revered the Russian village commune as a model institution rooted in an authentic collectivist tradition – appropriate to Russia at the time as the rural Russian village life was not yet perceived to be tainted by money, capitalism and industrialization.

Slavophiles also believed in sobornost or the universal, mystical nature of the Orthodox Church – often rejecting or struggling to reconcile with “rationalist” approaches to theology.

However, in the case of Solovyev’s Slavophilism, it appears to be more complicated.  He acknowledged the intuitive as well as the rational. He was friends with Dostoyevsky but had disagreements over Orthodoxy since Solovyev was an advocate of ecumenism and healing the schism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism.  Furthermore, he is credited with influencing Nicolai Berdyaev, Rudolf Steiner and the Russian Symbolists, among others.  He admired the Greek goddess Sophia who he characterized as the “merciful unifying feminine wisdom of God.”  Solovyev was adept at integrating several spiritual strands, such as Greek philosophy, Buddhism, Kabbalah, and Christian Gnosticism.

His view of sobornost was that it was an organic and spontaneous order through integration.  He believed that all bodies of knowledge and disciplines of thought could be reconciled through logic, reason and fusing all concepts into a single system.

Solovyev’s debates with his Slavophile contemporary, Fedorov, highlight his views on the nature of spirituality and integration – believing that humans needed to recognize that they were a part of nature and seeking to elevate spiritual development within the world as opposed to Fedorov’s inclination toward wanting to control nature via technological fixes such as cloning and conquering death through the literal resurrection of the dead.

As one of the book’s essayists, George M. Young, Jr., points out, the debates between Solovyev and Fedorov reflect issues and questions that are just as relevant today:

What happens if technology outpaces morality?  Should we permit some people to enjoy extreme longevity, even approach immortality, while others die after a “natural” span of years?  Can a democratic society undertake a task as grandiose as the resurrection of the dead, or must there be a benevolent autocrat to set and keep us on the long project?  What is the point of space exploration when so many problems exist on earth?

….How much control should man attempt to exert over nature?  How do we alter one part of an ecological system to our benefit without altering other parts to our detriment?  If we insist on individual freedom, what are the alternatives to a pornocratic, parricidal culture? (p. 70)

Young elaborates further on the philosphical differences between Solovyev and Fedorov and their implications:

Our technological progress has made Fedorov’s thought more plausible.  On the other hand, with Solovyev, the lack of spiritual advancement over the last century may be one reason for the renewed interest in his thought that we find in today’s Russia.  Solovyev offers practical steps for precisely the kind of spiritual development that has been missing in the cage of Soviet Marxist thought. (p. 69)

It is interesting to note that, of all the early Slavophile philosophers, Putin chose the one who was the least strident and most open to the synthesis of differing values and viewpoints.

Moreover, Solovyev is generally considered by both Russians and western academics as one of Russia’s greatest philosophers ever, despite the fallacious denigration heaped upon him by the likes of David Brooks, Mark Galeotti and Maria Snegovaya after learning of the Russian philosophers that Putin had assigned the regional governors to read.  The articles by these writers reveal them to be either tendentious or lacking any substantive understanding of the philosophers they are criticizing.

As Paul Grenier writes in his insightful article, “Distorting Putin’s Favorite Philosophers”:

Up until these articles in March-April of 2014, I do not recall reading a single negative assessment of either of these Russian thinkers [Solovyev or Nicolai Berdyaev], at least not among Western specialists, nor a single one accusing them of being hostile to the West, nor a single one suggesting that they are friendly to Russian chauvinism or nationalism.

Grenier goes on to describe Solovyev’s ideas and how they contradict the characterization presented by Brooks, et al.:

How can Solovyev be described as a “nationalist” when his magnum opus, The Justification of the Good (the book which Putin is said to have urged his governors to read), states precisely the opposite?  It is hard to imagine a more absolute condemnation of national exceptionalism than that contained in Solovyev’s definitive work of ethics:

“It must be one of the other.  Either we must renounce Christianity and monotheism in general, according to which ‘there is none good but one, that is, God,’ and recognize our nation as such to be the highest good that is, put it in the place of God – or we must admit that a people becomes good not in virtue of the simple fact of its particular nationality, but only in so far as it conforms to and participates in the absolute good.”

This same anti-nationalist theme runs through Solovyev’s entire corpus.  He argued bitterly against the Slavophile nationalists of his day.

The spiritual aspects of pre-Soviet Russian Slavophile philosophers and the revival of the Orthodox Church may appeal to a general human spiritual need, particularly in the aftermath of the chaos, trauma and social dislocation of the 1990’s, as well as the need for social cohesion.

Putin appears to grasp this on some level as is evidenced by his Address to the Federal Assembly in 2012 in which he lamented a shortage of empathy and solidarity in Russian society:

Colleagues, today, in our cities and villages, we are seeing the results of what has been happening in our nation, in society, in schools, in the media, and in our heads for the past fifteen to twenty years. And this is understandable. That was the time when we discarded all ideological slogans of the previous era. But unfortunately, many moral guides have been lost too. We ended up throwing out the baby with the bath water. Today, this is often manifested in people’s indifference to public affairs, willingness to tolerate corruption, brazen greed, manifestations of extremism and offensive behaviour. And all of this occasionally takes an ugly, aggressive, provocative form; I’ll go even further and say that it creates long-term threats to the society, security and even integrity of Russia.

It is painful for me to say this, but I must say it. Today, Russian society suffers from apparent deficit of spiritual values such as charity, empathy, compassion, support and mutual assistance. A deficit of things that have always, throughout our entire history, made us stronger and more powerful; these are the things we have always been proud of.

Putin appears to be in touch with the average Russian view of this as recent surveys of Russian opinion indicate that Russians believe in separation of church and state but believe that the church should have influence over social and cultural life.   Also, revealed is that most Russians identify as Orthodox Christian, but do not necessarily attend services, reflecting a desire for a spiritual and cultural anchor but not necessarily a shrill or fundamentalist form of religiosity.

Part II will cover the part of the book pertaining to Nicolai Berdyaev.