Category: History

“Weak Strongman” by Timothy Frye: why you should read this book

If you want to understand Russia better, here are the reasons why you should read this book.

1. Deflating Putinology

Putinology, i.e. the approach “Know Putin, Know Russia”, has dominated the newsfeed from Russia and research about it. This Putin-centricity assumes that the man is motivated by a core set of beliefs—and if you can decipher them, you can make sense of his policy, as well as predict what’s the future has in store for us.

Tim Frye demonstrates that the worldview of President Putin and his personal power is hugely exaggerated as a policy factor. He faces a wealth of constraints we can’t even imagine. Studying his tactical thinking and his reactive frame of mind is much more relevant.

2. Stress on quantitative research

The author doesn’t go down the beaten path of profusely quoting newsmakers, activists, media persons, dissidents, and tidbits from past newsfeeds to prove his points. Quantitative research, with a lot of figures and summaries of opinion polls, takes much place in the book. I wish this would be a golden standard for those who make a claim to explaining Russia’s current policies to the public.

3. Cross-cultural context

Tim Frye pulls together much international research about countries with political traditions comparable to Russia. It shows that what happens here is rather mainstream in the global context. If you believe the author, Russia is no longer the “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” like it was in the era of Churchill and Stalin.

My favorite quotes:

Former leader of the Soviet Union Khrushchev… described governing Russia to Fidel Castro as follows:

“You’d think I could change anything in this country. Like hell, I can. No matter what changes I propose and carry out, everything stays the same. Russia is like a tub full of dough, you put your hand down in it, down to the bottom, and think you are master of the situation. When you first pull out your hand, a little hole remains, but then, before your very eyes, the dough expands into a spongy, puffy mass. That’s what Russia is like.”

Russians have long since abandoned hope that the government will help solve their problems… Russians continue to rely heavily on friends and family to find jobs, earn a living, and solve their daily problems. They turn to the state and politics primarily when all other options have failed. As Greene argues, “The general quiescence [of the Russian public] coexists with a deep-seated antipathy toward the country’s ruling elite.”

“As late as June 2002, Putin stated that NATO enlargement to include the Baltics was “no tragedy” so long as no new military infrastructure was introduced.”

Three reasons not to read Tim Frye’s book

1. The yawn factor. The language is approachable alright, the topics are fully in trend. But the more you read it, the less exceptional modern Russia looks to you. If you believe Mr. Frye, almost all that’s going on here in our neck of the woods, has been observed someplace else in the world, time and time again.

2. Ideological non-alignment. If you belong to Putin’s fan club or are a Putin-hater, little in the book really gets you excited. Our beloved President mostly comes across as a shrewd guy who just minds his own business of getting the best out of his stay in the Kremlin for himself, his friends, and his family.

3. The book is a bit too light on Russian sources for empirical research data. I would expect more from someone with “fluent Russian” as his CV has it.

The picture below shows a half pint of dark ale at the bar Pig and Rose in Moscow. It teaches us to better tell foam from beer in President Putin’s policies—the way Tim Frye does in his book.

Tim Frye tells foam from beer in President Putin’s policies.

As a conservative, how do you stay in shape?

Short answer: Rucking and burpees.

Longer answer:

The Covid pandemics and the recurring lockdown let my inner conservative spread his wings like never before – and rucking and burpees have become a very prominent role in my body’s maintenance routine.

Historically, these two are very conservative exercises.

Below, me bathing in sunset shines in my gym this summer. Over the last year, despite certain overconsumption of red wine and chocolate, I went down in weight from 86 to 78 kg. (My height is 182 cm).

What I did was taking into use two basic body exercises known to the pious and God-fearing for thousands of years.

1. Rucking

Rucking is a heavy-duty, lower-intensity workout that consists of walking or slowly running with a weight for a set distance. Usually, it happens with a weighted rucksack. I use a weighted 30 kg vest:

I pace the walk to keep my average heart rate at about 80–85% of my maximum HBM for 30–45 minutes. Almost the entire body working under the pressure of additional kilograms makes me break in sweat during the first few minutes of the exercise. Usual walks bore me to death. Rucking at about 6 kmh with an additional 30 kg is the opposite of boring, I assure you.

Saint Peter was the most known practitioner (albeit involuntary) of rucking. In his time, people used chains for weight. St. Peters device is kept on display in the reliquary of San Pietro in Vincoli.

Many Christians have been practicing this ever since. Some of them even made it a lifestyle item. Below is a part of a large painting “Boyar Lady Morozova” with a fool for Christ sporting a massive metal cross with an industrial chain over his shoulders.

Below, a modern-day Russian lady in an Orthodox procession disciplining her body and spirit with a similar device.

2. Burpees

Burpees are ground bows extended to lying down flat on the floor at the low point and jumping jacks at the high point. You can take burpees at your own tempo. Fast or slow, they are taxing anyway.

The classic of Marxism-Leninism Vladimir Lenin discovered the magic of burpees in Tsar’s lock-up. This illustrates one major great advantage of burpees. You can do them whenever pandemics, angry parents, or court orders ground you in some cramped space.

Once you start doing burpees, it doesn’t take too many of them before you find out how much you hate them. I hate them, too. But my inner conservative is merciless. Millions of Christians, Muslims, and others who practiced the deep bows through centuries — and the founder of Soviet rule is also among them —can not be wrong. I abide.

Below, a woman in old-era Russia performs deep bows in the small living room of a peasant cottage in front of her mother-in-law. Combining your burpee routine with relationship-building with your in-laws, how about that?

What are the best films with conservative themes?

Conservative Themes on Screen in nutshell.

My Top Three Films to turn you into a conservative.

(The list below is based on my understanding of conservatism as a life strategy focused on detecting incoming threats and defending your perimeter.

As a conservative, I don’t believe in “good news”. The good news is no news. No news is good news. Change is mostly about things turning bad, or worse. Death is the ultimate Change Agent. Nor do I trust progress. “Progress” is an illusion, a mere projection of spiraling complexity of the outside world, cold and indifferent to man.)

1. “Black Hawk Down”, by Ridley Scott

The tale of President Clinton’s misfired “humanitarian mission” in Somalia in 1993. A brilliant exposé on how the best of plans to help out people in need turns into an orgy of death and destruction, where the bravest and the innocent are the first to get killed.

The bluish color palette is bled for light. The ageless ethnic-inspired musical theme is soaked with pain and sorrow. The final scene where heavily armed Americans run home to their base through a devastated cityscape peppered by rounds from ghost-like locals clearly tells you the bottom line. In this world, consider just staying alive for another day as a success. Anything above that is a precious blessing that won’t last long.

2. “The Wire” (TV series)

It’s the best TV series of all time to me. It’s a paradox how strongly the team of its liberal creators projects the central message of conservatism: the mission of man is to keep the Devil down in the hole, for as long as possible. At the end of the day, the Devil always breaks out—but don’t let it happen on your watch!

The iconic Clay Davis’ line is a hilarious soundbite to illustrate how progressives almost always play the Devil’s hand in the best-intentioned of their endeavors. Sorting out their mess falls on the conservatives. But never mind. As Murphy’s Combat Laws postulate, “Anything you do can get you killed. Including doing nothing.”

3. “Hard to be a god”, by late Alexei German

A dark, depressing piece for select film connoisseurs.

A progressive Earthling tries to save few feeble shoots of science and enlightenment among humanoids in some medieval extra-terrestrial universe. People there live unhappy lives in squalor and dirt. The black-and-white scenery reeks of stale sewage, an unkept slaughterhouse, smoke from damp firewood, and vintage BO.

It takes a particular passion for art movies to sit it out for the movie’s entire length. In keeping with Russian storytelling traditions, it’s protracted, verbose, loaded with attempts at collateral storylines and obscure cultural allusions. “If you’re bored, this is not made for the likes of you”.

What the movie does though, is vividly show life through the lenses of Russian progressives. Over many centuries, they’ve been agonizing finding themselves in an ocean of poor, uneducated, apathetic, often hostile and downright sadistic commoners, and their thieving, arrogant, ruthless rulers. A few bold attempts to profoundly make a difference ended in misery for millions, like in 1917 and 1991.

This slow-moving train wreck of a universe is suffused with conservative wisdom. Some houses cannot be put back in order, no matter how much resources and firepower you have. Let them burn if they want to. But for God’s sake keep them from burning your house!

What happened to the Communist Party members after the fall of the USSR?

Almost the entire top tier of Russian politics consists of former members of the ruling Communist party of the Soviet Union. They have proved their conversion to champions of Capitalism. They all are very wealthy now.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was banned by Yeltsin in 1991, and remained illegal for about a year. Hardcore Communists, who still believed in the ideology, formed the Communist party of Russian Federation as well as a few smaller parties and fractions.

Technically, it makes Putin and the other rulers past members of an illegal far-left political entity as per Nov 6, 1991. There are no records of their Communist allegiance after that date.

Boris Yeltsin, his team and other Communists who eyed new, bigger opportunities in the Capitalist Russia, threw out their membership cards and went on building their new careers. Some of them, like President Putin and his friends, ultimately became the super rich rulers of the modern Russian state-oligarchical system.

Here’s an abridged list of top politicians, bureaucrats and managers in today’s Russia who were card-carrying Party members under Soviet rule.

  • President Putin, member of the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) since 1975.
  • Valentina Matviyenko, head of the upper chamber of Russian parliament: member of the CPSU since 1972.
  • Sergey Naryshkin, Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service: member of the CPSU since 1976.
  • Dmitry Medvedev, PM: member of the CPSU since 1986
  • Sergey Shoygu, defense minister: member of the CPSU since 1979.
  • Sergey Lavrov, foreign minister: member of the CPSU since 1972.
  • Sergey Sobyanin, mayor of Moscow: member of the CPSU since 1986.
  • Alexander Bortnikov, FSB chief: member of the CPSU since 1975.
  • Yury Chaika, Putin’s chief prosecutor: member of the CPSU since 1976.
  • Igor Sechin, Putin’s oil czar: member of the CPSU since 1990.
  • Anatoly Chubais, Putin’s innovation czar: member of the CPSU since 1980.
  • Anton Siluanov, Putin’s economy czar: member of the CPSU since 1989.
  • Vyacheslav Volodin, Putin’s former spin master, now chairman in the lower chamber of Duma: member of the CPSU since 1985.
  • Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s special envoy in charge of Ukraine, former spin master: member of the CPSU since 1985.
  • Tatyana Golikova, Putin’s chief auditor: member of the CPSU since 1986.
  • Valery Zorkin, Chairman of the Constitutional Court: member of the CPSU since 1970.

Soviet WW2 propaganda and the Allies’ war effort

The Allied war effort in WW2 was the area where Soviet propaganda always observed factual accuracy. However, it was always framed as an auxiliary chapter, incomparable to the role of the USSR. Information about the lend-lease was patchy, and presented in such a way where only specialists could assess its significance.

The guidelines for the Soviet propaganda concerning the Allies and their contribution to the victory in WWII were rather unchanged throughout the whole post-war history:

  • The outcome of the war was decided by the USSR, with some help from the Allies. Their fear of Hitler made them overcome their previous anti-Sovietism. (But not for long).
  • The whole thing was called The Great Patriotic War 1941–1945. WWII before that was a separate war between Germany and the Capitalist France and Great Britain who unsuccessfully had tried to direct the German aggression toward the USSR. The Western front was opened in Bretagne in 1944, not in France 1939.
  • There was some delivery of weapons, equipment and food, on a commercial basis, called lend-lease. Many British and American men died transporting it over the Atlantic. We appreciate their sacrifice.

Below, you see a typical Soviet propaganda poster about the Allied effort in WWII at the bottom of my posting. The Soviet soldier takes the central, most prominent place, the American and British are sort of escorting him to battle, or trying to cover behind his back. No sign of anything suggesting the lend-lease deliveries.

The lend-lease itself was not a secret. But it was largely reduced to footnotes and short secondary chapters in the history books. The whole scale of it, especially the food component of the help, became known to the public first in the late 1980s, right before the USSR collapsed.

If my memory serves me right, my dad mentioned once or twice Soviet posters in English that were made in the USSR celebrating the British military transports to Arkhangelsk. They were intended for display in places visited during the war by the Allied diplomats and military. So far, I haven’t seen any of them.

Picture: “The Red Army, together with the armies of our allies will break the back of the Fascist beast (Iosif Stalin)“.

“Girl and her Red Army Trooper”

The picture below “Girl and her Red Army Trooper” was painted in 1920 by Samuel Adlivankin. It shows a Communist soldier spending quality time with a working lady over a Marxist study book.

The book cover says: “Politics 101”. The man is wearing the distinctive uniform of the Red Army. Red troopers inherited it from the Imperial army in WW1. The nationalist designers made a pointy hat to mimic the medieval helms of Rus warriors. The red razgovóry across the chest also mimicked the ethnic decoration from the pre-Imperial era of Muscovy.

The man’s boots are most probably taken from the military supplies sent by the Allied powers to the Czar and the Provisional Government, and taken by local Soviet troops from busted warehouses around the country. The wall is adorned by a portrait of Karl Marx. The phonograph and the sofa were most probably confiscated from counter-revolutionary elements for the benefit of exploited masses.

The USSR and universal health care

The Soviet experience confirmed that even with the best of efforts health care ends us just like any competitive race. Even though all the runners in a race start equal, they finish unequal.

I lived both under the real Socialism and Capitalism, so I have sort of 3D optics on the issue of universal health care.

Impractical beauty

Universal health care is one of particular implementation of equality. As such, I view equality very much like heavenly sex. It’s perfectly possible, people have experienced it, and everyone have pretty much the idea what it is like. Yet, it’s a very, very elusive animal. The problem is, it doesn’t last long, it’s very hard to get to, it’s often very impractical, and most attempts to get there are doomed to end up in an abject failure.

“Health for all”

With health care, you are in the same situation as with universal education, and universal security: there’s no way any society can have “too much” of it. Unlike good sex, there’s no natural limit to how much of it we can take before we say: “This is simply too good, we must put a limit to it.”

In addition, we’re all awfully unequal in health. Some people are born perfectly healthy, never catch as much as a flu, live to 100, no problem. Many more people are in need of health care throughout the whole life. Also, there are hypochondriacs. On top of it, there are too many people who knowingly try to abuse the system.

The Implementation Hell

Communists in the USSR hit the problem pretty much right away when they introduced the universal health care. As long as it was about pretty basic things like maternal care, shots for kids, fixing broken limbs and bandaging wounds, it worked decently. But once we went up in quality and scope, we ran into the same darned problem as the US:

  • some people contributed much without getting back what they needed when they needed it
  • some people needed much more than the system could afford to provide
  • some people abused the system
  • some people used their privilege to get access to more (or much more) than the contributed themselves

Useful slogan

The Soviet experience suggests that health care issue is destined to remain a bottomless source of inspiration for populist politicians. It will go on as long as we won’t know how to make our bodies smooth reparable machines on a simple malfunction insurance plan.

Below, a poster from the 1930s: “He is a malingerer. He’s fine, but fakes illness, to shirk from work on insurance. He steals from the genuinely ill and fails the work requirements.”

USSR 2.0: A possibility?

Saving the country by ditching the Communist project was a project that the Soviet reformers ran aground. Putin had great success in turning Russia the way they tried to change the USSR.

Soviet Communism has compromised itself to the degree that even hard-boiled Stalinists find it necessary to recreate it with a serious upgrade. A multi-ethnic empire without the Communists is a different matter, though.

President Putin has been recreating on the territory of Russia something we could for simplicity call a sort of a Soviet-Union-with-shopping-malls-instead-of-Communism for some time now. Looking back, we discern parallels between today’s Russia and long-term visions of Andropovites. They were technocrats and intellectuals in the service of the KGB in the 1960s-80s who prepared a kind of China-like transition to Capitalism in “Socialist” clothes.

President Putin has achieved a considerable success where the Andropovites failed. This proves that some form of the “old USSR” in 1990s was salvageable.

Three big caveats, though:

  1. Ethnic nationalism in the colonies around the southern and western rim. This is what brought down the USSR in 1991. China didn’t have to grapple with that. Ukraine and Belarus could have been retained, but hardly the rest.
  2. Oil prices. Everyone is blaming Yeltsin and his dodgy American counselors for the chaos in the 1990s. The question is how someone like Putin would have made it with his state pockets empty back then. Putin’s approach to every problem has always ample money in it. I seriously question Putin’s ability to manage serious challenges on a shoestring.
  3. If Communists and radical nationalists (“the Red-Browns” of Khasbulatov, Rutskoy, or Ziuganov variation) had reclaimed power in 1992, 1993 or 1996, the USSR 2.0 wouldn’t have a chance by now. Imagine everything what Yeltsin is now blamed for, plastered all over the Soviet old-timers. Russia would have been in NATO and EU by now.

Three beasts that killed the USSR

There were three basic factors that brought down the USSR:

  1. The system exhausted sources for the economic growth. From the late 1970s onward, the economic inputs in the Soviet Union started to surpass the economic outputs. With the drop in oil prices in the 1980s, we ran out of reserves to compensate for the inefficiencies inherent to our centrally-planned model (see the graph below).
  2. Sharp rise of ethnic nationalism, starting with the Jeltoqsan riots in 1986.
  3. Military setbacks amid the dramatic escalation of arms race: the Afghan war, Operation Mole Cricket 19, the impossibility to match the increasing technology gap in the latest military technologies. This created an enormous pressure to close the gap, which made the top elite start casting around for new approaches. That’s how the Perestroika and Glasnost weren’t shot down right from the outset.

Computers in the USSR: a promise of the see-all, know-all central brain

Creation of an all-encompassing, ubiquitous national data network that would compute plans and quotas and survey their implementation was a grand dream of Soviet progressivists after WW2. The bureaucracy liked the idea of omniscience, but didn’t want machine brains substitute their own.

Starting in the early 1950s, many Soviet researchers were very upbeat about computers and mainframe networks.

A high-ranking scientist Viktor Glushkov came in the late 1950s with a blueprint for an All-State Automated System for the purposes of Soviet planning and reporting. It would be a vast digital network with 20,000 mainframes at major industrial units, with 300,000 operators, linked to hundreds of regional administrative centers, who then would be pushing the data to a processing hub in Moscow. The proposal was to roll it out over 30 years, and spend on it $335 million at today’s prices.

The Soviet leaders came to consider the plan first in 1970. They radically scaled it down to a few thousand mainframes, not connected. After repeatedly failing over the following years to revive interest in his plan, Glushkov succumbed to the theory that his problems were caused by a sabotage from American spies. He died in 1982, by which time Yuri Andropov, the new Soviet crown prince, had already pinned his hopes for economic renewal on limited market liberalization, an approach that rendered the concept of a computerized command economy redundant.