Category: history

Stalin and Israel

~ Clarissa ~ 37 Comments
Jews greet Golda in Moscow

It seems like there are people who don’t know that Stalin not only supported the creation of Israel but also was key in helping the Jews win the War of Independence in 1948.

There is a long-standing myth that Stalin was an anti-Semite. He wasn’t, though. Stalin was a pragmatist. When it served his purposes to like Jews, he liked them. When it became more useful to hate them, he hated them.

After the end of World War II, Stalin was preparing to make yet another effort at “world revolution.” He needed a foothold in the Middle East, and the Palestinian Jews, who were fighting against the British Empire and who had many people interested in the ideas of socialism and communism among them, seemed to offer a perfect possibility to establish a presence in the region.

Soon, however, it became clear that the Jews of Israel were not planning to create a Communist state and were not likely to repudiate the advances of the US. Still, Israel could play a useful role for Stalin. He could now champion the Palestinians and condemn Jews for their colonialist, Zionist agenda. He needed a conflict with the US, the only existing world power that could compete with the USSR for world domination, and he was going to find a way to provoke the Americans in one manner or another.

In 1948, when Stalin still had hopes for the Soviet-friendly Israel, Golda Meir came to visit the Soviet Union. What happened was completely unexpected for Stalin. He wanted the Soviet Jews to explain to Golda that they were so happy in the internationalist Communist state that they had no need to be Jews any more.

Instead, tens of thousands of Soviet Jews came to a Moscow synagogue to meet “our Goldele.” Stalin was livid. As I explained before, the price that the Soviet Jews had paid for the complete absence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1948 and the great advances they were allowed to achieve was renouncing their Jewishness. And now, in 1948, Stalin was seeing crowds of Jews coming out into the streets of Moscow, inspired by the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine and very conscious of their Jewish heritage.

Since his first days in the Communist Party, Stalin, an ethnic Georgian, was convinced that nationalism was the greatest danger to the Communist dream. And he was right. In the late 1980ies and early 1990ies, nationalism will destroy the USSR. This is why Stalin could not allow nationalist sentiments and ethnic allegiances to flourish among the Soviet Jews. He unleashed a campaign of vicious anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. The campaign’s goals were two-fold: on the one hand, Stalin was teaching a lesson to all those people who, in the aftermath of WWII, were recovering their nationalist feelings, and on the other hand, he was preparing to provoke the United States into starting a third world war.

Ricardian: A Review of Elizabeth George’s "I, Richard"

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

Elizabeth George’s collection of short stories I, Richard hasn’t been received very well even by her hardcore fans. The reason for what I believe is an unfair rejection of this collection is the disappointing first story titled “Exposure.” If you decide to read I, Richard, I suggest you skip this story altogether and enjoy the rest of the collection.

Only the very last story, “I, Richard” belongs to the genre of Ricardian Apology. George wrote this story to make her Ricardian allegiances known to her fans. Of course, as a mystery writer, she couldn’t fail to structure this story as a modern-day murder mystery that is inspired by one of the character’s belief in Richard’s innocence.
George is different from many Ricardians in that she does not blame Henry Tudor for killing the young princes. This writer makes us question why we always assume that history was made by men. She allows a woman (of course, I will not spoil your reading pleasure by telling you her name) to become a protagonist of the story. Both the mystery of the princes’ murder and the modern-day mystery that frames them are based on the idea that dismissing female protagonism is a big mistake. George reminds us that women make history as much as men do. Those men who try to treat women as objects with no will of their own always end up paying a very high price for this delusion.

>Who Caused the Collapse of the Soviet Union? Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

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The first post in this series got a huge number of visitors, which makes me think that the topic is of interest to people and has to be developed further. So I’ll keep writing on this subject until I run out of things to say (which will not be very soon.)
Now, the most important thing you need to do if you want to understand what happened to the Soviet Union and what’s going on in its former republics right now is forget about the United States. I know that there are many people who like to believe that every single thing in the world is caused by the United States. Pseudo-liberals unwittingly demonstrate just how much they despise those of us from other countries by their insistence that if life in our countries does not correspond to their standards, that must have been caused by the interference of the US. This attitude is condescending, reductive and wrong. Today’s reality of the former Soviet countries was created and is maintained by people in those countries. And it’s not a reality that makes them unhappy, so fake compassion for us, poor unintelligent victims of the bad, all-powerful US, is completely misplaced. If that’s the direction of your thoughts about us, you need to reexamine what psychological issues make you want to exaggerate the importance of your country at the expense of others.
Even Naomi Klein, who in her imaginative and often funny book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism demonstrates a grievous misunderstanding of the post-Soviet Russia (she refers to Yeltsin as Russian Pinochet, for Pete’s sake), recognizes in a grudging manner that the Russians beat the IMF at its own game. Those of you who have read the book know that it’s informed by Klein’s extremely Americentric agenda. Still, even she doesn’t manage to create a convincing account of American protagonism in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the further fate of the former Soviet republics.
Now that we have established a productive framework within which these events should be discussed, we will be able to continue exploring this topic.

>Who Caused the Collapse of the Soviet Union? Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

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Nothing annoys me more than hearing people discuss completely in earnest whether the collapse of the Soviet Union was brought about by Ronald Reagan or by somebody else. Such discussions make just as much sense as trying to figure out whether world peace was achieved by this or some other politician. “Well, there is no world peace,” you’d say. Right you are. And there was no collapse of the Soviet Union. Not in any meaningful sense, that is. As to the end of the Cold War, if you seriously think it’s over, you need to stop spending so much time listening to the American media and turn to some external sources of information every once in a while. The winner of the Cold War is yet to be decided but I somehow doubt that you can win any war by pretending it isn’t taking place.
In case you want to know what really happened with the Soviet Union, North American media sources will not tell you anything intelligent. Every time I read an article or watch a news segment on the former USSR countries in the US or Canada, I am terrified at the amount of sheer factual errors and ridiculous mistakes that I encounter. I read an article in Montreal’s Gazette a few years ago that stated in no uncertain terms that radio was very popular in Russia nowadays because people had no money to buy TV-sets. This made me realize that woeful ignorance and ideological dishonesty of print media journalists makes writing about the former USSR the perfect ground for them to demonstrate their complete lack of investigative integrity. They just write whatever old bunch of lies will make the readers feel more relaxed and happy at any given moment.

In order to answer the question as to what happened to the Soviet Union, I want to give you small snippets from the biographies of the richest and most powerful people in Russia today. Tell me if you find anything these people have in common. I marked the relevant parts with bold type in case you don’t feel like reading a lot today.
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Vladimir Putin, the President and now the Prime-Minister (and the real ruler) of Russia:
Putin joined the KGB in 1975 upon graduation from university, and underwent a year’s training at the 401st KGB school in Okhta, Leningrad. He then went on to work briefly in the Second Department (counter-intelligence) before he was transferred to the First Department, where among his duties was the monitoring of foreigners and consular officials in Leningrad, while using the cover of being a police officer with the CID. He served at the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, which combated political dissent in the Soviet Union. He then received an offer to transfer to foreign intelligence First Chief Directorate of the KGB and was sent for additional year long training to the Dzerzhinsky KGB Higher School in Moscow and then in the early eighties—the Red Banner Yuri Andropov KGB Institute in Moscow (now the Academy of Foreign Intelligence).
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Mikhail Potanin,  one of Russia’s billionaires, former First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation.

Potanin was born into a high-ranking communist family. In 1978, Potanin attended the faculty of the International economic relations at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), an elite school that groomed students for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. . . In 1993, Potanin became President of United Export Import Bank. From August 14, 1996 until March 17, 1997 he worked as . Since August 1998, Potanin hold the positions of President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Interros Company. Potanin’s Interros owns 25% and controls Russian Nickel giant Norilsk Nickel
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Mikhail Khodorkovsky,  is a Russian oligarch and businessman. In 2004, Khodorkovsky was the wealthiest man in Russia, and was 16th on Forbes list of billionaires. Now, this vile criminal is finally in jail.
He succeeded in building a career as a communist functionary. He became deputy head of Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) at his university. The Komsomol career was one of the ways to get into the ranks of communist apparatchiks and to achieve the highest possible living standards. After perestroika started, Khodorkovsky used his connections within the communist structures to gain a foothold in the developing free market. He used the help of some powerful people to start his business activities under the cover of Komsomol. Friendship with another Komsomol leader, Alexey Golubovich, helped him greatly in his further success, since Golubovich’s parents held top positions in the State Bank of the USSR.
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Alexander Lebedev:  In May 2008, he was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the richest Russians and as the 358th richest person in the world with an estimated fortune of $3.1 billion. He owns a third of airline Aeroflot, and is part owner of the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and owner of four UK newspapers with son Evgeny Lebedev: the London Evening Standard, The Independent, the Independent on Sunday and the new i newspaper. 

In 1977, Alexander Lebedev entered the Department of Economics at Moscow State Institute of International Relations. After he graduated in 1982, Lebedev started work at the Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System doing research for his Kandidat (equal to Ph.D.) dissertation The problems of debt and the challenges of globalization. However he soon transferred to the First Chief Directorate (Foreign Intelligence) of KGB. He worked there and at its successor Foreign Intelligence Service until 1992. In London he had the diplomatic cover of an economics attaché. 
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Chernomyrdin: was the founder and the first chairman of the Gazprom energy company, the longest serving Prime Minister of Russia (1992–1998) and Acting President of Russia for a day in 1996. He was a key figure in Russian politics in the 1990s, and a great contributor to the Russian transition from a planned to a market economy. 
Chernomyrdin began developing his career as a politician when he worked for the Communist Party in Orsk between 1967 and 1973. In 1973, he was appointed the director of the natural gas refining plant in Orenburg, a position which he held until 1978. Between 1978 and 1982, Chernomyrdin worked in the heavy industry arm of the Central Committee of the Communist party.
In 1982, he was appointed deputy Minister of the natural gas industries of the Soviet Union. Concurrently, beginning from 1983, he directed Glavtyumengazprom, an industry association for natural gas resource development in Tyumen Oblast. During 1985-1989 he was the Minister of gas industries.

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I could continue this list practically ad infinitum but I’m sure that everybody knows what I’m trying to say here.  All of the major politicians and the billionaires in Russia and other former Soviet republics are former high-ranking members of the Communist Party, apparatchiks, and KGB employees. There was never any transfer of power, either politically or  economically. Absolutely the same people (or, rather, families) who ruled us before 1985 are still in power today. And if you want to know how and why that happened, wait for the second part of this post. 

Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants: A Review, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

In the first part of this review, I discussed the numerous historical errors that Ken Follett makes in his novel about World War I. This author tortures and murders facts of history with a terrifying abandon. By the end of this very long book, I thought that nothing else could possibly shock me until I encountered a description of “surly Russians” engaging in group sex in broad daylight in the streets of Petrograd. And then engaging in more public sex with children.

However, Follett’s complete disregard for historical facts is not the only problem with this book. His entire understanding of important events in history is extremely limited and often naive. In Fall of Giants, World War I and the two Russian revolutions are a result of backroom deals between inept diplomats and bored society ladies.

”On or about December 1910 human character changed,” Virginia Woolf once said. Since then, volumes have been written on the profound ideological shift that was caused by the advent of Modernity. The unwieldy, otdated empires of the Romanovs, the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns could not adapt to these radical transformations and had to plunge into suicidal warfare, social unrest, and revolutions. Follett’s grave intellectual limitations (and what else can be said about someone who relies as much as he does on silly cultural stereotypes?) prevent him from realizing that the events he describes are too important to be addressed in a superficial manner. This writer is, unfortunately, too self-assured and condescending to consult the existing body of scholarship on the events of 1914-1919.

I do not recommend this book to anybody. Not only will you not learn any reliable information about this period in history, you will not even have a good time. If the first part of the book is at least marginally entertaining, the second half of it is excruciatingly boring, long-winded and extremely repetitive.

>Noam Chomsky’s Hopes and Prospects: A Review, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

The fact that the two main candidates in the 2008 Democratic primary were a woman and an African American were a welcome sign, Chomsky acknowledges, that the country has managed to get at least somewhat civilized. Still, we cannot expect the joy from this reality to keep us perennially blind to the numerous ways in which Obama has not been living up to his promise. Chomsky reminds us that “Obama’s message of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ offered a virtual blank slate on which supporters could write their wishes.” And write we did, only to be disappointed in most of our expectations.

Chomsky points out that we do not elect politicians based on what policies they will promote. Rather, we vote for whomever presents us with the best PR campaign. Of course, we conveniently forget that after our candidate gets elected s/he will have to pay for the expensive campaign by servicing corporate interests and screwing us, the hardworking folks who put them in power. This is precisely why politicians have been working so hard to destroy the education system in the US. If you keep people in a state of permanent ignorance, you can feed them soap operish melodrama instead of real political discussion. Gossiping about Bristol Palin’s engagement and gushing ver the puppy Obama bought for his daughters is much easier than educating oneself on what it is that the Congress does and what the Supreme Court is responsible for. (As I discovered to my complete horror last semester, none of my 80 students had the slightest suspicion of what the role of SCOTUS might be).

The biggest disappointment of the Obama’s presidency has been, of course, his Economic Advisory Board. As Chomsky points out, it was packed by the poeple who engineered the economic crisis and then bled the government dry to compensate themselves for that. Chomsky is right, of course. I remember this sinking feeling I experienced as soon as Obama surrounded himself by criminals like Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers (a vile prick, if there ever was one), Timothy Geithner, Alan Greenspan, etc. It was the best indication we could have received that the only change we could expect would be for the worst. Of course, even Obama’s feeble attempts to rein in the robber bankers immediately resulted in threats to withdraw funds from his future campaigns. Ultimately, the responsibility rests with us, the voters, to educate ourselves about what the candidates actually stand for and insist that they carry out the will of the people. As good as this plan sounds, something tells me we have neither a hope or a prospect of it working out any time soon.

Chomsky offers a very bleak but an undoubtedly correct vision of Obama’s position on warfare and torture. As we all remember, a lot of Obama’s supporters preferred him to Hillary Clinton because of his opposition to the Iraq war. Understandably, we also believed that his position on torture would be in opposition to the barbaric practices adopted by the US starting in the 80ies. Chomsky departs from this hopeful attitude that has blinded many of the American progressives to the sad realities of Obama’s real position on these issues. What Chomsky says in this part of this book is something that no one wants to hear. However, his analysis in this part of the book is unassailable. After all his anti-war and anti-torture rhetoric, Obama has failed to deliver any actual change in these areas.

>Noam Chomsky’s Hopes and Prospects: A Review, Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 75 Comments

>I’m not usually a huge fan of Chomsky but his new collection of essays Hopes and Prospects is really good. The first part of the book deals with Latin America. Chomsky outlines the colonial past and present of Latin American countries and their valiant efforts to rid themselves of neo-imperialist domination by the United States. He states correctly that today’s struggles of Latin American countries (Bolivia, Argentina, Venezuela) to oppose the depredations of the US-inspired version of globalization offer hope for the rest of the world.  He is also absolutely right in pointing out that “Latin America is not merely the victim of foreign forces. The region is notorious for the rapacity of its wealthy classes and their freedom from social responsibility.” Here, Chomsky echoes Eduardo Galeano’s classic work Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent that decades ago offered a brilliant analysis of how Latin American power elites sold out their own countries to the predatory forces of the US neo-liberalism.

Chomsky states that the drive to imitate their Northern neighbors in ostensible consumption of Westernized goods and services has been the main cause of Latin American failure to achieve real as opposed to formal independence from colonial domination. Today, Chomsky points out “Latin America has real choices, for the first time in its history.” And this is great news for the entire planet.

In the second part of the book, Chomsky analyzes the influence that the imperialist mentality in the US exercises over the discussions of the US military presence in Iraq. I was particularly pleased to see that Chomsky decided not to follow in the footsteps of most liberal commentators in their refusal to see that Russian imperialism is in no way “better” or more justified than the US imperialism. Chomsky qualifies Putin’s actions in Chechnya as “murderous”, which they most definitely are. I only wish that more progressive analysts dared to depart from the tendency to praise everybody who opposes the US regardless of the atrocities they perpetrate. It is definitely right that the US imperialism and Russian imperialism should be discussed together since there are glaring similarities between them.

Chomsky then segues into what I consider the weakest part of the book: the discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As usual, Chomsky’s analysis of the issue is one-sided and biased. Israelis are all villainous nationalists and religious fanatics, while the Palestinians are without an exception languishing and tolerant victims. While Chomsky is right in suggesting that the Israelis do everything they can to make sure the conflict continues, he forgets to say that so do the Palestinians. When he describes the Israeli “information campaigns to instruct the world on its errors and misunderstanding, arrogant self-righteousness, circling the wagons, defiance . . .  and paranoia,” he avoids mentioning that this exactly the pattern adopted by every single nation-state with a very weak and diluted national identity (Russia is a great example of precisely this kind of paranoid nation building. Closer to home, so is the US.)

Chomsky’s discussion of nuclear proliferation is powerful and convincing, and I believe everybody should read it because it touches on some of the most important issues we confront today. The only objection I have to this part of his discussion is Chomsky’s insistence that there is no need to fear a nuclear attack from Iran because that would be suicidal and self-destructive. Chomsky forgets that these same statements were made about Germany 70 years ago: “Germany would not start a war, that would be suicidal and self-destructive.” And then a few years later: “Germany will not open up a second front, that would be suicidal and self-destructive.” We all know how those predictions went. Countries often act in completely self-destructive ways, which should be well-known  to Chomsky.

Starting from Chapter 9 of Part II, Chomsky offers a brilliant analysis of the 2008 presidential elections and the job Obama’s presidency has done since then. He points out correctly that both Democrats and Republicans are considerably to the right of the American population on many major issues, both international and domestic. Hence, it is not surprising that Obama’s tepid efforts to defend his intentions to introduce some kind of change don’t convince Americans any longer. Chomsky talks about how the American people have been brilliantly manipulated into being suspicious of public welfare programs that would be of invaluable use to themselves while supporting the “nanny state for the rich.”