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Hat tip to Ian!

Great piece of intellectual history here by Dr. David Engerman, writing in Humanities on Philip Mosley, who was to Cold War Sovietology what Vannevar Bush was to the Manhattan Project:

The Cold War’s Organization Man How Philip Mosely helped Soviet Studies moderate American policy

When Winston Churchill ominously announced in March 1946 that an “Iron Curtain had descended over Europe,” the United States government employed around two dozen experts on the Soviet Union and even fewer on Central and Eastern Europe. Two years later, after a steady drumbeat of Cold War crises, the young Central Intelligence Agency employed thirty-eight Soviet analysts, only twelve of whom spoke any Russian. The few university-based Russia specialists varied tremendously in intellect and energy; only a handful were willing and able to contribute to shaping policy. How could American officials chart a foreign policy without knowing what was going on inside the Soviet Union, let alone inside the Kremlin? As Geroid Tanquary Robinson, head of the USSR analysis for wartime intelligence and the founding director of Columbia’s Russian Institute, put it, “Never did so many know so little about so much.”

Into this breach stepped a handful of scholars, including Philip Edward Mosely, the man who would become the most influential Sovietologist of the Cold War. He lacked the name recognition and elegant writing style of the diplomat George Kennan, whose 1947 “X” article introduced the concept of containment to the world. Nor could he rival the publication record and scholarly reputation of Harvard professor Merle Fainsod, whose 1953 book How Russia Is Ruled introduced generations of readers to Soviet politics. And Mosely was nowhere near as colorful a character as the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron, whose 1952 essay on “economic backwardness” remains a subject of debate into the twenty-first century. Mosely’s contributions to the development of Soviet Studies have received little attention. But in a field of study that emphasized its practical application to policymaking, no one else was so adept at working the lines of influence and power that connected America’s campuses and its capital.

Read the rest here.

Hat tip to Meredith Hindley.

Ayatollah Wojciech Jaruzelski

Shane Deichman had a superb post on Soviet Admiral of the Fleet and C-in-C of the Red Navy, Sergei Georgyevich Gorshkov over at Antilibrary. The admiral was the father of Soviet blue water power projection. Shane is reviewing Gorshkov’s The Sea Power of the State:

Gorshkov’s “The Sea Power of the State”

In this book, Admiral of the Fleet Gorshkov not only offers a vision of the relevance of the “World Ocean” to any nation’s well-being – he also provides a compelling rationale for “joint operations” a full ten years before our own nation’s Goldwater-Nichols Act forced jointness onto a reluctant American defense establishment, and underscores the importance of the littoral in a navy’s ability to influencing events ashore nearly two decades before “… From the Sea”.

The Sea Power of the State is rich in dichotomy: a land-rich nation with few accessible ports preaching the relevance of sea power, an atheist totalitarian regime describing the social and cultural significance of the “World Ocean”, a nation besmirched for its negative impact on the environment bemoaning pollutants and the need for “union with the environment”, and a foundational tome for effective naval force planning from a nation that just this month claimed the lives of nearly two dozen civilians in a submarine accident. Such is Gorshkov’s compelling style – scholarly and impeccably researched, with steadfast devotion to the tenets of Marxism, decrying the “imperialist aggression” of the Capitalist powers who exploit sea power to “hold in check other states.”

….Most impressive about Gorshkov is the breadth of his perspective.  Alongside the typical Communist demagoguery (e.g., “Imperialist power exploit sea power to preserve their monopoly …”) are lucid arguments for balanced force structure planning (inclusive of creating large merchant fleets), diminished pollutants, and even maritime law (with an appeal to demilitarize the World Ocean beyond the 12 mile territorial waters).  Curiously, he never once expresses disdain at the limited blue water access of the Soviet Union – and was convincing enough in his vision that the Kremlin subsidized his development of a fleet that nearly reached parity with the dominant sea powers of the west

Read the whole review here. 

I am not an expert in maritime matters but I am relatively conversant on Soviet affairs. Shane’s right, by Soviet standards, where bureaucratic conservatism and enforced conformity to CPSU doctrine served to weed out independent thinkers before they could ascend the first rungs of the nomenklatura ladder, Gorshakov was making a daring, even a startingly bold argument. The Sea Power of the State could have easily been a career-ender had the ideological winds taken a wrong turn; Gorshakov’s argument has very little to do with Marxism or Soviet military doctrine. Instead, it draws upon the Petrine tradition of modernization and securing the “window to the west” that Peter the Great sought in building St. Petersburg and the warm water ports after which subsequent Tsars lusted.

Fortunately for Gorshakov, his ideas coincided with the noontide of Brezhnev’s faction, which was rooted in military heavy industry, the Dnepropetrovsk mafia and a national security axis of the power ministries – Defense, Foreign Ministry and the KGB which were controlled by Brezhnev’s then allies and proteges, Ustinov, Gromyko and Andropov. Gorshakov’s vision of expanding Soviet reach abroad also had appeal to party hardliners like Mikhail Suslov and Boris Ponomarev who were deeply interested in supporting radical third world regimes and adding the Ethiopias, Angolas and Nicaragua’s to the “Socialist camp”

Nobel Prize winning writer and former Soviet disident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died the other day at the venerable age of 89. To put Solzhenitsyn in perspective, over the course of his life he had survived Stalin’s Great Terror, combat in WWII, torture at the hands of the NKVD, slave labor, cancer, harrassment by the KGB and enforced exile to return in bittersweet triumph to his beloved Russia after the Soviet collapse.  His last years were spent in ill-health, moving closer to Russian nationalist circles and celebrating Russia as an Orthodox civilization spiritually apart from the liberal West.

An uncompromising and fearless moral voice against Soviet tyranny, Solzhenitsyn’s monumental work, The Gulag Archipelago, shook the Soviet Union’s ruling nomenklatura to the core. Along with the liberal physicist Andrei Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn was the dissident that Soviet leaders most feared given his ability not only to condemn the system’s crimes but to articulate an alternative, Russophilic, nationalist political program that millions of Soviet citizens might find attractive. Solzhenitsyn was among the first to postulate an independent Ukraine in his writings and thought that a territorial reduction to the Russian core of the Soviet Union would lead to a healthy regeneration of Russian culture and values that had been so badly damaged by Communism.

Solzhenitsyn was not and never claimed to be an admirer of Western liberal democracy, of whose chances as a historical victor over Communism he deeply and incorrectly doubted. If he had any forerunners in modern Russian history, Solzhenitsyn probably would have sympathized with the Tsarist Prime Minister and conservative reformer Petr Stolypin who had said before his assassination, that ” ….what we want is a Great Russia”. Solzhenitsyn dwelt on Russianess and wrote in the language in a way that eschewed foreign influences and saw other, even deeply entwined, ethnic groups in Russia from Jews to Ukranians and Belarussians as “others”.

A man wrong on many smaller things, on what he had right Solzhenitsyn was a titan.