All 22 entries tagged Russia

Putin: King in Russia or Emperor of all the Russias?

Writing about web page http://www.maxkeiser.com/2014/03/liam-halligan-on-bbc-radio-4-idea-of-sanctioning-russia-pretty-mad/

After recent events in Crimea several commentators have asked for more understanding of Russia's position -- among them, for example, my old friend Liam Halligan. This is particularly important because, if we do not understand Russia, we will be unable to predict the consequences of our own actions. Because this will be a long blog, here's the short version:

• Does Putin want primarily to be King in Russia or Emperor of All the Russias? We don't know, and it will make a big difference.
• If Putin wants to be King, the result of his invasion of Ukraine will be to consolidate his rule, at least for a while, but any further implications are limited.
• If Putin wants to be Emperor, a protracted and dangerous international conflict has already begun; only resolute deterrence will avert tragedy.

We need better to understand Russia, but Russia is not easy to understand. Why? The most important reason is that Russia's politics lack transparency and accountability. Consider the following. The Russian invasion was clearly well planned, yet took the world by surprise. It was undertaken despite a near total absence of popular support; according to a VTsIOM poll published on 24 February[correction: link updated, 8 March 2014], only 15 percent of Russians endorsed military intervention in Ukraine, with 73 percent opposed. Although there was no popular enthusiasm for military intervention, Russia's parliamentarians mandated it unanimously. Although there would appear to be clear blue water between the administration and public opinion, the administration's action has met with little or no popular reaction.

Russia, in short, is free of the public agonizing that signals a vibrant democracy. Nothing could show more clearly that Moscow's decisions are made in a secretive, unaccountable way, so that ordinary people expect to have no voice and remain passive.

Two related factors only add to the difficulty we face in trying to interpret Russia's behaviour. One is that the Kremlin understands the value of surprise. The sudden and unexpected character of the Russian action in Crimea deprived Russia's opponents of the chance to react promptly in a calculated way. The result has been confusion and indecision in Kiev and western capitals. While Ukrainian and Western leaders have pondered their best responses, Moscow has consolidated its gains. The result of this is an analyst's paradox. A capacity for unpredictable action is valuable, but can only be maintained by preventing adversaries from understanding how Russia will decide its next move, and therefore from predicting it. Thus, Russia's leaders must continue to behave unpredictably, avoiding any clear or systematic pattern.

A second related factor stems from the fact that, while Russia's action in Crimea was extremely successful in exploiting surprise to achieve a bloodless coup, the bloodless nature of the intervention could not have been predicted. Any panicky self-defence by Ukrainian troops or (say) Tatar civilians would have led to a bloodbath. One must suppose that Putin and his cabinet anticipated this possibility, but discounted it and went ahead regardless. As things turned out, the risk of bloodshed was not realized, but this was just lucky. In other words, Russia's leaders were prepared to take a very substantial risk. A propensity for risky behaviour is characteristic of rulers that have a great deal at stake but also fear that time is running out: the option of wait-and-see has low value for them, or is seen as also highly risky, so they act now despite the risks.

What is at stake for Russia in Ukraine that is of such value? What is Russia's action designed to achieve? Here I see two possibilities, and the opaque, unaccountable nature of Russia's politics makes it hard to discern which is the dominant factor.

I take it for granted that Russia's action in the Crimea was designed to help bring about a lasting change in the balance of forces. I cannot see that any lesser objective would justify invading a sovereign neighbour whose borders are guaranteed by two other nuclear powers (the US and UK, the third being Russia itself). But which hostile forces was the Russian action designed to counter? Does Putin mean to change the balance of forces within Russia or that in the world beyond Russia? Related to this, is Putin content to be King in Russia more or less as it is today, or does he mean to become the new Emperor of All the Russias?

Explanatory note. "All the Russias" means Great Russia (Russia proper) plus Little Russia (the Ukraine) plus White Russia (Belarus). All the Russias would be a smaller territory than the old Russian Empire (which extended to Poland, Finland, the Baltic, the Caucasus, and Central Asia) and also smaller than the Soviet Union (which lost Poland and Finland), but it would reunite all the Slavic nationalities under one authority.

There is a case for thinking that Putin just wants to be King, and his primary objective is to offset potential domestic opposition. Among Russians, his legitimacy rests on a narrative of Russia, weakened by the collapse of the Soviet Union, plundered by domestic and foreign thieves, and encircled by enemies at her borders. When Putin's position at home is weakened by stories of election-stealing or corruption, he portrays his opponents as fraudsters and agents of foreign powers and he deters many critics by putting a few of the more important out of circulation. His narrative has been sustained by the turmoil of Ukraine's unfinished transition from communism and by worsening relations with the West. On this interpretation, Putin's goal in Ukraine has been to stoke international tension for a while and so change the balance of forces domestically, within Russia. He has used the Ukrainian events to teach Russians that Ukraine's movement is not "anti-corruption" or "pro-democracy" or "pro-Europe" but "anti-Russia." And anyone in Russia who campaigns against corruption or vote-rigging is now vulnerable to proscription as anti-Russian.

If it is Putin's strategy to weaken domestic opponents and so shift the domestic balance of forces in his favour, then it is already largely successful. All that is required is for the West to put up a show of resistance, and Putin will have achieved his objective, which is to confirm that Russia is embattled and he is the Russians' only defender. He does not need a war to prove it. He will take no more risks, and he will stop here. It's hard to say how long the effects will last; they might be relatively short lived. As for Crimea, the outcome can be some messy compromise that will poison Ukrainian politics and store up future conflict, which will also serve Putin's domestic purposes.

Alternatively, and much more seriously, Putin's final objective may be to weaken external adversaries, and so to shift the balance of forces in Europe. To do this permanently would mean to redraw frontiers by creating a new Empire of All the Russias with a cordon sanitaire of neutralized states on its borders. A first step is to expose the powerlessness of the EU, to divide Europe from the US, and so to divide NATO. But in this case he has only just begun. He will continue to work to subordinate Ukraine and Belarus in a Eurasian Union, while isolating and neutralizing all Russia's less compliant neighbours, which include Georgia, Poland and the Baltic states. If that is Putin's grand project, it is probably shared by others around him.

If Putin wants to be Emperor, it is hard to see how confrontation can be avoided at some point. If Europe and NATO signal accommodation, for example, and express only token resistance to the Russian action in Crimea, then Putin will drive on towards his ultimate goal by undertaking other adventures, perhaps by going deeper into Ukraine or by setting out to humiliate other neighbours. On the other hand, to the extent that Europe and NATO show unity and put up resistance, Putin's objective will become more distant and, because time is not on his side, he will be willing to take more risks to achieve it. Only resolute deterrence will prevent violence and tragedy.

As I see it the immediate policy implications are limited. In 1994 Britain guaranteed the security of Ukraine's borders. In return, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons. Whatever Russia's motivation for breaking its word, we cannot honourably walk away from our own guarantee. There are many steps that Britain, Europe, and NATO should now take, that fall well short of destabilizing military intervention. Most importantly, we should take them together.

It troubles me, however, that we do not know how Russia will respond. If Putin's objective is to affect the domestic balance of forces, nothing much more will follow, except that his regime will be consolidated for a while. If his objective is to redraw Europe's boundaries, then a game has begun with many unpredictable and dangerous moves in store.

Mark Harrison : 05 Mar 2014 17:25 |  Tags: Politics Russia War |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Kiev, Europe's Dangerous Crossroads

Writing about web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26312008

Europe has been at this crossroads before. An ancient multi-national empire creaks dangerously under the strains of modern nationalism and separatism. Its rulers fear the mob, and fast-moving events. It fears especially the example of a neighbouring independent state, once its colony. Above all, it fears the future.

A century ago this was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the Hohenzollern dynasty, ruling in Vienna, determined to crush the rising challenge of Serbian nationalism. In planning war on Serbia, the Austrian government knew that Serbia had a powerful ally, Imperial Russia. The Austrians knew they would face strong resistance. They feared their enemies, but they feared the future more. They gambled on war.

Austria was encouraged in its war aims by the rising power of Germany, which expected to take advantage of the resulting conflict to settle accounts with its own rivals and shift the balance decisively in its own favour. This too was a gamble.

Today the ancient, creaking multi-national empire is Russia itself, where the Kremlin looks to events in the neighbouring Ukraine, once ruled from Moscow, with mounting anxiety.

Note what I am not saying. I'm not saying that history repeats itself. It doesn't repeat itself at all, never mind exactly one hundred years later. Over a century the world has changed in too many ways for this to be a nice laboratory experiment with controlled conditions under which similar reagents reliably produce a similar result. All that history can tell us is some of the risks in the situation -- and not all of them, because there is always something latent or new that did not happen before.

But I am saying that Europe is at a dangerous crossroads. A popular uprising has rid Kiev of the corrupt Yanukovych regime. In this moment, 45 million Ukrainians face an unknown future. That's their problem. It's not an easy problem. If it had been easy, former president Yushchenko and former PM Tymoshenko would have solved their first time around, in 2005. They would not have fallen out and Yanukovych would not have been elected president in 2010.

The one thing that Ukrainians cannot change is their location. Russia was, is, and will remain their powerful neighbour. Many Ukrainians speak Russian and feel Russian. Whether the reformers like it or not, they have to take this into account.

The problem for Russia's president Putin begins with the fact that events in Kiev look set to put an end to his dream of uniting Ukraine with Russia and Belarus in a Eurasian Union. Worse than that, Ukraine in this moment embodies an existential threat to his rule. If the people can get rid of Yanukovych, they can get rid of Putin.

The problem for 700 million Europeans in this moment is: What will Russia do now? Does Russia have the will and the capability intervene in Ukraine by whatever means present themselves -- openly or under cover, by inducements, threats, or force? Financial inducements have been tried. Repression from within has been tried. Both have failed. What else can Russia do?

When rulers feel their survival is at stake, the normal restraints and inhibitions can melt away. They may not act rashly or precipitately; they will still calculate and if calculation suggests waiting they will wait. But what enters the calculation and with what weight may change. And pessimism is a dangerous element, because fear of the future may tilt the calculation in favour of taking a gamble on precipitate action today.

If the alternative is to be chased out of the presidential palace, the resort to violence may no longer look so bad. That's what Yanukovych showed us last week. I wonder what Putin is thinking about this morning.

Mark Harrison : 24 Feb 2014 09:11 |  Tags: Germany Politics Russia Ukraine War |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Stalin Equals Cromwell: How Putin Sees Russia's Past

Writing about web page http://www.kremlin.ru/news/19859

How is Cromwell so different from Stalin? Can you tell me? There is no difference. From the standpoint of our liberal representatives, from the liberal spectrum of our political establishment, he is a similarly bloody dictator. He was a treacherous guy, and he played an ambivalent role in the history of Great Britain. His memorial stands, and no one is tearing it down.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin does not know the difference between Joseph Stalin and Oliver Cromwell. It is true, as Putin declared (at a four-hour press conference held at the end of last year, on 19 December 2013), that Cromwell was a dictator. It is true, also, that Cromwell's historic achievements were stained with the blood of others. Yet his statue stands in Westminster outside the British Parliament. Putin's implication is clear: Like Cromwell, Stalin is just another national leader from times past, and any nation would be willing to remember him for his place in national history.

What should we take from this? There is a characteristic skew to Putin's view of Russia's past. But this is hardly new. In 2007 Putin had this to say:

As for the problematic pages in our history -- yes, they existed. The same as in the history of any state! Indeed, we have had fewer than some others. And not as terrible for us as in some others. Yes, we had some dreadful pages: let's remember the events that began in 1937, let's not forget them. But there were no less in other states, they've had worse. At least we haven't used atomic weapons on civilians. We haven't flooded thousands of kilometres with chemicals and we haven't dropped seven times more bombs on a small country than were used in the whole Great Patriotic [War, i.e. World War II], as happened in Vietnam, let's say. We've had no other black pages such as Nazism, for example.

You never know what might have happened in the history of other states and peoples! We can't afford to let them make us feel guilty about it -- they should worry about themselves.

In short, Putin does not see much to feel bad about in Soviet public life before 1937. He feels bad about "the events that began in 1937" (when Stalin ordered the execution of 700,000 and the imprisonment of 1.5 million more), but these were no more than would fall into the normal range of bad stuff that might have happened anywhere. I'm not going to go into more detail here on this. Interested readers can go back to the blistering response of Leon Aron, who said it at the time much better than I can.

If "Stalin = Cromwell," what does it matter? One implication might be for Russia's public life, given that Stalin is still politically relevant to Russia in a way that Cromwell is not to the UK. It is three centuries and a half since England's Civil War was concluded and there is no significant Cromwellian party in British public life (other than perhaps in Northern Ireland). Russia today, in contrast, has many active claimants to Stalin's mantle, including a communist party whose leader Gennadii Zyuganov, according to Putin, could be considered as the second figure in Russia's public life. Still, Putin is not calling on Russians to rally under Stalin's banner and return to the peasant-slayer's precepts; far from it.

An alternative implication is the one that matters: Putin wishes Russia's past to be seen as normal. Specifically, a believer in the Russian state and national power, he wishes the history of Russia's state to be seen as continuous and normal. All countries have had their builders of the nation state and its capacity: Cromwell, Napoleon, Bismarck, Ataturk, ... and Stalin. All were forceful modernizers, Putin seems to say, that got their way by imposing sacrifices and crossing the margins of conventional morality. But all deserve their laurels and should have their statues. As for their transgressions, we will not forget to mention "the events that began in 1937," but there's no need to enumerate the mass graves in the birch woods or to detail who killed whom on whose orders.

My guess would be that this view resonates strongly with many Russians today. It's something you can easily lose sight of in Moscow, where most streets and squares lost their Soviet-era appelations and decorations in the early 1990s, and went back to the pre-revolutionary style. But Moscow is not Russia. In many provincial Russian towns the statues of Lenin and other Bolshevik revolutionaries still stand.

A minor detail caught my eye in the reporting of the recent tragic events in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad): the second (trolleybus) bombing of 30 December took place in the city's Dzerzhinskii district, that is, a part of the city named after Feliks Dzerzhinskii, founder of the Soviet secret police and architect of Red Terror in Russia's civil war. According to Wikipedia, there remain no less than ten Dzerzhinskii districts in Russia's cities and provinces (as well as one in Eastern Ukraine), not to mention the town of Dzerzhinsk, not far from Nizhnii Novgorod. In provincial Russia you can't yet have Stalingrad, despite a campaign to restore Stalin's name to the city, but it's quite normal to have Dzerzhinskii. In Moscow the destruction of Dzerzhinskii's statue was one of the symbolic acts of 1991; recent calls to restore it have evoked polarized opinions.

I thought about this a few months ago when I visited Ekaterinburg. Standing on the edge of Asia, Ekaterinburg is the capital of a province the size of England and Scotland combined, but with less than a tenth of the population. First named after the Empress Catherine the Great, the city was renamed Sverdlovsk in 1924 after the early death of Soviet Russia's first head of state: Yakov Sverdlov. In 1991 the city's pre-revolutionary name was restored, but its hinterland is still called Sverdlov province, and Sverdlov's statue still stands on the main street.

Photo: Mark Harrison.

Ekaterinburg's streets and squares commemorate many figures from the Bolshevik past from Kuibyshev (architect of the first five year plan) and Malyshev (Stalin's minister of the atomic industry) to Michurin (Stalin's pet anti-Darwinian pseudo-scientist) and Serov (first head of the post-Stalin KGB). Oh, and here's the "Iset" hotel, built in the shape of a hammer and sickle in the 1930s as an apartment block for security officials and their families.

Photo: Mark Harrison.

People still call it Gorodok chekistov, the little town of the secret policemen. Elsewhere in the town is Ulitsa chekistov, the street of the secret policemen.

Photo: Mark Harrison

In Ekaterinburg Lenin's statue stands opposite the town hall, just as Sergo Ordzhonikidze's statue stands in the suburbs outside the head office of Uralmash, the giant Soviet-era engineering factory. Ordzhonikidze was Stalin's minister for heavy industry. (He shot himself in 1937 as a protest when Stalin eliminated his subordinates one by one).

Photo: Mark Harrison.

In Ekaterinburg some things have changed since Soviet times, not just the city's name. A mile from Sverdlov's statue stands a new shrine to Sverdlov's most famous victims, Tsar Nicholas II and his family, murdered on the spot in July 1918.

Photo: Mark Harrison

In Ekaterinburg, it seems, perpetrators and victims are commemorated with complete impartiality. The martyr Nicholas gets a new statue, while the likely murderer Sverdlov keeps his old one. It's just like London, where Cromwell's statue stands in Westminster, a short walk from that of Charles I, the King whom Cromwell executed, at Charing Cross.

Not quite like London, though. In Ekaterinburg, something is missing. On a highway a few kilometres out of town, a handpainted sign labelled "Memorial" points off the road. (I didn't get a chance to take a picture.) Memorial to whom? The path leads into the birch forests where the Chekists took tens of thousands for night time execution and burial in the years of Stalin's terror. Mass graves have no importance in Putin's nation-building narrative. They can be forgotten, or filed away under the heading of necessary sacrifices and inevitable mistakes.

This is Putin's view of Russia's past. Sverdlov and Tsar Nicholas; Lenin, Stalin; the Chekists; Kuibyshev, Malyshev, Ordzhonikidze. All are figures from history, state leaders in whom Russians should feel equal national pride. Who can tell the difference? No one. As for the ordinary victims, forget them. Anyway, who cares? Only those that wish to dig for dirt among their bones.

Mark Harrison : 08 Jan 2014 10:10 |  Tags: History Russia Stalin |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Unlearning the History of Communism

Writing about web page ttp://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/men_make_their_own_history_but_they_do_not_make_it_as_they_please

On the Pieria magazine website there has been an exchange of views on capitalism and socialism. I guess it is my fault; on 28 June I contributed a summary of some remarks on the subject. I concluded:

Liberal capitalism isn’t perfect, but it has done far more for human welfare than communism. It has been the solution more often than the problem. Last time capitalism experienced some difficulties, many countries went off on a search for alternatives. That search for alternatives led nowhere. It wasn’t just unproductive. It was a terrible mistake that cost many tens of millions of lives. Lots of people have forgotten this history. Now is a good time to remember it.

On 31 July, the blogger UnlearningEconomics responded:

In my opinion, this view rests on a highly selective interpretation of events. It requires that we gloss over two major historical points: first, the historical circumstances of existing communism; second, the history of capitalist countries. It fails to acknowledge the fact that existing socialism occurred primarily in undeveloped countries, which we would naturally expect to exhibit lower standards of living than developed ones. It ignores the deliberate campaign of destruction and sabotage toward the socialist states by the capitalist states, a process comprehensively documented by US foreign policy critic William Blum (Blum, 2003). It also requires that we define past and present abuses of capitalist states as somehow 'outside' capitalism, in order to place ourselves above the (real or imagined) abuses of the communists.

I do not hope to defend anyone's atrocities, though I am happy to refute some of the absurd exaggerations that sometimes pervade these debates. In any case, my main aim is to show two things: first, the abuses of existing socialist states are better explained by their political circumstances than their innate evils of the ideology; second, capitalist countries have a similarly abhorrent record, one which is not so easily explained by political necessities. My rendition will definitely annoy capitalists and anti-communists by being too sympathetic toward communism, which is a dirty word for many. It will also potentially annoy communists and socialists by not being sympathetic enough and repeating some of the more simplistic mainstream narratives. However, the important thing is that we examine the history of both systems in context, rather than lazily parading the kill count of the other side to try and shut down debate.

UnlearningEconomics (below I'll call him or her "UE") goes on to present "brief" (but, for a blog, quite lengthy) histories of both communism and capitalism. The general story is that if communism has had a bloody history it is mainly because communist revolutions occurred under unfavourable circumstances and had to struggle against the encirclement and aggression of the surrounding capitalist states; as for capitalism, it has its own bloody history, which is too often ignored.

What is there here that we can agree on? Perhaps we might agree that twentieth century warfare was terrible enough that it could damage social norms and other institutions of a relatively poor country like Russia or China; in such conditions organized minorities with unscrupulous leaders could seize power and use it to do terrible things. The efforts of other countries to intervene and prevent this, then as now, were largely fruitless or even counterproductive; perhaps they should not have tried, although politicians are not generally selected for lack of ambition and public opinion too often demands that something must be done.

UE goes beyond this to suggest that somehow history has been unfair to those same minorities and psychopathic leaders by allowing them to seize power only under terribly adverse circumstances. We owe it to them (the argument seems to go) to compensate them for their disadvantage; we should allow them at least a few decades of unchallenged power, so that they have a fair chance to show what they can achieve. But this seems completely unhinged.

In bringing up my children, I tried to teach them that people show their inner qualities when things go badly. It is easy to look good when things go well. Only good people will still be good when things go badly; adversity reveals character. I believe this rule can also be applied to politics. It is when things go badly that we see political leaders and their programmes and ideals put to the test.

Can systems be blamed for atrocities of whatever kind? It is not systems that take food from the mouths of the hungry or put bullets into the back of anyone’s head. People do this. But the system matters, nonetheless. What the system does is to leave more or less scope for the concentration of power in the hands of people who are inclined to exploit it without restraint. Liberal capitalism at least allows the separation of economic power from politics and decentralizes decisions to firms and households in markets. This is because, in the words of North, Wallis, and Weingast (2011), it is an “open-access order.” Communism is a “closed-access” order that restricts who may exercise political power and concentrates control of the economy in the hands of that privileged elite. Given that, ask which of these systems is more likely to permit the abuse of power and allow abuses to be hidden from the public gaze?

When general outlooks clash, it is not always enough to stay with generalities. Sometimes we have to get down with the particular facts. History is full of good stories, and UE tells some of them well. The problem is that not all good stories are true, but this becomes evident only when they are confronted with the detail. So, I will confront some of UE's history with the detail. I will not cover everything; I will focus for the most part on the "brief history" of communism, where I think I have more to offer.

• UE says: Unfavourable views of communism ignore “the fact that existing socialism occurred primarily in undeveloped countries, which we would naturally expect to exhibit lower standards of living than developed ones.”

This is seriously incomplete. Existing socialism occurred in relatively few undeveloped countries, and generally only in those weakened by war (Russia, China, Korea, and Indochina). Central Europe would scarcely have counted as undeveloped; there the precondition was war followed by military occupation. Cuba may be the only example of a country that had a communist revolution without a foreign war. In 1945 in several places the boundary of “existing socialism” was laid down in the middle of a region that was previously economically and ethnolinguistically integrated. As well as showing that warfare counted for more than lack of development, these examples also provide natural experiments for the long run consequences of system change. Think of Estonia versus Finland, East versus West Germany, and North versus South Korea. For discussion see Harrison (2013).

• UE says: Unfavourable views of communism also ignore “the deliberate campaign of destruction and sabotage toward the socialist states by the capitalist states” (citing William Blum).

Again, seriously incomplete. The UE view of postwar history rests on selection, overstatement of the capacity of outsiders to intervene in Russia and Eastern Europe, exaggeration of popular support for communism (the most popular communist party in Europe at the end of the war was probably the French party with no more than a quarter of the popular vote), and ignorance of the documented process whereby Stalin’s secret police entered Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945 “embedded” with the Red Army and armed with a template for dictatorship that they began to apply immediately, regardless of whether or not communists were in the government (Applebaum 2012). Far from resenting western "sabotage," millions of Central and East Europeans felt abandoned by the West as Stalin crushed their hopes for national self-determination. Finally, it forgets that the one American initiative that could have decisively altered the trajectory of Eastern Europe was not “destruction and sabotage” but Marshall Aid, which Stalin instructed his allies to reject.

• UE says: The unfavourable conditions of the Russian Revolution are shown by the fact that “Russia had suffered the worst losses out of any country during the war.”

No. It is hard to imagine that Russia would have suffered the Revolution without three years of world war, and it is true that battle and non-battle deaths of Russian soldiers up to 1917 were heavy (1.8 million). At the same time Russia's losses were fewer than Germany’s absolutely, and (given Russia’s large population) were proportionately fewer than of those of Britain, France, Italy, Serbia, Rumania, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey (Broadberry and Harrison 2005). Russia’s economic loss of GDP per head up to 1917 was less than that of Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, and Turkey (Markevich and Harrison 2011). The latter conclude: “We have seen that the economic decline up to 1917 was not more severe in Russia than elsewhere. In short, we will probably not be able to explain why Russia was the first to descend into revolution and civil war without reference to historical factors that were unique to that country and period.”

• UE says: “By the time Joseph Stalin took (absolute) power in 1929, many – including, perhaps, himself – believed the threats the USSR faced were justifications for his purges and the Gulags.”

Seriously incomplete. There is no “perhaps” here: Stalin had a precise understanding that is now well documented (e.g. Khlevniuk 1995; Simonov 1996; Davies et al. 2003; Harrison 2008; Velikanova 2013). In 1921, 1924, 1927, and 1929 there was no foreign threat. But rumours of war were frequent, because the Soviet Union’s strategy of inciting revolution and mutiny abroad kept Soviet foreign relations in a state of continual tension. In domestic society, Stalin's secret police told him, every rumour was destabilizing; peasants and workers started to wonder when the chance would come to get rid of the Bolsheviks. Stalin was aware that above all he had to secure the regime internally and externally and that drift could only weaken him. This is why he launched Soviet society simultaneously on the courses of forced industrialization, mass collectivization of the peasantry, and political violence. Justification? Yes, of course, if taking power and holding it are sufficient motivations. Not otherwise. Khrushchev was personally responsible for tens of thousands of killings under Stalin, and this left him with a bad conscience. In trying to come to terms with it he blamed Stalin many times but not Hitler, the CIA, or anyone else outside the country.

• UE says: “The country did face a very real Nazi threat that, failing industrialisation, it would not have been able to overcome.”

No. Stalin changed course towards industrialization, collectivization, and mass violence in 1929, when there was no significant external threat. The Nazis came to power in 1933, and no European leader (including Stalin) recognized the threat from Hitler before 1935. Before Hitler, a threat to Siberia appeared from the East in 1931 with the Japanese annexation of Manchuria. These threats came after, not before, Stalin’s “revolution from above.” As for whether the Nazi threat justified Stalin’s policies after the event, I have written about this in many places (most recently Harrison 2010).

• UE says: “This reasoning is consistent with the fact that once Stalin died and the more immediate western threats disappeared, ‘de-Stalinisation’ took place: the Gulags were softened and reduced in size; the cult of personality was dismantled … things certainly improved once the Nazi threat had been eliminated.”

No. The Nazi threat was eliminated in 1945. The softening of the Soviet regime after 1953 had everything to do with Stalin’s death and nothing to do with the disappearance of “immediate western threats.” De-Stalinization took place not because of the disappearance of western threats but because the entire Soviet leadership was tired of living in fear of their own lives, and then went further because Khrushchev and Mikoyan had bad consciences about their own responsibility for past mass killings. The Gulag was dismantled immediately, not because of the disappearance of western threats but because Lavrentii Beriia had long before determined that it was an economic drain and a source of social contagion but Stalin had prevented him from acting on his findings. There was bitter resistance to dismantling the cult of Stalin from other communist leaders (especially Mao), not because of western threats but because it threatened their own legitimacy (and their own cults). The cult of Stalin was dismantled but was soon replaced by the cult of Khrushchev.

• UE says: “The Great Leap Forward (GLF) … undoubtedly caused a large degree of famine, surely because of the over-centralised and inflexible nature of the policy.”

Seriously incomplete. A centralized, inflexible policy was enough to start a famine, but it does not begin to explain explain how the famine proceeded, nor does it explain the secrecy that then shrouded it for decades.

Think about what is required for an act of policy to cause millions of famine deaths. Here is the problem: When people starve to death, they do not die suddenly and unexpectedly. It takes them months, even many months to weaken, become sick, and die. Some die before others. Some die of hunger; some are carried off by diseases to which they lose immunity. Some die at home; some drop dead in the street. Some die passively; some steal or even kill for food; a few turn to cannibalism. In other words, a policy that causes millions of famine deaths (such as in the USSR in 1932 to 1934) or tens of millions (in China in 1958 to 1960) cannot go unnoticed by those carrying out the policy.

In fact, in both the USSR and China, the famine process worked like this (Davies and Wheatcroft 2004; Chen and Kung 2011). First, the leaders issued quotas for the collection of food, province by province. They also gave the provincial leaders to understand that their future depended on meeting the quota. The provincial leaders competed to raise more grain than their neighbours in order to show loyalty and to save their own lives and the lives of their families. And they passed these incentives down the line to their subordinates charged with doing the actual work. When some people reported that the quotas were too heavy, or they resisted or dragged their feet, they were arrested and others took their place. Food collections began and the first people started to die. When some people reported that other people were dying, they were told that this was just “simulation or provocation”: enemies were maliciously withholding food and starving their own children to cause trouble (Davies and Wheatcroft 2004, p. 206).

While the first ones were dying, the people responsible for extracting grain from the villages had to go deeper and deeper into the countryside to find food and take it by force. On every journey along all the different routes they took, they had to go past the people from whom they had already taken food, who were now dead or dying, to find more food that they could take. In China, the provincial leaders of lower rank had more to prove and Chen and Kung (2011) show these people tried harder, so that more grain was collected and more people died in their provinces. Returning from every journey past the already dying and dead people, they sometimes reported what they had seen (although it was sometimes “forbidden to keep an official record”) but in public they had to remain absolutely silent about, not just at the time but for the rest of their lives. The same applied to everyone with business that required them to move around the countryside. While they were doing this, others had to be ordered to stop some of the dying people who were not dead yet from moving out in search of food elsewhere. They had to be ordered to stop them because the food that had been collected and stored elsewhere was destined for others; if the dying people were allowed to eat it, it would not be available to feed Stalin’s Great Breakthrough or Mao’s Great Leap Forward. A particular reason for these orders is that when hungry people are allowed to mix with people that have enough to eat, it is extraordinary difficult to stop kind people from giving some of their food to starving families; the Germans found this in occupied Europe when they tried to cut Jewish communities off from food, and this is one reason why they first herded Jews into ghettoes and later decided to accelerate the Holocaust (Collingham 2010, pp. 205 ff). Finally, both at the time and later, the surviving victims and perpetrators alike learned never to talk about it, perhaps not even to their children. As a result, witnesses of terrible things (such as Yang 2012) often concluded the events they had seen were isolated and exceptional.

In other words, the “over-centralised and inflexible nature of the policy” was enough to start a famine, but further deliberate actions were required to ensure government priorities for food supplies when millions of people were dying of hunger. All this must be read into the “over-centralised and inflexible nature of the policy,” and it suggests why those words do not begin to provide a full explanation.

• UE says: “It is also worth noting that the remaining Cold War paranoia was certainly not a USSR-only phenomenon, with McCarthyism and the red scare in the US reaching levels which now seem ridiculous to most.”

No. McCarthyism was ridiculous and, partly as a result of it, the FBI missed many Soviet agents that were actually at work in American government and society after the war (Moynihan Commission 1997).

• UE says: “In Poland, the popular party Solidarity wanted some form of worker ownership – in other words, socialism – until, in desperation, they had to turn to the IMF, who made capitalist policies a condition for any aid. In Russia, Boris Yeltin’s ‘free market’ reforms were resisted, which was met with force; similarly, in China, the Tienanmen Square massacres were not made in favour of capitalism but in favour of democracy and worker control” (citing Naomi Klein).

No. None of us can possibly know what demonstrators in China or elsewhere “really” wanted. Politics is the art of the possible, and for this reason people tend to express their choices strategically, in the light of the constraints they perceive and the choices they expect others to make. I saw this myself in Russia: As long as the communist party was in full control, many dissenters preferred to limit their demands by appealing to rights guaranteed by the Soviet constitution, asking for a return to “true” Leninism, calling to rehabilitate Old Bolsheviks like Trotsky and Bukharin, and so forth. Only when the communist monopoly gave way did it become politically and psychologically possible for free thinkers to go further; some didn't but many did. UE refers to IMF conditionality in a disparaging way; but why would a responsible aid donor give aid without wishing to rule out uses of its resources that would be damaging or counterproductive? UE relies on Klein’s Shock Doctrine as a source; on its use of evidence see Harrison (2009).

• UE says: “While estimates of deaths from Mao’s GLF are exaggerated using dubious estimation techniques (which effectively allow the demographers to pick the number arbitrarily), little to no cover has been given to the increase in Russian deaths during the ‘transition’ to capitalism, which, by a reasonable estimation method of simply counting the increase in death rates, claimed 4 million lives between 1990 and 1996” (citing Utsa Patnaik).

No. UE (or perhaps Utsa Patnaik) seems to confuse demographic studies with the literary and journalistic accounts written by people who do not have a good understanding of error margins. Demographers know that when people die in numbers so large that they are not recorded individually there is always an error margin. The error margin has several sources: mismeasurement of the population before and after the shock, imputation of normal mortality during the shock (required to infer excess mortality), and correctly apportioning the birth deficit between babies not born (or miscarried) and babies born and died within the famine period. In other words the best available estimation techniques give rise to ranges rather than point estimates, and it is from these ranges that nonspecialists feel entitled to pick and choose.

As for the cause of Russia’s mortality spike in the transition years, the research attributing it to mass privatization (Stuckler and McKee 2009) has been widely disseminated; less well known is that it has also been thoroughly criticized (Earle 2009; Earle and Gehlbach 2010; Brown, Earle, and Telegdy 2010; Battacharya, Gathmann, and Miller 2013; see also reply by Stuckler and McKee 2010). In the last years of the Soviet Union Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign temporarily prevented millions of Russians from drinking themselves to death. However, it did not alter their desire to drink. Their deaths were postponed and so stored up and waiting to happen when alcohol became cheaper again and more easily available. Thus, the increase in Russian deaths during transition is more plausibly attributed to an increase in the availability and collapse in the price of alcohol.

I’ll conclude on the subject of atrocity. UE writes: “I do not hope to defend anyone's atrocities, though I am happy to refute some of the absurd exaggerations that sometimes pervade these debates … the important thing is that we examine the history of both systems in context, rather than lazily parading the kill count of the other side to try and shut down debate.” I noticed that the UE blog goes further, wishing to move debate on from “disingenuous ‘Black Book of Communism’-style kill count porn” (the "Black Book" reference is to Courtois et al. 1999).

This shocked me. Is there room for debate over the scale, causes, and significance of the excess deaths that arose around the world from communist policies? Absolutely. Should any figure in the Black Book of Communism be above discussion? Of course not. But kill count porn? The demand for these people to be remembered and their suffering acknowledged comes from the victims themselves. “We were forgotten. For our broken lives. For our executed fathers. No one apologized. If we don’t preserve the historical memory, we shall continue to make the same mistakes” (Fekla Andreeva, resettled as a child with her “kulak” family, whose father was executed in the Great Terror, cited by Reshetova 2013; see also Gregory 2013).

References

• Applebaum, Anne. 2012. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56. London: Allen Lane.
• Bhattacharya, Jay, Christina Gathmann, and Grant Miller. 2013. Gorbachev’s Anti-Alcohol Campaign and Russia's Mortality Crisis. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 5(2): 232-60.
• Broadberry, Stephen, and Mark Harrison. 2005. The Economics of World War I: an Overview. In The Economics of World War I: 3-40. Edited by Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Brown, J. David, John S. Earle, and Álmos Telegdy. 2010. Employment and Wage Effects of Privatisation: Evidence from Hungary, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine.”Economic Journal 120, no. 545: 683-708.
• Chen, S. and Kung, J. (2011), ‘The Tragedy of the Nomenklatura: Career Incentives and Political Radicalism during China’s Great Leap Famine’, American Political Science Review, 105(1): 27-45.
• Collingham, Lizzie. 2010. The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food. London: Allen Lane.
• Courtois, Stephane, Mark Kramer, Jonathan Murphy, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin. 1999. The Black Book of Communism. Ed Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Davies, R. W., and Stephen Wheatcroft. 2003. The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, vol. 5: The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
• Davies, R. W., Oleg Khlevniuk, E. A. Rees, Liudmila P. Kosheleva, and Larisa A. Rogovaia, eds. 2003. The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-36. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Earle, John S. 2009. Mass Privatisation and Mortality. The Lancet 373 (April 11), p. 1247
• Earle, John S., and Scott Gehlbach. 2010. Did Mass Privatisation Really Increase Post-Communist Mortality? The Lancet 375 (January 30), p. 372.
• Gregory, Paul R. 2013. Women of the Gulag. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press.
• Harrison, Mark. 2008. The Dictator and Defense. In Guns and Rubles: the Defense Industry in the Stalinist State, pp. 1-30. Edited by Mark Harrison. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
• Harrison, Mark. 2009. Credibility Crunch: A Comment on The Shock Doctrine. University of Warwick. Department of Economics.
• Harrison, Mark. 2010. Industry and the Economy. In The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945, pp. 15-44. Edited by David R. Stone. Barnsley: Pen & Sword.
• Harrison, Mark. 2013. Communism and Economic Modernization. In The Oxford Handbook in the History of Communism. Edited by Stephen A. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Khlevniuk, Oleg. 1995. The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937-38. In Soviet History, 1917-1953: Essays in Honour of R. W. Davies: 158-76. Edited by J. M. Cooper, Maureen Perrie, and E. A. Rees. New York, NY: St Martin's.
• Markevich, Andrei, and Mark Harrison. 2011. Great War, Civil War, and Recovery: Russia’s National Income, 1913 to 1928. Journal of Economic History 71:3, pp. 672-703.
• Moynihan Commission. 1997. Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. Senate Document 105-2 Pursuant to Public Law 236, 103rd Congress. Washington, United States Government Printing Office.
• North, Douglass C., John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast. 2011. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Reshetova, Natalia. 2013. Women of the Gulag. Hoover Digest no. 3, 108-115.
• Simonov, Nikolai S. 1996. "Strengthen the Defence of the Land of the Soviets: the 1927 War Alarm and its Consequences." Europe-Asia Studies 48(8): 1355-64.
• Stuckler, David, Lawrence King, and Martin McKee. 2009. Mass Privatisation and the Post-Communist Mortality Crisis: a Cross-National Analysis. The Lancet no. 373 (January 31, 2009): 399-407.
• Stuckler, David, Lawrence King, and Martin McKee. 2010. Did Mass Privatisation Really Increase Post-Communist Mortality? – Authors’ Reply. The Lancet 375 (January 30, 2010), pp 372-74.
• Velikanova, Olga. 2013. Popular Perceptions of Soviet Politics in the 1920s: Disenchantment of the Dreamers. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
• Yang Jisheng. 2012. Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine. London: Allen Lane.

Mark Harrison : 08 Aug 2013 15:02 |  Tags: China History Politics Russia Stalin |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Mordor: An Economic History

Writing about web page http://lectures.gaidarfund.ru/articles/1698

When I visited Moscow in April, Ilya Venyavkin of the Gaidar Foundation was kind enough to interview me. The interview has just appeared in Russian on the Gaidar Foundation website. Here I've translated it back to English.

***

Mark Harrison: “When people said they’d prefer a strong leader to democracy, as an economic historian I say: I’ve heard that before somewhere." A professor of economics at the University of Warwick, Mark Harrison recalls his attraction to communist ideas and explains why we need economic historians, and why the USSR reminded him of Tolkien’s Mordor.

• Gaidar Foundation: Why did you become interested in the Soviet economy?

Mark Harrison: I’m a child of the Cold War - my parents followed events in the Soviet Union closely and felt the fear of nuclear war. At the age of six or seven, I already knew of the Soviet Union as a threat. An incident when I was in school had quite an influence on me: during English class we had to demonstrate correct usage of an idiom, “a household name” (“a person that everyone knows”). When my turn came, I said: “Khrushchev.” Then my problems began. First, the teacher began to ask me why I named Khrushchev and not, for example, Kennedy; then my classmates teased me that I was a communist. At the time I had no idea what that meant, and in the end I decided to find out. A few years later I began studying economics, and one of the reasons I became interested in it was Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. I read it and asked my father if what was written there was true. My father said he didn’t know, and then I decided to look into that too.

The end of the 1960s, when I went to university, was a time when youth culture and student movements flourished: we were all revolutionaries and socialists. I studied at Cambridge and we had lectures from Charles Feinstein, one of the leading economic historians of the twentieth century. Charles was born in South Africa and was a member of the Communist Party of South Africa. In his homeland he faced a choice: leave the country or go to jail. He ended up in England and I learned a lot from him. Another of my teachers was Maurice Dobb: he was a member of the British communist party, and he wrote the first serious (although somewhat biased) history of the Soviet economy. All this led me naturally to the idea of studying the Russian economy.

• GF: And you also became a leftist?

MH: Yes, and I stayed on the left for quite a long time.

• GF: Were you hoping to find in the USSR a model of a more just social and economic order?

MH: That’s what I hoped, but it’s not what I found. I can describe clearly the impact on me of visiting the USSR in 1972. I brought two thick books: one was the works of Jane Austen, and the other was The Lord of the Rings in three volumes. I read Jane Austen first, and that was great because it was a complete escape from life in the Soviet Union. Then I started to read The Lord of the Rings, and a depression descended on me because I saw something just like the Soviet Union: border guards, barbed wire, a secret police ...

To live in the Soviet Union was both frightening and interesting. As a foreigner I lived a privileged life - we always knew that nothing would happen to us, unless we did something really stupid. We knew we were living in a police state, and we quickly learned the simple rules – for example, always to call only from a phone booth, if possible, and not to tell anyone about one’s plans.

• GF: Did you come across the secret services during your first visit?

MH: Not directly. But I’ll tell you a story: before going to the USSR (our student trip fell under an intergovernmental agreement), we attended a meeting at the Foreign Office where a diplomat, who was in charge of the meeting, told us:

You are going to Moscow to study and that’s fine. But be careful, because the KGB will be interested in you – they may follow you, see who you are talking to, or even try to compromise you by using alcohol or drugs to put you under pressure. If that happens, come to us and we’ll help you.

Last year, I chanced on a document in the archives of the KGB, dating back to the end of the 1960s. The document says that the British Foreign Office is advising everyone who visits the Soviet Union about the working methods of the KGB. It goes on to detail all the advice that our diplomat gave us. I was reading the paper and I was wondering what they would write at the end – would they say that this was pernicious anti-Soviet propaganda? But in the last paragraph I found the words:

We circulate this information to all operative staff so that they can be aware that our working methods are known.

• GF: Do you remember exactly when you became disillusioned in the system?

MH: I continued to believe in the possibility of a more just world order and I was attracted by the idea of Euro-communism – the ideas of reform communism that arose in Italy, France and Spain. With many friends I was very excited when Gorbachev came to power. We hoped that he would be able to combine the ideas of socialism and democracy. But this did not happen. That was when I realized that I needed to move on – the stage of my life that began in 1970 came to an end in 1991.

I think it’s a very interesting example of how each new generation came to the Soviet experience with new knowledge and new hope. New knowledge meant an understanding of how terrible everything could be, but there was always the hope that it could all still be put right, and Khrushchev had that, and then the Eurocommunists, and then Gorbachev. Today what I believed then looks completely crazy, but nonetheless I believed it wholeheartedly.

• GF: How did you react to the rejection of socialist values in the 1990s?

MH: I think that at that point I was already becoming a liberal. I am very grateful for my experience of the 1990s, because I was able to see how a colossal system broke down as production stopped, money lost its value, and law and order stopped working. I understand that the transition period was very difficult, although I don’t accept (as some do) that it was because of this that millions died.

Another issue is the growing nostalgia today in Russian today for the days of Brezhnev or Stalin. But it is very useful to compare this situation with that of Germany: After the fall of the Berlin Wall, all the opinion polls showed that residents of the former East German state were very happy to get rid of self-censorship and constant surveillance by the Stasi. Today, people have had time to forget about what it was like for them, and nostalgia for the GDR is growing.

• GF: What do you think of Gaidar’s reforms as a scholar?

MH: I’m not sure I have an easy answer. I have a few answers. First, he was a brave man. Secondly, I am not sure that at that moment he had a lot of choice. The state was collapsing and in such a situation it’s not particularly important what policy you choose, or whose advice you listen to, because you have only a very limited ability to influence the situation. The collapse of the Soviet Union had begun under Gorbachev and by 1991 has already gone so far that, it seems to me, the trauma of transition was unavoidable. As you know from my lecture, I’m not one of those who believe that the Soviet Union could have followed China’s path.

The main problem of the transition period in Russia was the oligarchy that emerged from privatization and the loans for shares deal; many people both here and in the West believe that there was dirty dealing. This is the original sin of the Russian reforms, which continues to define the nature of the economic and political system in Russia.

I could imagine a different version of events in which the Russian companes could have been sold off in open international auctions. In this case, the Russian government would have been able to recoup much more money, and then a limited stratum of extremely rich people would not have been created. But that raises another question: could the Russian government at that moment have afforded to sell the most important industrial companies to foreigners?

Now I think a lot about the disastrous consequences of nationalism, and this is another example of how nationalism hinders the government from making the right choices.

• GF: Was it possible to avoid the collapse of the Soviet Union?

MH: No, I think not. Gorbachev’s decisions were very important. You can quite easily imagine that if Andropov lived a little longer, he would have used repressive methods, and they would most likely have had some effect.

When the miners went on strike in 1989, Gorbachev gave a very clear signal that the old repressive methods would not be applied. It was Gorbachev’s personal decision and everything followed from that. It is easy to imagine how Andropov might have decided otherwise. In that case the Soviet Union would have survived longer, although it would not have become a prosperous state, just there would have been some more time before it collapsed.

• GF: What issue in the economic history of Russia do you think is most interesting?

MH: There are areas of research that I think are extremely promising. My co-author Andrei Markevich is working currently in one of them – to reconstruct the economic history of pre-revolutionary Russia. The point is that what we know about this period is based on various assumptions with little idea of how they correspond to reality. Now Andrei is building regional statistics, and this should give us a much better idea of how Russian agriculture was organized and how effective were the measures to reform it. I think that in 10 or 15 years we will have very precise answers to these questions.

A second major theme, one that I am engaged in now, it is the question of how the security system worked in the Soviet Union and how it influenced the Soviet economy.

• GF: What is going on today in economic history as a discipline?

MH: I think economic historians are currently doing two things that are important both for science and for society. [One is that] they are giving much attention to the long-term. My colleagues are working on the national accounts of England and Holland and tracking them back to the eleventh century so that they can make use of a thousand years of data. Tracking and comparing data in the long term, we can think much more clearly about the nature of economic growth. For example, we find that medieval Europe was much richer than many modern countries, and that the conditions for the industrial revolution matured over several centuries. Such studies are extremely important and of significant interest to the public. This, incidentally, is an additional complexity facing economic historians: in contrast to more traditional historians, it’s more difficult for us to tell a compelling story and attract public attention.

Another important task of modern economic history is to tell people about the economy in historical perspective. Today the world and, especially, the Western capitalist countries are going through an economic downturn and people are in a panic because they have not lived through a similar crisis before. But economic historians can say: Look at the Great Depression of the 1930s for other examples of economic crises – what's going on is not new.

This is an important lesson. Currently many people are saying: Look at the disastrous results of democracy and the free market economy, the government should step in. Maybe we need less democracy and more strong leaders! As an economic historian, I say to myself: I’ve heard this before somewhere. In the 1930s it was just the same. Then, it seemed, liberal democracy had failed and many countries turned readily to communism and fascism. This was a real disaster, ending in the Second World War and 50 million deaths. We shouldn’t do it again.

***

Video presentation and transcript of Mark Harrison’s lecture: “Stumbling Bear, Soaring Dragon: Could the Soviet Union have Followed the Chinese Road?”

Mark Harrison’s three must-reads for those that are starting out in economic history:

• Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food(Allen Lane, 2011).
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Norton, 1997).
• Paul Gregory, Terror by Quota: State Security from Lenin to Stalin (an Archival Study) (Yale University Press, 2009).

Mark Harrison : 12 Jun 2013 13:14 |  Tags: Communism History Politics Russia |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Needles in the Mega–Haystack: NSA versus KGB

Writing about web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22811580

Widespread concerns about mass surveillance in Western societies have been triggered by two revelations in The Guardian: a court order of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court giving the FBI unlimited access to the call logs of the Verizon telephone network; and details of the Prism program that gives the U.S. National Security Agency – and maybe others, such as our own GCHQ, access to servers through which foreign communications pass.

Natural questions arise. Are our liberties at risk, along with our privacy? Are we moving in the wrong direction along the spectrum that runs from a free and democratic society to a totalitarian police state?

To help answer such questions, it would seem only sensible to ask how surveillance works in real totalitarian police states. The answer might give us a reality check. That comparison is what I’m going to offer. I’m going to point out some important similarities between what the U.S National Security Agency (and others) are up to and the functions of the secret police under communist rule. I’m also going to show some differences. My conclusion is going to be that we are a long, long way from mass surveillance in the style of the Soviet KGB or China’s Public Security Bureau. But that should not be completely reassuring.

Here are the similarities that look important to me:

• Mass surveillance

American counter-intelligence is in the business of mass surveillance. They’re looking at everyone. Jeremy Bash, chief of staff to former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta, is quoted in the New York Times as saying:

If you’re looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a haystack.

That haystack is the millions and billions of bits of our data that are being gathered. Mass surveillance was also the business of the KGB, as it is the business of the secret police under any dictator. In fact, counter-intelligence everywhere has an unquenchable thirst for personal facts. Every secret policeman knows that the most dangerous enemy is the one you don’t have on file. You can keep tabs on the ones already in the Rolodex – but what about the sleepers, the new recruits, the ones that are out there and completely invisible to you? It’s what you don’t know that can kill you. So, in the interests of staying alive you can never know enough.

• Detection relies on big data

How do you find the enemy you don’t know? By using data and looking for patterns in the data. This is what the KGB did. They looked for several kinds of patterns. They were pioneers of profiling, for example. They figured that many disloyal people had markers in common, although exactly what mattered changed from one period to another. In one period it was your social origins – upper class (which meant the regime had taken your property) or poor. In other periods it was whether you had family members that had fled abroad, or you spoke a foreign language, or you had stayed behind when the war came and tried to live quietly under German occupation. So, the KGB looked for people with those markers. Another thing the KGB looked for was who knew whom or was related to whom. When they put a person under surveillance, they obsessively tracked friends and family members, telephone callers, letter writers, and so on. A third thing was just to look for unusual patterns of activity in the street and at work. To know what was unusual, they had first to know what was usual, and this in itself required data collection on a massive scale. The abnormal would stand out only against the normal. Qualitatively, this isn’t different from what the FBI or the NSA are doing. They too are mainly just looking for anomalies, or patterns of interest in the data.

• The goal is prevention

The ultimate goal of surveillance is prevention. Exactly what is being prevented may vary. Most western intelligence agencies today are trying to prevent another 9/11 or its London equivalent, another 7/7. They are also trying to prevent the public from finding out exactly how they are doing this, because that knowledge might help their targets to pass under the radar. China’s Public Security Bureau has a wider set of goals: to prevent public disorder, to prevent open criticism of China’s leaders and political order, and to prevent everyone from getting the idea that open opposition could ever be normal and go unpunished. The KGB’s goals were pretty similar. To do any of these things you have to be ready to react instantly to signals that something is up. Sometimes you receive a signal, and you can wait and see how it develops. Sometimes you have to react and nip it in the bud even before you know what it is that “it” might be. To prevent the bad stuff you have to review all situations that look as if they have a potential for going bad, and consider all people that look as if they have a potential to become enemies. Identifying the potential enemies is always and everywhere a judgement call.

• Risk of type I errors.

So much in this line of work is a judgement call that errors are inevitable. Some are what statisticians would call Type I errors and some are of the opposite type – Type II. You make a Type I error when you see a pattern in randomness, so for example a person has a random resemblance to a terrorist by having the wrong appearance and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and suddenly you’ve got them on a plane to Guantanamo Bay. And then a Type II error is when you miss a pattern, or overlook a real spy or terrorist. To explain this another way, when you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, and it’s important to avoid missing it, it’s inevitable that you will turn up lots of things that might be needles because they look quite like needles and in fact you might have even stuck one in the pin cushion before you realized that it’s just a shiny thorn … and now you can’t be bothered to retrieve it. Yes, and that means that where there is scope for error there is also scope for abuse, because secret policemen are not all dedicated professionals; among them will be those that are too lazy, or too ambitious, or too much in love with power to correct a mistake. In most situations Western societies show a preference for Type II errors over Type I errors; we’d rather leave a criminal at liberty than imprison an innocent person. That’s not so hard when we’re talking about shoplifting; it’s harder by orders of magnitude when the criminal at liberty has the potential to behead a bystander or fly a passenger jet into a shopping mall.

Those are the ways in which western counter-intelligence looks very much the same as counter-intelligence under totalitarian rule. But there are also some key differences. Here they are:

• Law governed and openly contested

Most obvious is the existence of a legal framework. It was not always like this but in both Britain and America the intelligence services now operate within the law, subject to both legislative and judicial oversight. The law permits some things and not others. The NSA can find out that X sent an email to Y, but it can’t read your email without a court order that names you and convinces a judge of probable cause. This framework may well look unsatisfactory, and may indeed be unsatisfactory; I’m not a lawyer and don’t pretend to know. At the same time, we also have a free press and intrepid journalists that have strong incentives to find scoops and dig out scandals. As a result, the scope of secrecy and surveillance is law-governed (although imperfectly), open to free discussion (to the extent that we know of it), and contested (vigorously and continually). If you don’t like the law you can take the contest to the polls, and do the hopey-changey thing of tossing out the law makers. Or you can take a personal stand, break the law, and answer for it in the courts like Bradley Manning (although this does not seem to be the path preferred by Julian Assange or Edward Snowden). The contrast with the situation in countries under communist rule could not be more stark. There the KGB responded only to the instructions of the ruling party (and the same no doubt holds in China, Cuba, North Korea, and North Vietnam); there was and is no answerability to the parliament, the courts, or the press. What is more, the merest mention of secrecy and surveillance was completely suppressed; the existence of secrets was a well policed secret.

• A much bigger haystack

America’s haystack is of unimaginably vast dimensions. It’s so big that, according to Edward Luce in the Financial Times, it employs a data-intelligence complex with a staff of nearly a million and a budget of $80 billion. The KGB’s haystack was pretty large in its time. It was put together from many individual straws: agent reports of gossip from canteen queues and student dormitories, surveillance reports, information gathered from microphones, phone taps, opening the mail, and so forth. In 40 years the archive of KGB counter-intelligence in Soviet Lithuania (a country of around 3 million people) accumulated at least a million pages of documents. On that basis, the total paperwork of the entire Soviet KGB archive (for 70 years and a country of 200 million people and more) ought to exceed that of Soviet Lithuania by at least two orders of magnitude. And this was in a society with one landline system and one mail service, without networked computers or mobile phones, where no one even had free access to a photocopier. When even intercity phone calls had to be booked through an operator in a city exchange, it was relatively easy for the KGB to monitor anyone’s personal network. So the size of America’s haystack must be thousands of times larger than this, and probably tens or hundreds of times larger than even China’s haystack. This observation, at first alarming, is testimony to the fact that we live in a free society in which communication is unfettered and of negligible cost by historical standards. We, the citizens, are the ones that make the haystack so large by our abundant use of the freedom to communicate.

• Many fewer needles

The problem of finding needles in this vast haystack is magnified by the fact that western societies do not appear systematically to produce needles – certainly not on the scale of more repressive societies. As the sociologists Inkeles and Bauer (in The Soviet Citizen, 1959) reported from the first wave of the Harvard Interview Project, the Soviet system of repression was apparently based on the assumption that everyone had a reason to hold a grudge against the communist rulers somewhere in their past. A parent had lost property, a brother had been arrested, a husband shot, a cousin’s family resettled in the remote interior. As time passed the salience of such historical events might recede, yet for some reason each new generation of Soviet-educated citizens kept on throwing up new kinds of nonconformity and outright disloyalty that had to be monitored and checked. In contrast western societies are not governed by dictators that have systematically expropriated property and penalized wide social classes and ethnic groups; they also provide multiple channels for citizens to express discontent and resentment and organize for social and political change. Despite this, there are still needles: enemies of openness and tolerance. But they are far fewer in number than the hostile forces that repressive regimes cannot help but produce and reproduce continually.

• More type I errors.

You put a much bigger haystack together with far fewer needles and the implication is unmistakeable. When the haystack is small and needles are many, the chances of making Type I errors are reduced. Under communist rule, if it pricked like a needle and it looked like a needle, there was at least a good chance that it was a needle. Any western intelligence agency trying to find those few needles in today’s mega-haystack has a much reduced chance of coming up with real needles compared with their communist counterpart, and a correspondingly heightened chance of false positives. The fact that so many people are looking for the few needles, that the number of big data analysts must exceed the probable number of real terrorists by a factor of one hundred or even ten thousand, just makes it much, much worse. So you want to make a career as an analyst. How can you distinguish yourself if you never identify a threat? How can you fend off boredom if you never reach the point of saying: “This is someone we should look at more closely”? So you do it, and you make a mistake. Well, it was worth looking into. And that is most unfortunate, because as a society we want to live in safety but we also hate Type I errors. We intensely dislike the idea that an incidental bystander might get investigated, or even detained, because of an intelligence error. So intelligence errors sow cynicism and mistrust.

Now I’ll summarize. NSA versus KGB: Is there good or bad news in the comparison? To me the news looks mostly good. Compared with the KGB, the NSA looks quite benign. But there is also a warning. The warning flows from the observation that there is no limit on what our guardians would like to know about us. The more they know, the better informed they are. But the more resources they have, the greater is the scope for over-ambition, the abuse of power, and the false positives that we rightly fear. How much is enough? The purpose of national security is not to suffocate us with cotton wool. It is to enable us to be the people we would like be and to protect the rule of law that we would like to have. In a free, open society the limits of security are something we, the citizens, should always debate, contest, and, if necessary, push back.

About me: I've spent much of the past five years working with archives of the KGB of Soviet Lithuania held at the Hoover Institution Archive. This work is in a paper I have coming out soon in the Journal of Economic History and in other work in progress or under review.

Mark Harrison : 11 Jun 2013 14:15 |  Tags: Kgb Politics Russia Security |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

When the USSR Collapsed: What do Russian school students think?

Writing about web page http://gaidarfund.ru/articles/1693

What do Russian school students think about the collapse of the USSR? On 28 May the Gaidar Foundation published excerpts from an essay competition among Russian school students, in which they write about their impressions and the family histories that have been passed down to them.

With permission, here is my translation of the article on the Gaidar Foundation website. I've kept as close to the orignal as I can; any words that I inserted for clarity are in [square brackets]. An important Russian word is perestroika, which literally means "restructuring" or "conversion." Mikhail Gorbachev did not invent it; in fact it was a common Stalinist buzzword for reorganization. But he used it to describe the package of economic and political reforms that he developed in the late 1980s, which turned out to point the way to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and that's how most people know it today. I have left it as perestroika, capitalized or not as in the original, except in one case where the writer clearly has a double meaning in mind.

Anywhere, here it is.

What do students think about Perestroika and the collapse of the USSR?

May 28, 2013

Excerpts from essays by students who participated in the historical game “The Last Russian Revolution (1989-1993),” organized by the "Memorial" Society in conjunction with the Yegor Gaidar Foundation under the competition for schools “The Person in history: Twentieth-century Russia.”

In April 2013, the winners of the Fourteenth All-Russian senior school students’ historical research competition organized by the “Memorial” Society came to Moscow. On one of their days in the city, they took part in an historical game jointly organized with the Yegor Gaidar Foundation, dedicated to events of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

During the game, students listened to two expert lectures, went round a historical exhibition, and took part in a debate. The players were formed into teams, and with the help of an adviser each had to formulate its own response to the questions of the time in mid-1991: Should we keep the Soviet Union? Should we move from a command economy to a [market] economy? On which countries should Russia focus its development? In addition, each team had to support the perspective of one of the social forces influential in the early 1990s. They had to defend this point of view in debate.

Before the game started, the competition winners had to write a short essay on Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Below are the most vivid excerpts from these works, which form an interesting picture of the younger generation's [attitudes to] the events of 20 years ago.

Why did the Soviet Union collapse? What leading characters and events determined the course of Russian history of the late 1980s and early 1990s?

I do not know exactly, but I think the Soviet Union fell apart because there was a power struggle. I think that's what happened in 1991.

***

In my opinion there are several reasons. First was the weakening of central authority. Second was ethnic conflict. As we know, republics could not secede from the USSR. The third reason was the deep economic crisis after the Great Patriotic War, the “Cold” War, and the arms race. Resources went to build nuclear weapons and heavy industry, and the social sphere was left with tens of percents. The fourth reason was dissatisfaction with control over all spheres of society – people were becoming more active in political life.

***

The words Gorbachev and Perestroika are inextricably linked. Gorbachev was young enough when he came to power, and he had a birthmark on his forehead. Everyone said that he was a marked man, that he would do either much good or much bad, but he leaned more to the bad side. The result was Perestroika.

I think change was necessary! Gorbachev's ideas were not bad. But at the same time there was no clear plan or support team.

***

Before I begin my story of Perestroika, I will say I am neither “for” nor “against” perestroika. Yeltsin, Sobchak, Gorbachev are the main heroes and villains of this comic book called “perestroika.” There are many nuances, so I will not come to straightforward conclusions. My parents were all ardent activists for perestroika and yes, in many ways, I understand them. Communism sounds good, but how many plans were there and what was the outcome? Nothing, it was all beautiful on paper. My grandmother used to say: “in childhood we were all dreamers, we all lived with the idea that we would live better than anyone.” And in fact humanity was the last thing they thought about. In criticizing and condemning communism, I don’t say that democracy is better. No, since then, little has changed. My friends, we are just as hidebound. The only thing is that we can move forward freely.

Why did the Soviet Union collapse? Because “empires” don’t last forever. Each republic wanted independence, something I understand, but they forgot that it would go hard for them without our support. It’s enough to recall the gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine, which actually led to the breakup.

But there is something else. Our top elite wanted wealth, because under communism everyone had to be equal. That's the reason. My grandmother used to say this and I say the same. You watch how the Olympics went, and our overall score faded out at fifth, and then add on the medals of the former Soviet republics, and that’s when nostalgia hits you ...

I cannot judge from the records and books of Perestroika, I just had to live through it. My mother and grandmother living in Kyrgyzstan were literally thrown out back to Russia, they carved out entire neighbourhoods of Russians. My grandmother's girlfriend was raped right there in a summer house. This tells you that it was not just the political elite that wanted the collapse, everyone wanted it. My family had to flee. And there was a huge number of such cases. Now look at life today and you wonder if the restructuring [perestroika] is over. You know the answer.

***

When people talk about the USSR, there is not a very happy picture in my mind: harassed people go to work / school / college, life under continual oppression, it is not clear whether you're a citizen of your own country or a slave of the totalitarian system. It seems that people living in the USSR had little no joy in life. Even when these events come to mind, everything appears in a grey-brown color. For me, it is not surprising that the Soviet Union collapsed. What’s strange that this did not happen earlier. Fifteen countries could not coexist under a single rule. The USSR united the unreconcileable, having built its system on the bones of people, and paid for it by its collapse.

***

From the 1960s, the foundation of the state budget was so-called “piss money” that the state alcohol monopoly brought in. The more Russian people drank, the greater was the revenue to the treasury. Drunkenness was instilled in the Russian people as a tradition, and one of the world's once most sober people became the most drunken.

In 1985, Gorbachev introduced prohibition, betting on oil to be the main source of revenue to the treasury. But Saudi Arabia, evidently at the request of the United States, pumped the oil harder, and this led to a sharp drop in the price of “black gold” and the collapse of the Soviet economy.

***

In this matter are encapsulated the fates of the peoples, and of the whole world, and of course the fates of ordinary people drawn into the vortex of history. There was no single cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was an entire complex of reasons, and they all played their own significant parts in the history of our country.... Now there are active discussions on the issues of perestroika, the collapse and the whole Soviet period of our history. The people and the Russian authorities have finally to determine their attitude to the country’s past. On this depends the future of our common motherland, Russia.

***

It's hard to express my thoughts on this topic, since I myself personally did not catch the collapse of the USSR, and the views of those around me like teachers and relatives are very mixed. For example, my family was affected by inflation. If, as my grandmother said, with yesterday’s family savings they could buy two new cars, the day after they could not afford anything with the same money. But generally after the revolution from 1989 to 1993, people could live more easily and better. Interesting films began to appear on TV, anti-religious propaganda stopped, and there was openness. The rules and traditions of that time had outlived themselves. Reflecting on this topic, the movie Born in the USSR comes to mind. This film is evidence that people’s lives have changed for the better.

***

M. S. Gorbachev wanted to make his country and the people living in it, happy. Yes, on one hand he did it: he opened the iron curtain and ended the American threat hanging over Russia (the atomic bomb), but on the other hand, there were endless queues in stores where the shelves were half empty.

How did perestroika and the events of the 1990s affect your family's life?

My associations with perestroika are like movie clips where crowds of people with banners and swords move onto a government building, and also the ballet Swan Lake which was being broadcast on TV.

***

Until now I had no interest in conversations at home about the 1990s. What did it have to do with me, a child? But growing up, I began to realize that my parents have a different perspective on the 1990s. Oh, and mum and dad were affected by shortages of goods, political instability, and the collapse of the Soviet Union ... But now, after a while, which gave them a chance to reflect on a lot of things, they get into arguments. Mum likes to live in a brand new country where she isn’t worried about the future, where she can buy what the children need, of course, if she has earned it. But dad regrets [the passing of] the USSR. And he is very negative about Gorbachev, [he thinks] he alone is to blame for the breakup of the USSR. In my view it was not only his fault.

The life of my family in the 1990s came down to one thing: you need to find ... I see it now as a kind of struggle to survive. To feed the family at that time my grandmother travelled to Moscow for groceries. They brought cakes, sweets, and … oranges, even! It was bliss!

I'm not used to that. I live in a quiet time. And the events of those years reach me only through stories. “You know, Olga,” mother says, “when the economy looked up and children's dresses appeared in the shops, I go there one day, and there’s satin in ribbons, just lovely! And it was 580 rubles! I found the money and bought it. And you looked just wonderful in it.” Sometimes it’s better to understand our country’s history through a connection like that than through the textbooks.

***

My mother's parents were laid off from work and she was left without means of support. Dad was in a children’s home. They had very harsh rules. The children stole to feed themselves because the home did not feed them enough and they were always looking for something tasty. Some were put on trial, marking them for life as convicts just for petty theft. There were shootouts where my dad was involved, but he was just a pawn. My mother's parents were trying to get work, but no one would take them on; they got by on moonlighting, but that was unstable.

Now I think that I was lucky that I was not born at that time. But my parents worse luck than me and my sister. When I ask about the time when the Soviet Union collapsed, my parents make excuses or laugh it off, and won’t tell me. Some of my friends who were alive at the time say that for them it was a great time, but I don’t think so.

***

On the slide before me now I see a white, blue, and red flag flying over thousands of heads. I would not want to change the flag. Also, I do not think it is possible to get rid of it altogether. But this is not a flag that can be a symbol of a generation, not one that can be raised so high. I do not love it. It’s so simple and stupid, but also infinitely important. I am one of those to whom (they say) the country's future [is given] – [yet] I do not love it. And how can I love a symbol of the new world, if I have such pride in the old one?

***

I was born in the Russian Federation. I cannot fully understand how life was in the Soviet Union, so I settle for the recollections of those alive at that time. I understand that perestroika was a step, a step for the better. Now I live in a country that seeks to promote democracy, civil society and a law-governed state. I am glad that my voice has political importance, that I have not just rights but a guarantee of their realization. The only thing I regret is the very process of perestroika and the events of the 1990s. This time it was very hard for everyone. Were there better ways to get it all more easily? I’d like to believe that. But history is born at the crossroads of ideas. I believe that our new country, which until now has been rising and recovering from the events of the 1980s and 1990s, will become a democratic model, and will be a country where the ideas of human rights will stand above the personal ideas of political leaders, and a strong but not harsh state.

Mark Harrison : 31 May 2013 13:48 |  Tags: History Russia |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Alternatives to Capitalism: When Dream Turned to Nightmare

Writing about web page http://cpasswarwick.wordpress.com/overview-2/peking-conference/proposed-topics/

On Friday evening I found myself debating "Socialism vs Capitalism: The future of economic systems" at the Peking Conference of the Warwick China Public Affairs and Social Service Society. The organizers also invited my colleagues Sayantan Ghosal, Omer Moav, and Michael McMahon, who spoke eloquently. The element of debate was not too prominent because we all said similar things in different ways. I'm an economic historian and the great advantage of history is that it gives you hindsight. Anyway, here is what I said:

Let’s start from some history. There was a time between the two world wars when the capitalist democracies, like America, Britain, France, and Germany, were in a lot of trouble. In 1929 a huge financial crisis began in the United States and went global. There was a Great Depression. Around the world, many tens of millions of farmers were ruined. Tens of millions of workers lost their jobs.

As today, people asked: What was the cause of the problem? One answer they came up with was: Capitalism is the problem. Lots of people decided: the problem is the free market economy! The government should step in to take over resources and direct them! The government should get us all back to work! The government should get us building new cities, power stations, and motorways!

Another answer many of the same people came up with was: Democracy is the problem. Lots of people decided: the problem is too much politics! We need a strong ruler to stop the squabbling! Someone who can make decisions for the nation! Someone who can organize us to build a common future together!

So there was a search for alternatives to capitalism. Different countries tried different alternatives. The alternatives they tried included national socialism (or fascism) and communism under various dictators, like Hitler and Stalin.

What happened next? On average the dictators’ economies did recover from the Depression faster than the capitalist democracies.

(Here's a chart I made earlier to illustrate the point, but I did not have the opportunity to use it in my talk. Reading from the bottom, the democracies are the USA, France, and the UK; the dictatorships are Italy, Germany, Japan, and the USSR. You can see that Italy does not conform to the rule that the dictators' economies recovered faster. Without Italy, the average economic performance of the dictatorships would have looked even better.)

But solving one problem led to another. Before the 1930s were over the dictators’ policies had already caused millions of deaths. A Japanese invasion killed millions in China (I'm not sure how many). An Italian invasion killed 300,000 in North Africa. Soviet economic policies caused 5 to 6 million hunger deaths in their own country and Stalin had a million more executed.

And another problem: As political scientists have shown, democracies don’t go to war (with each other). Dictators go to war with democracies (and the other way round). And dictators go to war with each other. The result of this was that in the 1940s there was World War II. Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and Stalin went to war -- with the democracies and with each other. Sixty million more people died.

After the war, capitalism recovered. In fact, far from being a problem, it became the solution. By the 1960s all the lost growth had been made up. Think of the economic losses from two World Wars and the Great Depression. If all you knew about capitalist growth was 1870 to 1914 and 1960 onwards, you’d never know two World Wars and the Great Depression happened in between.

(To illustrate that point, here's another chart I made earlier, but did not use. It averages the economic performance of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA.)

After World War II fascism and national socialism fell into disrepute, but communism carried on. In China, Mao Zedong’s economic policies caused more deaths. In 1958 to 1962, 15 to 40 million people starved. Communist rule led China into thirty years of stagnation and turmoil. After that Deng Xiaoping made the communist party get its act together. And the communists forgave themselves for their past and agreed to forget about it.

Here's the takeaway.

Liberal capitalism isn’t perfect, but it has done far more for human welfare than communism. It has been the solution more often than the problem. Last time capitalism experienced some difficulties, many countries went off on a search for alternatives. That search for alternatives led nowhere. It wasn’t just unproductive. It was a terrible mistake that cost many tens of millions of lives. Lots of people have forgotten this history. Now is a good time to remember it.

Postscript. At one point I thought of calling this blog "Alternatives to capitalism: the search for a red herring" (a "red herring" is something that doesn't exist but people look for it anyway.) But I realized that would have been wrong, because alternatives to capitalism have actually existed. The problem with the alternatives is not that we cannot find them. It is that the people who went searching for them fell into a dream and woke up to a nightmare.

Mark Harrison : 04 Feb 2013 08:34 |  Tags: China Economics History Mao Politics Russia Stalin |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Markets versus Government Regulation: What are the Tail Risks?

Writing about web page http://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/jeclit/v45y2007i1p5-38.html

Tail risks are the risks of worst-case scenarios. The risks at the far left tail of the probability distribution are typically small: they are very unlikely, but not impossible, and once or twice a century they will come about. When they do happen, they are disastrous. They are risks we would very much like to avoid.

How can we compare the tail risks of government intervention with the tail risks of leaving things to the market? Put differently, what is the very worst that can happen in either case? Precisely because these worst cases are very infrequent, you have to look to history to find the evidence that answers the question.

To make the case for government intervention as strong as possible, I will focus on markets for long-term assets. Why? Because these are the markets that are most likely to fail disastrously. In 2005 house prices began to collapse across North America and Western Europe, followed in 2007 by a collapse in equity markets. By implication, these markets had got prices wrong; they had become far too high. The correction of this failure, involving large write-downs of important long term assets, led us into the credit crunch and the global recession.

Because financial markets are most likely to fail disastrously, they are also the markets where many people now think someone else is more likely to do a better job.

What's special about finance? Finance looks into the future, and the future is unexplored territory. Only when that future comes about will we know the true value of the long-term investments we are making today in housing, infrastructure, education, and human and social capital. But we actually have no knowledge what the world will be like in forty or even twenty years' time. Instead, we guess. What happens in financial markets is that everyone makes their guess and the market equilibrium comes out of these guesses. But these guesses have the potential to be wildly wrong. So, it is long-term assets that markets are most likely to misprice: houses and equities. When houses and equities are priced very wrongly, chaos results. (And in the chaos, there is much scope for legal and illegal wrongdoing.)

When housing is overvalued, too many houses are built and bought at the high price and households assume too much mortgage debt. When equities are overvalued, companies build too much capacity and borrow too much from lenders. To make things worse, when the correction comes it comes suddenly; markets in long term assets don't do gradual adjustment but go to extremes. In the correction, nearly everyone suffers; the only ones that benefit are the smart lenders that pull out their own money in time and the dishonest borrowers that pull out with other people’s money. It's hard to tell which we resent more.

If markets find it hard to price long term assets correctly, and tend to flip from one extreme to another, a most important question then arises: Who is there that will do a better job?

It's implicit in current criticisms of free-market economics that many people think like this. Financial markets did not do a very good job. It follows, they believe, that someone else could have done better. That being the case, some tend to favour more government regulation to steer investment into favoured sectors. Others prefer more bank regulation to prick asset price bubbles in a boom and underpin prices in a slump. The latter is exactly what the Fed and the Bank of England are doing currently through quantitative easing.

Does this evaluation stand up to an historical perspective?

We’re coming through the worst global financial crisis since 1929. Twice in a century we've seen the worst mess that long-term asset markets can make -- and it's pretty bad. A recent estimate of the cumulative past and future output lost to the U.S. economy from the current recession, by David H. Papell and Ruxandra Prodan of the Boston Fed, is nearly $6 trillion dollars, or two fifths of U.S. output for a year. A global total in dollars would be greater by an order of magnitude. What could be worse?

For the answer, we should ask a parallel question about governments: What is the worst that government regulation of long term investment can do? We'll start with the second worst case in history, which coincided with the last Great Depression.

Beginning in the late 1920s, the Soviet dictator Stalin increasingly overdid long term investment in the industrialization and rearmament of the Soviet Union. Things got so far out of hand that, in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan in 1932/33, as a direct consequence, 5 to 6 million people lost their lives.

How did Stalin's miscalculation kill people? Stalin began with a model that placed a high value (or “priority”) on building new industrial capacity. Prices are relative, so this implied a low valuation of consumer goods. The market told him he was wrong, but he knew better. He substituted one person’s judgement (his own) for the judgement of the market, where millions of judgements interact. He based his policies on that judgement.

Stalin’s policies poured resources into industrial investment and infrastructure. Stalin intended those resources to come from consumption, which he did not value highly. His agents stripped the countryside of food to feed the growing towns and the new workforce in industry and construction. When the farmers told him they did not have enough to eat, he ridiculed this as disloyal complaining. By the time he understood they were telling the truth, it was too late to prevent millions of people from starving to death.

This case was only the second worst in the last century. The worst episode came about in China in 1958, when Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward. A famine resulted. The causal chain was pretty much the same as in the Soviet Union a quarter century before. Between 1958 and 1962, at least 15 and up to 40 million Chinese people lost their lives. (We don’t know exactly because the underlying data are not that good, and scholars have made varying assumptions about underlying trends; the most difficult thing is always to work out the balance between babies not born and babies that were born and starved.)

This was the worst communist famine but it was not the last. In Ethiopia, a much smaller country, up to a million people died for similar reasons between 1982 and 1985. If you want to read more, the place to start is “Making Famine History” by Cormac Ó Gráda in the Journal of Economic Literature 45/1 (2007), pp. 5-38. The RePEc handle of this paper is http://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/jeclit/v45y2007i1p5-38.html.

Note that I do not claim these deaths were intentional. They were a by-product of government regulation; no one planned them (although some people do argue this). At best, however, those in charge at the time were guilty of manslaughter on a vast scale. In fact, I sometimes wonder why Chinese people still get so mad at Japan. Japanese policies in China between 1931 and 1945 were certainly atrocious and many of the deaths that resulted were intended. Still, if you were minded to ask who killed more Chinese people in the twentieth century, the Japanese imperialists might well have to cede first place to China's communists. However, I guess there is less national humiliation in it when the killers are your fellow countrymen than when they are foreigners.

To conclude, no one has the secret of correctly valuing long term assets like housing and equities. Markets are not very good at it. Governments are not very good at it either.

But the tail risks of government miscalculation are far worse than those of market errors. In historical worst-case scenarios, market errors have lost us trillions of dollars. Government errors have cost us tens of millions of lives.

The reason for this disparity is very simple. Markets are eventually self-correcting. "Eventually" is a slippery word here. Nonetheless, five years after the credit crunch, worldwide stock prices have fallen, house prices have fallen, hundreds of thousands of bankers have lost their jobs, and democratic governments have changed hands. That's correction.

Governments, in contrast, hate to admit mistakes and will do all in their power to persist in them and then cover up the consequences. The truth about the Soviet and Chinese famines was suppressed for decades. The party responsible for the Soviet famine remained in power for 60 more years. In China the party responsible for the worst famine in history is still in charge. School textbooks are silent about the facts, which live on only in the memories of old people and the libraries of scholars.

Mark Harrison : 15 Oct 2012 12:22 |  Tags: China Economics History Politics Recession Russia Stalin |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Prince Harry and The Rules

Writing about web page http://www.sps.ru/?id=213821

What happened in Vegas should have stayed there, but somehow it was allowed out and got away.

Back home, the nation is divided. Some think Prince Harry let us down. Others think he was doing what comes naturally to a healthy twenty-something with more money than sense -- and good luck to him.

The first lot apparently includes the senior members of the royal family. A source told a Mirror journalist:

This situation [the prince's partying in a Vegas hotel] has been embarrassing for the royals and particularly disappointing since they had been successfully building Harry’s image as a serious royal and ambassador for the Queen.

Prince Charles probably wishes he could put the same kind of armlock on his younger son that the Soviet state put onto every Soviet citizen that was send abroad. Recently I looked up the rules that were issued to all Soviet tourists before they were allowed to leave the country. These rules were approved from time to time by the communist party leadership.

I've pasted the version approved in August 1979 below (scroll down to the end). These rules were published a few years ago in a book of Soviet-era documents. It's not my translation. I put the Russian text through Google translate and corrected the preamble. The result is a bit rough but the spirit is clear enough.

There were 25 rules. They covered everything from not leaving government documents in your hotel room to what to do if a strange woman entered your sleeping compartment on the night train.

Here is some context that might help:

• No Soviet citizen could travel abroad on their own initiative, whether for tourism or for any other purpose. You had to get permission, which meant entering into a multi-stage process of examination and disclosure of all aspects of your life, thoughts, and habits. This examination took weeks or months; you could fail the inspection at any stage and never know why.
• Only if you passed the process would they trust you with knowledge of the rules. For the rules were a government secret, which you were shown and had to sign for on the eve of departure.
• On successfully obtaining permission, you did not then "go" abroad; the government was "sending" you. As the rules below conclude (this is my translation):

The state, party, and social organizations of the Soviet Union sending Soviet citizens abroad are showing great trust in them. Soviet people are obligated to justify this trust by fulfilling their administrative duties and by irreproachable behaviour. Failure to comply with the rules of conduct abroad should be considered as a breach of public duty and of state discipline.

• If you went, you did not go alone. Every Soviet tourist group and delegation included one or more KGB officers and informers, travelling under cover; their job was to keep an eye on the others.
• If you misbehaved while out of the country, there would be consequences. On your return, you would be reported and interviewed. Most likely, you'd never be allowed out of the country again. There was one escape route: Rule 20 states:

The Soviet citizen who makes an individual mistake in work or conduct must not conceal it and is obligated immediately to report the incident to his supervisor.

In other words, if you made an honest mistake that was not too serious, and you owned up and helped to mitigate its consequences, there was a slim chance you'd be let off the hook.

• One thing not in the rules: if you tried to escape the consequences of breaking the rules by taking refuge in a foreign country, you became a traitor, so your family would become the family of a traitor. They would have to disown you or share the price of your treason. Either way, you lost them forever.

If Prince Harry had known the rules, and been frightened enough to stick to them, nothing would have happened in Vegas. Specifically:

• Harry would have known it was not "his" trip; while travelling, it was his job to promote his country's foreign policy (Rule 1).
• He'd have known that the enemy is always planning to eavesdrop, engage in secret surveillance, and use the results to deceive and discredit (Rule 4).
• He'd have known that you can't trust "guides and interpreters, doctors, teachers, tailors, vendors, taxi drivers, waiters, hairdressers and other service personnel" (including hotel staff) (Rule 4), any of whom are likely to be working for the enemy (the press in this case).
• He'd have known that he should match his expenditure with his means, not incur obligations to others by accepting hospitality or gifts from them (Rule 13), and specifically avoid gambling and casinos (Rule 14).

But the history of Soviet tourism tells us that rules alone are not enough to guarantee good behaviour; fear of consequences was the key. Sometimes even fear was not enough, because Soviet tourists did sometimes give in to temptation.

In this case Prince Harry is third in line to the British throne; can we credibly threaten to consign him to oblivion if he misbehaves? Can we sanction his father or brother if he overstays his leave?

To conclude: you can send people far away and still control their conduct by terrifying them with the consequences of misbehaviour. It's hard to do it any other way. The price of living in a free society is that some young men will go abroad and behave badly.

You can criticise the House of Windsor for its privilege and lack of morals, but it looks like Harry will have fun, fun, fun 'till his Daddy takes the T-bird away.

* * *

Here are the rules that were adopted by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union central committee on August 17, 1979, courtesy of Google translate:

Secret

Appendix to item 3s [secret], draft resolution № 167

BASIC RULES of conduct of Soviet citizens visiting the capitalist and developing countries

Soviet citizens who migrate to capitalist and developing countries should be guided by:

1. Soviet foreign policy aims to create favorable international conditions for the building of communism, to strengthen the unity and cohesion of the socialist countries, to support the people's struggle for national and social liberation and to fully cooperate with the newly independent states, consistently the principles of peaceful coexistence between countries with different social systems, to deliver humanity of global thermonuclear war. Soviet citizens while abroad, must be an active proponent of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union.

Soviet man, remember that high moral and political qualities, great love for the Soviet motherland, faithful to the principles of proletarian internationalism, the constant vigilance during their stay abroad will contribute to the successful implementation of its objectives, to protect it from enemy provocations and intrigues.

2. While abroad in any part of the work entrusted to him, a Soviet citizen must uphold the honor and dignity of citizens of the USSR, in strict moral code of the builder of communism, faithfully perform their duties and assignments to be un-blameworthy in their personal behavior, consistently defend the political, economic and other interests of the Soviet Union, strictly to keep state secrets.

3. During his stay abroad Soviet nationals, using the opportunities and explain the peaceful foreign policy of the Soviet state to the Soviet-achieving people in the development of economy, science, culture and other areas of building communism.

Soviet citizens should actively use their facilities for the study of international experience, and all that could be useful for the development of the economy of the Soviet Union.

4. While abroad, constant political vigilance, remember that the intelligence agencies of the capitalist countries and their agents seeking from Soviet citizens interested in their information, compromise the Soviet man, when it suits them, up to the inducement to treason. For this purpose, intelligence imperialist countries, using modern techniques, methods of eavesdropping, secret surveillance and photography, as well as methods of deception, blackmail, fraud and intimidation. Capitalist intelligence agents are often under the guise of guides and interpreters, doctors, teachers, tailors, vendors, taxi drivers, waiters, hairdressers and other service personnel.

Intelligence agencies in capitalist countries tend to exploit such weaknesses and individuals, as a tendency to alcohol, for easy communication with women, gambling, purchase of various things, and the inability to live within our means, and carelessness, indiscretion, carelessness and negligence in the storage official and personal documents.

To avoid possible provocations in the case of attempts on the part of anyone else to offer information, supposedly of interest to the Soviet Union, or attempting to engage in obtaining such information to exercise due restraint, not to accept any proposals and report to the head of the Soviet establishment.

In order to protect the citizens of the Soviet secret service possible provocations in a number of capitalist countries have sovposolstv Assistant Ambassador for safety. Must promptly inform the Assistant Ambassador on his contacts with foreigners, whose actions are unfriendly toward our country in nature, as well as other facts hostility to the Soviet Union and the case for action to ensure the safety of overseas Soviet people.

Given all this, the Soviet citizens should behave in such a way as not to give occasion to use foreign intelligence itself in its interests. At the same time, Soviet citizens who are abroad, do not have to stay closed and arrogant towards the citizens of the country. Reasonable sociability of the Soviet people, combined with high political vigilance is necessary for the proper conduct of Soviet citizens abroad.

5. Before the departure of the Soviet Union abroad should:

well understand the goals and objectives of the mission and get the necessary instructions to the sending organization on issues of the work;

acquainted with the basic facts about the country: its political and state system, domestic and foreign policy, relations with the Soviet Union;

more familiar with the route to the place of destination;

get a passport, see for yourself, there is sufficient period of validity, whether it entry and transit visas to remember their validity;

receive payment-certificate, permission to currency export and, where necessary medical certification standard pattern stamped on vaccinations.

When going abroad for a period of three months to hand over to the appropriate organization of the Party, Komsomol and trade union fees. Get the adhesive stamps and on arrival in the country to stand up to the party, Komsomol and trade union in the Soviet foreign office records. Not to bring personal documents, except those required to travel to your destination. All private and non-public documents and materials required to work abroad, to surrender to the sending organization to send them to the destination. Unclassified documents, office supplies and other materials needed to work abroad, you can take it only with permission of the sending organization.

Should have with addresses and phone numbers of embassies and consulates of the Soviet Union, along the way, so that, if necessary, you can refer to these institutions for advice, and if necessary - for assistance and adequate protection. If seconded sent to a country where there is no embassy, consulate or other representative of the USSR, he should have the address and phone numbers of the embassy, mission or consulate of a State representing the interests of the Soviet Union in the country.

6. Before traveling abroad should be familiar to the ministry, department or central office, through which the trips abroad, the customs regulations of the USSR, and strictly abide by them.

When you move the boundaries of foreign countries, as well as in transit through their territory to the destination comply with relevant laws and regulations of the border control, health and customs authorities. At the request of representatives of the border to bring your passport for verification. Before leaving the checkpoint does not forget to get your passport back.

At the request of the representatives of Customs show things, baggage, without giving a reason for the charge of concealing anything in particular to bring foreign currency. If the inspection of luggage will be asked to pay customs duty, it must be paid, and for this currency priotsutstvii take a receipt for the items left in the customs, without entering into a dispute.

In the case of personal search border or customs authorities, without conflict, to declare verbal protest. During the search to make sure that does not have thrown any documents or materials in the provocation. In all cases, the seizure of objects when viewed from demand of act or issue a receipt showing where, when and by whom were made inspection and seizure of objects.

If verification of documents and examination of things and luggage representatives of border and customs authorities will allow offensive, politically hostile attacks and other actions should be required to immediately stop them, drawing attention to the inadmissibility of such behavior by the authorities.

At the first opportunity of the facts the search, seizure of objects, abusive behavior on the part of foreign border and customs authorities should inform the nearest embassy, consulate or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, just stating the time and place of the facts occurred, and, if possible, the names, positions, or what , or other signs of the perpetrators of such acts.

Currency exchanges are made only in Soviet organizations or with the assistance of Soviet foreign institutions in the banking institutions of the host country.

Note. According to paragraph 6 of the rights of Soviet citizens traveling abroad with a diplomatic passport, are guided by specific instructions, the Soviet Foreign Ministry.

7. In route to the destination on the train, by boat or plane with strangers satellites should stay politely and correctly, showing to them the necessary vigilance. If the sleeping compartment (cabin) will be one outside person of the opposite sex, you need to request a transfer to another compartment.

Do not be distracted towards his things and do not rely on strangers satellites. Money, passport and other documents to keep always with you in a safe place. Do not leave your passport and other documents in the hotel rooms, cabins, compartments and other places even for a short time.

Do not give a casual acquaintance of his address, phone number, etc.

For every kind of trip ticket inquiries and seek advice to officials.

In the case of an unexpected delay in the way, resulting in the visa may be overdue, the passport shall be left at the nearest embassy or consulate of the Soviet Union to extend the visa.

In transit through the countries with which the USSR has no diplomatic relations, it is forbidden to go to stop the train, ship or go to the airport.

8. Upon arrival to your destination seconded required to register at the Soviet embassy or consulate, and on leaving the country home - struck off the register. If it is not possible to appear in person at the embassy or consulate, you must inform them of their arrival in the country and out of it over the phone or by letter.

The embassy or consulate should be familiar with the established in this country by the laws and rules governing the rights and duties of foreigners, and strictly comply with them. With respect to the customs and traditions of the peoples of the national of the host country, so as not to give rise to local authorities and hostile to the Soviet Union of the Soviet citizen accused elements in "hostile acts", in the "interference in internal affairs" or "indecent acts" in relation to a given country or its citizens.

It is also necessary to obtain clarification on the situation in the country, the Council on the device in the hotel, on the order of registration of residence in respect of medical care, food and all other emerging issues.

Seconded must keep in mind that staying permit in private homes and take in hiring foreigners for personal services shall be permitted only in exceptional circumstances with the permission of the Embassy or Consulate of the USSR.

9. At a hotel or a private apartment is prohibited:

a) to arrange official meetings on matters not subject to disclosure, and make telephone calls on these issues, discuss the characteristics and behavior of Soviet people. Production meetings should be held at the embassy, consulate or trade mission to other devices for these purposes;

b) maintain official documents or notes;

c) to keep foreign communist literature and newspapers (in those countries where there is no free sale of literature and newspapers).

If the country of residence of Soviet literature and newspapers in the free market are not available, these publications can be sent to local citizens on request only with the permission of the head of the Soviet establishment.

10. All correspondence with the ministries and departments of the USSR, as well as letters to relatives and friends should be sent through the embassy or consulate of the USSR. Since all correspondence is usually seen bodies-eign intelligence and data of these letters can be used to the detriment of our country and the very sender, sending telegrams and letters through the postal agency of the host country is not recommended and can be made only in exceptional cases.

11. Remembering that the intelligence agencies of the capitalist countries often use international conferences and meetings, conferences and scientific symposia, talks on issues of trade, economic, scientific, cultural and other ties to scouting secret information, Soviet citizens should exercise caution and report with the permission of the head of delegation (tour group), only the data that the circumstances of the case or provide guidance.

12. Soviet citizens who are abroad on business, need to continue to work on improving their ideological and political level, and business skills, be aware of the events and the life of our country, to participate actively in the social life of the Soviet team, learn a foreign language. You must also be aware of the internal and foreign policy of the government of the host country and its relations with the Soviet Union.

13. Soviet citizens during the stay abroad must be carefully and continuously monitor their appearance, always be neat and tidy, keep good clean accommodation.

In everyday life, and culturally Soviet citizens abroad must be exemplary and modest. Should strictly match their costs with get paid to avoid debt, not to buy anything on credit or in installments. At the same time, do not be excessive savings worsening living conditions, food, etc.

Should avoid accepting gifts, no matter under what pretext they were presented either. If circumstances force to accept the gift, then report this to his superiors.

14. Soviet citizens abroad categorically prohibits:

to talk on the phone in public places, hotels, places of residence, in cars with other Soviet citizens on the nature of the work, the personnel of the Soviet institutions abroad, departmental affiliation of employees, their personal and professional qualities, the internal order, location and security of missions ;

used cars for trips and other vehicles (except taxis) owned by unfamiliar individuals;

visit night clubs, cinemas, that demonstrate the anti-Soviet or pornographic films, and other places of questionable entertainment, as well as participate in games of chance;

visit areas inhabited by immigrants or other groups hostile to the Soviet Union, cafes or restaurants that are going to members of any immigrant, reactionary and other organizations, and to participate in demonstrations, rallies and meetings, including the [ organized] Communist Party, if it is not the task of travel;

visit areas of the host country, declared closed to foreigners without proper permission from the authorities of that country;

establish and maintain, directly or through other persons due to foreigners, if it is not caused by business need (for each case to establish contacts with foreigners to report the head of the Soviet missions abroad, and if necessary, as provided in paragraph 4 of these rules - even after having on security);

take when returning home parcels and letters from Soviet citizens and foreigners for those living in the USSR;

abuse of alcohol, to appear in public places and on the street drunk;

store their personal cash savings in foreign banks (but not the Soviet citizens who are paid in checks) and to participate in lotteries, collecting donations, and other similar activities;

Soviet money to exchange for foreign currency, unless there is proper authorization;

sell or trade personal items;

acquire and bring to the Soviet Union literature, films, tapes, cards and other printed matter and anti-Soviet pornographic content.

15. In the period of stay abroad is strictly forbidden to enter the oral or written agreements for works or perform any activity, paid or free, and the public to speak at meetings, rallies, radio and television, in the press, cinema, concerts, participate in professional and so on if it is not provided-trip mission. Of all the proposals of this kind, Soviet citizens are obliged to inform their supervisor or the embassy and to act in accordance with their recommendations.

16. Upon returning from trips abroad Soviet citizens must, within two weeks to surrender all they have received at the public expense in foreign government, private and personal files documentaries send them to ministries, departments or agencies that send these materials to the relevant archives. On this kind of material, free or purchased personal funds should inform these ministries, departments or agencies, which, depending on the character and historic value of the materials, decide to transfer them to state custody.

17. All kinds of patrols by the host country on business and personal matters only with the approval of the Embassy or Consulate. Driving a car in the host country can only Soviet people with the appropriate local or international driver's license and permission from the ambassador, consul or manager.

Be careful when photographing, filming amateur, strictly within established rules in the country.

18. Soviet citizens residing abroad must proceed from the fact that the Soviet ambassador to the country is a representative of the Soviet state, and on it the control of the activity of all of the country of residence of Soviet institutions, delegations and officials.

Soviet citizens who are abroad, in their official and social activities, and personal behavior should strictly and unswervingly follow the orders and instructions of the ambassador or a substitute person.

19. In the performance, behavior and relationships with foreign agencies, organizations and their representatives must strictly follow the instructions and guidelines of the leaders of the Soviet establishment.

Soviet citizens who entered the country on temporary assignment in the delegations, art groups, sports teams and other groups, are required in all of its offices and public affairs and personal conduct strictly obey the orders and instructions of the head of delegation, team or group that informs the embassy plans stay in the country and the results of work during trips abroad.

20. In the case of the Soviet people difficult issues at work, at home, in relationships with foreigners, and to call the police or any other foreign institution should immediately report this to your supervisor, the consul or ambassador and act only in accordance with their instructions .

Assuming an error in personal or behavior, the Soviet citizen should not hide it, and shall immediately report the incident to your supervisor.

21. In the case of the detention and the police drive the Soviet people, avoiding confusion, should require a call representative of the Soviet embassy or consulate. Without a representative of the Soviet embassy or consulate not to answer questions, not to sign any papers and reports, not to succumb to threats and intimidation.

In case of accident, which occurred outside the apartment or the Soviet office space, resulting in a board-sky people admitted to hospital, he shall as soon as possible by any means to inform the Embassy or Consulate of the USSR.

22. Of all the facts attacks and insults directed against the Soviet Union or the Soviet institutions, regardless of where it occurred (in the street, in shops, theater, cinema or other places), should be reported immediately to the manager or senior to the Soviet embassy (consulate). If such attacks and insults will be permitted with the direct address to the Soviet citizen, he should, avoiding temper, take them, and if necessary, to protest and also to inform the senior manager or to the Soviet embassy (consulate).

23. In the Soviet citizens abroad must always remember that they are under the protection of the Soviet state. If, due to unforeseen circumstances prevailing Soviet citizen would be in a difficult situation for him and promptly declare it to representatives of Soviet power, he will always find help and support from the institutions representing our country abroad.

24. Living abroad, the Soviet citizen must not only personally to comply strictly with all the requirements of these rules and guidance of leaders but also alert and keep your family from misconduct abroad.

25. Soviet citizens who migrate to capitalist and developing countries as members of the family (wife, parents, adult children) are also required to comply strictly with the relevant paragraphs of the rules and keep in mind the following:

at home to behave modestly, not to be curious for their working relatives in the family circle to avoid quarrels and family domestic turmoil. Modest, polite and dignified behavior among foreigners, particularly when visiting the shops and stores, markets and other public places, do not go for casual dating, no exercise of gab, having in mind that among the foreigners around the Soviet people in public places may always be people who know Russian, and other languages of the Soviet Union.

***

State, party and social organizations of the Soviet Union, directing Soviet citizens abroad and provide them with great confidence. This trust is the Soviet people must live exemplary performance and the impeccable behavior.

Failure to comply with the Rules of Conduct abroad should be considered a breach of duty and discipline of the state.

TsKhSD, f. 89, op. 31, 7, ll. 9-22. [This is the archival reference of the document.]

Mark Harrison : 27 Aug 2012 16:41 |  Tags: Monarchy Russia |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem