We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Asks b3ta.com:
Men: Like looking at pretty ladies? Like laughing at bad translations of Russian mobile phone conferences? You’re in the land of luck as this site combines both.
It certainly does. Eldar Murtazin is impressed, and Andreas Von Horn (that’s what it says) translates:
Year by year, visiting CeBIT, catch myself at idea, that they have better organization, and exhibits for the first time are shown exactly at this exhibition, instead of wandering on the world, turning in an antiquity. But there is one big advantage of the Russian exhibitions and of SvyazExpocomm as one of the most appreciable, there are excessive plenty of beautiful girls on one square meter of the area. The last year one my foreign friend after visiting the exhibition has left in prostration and has told, that knows where to look for a wife. Girls in city centre which caused the genuine interest and remarks in the excellent form, have simply ceased to exist. The friend all the rest three days has spent at the exhibition, and according to him has not been sorry at all about it.
On results of the first day has collected about 500 photos of girls from various stands, a part from them we’ll publish in this picture story. I can not give up to myself such pleasure, and the reputation needs to be supported, in fact the tradition began the last year. To try listing all photos is senseless, further are photos that have appeared by will of case beside and have pleased me.
For knowing people and visiting the exhibition not the first year, CBOSS name talks a lot about, but I beg to assume, that in the last turn about billing. However, judge, I in my turn dream to shake hands with the person, which selects girls for this company!
Ah, those wacky foreigners.
 
Political assassination is becoming something of a national pastime in Russia. The latest victim is Sergey Yushenkov , a Liberal Party deputy in the Dumas who was gunned down yesterday outside his apartment building in Moscow.
Russian Liberals are ‘Liberal’ in the European sense of the word, not the American sense i.e.
He was a strong proponent of military reform and favoured the creation of a free market in Russia when many deputies were dragging their feet.
Of course, murder is always murder regardless of the opinions held by the victim, but in this case Russia has lost one of the genuine good guys and at a time when they need all the good guys they can get.
There are no indications as to who carried out the murder or why.
R.I.P. Mr.Yushenkov.
That people who hate Anglosphere capitalist civilization should make common cause with a mass murdering tyrant is interesting but to anyone who has spent years observing the incoherence of ‘progressive socialism’ it is hardly a surprise.
What is a surprise is that Vladimir Putin has shown that not only is the Russian state still the enemy, its leaders are not nearly as smart as I had given them credit for, given they have been caught having given active support to the Ba’athists even to the extent of acting as an employment agency for assassins on their behalf.
To have squandered such a large pool of political capital and good will by continuously passing intelligence and weapons to the Iraqis right up to the start of the war is utter madness. Did the Russians think any outcome was possible in the long run other than an Allied victory over the Ba’athist regime? And surely once that fact is grasped, how could they think that news of their treachery would not eventually come to light?
What possible benefit could the Russian state gain from this move? Is this going to make honouring Russian contracts with the fallen Ba’athist regime more likely or less likely in US dominated post-war Iraq? Were they hoping Putin’s good buddy Tony Blair would pressure the Americans into a softer line regarding Russian economic interests in Iraq? If so, I wonder how Blair feels about his private diplomatic conversations being relayed to the Iraqis by the Russian intelligence services.
It is a terrible thing to live in a world filled with enemies, but if Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussain are the measure of our foes then at least we can comfort ourselves that we are facing opponents who are not just weak, they are self-deluded and quite frankly stupid.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said on Tuesday that it was unlikely Moscow would abstain on a U.N. vote on authorizing war against Iraq and strongly indicated it will use its Security Council veto to stop it if necessary.
At a joint news conference with Jack Straw yesterday the Russian softened his stance slightly. “The Iraqi issue is one that is unlikely that one of us would abstain…We have not ruled out using a veto over the crisis.”
The French/Chirac’s interests in Iraq have already been examined in some detail but I am yet to see a comparable analysis of the Russian motives. At the moment it seems that Russia is giving itself ample room to support America and Britain in future military action despite declaring its opposition to war in Iraq.
It is clear that Moscow expects to extract maximum amount for its support of military action in the UN. Perhaps the price has not been high enough. They will want guarantees that Russia’s economic interests in Iraq will be preserved, particularly its contracts to develop rich oil fields once sanctions are lifted.
Also, Iraq is one of Russia’s traditional allies. Russian hardware makes up 95 per cent of Iraq’s arms and the two developed strong ties in Soviet times. It is hard to believe that they do not see that they would be much better off supporting the US and the UK in its strategy.
The problem seems to be not only the Russian government’s need to protect huge investments and deals already made but also its inability to recognise that the kind of blackmail Iraqis are trying on them, is not necessarily ‘understood’ by the Bush administration.
Last year, a week before Christmas, a row broke out between Russia and Iraq when Baghdad declared “null and void” a �200 billion deal with Lukoil to develop the West Qurna oil field.
Russia’s energy and foreign ministries reacted furiously to the news. Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, said the cancellation was to punish Lukoil for negotiating with America over its future interests in the region. Given Iraq’s record, the cancellation of the deal was probably a crude attempt to blackmail Moscow into offering greater diplomatic support during the crucial developments in the UN in the coming months.
At that time Igor Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister, called for talks on the deal. If America had offered Moscow the guarantees it was seeking for Lukoil, the balance of power (or rather of obstructiveness) might have looked rather different today. Russia’s aim is to get the US to convince it that Saddam’s downfall would be to its economic advantage. Or in other words, pay them now or in future lucrative contracts, or else. Who said that the UN was a street market of sordid bargains?
Update: Earlier today on MTV, Mr Blair said that in a post-conflict Iraq, the country’s oil should go into a UN supervised reserve which would be for the benefit of the Iraqi people. Oh dear, oh dear…
It now apears that the number of victims of the Moscow theatre siege has risen to 117. It also appears that all the victims were killed by the gas that was used to overcome their terrorist captors.
Unarguably that is a terrible price to pay but I am forced to agree with Dale Amon that the Russian authorities had no other plausible options open to them. Faced with not being able to win them all, they settled for not losing them all. Decisions do not come any harder than that.
Negotiations, however framed, were a non-starter. To even commence them would be, and be seen as, a capitulation; a reward to the terrorists for their audacity and enterprise and a guarantee that every public venue in the civilised world would, henceforth, be eyed hungrily for the prospect of a repeat performance. Negotiations don’t always save lives.
Like it or not, the Russians have now established the template for dealing with these situations and, regardless of the whining in the mainstream media, it’s a template that will be followed, albeit improved upon. It is also a message to every terrorist nutjob in the world that all they can expect in return for their ‘heroic’ efforts is a miserable, pointless death. I wonder how many other planned terrorist ‘operations’ of this nature are, even now, being hastily reconsidered? The much-feared Russian proclivity for brazen ruthlessness has, for once, worked both in their favour and ours.
They have a saying in Russia: if you’re going to die, then die with music. It means go out with a bang, go down fighting, make sure your death has meaning. Whilst it will not constitute even a meagre crumb of comfort for the bereaved, I do not believe their loved ones died in vain. By their tragic deaths, many, many others might avoid an equally grisly fate.
I cannot bring myself to glorify an event which led to the deaths of so many people who went out to enjoy a musical evening. But I think it appropriate to pay them tribute by acknowledging that they died with music.
That 80 or more hostages have been killed is dreadful but the fact 750 were saved is a triumph.
But there are some very stark lessons here.
In 1995, a related Chechen group took over 2000 people hostage in a hospital in Budyonnovsk. After an initial attempt to free the hostages was botched with considerable loss of life by the Russian forces, a deal was cut by then Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin that agreed a cease-fire in the Chechen war and allowed the hostage takers to escape in return for the safety of their captives.
And of course that was proof that you can indeed get the Russians to cut a deal if you are daring enough and willing to slaughter enough innocent civilians.
Well I hope that Vladimir Putin has just signalled a complete rejection of that mind set. As terrible as it is that so many hostages have died, the fact is the Chechen terrorists who did this are now either dead or facing a very grim time indeed in a Russian jail… and were given nothing for their pains by the Russians. That is the only message that must be sent to terrorists everywhere, to do otherwise is to motivate such people to cause more horrors in theatres, hospitals and homes. The enemy may not fear death itself but I suspect they do indeed fear pointless death.
So whatever the cost, in the long run it is cheaper in lives to never negotiate (other than as a tactical ruse). Give them the death they desire but nothing that would further their aims, no matter how small.
Russian commando with SV-98 sniper rifle
My initial hopes, that the storming of a theatre just outside Moscow (the name of which doesn’t appear to be published anywhere, incidentally) by a gang of heavily-armed Chechenhawks was merely the execution of a piece of bizarre and shocking performance art, have now ebbed away.
“I swear by God we are more keen on dying than you are keen on living,”
“Even if we are killed, thousands of brothers and sisters will come after us, ready to sacrifice themselves,” said a female among the group, only her eyes peering from a head-to-toe black robe.”
As substitute for hope, I now have the tangibly queasy feeling that this is all going to end very badly.
I am back from Slovakia now, and had a lovely time thanks. On my final weekend, while football related mayhem reigned in Bratislava, I took a trip northwards to the Czech countryside. I was shown several fine churches, but the most intriguing item of my stay did not involve any sightseeing trips, at any rate not by me. It concerned, rather, one of my host’s first cousins, a man called Karel Krautgartner.
Krautgartner was Czecho-Slovakia’s answer to Benny Goodman, that is to say a hugely accomplished jazzman who could also more than hold his own in the classical repertoire, on clarinet, saxophone and all related instruments. My host played me a videotape of a Czech TV documentary recently shown to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Krautgartner’s death. He looked like a James Bond villain, and played sublimely. He didn’t seem to have been a huge creative musical force. But he was a great band leader and organiser, who inserted successive jazz innovations from America into Czech musical life, and who added middle-European technical polish and discipline to everything he touched.
Krautgartner was only about sixty when he died, of cancer of the colon, in West Germany. He had emigrated there on account of his unwillingness, following the suppression of the Prague Spring of the late nineteen sixties in which he had played a prominent part, to become a Soviet stooge. Concerning Krautgartner’s death my host told me a fascinating and terrible story, which was not mentioned in the documentary, but which my host had learned through being personally acquainted with many of the personalities involved.
Somewhere in the Urals, during the nineteen fifties, a nuclear bomb went off by mistake in a research laboratory, devastating the entire surrounding region, with, as you can imagine, appalling loss of life. → Continue reading: The USSR and all that jazz
The Blogger Bash is tonight, so I got myself in the party mood this morning by reading how David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky had responded to Adriana’s griefometer posting.
He tried it on Soviet Communism, but deliberately took it all a bit seriously and tastefully, ignoring for example how very uncute lots of the victims of Soviet Communism were.
Now, this griefometer is just a silly game, isn’t it? A bit sick perhaps? Well, consider this: 100 million killed over 80 years is about 3,422 per day.
Or one “World Trade Centre”.
Every day for 80 years.
What’s really sick is that the communists’ ideological soulmates infest almost every academic institution in the western world. And I am still waiting for them to apologise.
Have a nice weekend.
Veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) who opposed both the Nazis and the Red Army (whom they regarded as occupying Russians) from 1942 until they were largely crushed by the communists in 1953, are to be accorded the same rights as former Red Army veterans by the Ukrainian government. It is interesting that the Russian government regards this as an affront even after all these years, calling the UPA ‘bandits’ for having the audacity to defend the Ukraine against all comers.
However although the UPA opposed both the Soviets and Nazis, they were also implicated in the mass murder of Poles and Jews and do not really fit comfortably into the ‘clearly-the-good-guys’ category, a fact surprisingly absent from several reports on the recent hostile reaction by the Russian government to the Ukrainian decision to grant surviving UPA veterans full military pensions.
On my recent holiday in France I took with me a biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the one by D. M. Thomas (subtitled “A Century in His Life”, first published Little, Brown and Company, 1998). Before that I had been reading Solzhenitsyn’s own The Oak and the Calf (which came out in 1975), and now I’m reading his Invisible Allies, which came out in 1995.
These latter two books are Solzhenitsyn’s answer to the question: “How on earth did you do it?” The first puts Solzhenitsyn’s own exploits centre stage. The second names some of the many names that could finally be named safely, without endangering lives. He did a lot himself. And he had a lot of help.
It was partly being a contributor to Libertarian “Samizdata” that prodded me into this reading burst. I quite understand why Perry gave the name “Libertarian Samizdata” to Libertarian Samizdata � messages that go under the radar and past the editorial defences of the official statist oriented big media, and so forth. Nevertheless I do feel a bit uneasy decking myself out in the word that originally meant people risking their very lives, all day, every day, for years on end, copying and distributing the real Russian literature of those times. The worst that can happen to us is a few hostile e-mails.
This reading has, of course, stimulated a million thoughts, but one thought in particular relates to Adriana Cronin’s point about how Stalin, his henchmen, his successors and his middle managerial puppets throughout the Soviet empire were prone to believe their own bullshit.
Simply: Why didn’t they just kill him? Solzhenitsyn was making a monumental nuisance of himself. So why, as soon as he started doing this seriously, didn’t they just take him out the back of somewhere private and have him shot? They had their chances, as Solzhenitsyn himself relates.
There are many reasons. Western “pressure” was indeed crucial. And Solzhenitsyn was a literary and political tactician of genius. This was no dreamy, socially dyslexic wimp we’re talking about. This was a man who, until they arrested him for being incompletely reverent about Stalin, was a highly effective and courageous Red Army artillery officer, and the military metaphor he uses to describe his “battles” with Soviet officialdom is relentless and entirely appropriate. He writes particularly memorably in The Oak and the Calf of “encounter battles”, involving not only him and his Soviet enemies, but also, operating independently, the dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov.
But here’s another reason they didn’t kill him. They didn’t kill him because killing him would have contradicted their idea of what they thought they were doing.
It wasn’t just “idiot savants” (D. M. Thomas’ killer phrase) like Jean Paul Sartre and his ilk who swallowed Soviet lies about happy smiling people marching joyfully into the cornfields and the steel factories; they believed this drivel themselves, if not as a complete fact exactly, then certainly as an aspiration. To have killed Solzhenitsyn would have been to admit to themselves that all this socialism-with-a-human-face nonsense was indeed nonsense, and that they were just old-fashioned, self-serving tyrants whose rule was based on brute force and nothing else.
Looking at the larger picture, the tendency to believe their own lies was a major part, not only of their failure to handle the likes of Solzhenitsyn, but of their failure period. The Soviet Empire fell apart because it was founded not only on the deception of others, but on self-deception self-inflicted by and on its own rulers. They didn’t, in the end, con us. Not enough of us, anyway. But they did con themselves.
This morning on the tube (a mode of shifting vast crowds of people from one place to another, aspiring to the name of London’s underground transport system) the person sitting next to me was drowsing over an article in an issue of today’s newspaper called The Soviet threat was a myth. That really caught my attention so I spent the rest of the journey trying to work out which newspaper was gently resting on my neighbour’s lap. Many furtive glances later I discovered it was The Guardian, a left-wing (to put it mildly) daily. Shock horror but no surprises there with regard to the title then… Nevertheless, I was intrigued and decided to read the online version as soon as I could get to my computer.
The conclusion of the argument was predictable and I am now torn between a point to point response to Andrew Alexander, the author of the article, who apparently is writing a whole book on the subject and just a few well placed words of wisdom, backed up by my personal experience, that would put him in his place. Something tells me that the latter approach would not satisfy the discerning Samizdata audience, so I will briefly highlight the most contentious of Mr Alexander’s statements and assumptions.
The conclusion that Stalin had no intention of attacking the West and that therefore the West is to blame for the Cold War just doesn’t hold. Just because the orthodox view of the Cold war as a ‘struggle to the death between Good (Britain and America) and Evil (the Soviet Union)’ may seem today as a simplistic ‘Manichean doctrine’, it does not follow that the Soviet Union’s actions such as installing communist governments throughout central and eastern Europe can be interpreted merely as a frightened response of the war-weary Russia to the speeches made by Churchill (the Iron Curtain speech of March 1946) and Truman (the phrase ‘stand up to Stalin with an iron fist’).
There are two lines of reasoning employed by those who challenge the Cold War orthodoxy, often combined to achieve greater emphasis. One is examination of the internal ideological struggles of Stalin with Trotsky and other opponents within the communist camp such as Tito and Mao to point out that Stalin was not driven by ideology. The logic blind spot is obvious here – Stalin’s version may have been different from the others but not necessarily less virulent and aggressive. And so, this flimsy and unsupported conclusion is then applied to his foreign policy and in combination with the realpolitik school of thought used to argue that Soviet Russia was acting in its national interest. The forceful communisation of central and eastern Europe is transformed to a natural reaction of a state defending its territory and security. By extension, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were necessary as part of the ‘cordon sanitaire’ around Russia and the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, however brutal, were ‘aimed at protecting Moscow’s buffer zone’.
Where does one start?! Rather than getting into a detailed discussion about the validity and interpretations of this or that surviving historical evidence of Stalin’s world view (which I plan to do anyway at some stage), I think it is important to point out the power of one’s own propaganda, especially when carried out in the Soviet proportions. Most students of communism tend to forget that it may be impossible to resist such intense and pervasive ‘brainwashing’ (including your own) without a deeply rooted alternative world view. So, how can we assume that Stalin was not susceptible to the effects of his own megalomaniac personality cult? Here my personal experience comes in handy as I remember only too well how insulation and ignorance create a breeding ground for a warped perception of reality and how those who perpetuate it fall victims to their own lies. Therefore, to attribute a perspective of an international relations academic to a dictator of Stalin’s calibre who wielded an ‘unlimited power’ over human lives using an elaborate ideology and a totalitarian regime is at best naive, at worst… well, let’s not be beastly to the Guardianistas in this enlightened day and age…
The most we can acknowledge is that there is no hard evidence (as yet) to prove or disprove the claims that Stalin had a masterplan for invasion of Europe and that only the determination of the West had prevented the Red Russia from taking over the world. However, to say that ‘any post-war Russian government – communist, tsarist or social democratic – would have insisted on effective control at least of Poland, if not of larger areas of eastern Europe, as a buffer zone against future attacks’ as Mr Alexander does, is just plain wrong, bordering on a serious lapse of judgement. The balance of power argument cannot possibly apply in the case of democratic Russia, as Germany, the main threat to Russian security, had been defeated by democratic countries and subjected to forceful democratisation by the US. The only way such an argument can be made, is if it contains an implicit assumption that communism is a morally equivalent (or morally neutral) alternative to the Western democratic regimes. Welcome back to meta-context!
And meta-context is where I want to remain for the moment in the Cold War debate as I do believe that its origins are not as clear as the orthodox or revisionist interpretations would have us believe. The methodology of discovering the causes of the Cold War is crucial as I believe this period of history to be steeped in meta-contextual clashes and misperceptions. This is not to ignore the moral dimension, far from it, but merely separate it from the rubble of the usual academic discourse that hides so many skeletons in its own meta-contextual closet.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
