All 11 entries tagged History

Afghanistan: Ten Years in a Dead End Street

Writing about web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-15209793

Marking ten years since the coalition invasion of Afghanistan, former U.S. commander Stanley McChrystal has said that the U.S. and its NATO allies are only a little better than half way towards reaching their war goals. He added:

Most of us -- me included -- had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history [of Afghanistan], and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years.

Respectfully, I disagree. The problem was not a lack of understanding specifically of Afghanistan's history, or of recent history. The problem was a lack of history in general. They did not understand how our modern world has been created.

The most basic acquaintance with European history since the tenth century would have told them two things.

• Democracy cannot be built overnight. It is a long, long process. A successful democracy depends on the rule of law. The rule of law comes first. Without the rule of law, electoral competition leads swiftly to chaos.
• A society based on patronage and rent sharing -- the kind of state that Afghans had before it was destroyed by a communist coup d'état and Soviet intervention -- can be more stable, more prosperous, and provide more rights than one based on chaos and looting. In fact, the right kind of patronage and rent sharing can foster the rule of law.

Based on ignorance of these two simple things, coalition policies in Afghanistan have been set up to fail from the word Go. We have failed to achieve our goals because the goals were fundamentally misconceived. Tens of thousands of troops and civilians have paid for this with their lives. The immense damage that has been done in Afghanistan and neighbouring countries will persist for decades.

Twenty/twenty hindsight? No. The first time I wrote this was on December 4, 2001. (I updated it on January 9, 2002, and expanded on it in 2009 on July 18 and August 30, and on January 1, 2010.)

I'll be modest about this -- I should be. I have made few predictions that have stood the test of time. Actually I have made few predictions, period. Not having to have a crystal ball is one of the good things about studying history.

I am not saying: Look, I got it right. I'm saying: Look, even I got it right. Why couldn't they?

Maybe because they didn't know the right kind of history.

Mark Harrison : 07 Oct 2011 09:38 |  Tags: Afghanistan History |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Why Bad Economics is Like Bad Art

Writing about web page http://whatpaulgregoryisthinkingabout.blogspot.com/2010/09/do-we-need-new-economics-101.html

It's economics bashing time again.

The latest to have a go is Gideon Rachman in yesterday's Financial Times. "Sweep economists off their throne!" he demands. He compares economists unfavourably to historians, "archive grubbers" who at least have a sense of modesty about their claims to rigour. He goes on to complain about the "brash certainties, peddled by those pseudo-scientists, otherwise known as economists." 

As an economic historian -- and I do grub around in archives -- I suppose I have some sympathy for this view. Only a year ago I was writing about the advantages of history in helping us see what's coming round the next corner.

But as a trained economist I think it misses the point.

Good economics isn't brash and doesn't make unjustified claims of predictive power. Specifically, good economics is not the handmaiden of the journalists and politicians who most want economics to support their nostrums and interventions. My Hoover colleague Paul Gregory makes a powerful case that what our first year students have been learning is still pretty much on the button in today's world. It is, above all, an economics that promotes scepticism, critical thinking, and the avoidance of Type I errors.

My point is that there is not just "economics." There is good economics and bad economics. I don't care if it is radical, liberal, conservative, or what. It's interesting that good economics of every school or tradition has more in common with the good economics of other schools than it has with bad economics of any school.

The problem is that there is always a demand for bad economics and there is also a plentiful supply of it. Why? We won't discuss good and bad physics, because that annoys too many people. Instead, think about bad art. On the supply side, untalented artists exceed the number of talented ones by a large margin. So, bad art is abundant. The same is true of economists; there are many more people like me that are writing about economics, for example, than there are Keyneses, Hayeks, and Friedmans. (I hope there's an even larger number of economists that are worse than me, but that's not for me to say.)

On the demand side, many people (myself included) are not really sure of the difference between good and bad art. Also, there are many reasons why we positively desire bad art: because it is comfortable; because it fits with the decor of the room we live in; because it promotes our fantasies without transcending them; and, particularly, because some critic tells us it is good when it's not. I'm sure I personally subscribe to at least some bad art for each and all those reasons.

The demand for bad economics is similar. In fact, just as critics and reviewers mediate the demand for bad art to the public, bad economics has a bunch of people that do the same job of telling the public to buy it. Who are they? Well, many of them are politicians and, er, journalists.

Since this is about economics, we should also think about price. Good economics is relatively scarce, difficult, and uncomfortable; it's designed for truth, not reassurance. In short, the price is high. Bad economics is abundant, soft, and easily absorbed. For all these reasons, it's cheap.

In fact, I'm fairly sure some of the journalists that are now hopping mad at economists are mad just because they themselves previously invested too much of their beliefs in bad, cheap economics. I once had a rather ill-mannered go at Anatole Kaletsky of The Times on this score. Not all of them are to blame, though, and specifically not Gideon Rachman. (I checked out what Rachman was blogging about before the crisis broke in 2007. At least, he wasn't promoting buy-to-let.)

Anyway, let's get back to sweeping the bad economists off their throne. Get rid of them; then what? Who are we going to ask about the economy? Sociologists? Some guy in the pub? Use common sense?

The trouble is, this is a surefire way of replacing bad economics with ... more bad economics. It was Keynes, himself a great economist, who wrote:

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

Mark Harrison : 08 Sep 2010 18:14 |  Tags: Economics History Keynes Recession |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

You Have Been Warned

Writing about web page http://www.agentura.ru/timeline/2010/profilactika/

A draft law before the Russian Parliament gives new powers to the FSB (Federal Security Service), the successor to the KGB. It allows the FSB to issue binding warnings to citizens suspected of creating conditions, through negligence, passivity, or incitement, in which crimes might be committed or facilitated. A warning that is ignored can be followed by an unspecified penalty, even though the actions that led to the warning may not be offenses in themselves.

This provision of the draft law restores the legal basis of a function once widely exercised by the KGB. This function was known in Russian as profilaktika, which translates directly as "prophylaxis" or "prevention."

Across the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, the KGB subjected around 15,000 people a year to profilaktika, more than half of them for displaying some sort of overt political unreliability, or having connections with foreigners leading to suspicion of disloyalty (see Rudol'ph Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz: istoriia vlasti, 1945–1991: Moscow 1998, pp. 365-366.) In proportion to the population, this would be about one in 10,000 adult Soviet citizens in each year.

What did profilaktika mean? Evidence of many, many individual cases can be found, for example, in the Lithuania KGB collection of the archive at the Hoover Institution, where I'm working now. How did they work? You could imagine it like this. Out of the blue, you get a call to come into your local KGB office. You really don't know what it's about, but you're on your best behaviour. Sitting behind his desk is a KGB colonel. He asks you what you think of the Soviet Union. Wonderful! You declare. Good, he says.

But in that case, he goes on: How come you told this anti-Soviet joke to your colleagues in the office on Thursday? And on Friday in the bar you repeated the news you heard the day before on Radio Liberty? And on Saturday you were heard cursing your Soviet-made automobile and wishing you had a BMW?

At first you bluster and deny everything. Inside, however, your world is collapsing. You're realizing just how much trouble you're in; your job and your home depend on the state and both are on the line. But that is only the start. Worse, it's dawning on you that your colleagues, your friends, maybe even your family members have been telling tales about you to the KGB. You're on your own.

You crumble. You start to make excuses: You were tired and under stress, you've always been a bit of an ignorant big mouth, you've been promoted above your competence and this has put you under pressure. You didn't realize how wrong it was. But you do now. Yes, you do, you do.

You promise you will never, ever do such things again. And you really mean it because, short of being physically beaten or locked in a cell, nothing is worse than the state of mind that this profilaktika has put you in. You've been exposed, hurt, humiliated, compromised, and isolated from society: From now on you will trust nobody, not even yourself. In fact, the only honest person in the room is the man in front of you.

The colonel listens as you stammer out your explanations. He is calm and nods a lot. He accepts what you say. When you've done, he closes the file. Go away, he says, and change your ways. We'll keep the information but, as long as you do the right thing from now on, we'll never have to look at it again. As you leave, you thank him for putting you back on the right track.

After you've gone, he makes a note to keep a special watch on you for a few months or a year, just to be sure that you meant it.

Profilaktika was applied to all sorts of cases, from loose morals and rowdy behaviour to indiscreet or unauthorized contacts with foreigners, petty smuggling or currency violations, and to adolescents who, in a place like Lithuania, might get caught up in the romance of anti-Soviet fly-posting or dreams of emigration. In such cases profilaktika was applied to the parents as well as the children.

More than half of all the cases of profilaktika were carried out in the privacy of the KGB offices, but there was also another version of the drama. This was enacted in public meetings. In this case the psychological beating was administered by your own colleagues, your student peers, or the pillars of your neighbourhood community.

For a police state, profilaktika was relatively humane. For hundreds of thousands of people it took the place of arrest and imprisonment, which would have been their fate in Stalin's time. It was also very effective in causing people to change their behaviour. In eight years, according to Pikhoia, out of more than 120,000 people subjected to such treatment, only 150 were subsequently taken to court for an actual offense. That's one eighth of one percent, a recidivism rate that western penal systems can only dream about.

A durable police state cannot be built out of bricks alone. There are building blocks like the security police and civilian police, border controls, the control of public assets, the distribution of taxes and resource rents, and media monopolies. In addition, binding agents are needed to assemble the blocks and glue them in place by controlling and coordinating the everyday behaviour of citizens at work, at home, and in the streets. Profilaktika was part of the mortar that held the bricks of the KGB state in position. Looks like it will do so again.

Mark Harrison : 28 Jul 2010 05:19 |  Tags: History Politics Russia |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Israel and Gaza: When Sanctions Fail

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/10195838.stm

Israel's deadly assault on the SS Mavi Marmara, the Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza, has evoked worldwide protests and condemnation. Not only that, it promises to undo Israel's three-year blockade of Gaza. Egyptian President Mubarak has ordered the reopening of Egypt's closed border crossing to Gaza. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called the situation in Gaza "unsustainable." Israeli relations with Turkey are clearly at risk; responding to popular protests, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has called Israel's raid a "bloody massacre."

In many ways Israel's use of sanctions to isolate and weaken the Hamas rulers of Gaza has followed a predictable course, up to and including its calamitous denouement. In the last hundred years trade sanctions and blockades have been employed in many conflicts, from World War I to Iran and North Korea today. It's possible to draw three lessons from this experience:

• Trade sanctions are generally slow to take effect on the country that is sanctioned and have fewer economic effects than expected. This is because, when a country is denied access to commodities that were previously imported, new ways of living without them turn out to be available. Economies are made or substitutes found. There are few limits on the ingenuity that can be brought to bear, provided the will is there. Even poor communities find workarounds. Of course, trade sanctions do make everyday life more difficult and raise the costs of resistance.
• Trade sanctions are usually very costly to impose. The country that imposes them has to meet the economic and political costs of enforcement. The economic costs alone can be large or small depending on the particular situation, but these are at least fairly predictable. The political costs are rarely foreseen beforehand, but can turn out to be even more important. For example, trade sanctions generally have strong political effects that are negative from the point of view of the blockading country. Within the blockade, the effect is to stiffen national feeling, which consolidates support around the government. As a result, the will to maintain resistance turns out to be there, whether or not it was there previously.
• Trade sanctions can also have strong political effects on the international community, and these too can be counter-productive. This is because trade sanctions cause collateral damage, some of which hurts the commercial interests and citizens of neutral countries. In turn, this affects neutral opinion. In some circumstances, the result can be to convert neutral countries into allies of the country that is sanctioned. This is not inevitable, however.

Trade sanctions are often imposed in the expectation that they will quickly cause the adversary's economy to break down or, failing that, to cause the adversary government to reach an acceptable compromise. Alternatively, they are advocated by well meaning humanitarians who prefer non-violent ways of changing the adversary's behaviour. But it is hard to think of a case where trade sanctions actually worked in that way.

Historically, trade sanctions generally did worsen the economic conditions of the sanctioned population and signficantly increased the economic costs of maintaining resistance, as intended, although by less than expected. The political effects, in contrast, tended to work in the other direction, making it easier for the sanctioned government to impose the economic costs on its community. Any payoff to the sanctioning power did not materialize in less than several years and often, even then, only when combined with direct military action.

A clear illustration can be found in World War I. From an early stage in the war, Germany imposed a submarine blockade on the British Isles. Since Britain imported more than three quarters of the food calories consumed in peacetime, German naval strategists believed this was a war winning weapon. Eventually, however, the blockade may have done more damage to Germany than to Britain.

How did Britain survive the blockade? Countermeasures included wartime expansion of home agriculture, its restructuring away from meat to cereals, and rigid prioritizing of convoy shipping space. These measures, although costly, were so effective that, despite a large reduction in food imports, there was no deterioration in wartime nutritional standards for the British population. This illustrates well how the principle of substitution can lessen the effectiveness of blockade in comparison to what is expected beforehand.

The blockade was extremely costly for Germany, which had to build and operate hundreds of ocean-going submarines and replace heavy losses at sea in order to sustain a blockade that was only partially effective. The political costs to Germany were even more disastrous. Within Britain, the political effect was to stiffen patriotism and national resistance.

Internationally, Germany's efforts to tighten the blockade led to the sinking of neutral ships, with their cargoes, crews, and passengers, and to the deaths of neutral citizens carried by British ships. As a result, the neutral community became more sympathetic to Britain. In the first years of the war, the most important neutral power was the United States. It was the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare that progressively antagonized American opinion and brought America into the war in 1917. America's entry into the war ensured Germany's defeat. These effects illustrate how the political costs of trade sanctions can outweigh any benefit to the blockading power.

During World War I, Britain also blockaded German trade. This was achieved bloodlessly, by a combination of the control of surface shipping and diplomatic pressure on Germany's neutral neighbours. Of course this was very costly to Britain but one difference is that Britain did not lose as many friends as Germany. The main reason is that Britain did not need to attack neutral assets or victimize neutral citizens to enforce its blockade of Germany. In contrast, Germany could not attack British trade without sinking neutral ships and shedding neutral blood.

This is now Israel's problem with Gaza. Until recently, both Israel and Egypt had a common policy of opposing the Hamas administration in Gaza by means of trade sanctions. The sanctions have had some positive effects. Syria and Iran have not been able to resupply the Hamas militants with armaments to attack Israel, which no longer faces daily bombardment. But sanctions have not succeeded in bringing Hamas down or changing its goals. They have not freed the Israeli soldier Shalit Gilad. The economy of Gaza has been reduced to a low level but is maintained there by sanction-busting gangs of criminal entrepreneurs whose profits depend on the blockade, on smuggling through it, and on the distribution of smuggled goods.

The aid flotilla, and Israel's heavy handed response, have broken this equilibrium. The siege has been ended, temporarily at least, on the Egyptian border. Having lost the cooperation of Egypt and Turkey, Israel cannot reimpose sanctions without undertaking measures that are likely to further alienate world opinion; possibly, Israel cannot reimpose it at all. In this way the blockade of Gaza has conformed with historical experience.

I say this without considering the morality of the opposing sides and their actions. Israel has the right to defend its citizens against their enemies. But the blockade of Gaza has ceased to be a means to that end.

Mark Harrison : 03 Jun 2010 09:05 |  Tags: Economics History Israel Palestine Politics |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

World War II: Hitler and Stalin, Guilt and Responsibility

Writing about web page http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSL1655337

For Britain, World War II began 70 years ago today. On a personal note, today would also be the 71st wedding anniversary of my mother and father. They married on September 3, 1938; one year later, they heard Neville Chamberlain declare war on Germany. The war didn't stop them from believing in the future; by 1945 they had two baby girls, my older sisters. I'm thinking of them all as I write.

Who was to blame for World War II? This question is not the same as "What was to blame?" World War II had many deep causes. Ultimately, however, the decision for war is a political act, taken by human beings whom we can hold to account for their actions.

So, who was to blame:

• Germany?

In Europe, the guilty men were the leaders of Nazi Germany. Hitler's plan was to build a German Empire in the East, making Germany self-sufficient in food. Hitler intended to conquer, depopulate, and then resettle Russia and Ukraine. This plan, not yet worked in detail, was soon elaborated in parallel with, but somewhat in advance of the much better known plan to exterminate Europe's Jews. Like the "final solution," the Hungerplan was genocidal: it envisaged starving up to 30 million people of the European part of the Soviet Union to death. 

Between Germany and the Soviet Union lay Poland and Czechoslovakia; these states had to be destroyed to clear the path into Russia. The attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, in response to which Britain declared war on September 3, was a necessary step towards Hitler's wider goal. Others contributed to the timing of Hitler's decision and played into his hands in various ways. This is the context in which the behaviour of the British, French, Polish, and Soviet governments should be judged.

• Britain and France?

The worst thing for which the British and French were to blame was the Munich agreement of September 1938. By this agreement Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier, the French prime minister, betrayed Czechoslovakia, their ally, by giving part of it away to Germany. They made themselves accessories before the fact of Hitler's crime. Correctly interpreting this as weakness, in March 1939 Hitler broke the agreement and took the rest of Czechoslovakia.

• Poland?

Although not signatories to the Munich agreement, the Poles also played a small role. First, they refused Soviet offers to send troops to defend Czechoslovakia. They suspected Soviet motives; it was less than twenty years since the Red Army's last invasion. (And history after 1945 strongly suggests that their suspicions would have been correct.) Second, when it became clear that Czechoslovakia was up for grabs they grabbed their own slice, a Polish speaking region on their border. In this small way they became accessories after (not before) the fact of the crime. On the scale of guilt, however, it was very minor. Like the British and French, they acted out of weakness. The best way to understand the Polish leaders at this time is that they were both overplaying and trying vainly to improve their hand in a game they hadn't chosen to enter and couldn't win; it is also true that they were willing to do so at the expense of others.

• The Soviet Union?

The responsibility of the Soviet Union is more complex and wide-ranging. The Soviet government -- in other words Stalin who, by this time, was an unquestioned dictator --did several things, the sum of which was far worse than the Anglo-French collusion with Hitler at Munich. It is important that they all came after the Munich agreement. Until Munich, Stalin hoped to deter Hitler through "collective security" -- an agreement with Britain, France, and their allies Poland and Czechoslovakia, to contain Germany. The Munich agreement told Stalin that this was no longer an option. As his least bad remaining option, Stalin decided to collude with Hitler himself.

To the public, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (named after the Soviet and German foreign ministers) of August 1939 was simply an agreement between two countries not to attack each other. This in itself was no crime; Moscow had a similar pact with Tokyo that both sides upheld until August 1945. The crime of the pact was its secret clauses. Infamously, it dismembered Poland, which the Soviet Union had previously offered to defend, carving up that country with Germany, and creating the common Soviet-German border across which Hitler would attack less than two years later.

The pact was Hitler's green light to attack Poland, and determined the timing of today's anniversary. By agreeing to it, Stalin became a co-conspirator in Hitler's decision for war. At the same time it is clear that, even without any secret clauses, Hitler was ready to attack Poland anyway. Thus, Stalin made the Soviet Union an accessory to the crime before and after the fact, but he was not the prime mover in the major crime.

Stalin is directly to blame for many other crimes that followed directly from the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland. The very worst of these was his decision to approve the mass shooting of some twenty thousand Polish officers whom the Red Army had taken prisoner. The officers killed in the Katyn woods were not just professional soldiers; they were the elite of Polish society, politics, and business. The only possible reason for the massacre was that Stalin had determined to prevent the reemergence of an independent Poland.

Just as Stalin gave Hitler permission to attack Poland, other clauses, with some later amendment, gave Stalin Hitler's permission to do what he liked around the Baltic. Thus the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact led directly to the destruction of the independent states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and to the "winter war" in which Stalin tried, at huge cost, to adjust the Soviet border with Finland. Like Poland, the three small Baltic republics suffered political and social decapitation through the imprisonment and deportation of their former elites.

The official Soviet justification of these measures -- at least, of those that were admitted -- was that Stalin was manoeuvring defensively from a position of weakness and was therefore, like the British, French, and Poles, not primarily to blame; through the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he bought the Soviet Union time to prepare for an eventual war with Germany. On first hearing, this justification sounds a little like what I said about Poland: Stalin was trying to improve his hand in a game he had not chosen to play. I take it half seriously. Stalin feared Hitler, realized that war was almost inevitable, and played for time, although he went on to develop many illusions about the likely timing of war and the margin for avoiding it. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact did buy time, and he did use the time to prepare.

There are big differences from Poland, however. One is that the Soviet Union was militarily much stronger than Poland and had much more freedom of action. This must undermine Stalin's excuses for behaving badly. Yet Stalin behaved far, far worse than Poland ever did. The annexations, deportations, and mass killings that he authorized did not buy time or friends, and had little or no justification as preparations for war. On the contrary they caused or intensified anti-Russian feeling in the borderlands that persists to this day. The Katyn massacre had nothing to do with defendng against Germany and everything to do with completing the destruction of Polish independence. One thing to remember about Stalin is that it suited him to have tension on his borders, because this played well with the narrative of encirclement that he used to justify his own rule and the repressions that secured it. 

Stalin's decisions had profound effects on the timing of World War II and the course that it followed. But they did not cause the war. The war's trajectory was determined first and foremost by the character and aims of the nationalist socialist dictatorship in Berlin. If Germany had been governed by liberals, socialists, or traditional conservatives in the 1930s, there would not have been a war in the heart of Europe. Without Germany at war, there would still have been an Italian war in North Africa and a Japanese war in China, but neither the Japanese nor the Italians would have been brave enough on their own to start wars against Britain or America in the Mediterranean and the Pacific.

It is true that in 1941 Nazi propagandists tried to justify the German attack on the Soviet Union as a defensive reaction to Soviet preparations for an attack on Germany. This explanation. built on speculation at a time when all the Soviet documents were secret, continues to find traction today in some quarters, but the opening of the Soviet archives has found no more hard evidence for it than there was before.

• Italy? Japan?

Italy was also involved, not only as a signatory at Munich but as an empire-builder around the Mediterrranean. And Japan; don't forget that World War II began in Asia in July 1937 when Japan opened full-scale hostilities against China. Mussolini and the Japanese leaders share the guilt for the war.

• Deeper causes?

When we see several countries bent on the same course, we have to suppose that there might be common factors at work, and these factors might go deeper than any one person's calculations. These deeper factors must include the tensions and imbalances left over from World War I, and the devastating impact of the Great Depression. I've written elsewherethat in the long run the main cost of the Great Depresson was not economic but political, in the way it opened up European politics to dictatorships and aggressive warfare.

Does this reduce the guilt of the individual leaders? I don't think so. A criminal gang that exploits the devastation of a natural disaster to loot and kill is still a gang of criminals.

The idea that World War II had underlying causes is sometimes used to shift the focus away from Germany to Russia. Above, I suggested, "No Nazis -- no World War II." A counter-argument is "No Bolsheviks -- no Nazis." The Soviet Union was a frightening neighbour for both Poland and Germany. Before Hitler came to power, the Bolshevik record of government already included class warfare, mass killings, and concentration camps. Between 1918 and 1924 the Bolsheviks had incited several armed insurrections in Germany. The Red Army had invaded Poland as recently as 1920. This record certainly helped Hitler's racial politics and plans for expansion to play well with the German public. It also undermined any Polish inclination to a common front with the Soviet Union against Germany. 

At the same time, Germany did not attack the Soviet Union to restore democratic government or property rights to the Russians or anyone else. Hitler did not target only communist countries, nor did he spare Poland and Czechoslovakia on the grounds that they did not have Bolshevik regimes. His war in the East was a grab for land and food, regardless of who would be displaced. Saying that Bolshevism was responsible for this has more than a whiff of blaming the victim for the crime. The Bolsheviks should have been held to account for many crimes of their own, but not this one.

• How does Russia see Stalin today?

The major crime was the world war itself. The primary guilt for it belonged to leaders in Berlin, Tokyo, and Rome. The war unfolded through many stages; at various times Hitler won cooperation from London, Paris, Warsaw, and Moscow. Those who colluded with him did so sometimes under duress, sometimes to play for time. In retrospect this might look weak or foolish, but those who did it did so to avoid war, not to cause it.

Sometimes it was worse than that. On occasion, Hitler's allies of convenience worked with him opportunistically, because it suited their other goals. This applied more than anyone to Stalin, who exploited his temporary truce with Hitler between 1939 and 1941 not only to build up defenses but also to weaken or destroy the previously independent states on his borders. In the course of this the Soviet Union committed crimes on its own account, that did not flow from Germany's crimes.

In spirit, my apportioning of responsibilities for World War II may not be that different from the account offered by Vladimir Putin to the Polesat ceremonies marking the anniversary of the German invasion on September 1. For example, Putin condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact -- although only as a "mistake." He also offered a joint Russian-Polish commission to establish the facts of what happened at Katyn, although the facts are already well documented. Apart from that, what Putin said in Poland is not the problem.

The problem with Russia's present-day administration is not what it says abroad, but what it says at home. To the Russian public President Medevev has declared, in remarks that were notably anti-Polish and anti-European, there can be no debate over

who started the war, which country killed people, and which country saved people, millions of people, and which country, ultimately, saved Europe.

And for professional historians in Russia the message of the Presidential decree of May 15 this year, directed against "attempts to falsify history to the detriment of the interests of Russia," is again that on certain matters debate is to be ruled out -- by law if necessary.

The Soviet Union, led by Stalin, did not cause the war, but everything else in Medvedev's formulation is highly debatable. The Soviet Union certainly killed people in very large numbers for purposes that ought to be condemned. For Poland, Katyn was a national tragedy. It is true that the Soviet Union "saved Europe" from German domination, and "saved people, millions of people" from destruction. But Stalin did this primarily to save himself; it is not clear that he deserves their thanks for that.

As for the people that the Soviet Union saved most directly, its own people and the citizens of the countries that the Red Army "liberated," it saved them in order to subjugate them, and it subsequently killed more than a few of them in repressing their freedom and independence.

Stalin's legacy is complex. It is in Russia itself that well-informed debate, free of government pressure and "patriotic" restraints, is most needed. When polled, for example, most Russians approve of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact but do not know that the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland under its provisions.

Meanwhile, I'll stop to think for a moment about Roger and Betty Harrison, married under the gathering stormclouds of September 3, 1938, and their war babies.

Mark Harrison : 03 Sep 2009 08:37 |  Tags: History Russia Stalin War |  Comments (10) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Capitalism and Communism: A Few Things I Changed My Mind About

I sat over lunch under an apple tree with some old comrades. We reminisced about the U.K. referendum on EEC membership back in 1975. At the time, we all campaigned against. I mentioned that since then I had changed my mind. Why? Because, I offered, the EU had done more to spread and consolidate democracy in central and eastern Europe than any other factor or force. I'm not sure, but I think someone close to my right ear muttered "Shame!" That, and a few other remarks, made me realize that some of those I was sitting with might not have changed their minds about much, despite the passage of a third of a century.

Some things I have kept. I was brought up in a high-minded atmosphere of nineteenth-century rationalism. Now, I would not recommend this for everyone. It was not a lot of fun. I did not really learn how to party, for example. However, I did absorb a lot about the sanctity of truth and the beauty of logic. As for politics my mother, a lifelong Liberal, imbued me with the notion that:

Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where one grew before would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift).

That was the "rationalism" side of my upbringing. The "nineteenth century" bit was the optimism that came with it. I had instilled in me a belief in the possibility of progress -- that we, the human race, could learn from experience and reasoning to make things better for everyone.

These things I still believe.

But some I don't. One thing I used to believe was that the government could always fix things -- at least, if not the government, then some other government.

I lost faith in this idea gradually, a bit at a time. To begin with, I believed it wholeheartedly -- as did we all (this was those of us that were studying economics in Cambridge, England, in the late 1960s). The only problem would be if the government was mistaken in fact or logic. If so, it was our job to put it right! We all saw government service as the highest calling of a professional economist. I nearly went that way, but I got bitten by the economic history bug.

A little later, my view of politics had darkened. I no longer trusted the government -- our government, the capitalist government, that was. I became a revolutionary socialist, and then a communist. (By this point I had forgotten about the two blades of grass.) It was still the government's job to fix things, but it had to be a government of the people, by the people, for the people. This outlook wasn't anarchistic, but it was libertarian. I wanted a world, foreshadowed by Marx in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, where,

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

What kind of government would that be? Well, although a communist, I did know it wasn't the Soviet government of the day. I had lived and studied in Moscow; I knew it was a police state and didn't much like it, although there were other things I was ready to admire. But the voices from the Soviet bloc that I listened to were the Czechoslovak and Polish reformers (some of them now exiled to Britain) and, in the Soviet Union, democratic Marxist dissenters like Roy Medvedev. This was the now forgotten era of Eurocommunism which, germinated by the 1960s, blossomed briefly during the 1970s. Italian and Spanish communists put forward the daring view that Soviet socialism had something missing from its makeup. The Russian Revolution of 1917, although not a mistake, had driven a wedge between democracy and socialism. In Britain some communists, but by no means all, took this up. It was our job to put democracy and socialism back together. (We failed.)

We debated the mistakes and crimes of Stalinism. This debate turned out to have some unexpected twists. In the Great Terror of 1937, Stalin had murdered a million people. No one really wanted to defend this. Those who wanted to support the Soviet Union on principle generally divided into two. One lot went into denial: some real enemies had been justly executed, and the rest was a fabrication. Others accepted the truth, but stuck to the line of Khrushchev in 1956: it was the fault of Stalin and a few leaders, who had died or been got rid of, and everything else was basically healthy, so that made it okay.

More disturbing, if anything, was the problem of the far more numerous victims that Stalin didn't intend, but killed anyway: for example, the five to eight million deaths resulting from the famine of the early 1930s. There was no plan to kill them, but they died because Stalin's drive to industrialize the country took too much food from the villages, leaving not enough to keep the rural population alive. Their bones were buried in the foundations of socialist construction. This was harder for some to face up to than premeditated mass murder. If a death was a crime you could convict the murderer, but killing by mistake placed the whole Soviet system on trial.

We wanted to heal the rift between socialism and democracy. We were failing, but we didn't know it yet. For the mid-1980s saw the coming to power in the Soviet Union of a leader who walked and talked like us: Mikhail Gorbachev. Like us, Gorbachev wanted to put socialism back together with democracy. The Soviet Union could become a free, democratic society! We were re-inspired, briefly.

It wasn't all philosophy and infighting. While disagreeing on history and the Bolshevik Revolution, we lived in our own country in the present. Putting differences aside, we engaged in many campaigns. We fought for jobs and full employment, opposed racism, supported strikers, marched for peace, campaigned for votes, and worked to enliven and empower our local communities.

Some other beliefs that I still held at that time mirrored my faith in political action to put things right. One was that fairness matters more than efficiency. In the late 1980s, shortly before his final illness, I became friends with Peter Wiles. We soon understood each other pretty well. Given our different starting points -- in many ways he was a classic liberal -- he was exceptionally kind to me. But even when he was no longer quite sure who I was or why I was there, he would turn to me suddenly and say: Efficiency! You've never paid enough attention to efficiency! Efficiency is very important!" And he was right. Because, the more efficiency you have, the more blades of grass and ears of corn you have, and the easier it is to be fair. At the time, this was something that I was still thinking about.

Then the Soviet experiment came to an abrupt end, a complete and total failure. Sometime early in 1991, I decided that the era ushered in by the Bolshevik Revolution was over. It was time to move on. I didn't know where, but I knew I couldn't stay where I was. I turned in my party card, and that was it.

A few years later, I was still stuck with nineteenth century rationalism, but I had changed allegiance from Marx and Engels to Smith, Ricardo, and Mill. In economics and politics I had become a liberal. I was happy -- as most liberal economists are -- with progressive redistribution through taxes and benefits, and tax-financed health and education services. I still had an optimistic belief in progress. But I no longer thought the government could drive progress, or fix everything, and I didn't even want it to do these things any more.

Political economy and the study of bureaucracy helped me to this view. Politicians and government officials, I realized, are not to be judged by their high-mindedness. Whether capitalist or socialist, under democracy or a dictator, political leaders and civil servants are self-interested. If the incentives align their private interests with those of society as a whole, well and good. Mostly, however, this is not the case. I ceased to believe that good government needed only correct facts and correct logic. I began to grasp the possibility that governments could fail systematically, perhaps more often than markets could fail.

From there it was a short step to the idea that a good way to organize society is to place the government under strict constitutional constraints, and let the citizens govern themselves as much as possible.

There were plenty of things I struggled with then, and still do today.

One is climate change. When climate change is (in the words of the Stern report) "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen," it is clear that without some kind of political action there is no solution. (You can actually read me struggling with this in my first and only article about climate change, written way back in 1991. I had figured out the political action problem, although in a crude and overdramatic way, but not yet the coordination problem that goes with it.)

Another is military intervention. I still thought military force had a purpose in the modern world and, to be perfectly honest, I still do. That doesn't mean I know exactly what that purpose is. Here's an example. I was in favour of the U.S. led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and less surely in favour of the invasion of Iraq two years later. What do I think now? There is a lot of evidence now to suggest I was wrong. I still think Saddam Hussain brought defeat on himself by pretending to have weapons that he wanted to have, and had tried to develop, but did not in fact possess. Also, I think the full consequences will not be known for many years, and could well differ greatly from what seems obvious now. Still, that is to anticipate hindsight that we don't yet have.

More to the point is this. I never forgot a conversation about Iraq with an American friend and fellow economic historian. I visited his university in November 2004 when Bush had just won his second term. Depressed and angry, Tim exploded at me: "You ex-coms are all the same!" (I wondered how many he knew.) "When it comes to military intervention you still think the state can fix everything." I think he had me just right. I was skewered.

A third thing I struggle with is who gets my vote. I favour policies that are economically conservative, socially liberal, tolerant and generous in international affairs, interventionist when forced but always reluctant and mindful of the perils of selective intervention. The only party that would be all these things is a party that is not interested in power. No party is all of these things in any country that I can think of. But if we don't vote, I believe, they will take our liberties anyway.

The last thing I want to mention is what it has meant to me to have spent the last eighteen years working in and with the Soviet state and party archives. First, a wonderful privilege: what luck, that I was granted such an opportunity. I have used it to work on a wide range of topics -- statistics, economic planning, growth and development, wartime mobilization, defence planning and procurement, decision making, information, secrecy, lying, cheating, whistleblowing, and repression. There is so much to study! This was a state of 200 million people and one sixth of the world's land surface that recorded everything of note in millions upon millions of documents over 70 years.

And second, a strange voyage of discovery, hard to define in a few words -- but I'll try. In general, no great surprises. The documents show a vast, centralized dictatorship with a mailed fist and a decaying metabolism. But we knew that, already. The fact is that academics and writers older and better than me, the dissidents and scholars of Peter Wiles's generation, had already worked out the main dimensions and characteristics of the Soviet system, its politics and economics. This was a state that just had too much power. 

In specifics, though, my sense of shock, accompanied by a full span of emotions from grief to laughter, is continually renewed by the opening of each new file. Two examples: First, how did I get interested in secrecy? I was working on Soviet military procurement. Every year the government gave the Red Army a cash budget to buy new equipment. Soldiers toured the factories to work out what weapons were available and at what price. Industry was supposed to sell weapons to the military at cost price. So, the officers' first question tended to be: "How much does that cost?" And the standard answer? "We can't tell you. It's a military secret." It sounds ridiculous! But it worked! Year after year and decade after decade, it worked. That told me there was something interesting and remarkable in the operation of Soviet secrecy that needed to be understood.

Second example: Earlier in the summer I took a first look at the files of the Lithuania KGB, newly acquired from Vilnius by the Hoover Institution archive. Every year the KGB second administration, responsible for counter-intelligence, made a plan of work and a report of work. They enumerated the thousands of "objects" that, in the course of the year, they would aim to monitor, intercept, warn off, compromise, recruit, blackmail, or arrest, and the hundreds of informers they would deploy to achieve the plan. This is what the KGB did in Lithuania year after year, right up to the end of the 1980s. The term "object" is no mistake; they coldly manipulated "the lives of others" with casually understated brutality. Suddenly at the end of the 1980s the endgame arrived, and a hundred thousand people were on the streets, demonstrating for independence -- half of them, party members! They were taken completely by surprise! They'd been watching the wrong people! (Or had they? Again, there's a story in this.)

And finally, an inner struggle between the calls of science and morality. As a social scientist, my first duty must be to understanding. Understanding comes from new knowledge, and there is so much new knowledge in those dusty files and blurred microfilms! Judgement should come later. But there is also a feeling that spreads involuntarily from my gut, a voice that I can't shut out: Reagan was right. This was an evil empire.

Do I regret my past associations or activities? No. I believed or did many things that seem silly or misguided with hindsight, but I did not betray anyone or do anything really wrong. Many good people belonged to the communist party who inspired me both as idealists and as activitists. From them I learned about how to translate ideals into action, and how to work with people of differing views, build cooperation, and get things done in the face of criticism and opposition; it is hard to imagine that I could have learned these things in any other way. One thing I learned was always to start from the world as it is, not as you would like it to be. This was one reason I did not write off the Soviet Union at the time. Which bring us to mistakes. Well, they are supposed to help you learn. I made many, many mistakes and this just gave me plenty of scope to learn from them. Of course, I probably did not learn all that I should and I probably made many more mistakes than I ever recognized.

No doubt there is some degree of self-serving fiction in my story. The way I tell it, I remained true to the values I got from my mother: truth and reason before everything else. The facts changed, so I changed my reasoning. The world changed, and I moved on. But there could be other versions.

My children might say: In his youth, Dad was a free thinker. He got older and more established, put on weight, and settled for a comfortable life in an armchair.

The old comrades I lunched with might not go along with that. After all, they got older too, but they did not settle for comfort or accommodate to new times. They remained true to the cause. Among them, some might tell a story of treachery and betrayal, in which I began with my heart in the right place, but eventually sold out the cause in return for academic status and reputation. Others might wonder if I wasn't always a middle-class revisionist, just playing with politics, an enemy within from the start, never a true comrade. Somewhere in this tangled tale lies the golden thread of truth -- but where? You choose.

Mark Harrison : 19 Aug 2009 08:23 |  Tags: History Politics |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

How Can We Get to See What's Coming Round the Corner?

Writing about web page http://www.wehc2009.org/programme.asp?find=world+in+2030

At a meeting I attended earlier this week, some of the world's best economic historians discussed how the world might look in 2030, based on their knowledge of the long-run trends at work over the last couple of centuries (or, in the case of China, the last couple of millennia). People talked about trends, models, and forecasts, using a lot of numbers and graphs. The picture was generally optimistic, in a moderate sort of way.

One speaker worried about the small number of big things that, although they happen only rarely, might completely derail our visions of the future: things like deadly pandemics, Great Depressions, and global wars. Anther speaker worried about the rise of nationalism, how far it might go, and whether it could then have unpredictable effects.

This made me think about people that haven't had the benefits of a training in economics -- most historians, for example, but of course not only them. It occurred to me that such people often think about the future in a completely diffferent way, a way that is much more intuitive than economists' trends and models. They think about the future by telling stories taken from the past. (This is not a completely original thought. I began to think about it after reading "The Political Economy of Hatred," by Ed Glaeser, in 2005 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics 120:1, and more recently Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, published by Princeton University Press in 2008).

How do people use stories from the past to think about the future? First, they think about the conditions obtaining in the world today. Then, they scan the past for stories that began with initial conditions somewhat like these. They ask: "What happened next?" Then, they let the story unfold. From the story, they work out what might be about to happen in our own future. In this way, they try to see what's coming round the corner but still hidden from direct view.

Here are two examples.

• Today, we are in the early stages of a Great Recession that was preceded by a financial crisis. That's somewhat like the world economy in around 1930 or 1931. What happened in the Great Depression was a global contraction followed by the breakup of world markets, the rise of nationalism, the attempt of Germany, Italy, and Japan to carve out new empires, and World War II. Is that what might come next?
• Russia today is a great power that began the transition from totalitarianism to democracy -- and got stuck half way. The Russian political elite feels encircled by an old enemy, NATO, in the West, and a new rival, China, rising rapidly in the East. With a shrinking population, Moscow may well feel that time is running out. That's somewhat like Germany in around 1912. Germany was stalled half way from Prussian absolutism to parliamentary democracy. Germany was a rising power, but with the sense of being encircled by old enemies, Britain and France, in the West, and new rivals, Russia and Japan, that were rising even faster in the East. What happened next in that case was that the German political elite took an immense gamble. They launched World War I, not because they were confident of winning, but because they feared that time was running out. They feared the consequences of doing nothing -- the certain continuation (as they saw it) of peaceful decline -- more than the combined risks of victory and defeat if they started a military adventure. Is that what might come next?

Story-telling like this has some remarkable features. First, it is indeed a way of thinking about the possibility of rare and unpredictable events. As such it is immensely powerful. Its intuitive appeal is much greater than models, charts, and numbers. It speaks the language of nations and politics: shared experiences, common destinies, collective rights and wrongs. It is easily voiced by leaders and heard by followers untrained in statistical thinking about trends and standard errors. As a result, while politicians may turn to economists for technical advice, they get historians to help write their speeches -- Arthur Schlesinger Jr (John F. Kennedy), Richard Pipes (Ronald Reagan), and Norman Stone (Margaret Thatcher).

Second, story-telling is deliberately selective. When we scan history for stories, we look by definition for sequences of events that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the middle, something happens that is out of the ordinary, dramatic, and unexpected. Invariably, we rule out all those past historical circumstances that also somewhat resembled the present day, but after which there were no surprises and nothing much happened.

Third, story-telling typically sounds an alarm. In history, dramatic events are rarely good news. The good news in history has generally been made up of the slow, steady progress of emancipation, literacy, and prosperity. Such good news is easily illustrated by statistics and trends, but does not make good stories. It is the bad news of crises and wars that makes good stories.

Fourth, exactly because story-telling is alarmist, an entirely legitimate purpose of stories may sometimes be to sound the alarm about the risks we face and so avert their realization. Putting it in its best light, we sound the alarm of another Great Depression so that governments will take the actions necessary to save us from having to relive the experience. We warn of the danger of a new war so that governments will change their policies to a peaceful track. One result is that it is generally very difficult if not impossible to test the efficacy of story tellng as a form of prediction.

Fifth, some stories can be self-fulfilling. There is a particular kind of collective story, for example, that communal identity politicians like to tell (Glaeser wrote about this in "The Political Economy of Hatred"). These are stories of past hate crimes allegedly committed by some other ethnic or religious group against their own group: Black against White, Germans against Jews, Jews against Palestinians, Protestants against Catholics, Sunni against Shia -- and, in all cases, vice versa. Such stories can be extrapolated into predictions of future hate crimes yet to be committed, and then into justifications for hateful and violent action to preempt the future crimes.

Related to all this is the problem that we control the initial conditions of the stories we select only very imperfectly. The world economy today is only somewhat like the world economy of 1930; in many ways it is quite different -- and the differences may well turn out to be crucial. In the same way, Russia today is only somewhat like Germany in 1912. And so on. Thus, the stories we tell have the capacity to be deeply misleading about the true underlying risks in the world today.

If the risk of war or depression illustrated in the story does not materialize, this could be because telling the story stimulated effective action to avert the risk, or because the risk, although real, happened not to materialize this time (i.e. we were lucky), or because the risk was nonexistent in the first place; we may have no idea which is the case. If the risk of community violence does materialize, we don't know whether the underlying story merely predicted it -- or actually precipitated it.

In summary, such stories are powerful. They have great potential to illuminate the risks we face, but this potential is also dangerous; it is a power to accentuate risks, as well as to illuminate them.

I draw two simple conclusions from this. One is that economists and economic historians interested in addressing the wider public should think carefully about the stories that can put our messages across. The other is that we should pay close attention to the stories that others narrate in public about what has happened in economic history: we should look out for these stories, identify them, test them carefully against the evidence that we have, and then report the results to the public ourselves.

Mark Harrison : 06 Aug 2009 08:09 |  Tags: Economics History Politics |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Comrade Frumkin Was Right

This is about a forgotten prophet of the twentieth century. In 1951, the case of party member M. S. Frumkin came for investigation to the party control commission in Moscow. Frumkin was accused of adopting "a Trotskyist standpoint on matters of building socialism." 

The scandal arose in the context of a lecture that Frumkin gave on April 11, 1951, to teachers of the USSR transport ministry college for commanders of its armed security forces. The unpromising subject of Frumkin's lecture was "The conditions of material life of society." In the course of the lecture Frumkin remarked:

Transitional forms of production relations can exist not only during the transition from capitalism to socialism but also, conversely, during the transition from socialism to capitalism.

This opaque remark caused uproar. As the investigator commented afterwards, Frumkin had contradicted Stalin's "entirely clear" teaching on the transition from capitalism to socialism; according to Stalin, transitional production relations arose only in the context of movement from a lower form of society to a higher form -- not the other way around. The listeners protested. What was this "transition from socialism to capitalism"? One commented:

Comrade Frumkin's statement contradicts the laws of historical development of society ... it would follow from this formulation that the socialist system should be replaced by the capitalist [system].

Another asked:

Why was so much blood spilt in the struggle for socialism, if a return to capitalism is inevitable?

Instead of recognizing his mistake, however, Frumkin went on to defend it to the listeners, giving three historical examples of transition from socialism to capitalism:

• The fall of the Paris Commune (1871)
• The crushing of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919)
• And the defection of Yugoslavia to the camp of imperialism (1948)

As I read the report (in the Hoover Institution's Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and State collection, RGANI, fond 6, opis 6, file 1643, folios 26 to 28), my interest mounted. These seemed like good examples to me. How would the listeners respond? But they objected: "These examples are incorrect!" Frumkin took a step back: the issue had "not been worked through and was for discussion."

Over the next few weeks Frumkin maintained this position. During this time he was first criticized at a party committee meeting in the college, and then reprimanded by the township party committee "for the political error that he committed and for reluctance to correct it at the proper time."

When the matter came finally to the party control commission, Frumkin accepted his mistake, putting it down to a "slip of the tongue." He claimed that he had confused it with the possibility of a violent capitalist restoration from outside, of the sort that Stalin himself had admitted in a letter "On the Final Victory of Socialism in the USSR," published in Pravda on February 14, 1938. Since Frumkin now accepted his mistake, and had been penalized within the party, the party control reporter proposed no further action.

Who was Frumkin? We are given only a few details. We know his initials but not his given name or patronymic. He was born in Russia in 1903; his family background was working-class. He joined the communist party in 1925. In 1935 he graduated from the Lenin Military-Political Academy in Leningrad. From there he was sent to teach in military schools in Briansk, then Gor'kii.

In 1943 Frumkin was taken into the Red Army where he served until 1946 as deputy chief of the political department of the 153 rifle division. On demobilization he was appointed deputy chief of administration of educational establishments for the RSFSR ministry of trade, and then section chief of the ministry of transport college where the incident took place. By the time of the investigation he had been moved on -- or down -- to be a political instructor in the security establishment of the Moscow-Riazan railway.

In short, Frumkin was a functionary of his time; there were millions like him in everything but that instinct that led him, for a few weeks in 1951, to defend the idea that history could go in reverse. Frumkin would have turned 88 in 1991, so he is unlikely to have lived to see his prophesy come true.

Mark Harrison : 31 May 2009 23:37 |  Tags: History Russia Stalin |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

At the Centre of the Gulag Archipelago, a Quiet Lagoon …

What sights and sensations does the word "lagoon" evoke? The poet Sheri Hoff thinks of:

A quiet lagoon...
Floating in the salty, blue water,
the sun shining on my face.

That's what it makes me think of, too.

If you like playing with words, there can be other associations. For Germans and Russians the first syllable of this beautiful word might evoke less pleasurable images. If the British invented the concentration camp (at the time of the Boer war), the Germans abbreviated the term to konzentrationslager and the Russians imported the word lager from German for their own forced labour camps. "Lag" was the Soviet-era abbreviation of anything to do with the institutions of forced labour. GULAG for example, was the chief administration of labour camps of the USSR interior ministry in Moscow; Siblag, Sevlag, among many others, were respectively the Siberian and Northern camp complexes.

But how could you get from the frostbitten outposts of the Soviet empire, encircled by barbed wire, to a lagoon? While some could only dream, others played with words.

On July 5, 1946, Lt. Col. Luferov, chief of the secretariat of GULAG (the chief administration of labour camps) of the USSR MVD (interior ministry) in Moscow, signed off a curt memorandum to his party comrade Major Silant'ev, chief of the control and inspection department (the document is in the Soviet archives collection of the Hoover Institution: GARF, f. R-9414, op. 1 dop., d. 144A, folio 91):

I inform you that the word "Laguna" is assigned to GULAG as its customary telegraphic address.

I request you to inform all departments and administrations of the USSR interior ministry chief administration of labour camps and also the peripheral units: ITL MVD [the labour camps themselves], UITLK MVD (the administration of labour camps and colonies), OITK MVD [the department of labour colonies], and PFL MVD [the verification and filtration camps for returning Soviet prisoners of war and labourers previously held in Germany].

This story shows that even the most heartless of Soviet bureaucrats could hear the poetry of word-play in his soul.

Mark Harrison : 14 May 2009 21:47 |  Tags: Forced-Labour History Russia |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Truth in Humour; No Humour in Truth

In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn recounted the Stalin-era joke of the labour camp guard who asked a newly arrived convict about the length of his sentence.

The man says 25 years, but proclaims he is innocent!

The guard retorts that he must have done something because the innocent are only given 10 years.

There can be a grain of truth in humour; that's what makes it funny. In this case, it's a matter of historical record that millions of people suffered unjust imprisonment or execution in Stalin's time. It isn't funny when the victim says it; the joke is when it is said by the perpetrator.

This next bit isn't a joke.

On January 31, 1938, the Politburo of the party Central Committee in Moscow considered the problem of foreign refugees. (The document is in the Soviet archives collection of the Hoover Institution: RGANI, f. 89, op. 73, d. 11, folio 53). The minutes of the meeting record:

It has been established that foreign intelligence services are casting their mass espionage and sabotage network of agents into the USSR, mainly under the guise of refugees and those apparently seeking a political safe haven, better economic conditions in consequence of unemployment, deserters from military units and border security, and returning migrants and emigrants.

The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) resolves:

1. To propose to the USSR NKVD [interior ministry in charge of state security] to arrest immediately and subject to meticulous interrogation all refugees detained at the border, regardless of their motives for entering the territory of the USSR.
2. All refugees for whom it is established directly or indirectly that they entered the territory of the USSR with espionage, sabotage, or other anti-Soviet intentions -- to hand them over to the court of the Military Tribunal, with mandatory application of [death by] shooting. 
3. Cases of all refugees for whom it is established that they entered the territory of the USSR without ill intentions -- to hand them over for consideration by the USSR NKVD Special Asssembly, with application of the penalty of 10 years' imprisonment ... [emphasis added]

So: Guilty, death. Innocent, ten years. It didn't make me laugh.

Mark Harrison : 02 May 2009 01:32 |  Tags: Forced-Labour History Russia Stalin |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem