Category Archives: History

George F Kennan, Moscow, 1944: “Here men determine what is true and what is false.”

George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American diplomat, political scientist, and historian. He was known best as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War on which he later reversed himself. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as “The Wise Men”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan

How Bryan Cranston’s ‘Trumbo’ Whitewashes Stalinism

But as documents from the Soviet archives have revealed, McCarthy was largely right, even if not every last accusation he made was credible. Proof that Trumbo was a communist shill can be seen in the fact that he promoted his anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun when the communists opposed American involvement in WW2, and then agreed to have it taken out of print when the communists began to favor American entry into the war.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/05/how-bryan-cranston-s-trumbo-whitewashes-stalinism.html

A great history of Russia in the Middle East

Excerpted from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/opinion/putins-imperial-adventure-in-syria.html?_r=0

IN June 1772, Russian forces bombarded, stormed and captured Beirut, a fortress on the coast of Ottoman Syria. The Russians were backing their ally, a ruthless Arab despot. When they returned the next year, they occupied Beirut for almost six months. Then as now, they found Syrian politics a boiling cauldron of factional-ethnic strife, which they tried to simplify with cannonades and gunpowder.

Russia’s first major intervention began in 1768, when Catherine the Great went to war with the Ottomans, and Count Alexei Orlov, the brother of her lover Grigory, sailed the Baltic fleet through the Strait of Gibraltar to rally rebellions in the Mediterranean. Recruiting Scottish admirals, Orlov annihilated the Ottoman fleet at Chesme, after which Russians temporarily dominated the eastern Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, in Egypt and Syria (which spanned present-day Lebanon and Israel as well), the respective Arab strongmen, Ali Pasha and Dahir al-Umar, had collaborated to seize Damascus from the Ottomans, but then lost it. Desperate, they approached Orlov and Catherine, who agreed to back them in return for possession of Jerusalem. Orlov’s ships bombarded Syrian cities, eventually occupying Beirut.

They left in 1774, when Russia dropped its Syrian allies in return for Ottoman concessions over Ukraine and Crimea. Yet a Russian Mediterranean base was now a strategic aim: Catherine and her partner Prince Potemkin annexed Crimea, where they founded a Black Sea fleet, then tried to negotiate a base on Minorca.

Catherine’s successors saw themselves as crusaders, with Russia destined to rule Constantinople and Jerusalem. Ultimately it was this aspiration — and a brawl over the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, between Russian-backed Orthodox and French-backed Catholic priests — that led to the Crimean War.

Russian defeat in 1856 persuaded Alexander II and the last czars to back off on using military force to dominate Jerusalem, preferring diplomacy and soft power. But during World War I Russian forces occupied northern Persia and invaded Ottoman Iraq, nearly taking Baghdad.

Polish Operation of the NKVD (1937–38)

The Polish Operation of the Soviet NKVD security service in 1937–1938 was a mass operation of the NKVD carried out against purported Polish agents in the Soviet Union during the period of the Great Purge. It was ordered by the Politburo against the so-called “Polish spies” and customarily interpreted by the NKVD officials as relating to “absolutely all Poles”. It resulted in the sentencing of 139,835 people, and summary executions of 111,091 ethnic Poles, as well as those accused of working for Poland. The operation was implemented according to NKVD Order № 00485 signed by Nikolai Yezhov. The majority of the victims were ethnically Polish but not all, according to Timothy Snyder, who gives a conservative estimate of 85,000 confirmed Poles executed simultaneously across the country. The remainder were ‘suspected’ of being Polish, without further inquiry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD_%281937%E2%80%9338%29

High level account of Russian Official’s comment on Ukraine’s importance

Testimony of Poland’s Professor Bronisław Geremek who was active in forming Poland’s eastern policy after the fall of the Soviet Union. Here, he quotes Gorbachev’s envoy:

“Don’t you understand that we will never let you extend support to Ukraine? To hell with Lithuania– and you will soon regret it yourselves. But Ukraine is off-limits to you. It is a country on which Russia’s potential relies. Some 40% of the Russian armaments industry depends on spare parts supplied from Ukraine. It is impossible to think about a Russian economy without ties to the Ukrainian economy. And the latter will perish without Russia, without the Russian markets and raw materials.” Then he added something which at first made me think I misheard him: “It is not only about the economy or the military,” he said. “The thing is, Russia could not exist with its spiritual capital being part of a foreign country.” Kiev was treated as the spiritual capital of Russia….

http://intersectionproject.eu/article/russia-europe/eastern-policy-third-polish-republic-beginnings

Black Sea Slave Trade

https://allkindsofhistory.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/blonde-cargoes-finnish-children-in-the-slave-markets-of-medieval-crimea/

The horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade have left an ineradicable mark on history. In the course of a little more than three and a half centuries, 12.5 million prisoners – at least two-thirds of them men destined for a life of labour in the fields – were shipped from holding pens along the African coast to destinations ranging from Argentina in the south all the way north to Canada. It was the largest forced migration in modern history. . . .

A second great market in slaves once sullied the world, this one less well-known, vastly longer-lasting, and centred on the Black Sea ports of the Crimea. It was a huge trade in its own right; in its great years, which lasted roughly from 1200 until 1760, an estimated 6.5 million prisoners were shipped off to new and often intensely miserable lives in places ranging from Italy to India.

Slavery in the Crimea, however, differed in significant ways from the model made so familiar by the trans-Atlantic trade. The slaves sold there were white, being drawn for the most part from the great plains of the Ukraine and southern Russia in annual raids known as the “harvesting of the steppe.” Their masters were successively Vikings, Italians and Tatars – the latter being, for nearly half of the trade’s life, the subjects of the Crimean Khanate, a state that owed its own long life to its ability to satisfy demand for slaves. And most of the slaves themselves were not male labourers. They were women and children destined for domestic service – a fate that not infrequently included sexual service. The latter sort of slave was always fairly commonplace in the Crimea. . . .

It can be argued, indeed, that the significance of the Crimean slave trade as a whole has been severely under-estimated. It was not simply a precursor of the Atlantic trade; it provided a model and, in a number of cases, the expertise for it. Some of the Genoese slavers who were thrown out of Caffa by the Ottomans a few years after the fall of Byzantium reappeared as founders of the Atlantic trade towards the end of the fifteenth century. Moreover, Ottoman Istanbul, the largest city in all of Europe and western Asia by 1550, grew rapidly in part because one in five of its booming population was a Crimean slave. And the Cossacks of the Ukraine first organised themselves into large bands to protect against Tatar slave raids.

Finally, the diversion of Muscovite resources and Russian gold to Caffa plainly had some impact on the development of Russia. The cost of ransom slavery alone was as much as 6 million roubles each year after 1600, and the great Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky – writing late in the nineteenth century, at a time when Russia’s inability to keep pace with the developing west was a matter of prime political importance – observed that “if you consider how much time and spiritual and material strength was wasted in the monotonous, brutal, toilsome and painful pursuit of [the Tatar] steppe predators, one need not ask what people in Eastern Europe were doing while those of Western Europe advanced in industry and commerce, in civil life and in the arts and sciences.”

That so many lives, and so many millions in gold, in short, were not available to be invested in Russia, nor to be directed against Poland-Lithuania or Sweden for so long, may have been merely an inadvertent consequence of the Crimean khan’s inability to control his chiefs and followers. It was a consequence, nonetheless.

Also, this bit about Muskovite participation:

“This trade in Scandinavian captives – known to the Muscovites as nemtsy – flourished throughout the 16th century, and was large enough for other rulers to send specially to Moscow for these coveted slaves. Izmail-bek, the khan of the Nogai horde (whose lands were situated north of the Crimea) sent a diplomat north to purchase two Scandinavian children in 1561; the khan of far-off Bukhara dispatched a delegation which toured the slave quarters of five towns for nemtsy girls. The prices they paid were about ten times the average for an ordinary slave, and Korpela suggests that the word nemtsy itself became practically a trademark, “which referred to an already established extra quality.”

Here’s what Putin was likely doing as a KGB spy in Germany

There is no official version of what Putin was doing in Dresden, and he has not offered much personal detail.

Nor is there any concrete information about which directorate of the KGB Putin worked for.

One suggestion is that he was in an operation, “Operation Luch” (“beam” or “ray”), to steal technological secrets. Another says that while he was indeed part of Operation Luch, the mission was not to steal secrets at all.

It was an undercover operation to recruit top officials in the East German Communist Party and secret police (Stasi).

The goal was to secure their support for the reformist, perestroika, line of the Soviet leadership in Moscow against opposition from Honecker and his hardline East German leadership.

A third says simply that the goal of the KGB in Dresden was to contact, entrap, compromise, and generally recruit Westerners who happened to be in Dresden studying and doing business.

Other versions suggest that the KGB was focused on recruiting East Germans who had relatives in the West. Some versions of the story have said Putin himself traveled undercover to West Germany on occasion.

The most likely answer to which of these was Putin’s actual mission in Dresden is: “all of the above.”

Not only is it likely that Putin engaged in some or all of these activities, it is virtually inconceivable that he did not.

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-putin-was-likely-doing-as-a-kgb-spy-in-germany-2015-6