| JRL HOME | SUPPORT | SUBSCRIBE | RESEARCH & ANALYTICAL SUPPLEMENT | |
Old Saint Basil's Cathedral in MoscowJohnson's Russia List title and scenes of Saint Petersburg
Excerpts from the JRL E-Mail Community :: Founded and Edited by David Johnson

JRL Research & Analytical Supplement - JRL Home
Issue No. 37 February 2007 JRL 2007-37
Editor
: Stephen D. Shenfield, sshenfield@verizon.net 
RAS archive: http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/jrl-ras.php
The Research and Analytical Supplement (RAS) to Johnson’s Russia List is produced and edited by Stephen D. Shenfield. He is the author of all parts of the content that are not attributed to any other author.

POLITICS
1. “Siloviki”: a complementary interpretation
ECONOMY: FOCUS ON POVERTY
2. Poverty: survey results
3. Economic conditions in Chechnya
ECOLOGY
4. Is global warming good for Russia?
ETHNOGRAPHY: THE CIRCASSIANS
5. Who are the Circassians?
6. The issue of the Circassian “genocide”
7. Circassian “Zionism”
RUSSIA AND ITS NEIGHBORS
8. Tajikistan and the drug trade
HISTORY
9. Remembering 1956
10. The story of Greenham Common
SOCIAL THOUGHT
11. Bogdanov and the cult of the engineer
FOLLOW-UP: Piontkovsky

POLITICS

1. “SILOVIKI”: A COMPLEMENTARY INTERPRETATION

Source. Bettina Renz, Putin’s Militocracy? An Alternative Interpretation of Siloviki in Contemporary Russian Politics, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 58, No. 6, September 2006, pp. 903-924.

RAS 36 featured a critique by Sharon and David Rivera of the common view that attributes great political significance to the increased representation in Russia’s power elite of men from the “force structures” (i.e., military, police, and security agencies) – the so-called “siloviki.” Bettina Renz of King’s College London provides a complementary critique. While the Riveras reinterpret the statistical evidence to demonstrate that the siloviki do not in fact predominate over the business section of the elite, Renz takes a closer look at the siloviki themselves. She has even talked with some of them – and lived to tell the tale!

She concludes that there are no grounds for believing that Putin has systematically promoted siloviki as a deliberate strategy aimed at creating a more authoritarian regime. If he had been pursuing such a strategy, she argues, there would be more siloviki by now in top positions in the presidential administration (PA) and federal ministries. Of 47 leading officials in the PA in 2005, only 9 had backgrounds in the force structures, and none of these 9 occupied any of the top 3 positions. Of 10 presidential advisers only 2 were siloviki.

According to the author, the most plausible explanation for the substantial number of siloviki appointed by Putin to important positions is simply that this was an unavoidable result of his preference for people with whom he had worked in the past and on whose personal loyalty he therefore knew he could rely. He had no other power base on which he could draw (a political party, for instance).

Professor Renz points out that a number of prominent “siloviki” have experience of working not only in the force structures but also in other spheres, such as journalism. (The same is true, of course, of Putin himself.) Moreover, at least some of them have made strenuous efforts to acquire the skills and knowledge they need in their new positions – for example, by means of extramural study.

The siloviki in the power elite vary in terms of both political and professional outlook. Individuals with backgrounds in one force structure (the army, say) do not resemble very closely individuals who come from a different force structure (say, the FSB). In short, the siloviki do not constitute a group or faction with the coherence that a word like “militocracy” implies.

Back to Table of Contents

ECONOMY: FOCUS ON POVERTY

2. POVERTY: SURVEY RESULTS

Source. Irina Denisova and Marina Kartseva, Poverty Is No Crime: Measuring Poverty in Russian Regions. Working Paper No. 84 of the Center for Economic and Financial Research at the New Economic School, September 2005

This is an analysis of the results of the NOBUS survey conducted in April and May 2003 by the Federal State Statistics Service in consultation with the World Bank and based on a representative sample of 45,000 households in 46 of Russia’s regions.

A household was classified as “poor” if its per capita consumption was below a subsistence level equal to the regional cost of a minimum consumption basket. (1) Deeper levels of poverty were defined in relation to ¾, ½, and ¼ of subsistence level.

Taking the country as a whole, just under half (48 percent) of households are “poor.” Almost a third (30 percent) are below three-quarters of subsistence level. An eighth (12.5 percent) do not reach half of subsistence level and 2 percent do not even reach quarter of subsistence level.

However, the more children in a household the poorer on average it is. The poverty rates for households with one, two, and three or more children are 54, 65, and 82 percent, respectively. This means that at least 55 percent and perhaps as many as 60 percent of children are living below subsistence level.

Contrary to widespread belief, it was found that female-headed households are NOT on average poorer than male-headed households, except for a few regions with highly developed labor markets. Households consisting of old age pensioners are also on average no worse off than other households.

In almost all regions rural households tend to be somewhat poorer than urban households (overall poverty rate 54 percent).

Poverty rates vary widely by region. The authors divide the 46 regions surveyed into 4 groups:

* 4 regions with a very high poverty rate (over 60 percent of households below subsistence level)

* 16 regions with a high poverty rate (50­60 percent of households below subsistence level)

* 18 regions with a modest poverty rate (40­50 percent of households below subsistence level)

* 8 regions with a low poverty rate (below 40 percent of households below subsistence level)

I would like to query the labels assigned to the various ranges of poverty rates. Is it really in accordance with either international practice or commonsense to refer to a situation in which, say, 38 percent of households (and therefore about 45 percent of children) are living below subsistence level as a “low poverty rate”? I would be disinclined to call anything above 10­15 percent “low.” By this standard, NO Russian region has a low poverty rate. What labels would I use? How about: quite high, high, very high, extremely high?

The region with the highest poverty rate was Sakhalin (67 percent). Of the 3 other regions in the “very high” category, 2 were also in the Far East (Primorye and Chita) and one in the Caucasus (Dagestan). (2)

The region with the lowest poverty rate was Tyumen (18 percent)

I was struck to see that the 8 regions with the lowest poverty rates (under 40 percent) included St. Petersburg (36 percent) but NOT Moscow, which had a relatively as well as absolutely high poverty rate­56 percent. This is at such sharp variance with the usual picture contrasting the prosperity of Moscow with the poverty of most of the rest of the country that explanations seem called for. I would like to suggest a few:

-- Prices in Moscow are higher than in most parts of Russia (excluding Siberia and the Far North). Unlike many statistical comparisons that ignore regional price differences, the NOBUS survey takes them into account.

-- The average (arithmetical mean) income for Moscow is skewed upward by the concentration of very wealthy people in the city. This factor has much less influence on such indicators as median income and the poverty rate.

-- Moscow has numerous low-paid migrant workers from Ukraine, Tajikistan, etc. Many are illegal, that is, without Moscow residence permits. The NOBUS survey probably captured this hidden part of the population better than most statistical sources. It is consistent with this explanation that while Moscow has an unusually high proportion of households (47 percent) in the interval between subsistence and ½ of subsistence level, its proportion of households below ½ of subsistence level (9 percent) is somewhat below the national average. The deepest poverty is found in depressed, predominantly rural areas with high unemployment such as Buryatia, the region with the highest proportion of households below ¼ of subsistence level (7 percent).

Notes

(1) The composition of the basket was similar for all regions, but with some adjustments to regional variations in basic needs.

(2) But bear in mind that almost half of Russia’s regions were not covered in the survey.

Back to Table of Contents

ECONOMY: FOCUS ON POVERTY

3. ECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN CHECHNYA

Source. Vadim Rechkalov, Politics Thwarts Reconstruction in Chechnya, The Green Cross Optimist, Spring 2006. http://www.optimistmag.org/gh/0000/index.php

Vadim Rechkalov, a frequent visitor to Chechnya, reports that Grozny remains a dangerous city of ruins. Reconstruction has taken place on a very limited scale. The sewerage system has still not been restored. However, residents are now able to buy water from trucks at 50­80 kopecks a bucket.

All industrial plants have been destroyed in the war and/or stripped bare by looters except for one called “Turbina,” which is well guarded. “Turbina” is not in operation, but might be at some time in the future.

Nevertheless, street markets are well supplied with food. Those who can’t afford a good cut of meat can get a sheep’s head for making soup.

How do people survive (those not fortunate enough to be on the government payroll)? The author gives us a couple of clues:

(a) “natural economy” (i.e., growing your own potatoes)

(b) illegally tapping and refining oil from the pipeline that crosses Chechnya (1)

Public funds have been plundered to supply luxury goods to top officials of the Republic’s administration and weapons and equipment to their private armies. (They are at war with one another as well as with the equally divided insurgents.)

95 million rubles ($3.3m) have been spent on erecting a giant statue of the late president Kadyrov, who was blown up on May 9, 2004. It’s close to the spot where there used to be a giant statue of Lenin, but Kadyrov’s statue is even taller – until it too gets blown up.

Note

(1) For more on means of surviving in Chechnya, see RAS 7 of April 2002 (items 6 and 7). Very little seems to have changed since then.

Back to Table of Contents

ECOLOGY

4. IS GLOBAL WARMING GOOD FOR RUSSIA?

Source. Interview by Olga Lobach and Vitaly Leibin with Professor Vladimir Klimenko, on http://www.polit.ru January 5, 2007.

In their public assessments of climate change, Russian scientists continue to adopt a wide variety of stances. Some scientists support the broad international scientific consensus shaped and represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (1) Many, however, oppose this consensus. In contrast to the West, where the so-called “global warming skeptics” are a handful of mavericks on the fringe of the scientific world, in Russia they include prominent figures in a variety of scientific disciplines.

Some of the Russian “skeptics” adopt a position commonly argued by their Western counterparts: that is, they argue that global warming is unconnected with human activity. Thus Khabibullo Abdusamatov, head of the Laboratory of Space Research at the Central (Pulkovo) Astronomical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences, declared recently that the decisive influence on climate change on earth, as on Mars, is fluctuation in the intensity of solar radiation. The warming effect will therefore last another 6­8 years before giving way to very gradual cooling. (2)

The crucial argument for other Russian “skeptics” is less familiar to the Western public. This is that global warming is to be welcomed as a good thing­for Russia. (Whether it is a good thing for the rest of the world is not considered: with the rise of Russian nationalism, caring about the world is no longer in fashion in Russia.) As Russia is by far the coldest country in the world, (3) this attitude might be considered natural and understandable. Here I want to analyze and criticize a recent presentation of the “good for Russia” position by Professor Vladimir Klimenko, head of the Laboratory of Global Energy Problems at the Moscow Energy Institute,

Klimenko predicts that over the next decade Russia will experience further warming of about 1.5 degrees C. (4) That will save 150m tons of fuel a year, or $30bn at $200 a ton. He also says that over the next 200 years “winters will get substantially warmer, but only by 4­5 degrees.” So “bananas, unfortunately, will never grow in Moscow, or kiwi fruit in Siberia” (as many Russians appear to imagine). His modest long-term prediction, not substantiated in any way, is hard to reconcile with his short-term prediction. At 1.5 degrees per decade, 4­5 degrees of warming should take only 30 years, not 200. Why should warming decelerate so sharply?

The welcome effects of global warming include not only higher temperatures but also increased precipitation: “90 percent of Russian territory will become wetter and that is good” because Russia has always suffered much more from drought than from flooding. At 550mm, annual precipitation in Moscow is not much greater than in areas bordering the Sahara.

Here Klimenko overlooks the important point that global warming leads to a denser concentration of precipitation in time and space. This will make it harder to derive full benefit from increased rainfall and create in many areas a typical pattern of alternating flood and drought. More of one does not necessarily mean less of the other.

What of the other 10 percent of Russian territory? Klimenko admits that “part of southern Siberia, the North Caucasus, and Ukraine” will suffer drought in coming decades. He might have added Kazakhstan and Central Asia. (5) In assessing the negative impact on Russia of warming plus dessication throughout this southern zone, we should consider:

* the slow but steady northward expansion of the zone, e.g., the spread of mosquito- and tick-borne disease up the Volga from Astrakhan to Volgograd province; (6)

* how important the North Caucasus (i.e., Stavropol and Krasnodar territories) is as a breadbasket and how serious a problem soil erosion already is; (7)

* ecological refugees and other overspill effects

Shifting our attention from the south of Russia to the north, the melting (degradation) of permafrost into bogs over large areas presents a growing threat to buildings and other infrastructure (roads, pipelines, etc.), as it does in Alaska and the Canadian north. Klimenko reassures his audience about this problem in two ways.

First, he plays down its scale: “On Taimyr and Yamal [in the Far North] nothing will happen to the permafrost because it starts to degrade when average annual temperature rises above minus 2, and in the Far North warming will never reach such a level.” This assumption clearly comes from his modest long-term prediction regarding temperature change.

Second, he takes a highly optimistic view of the technologies for coping with permafrost degradation, such as floating foundations. “True, according to our calculations, permafrost degradation will occur this century on a territory of up to 1.5 million square kilometers. We shall have to live with this and react adequately. We know how… [If proper measures are taken,] nothing will break or collapse.”

It does not seem to me that there are adequate grounds for such confidence concerning the feasibility, effectiveness, and cost of these technologies. We can regard the new railway line across the degrading Himalayan permafrost from Golmud to Lhasa in Tibet as a test case. Despite the use of a range of protective techniques, barely a month after the line was opened to traffic in July 2006 the Chinese railways ministry reported cracks in the track's foundation and bridge structures, causing them to sink in some sections. (8)

Klimenko dismisses certain scenarios seriously discussed by Western scientists – for instance, the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic – as “nonsense” that researchers think up in order to get grants. He even places in this category the idea that low-lying St. Petersburg may be inundated by the sea. And yet even before global warming came along the city periodically suffered disastrous inundations (e.g.: 1777, 1824, 1924). True, the dams now under construction will provide some protection from storm surges, but they cannot prevent the increasing seepage of seawater as the global sea level rises. Judging from his remarks about the Dutch, Klimenko will be surprised to learn that even in the Netherlands, with its massive system of flood protection, the government is evacuating the most vulnerable areas and abandoning them to the sea.

In general, the picture is a very mixed one. The potential benefits of global warming for Russia are on a large scale, but so are the potential costs. The net effect is by no means obvious: intuitive assessments of the difference between two very large magnitudes are especially prone to error. So perhaps, on balance, global warming is good for much if not all of Russia in the near term. Over the longer term, as more of the potential negative effects make themselves felt, the balance is bound to shift. In any case, Russians need not fear that action to slow down global warming will deprive them of any near-term benefits that may be in store for them. Due to the huge inertia of the world climate system, no conceivable action can do much to change the near-term impact of global warming, for good or ill. Even the long-term impact may be open to influence only at the margin­but that margin may prove crucial for the long-term survival of humanity, in Russia as elsewhere.

Notes

(1) See, for example, the statement by Vladimir Katsov, a geophysicist and member of the IPCC, reported by MosNews February 6, 2007.

(2) Reported on January 8, 2007 at: http://www.aif.ru:81/newsfeed?news=3371

(3) In terms of the distribution of the population among temperature zones. See Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, The Siberian Curse (Brookings Institution Press, 2003).

(4) To be precise, he says that total warming in Russia will reach 2­2.5 degrees. From this I subtract 0.7 degree for warming that has already occurred.

(5) On the impact of global warming on Central Asia and Siberia, see RAS 9 item 6 and 31 item 5, respectively,

(6) On the northward spread of malaria and haemarrhagic fever, see RAS 34 item 5 and 35 item 3, respectively.

(7) On soil erosion, see RAS 23 item 6.

(8) The most informative source I have been able to find on the Tibetan railway is Hans Schaefer’s website: http://home.c2i.net/schaefer/tibetrail.html

Back to Table of Contents

ETHNOGRAPHY: THE CIRCASSIANS

5. WHO ARE THE CIRCASSIANS?

The Circassians are the main indigenous people of the northwest Caucasus. Circassian is the name traditionally used for them in English. In Turkish they are called Cherkess, and this name has been borrowed by Russian and some other languages. In their own language the Circassians call themselves Adyghe or Adyg. There are also many names that refer to ethnic subgroups of the Circassians, such as Kabard (plural Kabardin) and Shapsug (or Shapsugh).

The Circassians fought for over a century against the Russian invasion of their homeland (1763­1864). According to the Russian historian Berzhe, out of a pre-invasion population of about a million 400,000 were killed by tsarist troops and 500,000 forcibly deported to Ottoman Turkey, mostly in the 1860s. The deportation took place under atrocious conditions and a large proportion of deportees perished. Only 80,000 Circassians were allowed to remain in Russia, most of whom were resettled away from their ancestral lands.

The descendants of the surviving Circassians now live in many countries, including Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Germany, Holland, and the US. They have integrated well in their countries of resettlement without completely losing their original identity.

Under the Soviet regime, the Circassians remaining in Russia became titular groups in four autonomous territorial formations in the northwest Caucasus, three of which still exist:

* The Kabardino-Balkar Republic, between Stavropol Territory to the north and Georgia to the south, has two unrelated titular groups: the Kabardin and the Balkars (a non-Circassian group of Turkic origin).

* The Karachay-Cherkess Republic, between Krasnodar and Stavropol territories to the north and Georgia and Abkhazia to the south, similarly has two unrelated titular groups: the Cherkess (i.e., Circassians) and the Karachay (another group of Turkic origin).

* The Republic of Adygeya (1), an enclave inside Krasnodar Territory, is the only formation in which the Circassians are the sole titular group. Putin planned to merge Adygeya into Krasnodar Territory in the context of his long-term goal of regional enlargement (2), but in the face of massive Adyg resistance has now abandoned the idea.

* A Shapsug National District was established, as another enclave inside Krasnodar Territory, in 1924 but abolished by Stalin in 1945. Repeated attempts to restore the national district have failed.

Notes

(1) Alternative spellings: Adygeia, Adygea, Adyghea, etc.

(2) See RAS 16 item 2 and 30 item 5.

Back to Table of Contents

ETHNOGRAPHY: THE CIRCASSIANS

6. THE ISSUE OF THE CIRCASSIAN “GENOCIDE”

Should the actions taken against the Circassians by the tsarist regime in the 1860s be qualified as “genocide”?

Two kinds of argument can be made in support of a positive answer. First, in the course of the fighting Russian generals carried out orders to destroy Circassian settlements, including gardens, fields, crops, livestock, and fodder, and kill all their inhabitants. Second, the deportation was enforced under conditions in which it was foreseeable that many deportees would not survive.

In my essay on this question I conclude that this is not a clear-cut case. (1) While it was certainly a major exercise in “ethnic cleansing,” there seems to be insufficient evidence of deliberate intent to destroy (as opposed to getting rid of) the Circassians as an ethnic group. Massacres and the use of starvation as a weapon have since become “normal” elements of warfare: consider, for instance, the blockade of Germany by the Entente during World War One.

Be that as it may, Circassian organizations have made repeated efforts to persuade the Russian Federation, as the self-proclaimed successor state to tsarist as well as Soviet Russia, to give official recognition to the “genocide of the Circassian people.” Thus on June 1, 2005, the Circassian Congress, a public organization in Adygeya, submitted to the State Duma an appeal to this effect, accompanied by three volumes (686 pages) of supporting documentation. (2) One circumstance prompting the appeal may have been the Duma’s recognition on April 4, 1995 of the Armenian genocide of 1915.

Eventually, on January 27, 2006, the Circassian Congress received a reply from the Duma’s Committee on Nationality Affairs. According to the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the committee pointed out, the Adygeyans (Circassians) were not among the ethnic groups repressed during the Soviet period. But the appeal had referred only to events that had occurred during the tsarist period! How is such an irrelevant reply to be interpreted? Had the committee not bothered to study the appeal, let alone the accompanying documentation? Or were they saying that they refused to dig that far back into the past?

Notes

(1) “The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide?” Originally published in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts, eds., The Massacre in History (Berghahn Books, 1999). Online at http://www.circassianworld.com/A_Forgotten_Genocide.pdf

(2) Similar appeals were sent by organizations in the Kabardino-Balkar and Karachay-Cherkess republics, in Shapsugia, and in the Circassian diaspora. An earlier appeal had been made on April 29, 1996 by the president and State Council of the Republic of Adygeya. The Supreme Council of the Kabardino-Balkar Republic passed a resolution on the issue on February 7, 1997. For more on the appeals and the response (or lack of response) to them, see: http://www.circassianworld.com/CircassianCongress.html and /Duma.html

Back to Table of Contents

ETHNOGRAPHY: THE CIRCASSIANS

7. CIRCASSIAN “ZIONISM”

Source. Chen Bram, Circassian Re-Immigration to the Caucasus. In S. Weil, ed., Routes and Roots: Emigration in a Global Perspective (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999), pp. 205-222. http://www.circassianworld.com/ChenBram.pdf

In recent years an ethno-national movement has crystallized among descendants of the Circassian exiles in the form of the Circassian World Congress (CWC). In the 1990s a few thousand of them emigrated to the northwest Caucasus. However, this attempt at “returning to the homeland” has not been very successful and the prospects of establishing a new “Circassia” in the Caucasus remain remote.

There are about 3,000 Circassians (mainly Shapsugs) in Israel. Most live in two Circassian villages in the Galilee. Chen Bram of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Truman Institute has studied the evolving attitudes of these villagers to the question of “return.” (1)

Perhaps the best starting point is the attitudes of the Israeli Circassians to the State of Israel. Like Circassians elsewhere, they regard loyalty to the country of residence as a matter of principle. Like the Druze, another Moslem minority in Israel, and unlike Palestinian-Arab Israelis, they serve in the army. There is an element of ambiguity here, because they also tend to say that they are neutral vis-à-vis the Israeli-Arab conflict. At the same time, they sympathize and identify with Jewish Zionism and use its vocabulary in talking about their own historical fate. Paradoxically, the logic of their “Israeli” patriotism redirects them away from Israel, toward their own “Zion” in the Caucasus. (2)

For a long time no contact was possible between Circassians in the Soviet Union and the Circassian diaspora. In the 1980s Circassians in the Caucasus were allowed to set up an organization to develop cultural contacts with Circassians abroad, but the latter were not allowed to settle in the Caucasus, except temporarily as students.

In 1991 a new Soviet law finally made provision for Circassian immigration. Immigrants were to be helped with housing and employment by local and federal government agencies as well as by the CWC, and could become citizens after two years’ residence. By 1993 there were 3­4,000 “returnees,” mainly from Turkey and Syria. But they were not happy with conditions in Russia, and as negative information filtered back to Circassians abroad the flow of migrants dried up.

In the case of the Circassians in Israel, the “return” never even got underway. In 1991 people from the two villages started visiting the Caucasus, and many of the things they discovered disappointed them:

* the inflation (at its worst in 1992­93) and the economic situation in general

* the poor condition of transportation (e.g., the havoc at airports)

* political and ethnic tensions (in particular, local Cossacks reacted with hostility to the Circassian “return”)

* the demographic, cultural, and linguistic domination of the “autonomous” Circassian territories by ethnic Russians

The visitors realized that they were in a much better position to preserve their language and cultural heritage in Israel (where, for instance, both are taught in the village schools) than they would be in the Russian Caucasus. The Circassian communities they encountered there were secularized and divided by clan rivalry. Especially shocking to their religious sensibilities was the nearly universal consumption of alcohol. (3) The social status of women was lower in the Caucasus than they were used to in Israel.

In short, they saw that the homeland of their imagination no longer existed except in a purely geographical sense. And, in contrast to the Jewish colonists in Palestine, the Circassians lack the support and freedom of maneuver they would need to change that situation. In that respect, Putin’s Russia is a far cry from Palestine under Ottoman and British rule. For all the non-Circassians who now inhabit what was once Circassia, that is perhaps just as well.

Notes

(1) She conducted anthropological fieldwork in the Galilee in 1990­94 and made field trips to the Caucasus in 1990 and 1993.

(2) The Israeli Circassians themselves draw a parallel between their dual identity and that of American Jews. The parallel is not exact, inasmuch as both parts of their identity are in different senses “Zionist.”

(3) The majority of Circassians are Moslem, and as such are not permitted alcohol. There is a Christian minority.

Back to Table of Contents

RUSSIA AND ITS NEIGHBORS

8. TAJIKISTAN AND THE DRUG TRADE

Source. Johan Engvall, The State Under Siege: The Drug Trade and Organized Crime in Tajikistan, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 58, No. 6, September 2006, pp. 827-54.

In 2005 Afghanistan was the source of an estimated 87 percent of world opium production. Tajikistan is the main transit country linking Afghanistan with the heroin markets of the CIS and Europe. Factors that enable it to play this role include:

* the long and porous mountain border between the two countries

* the ethnic ties between Tajiks on both sides of the border

* the large flow of Tajik migrant workers to and from Russia and other CIS states

* the continuing weakness of the state in Tajikistan following the civil war

Another major factor is the extreme poverty in both Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Even before they were devastated by war, these countries were among the poorest in the world. (1)

The weakness of the legal economy makes the drug trade essential to the survival of a large part of the population. According to the World Bank, the trade accounts for 30­50 percent of all economic activity in Tajikistan. Although some people make much more money from the drug trade than others and many derive no benefit from it at all, the “clan” structure of Tajik society, which obliges people to help even distant kin as well as neighbors, ensures that the direct and indirect gains are spread fairly widely. (2)

Professor Engvall (Uppsala University, Sweden) points out that a variety of actors profit from the drug trade. Some have purely economic (or “criminal”) motives, while the primary motives of others are political (or “terrorist”). Also common is a shifting mix of the two kinds of motive. Even for an ostensibly political organization, making money can easily become an end in itself. According to the author, this is what has happened in the case of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). (3)

Five main types of actor are involved:

* micro-level drug mafias, confined to a specific sub-ethnic group (defined by region of origin)

* transnational criminal networks supplied by the micro-level mafias

* Afghan and Tajik “warlords”

* government officials, ministers, diplomats, generals, etc.

* insurgent and terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda that use the drug trade as a source of funds

The warlords’ immediate reason for participating in the trade is to make money – not for its own sake, but to buy an armed following and political influence. As part of the implicit bargain that induced them to stop fighting, they are in practice immune to prosecution. So, we must assume, are government officials – at least most of the time, despite an occasional showcase prosecution. (4) It is probably more dangerous for an official to take real action against the drug trade than to participate in it, as the assassination of deputy interior minister Khabib Sanginov demonstrated in 2001.

The author calls HIV/AIDS in Tajikistan a “ticking time bomb.” Prevalence has been rising rapidly, though from a very low initial level. AIDS has not yet spread by sexual transmission from intravenous drug users into the wider population. So timely action might still ward off the threat. But who is going to take such action? An alarming development is the growth of prostitution among Tajik women – a striking sign of desperation in such a traditional society.

Professor Engvall makes no suggestions regarding what might be done to contain the manifold security threats posed by the drug trade in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The crucial need is to provide alternative livelihoods to the large number of people who rely on the trade for their survival. (5) From this point of view, the US bombing of Afghanistan was highly counterproductive. While Al-Qaeda and IMU bases were destroyed, so was much of the country’s economy and infrastructure, thereby making people more dependent than ever on the drug trade and enhancing the longer-term financial and political position of insurgent movements. In turn, the increasingly salient role of migrant Tajiks as drug pushers exacerbates xenophobia in Russia. A long chain of negative effects – and they didn’t even catch Osama Bin Laden!

Notes

(1) On Tajik migrant workers, see RAS 20 item 8. On Tajikistan as a partially reconstructed “failed state,” see RAS 13 item 6. On poverty and public health in Tajikistan, see RAS 28 item 8.

(2) “Clan” needs to be understood loosely in the Tajik context. “Clans” are defined not only by kinship but also by place of (original) residence.

(3) No evidence or supporting references are provided for this assertion. Possible anonymous sources may be biased.

(4) Such cases have involved, for example, a Tajik ambassador to Kazakhstan, a Tajik trade representative in that country, a former deputy defense minister, and a former minister of the interior.

(5) Legalization might also help, by bringing down profit margins in the trade.

Back to Table of Contents

HISTORY

9. REMEMBERING 1956

Source. Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 58, No. 8, December 2006. Special Issue: 1956 and Its Legacy.

The 50th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 has given birth to several books and also to this collection of papers, which were presented at a conference at the University of Glasgow in March 2006.

I can’t say anything about the books because I haven’t read them. Except for the excellent paper by Attila Szakolczai of the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (IHHR), the collected papers are not about what happened in Hungary in 1956. They are partly about what happened in Poland and in the USSR in 1956 and mainly about the remembering­and, equally important, the forgetting­of what happened in Hungary in 1956.

Two general essays about remembering and forgetting by Janos Rainer (IHHR) and by Gabor Gyani (Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest) are followed by two more specific studies. Eszter Balazs and Phil Casoar analyze the role of photojournalism­and of one “emblematic” photograph in particular­in shaping images of the uprising. James Mark (University of Exeter) traces on the basis of interviews how communist party members have repeatedly revised their public autobiographies in response to changing political winds, while trying to preserve a modicum of authenticity.

In the immediate aftermath of the uprising, those who had participated in it were vigorously denounced and harshly repressed. Later, however, the Kadar regime changed tack and sought to smother the whole memory of 1956, encouraging Hungarians to retreat from political engagement into a “normal” nonpolitical lifestyle. This entailed, for instance, replacing the previous description of the uprising as a “counterrevolution,” which needlessly aroused a bitter feeling of protest and insult in people who had supported the uprising, by “the events of 1956”­a bland and neutral term that anyone could tolerate.

When after 30 years it became possible to bring the induced forgetting to an end, many Hungarians tried to restore the memory of 1956. But the long period of forgetting made it easier for politicians and ideologues to create distorted images of the uprising.

The key public figures of the revolution, including Prime Minister Imre Nagy and other reform communists, proclaimed the goal of renewing, democratizing, and humanizing socialism. (Essentially the same goal was to be proclaimed 12 years later in the Prague spring.) At the institutional level, the revolution entailed the transfer of power from the party to newly formed workers’ councils. There were some conservative figures who called for a return to the past, Cardinal Mindszenty being the most prominent, but their role was marginal. Judging by the overwhelming weight of public discourse, it was a democratic, national, and anti-Stalinist revolution, but certainly not an anti-communist or anti-socialist one. (1) After 1989, however, right-wing parties such as Fidesz framed 1956 as a fight for a “free” capitalist Hungary. They placed undue stress on the role that conservatives had played and refused to distinguish between different brands of communists­or, indeed, between communists and fascists.

It is interesting to see how different forces have tried to manipulate the memory of Nagy. In the House of Terror museum, he is presented out of any context simply as a martyr (which, of course, he was) without any mention of the inconvenient fact that he was a lifelong communist. Efforts to suppress inconvenient facts about Nagy were also made by his daughter Erzsebet. She sued (unsuccessfully) the authors of a scholarly biography of her father and of a TV screenplay about him for even mentioning allegations that he had been involved in the killing of the tsar’s family and that he had been an NKVD informer between the wars. Unlike cardboard cutout “heroes,” real people are often contradictory and have the capacity to evolve over time.

I learned a lot about the complexity of the revolution of 1956 from the paper by Attila Szakolczai. Unlike most analysts, who focus almost exclusively on events in Budapest, she tells us what happened in the two main provincial centers of the revolution, the industrial cities of Miskolc and Gyor. In Miskolc popular local figures managed by means of skillful maneuvering to isolate the hardliners and effect a peaceful transfer of power to the city’s workers’ council, while in Gyor attempts to prevent violent clashes failed. Clearly, the revolution encompassed two distinct though interacting spheres: a relatively orderly sphere of institutional change and a chaotic and often uncontrollable sphere of spontaneous action by crowds of impassioned people.

A few words, finally, on the paper by Karl Loewenstein of the University of Wisconsin, who tells us what happened in 1956 in the USSR. Although it may be a little exaggerated to say that Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th party congress “opened the floodgates of public opinion,” it did trigger a great deal of real questioning and discussion at party meetings and in the Writers’ Union. (Professor Loewenstein pays special attention to the dramatic debate over Dudintsev’s book “Not by Bread Alone.”) In December 1956, however, new limits were imposed on permissible discourse by the intra-party circular “On strengthening the work of party organizations in cutting off the attacks of anti-Soviet, hostile elements.”

Note

(1) This is what made it possible for the Hungarian revolution of 1956 to serve as a source of inspiration for the Western New Left. But I make no assumption here regarding how the revolution might have developed later had it not been crushed. After all, the revolutions of 1989-91 in Eastern Europe and the USSR also took place under democratic, national, and egalitarian slogans (protest against nomenklatura privileges that in retrospect, by comparison with those of the new rich, seem fairly modest). No one demonstrated for privatization.

Back to Table of Contents

HISTORY

10. THE STORY OF GREENHAM COMMON

Source. Ann Pettitt, Walking to Greenham: How the Peace-camp began and the Cold War ended. Aberystwyth, Wales: Honno­Welsh Women’s Press, 2006. 310pp. Photographs. £8.99. ISBN 1 870206 762

In spring 1981, Ann Pettitt decided to organize a march of women from Cardiff to the US air base at Greenham Common, Berkshire, to protest against the planned deployment there of Cruise missiles. The march took place from August 26 to September 5 of that year under the aegis of “Women for Life on Earth” and led to the establishment of the Women’s Peace Camp. This is Ann’s story. (1)

The story may be of interest to readers of JRL because about half of the book is about Ann’s May 1983 visit, together with fellow activist Karmen and specialist in Soviet ecological issues Jean McCollister, to the USSR.

Unlike some Western antinuclear campaigners, Ann and her friends were far from naïve about the USSR. Both sides, in their view, shared blame for the arms race and the Cold War, neither of which could be ended without change on both sides. Such change had to include the building of trust at all levels; that required open and genuine communication; and that in turn required the dismantling of totalitarian controls in the Soviet bloc.

This line of thinking led Ann and her friends to join forces with the independent Moscow Group for Trust. Attempting to use their status as “heroines of the struggle for peace” to win official recognition for the Trust Group, they brought a member of the group along with them to a meeting with the Soviet Peace Committee. This provoked an outraged reaction from SPC deputy chairman (and KGB colonel) Oleg Kharkhardin. Nevertheless, their solidarity­and that of other peace activists who visited Moscow in their wake­enabled the Trust Group to continue functioning and protected its members from further repression. And while Kharkhardin’s mind was tightly closed, other Soviet participants in the meeting did not conceal an intense and sympathetic interest in what the women from Greenham Common had to say.

Ann claims that she made an important contribution to opening up Soviet society and ending the Cold War. I don’t find her claim totally implausible. Her testimony is further confirmation of the thesis so cogently argued by Matthew Evangelista­namely, that the Cold War was brought to an end through cooperative interaction between Soviet reformers and Western disarmament activists. (2) The “new thinking” was a product precisely of this interaction. To be sure, such efforts would hardly have borne such rapid fruit were it not for the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Notes

(1) For another account of the Greenham movement, see David Fairhall, Common Ground: The Story of Greenham (Tauris, 2006). Ann played a crucial role in starting the movement, but later it developed in ways of which she did not fully approve.

(2) See his book Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 1999).

Back to Table of Contents

SOCIAL THOUGHT

11. BOGDANOV AND THE CULT OF THE ENGINEER

Generally, political writers treat the terms “Bolshevism” and “Leninism” as synonyms. I am also in the habit of doing so. In view of Lenin’s enormous influence over the Bolshevik party and the oblivion into which his Bolshevik opponents have been cast it is perhaps not a grossly misleading usage. All the same, it is not accurate, for Lenin did have a major political and (especially) intellectual rival inside his own party­Alexander Bogdanov (1873­1928). (1)

Bogdanov had many talents and interests. His formal training was in medicine and psychiatry. In addition, he was a philosopher, economist, theorist of culture, and science fiction writer as well as a political activist. Most of his work has never been published or even analyzed in English. The only serious scholarly study of Bogdanov of which I am aware, that of Zenovia Sochor, deals with the cultural dimension of his thought. (2) But we do have Charles Rougle’s translation of his Martian trilogy, consisting of: “Red Star”­a novel set on a communist Mars; “Engineer Menni”­another novel set on Mars, but at the stage of transition from capitalism to communism; and the long tragic poem “A Martian Stranded on Earth.” (3) The book also contains interesting interpretative essays by each of the editors.

I want to examine an idea that is commonly associated with the name of Bogdanov: his alleged promotion of a “cult of the engineer.” Thus Richard Stites speaks of his “celebration of technocratic power [and] the technical intelligentsia” and the same claim is encountered in Russian sources. On the surface there are ample grounds for it. Apparently, Bogdanov’s Martian novels were popular among Soviet planners at the time of the first Five Year Plan, and Menni, architect and organizer of Mars’ imaginary canals, is certainly a heroic figure with whom any aspiring technocrat might readily identify.

But you do not have to search very hard to find a powerful anti-technocratic current. In his essay, Loren Graham points out that Bogdanov presents communist Mars as a society beset by deep tensions and serious problems­by no means a utopia. The technological character of the society is a major source of these tensions and problems. In Red Star, for instance, Leonid, the visitor from earth, learns that some workers become hypnotized by the machinery they operate and have to be forced to stop working. And Bogdanov places in the mouth of Nella, Engineer Menni’s abandoned lover, a song in which she complains that for all his virtues Menni is lacking in compassion:

“His heart is of ice, no pain does it feel For the creatures brought low by Fate… The tears of the wretches cast into the fray Warm not his heart of stone.”

I get the strong impression that the political system portrayed in Red Star­little explicit detail is provided­is indeed a technocracy. Thus, the main speakers at a conference convened to consider Martian colonization of earth are an astronautical engineer, a mathematician (who advocates the annihilation of earthlings and is later killed by the distraught Leonid), and a physician. In Engineer Menni, a workers’ delegate at a trade union convention bemoans the fact that the workers’ ignorance puts them at the mercy of experts whom they have no choice but to believe.

It is clear from Bogdanov’s fictional and non-fictional writing alike that he thought the coming revolution against capitalism was very likely to give rise to a technocratic order. The centralized and authoritarian nature of the Bolshevik party­although he regarded it as necessary: he was a Bolshevik, after all­undermined the workers’ initiative and made this prospect even more likely. (4) It was not a prospect that he welcomed, even if his misgivings were not strong enough to lead him to abandon the revolutionary cause. His ideal was a democratic socialism, and he hoped it would eventually be achieved by means of education. (5) That is why he devoted so much of his thought and activity to education.

Bogdanov may be regarded as a precursor of Soviet science fiction, on which he must have had some influence. Here too the communist society of the future is often portrayed as a technocracy. In time Bogdanov’s anti-technocratic countercurrent was likewise to reappear within this genre. (6)

Notes

(1) Bogdanov’s original name was Malinovsky.

(2) Zenovia A. Sochor, Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy (Cornell University Press, 1988)

(3) Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, edited by Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites (Indiana University Press, 1984).

(4) Another source of the workers’ lack of initiative was the capitalist production process itself (Sochor, p. 34).

(5) According to Bogdanov, the workers needed “not only a heightened class consciousness, but also a new political culture” (Sochor, p. 30).

(6) See Patrick L. McGuire, Red Stars: Political Aspects of Soviet Science Fiction (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985). See also my commentary on Ivan Yefremov, whose technocratic orientation is uncritical, in RAS 14, item 7.

Back to Table of Contents

FOLLOW-UP

PIONTKOVSKY

In the last issue (RAS 36, Correspondence) Martin Dewhirst drew attention to the collection of articles by Andrei Piontkovsky published in Russian under the title “Za Rodinu! Za Abramovicha! Ogon’!”

He writes again to mention that there is now an English-language collection of some of Piontkovsky’s writings. It overlaps with, but is far from identical to, “Za Rodinu!” The details are:

Andrei Piontkovsky, Another Look Into Putin’s Soul (Hudson Institute, 2006). $14.95. ISBN 1-55813-151-5. It can be purchased at http://www.hudson.org

Back to Table of Contents