tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/vladimir-lenin-35738/articlesVladimir Lenin – The Conversation2023-02-21T19:02:13Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1959382023-02-21T19:02:13Z2023-02-21T19:02:13ZEssentialising ‘Russia’ won’t end the war against Ukraine. Might ‘real and credible’ force be the answer?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511004/original/file-20230220-14-d1ckp8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=14%2C14%2C4886%2C3248&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kirill Braga/AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/russias-war-on-everybody-9781350255081/">Russia’s War on Everybody</a>, by UK writer Keir Giles, is an alarming book. It argues that for years Russia has been waging “a clandestine war against the West”. </p>
<p>The current all-out military aggression against <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-recap-how-the-conflict-might-unfold-in-its-second-year-200131">Ukraine</a> is only the latest escalation of this larger, hybrid war. “Shooting down airliners, poisoning dissidents, interfering in elections, spying and hacking have long seemed to be the Kremlin’s daily business.” </p>
<p>This multi-pronged and sophisticated war is deeply rooted in Russian history, the book further argues. Russia is different from “the West” (the latter term helpfully defined as “you know it when you see it”). </p>
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<p><em>Review: Russia’s War on Everybody and What It Means for You – Keir Giles (Bloomsbury)</em></p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511023/original/file-20230220-2192-tgt7id.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Russian soldiers aim guns in a field" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511023/original/file-20230220-2192-tgt7id.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511023/original/file-20230220-2192-tgt7id.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511023/original/file-20230220-2192-tgt7id.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511023/original/file-20230220-2192-tgt7id.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511023/original/file-20230220-2192-tgt7id.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511023/original/file-20230220-2192-tgt7id.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511023/original/file-20230220-2192-tgt7id.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The current ‘all-out military aggression against Ukraine’ is the latest escalation in Russia’s long, clandestine war with the West, writes Keir Giles.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP</span></span>
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<p>A post-imperial power that has never come to terms with decolonisation, Russia has fundamentally different values from the West – and this difference drives its attempts to take as much power as possible, wherever and whenever it can. </p>
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<p>Even at its weakest, Russia never stopped insisting that it has greater rights than other countries around it, or demanding to dictate the foreign policy decisions of countries beyond its borders.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/russia-is-fighting-three-undeclared-wars-its-fourth-an-internal-struggle-for-russia-itself-might-be-looming-189129">Russia is fighting three undeclared wars. Its fourth – an internal struggle for Russia itself – might be looming</a>
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<h2>A handbook for hawks</h2>
<p>Keir Giles is somewhat more sceptical about the effectiveness of Russia’s various interventions into democratic processes and public debate outside its borders than <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/570367/the-road-to-unfreedom-by-timothy-snyder/">a book</a> that can be seen as a direct predecessor. </p>
<p>Timothy Snyder’s 2018 <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-road-to-unfreedom-review-timothy-snyder-puts-the-blame-on-vladimir-putin-20180724-h132ck.html">The Road to Unfreedom</a> blamed everything from anti-immigration sentiments in Germany, to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, on Russia’s secretive meddling. </p>
<p>But the upshot is the same in Russia’s War on Everybody: be afraid; Russia is on the march everywhere; nobody is safe. The war against Ukraine is just an escalation of an ongoing hybrid war of “Russia” against “the West”. </p>
<p>Only military defeat will bring Russia to its senses and its leadership to </p>
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<p>reassess its place in the world. This would be the shock the country needs to start the long, hard process of transitioning from a frustrated former imperial power to a normal country that can coexist with Europe.</p>
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<p>This book, then, is a handbook for hawks. It is a timely corrective to interpretations that <a href="https://insidestory.org.au/its-nato-stupid/">blame NATO</a> or “the West” (either <a href="https://insidestory.org.au/ashes-of-empires/">partially</a> or “<a href="https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/03/11/john-mearsheimer-on-why-the-west-is-principally-responsible-for-the-ukrainian-crisis">principally</a>”) for Russia’s war of aggression, and imply it’s up to “the West” to find some compromise Russia can live with. </p>
<p>By contrast, Giles sees Russia alone as responsible: not Putin, not the kleptocratic <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/mikhail-zygar/all-the-kremlins-men-inside-the-court-of-vladimir-putin">elite in power</a>, not the <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374712785/putinspeople">men of the KGB</a> who have taken over the country, but “Russia”. </p>
<p>The book is sprinkled with historical comparisons that attempt to show everything Putin’s regime does today has “deep roots” in the country’s history. </p>
<p>“Almost everything Russia does,” Giles writes, “is recognizable from previous centuries – just updated as new technology for delivering malign effects becomes available.”</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/back-in-the-ussr-my-life-as-a-spy-in-the-archives-26303">Back in the USSR: my life as a 'spy' in the archives</a>
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<h2>A strange historical method</h2>
<p>These sections are highly problematic. They pick and choose instances that show continuity, while ignoring all change – a strange historical method. Take the claim that the Soviet Union </p>
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<p>did not <em>have</em> a war machine, it <em>was</em> a war machine, because every national effort and every sector of the economy was subordinated to sustaining the Armed Forces.</p>
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<p>It neatly encapsulates the period of the Bolsheviks’ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism">War Communism</a> (1918-21) or the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-stalins-great-terror-can-tell-us-about-russia-today-56842">Stalin</a> years (1928-53). It is entirely misleading, however, for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy">New Economic Policy</a> implemented by Lenin (1921-28) and even more so for the post-Stalin decades. </p>
<p>Under Nikita Khrushchev (1953-64), the size of the army was cut back repeatedly. Funds were instead poured instead into welfare for the population, including what one historian has called “the greatest <a href="https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780875804231/property-of-communists/#bookTabs=1">housing program</a> in the world”. </p>
<p>Khrushchev frequently clashed with his top military men over what he saw as their scandalous squandering of resources, as his <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Khrushchev/HyBYLL5V0z0C?hl=en">biographer</a> noted. “Are we planning to conquer anyone?” he grumbled when presented with the military’s shiny hardware. No, he was told. “Then why do we need the weapons we saw today?” </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511017/original/file-20230220-409-yvn22j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511017/original/file-20230220-409-yvn22j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511017/original/file-20230220-409-yvn22j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511017/original/file-20230220-409-yvn22j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511017/original/file-20230220-409-yvn22j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511017/original/file-20230220-409-yvn22j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511017/original/file-20230220-409-yvn22j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511017/original/file-20230220-409-yvn22j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Under Nikita Khrushchev (pictured, shaking hands with JFK), the size of the Russian army was cut back, with funds instead poured into welfare for the population. AP original.</span>
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<p>Khrushchev’s vision of the Soviet Union was the exact opposite of an army with a country. What he tried to build was a “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199236701.013.028">thermonuclear welfare state</a>”: behind the shield of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal, the army could be reduced to an absolute minimum and the resources redirected towards welfare. </p>
<p>His successor, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Brezhnev">Leonid Brezhnev</a> (in power 1964-82), did increase military spending again, but did not finance this by suppressing civilian consumption, as Stalin had. Instead, he overspent on both. And <a href="https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2009/R3907.pdf">the Gorbachev years</a> (1985-91) “witnessed an unprecedented erosion of the military’s standing in Soviet society at large”. </p>
<h2>Othering Russia</h2>
<p>Other historical references are the kinds of cliches one could routinely read in the worst examples of 1950s assessments of why “the Russians” were different from “us”. </p>
<p>Russia missed the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-preacher-who-changed-europe-reformation-at-500-years-86514">Reformation</a>, we read. So did, of course, most Catholics. And, as historian <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/lost-kingdom-9780141983134">Serhii Plokhy</a> has pointed out, Russia did undergo a process similar to the counter-reformation, which is what the Old Believers rebelled against. </p>
<p>Russia also allegedly missed “<a href="https://theconversation.com/criticism-of-western-civilisation-isnt-new-it-was-part-of-the-enlightenment-104567">the enlightenment</a>”, which makes one wonder why <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-catherine-the-great-may-have-inspired-putins-ukraine-invasion-178007">Catherine the Great</a> corresponded with <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-voltaires-candide-a-darkly-satirical-tale-of-human-folly-in-times-of-crisis-157131">Voltaire</a>. As a <a href="https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300113136.001.0001">careful study</a> of the interactions of Russian Orthodox and European thought after 1500 concluded, the “late eighteenth-century Russian intellectual scene would have been unrecognizable” without the reception of enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and <a href="https://theconversation.com/denis-diderot-and-science-enlightenment-to-modernity-15040">Diderot</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-montesquieus-persian-letters-at-300-an-enlightenment-story-that-resonates-in-a-time-of-culture-wars-160176">Montesquieu</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau">Rousseau</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-myth-that-holds-adam-smiths-wealth-of-nations-together-35674">Adam Smith</a>. </p>
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<span class="caption">Keir Giles writes that Russia ‘missed the enlightenment’ – but Catherine the Great corresponded with Voltaire.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Catherine II, Alexey Antropov</span></span>
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<p>The whole notion the Reformation and the Enlightenment are the basis of democracy and civil liberties was a staple of old-fashioned “from Plato to NATO” histories of “Western civilisation”. But this view has been undermined both by newer <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/The-Life-and-Death-of-Democracy/John-Keane/9781847377609">histories</a> of <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-edinburgh-companion-to-the-history-of-democracy.html">democracy</a> and explorations of the destructive <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-like-a-state/">possibilities</a> inherent in enlightenment thought. </p>
<p>The selective and misleading polemical pseudo-history, intent on showing that what Moscow does these days is just the normal state of how “Russia” behaved through the centuries, leaves the book open to charges of essentialising, othering and orientalising Russia. </p>
<p>Putin’s country is somehow essentially different from “us” – non-Western, non-liberal, non-civilised, and deeply and fundamentally so. The consistent use of “Russia” to refer to the current government in Moscow will further entice some critics to accuse the book of that all-purpose thought-crime of anybody critical of the Kremlin: “Russophobia”. </p>
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<em>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/protests-biznez-and-a-failed-coup-journalist-monica-attard-on-covering-the-empire-gorbachev-allowed-to-collapse-188469">Protests, 'biznez' and a failed coup: journalist Monica Attard on covering the empire Gorbachev allowed to collapse</a>
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<h2>Is Russia eternally malicious?</h2>
<p>Giles attempts to defend his book against such accusations with nimble terminological footwork. He pre-emptively accuses critics of his approach of being “apologists for Russia” and not “objective reader(s)”. And he tries to use a definition of what the word “Russia” means to safeguard his argument against critique. </p>
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<p>“Russia” in this book is a shorthand, standing for the people within the country today who direct its state policy, both for dealing with its own citizens and with foreign countries.</p>
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<p>Hence, only unobjective readers might claim he essentialises the Russian national character: they mistake a shorthand for a characterisation. </p>
<p>But the claim does not stand up to scrutiny. The historical argument, after all, is that today’s leadership in the Kremlin just enacts the normal way “Russia” has always acted. It has reverted to type: “Russia’s behaviour today is returning to what was normal in its Soviet past, and further back into Tsarist times.”</p>
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<p>Russia has always seen the idea of its subjects enjoying uncontrolled access to news and ideas from abroad as highly dangerous […] Russia has always felt the need to insulate its population from excessive exposure to foreigners so they are not contaminated with dangerous ideas of political liberty or democracy.</p>
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<p>And so on. Russia is eternal; and it is eternally malicious.</p>
<p>It therefore makes no difference who’s in the Kremlin. </p>
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<p>There is no reason to assume that what comes after Putin will be an improvement – because Putin and his accomplices are a product of Russia rather than the other way round.</p>
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<p>Russia always interfered in the politics of its neighbours, Giles writes. Putin’s Russia “has moved back towards its own historical normality – vicious repression and dictatorship at home, and open confrontation with the West wherever it can reach out and harm it abroad”.</p>
<p>Whenever “Russia” acts like the current government, it acts normally, in other words; whenever it does not, it’s just a temporary aberration. A better example of the practice of essentialising and simplifying the complex history of a country would be hard to find.</p>
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<span class="caption">Giles believes today’s leadership in the Kremlin just enacts the normal way ‘Russia’ has always acted.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP</span></span>
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<h2>An excellent grasp of Putin’s view</h2>
<p>It is lamentable that Giles has weakened the argument of his book by this methodological overreach. The claims about Russian history and the “deep roots” of the Putin regime will make it easy for critics to dismiss it. But his analysis of the way the current government thinks and acts should be taken seriously. </p>
<p>He has an excellent grasp of Putin’s view of the world and the ways the men in the Kremlin perceive the actions of what they, too, conceptualise as “the West” (although they don’t like what Giles tries to defend). </p>
<p>If he’s right (and I think he is), then the recurrent voices in the democratic world who ask to negotiate with Putin, to find him an “off-ramp”, to make concessions, have it all backwards: such approaches will be seen as the predictable weakness of the decadent enemy. Such perceived weakness will be exploited and lead to further escalation rather than compromise. </p>
<p>There are some fundamentally different interests involved, which will be difficult to negotiate. Giles writes:</p>
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<p>It’s simply not possible to humour Russia’s demands for what it sees as “great power” rights to influence the countries around it at the same time as respecting those other countries’ rights to independence and to make their own decisions. Russia’s drive to dominate Ukraine and dictate its future stems from an implicit assumption of entitlement and exceptionalism.</p>
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<p>Not off-ramps and compromises, but “real and credible military force” will cause Russia “to think twice and step back from aggression”. Replace “Russia” with “Putin” and you get a thesis that requires serious consideration as the war against Ukraine drags into its second year.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195938/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Edele receives funding from the Australian Research Council (DP200101728;DP200101777)</span></em></p>A new book argues the war against Ukraine is an escalation of an ongoing hybrid war of ‘Russia’ against ‘the West’ – and that only ‘real and credible force’ will make Putin step back from aggression.Mark Edele, Hansen Professor in History, Deputy Dean, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1836952022-07-14T12:32:24Z2022-07-14T12:32:24ZDecrying Nazism – even when it’s not there – has been Russia’s ‘Invade country for free’ card<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473479/original/file-20220711-25-3urf1g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C15%2C3489%2C2284&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, left, with Vladimir Putin, accused the West of supporting Nazi ideas in May 2022.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/russian-president-vladimir-putin-listens-to-belarusian-news-photo/1125050408?adppopup=true">Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Oleg Morozov, a member of the Russian parliament and an ally of President Vladimir Putin’s, made what sounded much like a threat in May 2022. </p>
<p>Poland should be “<a href="https://www.newsweek.com/oleg-morozov-russia-poland-denazification-comment-1706552">in first place in the queue for denazification after Ukraine</a>,” he said. </p>
<p>Just days earlier, pro-Putin Moscow city assembly member, Sergey Savostyanov, asserted that after Ukraine, Russia needs to drive alleged Nazis from power in six more countries: <a href="https://www.eurasiareview.com/03052022-moscow-deputy-says-besides-ukraine-russia-must-de-nazify-six-more-countries-oped/">Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and Kazakhstan</a>.</p>
<p>Just a few months following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which was made under the false pretense of denazifying the government of that country, such claims might send chills down the spines of the people in those countries as well as of many keen observers of the region. </p>
<p>It could be argued that such claims of denazification “<a href="https://www.eurasiareview.com/03052022-moscow-deputy-says-besides-ukraine-russia-must-de-nazify-six-more-countries-oped/">might be dismissed as the hyperbolic expression of one individual in the overheated atmosphere of Russia today</a>,” as scholar and former diplomat Paul Goble recently described it. Yet it’s evident that for over a decade, Russia has used lies and disinformation, including many references to denazifiying Ukraine, <a href="https://theconversation.com/using-lies-and-disinformation-putin-and-his-team-have-been-building-the-case-for-a-ukraine-invasion-for-14-years-179335">to build a case specifically for the Ukraine invasion</a>.</p>
<p>And unsupported claims of denazification have been an excuse <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/03/09/baseless-claims-denazification-have-underscored-russian-aggression-since-world-war-ii/">for Russian international aggression since World War II</a>.</p>
<p>Putin and his allies have attempted to expand the meaning of “Nazism” to essentially render it meaningless – but still useful to them. Anyone who opposes Putin’s government can be labeled a Nazi, representing basically the worst and most horrible enemies Russia has ever faced in its history, the battle against whom cost <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/percentage-of-countries-who-died-during-wwii-2014-5">almost 1 in 6 Soviet lives</a>, civilian and military.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473480/original/file-20220711-23-3kbbf7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman stands, hand to face in the rubble of a building destroyed in Ukraine by Russian forces." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473480/original/file-20220711-23-3kbbf7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473480/original/file-20220711-23-3kbbf7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473480/original/file-20220711-23-3kbbf7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473480/original/file-20220711-23-3kbbf7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473480/original/file-20220711-23-3kbbf7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473480/original/file-20220711-23-3kbbf7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473480/original/file-20220711-23-3kbbf7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Russia has claimed it’s denazifying Ukraine. Here, teacher Tetiana Novikova looks at a gymnasium building destroyed in shelling by Russian troops on July 10, 2022, in Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/teacher-tetiana-novikova-looks-at-a-gymnasium-building-news-photo/1241834856?adppopup=true">Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy/ Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The opposition is fascist</h2>
<p>As a scholar of <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers/article/russian-strategic-narratives-on-r2p-in-the-near-abroad/AC7092981E5CBDF70C0AB2668E7F8808">Russian diplomatic communication</a>, <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=fN3VFhcAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate">I have researched</a> Russian use of language to justify its military interventions. I found that Russian diplomats inconsistently use and misuse international law expressions to justify Russian actions <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers/article/russian-strategic-narratives-on-r2p-in-the-near-abroad/AC7092981E5CBDF70C0AB2668E7F8808">aimed at gaining either more influence or territory</a>.</p>
<p>And the label “Nazi” has been selectively used and misused to target the perceived opponents of the Putin regime, at times with some success. Indeed, on one extreme, according to Putin’s propogandists, Nazism doesn’t even have to be antisemitic. To Russian officials, anyone who expresses anti-Russian sentiment <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/putins-propagandists-explain-new-meaning-of-nazism-and-its-got-nothing-to-do-with-jews">can be denounced as a Nazi</a>. That allowed Russia to <a href="https://theconversation.com/russias-antisemitism-aimed-at-ukraines-zelenskyy-is-just-the-kremlin-variant-of-a-very-old-european-virus-183592">claim that Ukraine was run by Nazis</a>, even though President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish. </p>
<p>In May 2022, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a strong ally of Putin’s, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/16/belarus-urges-russia-led-military-alliance-to-unite-against-west">accused the West of supporting Nazi ideas</a>. Also in May, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs articulated that the Israeli government is supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine. This assertion came right after Israel demanded an apology for Russian Foreign Minister <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2022/05/03/moscow-accuses-israel-of-supporting-neo-nazis-in-ukraine-after-it-seeks-apology-for-lavrovs-claim-about-hitler-being-part-jewish/?sh=57034b0e4167">Sergey Lavrov’s claim that Hitler had Jewish origins</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473483/original/file-20220711-15-ne11fe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man in a green shirt looking at something on a table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473483/original/file-20220711-15-ne11fe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473483/original/file-20220711-15-ne11fe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473483/original/file-20220711-15-ne11fe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473483/original/file-20220711-15-ne11fe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473483/original/file-20220711-15-ne11fe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473483/original/file-20220711-15-ne11fe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473483/original/file-20220711-15-ne11fe.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Russia has claimed that Ukraine is being run by Nazis, even though President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, seen here on July 8, 2022, is Jewish and lost many family members in the Holocaust.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/RussiaUkraineWar/8f316a5217cc42248c7b35f58c24908c/photo?Query=(renditions.phototype:horizontal)%20AND%20zelenskyy&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=3027&currentItemNo=19">Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Long-running accusations</h2>
<p>Nowhere has Russia been more persistent with accusations of Nazism than in Estonia and Latvia, two countries with sizable Russian-speaking populations and membership in the European Union and NATO. </p>
<p>For decades, Russia has alleged that <a href="https://vilniusinstitute.lt/en/russias-nazism-narrative-against-lithuania-and-the-baltic-states/">fascist ideas have been circulating in these countries on a large scale and have become mainstream</a>. In 2007, Putin said that he is <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/putin-accuses-europe-of-ignoring-nazism-in-the-baltics/a-2817872">dismayed by Estonia and Latvia’s alleged reverence for Nazism</a>: “The activities of the Latvian and Estonian authorities openly connive at the glorification of Nazis and their accomplices. But these facts remain unnoticed by the European Union.”</p>
<p>In 2012, Russia reacted angrily to a recent gathering of World War II veterans in Estonia and stated that it was aimed at “<a href="https://www.euractiv.com/section/europe-s-east/news/estonia-fends-off-russian-accusations-of-nazi-glorification/">glorification of former SS-men and local collaborationists</a>.”</p>
<p>In 2022, <a href="https://www.baltictimes.com/latvia_passes_law_to_make_may_9_day_of_remembrance_for_ukraine_war_victims/">Latvia designated May 9 as the Day of Remembrance</a> for those killed in Ukraine as a result of the Russian invasion. This move was sure to irk some folks in Russia, as Russia celebrates the Soviet victory over the Nazis in World War II on the very same day. Latvia was at the time also debating <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/7/8/latvia-leads-charge-to-fell-soviet-memorials-in-europe">the removal of monuments to Soviet-era soldiers</a>. </p>
<p>In response, Putin’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that “<a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10703253/Kremlin-rants-against-Baltic-neo-Nazi-state-chilling-echo-Moscows-threats-Ukraine.html">the ruling regime in Latvia has long been well known for its neo-Nazi preferences</a>.”</p>
<h2>The pot calling the kettle</h2>
<p>Meanwhile, another debate rages about whether Russia under Putin itself <a href="https://theconversation.com/yes-putin-and-russia-are-fascist-a-political-scientist-shows-how-they-meet-the-textbook-definition-179063">can be seen as a fascist state</a>. On one hand, Putin’s dictatorship has embraced expansionist militarism, crushed domestic opposition, promoted toxic nationalism and revived Russian patriotism by building <a href="https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/how-putins-russia-embraced-fascism-while-preaching-anti-fascism/">national identity around the Russian defeat of Nazi Germany</a>.</p>
<p>On the other hand, those who argue that Russia may be a repressive and aggressive dictatorship – but not a fascist state – note that fascism is a fundamentally revolutionary ideology and tends to be accompanied with mass mobilization. Meanwhile, Putin is viewed by many as a reactionary right-wing dictator who is not guided by revolutionary ideas, does not have much charisma <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-repressive-aggressive-not-fascist/31794918.html">and is governing a largely passive population</a>. His supporters will likely continue labeling perceived adversaries as Nazis. Such rhetorical groundwork could eventually lead to more wars beyond Ukraine.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/183695/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Juris Pupcenoks has received funding from the Latvian Ministry of Education and Science.</span></em></p>What do Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and Kazakhstan have in common with Ukraine? Russian allegations that they are all overrun by Nazis.Juris Pupcenoks, Associate Professor of Political Science, Marist CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1826262022-05-23T13:20:27Z2022-05-23T13:20:27ZIdeology matters in unravelling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464249/original/file-20220519-21-cahh4d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ukrainian soldiers unload their guns after fighting on the front line in eastern Ukraine.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In explaining the war on Ukraine, ideology matters as much as interests. This means that we need to factor ideology into our analysis if we want to gain a deeper understanding of interstate violent conflict. If we focus purely on the material interests of an aggressive state we land up with a lopsided picture of war. We view it simply as a continuation of politics – diplomacy has failed therefore the use of force is the only option.</p>
<p>But understanding and forecasting foreign policy behaviour requires understanding ideology and interests – equally. Ideology is important for a number of reasons. It highlights political actors’ consideration of what is right or wrong and how they see themselves. It also tells us who they associate with as well as their interpretation of the world.</p>
<p>Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a rude awakening to the liberal world, raising the fear that liberalism’s ideological hegemony may have ended. This, after 30 years since the “The End of History?” as, advanced by political scientist <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/d0331b51-5d0e-4132-9f97-c3f41c7d75b3">Francis Fukuyama</a>.</p>
<p>Are we seeing an antithesis, the beginning of history, along opposing ideological fault lines?</p>
<p>Weeks before the Russian invasion, liberal democracies such as the EU, Ukraine, the US, stood in opposition to Russia, Belarus, and the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. What is not clear is the ideology of the side opposing the liberal democratic grouping, other than to say that they are illiberal or autocratic.</p>
<p>Opposing ideologies were also evident in the United Nations Security Council. <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/02/22/1082334172/kenya-security-council-russia">Kenya</a> expressed grave concern over Russia’s recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states and argued for the pursuit of peace through diplomatic channels. This placed it in the liberal democracy camp.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://theconversation.com/history-may-explain-south-africas-refusal-to-condemn-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-178657">South Africa together with Angola, Namibia, and Mozambique</a> abstained from a UN General Assembly vote opposing Russia’s invasion. This was interpreted as a tacit endorsement of Russia’s actions. Ideologically, Russia supported liberation movements such as South Africa’s African National Congress, Angola’s MPLA, Namibia’s Swapo, and Mozambique’s Frelimo.</p>
<p>The pursuit of liberal peace stood opposed to the tacit support of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2061128?src=">despotism</a>.</p>
<p>My <a href="https://www.africaportal.org/publications/water-wars-enduring-myth-or-impending-reality/">research</a> on conflict and cooperation over water resources and as a lecturer in international politics teaching foreign policy analysis shows that ideologies and interests are important in understanding and forecasting foreign policy behaviour. </p>
<p>Ideas contained in ideology inform foreign policy practice. Behaviour that could – for better or worse – influence individual lives. </p>
<h2>Why ideology matters</h2>
<p>Ideologies are about our <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13569775.2016.1201310">identities, moralities, how we perceive cause</a> and bring about change, and the interpretation of events and procedures. Through ideologies, political actors consider what is right or wrong, how they see themselves and with whom they associate. This goes along with their interpretation of the world.</p>
<p>Ideology resides within our cognitive and political lived experiences. </p>
<p>Ideology’s interpretation element comes to the fore when one considers that ideologies often claim that they have an <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13569775.2016.1201310">opposite ideology to denounce, overpower and defeat</a>. These opposite ideologies often take a dehumanised form of an alien power. In Ukraine’s case, it is perceived Nazism. The remedy is the <a href="https://time.com/6154493/denazification-putin-ukraine-history-context/">denazification</a> of the Ukrainian state and leadership.</p>
<p>Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government have been referring to this <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13569775.2016.1201310">phenomenon</a> in Ukraine before and during Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. This interpretation of Ukraine by Russia and its leaders is ideological propaganda.</p>
<p>Russia’s idea that Russians and Ukrainians are ethnically identical explains the rejection of Ukraine’s independent millennium-long history. Seen from Moscow, it is morally wrong to separate them into two sovereign states with a defined border in-between given that the identity of Russians and Ukrainians are similar. </p>
<p>Cause and effect play out in the ideological equation when the Russian leadership sees fit to react in such a way as to bring the Russians and Ukrainians together into one state since the powers in the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13569775.2016.1201310">Kremlin disbelieve that a separation between</a> the two peoples is not the preference of the Ukrainians.</p>
<p>Ukraine’s leadership and citizens resistance to the invasion indicates a general aversion to conquest and despotism. It also shows an ideological stance leaning heavily towards liberal democracy. This manifests particularly in the Ukrainian government’s calls to join the EU and NATO. It’s also been clear from the virtual addresses by President Volodymyr Zelensky to the <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/inside-the-americas/20220317-zelensky-addresses-us-congress-ukrainian-president-invokes-9-11-in-virtual-speech">US Congress</a>, the Parliaments of <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?518664-1/ukrainian-president-zelensky-calls-fly-zone-address-canadian-parliament">Canada</a>, <a href="https://www.axios.com/2022/03/01/zelensky-video-european-parliament-address-ukraine">EU</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E-XwBe9mRM">Japan</a> and a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwdqhb0Ju_c">host</a> of other liberal democracies.</p>
<h2>Interests, power and security</h2>
<p>Considering interests, power, security, and wealth in the invasion have seen its fair share of explanations. Putin’s view of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/explained-nato-and-its-role-in-russia-ukraine-crisis-2787399">encroachment ever closer to Russia’s border</a> over the past 30 years is often proclaimed as the main explanation for his decision to invade. Fearing an alliance that had been in the past the natural foe of the Soviet Union does not sit well with Russia and its leader. Within this interpretation, we see power and security manifesting at the state and individual levels.</p>
<p>The geopolitical proximity of the <a href="https://www.nato.int/nato-welcome/index.html">Nato</a> makes it difficult for Russia to keep its neighbours in its near abroad under its Soviet Union-style sphere of influence. The projection of Russia’s power is interlinked with its security concerns. Both are on the same side of the foreign policy coin. </p>
<p>With the prospect of Ukraine becoming a NATO member, Russia and its leader find it difficult to intervene and support unpopular regimes among NATO’s members. Belarus is a case in point.</p>
<p>Regarding the wealth aspect, Ukraine has for long been the breadbasket of Europe and many developing countries. Ukraine is also home to some of Europe’s largest <a href="https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/ukraine.aspx">nuclear</a> and <a href="https://www.netwerk24.com/netwerk24/stemme/aktueel/water-na-krim-opgedam-20220329">hydroelectric power</a> plants. </p>
<p>Before the invasion, there were plans to restructure the Ukrainian energy system and integrate it into a <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-has-made-a-major-move-towards-integrating-with-europe-by-plugging-into-its-electricity-grid-180164">common energy area</a>. Germany and the US are leading players. In July 2021, they declared that Ukraine’s connection to the <a href="https://www.state.gov/joint-statement-of-the-united-states-and-germany-on-support-for-ukraine-european-energy-security-and-our-climate-goals/">European energy market</a> is high on Germany’s and the EU’s political agendas. </p>
<p>Natural gas is, therefore, not the only explanation for Russia’s powerful grip over Europe.</p>
<h2>Ideological cusp or funeral dirge?</h2>
<p>Is the world standing again at the beginning of history after the Second World War when two emerging ideologies stood opposite each other? On this, and to paraphrase Vladimir <a href="https://0-www-jstor-org.oasis.unisa.ac.za/stable/pdf/126000.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Ac2b88f49d4a428733b9657f0441be7d6&ab_segments=&origin=">Lenin’s famous quote</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the end, one or the other will triumph – a funeral dirge will be sung over the Russian Federation or liberal democracy.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/182626/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>ichard Meissner receives funding from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and the National Research Foundation. He is also an Associate Professor at Unisa's Department of Political Sciences and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Centre for Water Resources Research.</span></em></p>Ideology informs foreign policy practice. Behaviour that could – for better or worse – influence individual lives.Richard Meissner, Associate Professor, University of South AfricaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1784722022-03-16T13:42:02Z2022-03-16T13:42:02ZKyiv has faced adversity before – and a stronger Ukrainian identity grew in response<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452297/original/file-20220315-13-bgd48k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C5%2C796%2C507&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ukrainian soldiers on the the streets of Kyiv in 1917.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Polubotkivtsi.jpg#/media/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Polubotkivtsi.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>This is not the first time residents of Kyiv have fought to defend the city from an encroaching, larger army.</p>
<p>On <a href="https://www.istpravda.com.ua/research/2014/01/29/141189/">Jan. 30, 1918</a>, a force made up primarily of military cadets and hastily armed students <a href="http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkPath=pagesKRKrutyBattleof.htm">took up positions at Kruty</a>, a railway stop northeast of Kyiv, to defend the capital city of the Ukrainian People’s Republic against Soviet Russia. The republic had only <a href="https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/serhii-plokhy/the-gates-of-europe/9781541675643/">declared formal independence</a> a week earlier to rebuff aspirations by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party to control Ukraine.</p>
<p>By the end of the day, the young defenders at Kruty had succumbed to Soviet Russia’s superior Red Army. With the help of aligned local Bolshevik militias, the Reds took Kyiv itself on Feb. 7.</p>
<h2>Occupation and identity</h2>
<p>The history of Ukraine following the battle for Kyiv is complex and messy. But as <a href="https://history.msu.edu/people/faculty/matthew-pauly/">a historian of Ukraine</a>, my research has found that this first period of modern independence from 1918 to 1920 is central to a national narrative that maintains Ukraine is a sovereign country, separate from Russia. </p>
<p>This sense of identity makes occupation a hard task, as the Soviets found out in 1918 following Kyiv’s fall.</p>
<p>With the Red Army in possession of Kyiv, the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic took <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Ukrainian_Revolution_1917_1920.html?id=q2SnwAEACAAJ">refuge in the northern city of Zhytomyr</a>. Its representatives signed a <a href="https://utorontopress.com/9781487524494/twilight-of-empire/">peace agreement</a> with the former Russian Empire’s opponents in the ongoing First World War, the Central Powers, and German and Austrian soldiers proceeded to push the Red Army out of Ukraine.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A group of men in uniform pose with weapons in a grainy photograph" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452298/original/file-20220315-25-138o3ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452298/original/file-20220315-25-138o3ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452298/original/file-20220315-25-138o3ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452298/original/file-20220315-25-138o3ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452298/original/file-20220315-25-138o3ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452298/original/file-20220315-25-138o3ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452298/original/file-20220315-25-138o3ix.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Red Army troops in the Kyiv region in 1918.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/partisan-detachment-of-v-i-bozhenko-in-the-tarashchansky-news-photo/1314608035?adppopup=true">Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Germany put in place a more <a href="http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CS%5CK%5CSkoropadskyPavlo.htm">pliant government</a> in Kyiv. But after the Kaiser’s army collapsed in defeat on the Western Front, Ukrainian forces under the leadership of a former journalist-turned-soldier, <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250116253/inthemidstofcivilizedeurope">Symon Petliura</a>, retook parts of Ukraine, including Kyiv, only for the city to be occupied again by the Red Army in February 1919.</p>
<p>An army comprising volunteer troops, Cossack units and bands of peasants – some of whom shirked their government’s command and committed <a href="https://theconversation.com/putins-claim-to-rid-ukraine-of-nazis-is-especially-absurd-given-its-history-177959">pogroms against the country’s Jewish minority</a> – fought for the restoration of dominion over Ukraine. After concluding a <a href="https://www.uap.ualberta.ca/titles/845-9781895571059-ukrainian-polish-defensive-alliance-1919-1921">hasty alliance with Poland</a>, the Ukrainian People’s Republic briefly recaptured the capital with the help of Polish forces.</p>
<p>But in June 1920, the Red Army subjugated Kyiv for the final and last time.</p>
<p>Ukraine was subsequently divided between Poland and the <a href="https://utorontopress.com/9781442648517/painting-imperialism-and-nationalism-red/">Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic</a>, a Bolshevik-led entity based in Kharkiv. And in December 1922, Soviet Ukraine signed a treaty with Russia and Belarus to <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/russias-empires-9780199924394?cc=us&lang=en&#">form the USSR</a>.</p>
<h2>Accommodating ‘national feelings’</h2>
<p>The lessons of the successive battles for Kyiv were not lost on Soviet leaders.</p>
<p>Lenin was forced to concede a need to accommodate what he described as Ukrainian “national feelings” in the development of the USSR. <a href="https://utorontopress.com/9781442619050/breaking-the-tongue/">The Ukrainian language was given equal standing in the early years of the Soviet Union</a>, and Communists in Ukraine had greater say <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Sovietization_of_Ukraine_1917_1923.html?id=b3seAAAAMAAJ">in the management of their republic under the nominally federal system</a> than they would have had in a unitary state proposed by Lenin’s detractors.</p>
<p>The Ukrainian national movement compelled these compromises. Ukraine — Soviet or otherwise — was not created by “Bolshevik, communist Russia” as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/world/europe/putin-ukraine.html">Vladimir Putin claimed</a> in a recent public distortion of history that has served as a justification for invasion.</p>
<p>The economic campaigns of Soviet leader Josef Stalin following Lenin’s demise demanded increased political centralization at the expense of some regional autonomy. In the 1930s, Stalin acted to <a href="https://utorontopress.com/9781442648937/breaking-the-tongue/">restrict Ukrainian national culture</a> by curtailing the promotion of the <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/making-ukraine-soviet-9781350142701/">Ukrainian language</a> and <a href="https://utorontopress.com/9781487501532/beau-monde-on-empire-and-x2019s-edge/">repressing Ukrainian intellectuals</a>, initially singling out former Ukrainian People’s Republic adherents for trial. A <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/236713/red-famine-by-anne-applebaum/">devastating famine</a>, instigated by a state drive for land collectivization, killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, and the <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/stalinist-perpetrators-on-trial-9780190674168?cc=us&lang=en&">secret police</a> imprisoned <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300226782/voices-dead">many more</a>.</p>
<p>Real power rested in Moscow. But even the Soviets acknowledged a separate Ukrainian identity while cultivating the <a href="https://utorontopress.com/9781442680166/stalins-empire-of-memory/">myth of a fraternal Slavic brotherhood</a>. Putin’s <a href="http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181">vision goes further</a> in subjugating Ukrainian identity, reviving an imperial era construct of Russians and Ukrainian as “one people.”</p>
<h2>History repeating?</h2>
<p>If Kyiv passes again to Russian forces, as it did multiple times between 1918 and 1920, history suggests this control will likely not last.</p>
<p>A sense of Ukrainian identity has only grown stronger in the century <a href="https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/glava-derzhavi-vshanuvav-pamyat-geroyiv-krut-72605">since young men gathered at Kruty to defend Kyiv</a>. </p>
<p>During Ukraine’s first campaign for independence, <a href="https://utorontopress.com/9781442641327/state-building-in-revolutionary-ukraine/">Ukrainians</a> increasingly thought in national terms, but not all accepted this construct. And <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780916458874">some national minorities mistrusted</a> the Ukrainian government’s promises of a broad range of cultural, educational and administrative rights.</p>
<p>Now, Ukrainians of multiple ethnicities and linguistic preferences have taken up arms to defend a potent, pluralistic and democratic vision of their homeland.</p>
<p>In June 1920, when faced with final entreaties for help, British diplomats told <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Ukrainian_Revolution_1917_1920.html?id=q2SnwAEACAAJ">Arnold Margolin</a>, the Ukrainian People’s Republic’s Jewish-Ukrainian emissary to London, that his government had to secure its own independence.</p>
<p>It is a task they face again now. It is unclear when or if Russia will occupy Kyiv. But Ukrainian defense of the city has been fierce. While NATO refuses to send soldiers to intervene in the current war, Ukrainian fighters benefit from foreign military support. And there is every reason to believe that should Kyiv yield, those fighters will continue to wage an insurgency with weapons supplied by their allies. </p>
<p>The national movement in Ukraine in 1918 to 1920 was strong enough to complicate, if not defy, Russian and Bolshevik control. And the Ukrainian national idea did not evaporate under Soviet rule. It is likely to animate a tenacious resistance today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/178472/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Pauly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A historian looks back at a time when Ukrainians battled for control of the capital, but succumbed to a superior Soviet army.Matthew Pauly, Associate Professor of History, Michigan State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1782432022-03-02T14:27:09Z2022-03-02T14:27:09ZUkraine war: what are Russia’s strategic aims and how effectively are they achieving them?<p>If generals are to succeed in the eyes of their political masters, they need to be given clear guidance as to what success will look like. “<a href="https://gai.georgetown.edu/tell-me-how-this-ends/">Tell me how this ends</a>” General David Petraeus, who commanded the US 101st Airborne Division, had wanted to know before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Unfortunately for Ukraine, President Putin has outlined clear strategic and political objectives for his senior leadership in Ukraine in a way that the then US president, George W. Bush, never did in Iraq. </p>
<p>In his “<a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/full-text-putin-s-declaration-of-war-on-ukraine">declaration of war</a>” speech to the nation on February 24, Putin set out the objectives of his “special operation”: his goals were to “strive for the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine”. The Russian president spoke of creating “the necessary conditions … despite the presence of state borders, to strengthen us … as a whole”. In other words, Putin is deliberately blurring the distinction between Russia and Ukraine. </p>
<p>We have seen absolutely nothing in their campaign so far to indicate that the strategic objectives have changed – decapitation of the Ukrainian political leadership, defeat of the Ukrainian armed forces and the destruction of Ukraine as a functioning independent state. <a href="https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/ukraine/2022/02/27/russian-troops-enter-ukraines-2nd-largest-city-of-kharkiv/">In the words</a> of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, “they want to break our nationhood”.</p>
<p>So how then will the Russian high command achieve these goals? In the early 19th century, strategist Karl von Clausewitz <a href="https://www.clausewitz.com/opencourseware/Clausewitz-COGexcerpts.htm">advised that</a> only “by constantly seeking out the centre of his power, by daring all to win all, will one really defeat the enemy”. <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10550271/I-target-number-one-Zelensky-says-Russian-kill-squads-inside-Kyiv-searching-him.html">Zelensky has defined himself</a> – and by extension his government – as that “centre” with every stirring, epoch-making speech he makes. </p>
<p>The immense power of Russian electronic intelligence will therefore be directed at locating him. Undercover commando units have been directed to <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10565833/Ukraine-says-killed-team-Chechen-assassins.html">find and assassinate him</a>. Spies have been working over the past months to acquire contacts within the president’s circle and bribe, threaten or otherwise force betrayal. </p>
<p>This effort has palpably (so far) not succeeded – <a href="https://theweek.com/russo-ukrainian-war/1010739/putin-is-frustrated-and-uncharacteristically-angry-over-ukraine">unlike US efforts</a> to penetrate the group of advisers closest to Putin. If special forces, <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ukraine-claims-a-plot-to-assassinate-president-volodymyr-zelensky-was-foiled-by-russian-spies-who-were-secretly-working-against-putin/ar-AAUuXlm?li=BBnbcA1&srcref=rss">spies</a> and electronic wizardry fail, Russian air power and artillery will try to succeed by obliterating every possible hiding place.</p>
<p>So on to the second of Putin’s aims – “demilitarisation”. <a href="https://www.clausewitz.com/opencourseware/Clausewitz-COGexcerpts.htm">Clausewitz goes on</a> to say: “Still, no matter what the central feature of the enemy’s power may be – the point on which your efforts must converge – the defeat and destruction of his fighting force remains the best way to begin.” It is indeed the best way to begin – but the Russians have failed to achieve this yet. </p>
<p>Were this a US or Nato campaign, no soldier would have crossed the border until every aircraft in the Ukrainian inventory, every radar, every element of the Ukrainian air defence system had been destroyed. After that, the air forces would get to work on destroying the deployed enemy army as far as possible. Only then would troops cross the border to complete the destruction of the enemy fighting force. </p>
<p>Russia did not do this sequentially. Instead they tried and embarrassingly failed to achieve these elements concurrently. Whether this is due to overconfidence, incompetence, <a href="https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russian-militarys-worst-enemy-hint-not-america-54307">corruption</a> – or a combination of all three – <a href="https://warontherocks.com/2022/02/interpreting-the-first-few-days-of-the-russo-ukrainian-war/">military analysts are baffled</a> by the planning failures of the “special operation” so far. </p>
<p>Russian air power has been <a href="https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/mysterious-case-missing-russian-air-force">conspicuously scarce</a> and much touted Russian <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-russian-military-remade-itself-into-a-modern-efficient-and-deadly-fighting-machine-178014">“combined operations” skills</a> equally conspicuously absent. The Russian failure to properly plan <a href="https://warontherocks.com/2021/11/feeding-the-bear-a-closer-look-at-russian-army-logistics/">logistics and supply systems</a> is clear to even the most casual observer. </p>
<h2>Battleground Kyiv</h2>
<p>Once they sort out these problems the Russian campaign will be directed primarily, though not exclusively, towards Kyiv. Given the vast <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/01/vast-russian-military-convoy-kyiv-siege-ukraine">medieval-style siege train</a> lumbering towards the city, it is no surprise that the Russian ministry of defence <a href="https://tass.com/defense/1414199">has warned</a> that strikes “are being prepared”. </p>
<p>The aim is to remove the symbolic heart of the country. Russian commanders rightly sees the city as embodying the Ukrainian state as a functional political entity. They will begin by destroying Ukrainian military and intelligence hubs to disrupt Ukrainian military command and control. Russian failure to strike these targets early in the war means that these buildings will now be unoccupied. </p>
<p>Media targets will be struck, denying the ability of the government to lead and inspire and enabling the Russians to attempt to spread disinformation and confusion. This was clearly the reason for the attempted <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-60542877">destruction of</a> Kyiv’s signature TV tower March 1. </p>
<p>Since they have not managed to end Ukrainian armed resistance, Russian commanders will default to the approach (it cannot be called a strategy) we saw in Grozny in <a href="https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/grozny-1994-battle-changed-post-soviet-russia-forever-181529">1994</a> and <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/the-second-chechen-war-in-photos/30185257.html">1999</a> as well as the Russian involvement in Aleppo in <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-38294488">2015-16</a> – among many other places. </p>
<p>This means bringing Kyiv under siege, blockading and starving the population, and shelling and bombing indiscriminately. The criminal logic behind this relies on a complete elimination of any western notions of restraint or discrimination in targeting civilians. This will not merely last a week or two. If unchecked, we are looking at an operation of many months.</p>
<p>The idea is to break the will of the people to resist. There is no other possible purpose for the kind of weapons that are being brought up for deployment – notably the heavy artillery, <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/01/russia-thermobaric-weapons-ukraine/">thermobaric rocket launchers</a> and attack helicopters. All of these weapons systems may well be used against enemy armed forces on the battlefield, but in a city of 3 million people, there can be no legitimate military purpose – unless one considers that terrorising a civilian population into total submission is legitimate.</p>
<p>Unfortunately recent Russian military history would tend to indicate that they believe legitimacy to be irrelevant. So much for Russian strategic goals. The Ukrainian armed forces backed by a united population and supported by a surprisingly strong international coalition will have something to say about whether they achieve them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/178243/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Frank Ledwidge does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Putin has clearly defined political objectives, but Russian military planners have not gone about them the right way.Frank Ledwidge, Senior Lecturer in Military Capabilities and Strategy, University of PortsmouthLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1776972022-02-24T18:20:09Z2022-02-24T18:20:09ZA historian corrects misunderstandings about Ukrainian and Russian history<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448156/original/file-20220223-27-r7wlnt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C22%2C7577%2C5176&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Donetsk residents celebrate recognition of independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics by Russia on Feb. 21, 2022. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/donetsk-residents-celebrate-recognition-of-independence-of-news-photo/1238677456?adppopup=true">Alexander RyuAlexander Ryumin\TASS via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The first casualty of war, says historian Ronald Suny, is not just the truth. Often, he says, “it is what is left out.”</em></p>
<p><em>Russian President Vladimir Putin began a full-scale attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 and many in the world are now getting a crash course in the complex and intertwined history of those two nations and their peoples. Much of what the public is hearing, though, is jarring to historian Suny’s ears. That’s because some of it is incomplete, some of it is wrong, and some of it is obscured or refracted by the self-interest or the limited perspective of who is telling it. We asked Suny, a professor at the University of Michigan, to respond to a number of popular historical assertions he’s heard recently.</em></p>
<h2>Putin’s view of Russo-Ukrainian history has been widely criticized in the West. What do you think motivates <a href="http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181">his version of the history?</a></h2>
<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/10/putin-likes-talk-about-russians-ukrainians-one-people-heres-deeper-history/">Putin believes that Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians are one people</a>, bound by shared history and culture. But he also is aware that they have become separate states recognized in international law and by Russian governments as well. At the same time, he questions the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/putin-russia-ukraine-history-speech-rcna17132">historical formation of the modern Ukrainian state</a>, which he says was the tragic <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/putin-invokes-soviet-heroes-lenin-stalin-says-russia-created-ukraine-1681185">product of decisions by former Russian leaders Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev</a>. He also questions the sovereignty and distinctive nation-ness of Ukraine. While he promotes national identity in Russia, he denigrates the growing sense of nation-ness in Ukraine.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448159/original/file-20220223-21-o5ijfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Russian President Vladimir Putin in a dark suit looking serious as he sits at the head of a very big table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448159/original/file-20220223-21-o5ijfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448159/original/file-20220223-21-o5ijfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448159/original/file-20220223-21-o5ijfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448159/original/file-20220223-21-o5ijfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448159/original/file-20220223-21-o5ijfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448159/original/file-20220223-21-o5ijfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448159/original/file-20220223-21-o5ijfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Russian President Vladimir Putin in a meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Moscow on Feb. 22, 2022.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/russian-president-vladimir-putin-meets-azerbaijani-news-photo/1238685465?adppopup=true">Photo by Russian Presidency/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Putin indicates that Ukraine by its very nature ought to be friendly, not hostile, to Russia. But he sees its current government as illegitimate, aggressively nationalist and even fascist. The condition for peaceful relations between states, he repeatedly says, is that they do not threaten the security of other states. Yet, as is clear from the invasion, he presents the greatest threat to Ukraine. </p>
<p>Putin sees Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia, believing that if it enters NATO, offensive weaponry will be placed closer to the Russian border, as already is being done in Romania and Poland. </p>
<p>It’s possible to interpret Putin’s statements about the historical genesis of the Ukrainian state as self-serving history and a way of saying, “We created them, we can take them back.” But I believe he may instead have been making a forceful appeal to Ukraine and the West to recognize the security interests of Russia and provide guarantees that there will be no further moves by NATO toward Russia and into Ukraine. Ironically, his recent actions have driven Ukrainians more tightly into the arms of the West.</p>
<h2>The Western position is that the breakaway regions Putin recognized, Donetsk and Luhansk, are integral parts of Ukraine. Russia claims that the Donbass region, which includes these two provinces, is historically and rightfully part of Russia. What does history tell us?</h2>
<p>During the Soviet period, these two provinces were officially part of Ukraine. When the USSR disintegrated, the former Soviet republic boundaries became, under international law, the legal boundaries of the post-Soviet states. Russia repeatedly recognized those borders, though reluctantly in the case of Crimea. </p>
<p>But when one raises the fraught question of what lands belong to what people, a whole can of worms is opened. The Donbass has historically been inhabited by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/21/what-is-donbas-donetsk-luhansk-conflict/">Russians, Ukrainians</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/13/russia-ukraine-jews-jewish-israel/">Jews</a> and others. In <a href="https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/ethnicity-and-language-ukraine">Soviet and post-Soviet times, the cities were largely Russian ethnically and linguistically</a>, while the villages were Ukrainian. When in <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30131108">2014 the Maidan revolution in Kyiv</a> moved the country toward the West and <a href="https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putin-is-the-only-winner-of-ukraines-language-wars/">Ukrainian nationalists threatened to limit the use of the Russian language</a> in parts of Ukraine, rebels in the Donbas violently resisted the central government of Ukraine. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448152/original/file-20220223-13-1m9fhkx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A goat stands in front of the rubble of a partially destroyed house." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448152/original/file-20220223-13-1m9fhkx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448152/original/file-20220223-13-1m9fhkx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448152/original/file-20220223-13-1m9fhkx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448152/original/file-20220223-13-1m9fhkx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448152/original/file-20220223-13-1m9fhkx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448152/original/file-20220223-13-1m9fhkx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448152/original/file-20220223-13-1m9fhkx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The War in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine has caused at least 14,000 deaths.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/goat-and-a-destroyed-house-inside-kiyvskyi-district-in-news-photo/893953490?adppopup=true">Photo by Martin Trabalik/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>After months of fighting between <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27011605">Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian rebel forces in the Donbas in 2014</a>, regular Russian forces <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/ukraine-russia-donbas-dpr-war/">moved in from Russia</a>, and a war began that has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/16/magazine/ukraine-war.html">lasted for the last eight years</a>, with thousands killed and wounded. </p>
<p>Historical claims to land are always contested – think of Israelis and Palestinians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis – and they are countered by claims that the majority living on the land in the present takes precedence over historical claims from the past. Russia can claim Donbass with its own arguments based on ethnicity, but so can Ukrainians with arguments based on historical possession. Such arguments go nowhere and often lead, as can be seen today, to bloody conflict.</p>
<h2>Why was Russia’s recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent such a pivotal event in the conflict?</h2>
<p>When Putin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states, he seriously escalated the conflict, which turned out to be the prelude to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That invasion is a hard, harsh signal to the West that Russia will not back down and accept the further arming of and placing of weaponry in Ukraine, Poland and Romania. The Russian president has now led his country into a dangerous preventive war – a war based on the anxiety that sometime in the future his country will be attacked – the outcome of which is unpredictable. </p>
<h2><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/world/europe/putin-ukraine.html">A New York Times story</a> on Putin’s histories of Ukraine says “The newly created Soviet government under Lenin that drew so much of Mr. Putin’s scorn on Monday would eventually crush the nascent independent Ukrainian state. During the Soviet era, the Ukrainian language was banished from schools and its culture was permitted to exist only as a cartoonish caricature of dancing Cossacks in puffy pants.” Is this history of Soviet repression accurate?</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Russian-Civil-War">Lenin’s government won the 1918-1921 civil war in Ukraine</a> and drove out foreign interventionists, thus consolidating and recognizing the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. But Putin is essentially correct that it was <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/50a428bb-91c3-4097-9f28-025fd147df6b">Lenin’s policies that promoted Ukrainian statehood within the USSR</a>, within a Soviet empire, officially granting it and other Soviet republics the constitutional right to secede from the Union without conditions. This right, Putin angrily asserts, was a <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/50a428bb-91c3-4097-9f28-025fd147df6b">landmine that eventually blew up the Soviet Union</a>.</p>
<p>The Ukrainian language <a href="https://www.mustgo.com/worldlanguages/ukrainian/">was never banned in the USSR and was taught</a> in schools. In the 1920s, <a href="https://www.mustgo.com/worldlanguages/ukrainian/">Ukrainian culture was actively promoted</a> by the <a href="https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/soviet-imaginary/socialism-nations/soviet-policy-nationalities-1920s-1930s/">Leninist nationality policy</a>. </p>
<p>But under Stalin, Ukrainian language and culture began to be powerfully undermined. This started in the early 1930s, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/145953/stalin-starved-ukraine">when Ukrainian nationalists were repressed</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Ukraine/The-famine-of-1932-33-Holodomor">the horrific “Death Famine” killed millions of Ukrainian</a> peasants, and Russification, which is the process of promoting Russian language and culture, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Russification">accelerated in the republic</a>. </p>
<p>Within the strict bounds of the Soviet system, Ukraine, like many other nationalities in the USSR, became a modern nation, conscious of its history, literate in its language, and <a href="https://www.wikiwand.com/en/P._Virsky_Ukrainian_National_Folk_Dance_Ensemble">even in puffy pants</a> permitted to celebrate its ethnic culture. But the contradictory policies of the Soviets in Ukraine both promoted a Ukrainian cultural nation while restricting its freedoms, sovereignty and expressions of nationalism.</p>
<p>History is both a contested and a subversive social science. It is used and misused by governments and pundits and propagandists. But for historians it is also a way to find out what happened in the past and why. As a search for truth, it becomes subversive of convenient and comfortable but inaccurate views of where we came from and where we might be going.</p>
<p><em>This article has been updated to reflect the correct ethnic and linguistic character of the villages in the Donbas during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. They were Ukrainian.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ronald Suny does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>History has many uses, and not all of them are noble. That’s very much the case as the public gets a crash course from politicians about Ukrainian history.Ronald Suny, Professor of History and Political Science, University of MichiganLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1534802021-01-18T17:27:31Z2021-01-18T17:27:31ZAlexei Navalny: Novichok didn’t stop Russian opposition leader – but a prison sentence might<p>After the dramatic flight into Moscow by Russian opposition figurehead Alexei Navalny – who <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/alexei-navalny-plane-account/2021/01/18/6ca3d366-597e-11eb-a849-6f9423a75ffd_story.html">arrived on a plane full of journalists</a>, live streamed his defiant speech on arrival and was promptly detained at passport control – the basic question is: “What’s his plan?” </p>
<p>It had been clear for some time that he would be arrested as soon as he set foot in Russia – the authorities issued a warrant for his arrest on December 29. The <a href="https://meduza.io/en/news/2021/01/14/russian-prison-officials-say-they-are-obliged-to-arrest-navalny-upon-his-return-to-moscow">message</a> was clear: stay out of Russia, or face prison. Navalny defied the Kremlin and came anyway.</p>
<p>The dissident politician was <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55700312">jailed for 30 days</a> by a Moscow court within 24 hours of stepping off the flight, on the grounds that he had violated the terms of his suspended sentence for embezzlement issued in 2017, a conviction he <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/08/alexei-navalny-russian-opposition-leader-found-guilty-embezzlement">has always dismissed</a> as being trumped up in order to deny him the chance to stand as a candidate in the 2018 presidential election. He will be held until a court rules on this new charge of parole violation.</p>
<p>Navalny’s situation calls to mind the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12082222">Yukos affair</a>, which became the defining episode of President Vladimir Putin’s first term. In 2003, Russia’s richest man Mikhail Khodorkovsky was under intense pressure to give up his Yukos oil empire and flee Russia. The oil company was expropriated for alleged tax avoidance and sold to Putin’s allies. Khordokovsky chose to stay and face prison. </p>
<p>At the time he thought it’d be impossible for Putin to arrest him due to domestic and international outcry. Instead he served ten years in a prison camp. Meanwhile the Russian economy prospered and the stock market boomed. </p>
<p>After lobbying by the German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, among others, Khodorkovsky was released in 2013 after being pardoned and went into <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/20/mikhail-khodorkovsky-germany-prison-pardon-putin">permanent exile</a>. He is still active as a sponsor of the Russian opposition through his <a href="https://meduza.io/en/feature/2017/04/27/khodorkovsky-s-open-russia-deemed-undesirable-organization-what-happens-now">Open Russia foundation</a>, but his influence on Russian politics is <a href="https://apnews.com/article/f4029396653c4b17899b11a23cbe31c8">negligible</a> and it’s unclear what the ten years in prison were worth in terms of political capital.</p>
<p>Navalny clearly doesn’t want to become another Khodorkovsky. He wants to remain relevant politically and decided that the only way to do it is to be in Russia. But the dramatic entry aside, how is he planning on doing it from prison?</p>
<h2>Courting danger</h2>
<p>Navalny has two potential strategies for building support. First, his return to Russia and any unfair prison term he might receive could galvanise his supporters and the public at large. But this looks a little naive. While he’s the most recognised opposition leader in Russia, and has a core of committed supporters – particularly among the younger generations – his overall approval <a href="https://www.levada.ru/en/2020/11/02/alexey-navalny/">ratings</a> are at -30%.</p>
<p>So, there’s little active support inside Russia for Navalny that would worry the Kremlin. There were no serious protests when he was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/world/europe/russia-navalny-poisoning.html">poisoned</a> and it’s unclear why would there be any larger ones now he has been detained again.</p>
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<p>Second, there is international pressure: as soon as Navalny was arrested, there was a flurry of <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-navalny-detained-germany-sheremetyevo-us-pompeo-michel/31050122.html">condemnations</a> from western countries demanding his immediate release. But western protests never bothered Putin when Khodorkovsky was in jail – even at a time when Putin was still trying to build bridges with the US and Europe. Now Russia’s relations are in deep freeze after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election or the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in the UK in 2018.</p>
<p>On each of these occasions, Russia was placed under significant <a href="https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russia-sanctions-bite-and-remind-us-of-the-value-of-transatlantic-unity/">economic and political sanctions</a>. There’s nothing for the Kremlin to care about in terms of possible damage to its non-existent reputation in the west, or even further economic <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a9b982e6-169a-11ea-b869-0971bffac109">sanctions</a>.</p>
<p>It’s inconceivable for Putin to let the west dictate to him how Russian politics should be run. Were Putin to release Navalny, it would create an untouchable opposition leader under western protection operating with impunity inside Russia. This would be akin to losing political sovereignty as far as Putin is concerned. So, the more the west piles on pressure to release Navalny, the more defiant Putin will be in keeping him in prison.</p>
<h2>Risk of return</h2>
<p>It’s possible that Navalny overestimates his own importance. Having survived a deadly poison attack against all odds, he might think his grand entry will start toppling Putin’s regime. Inevitable <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/collision-course-moscow-the-return-of-alexei-navalny/">comparisons with Lenin</a>, another famous revolutionary, spring to mind. Lenin was transported from his exile in Switzerland with the explicit support of the German High Command. Navalny was likewise given special <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/28/alexei-navalny-angela-merkel-visit-berlin-hospital">treatment</a> by the German authorities.</p>
<p>This might bode ill for Navalny’s future standing – an accusation of being a western “stooge” is clearly the line the Kremlin is all-too happy to <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55346239">pursue</a> (see for example Putin’s remarks about Navalny’s links with the CIA at the last press conference).</p>
<p>There is an important difference too – Lenin arrived in April 1917, after the Tsarist regime had fallen. And he fled Russia again as soon as there was a danger of arrest in the summer of <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lenin-returns-to-russia-from-exile">1917</a>. Navalny arrived expecting to be arrested in front of the world’s media. Lenin wanted power not publicity – Navalny seems to be happy for now with the status of a martyr.</p>
<p>Navalny is no rookie – he’s been around Russian politics for almost as long as Putin has been in <a href="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2017/06/14/navalny-challenge-to-putin-regime/">power</a>. From 2011 onwards, Navalny has steadily increased his status as the leading opposition figure – despite all the pressure from the Kremlin. From his point of view, having defied almost certain <a href="https://theconversation.com/alexei-navalny-poisoning-what-theatrical-assassination-attempts-reveal-about-vladimir-putins-grip-on-power-in-russia-145664">death by Novichok</a>, he may think there is literally nothing more they can do to him now.</p>
<p>But if Navalny’s poisoning was a turning point in Russian politics, it might not be the turn he expects. Russia’s politics under Putin is often called “<a href="https://theconversation.com/putin-is-sure-to-win-so-whats-the-point-of-elections-in-russia-93170">soft authoritarianism</a>”. This relies on creating a fundamentally uneven political field <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53255964">skewed in the Kremlin’s favour</a>. But it has shied away from mass political repression.</p>
<p>If – as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-putin-authoritarian/2020/12/26/13148432-45d1-11eb-8deb-b948d0931c16_story.html">some commentators think</a> – Putin’s Russia is moving away from “soft” to “hard” authoritarian methods of control, then there may simply be no more place for Navalny’s type of politics with direct street actions and anti-corruption <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsAw3WynQJMm7tMy093y37A">videos</a>. For now, it seems Navalny will have to ponder all this <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55700312">from a prison cell</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/153480/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexander Titov does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>He knew he would be arrested on arrival in Russia, but it’s unclear what the dissident politician ‘s next move will be.Alexander Titov, Lecturer in Modern European History, Queen's University BelfastLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1526482021-01-18T12:39:36Z2021-01-18T12:39:36ZRussia: Alexei Navalny’s return adds to an already challenging year for Vladimir Putin<p>Political commentators both inside Russia and around the world are comparing Alexei Navalny’s return to Moscow with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/18/alexei-navalny-calls-grow-for-release-of-arrested-russia-opposition-figure">Vladimir Lenin’s “sealed train” journey</a> from Switzerland to St Petersburg in April 1917. It was eight-day journey that, as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/books/review/lenin-on-the-train-catherine-merridale.html">Winston Churchill wrote</a>, “turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia”.</p>
<p>As we know, the plague bacillus spread and, by the end of the year, Lenin and his Bolshevik supporters were in control. Is this something that Navalny had in mind when making what appears to be a foolhardy return to his home country, bearing in mind that he was poisoned with a nerve agent the last time he was on Russian soil?</p>
<p>There’s no doubt that, at least among some demographics in Russia, support is solidifying behind Navalny as an opposition voice. His approval increased from <a href="https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-russia-politics-navalny-idUKKBN26N1YW">9% in 2019 to 20%</a> in 2020, although this was <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-politics-navalny/putin-critic-navalnys-approval-rating-surges-in-wake-of-poisoning-idUSKBN26N1Z9">after he was poisoned</a>, so it might reflect a degree of sympathy that might not translate at the ballot box.</p>
<p>There’s little doubt that his “<a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/09/09/russias-elections-smart-voting-successes-alleged-tampering-and-more-a67204">smart voting</a>” programme, which aimed to coordinate support for anti-Putin candidates in regional and mayoral elections last year, proved effective in Moscow where Putin’s United Party lost seats. But there’s little evidence that smart voting had traction in other regions and Putin remains the most popular politician in Russia.</p>
<p>Yet polling suggests that the Russian president’s support is <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/vladimir-putins-popularity-with-young-russians-plummeting-opinion-poll-finds-678xx6gd5">softening among younger voters</a> (18-24 year olds), falling from 36% to 20% over the past year. This potentially indicates that in the long term Putin may struggle to remain relevant to a sizeable segment of the population. </p>
<h2>Shifting the goalposts</h2>
<p>What of Putin’s long-term plans? There were rumours late last year over the <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13122054/vladamir-putin-resign-next-year-health/">poor state of his health</a>. This has prompted speculation in some quarters that he may harbour plans for an early retirement – maybe even in 2021. The passage of legislation in November 2020 <a href="https://euobserver.com/tickers/150113">granting life-long immunity</a> to former presidents seemed to add weight to these theories. But such rumours have been <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/vladimir-putin/9647845/Vladimir-Putins-health-subject-of-speculation-in-Russia.html">doing the rounds in cyberspace</a> since as early as 2012. And constitutional reforms passed in July which would allow him to remain in power until 2036 would seem to suggest the opposite.</p>
<p>Other electoral amendments passed last year, introducing innovations such as online voting and <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-lawmakers-approve-bill-on-multiday-voting-in-elections/30739695.html">extending voting over several days</a>, are both thought likely to <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/early-voting-under-way-in-russian-regional-elections-seen-as-key-test-for-ruling-party/30833740.html">increase the possibility</a> of electoral manipulation. </p>
<p>The rest of the world will get an indication of how these measures might affect voting in September’s crucial <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/01/05/russia-in-2021-looming-elections-dominate-the-domestic-scene-a72391">State Duma polls</a>. United Russia is still expected to win an overall majority. But whether Putin’s party will be able to hold on to its <a href="https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/10/21/confident-but-not-uncontested">constitutional majority</a> – which requires it to win two-thirds of the 450 seats in the Duma – <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/01/05/russia-in-2021-looming-elections-dominate-the-domestic-scene-a72391">remains to be seen</a>. Nalvalny’s presence in Russia may give opposition voters a figurehead to coalesce around. </p>
<h2>How this may play out</h2>
<p>Health rumours aside, it is unlikely that Putin is in a hurry to step down before 2024. Putin himself said last year that his presidency “<a href="http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/64261">must definitely end one day</a>”. But he followed that remark with a reference to the change to term-limits being about reinforcing the sovereignty of the Russian federation and concluded that “As to what will happen in 2024 or later – we will see when the time comes”. This suggests that he is not only keeping his options open, but is also deliberately obfuscating his plans.</p>
<p>Kremlin watchers also point out that it’s far from clear who might be being groomed to succeed Putin – Russia’s longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin. The list of potential candidates is very limited – and the return of former president Dmitry Medvedev cannot be ruled out. Despite his low approval ratings (<a href="https://www.levada.ru/en/ratings/">38% in December 2019</a>) Medvedev is still seen very much as a Putin loyalist who was happy to occupy the presidency in 2008 for one term to <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15045816">clear the way</a> for Putin to resume power in 2012. Of course, since last year’s referendum, such machinations will not be needed for Putin to remain in power until the ripe old age of 84. </p>
<p>Medvedev’s removal as prime minister early in 2020 and his subsequent appointment as <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/03/10/medvedevs-security-council-role-makes-him-and-it-more-interesting-a69571">deputy chairman of the Security Council</a> has shielded him from criticism over the economic fallout of the pandemic. Some believe this has been engineered to allow him to stand as a more palatable candidate to extend United Russia’s grip on the presidency. </p>
<p>All of which puts Navalny’s return to Russia into context. As Putin’s United Russia develops its long-term plans for control of the Russian Federation, the big question being asked around the world is whether the opposition figurehead, for now in police custody, can – like Lenin in 1917 – galvanise events as a catalyst for change.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/152648/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liana Semchuk does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The opposition leader’s return from poisoning will put pressure on the Russian president in a crucial election year.Liana Semchuk, PhD Candidate in Politics, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1401432020-08-03T11:58:48Z2020-08-03T11:58:48ZHow the failures of the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty set the stage for today’s anti-racist uprisings<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349728/original/file-20200727-21-gt3hqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=90%2C67%2C4865%2C3311&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">On May 27, 1919, British Prime Minister Lloyd George, Italian President Vittorio Orlando, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and American President Woodrow Wilson met May 27, 1919, during the Paris Peace Conference.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/british-prime-minister-lloyd-george-italian-president-news-photo/3289187?adppopup=true">Lee Jackson/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The racism that is now the target of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/world/george-floyd-global-protests.html">protest across the globe</a> is rooted in the tragic choices of leaders seeking to roll back change a century ago. </p>
<p>Nearly all historians now agree that at the end of World War I, the choice to return to an imperialist world order by the victorious Allied, or Entente, powers – France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan and the United States – was a historic error. It not only prepared the ground for the rise of fascism in Europe, but also sparked decades of political violence in Asia and Africa by <a href="https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/the_paris_peace_conference_and_its_consequences">people denied their rights</a> and humanity.</p>
<p>As World War I ended in <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/world-war-i-ends">November 1918</a>, the Spanish Flu pandemic swept across the globe, killing <a href="https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-second-wave-resurgence#:%7E:text=The%20horrific%20scale%20of%20the%201918%20influenza%20pandemic%E2%80%94known,and%20civilians%20killed%20during%20World%20War%20I%20combined.">more than 50 million</a> people. <a href="https://www.army.mil/article/210420/worldwide_flu_outbreak_killed_45000_american_soldiers_during_world_war_i">Most vulnerable were soldiers</a> living in crowded barracks and their families back home, where hunger weakened immunity.</p>
<p>Like today, the effect of pandemic was aggravated by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2015/02/02/the-biggest-recession-youve-never-ever-heard-of/#4d41863d3619">economic recession and unemployment</a>. Worse, the people of the defeated German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires <a href="https://www.history.com/news/germany-world-war-i-debt-treaty-versailles">suffered chaos under political collapse</a>.</p>
<p>Amid these multiple crises, the <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1914-1920/paris-peace">Paris Peace Conference</a> opened in January 1919. American President Woodrow Wilson personally traveled to Paris to ensure that the conference would make the world “<a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/woodrow-wilson-racism-self-determination.html">safe for democracy</a>.”</p>
<p>Wilson had promised a new era of peace and justice in his famous <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/fourteen_points.shtml">Fourteen Points</a> statement of war aims, which included an end to secret treaties, the curtailment of colonial empires, the right of all people to choose their own government and a League of Nations to adjudicate international conflicts. </p>
<p>In 1920, like 2020, race became the pivot of a historic turning point. In both moments, world leaders faced a choice: to restore the previous status quo that had produced the crisis – or to embrace the need for a new world order. </p>
<p>The European members of the Entente powers <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Allied-Powers-international-alliance#ref1228825">at Paris – Britain, France, and Italy</a> – ignored Wilson’s call for world order based on law and rights. With the implementation of the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/law/help/us-treaties/bevans/m-ust000002-0043.pdf">Treaty of Versailles</a> in January 1920, they chose to restore a racial hierarchy across the globe, extending their colonial rule over territories once held by the defeated German and Ottoman empires in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. </p>
<p>The treaty, which included establishment of the League of Nations, betrayed not only Wilson’s ideals, but also the Entente’s nonwhite allies and the colonial soldiers who fought in the “war to end all wars.” The racial injustice of the 1919-20 peace settlement sparked decades of political violence – not only in the colonized Middle East, Africa and Asia, but also in the United States. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349735/original/file-20200727-19-u04cq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Portrait of NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349735/original/file-20200727-19-u04cq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349735/original/file-20200727-19-u04cq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349735/original/file-20200727-19-u04cq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349735/original/file-20200727-19-u04cq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349735/original/file-20200727-19-u04cq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=950&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349735/original/file-20200727-19-u04cq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=950&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349735/original/file-20200727-19-u04cq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=950&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois went to Paris to try to ensure that racist laws like the U.S. had would not be imposed in Africa to the detriment of African rights.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2003681451/?loclr=blogloc">Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Journey to Paris</h2>
<p>In January 1919, activists from around the world traveled to Paris <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/1918-flu-pandemic#:%7E:text=Even%20President%20Woodrow%20Wilson%20reportedly%20contracted%20the%20flu,in%20Spain%2C%20though%20news%20coverage%20of%20it%20did.">despite risks to their health</a>. They embraced Wilson’s Fourteen Points as a chance to remake a broken world system of imperial rivalry that had led to World War I and the deaths of <a href="https://www.geo.tv/latest/212756-world-war-i-in-numbers">10 million soldiers and 50 million civilians</a>.</p>
<p>Among those activists was NAACP leader <a href="http://scua.library.umass.edu/duboisopedia/doku.php?id=about:versailles_peace_conference">W.E.B. Du Bois</a>, who had fought against the spread of racist, segregationist Jim Crow laws from southern states to the North. He now feared that a similar legal double standard might be imposed in international law, to the detriment of African rights.</p>
<p>Du Bois asked to join the American delegation at Paris, but the Wilson administration refused him. Wilson feared that Du Bois’ <a href="https://iowaculture.gov/history/education/educator-resources/primary-source-sets/civil-rights-during-and-after-world-wars/dubois-wilson">call for racial equality</a> might spoil his negotiations with the other conference leaders – prime ministers of Britain, France and Italy – who ruled most of Africa as colonies. </p>
<h2>Claiming rights</h2>
<p>Undeterred, <a href="https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/world-war-i-american-experiences/about-this-exhibition/world-overturned/peace-and-a-new-world-order/the-pan-african-conference/">Du Bois organized a Pan African Congress</a> to defend Africans’ rights. He understood, as others did in Paris, that racial <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/08/11/742293305/a-century-later-the-treaty-of-versailles-and-its-rejection-of-racial-equality">inequality was the foundation</a> of the old imperial world order.</p>
<p>Like Du Bois and his African allies, <a href="https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2019/06/the-middle-eastern-prince-who-tried-to-change-the-treaty-of-versailles/">Arabs and Egyptians</a> claimed their right to sovereignty. But they found that the Entente leaders also considered Arab Muslims a lower species of human, unfit for self-rule.</p>
<p>Prince Faisal of Mecca gained entry to the conference because his Arab army had fought against the Ottoman Turks alongside Britain, with the understanding that Arabs would <a href="https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/08/14/treaty-versailles-michael-neiberg">gain an independent state</a>. But the British broke their promise and denied independence to Faisal’s Syrian Arab Kingdom. They instead <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Sykes-Picot-Agreement">joined French colonialists to divide Arab lands</a> between them. </p>
<p>Asians, too, were regarded as an inferior race. Japan had fought alongside the victorious Allies and had <a href="https://www.bartleby.com/essay/The-Treaty-Of-Versailles-And-Japan-F3V33J6WKPTDX">won a leading role</a> at the conference.</p>
<p>But when the Japanese delegation proposed a racial equality clause for the Covenant of the new League of Nations, the conference’s white leaders <a href="https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-japan-turned-against-paris-peace-treaty-and-why-it-matters-39527">rejected it</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349734/original/file-20200727-23-11is6ba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The five members of the Japanese delegation to the Paris peace conference." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349734/original/file-20200727-23-11is6ba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349734/original/file-20200727-23-11is6ba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349734/original/file-20200727-23-11is6ba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349734/original/file-20200727-23-11is6ba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349734/original/file-20200727-23-11is6ba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349734/original/file-20200727-23-11is6ba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349734/original/file-20200727-23-11is6ba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Japanese delegation, shown here, proposed a racial equality clause for the charter of the new League of Nations. The leading powers rejected it.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.28843/">Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Racial inequality codified</h2>
<p>The Covenant of the League of Nations, drafted by those same leaders at <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/League-of-Nations/The-Covenant">Paris in 1919</a>, codified the inequality of races in international law.
<a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp">Article 22</a> denied independence to Arabs, Africans and Pacific Islanders once ruled by the Ottomans and Germans. </p>
<p>In the condescending language of moral uplift, the article designated them as “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” Therefore, they would be placed under temporary European rule as “a <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp#art22">sacred trust of civilisation</a>.”</p>
<p>In other words, the League of Nations would administer temporary colonies, called mandates, to tutor uncivilized (nonwhite) people in politics. Racial inequality was enshrined in the very institution, the League of Nations, that was to ensure the governance of international law.</p>
<p>The mandates were imposed by gunpoint, with no pretense to respect self-determination. In July 1920, the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Syria/The-French-mandate">French army occupied Damascus</a>, destroyed the Syrian Arab Kingdom and sent <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Faysal-I">Faisal into exile</a>. Likewise, the British battled mass opposition to claim its mandates in <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Iraq/British-occupation-and-the-mandatory-regime">Iraq</a> and <a href="https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199796953/obo-9780199796953-0200.xml">Palestine</a>. Meanwhile, South Africa imposed a brutal racist regime upon southwest Africa.</p>
<p>Racial exclusion from the club of so-called civilized nations provoked anti-colonial movements for the rest of the 20th century. </p>
<p>The president of the Syrian Arab Kingdom’s Congress, Sheikh Rashid Rida, foresaw violent consequences <a href="https://tcf.org/content/report/arab-worlds-liberal-islamist-schism-turns-100/?session=1">in his 1921 appeal</a> to the League of Nations. </p>
<p>“It does not befit the honor of this League, which President Wilson proposed to include all civilized nations for the good of all human beings,” he wrote, “for it to be used as a tool by two colonial states. These states seek to use this Assembly to guarantee … the subjugation of peoples.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Prince Faisal of Mecca with his delegation at the Peace Conference." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349737/original/file-20200727-27-1hwbmt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/349737/original/file-20200727-27-1hwbmt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349737/original/file-20200727-27-1hwbmt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349737/original/file-20200727-27-1hwbmt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349737/original/file-20200727-27-1hwbmt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349737/original/file-20200727-27-1hwbmt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/349737/original/file-20200727-27-1hwbmt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Prince Faisal of Mecca with his delegation at the Peace Conference.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal_I_of_Iraq#/media/File:FeisalPartyAtVersaillesCopy.jpg">Wikipedia</a></span>
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<p>Rida prophetically warned that “Syria, Palestine, and other Arab countries will ignite the fires of war in both the West and the East.” The bitter sheikh turned against European liberalism and inspired the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rashid-Rida">founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928</a>. </p>
<p>In the later 20th century, this racial exclusion of Arab Muslims inspired the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/06/30/the-new-islamic-caliphate-and-its-war-against-history/">violent Islamist movements that</a> drew the United States into seeming endless conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.</p>
<h2>Jim Crow stays</h2>
<p>In the United States, racial hierarchy was similarly reimposed by violence. Black veterans returned from Europe to confront <a href="https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/wwi/red-summer">lynching and race riots</a>.</p>
<p>[<em>The Conversation’s newsletter explains what’s going on with the coronavirus pandemic. <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=coronavirus-going-on">Subscribe now</a>.</em>]</p>
<p>The link between the American racial order and the new world order was made explicit by President Wilson’s adviser, Colonel <a href="https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=2294">Edward M. House</a>. He advised Wilson that racial equality would cost him votes in the South and California. Worse, such a clause could <a href="https://www.guernicamag.com/andrew-s-lewis-wilson-and-the-racial-equality-clause/">empower the League of Nations</a> to intervene in the United States against Jim Crow laws.</p>
<p>In March 1920, the U.S. Senate <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/senate-rejects-league-of-nations-nov-19-1919-113006">rejected American membership</a> in the League of Nations precisely because clauses on transnational law enforcement and collective security threatened U.S. sovereignty.</p>
<p>It is no accident that the current crisis in the U.S. has come to focus on racial injustice. Among its several sources are the decisions made 100 years ago by white men from powerful countries who believed maintaining their dominance was more important than seeking peace through justice.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140143/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elizabeth Thompson received funding for her research from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and American University in Washington, DC. </span></em></p>Suffering a pandemic and the aftermath of a war that killed 50 million, the world in 1920 faced a turning point as it negotiated a new political order. As today, the key issue was racial inequality.Elizabeth Thompson, Professor and Mohamed S. Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace, American University School of International ServiceLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1422132020-07-23T09:34:31Z2020-07-23T09:34:31ZFrom Lenin to Putin: Russia’s turbulent history as told by the foreign press<p>What a contrast it was. In early May 2000, Vladimir Putin strode through the Kremlin’s gilded corridors, his progress relayed on live TV across the world’s largest country, and beyond. I was reporting from Moscow for the BBC. Putin looked purposeful, slim and sober as he swore to uphold the constitution of the Russian Federation.</p>
<p>During the 1990s, the international press corps in Moscow had become used to the president of Russia as an unpredictable character: impulsive, sometimes even drunk in public. But Boris Yeltsin resigned suddenly on the last day of 1999. As the constitution required, his acting successor – Vladimir Putin, a prime minister who had built his reputation by taking the fight to separatists in Chechnya – had to stand for election to be confirmed in his post. He was duly elected.</p>
<p>Two decades later, Putin’s critics argue that he has upended that constitution – introducing changes, by means of a recent national vote, that mean he <a href="https://theconversation.com/vladimir-putin-secures-constitutional-changes-allowing-him-to-rule-until-2036-what-this-means-for-russia-141103">could stay in power</a> until he is 83. </p>
<p>None of the correspondents in Moscow in May 2000 stopped to think that Putin might be in power so long. He probably did not foresee it himself. At the time, his arrival appeared to be a necessary corrective to the chaos that had gone before. </p>
<p>We correspondents had certainly seen plenty of that: for the few winners of Russia’s new bandit capitalism, there had been unimaginable wealth; for many more, uncertainty and unpaid wages. From the years of political and economic chaos that had followed the collapse of communism, another kind of leader now emerged – one who was very much a product of the Soviet system in which he had grown up. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-wild-decade-how-the-1990s-laid-the-foundations-for-vladimir-putins-russia-141098">The wild decade: how the 1990s laid the foundations for Vladimir Putin's Russia</a>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346895/original/file-20200710-189216-1p5i1hw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346895/original/file-20200710-189216-1p5i1hw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346895/original/file-20200710-189216-1p5i1hw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346895/original/file-20200710-189216-1p5i1hw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346895/original/file-20200710-189216-1p5i1hw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346895/original/file-20200710-189216-1p5i1hw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346895/original/file-20200710-189216-1p5i1hw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Parade of premiers: is Putin a throwback to some of the early leaders in this line-up?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">YuryKara via Shutterstock</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Because relatively few westerners or other foreigners have visited Russia, those correspondents who have ventured there have had a disproportionate influence on forming outside opinion of the country. At various times, Russia has welcomed them, expelled them – or banned them altogether. </p>
<p>Theirs is the story I tell in my <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/assignment-moscow-9780755601158/">new book</a>, Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia From Lenin to Putin. In short, Russia’s treatment of international correspondents tells the story of its relations with the rest of the world. </p>
<h2>‘Golden age of openness’</h2>
<p>I first visited the Soviet Union as a language student in 1987. Four years later, I returned as a TV news producer. It was my first foreign assignment. It was also the year when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Major change had been underway for some years. That era of reform – started in the 1980s by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev – was also a golden age for international correspondents. </p>
<p>Fred Weir – whom I interviewed for the book – first went to Moscow in 1986 as correspondent for a Communist newspaper, the Canadian Tribune. He has reported for many other English-language publications since, and still does. He remembers that “a window on the country”, opened for foreign journalists as the Gorbachev era got underway. Travel restrictions remained, but were eased. Yet while it was not clear which direction the Soviet Union would take, few foresaw such a complete and sudden collapse of the system. </p>
<p>The brightest correspondents who have covered Russia have always tried to understand the country, its language, history and culture. Their insight has often enabled them to guess what was coming. </p>
<p>Journalism is designed to capture the sense of a moment, of a day. The greater understanding and interpretation is left for historians, who often benefit from a wider range of sources, and the power of hindsight. Yet the work of the best reporters from Russia – even as far back as the revolutions of 1917 – is still worth reading today. </p>
<h2>Fellow travellers</h2>
<p>For weeks after Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik followers seized power in November 1917, conservative newspapers gleefully predicted their downfall. Arthur Ransome – better known today as an author of children’s books, including the childhood idyll Swallows and Amazons – and Morgan Philips Price of the Manchester Guardian both stand out as two who correctly predicted that the Bolshevik regime would endure. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346909/original/file-20200710-46-5sed81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346909/original/file-20200710-46-5sed81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=307&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346909/original/file-20200710-46-5sed81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=307&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346909/original/file-20200710-46-5sed81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=307&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346909/original/file-20200710-46-5sed81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=386&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346909/original/file-20200710-46-5sed81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=386&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346909/original/file-20200710-46-5sed81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=386&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The Bolshevik revolution: but probably not as Moscow’s foreign press contingent reported it.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NaughtyNut via Shutterstock</span></span>
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<p>They were curious, both spoke good Russian, and had extensive contacts in political circles. Reporters could speak to revolutionaries, workers and peasants. Diplomats did not have the same freedoms, so they were slower to appreciate that the Tsar’s dynasty was doomed. </p>
<p>Philips Price and Ransome were not unbiased observers. Nor was John Reed, the charismatic young author of <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JUY1AwAAQBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s">Ten Days that Shook the World</a>, which was about the revolution. He admitted as much when he wrote: “My sympathies in the struggle were not neutral.” </p>
<p>Correspondence in the Guardian’s archives shows the length to which the paper later went to distance itself from Philips Price. A pamphlet which he wrote was deemed so inspiring by the Bolsheviks that they used it as propaganda to dissuade British troops who had entered Russia to reverse the revolution. As for Ransome, he clearly admired Lenin, and later married Leon Trotsky’s secretary. </p>
<p>Correspondents who were so impressed by Lenin found their counterparts in later admirers of Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev. In the 1930s, the king of Moscow correspondents was Walter Duranty of the New York Times. His 1990s biographer, SJ Taylor, declared him <a href="http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=moreTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=BLL01010408557&indx=1&recIds=BLL01010408557&recIdxs=0&elementId=0&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&frbg=&&dscnt=0&scp.scps=scope%3A%28BLCONTENT%29&vl(2084770704UI0)=any&tb=t&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&srt=rank&tab=local_tab&dum=true&vl(freeText0)=stalin%27s%20apologist&dstmp=1594978273430">Stalin’s apologist</a>.</p>
<p>The recent film <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/11/mr-jones-review-agnieszka-holland-james-norton-berlin-film-festival">Mr Jones</a> remembers Duranty’s refusal to report the famine in Ukraine in the 1930s. His playing down of the mass starvation kept him in favour with Stalin’s regime, and he later took credit for the US’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union. </p>
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<p>Another pioneering correspondent could not believe what seemed to be astonishing luck as she crossed into Russia at its border with Poland without the right papers and was still able to make her way to Moscow. Marguerite Harrison, hailed by the New York Times as a “brilliant news writer”, called her 1936 autobiography <a href="http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=moreTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=BLL01001603723&indx=2&recIds=BLL01001603723&recIdxs=1&elementId=1&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&frbg=&&dscnt=0&scp.scps=scope%3A%28BLCONTENT%29&vl(2084770704UI0)=any&tb=t&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&srt=rank&tab=local_tab&dum=true&vl(freeText0)=harrison%20born%20for%20trouble&dstmp=1594978390217">Born For Trouble</a>. </p>
<p>One trouble in her case was that she was not just a great reporter. She was also an American spy. In her defence, Harrison’s gender had prevented her from getting the journalistic assignment, so she agreed to work for US military intelligence too. She ended up in a Moscow prison cell, but her luck held out long enough for her to get an interview with Trotsky. Her excellent access was later explained by the fact that the Soviets knew what she was up to, and wanted to keep an eye on her. </p>
<h2>Hostile actors</h2>
<p>The sense of press freedom – the “window on the country” that Weir remembers – endured through the first chaotic decade of post-Soviet Russia. It no longer does. Western correspondents “are seen more as hostile actors”, Matthew Chance, who has reported from Russia for CNN since the late 1990s, told me. In an age when Russia’s relations with the west – especially the UK – are worse than at any time since the cold war, correspondents face great challenges. Access “is negligible”, Chance argues. </p>
<p>Journalism itself is in crisis: criticised not only by leaders in countries where the media has rarely been free, but also ignored and chastised by governments in the west. Russia’s media policy in recent years shows a shift towards wanting to tell its own story, through RT and its other international media platforms, rather than engaging with western media. Still, recent <a href="https://apnews.com/12c8f559a4ec43f72035e6d1ca58271a">verbal assaults</a> and veiled threats to the Financial Times and New York Times over their reporting of coronavirus statistics shows that international coverage can still sting. </p>
<p>The brightest correspondents who have covered Russia have always tried to understand the country, its language, history and culture. Their insight has sometimes – as in the case of Ransome and Philips Price – enabled them to guess what was coming. </p>
<p>My generation of correspondents may have witnessed, and understood, the factors that delivered Putin’s initial popularity: his tough line on fighting separatists in Chechnya and his determination to bring Russia’s new tycoons – the oligarchs – under the Kremlin’s control. </p>
<p>I see now that I did not realise fully what I was witnessing that day in May 2000. Looking back two decades later, it feels like the start of yet another revolutionary period in Russia’s history. What seemed then like a peaceful transition of power was the beginning of a new system – the Putin system – that endures to this day, and may last yet longer: giving Moscow correspondents plenty more to write about.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142213/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Rodgers received funding from the Society of Authors to research his book 'Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin'. </span></em></p>The way foreign correspondents cover Russia tells the story of its relations with the rest of the world.James Rodgers, Reader in International Journalism, City, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1216702019-08-13T14:58:59Z2019-08-13T14:58:59ZRussian protests highlight how authorities crackdown on activists – by targeting their families<p>When <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/06/couple-face-losing-son-after-bringing-him-to-unsanctioned-rally">Dmitri Prokazov and his wife Olga Prokazov</a> recently found themselves caught up in an <a href="https://time.com/5639451/what-the-protests-in-russia-mean-for-president-putin/">unsanctioned demonstration</a> in Moscow, while out with their one-year-old son, they didn’t expect it to end with prosecutors threatening to strip them of their parental rights.</p>
<p>But this is exactly what has happened – a district court in the city pressed for the <a href="https://www.mosproc.ru/news/moscow/prokuratura_moskvy_provodit_proverki_po_faktam_uchastiya_lits_s_maloletnimi_detmi_i_nesovershennolet/">child to be taken into care</a>, on the grounds that at one point during the protest their son was handed over to a third person (a close friend) – which supposedly put the child’s life in danger. Investigations have also been carried out against other people who took part in the <a href="https://www.mosproc.ru/news/moscow/prokuratura_moskvy_provodit_proverki_po_faktam_uchastiya_lits_s_maloletnimi_detmi_i_nesovershennolet/">protests with young children</a>.</p>
<p>The July 27 demonstration was one of a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49125045">series of protests</a> that have been held in the city recently after authorities disqualified a number of opposition candidates from standing in local elections. Thousands were detained at the protests which authorities consider unauthorised and illegal.</p>
<p>Investigators have now <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russian-protest-row-parents-dmitri-and-olga-prokazov-live-in-fear-of-losing-baby-son-vgqh2tpv3?ni-statuscode=acsaz-307">dropped criminal charges</a> against Dmitri and Olga Prokazov after public outcry. But the couple say they continue to <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russian-protest-row-parents-dmitri-and-olga-prokazov-live-in-fear-of-losing-baby-son-vgqh2tpv3?ni-statuscode=acsaz-307">live in fear</a> that child protection services could come and take their son away at any moment.</p>
<p>For demonstrators, the implication is clear: opponents of the regime who have young children should think twice before getting involved in any protest – and there is a tradition here.</p>
<h2>Intimidation and control</h2>
<p>“Hostage-taking” is not a new tactic for the Russian state. Indeed, the targeting of the families and networks of “enemies” goes back at least to the Russian Civil War. In the summer of 1918, for example, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/pdf/lenin-cw-vol-44.pdf">Vladimir Lenin ordered that 25-30 hostages</a> be detained in every grain-producing region, with the idea that they would be answerable with their lives for failing to meet grain procurement targets. </p>
<p>During the Russian Civil War, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/650938">Leon Trotsky also insisted on the imprisonment</a> of the families of former tsarist officers serving in the Red Army to ensure their loyalty. While the Cheka (later the KGB) used hostage-taking ruthlessly during the <a href="https://time.com/5386789/red-terror-soviet-history/">Red Terror</a> – a period of political repression and mass killings, that began in 1918. This was terror as a form of propaganda, with the justification that the regime was in a struggle for survival.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dispatches-from-red-square-reporting-russias-revolutions-then-and-now-63370">Dispatches from Red Square: reporting Russia's revolutions then and now</a>
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<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/timelines/z8nbcdm">Joseph Stalin also deployed similar methods</a>. In the 1930s the family of any “enemy” became a legitimate target. A decree of June 1935 established that spouses and children of people who fled abroad were liable to five-year terms of exile – whether or not they knew anything about it. </p>
<p>A couple of years later, in the <a href="https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/nkvd-mass-secret-operation-n-00447-august-1937-november-1938">infamous Order 00447 of July 1937</a> – which set out numbers for people to be killed or incarcerated – one of the targeted groups was families whose members were “capable of anti-Soviet actions”. The phrasing was conveniently elastic. In the <a href="https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/modern-world-history-1918-to-1980/russia-1900-to-1939/the-show-trials-in-the-ussr/">show trials of the late 1930s</a>, pressure was put on defendants to toe the line in exchange for lenient treatment of their relatives. </p>
<h2>Heavy-handed tactics</h2>
<p>Stalin’s death in 1953 <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-stalins-great-terror-can-tell-us-about-russia-today-56842">led to a decline in terror</a>, but authoritarian practices did not disappear. The KGB under <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yury-Andropov">Yuri Andropov</a> – a figure much admired by Vladimir Putin – was adept at devising subtle forms of coercion, sometimes termed “prophylactic methods”. </p>
<p>Applying pressure on people through their families and friends continued to be a trusted method of intimidation. The editors of the human rights journal, <a href="https://chronicle-of-current-events.com/">Chronicle of Current Events</a>, founded in 1968, were once told that whenever any edition of the magazine appeared, <a href="http://www.interpretermag.com/soviet-era-dissident-chronicle-of-current-events-resumes-publication-on-the-internet/">there would be arrests</a> of people not directly involved. And that they could improve the conditions of political prisoners if they moderated their activities. </p>
<p>The intention in this was to load onto dissidents a sense of guilt for actions that the regime was itself responsible for. The physicist and dissident, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/28/archives/soviet-dissident-arrested-in-inquiry-on-secret-journal-special-to.html">Sergei Kovalev</a> – who was for a time chairman of the President’s Human Rights Commission in the 1990s – once observed that hostage-taking was the “foundation” of the Soviet system. But he insisted that responsibility for repressions lay “not with us, but with the regime”. His colleague, <a href="http://www.rightsinrussia.info/archive/voices-from-the-past/9">Tatiana Velikanova</a> – who helped produce the Chronicle of Current Events – fiercely rejected all forms of hostage-taking, declaring herself determined not to engage in what she called “these compromises and collusions”. </p>
<p>Hostage-taking also had pre-revolutionary roots, in the practice of what in Russian is called krugovaia poruka. This phrase, which translates as “circular guarantee”, means something like “collective responsibility”. If for example someone failed to pay their taxes, other families were required to step in. This encouraged local institutions to take a strict line against dissent to guard against the possibility of everyone’s lives suffering for the behaviour of one person. </p>
<h2>A powerful message?</h2>
<p>But of course, hostage-taking is <a href="https://theconversation.com/putins-patriotism-and-paranoia-will-be-russias-undoing-34683">not a technique exclusive to Russia</a>. Many countries have used it either in a military or a psychological sense. Indeed, if <a href="https://theconversation.com/zero-civilian-casualties-why-the-face-of-western-war-gives-us-a-false-idea-of-conflict-93090">threats to civilians in war</a> are counted as a kind of “hostage-taking”, then it would be difficult to find any powerful country that has not deployed these means at some point.</p>
<p>But such methods <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=russia+democracy&sort=relevancy&language=en&date=all&date_from=&date_to=">will not create an enduring stability</a>. Indeed, the tactics of hostage-taking can only have unhappy consequences for a country – as a climate of fear stifles creativity and destroys the possibility of <a href="https://theconversation.com/little-prospect-of-regime-change-in-russia-short-of-a-popular-uprising-and-thats-unlikely-82465">healthy national development</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121670/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philip Boobbyer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Targeting the families of protestors is highly effective as a means of control.Philip Boobbyer, Reader in History, University of KentLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1207902019-07-31T13:22:34Z2019-07-31T13:22:34ZKwame Nkrumah: why, every now and then, his legacy is questioned<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286044/original/file-20190729-43109-1rl1h6i.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Statue of Kwame Nkrumah at his mausoleum in Accra</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Flickr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Kwame Nkrumah led Ghana to <a href="https://www.uew.edu.gh/lib-fetured/ghana-autobiography-kwame-nkrumah">independence</a> in 1957 – the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve this feat. He’s still remembered for his unrepentant anti-colonial stance and strident <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313574089_Kwame_Nkrumah_and_the_panafrican_vision_Between_acceptance_and_rebuttal">Pan-Africanism</a>. Above all, he is regarded as one of Africa’s ablest statesmen of the 20th century.</p>
<p>Nkrumah has been ranked among leaders such as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vladimir-Lenin">Vladimir Lenin</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mahatma-Gandhi">Mahatma Gandhi</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mao-Zedong">Mao Tse-Tsung</a>. All contributed significantly in shaping the course of history during the last five decades of the 20th century.</p>
<p>Nkrumah’s rise in the anti-colonial movement in Ghana, then called the Gold Coast, began in the late 1940s. Before then he had spent almost <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kwame-Nkrumah">15 years</a> in the US and the UK studying. </p>
<p>By the mid-1940s <a href="https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/58461/lande_1.pdf">political activism</a> in the Gold Coast was taking a radical turn. Political agitation had compelled the <a href="https://www.virtualkollage.com/2016/12/the-shortcomings-of-1946-burns-constitution-of-the-gold-coast.html">colonial administration</a> to introduce constitutional reforms that gave Africans a majority of seats on the colonial Legislative Council. </p>
<p>By 1947 there were only two political organisations: the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41971238?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">Gold Coast People’s League</a> and the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41971238?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">Gold Coast National Party</a>. Both were ineffectual, weighed down by ethnocentric divisions between the Akan and the Ga, and dominated by lawyers and wealthy merchants. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, on 4 August 1947 the two parties agreed to form one organisation they called the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-Gold-Coast-Convention">United Gold Coast Convention</a>. The hope was that they would lead the struggle for independence by providing a united front that appealed to all Ghanaians. </p>
<p>But the leaders of the new party were all successful professionals and business people who had little time to run the party. So nobody objected when a leading member <a href="https://obedbekoe.wordpress.com/2015/10/22/biography-of-dr-ebenezer-ako-adjei/">Ako Adjei</a> suggested that Nkrumah, who was living in London at the time, should be invited to become the party’s full-time secretary.</p>
<p>This invitation, according to one commentator “proved a tragic error” – for Nkrumah would become their most dreaded rival and <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/life-and-times-of-dr-jb-danquah/oclc/2157673">ideological opponent</a>. </p>
<h2>Intellectual influences and contested legacy</h2>
<p>Nkrumah was an avowed <a href="http://africaworldpressbooks.com/the-life-and-work-of-kwame-nkrumah-edited-by-kwame-arhin/">Marxist-socialist</a>. He was exposed to several intellectual influences that shaped and conditioned his political ideas. During his stay in the US he immersed himself in the reading of the political theories of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Marcus Garvey. These theories, especially <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2934320?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">Marxism-Leninism</a>, profoundly affected his intellectual and ideological dispositions. Garvey’s influence, suggests, <a href="http://africaworldpressbooks.com/the-life-and-work-of-kwame-nkrumah-edited-by-kwame-arhin/">Dr Kojo Afari Gyan</a>, an academic and a former electoral commissioner of Ghana, was largely inspirational.</p>
<p>Like many great men, Nkrumah’s legacy is not uncontested. His detractors accuse him of progressively running down Ghana’s economic gains at independence, gagging the press, curtailing the freedom of speech and being an authoritarian. </p>
<p>His detractors still deeply resent the fact that he imposed a one party state and passed laws that landed his opponents in jail.</p>
<p>But if there are any merits in these criticisms – and perhaps there are – we should agree with <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/kwame-nkrumah-the-anatomy-of-an-african-dictatorship/oclc/92143">Dr Peter Omari</a>, a former executive director of the <a href="https://uia.org/s/or/en/1100056119">African Centre for Applied Research and Training in Social Development</a>, that Ghanaians must take some of the blame for allowing one man so much scope that they could virtually be enslaved through fear and cowardice. </p>
<p>Omari also notes that, however <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/kwame-nkrumah-the-anatomy-of-an-african-dictatorship/oclc/92143">Ghanaians</a> might judge Nkrumah, they ought not to forget that he was a true reflection of the Ghanaian personality – good and bad.</p>
<p>All these controversies have led, every now and again, to his legacies being questioned and debated. </p>
<h2>Stewardship</h2>
<p>Nkrumah arrived in the Gold Coast on 14 November 1947. He immediately assumed his secretarial duties, offering to work <a href="https://www.scribd.com/book/245136029/Kwame-Nkrumah-Vision-and-Tragedy">without pay</a> after he realised that the party had no funds to pay his monthly salary. Eventually, the leadership prevailed on him to accept a fraction of the salary. </p>
<p>Nkrumah immediately drew up a detailed, radical plan which he presented to the leadership of the United Gold Coast Convention. He suggested that the party set up branches in every corner of the country and embarks on demonstrations, <a href="https://www.graphic.com.gh/features/opinion/reasons-why-the-ugcc-failed.html">strikes</a> and boycotts to press for independence. </p>
<p>His approach appealed to some of the leaders. Others were apprehensive. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, Nkrumah set his plan in motion. New branches were set up and resources mobilised to the party. He paid particular attention to young people who were disappointed with the status quo and were looking for an avenue to vent their frustration at their chiefs and the colonial administration. </p>
<p>But before the close of 1948, cracks had developed in the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24393408?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">relationship </a> between Nkrumah and the party leadership. He was accused of being complicit in <a href="https://www.scribd.com/book/245136029/Kwame-Nkrumah-Vision-and-Tragedy">riots</a> that resulted in the detention of the leaders, Nkrumah himself included.</p>
<p>From this point their mistrust of Nkrumah heightened. For his part, Nkrumah too became estranged from the views of the leadership. </p>
<h2>Breaking ranks</h2>
<p>The difference in aim, philosophy and political strategy eventually compelled Nkrumah to break ranks and form the <a href="https://www.graphic.com.gh/features/opinion/reasons-why-the-ugcc-failed.html">Convention People’s Party</a> in 1949. By this time, he had toured almost every part of the country. And because of his affability, oratory skills and his identification with the struggles of ordinary people, he’d endeared himself to the youth who became his main supporters. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.scribd.com/book/245136029/Kwame-Nkrumah-Vision-and-Tragedy">David Rooney</a>, the historian and author, has observed, Nkrumah roused the youth with his</p>
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<p>fiery oratory, slept on their verandas…shared their hardships …captivated them with his charm, enthusiasm and passion. He inflamed the people with demands for self-government now. </p>
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<p>This was what the leadership of the United Gold Coast Convention lacked. They were unable to relate to ordinary people and their views on political change were, in Rooney’s words, </p>
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<p>dispensed with <a href="https://www.scribd.com/book/245136029/Kwame-Nkrumah-Vision-and-Tragedy">condescension</a> from an aloof aristocratic pinnacle.</p>
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<p>The formation of the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24393408?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">Convention People’s Party</a> leapfrogged Nkrumah into the leadership of the independence struggle and changed the course of Ghana’s history. The party injected a new sense of urgency into the fight for independence. Not even Nkrumah’s association with communism and the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24393408?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">castigation</a> of his followers as hooligans could stop the party’s progress and Nkrumah’s march towards political independence. </p>
<p>Nkrumah pulled the political rug from under the feet of the leadership of the United Gold Coast Convention and fired up the passion and enthusiasm of the country’s young people in the fight for <a href="https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/58461/lande_1.pdf">independence</a>. </p>
<p>From then on he was viewed as the father of the independence movement, and after independence the father of modern Ghana.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/120790/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Akwasi Kwarteng Amoako-Gyampah does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Like many great men, the legacy of Ghana’s independence hero is not uncontested.Akwasi Kwarteng Amoako-Gyampah, Lecturer of History, Akenten Appiah-Menka University of Skills Training and Entrepreneurial Development Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1180342019-07-26T13:03:40Z2019-07-26T13:03:40ZA Confederate statue graveyard could help bury the Old South<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/285786/original/file-20190726-43136-xpbabp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A damaged Confederate statue lies on a pallet in a warehouse in Durham, N.C. on Tuesday, Aug. 15, 2017, after protesters yanked it off its pedestal in front of a government building. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Confederate-Monument-Protest-Statue-Toppled/15d7476fae6e4d1d887d525278683db8/81/0">AP Photo/Allen Breed</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>An estimated <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy">114 Confederate symbols</a> have been removed from public view since 2015. In many cases, these cast-iron Robert E. Lees and Jefferson Davises were <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/08/05/633952187/where-do-confederate-monuments-go-after-they-come-down">sent to storage</a>.</p>
<p>If the aim of statue removal is to build a more racially just South, then, as many analysts have <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-taking-down-confederate-memorials-is-only-a-first-step-78020">pointed out</a>, putting these monuments in storage is a lost opportunity. Simply unseating Confederate statues from highly visible public spaces is just the first step in a much longer process of <a href="http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/5597/">understanding, grieving and mending the wounds</a> of America’s violent past. Merely hiding away the monuments does not necessarily change <a href="https://theconversation.com/tearing-down-confederate-statues-leaves-structural-racism-intact-101951">the structural racism that birthed them</a>. </p>
<p>Studies show that the environment in which statues are displayed <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464936042000252769?journalCode=rscg20">shapes how people understand their meaning</a>. In that sense, relocating monuments, rather than eliminating them, can help people put this painful history into context. </p>
<p>For example, monuments to Confederate war heroes first appeared in cemeteries <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/585508">immediately following</a> the Civil War. That likely evoked in visitors a direct and private honoring and grieving for the dead. </p>
<p>By the early 1900s, hundreds of Confederate statues dotted courthouse lawns and town squares across the South. This prominent, centrally located setting on government property sent an <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues-were-built-to-further-a-white-supremacist-future">intentionally different message</a>: that local officials endorsed the prevailing white social order.</p>
<p>So what should we do with rejected Confederate monuments? We have a modest proposal: a Confederate statue graveyard.</p>
<h2>Lessons from the Soviet past</h2>
<p>Our <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780815354260">research as cultural geographers</a> recognizes that Confederate monument controversies – while typically considered regional or national issues – are in fact part of <a href="https://theconversation.com/brazils-long-strange-love-affair-with-the-confederacy-ignites-racial-tension-115548">global struggles</a> to recognize and heal from the wounds of racism, white supremacy and anti-democratic regimes.</p>
<p>The idea of a Confederate monument graveyard is modeled after ways that the former communist bloc nations of <a href="http://www.mementopark.hu/">Hungary</a>, <a href="http://grutoparkas.lt/en_US/">Lithuania</a> and <a href="https://www.ajaloomuuseum.ee/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/noukogude-aegsete-monumentide-valinaitus">Estonia</a> have dealt with statues of Soviet heroes like <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/russia/history-of-the-soviet-union">Joseph Stalin</a> and Vladimir Lenin.</p>
<p>Under communist Soviet rule between 1945 and 1991, Eastern European countries suffered <a href="https://www.history.com/news/ukrainian-famine-stalin">mass starvation</a>, land theft, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/4477/iron-curtain-by-anne-applebaum/9781400095933/">military rule and rigid censorship</a>. An estimated <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Great-Terror-Reassessment-Robert-Conquest/dp/0195317009">15 million</a> people in the Soviet bloc died during this totalitarian reign.</p>
<p>Despite these horrors, many countries have opted not to destroy or hide their Soviet-era monuments, but they haven’t left them to rule over city hall or public plazas, either. </p>
<p>Rather, governments in Eastern Europe have altered the meaning of these politically charged Soviet statues by relocating them. Dozens of Soviet statues across Hungary, Lithuania and Estonia have been pulled from their pedestals and placed in open-air parks, where interested visitors can reflect on their new significance.</p>
<p>The idea behind relocating monuments is to dethrone dominant historical narratives that, in their traditional places of power, are tacitly endorsed.</p>
<h2>A statue graveyard</h2>
<p>The Eastern European effort to create a new <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-008-9201-5">memorial landscape</a> has been met with mixed public reaction. </p>
<p>In Hungary, some see it as <a href="https://urbanlabsce.eu/budapests-memento-park-an-example-for-america/">a step in the right direction</a>. But, in Lithuania, people have expressed that re-erecting the statues of known dictators is in “<a href="https://www.economist.com/prospero/2017/08/30/how-lithuania-dealt-with-its-soviet-statues">poor taste</a>” – an affront to those who suffered under totalitarianism. </p>
<p>The relocation of Soviet statues in Estonia has taken an even more interesting turn. </p>
<p>For the past decade, the <a href="https://www.ajaloomuuseum.ee">Estonian History Museum</a> has been collecting former Soviet monuments with the intention of <a href="https://www.ajaloomuuseum.ee/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/noukogude-aegsete-monumentide-valinaitus">making an outdoor exhibition</a> out of them. For years it kept a decapitated Lenin and a noseless Stalin, among other degraded Soviet relics, <a href="https://www.timetravelturtle.com/soviet-statue-graveyard-tallinn-estonia/">in a field next to the museum</a>. </p>
<p>The statues weathered Eastern European winters and languished in a defunct, toppled state. Weeds grew over them. The elements took their toll. </p>
<p>Travel writer <a href="https://www.timetravelturtle.com/soviet-statue-graveyard-tallinn-estonia/">Michael Turtle</a>, who visited the museum in 2015, called the field a “statue graveyard.”</p>
<p>“Everything here seems to fit into some kind of purgatorial limbo,” he wrote on his blog. “The statues are not respected enough to be displayed as history but are culturally significant enough to not just be destroyed.” </p>
<p>To this we would add that these old statues, when repurposed thoughtfully and intentionally, have the potential to mend old wounds.</p>
<h2>Confederate monument graveyard</h2>
<p>What if the United States created its own graveyard for the distasteful relics of its own racist past? </p>
<p>We envision a cemetery for the American South where removed Confederate statues would be displayed, perhaps, in a felled position – a visual condemnation of the white supremacy they fought to uphold. Already crumpled monuments, like the statue to “The Boys Who Wore Grey” that was <a href="https://www.apnews.com/dace53761754407a8d48c193d52d522e">forcefully removed from downtown Durham, North Carolina</a>, might be placed in the Confederate statue graveyard in their <a href="https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article224038660.html">defunct state</a>. </p>
<p>One art critic has even <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2019/02/15/getty-monument/#624ec6e452c5">suggested</a> that old monuments be physically buried under tombstones with epitaphs written by the descendants of those they enslaved. </p>
<p>We are not the first to suggest relocating Confederate statues.</p>
<p>Democratic presidential candidate <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elizabeth-warren-president-confederate-monuments-museum-a8830841.html">Elizabeth Warren</a>, for example, has proposed that toppled Confederate statues be housed in a <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-museum-of-confederate-statues-could-help-end-the-american-civil-war-82934">history museum</a> – “where they belong.” </p>
<p>That has proven <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/are-museums-right-home-confederate-monuments-180968969/">challenging for curators</a>. </p>
<p>When The University of Texas moved a statue of the Confederate President Jefferson Davis from its pedestal on campus to a campus museum, some <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Happened-When-One/244481">students criticized</a> the ensuing exhibit’s “lack of focus on racism and slavery.” One suggested that the statue’s new setting inadvertently glorified Davis, given the inherent value conferred on objects in museums. </p>
<p>And since statues in museums are typically exhibited in their original, upright position, Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee still tower over visitors – maintaining an imposing sense of authority.</p>
<p>We believe felled and crumpled monuments, in contrast, would create a somber commemorative atmosphere that encourages visitors to grieve – without revering – their legacy. A carefully-planned and aesthetically sensitive Confederate monument graveyard could openly and purposefully undermine the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2747/0272-3638.23.1.31">power these monuments once held</a>, acknowledging, dissecting and ultimately rejecting the Confederacy’s roots in slavery.</p>
<p>Planning a Confederate monument graveyard will prompt many questions. Where should it be located? Will there be one central Confederate monument graveyard or many? Who will design and plan the graveyard?</p>
<p>Answering these questions would not just be part of a conversation about steel and stone but about the serious pursuit of peace, justice and racial healing in the nation — and about putting the Old South to rest. </p>
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<p><a href="http://www.aag.org">Jordan Brasher is a member of the American Association of Geographers</a></p>
<footer>The association is a funding partner of The Conversation US.</footer>
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<p><a href="http://www.aag.org">Derek H. Alderman is a member of the American Association of Geographers</a></p>
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</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/118034/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jordan Brasher is a member of the American Association of Geographers.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Derek H. Alderman is a member of the American Association of Geographers</span></em></p>Where do old Confederate statues go when they die? The former Soviet bloc countries could teach the US something about dealing with monuments from a painful past.Jordan Brasher, Doctoral Candidate in Geography, University of TennesseeDerek H. Alderman, Professor of Geography, University of TennesseeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1021552018-09-13T10:47:56Z2018-09-13T10:47:56ZLessons from White House disinformation a century ago: ‘It’s dangerous to believe your own propaganda’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235446/original/file-20180907-90578-r5riyx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1917%2C939&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bolshevik leaders Nikolai Lenin and Leon Trotsky</span> </figcaption></figure><p>One hundred years ago, the U.S. government published <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015025039804;view=1up;seq=5">documents</a> that fueled the mounting Red Scare, helped justify the American military invasion of Russia and poisoned American-Russian relations for years to come.</p>
<p>Newspapers across the United States began to publish the <a href="https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030431/1918-09-15/ed-1/seq-1/#date1=09%2F15%2F1918&index=10&date2=09%2F15%2F1918&searchType=advanced&language=&sequence=0&words=Bolshevik&proxdistance=5&state=&rows=20&ortext=Bolshevik+&proxtext=&phrasetext=&andtext=&dateFilterType=range&page=1">fake papers</a> on Sept. 15, 1918. </p>
<p>Unbeknownst to the government, the documents were forgeries. They were created by Russian political interests whose party affiliation remains obscure, but whose objectives were clear. The documents were part of a Russian disinformation campaign – a common propaganda tactic during World War I – to discredit the Bolsheviks, who had just seized power in Russia after leading a Marxist revolution. </p>
<p>The publication of the documents was a classic case of the American government accepting bogus information because it confirmed its preconceptions and justified actions it wished to take. </p>
<p>We are scholars who work at the intersection of media and politics. We believe the incident illustrates the base power of disinformation lies not in technology, which many blame for the rise of counterfeit information today, but in weakness in human nature. The desire to confirm their beliefs about the Bolsheviks led top U.S. leaders to ignore credible and persistent warnings of the documents’ inaccuracy and aggressively assert government authority to discredit those few who questioned them. </p>
<h2>The Sisson documents</h2>
<p>By 1918, World War I had raged on for nearly four years, and the Russians, who fought on the side of the U.S. and others against Germany, had experienced two recent revolutions. </p>
<p>The first revolution ousted the Czarist regime. The second, led by Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, ousted the provisional government. </p>
<p>Despite the chaos, the U.S. and Allies desperately needed Russia to continue fighting. But the Bolsheviks were intent on taking an exhausted Russian military out of the war and promised to begin peace talks with Germany once in power.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/committee-public-information">The Committee on Public Information</a>, which operated as an American propaganda ministry during the war, sent Edgar Sisson, a former muckraking journalist, to Petrograd in November 1917, before the Bolsheviks seized power. He was to use publicity tools, which included press releases, films and speeches, to urge Russians to remain in the war. </p>
<p>By the time he arrived, the Bolsheviks were in power. A month later, they began peace negotiations with Germany. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235449/original/file-20180907-90565-snrg8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President Woodrow Wilson wanted to build a case against the Bolsheviks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library of Congress</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The peace talks played into widespread rumors in Russia and elsewhere that Lenin and Trotsky were paid German agents. Before its ouster, the Russian provisional government tried to use the rumors to discredit the Bolsheviks and hasten their demise. But the rumors had never been proven.</p>
<p>This all seemed to change, however, in February 1918.</p>
<p>Raymond Robins, head of the American Red Cross Commission in Russia, gave Sisson confidential documents that implied Germans financed and directed the Bolsheviks. Sisson deemed the documents valid despite Robins’ doubts.</p>
<p>President Woodrow Wilson and the State Department encouraged Sisson to collect evidence that Lenin and his comrades were German pawns, which would support the administration’s anti-Bolshevik policies. </p>
<p>By the time he left Russia in March, Sisson had collected <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/One_hundred_red_days.html?id=woDLMR9lJg0C">68 documents</a>, mostly with the help of a shadowy figure, Evgeni Petrovich Semenov. Semenov, a former secret service agent in the provisional government, told Sisson he lifted the papers from Bolshevik headquarters. </p>
<h2>Documents make news in the US</h2>
<p><a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1918/09/15/112640794.pdf">American press coverage</a> of Sisson’s story was sensational. Most stories appeared on the front page and were published in installments during the week. They accepted the government view of Bolshevik treachery. </p>
<p>The government’s timing of the release was politically strategic. Wilson had by this time agreed to an Allied military intervention in Russia for the purpose of protecting stockpiles of Allied war material and ensuring the safe travel of anti-German forces through Siberia to the Eastern Front. </p>
<p>In August and September, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=B1n_ydotyMsC&dq=when+the+united+states+invaded+russia">U.S. troops were arriving in Russia</a>. This move constituted a threat to the Bolshevik government and violated Wilson’s promise of self-determination. </p>
<p>But the fake documents legitimized intervention by suggesting that the Bolshevik stooges were not representative of the Russian people. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235450/original/file-20180907-90574-1ga4mff.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The New York Times, Sept. 15, 1918.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">New York Times archive</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Compliant journalists</h2>
<p>The documents presented a problem that often arises in national security reporting. </p>
<p>With little time or expertise to properly determine an account’s authenticity, journalists often rely solely on the government’s word. When a majority of the public is mentally prepared to accept the government’s account because it conforms to their preconceptions, the government can easily beat back doubts by calling doubters disloyal and un-American. </p>
<p>In a <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=HbE3AQAAIAAJ&pg=PA1064&dq=John+Reed,+%E2%80%9COn+Intervention,%E2%80%9D&hl=en&sa=X#v=onepage&q=John%20Reed%2C%20%E2%80%9COn%20Intervention%2C%E2%80%9D&f=false">reasoned analysis</a> of the documents published in a pamphlet by the Liberator, left-wing journalist John Reed showed they were probably forgeries and said they falsely justified military intervention in Russia. </p>
<p>George Creel, the head of the Committee on Public Information, sought to discredit Reed by labeling him the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/063.html">“center of the Bolsheviki movement in this country</a>.”</p>
<p>Mostly, though, Creel evoked government authority as the chief basis for accepting the validity of the documents when they were questioned. This was the case with the <a href="https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1918-09-22/ed-1/seq-25/#date1=09%2F22%2F1918&index=0&date2=09%2F22%2F1918&searchType=advanced&language=&sequence=0&lccn=sn83030213&lccn=sn83030212&lccn=sn83030214&words=Evening+Post&proxdistance=5&rows=20&ortext=&proxtext=&phrasetext=%22EVENING+POST%22&andtext=&dateFilterType=range&page=1">lone establishment newspaper</a> that challenged the authenticity of the documents, the New York Evening Post. </p>
<p>In letters found at the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/063.html">National Archives</a>, Creel said the Post gave “aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States.” He expressed surprise that the New York Evening Post refused to accept evidence put forth by the government. And he told the paper’s owner that his editor had acted as an advocate of Lenin and Trotsky. He said the paper behaved as if it, too, had taken German money.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235451/original/file-20180907-90553-1y9mq41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Edgar Sisson of the Committee on Public Information.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The New York Evening Post, he complained bitterly, was demanding “the Government should take the witness stand.”</p>
<p>The credulous acceptance of the documents by <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02684527.2017.1294643">the press</a> can be traced to the effectiveness of extensive wartime propaganda by the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/happy-100th-birthday-information-warfare/2014/08/01/3786e262-1732-11e4-85b6-c1451e622637_story.html">Committee on Public Information</a>, which we have been studying for the past several years. One of the committee’s chief propaganda messages was widespread German spying and treachery in the United States and abroad. </p>
<p>It was an easy step, when nudged by the government, to believe the Germans enlisted godless Bolsheviks in their cause. </p>
<p>As the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=PbsmtAEACAAJ&dq=literary+digest+september+1918&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiU--Lji5vdAhVGC6wKHSL_D-MQ6AEIKTAA">Literary Digest</a> magazine observed, editors found “great satisfaction in adding legal proof to their moral certainty, and when the Government guarantees the authenticity of the documents proving that Lenin and Trotzky are German agents, it gives them an opportunity to speak their minds without hesitation and without reserve.” </p>
<p>Congress, too, was willing to endorse this view. The Democratic majority in the Senate used a <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Brewing_and_Liquor_Interests_and_German.html?id=JnZIAQAAIAAJ">special subcommittee</a> to emphasize Bolshevik-German ties. They found witnesses who testified the Bolsheviki movement was a branch of the German government. </p>
<h2>Power in plausibility</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/237884">George Kennan</a> and <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/151612?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">other historians</a> have concluded the Sisson documents are “unquestionable forgeries,” but this does not mean they were devoid of truth. </p>
<p>As with all effective disinformation, their power lay in their plausibility. The documents’ authors enhanced their forgeries with facts.
<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=UBnv9I_guMUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Unknown+Lenin&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjG9Ibvk5vdAhUBOKwKHb_CAwMQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=The%20Unknown%20Lenin&f=false">Germans did help the Bolsheviks</a>, funneling millions of Deutsche marks to them during the war. </p>
<p>But, as <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4078682/">one diplomat</a> noted, the Bolsheviks would have accepted money from anyone. More important, the Bolsheviks sought to foment a communist revolution in Germany as soon as they could.</p>
<p>For those who spread disinformation, then, it is often not a matter of being tricked into believing the information they have spread. Creel, Sisson and others recklessly ignored warnings the documents were false. They wanted to believe the conspiracy, so they did. </p>
<p>Today, we call this <a href="https://theconversation.com/confirmation-bias-a-psychological-phenomenon-that-helps-explain-why-pundits-got-it-wrong-68781">confirmation bias</a>. </p>
<p>The United States’ path to war with Iraq in 2003 eerily recalled that element of the Sisson documents. To make the case for an invasion, the George W. Bush administration relied heavily on <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=-kykEEiazfgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Isikoff+and+Corn,+Hubris,+49%5C&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitqvWflJvdAhVGmK0KHfYNDgMQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=Isikoff%20and%20Corn%2C%20Hubris%2C%2049%5C&f=false">Ahmadi Chalabi</a>, an exiled Iraqi politician, and fellow Iraqi dissidents who wanted Saddam Hussein ousted. </p>
<p>Chalabi lined up a parade of Iraq defectors to provide compelling – and inaccurate – stories of Hussein’s terrorist connections and his stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. In addition to selling the invasion to the public, the campaign solidified the administration’s conviction that it was right to do what it wanted to do. </p>
<p>“It’s dangerous,” Chalabi was known to say from time to time, “if you believe your own propaganda.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102155/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Forged documents were used by the US government 100 years ago to justify hostile actions against Russia. All but one US newspaper accepted the government’s propaganda. The lessons for today are stark.John Maxwell Hamilton, Global Scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC and Hopkins P Breazeale Professor, Manship School of Mass Communications, Louisiana State University Meghan Menard McCune, Ph.D. candidate, Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/869762017-11-07T03:26:44Z2017-11-07T03:26:44ZOne American woman’s life in revolutionary Russia<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193477/original/file-20171106-1046-17az93e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Female protesters in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) in 1917 on International Women's Day.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Anna Louise Strong, a journalist from Friend, Nebraska, was thrilled by what she heard about the Russian Revolution in 1917. </p>
<p>Although she is almost wholly unknown today, Strong was a household name in her time. She lived in the Soviet Union for 25 years, and made a career of “roving to revolutions, and writing about them for the American press.” She published dozens of books, novels and poetry. </p>
<p>Strong represents a complicated historical figure some might think is better off forgotten. The collapse of the Soviet Union and, more importantly, the violence and repression practiced under Bolshevik rule suggest Strong and other American women who lived and worked there for months or years were wrong to invest their hopes in the revolution.</p>
<p>Yet, revolutionary Russia, at least in theory, offered what many women yearned for – an equal role in public life, equal pay for equal work, access to birth control and abortion, affordable childcare and romantic partnerships based solely on mutual affection. This at a time when American women could not even vote. As I explore in my book, “<a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo20098421.html">American Girls in Red Russia</a>,” the the experiences and aspirations of women who, like Strong, placed faith in the “Soviet experiment” beg the question: What does it mean to be on the wrong side of history when you deeply believed you were right?</p>
<h2>Called to Russia</h2>
<p>“<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/903224334">I Change Worlds</a>” is the title of Strong’s 1935 autobiography, but it’s not clear that she changed anything.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193476/original/file-20171106-1008-2mhga1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193476/original/file-20171106-1008-2mhga1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193476/original/file-20171106-1008-2mhga1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193476/original/file-20171106-1008-2mhga1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193476/original/file-20171106-1008-2mhga1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193476/original/file-20171106-1008-2mhga1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1115&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193476/original/file-20171106-1008-2mhga1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1115&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193476/original/file-20171106-1008-2mhga1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1115&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Anna Louise Strong.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons/Tim Davenport</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Strong learned about the revolution while living in Seattle. She wrote for the Seattle Daily Call, a labor paper that supported the Bolsheviks. Amid growing income inequality, political repression and violent suppression of demands for improved working conditions, radicals <a href="http://www.lib.washington.edu/specialcollections/collections/exhibits/strikes/images/lab3/image_view_fullscreen">hoped for</a> a revolution in the U.S.</p>
<p>To some, talk of the revolution in Russia was thrilling. <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/903224334">Strong wrote</a>: “We heard of women’s freedom, of the equality of backward races, of children rationed first when supplies were scant; these things strengthened our enthusiasm.” </p>
<p>Strong <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/22/arts/tv-witness-to-revolution-anna-louise-strong.html">has been called</a> a “press agent for some of this century’s least attractive people.” But she never thought of herself as a propagandist. She wanted to tell “a greater story” of what was happening in Russia, using “very simple words,” so that common people in America could relate.</p>
<p>Strong was never a member of the Communist Party. She tried to join, both in the Soviet Union and in the United States, but neither party would have her. Records I examined in the Comintern archives in Moscow point to concerns about her emotional stability; in Moscow Strong was told her application was “premature,” and in the United States she was told she would be more useful outside the party. </p>
<p>On the advice of Lincoln Steffens, a reporter who <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=whg05Z4Nwo0C&pg=PA282&dq=Steffens+%22Marie+Howe%22+1919+%22I+have+seen+the+future+and+it+works.%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwik4PjQ7KrXAhXGabwKHYmbAJMQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=Steffens%20%22Marie%20Howe%22%201919%20%22I%20have%20seen%20the%20future%20and%20it%20works.%22&f=false">famously declared</a> upon his return from Soviet Russia, “I have seen the future and it works,” Strong decided to volunteer with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker relief organization. Strong asked if she could go to Russia. They said no, and sent her instead to Poland.</p>
<p>In Poland, Strong insisted to her supervisor that she had to cross into Russia when news broke of the 1921 famine, the most extensive and damaging <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/herbert-hoover-and-famine-relief-to-soviet-russia-1921-1923/oclc/925306037&referer=brief_results">in modern Russian history</a>, affecting some 25 million people. And she actually helped a lot of people. By the time the Quaker office in Philadelphia found out she was there and told her to leave, she’d come down with typhus and almost died. But she wanted to stay where “a world was being born.”</p>
<p>Later, she was given the opportunity to organize an agricultural commune for famine orphans and thereby play a real role in the Soviet enterprise. Strong raised thousands of dollars to support the <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/children-of-revolution-story-of-john-reed-childrens-colony-of-the-volga/oclc/740892613&referer=brief_results">John Reed colony on the Volga</a>, of which she was nominal “chief.” Strong’s papers at the University of Washington reveal that she eventually figured out that nearly all the money she’d raised was being siphoned off by Russian bureaucrats, who then tried to extort even more money from her. She also started Russia’s first English language newspaper, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moscow_News">the Moscow News</a>. Although it was published continuously until <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-25299116">shut down by Putin</a> in 2014, it was never the witty, independent paper she’d wanted it to be. </p>
<p>Strong was among the hundreds of <a href="http://lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/11-la-events-humanities-research-awards.jpg?x18431">“American girls in red Russia.”</a> They were “chic, smart young women” who came “barging into the Red capital, some lending the boys and girls a hand in building Socialism, others seeking husbands among the lonely American engineers, or romantic young Russians, always ready to pay homage to the glamorous American girl,” as one syndicated news article put it in 1932.</p>
<p>Strong did find love in Russia, or so she thought. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/trotsky_leon.shtml">Leon Trotsky</a>, a Marxist revolutionary and Soviet politician to whom she taught English, was <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/right-in-her-soul-the-life-of-anna-louise-strong/oclc/760672499&referer=brief_results">rumored to have been her lover</a>. She married a Russian Communist, which made her feel almost like a real Russian herself. She <a href="http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1934aug-00415">wrote</a>: “We Russians feel that marriage with us has entered a new stage of development, foreshadowed by some of the friendlier companionships of America, but not widely attainable under capitalism.”</p>
<p>Yet, Strong’s nephew and biographer, whom I interviewed, told me that some people said the party had forced the Russian Communist to marry Strong so that she wouldn’t make any trouble. She was arrested in 1949 in Moscow as a suspected spy and expelled. Back in the United States, she was hounded by the FBI for her Communist ties. Her left-wing former friends shunned her.</p>
<p>Small comfort that Strong was ultimately “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(Soviet)">rehabilitated</a>” or declared in retrospect not guilty by the Soviets. By that time she’d moved to China, where she lived out the rest of her life, embittered, but still believing in the Soviet dream – if not in Stalin himself. <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/stalin-era/oclc/1086505">In 1956</a>, after Khrushchev made public the violence enacted under Stalin, Strong admitted that “no man should be deified as Stalin was.”</p>
<h2>Lessons for today</h2>
<p>If people remember Strong at all today, it is as a Stalinist hack, or the ultimate <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/the-fellow-travelers-a-postscript-to-the-enlightenment/oclc/986948907&referer=brief_results">fellow traveler</a>, a term used for followers of communism who were not members of the Communist Party. The extent of her dedication to the Soviet dream is unusual among the American women who were drawn to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. Most of them were more skeptical, or at least more quickly disillusioned.</p>
<p>But what was typical, and what also makes Strong’s story both tragic and still relevant, was the desire that drew her there: desire for a more meaningful life, for a marriage of equals, for worthwhile and fulfilling work, for a more just system that provided health care, maternity leave, equal pay for equal work, child care, legal and free abortions, and access to culture and art. </p>
<p>The Soviet Union, which had no freedom of speech and lacked soap and toilet paper, offered all of these things. Foreigners like Strong somehow found ways to overlook or explain <a href="http://art-bin.com/art/amosc_preeng.html">show trials</a>, food lines and gulags.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86976/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julia L. Mickenberg received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as a number of travel and research grants for the completion of her book, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (University of Chicago Press, 2017)</span></em></p>How a journalist from Nebraska chased the ‘Soviet dream’ all the way to Russia, only to be expelled on accusations of espionage.Julia L. Mickenberg, Associate Professor of American Studies, The University of Texas at AustinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/861212017-10-25T16:10:34Z2017-10-25T16:10:34ZInterview: grandson of Alexander Kerensky, Russia’s last leader before the Bolshevik revolution<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191403/original/file-20171023-1692-yw64hg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Alexander Kerensky, prime minister of Russia's Provisional Government in 1917.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AKerenskijEnDespacho.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Alexander Kerensky played a prominent role in the Russian Revolution, holding several ministerial positions in the Provisional Government, which was created following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March 1917, only itself to be overthrown by the Bolsheviks in November. Some historians have suggested that Kerensky, who was Russia’s last prime minister before Vladimir Lenin, failed to take the kind of decisive measures that might have helped to enforce the authority of the government.</em></p>
<p><em>I sat down with Stephen Kerensky, Alexander’s grandson, in an interview for The Conversation, which also features on <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthill-18-revisiting-the-russian-revolution-86284">the latest episode of The Anthill podcast</a>. Stephen, who grew up in the UK, only met his grandfather a couple of times as a teenager, before Alexander died in 1970. Although he is not a historian, in recent decades, Stephen has set out to defend his grandfather’s historical legacy, which he believes has been unfairly maligned. This is an extract from our conversation, where Stephen gives his opinion on some of the events of 1917, and shares some insights on his grandfather’s life.</em></p>
<p><strong>Michael Hughes: In most standard textbooks, Alexander Kerensky seems to suddenly appear in 1917 as one of the leading figures in the Provisional Government. What was his background and why was he able to command widespread popularity throughout much of 1917?</strong></p>
<p>Stephen Kerensky: He was a lawyer, graduated in 1905. His father had been Lenin’s school teacher and his grandfather had been a priest who left the priesthood to become a teacher. So between 1905 in 1917 most of his time, a bit less towards the end when he was in the Duma [the Russian parliament], his time was spent all over Russia defending the poor and the oppressed – mainly peasants from the injustices of the Romanov dynasty. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191809/original/file-20171025-25551-pe2qb9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191809/original/file-20171025-25551-pe2qb9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=702&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191809/original/file-20171025-25551-pe2qb9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=702&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191809/original/file-20171025-25551-pe2qb9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=702&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191809/original/file-20171025-25551-pe2qb9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191809/original/file-20171025-25551-pe2qb9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191809/original/file-20171025-25551-pe2qb9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Stephen Kerensky.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the Kerensky family.</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Now this is vitally important for two reasons. Firstly, he discovered in a precise legal way exactly what the faults of the system were. And in a more emotional way he discovered what the people wanted done about it. Not only that, but he also knew how to speak to them. And hence the rather emotional and probably over-emotional style of his some of his speeches.</p>
<p><strong>MH: Kerensky is both praised and damned for his personality in 1917. On the one hand he is the charismatic figure, the man who tours the army, the man who could have mobilised the masses. On the other hand he’s seen as the empty vessel, the talker who could do nothing. Perhaps the man who wants to be Bonaparte and when he becomes prime minister sit in the winter palace and control it. Can you give me some sense of how you view his personality?</strong></p>
<p>SK: Zinaida Gippius, the poet, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alexender-Kerensky-First-Love-Revolution/dp/0231061099">called him</a> “the first love of the revolution”. And he was. There were storms of applause and wild cheering wherever he went in the beginning of the time of the Provisional Government. But he was also formidable. He was a little bit intimidating. He had a very commanding personality … Would you want a vain hysterical dithering nitwit to be your defence lawyer if you were taking on the Tsar’s courts? Would you?</p>
<p>There’s another thing that’s never mentioned. In April of 1916 Kerensky went to Sweden and had a kidney removed. And therefore he was on intravenous morphine all through the revolutionary period. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever tried intravenous morphine but one of the things it does is alter your personality and it does make you more … variable in your moods. And that’s never ever been mentioned by anyone until Richard Abraham and his very good, but colourless <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Alexander_Kerensky.html?id=fOxopOa4ogUC&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y">biography</a>. </p>
<p><strong>MH: There is no doubt in that in the final months of the Provisional Government the Bolsheviks were becoming more popular but at no point were they hugely popular. But I want to go to July 1917 – the so-called July days. This is where some rank-and-file Bolsheviks try to effectively seize power. Lenin is taken by surprise. He’s not in charge … and he sort of tags along with it. It fails. Could Kerensky at that stage have taken a tougher line to snuff out Bolshevism?</strong></p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="1123" data-image="" data-title="Mike Hughes in Conversation with Stephen Kerensky" data-size="14740084" data-source="The Anthill podcast" data-source-url="" data-license="CC BY-ND" data-license-url="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/936/kerensky-segment.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
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Mike Hughes in Conversation with Stephen Kerensky.
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Anthill podcast</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a><span class="download"><span>14.1 MB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/936/kerensky-segment.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
</div></p>
<p>SK: Well this is a cracker because it also applies to the beginning of the revolution. It applies to bringing people like Trotsky and Lenin back out of exile [earlier in 1917]. And [some at the time said]: “Why was this man so stupid? Did he not realise that if he invited these people back there would be trouble?” But the point is you’re either a Tsarist or you’re not. You either imprison people without trial or you don’t. And if they haven’t done anything there’s no reason to put them in prison. On the contrary there is every reason not to do so because to do so is counter-revolutionary and the revolution will roll on past beyond you. And the same is true of the July days.</p>
<p><strong>MH: In August 1917, General Kornilov, who hadn’t been for long commander-in-chief of the Russian army, marched towards Petrograd. That whole affair to this day is surrounded by confusion and uncertainty. We know there were telephone conversations between Kornilov and Kerensky. What I think was going on was that Kornilov was determined to crush the Provisional Government. There have always been rumours that Kerensky actually wanted to bring [Kornilov] in to actually crush the radical left. And the Kornilov revolt failed. There is no doubt that it damaged Kerensky hugely. What do you actually think happened in those few frenzied days of the Kornilov rebellion?</strong></p>
<p>SK: How much demand was there for a counter-revolution against the Provisional Government in Russia in August 1917? Not one jot or iota, not a single one. And the only people who wanted it were the rich and a few senior officers. They had no troops. Kornilov was not going anywhere. And the worst possible thing that could have happened in Russia would have been an attack upon the Petrograd soviet which was [Kornilov’s] other plan – he was going to going to close it down. </p>
<p><strong>MH: One of the tantalising possibilities around the whole Kornilov affair is the role of the British. Now we know a few weeks, possibly a few days before the Kornilov rebellion that the American military attache William Judson wrote in a private letter that he believed something was going to happen but that the Americans would have clean hands: “suspicions could not attach to us”. So it’s very obvious that he had picked up that some allied representatives were playing with the idea of some kind of military counter-revolution. The question is: what was British involvement?</strong></p>
<p>SK: Now at some point, Commander Locker-Lampson of the Royal Navy Air Service, armoured car division which had been in Russia since 1915, was told that if Kornilov invited him or ordered him to his HQ, he was to take his armoured division of 500 men [and support Kornilov]. And he did. Now the only reports I know of this is what’s in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Kerensky_memoirs_Russia_and_history.html?id=tdRoAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">grandfather’s book</a> … [Locker-Lampson] went to Kornilov’s HQ and Kornilov tried to get to St. Petersburg to close down the Soviet and the railwaymen wouldn’t transport his men. So it was a farce.</p>
<p><strong>MH: But the question here is actually finding the information that links [senior figures in the British military establishment] to the Kornilov affair. Charlotte Alston, a very good historian of Russia wrote an <a href="https://www.history.org.uk/student/resource/8936/british-armoured-cars-wwi">article</a> recently on Locker Lampson’s armoured car squadron. She too can’t find the evidence of the actual links. And it is one of those areas that is very murky … I wonder in a sense if it is the Kornilov rebellion, which in some ways is a fairly random act of history, which is absolutely fundamental in changing around your grandfather’s reputation – I would agree unfairly. He has been denigrated from both the left and the right [for it], which is perhaps always the fate of those who are trying to pursue something close to a middle course.</strong></p>
<p>SK: Well I don’t think there’s much chance for a middle course in Russia in 1917. The thing is that they hated him for his revolutionary views. They regarded him as the author of disorder. He was responsible as far as they were concerned for all the chaos in Russia. When he died in a hospital in New York in 1970, the staff there were nurses of Russian origin … And they refused to touch him. An 89-year-old man dying of cancer and shingles … That’s what they did because they held him responsible to starting the revolution. The man responsible for the Russian Revolution was Nicholas Romanov.</p>
<p><strong>MH: You read your grandmother’s memoirs and you read about two or three very difficult years … they finally got out in 1920. Your grandmother and her two sons they’re in the Lubyanka [prison] for a time, the treatment isn’t as harsh as it might be but it’s no picnic. They experience poverty, they experience deprivation, starvation.</strong> </p>
<p>SK: They were in a cell a prison room in the Lubyanka containing about 50 women and every night at about two or three o'clock people would be taken away to be interrogated. And some of them came back and some of them didn’t … And then [my grandmother] narrowly escaped. And then she was in the Blitz in London and wouldn’t go down the shelters, was in a top floor flat and the roof was blown off twice and then she came to us and she was. … I can’t, I can’t begin to describe her. There would be days when she wouldn’t speak. There would be days when she would say “<em>Bozhe moi, bozhe moi</em>” – oh my God, oh my God. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191632/original/file-20171024-30561-1xfexke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191632/original/file-20171024-30561-1xfexke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191632/original/file-20171024-30561-1xfexke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191632/original/file-20171024-30561-1xfexke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191632/original/file-20171024-30561-1xfexke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=559&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191632/original/file-20171024-30561-1xfexke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=559&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191632/original/file-20171024-30561-1xfexke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=559&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Olga Kerensky in 1916 with sons Oleg (left) and Gleb (right).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of The Kerensky family.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>MH: What happened to your grandfather after 1917?</strong></p>
<p>SK: He went to Paris … it’s only in Britain that Kerensky is treated with utter contempt. They’re very fond of him actually in France and Italy and Germany and Spain and and also in America where he was put up, this Russian revolutionary, was put up in a New York brownstone near Central Park by a Republican senator and his wife … [Kerensky worked for periods of time at Stanford University on the papers of the Provisional Government]. He had to get a job as a library assistant to pay his way. That’s how well off he was. That’s how many millions he had salted away in Swiss bank accounts that he’s been accused of.</p>
<p><strong>MH: One of the things that strikes me about his writings on the Russian Revolution is of course, they’re informed by a particular perspective, but these are not crude hatchet jobs or kind of crude defenders of his position. They’re actually useful sources and they’re well written. Do you think he became a kind of, almost a dispassionate historian?</strong> </p>
<p>SK: When everyone is lying about you, the last thing you do is try break it with lies. Not only was he not dishonest. But he was self-effacing. He never said anything about his kidney. He never said anything about his wife and children. He never said anything about the rest of his family … He was totally, totally unconcerned by all the abuse he gets. And I think there’s a bit in Julius Caesar where Brutus says: “Your threats passed me by as the idle wind and I respect them not.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86121/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Hughes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Stephen Kerensky on why he thinks his grandfather’s legacy has been so maligned.Michael Hughes, Professor of Modern (Russian) History, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/858652017-10-23T15:52:38Z2017-10-23T15:52:38ZRosa Luxemburg: freedom only for the members of one party isn’t freedom at all<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191382/original/file-20171023-1689-1h6ml32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Red carnations are laid on the Berlin tomb of German communist leader Rosa Luxemburg during a ceremony to commemorate her death.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In October 1918, a year after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, a sailors’ mutiny in Germany triggered a revolutionary upsurge. Polish-born German philosopher <a href="http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSluxemburg.htm">Rosa Luxemburg</a> and her comrade <a href="http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/modern-world-history-1918-to-1980/weimar-germany/karl-liebknecht/">Karl Liebknecht</a> emerged as key leaders in the unfolding revolution. </p>
<p>On 15 January 1919, at around nine in the evening, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/periodicals/communist_review/1924/09/last_hours.htm">arrested</a> by the army in Berlin. They were taken to the Eden Hotel where they were interrogated and tortured. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191384/original/file-20171023-1717-5ndo6e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191384/original/file-20171023-1717-5ndo6e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191384/original/file-20171023-1717-5ndo6e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191384/original/file-20171023-1717-5ndo6e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191384/original/file-20171023-1717-5ndo6e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191384/original/file-20171023-1717-5ndo6e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191384/original/file-20171023-1717-5ndo6e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A German postal stamp from 1974 commemorating Rosa Luxemburg.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Luxemburg was then taken outside the hotel where she was beaten to death with a rifle butt. Her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal. Liebknecht was shot dead.</p>
<p>In death Luxemburg and Liebknecht became martyrs to the communist cause. Even the Soviet Union’s first head, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/lenin_vladimir.shtml">Vladimir Lenin</a>, with whom Luxemburg had a conflicted relationship, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/feb/x01.htm">wrote</a> that,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>she was — and remains for us — an eagle. And not only will communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete work… will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of communists all over the world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lenin’s comments were prescient. </p>
<p>Here in 2017, Luxemburg is still widely regarded as a major theorist of imperialism, capitalism, democracy and political action.</p>
<h2>Electrifying intelligence</h2>
<p>Luxemburg was born in Zamość, Poland, on 5 March 1871 to a lower middle-class Jewish family. At the age of five she became very ill and suffered damage to her hip that left her with a permanent limp and lifelong pain. But even as a child she had what’s been <a href="https://rosaluxemburgblog.wordpress.com/2012/07/13/history-and-heartbreak/">described</a> by memoirist, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150530170852/http://english.uiowa.edu/people/vivian-gornick">Vivian Gornick</a>, as an “electrifying intelligence”.</p>
<p>At the age of 15 she joined the Polish Proletariat Party, in which she developed a lifelong political connection to radical unions and workers. It was during this period that she began engaging in a range of political activities, including organising a general strike. These actions brought Luxemburg to the attention of the authorities. In 1887, when she had completed her secondary education, she fled to Switzerland to escape arrest. </p>
<p>She enrolled at the University of Zurich. She wanted, as one writer <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/history-and-heartbreak-letters-rosa-luxemburg/">put it</a>, everything – “books and music, sex and art, evening walks and the revolution”. Ten years later she graduated with a doctorate in law, making her one of very few women with a PhD at the time.</p>
<p>Luxemburg then returned to serious political work. Her anti-capitalist and internationalist stance immediately put her at odds with the Polish Socialist Party. For Luxemburg, true independence did not just mean the independence of Poland, but a truly internationalist, anti-capitalist revolution. She would hold to radical internationalism till the end of her life.</p>
<p>In 1898 Luxemburg moved to Berlin to be, she believed, at the heart of the communist struggle. Unsurprisingly Germany didn’t allow the young revolutionary into the country. She remedied this via an unconsummated marriage of convenience.</p>
<p>She immediately positioned herself on the radical left of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. She came to loathe the reformist parliamentary route taken by German socialists, leading her, years later, to describe the party as “nothing but a stinking corpse”.</p>
<p>During this period of her life Luxemburg worked at a frantic pace, writing, teaching and speaking to build the international movement of the workers across Europe. From the outset, she was radically anti-imperialist. In 1899 she <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=ZeJWCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA381&lpg=PA381&dq=Luxemburg+wrote+the+dismemberment+of+Asia+and+Africa+is+the+final+limit+beyond+which+European+politics+no+longer+has+room+to+unfold.&source=bl&ots=cWZjHX0HeP&sig=Gl-cJCUpnFXfiQa32ILJov40Iis&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiL2f7bwIbXAhWlBsAKHY20BhoQ6AEIJDAA#v=onepage&q=Luxemburg%20wrote%20the%20dismemberment%20of%20Asia%20and%20Africa%20is%20the%20final%20limit%20beyond%20which%20European%20politics%20no%20longer%20has%20room%20to%20unfold.&f=false">wrote</a> with foresight that,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the dismemberment of Asia and Africa is the final limit beyond which European politics no longer has room to unfold. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Intellect and passion</h2>
<p>Luxemburg first met Lenin in 1901 and was immediately drawn to his intellect and passion. They got to know each other well during the proletarian upsurges across Russian and Eastern Europe in 1905 and 1906. But Luxemburg and Lenin were often critical of each other. </p>
<p>She argued for a form of revolutionary democracy rooted in struggle, and theory as something constantly open to debate and change. In <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/">“The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions”</a> (1906) she argued that spontaneity and organisation are both vital to any struggle.</p>
<p>In 1907, while teaching at a political school in Berlin, she began to undertake serious theoretical work on imperialism. This included a <a href="https://marxismocritico.com/2013/09/04/rosa-luxemburg-interview-with-peter-hudis/">study of southern Africa</a>. Luxemburg argued that the development of capitalism depended on the destruction of non-capitalist societies, beginning with the appropriation of land.</p>
<p>Her first major theoretical intervention, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/">“The Accumulation of Capital”</a> (1913) argued that capitalism could not function within a single society and that imperialism, “a system of exploitation practised by European capital in the African colonies and in America”, was inherent to capitalism. Capital, she wrote</p>
<blockquote>
<p>ransacks the whole world. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Bourgeois interests</h2>
<p>As the First World War ravaged Europe, Luxemburg, like her Russian comrades, was firm that the working classes were being used to fight the war but that it would be resolved in the interest of the bourgeois and the elite. Luxemburg together with Liebknecht, and others started the <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm">Spartacus League</a> to oppose the war and advocate for a more radical agenda in Germany.</p>
<p>In 1915, she was arrested but continued to agitate, write and communicate with the world outside. In a letter from prison she wrote that,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To be a human being is the main thing above all else … To be a human being means to joyfully toss your entire life in the giant scales of fate if it must be so, and at the same time to rejoice in the brightness of every day and the beauty of every cloud.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“The Russian Revolution”, an essay written in prison contains what is perhaps her most widely repeated <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=-5OLBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=Freedom+only+for+the+supporters+of+the+government,+only+for+the+members+of+one+party+%E2%80%93+however+numerous+they+may+be+%E2%80%93+is+no+freedom+at+all.+Freedom+is+always+and+exclusively+freedom+for+the+one+who+thinks+differently.&source=bl&ots=MfBzQWFYLz&sig=XcxjGi66_keMZhefQg5NRPM10-s&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjpp8bKt4bXAhVnLMAKHUrjCVMQ6AEINDAC#v=onepage&q=Freedom%20only%20for%20the%20supporters%20of%20the%20government%2C%20only%20for%20the%20members%20of%20one%20party%20%E2%80%93%20however%20numerous%20they%20may%20be%20%E2%80%93%20is%20no%20freedom%20at%20all.%20Freedom%20is%20always%20and%20exclusively%20freedom%20for%20the%20one%20who%20thinks%20differently.&f=false">remark</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When released from prison in 1918, she and Liebkneckt, immediately began the <em>Die Rote Fahne</em> (the Red Flag) newspaper. Luxemburg also worked tirelessly to foster the revolutionary spirit that led to the second revolutionary wave that hit Germany in January 1919. If she and her comrades had been successful with their revolution, history would most probably have taken a very different course, avoiding the rise of fascism in Europe.</p>
<p>But alas, it was not to be. As German poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/bertolt-brecht">Bertolt Brecht</a> <a href="http://www.barnum-review.com/farewell-rosa-farewell-revolution/">wrote</a> in <em>Epitaph</em> (1919):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Red Rosa now has vanished too. (…)</p>
<p>She told the poor what life is about,</p>
<p>And so the rich have rubbed her out.</p>
<p>May she rest in peace.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>This year marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution. This article is part of a series taking a look at a number of women who played decisive and revolutionary roles before, during and after the Revolution.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85865/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vashna Jagarnath is affiliated with the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa. </span></em></p>If Rosa Luxemburg and her comrades had been successful with their German revolution in 1919, history would most probably have taken a very different course, avoiding the rise of fascism in Europe.Vashna Jagarnath, Senior Lecturer, History Department, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/851182017-10-08T10:05:08Z2017-10-08T10:05:08ZThe Russian Revolution: a reflection on the role of women revolutionaries<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188784/original/file-20171004-6713-vkl7ga.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>This year marks the centenary of the <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/the-russian-revolution-of-1917-1779474">Russian Revolution</a> – in fact it’s two revolutions. The one in February 1917 overthrew the Russian monarchy. The second one, in October 1917, came about after a nearly bloodless coup put the Bolsheviks in charge under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin.</p>
<p>Creating the world’s first communist country, it was a central event of the twentieth century. It’s an event experienced as an electric shock throughout much of the colonialised world. </p>
<p>Recollections of this seismic event often revolve around images of powerful men – the ideas of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/marx_karl.shtml">Karl Marx</a> and <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1895/misc/engels-bio.htm">Friedrich Engels</a>, and the political strategy of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/lenin_vladimir.shtml">Lenin</a> and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/trotsky_leon.shtml">Leon Trotsky</a>. But women have always been key participants in the Communist movement, in terms of theory and practice, including in the October Revolution. </p>
<p>Leading Marxist historian <a href="http://vijayprashad.org/">Vijay Prashad</a> recalls that in October 1917 women factory workers in St Petersburg marched to see Lenin in the <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1917/lenin-smolny.htm">Smolny</a>, the compound in the city where he worked, and asked him to, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Take power, Comrade Lenin: that is what we working women want. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lenin famously replied: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is not I, but you - the workers - who must take power. Return to your factories and tell the workers that. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Before the Russian Revolution</h2>
<p>But women played decisive and revolutionary roles even before the Russian Revolution.</p>
<p>In seventeenth century England women were a powerful presence in what was known as the <a href="http://www.northamptonshiretimeline.com/scene/1607-newton-rebellion/">Midland Revolt</a>. The more than thousand-strong crowd that gathered at Newton in 1607 to protest against the land enclosures by the Tresham family, who were aggressively enclosing the lands of East Midlands, included women and children. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.onthisdeity.com/5th-october-1789-%E2%80%93-the-womens-march-on-versailles/">Women’s March</a> on the Palace of Versailles in October 1789 was a decisive moment in the struggles that brought down the power of the French Monarchy. Nearly 7,000 women, <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/womens-march-on-versailles-3529107">chanting “bread! bread!”</a>, marched from Paris to the palace. The uprising contributed to the fall of Louis XVI and the much-hated Marie Antoinette.</p>
<p>The women who initiated the march were called “Mothers of the Nation”. Importantly, the march wasn’t only a turning point for Republicans, but also crucial for gender equality. </p>
<p>In 1802 Edward Despard, an Irish soldier who served in the British army but who became involved in revolutionary politics, and his African-American wife, <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011115131942562643.html">Catherine Despard</a>, led a plot to seize the Bank of England and the Tower of London, and to assassinate King George III. He was arrested for the failed Despard plot.</p>
<p>Catherine <a href="https://mikejay.net/edward-and-catherine-despard/">publicly defended</a> her husband against charges of terrorism and sedition, and also lobbied and campaigned on his behalf. She <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/22/catherine-despard-abolitionist/">petitioned</a> the Home Secretary and
enlisted the help of an independent MP who raised the plight of the men incarcerated at the Coldbath Fields prison, where Edward was detained. Catherine also worked with the wives of other political prisoners. </p>
<p>Despite Catherine taking the fight to the highest authorities, Edward was found guilty on charges of <a href="http://equianosworld.tubmaninstitute.ca/content/edward-despard">high treason</a>. He was hanged, drawn and quartered. Catherine was one of 20,000 people who witnessed his execution. </p>
<p>As capitalism consolidated its hold over land and labour through the industrial revolution the <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/">Luddite movement</a> attacked factories and destroyed machines. It was not to halt the development of technology but to subject it to the interests of the workers. </p>
<p>Ned Ludd, a fictional character, based on an amalgam of various apprentices came to provide the name and face of the movement. But women often led the attacks on the factories. On 24 April 1812, a particularly successful attack was launched against a mill outside Bolton in North West England under the leadership of sisters <a href="https://womenshistorynetwork.org/luddite-women/">Mary and Lydia Molyneux</a>. The mill was destroyed. </p>
<p>In 1871, just over a hundred years after the Women’s March on Versailles, French women took to the streets with the same militant vigour, during the <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/kristin-ross-communal-luxury-paris-commune/">Paris Commune</a>. Leftwingers took over the French capital, but the radical experiment in socialist self-government only lasted 72 days.</p>
<p>In stark contrast to the supposed fragility of women, the militant anarchist and feminist, <a href="https://spaceinvaderjoe.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/female-badasses-in-history-nathalie-lemel-1827-1921/">Nathalie Lemel</a> <a href="https://www.marxist.com/women-in-the-paris-commune.htm">called</a> women to militant action during the Commune:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have come to the supreme moment, when we must be able to die for our Nation. No more weakness! No more uncertainty! All women to arms! All women to duty! Versailles must be wiped out!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On Sunday 22 January 1905 women, once again were at the forefront of the march on the Winter Palace in St Petersburg that came to be known at Bloody Sunday. Many paid with their lives for the transformation of Tsarist autocratic rule. </p>
<h2>Women and Communist thought</h2>
<p>Before and during the Russian Revolution, the Polish-born German philosopher <a href="http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSluxemburg.htm">Rosa Luxemburg</a> was a leading Communist theorist. Thereafter women like the American Marxist, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/">Raya Dunayevskaya</a>, Trinidad-born journalist, political activist and feminist, <a href="https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/england/london/articles/claudia-jones-communist-black-activist-and-mother-of-notting-hill-carnival/">Claudia Jones</a> – also known as the “mother” of London’s Notting Hill Carnival, South African academic and journalist, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/ruth-heloise-first">Ruth First</a>, and longstanding American activist and feminist, <a href="https://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/faculty/singleton.php?&singleton=true&cruz_id=aydavis">Angela Davis</a>, played key roles in the development of Communist thought.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/188788/original/file-20171004-32388-yy8x9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">South African journalist and activist, Ruth First.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sunday Times</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A closer look at the great male figures in the Communist tradition often shows that they worked closely with and relied heavily on radical women. Engels could not have written <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/824042.The_Condition_of_the_Working_Class_in_England">“The Condition of the Working Class in England”</a> without the guidance of his working class Irish partner, <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-friedrich-engels-radical-lover-helped-him-father-socialism-21415560/">Mary Burns</a>. </p>
<p>Marx’s daughters <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/family/laura.htm">Laura</a> and <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/11/how-eleanor-marx-changed-world">Eleanor</a>, were leading communists and significant activists in their own right. <a href="http://www.counterfire.org/women-on-the-left/15628-women-on-the-left-nadezhda-krupskaya">Nadezhda Krupskaya</a>, Lenin’s lifelong partner and comrade was a leading educational theorist and radical communist. <a href="https://socialistaction.ca/2014/06/08/celia-sanchez-heroine-of-the-cuban-revolution/">Cecilia Sanchez</a>, one of Fidel Castro’s closest and most trusted comrades, is hardly known outside of Cuba.</p>
<p>When women are remembered as part of the Communist or any other political tradition it is often as an afterthought, or as part of the support system of the revolution, taking care of the home and the family. These are important tasks in any struggle but by focusing only on this precludes women from inhabiting the identity of a revolutionary or a theorist. This is in marked contrast to one of the most significant of the achievements of the Russian Revolution in its early phase – it’s radical action in support of full equality between men and women.</p>
<p>Lenin, often invoked by very <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=r8_OCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT15&lpg=PT15&dq=Lenin+masculinist+forms+of+politics&source=bl&ots=7pAVaDY3lS&sig=_7h1QaDct1Dk6PFVF5r5XbMGCDQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwie3MfL09bWAhWHKsAKHR6YA8kQ6AEIMjAC#v=onepage&q=Lenin%20masculinist%20forms%20of%20politics&f=false">masculinist</a> forms of politics was crystal clear on this score. He <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/mar/04.htm">insisted</a> that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The female half of the human race is doubly oppressed under capitalism. The working woman and the peasant woman are oppressed by capital, but over and above that, even in the most democratic of the bourgeois republics, they remain, firstly, deprived of some rights because the law does not give them equality with men; and secondly — and this is the main thing — they remain in ‘household bondage’, they continue to be ‘household slaves’, for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the most squalid and backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and the individual family household.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>This is the first of a series of articles on the centenary of the Russian Revolution.</strong></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85118/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vashna Jagarnath is affiliated with the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa</span></em></p>When women are remembered as part of the Communist or any other political tradition it’s often as an afterthought, or as part of the support system of the revolution.Vashna Jagarnath, Senior Lecturer, History Department, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/755992017-04-05T14:54:45Z2017-04-05T14:54:45ZWhy every generation of students must find, fulfil or betray its mission<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163641/original/image-20170403-21966-10yk9fp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Student protests in South Africa have centred around free tertiary education.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Sumaya Hisham</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a recent opinion piece in the Business Day newspaper, author and academic Jonny Steinberg <a href="https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/business-day/20170303/281767039009215">suggested</a> that a “generational estrangement deeper than we have acknowledged” had emerged between the Fees Must Fall generation – those who’ve led protests against high university tuition fees and higher education structures they say are unjust – and their “scorn for almost everyone over the age of 40”. </p>
<p>At times over the past two years it may have seemed that a generation had emerged on South Africa’s campuses that has disowned the past. But generational rebellion is an enduring feature of all societies. Indeed, it’s the dynamic through which societies renew themselves and move forward. </p>
<p>Reflecting on more than 40 years of teaching three generations of University of Witwatersrand (Wits) students – incidentally, Steinberg was among them – I couldn’t help observing how each generation developed a distinct self consciousness; a world view. Each generation was shaped by particular political icons and engaged in particular forms of political action.</p>
<h2>Repression and state violence</h2>
<p>The first generation, the Soweto generation, looked for theories of radical – even revolutionary – change. The central figure was <a href="http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/marx.HTML">Karl Marx</a>, whether students chose to reject him and go in a different direction or to adopt one or other of the intellectual currents that had their source in Marx. These included <a href="https://global.britannica.com/biography/Antonio-Gramsci">Antonio Gramsci</a>, <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/leon-trotsky-9510793">Leon Trotsky</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/23/ernesto-laclau">Ernest Laclau</a>, <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/vladimir-lenin-9379007">Vladimir Lenin</a> and so on.</p>
<p>In 1981 half of the students in my honours class in industrial sociology were held under the <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01828/05lv01829/06lv01927.htm">Terrorism Act</a>. Some were detained for months without trial. It was the time of the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/united-democratic-front-udf">United Democratic Front</a>; of trade union militancy and nationwide resistance to apartheid. </p>
<p>But it was also a time of repression, of state violence – even assassination. The assassination of <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/david-joseph-webster">David Webster</a>, a colleague in the department of anthropology, was a dramatic illustration of those times.</p>
<p>The release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and 1994’s new democratic government was an event that profoundly changed the classroom. This, the 1994 generation, was quite different from those who’d come before.</p>
<h2>Decolonisation of knowledge</h2>
<p>For many, the classroom was an opportunity to escape the poverty and political turmoil of the townships for a career in a transformed public sector or the private sector. But they were rebels too. I recall students occupying the administrative building and trashing the campus in support of their demands for the transformation of Wits. Indeed, one of the demands was for free education. </p>
<p>By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, around 2009, I sensed a new assertive spirit in the corridors of the humanities faculty at Wits. A new generation was in the making, a third generation. It was to culminate in the Fees Must Fall movement of 2015 and 2016. </p>
<p>In February 2016 I was in discussions with my new, black female Masters interns about what they wanted to research for their theses. They announced: “We are tired of white people studying blacks; we want to study whites.” This generation had found its voice and the language to express their feelings of discomfort and <a href="https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/globallabour/article/view/2839/2543">sense of racial injustice</a> in a world where knowledge production is still dominated by whites. </p>
<p>The decolonisation of knowledge was their aim. Post-colonial theory was their guide. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/arts/edward-w-said-literary-critic-advocate-for-palestinian-independence-dies-67.html">Edward Said</a> and <a href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/fanon/national-culture.htm">Frantz Fanon</a>, and African intellectuals such as <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/stephen-bantu-biko">Steve Biko</a> and <a href="http://www.ngugiwathiongo.com/">Ngugi Wa’ Thiongo</a> were now the key theorists. </p>
<p>What’s striking about this, the third generation, is the leading role played by black female students. Black feminism, the black body and sexuality become the dominant discourse of this generation. This third generation had found its voice. They were now comfortable in their skin and proud of their identity.</p>
<p>The teacher student relationship – what I call the chalk face – is a crucial interface between the generations. It’s here that academic generations are made. A central demand of the current generation of students is the need to recognise their dignity, their material needs, their distinct family and cultural backgrounds, and of course their language.</p>
<h2>Discovering a new mission</h2>
<p>But the generational rebellion that Steinberg refers to is not simply about the need for better communication. </p>
<p>It’s a demand that goes back many generations. Indeed it was <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/robert-sobukwe-inaugural-speech-april-1959">a demand</a> made by Pan African Congress founder <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/robert-mangaliso-sobukwe">Robert Sobukwe</a> when he was a tutor at Wits nearly 60 years ago. </p>
<p>It’s a demand to change the content of the curriculum so that South Africans, especially black men and women from all over Africa, can become the producers of knowledge. </p>
<p>To rebuild trust and mutual respect between the generations we need to make our classrooms places where our students are not only the consumers of knowledge produced elsewhere. This is the challenge for the graduating class of 2016. In the memorable words of Fanon:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Your mission is to become the authors of the books the next generation of students read; the articles they cite and the theories that shape their thinking. </p>
<p><em>This is an edited extract of the author’s speech on the occasion of being awarded an <a href="https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/graduations/2017/a-life-servicing-many-generations-.html">honorary doctorate</a> from the University of the Witwatersrand.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75599/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Edward Webster does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Generational rebellion is an enduring feature of all societies. Indeed, it is the dynamic through which societies renew themselves and move forward.Edward Webster, Professor Emeritus, Society, Work and Development Institute, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/724772017-02-09T19:14:28Z2017-02-09T19:14:28ZFriday essay: Putin, memory wars and the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155792/original/image-20170207-27214-1wgaobf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Russian army officers take the oath of allegiance to the Revolution, 1917</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Everett Historical/shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>One hundred years ago, the Romanov dynasty fell in the February Revolution of 1917. This centenary haunts Russia’s current government. “In the Kremlin,” <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16073230-fragile-empire">wrote journalist Ben Judah</a> in his important analysis of Vladimir Putin’s “Fragile Empire”, “they have nightmares about Nicholas II”.</p>
<p>In the middle of a terrible war with Germany, a revolutionary crisis had started in late February (according to the Julian calendar then in force in Russia). The Tsar, under pressure from the street, the parliamentary opposition, his own ministers, and the army command, abdicated on 2 March. A Provisional Government of liberals and moderate socialists took over the affairs of state and the war effort.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155807/original/image-20170207-27204-c56stj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155807/original/image-20170207-27204-c56stj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155807/original/image-20170207-27204-c56stj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155807/original/image-20170207-27204-c56stj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155807/original/image-20170207-27204-c56stj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=740&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155807/original/image-20170207-27204-c56stj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155807/original/image-20170207-27204-c56stj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155807/original/image-20170207-27204-c56stj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A stamp depicting Nicholas II, circa 1913.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Eventually, the revolution radicalized in the Red October. Historians continue to debate if this uprising of the Bolshevik party was a “revolution” or a “coup.” The former interpretation stresses the fact that Lenin’s party had significant support among the working class, in particular among workers and soldiers of the capital, Petrograd (today St Petersburg). </p>
<p>The takeover of power was relatively unbloody, with only few victims initially. And Bolshevik slogans (land to the peasants, peace to the soldiers, and political power to the working class), were popular far beyond the immediate constituency of the party. At the same time, the Bolsheviks had little support among the peasantry, still the overwhelming majority of the population. The uprising was not spontaneous like its February equivalent, but planned by a small group of conspirators around Lenin. And once in power, the Bolsheviks built a one-party dictatorship, which quickly alienated even many of its initial followers. Lenin’s government had to fight armed resistance in what soon escalated into a complex but devastating civil war. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156106/original/image-20170208-17328-1ntyxi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156106/original/image-20170208-17328-1ntyxi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/156106/original/image-20170208-17328-1ntyxi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156106/original/image-20170208-17328-1ntyxi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156106/original/image-20170208-17328-1ntyxi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156106/original/image-20170208-17328-1ntyxi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1213&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156106/original/image-20170208-17328-1ntyxi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1213&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/156106/original/image-20170208-17328-1ntyxi1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1213&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Postage stamp marking the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Together, the two revolutions of 1917 led to military defeat, the destruction of the state, and disintegration of the empire. Many non-Russian regions broke away, often forming precursors to nation states which would only come into their own after the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991. Nicholas II would not survive the incredibly brutal civil and international wars of succession that followed in 1918-22: the Bolsheviks executed him together with his family in 1918. </p>
<p>These high-profile executions were only the most prominent examples of the “Red Terror” Lenin unleashed to frighten his many enemies into submission. Members of the former upper classes, clergy, nationalists fighting for the independence of non-Russian successor states, and real or presumed defenders of the old regime (“Whites”) were singled out for imprisonment or execution. </p>
<p>In the end, by 1922, the Bolsheviks had won this many sided war, presiding over an exhausted and mutilated country set back for decades by the destruction of war, revolution, and civil war. Eventually, under the brutal leadership of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union would win the Second World War in Europe and establish itself as one of the two Superpowers to rule the world during the Cold War.</p>
<h2>Putin’s dilemma</h2>
<p>Putin’s government faces a dilemma regarding this past. The Revolution can neither be fully embraced nor fully disowned. Revolutions are anathema to Putin, who does not want to be swept away by a successful uprising similar to the <a href="http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/euromaidan-ukraine%E2%80%99s-self-organizing-revolution">Ukrainian Euromaidan</a> in 2013-14. At the same time, Russia <a href="http://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_7258/7e78a4c5fc20342141f0f809e128f3e29c730a41/">both legally</a> and ideologically <a href="http://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_23178/">claims to be the successor state </a>to the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union’s founding event happens to be a revolution. The centenary cannot be simply ignored.</p>
<p>History, in Putin’s Russia, is not a mere academic pursuit. It is part of what La Trobe political scientist Robert Horvath calls <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09668136.2011.534299">“preventive counter revolution”</a>: an attempt to nip in the bud any potential for a popular uprising. The past which Putin and his Minister of Culture, the maverick historian Vladimir Medinsky, most frequently deploy to this end is the “Great Patriotic War” against Nazi Germany. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155787/original/image-20170207-27189-18o9x77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155787/original/image-20170207-27189-18o9x77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155787/original/image-20170207-27189-18o9x77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155787/original/image-20170207-27189-18o9x77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155787/original/image-20170207-27189-18o9x77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155787/original/image-20170207-27189-18o9x77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155787/original/image-20170207-27189-18o9x77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky inspecting a monument to Mikhail Kalashnikov, the Russian inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle, last September.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sputnik Photo Agency/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As I argue in an article forthcoming in the journal <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/71">History & Memory</a>, their self-confident, patriotic rendering of the Soviet Second World War serves as ideological glue attaching the population to the government.</p>
<p>Could one do the same with the Revolution: write it into a positive history of contemporary Russia? It would be possible to embrace the February revolution as a legitimate, potentially democratic uprising, which also freed the nations of the empire from imperial control: a decolonizing as well as democratizing event. The Bolshevik revolution could then become an illegitimate coup bringing a criminal regime to power, which re-erected by force of arms the old empire under a new guise. </p>
<p>Such a narrative de-legitimizes much of the Soviet period, while celebrating the breakdown of the Soviet Union into 15 independent states in 1991 as the historical fulfillment of the promises of February 1917.</p>
<p>Such a version of the past finds few enthusiasts in today’s Russia. As historian Geoffrey Hosking <a href="http://blog.oup.com/2015/11/russia-october-revolution-vsi/">has written</a>, most formerly Soviet peoples experienced 1991 </p>
<blockquote>
<p>as national liberation. For Russians, however, who had lived in all republics and thought of the Soviet Union as ‘their’ country, it was deprivation. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This perception “still rankles today” and “underlies the current Ukrainian crisis.”</p>
<h2>‘Reconciliation’</h2>
<p>Nostalgia for the good old Soviet times is better served by a different version of this past: the February revolution as treason. In such an alternative narrative, liberals and other elites were stabbing the legitimate government in the back at times of war. Imperial breakdown and defeat in war followed. </p>
<p>The Bolshevik revolution, then, was the start of a re-building of the state and the re-gathering of the empire. According to this way of telling the story, the Bolsheviks were state builders who fixed what others had broken. The Soviet Union was the legitimate successor of the Romanov empire and the 1991 breakdown a geopolitical catastrophe, another setback for “Russian statehood”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155796/original/image-20170207-27185-7mnun9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155796/original/image-20170207-27185-7mnun9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155796/original/image-20170207-27185-7mnun9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155796/original/image-20170207-27185-7mnun9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155796/original/image-20170207-27185-7mnun9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155796/original/image-20170207-27185-7mnun9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155796/original/image-20170207-27185-7mnun9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155796/original/image-20170207-27185-7mnun9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bolshevik parade in St. Petersberg, 1917.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Everett Historical</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This second narrative implies a neo-imperialist stance guaranteed to alienate Ukrainians or Latvians, or any other non-Russian successor nations to the Soviet Union. It will also prove unpopular with a significant minority of Russians at home and abroad: monarchists and those who embrace the anti-Bolshevik “White” movement as their historical ancestry. Hence, the government performs something of a fudging act: “reconciliation”.</p>
<p>“Reconciliation” implies that the warring sides in revolution and civil war can be remembered as parts of a positive history of the fatherland. This move requires reducing the revolutionary process to a “Russian” event.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155794/original/image-20170207-27214-3ax9u3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155794/original/image-20170207-27214-3ax9u3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155794/original/image-20170207-27214-3ax9u3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155794/original/image-20170207-27214-3ax9u3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155794/original/image-20170207-27214-3ax9u3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155794/original/image-20170207-27214-3ax9u3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155794/original/image-20170207-27214-3ax9u3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155794/original/image-20170207-27214-3ax9u3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Russian Revolution poster, 1918-20: ‘The Russians say, Above Moscow is the Kremlin, and above the Kremlin are only the Stars.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Everett Historical/shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rather than multi-national wars of succession to the Romanov empire, what happened in the period 1917-1922 becomes a struggle between “White” and “Red” Russians. Ukrainian, Polish, Baltic, or Central Asian actors are either ignored, assigned to the one or the other side in this conflict, or declared pawns of foreign interventionists. Popular resistance to both Whites and Reds by Russian rebels in peasantry, army, and working class is waved away as an inconvenient complication.</p>
<p>Attempting to construct such a narrative has kept Putin’s history warrior Medinsky busy. In 2013, <a href="http://www.omsk.aif.ru/society/society_transport/114337">he stated</a> that it was “meaningless” to decide which party of the civil war was “right” or who was “guilty.”</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155809/original/image-20170207-27185-1438zmr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155809/original/image-20170207-27185-1438zmr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155809/original/image-20170207-27185-1438zmr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155809/original/image-20170207-27185-1438zmr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155809/original/image-20170207-27185-1438zmr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155809/original/image-20170207-27185-1438zmr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155809/original/image-20170207-27185-1438zmr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155809/original/image-20170207-27185-1438zmr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Russian monarchist displaying a portrait of Nicholas II.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dima Korotayev/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Instead, one needed to understand that both Reds and Whites “loved Russia.” Both sides had their own truth and were ready to die for it. “We have to approach this with respect,” he added. Monuments to Whites had the same legitimacy as monuments to Reds. They were both needed.</p>
<p>In 2015 Medinsky built on this beginning <a href="http://histrf.ru/biblioteka/book/mify-o-rievoliutsii-i-grazhdanskoi-voinie">in a lecture to students</a> of the elite Moscow State Institute for International Relations. We have <a href="http://www.odnako.org/blogs/o-mifah-russkoy-revolyucii-i-primirenii-krasnih-i-belih-s-istoricheskoy-rossiey/">two versions</a> of what he said, both distributed through semi-official websites. Different in some details, they both make an attempt to come to terms with this revolution by taking a philosophical view of events.</p>
<p>Both Reds and Whites, Medinsky stated, were subjects of the same historical moment of catastrophic breakdown of “Russian statehood in the Romanov version” which led to a time of “troubles” . He lined up the Whites with the February revolution on the one end and liberal post-1991 Russia on the other – a breathtaking simplification, but a useful one, as we shall see.</p>
<p>The historical role of the Reds is central in Medinsky’s account. Independent of their own radical socialist motivations, they ended up re-building Russian statehood (and implicitly, the Russian empire). It was “the logic of history” which worked through the Bolsheviks, and led to the re-creation of “the united Russian state, which they started to call USSR.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155786/original/image-20170207-27194-1bz411t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155786/original/image-20170207-27194-1bz411t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155786/original/image-20170207-27194-1bz411t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155786/original/image-20170207-27194-1bz411t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155786/original/image-20170207-27194-1bz411t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155786/original/image-20170207-27194-1bz411t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155786/original/image-20170207-27194-1bz411t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155786/original/image-20170207-27194-1bz411t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Women (and men) of the Red Army.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">rosaluxemburg/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Thus, the real victor of the revolutionary upheavals was </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a third force, which did not participate in the civil war: historical Russia, the same Russia which existed for a thousand years before the revolution and which will continue to exist in the future.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So far, so sophisticated: By declaring “Russia” the real subject of history and the human beings who fought over it the mere executors of a higher will they did not know themselves, Medinsky seems to have found a way out of the polarizing interpretations of the revolution. </p>
<p>Upon closer inspection, however, his is just a well-camouflaged version of the second interpretation outlined above: February as destruction, October as re-creation, the Bolsheviks the virtuous state builders implicitly linked to the current government. Medinsky’s fusion of the Whites with post-1991 liberalism is instructive. While the Bolsheviks re-built the Russian state in 1918-22, the liberals triggered, in 1991, the “destruction of the united historical-cultural and economic space… the breakdown of the Soviet Union.”</p>
<p>It appears to be this negative assessment of the Whites that has kept Vladimir Putin from fully embracing his Minister of Culture’s historical scheme. The President accepted reconciliation but rejected Medinsky’s supporting interpretation of events.</p>
<h2>A divisive event for Russians</h2>
<p>Putin’s reluctance could be seen as careful tactics in a historiographical minefield. The history of the revolution is much more divisive among Russians than the history of World War II. </p>
<p>As University of Sydney historian Sheila Fitzpatrick points out in a forthcoming essay, the “real problem” of the centenary for Putin’s government is the lack of consensus about the meaning of this event among the population of Russia.</p>
<p>Despite all its authoritarianism, the Putin regime is very alert to popular opinion, and given the divisiveness of the memory of 1917-22, the best possible solution is to fudge the issue. In his <a href="http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53379">annual speech</a> to Parliament on 1 December 2016, the President refused to take sides, asking his compatriots to let sleeping dogs lie. The “lessons of history” were needed: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>first of all for reconciliation, for the strengthening of the social, political, and civil harmony we have achieved today. It is not permissible to drag the schisms, malice, insults and bitterness of the past into our contemporary life, to speculate on the tragedies which have engulfed practically every family in Russia, in order to advance one’s own political or other interests. It does not matter on what side of the barricades our ancestors found themselves. Let us remember: we are a united people, we are one people, and we have only one Russia.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155789/original/image-20170207-27197-1vjlkq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155789/original/image-20170207-27197-1vjlkq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155789/original/image-20170207-27197-1vjlkq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155789/original/image-20170207-27197-1vjlkq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155789/original/image-20170207-27197-1vjlkq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155789/original/image-20170207-27197-1vjlkq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155789/original/image-20170207-27197-1vjlkq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155789/original/image-20170207-27197-1vjlkq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vladimir Putin at his end of year press conference last December: an independent actor in a complex political game.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Putin’s position on the revolution, however, might be rooted in more than just tactics. During a meeting of the All-Russian People’s Front (an organization uniting the ruling party with selected pro-government NGOs), the President <a href="http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/51206">was asked </a> for his opinion about Lenin, the Bolshevik leader during the Revolution and civil war, who led the Soviet Union until his death in 1924. </p>
<p>The question does not appear to have been scripted: it was so rambling that Putin needed to ask for clarification, and his answer was no less convoluted. It seemed improvised, ambiguous and contradictory.</p>
<p>First, the President recalled his past membership in the Communist Party and that he “liked and still like[s] communist and socialist ideas.” He listed the successes of the planned economy, most importantly the victory over Nazism in World War II.</p>
<p>At the same time he mentioned mass repressions under the Soviets. Did the children of the Tsar really have to be executed? Or the Romanovs’ family doctor? Why did the Soviets kill clergymen? And what about the role of the Bolsheviks in disorganizing the front in World War I? The revolution, in effect, made Russia lose the war to the losing side (Germany had to capitulate less than a year after the Bolsheviks signed a punishing peace treaty), “a unique event in history.” Clearly, the Bolsheviks’ role was not all positive.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155793/original/image-20170207-27179-16rtnp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155793/original/image-20170207-27179-16rtnp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155793/original/image-20170207-27179-16rtnp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155793/original/image-20170207-27179-16rtnp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155793/original/image-20170207-27179-16rtnp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155793/original/image-20170207-27179-16rtnp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155793/original/image-20170207-27179-16rtnp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155793/original/image-20170207-27179-16rtnp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vladimir Lenin, at his desk, circa 1920.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Everett historical/shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Putin kept his most biting comments to the end of his monologue. By creating the Soviet Union as a federation made up of republics with the formal right to secession, Lenin (against the advice of Stalin) planted “a mine under the building of our state:” in 1991, the Soviet Union would break down along the borders of the republics. Ultimately, then, Lenin was responsible not only for the defeat of the Romanov empire in World War I, but also for the breakup of the Soviet empire in 1991 – hardly a positive evaluation.</p>
<p>These rambling remarks stand in sharp contrast to Putin’s well developed and unambiguous line on World War II as well as Medinsky’s sophisticated pro-Bolshevik dialectics. It appears that the President, like the country as a whole, is much more confused about what to make of the revolution. The President has <a href="http://www.kp.ru/daily/24316.4/508969/">much more time for the Whites</a> than his Minister of Culture. In the memory wars, as elsewhere, he is an independent actor in a complex political game. </p>
<p>There is another interpretation of the dissonances between Medinsky and Putin, however. What better way to unify the country over this contentious past than to give slightly different emphases to the reconciliation message?</p>
<p>Effectively, the President appeals to monarchists and White forces while his Minister of Culture caters to Red nostalgia.</p>
<p>We shall see throughout the centenary year, if this division of labour continues or if the one or the other line will prevail. The first test will be if and how the anniversary of the February Revolution will be commemorated; the second will be what public events will mark October. By the time of writing, it is unclear what these events will look like. It will be fascinating to watch.</p>
<p><em>La Trobe University’s Ideas & Society Program will host a conversation between historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union, and Mark Edele <a href="http://www.latrobe.edu.au/events/all/the-russian-revolution-of-1917-and-world-history-a-centenary-reflection">on February 23 at 6:15 pm</a>. Their conversation will concern the role the Russian Revolution of 1917 played in shaping the history of the 20th century. It will be <a href="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y6Zbd0glfSs_">live streamed here</a></em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72477/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Edele receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>How is Vladimir Putin - for whom uprisings are anathema - treating this year’s centenary of the Russian revolution?Mark Edele, Professor of History, The University of Western AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.