Quote of the Day (Martin Cruz Smith, on a World of ‘Money, Propaganda, and Terror’)

“It came back, Arkady knew, to three things: money, propaganda, and terror. They weren’t discrete entities but a triskelion, forever whirling around each other. This was the mindset of spies, the men whose formative years had been spent in the margins of the shadow world. The more rules you break, the more success you have. The game never pauses and never stops. There are no periods of war and peace, just active hostility and retrenchments. There are no threats other than those which can be talked up, or in many cases made up, the better to justify eliminating them. There are no social problems that would be solved if solving them would reduce people’s dependence on the state. There are no grand plans, no master strategies, just the lust for power, the insane addictive desire to accumulate more and more because too much is never enough.”— American mystery and suspense novelist Martin Cruz Smith (1942-2025), Independence Square: Arkady Renko in Ukraine (2023)

What Donald Trump has presented to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shouldn’t be dignified with the phrase “peace plan.” Even “surrender plan” has the diplomatic scent of perfume about it. Believe it or not, I don’t even think “appeasement” does it.

No, in its demands that Ukraine yield significant portions of its territory to Russia and cap the size of its security forces, along with an implied threat to curtail U.S. weapons deliveries if Zelenskyy doesn’t capitulate by Thanksgiving, the right word is "ultimatum"—something that Russian President Vladimir Putin (pictured) might make.

While reading this penultimate of 11 Arkady Renko mysteries by the late superb Martin Cruz Smith, I came across a succinct passage on Ukrainian history that I wish Trump could have read.

But what would have been the use? The President’s attention span is such that he’s lucky to digest a few bullets on a Powerpoint slide, let alone interconnected sentences.

Then I came across the quote above. Forget about Trump—I wish large portions of MAGA could read and ponder this. It explains so much about Putin, and, by the end, Trump himself (“There are no threats other than those which can be talked up, or in many cases made up”).

If the American President is not authoritarian, like the Russian leader, then he’s at least authoritarian-curious, and even more likely authoritarian-adjacent.

Quote of the Day (John McCain, on Russia’s Leaders, ‘Corrupt With Power’)

“Russia's leaders, rich with oil wealth and corrupt with power, have rejected democratic ideals and the obligations of a responsible power. They invaded a small, democratic neighbor to gain more control over the world's oil supply, intimidate other neighbors, and further their ambitions of re-assembling the Russian empire. And the brave people of Georgia need our solidarity and our prayers.”—US Senator (R-AZ) and former POW John McCain (1936-2018), “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, MN,” Sept. 4, 2008, The American Presidency Project

For years, Donald Trump has acted weirdly and inexplicably towards Vladimir Putin, to say the least—from urging Russia in the 2016 Presidential campaign to release Hillary Clinton’s emails to claiming this year that Ukraine started its war with Russia. 

That behavior became even odder earlier this week, when he posted that the Russian dictator has “gone absolutely CRAZY” by escalating attacks on Ukraine amid peace negotiations.

Crazy? Hardly. That adjective, many would say, applies more to Trump.

No, despite the American President’s dictator-wanna aspirations, Putin has been unrelenting about his nationalist goals, pursuing them with a silence that Trump is temperamentally unable to maintain and with a cunning he can only envy.

Most of all, he has known how to appeal to Trump’s overweening ego, calling him a “genius” and feeding his misperception that Putin disregarded Barack Obama and Joe Biden because he didn’t “respect” them as he did their successor in the Oval Office.

So, over last weekend, Trump voiced frustration that Putin is “killing a lot of people.” Where has he been these last three years, since the invasion of Ukraine? Or the past decade? Or, to take McCain’s point, the last two decades?

You have to wonder, why is Trump squawking about Putin now? From the moment he became a serious contender for the GOP nomination a decade ago, he adopted a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” attitude on the former KGB operative.

Do you think the President is reading polls that show Americans don’t approve of that posture—and wonder if he is taking a tough enough stance against Putin?

Maybe, like Rip Van Winkle, Trump fell asleep for a generation, only to wake up to find the world utterly changed. Maybe his short-term memory is vanishing.

Long ago, that same phenomenon took hold of the MAGA faithful. How else to explain why, even after Putin’s actions unleashed the concerns of McCain (and the 2012 GOP nominee, Mitt Romney), delegates to the 2016 convention agreed, without the slightest fuss and following the urging of Trump representatives, to water down that year’s platform language about “providing lethal defensive weapons” to help Ukraine fight against pro-Russian separatists?

Whatever the case may be, Moscow can barely disguise its amusement over Trump’s incoherent rhetorical flailing. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov referred to “emotional overload,” while a female flunky trotted out for Putin-controlled television said Trump’s warning that the Russian strongman might be “playing with fire” would last “until tomorrow.”

Remarkably, the Russian government finds itself in accord with Wall Street about Trump’s mood and policy shifts—all that loud blustering followed by hasty retreats. The nickname most applicable, an acronym that made the President lash out yesterday at yet another reporter for asking a “nasty question,” was TACO—“Trump Always Chickens Out.”

(The image accompanying this post—John McCain's official senatorial photo, taken Jan. 23, 2009—derived from his Facebook page.)

Quote of the Day (Immanuel Kant, Defining ‘Enlightenment’)

“Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! [from Horace, Epodes, 1, 2, 40] ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’ — that is the motto of enlightenment.”— German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), "What Is Enlightenment?" (1784), in On History, edited by Lewis White Beck (1963)

Last month marked the 300^th birthday of Immanuel Kant in Königsberg, near the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea. As I learned from Lea Ypi’s essay from April in The Financial Times, his place of birth—and the extent to which his legacy belongs to one nation, rather than all humanity—has become tied up in the epic, blood-soaked wars of the 20^th century that saw Konigsburg shift from East Prussian—i.e., German—control to that of Russia.

Unfortunately, changed European borders have, in the case of this pivotal modern philosopher, certainly proven the first half of George Orwell’s 1984 dictum that “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.” We are about to see, as the struggle over Crimea moves into another phase, whether the second part of that statement will hold true.

I first encountered Kant in the famous Contemporary Civilization” course at Columbia University. I came away with two points that have lingered in my mind about him ever since.

First, he was so quirkily regular in his habits, the legend went, that the residents of Königsberg set their clocks to coincide with his afternoon walk.

Second, though a constellation of thinkers were trying to come up with a more convenient way of viewing the world, it was Kant who offered the definition of “Enlightenment” with which I began this post—and which has come to characterize an entire strain of thought in 18^th century Europe and America.

Humanity can only change by beginning a public questioning of what is true and what is false.  But, Kant implied, it is inhibited by laziness and cowardice.

In moving Europe further away the sway of religion, Kant and other philosophers of his movement looked to “enlightened” rulers—i.e., “benevolent despots”—like Frederick the Great of Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria to spread education, learning and culture.

In time, the despots became less benevolent (if they ever really were) and the continent became continually rocked by great-power struggles.

My class had read the philosopher’s stringently argued Critique of Pure Reason. What I was not aware of, however, until I read Ypi’s essay, was how difficult it was for Kant to maintain the independence of thought he advocated in his writings with the necessity of survival when Königsberg came under the influence of a foreign power: perhaps not so surprisingly, considering current events, Russia.

In 1759, Kant petitioned Russian Empress Elizabeth, asking for an academic post.  But 11 years later, once the Russians withdrew, Kant went back to his original Prussian rulers and was granted a full professorship.

In recent times, some elements in Russia highlighted that reversal, calling Kant a “turncoat.” That term might be a bit strong, but “opportunist” might apply better—and even that is hardly a compliment or term of endearment.

Did Kant feel disgusted with this ideological maneuvering? Maybe, because late in life he was writing, in no uncertain terms: “No state shall forcibly interfere in the constitution and government of another state.”

Having already seen Konigsberg change hands in his thirties, he had, by his seventies, lived long enough to see how the French Revolution had introduced the notion of an entire nation in arms—and collapsed any idea that civilian populations should be off limits in wars.

In 1795, Kent wrote the piercing essay “Toward Perpetual Peace,” warning, a century and a half before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about how “a war of extermination in which the simultaneous annihilation of both parties . . . would let perpetual peace come about only in the vast graveyard of the human race.”

Instead, he advocated a “cosmopolitan right,” based on the belief that “a violation of right on one place of the Earth is felt in all.”

Kant’s ideas have not only influenced notions of public education, but also the formation of organizations dedicated to preserving international security and guarding against the outbreak of war, such as the European Union and the United Nations.

(For yet another view of Kant focusing on the question of his Prussian or Russian identity, please see this essay by Robert R. Clewis in the April/May issue of Philosophy Now Magazine.)

This Day in Military History (Western Democracies Pledge Mutual Security With North American Treaty)

April 4, 1949—The countries who put their signature to the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, DC, looked just like the Allied coalition that had recently won World War II in Europe—but with one notable exception: the Soviet Union, whose postwar threats to elected governments had alarmed its former partners.

Since the formation of this defensive pact, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has increased from its original 12 to 32 members. Its recent growth derives from the same factor that brought it into existence: a septuagenarian dictator who, in his quest to annex neighbors and subvert republics, inspires other nations to band together in mutual support.

Back in 1949, that authoritarian ruler was Joseph Stalin, who saw the chaos and devastation in the wake of WWII as an opportunity to expand Soviet influence, including through:

*reneging on its Yalta Conference promise of free elections in Poland;

*exploiting its continued military presence in Hungary to pressure non-Communist parties into submission;

*covertly backing an overthrow of the democratically elected government of Czechoslovakia by the nation’s Communist party;

*blockading Allied-controlled West Berlin in an unsuccessful attempt to incorporate the whole city into its orbit.

In 2024, the dictator is Vladimir Putin, whose revanchist nostalgia for the return of Russian influence has led him to invade Ukraine—a move that, in turn, led to a prompt application to join NATO by Finland and Sweden.

The West’s attempts to begin new eras of cooperation with Stalin and Putin quickly foundered as perceptions grew that these dictators were intent not just on cracking down on internal dissent but on posing a threat to Eastern Europe.

American, Britain, and French leaders had hoped to include the Soviets in a postwar Council of Foreign Ministers, according to a Truman Library oral history interview with John D. Hickerson, the Assistant Secretary of State generally credited with writing the text for what became the North Atlantic Treaty.

But, after 1947 conferences in Moscow and London that went nowhere because of Soviet intransigence, the three transatlantic partners determined to go their own way.

The genesis for the new system of cooperation came from British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, but the indispensable forces were the two American Secretaries of State when the treaty was hammered out in 1948 and early 1949, George Marshall and Dean Acheson.

The most important element of the North American Treaty may be Article 5, in which the signatories agreed that "an armed attack against one or more of them… shall be considered an attack against them all" and that following such an attack, each Ally would take "such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force" in response.

The first time that mutual-aid pledge would be invoked came not in response to a move by the USSR, but after 9/11—and it did not involve the US coming to the aid of the organization’s European members, but them supporting us in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center.

Hickerson’s oral history interview gives a strong sense of the improvisational nature of the discussions shaping the North Atlantic Treaty. 

The diplomats, he explained, were talking about “what we would do in the event of an attack, without considering anything beyond the political commitment to do that. And frankly in the back of our minds was the hope that that commitment itself would be enough to restrain any aggression.” 

It would not be until the following year, with the outbreak of the Korean War, before the “machinery” of NATO would be set up.

This brief history is worth keeping in mind in the present US. Presidential cycle, with one all-but-certain party nominee saying he would encourage Putin to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member that falls behind on its defense spending guidelines.

That Presidential candidate’s complaint about failing to meet these guidelines echoes the chief  American opponent of the pact back in 1949, Robert Taft, who saw it as “arming Western Europe at American expense.”

But the deeply conservative, anti-communist Republican Senator from Ohio was under no illusions about Stalin’s intentions and never praised his “strength.”

Moreover, the national defense spending percentages on which today’s isolationists fixate are, as mentioned earlier, guidelines, not ironclad commitments.

The Cold War between the US and USSR was often conducted without nuance and sometimes risked catastrophe. But NATO created a defensive alliance based on collective security—an arrangement missing before WWII that would have eased the task of countering Nazi aggression.

That alliance resulted in 75 years of peace, encouraging international commerce—the kind of minimal-cost arrangement that one might have hoped a once and future businessman might have better appreciated.

(The photo accompanying this post shows President Harry Truman with the diplomats from the countries signing the North Atlantic Treaty.)

Quote of the Day (Mstylslav Chernov, on Ukraine’s Anguish, History, and the Responsibility of Filmmakers)

“I cannot change the history. I cannot change the past. But we, all together, you—some of the most talented people in the world—we can make sure that the history record is set straight and that the truth will prevail and the people of Mariupol and those who have given their lives will never be forgotten.”— Ukrainian filmmaker Mstylslav Chernov, accepting a Best Documentary Feature Oscar for 20 Days in Mariupol, quoted by Dan Heching, “Winners, Stars Tout Peace Over Politics at ThisYear’s Academy Awards,” www.cnn.com, Mar. 11, 2024

Quote of the Day (Jeffrey Lewis, on the Coming Military Challenge in Space)

“China, India, Russia, and the United States have all conducted antisatellite tests that created large amounts of debris. If they continue to conduct these tests, or if other countries follow suit, then the debris problem will continue to worsen, posing threats to both satellites and human crews in space. And antisatellite weapons are just the beginning. There are so many new actors in space. More than a dozen countries have the ability to launch satellites into orbit, including India, Iran, Japan, South Korea, and even North Korea. Add to that the private space launch companies owned by billionaires, like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. New technologies, such as autonomous proximity operations, also allow for the development of small satellites that can rendezvous in orbit with other satellites—to inspect them, fix them, or even damage them. The orbital environment is changing rapidly. Increasingly we need rules, as well as the ability to understand our interests in the broad context of common interest among all spacefaring states to maintain the orbital environment. These rules must address military activity in space. Yet the international community was unable to agree on even a voluntary code of conduct.”— Arms control blogger and scholar Jeffrey Lewis, “2022: A Space Emergency,” The American Scholar, Spring 2022

Such is my curiosity that over the last few years, my propensity to buy reading matter, only to lay it aside for when I have more time, has grown apace. I must admit that, nearly two years ago, when I saw the “War and Space” cover headline for the Spring 2022 issue of The American Scholar, it all sounded like Flash Gordon stuff to me—or, maybe more appropriate, “Star Wars.”

I am sure that all too many Americans, still reeling from COVID, inflation, and the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, felt similarly.

Buy now, the Space Defense Force that Donald Trump pushed into being while in the White House is going to be tested in a major way by Vladimir Putin.

For reasons best known to himself, Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, released a statement two weeks ago on a “serious national security threat” that some thought might be a nuclear weapon, while others believed the weapon might be nuclear-powered but not a nuclear warhead.

The next day, the White House said the Russian system under development was a space-based anti-satellite weapon. Its use would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bans weapons of mass destruction in space.

Little of this should have come as such a shock because it was widely reported at the time, but the current prospects for nuclear terror, as Lewis notes, were laid two decades ago, when the administration of George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty, signed by Richard Nixon in 1972, which limited missile defenses.

Lewis’ article reinforces my conviction that a crisis is simply a problem worsened into potential catastrophe by officeholders through perpetual procrastination.

You may remember—or maybe you won’t—that the successful launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 and the possibility that the Soviet Union was leapfrogging the US in the technological superiority behind military systems boosted momentum for the creation of the National Air and Space Administration and more spending for science education in the National Defense Education Act the following year.

We will see whether Putin’s statements since the Turner disclosure—a denial that Russia intends to deploy outer-space weapons, coupled with a confirmation that its “strategic nuclear forces are in a state of full readiness"—are enough either to boost science education again or to disenthrall Rep. Turner, his Capitol Hill colleagues in his party caucus, or the party leader who once told reporters he accepted the assurances of Putin rather than the word of his own intelligence agencies.

Quote of the Day (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, on How Writers and Artists Can ‘Conquer Falsehood’)

“And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world – but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.”—Russian novelist and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Nobel Lecture 1970

Fifty years ago this week, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was deported from the USSR for having written The Gulag Archipelago, a searing history and memoir of life in the Soviet Union’s prison camp system. His real “crime” was to expose the falsehood at the heart of Communist Party rule: that terror in the country began not with Joseph Stalin but with his predecessor, the founder of the USSR, V. I. Lenin.

Solzhenitsyn came to the United States but was never comfortable with the country that provided him with a refuge from harassment, arrest, and, potentially, even worse. Four years after the start of his exile, in a controversial commencement address at Harvard University, he surprised listeners and the wider world by attacking the West for its secularism, materialism, and lack of courage.

If you Google this speech, you will find many links praising it for its prophetic vision. I can’t help but regard much of it with dismay, though—not only for the points the great Russian dissident overlooked about the West but for an underlying outlook that became more apparent when he returned to his post-Communist homeland.

Solzhenitsyn could not see, for instance, that the legalistic culture and stress on individual rights in the West provided the basis for the human rights movement that created an alternative to totalitarianism and undermined Soviet legitimacy.

Moreover, after going home triumphantly to Russia 20 years later as a free man, with his citizenship restored, Solzhenitsyn started expressing more aggressively what Robert Coalson, in a 2014 essay for The Atlantic, called his “Greater Russian, Orthodox-driven nationalism.”

That outlook led the Nobel laureate to praise Vladimir Putin as he rose to power. In fact, Coalson notes, Solzhenitsyn’s 1990 essay “Rebuilding Russia,” though it urged the divestment of non-Slav republics, foreshadowed Putin’s plan to reunite Ukraine with Russia.

This week, still under the influence of The Gulag Archipelago’s act of profound moral witness, I bought an epic historical novel that Solzhenitsyn extensively revised while in exile, August 1914, part of his "Red Wheel" cycle on the end of Czarist Russia and the rise of the USSR. I wonder how much of it will reflect his great literary gifts and moral outrage—and how much of it will display the nationalistic blindness that led him to overlook Putin’s creeping authoritarianism.

William Harrison’s retrospective at the time of Solzhenitsyn’s death in the English publication The Guardian praised the Russian for his “principled and brave unmasking of the horrors of the Soviet regime,” while also lamenting his pan-Slavism, “the fantastical, backward-looking political idealism that led him to support Putin's project.”

“Like many of those disillusioned with western liberalism, in Russia and the west, he fancied that ‘Putin's path’ provided an alternative,” Harrison concluded. “The reality of this ‘alternative,’ involving, for example, the pilfering of resources by Kremlin-backed ‘businessmen’ and the silencing of the media by censorship and killing, is less than promising.”

Ironically, Solzhenitsyn failed to perceive that Putin would mix Russian nationalism with the dark arts of disinformation and deception he learned as a KGB foreign intelligence officer to create a homegrown 21^st-century model of authoritarianism, maybe even more exportable and viral than the Communist variety. The obligation now resides in others once again to “conquer falsehood.”

This Day in Russian History (Lenin Final Rites Strengthen Stalin’s Hold on Power)

Jan. 27, 1924—The Moscow funeral of V.I. Lenin, who seven years before had led a small cadre of revolutionaries to seize power over a Russian population of 158,000,000, took on all the characteristics of a secular sanctification, with the city of Petrograd renamed in his honor and even a special mausoleum containing his carefully preserved body erected in a mere three days.

Braving temperatures 35 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, lines of mourners more than a mile long waited patiently to segue past his coffin.

Already signaling the credulous reporting he would display in downplaying the Soviet terror famine of the early 1930s, The New York Times’ Walter Duranty reported that the Lenin-related pageantry would lay “the foundation of a revival campaign to infuse new energy, enthusiasm, unity, and discipline in the Communist party.”

While acknowledging an attack by Lenin’s emerging successor, Joseph Stalin, on his rival, Leon Trotsky, the day of Lenin’s death, Duranty brushed it off, seeing potential for harmony in the offing:

“The best-informed people here are confident that Trotsky, Radek, and other insurgents will join hands with the ‘machine’ leaders, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, over Lenin’s grave. If Trotsky gives no sign to the latter, they may make the first step toward reconciliation.”

No such “reconciliation” took place. Unity would be achieved by fear and capitulation.

This was more than the kind of mass grief that followed, for instance, the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy in the United States. 

This was a form of mass indoctrination, a means of smothering internal dissent about the meaning of Lenin’s life and the Soviet regime he had agitated, plotted, and fought to bring into being, and the beginning of what became a familiar sight for decades: 

The entombment of the Communist leader, performed against the express wishes of his family and several key Party leaders, reflected the wishes of Stalin, who—mindful of the traditional Russian Orthodox Church belief that a divine body would not deteriorate—used the last rites to position himself as Lenin’s successor and to help fashion his own “cult of personality.”

Somehow, architect Aleksei Shchusev managed to build this temporary mausoleum within the three days that Stalin allotted. Then he was asked to revise his plans twice more, with each revision producing a more grandiose structure.

What ordinary Russians couldn’t perceive over several decades was the sleight of hand needed to manufacture all this reverence. A phrase from The Wizard of Oz comes to mind: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, published after the collapse of the USSR, noted that control room staffers supervised the optimal temperature and degradation of Lenin's corpse, and that beneath the mausoleum there was also a workout room for the guards, in which the reporter imagined "some pimply kid from Chelyabinsk doing squat thrusts."

In addition to successfully wrapping Stalin in Lenin’s mantle, the creation of Lenin as a revolutionary icon later served the purpose of Stalin’s opponents. The ceremony at Red Square substituted a revolutionary form of devotion for a religious one, with Lenin joining Karl Mark as the crucial icon.

With Stalin’s unmasking as a paranoid director of a police state a few years after his death in 1953, Lenin became the great “what-if” alternative for Communists who couldn’t abide any questioning of the legitimacy of the U.S.S.R.—or, according to Lenin biographer Christopher Read, “a ‘good’ Lenin, a democrat blown off course by Russian backwardness and the exigencies of the [Soviet] Civil War, as opposed to a ‘bad’ Stalin.”

Starting in spring 1922, three strokes had progressively undermined the Soviet leader’s health and, more important for the state he hoped to direct, limited his day-to-day control of Party affairs.

With his physical strength waning but his anxiety mounting, he sought to stave off a split between two of his closest associates, Stalin and Leon Trotsky, that might divide the Soviet leadership while he was alive and spark a succession struggle after his death.

Yet, though he chastised both men for behavioral traits that gave rise to tension in the ranks, he viewed Stalin—to whom he had often turned to implement his directives—as s figure who should be blocked from assuming ultimate authority in the state.

As Lenin grew feebler, he had attempted to curb Stalin’s increased accumulation of power by issuing in late December 1922 a “testament” to the Communist Party’s Central Committee. As General Secretary of the committee, he noted, Stalin now possessed “unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.”

A couple of weeks later, after Stalin had insulted Lenin’s wife, the ailing leader went further in an addendum to his report, observing that the younger man’s rudeness was intolerable in a party leader, and that the committee should “think about a way of removing Stalin from that post” and appoint somebody “more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.”

When Stalin’s death came in 1953, he joined his old chief in the mausoleum. But his period as an object of devotion was much shorter. 

After Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech” to the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union denouncing his crimes, it was only a matter of time—five years, to be exact—before he was removed from Lenin’s tomb and re-buried in a far humbler resting place.

But the cult of Lenin remained intact for decades more. “Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live” became a longtime mantra of Soviet society, and even beyond, as the ubiquitous image of the international Communist movement at parades. Amid regimes that placed a premium on censorship, his works continued to be produced in mass quantity, year after dreary year.

There was far less distance than one might suspect between the current dictator of the sprawling Russian land mass named Vladimir and the one a century ago. (Lenin’s initials, V.I., stood for “Vladimir Ilich.” His surname was adopted as a pseudonym to evade the Czar’s secret police.)

Russia’s first kleptocratic ruler and the world’s first Marxist dictator embraced the same means to power: ruthless force that crushed opponents. 

Indeed, Vladimir Putin learned about the dark arts of poisoning, targeted assassinations, even striking at critics in foreign lands as a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB, a descendant agency of the Cheka, or Soviet state security police, set up by Lenin and under the direction of Felix Dzerzhinsky.

For a deeper, contemporary consideration of Lenin’s legacy—not just in the Soviet Union well into the glasnost era, but even among American right-wingers like Steve Bannon who emulate the Communist’s style of disruption if not his ideology—Cathy Young’s recent article from The Bulwark is well worth reading.

Quote of the Day (Masha Gessen, on How Midcentury Totalitarianism Led to Unusual Soviet Population Policies)

“For decades now, the Soviet Union had been trying, and failing, to recover from the catastrophic population loss caused by the Second World War and the Gulag extermination system. The thrust of the population policies initiated by [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev was to get as many women as possible to have children by the comparatively few surviving men. The policies dictated that men who fathered children out of wedlock would not be held responsible for child support but the state would help the single mother both with financial subsidies and with childcare: she could even leave the child at an orphanage for any length of time, as many times as she needed, forfeiting her parental rights. The state endeavored to remove any stigma associated with resorting to the help of orphanages, or with single motherhood and having children out of wedlock. Women could put down a fictitious man as the father on the child's birth certificate—or even name the actual father, without his having to fear being burdened with responsibility.”— Russian-American journalist, author, translator, and activist Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017)

The massive Soviet casualties in WWII (27 million) and the Gulag, labor colonies, and prisons from 1931 to 1953 (1.7 million) are only dimly known to the wide American public. Even less understood are the consequences of this for subsequent government policy.

Masha Gessen’s careful analysis of all this, in the broader context of the broad-based psychological despair experienced by so many in Russia, reveals something eye-opening about how totalitarian rule (in the form of one country waging war not only on another but even on its own citizens) creates ripple effects that need to be analyzed and absorbed. 

It may be some time before we can fully grasp what is going on now in Russia under Vladimir Putin and China under Xi Jinping. But it is surely not the "strength" that they proclaim or their acolytes in the West blindly accept.

Quote of the Day (Christo Grozev, Foretelling the End of Russia’s Major Coup Plotter)

“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin went on TV and called [Yevgeny] Prigozhin a traitor. Everyone knows what they do with 'traitors,' and Putin hasn't done that. He wants to see him dead. He can't do that yet. In six months, Prigozhin will either be dead, or there will be a second coup. I'm agnostic between the two, but I can't see neither of these happening."— Investigative journalist Christo Grozev, correctly predicting the fate of the late Wagner Group leader and coup plotter, quoted by Edward Luce, “Lunch With the FT: Christo Grozev,” The Financial Times, August 12-13, 2023

Now, I’d like to credit Grozev with the uncanny powers of Nostradamus, or what passes as such in the international intelligence community.

But I suspect that the journalist would be the first to tell you that it took no special soothsaying skill to know that Prigozhin would come to an untimely end. So many people, inside and outside Russia, who find themselves at odds with Vladimir Putin have suffered a similar fate, as itemized in Lauren Said-Moorhouse's CNN story today. 

The only real question was how Prigozhin would die. A plane crash was so convenient, and so poetic, in a sense. After all, his coup attempt of a few months ago never did really take flight, did it?

Quote of the Day (Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage, on the ‘Rules-Based Order’ Putin Left Long Before Invading Ukraine)

“[Vladimir] Putin projected a conciliatory air early in his presidency, although he may have harbored hatred of the West, contempt for the rules-based order, and an eagerness to dominate Ukraine all along. In any case, once he retook the presidency in 2012, Russia dropped out of the rules-based order. Putin derided the system as nothing more than camouflage for a domineering United States. Russia violently encroached on Ukraine's sovereignty by annexing Crimea, reinserted itself in the Middle East by supporting Assad in Syria's civil war, and erected networks of Russian military and security influence in Africa.”— Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage, “Putin’s Last Stand: The Promise and Peril of Russian Defeat,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2023

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on the One Thing Still Impossible in Russia)

Michael: “What has the tyrant done now?”

Vera Sabouroff: “Tomorrow martial law is to be proclaimed in Russia.”

Everyone: “Martial law! We are lost! We are lost!”

Alexis Ivanacievitch: “Martial law! Impossible!”

Michael: “Fool, nothing is impossible in Russia but reform.” — Anglo-Irish dramatist, novelist, and poet Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Vera: Or, The Nihilists (1880)

Quote of the Day (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, on ‘Unlimited Power’)

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”—Russian Nobel Literature laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (1973)

It was one of the great ironies and tragedies of the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn that the Russian novelist, who endured imprisonment, harassment, and exile at the hands of the Communist regime, was blind to the growing menace to his country posed by a former KGB operative.

Wrapping himself in the intense love of country and faith in God felt by Solzhenitsyn and so many of his countrymen—all the while ensuring that the material needs of the populace were met more than they had been in generations—Vladimir Putin consolidated absolute power by degrees. With an additional dollop of ego-stroking, he managed to fool even the great Russian writer and dissident into believing that he was merely restoring national greatness.

Too bad Solzhenitsyn could not have pondered again his own words about what happens when “unlimited power” is placed in the hands of people without the capacity to withstand temptation. But those of us in the West should not go away thinking it can’t happen here. It has, and may yet again.

Quote of the Day (Fiona Hill, on Putin’s Sense of Internal and External Threats)

“In truth, most American policymakers simply wish that Russia would just go away so they can refocus their attention on what really matters. For their Russian counterparts, however, the United States still represents the main opponent. That is because, as a populist leader, [Russian dictator Vladimir] Putin sees the United States not just as a geopolitical threat to Russia but also as a personal threat to himself. For Putin, foreign policy and domestic policy have fused. His attempt to retain Russia’s grip on the independent countries that were once part of the Soviet Union and to reassert Moscow’s influence in other global arenas is inseparable from his effort to consolidate and expand his authority at home.”—Fiona Hill, Brookings Institution fellow and former National Security Council Russian specialist, “The Kremlin’s Strange Victory: How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2021

Quote of the Day (Michael Idov, on Cynicism and Dictatorships)

“One tends to imagine life in an autocratic regime as dominated by fear and oppression: armed men in the street, total surveillance, chanted slogans, and whispered secrets. It is probably a version of that picture that has been flitting lately through the nightmares of American liberals fretting about the damage a potential autocrat might do to an open society. But residents of a hybrid regime such as Russia’s — that is, an autocratic one that retains the façade of a democracy — know the Orwellian notion is needlessly romantic. Russian life, I soon found out, was marked less by fear than by cynicism: the all-pervasive idea that no institution is to be trusted, because no institution is bigger than the avarice of the person in charge. This cynicism, coupled with endless conspiracy theories about everything, was at its core defensive (it’s hard to be disappointed if you expect the worst). But it amounted to defeatism. And, interestingly, the higher up the food chain you moved, the more you encountered it.”— Michael Idov, “Russia: Life After Trust,” New York Magazine, Jan. 23, 2017

The image accompanying this post shows Russia’s Vladimir Putin—not only the dictator of his country’s own autocracy, but also a model for would-be strongmen elsewhere. This article was published three years ago, but it is no less relevant now--and probably more so.

The Impeachment Saga: Trump’s Putinesque ‘Misdirection, Disorder, and Political Stagecraft’

“Once this quagmire—in which truth and lies are knotted up and nothing is incontrovertible—is established, the final aim comes into view….As the Kremlin has long known, once you've successfully swamped truth, you're no longer accountable for your actions. Mounting evidence  from the administration's first month or so in office suggests that this is the Trump team's goal: to produce a state of disorder between themselves, the media, and the public, so that it becomes all but impossible for Trump and his team to be held accountable for conflicts of interest, shady relationships, and abuses of power. It’s how Moscow has entrenched a super-rich oligarchy and a thinly veiled authoritarian regime: by hiding behind its splashy dramaturgia [Russian for “theater craft”]. Trump is quickly learning his own variation on this theme. ‘There is a sense that he will purposefully move the conversation onto colorful bullshit, away from the really serious stuff,’ [former Russian TV producer Peter] Pomerantsev says. The Kremlin has provided him with a blueprint for ruling with impunity by way of misdirection, disorder, and political stagecraft.”—Mike Mariani, “In Trump’s America,” Vanity Fair, April 2017 

A few weekends ago, while channel-surfing, I came across a C-Span talk to a Temple University class given by Geoff Shepard, who 45 years ago served as principal deputy to President Richard Nixon’s lead defense lawyer. Shepard was speaking about alleged judicial and prosecutorial abuses in the case that brought the President down, or what he insisted on calling The Real Watergate Scandal in a book by that name.

Poor Tricky Dick. I imagine he would be kicking himself that when he needed it, he didn’t have a cybersphere where anything goes and a Fox News happy to offer guest appearances to die-hard apologists who wrench facts out of context and manufacture political conspiracies out of whole cloth.

Most of all, Nixon—who made his career as an unrelenting commie-hater—would be stunned that a later Republican occupant of his office would not only solicit, on national television, aid from a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB and take that spy-turned-dictator’s word over his own intelligence agencies, but would then, as Mike Mariani noted above, copy that foreign thug’s playbook to power. 

Such is the state of America, even with the battle on Capitol Hill joined now, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally moving the articles of impeachment against Donald Trump to the Senate after a delay of several weeks, and—in a scene with multiple levels of irony—Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts swearing the Senate to impartiality—something that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for one, has previously gloated he would not do. 

This weekend, a friend told me that, even as the third President in our lifetime undergoes impeachment, the U.S. should emerge as intact as it always has. I’m afraid I can’t be that confident. 

The Russian-style regime viruses pointed out above by Mike Mariani—"conflicts of interest, shady relationships, and abuses of power”—have been normalized here now, too, starting with Trump's own family and radiating out to businessmen who enjoyed his favor as Cabinet members or in their own industries. 

And the means of accountability that Americans have long employed to keep wayward Presidents in check—independent investigators, the press, the opposition party, and even formerly independent Congressmen in his own party—have found themselves slipping on what Mariani has correctly identified as “misdirection, disorder, and political stagecraft.”

No Matter What the Outcome, A Capricious, Transgressive President Has Been Marked

It may be a foregone conclusion that the President will escape conviction in the Senate, as Bill Clinton did two decades ago and as Nixon almost certainly would not have in 1974. Yet, no matter what else happens now, Trump has been marked as a transgressive President whose conduct has been judged even by subordinates as legally perilous to him and themselves. (Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney fled the room during crucial meetings on the Ukraine involving Trump and the President’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.)

The enormity of what is happening to him has managed to penetrate even the skull of this Oval Office occupant with precious little knowledge of history. His consequent default to whining—full Trump Baby mode—has been lightning-fast, and all the more horrible to watch. (Trump’s cry that he has not been given due process, for instance, is laughable, starting with the fact that he forbade any documents or witnesses that might have exonerated him before the House Intelligence Committee.)

It is never a cause for celebration when a President is impeached, because it is not only the ultimate weapon allowed by the Constitution against a President, but the only possible one sanctioned when assassination is considered too awful and rotation in office insufficient to prevent further ills. It is a tragedy when an intelligent politician's deep character flaws make him vulnerable to this instrument, whether it be Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton. 

But Trump was never an attentive if deeply imperfect student of government, as those Presidents were. Neither has he ever been capable of summoning a lonely courage in his best moments before the public, as Andrew Johnson did as the only Southern senator to remain loyal to the Union. Nor can Trump even be considered a conventionally tragic figure, as he has never demonstrated the slightest capacity for the self-examination undertaken by such dramatic figures after their fatal mistakes.

For anyone still inclined to see tragedy in the President’s case, it is that Trump never learned to channel properly his near-boundless energy. He could have steered the ship of state firmly but decisively forward. Instead, he nearly capsized it with mad caprice. 

Understand this: as the White House, early in this new year, escalated tensions with Iran, most Congressional Republicans had to be privately asking themselves what they had let themselves in for by never curbing the President’s penchant for metastatic mendacity. 

We should not imagine that the lack of an all-out shooting war to date means an already fragile Middle East has not been further destabilized. It’s a shorter walk than the GOP should imagine from campaign falsehoods to flimsy excuses about whether or not Iran presented an imminent threat.

Lawmakers’ tolerance for the never-ending tide of lies from the White House has worn perilously thin, as seen in Sen. Mike Lee’s outburst after listening to an "insulting and demeaning" briefing by administration officials offering no plausible, even coherent rationale for the assassination of Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani. 

No matter how audible their sighs of relief over the lack of American bloodshed after that strike, Republicans on Capitol Hill had to wonder if the inevitable had merely been postponed. With the credibility of America’s commander-in-chief suspect from the get-go, what exists to tamp down protest at home and street rage abroad?

Republicans were so busy going into a fetal position in the first few hours after Trump’s saber-rattling that they weren’t repeating with their accustomed shameless gusto their argument that it is the American people through the next election who should decide his fate. (If impeachment is a coup, as Trump has insisted ad infinitum, what do you call the attempt to remove from office Bill Clinton, who won more terms by wider margins than Trump as the popular and Electoral College victor both times?)

Trump Has Left No Alternative to Impeachment

The GOP could say what they wanted about their opponents, but really, what alternative did Trump leave Pelosi and the House Democrats? 

*If they did nothing after knowing the facts of the Ukraine scandal, Trump could reasonably claim that they saw nothing wrong when he tries something worse the next time (and there WILL be a next time—he is STILL sending Rudy Giuliani over there to find dirt on Biden, and, in the most recent budget negotiation, STILL held up military aid to Ukraine). 

*If Congress censured him, he would move to rescind it (as Andrew Jackson did in the 1830s, before he left office) or laugh it off as a slap on the wrist (more likely). 

Trump brought the tsunami of his current troubles on himself because he can never leave well enough alone: enough women, enough money, enough power, enough adulation.  He could not abide being a laughingstock for exhibiting Presidential ambitions, so he had to find some way, any way, to get it done. He could not tolerate Americans watching the storming of a U.S. embassy in Iraq and wonder if this was so much better than the Benghazi affair under President Obama.

Without realizing it, Trump had revealed that he is exactly what he scorns so often in others: weak. With no other alternative, he has sought, ever more frantically, to capitalize on the chaos that has resulted from this emotional incapacity.

Baseball fans throughout the country have been convulsed by the cheating scandal involving the Houston Astros. The team’s victory in the fall 2017 campaign has been tainted, many believe.

Yet the stakes in the 2016 Presidential campaign were far more consequential, and nearly half the country not only shrugs off credible reports that Russia aided Trump but equally urgent testimony by intelligence officials that this is occurring again. Where is the outrage comparable to what we are seeing in the baseball world?

Trump’s Farrago of Irrelevancies, Insults, Half-Truths and Brazen Falsehoods

The Ukraine affair itself was only the most recent attempt to distract voters from the lingering stench from the more than 100 contacts made between Russia and 18 people (including the candidate himself) from the Trump campaign, according to the Mueller report.

From virtually the moment Trump was inaugurated, he sought to defuse a series of revelations that could have destroyed his Presidency before it had barely begun, with threats against all the players who could bring him and his henchmen down:

*The investigators: The ostensible cause of the removal of Acting Attorney-General Sally Yates was her refusal to defend his travel ban. But her firing also got out of the way someone who had warned him that then-National Security Adviser Mike Flynn could be "blackmailed by the Russians," because he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his "problematic" conduct. The FBI has endured even worse, as Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe were not even fired by Trump but subject to investigations themselves. While Comey has been investigated for his leak of a Russian-related document, former Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has so far escaped similar recrimination from his old boss for leaking private text messages critical of Trump by FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. The latter leak enabled the President to ridicule the latter pair for their affair—and to serve notice on others who dared to step out of line that their vulnerabilities would be similarly exposed to public shaming. Ask yourself: After being around for 40 years, why is it only now that FISA warrants have been called into question as a tool of prosecutors? Even Robert Mueller, a registered Republican who served in the (Republican) George W. Bush administration, was not spared, as Trump ludicrously claimed that a dispute over a country-club fee in a Trump property biased him against the President. After all that, Trump still felt the need to make Attorney-General William Barr—the most dangerous administration confederate in his assault on the Constitution—authorize the Inspector General Michael Horowitz and John Durham, U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, to poke around in the original allegations that helped surface Trump’s misdeeds.

*The opposition: Trump has continually sought to blunt the effectiveness of the Democratic Party as a means of restraining him. Incensed by Hillary Clinton’s post-election criticisms, he authorized two investigations—into her use of a private server and possible corruption at the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State—that turned up nothing. Biden has seen his credibility called into question through the Ukraine affair. Rivals and critics of the President have been served notice: if they don’t keep quiet, they will have to endure some combination of loss of votes, Twitter-induced hatred, or mounting legal bills.

*The media: Everyone from reporters up to and including publishers have been subject to a campaign of vitriol and Presidential retaliation far surpassing any prior administration’s. One media claim after another about Trump’s actions on Russia and the Ukraine have been denounced as “fake news,” then proven by documentary or eyewitness testimony, then dismissed with the equivalent of “who cares?” shrugs. Repeatedly, he has used the totalitarian trope that the press are “enemies of the people.” In a particularly egregious retaliation against a prominent press critic, Amazon has charged him with exerting “improper pressure” to block a $10 billion cloud-computing contract with the Pentagon because of negative coverage by the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon head Jeff Bezos.

*The Senate: Six-year terms had long enabled the Senate to act in effect as a “coolant” to a House of Representatives subject to elections every two years. Powerful committee chairs especially had to be placated, even by Presidents of the same party who had enjoyed landslide victories like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. But GOP Senators today are running scared that a storm of Trump Twitter tirades will lead to them being “primaried” out of office. Thus, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, two fierce (and, in retrospect, far-seeing) critics of Trump in the race for President have fallen meekly in line. No surprise, then, that Republicans are trying to distract the focus of the Senate trial, periodically threatening to subpoena the targets of Trump’s dirty tricks, Joe and Hunter Biden, rather than the aides who could confirm or deny the President’s account. To an effect never before seen in a body that traditionally valued its independence, they have become, in effect, a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump Inc., as they obfuscate the overwhelming conclusion of witness testimony and the President’s own transcript of his July 25, 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: i.e., that Trump personally shook down a foreign leader for dirt to use against the leading candidate to defeat him in the next election.

The Ukraine Affair—Geopolitical Three-Card Monte

Those with long memories will recall that dirty tricks against the presumptive nominee of the opposing party represented the same strategy that Richard Nixon used in his 1972 reelection against Sen. Edmund Muskie. As ugly as that was, it was still less dangerous than Trump’s Ukrainian three-card monte—a geopolitical sleight-of-hand that:

* diverts attention from his Russian machinations; 

* bolsters his reelection prospects;

* ensures he is less likely to be prosecuted following an electoral defeat; 

* continues the cozy arrangement by which the family business in which he retains an ownership interest still reaps benefits from foreign governments; and

* imperils a small, relatively young nation threatened by a larger, neighboring authoritarian power (shades of 1938 Czechoslovakia and Nazi Germany).

Sticking to the Misdirection Script, Even as He is Brought to Account

Are you really surprised that Trump continues to bellyache and abuse even as the impeachment trial limps to its foreseeable conclusion? Consider how he:

*fired off a rambling—and, of course, fallacious—six-page letter to Nancy Pelosi, denouncing her for trying to impeach him while also insisting she wouldn’t dare (WRONG!);

*bizarrely tweeted that Pelosi’s “teeth were falling out” at a recent public appearance (leading many to wonder if the President’s frequent mispronunciations resulted from his own dental difficulties); 

*retweeted (with no evidence, naturally) a suggestion by former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer that Pelosi’s delay in moving impeachment to the Senate resulted from the Democratic establishment’s desire to hurt Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who must attend the impeachment trial instead of visiting Iowa in the crucial final week before its caucus; and

*suggested at rallies that the late Rep. John Dingell and LBJ were currently in hell.

The intent was the same as it's always been for him: to get the media he says he despises (but cannot do without) to run off to tut-tut or correct his latest outrage, even as they shift the public's attention from his real misconduct.

In the 2016 election, before they began to cower at the rampaging menace in their midst, many Establishment Republicans questioned whether Trump was adhering to conservative doctrine. I, for one, am here to say that Trump runs a grave risk of being liberal, if we use Tom Wolfe’s winking definition of that term in regard to his once-smug "Master of the Universe" Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities: “A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.”  

Only that can account for Trump's suddenly tender concerns about violation of rights (his!) and “McCarthyism.” Those concerns are only marginally less laughable than his contention that in the Ukraine affair, he’s acted as an international corruption fighter. (If you believe that, then you probably bought O.J. Simpson’s claim  that he would spend the rest of his post-acquittal life seeking the real killers of his ex-wife.)

Throughout his life, nobody has ever called Donald Trump to account. Now that he has been, let's be clear why this came to pass: not because he is a bullying wretch, not because his opponents disagree with his policies, but because he broke the law and flagrantly abused the Constitution he swore an oath to uphold. 

In the number and variety of his offenses in a still-limited amount of time--profiting from his office through shameless violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, open solicitation of three foreign governments' (Russia, Ukraine, and--lest we forget!--China) intervention of U.S. elections, obstruction of justice, such blatant coddling of an authoritarian that he could credibly be charged with treason were we at war, discrediting the intelligence and criminal-justice agencies charged with keeping us safe, and rampant abuse of power--no other President has deserved impeachment more. 

Indeed, if Trump's actions do not violate the Constitution (as egregiously obnoxious impeachment defense team member Alan Dershowitz insists, against all evidence), then it is impossible to conceive what the Framers might have had in mind with this clause.

Now is not the time for his critics to bewail his misconduct. Action is called for--loud enough so it can even be heard and heeded by Senate Republicans who right now have as much backbone as a chocolate eclair.

But, no matter what else happens from now on, Trump can’t say he hasn’t been warned about the consequences of his misconduct—and we, the American people, can’t claim, like Germans after WWII, that we didn’t know what was going on when a leader convinced his nation to follow him down a reckless, lawless path.