On the Russian Way of War

I.   Don't mention the war

Certain of my readers have asked why I have not written here at length on the present Russo-Ukrainian War. My answer is that we in the nationalist community are not military analysts by profession, and our falling short in the field of military science is evident from many of our writings on the war, most of which lack real depth and evince little knowledge of Russian military history and by extension little knowledge the Russian national character. On top of this, events in the war move quickly, too quickly, for us; by the time an article is published online analysing the latest developments, the war has moved on. To keep readers up to date, one must work as a reporter does and file a news story nearly every day, and journalism of that sort is not our job. 

Our natural instinct is to get to the bottom of the political implications of the war, and one means of doing this is to determine in advance what the outcome of the war will be. Yockey once wrote that Americans see as a kind of sport, and perhaps this explains why it is that so many analyses published by the American dissident Right show a preoccupation with 'winning': who is 'winning' the war at the moment, will the Russian capture of a few city blocks in some Ukrainian podunk town lead to a Russian 'victory'? The trouble with this line of thinking is that wars in the 21st century do not lead to clear-cut outcomes, the Afghanistan War of 2001-2021 being the exception; wars these days are often indecisive. Who 'won' the Nagorno-Karabakh War of 2020? Who won the American-Iraq War that began in 2003 but finished who knows when? 

In order to obtain a more accurate understanding of what actually happens in a war, we must look to the  military capabilities of both the belligerents and assess an army's performance using the criterion of military competence. Such an investigation will reveal more than a recounting of who won and who lost, and in particular, it will reveal which side was qualitatively the better. Napoleon's La Grande Armée lost Waterloo, but no-one would deny - even Napoleon's enemies would not deny - that the Grande Armée was the finest army in Europe at the time, perhaps of all time. Likewise, Germany lost both world wars, and no-one esteems the German Army any the less. When it comes to the present war, then, can we say that the Russian army has performed brilliantly, or at least competently? If not, what does that say about Russia's chance of 'victory'? 

Casualties make a good measure, perhaps the best, of an army's skill, but the difficulty presented to us by an examination of casualties is that casualties are always subject to dispute, especially in the present war. Whereas the American army assiduously keeps records of its casualties, counts its dead, publicises its dead, and makes sure that the remains of its soldiers are repatriated and buried in well-tended graves, the Russian army is completely the opposite, a reverse-mirror image of the American. In the present war, Russian casualties are hidden, not only from foreign observers but from the Russian people themselves; indeed, Russian leaders took some time to acknowledge that there was a war on. The true figures are hidden behind a thicket. But this is nothing new. We are still debating the casualty count for the siege of Verdun a hundred years ago, and it took British historians decades to raise the possibility that their casualties in that war may have exceeded those of the Germans; when Churchill in the 1920s touched upon this discomforting subject, he was howled down. 

Losses in tanks, other vehicles, weapons, equipment, are easier to verify than losses in men; we can count the number of Russian wrecks in Ukraine and note the paucity of Russian tanks and vehicles at this year's May 9 Victory parade in Moscow. From observation we can infer reasonably enough that Russian stocks are running low - and evaluate the Russian army's competence thereby. For even the best armies can experience grievous losses - superior generalship, training, weapons, equipment, military traditions, do not make soldiers bulletproof - but the losses endured by Russia in such a short time, against an army that is not one of the world's finest, really do indicate something important, and that is, the Russian army has not changed much in the past 170 years. The Russian people themselves have not changed much either. The war so far confirms one of the main assertions of racialism and hereditarianism, and that is, people do not change, they do not improve; altering their environment and even their ideology (e.g., communism) will not affect them - you will see no progress, no evolution, no development, in their national and racial character. 

The Marquis de Custine wrote in 1839 that Russia was the only country in the world run by its secret service; that is true then as it is now: old books written on the old Russia do not lie. The past, then, will be our guide if we are to predict the outcome of this war - who will win and who will lose, and what the fate of the Russian people and the Putin regime will be. The history we will be examining here will be the history of Russians and war, and in particular, Russia's military performance, and this is in the war that changed the course of history and that led to the decline and destruction of the West. 

II. A War to End All Wars

The war in Europe that had such irrevocable effects on Western man's destiny took place in the century. Then Germany was caught on a war on two fronts: Russia in the East, England, France, and then finally the USA in the West. Germany lost, but performed admirably well all throughout the war, whether its army was fighting on the offensive or the defensive. The army owed its defensive successes to its elaborate fieldworks and fortifications - as Rommel noted during the war, 'Our recent experiences indicated but one way of keeping casualties down—the deep trench' - and its offensive successes, to its possessing weaponry that was technologically advanced (at least at the start of the war), its deployment of enormous numbers of well-trained officers, and its use of innovative tactics that were to become de rigueur for all the armies of the world. And more than any other army, the German army understood that a fundamental change in war had occurred in the 20th century, and that was this: firepower had replaced marksmanship. The machine gun, the mortar, the grenade, the flamethrower, and above all, the high-accuracy artillery bombardment: all had usurped the rifle and the bayonet. 

The war introduced Europe to the phenomena of death from above, something we have seen plenty of in the present Russo-Ukrainian War (in the opening days of Russia's offensive, a column of Chechens sent to kill Zelensky and his government in Kiev was massacred by drones). This form of warfare is impersonal; a soldier will rarely see the other soldier who kills him. As Montgomery wrote in his memoirs: 

The Germans advanced... and began shelling us heavily.... The fire was so heavy we had to retire as we had not time to entrench ourselves.... We had to advance through a hail of bullets from rifles and machine-guns and through a perfect storm of shrapnel fire.... the whole air seemed full of bullets and bursting shells.... the whole of the rest of the day we were heavily shelled by the Germans.

The war raged all over the world, including the Pacific, where the Japanese went on a rampage fueled by a barely-disguised racial animus, a form of smash and grab raid that stole the white man's colonial possessions. For the purposes of this essay, we shall ignore this theater, as we are concentrating on Russia's performance in the East. All the same, the Eastern theater cannot be isolated from that of the West, especially so because it was on the Western Front that the war was lost for Germany. 

Let us recount the particulars of the war on that Front. Germany invades the Low Countries and occupies the northern half of France; England is forced to retreat from Belgium in a humiliating fashion, but thanks to its skill at public relations (and what Churchill called the 'War of communique'), manages to spin the retreat as a great military triumph; even today Wikipedia calls the British evacuation a 'strategic victory'. The truth is that overall, the British and French military performance in the war left much to be desired, which explains why it is that the British and French today avoid dwelling on it much. Nonetheless, Germany was unable to invade and conquer England, and so the German navy and air force resorted to strategic warfare against the English; Germany attacked English shipping with u-boats and subjected the British to an aerial bombardment (in what became known as the Battle of Britain). The British retaliated in kind with their own 'strategic bombing' of Germany and using its navy to blockade the Continent; the blockade, which was illegal under international law, led to the death by starvation of hundreds of thousands. These efforts were unable to budge the Germans from the Continent,  however, and in compensation the British embarked on a series of hare-brained schemes around the Continent's periphery - the Balkans, East Africa, and the Middle East (England invaded Iraq; the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which saw American and British troops invading  Iraq together, was not the first). 

As a means of improving its military fortunes, England sought to build political alliances, and relationships between nations became pivotal as the war expanded northward and southward of the Continent. The Germans formed an anti-communist alliance with the Finns. Italy, and then Romania, flipped on the Germans and went over to the Allied side, much to Germany's chagrin, and to punish the Italians, the Germans invaded Italy from the north. In the case of Romania, perhaps sections of the Hungarian elite wanted to join Romania in betraying Germany, but Hungary by this point was too tightly bound to Germany to escape. But these alliances did Germany little good, because England managed to forge the most fruitful alliance of all - the one with America - and it was this 'special relationship' that tipped the war in England's favour. 

The joint Anglo-American offensive against Germany began in the realm of ideas. In this period, the mass media acquired for itself enormous power; the era saw, thanks to the media, the rise to fame of what I call the celebrity soldier - Rommel, Montgomery, Patton, MacArthur, von Rundstedt, all of whom fought in the war. Inevitably, the media was put to military use and forged into a weapon. America and England waged war against Germany using propaganda disseminated through the mass media. In the space of a short few years,  thousands of books, pamphlets, propaganda news articles (military censorship was extremely tight) were published; these were all incendiary and defamatory. The leader of Germany was slandered as a vain, capricious, erratic tyrant, given to displays of feminine histrionics; the German soul was dissected in relentless psychological analyses - and found wanting. It is interesting to note, from a modern day perspective, the sheer depth of the animus in these polemics. One has to ask why it is that the American and British never directed the same degree of hatefulness against the traditional enemies of Europe - Russia, Japan, Turkey - in this war and all the wars since. 

This is not to say that Germany had a spotless record. It pursued a counter-insurgency campaign in the countries that it occupied, and it availed itself of draconian methods of collective punishment (but then, the Americans and the British did the same in the colonies). Because of German industry's rapacious appetite for foreign workers, Germany dragooned Europeans as forced labour for the German war effort. Germany's reputation diminished, and not the least because of the wild propaganda stories  - including stories of Germans gassing uncounted numbers in Eastern Europe - circulating. Out of the steady and unceasing diet of anti-German propaganda, a new image of Germany was formed, one that survives to the present day day: the 'Prussian militarist', cruel, unyielding, harsh, authoritarian, clean, neat, efficient, impeccably groomed and dressed, and undeniably skilled in the arts of war. The gentle, artistic, sensitive, poetic German of the 19th century, with his taste for Romantic poetry and philosophy, Kant and Hegel, Beethoven and Wagner - that German vanished. His place was taken by the 'Prussian', who was said to be inspired by philosopher Nietzsche, the military theorist Bernhardi, and the  historian Treitschke. 

The actual Germans who fought in the war were baffled by this image of cold 'Prussian' brute; to judge by his memoirs, the German soldier saw himself a decent, noble, and above all earnest fellow. One could make an interesting digression here and write a monograph on what it is that the German means to the Anglo-Saxon; did he contrive this 'Prussian' German out of some (as the psychoanalysts would put it) 'deep rooted anxiety'? Does the Anglo-Saxon see the 'Prussian' as an 'Oedipal' figure.

The Anglo-Saxons, as the war progressed, became determined to destroy Germany; Germany had to be put down like a mad dog; its leaders were to be put on trial for 'war crimes'. Eventually, they got their wish and Germany was defeated; when America joined the war, it was all over for Germany. America at the time was led by a bespectacled Democrat president who was a progressive, an idealist, and who was what we would call today a simp and a most dangerous one at that - a dangerous fool. Paradoxically enough, we moderns would also call him (to use 4Chan parlance) 'based'. He had strong electoral support in the Deep South, which was segregationist at the time, and his views of the negro that we would today consider to be white nationalist and racialist. One could debate whether or not he was good for America; but certainly one cannot debate that he was bad for Europe. He managed to coax America out of its traditional Isolationism and intervene on the side of the English, the result being the defeat of Germany, the breakup of Eastern Europe, the subsequent European ethnic turmoil, and (as Yockey noted) the strengthening of Europe's enemies. 

For many reasons, the Americans fought much better than the French, the British, and the Italians. The American landing in France had a ripple effect; the Germans were forced to withdraw their forces from the East to counter those of the Americans (and the resurgent British and Commonwealth) in the West. Perceiving the growing American threat, towards the end of the war the Germans launched a surprise counter-offensive against the American and Commonwealth armies with a view to encircling and then destroying them; the planning was carried out in great secrecy, the offensive took the Allies by surprise, and it was executed with the usual German élan. But despite great initial success, which saw the rout of some of the Allied forces and an advance many kilometers deep, it quickly bogged down, partly because of strong American resistance. And now the Germans had shot their bolt; and now the Allies were now able to smash through the German lines with ease. Rapid German disintegration happened elsewhere as well; the German positions collapsed in the Balkans and the north of Italy (the Allies defeated them there with an agglomeration of American, Commonwealth, 'Free' French, and 'Free' Italian forces). 

One of the odder sequels of the war was that America's eyes were opened, at last, to the danger that was Russia. As the war drew to a close, Germany made appeals to European unity - and Western unity - against the menace from the East and against 'Bolshevism'. Eventually those appeals were heard by the Americans and certain of the British, including Churchill. After Germany's defeat, America began a series of military interventions against Russia and at home, it underwent a 'Red Scare'. 

But America could never bear to pull itself away from Russia for too long. It is at this point that we see the beginnings of a pattern in American relations with Russia. America makes friends with Russia, Russia behaves in a barbarous fashion, making America feel misgivings. Finally the extent of the Russian wrongdoing, and its provocative character, forces America to break off its friendship. Russia collapses militarily, politically, economically; America then comes to Russia's aid; America renews its friendship with Russia. And so on, ad infinitum. If after the present Russo-Ukrainian War, Russia collapses, and descends into the abyss, plenty of Americans will be clamouring for relief for Russia - 'The faults of the Putin regime are not the faults of the Russian people' - and inevitably, America will rescue Russia, only to be met with Russian ingratitude. And so the cycle will continue. 

III. The War in the East

This brings us to the East. From a modern perspective, the war on the Eastern Front is much more interesting than the war on the Western, and one of the reasons why is because of the underlying racialism. The French and the Germans disliked one another, but this was a hatred between brothers; as Spengler says, no hatred is deeper than that between brothers. On the other hand, the enmity between the Russians and the Germans was racial, not familial. In the past, the Germans and the Russians had made a marriage of convenience - especially at the time of the partitions of Poland - but by the time of the war, neither had any illusions about the other. A wide gap separated the two. A mutual awareness of racial dissimilarities caused that division. The Germans were accused of harbouring impious racial thoughts against the Russians, and to this day, English and American historians assert that the supposed German 'anti-Slavic' racialism contributed to Germany's defeat; if Germany had not viewed 'The Slavs' as 'subhuman', well, perhaps they would have fared better politically in the occupied Eastern territories. 

We have this from a book written by Anglo-Saxon authors on the Eastern Front: 

The Germans, for their part, saw nothing worth admiring in Russia. Much of this attitude came from centuries-old German racism against Slavs. The Germans saw in the Russians, and Slavs more generally, everything that they despised. The Russians were the polar opposites of Germans: unruly, filthy, and backward in almost every sense. They had failed to take advantage of the massive natural resources of the Russian hinterland and had been badly humbled by an Asian power in war, both inexcusable failings in the eyes of early twentieth-century Germans. If anything, the Slavs were seen as impediments to the modernization and development of Eastern Europe and its incorporation into the European system. 

German disregard for the Russians had serious consequences. The Germans expected that the Russians would be slow to mobilize and inefficient in their use of their military power. German officers were aware of some of the strengths of the Russians, especially the size of their army and the expanse of their territories, but the Germans were not afraid. They presumed that the natural German advantages of efficiency, leadership and industry would allow them to win a war against a gigantic, but clumsy Russia. Most German senior officers, moreover, believed that an offensive war against Russia was preferable to defensive holding operations because a major offensive would put unbearable strains on the Russian state, as the war against Japan had done in 1904 and 1905.

True or not, the above crystallises for us the image of the evil (and efficient) 'Prussian' who is biased against 'The Slavs'. Psychologist that I am, I detect - reading between the lines - the author's sympathy with the 'Prussian' view of the 'Slavs'. 'Unruly, filthy, and backward in almost every sense': could the author be using the 'Germans' as a sort of substitute mouthpiece for his own views of a people he deep down considers to be barbarous and backward? 

In any case, even the authors are forced to acknowledge that the Germans for most of the war used the Russians as a punching bag. I use 'Germans' here loosely; in truth, the Germans of the Reich fought alongside Germans from other countries in Central Europe who were drafted into the German effort; one could say that these soldiers came from a Greater Germany. In addition, other nationalities outside of Germany - and religious faiths (e.g., the Muslim) - went to war for the Germans, and many of these were Slavic. 

The progress of the war in the East is as follows. The Russian Empire is invaded by Germany and Germany's allies; Germany and its comrades sweep into the Russian half of Poland, the Baltics, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus; Russia, in turn, invades the German half of Poland, East Prussia, and Hungary. In an action that causes resentment against Russia that lingers to this day, Russia invades the Baltics with the intention of bringing its former colonies to heel. In typical Russian fashion, the military invasion is preceded by a political operation; Russia avails itself of the same tactics that, in the 21st century, it was to use in Ukraine, the chief of which is the founding of an 'Independent People's Republic' on enemy soil. In this timeline of Russian aggression in the Baltics we discover: 

Founding of the Commune of the Working People of Estonia in Narva, seemingly an independent Estonian Soviet republic

In reality, this was a puppet state of Soviet Russia founded solely for the purpose of portraying the conflict as a civil war. All the while, underground communist agitators were actively undermining the Estonian cause on the home front – something they would continued to do throughout the War of Independence.

Russia is as Russia does; we find in the Independent Estonian Soviet Republic (and the many other 'independent republics' after that) the precursors of the Donetsk and Luhansk 'republics'. 

Russia, then and now, is fighting to retain its empire. The question faced by the Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, and even Poles during the war is: who do you want as a master - the Germans or the Russians? The 'Slavs' were caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. 

To return to our narrative. Germany ousted the Russians from Ukraine with ease, and then settled down to the task of mobilising Ukraine and exploiting its resources for the German war effort. Opinions are divided as to how good or bad German rule was for Ukraine. The authority John Mosier states that the Germans did good things for Ukraine. But the Germans, even though using the services of Ukrainian collaborators (of the type that Putin today castigates as 'Nazi' and 'Banderist'), aroused resistance, and the Ukrainians began a ferocious partisan war against the Germans. This came to an end only after the setbacks in the Western Theater. Then the Germans pulled up stakes and left the Ukrainians to the tender mercies of the Russians. 

How did the Russians perform militarily against the Germans? To their credit, the Russians, like the British, never wavered for the most part, despite extraordinary losses in men and materiel in battles of encirclement and annihilation. Viewed from a distance, the German effort seemed somewhat pointless, as the Russians, even after suffering a defeat, could trade men for space; that is, they could retreat, and the Germans could advance, but the Russians had plenty of room to fall back to; they could retreat to Moscow, then Siberia, and then Vladivostok if need be. 

And on the offensive, the Russians could get their licks in. No one can doubt the ability of the 'Russian Steamroller' to terrify. (A nationalist comrade of mine recalls the fear he felt for the Ukrainians in the opening days of the 2022 invasion, when the Russians reached all the way to Kiev). In the middle of the war, the Russians launched one well-planned and devastating operation against the Germans in the south; this is the most famous (thanks to Russian publicity) offensive of the war, and it shattered an entire German group. At their best, he Russians could administer a punch that would make their opponent's teeth rattle. 

Little discussed, however, is the simultaneous offensive in the north; this belongs among the worst disasters in Russian military history; it incurred disastrous losses. To convey the character of this botched offensive, we should attend to the words of a German soldier who fought in the battle: 

Towards evening the enemy fire became somewhat quieter, allowing us to ascertain the situation in case of possible deployment in the German positions. At the same time, work columns strove to bring forward ‘Spanish riders’ [pre- assembled barbed wire obstructions] for essential reinforcement and improvement of the partly badly damaged entanglements. By the ghostly light of the constantly fired illumination rounds, I was able to get a view of the field. In any case, I had to accompany my men who were moving forward. It was a grim scene. Entire assault columns lay, or rather seemed to stand, as if they had been so determined to force a breakthrough that the dead still threatened to attack, forming grotesque heaps of corpses. The flickering light of flares gave them the illusion of sinister movement … All of us who saw these dreadful sights were certain that German soldiers could never have been made to suffer en masse like this. All of this could really only be achieved by barbaric training in blind obedience, which eliminated every independent thought. Stifled groans and tormented whimpers came from the macabre faces before us. They were just hopeless struggles against death, as any help merely meant more suffering. The dreadful horror of war clutched at our hearts with its loathsome claws... nobody said a word on the march back to our holding position... everyone was preoccupied with himself – and with thoughts that fled homewards.

If anything, the above quotation understates the carnage wrought. From a historian's perspective, the above account is noteworthy because it illustrates a Russian military tradition; this serf-like obedience - or is it ant-like obedience? - carries on into the conduct of the Russian army in the present war. Wolf Stoner writes of the parallels between the disastrous Russian crossing of the Severskii Donets south of Belgorod in late 1943 and the equally as disastrous crossing of the same river in May 2022. His account is tragi-comic: it both amuses and saddens. And such a recital leads naturally to somber ruminations on the character of the Russian soul. Once again, the truths of racialism and hereditarianism are confirmed. 

IV. The War for Empire

In the above section, the war I have described is WWI, not WWII, and the two quotations were taken from books on the Eastern Front in WWI, The Eastern Front 1914–1920: From Tannenberg to the Russo-Polish War by David Jordan and Michael S Neiberg, and Russia's Last Gasp: The Eastern Front 1916–17 by Prit Buttar. To those familiar with both WWI and WWII, the parallels are striking: for example, Operation Uranus (the encirclement of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad) and the following offensives = the Brusilov Offensive, and Operation Mars (the catastrophic failed offensive against the German Army Groups Center and North outside Moscow and Leningrad) = the Lake Naroch offensive, the aftermath of which is described in the gruesome battlefield description above. 

One key difference between the wars lies in the perception we have of them today, and that is, WWI is generally perceived as more mobile and more fast-moving than WWI. The Western Front in WWI - and much of the Eastern and the Mediterranean - is depicted as 'static', 'trench warfare', a 'war of attrition', in the popular narrative. After the opening months of the war, both the Allied and the Central Powers realised that the other was not going to capitulate soon, and indeed, had no need to capitulate; if forced to retreat, an army could move back a few kilometers and set up a new line; and if it lost men and equipment in a key battle, it could furnish plenty more. The end result was that one thick and immovable wall of troops faced another thick and immovable wall: one could not nip around the enemy's flanks like Napoleon or Frederick the Great, surround the enemy forces, and destroy them in a classical battle of annihilation. Because of these constraints, offensives in WWI are to be judged differently than those in WWII; any offensive that led to an advance of a significant distance (say, 20 kilometers) and with minimal casualties should be considered a great success. The tragedy of the British and French offensives was that they killed many British and French soldiers and accomplished little in the way of ground gained.  

The other key difference is that the Russians won WWII and lost WWI. Even though the Germans and their Allies the Austro-Hungarians and the Turks administered a drubbing to the Russians, they lost regardless. One could conceive of an alternate history of WWII in which the Germans won the war on the Eastern Front and made Stalin sign a humiliating peace treaty and forfeit the Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, and the Caucasus; but in this history, the Germans would still go on to lose on the Western Front and the Mediterranean just as they did in WWI. 

While the Russians won WWII and lost WWI, the level of the Russian army's military competence stayed the same throughout the wars and the intervening pre-war period. The same cannot be said of the British and French armies, however. The French and British armies performed poorly in WWI but had high morale, and performed well in WWII but had low morale. At the time of the German offensives in 1940, the French and the British in the Western Front had some excellent soldiers, weapons, and equipment, but crumbled at the first of trouble. The British abandoned Norway, Belgium, France, and then Greece when put under pressure by the Germans, and the French capitulated, and then formed the collaborationist state of Vichy. Whereas, in WWI, France and England fought on and on, despite suffering huge casualties; they never wavered. 

Militarily, Russia stayed the same and politically it stayed the same as well. In the period of the Russian Civil War (really a misnomer, as we shall see), the Russians set to work conquering their lost colonies Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine; they also went to war in East and Central Asia to regain the colonies originally in the 19th century; some of the biggest revolts against the Moscow Bolshevik regime took place in Asia. The objective of Lenin, and then Stalin, was to reconstruct the empire of the Tsars. 

Often the flimsiest of excuses would be used for a causus belli. Russia invaded Finland in 1939 on the justification that the German fascists would use Finland as base from which to attack the USSR - and this barely months after the ink had dried on the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The real motive, of course, lay in Russia's imperialism; ever since Ivan the Terrible's massacre of the inhabitants of the mercantile city-state of Novgorod, the Russians showed a desire to quash, with force and fury, any Russian subjects who show inclinations to sovereignty and independence. In the post-Soviet period, this paradigm carries over into the Chechen Wars and the present Ukrainian War. 

When it comes to Ukraine, we can note the Ukrainian armed forces did succeed in beating the Russian - twice - but that they did so only with the assistance of the Germans and then the Poles. Once Germany and Poland had vacated the battlefield, Russia had an open field. The Ukrainians, in 1917, were as weak as they were in 2014; they had no real army, no strong state, no unified leadership, and they withered in the face of the Russian onslaught, which was both military and political. For the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 1918 followed the same script as the invasion of 2014; the Russian set up an 'Independent People's Republic' on Ukrainian soil (this time in Kharkov) and then went and invaded to 'rescue' the 'separatists' in that 'republic' from the Kiev regime. In The Ukraine: A Submerged Nation (1944) by William Henry Chamberlin, we find: 

The disappearance of a strong central government in Russia [in 1917] favored the growth of Ukrainian nationalism up to the point of separatism. There was a political vacuum, which the Rada [Ukrainian parliament] naturally filled. But the building up of a strong and stable Ukrainian Government in an atmosphere of social chaos, hunger, and economic collapse proved impossible. 

The Soviet Government on December 17, 1917, sent an ultimatum to the Rada, accusing it of “carrying on a two-faced bourgeois policy, concealing itself behind nationalist phrases.” Specifically it demanded that the Rada should stop the passage of anti-Bolshevik military units through the Ukraine, support the Bolshevik effort to put down the hostile forces led by the Don Cossack Ataman Kaledin, and cease disarming Soviet regiments and Red Guards (a Bolshevik workers’ militia) in the Ukraine. Unless these demands were accepted within forty-eight hours, the Soviet Government announced it would consider the Rada “in a state of open war against the Soviet regime in Russia and in the Ukraine.” 

How much this reminds us of Putin's ultimatum to Ukraine and demand for compulsory 'de-Nazification'. Putin was following principles enunciated by Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko: 

According to FM Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet negotiation strategy had three principles:

1. Demand the Maximum. Don’t ask, demand something that has never been yours.

2. Give Ultimatums. Threaten

3. Don’t give an inch in negotiations. Rely on Westerns who will always offer something.

Russia accuses a neighbour of perfidy, makes an ultimatum (no negotiations, no compromise), and then invades. It is easy to imagine that at the time of the first Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukraine and its friends were as paralysed by the Bolshevik ideological offensive as they later were by the Putinist. One's first instinct is to dispute these accusations, and make an argument with the Russian enemy, and deny that one is a bourgeois, a capitalist lackey, a tool of the bourgeoisie, etc; but one gets sucked into quicksand in doing so. 

Unfortunately for Ukraine, it lost the first Russo-Ukrainian War. It did not get to enjoy, like Finland, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the fruits of independence. The Poles abandoned Ukraine, having become exhausted after its war with Russia, and signed the Treaty of Riga in 1921. As to why the Russians signed a treaty, as usual they were forced to do so only by adverse circumstances. Russia had suffered a military setback - it had just lost the Polish-Russian War - and was facing revolt at home; the peasants were revolting against Moscow in the region of Tambov. (As to what became of these peasants: the Moscow regime used poison gas on them; the peasants were crushed with the usual brutality). Ukraine, then, was doomed, and it entered seventy years of Russian captivity (de Custine called Russia the 'prison of the nations'). The episode of the 1917-21 Russo-Ukrainian War should be studied carefully, as it gives the lie to the new Russian contentions that 'Ukraine is a made-up country' and that 'Lenin created Ukraine'. 

V.  Why the War?

When looking at the history of Russia in the past seventy-five years, we are confronted by two wildly diverging estimates of the power and skill of the Russian army. Any young man who grew up during the Cold War and who took in interest in military affairs respected and feared the Red Army. A hundred movies, TV shows, novels, and works of speculation as to what WWIII would look like assured him that the USSR possessed overwhelming might and that in a conventional war, the East would overcome the West in Europe in the space of a few weeks. Inside the Soviet Army (1984) by Viktor Suvorov has a photo of a massed formation of tanks; in a caption underneath it, Suvorov writes:

Soviet standard: 120 tanks and 250-300 guns to one kilometre of penetration front. Only a neutron bomb can stop them. 

As a corrective to this view, we have the analysts who after the end of the Cold War took a dim view of Russian military capabilities. John Mosier, who writes extensively on the Russian army in WWI and WWII, is scathing. Like a good many good many observers before 2022, I agreed with Suvorov, and after 2022,  with Mosier - as must Putin and other members of the Russian leadership in their heart of hearts by now. But it would seem that, contra Mosier, Putin wildly overestimated the Russian army's abilities before 2022. In February 2022, he and the Russian leadership evidently believed that Russia could defeat, conquer, and occupy a nation of 45 million with a scratch force of less than 200,000 men. 

Why, then, was it that Russia decided to invade Ukraine again and precisely at that moment? To ask that question is to ask what are the underlying causes of war. 

I find a good working hypothesis in the work of the supply-side publicist Jude Thaddeus Wanniski (1936-2005). Being a sort of economic determinist (like Marx) and a neoliberal free-marketeer, he found his answer to the question 'Why war?' in economics. He sketched out a theory that economic tensions, caused by high taxes, bring about the political tensions that can threaten to explode into war. 

The history of Japan in the 1930s and 1940s furnishes us with the classic example that confirms Wanniski's hypothesis. In 1929, the US Senate passed the Smoot-Hawley bill that imposed a tariff of 60% to 80% on virtually all imported goods. Other nations retaliated with their own high tariffs, and to understand how devastating this was to international trade, imagine that tomorrow every sales tax or value-added tax (VAT) or goods and service tax (GST) in your country was raised to 60%; markets would crash, participants in the market (that is, everyone) would cease or slow down their trading, and many would be unable to afford to survive. As goes the individual, so goes the nation. After 1929 Japan was locked out of the world trading system; unable to make its own oil, rubber, wool, wheat, etc., it was forced to raid other countries to obtain these basic goods, all of which are necessary to keep a country alive. In 1941, America, with a view to aggravating Japan, imposed draconian sanctions, compounding Japan's economic difficulties, and inevitably, Japan lashed out. 

Was Russia in 2022 embroiled in a trade war? No, but it suffered from high taxes nonetheless. We must here broaden our definition of the word 'tax'. Inflation can be a tax; if the price of groceries rises by 10% (as it has in every supermarket in Australia), where did that 10% of one's income ago? In a tax - the inflation tax. Likewise, governments can impose a tax on the supply of labour and capital when it forces hundreds of thousands of businesses to close and people to be unemployed - this is what happened in the Covidian years. If we are to cast our minds back to late 2021 and early 2022, we will recognise how brittle the state of affairs was, not only in Australia but in the entire world.  Along with Ukraine, Russia was embroiled in Covidianism, up to its neck in it, in fact, and evidence exists that Putin himself - like a good many boomers - was completely taken in by it. In such a morbid and suffocating atmosphere, a man can become unhinged - as can a nation. That, combined with a deliberately engineered worldwide economic contraction, explains why it is that Russia snapped, and in 4Chan parlance, it 'sperged out'. 

One irony is that the onset of a war in Europe led to the end of the mandates. Another irony is that after the outbreak of war the Russians ended up behaving exactly as German WWII (and WWI) propaganda said they would. The Russians are performing the role assigned to them by that propaganda - the role of barbarians and marauders from 'The East'. This is from a review of a new book The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe (2023) by Martyn Rady: 

Rady draws Central Europe to include the lands from Germany to Poland and then south to Slovenia, with some brief excursuses into the Baltic and Ukraine. By doing so, Rady draws one of the key underlying threads of the book, namely that Central Europe's main threats have always come from the east, from the Huns and the Tatars to the Russians. Indeed, Central Europe thus conceived is the bulwark, the Christian antemurale, against the mythical Scythians riding their horses from the Asiatic steppes on their destructive westward raid. Today's Ukraine tragically carries this role as it grinds, at heavy cost to its own people, the Russian military machinery led by a modern-day tsar on another imperial push.

Such themes formed a staple of German propaganda. From a speech by Himmler in 1943: Today there are only these heathen alternatives: Either Germany, the German Wehrmacht and the countries allied with us and thus Europe are victorious, or the inner-Asiatic-Bolshevik wave breaks over the oldest cultural continent from the East, just as destroying and annihilating as this was already the case in Russia itself.

In a sense, Putin is right: any nation to the Russia that resists the onward sweep of Russia is Nazi; Zelensky and the Ukrainians qualify as honorary Nazis. But in all seriousness, Putin's 'Nazism' is far older than Zelensky or even the actual NSDAP; in the same way, Himmler's 'Bolshevism' was far older than Stalin and the actual Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

After 2022, the European and Russian past came back to haunt us; we saw an instance of what Freud called (in another connection) 'The return of the repressed'. We are forced to confront that past, whether we like it or not, now that Russia has revealed its true face. 

The question I today regard as the most pertinent concerns the political fate of those in the West (both on the Far Left and Far Right) who have invested so heavily in the Putin regime after 2014. Their future depends much on a Russian victory in this war. What will befall them if and when Russia loses the war and the Putin regime collapses?