SURVIVING KATYN: STALIN’S POLISH MASSACRE AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH by Jane Rogoyska

December 6, 2025szfreiberger Russian History, World War II Leave a comment

(Mass grave of Polish officers in Katyn Forest, exhumed by Germany in 1943)

The Katyn forest massacre committed by the Soviet Union occurred between April and May 1940. Though killings took place in Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons operated by the NKVD and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest where mass graves were first discovered by the Nazis in April1943. Roughly 22,000 Polish military, police officers, border guards, intellectual prisoners of war were executed by the Soviet Secret Police, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin issued the orders. Once the Nazis announced their findings Stalin severed diplomatic relations with the London based Polish government in exile because they asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbles realized the publicity value of the find he immediately contacted the Polish Red Cross to investigate but the Kremlin denied culpability and blamed the Germans. The British and their allies, dependent upon Soviet participation to defeat the Nazis, went along with the falsehood. The Kremlin continued to deny responsibility for the massacre until 1990, when it finally accepted accountability for NKVD’s actions and the concealment of the truth by the Soviet government.

At that time Russian president Boris Yerltsin released top-secret documents pertaining to the investigation and forwarded them to Lech Walesa, Poland’s new President. Among the documents was a plan written by Lavrentiev Beria, the head of the NKVD until 1953 dated March 5, 1940, calling for the execution of 25,700 Poles from the Kozelsk, Ostashkov, and Starobelsk prisoner of war camps, and from prisons in Ukraine and Belarus. After the fall of the Soviet Union the prosecutors general of the Russian Federation admitted Soviet responsibility for the massacres but refused to admit to a war crime or an act of mass murder.

(Aerial view of the Katyn massacre grave)

The historical record acknowledges that Stalin was behind the genocidal atrocity and it was part of his larger plan to remove anyone who might conceivably pose a threat to the imposition of future Soviet rule in Poland – “a decapitation of Polish society strikingly similar to Nazi policy in occupied Poland at the same time.” He wanted to eliminate large elements of the Polish elite to remove any potential obstacle to the later imposition of communist rule. For Stalin, Poland was an artificial creation of the 1919 Versailles Treaty that undid the 1772, 1793 and 1795 partitions of Poland between Russia, Prussia, and the Austrian Empire. Because of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 26, 1939, Poland would be divided a fourth time between Germany and the Soviet Union. Stalin could retake Russia’s Polish holdings, Western Ukraine and Belorussia without worrying about German opposition. A second line of reasoning for Stalin centers around the Soviet dictator’s knowledge of Adolf Hitler’s intentions. Stalin had read MEIN KAMPF and was fully cognizant of Hitler’s endgame- Lebensraum or “living space” in the east, and how Russia was to be Germany’s “breadbasket.” By invading Poland on September 16, 1939, completing the fourth partition of Poland he would create a buffer zone for the eventual German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. For Stalin it was a defensive measure.

The mystery clouding responsibility over the massacre is the subject of historian and biographer Jane Rogoyska’s book, SURVIVING KATYN: STALIN’S POLISH MASSACRE AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH which chronicles how the NKVD worked to reshape the facts pertaining to the massacre blaming it on the Nazis. Planting documents on dead bodies to pursuing a truck full of evidence across Europe, destroying records, to staging incidents in European capitals the Stalinist government left no stone unturned in quashing the truth. Only 395 men survived the massacre who were unwitting witnesses to a crime that theoretically never officially happened. In a striking narrative, Rogoyska brings the victims out of the shadows, telling their stories as well as those of the people who desperately searched for them. In a work of moral clarity and precision, the author does not just supply statistics about another World War II atrocity, but how individuals were sacrificed for no reason and whose memory was lost, a sideshow in the battle between two psychotic and demented dictators.

(Map of the sites related to the Katyn massacre)

At the outset Rogoyska introduces the reader to the prisoners of war and their overseers. She lays out the incarceration process, the paranoia of the NKVD, and the incompetence of the bureaucracy of those in charge. Recounting the interrogation process, attempts to propagandize the Poles, and presenting intimate pictures of the prisoners, the author employs interviews, memoirs, and whatever documentation was available in order to the provide the most complete picture of the personalities and events pertaining to the massacre since Allen Paul’s KATYN: STALIN’S MASSACRE AND THE TRIUMPH OF TRUTH.

Initially the prisoners were taken to three camps, Starobelsk, Kozelsk, and Ostashkov. Rogoyska discusses life in all three camps and focuses mostly on Starobelsk as she follows the lives of Bronislav Mlynarski, Jozef Czapski, and Zygmunt Kwarcinke. They would be among the last group that left Starobelsk and were sent to a transit camp at Pavlishchev Bor in a group of 395 out of 14,800 from all three prison camps. On June 14, 1940, they were taken to the Griazovets camp located halfway between Moscow and the Arctic port of Arkhangelsk.

While in Griazovets, Beria, with Stalin’s support, worked to create a Polish Division within the Red Army, a topic that Rogoyska spends a great deal of time discussing. Beria and his henchmen tried to recruit Polish officers to lead it, most refused, but a few from a pro-Soviet group from Starobelsk known as the “Red Corner” agreed. The NKVD was concerned about the officer’s attitudes toward the exiled Polish government in London. While questioning other officers who remained POWs who wanted information about the whereabouts and availability of their compatriots, Beria responded “no, we made a big mistake.” From this phrase the author develops Beria’s guilt in the death of thousands. It would take until May of 1943 for the creation of the Polish 1^st Tadeusz Kosciuszko infantry division within the Red Army led by General Zigmunt Berling, an NKVD collaborator. This would satisfy Beria’s goal of a division with a “Polish Face” within the Soviet military.

( Director of the Soviet secret police-NKVD Lavrenty Beria)

During training at Griazovets, the NKVD invested a great deal of time trying to gain the loyalty of the Poles. They created a cultural school employing film, lectures, music, better treatment, etc. to no avail. The NKVD attempt to re-educate these men was an abject failure.

Finally on June 22, 1941, Stalin’s greatest fear came to fruition when the Nazis invaded Russia. The invasion impacted the prisoners in a number of ways. First, conditions at Griazovets worsened as rations were cut 50%, clothing became unavailable, and freedoms were lessened. Secondly, the Polish POWs feared as the Russians collapsed they would be seized and imprisoned by the Germans. Thirdly, a large influx of new prisoners created chaos. Lastly, the London Poles came to an agreement with the Kremlin, known as the Sikorski-Maisky Agreement, restored diplomatic relations between Poland and Russia, instituted an amnesty for all prisoners in Russia, including thousands of women and children. It was decided that General Wladyslaw Andres would command the Polish army after his release from prison on August 4, 1941. The Poles, no longer prisoners, wondered the fate of their comrades – they had no idea that 14,500 of them from the three camps had been massacred.

From this point on Rogoyska explores who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of POWs, who was responsible for their deaths, and how the truth was covered up. Despite the amnesty for prisoners during their arrests they were sent deeper into Russia. These deportations took place between 1940 and 1941 numbered between 1.25 and 1.6 million, though the NKVD argues it “was only” 400,000. The death toll was about 30%.

( Jozef Czapski in uniform, January 1943)

Rogoyska focuses on the major players in her investigation. Generals Anders and Zygmunt Bohusz-Szysk met with Marshal Georgy Zuhkov and General Ivan Pantilov asking for a list of Polish soldiers taken by the Soviet Union. They met six times and meetings were pleasant until the fate of the prisoners were brought up and Zhukov would change the subject and remarked they would eventually be found. Professor Stanislaw Kot, a Polish academic was placed in charge of the prisoner issue by Andres, but he also was stonewalled and got nowhere. His meetings with Andrey Vyshinsky (Stalin’s purge prosecutor in the 1930s) and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov who offered to assist but claimed the NKVD did not maintain detailed records on the missing officers. Kot knew it was a lie, and the author details the meticulous records the NKVD kept. Rogoyska integrates transcripts of their meetings and Kot grows increasingly angry and frustrated with Vyshinsky’s responses. Molotov wrote General Sikorski in December 1941 that “all Polish citizens detained as POWs had now been released and that Soviet authorities had given them all necessary assistance.”

The author addresses the silence surrounding the missing men that gave rise to theories as to their fate. The most plausible thing was that they had been sent to one of the Soviet Union’s remote regions and had not yet been able to make their way south. Another theory rests on the claim that Polish prisoners were working in the mines and construction of military facilities in the Gulag region of Kolyma in the far east of Russia. Andres put former prisoner Jozef Czapski in charge of investigating the plight of these men and basically took over from Professor Kot. After meeting with Major Lenoid Raikhman, who was in charge of the Polish section at the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow who plead ignorance about the fate of the 14,500 officers, Czapski concluded they were probably sent to the remotest parts of the country and very few returned, and even those who made it back could not provide any useful information. Czapski was limited because he was appointed by the exiled Polish government in London and since the British were dependent on their Soviet allies in defeating Hitler they did not want to create waves.

Another key figure in the investigation was Lt. Stanislaw Swianiewicz, a former prisoner in the Kozelek camp and a distinguished professor of economics. The NKVD was interested in him because he had authored a book explaining how the Germans had rearmed. His story is right out of a movie set as the Russians interrogated him, released him, and tried to rearrest him but he escaped. Rogoyska’s chapters on his escapades provide a glimpse into Soviet thinking, the diplomatic game that was taking place between the Polish government in exile, the allies, and the Soviet Union, and Russian duplicity throughout. Swianiewicz was important to the Stalin because he was a witness to Soviet war crimes.

(Andrey Vyshinsky in 1940)

The Soviet smokescreen began in the fall of 1943 after the Red Army retook the Smolensk area. Before the Soviets arrived, the Germans allowed a group of Allied journalists to watch an autopsy prepared by Professor Gerhard Buhtz, the head of Germany’s Army Group Medical Services who pointed out that the bodies were all shot through the back of the head. Not to be out done, the Soviet Union conducted its own investigation headed by Lt. General of the Medical Corps and one time doctor to Stalin, brain specialist Nikolai Burdenko. NKVD operational workers arrived at Katyn in September 1943 under the direction of BG Major Leonid Raikhman whose men proceeded to rearrange the site, swaying witnesses, planting documents on dead bodies to support the charge that the massacre did not occur in 1940, but in August 1941 during the Nazi occupation. After allowing a group of journalists to visit the site, Alexander Werth, British journalist concluded that the evidence was very thin, and the site had a “prefabricated appearance.” He agreed with others that Moscow had committed the massacre. To her credit, the author delves into minute detail of the investigations and the personalities involved who could only conclude based on their findings it was not Germany that was responsible, but the Stalinist regime. She also includes primary source material like the Burdenko Commission report and others that were issued after careful investigations of the site and the exhumed bodies.

(Formal portrait, 1932 Josef Stalin)

The British and the Poles were convinced the NKVD was responsible, but it did not matter as the Soviet Union was needed to defeat Germany, so the allies swallowed their concerns. After the war, the communist government in Warsaw pursued anyone who tried to alter occurrences that would contradict the Soviet rendering of events.

Since the topic of the massacre has fostered a great deal of scholarship it is not surprising that the author does not contain any new revelations. But to her credit her account is lucid and powerful as she recreates the lives of the officers who were artists, scientists, engineers, poets, lawyers, as well as career military men. She chose to examine her topic through the lens of the investigation rather than describing it as it happened which may have been more thought provoking for the reader.

(A mass grave at Katyn, 1943)

DEMOCRATS VS. AUTOCRATS: CHINA, RUSSIA, AMERICA AND THE NEW GLOBAL ORDER by Michael McFaul

(Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing)

The other day President Trump gave Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky an ultimatum, accept his proposed peace plan by Thanksgiving or else. The next day Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the United States was still in negotiations with Kyiv to find a solution for its ongoing war with Russia, and the deadline was cancelled. Another day went by when we learned that Special Enjoy Steve Wycoff had spoken with a top Russian negotiator and provided him with information as to how to maneuver Trump to obtain his approval for Kremlin demands. It appears that the original twenty-eight step proposal ultimatum from Trump was a recasting of Putin’s maximalist position which has not changed despite the recent Alaska Summit.

It seems to me the only way to get Putin to seriously negotiate is to provide Ukraine with long range missiles, ammunition, and other military equipment to place the war on a more even footing. Further the Trump administration should introduce more secondary sanctions on Moscow and others whose purchase of Russian fossil fuels fund Putin’s war, which would create a more level playing field for Ukraine, however the president will not do so no matter how often he hints that he will. Another important aspect is that Trump refused to provide any direct American aid to Ukraine. He will allow the European allies to purchase American equipment and ship it for use by the Ukrainian army. The problem is that it is not quick resupply and the allies have had difficulty agreeing amongst themselves.

As the war progresses Putin has tried to showcase his burgeoning friendship with President Xi Jinping of China. China has purchased millions of gallons of Russian oil, as has India which states it will now find alternative sources, which has bankrolled Moscow in paying for its war against Ukraine. These two autocratic countries are solidifying their relationship after decades of disagreements. It would be important for American national security not to drive a wedge in Chinese-American relations, however, Trump’s obsession with reworking the world economy through his tariff policy seems to be his only concern. Increasing tariffs, threatening trading partners, disrupting trade just angers China and does not allow American businesses to plan based on a supply line that is at the whim of Trump’s next TACO or change of mind!

(President Donald Trump spent his first term pursuing a grand new bargain with China but he only got to phase one)

In this diplomatic environment Michael McFaul, a professor of Political Science at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, in addition to being a former U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014) latest book, DEMOCRATS VS. AUTOCRATS: CHINA, RUSSIA, AMERICA AND THE NEW GLOBAL ORDER is rather timely. In his monograph McFaul concludes, the old world order has ended, and we have entered a new Cold War era which is quite different from the one we experienced with the Soviet Union. The new era has witnessed many disconcerting changes; a new alliance emerging between China and Russia, Chinese economic growth has been substantial, and it has allowed them to fund their overwhelming military growth, the far right has grown exponentially in the United States and Europe, and the disturbing shift of the Trump administration toward isolationism, except in the case of Venezuela and the Southern Hemisphere. As a result, we are facing a new world which offers new threats without precedent in the 20^th century, and we seem incapable of dealing with them.

McFaul meticulously takes the reader on a journey encompassing the last 300 years as he argues that today’s new power alignments and problems require a fresh approach, unencumbered by our Cold War past or MAGA’s insular nationalist dreams. McFaul’s incisive and analytical approach provides a manifesto that argues against America’s retreat from the world. The author develops three important themes throughout the book. First, Russia’s disruptive ambitions should not be underestimated. Second, China’s capabilities should not be overestimated. Lastly, Trump’s move toward isolationism and autocracy will only weaken America’s place in the world balance of power. These themes are cogent, well researched, and supported by numerous historical examples that McFaul weaves throughout this lengthy work which should be read by all policymakers, members of congress, and the general public.

There is so much to unpack in McFaul’s monograph. He does an excellent job of synthesis in tracing the causes of great power competition today reviewing the history of US-Russia and US-China relations over the last 300 years and explains how we arrived at the tensions that define the global order today. He correctly argues that power, regime types, and individuals have interacted to produce changing cycles of cooperation and conflict between the United States, China, and Russia over the last three centuries. It is clear that over the past few decades these factors have created more conflict after the hopes of democratization that existed in the 1990s.

McFaul argues that there are some parallels between the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the present competition with China and Russia, but we should not go overboard because it distorts what is really happening. Similarities with the Cold War include a bipolar power structure this time between the US and China; there is an ideological component resting on the competition between democracy and autocracy; and all three nations have different conceptions of what the global order should look like. However, we must be careful as we have overestimated Chinese power and exaggerated her threat to our existence for too long. Containing China must be our prime goal but China is not an existential threat to the United States and the free world. China does not threaten the very existence of the United States and our democratic allies. President Xi of China has witnessed the decline of American power particularly after it caused the 2008 financial crash and no longer believes he has to defer to the United States and has taken advantage of American errors over the last twenty years to pose a competitive threat to Washington. Xi is not trying to export Marxist-Leninism, he is employing China’s financial and technological strengths to support autocracies around the world and expand Chinese power in the South China Sea, the developing world, especially in Africa – once again taking advantage of American errors.

Image: U.S. President Trump And Russian President Putin Meet On War In Ukraine At U.S. Air Base In Alaska

(President Donald Trump greets Russian President Vladimir Putin as he arrives at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson)

Along these same lines we have underestimated Russian power in recent years as under Putin it has the capacity to threaten US security interests, including those of our European allies. Though Russia is not an economic threat she is a formidable adversary because Putin is a risk taker and is more willing to deploy Russian power aggressively than previous Russian leaders. Secondly, its invasion of Ukraine provides military experience and lessons that can only improve their performance on the battlefield. Thirdly, unlike during the Cold War, Russia is closely aligned with China. Putin’s aggressive foreign policy has an ideological component and has sought to propagate his illiberal orthodox values for decades. Unlike his predecessors Putin is willing to intervene in the domestic affairs of other countries, i.e., kept Bashir Assad in power in Syria for a decade, interfered in American presidential elections and elections throughout Europe, invaded Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine, etc. Putin sees the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest disaster for Russia of the 20^th century and wants to restore the territorial parameters of the Soviet Empire in his vision of Russian autocracy. As he exports this ideology we can see successes in a number of European countries and certain right wing elements in the United States.

One of his most important chapters recounts the decline of American hegemony since the end of the Cold War. It has been a slow downturn and has resulted in the end of the unipolar world where the US dominated. The Gulf War of 1991 witnessed the United States at its peak power. Following the war the United States decided to reduce its military since the Soviet Union was collapsing. However, after 9/11 US military spending expanded. Under Donald Trump the US spends 1% of GDP on the Pentagon allowing Russia and China to close the gap. Today we correctly condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but from 1991-2020 the use of hard power in Kuwait to remove Iraq, the overthrow of Manuel Noriega in Panama, the bombing of Serbia in 1998, interfering in the Somali Civil War in 1992, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the overthrow of Gaddafi in 2011 created power vacuums for terrorist rebels to fill including ISIS in Iraq and Syria. In addition, it cost the United States trillions of dollars to finance. According to economist Joseph Stiglitz the war in Iraq alone cost three trillion dollars, and the trillions lost in Afghanistan money that could have been put to better use domestically and globally to enhance Washington’s reputation worldwide, along with thousands of American casualties resulting in death and life-long injuries. In this environment it is no wonder that the Chinese have expanded their power externally and strengthened their autocracy internally, and Putin feels American opposition is rather hypocritical.

(A satellite overview of Fiery Cross Reef in the South China Sea as seen on 1 April 2022)

If this use of hard power was not enough along comes Donald Trump to accelerate the decline in US power by turning to disengagement and isolationism as he withdrew from the Transpacific Partnership, the Paris Climate Accords, the Iran nuclear deal, the INF (Intermediate range nuclear forces) treaty, the World Health Organization and severely criticizes the World Trade Organization, NATO, the European Union, and imposed new and higher tariffs on China, and our allies. The Trump administration has done little to promote democracy and weakened the United States’ ability to compete ideologically with China whose reputation and inroads in the developing world have made a difference in their global image at the same time the Trump administration has severely cut foreign aid. His actions have led to little in the area of supporting democracy as an ideological cause as he has curtailed or stopped funding for USAID, NED, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe among many programs, in addition to picking fights with allies, and threatening to withdraw from NATO. If this is not enough, the COVID 19 virus showed how dependent the United States was on Chinese firms for drug production and critical medical supplies.

Domestically, Trump’s immigration policy is becoming a disaster for the American economy as there is a shortfall in certain areas of the labor market, particularly food production and distribution. The policy could be a disaster in the long run as university enrollment of foreign students has declined markedly and if one examines the contributions of immigrants historically in the fields of medical and other types of scientific research this is a loss that eventually we may not be able to sustain. As Trump attacks the independent media and truth, politicizes the American justice system, and uses the presidency for personal gain he appears more and more like an autocratic wannabe, and it is corrosive to American democracy and our image in the world. These are all unforced errors, and China and Russia have taken advantage dramatically, altering the global balance of power and America’s role in it.

McFaul provides an impressive analysis of the relative economic power vis a vie the United States and Russia, and the United States and China. The entanglement of the US and Chinese economies must be considered when their relationship has difficulties. China is both a competitor and a trading partner for the United States. American companies and investors engage profitably with Beijing, i.e., Boeing, Apple, Nvidia, and American farmers have earned enormous profits and supported thousands of jobs. American consumers have benefited from lower-priced products imported from China. Chinese companies trade with and invest in American companies, Chinese scholars conduct collaborative research at American universities, and Chinese financial institutions buy American bonds and go a long way to finance American debt. Their entanglement presents both challenges and opportunities, but the fundamental challenge for the American foreign policy toward China is figuring out the delicate balance between economic engagement and containment.

In turning to difficulties with Russia, the United States does not have the meaningful economic relationship it has with China. In fact, as McFaul correctly points out our issues rest outside the economic realm to the ideological – Putinisim. The Russian autocrat “champions a virulent variant of illiberal, orthodox, and nationalistic ideas emphasizing identity, culture, and tradition.” Putin wants to export his conservative values and attack western values, by supporting a strong state, enhancing autocracy by promoting Russian sovereignty, basically by creating a false image of Russia. China spreads its ideology to the developing world. Russia tries to spread Putinism to the developed world, especially Europe as he tries to foment social polarization in democracies to weaken them. The rhetoric out of Moscow does not bode well for the future and any change in their approach will have to wait until Putin leaves the scene.

Another very important issue for the American consumer and politicians is Chinese-American trade. Those who are against an interdependent economy increasingly call for a decoupling of the economic relationship with China because of the damage it does to Americans. McFaul drills down to show that this is not the case and more importantly how difficult it would be to decouple. The argument that the US does not benefit from this relationship is a red herring as China holds $784 billion in American debt, and Chinese manufacturing production is imperative for the global supply chain. Companies like Apple, pharmaceutical companies, and the robotics industry are entities deeply intertwined between the US and China creating economic growth in both countries. It also must be kept in mind that Chinese growth had a positive effect on the American economy as goods made in China make them cheaper for the US consumer, in fact during the period of increasing US-China trade and investment, the American economy grew more rapidly than any other developed economy. McFaul warns that the US has to learn how to further benefit from the US-Chinese relationship or at least manage economic entanglement better because it is not going away for decades.

(Author, Michael McFaul)

If there is a flaw in McFaul’s monograph it is one of repetition. The structure of the book makes it difficult to avoid this shortcoming. Whether the author is discussing Chinese and Russian approaches to confronting the liberal economic world, interfering in other countries, or the philosophies and actions of Putin, Xi or Trump at times the narrative becomes tedious. The constant reminder that the Chinese threat is much more dire than the Soviet threat was during the Cold War is made over and over as is the constant reminder that our fears of the Chinese are overblown, our attitude toward Russia is not taken seriously enough, and the threat represented by Trump’s devotion to isolationism. To McFaul’s credit he seems aware of the problem as he constantly reminds us he is repeating the same argument or that he will elaborate on the same points later in the book. My question is, if you are aware of a problem why keep repeating it?

McFaul spends the last third of the book warning that the United States cannot repeat their Cold War errors as there are fewer resources today to prevent mistakes. He calls for containing Russia and China, and avoiding what Richard Haass calls “wars of choice,” as took place in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. After critiquing errors like overestimating Soviet military and economic power, in addition to exaggerating the appeal of communism, along with underestimating China’s economic and military rise and the faulty belief that the Chinese communist party would democratize, he offers solutions.

All through the narrative McFaul sprinkles suggestions of what the United States should do to compete and contain China and Russia. Be it encouraging parameters for Ukrainian security, rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiating comprehensive trade agreements with the European Union, the restoration of USAID and other forms of soft power, maintaining and increasing funding for our research institutions, and most importantly lessen the polarization in American politics so China and Russia cannot take advantage. In considering these policy decisions and many others which would restore America’s reputation and position in the world – the major roadblock is the Trump administration who will never act upon them. According to McFaul we must ride out the next three years and hope that the damage that has been caused and will continue can be overcome in the next decade. McFaul is hopeful, but I am less sanguine.

(Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin)

A CALCULATED RESTRAINT: WHAT ALLIED LEADERS SAID ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST by Richard Breitman

May 31, 2025szfreiberger American Diplomatic History, British History, European History, German History, Holocaust, Nazi Germany, Russian History, United States Foreign Policy, World War II Leave a comment

(Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin at Yalta 2/1945)

The most frequent question concerning the Holocaust centers on what allied leaders knew about the genocide against the Jews and what they spoke about it in public and private. In previous monographs, FDR AND THE JEWS and OFFICIAL SECRETS: WHAT THE NAZIS PLANNED AND WHAT THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN KNEW Holocaust historian Richard Breitman addresses when these men knew what was occurring in the death camps. In his latest work, A CALCULATED RESTRAINT: WHAT ALLIED LEADERS SAID ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST Breitman shifts his focus as it took until December 1942 for allied leaders to issue a joint statement concerning Nazi Germany’s policy of eradicating Jews from Europe. It would take President Franklin D. Roosevelt until March 1944 to publicly comment on what was occurring in the extermination camps. In his new book, Breitman asks why these leaders did not speak up earlier. Further he explores the character of each leader and concludes that the Holocaust must be understood in light of the political and military conditions exhibited during the war that drove their decision-making and commentary.

Breitman begins his account by introducing Miles Taylor, a Steel magnate turned diplomat representing Franklin Roosevelt in a September 22, 1942, meeting with the Pope. Taylor described the Nazi genocide against the Jews and plans to exterminate millions. He pressured the Pontiff to employ his moral responsibility and authority against Hitler and his minions. In the weeks that followed Taylor conveyed further evidence of Nazi plans to the White House.

(Anthony Eden, British Foreign Secretary) in 1942

The Papacy’s response was much less than could be hoped for. Monsignor Dell’Acqua warned the Pope that any negative commentary concerning Nazi actions could be quite detrimental to the church, ultimately producing a Papal reaction that it was impossible to confirm Nazi actions, and the Vatican had no “practical suggestions to make,” apparently believing that only military action, not moral condemnation could end Nazi atrocities. It would take until 2020 for the Vatican to open records of Pius XII’s tenure to outside researchers.

Breitman states his goal in preparing his monograph was to discern what “Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin knew about the Holocaust to what they said about it in their most important statements on the subject.” The author’s approach rests on two key avenues of research and analysis. First, the extent to which allied leaders sought to create and mobilize the international community based on a common morality. Second, how allied leaders understood the relationship between the Holocaust and the war itself during different stages of the conflict. Breitman’s account relies on thorough research based on years of archival work, in addition to correspondence among allied leaders, numerous biographies and secondary works on the subject.

Despite the release of most allied documents pertaining to the war, except for Russia which has become more forthcoming since the fall of the Soviet Union there is a paucity of material relating to allied leaders. Further, there is little, if any record of allied leaders themselves addressing the Holocaust in any of their private conversations, though Stalin’s public commentary does allude to Nazi atrocities more so than Roosevelt and Churchill.

It is clear from Breitman’s account that with Hitler’s January 30, 1939, speech to the Reichstag that the Fuhrer was bent on the total annihilation of the Jews, not just pressuring them to leave Germany and immigrate elsewhere. It is also clear that Churchill and Roosevelt were fully aware of the threat Hitler posed to the international order, but were limited in their public reaction to the sensitive issue that a war against Germany to save Jews was not politically acceptable, particularly as it related to communism at a time when anti-Semitism was pervasive worldwide. Fearing Nazi propaganda responses, allied leaders generalized the threat of Nazi atrocities, thereby subsuming Nazi policies to exterminate Jews among a broader range of barbaric behaviors, thereby limiting explicit attacks on the growing Holocaust.

Breckinridge Long (1881–1958). Long was an Assistant Secretary in the US State Department during World War II, from 1940-1944.

(Breckinridge Long, anti-Semitic State Department official did his best to block Jewish immigration to the United States during the Holocaust)

The author is correct in arguing that had allied leaders spoken out and confronted Nazi behavior earlier it might have galvanized more Jews to flee and go into hiding and perhaps encourage gentiles to take serious steps to assist Jews. No matter what the result it would have confirmed the rumors and stories concerning Nazi “resettlement in the east,” and possibly encouraged neutral governments to speak out and do more.

Breitman’s overall thesis is correct pertaining to why allied leaders did not speak out publicly about the Holocaust, though they did comment on the barbarity of the Nazis. The reasons have been presented by many historians that Roosevelt was very concerned about providing the Nazis a propaganda tool because any comments would be used to reinforce the view that the Roosevelt administration was controlled by Jews and it would anger anti-Semites, particularly those in his own State Department, and isolationists in Congress. FDR reasoned the best way to approach the Holocaust was not to single out Jews and concentrate on the larger issue of winning the war. The faster victory could be achieved, the more Jews that could be saved. This opinion was similar to Winston Churchill’s beliefs.

The author spends the first third of the book focusing on the “Big Three,” and their early views as to what policies the Nazis were implementing in Eastern Europe. Breitman will focus on four examples of public commentary which he analyzes in detail. On August 24, 1941, Winston Churchill made a speech denouncing Nazi executions in the east. He singled out what the Germans were doing to the Russians on Soviet soil, with no mention of the Jews as victims. However, his last sentence read; “we are in the presence of a crime without a name.” Was Churchill referring to the Holocaust? Was he trying to satisfy Stalin? It is difficult to discern, but British intelligence released in the 1990s and early 2000s provide an important picture of what the SS and police units were doing behind battle lines in the Soviet Union in July and August 1941 – mass executions of Jews, Bolsheviks, and other civilian targets. Churchill’s rationale for maintaining public silence regarding the Holocaust was his fear that the Luftwaffe’s Enigma codes that had been broken by cartographers at Bletchley Park would be compromised should he make statements based on British intelligence. It is interesting according to Breitman that after August 1941, Churchill no longer favored receiving “execution numbers” from MI6, fearing that the information could become public. Churchill’s overriding goal was to strengthen ties with the US and USSR and would worry about moral questions later.

In Stalin’s case he made a speech on November 6, 1941, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 at the Mayakovsky Metro Station. According to Alexander Werth, a British journalist who was present it was “a strange mixture of black gloom and complete confidence.” Aware of Nazi mass murder of Jews, Stalin mentioned the subject directly only once, saying the Germans were carrying out medieval pogroms just as eagerly as the Tsarist regime had done. In a follow up speech the next day, Stalin said nothing about the killing of Jews. Stalin generalized the threat of extermination so all Soviet people would feel the threat facing their country, but at least he mentioned it signaling that subject could now be openly discussed, but Stalin’s overriding concern was to focus on the Nazi threat to the state and people of the USSR and believed that references to the Nazi war against the Jews could only distract from that. After his November remarks he made no further public comments about the killing of Jews for the rest of the war.

(Jan Karski (born Jan Kozielewski, 24 June 1914^[a] – 13 July 2000) was a Polish soldier, resistance-fighter, and diplomat during World War II. He is known for having acted as a courier in 1940–1943 to the Polish government-in-exile and to Poland’s Western Allies about the situation in German-occupied Poland. He reported about the state of Poland, its many competing resistance factions, and also about Germany’s destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and its operation of extermination camps on Polish soil that were murdering Jews, Poles, and others)

FDR’s approach was to prepare for war and his comments were designed to do so and not say anything that could rile up anti-New Dealers who opposed war preparation. At press conferences on July 31 and February 1, 1941, FDR did not raise the subject of Hitler’s threat to annihilate the Jews of Europe and was not questioned about it. Roosevelt feared any publicity surrounding saving Jews would create greater opposition to aiding the democracies of Europe to fight the Nazis. It took Roosevelt until August 21, 1942, for the president to denounce barbaric crimes against innocent civilians in Europe and Asia and threatened those responsible with trials after the war. He would reaffirm these comments in a statement on October 7, 1942, but in both instances he was unwilling to denounce the Nazi war against the Jews. However, if we fast forward to FDR’s March 24, 1944, press conference, shortly after the Nazis occupied Hungary, the president called attention to Hungarian Jews as part of the Nazi campaign to destroy the Jews of Europe, accusing the Nazis of the “wholesale systematic murder of the Jews in Europe.” Articles written by the White House press corps and government broadcasts were disseminated to a large audience in the United States and abroad.

Nazi camps in occupied Poland, 1939-1945 [LCID: pol72110]

Breitman dissects a fourth speech given on January 30, 1939, where Adolf Hitler lays out his plans in front of the Reichstag. The speech recounted the usual Nazi accusations against the west, praise for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, virulent comments and threat against the Jews, and fear of the Bolshevik menace. He was careful not to attack Roosevelt as he wanted to limit American aid. According to Chief AP correspondent Louis Lochner who was present at the speech Hitler reserved his most poisonous verbiage for the Jews as he would welcome the complete annihilation of European Jewry.

The title of the book, A CALCULATED RESTRAINT is somewhat misleading as Breitman focuses a great deal on events and personalities that may tendentiously conform to the title, but do not zero in exactly on that subject matter. The author details the negotiations leading up to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its implications for Poland and Eastern Europe in General. Further, he comments on the American and British about faces in dealing with communism. Breitman focuses on the “Palestine question” and its role in Nazi strategy and how the British sought to protect its Arab “possessions,” – oil! Operation Torch, as a substitute for a second in Europe is discussed; the battle of El Alamein and the role of General Erwin Rommel. Other prominent individuals are covered including Reinhard Heydrich who chaired the Wannsee Conference outlining the Holocaust and the Lidice massacre after he was assassinated. Breitman does deal with the Holocaust, not commentary by the “Big Three” as he introduces Gerhart M. Riegner, a representative of the World Jewish Congress and Polish diplomat Jan Karski, who met with Roosevelt, and Peter Bergson who did his best to publicize the Holocaust and convince the leaders to focus more on containing it through his Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. Another important American official that Breitman spends a great deal of time on is Oscar Cox, general counsel of the Foreign Economic Administration, which included the Lend-Lease Administration who tried to enlist others in the battle against anti-Semites, like Breckinridge Long inside the State Department. Both men played an integral role in making the Holocaust public and trying to convince Churchill and Roosevelt to be more forthcoming about educating the public about the annihilation of the Jews. This would lead to the Bermuda Conference and the War Refugee Board in the United States, neither of which greatly impacted the plight of the Jews. Breitman also includes a well thought out and incisive analysis of the murder of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz toward the end of the war.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler (right) during a visit to the Auschwitz camp. [LCID: 50742]

(SS chief Heinrich Himmler (right) during a visit to the Auschwitz camp. Poland, July 18, 1942)

Perhaps, Breitman’s best chapter is entitled, “The Allied Declaration” in which he points out that by the second half of 1942 there was enough credible information that reached allied governments and media that affirmed the genocide of the Jews. However, as Breitman argues, the atmosphere surrounding this period and the risks of going public were too much for allied leaders.

It is clear the book overly focuses on the course of the war, rather than on its stated title. The non-Holocaust material has mostly been mined by other historians, and in many cases Breitman reviews material he has presented in his previous books. Much of the sourcing is based on secondary materials, but a wide variety of documentary evidence is consulted. In a sense if one follows the end notes it provides an excellent bibliography, but the stated purpose of the book does not receive the coverage that is warranted.

In summary, Breitman’s book is a concise and incisive look at his subject and sheds some new light on the topic. We must accept the conclusion that the allied leader’s responses and why they chose what to say about the Holocaust must be understood in light of the political and military demands that existed in the war and drove their decision making. I agree with historian Richard Overy that Breitman spends much more time discussing what was known about the murder of Jews, how it was communicated and its effect on lower-level officials and ministers, rather than discussing the response of the Allied big three, which again reveals a generally ambivalent, even skeptical response to the claims of people who presented evidence as to what was occurring.

(Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference, November, 1943)

DEATH IS OUR BUSINESS: RUSSIAN MERCENARIES AND THE NEW ERA OF PRIVATE WARFARE by John Lechner

May 15, 2025May 15, 2025szfreiberger African History, Middle Eastern History, Russian History Leave a comment

(Yevgeny Prigozhi in Saint Petersburg in 2016)

In June 2023, it appeared for the first time there was a clear threat to the rule of Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. This risk to Putin’s reign was fostered by the inability of Russian forces to achieve a quick victory after it invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and was unable to overthrow and replace Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The danger Putin faced was the work of the Wagner Group, under the leadership of Yevgeny Prigozhin, his former chef and caterer who led the armed rebellion against the Russian government. This rebellion, which lasted for about a day, was a culmination of simmering tensions between the Wagner Group and the Russian Ministry of Defense and the fact that the fighting had reached a World War I type of stalemate. Prigozhin accused the Russian military of shelling Wagner positions, refusing to resupply his troops, and also criticized the Russian leadership for their “maximalist positions” in the war in Ukraine. It is interesting to analyze Putin’s response to Prigozhin and his private army since it was Russia’s most effective fighting force against the Ukrainian army. The rebellion ultimately failed, as Prigozhin got cold feet as his army marched toward Moscow. Prigozhin turned his forces away from the Russian capital and reached an agreement to move Wagner forces to Belarus. However, in the end Prigozhin went the way of others who opposed Putin as he died in a plane crash on August 23, 2023. Despite the death of their leader, the Wagner group lives on with its political business and military ventures as a pillar of the Russian government’s operations the world over.

As the bloody conflict continues to play out in Ukraine journalist John Lechner’s latest book, DEATH IS OUR BUSINESS: RUSSIAN MERCENARIES AND THE NEW ERA OF PRIVATE WARFARE has been published at a propitious time. Lechner’s excellent monograph is an education describing the origins of the Wagner group, its methods, and operations. We witness how the Wagner group gains a foothold in fragile nation states, gains access to a country’s natural resources, removes peacekeeping forces, all to cash in on the instability of weak states that possess resources that are viewed as vital for Russian strategic interests, and the profitability of the group itself.

Dirt graves with wooden crosses and red, yellow and black wreaths.

(The US says the Wagner Group has suffered more than 30,000 casualties)

Lechner points out in his introduction that after a two hundred year hiatus, private warfare has returned, albeit in new ways. For most of history private armies and mercenaries were the norm, nevertheless at the end of the Thirty Years War (1660) European rulers saw the advantage in recruiting public standing armies within their borders. By the 19^th century, the nation state was largely responsible for the prosecution of warfare on the continent. However, private armies were employed by colonial powers to subdue far-flung regions and governments would outsource the exploitation of colonies to private companies. Once decolonization made headway following World War II and late in the Cold War the United States and Soviet Union began to relax its financial and military support from previous colonial regions, they would partly turn to privatization both internally and externally. Newly independent countries would outsource their security requirements to private military companies, and the United States would turn to the privatization of warfare following 9/11. By 2010, private contractors outnumbered American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the most famous of which was Blackwater. Lechner describes two types of private military companies. First, mercenary companies are private armies that conduct autonomous military campaigns. Military enterprises, like Blackwater, augment a powerful state’s regular armed forces and embed with one government. Secondly, the two types were merged into a new novel private military company. This new organization was cultivated and advanced by Yevgeny Prigozhin.

(Donbas Basin)

Lechner delves into a number of Private Military Contractors (PMC) providing details on recruitment, operations, geographic involvement, and important personnel. However, the author’s most important focus is the Wagner Group under the direction and tight control of Yevgeny Prigozhin. In 2014, on the heels of Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Prigozhin linked up with Dmitry Utkin, a career soldier a member of an intelligence unit, and carried out training and proxy wars for the GRU to create the Wagner Group which would prove to be an effective fighting force with brutal enforcers in the rear. By 2015, working closely with the Ministry of Defense in Syria, and autonomously in northern and central Africa the group spread its influence and profitability. By 2018 Wagner forces seemed everywhere from Madagascar to Mozambique, in addition to becoming the “tip of the spear” of Russian assertiveness. By August 2022 Wagner mercenaries were fighting in eastern Ukraine and successfully reached the outskirts of Bakhmut. Prigozhin’s success rested on his ability to recognize opportunity in unstable situations, bringing a team together to take advantage of the situation in a nation’s capital and on the ground, especially in Africa which had over 100 million refugees, and employing social media highlighted by misinformation to enhance his reputation and ego.

Alexey DRUZHININ/SPUTNIK/AFP Yevgeny Prigozhin shows Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin his school lunch factory outside Saint Petersburg on September 20, 2010 (“I had known Prigozhin for a very long time, since the 1990s,” Vladimir Putin recalled)

Lechner is clear that today there is little distinction between soldiers and mercenaries in large part because of globalization. When one examines Russian recruitment of PMC and those in other countries it is clear that Lechner is correct. Russian mercenaries presented as “little green men,” many on “vacation” and began appearing in 2014 in Crimea and the Donbas. Lechner accurately explains Putin’s motivations involving the expansion of NATO, western plots against Russia, and his desire to recreate the Russian empire. Putin was supported by the growth of domestic nationalist Russian ideologues witnessed by the number of volunteers who came to fight in Ukraine believing that Ukraine belonged to Russia harkening back to Catherine the Great and Lenin who artificially designated Ukraine and Belarus.

The turning point for Prigozhin came with the invasion of Crimea as his contacts with the Ministry of Defense provided a degree of access to Putin who allowed him to become the handler of mercenaries in the Donbas – it is here that he and Utkin created the Wagner Group. Slowly they were able to do away with other mercenary leaders and centralize other separatist militias into one. This would be accomplished for the most part in 2015. Prigozhin was an entrepreneur who envisioned a PMC like Erik Prince’s Blackwater. He would get his start in Syria, supported the regime of Bashir Assad and helped arm, train, and participate in the brutal civil war designed to overthrow the murderous government in Damascus.

Russia formally intervened in Syria in 2015, and the first Wagner fighters entered the conflict in September of that year. Lechner describes the brutality of the civil war, highlighted by Assad’s use of poisonous gases, cluster bombs, and doing anything to remain in power. He could not have done so without the Wagner Group. The key for the group is that it developed its own esprit de corps. Their soldiers were mercenaries, but they were also Russian patriots, men willing to fight and die for the motherland, more so than the Russian military. Their success provided Prigozhin with greater access to Putin directly to circumvent the Ministry of Defense.

Reuters Yevgeny Prigozhin helping Vladimir Putin at a dinner table, 2011 (Yevgeny Prigozhin (left) pictured serving Vladimir Putin (centre) at a dinner in 2011)

Lechner carefully lays out the structure of the Wagner Group and breaks it down into its military and business components. Prigozhin would create a corporate structure, first called Evro-Polis from which he negotiated contracts with governments and gained access to their natural resources, provided military services, and protection. The group drew from varying ideologies and priorities, most of which were various degrees of nationalists and white supremacists. Much of the group’s strategy was designed to seize oil and gas fields, mineral mining, and other lucrative opportunities in the countries they were involved.

The Wagner Group proliferated across central and northern Africa feasting on the resources of the Central African Republic, Libya, Chad, Sudan, Mali, Syria, and Niger. Most people think of the Wagner forces as it relates to the Donbas, but Lechner spends a good part of his monograph detailing how Prigozhin penetrated Africa, the contracts he signed, the coups and counter coups he was involved in, and the many personalities he dealt with, many of course were as ruthless as he was – perhaps that was why he was so successful. By 2021 Prigozhin and his PMC were truly global. The threat he represented for the west was proof to the Kremlin that his initiatives were a worthy investment. Their effectiveness was less important than the west’s reaction to them.

In developing his material, Lechner relied on interviews with the relevant government officials and soldiers, especially 30 members of the Wagner Group. Lechner’s success rests on beautiful first-person writing with granular reporting. Further, the author is an exceptional linguist as he speaks Russian and Chechen as well as Sango, the language of the Central African Republic. His interviews saw him travel across war zones in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to the point he was almost kidnaped. Lechner witnessed the viciousness and cruelty in which the Wagner Group operated, a group that would eventually morph into a 50,000 man private army.

Reuters Yevgeny Prigozhin makes a statement as he stand next to Wagner fighters in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict in Bakhmut, Ukraine, in this still image taken from video released May 20, 2023 (Prigozhin became most vocal in a series of video statements from Bakhmut where he criticised the defence establishment)

Prigozhin’s forces were initially deployed after the annexation of Crimea, a year later the Wagner Group was sent to the Donbas region to support the pro-Russian separatists. They would participate in destabilizing the region, taking control of key locations, and directly engaging in combat. A major component of their actions was to eliminate dissident pro-Russian commanders, potentially through assassination. The Wagner Group’s actions contributed to the escalation of the Donbas conflict and the overall instability in eastern Ukraine. By 2022 and onward they played a significant role in the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, even recruiting prison inmates for frontline combat operations – estimated to number between 48-49,000. These men would die by the thousands in the Donbas meat grinder, but for Prigozhin they served their purpose. Eventually Prigozhin let his substantial ego get in the way and threatened to march on Moscow, as stated earlier it did not go well.

In the end, according to Nicolas Niarchos in his May 13, 2025, review in the New York Times, the Wagner Group “was an effective boogeyman, mercenaries of all stripes have proliferated across the map of this century’s conflicts, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Yemen. “The West was happy to leverage Wagner as shorthand for all the evils of a war economy,” Lechner writes. “But the reality is that the world is filled with Prigozhins.”

Lechner is right. When Wagner fell, others rose in its stead, although they were kept on a tighter leash by Russian military intelligence. In Ukraine, prisoners are still being used in combat and Russia maintains a tight lid on its casualty figures. Even if the war in Ukraine ends soon, as President Trump has promised, Moscow’s mercenaries will still be at work dividing their African cake. Prigozhin may be dead, but his hammer is still a tool: It doesn’t matter if he’s around to swing it or not.”

Yevgeny Prigozhin points his finger, his gaze his slightly past the camera

(Yevgeny Prigozhin says he was required to “apologise and obey” in order to secure ammunition for his troops)

THE ILLEGALS: RUSSIA’S MOST AUDACIOUS SPIES AND THEIR CENTURY LONG MISSION TO INFILTRATE THE WEST by Shaun Walker

May 6, 2025szfreiberger Cold War, Espionage, Russian History Leave a comment

(The Lubyanka Building in Moscow, Russia, is most famously known as the former headquarters of the KGB (Soviet secret police) and now houses the FSB (Federal Security Service)

For six seasons between 2013 and 2018, “The Americans,” an American spy drama television series aired on the FX channel. It depicted the Jennings family as a typical suburban American family. There were two teenagers and parents who happened to be KGB spies at the outset of the Reagan administration who try to come across as your average American family grouping. Their job was to spy on the United States during a period when the Cold War was escalating. This Kremlin strategy of embedding spies in the role of everyday citizens was not an aberration as since the Russian Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power, Moscow began deploying Soviet citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, training them to fit into American society and posing as different characters. In our current heightened environment with Russian aggression in Ukraine, interference in American elections, and Vladimir Putin’s obsession with recreating the Soviet Empire it is not beyond the realm of possibilities that Russia has continued this strategy today.

In his latest book, THE ILLEGALS: RUSSIA’S MOST AUDACIOUS SPIES AND THEIR CENTURY LONG MISSION TO INFILTRATE THE WEST, Shaum Walker, an international correspondent for The Guardian brings the Russian strategy to life as he explores the KGB’s most secretive program. His excellent monograph conveys a thrilling spy drama culminating with Putin’s espionage achievements as the Kremlin continues to infiltrate pro-western countries worldwide. In the current international climate Walker’s study is an important one as we try to combat Putin’s autocracy, particularly in light of Donald Trump’s seeming infatuation with the Russian autocrat.

Ishkak Akhmerov (undated)

Walker begins his study by introducing the reader to Ann Foley and her husband Don Heathfield, and their two sons Tim and Alex, However, in reality they were Russian spies; Elena Vavilova and Andrei Berzukov who had lived as a couple in Cambridge, MA for years. They would be arrested by the FBI and deported back to Russia in 2010. Their vocation was part of “the Illegal” program.

Illegals were recruited by the KGB. They were ordinary Soviet citizens who were given years of training to mold them into westerners. During the Cold War, the illegals living in the west were told to lie low and wait. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the KGB was disbanded. However, once Putin assumed power he began to restore Russian spy capabilities, including “the Illegals” and a fresh batch of operatives was trained. Walker correctly argues that flying illegals based in Moscow on short term missions to assassinate enemies of the Kremlin abroad was standard policy. “A new army of ‘virtual illegals’ impersonated westerners on social media and were a key part of Russia’s attempts to meddle in foreign elections. Even if the era of long term illegals seemed over, the concepts underpinning their work remained at the heart of Russian intelligence operations.” It is clear that at various points during the last century the era of illegals seemed to be over. However, each time Russia’s spymasters resurrected the program. Today, a network of SVR safe houses scattered around Moscow has produced a new generation of operatives undergoing preparation for deployment overseas. They spend their time honing the pronunciation of target languages, studying archives of foreign newspapers and magazines to absorb culture and social context, and memorizing details of their cover stories. Soon, this new generation of illegals will be deployed to live what appears to be mundane lives in various locations around the world, while secretly implementing Moscow’s agenda.

Image shows the DVD cover for the 2003 film 'Cambridge Spies'. On the cover are four men standing face on and the film title above them.

Walker lays out the early history of using illegals by discussing their use before the Russian Revolution to overthrow the Tsar, and once in power as a vehicle to be used against the west and for their own survival. The strategy is based on Konspiratsiya, defined as “subterfuge,” or “conspiracy,” – “a set of complex rules, a rigid behavioral tool, and a way of life, the overarching arm….was to keep party operatives undercover and undetected, and was used by many groups of anti-Tsarist revolutionaries.”

Walker does a credible job explaining the Bolshevik approach toward espionage especially when they did not have diplomatic recognition in the west which meant they had no embassies to hide spies. The result was to develop the illegal program further. The author describes the role of many incredible operatives and their impact on the course of history. Men like Meer Trislisser, a Bolshevik operative, and Dmitry Bystrolyotov, another Russian spy perhaps the most talented illegal in the history of the program, make for fascinating reading as they navigate their training, implement what they have learned as they integrate into other societies, how they recruited local nationals to spy for them, and how successful they were in acquiring intelligence.

(Grigulevich (Castro) and his wife during their stay in Brazil in 1946).

The program was run through the Cheka’s ION office which was in charge of the illegal program. A case in point is how they flipped an English communications officer, Ernest Oldham, into providing documents which covered much of the secret European diplomacy, i.e., impact of the depression, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, etc. It is clear that the Soviets were far ahead of the British and Americans when it came to espionage, especially when Franklin Roosevelt granted the Soviet Union formal recognition which provided them with an embassy in Washington to run their agents. Since the American economic influence was worldwide spies were needed to ferret out US positions. In addition, the Kremlin needed to industrialize quickly, and American technological and scientific secrets were a major target led by the fascinating figure of Ishak Akmerov who would train Americans like Michael Straight and Laurence Duggan, both with strong ties to the US State Department.

Walker’s insights into the assassination of Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s purges and “show trials” of the 1930s, and the awkwardness created by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 reflect the role played by a series of illegals who were trained assassins and acquired the ability to hunt down anyone whom Stalin deemed a threat. Stalin’s purges would decimate the military leadership and foreign intelligence sources, but information still flowed from England from the “Cambridge 5,” who were a ring of spies in the United Kingdom that passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II and the Cold war and was active from the 1930s until at least the early 1950s. The five were convinced that the Marxism-Leninism of Soviet communism was the best available political system and the best defense against fascism. All pursued successful careers in branches of the British government. They passed large amounts of intelligence to the Soviets, so much so that the KGB became suspicious that at least some of it was false. Perhaps as important as the specific state secrets was the demoralizing effect to the British establishment of their slow unmasking and the mistrust in British security this caused in the United States. In addition, Soviet agents like Richard Sorge became friends with Eugen Ott, the Nazi ambassador to Japan who along with others provided Stalin with evidence of the impending German invasion of Russia in 1941. Stalin and NKVD head, Lavrenti Beria rejected this intelligence as scaremongering as it went against Russian official policy. In June 1941, the Kremlin would pay for their stubborn adherence to the strict laws of Marxism-Leninism and Stalin’s perceptions of Hitler who he believed would have to defeat England before he could invade Russia.

(Former KGB head Yuri Andropov)

About a quarter the way into the book, Walker turns to the Cold War and successfully argues that Stalin’s ability to negotiate a favorable postwar settlement was assisted by the work of the Cambridge 5 in England as they produced innumerable numbers of documents and intelligence. Anthony Blunt, Donald MacLean, and Kim Philby, all members of the Cambridge 5 were essential figures and Philby himself was put in charge of British counterespionage! In fact, Walker argues that Stalin knew about the atomic bomb much earlier than Harry Truman which is why at the Potsdam Conference he did not act surprised when the president warned him about the new weapons.

(Elena Vavilova and Andréi Bezrúkov, in Moscow, while training for the KGB)

Walker goes into detail concerning Stalin’s fears of Josef Broz Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia who believed in a neutral approach to the Cold War and its path toward implementing socialism. Tito was able to act in this manner because his forces liberated his country from the Nazis, which was not the case throughout eastern Europe. Stalin tasked Iosif Grigulevich, a Soviet illegal to assassinate Tito. Interestingly, earlier Grigulevich was also involved in a failed attempt to kill Leon Trotsky. Stalin would fail to kill Tito, who would remain a thorn in his side and Russia in general. The dispute with Tito would last until Stalin died in March 1953 which also saved thousands of others he implicated in the Doctor’s Plot, a conspiracy that Jews were out to kill the Russian dictator.

Many of Walker’s chapters are like a movie script for an espionage thriller. Perhaps one of the most interesting chapters deals with a Soviet agent’s ability to gain connections in the Vatican and manage to become the Costa Rican ambassador to the Vatican at a time when there was a fear in the west of a communist victory in Italy. Other fascinating chapters include the life and work of Yuri Linov, a young man who was very facile with foreign languages and began his KGB career informing on fellow students while studying at the university. By 1961 he would be trained as an illegal and deployed to the United States. Linov was very patriotic, seeing Soviet success in space with the mission of Yuri Gagarin as proof of Russian exceptionalism. Walker describes his recruitment, training, and missions in detail providing the reader with further insight into the illegal program. First, Linov would find himself in Prague during the summer of 1968 ordered to infiltrate the liberal reform movement under the government of Alexander Dubcek, and by 1970 his training and focus shifted to the Middle East as his handlers steered him to becoming the KGB’s expert on Zionism. Apart from Linov’s espionage work, Walker delves into personal aspects of an “illegal” life. He examines how his wife Tamara was chosen for him, and the difficulties their careers presented for them on a personal level. At a time when it was becoming more and more difficult to choose, train, and deploy illegals, Linov’s work seemed to be a success.

AFP Paraphernalia belonging to KGB agent, including a minature camera, seen at the spy museum in Oberhausen, Germany (Illegals operate without diplomatic cover and blend in like ordinary citizens)

Walker also presents the American attempt to implement its own illegal program, and concluded it was almost impossible to train operatives in the intricacies of Soviet life and equip them with a story and documents that would stand up to Soviet security. The KGB on the other hand remained doggedly committed to a system that no longer seemed worth the enormous time and effort. The question is why? According to the author a number of reasons emerge. First, the institutional memory of success from the early Soviet period and its roots in Bolshevik idealism kept the KGB wedded to illegal work as a key part of their own internal mythology. Second, under the leadership of Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev who was in such poor health as being functionally useless as a leader that massive change could not take place. Third, by the late 1970s few of Russia’s 290 million people were permitted to leave the Soviet Union. Those who were allowed to leave experienced a lack of free movement because of surveillance. As result, the only people who had some freedom in other countries were the illegals and they became the only reliable source of intelligence for Soviet leadership.

Once Yuri Andropov headed the KGB (1967-1982) he would employ illegals as he saw fit. Having witnessed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 as ambassador to Hungary he would use all tools at hand to block any threat to Soviet control. Prague has already been mentioned, and Andropov had no qualms about employing illegals in Afghanistan in 1978 and assisting in a coup against the regime in Kabul that would lead to the Soviet version of “Vietnam” as it would be stuck in the Afghan quagmire that ultimately led to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Toward the end of the narrative Walker reintegrates the lives of Tracey Lee Ann Foley and Donald Heathfield into the monograph. He uses them as background to the emergence of Vladimir Putin as Soviet Premier and President. Interestingly, the two were dispatched to the United States during Gorbachev’s “glasnost” period as the KGB remained paranoid of the United States. Walker explains the meteoric rise of Putin and the restoration of the “KGB” mindset in Russia under a new organization, the SVR. Putin would rekindle the illegal program as part of a process to restore Russia to great power status which continues to this day. For a complete examination of Putin’s rise and career the two best biographies are Steven Lee Myers’ THE NEW TSAR: THE RISE AND REIGN OF VLADIMIR PUTIN and Philip Short’s recent work, PUTIN.

(SVR Yuri Drozdov had a legendary reputation in Soviet and Russian intelligence circles)

Under Putin, Foley and Putin would continue their espionage work and lives replicating an American couple until the FBI got wind of their work and arrested them. It is fair to conclude as does Joseph Finder in his New York Times, April 17, 2025, book review that “despite periods of diplomatic warming, Putin has never abandoned his illegals. He ordered the program revitalized in 2004, three years before his Munich speech signaled the return of Cold War tensions. While America was busy declaring the “end of history,” Russia was quietly training a new generation of agents to live among us.

Walker’s book serves as a reminder that somewhere in Russia right now, ordinary citizens are being molded into simulacrum Americans, learning to enjoy Starbucks and complain about property taxes, prepared to live among us regardless of who occupies the White House or how many summit handshakes take place. In international relations, as in life, it’s the quiet ones you need to watch.”

IN THE MIDST OF CIVILIZED EUROPE: THE POGROMS OF 1918-1921 AND THE ONSET OF THE HOLOCAUST by Jeffrey Veidlinger

March 20, 2025szfreiberger German History, Holocaust, Nazi Germany, Russian History Leave a comment

(Victims of a pogrom perpetrated by Ukrainian forces in Khodorkiv, 1919)

According to Webster’s dictionary a “pogrom” is an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a Russian word meaning to “wreak havoc, to demolish violently.” Historically, the term refers to violent attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire and in other countries. The first such incident to be labeled a pogrom is believed to be anti-Jewish rioting in Odessa in 1821. As a descriptive term, “pogrom” came into common usage with extensive anti-Jewish riots that swept the southern and western provinces of the Russian Empire in 1881–1884, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.

One of the most impactful pogroms took place in Kishinev located in the southwest corner of Imperial Russia in April 1903. It resulted in the death of 49 Jews, an untold number of Jewish women were raped, and 1,500 Jewish homes were damaged. This sudden rush of hoodlum violence — prompted by accusatory rumors of Jewish ritual murder — quickly became a talisman of imperial Russian brutality against its Jews. More than that, the incident brought the word pogrom to the world stage and set off reverberations that changed the course of Jewish history for the next century.

Pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19^th and early 20^th century became the impetus for Jewish immigration to the United States. Between 1880 and 1924 over 2,000,000 Jews immigrated to the United States to escape persecution and poverty. My own grandparents left their small village north of Kyiv in 1905 on arriving at Ellis Island and settling in the New York area.

(A funeral held for desecrated Torah scrolls following the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, in which 49 Jews were murdered and hundreds of women raped)

For those who have difficulty imagining what a pogrom is or looks like I refer them to the film “The Fixer” based on the novel of the same name by Bernard Malamud. THE FIXER was based on an infamous case known as the “Beilis case” or the “Beilis trial” of 1913, in which the mutilated corpse of a Christian boy was found in a cave outside Kiev in 1911, and it became the cause célèbre for myriad virulent antisemitic groups to propagate widespread persecution of Jews. A Jewish laborer named Menahem Mendel Beilis (Yacov Bok in the film and novel) was arrested on ludicrous trumped-up charges for ritualistically extracting the child’s blood to be used in Passover matzos and it led to his imprisonment and torture –a prelude to further pogroms and the coming Bolshevik Revolution. In a highly publicized trial akin to the Russian version of the Dreyfus affair, Beilis was ultimately acquitted by an all-Christian jury.

The latest use of the term pogrom has sparked controversy when it was applied to the devastating actions of Hamas terrorists perpetrated on October 7, 2024, against Israel. The end result was 1,180 people killed, of which 797 were civilians, including 36 children and 379 security forces. A further, 3,400 civilians and soldiers were wounded, and 251 civilians and soldiers were taken captive (74 later died in captivity or were confirmed dead). Hamas’ savagery fits the definition of the term “pogrom” with all the elements of violence, sexual attack, and antisemitism.

(Symon Petliura, a 1920s Ukrainian statesman blamed for the murder of 50,000 Jewish compatriots)

In his latest book IN THE MIDST OF CIVILIZED EUROPE: THE POGROMS OF 1918-1921 AND THE ONSET OF THE HOLOCAUST Jeffrey Veidlinger tackles the pogrom-like violence in western Belorussia (Belarus) and Poland’s Galicia province (now West Ukraine), that resulted in the murder of over a hundred thousand Jews between 1918 and 1921. According to Veidlinger, apart from murders, “approximately 600,000 Jewish refugees were forced to flee across international borders, and millions more were displaced internally. About two-thirds of all Jewish houses and over half of all Jewish businesses in the region were looted or destroyed. The pogroms traumatized the affected communities for at least a generation and set off alarm bells around the world.”

The perpetrators of pogroms organized locally, sometimes with government and police encouragement. They raped, murdered their Jewish victims, and looted their property. During the civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Ukrainian nationalists, Polish officials, and Red Army soldiers perpetrated these massacres blaming the Jews for the turmoil and destruction of World War I and the ensuing Russian Revolution. At the time reports of this violence were published in the press and many warned that the Jews were in danger of extermination – a prediction that would come to fruition in the Nazi imposed Holocaust between 1939-1945.

Veidlinger relies on long-neglected materials that include recently discovered eyewitness accounts, trial records, and government orders concluding that the genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. He explains how and why so many groups believed that the murder of Jews was a suitable reaction to their perceived problems, allowing “pogroms” to be seen as one of the defining moments of the 20th century.

(Professor Jeffrey Veidlinger)

The development of pogroms as a threat to the existence of Jews came to a stage. First, the reaction to the assassination of Alexander II which Russian newspapers and right-wing Christians blamed the Jews. Next is the results of the Russo-Japanese war which set off a wave of pogroms as the Russian people could not accept defeat. The situation was further exacerbated by the 1905 Revolution allowing the Black Hundreds and individuals within the Tsarist police to unleash devastating pogroms. It took until 1906 for the pogroms to subside. The pogroms unleashed between 1903-1906 helped model behavioral patterns that were further refined with each wave of unrest. Tensions were heightened with the appearance of THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION, first circulated by the Black Hundreds in 1903 it would be widely disseminated across Russia (and Europe) accusing the Jews of a global conspiracy to take control of world finances and manipulate government leaders. The next stage in the development and implementation of pogroms was a result of World War I where Jews were accused of financing the German war machine and supporting Russia’s arch enemy, Germany. Rumors of Jewish betrayal throughout the war led to their removal by Russian troops from front line areas leading to thousands of Jews imprisoned and others becoming refugees forced out of their homes and sent to other parts of the empire or forced to emigrate elsewhere when possible to eradicate what was perceived as a world Jewish revolutionary movement.

One of Veidlinger’s most important themes revolves around what happened to Jews in Ukraine during World War II, having its roots in what happened to Jews in the same geographic area in the post-World War I era. The massacres established violence against Jews as an acceptable response to the excesses of Bolshevism due to the unrelenting exposure to bloodshed which habituated local populations to bloodshed and barbarism. When the Germans arrived in 1941 they found a decades-old killing ground where the mass murder of innocent Jews was an acceptable reality.

Veidlinger correctly points out how Jews could not escape victimhood as after the Treaty of Brest Litovsk was signed in March 1918 by the Bolsheviks and Germans, the Jews would once again found themselves as victims. As the Germans occupied Ukraine the Bolsheviks accused them of collaboration with the enemy as well as being members of the bourgeois class. The Germans accused them of being Bolshevik sympathizers and engaging in violent attacks against German officials. The Jews were victims of attacks from both sides further reinforcing the concept that it was acceptable to beat up and kill Jews. Things grew worse when the Bolsheviks created the “Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Corruption” (Cheka) under Felix Dzerzhinsky which employed torture and terror to root out the opposition. Interestingly, with so many Bolshevik leaders with Jewish backgrounds it was easy to spread lies pertaining to them by opposition to the new Soviet regime. The remnants of the central powers, the White Army, the Black Hundreds all developed strong rationalizations to unleash further pogroms.

(Leon Trotsky)

With the collapse of the German and Austro-Hungarian empire the nationalist goals of the Poles for their own nation ensued. Joseph Pilsudski, a Polish military figure and statesman called for a multi-ethnic Polish state and became the first Chief of State for the new country. However, for Jews the situation was complex as they once again were caught in the middle of divergent forces and soon became victims of pogramatic violence as Poles, Ukranians, and others fought for control of cities within the new Ukrainian and Polish republics. Violence in Lviv set a new pattern as soldiers deliberately targeted Jews in their homes and businesses with no apparent military objective. This seemed different as now soldiers were added to gangs of ruffians and local discontented types who openly attacked Jews. This spread across Poland and Galicia resulting in over 130 pogroms against Jews by soldiers with the general population participating in the violence as crowds cheered them on. Once again Jews were caught in the middle as a Ukrainian Republic had been proclaimed that seemed to be more tolerant of Jews when compared to the new Polish state.

The author does an excellent job exploring in insightful detail four of the 85 attacks on Jewish life and property between January and March 1919. The four include pogroms in Ovruch, two in Zhytomyr, and Proskuriv. What set them apart from previous pogroms was that they were not necessarily an unprompted spree committed spontaneously by unruly soldiers rampaging through civilian neighborhoods, but part of a protracted reign of terror perpetrated by officers, or leaders who achieved some military control acting under the authority of the state military. They became a watershed for Jews because the Ukrainian government when it came to pass was predicated on the principle of minority rights and national autonomy and their lack of action showed they could not protect them. For Jews targeted for supporting Bolsheviks it betrayed the trust Jews had in their government.

(A 1934 edition by the Patriotic Publishing Company of Chicago)

The problem that emerges in all four pogroms is that the high minded ideals of the Ukrainian cabinet and intellectual elites were not shared by the rest of the military leadership. Instead, the officers and soldiers, many of whom had been poisoned by the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Imperial Russian army which they had served and by prejudices learned in their villages, continued to view Jews as speculators stealing the wealth of the Ukrainian people, as enemies of the church, and the agents of Bolshevism. It was a belief system that reverberated throughout the region to the detriment and of the well-being of Jews. This would continue in the battles for Kyiv, Fastiv and other areas as the White army with their Cossacks entered the picture.

Fastiv is another example of the horrors Jews faced in September and October 1919 as the White army entered the fray resulting in the death of over 8000 Jews, some the result of outright murder and the rest the effects of hunger, exposure and the lack of any medical care. The Whites wanted to eradicate the Jewish population anywhere they could find them. The Whites were made up of former Tsarist officers and soldiers, along with the Cossacks just enhanced the terror Jews faced under the leadership of Anton Denikin, a former peasant and disgruntled Tsarist officer. The former Tsarist officers saw the Jews as the progenitors of Bolshevism and as an internal enemy whose perfidy had led to Russia’s defeat in the Great War. Their goal was to restore the Tsarist empire sans Jews.

(Anton Denikin)

As previously mentioned the Jews were once again caught in the crossfire between the Red army, the White army, the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and the new Polish nation. With the settlement at the Versailles conference unclear when it came to borders and the fate of Ukraine, it left an opening for these disparate elements to continue to fight and for Jews who grew confused as to whom to support as the political situation was a minefield. The battlefield consisted of Whites fighting Reds, the Red Army fighting Poland, Poland fighting the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and sorted warlords seizing property and randomly killing Jews as opportunities presented themselves. Throughout Ukraine and border areas with the new nation of Poland, government control of territory was always tenuous giving anti-Semites the perfect opportunity to engage in pogroms. Fueled by conspiracy theories and past learning under the Tsar and the fact that Bolshevik leaders had Jewish backgrounds the plight of Jews seemed preordained. As Veidlinger describes the many pogroms with its executions, shootings, rapes, seizures of property, and outright torture physically and psychologically one has to wonder how depraved the perpetrators of these atrocities were.

Veidlinger sums up the plight of the Jews very clearly: “Jewish civilians were singled out for persecution by virtually everyone. The Bolsheviks despised them as bourgeois nationalist; the bourgeois nationalists branded them Bolsheviks; Ukrainians saw them as agents of Russia; Russians suspected them of being German sympathizers; and Poles doubted their loyalty to the newly founded Polish Republic. Dispersed in urban pockets and insufficiently concentrated in any one contiguous territory, Jews were unable to make a credible claim to sovereignty, no party trusted them. Regardless of one’s political inclination, there was always a Jew to blame.”

The concept of scapegoating stands out. If one follows the plight of Jews in Europe since the Middle Ages , the Jew was the perfect target. No matter what century we are speaking about pogroms would draw local people, at times the victim’s neighbors in what the author describes as a “carnivalesque atmosphere” of inebriated singing and dancing. The perpetrators were often young peasants who had suffered greatly during World War I, who lacked any guidance from their elders who also participated in the bloodshed.

POSTPONED – Pogroms and the Origins of the European Genocide of the Jews

(1919 map of Ukraine)

As the Nazis rose to power and consolidated their rule in Germany in the 1930s the situation for Jews grew untenable. The Nazi invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union created an invitation for “liberated peoples” to take out their frustrations against Jews. The Nazis encouraged anti-Semitism in the Ukraine taking advantage of its previous history of persecuting Jews. In 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, told subordinates “not to hinder attempts of local anti-communist and anti-Jewish circles to the newly occupies territories to engage in cleansing activities. On the contrary, they should be carried out and intensified, if necessary, and channeled in the right direction, but without leaving a trace.” Heydrich would organize the Wannsee Conference where the decision labeled the ‘Final Solution” was reached.

Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (Security Service) and Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia. [LCID: 91199]

(Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (Security Service) and Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia.. Place uncertain, 1942)

Pogroms broke out throughout the Ukraine in 1941 as the Nazis were aided by those who had participated in the horrors that took place between 1918 and 1921, and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. The Germans would incite the Ukrainians by equating Jews with Bolsheviks, drawing upon the same language which peasants and Cossack militias had massacred Jews twenty years earlier. The most deadly massacre took place in Kyiv on September 26, 1941, when Jews were marched to an open meadow, part of the Babyn Yar system were 33, 771 Jews were killed over thirty-six hours. By the spring of 1942, the genocide of the Jews of Ukraine was complete, with over 500,000 Jews, , one-third of the prewar population murdered. The pogroms Veidlinger describes in his deeply researched monograph had been mostly spontaneous and scattered, but once the Nazis crossed into Poland, the Ukraine, and the Soviet Union the Holocaust became increasingly systematic. The intellectual preparation lingered from twenty years before, became a reality. The precedent of1918-1921 came to fruition. The script of twenty years before was reenacted.

In the end Veidlinger’s scholarly presentation concluded that few of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were punished when compared to their victims. Some higher ups escaped, some were convicted, and many lesser accomplices had been sentenced to death by tribunals or vigilantes, but the reality is clear, as Veidlinger states, “the value of Jewish life had been debased.”

(Bodies of the Jewish victims of the pogrom in Orvuch, Ukraine, in February of 1919)

CRIMEAN QUAGMIRE: TOLSTOY, RUSSELL, AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN WARFARE by Gregory Carleton

March 12, 2025szfreiberger British History, Russian History Leave a comment

(An illustration of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava during the Crimean War. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

In his consummate diplomatic history, THE STRUGGLE FOR MASTERY OF EUROPE 1848-1918, A.J.P. Taylor describes the Crimean War as a largely pointless conflict driven by miscalculation and misplaced ego on the part of the leaders of Britain, France and Russia. As many historians have described the war originated because of a series of careless decisions on the part of all involved in events leading up to the conflict which ended the post-Napoleonic War period. According to Taylor the war was fought for imprudent reasons as its outbreak was due supposedly because of England and France’s desire to protect Christian interests in the Ottoman Empire, but that was a smokescreen for the European powers to weaken the Turkish domain and assert their dominance.

Taylor stresses the role of domestic political pressure and the need to maintain national prestige pushing the powers toward war making it difficult to pull back and secure the peace. An accurate phrase that encapsulates the outbreak of war can be summed as “a war that didn’t boil” which reflects how a minor incident escalated into a major confrontation because of the inability of politicians to deescalate. The Treaty of Paris (1856) ended the fighting, and its results were rather inconsequential as it was designed to guarantee the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and neutralize the Black Sea. However, decisions which originated at Paris in the years following the war would in the end prove to be very consequential.

(William Howard Russell, ca. 1854)

In his new book, CRIMEAN QUAGMIRE: TOLSTOY, RUSSELL, AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN WARFARE Russian specialist Gregory Carelton argues that the Crimean War transformed how we understand war, eradicating 19^th century Romanticism which followed the Napoleonic War. Focusing on two young writers; Russian officer Lev Tolstoy, and The Times journalist William Howard Russell, Carelton relates how these men exposed government misinformation and coverups as their countries engaged in what military historians describe as the first modern war. Both men would pay dearly for exposing the actions of their governments, but their legacy certainly outlived them.

Carelton correctly argues that the war developed major aspects of modern warfare introducing a number of technological achievements. First, the destructive power of the rifle; others include long-range artillery, the railroads and telegraphs, photography, improved medical treatment, iron-clad steam powered ships, explosive shells, and land mines, all contributing to the carnage of warfare.

Carleton’s thesis continues as he argues that what also made the war significant were the ways in which we understand war and how we inform the public as for the first time the domestic audience learned of the true horrors of war that took place on the battlefield. The Crimean War was the first whereby public opinion helped push combatants to the negotiating table.

In Carleton’s narrative it was Tolstoy and Russell who deserve the credit for introducing the public to the images of war it had rarely, if ever, had witnessed before as they offered graphic scenes from the conflict. What enhanced their dispatches was the rise in literacy rates, particularly among soldiers in the British army who could then inform their families and the public in general with their experiences through letters, diaries, and memoirs. For the first time in history warfare technology allowed the public immediate insights as to what was occurring on the battlefield.

(Leo Tolstoy)

As to the direct causes of the war that threatened the post-Napoleonic settlement balance of power, Russia was deemed most culpable. The Tsarist autocracy would soon replace Napoleonic France as the main threat to British influence and power as it continued to expand across the Caucasus and Central Asia along with its domination of Eastern Europe. Few diplomats, politicians or generals trusted Russia which did accept any threat to the European order and was always willing to dispatch troops to put down any revolutionary threat as occurred in Hungary during the Revolutions of 1848. This fact was highlighted by the century-long conflict with the Ottoman Empire throughout Southeast Europe, across the Black Sea and the Caucasus. Another useful argument is represented by the Crystal Palace and Great Exhibition of 1851 in England which focused the world on the technological and intellectual achievements and potential of the British Empire as compared to the backwardness of Russia who saw innovation and change as a threat to its rule and power. For an in depth analysis encompassing the immediate causes, the outbreak, and the course of the war consult Orlando Figes’ excellent study THE CRIMEAN WAR: A HISTORY, Trevor Royle’s CRIMEA: THE GREAT CRIMEAN WAR 1854-1856, and Robert Edgerton’s DEATH OF GLORY: THE LEGACY OF THE CRIMEAN WAR.

To quote Richard Haas whose excellent book, WAR OF NECESSITY, WAR OF CHOICE his views on the war in Iraq are very pertinent as the Crimean War was a war of choice initiated by empires infatuated with their own exceptionalism which were guilty of causing a stalemate on the battlefield, produced contradictory arguments and lies to justify their actions leaving both sides embittered with intense domestic blowback, all of which produced a quagmire as, it did in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and currently in Ukraine. Carelton argues that the effect of quagmires lasts long past the conclusion of the fighting. The results can break nations, bring down governments or lead to different types of revolution.

A key chapter in Carleton’s monograph is a comparison of the impact of Tolstoy’s and Russell’s socialization. Tolstoy on the one hand developed intellectually in a backward autocratic state with an 80% peasant population which was mostly illiterate. Russell, on the other hand, was impacted by a country that praised democratic principles, conducted elections, and had a mostly literate population. The impact of these writers was also different as Russell focused more on the tragedy as governments tried to cover up and deny the brutality of their war and the incompetence of the leaders who directed it. Tolstoy as a junior artillery officer focused on his direct experiences commenting on trench warfare, the siege of Sevastopol, and other examples of devastation in his short stories and later novels, WAR AND PEACE and ANNA KARENINA. As Carleton repeatedly points out, both men “laid the groundwork for veterans of World War I and later conflicts to try and understand and cope with their own experiences.”

The war itself would result in changing the governments of England and Russia. Russell wrote that Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen’s government was an aristocratic den, “aloof, out of touch, inept, and so it seemed uncaring.” He further pointed out that “the finest army that ever left these shores will soon cease to exist.” By the end of January 1855, Aberdeen’s government fell and was replaced by the former Home Secretary, Lord Palmerston. In Russia, Nicholas passed away and was replaced by Alexander II as Tsar who immediately wrote that the war was “a bottomless pit.”

(Cossack Bay, Balaklava)

Carleton does an excellent job integrating Russell and Tolstoy’s dispatches and stories describing the course of the war and the carnage they witnessed. The fact that both men were embedded with their armies gives further credence to support their views and how the public interpreted their ideas. Excerpts of their descriptions of the siege of Sevastopol provide the reader with many insights as to how the war was fought, the incompetence of the bureaucracies that hindered supplies, the brutal weather that soldiers endured, the lack of infrastructure limiting efforts to provide soldiers with what they needed, and the impact of the social class system that affected both armies. The end result was that the siege would soon devolve into a Somme-like catastrophe, albeit on a smaller scale.

Carleton’s use of letters, diaries, and memoirs by combatants in addition to the writing of Russell and Tolstoy add a high degree of authenticity in understanding the horrible conditions in which the war was fought and the incompetent leadership at home and on the battlefield. Carleton has produced a concisely written and tight monograph that provides numerous insights concerning the war, how it was fought, the results, and the implications for future wars. The author argues further that the war changed war writing forever and by breaking down different examples of Russell and Tolstoy’s works, i.e., “Sevastopol in September,” and “Sevastopol in May” Tolstoy has crossed the threshold, leaving behind Homeric expectations of glory with the truth about how a peasant army was being slaughtered. In Russell’s case his commentary on “the Charge of the Light Brigade” pulls no punches as it was not only a defeat, and its results had no consequences for the war. For Russell, the age of cavalry had passed as he described the siege as a “quagmire-like stalemate.”

The author spends an entire chapter tracing the myths associated with the “Charge of the Light Brigade” which would be immortalized by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The poet’s interest was piqued by Russell’s dispatches resulting in a remarkable poem in which Carleton beaks down stanza by stanza.

(British mortar batteries)

The writing of our subjects reflects the evolution of the transition from the Age of Romanticism to the Age of Realism leading to a revolution in war writing. Carleton makes the important point that Russell’s writing angered a public that grew tired of government obfuscation, and it became the major source of information for people to follow the war and understand it. Russell’s writings created a furor in government circles, and they put pressure on The Times’ editor, John Delane who refused to back down and would allow commentary such as the governments “incompetency, lethargy, aristocratic hauteur, official indifference, favor, routine, perverseness, and stupidity reign….the noblest army ever sent out from these shores has been sacrificed to the grossest mismanagement.” Russell went on to describe the soldiers as “victims” and for the first time newspapers began to publish lists of soldiers who had died. For Tolstoy, his wartime experiences convinced him to resign his military commission and pursue a writing career.

Carleton is clear as he reiterates how Russell and Tolstoy remapped how death should be understood on the battlefield and off, perhaps their most important contribution to understanding modern warfare. For both it came down to three principles: who died, how they died, and more importantly, why they died. In all areas they broke all previous conventions in their writing be it anyone could be a victim of war with no relation to rank, societal status or nationality. Further, they explored the true conditions on the battlefield. Lastly, they argued that Crimea does not fit the longtime view accepted of why wars are fought. The Crimean War, in short, had no precedent in the European mindset as it was the first to be recognized as a quagmire – literally where opposing armies struggled to take a few yards in deepening mud, trenches, disease, and resulting despair as an estimated 700,000 perished, three-quarters of which were Russian. The concept of a quagmire developed in the Crimea can easily be applied to today’s fighting in Ukraine.

(Camp of the 4th Dragoons, English and French)

The author’s short volume is loaded with examples to support each of his points and is an exceptional synthesis of the available material, primary and secondary. It looks at the war from a different perspective as Carleton argues it established truth as the aim of war reporting and understanding the power of words/lies to create war, death, and destruction. It helped establish a script with which to understand “quagmire conflict.”

As to the lessons learned from the war Donald Rayfield’s review published in History Today Volume 74 Issue 10 October 2024 is spot on as he writes: “The heritage of the Crimean War is mixed. Both sides realized that doctors and nurses, not generals and sergeants, were needed. In Britain and Russia, there was energetic medical progress: chloroform was now offered not only to officers and gentlemen. Sanitation, nutrition and nursing were given the same priorities as shells and fortifications. In Russia a military-medical academy started training thousands of doctors, including women, so that in the next Balkan war, 20 years later, Russia could boast of having women doctors serving at the front.

uses cookies. By continuing, you agree to accept cookies in accordance with our Cookie policy. Continue

(Alfred Lord Tennyson, poet)

Military lessons were learnt, too: Alexander II’s generals turned to the conquest of Central Asia and the Far East. As the world gradually conceded the Russians the freedom of the Black Sea, Alexander, the so-called liberator, began a genocidal deportation of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Caucasians and Crimean Tatars to Anatolia. The Crimean War, however, did initiate Russia’s most progressive era: serfs were freed, the arts flourished, a national health service was created. In Britain complacent aristocrats such as Lord Aberdeen yielded to energetic radicals such as Disraeli and Gladstone. Russians and Britons, but, alas, not the Ottomans, emerged wiser from their quagmire.”

According to Carleton the lessons to be learned are clear. “Quagmires become veritable graveyards of exceptionalism.” Need proof, look at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the American war in Vietnam. Each resulted in the collapse of government and major policy implications for the future. As these wars were fought the calling cards of quagmires emerge – atrocities and war crimes. To cover this up the key link of 20^th and 21^st century quagmires is the “foundational lie,” as in any quagmire truth is the first casualty.

(Old engraved illustration of the Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. (Picture by GettyImages)

SYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEAD: DIMITRI SHOSTAKOVITCH AND THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD by M. T. Anderson

February 8, 2025szfreiberger Biography, Russian History Leave a comment

(Dimitri Shostakovitch)

There are many historical works that describe the Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II. The monographs that stand out are Anna Reid’s LENINGRAD: TRAGEDY OF A CITY UNDER SIEGE, 1941-1944; Harrison Salisbury’s THE 900 DAYS: THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD; and David M. Lantz’s BATTLE FOR LENINGRAD: 1941-1944. All reflect the military strategy pursued by the Germans and the utter devastation they employed. Further, they are well researched and reflect each author’s mastery of the material. Another piece that describes the horrors of the siege, but in a different manner is M. T. Anderson’s SYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEAD: DIMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH AND THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD. The book is the story of the siege, mostly through the eyes of Russian musician and composer, Dimitri Shostakovich, and its impact on his beloved city of Leningrad.

The narrative is different from other works that explore the siege and is a story according to the author “about the power of music and its meanings – a story of secret messages and double speak, and how music itself is a code; how music coaxes people to endure unthinkable tragedy; how is allows us to whisper between the prison bars when we cannot speak aloud; how it can still comfort the suffering, saying whatever has befallen you – you are not alone.”

(Dmitri Shostakovich and second wife Margarita Kainova in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. May 1958)

Anderson educates the reader as to Shostakovich’s early years and career, reviewing his symphonies and other artistic works. He also provides the reader with the historical background that impacts Shostakovich. Beginning with World War I, the Russian Revolution, the role of Vladimir Lenin, the rise of Stalin and the implementation of the Five year plans, the resulting collectivization of the peasantry, and the purges and “show trials” that were employed to foster blame for the death of millions of peasants. Anderson is able to integrate Shostakovich’s artistic development during the period and his relationships with other intellectuals, artists, i.e., Vsevolod Meyerhold, Vladimir Mayakovsky who would commit suicide because of Stalin’s repressive regime, Boris Pasternak, and the poet Osip Mandelstam who died in a transit camp near Vladivostok.

Interestingly, the horrors that Stalin inflicted on the Russian people in the 1930s did not immediately affect Shostakovich. However, as the decade progressed and intellectuals, artists and poets were sent into internal exile or murdered he realized he would have to deal with the authorities. For Stalin, literature and the arts were the gear and screw of his propaganda machine. Anderson carefully lays out the impact of the new Soviet system on the arts and literature. He describes in detail how writers, musicians, poets, etc. were manipulated by the regime to propagandize the masses, i.e., using symphonies to depict the joys of collective farming!

Shostakovich’s problems began when Stalin attended Lady Macbeth at the Bolshoi for which he had written the score. Stalin was not pleased and complained “that’s a mess, not music.” Shostakovich became a target in Stalin’s war against culture. He was accused of “formalist” crimes which no one really understood as Stalin pushed “Socialist Realism.” Shostakovich was attacked for “being too simple, being too complex, being too light and trivial, being too gloomy and despairing, being too emotional, being too unemotional, including popular dance tunes, neglecting music of the people, tossing out the old ways of the great composers, and following the old ways of the great composers from the pre-Revolutionary past.” The government refused to allow Shostakovich to play his Fourth Symphony in public (it would remain banned for twenty-five years).

(Dmitri Shostakovich with his first wife Nina Varzar, Ivan Sollertinsky (far left), Alexander Gauk, and unidentified. Photograph from the 1930)

The effect of the Great Terror (see Robert Conquest’s book of the same title for a comprehensive look at Stalin’s murderous repression of the 1930s) on Shostakovich’s relatives and friends was immense as some were arrested, some went into internal exile, some were tortured, some were murdered. Shostakovich was listed by the NKVD as a “saboteur.” When Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony was completed, two members of the Committee for Artistic Affairs stated the “Symphony’s success has been most scandalously fabricated.” As Shostakovich watched everyone disappear he assumed he would be next. The Great Terror was a period of insanity as Stalin even purged the military including Marshal Tukachevsky, the Soviet Union’s most talented general who was murdered. Roughly 60-70% of the Soviet officer corps were eliminated; 27,000 officers were killed or lived in exile in the east. This would come home to roost as the Nazis invaded Russia in 1941 and the Russians offered little resistance at the start.

In the end the Great Terror resulted in eight million arrests; one million shot; and seven million sent to prison camps. As Anderson chronicles the horrors – two million died in camps between 1937-8. The question is how did Shostakovich avoid arrest. First, he was an international celebrity. Second, even though the NKVD paid a great deal of attention to him, gathering a case for prosecution, once the war drew closer it diverted their attention away from him.

(TASS/Getty ImagesHorses transport supplies to Leningrad over the frozen Ladoga Lake, dubbed the “Street of Life.”)

In part one of the narrative Anderson prepares the reader for the coming of the Second World War. Shostakovich’s life is studied and analyzed in detail. After recounting the impact of Stalin’s terror, in Part II, the author turns his attention to Russia in June 1941 as Germany invades and ultimately Shostakovich’s beloved Leningrad is placed under siege. Anderson lays out Nazi policy toward Russia and Hitler’s desire for lebensraum or living space in the east. Stalin had read MEIN KAMPF, and like Winston Churchill believed that a German invasion was inevitable. Anderson explores Stalin’s coping strategy which culminated in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, which failed to stop a Nazi invasion, but in Stalin’s eyes it allowed Russia over a year to prepare. Interestingly, at the same time Stalin could not believe that Hitler would go back on his word as they split Poland in two. The first days of the Nazi invasion were a massacre, and Stalin would disappear for ten days as he could not believe the Russian people would support a murderer, but in reality what they opposed even more was a German murderer. During this time Shostakovich composed music for the soldiers, dug ditches, and became a rooftop fire fighter. Shostakovich and the Russian people believed that “the Nazi barbarians seek to destroy the whole of Slavonic culture.” Shostakovich’s music was designed to remind Russians of the power and legitimacy of their own culture, so slandered by the invading German horde.

Anderson does a wonderful job mining period photographs of the war and the siege of Leningrad depicting the horrors that the Russian people were subjected to over a three year period. Famine, cannibalism, eating corpses, and other demeaning behaviors dominated the people of Leningrad as they tried to survive. Anderson’s chapter “The City of the Dead” explores the dreadful experiences of the Russian people in detail, to the point he explains the differences between cannibalism and eating dead corpses. The city’s population remained about 2.5 million, after 636,000 evacuated. The losses from starvation in part can be blamed on the incompetence of Russian leadership. For example, Andrei Zhdanov and Kliment Voroshilov, the Leningrad city bosses stored all of the city’s emergency food supply in one place, a group of thirty-eight year old wooden warehouses which made it easy for the Germans to destroy massively contributing to the city’s famine. The Nazi nutritionists figured out how much food intake the Russian people would need to survive. Once they decided that there was not enough food supply to feed the city’s residents they stopped bombing the city, implemented a siege, all to save German soldiers, and eradicate the subhuman Slavs. This would drive the Russian people to make many moral decisions dealing with who should live and who should die.

Citizens Dig Through Rubble And Snow Leningrad

(Sovfoto/UIG/Getty ImagesResidents clearing snow and ice. The city declared a clean-up operation to prevent the spread of disease from scattered feces and unburied corpses)

Anderson follows Shostakovich’s personal journey as he fled Leningrad and settled in Kuibyshev, a Moscow suburb. He decided on his latest symphony; the 7^th would be a testimonial to Leningrad’s struggle. He would broadcast for the Radio Committee and worked to raise morale, a key component in any war. This coincided with the turning point in the war as Nazi troops were finally stopped twenty miles south of Moscow, and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor bringing the United States into the war which provided massive amounts of equipment, planes, and weaponry. At the same time, December 1941, Shostakovich completed his 7^th Symphony. As the symphony was analyzed, was it anti-Stalin, was it anti-Hitler, was it anti Stalin and Hitler or something else. From Shostakovich’s perspective it “was an abstract depiction of the bondage of the spirit; all those petty, ugly things that grow disastrously within us and lead us all in a dance of destruction.” The symphony was dedicated to the people of Leningrad. The playing of the composition had to be put off for months as it required a large orchestra, however, half the number of musicians needed were dead. Anderson’s portrayal of how the orchestra was pieced together and the impact of the concert which took place August 9, 1942, is extremely moving and important, as it showed the Russian people how committed they were to their country as they finally experienced normality for a brief period of time.

Stalin’s regime decided to use the 7^th Symphony as a vehicle to cement the United States as a Russian ally and convince the American people to support the Soviet Union. At the outset of the book Anderson describes how a microfilm of the symphony was transported from Russia to the United States “across steppe, sand, sea, and jungle” in the midst of the war. Once it arrived it was performed in New York and Leningrad to try and shift the negative mood of the Russian people and even went as far as placing Shostakovich on the cover of Time magazine.

(A soldier buys a ticket for the first concert of Shostakovitch’s 7th Symphony)

If there is one area that the author could have improved upon it is his sourcing. To his credit the photos are remarkable, as are the excerpts from survivor’s diaries, and literary figures depicting the plight of the city. However, too many citations are from secondary sources which Anderson summarizes. But, there is enough primary material available so as to not rely so much on secondary works.

Anderson’s historical portrayal contains all the World War II intrigue of an Alan Furst novel. It tells of the horror of living during a three year siege and describes the physical oppression and daunting foes within and outside Leningrad. This is also a story of survival against impossible odds. Throughout, the author weaves the thread of Shostakovich’s music and the role it played in this appalling drama. Anderson’s writing flows beautifully despite his topic and is a useful tool to explore its subject matter without getting bogged down in minute detail.

Black and white photograph of composer Dmitri Shostakovich

(Dimitri Shostakovitch)

THE PATRIOT: A MEMOIR by Alexei Navalny

January 10, 2025szfreiberger Russian History Leave a comment

(Feb. 21, 2021: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny shows a heart symbol standing in the cage during a hearing to a motion from the Russian prison service to convert the suspended sentence of Navalny from the 2014 criminal conviction into a real prison term in the Moscow City Court in Moscow, Russia.)

The title PATRIOT: A MEMOIR for Alexei Navalny’s posthumous memoir is apropos because the deceased Russian political activist was a firm believer in his country’s potential and saw himself as a nationalist. The book itself is an indictment of the Kremlin encompassing the hope that events of 1991 fostered, the corruption of the Yeltsin years, and the authoritarianism of Putin’s continued reign.

The turning point in the memoir is 2011 as Navalny and his supporters created the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) which sought to educate the Russian masses as to the overt corruption and lying of the Putin regime. Navalny organizes his memoir chronologically after beginning the book with being stuck with Novichok, the FSB’s poison of choice, and his recovery in a Berlin hospital which took months. From then on he proceeds in an orderly fashion employing his own brand of sarcasm and humor to describe his battle with the Kremlin and Putin’s minions. Navalny offers detailed analysis of certain figures, particularly Mikhail Gorbachev who the author feels had the opportunity to do wonderful things for the Russian people but fell short in his accomplishments. However, Navalny thanks him for creating the environment for him to become involved in politics and trying to reform a corrupt government as he writes; “he goofed, and that is precisely what I have to thank him for.” He spends less time analyzing Vladimir Putin leaving that job to historians such as Steven Lee Myers THE NEW TSAR, Masha Gessen’s THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE: THE UNLIKELY RISE OF VLADIMIR PUTINN, Philip Short’s excellent biography PUTIN, Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy’s MR. PUTIN: OPERATIVE IN THE KREMLIN, in addition to the spate of books published since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

(May 8, 2012: Alexei Navalny is seen behind the bars in the police van after he was detained during protests in Moscow, on a day after Putin’s inauguration.)

The book is written in a somewhat lighter tone than one would expect from an author who has suffered the travails that Mr. Navalny has endured. Despite the tenor of the book Navalny’s remarks are serious and deeply thoughtful. Emotional at times, Navalny writes clearly and concisely as he tries to explain what he has experienced during years of fighting the Kremlin in the name of the Russian people. From outright assassination attempts by poison to the many scenarios the Kremlin could dream up – some violent, some less so, but extremely painful and debilitating physically and emotionally, and of course prison.

After commentary about the war in Afghanistan and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl leading to the events of 1989 and 1991 due to the decision making of the “senile leadership of old men,” Navalny relates the flaws in the Soviet/Russian system be it poor military training where soldiers are treated like convicts so when you return home it is like being released from prison (no wonder they have done so well in Ukraine!). Navalny describes the constant surveillance of the Russian people, the shortages of food and other consumer goods, rock music seen as a pernicious western plot by the west, the selling of the countries assets to Yeltsin’s and Putin’s cronies to create a class of oligarchs which robbed the Russian people of the countries wealth and natural resources when they could have been applied to uplifting the entire population, and of course how Putin rose to power by promising to protect Yeltsin and his corrupt family.

(Sept. 8, 2013: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, right, with his wife Yulia, daughter Daria, and son Zakhar leave a polling station in Moscow’s mayoral election. Moscow is holding its first mayoral election in a decade.)

Apart from the expected criticism of Yeltsin and Putin, Navalny points to the liberal reformers of the 1990s who he skewers for demanding freedom and all it can bring to becoming lackys of the Kremlin in return for the wealth that made them oligarchs. Navalny argues that the 1990-2020 period was stolen from the Russian people and how the Russian per capita GDP has fallen behind so many other countries because of the avariciousness of the Kremlin, their lies, and their contempt for their own people. Interestingly, Navalny began as a Yeltsin supporter but would realize that he was only driven by his lust for power, not the needs of his people.

Navalny’s sense of the absurd is on full display when writing about his arrests, trials, and imprisonment. He consistently points to the hypocrisy of post-1991 Russia where the only way to obtain or achieve one’s goals appeared to be through bribery, ripping off the state with cost overruns, limiting the civil rights of the people all in the name of the “new modern Russia.” Navalny provides intimate details of many aspects of his life. Two situations stand out for me. First, his flight from Berlin to Moscow after he recuperated from the Novichok poisoning by the FSB leading to his arrest upon his arrival at the airport. Another would be charges brought against him for actions he should have taken but could not because he was in prison resulting in further charges against him and lengthening his sentences. It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s “cloud cuckoo land!”

The fact that Navalny was a trained lawyer and had a degree in finance and credit contributed to his investigations of the Kremlin. He was very conversant in how stock markets and exchanges worked, and it made it easier for him to root out corruption. His initial success began in 2011 as he developed a blog where he could post what his ACF staff were learning. He would file lawsuits against Gazprom and Transneft and other state corporations and picked up tens of thousands of followers. Navalny would buy a small amount of stock in companies he was investigating, allowing him to attend stockholders meetings which would turn into a farce when he attended and asked questions. When his blog was shut down by the Kremlin he would turn to YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Twitter to get his information pertaining to government corruption and lies to his eventual millions of followers. For a time, the Kremlin did not have an answer for him, especially when he labeled Putin’s party, United Russia, as “the party of crooks and thieves.” In a sense he had become the reincarnation of the Soviet dissidence of an earlier period.

(March 6, 2015: Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader, walks out of a detention center in Moscow. Navalny walked out of a Moscow detention center a week after fellow opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot dead in what his allies say was a political killing aimed at intimidating them.)

The Kremlin’s goal in filing lawsuits against Navalny was to stop him from being active in politics – if you are convicted of corruption you cannot run for political office as Navalny did by announcing his run for the presidency in 2018 or the mayoralty of Moscow in 2013. Further, the Kremlin resorted to character assassination to discredit Navalny, but instead of losing support, much to the Kremlin’s chagrin, just enhanced his popularity.

(March 26, 2017: Police officers detain anti-corruption campaigner and opposition figure Alexei Navalny during an opposition rally in Moscow.)

What distressed Navalny a great deal was the impact of his work on his family especially when his brother was put on trial and given a three and a half year sentence, the constant harassment of his wife Yulia, and the tactics employed against hundreds of his followers. When he would ask if he should back off, they all stated that he “must” continue his work.

(March 27, 2017: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny gestures while speaking, as his lawyer Olga Mikhailova listens, in court in Moscow, Russia. Navalny, who organized a wave of nationwide protests against government corruption that rattled authorities, was fined 20,000 rubles ($340) on Monday by a Moscow court.)

Navalny integrated a few of his speeches to courts at the end of his trials in his memoir. He pulled no punches in his criticisms of Putin and his regime, the legal system, and anything else that was on his mind knowing full well this would result to his own detriment as his remarks would spread among the Russian people. His commentary would always be logical, cogent, and demeaning to Putin’s regime and would result in further imprisonment which he describes by including a prison diary in the book.

(Jan. 28, 2018: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, center, attends a rally in Moscow, Russia.The book is not all about corruption and lies. The section on how he met his wife Yulia, their courtship, and their family is heart warming in light of what was to happen to him. Yulia shared his beliefs and worked with him hand and glove. Throughout his memoir Navalny worries about Yulia and his children because in Putin’s Russia no one knows the depths of evil that the Russian autocrat will resort to.)

(September 13, 2015: A man takes a selfie with Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, center, near the Open Russia movement office during Russian regional elections in the town of Kostroma, some 300 km outside Moscow. Russians voted September 13 in a regional election expected to yield few surprises, with the country’s liberal opposition only able to field a handful of candidates.)

PATRIOT is a poignant book, because we know according to Putin that he was close to being exchanged for another prisoner a few months after his death. But his death follows a pattern in Russian dissident history be it Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, Andrei Sakharov and many others who used their stature as a megaphone against Kremlin injustice. As Carole Cadwalladr writes in the October 27, 2024, edition of The Guardian entitled “ The Man Who Dared Defy Putin,” “Throughout, there’s the absurdity of the Putinist regime and its casual brutality. At one point, Navalny reports that he is no longer considered an escape risk and can be removed from the intensive surveillance register. “My joy was so boundless the director had to ask me to be calm and speak only when permitted to do so,” he writes. But then, immediately afterwards: “It is proposed that convict Navalny is placed on the intensive surveillance register as an extremist and terrorist.” It’s not so bad, he jokes. He doesn’t have to kiss a portrait of Putin. There’s just “a sign above my bunk saying I’m a terrorist.”

“If they finally do whack me,” he writes at one point, half joking, half deadly serious, “this book will be my memorial.” “It’s less a memorial than a handbook on how to stand up to a bully, the mission of his life. It’s not just Russians he showed how to do so with humor and grace and without fear, but the rest of us too. And there’s a surprise at the end: his Ukrainian grandmother’s religion wins out over his Soviet atheism. It’s the pillar of his faith alongside his unshakable belief in his “beautiful Russia of the future.” To borrow a hint of Navalny’s relentless optimism, maybe PATRIOT is one small step towards making that day come true.”

(May 8, 2012: Alexei Navalny, a prominent anti-corruption whistle blower and blogger, center, speaks to protesters gathered across the street from the presidential administrations building as a police officer tries to stop him in downtown Moscow.)

NEW COLD WARS: CHINA’S RISE, RUSSIA’S INVASION, AND AMERICA’S STRUGGLE TO DEFEND THE WEST by David Sanger

June 16, 2024szfreiberger American Diplomatic History, Chinese History, Cold War, Russian History Leave a comment

Destroyed Russian tanks and military vehicles are seen dumped in Bucha amid Russia's invasion in Ukraine,

(Destroyed Russian tanks at Bucha, Ukraine, May, 2022)

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991President George Bush Sr. announced a “new world order” as a focal point of American power. This vision was carried out in America’s moment, the defeat of Saddam Hussein forcing Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait and implementing certain policies to control the Iraqi dictator. For Bush and American policy makers these events symbolized the unipolar power structure in the world that would be dominated by the United States. A major premise fostered by the new unipolar world for American policy makers was that since the Cold War was over Russia would experience greater democracy if it could be drawn into the American orbit. Secondly, China could also be democratized if it could be integrated into the liberal economic realm led by Washington. Both suppositions have turned out to be a fantasy.

Today, the reality is clear – the Russian government has evolved into a revanchist regime led by a man who believes the worst event in Russian history was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin’s main goal is to restore the glory of the Soviet Union and reassemble its empire. In the case of China under the leadership of Xi Jinping any subservience to the United States and the west would not allow China to achieve its rightful place of economic and political leadership in the world. According to the Chinese government any attempt to block Chinese growth would be a humiliation, not to be tolerated.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin pose for a photo prior to their talks in Beijing, China, Feb. 4, 2022.

(Putin and Xi at the Beijing Olympics, February 2022)

How did the world balance of power evolve from a unipolar world under American leadership in the post 1991 era to a multipolar power structure today where two major powers, Russia and China have begun to cooperate to offset western economic power and political influence? The answer to this question, if in fact there is one forms the basis of New York Times National Security correspondent, David E. Sanger’s latest book, NEW COLD WARS: CHINA’S RISE, RUSSIA’S INVASION, AND AMERICA’S STRUGGLE TO DEFEND THE WEST.

China’s continuing rise to economic and political influence on the world stage has been and will continue to be fueled by nationalism and a sense of past grievance. The same can be said of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a decision based on personal ego and exacerbated by Russian nationalism. For Putin, Ukraine is an illegitimate country that has always been part of Russia. Similarly, Xi argues that Taiwan is not a country and has been and will be part of China in the future. These positions by two of the world’s most powerful autocrats creates a dilemma for the United States as to how it should proceed when confronting these new perceived threats.

Putin and Xi had a common interest; “to stand up to the United States, frustrate its ambitions, and speed along what they viewed as its inevitable decline.” After the events of January 6, 2021, the bifurcation of the American political system, the ongoing drama that is Donald Trump, the right wing white supremacist movement in the United States, economic inequality, and immigration issues as the 2024 election approached, all reinforced their view that their rationale was likely to evolve in their favor. The events between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the invasion of Ukraine reflect how western leaders who accepted historian Francis Fukuyama’s analysis of 1989 that we were experiencing the end of history: “that is the end of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” was totally misguided. What Sanger proposes is a dose of reality.

New photos show China’s artificial islands are highly developed military bases

(In this Oct. 25, 2022 aerial photo, buildings and communication structures are seen on the China-built artificial island at Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands, South China Sea)

Sanger has written a comprehensive and insightful work of contemporary history that everyone in Congress and the national security establishment should read. He writes with a verve that seemingly offsets any subject that might appear somewhat dry. In arguing his premises his facile mind seemingly encompasses all areas related to the “new Cold War” from a discussion of the history of the microchip and semi-conductors as it relates to China’s quest for world power to the historical “Finlandization” of the Russo-Finnish border after World War II and its contribution to Vladimir Putin’s paranoia when it comes to the west. Sanger’s monograph is more than a compilation of autonomous topics concerning the quest on the part of China and Russia to overturn American world dominance. It is a work of synthesis that seems to turn over every rock in his quest to explain the background for his book’s title and where the world balance of power stands today.

Writing at a time that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has entered its third year with Putin and Xi seemingly moving closer together Sanger has done a magnificent job. Sanger’s lengthy career, impeccable knowledge of national security policy and issues, and his access to the major players on the world stage make him the perfect candidate to take on such an important topic. Sanger’s dominant theme is an explanation of how we misjudged what would happen at the end of the Cold War and trying to discern what comes next at a time of maximum peril and increasing threats.

Sanger begins his study by providing intimate details of how and why Putin invaded Ukraine despite American warnings and the tepid European reaction to American intelligence as Russian forces began building up around Ukraine’s borders and what they were about to perpetrate. The European reaction is couched in terms of the American invasion of Iraq and the faulty American intelligence that was disseminated pertaining to Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capabilities in 2003. For Washington policymakers it should have become increasingly clear that steering Putin in an acceptable direction, especially after he made his feelings known at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 was a pipe dream. Events in Georgia, Crimea, eastern Ukraine, the election interference of 2016 should have disabused anyone that Putin would not proceed with his personal agenda, seeing himself as another, “Peter the Great.”

President Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shake hands.

(President Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shake hands after signing a security agreement on the sidelines of the G7 in Savelletri, Italy)

In terms of President Xi the post-Clinton presidencies assumed China’s economic interests would overwhelm its other national objectives – territorial ambitions in the South China Sea, use of cyber tools to steal industrial state secrets and western “intellectual property,” and its desire for greater worldwide influence. The United States totally misread this. The west would wake up as China employed repressive technology against Hong Kong, increased its threats against Taiwan, reinforced its claims to vast areas across the South China Sea and built military bases on prefabricated islands, and tried to make as much of the world dependent upon Chinese technology. With Chinese policies at the outset of the Covid 19 outbreak, China’s reputation suffered a severe hit.

The book delves into many issues, but all are in some way related to Russia and China. The messy withdrawal from Afghanistan is recounted in detail and its impact on Russia and China. This was not the Biden administration’s finest hour, but after 20 years of US involvement in Afghanistan, Biden had experienced enough, and he was going to withdraw and ignore any advice to the contrary. Perhaps the best books on the topic are Carter Malkasian’s THE AMERICAN WAR IN AFGHANISTAN: A HISTORY; Craig Whitlock’s THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS: A SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR and David Lyon’s THE LONG WAR: THE INSIDE STORY OF AMERICA AND AFGHANISTAN SINCE 9/11. Sanger is correct as he points out that “superpowers have limits. America was relearning the lesson that it had failed to learn so many times before: that invading a nation is easier than building one.”

Another fascinating section deals with how the United States went from the world’s leading producers of microchips and semi-conductors in the 1980s to total dependency on Taiwan. It is clear from his portrayal that the supply line which affected all aspects of the US economy could be crippled by China if Beijing moved on Taiwan. It would not require a full scale invasion, but a quarantine/blockade of the island, or cutting underwater cables that linked Taiwan to the United States to accomplish its goals. The problem dates to US technology companies shifting their manufacturing processes overseas to Asia in the name of profits. The situation was exacerbated and highlighted during supply chain issues due to the outbreak of COVID 19 and the reliance on China for technology components. This would lead to the CHIPS ACT of 2022. Sanger warns the reader that it may appear the United States was moving to catch up pumping billions into the construction of modern technology facilities – but the US acted on a political timetable, the Chinese on a commercial one. The Biden administration has tried to overcome the China policies of a number of previous administrations in areas of national security, but the problem took years to emerge, and it probably will never be totally solved. What is very interesting is there is a surprising continuity between the Trump and Biden administrations when it comes to China. Biden has largely kept in place Trump’s trade war tariffs on Chinese products, increased export restrictions to impede Chinese technological advances, and increased US rhetoric regarding Taiwan.

(Taiwan-based company TSMC is bringing two major developments to north Phoenix, and it means good things for Arizona’s economy)

Sanger recounts all the major aspects of the war in Ukraine from drone warfare, to threats against the Ukrainian nuclear plant at Zaporizhzhia, Putin’s megalomania, Xi’s goal of a unipolar world led by China, the role of technology creating a new kind of warfare, the “nuclear paradox” and the issues surrounding nuclear deterrence, the “Prigozhin coup,” among numerous topics. In all areas under discussion Sanger and his long time researcher Mary K. Brooks has “has crafted a cogent, revealing account of how a generation of American officials have grappled with dangerous developments in the post-Cold War era — the rise of an enduringly authoritarian China, the return of state-on-state conflict in Europe — that have produced a geopolitical mash-up of old and new…NEW COLD WARS vividly captures the view from Washington. But, as Sanger makes clear, with America no longer an unchallenged hegemon, the fate of the U.S.-led order rests more than ever on the ideas, beliefs and emotions of people far outside the Beltway. One finishes this book wishing for equally comprehensive portraits of the view from elsewhere, especially Moscow and Beijing.” *

*Justin Vogt. “Frost Warning.” New York Times, April 13, 2024.

Houses destroyed by Russian shelling are seen in Irpin

(Result of Russian shelling of Irpin, Ukraine, May, 2022)

Doc's Books

A window into Doc Freiberger's library

Russian History