In Siberia by Colin Thubron

“Everything achieved under slavery was being destroyed by freedom.” Upon this crucial sentence hangs Colin Thubron's In Siberia. Soviet institutions, the fabric of Soviet infrastructure and the people shaped by Soviet communism were all degrading before Thubron's eyes as he traversed Siberia in 1997, six years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

This is how rabbit holes go; I started with Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar (London to Tokyo and back by train, the return leg taking him across the USSR on the Trans-Siberian Express. Fascinated by that particular railway journey, I then reached for a book devoted to it, Eric Newby's The Big Red Train Ride. That left me fascinated by Siberia itself, so on to Thubron.

Colin Thubron, born in 1939, so of the same generation as Theroux, had already written about travelling through the Soviet Union in Among the Russians, published after a journey made in 1982, in the dying days of the Brezhnev era. By the time Thubron returned, 15 years later, the USSR had fragmented and Russia itself was in chaos. This time he concentrated solely on Siberia. He witnessed the fallout: the hopelessness of people left behind among the shards of Soviet megaprojects intended to conquer and develop the tundra and taiga through science, industry and Marxism.

Newby spends several days watching endless forest, taiga and tundra pass his train window. Thubron spends months disappearing into their depths, travelling by train, bus, truck and river boat, hitching lifts and taking dodgy flights into places far beyond the railhead. Newby is travelling through the Soviet Union. Thubron is travelling through what it had left behind.

Akademgorodok, the 'Academic Town' south of central Novosibirsk, gets a chapter. Founded in the late 1950s as one of the great centres of Soviet science, by Thubron's visit it had been hit badly by the collapse of state funding. Scientists had emigrated to the West, institutes were impoverished and serious research projects had been curtailed. Into the vacuum seeped some distinctly unscientific ideas. Thubron encounters underpaid academics pursuing variations on old Russian cosmism, involving mysterious energies, altered states of consciousness and devices supposedly capable of opening normally inaccessible psychophysical realms. 

Komsomolsk-on-Amur provides another telling example. The city was founded in 1932 as a great Soviet industrial project. Official mythology celebrated the heroic young Komsomol volunteers who had gone east to build socialism in the wilderness. They did indeed exist, but the labour they supplied was nowhere near sufficient. The state increasingly turned to forced labour, and around 90,000 prisoners worked in Komsomolsk during the main years of construction. The bulk the city and its industrial infrastructure was in the end built by slaves.

Here, Thubron's remark about slavery and freedom takes on its full meaning. The Soviet state could decide that a city should exist in an impossibly remote place, send tens of thousands of people there, compel them to work and continue supplying the settlement regardless of whether what it produced made economic sense. Once that coercive machinery disappeared, the enterprises that it spawned began falling apart, naturally. It was not that freedom was destroying what slavery had built; rather, it was the lack of Moscow's coercion that ultimately showed how dependent those achievements had been upon that very coercion. Building railways over permafrost is not just an engineering challenge.

As with The Big Red Train Ride, I followed the author's journey along maps, online and printed, and dipped into the many places on Google Maps that have street view imagery (albeit from before the start of Russian aggression in Ukraine). These continue to fascinate.

Reading In Siberia, in places I had a distinct feeling of déjà lu – passages of Siberian history were tales I'd just encountered in The Big Red Train Ride: the aristocratic wives who voluntarily followed their Decembrist husbands into Siberian exile, grotesque punishments inflicted by the Tsarist authorities such as tearing out the septums from the noses of snuff users, and the strange survival of strange communities expelled to the  east over the centuries. Newby and Thubron had clearly drawn on some of the same source material while researching their journeys.

Both write extensively about the Old Believers, driven into exile in remote settlements after refusing to accept the 17th-century reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church. Under communism religion was suppressed but not extinguished. After its collapse, belief flooded back into the space vacated by Marxism-Leninism, though often in peculiar forms.

The dull certainties of communism had disappeared, suggesting the ideology's shallow roots, bereft of tradition. In the place of Marxism-Leninism came Orthodox Christianity, Old Belief, Buddhism, shamanism, mysticism and freelance spiritual entrepreneurs. Thubron has little time for the newly confident Orthodox establishment, whose clerics he portrays as arrogant, pompous, entitled and worldly, prospering amid the poverty of people with a genuine hunger for spiritual direction.

Thubron's Siberia is populated by sects and millenarian religious groups awaiting the End of Days. He also writes about the revival of shamanism after decades of active Soviet persecution. But how do you revive a religion whose traditions were mostly oral, when the people who carried those traditions have been killed, dispersed or silenced?  You improvise; you make stuff up, filling the gaps with what you imagine it to have been like. Thubron meets ersatz shamans, some inventing traditions as they go along, complete with plastic antlers and paying clients waiting for consultations in the corridors of shabby apartment blocks.

The most striking difference between Newby's USSR of 1977 and Thubron's Russia of 1997 was the lack of a system. In Newby's Soviet Union, there's always some official somewhere, a permit needed, a guide watching him, regulations, timetables, a place one may or may not visit. Thubron's people have been abandoned by the system. People ignore regulations and scoff at uniformed officials who try to enforce them. The institutions remain, the uniform blocks of flats, the mines, the railway lines, laboratories and factories remain, but the ideology which once explained why they were there has vanished.

The final chapter takes Thubron into Kolyma, the darkest heart of the Gulag. At Butugychag he visits the remains of a forced-labour mining complex where prisoners extracted and processed uranium ore without adequate protection. Accounts from the camp describe men surviving only months in some of the most hazardous jobs. The ruined machinery and abandoned buildings are the logical end-point of his journey: Soviet industrial achievement stripped of all propaganda and reduced to its human cost.

The inhumanity of the system is stark – shocking to those who have not confronted it in their family history. The collapse of the Soviet system was something to be welcomed. Thubron had arrived in Siberia at a bleak point in its history; Soviet tyranny was not replaced in the 1990s by a liberal order that would ultimately lead to peace and prosperity as it did across most of Central Europe, but institutional breakdown, corruption, mafias, unpaid wages, collapsing industries and the sudden disappearance of certainties by which people had organised their lives.

When Thubron writes that “everything achieved under slavery was being destroyed by freedom”, he is not claiming that freedom had failed; he was underlining the extent to which Soviet achievement had been grounded on compulsion.

Reading the book nearly 30 years after Thubron's travels through Siberia, we can now see that this was a Russia in transition, after the Soviet state had lost the power to imprison society but before another authoritarian state had assembled itself to take its place. The direction Russia eventually took out of that chaos was not towards ever greater freedom.

Ultimately, I doubt if Moscow will be able to cling on to Siberia – at least the far eastern, trans-Baikal part of it, until the end of this century. Much of this was Outer Manchuria, once ruled by Chinese dynasties – and China wants it back.

This time last year:
Prophesy

This time eight years ago:
Comfort comes in layers

This time nine years ago:
Preference and familiarity

This time ten years ago:
A long day in wonderful Wrocław

This time 12 years ago:
Putin will not heal Russia's tortured soul

This time 13 years ago:
Opole, little-known town

This time 14 years ago:
Raise a glass to Powiśle 

This time 16 years ago:
Mud, rain and local elections 

This time 18 years ago:
There must be a better way (commuting woes)

Moral obligation and history

The spectacle of Putin, Xi and Kim Jong Un all chummy in Beijing fills me with revulsion and dread. 'Might is right' has triumphed. The boot stomping down on the human face.

My post-war generation grew up believing that the arc of history tends invariably upward – the 'Whig view of history', the notion that today is better than yesterday, and therefore tomorrow will be better than today. The inhumanity, the barbarism of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, had both been crushed; steamrollered flat by the Allies. But then both were helped to rebuild and invited into the circle of decent nations; within 30 years of the war's end, West Germany and Japan had overtaken the US and the UK in living standards.

But the seeds of the resurgence of old-style might-is-right can be traced back to the original sin which was treating Stalin's Soviet Union as another democracy. The founding charter of the United Nations from 80 years ago mandated its member states, including the USSR, "to maintain international peace and security, uphold international law, achieve higher standards of living for their citizens, address economic, social, health, and related problems, and promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion." 

If only those words carried some weight. Allowing the USSR in as a founding party, as well as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, was clearly a mistake; the original sin. 

As deeply flawed as the Western democracies have shown themselves to have been, at least they are not led by leaders who consider putting human beings to death on an industrial scale as policy. 

Saying to Putin "I want this war to end, so you get to keep what you've stolen; you will not be punished and we can get back to working together" is exactly what the Prisoners' Dilemma tells you not to do. This game-theory thought experiment, played out millions of times, clearly shows that if the other guy defects on you, you hit him and do so repeatedly until he relents. Only then, and instantly, you return to the strategy of cooperation. And do so until the next time he defects. To cooperate with an aggressor is to invite future aggression from him. It is that simple. Look at history.

In 416 BC, the Athenians invaded the island of Melos and demanded that its people surrender and pay tribute to Athens or be annihilation. The Melians refused, so the Athenians laid siege to their city. Melos surrendered; the Athenians then executed its men and enslaved its women and children. In the Melian Dialogue, Thucydides' dramatised negotiations between the Athenians and the Melians, the Athenians offer no moral justification for their invasion. Instead they tell the Melians that Athens wants Melos for itself and that the only thing Melians would gain by submitting was not being slaughtered. The Melian Dialogue is still taught as a case study in political realism; the world is brutal, states are selfish, and that the only rational approach is based on power and advantage. The quote "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" is taken as founding statement of political realism.

So another 'life-in-balance' slider can be between utopianism and realism. Is it utopian to want Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine to end with the full withdrawal of Russian forces behind Russia's 2014 borders, and to see Russia punished for the murder and destruction it has wreaked upon Ukraine? Is it realistic to expect Ukraine to give up territory and its ambitions to join NATO and the EU in exchange for a ceasefire? 

Utopians have unrealistic expectations. Politically, they are naive and foolish. (That's utopians of the left and the right, by the way; Brexit was built upon utopian expectations.) Realists, on the other hand, are too ready to accept grubby compromises, to accept corruption, injustice and barbarism.

In my mind, there is an optimal path; it is guided by the solution to the Prisoners' Dilemma: always get on with your fellow (or nation), until they do the dirty on you. Retaliate immediately. Fight back with ruthless determination, until they return to the path of righteousness. As soon as they cease their egregious behaviour – flip back to cooperation and continue cooperating (until their next defection). The problem will then be how to define 'defection', and selecting the appropriate level of counter-strike.

Trump is not clever, he is weak; a pathological narcissist with ADHD. He will fall. But will America be able to pick itself back up? Europe has to take up the slack; I'm delighted that Poland at least is pulling its weight in terms of defence spending. That is a moral obligation.

This time last year:
Sunset's Trip Revisited

This time two years ago:
The Unbearable Pleasance of Flashedback Familiarity

This time three years ago:
The imperceptible end of summer

This time four years ago:

Another new bus stop for ul. Karczunkowska

This time five years ago:
Energy, focus and state of mind

This time six years ago:

50 years on – Gunnersbury Grammar school reunion

This time eight years ago:
All things visible and invisible

This time 10 years ago:
Work starts on Warsaw-Radom rail modernisation

This time 11 years ago:
Won't be long 'til summertime is through

This time 13 years ago:
It was a good year for the apples

This time 15 years ago:
Early-September moan about the commuting

Mutineers' march on Moscow - a turning point

Saturday saw me glued to Twitter. At times like this, following hundreds of accounts that track the Russo-Ukrainian war in detail, is by far and away the best method of staying up to date in a fast-changing situation. On Friday night, when much of Russia is incapacitated to one degree or another by alcohol, Prigozhin's mercenaries struck north towards Rostov-on-Don, leaving their prepared positions. On Saturday morning, they were in the city, the key logistics and command centre for the Russian invasion force. The military HQ was surrounded. By Saturday evening it was all over - Prigozhin had folded; a deal had been brokered by Lukashenka. The Wagner mercenaries who want to continue fighting Ukraine can do so under regular Russian army command; those that don't can seek sanctuary in Belarus.

The day's unfolding events were amazing to witness online; history in the making has never been so present. Knowing too that it was one bunch of evil murderers against another bunch of evil murderers, shooting down Russian high-value aviation assets, made the whole thing more interesting. Each Russian soldier less, mercenary or regular, was one less to hold back the Ukrainian counteroffensive. 

Prigozhin's stated aim was the removal of Russia's defence minister Shoigu and head of the armed forces, Gerasimov. His gripe was not, he suggested, with Putin, but with the corrupt incompetents that had led to Russia's battlefield humiliations. The build-up to the Wagner mutiny was ongoing for some weeks, with Prigozhin videoing his rants targeted at Shoigu and Gerasimov, who he claimed were depriving Wagner troops of ammunition on purpose. Some commentators have suggested that Prigozhin was actually getting the ammunition, but stockpiling it for a coup attempt.

Another interesting take was that Ukrainian intelligence had penetrated Prigozhin's inner circle, persuading him that Moscow was ripe for the taking, and that while Wagner were on their way, the rug was pulled out from under Prigozhin's feet, the supporters he was assured were waiting for him were fictional, and he was forced to parlay. And in doing so, by negotiating with Prigozhin, Putin was shown to the world to be weak. No longer a force to be reckoned with.

A historical parallel; a riposte to all those sceptics across the West who say the Ukrainian counteroffensive isn't delivering results... The D-Day landings happened on 6 June 1944; the Ukrainian counteroffensive is said to have begun on 5 June 2023, so we have a similar starting date. The Allied armies faced fierce German resistance, in and around Caen and Falaise. The breakthrough and the north-eastward dash that culminated in the liberation of Paris, didn't ultimately happen until 21 August 1944. By then, the Allies lost nearly 50,000 soldiers killed, lost over 4,100 tanks and over 4,000 aircraft. Despite having a numerical superiority over the Germans of nearly 3:1. 

But then the Waffen-SS hadn't left its defensive positions in Normandy to march on Berlin in protest at its treatment by the German High Command. Nor had the Waffen-SS been ordered by Hitler to disband and transfer all its tanks and heavy equipment to the Wehrmacht. 

As with the Allies in 1944, Good is on the side of Ukraine; the Russians are the evil party. Good will triumph.

This time four years ago:
Lifelong brand ambassador
[as if to prove the point, I'm wearing the same pair of shoes right now!]

This time six years ago:
How much for locally grown strawberries?

This time seven years ago:
Zamość - the beautiful, must-visit town of Poland's east

This time eight years ago:
Voting closes in citizens' participatory budget 

This time nine years ago:
Beginning of the end of PO [Civic Platform]

This time ten years ago:
Where's the beef? Fillet steak in Warsaw

This time 11 years ago:
W-wa Zachodnia spruced up for the football, W-wa Stadion reopened

This time 13 years ago:
Literature and biology

This time 15 years ago:
Old Nysa van spotted in Grabów

This time 16 years ago:
The oats in the neighbouring field rise high

The Long Review of 2022 (Pt. 1)

It was on 21 May 2017 that I spoke to my father, as I did most evenings. He was in an anxious mood. "I don't like the number 22," he said. He'd spoken of his unusual superstition before - if there's a number people consider unlucky, it's usually 13. "Something bad will happen tomorrow," he told me.

The following day we spoke. "I was right," he said sombrely. "A 22-year old man murdered 22 people on the 22nd of May." The suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena.

Since then, I have become wary of the number 22. At the start of this year, that feeling of unease was upon me; then the rumours of war began to grow ever louder. After two years of pandemic, what could go wrong in 2022? As February began, that number 22 was creeping up on the calendar - then social media began circulating a clip of Zhirinovsky (from December 2021) speaking in the Duma that "on 22 February the world will witness Russia's might". 22.02.22.

It was not to be. The 22nd came and went; the morning of the 24th found me in Wrocław for a conference. Waking up that day (an early start, my hotel was a good walk from the conference venue) I opened my laptop and saw that the invasion had kicked off. Eating breakfast on a barge in the Odra river, by the Hotel Tumski in a state of high anxiety, I was glued to Twitter on my phone. The return of war to this part of Europe after 77 years. How would this scenario play out? Nuclear war was certainly one potential outcome.

Back in Jeziorki, the last days of February and into March would see each day would begin with me checking Twitter to see if Kyiv was still free. It was touch and go. The infamous 40km-long column of Russian vehicles parked alongside the highway south-west of Kyiv looked poised to roll into the Ukrainian capital.

In Jeziorki, just 4,400m from the end of Runway 33 of Warsaw's Okęcie airport, I was worried. Within days of the start of the invasion, I could see NATO transport aircraft landing regularly from my window; ADS-B Exchange would show military aircraft patrolling the skies over eastern Poland, with aerial tankers flying 'racetrack' patterns, refuelling fighter jets (not visible on the radar) on combat air patrols. If Putin were to fire a tactical nuclear missile anywhere outside of Ukrainian territory, a Polish airport such as Okęcie or Rzeszów serving as a transfer point for military materiel would make perfect sense. Months passed; no nuclear confrontation. Has the risk lessened? Russia was brewing up bullshit about a 'Ukrainian dirty bomb', but the world wasn't buying it. The nuclear power stations in Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia were used as hostages by Russia, cynical as ever. 

For nine days in March, I hosted three guests from Ukraine on my działka - Maxim (18 months old), with his mother and grandmother, while they waited for visas to the UK - something that happened very quickly and smoothly, despite all the negative media coverage.

It was around this time that it became increasingly clear that Putin would not seize Kyiv, that the invasion was badly planned, based on faulty intelligence assessment, and poorly supported with inadequate logistics. Above all, Ukrainians themselves were determined that their country should not fall. The Polish labour market, which for years had depended on Ukrainians to plug skills shortages, suddenly saw 200,000 Ukrainian men downing tools to return home and fight for their country. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women, children and older men were pouring into Poland. At the time of writing, there are around 1,800,000 more Ukrainian citizens present in Poland than on 23 February. What surprises me is the large number of Ukrainians crossing back into Ukraine from the safety of Poland into the uncertainty of their homeland; shells, rockets and guided missiles are falling on civilian targets, on energy infrastructure; life is fractured, anxious, cold and dark. Yet every day, some 15,000 to 20,000 cross back home.

The horrors of war unfolded swiftly - Russia, unable to conquer Ukraine swiftly, turned to doing what  it was used to doing - bombarding civilian targets, raping, looting and murdering. Bucha and Mariupol have become bywords for Russian inhumanity. Meanwhile, the rest of the world have become more inured to Russian lies. For the Russian government, telling the truth is like sending a tank into combat painted day-glo pink. Putin's lies about a 'special military operation' aimed at 'liberating' Russia's Ukrainian 'brothers' from their 'Nazi' government fell flat almost immediately among all but far-left and far-right fantasists.

NATO, and in particular the US, the UK and Poland, have provided Ukraine with much of the weaponry it needs to push back against the Russian army. But the West has stopped short of supplying modern fighter jets and main-battle tanks. Britain, despite its political woes (see tomorrow's post), has steadfastly backed President Zelensky's government, providing weapons and much-needed infantry training. Visits by Western leaders to Kyiv, despite the continuous threat of missile attacks, has kept the war rightfully at the forefront of minds around the world. 

Every passing month during which Russia hasn't used nuclear weapons makes the threat less likely. An outcome in which Ukrainian troops drive the Russian invader out of their country now looks far more certain than it did even back in summer. The successful thrusts at Kharkiv and Kherson and Russia's inability to capture the small town of Bakhmut after five months suggest that 2023 will see more Ukrainian than Russian victories. 

American made Javelin anti-tank missiles (which rise up from their flat trajectory to strike their targets from the top) and HIMARS rocket artillery have given Ukraine the edge against a foe that has failed to progress technologically since the 1980s. By Ukrainian measures, over 100,000 Russian soldiers had been liquidated by mid-December. The September mobilisation of Russian men resulted in more of them fleeing to Turkey, Georgia or Kazakhstan than going into the army.

And Russia - which had been poisoning the well of social discourse in the West for years - is badly losing the online war for hearts and minds. This is important in the context of the Global South - in time, India, China, Africa, South America and South-East Asia are beginning to see Russia for what it is - a brutal, stupid, corrupt imperialist coloniser.

An optimal outcome will be a Russia that falls apart, leaving a core of Muscovy surrounded by newly independent states that have been under the Russian heel for centuries - Yakutia, Buryatia, Komi, Chechnya and many others. And a strong Ukraine, an EU and NATO member.

How it will all end is now looking a little clearer than it did in spring. We can but hope and watch - and support Ukraine through any number of civilian or military charities. And join the NAFO fellas online to bonk the vatniks.

My father warned me about 2022. He would have been right.

This article by Luke Mogelson from The New Yorker is the best piece I've read so far about the reality of the war. It's a long read, told from the perspective of International Legion volunteers on the front line. Worth your time.

This time last year:
S7 extension Section A walked end to end

This time three years ago:
Eighty-five chains to Hazelwood Station

This time four years ago:
Christmas round-up

This time six years ago:
Derbyshire at Christmas

This time seven years ago:
Across the High Peaks

This time eight years ago:
Derbyshire's rolling landscapes

This time nine years ago:
Our Progress Around the Sceptr'd Isle 

This time ten years ago:
Out and about in Duffield

and...
Christmas Break

This time 11 years ago:
Boxing Day walk in Derbyshire

This time 12 years ago 

Derbyshire in the snow

This time 14 years ago:

Derbyshire in the sunshine

This time 15 years ago:

Derbyshire in the drizzle

Russia's army: not what we feared it was

Within days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, observers could see that the invading army had many shortcomings. From the strategic (it was prepared for a three-day war, regime change, and being welcomed as liberators) and the doctrinal (the way, for example, tanks or infantry are used), to the operational (truck tyres, expired ration packs, poor wireless communication with the front line) it's clear that Russia's military leadership has (thankfully) failed to its reputation.

The world has moved on in many ways from WW2, when the Red Army seized Berlin. Some of the factors - and differences - were overlooked by Western analysts. Key is manpower. The generation of young men who fought WW2 was born at a time when the average Russian woman had a fertility rate of 7.3. The young men Putin is sending into Ukraine were born around 2000, by which time the average Russian woman was giving birth to a mere 1.23 children. In other words, Stalin had meat for the meatgrinder, Putin doesn't. (Having said that, neither does Ukraine. But the Ukrainian army isn't wasting its manpower like Russia's is.)

We could see outside Kyiv, the famous 40-km-long column, stalled for lack of fuel, less than 100km from the border. Logistics are crucial to victory. Without the 400,000 vehicles that America supplied to the USSR as part of Lend-Lease, the Red Army would not have been able to advance west at such speed in 1943-45. Of that number, 200,000 alone were Studebaker 6×6 trucks, the rest being smaller 4x4 trucks, Jeeps and Dodge Weapons Carriers. Below: a Studebaker US6 2½-ton 6×6 truck... 

...and the most-widely produced Soviet trucks of the Second World War era, the ZIS 5 and GAZ AA (left and right respectively below), outdated, less robust, and built in smaller numbers than those received from America. 

Russian logistics in Ukraine are the result of poor planning, poor training, poor maintenance, poor equipment and widespread corruption. Tanks stuck in the middle of nowhere without fuel, soldiers without rations because the campaign was to be over in three days. Many ammunition supply trucks were destroyed by Ukrainian fire because unloading shells is done crate by crate by soldiers, rather than removed from the truck by the pallet-load using a crane. Manual labour is cheaper, but it takes much longer - giving artillery-spotting drones a chance to locate and destroy their target - thousands of shells.

Russia's infantry-fighting doctrine hasn't moved on from the day of the mass charge against prepared positions. Note the long, curved magazine on the AK47/74 family of assault rifles. It cannot be fired by a soldier lying down - it's meant to be fired by a soldier advancing. But most importantly - the basic infantry unit, the squad, is without autonomy. The squad leader is not allowed to take the initiative - only to follow orders. The rigid top-down command-and-control system has been under strain due to poor quality communications equipment - senior officers have to move right up to the front line to get reluctant troops to advance - and get hit by Ukrainian artillery or snipers. Russia has lost ten generals in two months.

NATO doctrine has always focused on the autonomy of the squad. Like in any democracy, war-fighting should be done on the basis of teamwork and consensus, and not taking (bad) orders from the top.  Ukraine's armed forces - fighting for their country these past eight years - have accepted the NATO way of doing things. This leads to greater cohesion, morale and combat effectiveness. And reflects a healthier society - a network, rather than a hierarchy.

Another major factor hampering unit cohesion in the Russian army is continued presence of dedovshchina - the systematic hazing of recruits and conscripts by their elders. From Wikipedia: "Dedovshchina encompasses a variety of subordinating and humiliating activities undertaken by the junior ranks, from doing the chores of the senior ranks, to violent and sometimes deadly physical and psychological abuse, not unlike an extremely vicious form of bullying or torture, including sexual torture and anal rape. When not leaving the army seriously injured, conscripts can suffer serious mental trauma for their lifetime. It is often cited by former military personnel as a major source of poor morale." 

So - brutal stupidity, and stupid, counterproductive brutality. In close combat, the hazed can take revenge on their tormentors. Who knows where that bullet was fired from. An army formed of soldiers traumatised to the point of insensitivity is easier to order to be brutal to civilians or prisoners of war, which has negative consequences in the memetic war - the global struggle for hearts and minds. Which Russia is losing and Ukraine is winning, with its tractors and cats.

Putin drew back the forces that had been trying to capture Kyiv and reassigned them to the east of Ukraine, without much pause, with the bare minimum of new equipment - but without any of the root-and-branch reforms needed to create an effective fighting force. 'More of the same' is all Putin can muster. Reform of military doctrine means social reform - bullying and corruption are the very basis of Putin's Russia, dressed up in a nationalist ideology that has all the hallmarks of fascism.

The top-down corruption endemic in the Russian army has also played a major part - monies earmarked for research and development, for the modernisation of tanks and aircraft, were spent on villas and yachts. What was spent created a Potemkin army of T-14 Armata tanks and Sukhoi Su-57 'fifth-generation' stealth jet fighters that are only seen on parades. There were meant to have been 2,300 Armatas in service by 2020. Instead, there are now planned to be only 100 by this year; the first regiment of Su-57s is planned to become operational by 2025. [At least the money Germany didn't spend as planned on defence was diverted to social programmes.]

Russia's army, as they say, is "big and modern - just that the 'big' part isn't modern and the 'modern' part isn't big." Nevertheless, Putin has the ability to use nuclear blackmail - and this is a worry - even if only one in a hundred of his warheads work properly.

This time last year:

Long wait for apple blossom

This time three years ago:

Electromobility - the last half-mile

This time four years ago:
It's binary. There's either a God or there isn't...

This time six years ago:
Work on the railway line, work on the golf course

This time nine years ago:
Kestrel on the roof

This time ten years ago:
Definitely worse in Britain

This time 11 years ago:
Miracle on the Vistula

This time 12 years ago:

Collapsing footbridge on Puławska

This time 13 years ago:|
A new dimension to plane-spotting

This time 14 years ago:
One swallow does not a summer make

Russian imperialism

This post is aimed at those useful idiots in the West who either support Russia or who claim they are 'neutral', because NATO is 'imperialist' which makes Ukraine just as bad than Russia. I was angered by a post on Facebook from an old friend who actually stated that Tony Blair is worse than Putin. [Blocked for good.]

Russia is an empire. An empire can be defined as "a political unit consisting of several territories and peoples, created by conquest, and divided between a dominant centre and subordinate peripheries". The difference between the current Russian empire and say, the former British or French empires, is geographic (it is contiguous, not offshore) and historic (the empire was punctuated by a period of being the 'Soviet empire'). But nevertheless, Russia is an empire.

At its peak in the 1860s, the Russian empire stretched well into Europe, with half of Poland, all of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and (from 1809 to 1917) Finland, within it. But the empire also stretched into North America - Alaska was Russian until 1867. 

Today, the Russian empire - other than ethnic Russians - includes hundreds of indigenous peoples subjugated by Moscow over the centuries, Russified to a greater or lesser extent. Buryats, Komi, Yakuts, Ingush, Kalmyk, Chechens, deprived of their right to govern themselves, their languages and cultures crushed by tsars and commissars. 

Russia expanded eastward, conquering land at an average annual rate of the area of the Netherlands for 150 years. Hundreds of different nations were subjugated to the Tsar's will, and forcefully Russified. Serfdom - abolished in 1861- enslaved 23 million subjects of the Tsar (whilst in America, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation legally freed 3.5 million slaves - and started the Civil War).

After defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet empire extended beyond the farthest reaches of the Tsar's domain, with the subjugated satellite states stretching to the Elbe. By the Soviet times, the terms 'Russia' and 'Soviet Union' had become interchangeable in the West, with only purists and experts pedantically using the right term.

Example. I have a copy of Russian Self-Portraits by American photographer, David Attie. Published in 1978, it was a rare glimpse of ordinary people from behind the Iron Curtain. Attie set up a large view camera and full-length mirror in a studio; subjects were invited in to pose themselves and then press the shutter with a remote-release cable. They took Polaroid prints with negatives; the subjects would get the print and Attie would use the neg to print the photos for the book. This contained 84 self-portraits of individuals and groups. And here's the thing: the sessions took place in Kyiv (or Kiev as the book calls the Ukrainian capital). But the words 'Ukraine' and 'Ukrainians' are absent. There's only one mention (in the whole book!) - the Ukrainian Folk Ballet - suggesting cute folksy customs from bygone days. The words 'Soviet Union' and 'USSR' are also absent. Otherwise it's just  'Russians' in 'Russia'. It's as though a Chinese photographer visited Cardiff to take photographs of English people in England, and used them to represent the whole of the United Kingdom.

Russians tend to believe that Ukrainians are just Russians who've gone wrong - comedic bumpkins who speak funny who belong firmly within the Russki Mir. Because these 'Russians' have gone astray, choosing the West in preference to Mother Russia, they deserve nothing less than extermination, say a great many Russians (maybe even as many as one in five).

Who's dying for Russia? It's not ethnic Russians who are bearing the brunt of the fighting in Ukraine. On 6 April, the BBC’s Russian service compiled a list of names and regions of 1,083 of the 1,351 officially confirmed military deaths using official state and regional media sources. There was not one reported death from Moscow, a city of 13 million people, while 93 deaths - 9% - come from Dagestan alone. Buryatia has the next largest number of fatalities, at 52. [More here.] Imagine if in 1914 it transpired that the British soldiers killed at Mons, Arras or Namur were mostly from Ireland, Wales, Scotland or the Isle of Man  or Guernsey - and none were Londoners.

The Soviet Union's collapse was not followed by a period of national reckoning, as happened in Germany or Japan after 1945. There was no remorse, no attempt to describe what had occurred between 1918 and 1991- collectivisation, the Gulag, the Great Terror, the Holodomor - as wrong. Putin's popularity rests on perpetuating national myths - of the 'Great Patriotic War' (no one mention the Stalin-Hitler pact), the defeat of Nazi Germany, Sputnik and Gagarin - and a nuclear-armed empire spanning 11 time zones.

I can't find it now, but I recall reading a piece by an American journalist in Moscow about a taxi ride he took around the city. His driver, on hearing he had an American passenger, began to telling him how great everything was in Russia. When the American began listing the country's many shortcomings, the taxi driver changed tack. "Yes, you're right. It is a shit hole. Can you help me get a visa for the US?" The journalist said, helpfully, that it would be much easier to get a visa for Canada. The taxi driver spat on the floor of his car and said with disgust "I could never live in a country that's not a superpower!"

The British Empire faded away shortly after the crumbling of the Third Reich and the nuclear destruction of Imperial Japan. I can still remember 'Empire Day' at primary school being rebranded 'Commonwealth Day' after 1965, with children trooping around the playground carrying flags of the Commonwealth nations. But Russia insists - to this day - that its imperial sway holds dominion over Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia and northern Kazakhstan. As well as - and it goes without saying - Buryats, Yakuts, Ingush, Kalmyk and Komi people. Russian imperialists would dearly love to include the Baltic states and Poland into the fold - but fortunately, we are in NATO now.

See: White Fever - my review of Jacek Hugo-Bader's book about Russia's Far East

This time two years ago:
Drainage ditches and the hunters' pulpit
(The pulpit collapsed last year)

This time three years ago:
Aviation the theme 

This time four years ago:
Five closed-off hectares of central Warsaw

This time five years ago
Progress by the ponds

This time nine years ago:
Kaczyński's ignorance, deceit or folly? 

This time ten years ago:
The British electrical plug reigns supreme

This time 11 years ago:
Easter, and the end of Lent

This time 12 years ago:
That Icelandic volcano

This time 13 years ago:
Views of Historic Toruń

This time 14 years ago:
One swallow does not a summer make

Easter everywhere - but not in Ukraine. Lent 2022: Day 46

Lent comes to an end at midnight, the top comes off the bottle of beer and the bottle of single-malt whisky, with some kiełbasa to go with. Very much Easter in a minor key this year; with a war going on across the border in Ukraine. Deaths, serious injuries, bombing and shelling of residential areas - a war driven by evil instincts that over the past several decades we hoped had been eradicated from the people of Europe.

War - the fear it generates, the anxiety and stress, the loss, the anger and the hatred it generates - distracts us from what should be our priorities; fulfilment of human potential.

Peace of mind is necessary for growth; this Lent has been spent under a cloud. Fears of a Russian nuclear strike recede as Western resolve seems to have restrained Putin somewhat, but firing a tactical nuke is still a card he might play. My sleep has returned to normal (I am no longer unable to fall asleep after waking in the night for worry about what's going on).

Easter will not arrive in Eastern Orthodox churches for another week. Because of the computational difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, Western Christianity celebrates Easter between one week (as this year) and five weeks (as will be the case in 2024) apart. I had been hoping that by Easter - Orthodox Easter - the war will be over, Putin will have been killed or overthrown, and the murderous invaders will have gone back to Russia. 

There's a week to go, but it looks unlikely that a policeman in his early 30s, named Grytsak (Грицак) will have shot Putin with a handgun outside a white government building with classical columns set among grassy parkland (I had this dream on 25 February this year, though uncertain in which Russian city this scene was set).

Gratitude normally expressed for health and prevention of misfortune now extends to gratitude for not being bombed by Putin; for our Ukrainian neighbours and their brave army to make it through the night.

We can but pray, earnestly, with intent, that this awful, evil war will end soon with the minimum of extra bloodshed or trauma. Until it does, I cannot fully devote myself to spiritual pursuits.

I hope there will be will be another Lent. At this moment in history, I can no longer take that for granted.

This time last year:
Climate vs weather

This time two years ago:
Seven lockdown sunsets

This time five years ago:
Easter everywhere

This time 12 years ago:
Strange days indeed (though less strange than these!)

[link to video of the blog post, courtesy of Nick Morris]

Traitors and useful idiots

The sight of apartment blocks, schools, hospitals and administrative buildings being hit by Russian rockets, bombs and shells has revealed to the world the truth about Putin. It is a truth that those living in his immediate neighbourhood have known for a long time. He is the manifestation of evil in human form; a Hitler, a Stalin, a Pol Pot. An inhuman madman for whom massive loss of innocent life has no meaning. Protests around the world, but particularly across Europe, show that Russia has lost any residual soft power it might have enjoyed. And yet, and yet...

Unrestrained by the intellectual straightjacket of Marxism-Leninism, Putin's propaganda war aimed at the West this past decade has been infinitely more successful than the USSR's. Back then, the useful idiots were exclusively the far left. I remember at the time of Martial Law in Poland, an organisation in the UK called the Spartacist League was actually protesting against the Solidarity trade union movement, on the basis that "an imperfect workers' state is better than no workers' state". Nutters. The British Communists were partially funded through the bulk purchase by the Soviet Union of the Morning Star, the newspaper aligned with the Communist Party of Britain. The paper, then and now is so ideologically turgid that its readership is insignificant. 

The Morning Star website today leads not with the slaughter of innocent Ukrainian civilians but with global climate change. All the British far left can do is numbly repeat the mantra "NATO and the EU should not have been encroaching on Russia".  And funnily enough, this is also the mantra of the British far right. 

The far left are the useful idiots - so hidebound in their anti-imperialist ideology that they fail to see Putin as the arch-imperialist. This is because Putin says he is against NATO, as are they - because they see NATO through an ideological prism, and not as a bulwark protecting Central and Eastern Europe from the return of the Russian imperial boot. Putin doesn't need to pay them to parrot his propaganda - they just do so.

Now look at this semi-literate tweet from George Galloway. Paid Kremlin assets or useful idiot? He names names. Nigel Farage, Christopher Hitchens, Tucker Carlson and Rod Liddle - which of these have taken Putin's shilling, and which simply believe the Kremlin's narrative?

Venal politicians, easily bought by smooth-talking Russians in the West are as culpable as hidebound ideologists. Britain's shabby response to sanctioning Russian oligarch and their assets in the UK suggests fear and shame regarding the ease with which their donations filled party coffers. And their resulting hesitancy to take a firmer stance on Putin's malevolence.

The links between Russia and the Brexit campaign were clear to see to all those who wanted to see, and all those who understood Russia. Putin needed to fragment the West, splinter its institutions. Those who bought into the lie that the EU was 'antidemocratic' need to ask themselves how democratic it is to have one man with a nuclear trigger holding our planet to ransom. Many who voted for Brexit were swayed by arguments coming from Putin's troll farms, polluting Britain's social media, or from figures directly financed by Moscow [when this is all over, I hope the Kremlin's archives will be opened so we can see proof of which figures].

Putin's courting of the West's far right and far left (the latter being cheaper to buy) had been successful for the past 22 years. But now that he has revealed his true nature in a way that's impossible to cover up with lies about 'Ukrainian fascists', 'genocide in Donbas', 'NATO provoked the bear' or 'Eastern Europeans have no right to self-determination', he has cut off that support. It will be interesting to see how the presidential campaigns of Marine Le Pen or Viktor Orban go.

When this is all over, the bought-up politicians and the useful idiots will be called to account. When this is all over, the far left and far right will not have an easy time. And that will be good for us all. In the meantime, let us pray in a focused, metaphysical way, to the Good God for a swift end to the spilling of innocent blood in Ukraine.

Lent starts tomorrow, I shall be blogging about the spiritual and metaphysical; for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, follow me on Twitter (Michael Dembinski@policies4poland).

This time last year:
Chance and luck - can you will the outcome?

This time two years ago:
Define your Deity

This time four years ago:
The Mysteries of Quantum Physics

This time fiver years ago:
Lent starts tomorrow

This time six years ago:
Coincidence and survival

This time nine years ago
The Book of Revelations

This time ten years ago:
Strong late-winter sunshine

This time 11 years ago:
Best pics from February 2011

This time 12 years ago:
Kensington

This time 14 years ago:
End of the line

War

 "What was it like, the atmosphere of those last few days in August 1939, before German tanks and bombers poured into Poland?" I would ask my father. 

"We were resigned to it - wars happen. War broke out in August 1914, then the Bolsheviks invaded in 1920," he replied. Indeed, looking at European history, wars, invasions, uprisings, revolutions, civil wars would punctuate short periods of peace with monotonous regularity.

I was born in the penumbra of war, 13 years after my father and his Home Army comrades were put on trains bound for PoW camps in Germany at the end of the Warsaw Uprising. My mother's experiences as a child deported to a labour camp in northern Russia had an effect on my upbringing. Polish scouts in London, led by men who had fought at Tobruk and Monte Cassino, was paramilitary in nature; we'd drill Polish army drill, sing Polish army songs, and learn fieldcraft.

The Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present; I was too young to sense the fear engendered by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Czechoslovakia - the crushing of the Prague Spring - was sad, but at least there was no risk of spill-over. The Protect and Survive era of the mid-1980s, was chilling - there were a few close calls, though we didn't know it at the time. 

The dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 heralded what many believed was the End of History - the Evil Empire had crumbled, free-market democracy had triumphed.

The arc of history was tracking upward. Life was getting better. Technology was bringing us new gadgets, opening new horizons and creating a new way of digital living. Had Europe managed to rid itself of the curse of war for good? Serbia, Bosnia - Srebrenica, the bombing of Belgrade - briefly brought back the ghosts of past horrors. But by the middle of the first decade of the new century, with Poland and nine other former Soviet Bloc members inside NATO and the EU, all looked well, even while Putin consolidated his rule over the Russian Federation.

Then we passed a tipping point - and another - and another - and another. Georgia, Litvinenko, Crimea, Syria, Skripal... Obama said 'reset'. The Germans wanted Nordstream 2. And many venal Western politicians were bought by the Kremlin. What have we learnt? Apparently nothing. 

I had been expecting the Russian attack to start at 04:00 on 22 February (22, my father's unlucky number). It didn't happen. The world breathed a sigh of relief - and then 48 hours later it kicked off. 

Today, the world knows what any country once under the Russian heel knows - giving way to Putin only provokes him to further aggression. "You may not think you are at war with Russia - but Russia is at war with you." Until now, Putin has never overtly crossed the West's red lines. He merely pushed the red line ever further and further and further; the West imposed sanctions here and there - but nothing that would halt Putin in his obsessive quest to reconquer lands he sees as lost to Russia as the USSR collapsed.

This time, the world is seeing a European city in flames, Europeans fleeing tanks and bombs - something not seen on this scale since the last weeks of World War 2. The sight of columns of women and children walking towards the Polish border remind me of how my father, his mother and two brothers walked east from Warsaw as German bombs rained down on the Polish capital, panzers approaching from the north and west. My father was 16 then; he died in 2019; few people alive today remember at first hand the horrors of WW2.

Russian oligarch's money has corrupted the British establishment. Parliamentarians, lawyers, accountants, PR firms, estate agents, thought that they could 'civilise' the nouveau-riche Russians, co-opting them as they once had co-opted oil-rich sheikhs and American tycoons. But Putin's oligarchs have strings attached. You are not permitted to be an oligarch in Britain unless you kick back to Putin, and do his bidding. This includes buying up venal British politicians. Don't do as you're told and you wind up as one of the 14 or so Russians who have died in London under mysterious circumstances.

Putin is the quintessential evil KGB villain, brought up in the dark arts of maskirovka, playing by the playbook he grew up with. The playbook of the NKVD - the Holodor, the Great Terror, the Gulag, Katyń. Surrounded by a coterie of yes-men and women, no one dares tell him how futile is his quest to rebuild the USSR. Economically, it has no chance of success. Robbing the country so brazenly is possible only if the people are repressed by brutality. There is no escape - entrepreneurs are shaken down, and so their ranks are thinned out; the same people who would have the resourcefulness to start small businesses in the West just take the view that the risk is too great. Better be an official and live by shaking down citizens - traffic cops, hospital administrators, health & safety inspectors, granters of planning permissions, tax inspectors, university admissions officer. Run this way, the Russian economy could never lift off and hold its own in the modern world.

Failing to turn Russia into a genuinely modern economy, all Putin can do is to wreck the socio-economic systems of other countries. Had Russia made the right policy and political choices, it could have been a powerhouse, driven by foreign investment and innovation. As it is, ordinary Russian look longingly across at former Soviet republics in the EU - the freedom, the quality of life, sanctity of private property based on the rule of law, prospects for the future. This is a threat to Putin; repression can only go so far. 

Trump's election and Brexit were both supported massively by Russia - using all forms of 'active measures'; financially, through their 'useful idiots', and by an online onslaught using social media, the West's soft underbelly. As bombs rain down on Kyiv, the main proponents of Brexit are today acting as the Kremlin's apologists  in the UK - 'the West's fault for poking the bear' (N. Farage). [As an aside, can you imagine an organisation called Conservative Friends of Germany active in Westminster in the late 1930s?]

This time last year:
Yes, there is such a thing as Original Sin

This time three years ago:
London's Smithfield Market

This time four years ago:
Mid-winter in late February

This time five years ago:
Ten years of digital photography

This time six years ago:
Between atheism and creationism

This time seven years ago:
A peek into the Afterlife

This time eight years ago:
The new dupes of Moscow

This time nine years ago:
Late-winter commuting, Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
My Nikon D80 five years on

This time 11 years ago:
My Nikon D80 four years on

This time 12 years ago:
Nikon D80 two years on

This time 13 years ago:
Nikon D80 one year on

February made me shiver

After three glorious days, the clouds have rushed in from the west, driven by strong winds. Four days without rain - then buckets start to fall, horizontally. Looking out of the bathroom window, I see the netting on the neighbours' new fence ripped off and a fire hose laid out across and land to pump surface water off the sodden land, which is trying to grow a crop. Brief excursions yesterday and on Tuesday, but today only a few metres across the garden to the compost bin. 

I feel as though venturing out further would be risky for my immune system; it's a definite low. An early night last night, followed by a massive ten and half hours of sleep (22:00 to 08:30) has kept at bay whatever I feel was creeping up on me; another such night is in order. And it's hard to motivate myself to exercise.

Koleje Mazowiecki is sending messages several times a day informing me about difficulties on the Warsaw-Radom line. I feel sorry for commuters waiting on rain-lashed platforms staring in their apps at icons of trains halted indefinitely at some remote halt between Warka and Dobieszyn.

Meanwhile, I am feeling jittery as a result of the situation going on in Putin's head. A thug, a bully, an evil, soul-less animal, threatening millions of people with death. Things could kick off at any moment, and if they don't, it's still going to be on absolute knife's edge until Putin's last dying breath. He'll be ratcheting up the tension whenever he wants to - marching his troops up to the borders, keeping them there, making noises to unsettle and dismay peaceful populations. The sight of American and British military aircraft in the skies of Central and Eastern Europe, flying in military supplies, keeping watch on the Russian military build up gives me a certain degree of reassurance - much more that the waffle from German or French diplomatic missions to the Kremlin. As V. I. Lenin said: "If you push in the bayonet and feel mush - keep pushing. But if you push in the bayonet and feel steel - stop." Making concessions to a psychopath makes no sense. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, cooperating with an opponent who hurts you makes no sense - you respond with force. Putin knows this and is pushing the West to effect a split in the alliance.

Gas is his weapon; Gazprom 'a gas company with tanks.' My gas bill: end of 2021, price per kilowatt-hour: 1.01zł. Early 2022, price per kilowatt-hour: 2.01zł. Next gas bill likely to be in the order of 3,600zł (around £670). More reasons to be cheerful.

The Polish government is still behaving in an irrational way. Polski Ład (the Polish deal) - the government's flagship tax reform programme - has gone awry, it is deeply unpopular even with the electorate it is trying to buy. The government is also winding up the European Commission on rule of law. Poland could end up being many billions of euro out of pocket if the government doesn't back down.

Spring is still a long way off. Another six weeks until April comes; assuming it's a nice one (latest snow-on-ground from my 25 years' experience in Warsaw was 4 May back in 2011). The days are getting longer; the sun goes down an hour and half later than the year's earliest sunset. Gone is the snow cover, the ice on the ponds - winters are getting milder and milder. Winds are getting stronger, winter storms more frequent. And yet people don't seem to see it and aren't changing their ways; driving their idle arses a few miles in their SUVs to their offices in town. To paraphrase the Dead Kennedys, it's not so much 'Give me convenience or give me death', it's 'Give me convenience or kill off the entire planet and everyone on it'. 

Covid is still here - the new cases are on their way down from the peak of the fifth wave (the fifth! I predicted a mere three waves when the pandemic began); deaths, however, refuse to follow. Poland is still seeing around 250 people a day dying from the disease.

Lent is around the corner - starting on Ash Wednesday, 3 March. I look forward to this time of cleansing and spiritual introspection; I just hope it will not be marred by a bloody war, an invasion of a peaceful country neighbouring Poland. Or by Covid. Or by the stupid Polish government telling Brussels to shove all its money destined for infrastructure and green transformation.

Reasons to be cheerful? Not many right now.

This time last year:
Starting my 30th Lent

This time two years ago:
Grey February dusk; buzzing Warsaw

This time three years ago:
Skierniewice-Łuków line modernisation announced

This four years ago:
Entropy and anti-entropy in a constant-ruled universe

This five three years ago:
Truth, spin, bullshit and lies

This time six year:
How much spirituality do we need?

This time nine years ago:
The Chosen Ones

This time ten years ago:
Fixies in the snow

This time 13 years ago:
Just the ticket

The Mechanical Engineers

Inspired by a dream I had on the morning of 23 February 2020

“What’s that smell – unwashed feet or armpits?” asked Nadia as the overcrowded tram jerked its way down the cobbled street towards the gates of the zavod. “Feet”, replied Yakov. “Feet”. He said it to her quietly, so as not to incense the people standing around them. But he was overheard. “Insulting the proletariat, you rose-scented intelyigyent? Yakov looked across at a short, pock-faced man in his early thirties with a few missing teeth. The stench became overwhelming, there were still seven stops to go and more people were boarding the tram. Yakov looked at a pair of narrowed eyes that glared at him with pure hatred. Yakov wondered whether to stand his ground here, and threaten the man with denunciation as lacking in socialist personal hygiene; but he too considered the risk that the man might be carrying in his filthy coat pocket some sharpened tool he'd smuggled out of the factory. Where is the greater fear – party discipline or low-life violence?

Yakov could feel Nadia tugging him back, away from confrontation.

The tram rattled on. Outside, the grey industrial districts that sprawled endlessly outside Moscow. The Fifth Five-Year Plan had just been approved by the Party's 19th Congress. A victorious nation, one devastated by war, needed to rebuild its industries at a lightning tempo, so that the capitalist-imperialist camp would never catch it off guard. Yakov and Nadia – not his girlfriend, but a very good friend from student days – had arrived last autumn in Moscow as graduates of the Irkutsk Mining and Metallurgical Institute, with degrees in aeronautical engineering.

Irkutsk had a good reputation; the institute had started taking on female engineering students at the height of the Great Patriotic War, and they had proved themselves a useful asset in the fight against Fascism. And now Capitalist Imperialism. The fight for production was the front line in every Soviet factory; technology and numbers. Better, faster, more powerful - and more. Always more.

Since the end of the summer holidays of 1952, Yakov, Nadia and a few of their colleagues from Irkutsk had been delegated to work at OKB 301, the Lavochkin factory, in a suburb of Moscow called Khimki. Their job was to transfer the blueprints of parts - what of, they knew not, they were not told - aircraft? rockets? and to prototype them for production. Sub-components, precision parts. Work was urgent. In Korea, the capitalist-imperialists were murdering children. The Soviet Union's socialist allies, China and North Korea, were holding the front line, defending world peace. Jet engines, bought from England for bags of flour, were being taken apart in and copied in our factories so that we could give the capitalists a bloody nose with the very rope that they had sold us. "This is our job!", thought Yakov to himself. "And this filthy scum with his stinking feet is threatening me, an aeronautical engineer with a diploma, me - a candidate member of the Party!"

Nadia tried to steer Yakov's attention away from the malodorous fellow, but Yakov remained caught up in his train of thought- "Whose denunciations carried more weight? Maybe the man had fought at the Front - from Stalingrad to Berlin... Medals, decorations, orders... Or maybe he was just a wastrel who'd somehow managed to keep himself out of the war? Those ten extra years upon his shoulders... years unknown to him, Yakov the mechanical engineer, with diploma... Nadia, sensing the acute tension, again engaged with Yakov. "On Sunday, we will go to the zoo, no?"

This finally snapped Yakov's attention elsewhere. "Yes, the zoo, the zoo... the animals - Africa, lions, elephants, Africa, childhood stories, monkeys, zebras - " Yes, Nadia - I am looking forward to going to the zoo," Irkutsk had a botanical garden, but no zoo. It would be interesting. A brief reflection; Yakov's father had been taken by the NKVD in 1938, no one would tell him why. A seven-year old boy; the day after the arrest, his mother took him to the zoo. No giraffes or hippopotamuses, no rhinoceroses, just wildlife from Siberia - but he most remembered the small animals he could touch - goats and sheep. It took his mind off his father's disappearance...

The aggressive man had lost interest and began picking his nose, he too was on his way to work and not feeling in a happy mood. The works canteen - so airy and spacious! - would again be selling second-rate sausage, more gristle and bone fragments than meat; but the broad beans and fried cabbage at least could be depended upon. He looked down and spat at his feet. Everything in his life was wrong. And that tall intelligent-looking chap was right - his feet did smell. But he looked like a party member. Better take care of yourself! Don't let them provoke you!

Dirty late-February snow lay piled up against the walls, it was above freezing, the meltdown would soon begin. The endless grey sky promised not spring - that was many weeks away. Sweaty winter clothes, heavy overcoats, burdened shoulders. Where was the hope? Nothing but hard work. Where was the laughter? Always looking around - who's watching? Who's talking?

At last the tram reached its final stop, the loop at the end of the line. The two wagons disgorged far more workers than they were ever designed for, and then there was a rush for the factory gates - the whistle would soon be blowing for the start of the morning shift. Another morning shift. Plastered to boards running the length of the factory fence, today's issue of Pravda. Read about the progress of the war. How the Camp of Peace is prevailing, having stopped Eisenhower's forces at the 38th Parallel. But there is no time to read! Everyone is focused on punching in. The clock is merciless.

Four hours at the lathe, then lunchtime. Precision. If you are sloppy - sabotage! If you spend too much time on one piece, and you're behind with the plan - sabotage! The Party is all-vigilant. The plan must be met. The imperialists and their lackeys must not prevail. Yakov couldn't work out whether he was a pawn in the scheme of things or whether he was being groomed to be one of those controlling the game - join the Party, work your way up, in your profession, in the zavod, in the Party, and all will be clear, Yakov! Work, don't question.

Never question.

Don't ever question.

This time last year.
Ealing in the earliest of spring

This time three years ago:
Fat Thursday: a blast against sugar

This time four years ago:
The Devil is in doubt

This time five years ago
Are you aware of your consciousness?

This time seven years ago:
"Why are all the good historians British?"

This time eight years ago:
Central Warsaw, evening rush-hour

This time nine years ago:
Cold and getting colder

This time 11 years ago:
Uwaga! Sople!

This time 12 years ago:
Ul. Poloneza at its worst

Cooperate, cooperate / Defect, defect

I have written about the Prisoner's Dilemma several times on this blog over the years. The famous thought-experiment holds a useful life lesson for us all. I came across this excellent version (link below), using a coin game in place of the harder-to-understand dilemma put to the prisoners, but essentially working the same way.

It's you vs. another person. Do you cooperate for mutual interest, or do you try to cheat the other player? More importantly, in the long term - which strategy works best?

[Click through to the game, and have a go for yourself. See what works and what doesn't. It's worth spending a bit of time to understand it.]

Once you've done that, time for reflection. The strategy that is clearly victorious is the one whereby you start off trusting the other person, and continue cooperating with them until the very moment in which they do the dirty on you. Then you break off. Then you carry on retaliating - until the very moment in which they relent and go back to cooperation. In this version of the game, this is called the 'copycat' strategy. It depends on your copying of what the other player does, in the very next round. No need to initiate or think. Nothing smart about this strategy - there are others which depend on you trying to work out the other player's strategy (assuming they have one).

The results are clear - if you carry on cooperating even when the other player is abusing you, you're a sucker and deserve to lose, you deserve to be punished. And if you are abusive you will not get far either; people will work out that you play dirty and will start to hit back.

The 'copycat' strategy is essentially the one deployed by the US in the Pacific War. The Japanese bomb your fleet? You take the war to them. You hammer them at sea and from the air. Hard. Eventually, they surrender. Then you help them rebuild, grow their economy. But watch that they don't defect on you again.

The 'sucker' strategy? Appeasing aggression. Hoping the defector will come to their senses and change behaviour, unbidden. To quote Lenin again; "if you plunge in the bayonet and feel nothing but mush, keep pushing. But if you push in the bayonet and come across steel - stop."

So cooperate, cooperate / defect, defect is the way to go.

Would that it were so simple.

Define 'defect' and define 'punish'? Here is the problem. Is the fact that a friend of yours voted for Brexit or Trump or PiS a 'defection'? Is it reason to 'punish'? And what form should that 'punishment' take? If someone parks their car across the pavement so you can't push through with a wheelchair - is that reason to scratch the car - or is leaving a polite note under the windscreen enough? A house in your neighbourhood continues to burn crap, harming air quality for everyone. Call Straż miejska? Or heave a brick through their window and continue to do so until they switch to a cleaner fuel?

A thought-experiment that is binary in its policy-response choice (cooperate or defect) comes face-to-face with the messiness of reality, composed of an infinite number of shades and nuances. Here, that crucial word 'judgment' (a word so lacking in Polish! - osąd doesn't come close) comes into play. Response needs to be proportionate, balanced and fair; one needs to be alert to infractions and instances of the other player defecting - even when no binary border has been crossed.

This is Putin's strategy - avoid crossing the red lines (such as invading a NATO member), but pushing all the time through social-media trolls, agents of influence and useful idiots for a similar outcome - buying venal politicians and entire political parties, splitting Western societies. The West needs to take tougher action to send the message to Putin that this behaviour is utterly unacceptable. The balanced response would be to step up sanctions against Russian oligarchs who are in Putin's pockets and their assets, while at the same time launching an unattributable cyber-war against Russian IT systems. Cooperate. cooperate / Defect, defect. And keep on hitting back until the very second Russia relents. And should it then renege, return to hitting back. 

And so on until the end of time - the copycat strategy is the one that works best - something proven by millions of rounds of simulation.

This time two years ago:
The Becoming and the Magic that'll Re-enchant Us

This time three years ago
Short-haul musings 

This time four years ago:
Mind, matter and life

This time five years ago:
Compositions in blue and white

This time eight years ago:
Waiting for the change to come

This time nine years ago
A wetter Poland?

This time 11 years ago:
Heavy overnight snow

This time ten years ago:
Changing Jeziorki skyline