I am working very hard on getting Sikunder Burnes into shape for publication. Just ten weeks left to achieve that. Still hacking a lot of draft material out of the text. This passage on the Russian Empire was written before the tragic events in Ukraine.
I still reckon the solution for Ukraine is a series of internationally supervised referenda, in the Eastern districts and also in Crimea, with UN peacekeepers in charge of security. Putin needs a ladder to climb down. For the West to base its position solely on the sanctity of arbitrary borders is unimaginative and fruitless.
I would point out that what follows was a draft, not finished writing:
British people, myself included, have to concentrate their intellectual resources to get a clear conceptualisation of the Russian Empire, which can be obscured from our view by a number of factors.
Firstly, from British history and geography, we British tend to think of colonies as something reached exclusively by ship. The idea that colonies can be a contiguous land mass with the metropolitan is not a pre-received idea for us. Russia’s absorption of the entirely alien cultures of vast areas of Asia was undoubtedly a massive colonial expansion. In Central Asia today, political societal and economic developments can only be understood as a post-colonial situation. Crucially, the broad mass of people are themselves entirely of the view that they are former colonised.1. But I found in the FCO a great many western and particularly British officials had much trouble with the concept.
Secondly, the transmutation of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union confused the issue, in bringing a spurious equality to the different Soviet Socialist Republics. In particular, this brought members of the political elite from the Asian areas within reach of holding political power at the centre. But that is not at all unusual for the history of Empires in general, particularly as they mature. The economic relationships within the Soviet Union, with the Asian regions very much operating as suppliers of raw commodity or goods with little value added, followed a well-worn colonial pattern even if operated by central planning rather than overt capitalism. But many did not realise the Soviet Union in itself was an Empire incorporating colonial structures.
Thirdly, particularly for those brought up like myself during the Cold War, the Russians were distant and feared figures and not perceived as altogether European. In fact, the Russian conquest of the the North and heart of Asia was a major part of a complete encirclement of Asia by Europeans from the late eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. This included the occupation by United States Europeans of the American Pacific Rim, and of Australia, New Zealand, East Africa, much of South East Asia and India by the British and occasionally others. Russian and British expansion into Asia were part of the exact same process, except the British often did not see it:
A long liberal tradition took a sceptical view of Russia’s European credentials, seeing Tsarist Russia as as “Asiatic despotism” too crude and too poor to be “one of us”…A more realistic view would see Russia, like Spain or the Hapsburg Empire, as one of the frontier states that played a vanguard role in Europe’s expansion…behind Russia’s expansion was in fact its European identity…the economic energy that flowed from Russia’s integration into the European economy; and the intellectual access that Russians enjoyed, from the sixteenth century onward, to the general pool of European ideas and culture. Russians, like other Europeans, claimed their conquests as a “civilizing mission.”2
Britain’s claim that Russia was excluded from the “civilizing mission” of Empire because it was a despotism, when British officials were arbitrarily blowing Indians from the muzzles of cannon while practising unabashed despotism, is something those of my age were educated not to question. The notion that the culture of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Tchaikovsky is not European is self-evidently wrong. I found that walking around the 19th century Russian cantonments of Margilan in the Ferghana Valley, with its beautiful little theatre for amateur dramatics, its racecourse and mess hall, the architecture could have been a British hill station. It even has its Freemasons’ Lodge.
So Russia and Britain were expanding their colonial possessions in Asia, and their boundaries were pushing ever closer.
The Russophobes therefore were not talking absolute nonsense. Nobody knew how far North-west the British might push and how far South-east the Russians. Nor was it physically impossible for a Russian army to invade India through Afghanistan or Persia. Alexander, Mahmood, Tamerlane, Babur, Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah had all done that. The logistics were difficult, but not impossible. The British were very aware that historically India was vulnerable to attack from the North West. In the marvellous prose of an end of Empire administrator, Kerr Fraser-Tytler:
“For upwards of 2,000 years the tide of conquest rose and fell, pouring in great cascades over the breakwater of these most vital mountains, seeping through the passes, or flowing round the exposed Western flank, to surge onwards to the south where it spread out, stayed and finally was absorbed in the great open spaces of India.”3
Where the Russophobes got it seriously wrong was their political analysis. A successful Russian invasion of India would have taken enormous resources and been a massive strain on the Russian state, and would certainly have precipitated a major European war. Russia’s economy was still recovering from Napoleonic devastation. Her foreign policy priorities were focused on the richer and more central lands of the Mediterranean and Caspian. Russia’s desire to divest Persia and Ottoman Turkey of vast provinces and to become a Mediterranean power was the consuming passion of the Tsar’s ministers, and Nesselrode in particular. Bringing Central Asia into play may occasionally be a useful bargaining chip with Britain, but was never more than that.
It is a peculiar fact that for two hundred years, fear of an attack by Russia has been a major factor in British foreign and above all defence policy, and was for much of my lifetime the factor that outweighed all others. Vast sums of the nation’s money have been squandered on guarding against this illusory threat, and that is still the unacknowledged purpose of the ruinously expensive and entirely redundant Trident missile system today. Yet on any rational analysis, Russia has never had any incentive to attack the United Kingdom, and historical research has never uncovered even a remote Russian intention actually to attack the United Kingdom. However an awful lot of arms manufacturers have become exceedingly wealthy, as have an awful lot of politicians, while the military have had enhanced careers.
@Leviathan emetic
Bloody hell, someone mentions Kobane on this site. Yes it’s very interesting what is going on there. What to make of it?
Here’s an article by David Graber after he visited recently. There are links to other first hand accounts in the comments too.
http://libcom.org/forums/news/no-genuine-revolution-interview-graeber-evrensel-newspaper-29122014
As to Russian expansion eastwards, this is best understood in the context of Chinese expansion westwards in the C18th. The Qing dynasty was extremely active in expanding the Empire west and dismantling the threat posed by the Zunghar Empire. Russian expansion, in the other direction, was, to a great extent, coordinated with the Chinese.
Chekhov, a westerniser, takes a very optimistic Kiplingesque view of the progressive gifts of the British Empire to the Indians. But whether British rule in India-a system of Utilitarian plundering- was actually preferable to Russian rule in Central Asia is doubtful. As Dutt pointed out more than a century ago, those roads and railways were built to export Indian wealth while providing the Army with the means of suppressing popular revolts. And they were all paid for by the Indian poor, through viciously regressive taxation.
Uzbek
“The salt here is whether or not sophisticated spy network established by soviets helped them to get hold of atomic bomb secrets and to produce successful test in 1949.”
Not really it was not that sophisticated they gave the secrets away freely to keep the balance of power otherwise after WW2 the Americans most likely would have threatened Russia with a nuking.
Uzbek I really think you are confused.
The GRU was the Soviet spy network. Maybe this will help you with the facts. It was Britain
that started the Atomic bomb project in North Wales called Tube Alloys. They had to persuade the
Americans to get involved as they did not believe it was possible. As I have said the CIA did not exist. In Britain it is the MI5 which is responsible for counter espionage and the FBI in America.
Uzbek, I am trying to remember the name of a film about Russians with stiff rationality trying or planning to build a railroad through Central Asia and meeting up with a wise hermit of the forest.
@ Fool was it this one, Dersu Uzala, by Kurasawa?
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kxci/.artsmain/article/8/218/1707096/Movies/Flicks.-.Dersu.Uzala
I still reckon the solution for Ukraine is a series of internationally supervised referenda, in the Eastern districts and also in Crimea, with UN peacekeepers in charge of security. Putin needs a ladder to climb down.
As far as Crimea is concerned, this is bollocks.
A Gallup survey in April 2014, just after the Crimea independence referendum, confirmed the referendum result almost exactly.
It’s arse holes like Cameron and Obarmy who need a ladder to climb down.
Russia Cuts Off Ukraine Gas Supply To 6 European Countries
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-14/russia-cuts-ukraine-gas-supply-6-european-countries
And why restrict the proposal for referendums in Ukraine to the East? You think everyone else in Ukraine likes having a Nazified government imposed on them by the US and their Euro stooges — a government that claims Russia’s WW2 march on Berlin was an act of aggression (a joint “aggression” with Britain, the US and France.)
Russia has cut of the supply of gas that Ukraine, the Nazified loony-bin that Craig’s Euro friends are so keen to support, had been stealing. Maybe if Ukraine’s European friends an Obama’s stooges would pay Ukraine’s overdue gas bill, Russia will reopen the tap.
But you are right about the threat of Russia to the UK. It is essentially non-existent. Only if Britain continues its insolent hostility toward Russia will Russia have any reason for hostility to Britain. A.J.P. Taylor long ago argued that Russia was a natural British ally.
Why, incidentally, don’t you chuck this dead white Scotch male, Burnes, and write something people would be interested in. You’d then have a book that would get friendly reviews (reviewers like expressing their own opinions, which is only possible if the subject is one that the reviewers knows something about) and decent sales.
“The Kurds, like the Scots, have been denied their right to self-determination.”
That is an insult to Kurds, hang your head in shame.
Scots have their self determination, they even had a referendum to decide their own future even if the mindless minority oppose their democratic rights.
To say the Scots in anyway compare to the Kurds is wrong in every sense of the word.
‘mindless minorities’. Fred take a cold shower you are beginning to sound like a loon. they all had considerable hopes, dreams, wants and wishes, regardless of which faction or tribe they were from, just as the Kurds have.
The Kurds are well armed, that is were the comparison stops.
Better Together and the unionists, had nothing on the US/UK governments of the 50’s/60’s when it came to scaremongering, I’ll never quite understand why the US and the west didn’t embrace Russia, after the Yalta Conference.
How could they pull together in such a tight knit way to win WWII, and then throw it all away.
Its ironic though that the (ISS) International Space Station, suffered an ammonia leak in the US sector yesterday, and both US astronauts had to take shelter in the Russian area.
If only the west and Putin could somehow emulate such grown up behaviour.
Discussion on the Saker’s blog indicates that Russia has not cut gas supplies to Europe.
e.g., “What happened was a clear statement of future intentions, which will take 2 – 3 years to accomplish. At the present time, gaz transit through Ukraine to SE europe is unchanged.”
O/T
After writing for The Guardian for over a year, my contract was unilaterally terminated because I wrote a piece on Gaza that was beyond the pale. In doing so, The Guardian breached the very editorial freedom the paper was obligated to protect under my contract.
I’m speaking out because I believe it is in the public interest to know how a Pulitizer Prize-winning newspaper which styles itself as the world’s leading liberal voice, casually engaged in an act of censorship to shut down coverage of issues that undermined Israel’s publicised rationale for going to war.
I joined the Guardian as an environment blogger in April 2013. Prior to this, I had been an author, academic and freelance journalist for over a decade, writing for The Independent, Independent on Sunday, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, among others.
https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/palestine-is-not-an-environment-story-921d9167ddef
……………………..
A interesting piece, by,Nafeez Ahmed which shows the British press, for what it really is.
If only the west and Putin could somehow emulate such grown up behaviour.
What you call the West is not, as many think, a community of nations who all quite reasonably agree on what to do about Putin’s “aggression” in Ukraine, etc.
Rather it is an empire run from Washington, DC, and any state that steps out of line will likely get a terrorist attack, organized by “les illuminé” as Hollande describes them, to remind the “leadership” who’s in charge.
The struggle between the West and Russia is thus not the result of some disorderly pushing and shoving among a bunch of independent states, it’s an ongoing American drive to conquer Russia, divide into a bunch of oligarch-ruled stans, the better to encircle China with NATO missiles. This, I believe, is a project that Craig supports.
But in any case, it is a project that means the end of the European nations as racial and cultural entities: Just get used to your diet of hamburgers and French fries, your early death due to obesity and diabetes, and your culture delivered via the corporate news and entertainment industries.
If this comes to pass, it will be a huge catastrophe for humanity: it will mean the end of human diversity as we know it and the subjugation of the 99% to an oligarchy of scum such as Soros and Kolomoisky.
Now who was it again who kept bumping their gums about oil prices and how the SNP predicted them to be over $100 dollars a barrel.
The (DECC) the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, ran long term predictions for oil, and their prediction for 2015 was between $92 Dollars and $131 Dollars a Barrel.
Which make the SNP’s prediction of around $113 Dollars a barrel perfectly within the UK norm.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/212521/130718_decc-fossil-fuel-price-projections.pdf
…………….
Hopefully we’ll here no more dross from you know who regarding oil prices, as his beloved Britannia got it completely wrong as well.
“However an awful lot of arms manufacturers have become exceedingly wealthy, as have an awful lot of politicians, while the military have had enhanced careers.”
The whole analysis is shrewd and correct. Harold Macmillan eventually realised that empires are not sustainable, or even defendable, in the long term. When they reach the point of diminishing returns a kind of freedom is granted to the former colony. Or the government of the former colony sees this and grants itself freedom. Margaret Thatcher thought she could buck the trend and the cost to the UK taxpayer has been massive.
Dreoilin, at 4.40 pm. Thanks for that link. I am busy on a project of my own and missed this snippet. I think Russia has done the right thing. It surprised me when fuel prices plummeted that Russia did not just sit on its vast oil reserves too. Ukraine, which has stolen Russian gas previously, and not paid its bills for gas received, has shown that a contract is useless. Can’t wait for the dollar crash. Tomorrow hopefully. Then perhaps we can start building a better world on the model proposed by Syriza.
Did you buy Rubles Habbabkuk? Or are you still selling them?
I believe it is in the public interest to know how a Pulitizer Prize-winning newspaper which styles itself as the world’s leading liberal voice, casually engaged in an act of censorship to shut down coverage of issues that undermined Israel’s publicised rationale for going to war.
Well you’re in good company being censored by the Gurudian. Malcolm Muggeridge’s dispatches from Russia on the state imposed Ukraine famine of the 1930’s “were were severely edited, and he was forced to leave Russia”. And, from the same source:
“Ian Hunter, Malcolm Muggeridge’s first biographer writes: “He was sacked, then vilified, slandered and abused, not least in the pages of the Manchester Guardian, whose sympathy to what was called ‘the great Soviet experiment’ was de rigeur.”
Meantime, Walter Duranty at the every lying New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for totally denying the Holodomor.
BP announces job cuts:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-30817678
An independent Scotland would be heading for financial meltdown right now.
Better together did warn that oil prices are volatile, just google it and see if anyone tries to tell you different.
The whole analysis is shrewd and correct. Harold Macmillan eventually realised that empires are not sustainable, or even defendable, in the long term.
Here John Goss draws the inference that seems implied by Craig’s remarks about Russia; namely, that it is an empire past it’s due date, a relic of the past that the West should go ahead and smash.
This is more bollocks. Or at least a massive distortion of reality — which is I suppose the function of a blog such as this.
The greatest empire today is clearly NATO, run from Washington under the guise of a pluralistic democratic alliance of independent states. If we are to get serious about dismantling empires, we should therefore think how to dismantle the US Empire first.
The Russian Federation can be viewed as an empire if one wishes, but it would be foolish to seek to destroy it simply because of a label. The question that should be important to Europeans is how Russia affects European interests, and it seems clear that on balance the existence of Russia is beneficial to Europe. Russia has vast resources which it is ready to trade freely for Western manufactured goods, moreover Russia invites all of Europe to engage with it in a free trade association. In addition, Russia shields Europe, today, as it has for a thousand years, from land invasion from central Asia and the far East.
Russia is not hostile to Europe, merely defensive in response to clear US-inspired European aggression (e.g., sanctions in response to MH17, which appears to have been a criminal act of the Ukrainian state under direction most likely of the CIA), but has sought since the fall of the Soviet Union to find a mutually beneficial relationship with the European states within what Gorbachev called “our common European home.”
One difference between the Kurds and the Scots is that before 2003 the former were never an autonomous state, or likely to be. And for most of their history, their nominal rulers’ accounts; those of travellers in the region, and indeed those of the Royal Navy armoured car detachment* fighting its way through them in order to support the White Russians ca 1919, are far from complimentary.
* A surprising story and well worth Googling. I’d cite the book I found it in if I could remember its name.
An independent Scotland would be heading for financial meltdown right now.
It wouldn’t. The earliest independence could have cut in would have been 2016, as you have been told before. Goldman Sachs wasn’t seeing volatility as a problem, and it is doubtful that UK plc did either. It doesn’t seem to have taken any precautions against it. And Scots, like everyone else, can revel in the slight drop in the cost of living due to reduced energy prices, (which UK plc’s global gimp, Osborne, is mendaciously claiming the credit for). Roll on deflation, I say.
Speccy,
the full comment says this
“What happened was a clear statement of future intentions, which will take 2 – 3 years to accomplish. At the present time, gaz transit through Ukraine to SE europe is unchanged. However, the EU is expected to pay for Ukraine’s gaz forthwith. The zerohedge article with the old Daily Mail link was highly misleading. On zerohedge, the original article was been removed.”
As far as I can see, the zerohedge article is still up, along with the Daily Mail one. (But zeohedge could be a cache issue at my end.)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1106382/Europe-plunged-energy-crisis-Russia-cuts-gas-supply-Ukraine.html
and then there’s this
Gazprom warns EU to link to Turkey pipeline or lose Russian gas
http://news.yahoo.com/gazprom-warns-eu-turkey-pipeline-lose-russian-gas-212440234.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1106382/Europe-plunged-energy-crisis-Russia-cuts-gas-supply-Ukraine.html
Undated??
Charlie Hebdo, cold war with Russia, EU central bank QE and today Swiss Central Bank’s massive move, 38% up at one point! Something is seriously afoot.
“It wouldn’t. The earliest independence could have cut in would have been 2016, as you have been told before. ”
Yes, people just keep on repeating it as if it made any difference. It doesn’t, it would still have been devastating, probably even more devastating. Westminster would hardly be likely to step in with an expensive rescue package and Holyrood would be in no position to, too much uncertainty for private investors.
Up shit creek without a paddle.
Doesn’t alter the fact that Better Together told the truth and the SNP White Paper didn’t either.
“Here John Goss draws the inference that seems implied by Craig’s remarks about Russia; namely, that it is an empire past it’s due date, a relic of the past that the West should go ahead and smash.”
I did not infer what you do from Craig’s post. Russia did have an empire and was imperialist in the days in which the “Great Powers” as they called themselves had their empire. Russia has morphed into a large homozygous inter-racial country and is no longer adventurist as it was in the Tsars’ days.
Mr Goss
“Then perhaps we can start building a better world on the model proposed by Syriza.”
________________
You often mention Syriza. But when – many moons ago – I asked you questions about Syriza’s programme you never replied. Would you now like to take the opportunity to tell us something about the model proposed by Syriza? I’d be particularly – but not exclusively, of course – interested to hear Syriza’s position and policy proposals on the question of illegal immigration into Greece; as you know, illegal immigration is one of the reasons why the right wing party Golden Dawn has gained in popularity in Greece but strangely enough Mr Tsipras, when setting out his party’s election stall recently, apparently evaded giving any indication of his party’s position on this. Can you think of any reason why that should have been so?