On the alleged responsibility of the entire Russian people for the war in Ukraine

I have to disagree. Russia, as state and people, bear responsibility for Ukraine War. I agree that punishing individual Russian is a mistake. But Russia, as people, have responsibility. An organization, an identity, can and should bear responsibility for their action. Otherwise no collective action can be judged.

Russia elect Putin in democratic election, several first elections is relatively fair, Putin is not always a dictator. These is also not first time Putin invaded another country, he invaded Crimea, he invaded Georgia, all have majority support of Russian people. Also Russian invasion of Ukraine had support, or at least aquiscence of Russian people, Russia had forced Putin to reverse his program several times. Russians support Ukrainian war and Great Russia ideology, notably even opposition agree with Ukraine is part of Russia theory.

Also, Versailles didn’t punish Germany/Germans enough. Versailles is no harsher than Franco-German war, and most of payment later withdrawn. Germans clearly want rematch during WWII. Too lenient is also a mistake.

Big #NotAllRussians energy, Chris. And yet, what we know from liberated territories in Ukraine (and reconfirms what we know from Chechnya, Georgia and Syria) is clear: Russian soldiers are synonymous with war crimes. They rape, torture, and murder. We have never, not ONCE, heard of a Russian soldier who refused to rape and murder, who tried to stop his comrades. Never, not once.

If it were just the “regime”, then you wouldn’t see these crimes as so pervasive, would you?

Where are the mass demonstrations of Russian exiles in Europe, in support of Ukraine, in support of arming Ukraine? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

We have never, not ONCE, heard of a Russian soldier who refused to rape and murder, who tried to stop his comrades. Never, not once.

Chetan, do you speak Russian? Do you follow the social media sources in Russian (or Ukranian) on the war? I am pretty sure the answer to these questions are “no”, but if you did, you’d have a better picture. I want to ask you to please calm down a bit, because you really don’t know as much as you think you do here.

(None of this is to minimize the horrors of the war. They are awful. But you are going well beyond what is reasonable here.)

Big #NotAllRussians energy, Chris

Did #NotAll—- ever mean anything less obviously silly and pernicious than “you are refusing to treat my designated out-group (of human individuals) as a morally homogenous block of evil-doers, and you must”?

Why should we care about the Russian people right now? The Russian population is being brutalized, but they’ve shown they as a group, either support this war, prefer to keep their heads down, or are insufficiently powerful to stop the war. Since the overriding impetus is to stop this aggressive war carried out on Ukrainian soil against the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian people, shouldn’t we be focused on that? The Russian people have demonstrated that they are not the critical component to stopping this war, so we should instead focus on what matters: the military forces, international military and financial support for Ukraine, and changing the decision-making calculus of the Kremlin. All that has to happen to end the war is for Russia to decide to stop fighting and pull out. It’s unfortunate the Russian people are suffering while their state kidnaps, press-gangs, kills, tortures, and rapes Ukrainians, but ending the war has to be the primary concern, hopefully with “justice” as Chris Bertram says. The Kremlin just doubled down on its aims, calling for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine and the international acceptance of the oblasts it has failed to conquer. Until the Kremlin changes its mind or is forced to accept defeat, the war will go on.

“War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

I fully agree with the OP, and I’m surprised by some comments that say that Germany should have been punished more after WW1.
I consider this opinion very stupid and close to historical revisionism.
I’ll note that this is a way of thinking that comes from attributing too much causal explanation to culture (russians/germans/arabs etc. are always…) and too few on socioeconomic causes.
This kind of thinking is quite close to racism.

Checking on my point above, it turns out that the issue of war crimes was discussed, amid agitation to “hang the Kaiser”. More interestingly, Bethmann-Hollweg offered to stand trial in the Kaiser’s place. But the military criminals (I should have added Tirpitz, who promoted unrestricted submarine warfare) were never in the frame, AFAICT.

As someone with plenty of (anti-war) Russian friends, I find myself wanting to agree with the general thrust of the post I find it difficult to do so.

Firstly, despite outward appearances the Putin-regime is deeply sensitive to public opinion. The Federal Guard’s Service (FSO – the presidential bodyguard, roughly equivalent to the US Secret Service) conducts frequent, detailed public opinion surveys which both inform policy and how the regime shapes its propaganda. The regime uses narratives of aggressive, imperialist revanchism because they are highly popular among the Russian people. Putin’s approval ratings are a dubious measure, but the annexation of Crimea and the 2014 invasion were both hugely popular. It’s no surprise Navalny has been historically cagey about Crimea (Sergei Udaltsov and the left-wing opposition were enthusiasts, and are staunchly behind the current war, to the surprise of no-one familiar with the Russian left wing).

Equally the issue of the role of propaganda is complex – yes, the television puts out a constant stream of poison, but there were opposition media available before February and internet restrictions are pretty easily circumvented with a VPN. A Russian citizen who wants to know what is going on has the means to find out.

The idea that the Russian people are unable to restrain their government is partially true, but only partially. The 2018 pension reforms, and the 2005 attempt to remove non-monetary benefits for pensioners in exchange for cash payments both prompted major, sustained national protests that compelled the Kremlin to change course. Likewise, the reason the Kremlin delayed mobilisation – despite military advice to the contrary and the huge strategic costs of delay – is that Putin and his aides knew that a draft would be hugely unpopular and potentially politically destabilising. If you’re a Ukrainian, this looks a lot like Russians being willing to take the risks of protesting if their monetary interests are affected, but not to stop a genocidal war of imperial conquest.

This also applies to the issue of draft-refugees – from the Baltic perspective these are Russians who were willing to, at least, acquiesce to the regime’s crimes up until the moment it looked like they might be personally affected by them. That the people fleeing the draft tend to be relatively affluent people with means, who could have made the decision to leave at any point in the recent past also makes them less sympathetic. There are also ‘free Russian’ battalions fighting on the Ukrainian side, as well as Russians working in non-combat support roles. Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, all of whom have had to deal with settler-colonial populations during the Soviet-era, shouldn’t be judged too harshly for wondering if draft refugees shouldn’t just be allowed to sit out the fight.

Additionally, in Kazakhstan, Armenia and Georgia where thousands of (pre-draft) Russian exiles have fled the result has been skyrocketing rents in the major urban centres, stoking a lot of local resentment. This hasn’t been helped by the fact that many of these Russians haven’t exactly been gracious guests. While of course, #notallRussians, a significant enough proportion have been obnoxiously chauvinistic that the well has been poisoned.

We also have to take into account that plenty of Ukrainians (and Russian expats) have familial and other social ties with ethnic Russians and Russian residents and converse with them frequently. I’ve been privvy to some of these conversations and the general attitude of the Russian side is largely in line with the view that the Ukrainians are really “little Russians” who need to be brought back into the fold, at a minimum.

Finally, the Ukrainians have faced authoritarian repression in their time and responded with massive resistance, even when they were literally being stripped naked and left to freeze in forests in the middle of winter, or gunned down in the streets by security services every bit as vicious as the FSB and Rosgvardiya. In Belarus, Lukashenko constructed a far more vicious and repressive regime than Putin’s but came within a hair’s breadth of overthrow in 2020 until Russia provided police auxiliaries. Ditto the Armenians, the Georgians, the Kyrgyz and arguably the Kazakhs. For people on the receiving end of Russian imperialism the failure of the Russian people to do likewise is more than a little grating. And I do think that when the state is responsible for crimes of such magnitude there is a responsibility for the populace to resist unless, perhaps, the state is willing to use lethal force to supress protest. Russia isn’t there yet, and during other periods of mass protest (such as after Navalny’s arrest in 2021) the security services have visibly struggled and had to resort to self-defeating displays of brutality.

I agree broadly with the point that a Versailles style peace settlement would be disastrous and that Macron is right that we shouldn’t ‘humiliate’ Russia. But in many ways the Russian populace is much like the poor-white farmers of the antebellum south – hugely disadvantaged by the system themselves, but willing to support it because it puts them one or two steps up the ladder of oppression. Changing this mentality will be difficult work – potentially the work of generations. But its work that needs doing if there is going to be a Russia that isn’t inclined to aggressive predation on its neighbours.

One point I forgot to add to the above is the mass deportation of Ukrainian civilians to Russian territory and, in particular, the kidnap of ca 200,000 Ukrainian orphans and their placement in Russian families for the purposes of forced Russification. Whatever way you slice it, that is direct and conscious participation in crimes against humanity, and Russian society at every level appears to have acquiesced in it.

On the case of Russian soldiers refusing:
‘The case of the first Russian officer charged with a felony for refusing to kill in Ukraine’
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/12/27/my-soul-is-in-my-own-hands

from the OP:

Since then [i.e., since WW1] there has been a cottage industry of academics explaining how German culture, as such, was the deep explanation for militarism and expansionism

It’s been many years since I had to study the historiography on these issues, but I did not run across this “cottage industry.” A non-exhaustive list of the preferred explanations for militarism and expansionism, with differing emphases depending on the historian, included: (1) widespread assumptions common in many European countries about the inherently competitive and social-Darwinist nature of international relations, and more generally the prevalence of nationalism, often in belligerent forms (2) the character of domestic politics in Wilhemine Germany, including the strength of particular industrial and commercial interests that benefited from an expansionist foreign policy and naval-building program (and, more generally, what one writer, whom I read later, referred to as the “cartelized” character of German politics in this period), and (3) the strength of groups such as Pan-German League. To number (1) I would add a view of war, esp among segments of the “chattering classes” in various European countries, that viewed it as an inevitable and in some sense “healthy” occurrence.

(2) and (3) have to do with the political situation in Germany at the time but not with “German culture, as such.” Now maybe there is such a strand in the reputable historiography and, if so, I’d be curious about which historians are associated with it.

I am reminded of some of my friends in the USA, who are able to pivot very quickly from “my country is the most democratic nation” to “I can do nothing to influence the horrible things the US leadership and military do”. By that latter standard it’s unreasonable to blame anyone in Russia except Putin.

On the other hand, while holding itself to be above international law the USA actively prosecutes people it considers war criminals and holds that US law has universal jurisdiction, from Assange to Bin Laden. Just like the Russians did with Skripal and Saudi Arabia did with Khashoggi… where do us good little democrats draw the line? And what do we do if we think our country has crossed it?

I know in Australia we happily refoul refugees, for example, and there’s evidence we murder them ourselves. That’s popular with the voters so we keep doing it. Many on the green and left sides protest this, but more … at best do not change their votes because of it. Maria’s recent post on persuasion crosses with this I think.

I very much agree with Daragh’s view here – whilst the basics of the OP are true, and individual Russian civilians cannot be held accountable for the regime’s crimes, it is equally true that if bulk of the Russian people would oppose the war, even quietly, it would tend to stop. It is a war of choice, like the Iraq War, and such criminal enterprises are easier to give up than a total war.

Furthermore the OP doesn’t engage with the fact that Russia is a bloody imperialist menace and has been, off and on, for at least 300 years. Russian political culture is profoundly comfortable with the idea that independence is a very conditional state for any state bordering Russia, apart from China, one that can be violently withdrawn without real pretext. I don’t see how long term peace is possible with this Russia without it having some profound Germn-style self-reflection (and I say that as a Russian-speaker lover of Russian culture).

And yes, the U.S. has related psychoses, and I find it bizarre how many of those who rightly campaign day and night for the US to reflect on its past and present failings cannot see that Russia has the same illness.

Of the comments to date, I found Daragh’s most instructive because it brought me new evidence that the Putin regime is sensitive to public opinion.
But I found James Landry’s to be most convincing overall: we must simply do whatever it takes to defeat the invasion and drive the invaders back behind their borders.
Russian popular opinion and the sentiments of individual Russians may be sporadically relevant to the military defeat of the Russian army, but not sufficiently relevant that we should let it distract us from the necessary work of defeating the invaders in the field.

Russian popular opinion and the sentiments of individual Russians may be sporadically relevant to the military defeat of the Russian army, but not sufficiently relevant that we should let it distract us from the necessary work of defeating the invaders in the field.

Not sure how many Crooked Timber commenters are in danger of being distracted by it from this necessary military work?

bad Jim @23
I’m going to be blunt and un-nuanced. The notion of a “crime against humanity” did not exist in international law when WW1 occurred. The Kellogg-Briand pact purporting to outlaw war was signed in 1928. Aggressive war’s status as a “crime against humanity” doesn’t exist until the Nuremberg trials.

So even if you agree with those historians who assign the major blame for WW1 to Germany’s rulers (and historians are still arguing about this), and taking due account of the violation of Belgian neutrality etc , WW1 was not, for a variety of reasons most of which I can’t touch on here for space and time reasons, a “crime against humanity” in the way WW2 was. Thus it’s not surprising that Germans after WW1 did not think, in your words, that their “nation was guilty of a crime against humanity.”

LFC @ 22

I assumed this refers largely to the debate about the supposed Sonderweg, which is associated with intellectual history. The Wikipedia article is poorly documented and confused (not sure how noting the continued outsized power of the Junkers amounts to a racist condemnation of “the German character” or even German culture, and the couple of facts I tried to pin down were inaccurate) but it will give you an idea.

My own additional points to add –

1) A couple of commentators here have attempted to make the ‘but America’ argument. This morning Russia unleashed a massive missile barrage against Kyiv and Mykolaiv, the latest in an ongoing onslaught against purely civilian targets and infrastructure. One of the goals of this campaign is to inflict mass suffering on the Ukrainian population during the winter months. I’m sure I don’t need to go over the systematic, deliberate murder of civilians and POWs, the forced deportations of Ukrainian citizens and kidnapping of orphaned children and policies of forced Russification in the occupied territories.

Whatever one thinks of the Iraq war (I was pretty fiercely opposed to it myself) it is obscene to compare US and allied conduct in that war with what Russia has done in Ukraine (and has been doing in bits of it since 2014).

Similarly, comparing the killing of bin Laden (a comparatively surgical operation against a mass-murdering terrorist) with the attempted assassination of Skripal (which involved using a chemical weapon in a civilian area which killed one innocent bystander and severely injured a policeman in order to send a political ‘message’) is grotesque.

Finally, I’ll note that the US has gone through the process of law to extradite Assange (who worked as an agent of the GRU to ratf*** the 2016 election) rather than luring him to an embassy under false pretences to hack him to pieces. The moral record of the US and its allies is not spotless, but pretending they’re even in the same league of monstrousness as the examples cited is less an attempt at moral sophistication than it is at obnoxious moral posturing.

2) With regard to the OP, I think Chris is setting up a strawman where assigning a general collective guilt to the Russian state means assigning guilt and punishment to literally every Russian everywhere in equal amounts*. This is clearly nonsense. However, if and when Russia is defeated in Ukraine an acceptable peace settlement will very probably involve things like monetary reparations, the surrender and trial of war criminals, the public acceptance of responsibility for the conflict and the education of the Russian citizenry on that fact, and limits on the military capabilities Russia is allowed to possess, possibly even its nuclear forces. That is, Russians will be made poorer and the state that represents them will lose vital aspects of sovereignty. This is collective punishment.

Unless Chris is prepared to argue Russia should bear no financial responsibility for rebuilding Ukraine, and that war criminals should be allowed to walk free and promote a revanchist narrative in a rearmed Russian state, then I don’t see how he can avoid accepting the logic of a degree of collective responsibility and therefore collective punishment for the war.

3) While the OP references draft refugees Chris hasn’t returned to the point. Nevertheless I think it is worth reiterating – from the perspective of the Balts (and the Armenians, Georgians, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz) these are Russians who were happy to acquiesce in the regime’s crimes up until the point that their skin was being placed in the game. It’s also telling that aside from some demonstrative hassling by the FSB and other goon squads, the regime has been happy to let these people go, because it means an increase in the overall ratio of regime supporters within Russia. Does this mean these people should be refused when they try to flee? Honestly, I don’t know, but I think its a far more morally complicated question than Chris makes it out to be.

I’ll leave this by saying I have quite a few Russian friends who are opposed to this madness. for whom I have nothing but sympathy and whose well being I fear for. But I also have quite a few Ukrainian friends who went to the barricades in 2014, who have lost friends and family over eight years and have genuine grievances against a people who haven’t been willing to make the same sacrifices to stop the crimes being committed in their names (not to mention the often patronising and chauvinistic discourse that persists even in the Russian opposition). This is an awful situation that will take generations of dialogue, and painful compromises to heal. The #notallRussians discourse may give one a sense of moral righteousness, but it doesn’t contribute to this healing process. In fact, just the opposite.

On the ethnicity point – its notable that the fiercest advocates of the Russkii Mir (Russian World) concept both among the elite and the citizenry comes from non-ethnic Russian citizens. This goes back to my point that a lot of oppressed people are quite content, even eager, to support the systems that oppress them so long as their one or two steps up the ladder and can put their boots on someone else’s face too.

It seems rather odd to me to conceptualise either reparations in general or individual criminal penalties as forms of collective punishment that presuppose national collective moral responsibility.

Thank you, Daragh:
“Whatever one thinks of the Iraq war (I was pretty fiercely opposed to it myself) it is obscene to compare US and allied conduct in that war with what Russia has done in Ukraine (and has been doing in bits of it since 2014).

Similarly, comparing the killing of bin Laden (a comparatively surgical operation against a mass-murdering terrorist) with the attempted assassination of Skripal (which involved using a chemical weapon in a civilian area which killed one innocent bystander and severely injured a policeman in order to send a political ‘message’) is grotesque.”

Ditto for comparing Bin Laden, a terrorist, with Khashoggi, a journalist. Whoever made that comparison — I hope the House of Saud rewards you handsomely for doing their work for them.

Unless Chris is prepared to argue Russia should bear no financial responsibility for rebuilding Ukraine, and that war criminals should be allowed to walk free and promote a revanchist narrative in a rearmed Russian state, then I don’t see how he can avoid accepting the logic of a degree of collective responsibility and therefore collective punishment for the war.

In order for me to win a lawsuit against a body corporate and for the court to award me compensation, there is no requirement for me to demonstrate anything about the guilt of the members of that body corporate, and nor should there be. In order for me to win a lawsuit against the Commonwealth of Australia and for the court to award me compensation, there is no requirement for me to demonstrate anything about the guilt of the Australian people and nor should there be. There is no connection between questions about the moral responsibility of individuals and questions about the payment of reparations.

#41
All countries are bad including this one.

The Russian people may not be morally responsible for the way, but they will suffer its consequences. Good argument for democracy that goes back to the Bible: when the king sins, the people perish.

Chris @47

Fair enough – my read of your contention that the proposition “all Russians bear responsibility for the war” would necessarily include children left me with the impression that you were conceiving of the first statement as supposing an equal distribution of guilt. I’m happy to accept that was not your intent. Nevertheless I think once you accept the state bears responsibility for certain crimes you’re inevitably in the realm of collective guilt and collective punishment, unless your post-war project involves the complete and deliberate dismantling of said state, ala Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Reparations means taking money that could be invested in Russia and investing it in Ukraine, to Ukrainian benefit, which is in and of itself a form of collective punishment.

I’d also like to avoid a settlement that doesn’t provide fertile ground for nationalist resentment, but given the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine and popular attitudes towards the latter in the former this will be extremely difficult (think Brexit and Ireland, but several orders of magnitude worse). If it’s a choice between that and reconstructing Ukraine and limiting Russia’s capacity for imperialist aggression against its neighbour then I think the moral imperative is to prioritise the latter.

The Ukrainians will also have their own resentments that need to be assuaged in this settlement. They’ve gotten extremely good at identifying individual officers and soldiers responsible for atrocities like Bucha or the shelling of residential areas, and their security services are extremely competent and capable of operating in a country whose language and customs they know intimately. Unless we want a Ukrainian Kidon bringing its own Wrath of God to Russia for the next generation or so we need to make sure Kyiv can feel justice has been done.

In any case, FWIW, I’m also very much opposed to the maximalist take of people like Maksim Eristavi that the whole of the Russian populace bears the Mark of Cain for the war, even if I think the failure of the Russian populace to oppose the war with the same rigour they opposed raising the age of retirement from 60 to 65 speaks to a collective moral failure that needs to be addressed, somehow. Other than that I think our disagreement is more one of degrees and terminology rather than fundamentals.

Thomas P @39

I was referring to the 2003 Iraq War, not the Gulf War, but as you bring it up – the Iraqi state was engaged in a war of aggressive conquest (launched shortly after another, long and bloody failed war of aggressive context). The allied bombing campaign was designed to both degrade its capacity to do so in future (which was reasonably successful) and encourage the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam by reducing the fairly high quality of life they had enjoyed under him to that point (which wasn’t). Notably there were a wide array of humanitarian programmes put in place by the UN to try and alleviate unnecessary suffering (which were, of course, abused by Saddam and his odious spawnlings).

If you would like to compare this to hitting power and gas distribution networks in the middle of Ukraine’s famously cold winters in order to freeze to death be my guest. If you want to come up with incredibly convoluted reasons for why Russia and the US are equally bad despite the former engaging explicitly in imperialist genocide, that is also your right, but it doesn’t make it any less unpleasant, particularly its condescending infantilisation of the Russians themselves.

Moz in Oz @41

Good grief where to start.

Firstly, on your flippant characterisation of the assassination of bin Laden as the Americans “executing whoever they want” – bin Laden and his organisation had both admitted responsibility for 9/11 as well as many other gruesome crimes, and not just against Americans. Al Qaeda’s particular brand of Salafist extremism wasn’t friendly to Shi’ites for example. Moreover, AQ had a long history of using people as human bombs and bin Laden himself had stated on multiple occasions that if he was about to be captured. In other words, there was a moral imperative to both neutralise his ability to continue to direct a murderous criminal organisation, and very good reason to assume the only way to do so was to kill him.

Second – “You seem upset about Skirpal’s [sic] daughter but not the four others killed when the US killed Bin Laden. Some casualties matter more than others.”

Yulia Skripal is still very much alive. The fatality in the Skripal case was Dawn Sturgess, a troubled woman who had nothing to do with Skripal, Russia or much of anything beyond her own life and who died because Skripal’s would-be assassins used a chemical weapon in a residential area. Two other people, Nick Bailey and Charlie Rowley suffered life-threatening injuries and ongoing psychological damage.

The ‘four others’ killed in the bin Laden raid were, by most accounts, his bodyguards and associates and possibly one of their wives. The US commandos conducting the raid took care to protect the other women and children in the compound. The raid itself was conducted instead of a less risky bomb or missile strike because of the risk of killing innocent bystanders.

In other words, you are claiming the deployment of a chemical weapon in a UK city against an ex-spy who was of no particular threat to anyone, with the deliberate intent of causing civilian casualties in order to send a political message*, is morally the same as a commando raid to kill a man who was by his own admission responsible for the death of tens of thousands, an ongoing threat to innocent civilians all over the world, and conducted in such a way as to minimise the potential harm to innocent bystanders. To call this nauseating would be an understatement.

An addendum on the use of Novichok in the Salisbury poisoning. The best explanation for the use of a fantastically lethal chemical agent rather than the more simple and effective means of a bullet to the forehead is that the Kremlin intended the assassination to be what the mafia sometimes calls a ‘cowboying’ – a spectacular display of violence with plenty of collateral damage that is intended to send a message more than it is to eliminate a specific target.

engels @49
“Do you know which one you’d rather be invaded by? Which one you’re more likely to be killed by?”

I’m sure you think this is a devastating response, but literally anyone familiar with how the US and Russian armies conduct warfighting and occupation would, if forced to choose, go for the Americans in a heartbeat. Not only would you be much less likely to be killed, you, your family and your property would be treated much better by the occupying forces. To give just two examples, I don’t recall the Americans rolling into Iraq with mobile crematoriums in their rear echelons and rolling out with the contents of Iraqi civilians houses tied to their tanks. But then again, ‘bothsidesing’ is an easy way to posture as a moral sophisticate without doing the tedious mental work that actual moral sophistication demands, doesn’t it?

Thomas P @51

The U.S. 1998 strike on the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan occurred not long after the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed numerous people, esp the bombing in Kenya, where the toll was 213 dead, the vast majority of whom were Kenyans (a secretarial college next door to the embassy was completely leveled by the blast), and 4,500 injured, “more than 150 of them blinded by the flying glass.” (Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, p. 308)

Ten days after the embassy bombings, U.S. intelligence got information that two men involved in the bombings were in Khartoum (Wright, p. 319). The al-Shifa plant was suspected of being a chemical weapons facility and thought to be part owned by bin Laden (both turned out to be false). The CIA got a soil sample from an area close to the plant that purportedly showed “traces of EMPTA, a chemical that was essential in making the extremely potent nerve gas VX” (Wright, p. 320). On that basis Clinton ordered the firing of cruise missiles that destroyed the plant. “The result of this hasty strike was that…Sudan lost one of its most important manufacturers, which employed three hundred people and produced more than half of the country’s medicines, and a night watchman was killed.” (Wright, p. 320)

So the al-Qaeda embassy bombing in Kenya killed roughly 200 people and injured 4,500, including 150 who were blinded, while the U.S. missile strike on the pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum killed one person, a night watchman, and (presumably) did harm to those who lost their jobs at the destroyed plant and also harmed those who depended on the medicines it produced. Presumably the plant was eventually rebuilt, though I haven’t looked that up.

LFC I am quite aware of the official story, and it’s totally unbelievable, more fake than Bush claims of Iraqi WMD:s. EMPTA is not a bannd chemical and it is easy to mistake for other substances in tests, assuming there even was any sample. It was not some sort of secretive facility as Clinton claimed, at the contrary it was an open facility with some Western employees that the government often showed to foreign visitors. If you are interested, Barletta is fairly thorough:
http://cns.miis.edu/npr/pdfs/barlet61.pdf

After the bombing the Sudanese government demanded a UN investigation, something that USA blocked. Had there been chemical weapons produced there there would have been plenty of evidence afterwards and the fact that Clinton blocked the investigation suggests he knew nothing would be found.

“..and also harmed those who depended on the medicines it produced” No kidding. Sudan is one of the world’s poorest countries. It’s not as if they had plenty of cash to go around importing substitutes. I find it interesting how you compare the attack with the al-Qaeda embassy bombings. Are you reduced to argue that USA isn’t quite as bad as that notorious terrorist group?

“someone who asked why, if there are are some good Russians, they haven’t stopped the war”

Liberals are reaching new heights of bloodthirstiness. The Russia-Trump nonsense rotted so many brains.

Whatever view you take of the Russian population in general, tens of thousands of Russians, from Putin down to individual soldiers, have committed war crimes. Given the campaign of terror attacks on Ukrainian cities, every Russian who has served in the armed forces is a potential accused. There’s almost no possibility of a peace settlement that doesn’t include a War Crimes Tribunal, and a requirement for Russia to hand over those charged. There’s also little chance that even a post-Putin regime will be willing to accept such terms.

The likely outcome will therefore be a ceasefire, without a peace, as in Korea, with Russia permanently subject to a wide range of sanctions, and vast numbers of Russians unable to travel abroad without fear of arrest. So, we will have another nuclear rogue state to deal with for the foreseeable future.

And war crimes never go away. A German concentration camp guard, aged 101, was just sentenced to 5 years jail for murders committed between 1942 and 1945. We will be dealing with the aftermath of this war for the rest of the century.

This is grim, but it’s what Putin chose and what Russians have gone along with, willingly or otherwise.

(Also, please take whataboutery on Blair and Bush as read. It would be great to see them in the dock but, as numerous commenters have pointed out above, Putin is in a whole different category).

and thank you Prof. Q for your comments I gladly would have written if there would have been a chance that such comments would get posted – as especially the whataboutery on this thread is… may I say:
‘Very unsympathetic Greenwaldish’.

Moz in Oz: “Just like the Russians did with Skripal and Saudi Arabia did with Khashoggi”

Analogizing seeking legal extradition (unsuccessfully) of someone to be tried in a court of law with due process (your first example), or killing someone who killed 1000s of your civilians and who you could not extradite (Bin Ladin), to Kashogi …? You don’t deserve any response but utter distain.

I’ll just note that “we” are not at war with Russia, and for good reason (fear of a nuclear war).
We are just giving weapons to Ukraine.

Therefore, it is quite dubious that “we” can impose anything on Russia after the war ends: probably not even that Putin stands down, let alone reparations (this depends on how long the Ukrainians want to fight but I doubt they want to invade Russia and if they did we shouldn’t enable them).

After the war, there will be plenty of hate going around, worst case we get into a new Palestine.

If we look at the past, contrary to what some commenters said, after WW2 Germany (W), Japan and Italy were treated very well, better that Germany was treated after WW1, and this is the reason there wasn’t a new nationalism surge.
This happened for two reasons: the USA feared that they could switch to the USSR side, and the heavily statalistic reconstruction economy that worked well with the keynesian economy of the USA.

Currently the West isn’t trying to help Russia’s economy, and perhaps this would be impossible in a situation where this kind of economic help is disappearing even inside of rich countries (which in turn probably depends on the fact that the USA isn’t 60% of global GDP anymore).

So while Germany, Japan and Italy are now rich countries and staunch USA allies the final result of many american adventures has been quite bad, the only place that I would see as a proper success is former Yugoslavia (where the USA acted against Serbia but in the interest of the other successor states).

This is a situation where, to win peace, we have to create an economic climate that is very good for both the Ukrainians AND the Russians, and this will be extremely difficult also because inside our countries there is already an air of belt tightening.

This idea of “we” being the arbiters of justice that deal punishment on the russian population (that is the only possible meaning of the idea of keeping Russians accountable) is not only morally dubious, but very damaging for everyone in the long term.

and about:
‘but we shouldn’t forget the current wars in Yemen, Ethiopia and Congo and past wars in the former Yugoslavia, all involving crimes against humanity. Another example: the genocide of the Rohingya won’t be a barrier to future trade with a post-dictatorship Burmese state’.

but ‘a post-dictatorship Burmese state’ or ‘the current wars in Yemen, Ethiopia and Congo and past wars in the former Yugoslavia, all involving crimes against humanity’ are something completely different than Putins Invasion of a neighbouring (European country) and they are not comparable or useful for ‘whataboutery’ in any way.

“after WW2 Germany (W), Japan and Italy were treated very well, better that Germany was treated after WW1, and this is the reason there wasn’t a new nationalism surge” MisterMR, 63
Germany was occupied and partitioned and large areas were annexed to Poland and the USSR. German minorities like the Sudeten Germans were dispossessed and expelled from Eastern and Central Europe. I would not say Germany was treated better after WWII. I’d say Germany was clearly, undeniably beaten in a way that made a nationalist surge unviable. Russia is unlikely to be defeated like that, at best they will be forced to retreat from Ukraine and maybe not Anschluss Belarus, carve up Kazakhstan, or annex additional bits of Georgia.

[allowing this through for reasons of fairness -CB]

@
Anyway, no hard feelings but I’d prefer it if you didn’t comment on my threads in future.

I won’t – if a comment of mine doesn’t get used for posting:
(Naturally, I disagree that wars and crimes involving non-Europeans, either as perpetrators or as victims, are “something completely different”.)

without posting my response:

‘But they are completely different – if Europeans -(and/or Americans) fight a war respecting the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols which regulate the conduct of armed conflict – and somewhere else a war gets fought without any of these rules’.

That wouldn’t be… fair.

Right?

@Lurker 71

Yes, I wrote “Germany (W)” meaning western Germany (that still is 3/4 of total Germany).
It is true that in the east the soviets were comparatively more punitive, and in the west many people probably wanted to punish western Germany more, but the dinamics of the cold war made it so that the USA changed its mind soon and helped Germany a lot, via loans, via condoning loans later (though most of it was postwar inflation I think, Italy did pay back Marshall plan debts in full but it took many decades so I suppose postwar inflation in the 70s helped a lot), and by a non punitive economic policy.

Many people, starting from Keynes, understood that the treaty of Versailles was one of the causes of the rise to power of the Nazi: Germany had to pay an outsized reparation in gold, that meant that Germany had to be a net exporter (to buy the gold with which to pay the debt), but everyone else in Europe tried to be a net exporter, and in the meanwhile the USA, which was already more technologically advanced than european countries, also was a big net exporter.
The Weimar government thus had to tax citiziens a lot, but then had to print tons of money (marks) to keep the economy running. This was the cause of the Weimar inflation, that was in pratice a form of tax through currency devaluation, not caused by stimulus as modern forms of inflation are.
When this ended the government tried to stop inflation but caused a wave of bankruptcies; the high tax throug devaluation and the subsequent bankruptcies were blamed on jewish bankers and this propelled the Nazi into power.

After WW2 instead the USA was too big to try to export its way out of the expected recession (by the end of WW2 the USA represented 60% of global GDP) so it doubled down on keynesian stimulus instead, and pushed this kind of economics (big government stimulus and high and sharply progressive taxes that came from the war years) on Germany, Japan and Italy, also subsidizing them with loans (that in the beginning meant that they could buy capital goods from the USA so a win-win situation), and the Bretton Woods economic planning also pushed other european countries in the same direction.

This is what caused the postwar boom and the reason said countries were (and still are) happy to be allies of the USA, whereas eastern Germany for example liked the soviets much less so the pro societ government had to rely on a huge secret police; in the west the USA did something like this, search for “Gladio” ob Wikipedia, but its scope was much smaller and never really had to came in action because people liked the USA overall (there are some unproven suspicions that some pets of Gladio collaborated in the murder of italian premier Aldo Moro, but no proof).

This idea, that the Versailles treaty partly caused the rise of nazism whereas the Marshall plan and similar policies caused the postwar boom, democracy, and generally goodwill towards the USA is something indisputable and I find it very worrying that many people seem to not know/understand this and go for punitive policies instead.

MisterMr@75 It’s probably hopeless to interject this into a post and thread, but the Nazis were never propelled to power by the people, but selected by high-level political intriguers, people like von Schleicher and von Papen. Hitler was literally appointed Chancellor by von Hindenburg. Also, the Weimar inflation as I recall was prompted by the French occupation of the Ruhr and long predated the Nazi rise to power. Inflation is regarded as the ultimate sin by reactionaries but the real crisis in Weimar Germany was the Depression, deflation and mass unemployment. Lastly, the notion that West Germany was genuinely denazified is dubious.

The Marshall Plan was only acceptable to the victors of WWII because there was a pretense made of denazification and the imposition of first an occupation government and later representative democracy and republican (in the sense of nonmonarchical) forms of government on the states that had lost, and because it imposed little pain on the people in the states that had won. (Combined with very generous veterans’ benefits in those states.) It’s hard to see how it could be repeated. In part since that is largely what was offered to the former Soviet bloc after 1989.

Russia doesn’t need help from Europe and the US, moreover, if it can go to China and the Saudis, who are happy to allow it to continue its current policies.

Long-time lurker, first-time (maybe last-time) poster. For what it’s worth, also someone who has had long association with Russia and Russians and the bitter and sweet that comes with such experiences (and there have been plenty of both).

Just wanted to chime in to second Chris’ observations and response in the OP. Lots of say and too little time to say it, so forgive typos or oversights. For months there has been a growing clamor about the collective guilt of “Russians” for the war and atrocities in Ukraine. Some of these Twitter participants are academics who should know better than to paint with a broad brush. Okay, sometimes this is rhetorical ease (or laziness) to use the generic plural term, but it is rarely unpacked. There is this elemental anger, not only from Ukrainians (understandably) but also from Poles, Estonians, Latvians, and others in eastern Europe. For example, many cheered the v isa restrictions on Russians getting out, even though this has made Putin’s life easier. (For example, now he doesn’t have to close to border to reduce the “exit” strategy, and so he does not have to adopt this risky policy.) Some pushed back but were in a minority—at least in many of the Twitter spaces following the war. Sam Greene and Sergei Radchenko, among others, have tried to push back as Chris has, but often not to much avail, alas.

Painting with broad brush strokes is this sin, and not for the first time—I’ve seen comments that this resembles the general and broad anti-German sentiment in the USA and UK during WWI. But is skews our perception of the reality. And that reality is that there is variation inside Russia in terms of support or participation of the war and its atrocities—being or ready to be “Putin’s willing executioners”—and resistance. (And so I have to disagree with much of what Daragh has written—especially Daragh’s painting with the broad brush as well, e.g. “in many ways the Russian populace is much like the poor-white farmers”—really, the entire populace??? Also, the regime is not that happy with people leaving—it looks bad and hurts the labor market—but closing the border might be a step too far, for image or capacity. Also: “I think once you accept the state bears responsibility for certain crimes you’re inevitably in the realm of collective guilt and collective punishment, unless your post-war project involves the complete and deliberate dismantling of said state, ala Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.” If the state acts as a complex, multi-tiered mafia clan or occupying army—take your pick—I don’t think this pluralist notion of the state embodying “the people”—whatever that might mean—really holds for moral accountability. Ditto for some of John T’s point. Although they also have good points, such as the theft of Ukrainian children and the effects of Russians migrating by the truckload into neighboring countries.)

One problem is that too many in Russia feel absolutely powerless and helpless. They are watching out for themselves because that is all that they can do. People did take to the streets, and the authorities cracked down for the most minor “infractions.” Think in terms of exit, voice, and loyalty. Many have existed (left the country). I know several people who have: not only or simply to avoid conscription, but also fear of repression for signing anti-war petitions or following their consciences in other ways. I know people who remained because they had no means to get out or (so they felt) to survive if they got out. I know many who remained because they felt the duty to care for elderly or sickly parents or relatives, or to care for newborns.

I also know some people who are apathetic about the war. Some of these people were apathetic about politics before 2022, and in moments when they let their hair down (e.g. were drunk), some ethnocentricity, nationalism, xenophobia, or racism could emerge. They don’t support the war, but they aren’t against it—they really don’t care either way. (How many people do you all know who are like this at heart?)

Resisting Putin’s pension reforms, or his return to power in 2012, was a different story because repression was not as fierce then as now. (Another point on which I disagree with Daragh.) Putin has slowly boiled the water in which the frog is sitting—and so rather than take to the streets en masse, we have a population, many of whom have become conditioned to feel powerless. Some of such people whom I know participated in protests in February and March, but when the numbers didn’t go up, what were they to do? Are we to demand everyone (except us) become martyrs?

Let’s not avoid the harsh realities: There are Russians (ethnically or legally, i.e. citizens) who support this effort. Forget about Simonian and Soloviev and the other turkeys in the media who are “working towards the Führer.” I would be cautious making too many claims here without a mountain of caveats. The question of how average Germans participated in the Holocaust—acting as “Hiter’s willing executioners”—requires careful thinking, and it requires the kind of study we simply cannot do at the moment.

It behooves us, then, to avoid painting with the broad brush, as Chris is noting. And it also behooves us to think carefully about why people are not resisting. We need to think carefully about power. Maybe non-ethnic Russians who support Putin do so out of resentment born of bad situations, and they target someone besides Putin to vent that resentment. (At least these kinds of questions get at causation, which we really need to figure out before assigning guilt willy-nilly.) Maybe some support Putin for various reasons (racism, opportunism). Maybe some are trying to survive in a police state getting worse by the month and where the memories of repression in the 20th century are not entirely lost or warped.

(I’ll leave aside the issue of opinion polls. There are different groups trying to make sense of this, and it seems there might be a nontrivial amount of preference falsification going on. Sam Greene has also had some interesting comments on this.)

I wish more people read James C. Scott’s and work on power more carefully (and brought Browning and Kershaw and even Goldhagen into the conversation), and think in terms of variation. The guilty should be held accountable—but who is guilty, and why? Putin and his circle, obviously, and Prigozhin, and Kadyrov, those who butchered in Bucha and Izyum…but there is more to the story in that bigger mass that is far from faceless.

Thanks, Chris.

Russia elect Putin in democratic election, several first elections is relatively fair

Only if you use the word ‘relatively’ to mean ‘not’.

Why should we care about the Russian people right now?

The kind of thing that is likely to be happening now–I don’t know how much things like this are happening, but it would be slightly surprising if it isn’t happening at least a bit–is bullying in schoolyards in Western countries of children who come from a Russian background (or who are wrongly supposed by their schoolmates to come from a Russian background). Do I need to explain why that’s the kind of thing people should care about?

Checking on my point above, it turns out that the issue of war crimes was discussed, amid agitation to “hang the Kaiser”. More interestingly, Bethmann-Hollweg offered to stand trial in the Kaiser’s place. But the military criminals (I should have added Tirpitz, who promoted unrestricted submarine warfare) were never in the frame, AFAICT.

The highest ranking officers prosecuted at the Leipzig War Crimes trials in 1921 were two Lieutenant-Generals, both of whom were acquitted. The highest ranking officer convicted was a Major, who was sentenced to two years imprisonment, the heaviest penalty imposed on any of those convicted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leipzig_war_crimes_trials

On 3 February 1920, the Allies submitted a further list of 900 names of alleged war criminals to the German government. The Germans refused to extradite any German citizens to Allied governments, and suggested instead trying them within the German justice system, i.e. at the Reichsgericht in Leipzig. This proposal was accepted by the Allied leaders, and in May 1920 they handed the Germans a reduced list of 45 accused persons. Not all these people could be traced, and in other cases there was difficulty in finding credible evidence. In the end only twelve individuals were brought to trial.

@Steven T Johnson 77

Yes the inflation predated the Nazis, and the occupation was one of the causes, but my understanding is that Germany really had big problems paying the reparations, and that the government had to substantially tax more than it spended to pay the reparations, and that this forced Germany to be a net exporter.
It is my understanding that the Weimar government had to basically print money to but stuff in Germany and sell it abroad for cheap (to exchange it with gold to pay the reparations), which was the main reason, though not the only one, for the continuous and self reinforcing inflation.

MrMr @84 The G7 was expanded to include Russia, and Russian membership of the WTO was supported. Accession was in 2011, long after the expansion of NATO etc which was later used to justify aggression against Ukraine . Interestingly, Medvedev was president at the time
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-16212643

As the cookbook says when making a rabbit stew, ‘First, catch your rabbit.’
Punishing Putin and his gang will require the military defeat of Russia and its unconditional surrender, putting in place an occupational control in Moscow to supervise reparations and organise the ‘Nuremberg ‘trials. How likely is this level of defeat?

And, rather than seek parallels with WW1 and WW2, may be we should look at the ‘winter war’ between Finland and the USSR in 1939. Initially the SU underestimated the resistance of the Finns, who were armed by France, UK, Italy, etc., and was humiliated militarily. However, it reorganised its operations and gained the treaty it wanted. Isn’t territory that was once Finnish still part of Russia?

Consider two children. One has a wealthy family, and act as a bully at school knowing he is protected by his wealth. The other is also a bully, but he has a father who drinks and beats him. Who is morally worse?

People can benefit from considering how to evaluate the morality of actions, choices, and decisions, because people take and make actions, choices, decisions.

I question the morality of evaluating the moral worth of individual people, in general, and in particular comparative evaluations: I don’t know what the benefits are supposed to be, and I fear the effect may be corrupting of the moral character of the people doing the evaluating. I can’t figure how it would be a good use of my time to spend it calculating who is bad and who is worse. When children are engaging in bullying, the important moral question, as I understand it, is not how bad they are but what to do about it.

The Marshall plan for Russia

Surrounded by a small group of Russian reformers and Western advisers, Yeltsin used this unique historical moment to launch an unprecedented program of economic “shock therapy.” Prices were liberalized, borders were opened, and rapid privatization began – all by presidential decree. Nobody in Yeltsin’s circle bothered to ask whether this was what Russia’s citizens wanted. And nobody paused to consider that Russians might first want a chance to develop a sound constitutional foundation for their country, or to express through an election their preference for who should govern them.
The reformers and their Western advisers simply decided – and then insisted – that market reforms should precede constitutional reforms…

Phil H @94

A good point about the “hard-forged link,” and I would add that too often we all get confused about the nature of punishment, why we punish (and if we can and should), and what or whom to punish. Some degree of deterrence is necessary, although we are dealing with Kuran’s preference falsification and so don’t quite know whom/what to punish or how.

One quibble: I didn’t say that no one in Russia supports the war or that there should be no reprisals (or punishments) at all. (If I’m misinterpreting your comment, please forgive.) There are Russians who support and oppose the war but feel (often rightly) that they can’t do anything about it, especially given increasing repression, corruption, and the mafia nature of the regime. The best they could do is passive support or passive resistance, but the best that can do is keep alive any spark for action. But there are Russians who could plausibly do something because they have some capacity for meaningful action. What is Aleksei Kudrin doing? What are the technocrats like Mishustin and Nabiulinna doing behind the scenes? They are keeping the war machine going, but what is their motive? Keep your head down to gain, to survive, or to wait for the moment to actually do something useful against the war? (Nabiulinna and Prigozhin are not interchangable in terms of their actions and support for the war, even if both are contributing in different ways.) What are university administrators or enterprise managers doing behind the scenes when they publicly claim to support the war–are they also shielding “dissidents” in their ranks or at least not persecuting them? (I have seen evidence of the latter, but we also have the occasional evidence of snitching.) We don’t know all that much. And why this “Russian people,” a reification? How do we measure culpability across this vast and varied group? We have already slapped sanctions on some people and organizations (and the main goal really was not to crash the currency, although the ruble’s strength is as much illusory as real), and could do more.

But yes, this is a muddled issue, and war generally is muddled anyway.

Jeff @81
“Think in terms of exit, voice, and loyalty.”

With a bow to Albert Hirschman.

Further reflections. I’ve been reading more about current life in Russia, and –

Is it possible we are looking at mass psychological trauma here? First Stalin’s depredations, then World War II, then more Stalinism, then losing the Cold War (which probably could have been ended in the 1960s had US hawks not wanted to keep it going), then the horrors of the emergence of the Russia oligarchy, again aided by US hawks. Would it be any wonder if this population was angry and willing to strike out at the world in spite?

I don’t know that this is true, but I suspect it might be. If it is we have to rethink how we treat Russia. Obviously we cannot allow them to run roughshod over eastern Europe, but some sort of compassion and support is also in order.

Chris @100

The point I was making is the idea that “shock therapy” as a policy was responsible for the calamity of the 1990s, rather than the complete breakdown of the administrative capacity of the Russian Federation itself, is a myth. Notably the post-Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe enacted versions of “shock therapy” and prospered.

Put it another way – the privatisation of Siberian aluminium factories on the cheap wasn’t done due to a policy decision made in Moscow, as much as it was because men with guns in Siberia forcibly took over those factories and Moscow couldn’t do anything about it. Same with the various illicit schemes that allowed the original oligarchs to prosper by looting state-owned enterprises in collaboration with corrupt local managers.

I agree this was a massive lost opportunity for the new Russian state, and that perhaps Western policy makers could have made different decisions that would have improved the conditions and restraints under which post-Soviet Russia operated. I also agree that there are good faith critics of “shock therapy” as a set of economic policies, whom I disagree with on the above grounds. But I’ve also read more than my fair share of Russian nationalist and Western leftist critiques of “shock therapy” that are clearly motivated by a priori assumptions that it must have been a malignant American plot, and given engels’ record in this and other conversations I’m 95% confident they fall into the same category.

Perhaps reasonable people can agree that “shock therapy was the Marshall plan for Russia” was one of the most ridiculous things anyone has ever said on this blog and move on. I didn’t want to start a debate with Daragh about shock therapy as I’m sure we profoundly disagree, but I do appreciate his taking time away from advising financial masters of the universe to share his perspectives.

On Russia at the end of the Soviet Union: a couple of years or so ago I read the last edition of Alec Nove’s excellent book The Soviet Economic System. It’s a sort of textbook, revised many times over the years. The basic theme of the last edition is that the system is really, really messed up, with many deep problems that have no obvious solution. It’s also clear from Nove’s other work that, as messed up as the other Soviet Block countrys’ economies were, they were much less messed up, for various reasons. Of course, it seems implausible that nothing better could have been done, but I think it’s the begining of wisdom to note that the situation that the new Russia faced in 1992 was objectively extremely difficult, and that no matter what it was going to be very hard to make it work. That Yeltsin was a drunk half-wit didn’t help, of course. Maybe if Gorbachev had been willing to follow Yavlinsky’s plan in the late 1980s/early 90s, thing would have been better, but probably the only thing that would have happened is that hard liners would have deposed him even sooner.

A story from when I lived in Russia, which was well after the worst “cowboy” days, but that fits a bit with Daragh’s account: In early 2000, there was a dispute over who would be the new manager of a major vodka bottling plant in Kaluga, for what was, then, one of the best brands of vodka, Gzhelka. One of the disputants took over the plant with his private army. He didn’t win out in the end. But, the fact that he, not too unreasonably, thought that taking over the plant with his private army might lead to him being the manager says a lot about how things were done then. This wasn’t the fault of the US.

The notion that lawlessness in the Russian Federation was both an accident caused by no one’s negligence and an systemic inevitability erases the militant US support for Yeltsin, who bombarded the Russian parliament to make sure there would be no compromising.

The allied notion that shock therapy “worked” in other parts of central Europe so far as I can see is unjustified. East Germany came off the best. But other alleged bright spots ignore the massive emigration of peoples fleeing the blessings of capitalism. Isn’t the joke in Latvia, the last one out turn off the lights? And even a superficial glance doesn’t make me thing anything south of the Danube isn’t in sad shape. No doubt somebody won the Albanian lottery but I don’t think it was the people.

J-D 83: “I don’t know how much things like this are happening, but it would be slightly surprising if it isn’t happening at least a bit”

If you don’t know, maybe better leave it there? I don’t claim that antirussian incidents never happen but to a significant extent, the West’s alleged Russiophobia has been a propaganda trope of the Kremlin.

J-D 83: “I don’t know how much things like this are happening, but it would be slightly surprising if it isn’t happening at least a bit”

If you don’t know, maybe better leave it there? I don’t claim that antirussian incidents never happen but to a significant extent, the West’s alleged Russiophobia has been a propaganda trope of the Kremlin.

Whatever the current frequency, an increase is possible, but undesirable: therefore, trying to avoid doing things which will encourage an increase in frequency is a good idea.

[Possibky redundant re-post]

Daragh, my apologies: I don’t think it’s worthwhile my trying to debate a professional Russia analyst about a topic on which we are so far apart politically. That is not any kind of slight, certainly not “mudslinging”, and I genuinely appreciate your openness to engagement.

I have followed the comments of Russia hands with interest but I’m surprised no one has drawn a contrast with China or mentioned Isabella Weber’s book.

The decline in Russian majority living standards (starkly apparent in population decline) not due to shock treatment but to, as novakant’s link seems to tell us, the secret return of Communist tyranny could be usefully compared to the relative situation of the larger part of the population in Belarus (which did not have wholesale privatization) and Ukraine, which did not have revanchist KGB autocracy. Again, massive emigration and reliance on remittances are not signs of success. And the same is true of generous IMF loans, which should probably be deemed more like subsidies.

Of course the Russian people are diverse and all have different degrees of personal culpability for the crimes of their government. But I don’t think the important question is whether any given Russian is ethically at fault for the Ukraine war. The interesting question to me is what ethical limits does it place on our actions in responding to the Russian state? Obviously, the Russian state cannot act without the support of the Russian people. So stopping the Russian state from doing what it wants to do may require hurting a lot of Russian people. Should we feel bad about that? My feeling is that when a people are led by a truly evil government doing truly evil things, they have lost any claim to be treated in a certain way by the people who are trying to stop that government. The example here is Germany and Japan in WWII. Does the fire-bombing of cities constitute war crimes? Yes. Was it wrong for the allies to do so? Only if you think it was a less effective means of prosecuting the war. Ending human life unnecessarily is still wrong, but it is not wrong if it enables you to defeat a power like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. If you are the instrument that a truly evil government actor is using to pursue evil ends, you have effectively forfeited your life, even if that situation is not fair to you personally. That’s my opinion any way and as an American I can accept the implications for myself.

But I think this type of question – how much should we be concerned with harm to the Russian people by opposing the Russian state? – is kind of moot. Because Russia is a nuclear power, they will be subject to financial punishment, but not actual invasion or attack by NATO forces. So the question of whether Russian citizens have a moral claim to not being killed by acts of war is not very relevant.

Review of another recent book:

According to Ghodsee and Orenstein, the Visegrad countries — Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia — and Slovenia and Estonia best illustrate the workings of the J-curve transition. For the sake of brevity, this group of countries works well as an example of relative successes. However, the authors know that even these countries experienced a significant recession in the early transition years, combined with prolonged suffering in many dimensions. According to the economic dataset published online accompanying the book, the transitional recession in the most successful economies was comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s in the U.S., although somewhat less severe. Almost 100 years later, Western social scientists still consider the Great Depression one of the most traumatic events that profoundly reshaped the United States. However, a recession of comparable magnitude in Eastern Europe is considered a major achievement by advocates of the post-socialist success narrative. To contextualize this “success”, in terms of real GDP per capita (in 2011 USD), it took 12 years for Hungary to grow back to its 1989 level. Czechia and Poland were quicker – they lost “only” seven years. The hardest-hit post-socialist countries have not recovered their level of economic development of the late socialist period. In 2016, the real GDP per capita (in 2011 USD) of Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia, Montenegro, Tajikistan, and Georgia was still below the 1989 level. In the middle, we find countries that regained their 1989 levels sometime around the mid-2000s.

Confronted with these massive drops, some economists questioned the reliability of economic statistics in Eastern Europe. Ghodsee and Orenstein review the efforts that re-evaluated the economic transition by going beyond official GDP statistics. However, they find that those studies also point to a deep economic contraction. The most complete dataset imputing GDP growth suggests that the extent of the recession was somewhat lower, but comes very close to what official economic statistics show. Some countries are doing relatively better than others. However, inequality distorts the social distribution of these gains even in the most successful cases. In several countries, including Poland, average household income grew at only half the pace of GDP per capita between 1992 and 2010. In Hungary, GDP per capita grew by 1.92% between 1991 and 2012. However, real household incomes shrank by an average of 0.22% per year at the same time. Measures of income inequality also show that the top 10% captured almost two-thirds of post-communist economic growth in the post-socialist region. Behind the growth averages lurks a massive increase in poverty, with 191 million people — 47% of the the post-socialist population— living on less than $5.50 a day in the region in 1999, at the peak of the post-socialist poverty crisis.

Official assessments usually stop with the economic evidence. The most fascinating part of Ghodsee and Orenstein’s book starts here. Reviewing the demographic research, they find evidence for suffering of epic proportions. As the authors note, “we became fascinated by the ways these data had been elided or ignored by others proclaiming transition success, especially given that the transition coincided with the worst recorded peacetime population declines in history” (p. 86)…

@KT2, 117
Here’s a little something about the aluminium wars of the early 90’s, courtesy of Google:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/siberias-crying-cannibal-when-business-became-war/

KT2 @117

“I just couldn’t imagine the Russian State (whoever was in power) not sending in the military to remove the “men with guns”.”

That’s more or less the point I’ve been making – they couldn’t. The Russian military at the time was getting utterly mauled in Chechnya, the officer corps were busy enriching the likes of Viktor Bout and the Minister of Defence, Pavel Grachev, was popularly known as Pasha Mercedes. One of the reasons we know about the scale of corruption was reporter Dmitry Kholodov, who received a briefcase full of grenades for his troubles.

steven t johnson @116

The Belarusian economy also received large shipments of heavily discounted Russian oil far in surplus to its domestic requirements which it then sold on to Europe at world market prices in exchange for its geopolitical loyalty. As soon as Putin began withdrawing these subsidies the Belarusian economy suffered repeated balance of payments crises and currency devaluations in 2011 and 2015. Lukashenko responded by forbidding workers in export oriented industries (such as wood-working) and attempting to tax unemployment. By 2020 the pressures of Covid and the tapering off of the last of the subsidies left the regime with no viable means of staying in power beyond massive, indiscriminate violence (and even then it had to be backed with Russian interior troops).

engels @120

I’m afraid that analysis is pretty unconvincing if you’re familiar with the pathologies of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact economies. Kornai’s work on the ‘Shortage Economy’ is good in this respect. It’s not just that Soviet GDP statistics were largely fabricated, at all levels (the Kremlin had so little idea what was going on in the country by Gorbachev’s time it took them days to figure out what was going on at Chernobyl), it’s that central planning, quotas and soft budget constraints resulted in enterprises producing output with no purpose or end users. Metals production is the classic case – huge outputs of easily produced, but practically useless steel slabs filled the quotas when what was needed were smaller, thinner sheets that could be used to make things. This all contributed to Soviet GDP (both real and reported) without contributing to Soviet living standards. The same phenomenon contributed to ‘forced savings’ by the Soviet population (because there was nothing to buy) and exacerbated hyperinflation when market reforms were introduced.

Conversely, while there’s no questioning that output collapsed in the 1990s measuring ‘real’ GDP became challenging due to the prevalence of grey and black market activity. With the proviso that its anecdata, when I did my language training in a mid-size regional Russian city (think the Russian equivalent of somewhere in Ohio or Michigan) in the mid-2000s official per capita GDP was half of what it was in 1991. That said, everyone had a degree of unreported income, and while everyone I met there had suffered during the 1990s they also had vastly better living standards than they had during the Soviet period. The inequality issue is more complex, but suffice to say that Soviet officialdom enjoyed a range of perks and access to consumer goods that were entirely out the reach of the workers and peasants.

What I find most questionable about the analysis however is this: “In 2016, the real GDP per capita (in 2011 USD) of Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia, Montenegro, Tajikistan, and Georgia was still below the 1989 level.”

Let’s take a closer look at that comparison group shall we?

Georgia suffered a catastrophic civil war from 1991-94 that resulted in widespread ethnic cleansing and the partition of the country (including the relatively economically productive region of Abkhazia).

Moldova had a less bloody, but still tragic, civil war that resulted in local Soviet/Russian troops taking the initiative to carve out the separatist entity of Transnistria, whose economy is still heavily based in its status as an unrecognised entity that makes it a haven for organised crime (which bleeds over the border as well).
Tajikistan had a civil war from 1992-97 which was also ‘resolved’ by Russian troops who secured the regime of Emomali Rahmon, an erratic dictator memorably described in the Wikileaks cables as man who would “prefer to control 90% of a ten-dollar pie, rather than 30% of a hundred-dollar pie.” In 2016 Ukraine had been invaded two years previously, had large chunks of its territory seized, and the fighting in the Donbass was still at a relatively high intensity.

In other words, the post-Soviet case studies for the “failure of shock therapy” are ones that had suffered sustained, violent conflicts (which tends to deter investment) with accompanying major loss of territory and/or industrial assets. In Tajikistan’s case it would be hard to argue that any economic reforms of significance occurred at all. Georgia and Moldova also saw the creation of unrecognised separatist entities that became havens for organised crime. If were to play the opposite card and hold up Azerbaijan as proof of the success of the reform programmes without mentioning oil and gas, I would be laughed out of the room (and rightly so).

I won’t pretend to be familiar enough with the economic reform programs of 1990s Serbia and Montenegro to say anything intelligent about them, but they certainly weren’t oases of peace in the 1990s. Suffice to say given the case selection and lack of caveats, I question the analytical rigour on display here.

Chris @119

Rawls makes a number of interesting and valid points, but to my mind he has left out a crucial factor – Imperial Japan was still occupying large swathes of territory in mainland Asia where it was inflicting great suffering on the civilian population in August 1945. Rawls talks about a “crisis exemption” which excuses certain military acts in extremis, but only seems to apply this directly to the belligerents. Given that both the Nazis and Imperial Japan were engaged in, quite literally, some of the worst crimes in the history of the human species to civilians in territories under their control it seems to me that not considering the benefit in accelerating the end of the war for them is a major flaw in his argument.

mpowell @118 wrote:

“My feeling is that when a people are led by a truly evil government doing truly evil things, they have lost any claim to be treated in a certain way by the people who are trying to stop that government” — irrespective, mpowell says, of the degree of their personal culpability.

I don’t agree. Walzer’s well-known discussion of “supreme emergency” seems right to me — his conclusion being, iirc, that deliberate bombing of civilian targets is perhaps justified only when, in a just war as WW2 was on the Allied side, available means of taking offensive action are very limited and the situation is so dire that national survival is at stake. That was the case when Britain (and its empire) pretty much stood alone in WW2 (i.e., from the fall of France to Pearl Harbor). But that was an exceptional situation, a “supreme emergency” as Churchill termed it. After the U.S. entered the war, those conditions no longer obtained. The bombing of cities (via conventional and incendiary bombs) and the use of the atomic bombs was not necessary to the defeat of Germany and Japan, and the extent to which those actions hastened the end of the war (if indeed they did) is still a matter of historiographical debate.

Every Russian I’ve met in Australia is opposed to the war, but most of them have been outside of Russia for several years now, and were already not fans of Putin. Oddly, the only people I’ve met in Australia who were pro-Putin were a couple of women who work at a farmer’s market I go to on the Gold Coast, and they are both 100% Australian – they started volunteering to my wife how good it was that Putin was “de-Nazifying” Ukraine and the like. It was shocking, really. We told them that wasn’t true, but also don’t shop at their stall any more.

“One can not declare a radical economic experiment a failure if it starts with civil war” is an interesting principle to introduce into a discussion of the USSR and its legacy….

Generally it seems to me your points provide context that you have liked to see included rather than evidence that any of the claims above are “unconvincing” or “questionable”. I agree that GDP isn’t a good measure of overall societal development (and you will search in vain for an anti-neoliberal leftie who thinks it is). That may be why the focus of the research is on crosschecking these trends with demographic data about mortality, outmigration and fertility, opinion surveys and ethnographic studies. It’s really worth clicking the link imho, and their comprehensive review paints a much less rosy picture than your mid-2000s anecdata.

I wonder how many Chinese people are looking back over the last few decades and saying “I wish we’d taken more advice from American neoliberal economists”.

Another interesting review:

Even though GDP recovered in the US and European countries after the Great Depression, all scholars of the period accept that the associated economic suffering had immense political consequences. In some countries, of course, it triggered the collapse of democracy. That similar if not greater economic suffering, along with the profoundly disruptive social changes experienced by east-European populations since 1989 would not have political consequences is unimaginable. Yet why have nationalist populists so often been the ‘beneficiaries’ of eastern Europe’s traumatic experiences? As Ghodsee and Orenstein note, since it was the ‘losers’ of the transition, sometimes referred to in the region as ‘thrown-away people’—older, working-class, less-educated and/or rural citizens—who disproportionately supported nationalist populists, explaining their political behaviour is crucial. That these voters became the base of nationalist populist parties in the region was not, as myriad scholars including David Ost, Maria Snegovaya, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Milada Vachudova, and Gabor Schering have shown, because they were inherently prone to vote for illiberal, xenophobic politicians. Rather it was because nationalist populists, rather than left parties, proved most responsive to their economic grievances…

daragh 133: “any analysis of the economic pain of Russia in the 1990s that doesn’t grapple with the impact of 70 years of economic policy that preceded it, or the near total collapse of state capacity in favour of vague condemnations of “neoliberalism””

Sure you have a point, the policies and failures of the 1990s cannot be analyzed in isolation, as if everything was fine before the shock therapy was tried. But conversely you cannot just wave away the fact that life expectancy and living standards by all meaningful measures collapsed during the 1990s, coincinding with the shock therapy policies recommended by Western advisors. Amnd also that many observers warned even before the fact that the policies would have catastrophiv consequences. And the condemnations are not “vague”, there is an extensive literature that specifically analyzes these policies.