Western Hypocrisy Over St. Petersburg Attacks

It was a welcome change to hear the Western media acknowledge that the St. Petersburg bombing might have something to do with Russian foreign policy: the interventions in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria. Yet you will never hear such an angle raised when its an atrocity carried out in an American or a Western European city. In such cases any attempt to explain terrorism would be dismissed as making excuses for violence.

This moral blackmail was not deployed over St. Petersburg. What do we know about the attack? The main suspect Akbarzhon Jalilov, a Kyrgyz national, is accused of killing 14 people and injured 50 others in detonating a bomb in the St. Petersburg underground. Six people have now been arrested. They have been accused of recruiting for ISIS. The suspects are all from Central Asian states. This would fit with the analysis that the bombing was staged in reaction to Russian aggression.

Not only was Central Asia dominated by the Soviet Union, the region was on the frontline in the war in Afghanistan. Once the USSR had invaded Afghanistan, the war aims quickly changed to building a new society and occupying the country for the time being. The United States and its regional allies - particularly Saudi Arabia and Pakistan - established a network of jihadists to fuel the Afghan resistance to the Red Army.

The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan would come to a close by 1989. Gorbachev oversaw the withdrawal and warned the West that the forces they had mobilised in Afghanistan would come back to haunt them. Of course, the network behind Osama bin Laden and the attacks on the World Trade Centre had their origins in the Afghan struggle. The war itself would create a space for Eastern European dissidents to challenge regimes backed by the USSR. This combined with economic factors would bring down the Eastern bloc.

Events in Chechnya would be even more crucial for the terror factor in Russia. As the USSR was dismantled in 1991, Chechen Ichkeria declared independence under the nationalist leadership of Dzhokhar Dudayev. Growing instability and tension in the region would lead to the eruption of armed conflict in North Ossetia, the Chechens feared the presence of the Russian armed forces would be the first stage of mission creep. Dudayev imposed a state of emergency after Russia deployed troops to the border.

At the same time, Dudayev was facing a groundswell of opposition in the fledgling state. This opposition would turn to armed force in 1994. Boris Yeltsin pledged Russian support for the attempt to overthrow the Dudayev government. Yeltsin was desperate to bolster his domestic support in the midst of his disastrous economic reforms. The instability in the Chechen region offered an opportunity. The Russians backed the opposition in order to overthrow Dudayev and crush the example of independence.

However, Dudayev held his own from October to November against the forces Yeltsin had mobilised. Russian armed forces would play a clandestine role, but the Battle of Grozny left the Russian government humiliated after the Chechen independence forces captured a large number of military vehicles and personnel. It was meant to be a swift operation to topple the government. Faced with this, Yeltsin sanctioned the invasion of Ichkeria ostensibly to restore the territorial integrity of Russia.

The Russian army began bombing the Chechen air capabilities and within ten days the invasion was underway. Just as Brezhnev had mistakenly thought the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan would be successful within weeks the Russians now thought the Grozny government could be toppled. The war would rage for two years before a ceasefire was signed on Russian terms. Dudayev was assassinated in an 1996 airstrike.

With American help, Yeltsin would survive the Presidential elections of 1996. Estimates of the people killed in the first Chechen war range up to 100,000, along with 500,000 people displaced, in just two years of fighting. A new war would start in 1999 following the apartment bombings in Moscow and the rise of Vladimir Putin. The second war was waged by Russia and its Chechen allies to kill off independent Ichkeria and snuff out the emergent Islamist movement in the Northern Caucasus.

The first aim was secured, but an insurgency continues to this day. Russia has been struck by numerous bombings by Chechen Islamist fighters, and a key reason for the Russian intervention in Syria has been partly to extent the war against those same Chechens - now fighting in Syria alongside the mainstream rebels and an array of jihadist groups. Of course, the main reason has been to back the Assad regime - the only Russian ally in the region.

An honest look at the situation finds that the Russian government relies upon the Islamist threat to  justify its aggression in Syria. Even though Russia has been motivated partly by counter-insurgency in Chechnya, the main targets of Russian bombing have been the Syrian opposition and the civilians living in their territory, not Islamic State or al-Nusra. This in turn is a key factor in the continued threat of terrorism in Russia.

Catastroika: Are the Russians Leaving?

Apparently, the Russians are leaving. Seemingly out of nowhere, Vladimir Putin declared that the operation had “largely achieved” the desired aims and Russian forces would be winding down operations in Syria. Not that this means the Russian military base will be dismantled. Far from it, the Russian invasion (yes, we shouldn’t mince words here) has entrenched the influence over the Assad regime, which it has strengthened. Out of 60 aircraft, the Russians have withdrawn 30. The picture is more mixed than the announcement of the mission’s ‘success’.

Of course, it’s not true that Islamic State has been decimated by Russian actions, however, the real aim was to defend the Assad regime and crush rebel groups. This may have meant bombing Islamic State’s positions, but it mainly meant striking at groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra, the Army of Conquest and the Free Syrian Army. These efforts gave the Syrian regime an advantage over the rebels. While it left Islamic State as a more distant foe. Keep in mind Bashar al-Assad can use ISIS to justify his own position.

If it is a choice between Islamism and Ba’athism, many would turn to Assad for order and security over chaos and terror. This falls apart when you look at the record. Assad has far more blood on his hands than anyone else in Syria. Many liberal and even leftist commentators have turned to argue for tactical and critical support for the Ba’athists. But this means, as long as the regime remains intact, the Arab Awakening will not have reached its conclusion.

Meanwhile the problem for liberal interventionists is precisely the lack of any credible force in Syria. Who do we need to defeat more? If we bomb ISIS, we help Assad and vice versa. Can we defeat both simultaneously and birth a secular democracy? Unlikely, as it may be, the only just outcome would be a democratic opening. Western intervention has served prolonged the conflict, whereas Russian involvement has consolidated the gains of the Assad regime.

At the same time, the Russian withdrawal sends a clear message to Assad. There are no blank cheques, or free passes, for the Syrian regime and Russian support may not be unconditional. Putin cannot do everything for Assad. The Russian army obviously cannot sustain a long-term occupation in Syria. Even the Soviet Union could not occupy Afghanistan for as long as the US has done. In fact, the Soviet experience in Afghanistan is particularly relevant to the Syrian intervention.

Defeated in slow-motion

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan came in 1979 after Hafizullah Amin organised the death of Muhammad Taraki and seized the reins in Kabul. Officially, the Soviet army intervened to aid the leftists in their struggle with the Mujahideen. Yet the true purpose of the intervention was take control of the country and restore order.

The People's Democratic Party came to power in 1978 with the violent overthrow of President Daoud. Once at the helm, Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin declared a revolution and proceeded to try and transform the country by breaking apart the remaining feudal structures. They declared women equal, abolished shariah, criminalised arranged marriages and began redistributing land. The new regime began converting opium production towards agricultural development. But these reforms would bring unforeseen consequences.

Prior to this upheaval, the Soviet Union was more than comfortable with the Afghan monarchy, which guaranteed stability, even as it pursued modernisation programmes. Afghanistan itself is valuable as a source of natural gas, but also as a route for pipelines. The revolution threw them off and provoked rebellion in the countryside, where the leftists were carving up the land. This would be the beginning of the Islamist revolt. What the Soviet leaders feared most was that this instability would engulf Central Asia.

After all, the region was predominantly Muslim and a valuable cluster of buffer-states between Russia and China, Iran and Pakistan. Much like the Eastern bloc, the hold on energy-rich Central Asia helped the USSR stand tall as a superpower. This is exactly why the US moved to back the insurgents. The day Soviet forces crossed the border, officially, national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote to President Carter: “We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War”.

It's not that the Soviet leadership was ignorant of this factor. Alexei Kosygin was opposed to sending troops to Afghanistan precisely because of the example of Vietnam. In Kosygin’s view, the new regime should be able to hold its own against the rebellion, as North Vietnam had triumphed over the South and even against American aggression. Yet the balance of forces in the Soviet leadership still favoured intervention. In the end, Leonid Brezhnev was persuaded to back the intervention after Hafizullah Amin had Taraki smothered with a pillow.

Of course, financial support for the Mujahideen was already under way even before the invasion was launched. The CIA, with the help of Pakistan and Saudi, had set out to built a vast network of Islamist militants. This gave Arab regimes the opportunity to rid themselves of these troublesome elements. Far from harbouring any regrets, Zbigniew Brzezinski says he would do it again if he could go back. As Brzezinski personally told Islamists in the mountains: “Your fight will prevail... because your cause is right and God is on your side.”

Without any institutional framework for government, the country descended into civil war as the informal networks of power, both communal and tribal, were easily fractured and broke apart. This process would destroy the fabric of Afghan society. The US considered the reversal of social progress in Afghanistan as a necessary part of the efforts to defeat the Soviet-backed regime. Later the journalist Alexander Cockburn would read out a portion of a document seized during the Iran Hostage Crisis on the eve of the NATO-ISAF war in 2001:

The United States’ larger interest would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reform in Afghanistan. The overthrow of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan would show the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, that the Soviet’s view of the socialist course of history being inevitable is not accurate.

Although the Soviet intervention came with few humanitarian illusions, the occupation would soon take the shape of the civilising missions launched by European empires. Babrak Karmal, the leader of the Parcham faction, was installed as leader, while the USSR set about shaping the country in its image as it waged a brutal counter-insurgency campaign. The new narrative would be that the occupation was necessary to defend the rights of women from the reactionary forces mobilising against the regime.

Realpolitik was not enough in the end. The brutality of the Soviet occupation had to be dressed up as an expression of solidarity justified by socialist internationalism. As the years passed it became more and more evident that the occupation could not be sustained. Gorbachev would initiate an exit strategy concluding in total withdrawal in 1989. Just as the US would invade Afghanistan in 2001 in an act of vengeance - against the same network it helped to establish years earlier - only to discover the cause of women's rights. In both cases, the invaders were defeated in slow-motion.

Life after defeat

Members of the CIA would later claim the Soviet collapse was a result of endogenous factors. It fell apart like a house of cards because it was a house of cards. The political system was bankrupt and no longer functioned. So this had little to do with US policy. If anything, observers like Archie Brown have argued the Cold War helped preserve the USSR and not bring it down. But this was not the view taken by the Mujahideen. Many of the Islamists believed that they helped to bring down the USSR. They are not alone either.

Journalist Robert Fisk takes this view. It can be argued that the defeat of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan became so costly, it opened up a space for dissidents to win major battles in Eastern Europe. This was clear by 1981 when KGB chief Yuri Andropov (Putin’s hero, incidentally) persuaded Brezhnev not to intervene in Poland. It was evident that the system could not sustain such adventurism. In other words, the USSR could not repeat the actions it took in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Hungary in 1956.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian foreign policy has been primarily concerned with national sovereignty. This was the basis of Boris Yeltsin’s postures over Serbia and Chechnya. The brief war with Georgia, and the conflict in eastern Ukraine, also fits this pattern. Although Syria shares no borders with Russia, the civil war could well have implications for Chechen jihadists. It’s easy to sell the intervention as ‘defensive’ within Russia. Despite the economic problems Putin can still bolster support through jingoism.

The key question for Putin is how long can this last? Oil prices remain low and the sanctions are hitting the government and its oligarchs. Putin’s credibility is at stake. He is widely credited with ending the economic chaos of the 1990s. The military adventures are incidental, whether it’s Chechnya or Syria. If the economic problems facing the country cannot be resolved, there may be more trouble on the horizon.

This article was originally published at Souciant.

Catastroika: Putin's Syria Policy

So Russia is now an active participant in the Syrian civil war. The pretext is standard: Islamic State must be defeated at any cost to the Syrian people. Yet the bombs are falling on other rebel targets - al-Qaeda's Jubhat al-Nusra, no doubt - and civilian targets are not out of bounds. Russian bombs have already hit hospitals and medical centres. These incidents will only increase as the bombing continues and the war continues to hurtle onward.

As I wrote before the Russian army began bombing Syria, Vladimir Putin has a more coherent strategy than the Western powers - which still cling to the hope that Islamic State and Assad can be defeated at once. Putin begins from a different premise: Assad's regime is the most legitimate force in the war. This may be a key strength, but it doesn't guarantee victory - nor does it justify itself. Four years of war have left 250,000 people dead, maybe more, and displaced millions.

No one power seems capable of destroying the other. But this could quickly change. Bashar al-Assad could be ousted by his generals. Islamic State could takeover a major city and declare a new capital, which would be a tremendous blow. That's why Assad has been so desperate to cling onto Aleppo. If the Alawite-Sunni alliance, on which the Syrian regime depends, collapses then there will be a strong power vacuum.

The endless war

In this case, Syria will fall into the abyss, as if the conflict wasn't already bad enough, imagine total chaos. It's plausible external powers would back whichever factions they can to try and regain control over the situation. There are a hand full of countries where this has happened: Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya and now Syria possibly. It's not pretty, to put it mildly.

Russia has been here before. In December 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, first to topple Hafizullah Amin, who it found untrustworthy and unstable, then it set about trying to turn the Parcham wing of the People's Democratic Party into the centre of power in the country. Babral Karmal was its Menshevik front man. The Mujahideen, backed by the US and Pakistan, was its adversary. In the end, the Soviet Union was humiliated.

Today Russia cannot afford to reenact this catastrophe. Despite this historical lesson, the Putin government has not been deterred from de facto invading Syria on the side of the Assad regime. Up to now, Putin was playing the distant game. In early 2013 Putin made his stance clear at the UN Security Council and stood in unanimity with China. When it looked like the US was getting ready for 'punitive bombing' in August 2013 Putin was sending arms to Assad.

Now Putin has 'little green men' flying over Syria to dump explosives on the rebels. There has been a dramatic shift since 2013 and it may come down to one country: Ukraine. The Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea provoked outrage in the West and led the US and the EU to impose sanctions on the Russian Federation. As wrong as it was for Russian troops to march into a sovereign nation-state, the most outraged squeals came from war criminals.

As the Russian economy faces bleak prospects - thanks to the collapse of oil prices, never mind the sanctions - the Ukrainian crisis is being felt in the homes of ordinary Russians. If Putin cannot stabilise the economy he could face serious domestic opposition. The boost in popularity over Ukraine could easily disappear. The end of the Yeltsin years left Putin with a great deal of credibility. He appeared as a necessary force providing order and stability.

High-risk strategy

According to financial journalist Andrew Critchlow, Putin is playing a high-risk strategy to drive oil prices up. To undermine the Russian economy, the US and Saudi Arabia have repeatedly slashed oil prices. This has hit Russia hard, but it also threatens to destabilise the Saudi dictatorship. Rather than back down Putin has moved to confront his enemies via the Syrian civil war. He has moved to strengthen the Syrian regime and the Iranian government, which pose serious obstacles to Saudi Arabia.

By invading Syria, Russia can throttle the jihadi rebels mobilised by Saudi and Qatari petro-dollars. It might be the means to exhaust the Saudi royal family. King Salman can't afford to face chaos at home either. If the House of Saud feels its position threatened by the Syrian civil war it may back down. In this case, King Salman may cut oil production to allow prices to rise. This would help ease the strain of the Russian economy.

Along these lines, as Critchlow's theory goes, the Syrian civil war could threaten the ruling order in the Saudi Kingdom and the Russian Federation. If Putin's gamble leads all sides to push harder, then it's possible everyone would lose out. Even in that case, it's likely oil prices will have to stabilise in the end. In the meantime, as the civil war reaches new suicidal heights, the Syrian people are the real losers.

If the Russian air strikes can weaken the rebels, the Syrian regime can hold onto its gains and may be even expand its reach. This could force the Western powers to accept new terms of negotiation. In this scenario, Putin will have won and the US will have been humiliated. If Putin can do this and force the Saudis to raise oil prices this victory will be twofold. But the stakes are high and the war is far from cold.

This article was originally published at Souciant.

What buttons does Putin push?

The national psyche of any country may be made up by a complex web of associations in memory and myth running through history, culture and literature. It would be very easy to put down all of Russia's problems to its long history of authoritarian rule and chauvinism. However, we must remain aware that this is itself a construction of how the West would like to see itself - as standing out against the wretched backwardness of the East. This is a projection and we shouldn't fall into the convenience of old ideas in new conflicts. In fact, that's sort of the problem the Russians are having in the recrudescence of nationalism. I've covered this:

One of the first decisions undertaken by Putin after the 2000 election was to restore the Soviet National Anthem by Alexander Alexandrov. It was a symbolic break with the Yeltsin era. The anthem replaced the Patriotic Song of Mikhail Glinka that the Russian Federation had adopted in the wake of the dissolution of the USSR. Many in the West perceived this as an ominous sign of things to come. As the 1996 election was deemed to be the last hope for Russia’s Communists, the alternative to Yeltsin had always been framed as a throwback to the days of Stalin. 

The return of Alexandrov’s anthem seemed to confirm Putin was looking to recreate the old Soviet Union. This perception was widely shared, particularly by free market advocates, fearful that their revolution was coming to and end. Leading liberal Grigory Yavlinsky said, “We see this as a signal of where our society is heading, of what awaits us in the near future”. Yavlinsky was a proponent of the 500 Day Programme, first articulated in the late 1980s. It called for the mass-privatisation of state assets combined, with market reforms and the stripping away of regulations. All in 500 days. The programme was eventually implemented, in diluted form, under Yeltsin. 

What was lost on market liberals like Yavlinsky was that it wasn’t just about economics. The Soviet anthem has an equally significant nationalist side to it. After all it comes from Stalin’s Great Patriotic War, and supplanted the traditional socialist anthem the Internationale with its revolutionary patriotism. It was this side of the Russian campaign that Putin was tapping into, not a retreat back to the state capitalism of the Communist era.

The Russian nationalist narrative has a lot of sway and popular appeal because it holds factual ground. That isn't to say it is accurate of the full story. Pavel Stroilov recently produced an article exploring the popular claim in Russia that the West - principally, manifested in its expansion of NATO eastwards - reneged on its promises at the end of the Cold War. Stroilov put his own right-wing perspective on it and appears to be woefully uncritical of NATO and Western foreign policy. Even still, it is worth a read. You can read the rest of my article on Russian nationalism at Souciant.

Putin's Asia.

My latest article for Souciant focuses on Putin's foreign policy in West Asia. Here's an excerpt:

Last year, many commentators in the West were aghast at the Russian stance on the Syrian civil war. It was in early 2013 when Russia and China presented a united opposition at the UN Security Council to intervention in Syria. Then it was flabberghasted at the Russian opposition, in the summer of 2013, to Obama’s proposed ‘punitive measures’ (e.g. indiscriminate bombing). This was after Assad’s use of chemical warfare, which led to Putin pledging more military hardware as a gesture of support. The proponents of ‘humanitarian interventions’ will pretend that Vladimir Putin succeeded in deterring the Americans.

In reality, the US government would have gone ahead whatever the UN Security Council concluded if it had really wanted to intervene. It certainly didn’t stop when the UN opposed the occupation of Iraq. The sudden capitulation may have been more symptomatic of any clear strategy in Washington than anything else. The Sino-Russian veto was a convenient pretext not to directly intervene and watch the conflict play out.

The US non-strategic proposal of ‘punitive measures’ was a lot like Israeli airstrikes against Syria in early 2013. Nothing constructive could’ve come of it, and probably nothing good was intended. Once again, there was no great loss in waiting it out in the absence of any willing military collusion. In the United Kingdom, parliamentary debate on Syria opposed the government’s stance and – for the first time since 1782 when the British conceded American independence – the country had to rule out getting involved.

In the end, Obama decided not to pursue punitive measures and hold back until Assad had rid his regime of chemical weapons. The US government may well have concluded that it would be best to draw out the conflict for as long as possible, due to the various forces tied up in the country, thereby ensuring long-term instability. Everyone is playing the Syrian game right now: militants, Iranians, and so on. As long as there is no unanimous victor, there is no impetus to bomb.

Putin backed the move to clean Syria of chemical weapons for the very opposite reason: if the secular nationalist regime can survive, then there is the possibility of a stability beneficial to Russian interests. This is the crux of the matter. The US has a vested interest in regional instability, which keeps its opponents busy, whereas the Russians have an opposing interest in stability which may allow them to assert their influence. On Syria, these interests ultimately converged, and settled on chemical weapons.

What kind of regime does Putin head?

The Western mass-media have had for many years the problem of how to characterise the Russian government under Vladimir Putin. The most often characterisation draws upon crude simplifications of Russian history: the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. We're told Putin is a mini-Stalin and a mini-Tsar all in one. This is highly misleading for a number of reasons. Two come to mind immediately.

Firstly, it implies that the possibility of aggressive expansionism by Russia is a plausible likelihood. Putin has no plans to provoke a full-blown conflict with the European powers. He knows how vulnerable Russia is to such opponents. Putin now acts to hold-off encroaching Western influence and NATO outposts from the borders of the Russian Federation. It's not in the Russian interests to have NATO missile systems on its borders so close to major cities. He could live with Ukraine becoming a EU member-state, as long as the gas network is not effected seriously. In this regard, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and de facto annexation of Crimea does not compare to Stalin's 'spreading the revolution' by rifle and bayonet. Even when Stalin acted to build a buffer-zone of satellite states in Eastern and Southern Europe it was not a bid for global domination. It was about the consolidation of Soviet power by securing the country from any future Western intervention. The position Putin has taken is defined by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Secondly, the phase of development we currently see in Russia has little precedent in previous historical conditions. The Tsars of the 19th Century presided over a feudal society with an emerging industrial and capitalist base, perching over Orthodox Christendom at home and imperialism abroad. The USSR was defined by the exacerbation of such conditions of scarcity and dislocation in the First World War and Civil War. The mission was not to reproduce the feudal order of the past, nor to build from its remains a capitalist society, it was to establish the material pre-conditions for socialism. That amounted to the industrialisation of Russian society to create the material surplus of a capitalist society by non-capitalist means and ultimately to non-capitalist ends. The promised communist future never arose from this process. When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 the whole edifice was then broken down and digested by economic shock therapy. Putin emerges out of this historical conjuncture.

So we find the situation in Russia is a period distinct from preceding epochs. The Russian Federation emerged out of the collapse of the Soviet Union to be forced through primitive accumulation by the Yeltsin administration. The immense resources were handed over to a small clique around Yeltsin as the Russian state-sector and public assets were dismembered and chucked to these ravenous beasts. The transformation of the material base of Russian society inevitably reverberated throughout its superstructure. The state became so weighed down by its own corruption that the oligarchs around Yeltsin decided to replace him with Putin. The hope was that Putin would deal with the officials looking to crackdown on corruption while simultaneously reinstating authority in the government. The liberalisation of the economy had led to the formation of an internationalising class, which in turn spurred on a recrudescent nationalism.

I've written before that it seem as if the Russian President stands at the apex where anti-political purism and ultra-political nationalism meet. He initially presented himself as a non-political man of action, who will enforce order and stability. Of course, there is nothing 'non-political' about the man at all. He appeals to Soviet nostalgia, particularly with regard to the defeat of German Fascism. Yet only in nationalist terms, the Soviet era was a great era when Russia wielded power on the world stage. The world was not unipolar and Russians did not have to live in fear of Western aggression. The victories in Georgia and Chechnya and now Ukraine can be understood as reactive. Putin wants to fend-off encroachments of non-Russian influence, primarily from the US, but also from independent actors, such as Chechen Islamists and separatists.

Many like to talk about 'Putinism' as if it signifies a clear characterisation of the Russian government. It is certain that the managed democracy in Russia represents a new order. The rapid and chaotic pace of primitive accumulation under Boris Yeltsin has been slowed by Putin, but it is not over by any means. It was Putin who furthered the privatisation of land. The concentration of economic power in the hands of oligarchs sits side-by-side with the state power. 'Putinism' is a very misleading and vague term. It's mainly another way of carrying out the spurious comparison between Putin and Stalin. The phrase 'Stalinism' was really used to signify a deviation from Marxism by the Soviet leadership. Perhaps in a similar vein 'Putinism' refers to a deviation from the Washington consensus which the Yeltsin administration was completely embedded in.

Aleksandr Buzgalin calls it 'jurassic capitalism' where the old state-order, as well as even older feudal structures (i.e. the Church), stand alongside a capitalist economy. We might see this as a developing form of corporatism or 'national' capitalism, rather than the internationalist and liberal variety we are so comfortable with in Western Europe. It's certain that Putin is a part of the right-wing economic consensus that has been ruling Russia since the Soviet Union was dissolved. But it is not the same as it was in the 1990s. The sympathies Putin has drawn from Westerners have been insightful. Among them we find the British journalist Peter Hitchens, a cultural-traditionalist conservative, who sees Putin as taking a stand against neoliberal globalization in defence of national sovereignty. Then there is the fascist Nick Griffin who sees Russia as the last bastion of the "white race".

Yeltsin Nostalgia.

Today’s tensions with Vladimir Putin probably make American policymakers nostalgic for the days of Boris Yeltsin. If we wish to understand today’s Russia, we have to look at the way the Federation emerged from the tumultuous collapse of the USSR. Putin’s allegiances were clear from the beginning. He was not a mindless KGB thug, as he is often portrayed.His intelligence career ended with a principled stance in support of Mikhail Gorbachev, and against his superiors, when he opposed the Communist attempt to overthrow the leader and turn back the tide in 1991. Years later, much of his ideology would be affected by its fallout.

The possibility of a new order was realistic in the days before the attempted coup. Gorbachev had initiated a modicum of reform. The bloody war in Afghanistan was over. It looked as if the US might actually want a settlement on missiles. Bush had promised the Soviet leader that he wouldn’t expand NATO any further eastwards. It’s no wonder  that the majority of Russians, along with Putin, were on the side of glasnost and perestroika.

However, Yeltsin, and his backers, had other plans. His ambitions were right for the time, although they were wrong for Russia. His ascendency came at the heel of the Bush administration’s efforts to back nationalists in Yugoslavia, adjusting its aid policies accordingly and ending Josip Broz Tito’s dream of a state for all Southern Slavs. Following suit, Bush took the side of Russian nationalism in order to definitively break up the Soviet Union.

The “great reformer” Gorbachev, and his supporters, were a hindrance to these objectives. Thus, the United States backed Yeltsin, who became instantly popular in the aftermath of the botched coup. Many democrats hoped that their new political centre would guide Russia into a new era. However, the enthusiasm wouldn’t last, since Yeltsin’s real agenda had little to do with democracy.

The right-wing consensus was that a selection of tiny, fractured states would succeed the USSR. They were designed in this manner so that they could easily be picked off, and be subjected to economic underdevelopment. These plans aligned with Yeltsin’s personal aims for power and grandeur in the post-Cold War era.

The Russian President was integral to it happening. In a series of manoeuvres, Yeltsin cut deals with the various leaders of Soviet republics, including Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine, and saw the Soviet Union dissolved. Yeltsin could do this because Gorbachev had guaranteed a policy of non-intervention towards Eastern Europe. Signalling just how much the balance of power had shifted after the events of 1991, Gorbachev’s resignation was accepted pre-emptively.

Shock Therapy

The fall of Gorbachev marked the end of the Soviet era and set things in a completely new direction. Russia’s Parliament gave Yeltsin free reign to implement an economic programme of rapid deregulation and privatisation, known as shock therapy. Yeltsin had the advice of US economist Jeffrey Sachs and Clinton administration official Larry Summers, who is often blamed for the post-Communist Russia’s first, and most severe downturn. The plan was to establish the conditions for a market society as fast as possible.

First, price controls were eliminated. The resulting hyperinflation quickly ate through the savings of most Russians. This was soon followed with a rapid privatisation of over 200,000 state-run companies.

The Russian people suffered greatly for this and the rouble was tremendously devalued. Living standards plummeted. Millions fell into unemployment. Even the employed were not guaranteed a wage. Every Russian was given vouchers to buy shares in the newly private companies. However, since most were desperate for cash, they sold their vouchers cheaply to ruthless businessmen who began to organize the early phases of “mafia rule.”

After a year of ruling by decree, Yeltsin’s struggles with wresting government controls from parliament and state institutions reached a head. Apart from its effects on citizens, the privatization program had also led to a credit crunch and heavy taxes, causing a prolonged depression. Legislative-executive tensions peaked with the 1993 constitutional crisis, when Parliament presented its own draft constitution.

This quickly led to a general repeal of ‘shock therapy,’ and Yeltsin responded by dissolving the legislature and suspending Russia’s constitution. The Clinton administration, along with many Western governments, backed Yeltsin’s decision to shell Moscow’s White House when it was occupied in protest. This was the bloodiest non-foreign violence that Moscow had seen since the October Revolution. Yeltsin justified it by saying it was necessary to remove impediments to a market economy.

After he regained control, the market reforms went further. More price controls were removed, going as far as basic food stuffs like bread. State expenditure on social services was slashed, and the rate of privatization increased dramatically. Yeltsin found enthusiastic support in a newly ascendant upper-class, later to be dubbed “the oligarchs.” He assisted them in wiring approximately $2 billion out of the country per month. He also undersold enormous industrial assets and resources to his constituents at sometimes less than 2% of their actual value.

The end result was that by 2000, 74 million people were in poverty, with 37 million of them ranked as “desperate.” Meanwhile, Moscow became home to more billionaires than other city in the world.

Yeltsin was a barely functional figurehead by 1999, and kept a coterie of close advisors and friends around him at all times. It included oligarchs like Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky. Although corrupt, and exploitative, many Western leaders were relieved to see the Federation controlled by people who were reliably compliant. This same entourage would be the one that ultimately selected Putin as Yeltsin’s successor.

He was an appealing choice. Yeltsin may have survived multiple crises, but the Kremlin was wracked with corruption scandals. Putin was head of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, and oligarchs thought it could use him as a battering ram against their enemies who were looking to crack down on their activities. Putin was soon made Prime Minister in 1999, and Yeltsin’s resignation was secured the same year.

Putin’s Wager

The oligarchs had underestimated Putin. He skilfully used a series of terrorist attacks as a justification to wagewar in Chechnya and consolidate his rule. The conflict boosted his popularity, and also legitimized his budding push for an Orthodox Christian nationalism.

He followed up by turning on The Family, rather than simply rubber-stamping their extraction of wealth. Shortly after Putin became President in 2000, Boris Berezovsky fled to London to escape arrest, and was soon joined by other oligarchs who now live in exile. They were smashed by Putin, who strengthened his position as a Hobbesian force of stability after the disarray of the 1990s.

Putin didn’t take long to find new oligarchs to support his rule, ones that were subservient to him and disproportionately employed in the energy industry. He reasserted the role of the state and buttressed his rule with tough appeals to populist chauvinism, which affected such decisions as the 2002 storming of the Dubrovka theater.

Putin is now seen as the man who can flush out all the “problems” affecting Russian society, whether they be Chechen terrorists, corrupt oligarchs, or more recently, homosexuals. The contrast with Yeltsin is stark. The Soviet Union isn’t back, but for Putin’s supporters, Russia is strong again.

This is exhausting for Western leaders, who yearn for a Yeltsin Kremlin. The difference between Putin and Yeltsin is the spin of the strongman policies. Yeltsin’s policies rarely antagonized the West, while Putin almost craves the opportunity.

This is how we should read the international outcry against Russia’s most recent military incursions: one in Georgia, with Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008, and Ukrainian Crimea in 2014. Both efforts were preceded by Yeltsin’s decision to invade Chechnya in 1994, setting off an ongoing conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people. However, Chechnya still rarely gets substantive coverage in Western media outlets, and certainly did not provoke the same level of Western outrage when Yeltsin was at the helm.

The real problem is Putin himself, who is comparatively disagreeable to say the least. His Kremlin is also much less willing to accept the expansion of NATO outposts into bordering states. Putin’s Russia is a brutal one, which deserves the fear and loathing it provokes. However, for Western leaders, it is despised mainly because of what it represents. Putin’s Russia is a Russia that has abandoned Yeltsin’s subservient market reforms, and positions itself against the United States in a manner that many believed had died with the Soviet Union.

The evaporation of Viktor Yanukovych’s government was welcomed by many in Ukraine and in the West. It was not welcomed in Russia, partly for reasons that any military historian can grasp. Russia has long been vulnerable to invasion on its Western frontier. One of Stalin’s major motivations for building the Eastern bloc was to create a buffer-zone between “the motherland” and Western powers. This is understandable, given that 23 million Russians died during World War II. Those concerns also framed the vicious crackdowns of 1956 and 1968.

However, since the world appears to have moved beyond major interstate warfare, these concerns are moot, for the most part. They make for strong rhetoric, but the real problem is that Putin recognizes how the EU’s and NATO’s presence in Ukraine will affect gas pipelines. This is part of the reason that Russia’s military assets in the Crimean Peninsula are so important: a state’s military presence bolsters its market activity in an area.

Putin’s actions are currently forcing a political compromise that Yeltsin wouldn’t have dared to even mention.

It is likely that Crimea will leave Ukraine, giving Putin a major strategic victory as well as a domestic image of rebuilding a foregone era of Russian glory.

He has proven himself so cunning that a future Ukrainian NATO bid is now effectively impossible, even if it does slip into the European orbit. It appears that due to Russian hostility, the future of the EU may be tied to it easing away from NATO.

Putin can also be a little more secure about the state of gas pipelines in the country, which are an even greater concern for him now that North America’s fracking boom threatens to corner Russia out of the market.

The wider picture, though, is that Putin has continued his original allegiance to Gorbachev into a rollback of the short-lived dream of a Western-friendly Russian Federation. For better or worse, the West now has to deal with a Russia that is an opponent again. Hence the fond memories of Yeltsin. Statements of “remember when we didn’t have to deal with this” are probably ringing through every Western capitol at the moment.

Originally written and published at Souciant Magazine on March 12th 2014.

Getting Russia Dead Right.

Western journalists claim Putin wants to ‘rebuild the Soviet Union’.

What’s wrong with this picture?

If we want to understand Putin’s Russia we have to look at the way the Russian Federation emerged from the tumultuous collapse of the USSR. Not simply a mindless KGB thug Putin was a supporter of Gorbachev and opposed the Communist attempt to overthrow Mikhail Sergeyevich and turn back the tide in 1991. The possibility of a new order was realistic in those days. Gorbachev had initiated a modicum of reform. The bloody war in Afghanistan was over. It looked as if the US might actually want a settlement on missiles. Bush had promised Gorbachev that he wouldn’t expand NATO any further eastwards. No wonder then that the majority of Russians, along with Putin, were on the side of glasnost and perestroika.

The Russian President Boris Yeltsin used this to his advantage. He was the right man for the time and the wrong man for Russia. Around this time the Bush administration was busy backing nationalists in Yugoslavia and had adjusted its aid policy to back secession to break up Tito’s dream of a state for all Southern Slavs. In the same way George HW Bush took the side of Russian nationalism to break up the Soviet Union. The great reformer Gorbachev had become a hindrance to be thrown on the wayside. The US sought to align itself with Boris Yeltsin. The Russian people flocked to Yeltsin after he became a political centre of gravity for democrats in the midst of the botched coup. It wouldn’t last. The real agenda had nothing to do with ideals of democracy.

The preference was for a selection of tiny fractured states which could easily be picked off one by one and subjected to economic underdevelopment. This matched Yeltsin’s personal aims for power and grandeur. In a series of manoeuvres Yeltsin cut deals with the leaders of Soviet republics, including Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine, and saw the Soviet Union dissolved. This is one of the ironies of the present crisis in Ukraine. The coalition of neoliberals and ultra-nationalists who seized power form Yanukovich have done so to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and closer to the EU and NATO powers. Yet it was nationalism followed by neoliberal prescriptions which have led to this conjunction of rebellion and incursion. It’s very likely that the people of Ukraine will not be served by these events as we can see from recent Russian history.

Within a week of Gorbachev’s resignation the new path was embarked upon. The Russian Parliament gave the President free reign to implement an economic programme of deregulation and privatisation. Yeltsin had the advice of the economist Jeffrey Sachs and such creatures of the market as Larry Summers. The plan was to establish the conditions for a market society as fast as possible. First the price controls were eliminated. The resulting hyperinflation quickly ate through the savings of most Russians. This was soon followed with a rapid privatisation of over 200,000 state-run companies. The Russian people suffered for this and the devaluation of the rouble, millions fell into unemployment and even those working were not guaranteed a wage. Every Russian was given vouchers to buy shares in the newly private companies. Desperate for cash most people sold their vouchers cheaply to ruthless businessmen. But it was just the beginning.

After a year of ruling by decree Yeltsin faced the first signs of opposition from the Parliament. With the approval of Washington the Russian President dissolved Parliament and suspended the Constitution. When the parliamentarians occupied the building in protest Washington backed his decision to besiege the building with tanks and shell them into submission. The economic reforms were taken further. Even more controls on prices were removed (going as far as to remove controls on basic food goods like bread), state expenditure on social services was slashed to the bone, and the pace of privatisation was raised. Yeltsin found his real constituents in the emergent bourgeoisie – later to be dubbed ‘the oligarchs’ – who, with his help, were stripping $2 billion out of the country every month. He undersold enormous industrial assets and resources to these people at sometimes less than 2% of their real value.

What was the end result of all this? By the end of the decade 74 million people were plunged into poverty, with 37 million living in poverty ranked as ‘desperate’. Meanwhile Moscow became the home city to the most billionaires of any other city in the world. In 1999 Boris Yeltsin was a barely functioning figurehead with a coterie of close advisors and cronies around him known to the press as ‘the family’. It included oligarchs like Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky. It would be this same coterie which selected Putin to succeed Yeltsin. It was appealing as the Kremlin was wracked with corruption scandals and Putin was the head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB. The oligarchs thought they could control him and use him as a battering-ram against their enemies who were looking to crack down on corruption. Putin was soon made Prime Minister. Terror attacks in Russia gave Putin the opportunity to wage war on Chechnya and boost his popularity.

The oligarchs expected Putin to be compliant and follow the Yeltsin plan of handing over Russia’s vast wealth of resources to them and their friends. Putin became President in 2000 after Yeltsin’s resignation was secured by the oligarchs. Putin had been underestimated by his allies. He soon consolidated his position and turned on them. Boris Berezovsky fled to London to escape arrest. He was soon joined by other oligarchs. Putin smashed his old allies and set out to strengthen his position as a Hobbesian force of order and stability after the disarray of the 1990s. He has aligned himself to oligarchs running the energy industry. The role of the state would now be reasserted and buttressed with tough populist appeals to chauvinism. Putin stands as the man who can flush out all the “problems” facing Russian society, whether it’s Chechen terrorists, corrupt oligarchs, or more recently homosexuals. He’ll even keep the factories running on schedule.

Now with Putin in the Kremlin the West is much more nostalgic for the days when Boris Yeltsin ran a money laundering operation out of that very building. There was never much scorn in Western governments for Russia for its savagery towards the Chechens and their bid for independence. Instead the Russian state is to be demonised for its incursions into Georgia in 2008 and, of course, Ukraine in 2014. Yet the killing of tens of thousands of people in Chechnya, since 1994, on and off, hardly gets substantive coverage in the Western media. The real problem Putin’s Russia poses for the EU and NATO is that Moscow is much less willing to accept the expansion of NATO outposts to border-states. The Russian Federation has a brutal government, but it is not feared or loathed because for its brutality, it is despised because it stands as an abandonment of Yeltsin’s market reforms and an opponent to US influence in its old backyard.

This was written and published for the Third Estate.

A Poet's Prescience.

When the reformist government of Alexander Dubček in Czechoslovakia was stamped out by a Soviet intervention, in August of 1968, it was the death knell for hopes of a democratic socialist alternative to the grey reality of the Eastern Bloc. It was a definitive moment for some, and only a reaffirmation of old divisions for others. The Stalinists would label it (without irony) the liberation of Czechoslovakia, while Trotskyists damned it as further evidence of the degenerated condition of the legacy of October 1917. It had only reaffirmed for many what had been so obvious years before. Heaven was no longer the only fortified structure from whence the military strikes against socialism would be launched. Fifteen years since the death of Stalin and the achievements of de-Stalinization were there for all to see. Across the border from the events in Prague in tranquil Austria WH Auden sat and watched, he decided to put pen to paper:

The Ogre does what ogres can,

Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,

Among it's desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

In these few words the English poet had succeeded in capturing the state of the Soviet experiment, at the time, and its ultimate trajectory in 1989. The years of Brezhnev's real socialism had just begun and the withering of the state apparatus had yet to come. In the institutionalisation of Lenin's works Stalin had codified Leninism into a party-state doctrine. It amounted to nothing less than the ossification of the pragmatism which had given Lenin his edge. Of course, the same went for Karl Marx. No alternative interpretations of the prophet and his disciples could be tolerated, or even acknowledged. Not only was dissent from the party-line not to be accepted, the line had to be immune to autocritique from within and critique from without. The materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels became doctrines preserved in formaldehyde for the people to behold in awe.  In the end there was only hot-air to fill the balloon and it was easily deflated.

It was amidst the factional infighting of the 1920s that Stalin consolidated his position with the promise of building socialism in one country. The various factions agreed that the Russian Revolution could not survive in isolation and had to export itself in order to overcome the conditions of scarcity in a devastated country. The disagreement was primarily over a matter of priorities, Trotsky favoured a much more rapid approach and had gone as far as trying to spread the revolution by bayonet much earlier. In these terms Russia was the first of a series of revolutions to be achieved in order for capitalism to be overcome throughout the world. It was impossible for a socialist society to be achieved under backward conditions of a war ravaged state ensnared by imperial powers. Wily Stalin was well aware that the gains of 1917 would always be vulnerable to a Western crusade. That was no doubt a major reason for the pact with Hitler.

The consolidation of the regime through the New Economic Policy - which Lenin described as state-capitalism - was a material necessity. It was also an opportunity for Stalin to pack the bureaucracy with his cronies and then to eliminate all potential rivals. He did so by first appropriating the allies of the NEP such as Bukharin to marginalise its opponents. Stalin then moved to overturn the NEP and institute the agricultural collectivization and rapid industrialisation of the economy. His former allies would soon find themselves on the shelf. It was all of this that the project of socialism in one country was justificatory. The claim that the class conflict becomes more acute after the Revolution became the pretext for political repression. This was a strategic measures to offset any pushes for liberalisation given the transitional nature of socialism and the necessity for the state to wither away in the end. The end of the transition would mean the end of the party-state apparatus.

When Stalin died Khrushchev moved to gradually open up Soviet society, going as far as to release political prisoners and permit some degree of artistic freedom. He denounced Stalin, famously, in a speech to Soviet delegates, provoking riots in Georgia as well as an uprising in Poland and a full-blown revolution in Hungary. The Russians were quick to stamp out the currents of independence. Khrushchev would later claim that the Soviet Union had established itself as a model socialist society, the aim was then to build communism by the early 1980s. Of course, the irony is that by that time the Soviet political economy had entered a process of terminal decline and its military ensnared in a hopeless war in Afghanistan. Brezhnev had seized power from Khrushchev in 1964 and the brief opening was closed and by the early 1970s the Party was claiming that Soviet society had entered a developed stage of socialism, but the conservatives were capable to stress stability and not undermine their power by talking about an imminent transition to communism.

Notice how alien all of this sounds to us nowadays. Communism is meant to signify the endless procession of soldiers marching in sync and the red flags fluttering over head. Communism was meant to be an Orwellian super-state, the essence of Big Brother realised. You know the scenario: the state tells you what time to get up in the morning, what to wear and just how many abortions to carry out. It comes across as counterintuitive to point out that the Communist Party was called as such to denote the ultimate egalitarian aim of policy. It was never achieved, and we can dispute the extent to which socialism was actually established as well. No one in the so-called people's democracies of Eastern Europe would have described their conditions as communist. This is the context of Prague '68 and the dream of socialism with a human face.


The truth of Auden's words came into full view a decade or more after his death. The passing of the swollen Brezhnev era left open the floor for Gorbachev, glastnost and perestroika. The delivery was ultimately far shorter on substance than in the rhetoric of reform and the worst possible transition. The countries formerly encased by the Iron Curtain were left to the mercy of market forces (in other words, anarchy by another name). Dislocation was inevitable as Gorbachev did not act on his reformist rhetoric in the Eastern bloc, but actually abandoned the countries to the chaos coming their way. After the collapse came the full brunt of capitalism. This was matched by a retreat from the orthodox of historical materialism as Gorbachev embraced a humanistic and ethical conception of socialism. The teleological element of Marxism-Leninism fell away and in the end proletarian internationalism was succeeded by a commitment to 'all-human values'.

The end of history was on its way. Where the ogre had once stuttered and stammered he now lost all coherence in his babbling. There was nothing left to be heard or said, not even drivel. One by one the Communist states of Eastern Europe fell, and then came the dissolution of the Soviet Union. With it Gorbachev was ousted and Russia was left in the fat fingers of a drunkard surrounded by a gang of radical free-marketeers. No one should be surprised by the sort of people who took over Russia after the collapse of the Soviet system. Both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, and most of the oligarchs, came out of the party-state apparatus. Consequently, Gorbachev is not a hero to ordinary people in his own country. And for good reason, the new Russia is not his brainchild but its afterbirth.

The Waiting Game.

With the celebrations at the weekend of the 60^th year since the end of the Korean War, if one considers it over, the West has forgotten that the Korean peninsula was divided into North and South the day after nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan. It was intended to be a temporary scenario, Kim Il-sung was installed in the North by the Soviet Union and the United States put Syngman Rhee in charge of the South (the first many military dictators). There were frequent border skirmishes from the start, but it would go all the way in 1950. It would have huge implications for the Cold War and for the world today.

The cause of a united and independent Korea had huge support on the peninsula for obvious reasons. From 1910 to 1945 Korea had been the private play toy of the Japanese Empire. Although the Japanese generals worked to abolish the caste system in Korea they were eager to suppress Korea’s linguistic, cultural and religious heritage. Korea would be plundered to fuel the Japanese war machine, everything from its natural resources to its inhabitants were utilised. In their thousands Koreans found themselves subjected to forced labour and sexual slavery. Koreans were among the victims of Unit 73 where the Japanese Fascists carried out experiments on human beings. Some 20,000 Koreans were killed in the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was against this backdrop that the Korean peninsula was held apart by foreign powers.

A few years later came the end of Chiang Kai-Shek’s scandalously corrupt reign in China. Mao Zedong soon cut a deal with Stalin while the Kuomintang was driven to running its opium ring out of Taiwan. It was perceived as an enormous loss for the fledgling hegemon. As Oliver Stone noted in his book, The New York Times called it a “vast tragedy of unforeseeable consequences for the Western World.”[1] When Kim Il-sung sent his troops down into the southern half of the peninsula The New York Times would urge Truman to act now or risk “los[ing] half the world.”[2] The Times, in many respects the voice of history in US media, had set the Korean War in comparison to the loss of China a year earlier. The implications should be clear for anyone to see. As Chomsky notes “The tacit assumption was that the U.S. owned China, by right, along with most of the rest of the world, much as post-war planners assumed.”[3]

It’s often described as though the Russians carried out a proxy-invasion which required a counteraction. Actually the Soviet Union was barely involved, aside from the green light that Stalin gave to Kim Il-sung who was eager for war and had promised a swift victory. Stalin had refused Kim permission in 1949 fearing a protracted war with the Americans, who had been beefing up Japan as a military outpost. By 1950 the Soviet Union had the atomic bomb and a new ally in China, so Stalin could give his blessing under the understanding that Russian forces would have a very limited role. In the whole conflict only 26,000 Russians died, a figure dwarfed by the piles and piles of Koreans and Chinese slain. Chairman Mao had agreed to support the invasion to appease the Soviet Union, but also wanted to keep China out of the war.

Upon the US intervention Truman said "A return to the rule of force in international affairs would have far-reaching effects. The United States will continue to uphold the rule of law."[4] The US intervened through the UN in what Truman described, in typical cynicism, as a ‘police action’ rather than call it what it was – an undeclared war – where the UN played a nominal role with half the ground troops composed of Americans.  The US went far beyond what the UN resolution stipulated, going as far as to push deep into North Korea eventually reaching the Chinese border and provoking a Chinese intervention. As Howard Zinn notes, the UN had only sanctioned actions to repel the North’s forces and to restore peace and security within the area.[5] The American intervention would not be shy of war crimes in its bombing campaign to level the Korean peninsula. Zinn refers us to the words of a BBC journalist on the effects of napalm:

 

In front of us a curious figure was standing, a little crouched, legs straddled, arms held out from his sides. He had no eyes, and the whole of his body, nearly all of which was visible through tatters of burnt rags, was covered with a hard black crust speckled with yellow pus. . . . He had to stand because he was no longer covered with a skin, but with a crust-like crackling which broke easily. . . . I thought of the hundreds of villages reduced to ash which I personally had seen and realized the sort of casualty list which must be mounting up along the Korean front.[6]

 

Although, Stalin saw the war partly as an opportunity to get back at the United States for its decision to form NATO after the war had been under way for a year Stalin pushed for negotiations. The table-talks would drag on for two years while the US continued in its firebombing campaign and ultimately forcing Koreans to seek refuge in caves. The campaign’s reach was not limited to the Communist forces in the North. Around this time the British armed forces yearbook observed “The war was fought without regard for the South Koreans, and their unfortunate country was regarded as an arena rather than a country to be liberated. As a consequence, fighting was quite ruthless, and it is no exaggeration to state that South Korea no longer exists as a country.”[7]

The war was a disaster for Harry Truman, who enjoyed an approval rating low of 22% as support for the war dipped to 39% in 1951.[8] Once Eisenhower had succeeded Truman and Stalin had died the US proceeded to bomb the dams near Pyongyang – having ran out of other targets – killing thousands of peasants and destroying crops for a population facing starvation. It was a crime with precedence in Nazi-occupied Holland, as Chomsky notes.[9] The war would end at an armistice which upheld the partition on the 38^th Parallel where the war had begun three years earlier. It was the first of America’s wars to be backed by establishment liberals. Not just The New York Times, but The Nation and even Henry Wallace capitulated to social chauvinism. It would not be the last time a progressive coalition would emerge on the side of US intervention.

 

We would see this re-emerge for Kennedy’s shameless aggression towards Cuba and Vietnam, let alone the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan decades later. The herd of independent minds has included such venerated creatures as Isaiah Berlin and most recently journalists like Christopher Hitchens. The few voices of dissent will continue to be vilified for their non-conformism. Like many later adventures the war was not a perceived victory because 37,000 Americans lay dead and the outcome had not established any significant gains for the South. Even though 3 million Koreans and 1 million Chinese had died in the war it wasn’t enough. It was total victory, or nothing. The original cold warrior Winston Churchill had the foresight to comprehend the significance of the Korean War when he said “Korea does not really matter now… Its importance lies in the fact that it has led to the re-arming of America.”[10]

Gore Vidal estimates the full price of the national security state at $7.1 trillion from 1949 to 1999.[11] The peninsula remains divided to this day, in a permanent stand-off of hundreds of thousands of troops at the ‘demilitarized zone’: a strange name for a place where there are nuclear mines in the ground. The war may have ended in a stalemate at the 38^th Parallel where it had begun, but it was a victory for the military-industrial complex. The prevailing interests seem to convergence with this stalemate being continued for years to come. China doesn’t want the immigration fallout, nor does the US want to shell-out any cash for a reunification. Yet war remains a possibility. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson has speculated that the South would win out in any outbreak of war, but it’s likely that there would be 100,000 dead (a low estimate) in the first week and Seoul may be devastated by North Korean artillery.[12]

 

Korea is still waiting for reunification and now it seems more unlikely than ever. Perhaps if the US had stayed out of the war Korea might have been reunited – albeit under the red flag – and this perpetual stand-off could have been averted. Likely such a Korea would have given into the same forces as its neighbours and opened up its economy. It’s possible that the military-party state would have saved itself in this way, as seen in China and elsewhere. The militarisation of the economy and society may not have arose had it not been for the six decades of deadlocked posturing. The prospect of a less gentle re-run of the first war may have been avoided completely. Indeed, it remains to be demonstrated whether or not this possibility would have been worse than the outcomes we face today.

This article was also posted on the Third Estate.

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[1] Stone, O; Kuznick, P; The Untold History of the United States (Ebury Press, 2013) pg.222-223

[2] Ibid. pg.236

[3] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/14/losing-the-world-american-decline-noam-chomsky

[4] http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinnpeopleswar.html

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Stone, O; Kuznick, P; The Untold History of the United States (Ebury Press, 2013) pg.245

[8] Ibid. pg.245-246

[9] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/04/us-disaster-race-noam-chomsky

[10] Stone, O; Kuznick, P; The Untold History of the United States (Ebury Press, 2013) pg.251

[11] Vidal, G; Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Clairview Books, 2002) pg.152

[12] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRb6ZGXGj_U