What Might Have Been in Moscow

Images of an unbuilt "Palace of the Soviets." Oh, the giant Lenin. Oh, the people. Via Archi/Maps.

Putinism

In the 6 December 2019 TLS, Owen Matthews reviews a stack of books about Vladimir Putin. He is unimpressed by those that attribute to Putin any ideology or long-range plan and prefers those that see him as reacting to events and responding to opportunities:

Putin, Mark Galeotti points out, is not a chess player; he is a judoka. Chess is a contest with rules and transparency; everyone starts with the same pieces. But Putin doesn't want to limit his options like that. His skill lies in turning his opponent's strength against him at just the right time. "In this respect, in politics as in judo, Putin is an opportunist," Galeotti writes. "He has a sense of what constitutes a win, but no predetermined path towards it. He relies on quickly seizing any advantage he sees, rather on a careful strategy."

This rings profoundly true. There is no Putin core, no ideology of Putinism – just ideologies and strategies to be used and discarded as the moment dictates. Putin is a "gut-level patriot who believes that Russia should be considered as a great power not because of its military strength, its economy or for another specific index, but because it's Russia." Beyond that everything is a tool to be used in the game of staying in power and increasing the country's prestige. Orthodoxy, nationalist philosophy, military intervention in Syria, the festering, low-level war in Donbas – all these policies can be switched on or off as expediency dictates. The result is that "many apparent short-term successes prove to be long-term liabilities, having been neither thought through beforehand nor followed through afterwards." But so far, Galeotti writes, Putin has managed to bluff Russia's poor hand into two decades of surprising wins.

I especially liked this comment on corruption, reviewing a book by opposition politician Gregory Yavlinsky:

Yavlinsky makes a similar argument. Corruption is at once the bond that unites the elite like a criminal clan and, perversely, a took of social control. The Kremlin is not bothered by corruption because, he writes, "it works to their advantage. Government compels a society to be its accomplice in crime, as everyone gets involved in it". And when everyone is guilty – from parents who bribe university admissions tutors to Putin cronies who trade billions in oil wealth through their Swiss offshore companies – the selective application of the law becomes an arbitrary tool of power. This allows Putin and his allies to keep the elite in a "state of uncertainty and fear . . . by suddenly paying to or, to the contrary, turning away from evidence."

Autistic Dissidents

From Tyler Cowen's interview with Masha Gessen:

COWEN: Why is it that so many dissidents came from the Soviet worlds of math and physics? There seems to be a correlation. What’s causing what?

GESSEN: I don’t know the answer. I can tell you my personal hypothesis. My hypothesis is that for people who are both trained and inclined to think in rigorously logical ways, it is particularly difficult to adapt to the Soviet system of doublethink. When we talk about this inclination now, I think we talk about people being spectrum-y or being neurologically different and, therefore, having difficulty with the illogical, irrational ways of life.

But I think we can retroactively diagnose a lot of dissonance with that because, basically, what we’re talking about is, there is the conditions of not just survival but of being reasonably comfortable while living in the Soviet Union were the conditions of doublethink. You had to be able to live inside untenable contradictions all the time. The opposite option was to confront those contradictions, but to basically be thrown out of society, to be in extreme discomfort.

Think about the type of person who would prefer the discomfort of being completely ostracized to the discomfort of living inside the tension. I think that that goes some way to explaining why so many people came from math and physics and the exact sciences.

These days, when I look at Greta Thunberg — I was actually, I’m pretty sure, the first American journalist to interview her — the now 16-year-old Swedish girl who went on school strike and has started this worldwide climate change movement.

She is diagnosed with autism, and she’s very, very clear about talking about how intolerable she finds life with the way that adults are not acting rationally in the face of climate change and how, for her, it is an absolute necessity to confront it. I really recognized that spirit of Soviet dissonance.

Russia Wants a Trump-Sanders Election

As I have written here before, elements of the Russian government want Americans to be divided against each other. I am not at all sure that they have had any success with this, since Americans already hate each other plenty, and even if it worked I am not sure how it would help them. But it does seem to be their aim.

In the light of this it makes perfect sense that Russian trolls and bots are throwing most of their weight behind Trump and Bernie Sanders. Surely a Trump-Sanders election would be one of the ugliest ever, and highly divisive. The two Americans have reacted differently to the news, Trump trying to deny it and Sanders accepting it; maybe that's partly because in a weird way it enhances Bernie's status by making him the most radical one.

Strange times.

Russian Troublemaking in Star Wars Fandom

This amused me:

A recent study by Morten Bay, a University of Southern California digital media researcher, revealed that over 50 percent of the venom directed on Twitter at Rian Johnson, director of “The Last Jedi,” came from the same sources as Russian election meddling.

Using the analytical tools that other technologists deployed to uncover Russian influence during the 2016 election, Mr. Bay found that “bots, trolls/sock puppets or political activists” were using the “Star Wars” debate “to propagate political messages supporting extreme right-wing causes and the discrimination of gender, race or sexuality” and that “a number of these users appear to be Russian trolls.” So it seems that it was political operatives, not fans, who were denigrating the movie and fomenting some of the virulent racism and misogyny against its cast.

Using “Star Wars” as the vehicle was a canny move by the trolls. Fans, like the American electorate, are polarized and angry. Online and in real life, they scream at one another about how Luke Skywalker would really behave decades after finding out that his dad was Darth Vader.

It also makes me wonder: suppose making Americans hate each other really is a goal of Russian policy. Would stirring up trouble among Star Wars fans be a good strategy? Or are we better than that at separating entertainment from politics? Personally I suspect it would be a powerful tactic.

On the other hand, is dividing Americans really useful for Putin? In the short term it may have helped a little bit to elect Trump, but I would worry that in the longer term it might create incentives for a future leader to lash out at Russia to cement his or her position.

Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood

Church in St. Petersburg built on the site where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. The church was built in 1883 to 1907. Crazy, but sort of amazing.

Korolev Crater and Stalin's Weirdly Successful Tyranny

This is Korolev Crater on Mars in a recent composite image from the Mars Express spacecraft. The crater is about 51 miles (82 km) across and more than a mile deep, and it is often full of ice; here it gleams white because of a recent fall of snow.

The crater is named for Sergei Korolev, who is generally identified as "the architect of the Soviet space program," or sometimes "the Russian Werner von Braun." I realized I knew nothing more than that about the man and decided to look around.

Korolev was born in 1906 and grew up in Odessa, where he fell in love with aviation and attended a special technical high school. His teachers recognized his ability and in 1924 he moved to Moscow to study engineering. There he became a protege of Andrei Tupolev, the famous Soviet aircraft designer. After 1930 he changed directions and got interested in rockets, co-founding Russia's first rocket institute. In 1933 the institute launched the USSR's first liquid-fueled rocket, and soon after that the whole institute was drafted into the Soviet military. Then things got weird:

RNII developed a series of rocket-propelled missiles and gliders, including, in 1936, Korolev's RP-318, Russia's first rocket propelled aircraft. Before the aircraft made a rocket propelled flight, however, Korolev and other aerospace engineers were thrown into the Soviet prison system after he was falsely denounced to the NKVD, the USSR's secret police, on June 22, 1938. Korolev spent months on the Trans-Siberian railway and in a prison vessel at Magadan. This was followed by a year in the Kolyma gold mines in Siberia, probably the most dreaded part of the Gulag. Soviet leader Josef Stalin recognized the importance of aeronautical engineers in preparing for a possible war with Nazi Germany, and retrieved Korolev and other technical personnel that could help the Red Army by developing new weapons. A system of sharashkas (prison design bureaus) was set up to exploit the jailed "talent." Korolev and coworkers from the RNII thus continued their rocket design activities for several years.

Sergei Korolev was paroled by Stalin on July 27, 1944, primarily by the intervention of senior aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, himself a prisoner, who requested Korolev's services in his own sharashka. Following the end of World War II, Korolev was released from prison and sent to Germany to study the Nazi's V-2 rocket and other technology. In August 1946, he was appointed Chief Constructor for development of a long-range ballistic missile and the next year promoted to Chief Designer. After Stalin's death in 1953, Korolev joined the Communist Party and soon won the support of communist leader and fellow Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev, who saw the propaganda and military potential of a strong rocket program. On April 1, 1953, Korolev received approval from the Council of Ministers to develop the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the R-7. The next year his proposal to launch artificial satellites into Earth orbit was also approved.

So: from 1936 until after the end of World War II, many of the USSR's top aeronautical engineers, including the famous Tupolev, were in prison. They did some of their best work under Gulag conditions, facing (like all Gulag prisoners) immediate execution if they tried to escape or even to establish contact with their families. Even after Stalin's death Korolev and other key scientists were treated as something like prisoners, their every movement and communication constantly monitored, their identities treated as state secrets.

Nor was there anything unusual about Korolev's fate in the world of Soviet science. The Soviet political elite had never trusted scientists, and they had been jailing them by the hundreds since the 1920s. You can read a fascinating short history of the sharashka phenomenon at the Russian History blog. A snippet:

For the most part, the wartime NKVD prison science system was successful in generating innovations to support the war effort. Extremely tight control, narrowly focused goals, and high levels of funding led engineers to achieve their targeted goals. Judging by a summary issued in 1944, the NKVD believed that the results were overwhelmingly positive. In the report, the NKVD agents listed twenty major weapons systems or processes—including bombers, engines, propellant production processes, radio systems, and a host of artillery guns and cannons—developed by prisoners. Of these, at least twelve were introduced into mass production, a relatively high percentage in comparison to the prewar record of military R&D. Nearly all the projects reached the certification-testing stage. Some of the successes of the sharashka system were noteworthy. Designer Vladimir Petliakov’s group, for example, developed the Pe-2 bomber, one of the most successful Soviet weapons of the war, of which eleven thousand were produced during the war. Similarly, Tupolev’s team produced the Tu-2 bomber, which was an important asset to the Red Air Force and remained in service until the 1950s.

It is part of my own worldview that if you want people to do good work for you, you should treat them with respect. But the success of the USSR during World War II shows that this is not necessarily so, and that the threat of being sent back to Kolyma can work just as well.

How 305 Russian Government Hackers were Exposed

Amusing story:

The public identification this week of more than 300 suspected agents of Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, is being dubbed by security analysts the largest intelligence blunder in Russian post-Cold War history.

And the cause for the bungling comes down, they say, to the simple “human factor” of wanting to avoid traffic fines, including for drunken driving.

Prompted by the midweek disclosure by Dutch and British authorities of the identities of four Russian GRU operators accused of trying to hack the headquarters of the world's chemical weapons watchdog, the investigative journalism consortium Bellingcat subsequently trawled through a publicly available Russian traffic-records database to unearth the names and details of 305 other individuals thought to be working for the Russian intelligence agency.

Passport numbers and, in many cases, mobile telephone numbers were included in the vehicle registrations.

Bellingcat scrutinized the traffic database after one of the four GRU operatives named Thursday by the British and Dutch was found to have registered his Lada car in 2011 using the Moscow address of the GRU barracks housing his cyberespionage unit 26165.

The unit has been accused by Western authorities, including the U.S., of being responsible for a series of cyberattacks and the hacking of computer networks of international anti-doping agencies as well as organizations investigating Russia's use of chemical agents, including the alleged nerve-agent poisoning in the English town of Salisbury earlier this year of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

By searching for other vehicles registered to the same address Bellingcat came up with a list of 305 other individuals ranging in age from 27 to 53-years-old.

This story doesn't mention that the reason that database is "publicly available" is that corrupt officials within the Russian motor vehicle bureau sold it on the black market. And of course GRU operatives  want those special license plates because Russian traffic law is a nightmare of corruption.

American Efficiency in the Soviet Union

Perhaps you have some time idly wondered how the Soviet Union was able to industrialize so successfully despite civil wars, communist ideology, and a central planning apparatus that failed spectacularly in so many other areas. Obviously this is a complex question with a complex answer, but part of the explanation was Lenin and Stalin's embrace of American manufacturing methods. The Soviets were much enamored of the "scientific management" of Frederick Taylor, who used stopwatches and other tools to refine manufacturing processes and make them more efficient:

In the Soviet Union, Taylorism was advocated by Aleksei Gastev and nauchnaia organizatsia truda (the movement for the scientific organisation of labor). It found support in both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Gastev continued to promote this system of labor management until his arrest and execution in 1939. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union enthusiastically embraced Fordism and Taylorism, importing American experts in both fields as well as American engineering firms to build parts of its new industrial infrastructure. The concepts of the Five Year Plan and the centrally planned economy can be traced directly to the influence of Taylorism on Soviet thinking. As scientific management was believed to epitomize American efficiency, Joseph Stalin even claimed that "the combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism."

To build their new factories the Soviets also turned to Americans, specifically Albert Kahn, who had already designed the enormous River Rouge Complex for Henry Ford:

On May 8, 1929, through an agreement signed with Kahn by President of Amtorg Saul G. Bron, the Soviet government contracted the Albert Kahn firm to design the Stalingrad Tractor Plant. On January 9, 1930, a second contract with Kahn was signed for his firm to become consulting architects for all industrial construction in the Soviet Union.

Under these contracts, during 1929–1932, Kahn’s firm operated from its headquarters in Detroit and the newly established design bureau in Moscow to train and supervise Soviet architects and engineers. The bureau Gosproektstroi was headed by Albert Kahn’s younger brother, Moritz Kahn, and 25 Kahn Associatese staff were involved in Moscow in this project. They trained more than 4,000 Soviet architects and engineers; and designed 521 plants and factories under the first five-year plan.

I suppose I must have known about this, since I once read a whole book on the first five-year plan, but I had forgotten and I was deeply impressed a few minutes ago reading about Kahn's work in Russia. It is one of those unexpected connections that undermines all simple narratives and dichotomies. It reminds us that technology has its own imperatives, and that the building of cars and tanks was in practice much the same in Stalingrad and Detroit. It may also explain something about why it was the US and the Soviet Union that emerged as the dominant powers; in our world it is those who best master the key technologies of the age that rise to the top.

45 Things Varlam Shalamov learned in the Gulag

Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) spent more than a decade in Stalin's gulag, mostly in the Arctic gold mining camps of Kolyma. My post on his poetry is here.

While he was alive Shalamov always refused to say anything about any lessons he might have learned from his experiences, but after he died a list of 45 things he learned was found in his papers. It dates to around 1961, a decade after his release. Full list here. A sample:

1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.

2. The main means for depraving the soul is the cold. Presumably in Central Asian camps people held out longer, for it was warmer there.

3. I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the pit face).

4. I realized that the feeling a man preserves longest is anger. There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent.

6. I realized that humans were human because they were physically stronger and clung to life more than any other animal: no horse can survive work in the Far North.

7. I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers.

8. Party workers and the military are the first to fall apart and do so most easily.

9. I saw what a weighty argument for the intellectual is the most ordinary slap in the face.

Media Dictatorship

New paper by Sergei M. Guriev and Daniel Treisman:

In recent decades, dictatorships based on mass repression have largely given way to a new model based on the manipulation of information. Instead of terrorizing citizens into submission, “informational autocrats” artificially boost their popularity by convincing the public they are competent. To do so, they use propaganda and silence informed members of the elite by co-optation or censorship. Using several sources–including a newly created dataset of authoritarian control techniques–we document a range of trends in recent autocracies that fit the theory: a decline in violence, efforts to conceal state repression, rejection of official ideologies, imitation of democracy, a perceptions gap between masses and elite, and the adoption by leaders of a rhetoric of performance rather than one aimed at inspiring fear.

The notion that the internet would make dictatorial information control impossible has been throughly refuted by Russia and China. In the future dictatorial violence will mainly take the form of deniable assassination of rogue journalists.

Via Marginal Revolutions. 

More Amazing Finds from the Siberian Bronze Age

Excavations continued last summer at the Iktul cemetery in southern Siberia, which I wrote about last year. The cemetery belongs to the Okunev culture, the beginning of Siberia's Bronze Age. This week archaeologists published two new finds from burials dating to around 2500 BCE. The head above is described by the excavators as a "mythical beast", and it does look a bit like a dragon, but it seems to me that it might also be a horse. It is made of meteoric iron.

This small figuring is made of soapstone. The excavators call it a "doll." Opinion among archaeologists as to whether objects like this should be considered toys or religious icons swings back and forth, and right now the toy faction seems to be ascendant.

The new publication also includes more pictures of the amazing infant burial I wrote about back in 2016. The baby was half-covered by what seemed to be a rattle of the type used by shamans to chase away evil spirits, made of elk antler figurines.

The figurines have been cleaned up and preserved, and these photographs are the result. Amazing.

Department of Irony

Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.

– Joseph Stalin

Soviet Bus Stops

Photographs by Christopher Herwig, who has published a whole book of these. More at This is Colossal.

Narva/Ivangorod and the Limits of Nationalism

Narva and Ivangorod are two Russian-speaking towns on opposite banks of the Narva River. But as it happens the river is the border between Russia and Estonia, so Narva is in Estonia and Ivangorod is in Russia. Times reporter Andrew Higgins found that while the people of Narva are drawn emotionally to Putin's Russian nationalism, few of them actually want to be part of Russia:

“It is a different world over there,” said Sergei Stepanov, the former longtime editor of Narvskaya Gazeta, a Russian-language newspaper in Narva. “You see and feel the difference as soon as you cross the bridge across the river — the roads, the bureaucracy, the mentality.”

Another Narva resident says, “We are all Russians, but we have a different mentality here. We are used to European ways.”

Incomes are higher in Narva, pensions are much higher, and it is much easier to do just about anything. Streets are in better shape, trash is picked up on schedule, construction projects are finished on time and on budget, and people are optimistic about their future. In Ivangorod, not so much.

Part of Ivangorod's problem is that as a border city it is wrapped up in the state's security mania, a Russian problem that goes back to Stalin:

The church, along with the fortress and various museums, make Ivangorod an attractive destination for tourists. But getting them to come is not easy: Russian law and its security apparatus have put Ivangorod out of bounds for all but the most determined visitors.

All Russians who live outside the border area and any foreigner who wants to visit must submit a written application in Russian and obtain permission from the Leningrad Region branch of the F.S.B., the successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B. It took a reporter for The New York Times two applications and four months to get the permits needed to spend time in Ivangorod.

The mayor of Narva summed it up: “Russians here do not want to go back to the motherland.”

The best defense against the raging emotions that can wreck democratic politics is government that works for the people. The threat of extremism is always with us, but it is much worse when the economy collapses or the government is corrupt and incompetent.

Russians Trolling Americans

Via the House Intelligence Committee and the New York Times, a sample of the ads Russians with ties to Putin bought on Facebook:

I have to say they understand Americans pretty well.

Putin's Strategy: Get Americans to Hate Each Other

The Times:

In its prepared remarks sent to Congress, Facebook said the Internet Research Agency, a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin, had posted roughly 80,000 pieces of divisive content that was shown to about 29 million people between January 2015 and August 2017. Those posts were then liked, shared and followed by others, spreading the messages to tens of millions more people. Facebook also said it had found and deleted more than 170 accounts on its photo-sharing app Instagram; those accounts had posted about 120,000 pieces of Russia-linked content. . . .

The Russia-linked posts were “an insidious attempt to drive people apart,” Colin Stretch, the general counsel for Facebook who will appear at the hearings, said in his prepared remarks. He called the posts “deeply disturbing,” and noted they focused on race, religion, gun rights, and gay and transgender issues.

The Wall Street Journal:

Russian-linked account activity went far beyond paying for polarizing ads dropped into Facebook members’ news feeds. At least 60 rallies, protests and marches were publicized or financed by eight Russia-backed Facebook accounts from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., according to a review by The Wall Street Journal, which looked at archived versions of now-deleted Facebook posts and interviewed activists, attendees and others familiar with the events, most of which were posted on Facebook. Facebook said in September that it had found 470 such accounts that it says belonged to Russians and that sought to exploit social divisions in the U.S. through provocative issue ads…

At least 22 of the 60 events actually took place, such as a May 2016 protest of an Islamic center in Houston planned by “Heart of Texas”, a Russia-created page that supported Texas secession and posted the “Blue Lives Matter” rally in Dallas two months later. On June 25, 2016, following the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla, “LGBT United” organized a candlelight vigil, where one of the victim’s brothers spoke. Both were covered by local media and attracted a dozen or more attendees.

National Review:

The Russian government didn’t really want to help Trump, and they didn’t want to help the Clinton campaign, either. (They may have felt they would get a better deal from Trump, but they certainly weren’t willing to put aside their efforts to exacerbate political and cultural tensions over that.) Russia is no true friend to either the American political right or left: “Event listings show how Russia-backed pages organized protests for and against the same issues. The page “Born Patriotic” planned 17 pro-Trump rallies on the same day in August 2016 while “Black Matters” hosted anti-Trump rallies after the election.” They wanted Americans angry, lashing out at each other, and paralyzed and weakened by our own internal political and cultural divisions. It appears many Americans helped make their task way too easy for them.

On the one hand, what a clever strategy. On the other, Americans hate each other so much without Russian help that this may have made no difference, and besides, what does Russia really gain from all their work, other than making themselves feel clever?

To me the thing worth noting is that Americans are so divided they would rather ally with Vladimir Putin against the other party than band together against a rotten dictatorship trying to ruin our democracy.

Brutalism in Playground Design

It's hard to exaggerate the Soviet passion for concrete.

Inside the Hermitage, St. Petersburg

Views of the galleries at the Hermitage, once the world's most ironically named palace and now one of its most opulent museums.

Below, two images by Antony Gormley, from a series titled Still Standing, 2011.

X-Ray Music from Soviet Times

From 1946 to 1964, many people in the Soviet Union listened to banned music (like western jazz and rhythm 'n blues) on bootleg records made on x-ray film:

In Leningrad (today’s Saint Petersburg), young music lover Ruslan Bogoslowsky managed to build a transcription lathe – a 3-kilogram “portable” device able to record live sounds on waxed or acetate discs, then mainly used by radio journalists.

When it came to choosing the recording material, Coates says, discarded X-rays were an obvious choice. “ X-ray film is soft enough to be recorded on, but strong enough to hold the groove,” he explains. “It was also very easy to find: Russian hospitals had to get rid of their X-rays within one year because they were flammable, back then.”

Bogoslowsky teamed up with some friends to create the “Golden Dog Gang”: a bootlegger outfit able to get hold of smuggled vinyls and churn out tens of copies of “bone” records.

It was a laborious process yielding mediocre results: a lathe had to be positioned next to the gramophone playing the vinyl original, and it could only make one record at a time – one song at a time, in fact, as its maximum length was three minutes.

Sound quality wasn’t great either – some of the bootleggers Coates spoke with said X-ray music “sounded like sand” – and the records tended to wear off over time. Still, they were the only thing around, and they cost a few rubles. (The trade wasn’t particularly lucrative.)

Quickly, Bogoslowsky’s technique spread across Russia, as peddlers of X-ray records mushroomed at every corner of every major city.

Fascinating. I suppose the thrill of listening to forbidden music on bootleg records helped to make up for the poor sound quality.