The Russian non-economic miracle
The Soviet Union was a superpower. Russia post-Gorbachev and Yeltsin is not.
The country is still rich, but the money is in the yachts, London flats and villas in the south of France of the super rich. Inequality of income in Russia is in fact the same as it is in Canada and the United States. But the average wage is much lower.
This chart shows that Russia took a 40% hit once the crony capitalism of the Yeltsin/Putin era. “Chaotic privatization also created a class of oligarchs, men with vast, unearned wealth. “Property is theft!” declared the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; well, in Yeltsin’s Russia, much of it really was. And the power of the oligarchs surely distorted economic policy,” wrote Paul Krugman in Saturday’s New York Times.
Here are comparable GDP per capita numbers (US$) from Our World in Data:
Russia: $26,456
United States: 59,920
Canada: 46,054
France: 42,231
Britain: 42,676
An odd way to remember Gorbachev
Corny, but he sure ain’t Putin.
On a more serious note…
I have a subscription to History Today. I hope they don’t mind if I reproduce the opinions of three historians on the subject of the Soviet Union. And they published this before they knew Gorbachev died.
We ask four historians whether the demise of one of the 20th century’s superpowers was as inevitable as it now seems.
History Today | Published in History Today Volume 70 Issue 10 October 2020
Soviet poster dedicated to the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution and IV Congress of the Communist International, 1922. Wiki Commons.
‘No one has suggested a convincing alternative scenario’
Rodric Braithwaite, British Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988-91) and author of Armageddon and Paranoia: the Nuclear Confrontation (Profile, 2017).
People still argue about the fall of the Roman Empire. They are not going to agree quickly on why the Soviet Union collapsed when it did. Some think it could have lasted for many years, others that the collapse was unforeseeable. Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident scientist, foresaw it decades before it happened.
Victory in war took the Soviet armies to the centre of Europe, where they stayed. The Soviet Union’s seductive ideology had already given it influence across the world. But after Stalin’s death in 1953 the ideology started looking threadbare, even at home. In Eastern Europe, inside the Soviet Union itself, the subject peoples were increasingly restless for freedom. Soviet scientists were the equal of any in the world, but their country was too poor to afford both guns and butter and their skills were directed towards matching the American military machine, rather than improving the people’s welfare. It worked for a while. But in 1983 the Soviet Chief of Staff admitted that ‘We will never be able to catch up with [the Americans] in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution’.
The Soviet leaders were not stupid. They knew something had to be done. In 1985, after three decrepit leaders died in succession, they picked Mikhail Gorbachev to run the country: young, experienced, competent and – they wrongly thought – orthodox. But Gorbachev believed that change was inescapable. He curbed the KGB, freed the press and introduced a kind of democracy. He was defeated by a conservative establishment, an intractable economy and an unsustainable imperial burden. It was the fatal moment, identified by the 19th-century French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, when a decaying regime tries to reform – and disintegrates.
Russians call Gorbachev a traitor for failing to prevent the collapse by force. Foreigners dismiss him as an inadequate bungler. No one has suggested a convincing alternative scenario.
‘Aimed at fixing the faults in Soviet society, Gorbachev’s policies emphasised them’
James Rodgers, Author of Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin (I.B. Tauris, 2020) and former BBC Moscow correspondent.
Lauded in its stirring anthem as the ‘Indestructible Union of Free Republics’, the USSR entered the 1980s as a superpower. Few foresaw then that it would collapse early in the following decade. While the ‘free republics’ part of the heroic lyric was barely believed outside – or, indeed, inside –the territory which they covered, the ‘indestructible’ part seemed much more convincing. Yet the system was failing. Yuri Andropov, who became Soviet leader in 1982 after being head of the KGB, understood that – the secret police were always the best-informed part of Soviet society. He launched reforms to address the economic stagnation he inherited.
Andropov’s death in 1984 was followed by that of his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, the year after. The Communist elite turned then to relative youth and energy. Mikhail Gorbachev was 54. In him, the Soviet Union had a leader who believed that its creaking system could be reformed and made fit for purpose. It could not. Aimed at fixing the faults in Soviet society, Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (‘reconstruction’) and glasnost (‘openness’) – it was a time of unprecedented press freedom, for both Russian and international journalists – ended up emphasising them. Attempts to crack down on the widespread drunkenness that plagued the Soviet workplace proved especially unpopular with large parts of the population. As the author of Vodka and Gorbachev, Alexander Nikishin, later asked: ‘Did he understand who he was getting into a fight with?’ The question could be applied to Gorbachev’s wider strategy. After hardliners in his own party tried – and failed – to take power in a shortlived coup in 1991, the Soviet system was finished.
The Soviet economy was not strong enough both to maintain a military system at superpower level and give its people a good standard of living. On my first trip to Moscow, as a language student in the 1980s, I bought a record of that Soviet national anthem. I paid more for the plastic bag to carry it in than for the actual record. It is a small example of the economic contradictions that meant the Soviet Union could not have survived.
‘In Soviet Kazakhstan, the scale of resistance took Moscow by surprise’
Joanna Lillis, Author of Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan (I.B. Tauris, 2019).
In 1986, when Kazakhs took to the streets to protest against the Soviet government in Moscow, nobody had an inkling that firing up the demonstrators in Soviet Kazakhstan was a heady cocktail of ingredients that would gather momentum around the USSR and help bring it down five years later. Disillusion with out-of-touch leaders ruling them from the distant Kremlin; disenchantment with inequality in a hypocritical communist state that professed equality for all; stirrings of national pride among the Kazakhs, who went out to protest against the Kremlin’s imperious imposition of a Russian leader from outside Kazakhstan. The scale of resistance took Moscow by surprise, an indication of how disconnected from the thinking of ordinary Soviet citizens their leaders had become.
The reformer Mikhail Gorbachev had recently come to power promising glasnost, so that his people could freely voice their opinions in a more tolerant Soviet Union. When the Kazakhs took to the streets to do that, Gorbachev sent in the security forces to quell the demos with bloodshed.
The Kazakhs’ bid to make Moscow heed their frustrations failed. But the rejection of high-handed colonial rule by other nations in the Soviet Union, who were unofficially expected to kowtow to Russian superiority while officially all the USSR’s peoples were equal, soon became a driving force in the country’s collapse. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc and the humiliating Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan after a decade of pointless warfare confirmed that the superpower was waning. In 1986, the Kazakhs had no idea all this was looming. But they were unwittingly holding up a mirror to the failings of the Soviet system, which was not fit for purpose – and could not, in those historical circumstances, survive.
‘If the Communist Party had retained control of the media, it could, perhaps, have survived anything’
Richard Millington, Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Chester.
The Soviet Union could not have survived, because by 1991 the Communist Party had lost control of the media and thus the public sphere. Key to the survival of any dictatorship is strict control of the media, which shapes public opinion and promotes tacit acceptance of a regime. Though many Soviet citizens may have claimed not to believe what was written in their newspapers, they were never aware of just how far removed from reality the reports were. When Mikhail Gorbachev ascended to power in 1985, it was his policy of glasnost that let the genie out of the bottle.
In his attempt to ‘open up’ society, Gorbachev permitted the press more freedom of expression. Some historians have viewed this move as a result of the fact that Gorbachev (born in 1931) was the first leader of the Soviet Union to have cut his political teeth in a de-Stalinised USSR. But his policy backfired. Glasnost meant that news outlets could lay bare the failings of the Soviet system and the Communist Party. Perhaps more than anything else, their reporting of the horrific accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 illustrated the Party’s incompetence and shredded citizens’ belief not only in its ability to govern effectively, but also to keep them safe. In fact, in 2006, Gorbachev pinpointed Chernobyl and the resulting media fallout as the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
By 1991 the game was up for the Communist Party. Glasnost had permitted dissenting voices to be heard and political movements that had once been suppressed to gain traction and support. After a failed attempt by Communist hardliners to retake control in August of that year, the Party was banned and with it disappeared the glue that was keeping the Soviet Union together. If the Communist Party had retained control of the media, it could, perhaps, have survived anything. We need only look to the Chinese example for what can happen when a dictatorship remains in full control of the public sphere.
Auf Wierersehen to the Autobahn?
Probably not, but Germans are piling onto trains. The main reason was the German government offered a nine Euro monthly pass from June to the end of August.
It was good for local and regional trains. Germans and tourists jumped on board.
Germany is also discouraging short term flights. One is only 86 miles and has been replaced by a bus service.
Boris goes German
Prime Minister (for another day) Boris Johnson alighting from an Audi A8. No more Jaguars for the British PMs.
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Curated
A perfectly good word now being over used. It usually means curating an exhibit at a museum. Sirius XM just sent me an email: Frederick, We’ve Curated Your Next Week of Listening. Enough to make you cancel the service, but I won’t.
Our fingers did the walking to the Oxford English Dictionary, (my emphasis).:
curate, v.
1. transitive. To look after and preserve (the exhibits in a collection, as in a museum); to be the keeper or custodian of (a collection, museum, public garden, etc.).Later uses in contexts relating to museums, art galleries, etc., are sometimes difficult to distinguish from sense 2a.
1898 Times of India 7 May 6/3 If a Member of Council developed tastes of this kind, he would be pronounced..as only fit to be curated and put in a museum.
1914 Country Life 18 Apr. 572/1 The Trustees make over to the Museum the collections they from time to time receive and defray the cost of identifying, arranging, cataloguing and generally of ‘curating’ the specimens.
1969 Daily Tel. 6 June (Colour Suppl.) 43/4 All London Zoo's mammals were being curated with tremendous flair.
1998 Univ. Oxf. Bot. Garden News Autumn 1/2 Those responsible for curating collections of plants must not be distracted away from their core remit and activity.
2001 Courier-Mail (Brisbane) 30 Apr. 10/5 People will be less enthusiastic about giving unless they can be assured that the collection will be readily accessible and curated with the expertise it deserves.
Not so Titanic these days
Essay of the Week
This is the third chapter of my novel, The Obit Man. You can see where it is going. MM, one of my loyal subscribers, says enough. He read the book. And I will run something different next week.
Chapter 3
LONDON, 1943
Seemed senseless to have washed the car, Jane remarked to the minder as they drove through Admiralty Gate. The Buick was an odd sight in London. A big American car, on loan from the Americans rather than the British models ‘borrowed’ from their owners for the rest of the war.
Early autumn storms were never like this at home, thought the minder’s charge in the back seat. Here the rain lasted all afternoon and the dark sky made the air seem much colder than it was. Where he grew up, when rain made it this cold in a hurry you could expect lightning. Not here it seemed. The windshield wipers kept the street in view though his eye was drawn to the driver whose blonde hair was brought up in a rather severe bun.
He took in her unlined neck and the straight line of her chin. The hair was almost perfect but one strand fell away. When she spoke he watched the side of her face and the redness of her lips as they parted. She moved her hand to push back the wisp of loose hair. It would look better let down, thought Henri.
The longer his life of celibacy lasted, the better women looked to him. He looked out the side window to the street and laughed to himself, thinking of the boys he went to school with who had joined the priesthood. He wasn’t much better off.
The driver didn’t say much but he could tell by her accent she wasn’t British. The minder travelling with him frowned when Henri spoke. Everyone worked on the no-talk rule, that the less people knew, the better.
“Are you American?” he asked her.
“No, Canadian,” she answered. “What about you. French, I suppose?”
It was one of the first times he had been out of uniform, at least when on official business. No shoulder flashes or badges to tell the world which country he came from. He decided to practice deception.
“Yes, French,” he said, trying to modify his accent to sound more like Maurice Chevalier in English and less like the son of a bourgeois family from Montreal. “You, where are you from in Canada? I hear it’s a big place.”
“Montreal.” He decided to say nothing and she too stopped speaking. The minder glared at them both. They were in any case near the address in Baker Street where he was to be dropped off. She might be the one who would pick him later, and then it might be someone else from the car pool. She stared at his taut profile as he slid across to get out of the car. Sharp blue eyes, impossible hollows on cheekbones so sharp they seemed almost carved by asculptor.
He looked back at her and she smiled at him, in a way that seemed to say she wished they could meet tonight. That was against the rules. But they’d have so much to talk about since she knew they were both from Montreal. Much later she would tell her flat mate the forced French accent didn’t fool her.
Beautiful boy, hope he doesn’t try anything like that in France.
The door opened for Captain Henri Foix without his even having knocked. A stern-looking woman in a harsh woollen suit and mannish shoes greeted him without using his name. After a short wait he was shown into anoffice where one man in uniform sat behind a desk, another in civilian clothes sat on a couch against the wall.
Henri knew the drill. He saluted and stood at attention in front of the desk.
“Do you know why you’re here?” asked the man in uniform, a brigadier. He told Henri to stand at ease. As he did he thought about how this was a bit of charade. He had al- ready trained as a commando and had been before two selection boards, one of which seemed concerned with his mental health. He was able to deal with them; he could deal with this.
“Yes. I volunteered for special duty and I assume because I am here in civilian clothes the special duties are those of an agent. I also assume since I am a native French speaker you want me for work in France.”
Seemed an odd conversation. Stiff on his part, but then his English went downhill if he was a little edgy. He was just stating the obvious to the two other people in the room. They must already know that he had trained at anAmerican Special Forces base in Helena, Montana. He thought the British wouldn’t trust the American training and he knew he might have to go to Scotland for a while. He wasn’t supposed to know that, but he did.
The civilian on the couch switched to French. “Have you ever been to France?”
“No, the only foreign country I have visited is the United States.” Then he thought and added, “That is until I arrived here.”
The civilian continued in French, which Henri thought sounded more Belgian than French, though with an English accent. An Englishman who went to school in Belgium. Henri always made a game of parsing accents. Countries were easy. He almost always knew which region or even small town people came from in Quebec, or in which district in Montreal they grew up. And he knew French accents too. Boys from France had been sent to his school and there were several French professors at university and a couple from Belgium.
The man continued in French and asked Henri what he thought was an odd question. “Why do you want to fight the Germans? Do you have anything against them?”
Henri thought, for maybe five seconds, before answering. He knew the answer, he’d thought about it.
“No, I don’t hate Germans. I think it’s wrong to hate any one nationality. That’s what the Nazis do. When I was at school and then at university, I always read the papers. I followed the Nazis. Kristallnacht. There are Jews in Outremont, the part of Montreal where I grew up. I never knew too many, but I tried to imagine how I’d feel if mobs burned synagogues and smashed shops.”
No expression crossed the civilian’s face. “Nothing about France? You’re French. Do you have feelings forFrance?”
“Well you might think I would. I love French, the language. And l love my own people, but I’ve never been to France, so I have no love for the country. Some sentiment, no love. There are people I grew up with who feel we shouldn’t do anything for France. Or England. I’m not one of them.”
Like his inquisitor Henri spoke without emotion. He wasn’t clipped, just answered the questions without excitement. In part it was his nature, but he also did it on purpose, thinking sang froid might be something they’d look for in a man.
The motive side of the inquisition was over. They switched to English, with the uniformed man asking a question or two. He seemed to be the kind one, the civilian the hard case. There were a few generalities until they returned in French to a part that Henri knew was important.
“Tell me why you think you might be useful to us if we were to choose you to work in France?”
Henri was ready for this too. He had thought about it, in Helena, hoping the special assignment would be working in France ahead of the invasion in northern Europe everyone knew had to come. But he wanted to make a good impression so he spoke in an even more deliberate way than he usually did and tried to make his French precise, as he had in debating at school. He’d been to the best private school, the best university; he knew the language of Voltaire better than this Englishman sitting watching him, waiting for him to make a mistake.
“First, I’m a good soldier. I’m trained and have my wings as a para. I speak French like a native. My accent may be a bit strange to someone from Paris, but it is not much different from that of people from Normandy.” The priests had told him that in the first years of school.
But he had thought ahead, knowing this was not enough. There were thousands of young French-speaking officers. What they needed was someone who wasn’t just brave, but clever.
“I have a university degree in science, which is unusual. I’m a trained chemist. If I had to, I could make explosives with things you find in a farmyard. Fertilizer contains nitrates. I also took some courses in electricity and worked with the signal corps when I was in the militia. I understand radios and I know telephones.”
That was an understatement. He knew more about phones that most men in the signal corps. He had worked two summers as a lineman with the phone company, and he worked in the country, not the city. But more talk might sound boastful so he stopped.
The man on the couch stared at him, saying nothing. He took a pipe from the table in front of him, pulled a box of wooden matches and lit it.
“You even worked for the phone company in the summer, isn’t that true?”
He’s done his homework, thought Henri. “Yes. Installing phone service in farms and small villages.” He decided to leave it at that. He didn’t want to ruin his chances by seeming too cocky. He felt he was close.
“Captain Foix,” said the brigadier, speaking for the second time, and switching back to English. “Please sit down.” Henri thought his accent a little odd. The way he pronounced vowels seemed almost familiar. The brigadier motioned for Henri to take the chair in front of his desk. Henri thought the chair looked out of place. It was ornate, French, and the building was so ugly. A utilitarian lump in the middle of Lon- don. He thought it looked like a department store from the outside.
“Have you ever heard of the Special Operations Executive?”
“SOE. Yes, I have.” Until that moment Henri didn’t know what form this special assignment might take. His heart started to race a little. This was beyond his dreams.
“Do you know much about it?”
“Well, only that it drops agents into occupied Europe. I think its most successful operation was the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.” Henri had read of the Czech operatives of the SOE who had parachuted into Czechoslovakia. They shot Heydrich, and thought they had killed him, though in fact he died of blood poisoning from his wounds.
Heydrich might have become Hitler’s successor, a blonde, ruthless sociopath, SS commander, the ‘protector’ of Bohemia and Moravia and the perfect Nazi. Henri would like nothing better than to be given such an assignment, even though he knew all the men who went to Prague died, all except one traitor who gave his friends away.
But Henri knew he wasn’t going to central Europe. All this flashed through his mind as he waited for the brigadier or the pipe smoker to speak. The brigadier kept talking.
“We’ve had other successes, though Heydrich is perhaps best known. We don’t really like people to know who we are, or that we even exist,” and he reached into a drawer and pulled out a folder.
“What we want you for is something similar. But we don’t want you to go after one man, but many. We need trained officers such as you to lead men in skirmishes in France. One day there will be an invasion. We need trains blown up, phone lines down. And we need dead Germans. Every dead German is one less to point his weapon at a British, or Canadian, soldier. We also need information.”
Henri sat in his chair. He seemed to have passed the audition. But he kept quiet until he was asked a question.
“SOE is not really the army, you know,” said the brigadier. “Thus my civilian friend over here. No, SOE reports to civilians. You’ll keep your rank, of course, but you won’t wear a uniform. Oh, I forgot t ask, are you on for this sort of thing?”
“Yes, sir. For me, it’s a great honour.” His English became a bit formal again. He spoke only French until he was about eight years old. The Gallic sentence structure slipped in with the excitement.
“Good. I liked what you said about phones and radios. We’ll need a lot of that.” The brigadier paused. “The odds of you making it through this alive are about even. It’s a dangerous business. No one will think you a coward if you want to back down. You don’t have to answer now.”
“My decision would never change,” said Henri, cursing himself inside for interrupting.
The brigadier stood up and so did Henri. The man in the suit put down his pipe. The brigadier saluted, Henri saluted back.
“Fine then. They’ll deal with you outside. Good luck Captain Foix.”
Henri never did get their names.
The paperwork didn’t take long, surprising for a government-run operation. They gave him train tickets to Scotland. He wouldn’t even have to return to his base. They didn’t want him speaking with anyone, or havinganyone guess where he was going. He was just gone.
“This is all secret of course,” said the stern lady in an office a few rooms down from the brigadier. She looked at him and said in a matter-of-fact way. “Tell anyone what you’re doing and you’ll be hanged, shot if you’re lucky.”
He didn’t register any emotion.
“There’s a car waiting for you outside. You have four days to get to Scotland. Now we’ve lost your minder.There are too many of you to deal with this week. So don’t say good- bye to anyone, just get there. There’s some money in here, as well. You’ll be met at the train station, no matter what train you arrive on. They’ll know who you are.”
She looked down at her desk, which he took as a signal to leave. A porter opened the door of the house and the driver was standing by the back door of the car. He looked at her legs, which had some shape even in those shoes. And the uniform couldn’t hide her figure, the waist and the roundness it promised. She opened the door and he got in.
“Hello again,” he said smiling at her. Well they did say he had four days.
Henri watched her walk away as she went down the hall to make some tea. Her soft curves clinging to her thin cotton nightgown, something she had brought over with her. He only knew her first name and she knew only his code name, Pierre, from a remark the minder made in the car. They hadn’t talked much, but he liked her, though it was doubtful he would ever see her again. Celibacy was over, for a while anyway.
Later she would pick up the car and take him the rest of the way to King’sCross.