The Red Underground’s War on Bourgeois Capitalist Europe: Euro-terrorism in the 1970s, West Germany and Italy

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Comparative politics, Political History, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

From the end of the Sixties the militant Weathermen in the US rode a global wave of youth and student rebellion against “the establishment” (see blog, 17-Jan-2020). Their emergence was in part a direct consequence of the student protests and violent clashes with the police and security forces that shook the leading cities of Europe and elsewhere in 1968 (the “Generation of 1968”). That same wave that gave impetus to the first stirrings of violent resistance by the Weathermen also ushered in other paramilitary organisations in Western Europe around the same time. The two of these that gained the most publicity/notoriety are discussed below.

⫸ West Germany: Red Army Faction (Ger: Rote Armee Fraktion) AKA Baader-Meinhof Gang❉

Ideology: anti-fascist, communist revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, anti-Zionist

The radical student critique: The West German “fascist state”

West German youth by the late 1960s were experiencing a sense of alienation from the Federal Republic (BDR). The source of this disquiet lay in the nature of West German society and politics. The BDR that they had grown up in was now prosperous, but it was moving away from the direction of liberalisation and reform toward a polity that was increasingly authoritarian under the veneer of democracy. The postwar West German government, allying itself to the US and to NATO, and with Berlin on the front line of the Cold War, was charting an increasingly illiberal course, as the country’s politicised youth saw it—the West German Communist Party had been banned in 1956; the police had violently over-reacted to student protests killing one unarmed student activist; the Brandt government had introduced the Radikalenerlass (German for “Radical decree”) law in 1972 barring radicals (as defined by the state) and those with a ‘questionable’ political persuasion from holding public sector jobs. Many in the student left railed against what they saw as hypocrisy from Bonn—assuming the guise of an advanced liberal democracy while at the same time hosting visits from ruthless dictators like the Shah of Iran, not to mention it’s other politically uncomfortable associations [‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki), http://military.wiki.org].

The Wirtschftswunder (the West German “economic miracle”) and its creator, economics minister Erhard 🔻

Students and those on the left generally viewed the postwar denazification of West Germany with justifiable suspicion, it’s outcomes were ineffective and at best incomplete. The policy was breached repeatedly, eg, Chancellor Adenauer’s appointment of a former Nazi-sympathiser to high political office; even more alarmingly, Kurt Kiesinger, a former Nazi Party member, rose to the republic’s top political post, Bundesrepublikkanzler, in 1966; and many ex-Nazis were still able to walk into government positions at the local level up. Many on the left in the BDR were convinced that the republic’s conservative media, controlled by Axel Springer, was biased in favour of the establishment, while the more liberal press in BDR was heavily censored by the government. At the same time radicals looked on aghast when the two major parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, formed themselves into a “Grand Coalition” (‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki).

As the succeeding generation, many students were left with a feeling of war-guilt as inheritors of the nation’s Nazi past. Added to this was the disillusion many Germans felt at their country being associated with a blatantly imperialist war in Vietnam. All of these dilemmas coalesced into a conviction for many on the left that the BDR government lacked legitimacy and was tantamount to a “fascist state”. Hence the collective call of West German youth for radical social change. The radicalisation of many in the republic’s student movement was partly fuelled by healthy doses of Marxist economic theory (it should be remembered that in 1966 the BDR economy had gone into recession—for the first time in 15 years) [‘German students campaign for democracy, 1966-68’, (Global Nonviolent Action Network), http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu].

BMG – terrorising the BDR

Student disaffection and that of other activists in the West German New Left was rife, many protested their disapproval, some turned to more violent and direct ways of voicing their opposition. Into this turbulent milieu came, among others, the first incarnation of the Red Army Faction, better known courtesy of the media’s tag, the Baader-Meinhof Gang (BMG), at the end of the Sixties. Its founders and main leaders were Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Horst Mahler.

BMG started by engaging in arson as a protest against the Vietnam War and graduated to bomb attacks on US military facilities, German police stations and media outlets controlled by the Springer press. To bankroll their terrorist activities the gang robbed banks and kidnapped VIP hostages for ransom✫ [‘The Red Army Faction and the Stasi’, TELOSscope, 24-Oct-2016, (Review of Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals), www.telospress.com; ‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki)]. Among BMG’s victims were symbols of the BDR regime (individuals from the political and economic elites), US military personnel, as well as a number of unfortunate bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Despite killing some 34 people during its urban guerrilla ‘career’, RAF managed to elicit a measure of support from within West German society. For scores of disillusioned young West Germans at the time, there was support for or at least acceptance of RAF’s actions…(as Siegel put it), owing to the (still recent) Nazi legacy many “guilt-ridden liberals saw (RAF’s) panache as a countercultural critique of West Germany’s boring bourgeois life”. There is evidence also that there was collusion between BMG and East Germany and specifically the DDR’s Stasi (secret police) (Neaman). BMG also underwent some guerrilla training from the Palestinian al-Fatah in Jordan – which didn’t go exactly to plan. Andreas Baader, the group’s leader, deliberately cultivated an outlaw image, likening himself to Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde criminal infamy) [‘The Romance of Evil’, by Fred Siegel, City Journal, 18-Sep-2009]§. Baader, Meinhof and their close associates were arrested in 1972 and the leaders died in custody within a few years—apparently by their own hands (though some are skeptical that these were in fact suicides).

Eponymous leaders of BMG 🔻

With the founding members in prison, a “second generation” of RAF cadres emerged, sympathetic to the group’s cause, picking up the terrorist-guerrilla baton where the incarcerated pioneers left off. This “RAF 2.0” was proactive between 1975 and 1979, especially during what became known as the “German Autumn” of 1977. They held personnel hostage at the West German embassy in Stockholm, perpetrated hits on public prosecutors and bankers, kidnapped industrialists, etc. ). In the 1980s and 1990s a” third generation” of RAF materialised and was intermittently active for some years, but since 1998 RAF has been considered to be moribund.

∝∾∾∾∾∾∝∝∾∾∾∾∾∝

⫸ Italy: Red Brigades (It: Brigate Rosse)

Ideology: anti-fascist, communist revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist

As with their West German counterpart, the Red Brigades (BR) had its antecedents in the massive-scale student protests of 1968 against the state, and the workers’ struggles in Italy in 1968-69 to bring about social and political change. The militant organisation was formed from a leftist student group at the University of Trento in Italy’s north set up by Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol. BR claimed a membership of up to 1,000 strong at its peak (others have put it at about 400 to 500 full-time members) plus an indeterminate number of supporters [“Years of Lead” — Domestic Terrorism and Italy’s Ref Brigades’, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, www.adst.org ; Sundquist, Major Victor H. “Political Terrorism: An Historical Case Study of the Italian Red Brigades.” Journal of Strategic Security 3, no. 3 (2010) : 53-68. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.3.3.5. Available at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol3/iss3/5].

CDP-PCI’s “compromiso storico”

In Italy BR was able to tap into the prevailing student and worker discontent with the government (at first through it’s grass-root activism in northern industrial cities like Milan and Turin). Many radicalised sections of Italian workforce were disillusioned by the ‘historic’ coalition formed between the conservative Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and a belief lingered that PCI’s deal with the main bourgeois party would not ultimately represent the interests of the country’s working class (Sundquist) (cf. the CDU/SDP coalition in West Germany).

Red Brigades in “the Years of Lead”

From the early to the late 1970s BR unleashed a series of terror strikes, a chapter in what became known in Italy as “the Years of Lead” (It: Anni di piombo), which was a longer period of postwar social and political turmoil in Italy characterised by terrorist attacks from both right- and left-wing paramilitary groups. Material help for BR was forthcoming from the USSR and Czechoslovakia (weaponry). After the arrest of Curcio and Cagol in 1974, a “second generation” of radicals took up the ‘war’ against the Italian authorities. The act most associated with the BR Mach II (now led by Mario Moretti) and earning it its greatest opprobrium was the kidnapping and eventual murder of former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro in 1978. BR’s murder of the highly popular Moro lost it much public support, including that of some sections of the left.

The assassination of Moro galvanised the national government, the Italian security forces and the Carabinieri into launching an all-out war against the leftist terrorist organisation☌. With a more concerted counter-terrorist strategy including intelligence from paid informers, the authorities were ultimately successful in capturing the leaders and a large chunk of BR cadres, effectively eliminating the threat to the country during the 1980s◎. [‘The Red Brigades’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org ; ‘Years of Lead (Italy)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Sundquist]. Despite its eventual failure and demise, BR was lethally effective in its methods – between 1973 and 1994 the terrorist group killed 223 people in its assaults (Global Terrorism Database, University of Maryland). One academic calls it “the most menacing radical group in Italy‘s post-WWII history”, [‘Learning from the Past: Case of the Red Brigades in Italy’, Daniela Irrera, Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses. Vol. 6, No 6 (JULY 2014]. International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research. URL: www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26351263].

Methods of the “Red Euro-terrorists”

Both RAF and BR used similar tactics and strategies – primarily sabotage, arson, bank robberies, kidnappings and assassinations. The human targets were generally politicians (almost all right-wing), senior police, judges, industrialists and bankers, though BR also went after trade union officials in Italy which eventually helped undermine its support. Initially, BR refrained from lethal violence, often inflicting the punishment of aginocchiare (kneecapping) on its selected targets. But, as the Seventies rolled on, they were taking a more direct and extreme retribution on the capitalist state expanding the scope of terror to murder.

RAF ‘wanted’ poster (source: www.vukutu.com)

These two far-left European terrorist groups according to their pronouncements shared roughly the same broad, radical objectives as the Weather Underground – to destabilise the state and bring down the country’s capitalist regime◘. The two, also like the Weathermen, took great inspiration and more than a few tips from the Tupamaros urban guerrilla group of Uruguay. The Weather, BR and RAF all pursued a avowedly violent strategy against the authorities, but the Weathermen, when compared to BR and RAF, were “terrorism-lite”. Whereas the Weather targeted material damage only, meticulously avoiding the endangering of human life, the two European terrorist groups had no such compunctions or qualms.

Endnote: RAF and BR – red militants in a crowded field of left-wing Euro-terrorists

Neither RAF in Germany or BR in Italy were sole traders in the leftist-terrorism game in their respective countries, such is the splintering nature of ultra-left, extremist groups. There were a string of other terrorist groups operating at the same time, the most consequential of these were Prima Linea (Italian for “First Line”) in Italy and the Revolutionary Cells (Ger: Revolutionäre Zellen – RZ) in West Germany—the latter having a lower profile than RAF but actually perpetrating more bomb and arson attacks on the state than it (Military Wiki).

◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘

❉ sometimes also called Baader-Meinhof Group. Red Army Faction was its official organisational name

✫ BR went one better in fund-raising it’s revolutionary mission, getting involved in drugs and arms trafficking which included doing business with the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra (‘Red Brigades’, Wiki)

§ a trait shared by the Weathermen

◘ BR also had another, more specific objective of wanting to force Italy to leave NATO

☌ this did not stop BR Mach II from making one more high-profile kidnapping, that of American deputy chief of staff of NATO (General Dozier) in 1981. Italian police managed to rescue the general unharmed and Italian and NATO security forces executed successful retaliatory action again BR (Sundquist)

◎ BR though didn’t entirely disappear…after it split into two separate groups in the early 1980s, the more hardline splinter group continued into the 2000s (amounting to a third organisation claiming to represent BR)

Work of “The Devil”, a Reference Compendium of Unconventional Wisdom for Cynics in the Progressive Era

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

The World According to Bierce

Ambrose Bierce, American short story writer, man of letters, journalist and civil war (Union side) veteran, is best known for his unorthodox lexicon, The Devil’s Dictionary, a humorous, satirical and very personal take on a selection of words in the English language. The dictionary was compiled by Bierce over three decades, being initially published in instalments in various newspapers and magazines. Eventually the collection was published in book form, first as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1906 and then as The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911, two years before Bierce’s never satisfactorily-explained disappearance in Chihuahua, Mexico, where the journalist was visiting to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution.

Highly influential literary critic of the first half of the 20th century, HL Mencken, heaped lavish almost doting praise on The Devil’s Dictionary… “the true masterpiece of the one genuine wit that These States have ever seen“…”some of the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language“…”some of the most devastating epigrams ever written“.⇑ First (1911) edition of the Dictionary

დ~დ~დ დ~დ~დ დ~დ~დ

Cynicism and satire provide the backbones of Bierce’s provocative dictionary. So, an interesting place to start looking is how he handles these terms – the words ‘satire’, ‘cynic’ and ‘dictionary’ themselves. Despite being fully versed in the craft himself, Bierce views the practitioner of cynicism less than favourably.

Cynic: A blackguard❅ who sees things as they are, and not as they ought to be (which presumably is the definition of an optimism۞).

Satire: An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness✫.

Dictionary: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.

Bierce goes on to add with tongue firmly planted in his cheek that his dictionary, however, is “a most useful work”.

But a cynic Bierce certainly is. At one point he sweepingly declares, in the blanket fashion that is his trademark, that “all are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher” (in which case, what would Bierce have made of Freud and the “dark art” of psychotherapy!?!). This perception of the author reminds me to some extent of the distinction often made between a person with an erratic behavioural pattern who is poor (and is labelled insane), and a person with an erratic behavioural pattern who is wealthy (labelled merely eccentric).

Romance and true love falls by the wayside with Bierce’s cynic always hovering around ground level:

Love: A temporary insanity cured by marriage.

Politics is even more fertile ground for Biercian cynicism…even the highest office in the land is not spared. With characteristic directness, there is:

President: The greased pig in the field game of American politics.

Senate: A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors.

Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.

And of course, to Bierce, ‘capital’ (ie, the capital) is defined as “the seat of misgovernment”.

The contemporary power politics of the day is very entrenched in Bierce’s cynic’s consciousness:

Cannon: an instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.

In a similar vein Bierce gives recognition to the tradition of his nation’s imperialistic ambitions in possibly the most quoted and most acute of Bierce’s definitions:

War: God’s way of teaching Americans geography⬲.

Bierce’s entries can go off on a tangent☒, often making extensive use of quotations from “eminent poets” to underscore his definitions (Father G Jape, SJ, is a much relied upon prop for Bierce). Sometimes this involves recourse to wordy anecdotes and phrases. In contrast to lengthy descriptors, some Devil’s Dictionary‘s entries are succinctly on the mark, some are absolute poetic corkers:

Absent: Peculiarly exposed to the tooth of detraction.

Erudition: Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

Envy: Emulation adapted to the meanest capacity.

Fib: A lie that has not cut its teeth.

Martyr: One who moves along the line of least reluctance to a desired death.

Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.

And even more succinctly summarised is:

Hope: Desire and expectation rolled into one.

Some of Bierce’s ‘opinions’ veiled as definitions are little more than whimsical nonsenses or clever wordplays:

Incumbent: A person of the liveliest interest to the outcumbents.

Harbor: A place where ships taking shelter from stores are exposed to the fury of the customs.

The Devil’s Dictionary dishes up irony in spades, repeatedly turning the mirror back on the reader:

Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

Bierce’s lexicon is strewn with idiosyncratic elements, one is a recurring motif of robbers and theft, regularly he describes a situation where someone’s hands are in someone else’s pockets:

Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.

Bierce is often lauded for his humanist perspective of the world…the major organised religions do not escape his critical eye:

Religions are “conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises”

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

He can be irreverent – “Christians and camels both receive their burdens kneeling”.

The Dictionary dishes up a smorgasbord of satirical, ironic and often bitter definitions of the world as seen by Ambrose Bierce (one of the acerbic writer’s nicknames was “Bitter Bierce”). But Bierce is of course a creature of his time with all the glaring faults and prejudices of the 19th century white man’s mindset. So, through the satire and cynicism we witness the less savoury traits and predisposition of the lexicographer. Casual assumptions of racism and misogyny run through the pages of The Devil’s Dictionary.

 Witch: A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.

Widows are depicted as “pathetic creatures”, whereas wives are dismissed as merely “bitter halves” (big surprise: Bierce was separated from his own wife). On occasions he crosses the line that even he should not have ventured, such as advocating or at the very least implying a violent impulse towards the female sex:

Bang: The arrangement of a woman’s hair which suggests the thought of shooting her.

The dreaded ‘N’ word is wheeled out in the cause superior of cynicism:

African: A nigger who votes our way.

And there is more than a hint of a general misanthropic disposition emerging from the pages of the Dictionary:

Birth: The first and direst of all disasters.

Marriage is the union of “two slaves”.

AB’s miscellany of hobby horses

Politicians and philosophers are on Bierce’s “hit list”, as are lawyers who get a predictable assessment:

Lawyer: One skilled in the circumvention of the law.

Liar: A lawyer with a roving commission.

Historians, in The Devil’s Dictionary are reduced to “broad-gauge gossips”, and ‘history’ is summarily pigeonholed as “mostly false (and) about unimportant events”.

Although he doesn’t specifically give medical students a definition entry, his regular references to them through the book might prompt one to conclude that their single defining feature is that of “grave-robbers”∞.

Places like New York City and specifically Wall Street are “dens of iniquity”, the sort of Biblical association Bierce employs to those things or entities representing (in his eyes) absolute evil.

Bierce’s idiosyncratic designation of ‘happiness’, as “an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another” dovetails neatly to the definition of the German term Schadenfreude (substituting the word ‘perverse’ for ‘agreeable’ perhaps).

Bierce’s dictionary is also prone to outbursts of elitism – such as:

Laziness: Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.

Idiot: A member of a large and powerful tribe✪ whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling (an ‘idiotocracy’ perhaps).

EndNote: Bierce’s cold trail
The mysterious disappearance of Bierce has fascinated interested parties for the hundred plus years since the author vanished in Mexico. Speculation has been wildly unrestrained and rampant as to the writer’s supposed end (eg, he hooked up with Mexican bandit leader Pancho Villa and he was killed by Federal troops, or by rebels, or by his own hand or by Villa himself). Novelists, playwrights and filmmakers have all had a go at unravelling the mystery, but the reality is that no one really knows what happened to Bierce [‘The Death of Bierce’, The Ambrose Bierce Appreciation Society, www.biercephile.com].

👿

⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝

❅ Bierce defines ‘blackguard’ as an “inverted gentleman”, like a box of cherries that displays the fine ones on top but with the box “opened on the wrong side”

۞ except that Bierce’s ‘optimist’ is “a pessimist (who) applied to God for relief”

✫ obsolete or not, it doesn’t stop AB from indulging in the device

⬲ it is not universally accepted that this most famous of Bierce-isms originated with Bierce himself, see for instance “The Ambrose Bierce Site”, www.donswain.com

☒ for example see the entry for ‘story’

∞ maybe overstated but Bierce was not fabricating a connection – “body snatching” for medical education was a very real and very lucrative activity at the time

✪ Bierce tended to view different societal groups as tribal entities

On the Appian Way: Model Community, Suburban Precinct?

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Leisure activities, Local history, Social History

Burwood is an old, established suburb in what is today called the Inner West of Sydney, but was once (broadly) just called the “Western Suburbs”. In the colonial period and even into the early days of Federation, Burwood’s standing in the “pecking order” of Sydney suburbs was probably somewhat higher than it is today, if the grandness of its large, surviving houses and mansions, especially towards the southern end of Burwood Road, Burwood, is anything to go by.

Appian way, or if you prefer, the Appian Way, is a reminder of the more exalted social status that Burwood perhaps once commanded. In the midst of the “Strata-titleland” that is modern day Burwood is the Appian Way, you’ll find it perched between Burwood Road (South) and the seminal Liverpool Road. Appian Way is just a short, little street which charts a serpentine course, looping not far from its eastern end. Within this loop lies the street’s main interest…at least as far as this correspondent is concerned.

Hoskins Estate
More of that later but first some background. Appian Way (with its obvious nod to Ancient Rome’s illustrious highway) had its genesis with wealthy industrialist George John Hoskins. Hoskins who along with his brother Charles extracted their immense capital from successful engineering and steel-making works, purchased the land which hitherto had been called Humphrey’ Paddock just after the turn of the 20th century✽. London-born Hoskins conceived of it as an (upmarket) model housing estate to accommodate the executives of his businesses in close proximity to himself. That is, a haven for citizens of his own socio-economic class. The estate of some 20 acres in area was intended for houses of a standard that would attract ‘respectable’ businessmen and professionals … a harmonious social community having all the facilities desirable for a self-contained suburban lifestyle” [‘A model community’, Cheryl Kemp and John Johnson, Inner West Courier, 28-May-2019, www.innerwestcourier.com.au].

Hoskins, exhibiting a tendency which nowadays we might describe as that of a “control freak”, leased rather than sold the estate’s houses, which allowed the industrialist and developer to monopolise all aspects of the community (only one solitary house in the tree-lined street had been sold by the time of Hoskins’ death in 1926) [ibid.].

The houses
The Dictionary of Sydney describes the Appian Way as a “heritage-listed precinct of Edwardian houses”. The architecture is of that period but the houses are best characterised as asymmetrical and very variable in style. Essentially, together the original estate comprises some of the finest examples of Australian Federation style with their multi-gabled roofs, wide use of slate and terracotta tiles, and drawing on a variety of domestic designs. The grounds of the properties are more than generously spacious – large blocks, expansive frontages, manicured lawns and landscape gardens. Appian Way includes a nature strip in the midst of these bushy and leafy residences which is neatly maintained and occupied by Brush Box trees [‘Appian Way’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

‘Erica’ – perhaps the Way’s standout ▲

The original houses still standing in Burwood’s Appian Way are a rich sample of different Federation styles. Among the variants of the genre is the Queen Anne Federation (‘Alba Longa’ and ‘Colonna’), the Arts and Crafts Federation (‘Erica’ and ‘St Ellero’) and the Bungaloiw Federation style (‘Casa Tasso’ and ‘Ostia’). One or two modern redbrick houses have also infiltrated the street, but these undistinguished abodes stick out by virtue of the paucity of their character in comparison with the elegant ‘Feds’.

Appian Way Recreational Club
On the eastern side of Appian Way the street forms a curve which envelops a communal reserve – this is Hoskins estate’s most distinctive feature回. The sign on the iron gate of the reserve spells out the acronym “AWRC’- Appian Way Recreational Club. The AWRC purportedly runs a lawn tennis club on the green field, but when I visited, the lines of the courts had not been recently marked and the nets nowhere to be seen✣. With the gates of the club firmly padlocked, it did not look like there had been a game in jest or earnest for some time.What tennis courts? ▲

When the estate’s houses were eventually offered for sale after Hoskins had passed on, the standing arrangement was that each house sold came with a share in the communal reserve (owned collectively by the Appian Way Recreational Club) [‘A model community’].▲ Bush plants and agaves surround the ‘courts’

Footnote: I have a distant but nonetheless pretty firm recollection (dating from around late 1970s) that before the lawn tennis courts existed at the AWRC, the field was used as a croquet court…which would be an altogether appropriately patrician pastime for the financially well-connected community of the estate’s earliest days – what today we might call “the big end of town”.

▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️

✽ recipient of the original land grant at Burwood was one William Faithful who came to the colony as a private in the NSW Corps in 1792

回 it is speculated that Hoskins may have derived inspiration for this distinctive feature from ‘The Parade’ in nearby Enfield [‘A model community’]
✣ let alone the semblance of an actual player or two

The Russian Far East: Russia’s Far Flung Territory in North-East Asia 1

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Inter-ethnic relations, Politics, Regional History, Social History

Vladivostok, the principal city and port of Far Eastern Russia, is nearly 4,000 miles from the Russian Federation’s capital, Moscow, yet it is only some 830 miles from China’s capital, Beijing. That stark fact of geography goes a good way to explaining the Russian Far East’s destiny. The inhospitable remoteness of the wild East from the capital of Russia, be it under empire, union or federation, has in its history never been until very recently❉ in the forefront of the minds of the country’s political leaders.

RFE today: the demographics
Russian: Дальний Восток России/ Dal’niy Vostok Rossi (trslit. Russian), literally “The distant East of Russia”.

Where exactly is it? The Russian Far East is a vast region within the world’s largest single-state political entity; roughly RFE extends from Eastern Siberia and Lake Baikal through to the Pacific coastline.
Area: 6,952,000 kms (comprising 40.6% of all the Russia territory)
Population according to the 2010 Census: 6.3 million (constituting a population scarcity of less than one person per square kilometre).
Composition: the majority are ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, with traditional indigenous and other ethnic minorities – including Mongols and Buryats, Aleuts and Inuits, Chukotko-Kamchatkan peoples, Koryats, Turkic peoples, Korean people (Koryo Saram).
Political division: RFE comprises four oblasts, three krais, an autonomous okrug (Chukotia) and the Sakha Republic⚛️.

Historical background
The Russian Empire, emerging out of its tentative, early Moscovy origins, was not quick to explore (and eventually conquer) the regions to the east of the Russian heartland. Exploration of the area got its impetus and propulsion under the rule of Ivan the Terrible (Tsar Ivan IV) in the late 16th century. Cossack Hetman Ermak’s 1581 victory over the Khanate of Sibir led to other eastern expeditions by other Russian atamans and ultimately to the defeat of the other khanates (the Golden Horde) and the incorporation of their lands under the Russian imperial banner. Aside from empire-building, the Russians were motivated by the mystique that had attached itself to the Asian hinterlands to the east, the reported vast quantities of wealth thought to be on the other side of the Kamen (a traditional name for the Urals)[‘Meeting of Frontiers: Siberia, Alaska and the American West’, (Library of Congress project), www.frontiers.loc.gov].

The image many hold of Sibir

Once the explorers and the conquerors had established the territory in the name of the tsar, the trappers, traders and merchants followed in their footsteps, populating the enormous reaches of Siberia. The promyshelenniki typified these pioneers, the frontiersmen who harvested and distributed the lucrative fur trade, much sought after by the European market. Finally, in 1639, the Russians reached the Pacific at the Sea of Okhotsk with Ivan Moskvitin’s expedition [ibid.].

Yakutsk (capital of Yakutia)

Yakutia, a land with a grim past to match its climate
Yakutia in RFE’s north, today the Sakha Republic (Coordinates: 66°24’N 129°10’E), (not to be confused with the Sakhalin Oblast comprising the Sakhalin and Kuril Islands) achieved legendary notoriety during the Soviet era. Described as “a prison without bars”, Yakutia was the location of somewhere in the region of 105 to 165 of Stalin’s Gulags. Between 1930 and 1950 the Soviets operated brutal forced-labour camps where many victims of Stalin’s autocracy were tasked with building the USSR’s infrastructure in conditions that were intolerable harsh and unbearable cold (arctic permafrost, frozen tundra, etc)⊙.

Contemporary Yakutia typifies the dilemma of RFE. The present government’s commitment to developing RFE is viewed with cynicism by most in the Sakha Republic. The town of Mirny (37,000 inhabitants) is the unofficial diamond capital of Russia, 25% of the world’s commercially mined diamonds are found here❂. In addition the region is blessed with ample deposits of gold and coal. Another more niche commodity found below ground in the republic are the bones of prehistoric woolly mammoths – many of which find a ready home on the black market [‘Left Behind in Russia’s Far East’, (Dmitriy Frolovskiy, The Diplomat, 24-Jul-2019, www.thediplomat.com].

Yakutia locals see the development priorities and benefits accruing from the new emphasis on the RFE differently to that of Moscow. In their eyes the increased wealth extracted from the region goes one way only – back to the centre. This has deepened Yukutians’ sense of isolation from “the mainland” (as the locals sometimes call the rest of Russia). Notwithstanding that the Republic of Sakha is critically underpopulated (around 1M residents in an area of 3,103,200 sq km), many locals also express dissatisfaction with the federal government’s recent attempts to bolster the depleted population of RFE with new intakes of migrants, largely from the ‘Stans’ of Central Asia’ [ibid.].

Norilsk, another ‘Gulagtown’ trying to live down its past
Current day Norilsk is overshadowed by a similar back story to Yakutia’s gulag towns…a remote location in Krasnoyarsk Krai, also supra-Arctic Circle, with no roads or rail lines into the city. Norilsk-Talnakh contains the largest-known deposits of nickel-copper-palladium in the world. In the days of Stalin’s “campaign of terror” Norilsk was “a node in the network of similar camps that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (described) in the Gulag Archipelago” [‘Norilsk: The remote Russian mining town uneasy about its gulag past’, (Tom Parfitt), The Times, 06-May-2018, www.thetimes.co.uk].

Norilsk Golgotha, a monument to the city’s gulag prisoners

Repopulating RFE with Eastern Ukrainians
Ukrainians have been (forcibly) resettled in Siberia and RFE since the 17th century. In the formative years after the Russian Revolution of 1917, Ukrainians resettled in the area known as Zeleny Klyn◚ (sometimes also called Transcathay) tried to secede from the newly established Bolshevik Far Eastern Republic and create their own Eastern Russian entity, Green Ukraine. Fast-forward to 2016, President Vladimir Putin, in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, launched a Ukrainian resettlement program, voluntary this time with inducements of free land in underpopulated northern towns like Igarka for refugees from East Ukraine [‘Green Ukraine’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘Meeting of Frontiers’, loc.cit.]. The free land carrot had already been offered to Russians living in the Federation to migrate to the Far East.

The follow-up second part of my Russian Far East blog piece will deal in more detail with contemporary developments in RFE including Putin’s desire and strategy to turn the region into an economic powerhouse, and the vexing question of foreign investment in RFE, especially that of China.

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❉ the current and greatly enhanced interest shown by the ultra-nationalistic Putin government in Russia’s Far East will be more thoroughly addressed in Part 2 of this blog

⚛️ oblasts, krais and okrugs are terms for administrative divisions with a fair degree of elasticity, although okrug is sometimes rendered as ‘district’ (raion)

⊙ known to get down to temperatures of -70° Celsius

❂ the ALROSA group of companies accounts for 95% of the country’s diamond production and dominates the Russian Far East’s economy

◚ literally “the green wedge”