Quotulatiousness

October 7, 2012

Russian intelligence agencies and the Soviet inheritance

Filed under: Europe, Military, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

Strategy Page looks at the two main Russian intelligence organizations:

Now there are two foreign intelligence services: SVR and GRU. The first one is the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. It is the former First Chief Directorate of the Soviet era KGB, which has managed most foreign intelligence operations for decades. Its activities are well known throughout the world.

The second one is the GRU, Russian military intelligence. It is a part of the Defense Ministry. Its full name is much longer (The Chief Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Army). GRU has retained its Soviet era name, and just about everything else. GRU is seen as a living relic of the Soviet times. That is why GRU is so much more secretive than the “Westernized” SVR. GRU officers are considered more patriotic (and old school) than those of the SVR. During the Cold War, there were fewer GRU defectors, still a point of pride in the GRU. GRU prefers to stay in the shadows. Western writers have not written many books about GRU, compared to the KGB. This is largely because GRU keeps its secrets better, and, in the West, is considered an obscure part of Russian intelligence. It’s possible that the GRU activated these sleepers, but for the moment the Germans aren’t talking.

Both GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) and SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) perform the same functions: Political Intelligence, Scientific and Technical Intelligence (industrial espionage) and Illegal Intelligence. Because of this, the two agencies have a very real rivalry going.

But there was, and remains, one area where only the SVR (and its predecessor, the KGB) participates; running counter-intelligence abroad. This was long a KGB monopoly because it was the KGB’s job to make sure the armed forces remained loyal, and GRU was, and is, very much a part of the armed forces.

Thus when the GRU officers are working abroad, they are monitored by Directorate “K” (counter-intelligence) of the SVR. Those who serve inside Russia are watched by the Directorate of Military Counter-Intelligence (The Third Directorate) of the FSB (Federal Security Service, inheritor to the KGB). Interestingly, in the Soviet period, it was also called the Third Directorate. It is not a coincidence but a continuation of the Soviet tradition. The Third Directorate of the FSB is still assigned to monitor the Defense Ministry, of which the GRU is a part. The head of GRU does not even report directly to the Russian President. GRU reports have to go through the Head of the General Staff and the Defense Minister before reaching the top man. Thus GRU is very much number two in the Russian foreign intelligence business. As Number 2, they tend to try harder, and consider themselves more elite than those wimps over at SVR.

On the other hand, there also is one function monopolized by the GRU; battlefield intelligence. The battlefield intelligence is run in peacetime as well. For example, in preparation for future wars, the GRU sets up illegal weapon and ammunition dumps in the territory of many foreign countries. This is a risky operation. It usually involves groups of junior Russian diplomats secretly going into rural areas to bury rifles, machine-guns and other weapons. They have to do this discreetly and in a hurry, to avoid detection by the local counterintelligence service. It is considered a hard job.

August 28, 2012

Rehabilitating Florence Nightingale’s reputation

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:31

History Today has a defence of the much-maligned Florence Nightingale:

Jamaican-born Mary Seacole (1805-81), voted top of the list of the 2004 ‘100 Great Black Britons’ poll, is now slated to replace Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) as the true ‘heroine’ of the Crimean War. She is to be honoured as no less than the ‘Pioneer Nurse’ with a massive statue to be erected at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. This in spite of the strong links between Nightingale and the hospital, her base for over 40 years. It was there she established the first secular school for nurses in 1860 with funds raised in her name for her work in the Crimean War during the conflict of 1854-56. The Nightingale School operated for over a century from the hospital, whose redesign in the 1860s Nightingale also influenced.

[. . .]

The campaign promoting Seacole over Nightingale builds on 30 years of books, articles and films denigrating the latter. While she always had detractors, the serious assault on Nightingale’s reputation can be dated to 1982, with the publication of the Australian historian F.B. Smith’s Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power (Croom Helm, 1982). The next major hit came in 1998 with Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel (Constable, 1998) by a retired management consultant Hugh Small, which argues that Nightingale was actually responsible for the high death rates of the Crimean War and had a nervous breakdown as a result when she supposedly recognised this. Neither claim is supported by any serious documentation. Social media goes even further: see Facebook ‘Florence Nightingale was a Murdering Bitch’, later renamed ‘Florence Nightingale: The World’s Worst Nurse’, where she is described as a ‘deluded power hungry bitch’, who ‘looks like an uptight bitch’, so that ‘the day she died’ was ‘the best thing that ever happened to the field of nursing’.

[. . .]

The French were the instigators of the Crimean War, sent more troops and were better prepared than the British. Their death rates were lower in the first year. But the British government learned from the commissions it sent out and made enormous changes. British death rates fell dramatically, from 23 per cent in the first winter to 2.5 per cent in the second — no greater than deaths among soldiers in peacetime barracks in London, as Nightingale proudly showed in a chart. In contrast, the French (lower) 11 per cent death rate in the first winter, rose to 20 per cent in the second winter. Since the French were late in publishing their statistics, neither Nightingale nor the royal commission could use them for comparison. However French doctors themselves credited the British reforms for their superior performance. Once they were properly cleansed and functioning Nightingale was proud of the Crimean hospitals. In her own charts she separated the two periods, before and after the sanitary and supply commissions, to emphasise the crucial role they played in reducing mortality.

Her analysis of what went wrong was widely accepted and led to major changes to health care in the British Army. The ‘Nightingale Fund’ raised in her honour for that work paid for the training school at St Thomas’, which led to raising nursing to the level of a profession throughout much of the world. Her experience of the war, and her reputation and research as a result of it, grounded all the social and public health work she did for the rest of her life. Her vision for health reform included bold statements, such as the belief that the poor should receive as good quality hospital care as private patients and warnings as to the dangers of hospital acquired infections. Nightingale, in short, is no mere historical figure. Her lamp should not be retired but shone brightly onto the hospital and health care problems of today.

August 20, 2012

Punks as snobs

Filed under: Europe, Law, Media, Religion, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

Always willing to explore the contrarian position, Brendan O’Neill explains why Pussy Riot’s legal issues have gotten so much attention in the west:

Pussy Riot’s closing statements in their trial for blasphemy confirmed that they have not only inherited the original punk movement’s thrashing guitars and in-yer-face sensibility; they have also effusively embraced its art-school snobbishness.

Punk, in its original incarnation, was always as much a screech of rage against the “sheeple” as it was a two-fingered salute to the powers-that-be. Think Johnny Rotten wailing “They made you a moron!” in the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”. “Don’t be told what you want / Don’t be told what you need”, sang Rotten, expressing the core belief of punk — that the vast bulk of the masses, effectively everyone except the punks, had been moulded into a moron by the man.

The same snobbish thinking animates Pussy Riot today. In her closing statement, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova bemoaned the “enforced civic passivity of the bulk of the population” in Russia. She said the Russian regime “easily manipulates public opinion” — which sounds like an attack on the regime but it is also a sly salvo against the Russian masses, who must have minds like putty if they can be so easily manipulated. In contrast to this civil slavishness, Pussy Riot are all about “authentic genuineness and simplicity”, said Tolokonnikova.

[. . .]

Now we can see why Pussy Riot are so popular among many liberal opinion-formers here in the West — it is because both share a view of the little people as less culturally sophisticated and more easily forced into conformism than the commenting, bohemian, punkish sets. But of course, making snobbish statements and singing rubbish songs should not be a crime. Pussy Riot should be freed from prison immediately and allowed to continue expressing their loathing of Putin’s regime and their disgust with the Russian masses.

August 17, 2012

The plight of Russian submariners

Filed under: History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:36

An update from Strategy Page on how far the Russian nuclear submarine threat has diminished from its peak during the cold war:

Three years ago two Akulas were detected (by the U.S. Navy) off the east coast of the United States, in international waters. Russia admitted two of its Akula class boats were out there. This was the first time Russian subs had been off the North American coast in over a decade. This spotlights something the Russian admirals would rather not dwell on. The Russian Navy has not only shrunk since the end of the Cold War in 1991, but it has also become much less active. In the previous three years, only ten of their nuclear subs had gone to sea, on a combat patrol, each year. Most of the boats going to sea were SSNs, the minority were SSBNs (ballistic missile boats). There were often short range training missions, which often lasted a few days, or just a few hours.

The true measure of a fleet’s combat ability is the number of “combat patrols” or “deployments” in makes in a year and how long they are. In the U.S. Navy, most of these last from 2-6 months. Currently U.S. nuclear subs have carry out ten times as many patrols as their Russian counterparts. Russia is trying to catch up, but has a long way to go.

Russia has only 14 SSNs (nuclear attack subs) in service and eight of them are 7,000 ton, Akulas. These began building in the late 1980s and are roughly comparable to the American Los Angeles class. All of the earlier Russian SSNs are trash, and most have been decommissioned. There are also eight SSGN (nuclear subs carrying cruise missiles) and 20 diesel electric boats. There is a new class of SSGNs under construction, but progress has been slow.

[. . .]

The peak year for Russian nuclear sub patrols was 1984, when there were 230. That number rapidly declined until, in 2002, there were none. Since the late 1990s, the Russian navy has been hustling to try and reverse this decline. But the navy budget, despite recent increases, is not large enough to build new ships to replace the current Cold War era fleet that is falling apart. The rapid decline of Russia’s nuclear submarine fleet needed international help to safely decommission over a hundred obsolete, worn out, defective or broken down nuclear subs. This effort has been going on for over a decade, and was driven by the Russian threat to just sink their older nuclear subs in the Arctic Ocean. That might work with conventional ships, but there was an international uproar over what would happen with all those nuclear reactors sitting on the ocean floor forever. Russia generously offered to accept donations to fund a dismantling program that included safe disposal of the nuclear reactors.

August 15, 2012

India’s next aircraft carrier delayed (again)

Filed under: India, Military, Russia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:02

The Indian navy will have to carry on with an ancient aircraft carrier for a few more years because the INS Vikrant is being further delayed:

India announced that its first locally designed and built aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant will be at least three years late. This was not unexpected. The latest delay was caused, in large part, because the Indian firm hired to build a complex portion of the engine, the gearbox, proved incapable of the task and a foreign company had to be brought in.

There have been many other problems. While construction began three years ago, it was soon delayed because Russia was late in supplying the high-grade steel needed for the hull. Last December 30, the Vikrant was floated out its dry dock. Vikrant was not supposed to leave dry dock yet but the dock was needed for another project. Construction will go on, with pipes, conduits, and other fittings installed. Later this year, Vikrant will return to another dry dock to have its engines and other major equipment installed, although some of that equipment will be late because of problems with suppliers.

While waiting for the Vikrant to be ready, India will have to extend the service life of the already aged INS Viraat, which began life as HMS Hermes in the Royal Navy before being transferred to Indian service in 1987. She is the oldest aircraft carrier in active service in any navy.

Image from Wikipedia.

August 5, 2012

Raoul Wallenberg remembered

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

Yesterday was what would have been Raoul Wallenberg’s 100th birthday. It was observed in Sweden:

Sweden on Saturday commemorated the life of a diplomat credited with saving thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis in World War II, but whose fate remains one of the country’s greatest war-time mysteries.

Crowds gathered in the town of Sigtuna, 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Stockholm to celebrate the centennial of the birth of Raoul Wallenberg, whose defiance of the Nazis has been commemorated worldwide in statues, streets names, and on postage stamps.

Wallenberg served as Sweden’s envoy in Budapest from July 1944 — where he saved the lives of at least 20,000 Jews by giving them Swedish travel documents, the so-called “shutzpass,” or moving them to safe houses. He is also credited with dissuading German officers from massacring the 70,000 inhabitants of the city’s ghetto.

But, in January 1945, the young Swede was arrested by the Soviet Red Army on leaving Budapest to go to the eastern part of the country, and suddenly disappeared.

The Soviets initially denied they had detained him, but later said he had died of a heart attack in prison on July 17, 1947.

June 16, 2012

Sometimes the navy gets far more use out of a ship than they expect

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military, Russia, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:12

Strategy Page on some extremely old ships still in service in various navies:

Last year, the British Royal Navy retired its oldest warship still in service, the 4,700 ton HMS Caroline. This light cruiser entered service in 1914 and fought in the epic Battle of Jutland in 1916. After World War II, Caroline served as a training ship, mostly tied up at dockside. When decommissioned last year, the ship could no longer move under her own power.

The Caroline was not the only World War I warship still in service. Currently, the oldest ship still in service is the Russian salvage ship VMF Kommuna. This 2,500 ton catamaran was built in the Netherlands and entered service in 1915. Kommuna began service in the Czar’s navy, spent most of its career in the Soviet (communist) Navy, and now serves in the fleet of a democratic Russia. Originally designed to recover submarines that had sunk in shallow coastal waters, Kommuna remains in service to handle smaller submersibles, does it well and has been maintained over the decades to the point where it cheaper to keep the old girl operational, than to try and design and build a replacement.

Most navies would not want to bring attention to their oldest ship, especially if it was nearly a century old. It’s different in the American Navy. For example, three years ago the carrier, USS Kitty Hawk (CV 63) was finally decommissioned, and ceased to be the oldest ship in the fleet. The Kitty Hawk served for 48 years and 13 days. In that time, about 100,000 sailors served on the ship. The ship was the navy’s last non-nuclear carrier and, since 1998, the oldest ship in commission. “The Hawk” did not age well, and had lots of breakdowns in its final years. This led members of the crew to nickname the ship; “Shitty Hawk”.

June 13, 2012

When is a bribe appropriate?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Law, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

The British government is trying to crack down on bribery, which on the surface seems like a good thing to do: but will it cripple British businesses in third world countries?

We used to draw a distinct line between what was acceptable business conduct here at home and what we did abroad with Johnny Foreigner.

Inviting Bertie from your major customer to Henley or the Derby, or waving Cup Final and Olympic tickets in his face was entirely acceptable. Slipping him £500 for an order was bribery and both illegal and immoral.

But what you did abroad was an entirely different matter: bribery was until very recently tax deductible.

[. . .]

This is of course very different from the system of old. Which was, essentially, that soft soaping someone with experiences and days out was just absolutely fine while any mention at all of cash was not just legally but also socially verboten.

At home, in Britain, that was. Having worked in some pretty odd and even rough places I’ve done my share of bribing people, but even so I would be profoundly shocked if I was asked for a bung in Blighty. But the system also most definitely facilitated the payment of bribes to Johnny Foreigner.

At one point, working in Russia, I needed to get cheap railway prices out of the Russian railroads to make the numbers on a metals shipment add up. The only way known to do this was to make a deal with the North Koreans who had special state-set prices on said railways. Which is how I found myself inside the N. Korean embassy in Moscow handing over $10,000 in crisp notes to their KGB-style guy after the successful conclusion of the shipment.

Yes, of course, it’s terribly naughty subverting the employees of a communist dictatorship, but the reaction here at home was the most interesting. When I made gentle enquiries to the taxman as to how I might account for this transaction, hinting gently at first, he finally pointed out that since I’d paid the bribe in a foreign currency to a foreign chap that was just fine. Just list it as a business expense and it was tax deductible.

John Kay on the Finnish frontier

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Finland had a very chancy time over the last hundred years. John Kay is visiting now, and reflects on how Finland survived to today:

The Finnish border is an anomaly. In 1918 the Finns won independence for a state that extended to the gates of St Petersburg. Russia captured territory in the 1939-40 Winter War. Finland then fought on the losing side in the second world war and did not remain neutral in the cold war. So the once thriving Finnish industrial city of Viipuri is today the depressed Russian outpost of Vyborg.

A cynical commentator on 20th-century history might observe that the political ineptitude of Kaiser Wilhelm and subsequently of Adolf Hitler brought America in on the opposite side of Germany’s quarrel with Russia in 1917 and 1941. Only when the democratic politicians of modern Germany made the rational alliance did Finland achieve the favourable political and economic outcomes it now enjoys. To pass the watchtowers and barbed-wire fences on the Finnish-Russian border is to be reminded of how fragile, and how recent, are the stability and security we take for granted today.

[. . .]

That observation is evident on the Finnish-Russian border. The razor wire kept Russian citizens in when the living standards of planned societies and market economies diverged. But now the border is easy to cross and the gap in per capita income has narrowed, though not by much. The very different income distributions of egalitarian Finland and inegalitarian Russia can be seen in the car parks and designer shops of Lappeenranta.

In the Soviet era, Finland produced Marimekko; Russia made no clothes any fashion-conscious woman would want to buy. Post-Communist but still autocratic Russia made surveillance equipment; democratic Finland led the world in mobile phones. Today Russia’s geeks hack into your bank account, while those of Finland develop Angry Birds.

The pristine countryside of Finland contrasts with the degraded physical state of much of Russia: a demonstration of the unexpected finding that regulated democratic capitalism preserves the environment more successfully than any other system of government.

May 23, 2012

Review of Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

Roger Moorhouse reviews the new book by Keith Lowe for History Today:

It examines Europe in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War, when the guns stopped firing. Yet, as Lowe clearly demonstrates, the absence of war is not the same as an outbreak of peace.

Savage Continent is a grim catalogue of humanity at its lowest ebb. Necessarily pointillist, given its broad scope, it ranges across much of the European continent, portraying a world where civil society and the rule of law were yet to be re-established and where revenge, antisemitism, ethnic cleansing and heightened political sensibilities gave rise to a renewed wave of inter-communal and political violence.

According to Lowe’s account, those immediate postwar years had a thoroughly unedifying air. From the Yugoslav partisans cutting off the noses of their erstwhile opponents, to antisemitic pogroms in Poland, to the massacres of Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, he shows a dystopian continent in which the all-pervasive dehumanisation of the war proved difficult to reverse, provoking a hangover of violence that would last, in some places, into the 1950s.

Alongside the now rather well-documented episodes of brutality from the period, such as the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe, or the expulsion of the German populations from the same region, Lowe does well to uncover some lesser-known examples of man’s postwar inhumanity to his fellow man. The story of the Lithuanian ‘Forest Brothers’, for instance, and their brave, futile resistance to the imposition of Soviet rule, is one that deserves to be much wider known and is outlined well. Similarly the ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians in postwar Poland is rightly placed alongside better-known events, such as the Kielce pogrom and the Vertreibung (expulsion) of the Germans.

I just started reading Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt, and he covers much of the same period of history as Lowe in the first part of his book. I’m moderately well-read on World War II, but the amount of violence and human misery in Europe for more than a decade after the war was “over” is indeed an under-covered and misunderstood aspect of that turbulent period.

Western European countries (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and even western Germany) recovered faster in all senses because the Nazi occupiers did much less damage to the social structures in those countries. It’s rather eye-opening to find how few Nazi officials were needed to oversee the local governments in those countries: 800 in Norway, and only 1,500 in France (plus 6,000 military and civil police auxiliaries). Local governments continued to operate pretty much as they had before the war, under the control of a tiny group of German overseers. Economic demands meant the local industries were harnessed to the Nazi war effort (but largely kept under the control of their original owners).

Central and eastern European countries suffered far more disruption as the Nazi racial “logic” did not allow local governments the same relative lack of interference the western local governments got. Local industry was more frequently nationalized and run by German managers directly, not working through the original owners, and local labour was more readily drafted to work in Germany. And unlike in the west, the experiences of newly “liberated” countries in the east often started with a fresh purge of local governments, business owners, and middle class professionals.

What we’d now call “ethnic cleansing” was a frequent second act after the Soviet armies moved in: ethnic Germans were expelled, ethnic Slavs were moved into the cleared areas. Jews, Gypsies, and other groups that suffered terribly under the Nazis did not necessarily see much improvement under the Soviets. Former resistance fighters were hunted down and eliminated (except for those belonging to identified Communist movements … and not even that was guaranteed protection).

Under the circumstances, it may well be nothing short of a secular miracle that Europe recovered economically and socially so soon after the war and the post-war convulsions.

May 7, 2012

“Welcome to the foreign policy Theater of the Absurd”

Filed under: Europe, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

Justin Raimondo on the recent spat between Russia and NATO:

A Russian general has threatened military action if the US and its NATO allies go ahead and build a “missile shield” in Eastern Europe: “A decision to use destructive force preemptively will be taken if the situation worsens,” say Russian chief of staff Nikolai Makarov. That the “shield” is of dubious effectiveness, and is mainly a cash cow for US defense companies, are not factors the Russkies are willing to take into consideration: their main beef seems to be the implied insult of Washington claiming the shield isn’t designed to protect against future aggression emanating from Moscow, but against an alleged Iranian missile threat to Europe. Hey, they seem to be saying: what about us? Aren’t we a threat, too?

Well, no — they aren’t. Russia’s population is falling rapidly, and their economy isn’t doing too hot, either. What the oligarchs didn’t loot and spirit out of the country has been either seized and mismanaged by the state, or else is part of the burgeoning black market. The last thing Moscow needs is an empire: they can barely manage what they already have. That hasn’t stopped Washington from manufacturing a phony narrative that imagines a “resurgent Russia” motivated by revanchism and a desire to refight the cold war.

So here we have the spectacle of a phony threat being uttered as a response to yet another phony threat: the Russians aren’t going to preemptively attack Poland, and neither they nor the Iranians represent a real danger to the West. Yet the actors in this little drama are intent on playing out their roles to the end, no matter how disconnected from reality their actions and pronouncements may seem.

Welcome to the foreign policy Theater of the Absurd.

April 16, 2012

India’s long, twisting path to nuclear submarine capabilities

Filed under: India, Military, Russia, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

India would like to run their own nuclear-powered submarines, but it’s taken longer for them to achieve that than they’d hoped:

On April 4th the new Russian Akula II SSN (nuclear attack submarine) Nerpa, that was supposed to be delivered to India (which is leasing it) two years ago, was finally turned over. It’s worse than it sounds. Three years ago, during sea trials there was an equipment failure on Nerpa that killed 20 sailors and shipyard workers. This delayed sea trials for many months and the Russians found more items that needed attention. These additional inspections and repairs continued until quite recently.

[. . .]

Indian money enabled Russia to complete construction on at least two Akulas that were less than half finished at the end of the Cold War. This was another aftereffect of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Several major shipbuilding projects were basically put on hold (which still cost a lot of money) in the hopes that something would turn up. In this case, it was Indians with lots of cash. But money could not overcome the construction problems and poor design decisions the Russians made. The single Akula II India was leasing was delayed again and again. The 8,100 ton Akula II has a crew of 73. The one leased by India has eight 533mm (21 inch) torpedo tubes and 40 torpedoes.

Meanwhile, in 2009, India launched its first nuclear submarine, the INS Arihant (Destroyer of Enemies). This came after over a decade of planning and construction. What was not revealed at the times was that the Arihant was launched without its nuclear reactor, which was not installed until 2011. Arihant is supposed to be ready for service later this year.

March 24, 2012

The less-than-glamorous reality of Cold War spy work

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

A review of Steve Gibson’s Live and Let Spy: BRIXMIS – The Last Cold War Mission by Bill Durodié at spiked!:

Called the British Commander-in-Chief’s Mission to the Group Soviet Forces of Occupation in Germany, or BRIXMIS for short, it was part of an officially sanctioned exchange of observers between the Red Army and the British Army established by the victorious Allied powers and the USSR through the Robertson-Malinin agreement in 1946. Its ostensible purpose was to improve communication and relations between them.

In addition to BRIXMIS — and their French and American counterparts in the East — the Red Army also conducted similar operations through a unit in West Germany. But, diplomatic liaison and translation duties aside, the real purpose of these units soon became clear: to find out what each other was up to by heading out into those areas where they had been specifically told not to go.

[. . .]

For anyone who imagines that spying is glamorous, or somehow akin to being in a Bond movie, they will be disabused by Gibson’s chapter on document-gathering from dumps (literally). It had been recognised for some time that, when they went on manoeuvres in East Germany, the Soviet forces were not supplied with any toilet paper. They would use whatever came to hand — a copy of Pravda, a letter from a loved one, or even their mission papers. And after they were done, it was then that Her Majesty’s specially trained and equipped Cold War warriors really came into their own…

The book is republished with an expanded final chapter reflecting on what happened in the time following the fall of the Iron Curtain:

As a professor of political science at the University of Warwick, Robert Aldrich, notes in the new foreword, Gibson is now clearly of the mind that ‘much of what [he] was led to believe [during the Cold War], and some of what he was told, was simply wrong!’

[. . .]

Gibson’s resolute clearsightedness is to be admired. So despite having been caught up in the exhilaration of it all as a young man, despite devoting the prime of his life to the East-West conflict, he refuses to lie to himself. ‘The Cold War’, he notes, ‘was a giant historical cul-de-sac where all enlightened efforts at producing a good society were suspended’.

Aldrich astutely summarises a key argument of Live and Let Spy: ‘while Cold War warriors fought a tyrannical and ruthless version of Communism abroad, they remained ignorant of — and lost — an ideological battle at home’. He then adds accusingly: ‘Western politicians now offer a watered-down version of the interfering, intolerant, controlling and authoritarian government that they were initially set against rather than anything freer.’

March 19, 2012

Finland’s cold-cut warrior, RIP

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History, Media, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

The most unusual cold war hero died recently. Eero Iloniemi tells the story of Finland’s Väinö Purje and how his TV commercials featured in the Cold War in the Baltic:

While Purje is virtually unknown in the West his exploits are legendary in the Baltic States, especially in Estonia. Alo Lohmus of Estonia’s leading daily Postimees referred to Purje’s contribution to the Cold War as part of a ‘spiritual nuclear bomb’ that blew apart a corrupt system.

High praise, indeed, for a modest tradesman. That a butcher could gain such a position in a global conflict is one of the most curious chapters of Cold War history.

Due to its proximity to the Baltic Soviet republics, Finnish television broadcasts penetrated the Iron Curtain, into Estonia and on occasion Latvia. Purje, who was the star of Finnish retail chain Kesko’s food adverts, became a cult figure in Estonia. From 1974 to 1981 he featured in more than 100 television spots showcasing sausages and cutlets, all virtually unknown in the then Soviet republics.

August 7, 2011

“When I used to do this I broke my hand 14 times, and I’m a banjo player”

Filed under: Europe, History, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 17:13

Poland’s answer to the Society for Creative Anachronism, Knights’ Brotherhoods stage their own form of medieval recreation:

Compering and judging the hand-to-hand combat is Krzysztof Ptasinski, the son of a Polish diplomat who learnt English from an American teacher in Addis Ababa and insists I call him “Redneck Chris”.

His hooded robe and summer gear make him look like a monk in flip-flops.

“Whoa dude! Ouch! In your face!” he hollers as two knights wearing full body-plate armour weighing 35kg (77lb) lay into each other with double-handed swords.

To progress, a knight has to reach five points, each earned by laying a clean blow on an opponent above the knee.

The swords are blunt, of course, but that does not mean it is completely harmless.

“When I used to do this I broke my hand 14 times, and I’m a banjo player,” he says.

“I’ve got two screws in this finger. I had a cracked skull.

“When we were fighting the Belarusian guys, I had my kidney displaced.”

I ask him what the appeal is.

“Whenever you get hit in the helmet you almost lose consciousness because it’s so loud. It’s a thrill,” he says.

I used to work with a guy from St. Petersburg who told me all about the replica medieval armour and weapons he had to leave behind when he came to Canada. It sounds like this is a similar group.

From this description, the group doesn’t have quite the same concerns about participant safety that the SCA and other North American re-creationist/re-enactor groups have generally adopted.

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