Go back instead to Russia’s 1945 victory over Nazi Germany. That triumph is the greatest event in Russia’s thousand-year history. In the largest war ever, Russia led the Soviet Union in crushing absolute evil and thereby saved the world from destruction.

Yes, Britain and the United States played a significant role in that victory, but Russians can counter by noting—accurately—that the back of Hitler’s army was broken on the Eastern Front before the Normandy landings. Russians also can say that no country has made a greater sacrifice in war. Officially, nearly 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives.

Or, put in a different perspective, more people died in the siege of Leningrad (around one million) than the British and United States lost, combined, across the entire globe during the war.

It is no wonder that May 9, when Russia celebrates VE Day, has become its greatest secular holiday. This victorious past is projected not only through the massive military parade in Red Square, which features soldiers both in contemporary and period uniforms, but also by its most demonstrative ritual: the march of the “Immortal Regiment.” This is when ordinary Russians, each holding high the photograph of a relative who served, flood the streets to form a single, massive procession.

In 2017, in Moscow alone, the official estimate put their numbers at 600,000, with President Putin at their head. Live television coverage highlighted the many children, themselves in uniforms recalling the war, reciting the feats of their great-grandparents.

Virtually every city in Russia hosts its own march of the Immortals, thus uniting the nation across 11 time zones through the blood of their greatest generation. The parade also makes a global statement both figuratively (by flying the flags of countries Russia helped save from the Nazi yoke, including the United States) and literally (with parallel marches of descendants of Soviet veterans in cities like London and New York).

VE Day has become the center of a civic religion showcasing the sacrifice Russians have made to save humanity from tyranny. The sentiment is so powerful—and not restricted to that day alone—that it anchors a prevailing myth of Russian exceptionalism.

Russia’s army, its people, and its harsh winters combined to push back Napoleon Bonaparte’s invading French forces, leading to the emperor’s disastrous retreat in 1812. Art courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

That myth has been fueled by the Second World War, but it did not begin there. In 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia, the conflict was framed in existential terms, with the French emperor officially tagged as the anti-Christ. The outcome of that titanic struggle was seen by contemporaries as nothing short of a miracle: Russia, by itself, destroyed the largest army the world had yet seen and then led a coalition to rescue Europe from French tyranny. They succeeded, occupying Paris in 1814, and sounding the death-knell for Napoleon’s dreams of dominating the world.

No other nation could claim such a victory, which fueled an explosion of Russian patriotism. (Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 was seen as a futile last gasp.) The victory united Russian writers and intellectuals across the political spectrum—conservatives such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, socialists like Vissarion Belinsky, icons of romanticism like Mikhail Lermontov—in the idea that Russia was a special country that had accomplished a special mission.

By century’s end, this idea became doctrine in the highest echelons of the military. As the director of Russia’s equivalent of West Point proudly proclaimed in 1898 (with emphasis in the original): “It is in the Russian people’s willingness to lay down their lives for others that one finds the key to understanding the special nature of Russia’s experience of war which so acutely distinguishes it from the experiences of other countries in the West.”

Why did he use the present tense when nearly a hundred years separated him from the miracle of 1812? It was because during that century Russian scholars and writers had delved deeper into history and found evidence that their triumph over tyranny had an even earlier precursor, suggesting that stopping invaders was part of Russia’s collective identity.

When the Mongols swept into Europe in the 13th century, they never made it appreciably further west than Russia’s lands (including those of present-day Ukraine and Belarus). Was this earlier defense, Russians would ask six centuries later, yet another sign of Russia’s definitive role in sacrificing to protect others?

Russia’s greatest writer, Alexander Pushkin, was among those who thought yes.

“We have had our own special mission,” he wrote in 1836. “Russia, with its immense expanses, was what absorbed the Mongol conquest. They did not dare to cross our western frontier and leave us in the rear. They withdrew back to the desert and Christian civilization was saved. And for achieving that goal we have had to lead a completely unique existence.”

With the seeds of exceptionalism already deeply sown in Russia’s historical imagination, the 20th century, and World War II, provided further confirmation of the country’s status as a force for good in the world.

Today Russia’s historical self-image colors its current stand-off with NATO. Does that military coalition not echo previous invaders like Napoleon and Hitler whose forces were not exclusively French or German but were also multi-national coalitions? What better demonstrates the West’s ingrained, collective hostility towards Russia?

To amplify that sentiment today, Russia’s political and popular culture tap even more into its military past. Besides the Mongols, Napoleon, and Hitler, Russia has been invaded nearly every century of its existence. When the Mongols attacked from the east, its western neighbors, the Swedes and Teutonic knights, attacked as well—only to be defeated by Russia’s greatest medieval warrior, Alexander Nevsky. In the 16th century, the Crimean Tatars drove north and burned Moscow. In the 17th, the Poles repeated that feat while deposing the tsar and killing the patriarch of the Russian Church. In the 18th century, the Swedes invaded but were stopped only by Peter the Great.

This history is applied to current events in ways that play well with the general population. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 can be spun as the necessary defense of native Russians from alleged Ukrainian persecution. The same story can justify the conflict in eastern Ukraine (though the Kremlin denies active involvement, noting that Ukrainian separatists are assisted, if at all, by Russian volunteers).

And NATO’s expansion to Russia’s very borders—how can that not be evidence of yet another plot to take Russia down? If NATO arose to counter the military threat posed by the Soviet Union, then with the latter’s collapse in 1991, what possible motivation can there be for its continued existence and eastern expansion if Russia is not its ultimate target?

Filtered through the nation’s mythic history, the answers to these questions come easily to many Russians, and they help cushion its isolation and the bite of sanctions—at least in terms of morale. Whatever the West does—from sanctions to enhanced NATO deployments close to Russia’s borders—it feeds a historical narrative in which Russia, on the defensive and sacrificing for the good and just, always wins in the end.

The post The Role of War and Sacrifice in Russia’s Mythic Identity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mostly, it seems, not in Russia. And it may be time for those of us in the West to grudgingly admit that our Eastern friends like their leader. In fact, they seem to really, really like him.

To put this latest referendum in context, let’s think about all that’s happened between the Western world and Russia since 2011-2013, when anti-government protestors were last taking to the streets in droves.

In the interim years, there was the annexation of Crimea by Russia after its ally, Ukrainian then-president Viktor Yanukovych, was run out of office in Kiev. There were subsequent sanctions. There was action threatened, and sometimes taken, over dueling interests in Syria. There were the Sochi Olympics. There was the international outcry after Russia implemented anti-LGBTQ legislation. There were falling oil prices and athletic doping scandals. There was the passage of a law that allows civil society groups to be put on a list of foreign agents if they accept foreign money or are politically engaged (the list now numbers over one hundred organizations, including independent pollster Levada, which was targeted on the eve of the election). There was derision over Mitt Romney saying Russia was our greatest geopolitical foe. There was derision over Barack Obama saying otherwise.

And plenty has happened within Russia, too—some independent from external events, some intricately entangled. There was the arrest, imprisonment, and release of punk group Pussy Riot. There was the arrest, imprisonment, and release (and Moscow mayoral campaign!) of lawyer and anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny. There was the release of billionaire turned political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. There was the murder of prominent opposition figure Boris Nemtsov. There were the recent Kremlin shake-ups. There was an economic crisis.

Throughout, journalists have been harassed, and opposition figures silenced (and, in the case of Boris Nemtsov, killed).

And still Vladimir Putin’s approval rating sits at 83 percent, up nearly 20 points from the time of his 2012 re-election. A fact that, again, is hard to face in certain quarters.

But, to quote Chekhov, “Mother Russia is vast,” and the vast majority of its people—including over a quarter who reside in rural areas—do not live in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or Vladivostok. They are divorced from the “foreign agents” and opposition figures of the cities, and want what so many people the world over want: To have enough money to eat and drink, enough to find a place to live, and to be left in a quiet peace. Whether we accept it or not, opposition to Putin is small and (at least geographically) contained. And those members who are not in jail or tired of arrest threats, like Soviet dissidents before them, cannot seem to agree on how to bring free and fair politics to Russia.

There may be something to the idea that Moscow’s persistent political persecution of the opposition and Putin’s high approval ratings are related, an opinion that’s been floated by America’s former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and echoed in a recent speech by President Barack Obama. And yet, to the extent that this criticism reaches ordinary Russians, it rarely influences their political outlook in the way Western elites intend.

We deride and mock Putin, and assume the Russian people should do the same. At the very least, we say, they would criticize him if they were free to do so. But Putin isn’t just popular because he keeps Russians from seeing alternate paths for themselves. He’s been able to gain and keep power because ordinary Russians saw themselves, and continue to see themselves, in him. They also see Putin as their protector. In the wake of the most recent election, the Moscow-based daily Vedomosti wrote that voting behavior was likely influenced by a popular notion that Russia is surrounded by enemies—and that only a president like Putin and members of his party can protect them.

In other words, when the West criticizes Putin— the man who stabilized Russia after a decade of discord, who told them they were great after the world told them they’d lost, who pointed out that Uncle Sam shouldn’t get to dictate how they live—the Russian people see us criticizing them. When we say that they only vote for Putin because they’re afraid or deluded, they may well feel not only insulted, but also justified in their political outlook. An outlook which will likely continue to be tied to how they perceive us perceiving them.

There are, to put it mildly, autocratic checks on civil society. And there are Russians who already want—and who have been arrested for, and who have died for—a freer, fairer society. But the fact is that many Russians won’t feel compelled to demand another choice so long as they see the necessity of a leader who will, first and foremost, be there to defend them from a hostile world. Tough talk like the American president likening their leader to a bored child slouching in the back of the classroom; the U.S. Congress cheering Russia’s isolation during a State of the Union address; or the leadership in Washington considering the Ukraine as an extension of the NATO alliance doesn’t boost Putin’s detractors—it only enshrines the problematic leader’s worldview.

In the technical language of political science, the calculus for many of the Russians who bother to go out to vote today boils down to this: Putin may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard. If Westerners really want to see his popularity wane, they best not give him justification to stay.

The post Memo to the West<span class="colon">:</span> Stop Giving Russians Reasons to Love Putin appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Noel Field was such a man–and for that reason his story is relevant for our troubled times. The mystery at the core of Field’s life is how an apparently good man, one who started out with noble intentions, could sacrifice his own and his family’s freedom, a promising career, and his country, for a fatal myth. His is the story of the sometimes-terrible consequence of blind faith.

The power of an Idea—be it a Holy Crusade, Fascism, Communism, or Radical Islam that promises a final correction of all personal, social, and political injustices can be compulsive. Some movements add the lure of “immortality.” They prey on questing, restless, dissatisfied youth who are gradually persuaded to surrender their freedom to a “higher” cause, an all-knowing Master. In this submission, there is relief from soul searching. At last there is an answer to every question. Once he surrenders, the convert feels a rush of relief—his existence now has meaning beyond himself. With the conversion he gains a fraternal comradeship, a family of the like minded. For this rapture, he yields moral responsibility, the duty to think for himself. The global crusade—and its master in the person in the Commissar or the Caliph—knows best.

Communism was one such messianic global crusade able to recruit the likes of Field and many others. Its seductive lure is one reason the Soviet Union proved such an unnerving Cold War adversary during the second half of the 20th Century. Great powers have always faced the danger of having traitors in their midst—citizens or officials who offer their services to rival powers, for money or petty personal grievances. But the Soviets, as the self-professed vanguard of an international revolution that would render nationalism and injustice a thing of the past, could count on a ready-made Fifth Column, especially among the intelligentsia, almost everywhere.

This was especially true in the 1930s, when Field, a young Harvard-educated State Department employee, was first approached by the Soviets. Field’s betrayal of his country and his family for the promise of Communism was not merely motivated by his deep longing for a life of significance. As was true for so many children of the Depression, disillusionment with democracy, capitalism, and the West’s appeasement of Hitler were strong motivations in signing up with Moscow. For these discontents, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat seemed to offer the only alternative to the West’s breadlines and mass unemployment, as well as opposition to the Nazis’ aggression and racism. That Stalin would later make his own deal with Hitler, that there were breadlines in Russia, that reality deviated from the Communist Manifesto—these were all facts. But what concerned Field and his compatriots were not the facts but the Cause.

Field, a sensitive, self-absorbed idealist-dreamer, was both an unlikely revolutionary and an ideal target for conversion to a powerful faith. In the 1930s, he joined the secret underground of the International Communist Movement. It was a time of national collapse: 10 million unemployed, rampant racism and, before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Washington parched of ideas. Communism promised the righting of social and political wrongs. To Field, World Revolution and the violent overthrow of his own government seemed a necessary price to pay for the ultimate triumph of the proletariat. Strict discipline and sacrifice for a cause beyond his person were expected of Field and his fellow recruits. Noel Field may never have hoisted an AK 47, nor strapped on a suicide vest, because he was never asked to. But his commitment and his submission to his cause were total and ultimately as destructive as those of today’s ISIS recruits.

But Field’s conversion wasn’t entirely political—his was a convergence of personal needs and political rationalization. What he and thousands of others like him had no way of knowing is that their recruitment was managed and manipulated by hardboiled cynics, skilled at spotting society’s vulnerable and promising youth. Nor did they suspect how far the reality of the Workers’ State would be from the promised Utopia.

Field was tapped as a potential spy in his time at the State Department—offering reports on colleagues and stealing documents from the West European Division—and continued when he took up a position in Switzerland for the League of Nations in 1936. He was lured to Prague in 1949, where he was arrested. He was then interrogated and tortured, his “confessions” manipulated and manufactured by Stalin to usher in the show trials that brought about the eventual murders of party members across the Eastern Bloc.

Field was not one of Stalin’s master spies. He lacked both the steel and the polished performance skills of a Kim Philby or an Alger Hiss. Field’s betrayals nonetheless cost lives. Above all, however, Noel Field’s story reveals his master’s boundless cruelty and sinister disregard for human life—including the life of his own faithful. Like thousands of others, Field was used—then, having served his purpose, he was discarded.

Communism tempted many of Field’s generation. Most, having observed the chasm between its promise and brutal reality, eventually moderated or abandoned their early zeal. Not Field. Though the dream of a triumphant working class soured and turned murderous, he stayed locked to his faith. He did not die a martyr in battle, but eventually he embraced a form of the martyrdom of innocents—his own among them—because that is what his master, Stalin, ordained.

Field never publicly spoke nor wrote candidly about his terrible choices. As Hungarian journalists working for American wire services in Budapest in the 1950s, my parents covered Field’s arrest by Soviet authorities, as well as the show trial that followed. Then, my parents were themselves arrested, and my father shared Field’s interrogator before his own fake trial for espionage. Moreover, my father was held in the same cell the American had previously occupied, both had been “Prisoner No. 410” for a period. Then, during the chaos of the Hungarian Revolution of October 1956, my parents located Field and his wife, and conducted the only known interview with them. Those are the circumstances that led me to write a book about him.

The post-Soviet Russia of Vladimir Putin is a craven, sly player on the international stage—a ruthlessly self-interested authoritarian, nationalistic project. Any pretense or sense of romance or idealism about Moscow’s role in global affairs is long gone, and so it is sometimes hard to remember now the power Russia once wielded in subverting some of our best and brightest through its appropriation of the socialist ideal.

But history—and a certain human vulnerability toward messiahs of all stripes—makes clear that there will be other waves of fanaticism in the future. They may be as dangerous and hard to control as the movement that now captures fighters for militant Islam, or the one that once held Noel Field. And Americans must always ensure that their own ideals are maintained and renewed, to withstand these external threats and misguided betrayals from within.

The post KGB Seeks to Hire Well-Connected Patrician WASPs, Apply Discreetly appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was the early 1980s and Robert Massie had just published his riveting Peter the Great biography (I devoured it on a family cruise, which surprisingly didn’t impress the teenage girls onboard); Warren Beatty had produced his magisterial (super long) Reds; and the ABC TV network broadcast The Day After, a movie about a Soviet nuclear strike that millions of high schoolers across the land, myself included, were encouraged to come together to watch, and then discuss. Because, you know, that really could happen. And so, the adults wanted to know, how did that make us feel?

Well, it made me feel like this Russia, land of despotic czars, earthshattering revolutions and missiles targeted our way, was a pretty happening place. And that’s even before getting to what was on the nightly news. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, and shot down a Korean airliner. President Reagan was calling them an evil empire and threatening to build a space-based anti-missile defense system in response to that movie we’d all seen on ABC. The Soviets were threatening to boycott our Olympics, as we had done theirs. The New York Times, meanwhile, spent a lot of newsprint trying to divine the intention of otherwise inscrutable Soviet leaders by their wardrobes. The nattier their suits, went the dubious logic, the greater the likelihood of a peaceful understanding between the two superpowers.

Back then, everything about Russia seemed massive, extreme and epic; contradictory and opaque. Russians had withstood centuries of unimaginable hardship to find themselves the improbable standard-bearers of a global cause that promised universal redemption, but delivered instead a rather grim version of purgatory on earth. Comrade, gulag, Siberia—single words dripping with vivid associations conveyed the price individual Russians had paid to preside collectively over one of two global power blocs: Team Red. The Russians had defeated Napoleon and Hitler; given humanity the gifts of Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky; launched the first satellite in space; kicked ass at every Olympics (now we know how); and obsessed weirdly over ballet and chess.

So naturally I said “sign me up” when I had an opportunity to visit the Soviet Union for two weeks while still in high school, as part of a cultural exchange. It was a trippy voyage to an alternative reality. With any genuine revolutionary zeal long extinguished by decades of living under the soul-crushing dictatorship of the proletariat, Moscow, Leningrad, and Minsk—their inherent March grayness still festooned with exhortative propaganda banners—felt like a kitschy totalitarian amusement park. Almost. There was nothing faded or fake about the palpable fear of ordinary Russians you’d meet with late at night under the statue of Yuri Gagarin to trade a Sony Walkman or jeans for KGB Border Guard hats or coats.

College deepened the seduction. I was completely in awe of the troika of Yale historians who brought the Soviets’ dramatic backstory to life: Firuz Kazemzadeh, who spiced his telling of the Romanovs’ three-century-long soap opera with vivid imagery of the empire’s Caucasian borderlands; Paul Bushkovitch, who handed out shots of vodka on Lenin’s birthday at our Russian Revolution seminar; and the ever-theatrical Wolfgang Leonhard, the former East German communist intellectual raised in Moscow who had turned on the DDR regime he had helped consolidate in its earliest days. As if the history weren’t enough, there was the brilliant literature and the challenging language, with all those declensions and the funky blending of those sh, ch and jr sounds, and the elongated mix of vowel sounds playing like a string quartet.

Best of all, none of this intoxicating immersion in all things Russian could be dismissed as an esoteric indulgence. Russia mattered; understanding Russia mattered. Couldn’t you see the breathless coverage those Reagan-Gorbachev summits were getting on TV? Know your enemy, and all that. It’s the same reason I see many young ambitious people nowadays rushing to study Arabic. It’s patriotic, career savvy, and intellectually satisfying, given the richness of the underlying culture.
 

***

 
Now don’t get me wrong. No other power has since replaced the USSR as a proper antithesis to the United States. China is a potent commercial competitor and a wary rival for influence in Asia, but its reach and ambitions aren’t expansive enough to turn the entire globe into a bipolar zero-sum face-off, as the Soviets once did. And more immediate threats loom elsewhere, across a series of smaller countries and terrorist groups.

The undeniable nostalgia for the Cold War in American culture is a hard thing to fathom, and it is one of the animating mysteries behind this week’s Inquiry at Zócalo. That confrontation came with a heavy price for Americans, and an even heavier price for people in many parts of the world who were treated as pawns in the two superpowers’ global chess match. And to the extent that after so much sacrifice and effort we’d already “won” it (a regrettable attitude that has gotten in the way of a more constructive relationship with Russia), why would Americans want to go back to the Cold War?

Let’s face it, the alternative to a Cold War with the Russians, has proven less appetizing than we might have expected. It’s not easy being the sole “hyperpower” responsible for all things. And the Soviets were formidable in a way that our more amorphous all-out enemies today—a shifting amalgam of unstable regimes and loosely affiliated transnational terrorist groups—can never be. Extremist Islamist groups aren’t competing head-to-head with our best and brightest to explore space, to cure cancer, to win over hearts and minds in Western Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, or to win Olympic gold.

And yet today’s less worthy opponents are more dangerous because they lack a superpower’s rationality and investment in a bipolar status quo. In our age of asymmetrical warfare and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, you don’t need a Russian-sized nuclear arsenal to pose an imminent threat to our way of life. No enemy we face again will likely have at its disposal the destructive force the Soviets could command, but plenty of enemies we face today and will face in the future are far more likely to unleash whatever destructive force they can muster. There was much to abhor about our Soviet nemesis during the Cold War, but deep down, its leaders never wanted us all dead.

With the Russians, you always felt that if aliens from another galaxy attacked earth, the American president could pick up his red phone and get Moscow to set aside their differences with us and join forces on Team Humanity. When it comes to the likes of ISIS, good luck with that.
 

***

 
The Russian-American rivalry has been playing itself out for one year shy of a century. It was in 1917 that both gigantic nations burst onto the global stage to offer a war-weary world competing visions of an alternative tomorrow. Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin appeared on the destroyed imperial scene as messianic figures, one peddling the possibility of national self-determination to all peoples through his Fourteen Points, the other carrying the torch for the international proletarian revolution that would render nationalism, and social classes, obsolete.

With all its flaws and heinous behavior, the USSR, much like the United States and contrary to most other modern nation-states, was predicated on a universal ideal that people anywhere could rally around. The Soviets’ project was also— again, despite its flaws—a forward-looking one, unlike those of our current enemies who desperately want to turn back the clock.

The formal demise of the USSR in 1991 ostensibly ended the Cold War, and historians will long debate the extent to which the ensuing few years constituted a missed opportunity on Washington’s part to recast U.S.-Russian relations on far friendlier ground. But whether you believe the fault lies primarily with our missteps or inevitable Russian yearnings to remain an antithesis to the West, the fact is that the Cold War antagonism is back.

That’s both maddening and comforting. Russia is less of a global player than the Soviet Union, more of a “normal country,” and it must now share the other end of the proverbial seesaw from us with other U.S. antagonists. So the stakes may not be quite as high, but Vladimir Putin is doing his darnedest to play the part.

The Russians are back, in time to mess with our presidential election, both as a befuddling topic and a devious protagonist. It’s hard to imagine a more Cold War-ish form of belligerence than cyber warfare, and the hacking of our electoral process and of our leaders’ private communications, with an eye towards their public dissemination. Such attacks are a sophisticated technical challenge, no one gets physically hurt, but the mere possibility of these hacks wreak havoc on our nerves, and incite waves of insecurity and paranoia, as well as calls for retaliation and escalation.

The seductive chess match is back on.

The post I Could Blame Peter the Great or Warren Beatty, But Either Way The Soviets Got to Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

00:00 Soviet ICBMs launch, possibly from Kozelsk or Tatishchevo.

The threats the Soviets posed to America and its vision of global order were at one level ideological, at another imperial, and at another existential. The first two threats were answered quickly. Our answer to communism was democratic capitalism and our answer to Moscow’s expansionism was containment.

00:01 U.S. satellites detect the Soviet missiles.

By the late 1940s, with the circulation of George Kennan’s Long Telegram (and subsequent “X” article), the articulation of NSC-68, and the formation of NATO, the lasting shape of a response to the Soviet imperial threat had taken shape.

There was to be no such tidy, rational response to the unprecedented existential danger posed by nuclear weapons, however. It was not simply a matter of vulnerability, but also a matter of deep uncertainty.

00:04 After confirming the satellite data, NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, notifies the designated White House “crisis coordinator” that an attack is underway. That person must then find and inform the president and convene an emergency meeting of top military and civilian advisers.

The Cold War was more than an ideological conflict, it was a psychological conflict as well: A quest for a global anxiolytic.

It’s hard, to this day, to grasp both the immediacy and durability of the nuclear threat. The Soviet development of nuclear weapons meant that for decades people in the United States lived with the knowledge that only 30 minutes stood between us and nuclear annihilation. That was obviously terrifying; it still is. But what made it even more terrifying was that there was no clear way to prevent or cope with this all-consuming threat.

For one, we never really knew what the Soviets had, or when they had it. The American intelligence community woefully and repeatedly misjudged Soviet capabilities. To start, they underestimated how long it would take the USSR to develop an atomic device, leaving Washington scrambling when they it detected their first nuclear test in 1949.

00:09 Military officers brief the president on preplanned emergency launch options, which are detailed in a black binder inside the so-called “nuclear football,” carried by a presidential aide at all times to minimize response delays.

The pattern continued in subsequent decades with unfounded fears of a “bomber gap” and then a “missile gap,” misreadings that highlighted more of an intelligence gap. Our knowledge of the Soviet nuclear program was inadequate throughout the Cold War, and only added to the climate of uncertainty.

Not only did we not know what the Soviets had, we also didn’t know what their intentions were. Many Americans thought that it was entirely possible that Soviet leaders would launch an attack out of the blue one day. U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who headed Strategic Command, even came up with a bizarre metaphor to describe this uncertainty, suggesting that a “gnome in the basement” (presumably Khrushchev) might someday see the light, judge that “the correlation of forces is right,” and decide to launch an attack. The U.S. met this uncertainty by building more weapons, which perversely led the Soviets to do the same. The arms race would then start over again.

00:17 The briefing concludes, leaving the president about two minutes to decide how to respond. If there is any delay, U.S. ICBMs will be destroyed in their silos by incoming Soviet warheads before they can be launched for a retaliatory attack.

Americans were also particularly worried about a nuclear surprise because we had been on the receiving end of conventional surprises. Pearl Harbor was still fresh in the national memory after World War II, and the attack had spurred the creation of the CIA. But the agency failed to predict North Korea’s 1950 invasion of the South, and we were caught flat-footed yet again.

00:19 The president selects one of the pre-planned options and communicates it to the Pentagon, which authenticates his identity and formats launch orders.

This new intelligence failure led to the establishment of the Office of National Estimates—an office charged with compiling the best intelligence evaluations and using them to predict the future. But ONE failed repeatedly as well—most notably with a Sept. 1962 estimate that Khrushchev was highly unlikely to put nuclear missiles in Cuba because it would not be rational to do so.

Uncertainty also marked planning for nuclear war: no one knew exactly what to do with the nukes we had. At first, the Air Force treated them as simply more powerful versions of conventional bombs, developing the anesthetically named “Single Integrated Operational Plan-62,” which allowed for a preemptive strike of over 3,000 nuclear weapons if the Soviets made an aggressive move.

00:24 The launch orders are transmitted to American ICBM crews via encoded Emergency Action Messages.

But the truth was that the military had no idea what it was doing. As Alain Enthoven, a former RAND strategist at the Pentagon, once retorted to an officer who found his civilian meddling intolerable, “General, I have fought just as many nuclear wars as you have.”

The prospect of nuclear war came at the same time that the military began using operations research and systems analysis to develop conventional war strategy. With these tools at hand, nuclear war at first seemed like just another problem to be solved with the careful application of scenarios and algorithms.

00:27 Having authenticated the EAMs, U.S. Air Force missileers begin the launch sequence.

But there was no scenario under which nuclear war could be considered winnable, and attempts to secure certainty with more weapons eventually morphed into attempts to secure certainty through arms control. Both Russians and Americans seemed to recognize that the existential danger of nuclear weapons was a problem as great, if not greater, than those posed by ideology or imperial expansionism.

00:29 U.S. ICBMs launch.

The fundamental purpose of arms control wasn’t a reduction of numbers, per se, but the establishment of transparency, predictability, and stability—i.e., the antitheses of uncertainty.

Of course, the notion that the weapons and not the Soviets were the problem was seen as dovish silliness by some hawks, the intellectual adjunct to the gut instincts of the …

00:30 Soviet warheads begin to detonate over the United States, destroying Washington, D.C. and killing millions.

The post I Tried Writing This in the Time It Would Take a Russian Missile to Hit Washington—I Didn’t Finish appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This was not Adams’ first trip to a country most Americans viewed more in the light of legend than history. Almost 30 years earlier, John Adams had sent his son, 14-year-old John Quincy, to serve as the secretary to Francis Dana, who was being dispatched to Russia to seek aid for the revolutionary cause. Catherine the Great refused to receive the American emissary, and neither diplomat nor secretary had much to do. But this remarkably perspicacious boy paid close attention to the world into which he had been cast. “The Sovereign,” he wrote to his mother Abigail, “is Absolute, in all the extent of the word … And the nobility have the same power over the people, that the Sovereign has over them. The Nation is wholly composed of Nobles and Serfs, or in other words, of Masters and Slaves.” The system, he wrote, is disadvantageous even to the ruler, for the nobles continually rebel against absolute power. Young though he was, Adams was very much a republican in the land of absolutism.

The Adams of 1809, the future president and son of a former president, was a man of wide experience. He had served as minister in The Hague and Berlin, and had represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. Adams knew Europe well, but Russia was not Europe. Adams thought about Russia much as many Europeans thought about America—as a vast, dynamic, semi-civilized, and almost dream-like place.

Even among the aristocrats who represented the nations of Europe in the Russian court, Adams cut a commanding, and quite forbidding, figure. “He sat in the frivolous assemblies of St. Petersburg like a bull-dog among spaniels,” as a British visitor put it, “and many were the times that I drew monosyllable and grim smiles from him and tried in vain to mitigate his venom.” Adams was not nearly so venomous towards other nations as he was towards America’s former colonial master, but he was a stubborn and single-minded advocate. We know from Adams’ own journal entries that he continually pressed Count Rumiantsev, Russia’s foreign minister, to break with Napoleon’s so-called Continental System, a series of embargos that kept English goods, whether carried by English ships or neutrals like the U.S., out of the ports of Europe. Russia had been compelled to enforce the system after suffering humiliating defeats by Napoleon’s army in 1806. Dozens of American ships had been bottled up in the Gulf of Cronstadt, outside of St. Petersburg.

Adams had an unexpected advantage over the much older men of the court, who had left their families at home: he had his young wife Louisa, their two-year-old son Charles Francis, and a pretty sister-in-law. While the 31-year-old Tsar Alexander trained his wandering eye on Louisa’s sister, he and his wife Elizabeth were also much taken with Charles Francis. They had lost two children before the age of two, the last one only 18 months before the Adamses arrived, and they practiced their English with Charles Francis, though the boy was more comfortable in French and German.

Whether because of Adams’ relentless prosecution of his country’s cause, or the Tsar’s fondness for his family, or perhaps even Alexander’s partiality to the United States, it had become clear by late 1809 that Russian policy was tilting away from France and towards the U.S. and other neutrals. On December 31, 1810, the Emperor issued a ukase lifting all restrictions on exports from Russia and on imports coming by sea, while at the same time imposing a heavy tariff on goods arriving overland, most of which came from France. Alexander thus broke decisively with the Continental System. This was a tremendous diplomatic triumph for the U.S., since most cargo carried to Russia by ship came in American vessels, whether the cargo was American or English. Napoleon concluded that he could not subdue Europe unless he invaded Russia, which he would do, suicidally, 18 months later.

In the early 19th century, when correspondence traveled no faster than a horse and carriage or a sailing ship could go, diplomats had a great deal of time on their hands. Adams engaged in learned banter—always in French—with his fellow ministers, several of whom were as erudite as he. (One of Adams’ colleagues whiled away his time translating Horace’s Latin Odes into Greek.) He went on long walks even in the blinding white winters, often meeting no one save the Tsar himself, out with his carriage.

The most painful rituals were social. Adams and Louisa were invited to lavish dancing parties, balls, masquerades, luncheons, and winter carnivals where ladies shot down ice hills on sleds. Everyone gambled, at cards and dice. Louisa was even more shocked at the debauchery than was her husband, who by now felt that he had seen everything. However, Adams barely survived on a modest American salary, and could reciprocate nothing, a source of great embarrassment.

Adams was deeply impressed by Russian piety, noting that even the gentry fasted for the 40 days of Lent—and then gorged themselves on the stupendous feats of Easter. Everything was strange and outsized. Men wagered on which day the ice on the Neva would break; and when, in mid-May, it finally did so, the governor of St. Petersburg brought the Tsar an ice-cold glass of river water, and the Tsar rewarded him with a hundred ducats. The Russian palaces were vast, the furnishings dazzling. At Catherine’s palace in Tsarskoye Selo—the Winter Palace—the magnificent decorations were decaying from wanton neglect. But Adams found the gravestones of three imperial greyhounds—”Sir Tom Anderson, Duchesse, and Zemire”—with inscriptions written in impeccable French verse.

Adams never lost his fascination with Russia; nor did Tsar Alexander’s fondness for the United States flag. But the bond between the two nations, the one the defender of autocratic orthodoxy, the other of republican liberty, was not a natural one. After Russia defeated Napoleon and humbled France, the Tsar placed himself at the head of the Holy Alliance, a league of princes dedicated to stamping out all traces of republican thought in Europe. In 1817, Adams became Secretary of State in the administration of President James Monroe. He was the chief intellectual force behind the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which stipulated that since “the political system of the allied powers”—the Holy Alliance—was “essentially different” from that of the United States, the U.S. would “consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” The New World, that is, would be republican, and the U.S. would be its guarantor. The ideological struggle that would come to define U.S. relations with the Soviet Union in the 20th century was thus prefigured by the friction between republican America and autocratic Russia.

Adams himself delivered a version of Monroe’s speech—in the form of a note verbale—to Baron de Tuyll, Russia’s minister to the U.S. He wanted Russia to understand that the United States would not tolerate any attempt to transplant authoritarian rule to North or South America.

The Adams of 1823, like the Adams of 1781, was a zealous patriot and a passionate republican. He would never permit his partiality towards Russia to supersede his defense of liberty.

The post America’s Relationship With Russia Has Always Been Complicated appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.