Showing posts tagged as: USSR
Fortress Moskva for Bibliophiles: The State Library, Depository for Everything Published in Russia
A quieter side of Moscow to visit—a diversion away from the tourist central of St Basil’s, GUM and the Kremlin¹—can be found at the Russian State Library (RSL) in Vozdvizhenka Street in the Arbat neighbourhood. Moskva’s huge public library (founded 1862) back in the USSR days was called with Soviet originality the VI Lenin Library (with the nickname the ‘Leninka’ or the ‘Leninski’). The library’s facade has the standard CCCP look, monolithic and imposing.
(Photo: rsl.ru)
Modern security, antiquated catalogue Once inside the entrance we are faced with a surprising level of security…a security cordon more in keeping with Fort Knox or at the very least a central bank, rather than a library – electronic gates and guards in police-type flak jackets. The way the culturally-proud Moscovites look at, it is a house of treasures that can’t be valued in roubles! The Guinness Book of Records ranks RSL as the largest in Europe and the second-largest library in the world behind the Library of Congress, Washington DC². RSL holds upward of 30 million book items (books, magazines, periodicals and other publications (a smaller but very significant number are in other than the Russian language)³.
(Photo: Pinterest)
But everything is big in RSL, collections of rare, historic maps, musical scores, art folios, etc, 36 separate reading rooms, the card catalogue system. Card catalogues? Yes RSL is holding 21st century technology at bay by clinging to row upon row of wooden card catalogue cabinets (Gen Ys and Millennials must puzzle over this furniture from Mars?)…some may scoff at the retention of the “old school” system but I found it quaint, a nostalgic throwback to less sophisticated methodology (although it should be added that the library maintains a digital catalogue system as well).
RSL is part library, part book and document museum. The 160 thousand item-strong maps collection is a cartographer’s “wet dream”, rare historic maps dating back to the 16th century. Rare books, early printed editions, are RSL’s forte, including manuscripts of ancient Slavonic codices.
RSL’s Ottoman collection (Photo: TRT World)
As Russia’s national library–a status comparable to the Library of Congress–RSL has a special role as the nation’s book depository (the recipient of legal deposit copies of all publications in Russia). No cost to enter RSL but tourists have to get a visitor’s badge at the entry gate, cameras and photography inside the library are “no-nos”.
‘Russian State Library’ publication_____________________________ ¹ actually not far at all from the Kremlin walls, but out of sight and earshot of the throng of tourist queues
² measured by catalogue size (number of items)
³ all holdings and collections in the library amount to over 47 million items
Late Communist Era Capitalist Cravings: The Pepsi Swap
During the Cold War not many people outside of the USSR knew of the Russian penchant for it’s ideological rival’s second most popular cola drink. The Soviet Union’s love affair with Pepsi-Cola started with a meeting between Premier Khrushchev and US Vice-President Nixon in 1959. As part of what was a rare cultural exchange for the time, Khrushchev was introduced to the sugary, carbonated beverage, the taste apparently meeting with the Soviet premier’s approval.
⏏️ Pepsi’s role in the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate
So began a novel bilateral trade. With Russian rubles not valued outside of the USSR, a barter system was forged. The Russian and other Soviet people got to drink Pepsi, in return vodka (in the form of the state-owned brand Stolichnaya) was made available in the US market.
Things went smoothly enough until 1980…the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan threatened the Pepsi deal. Americans boycotted Soviet goods including Stolichnaya…the popular vodka’s sales plummeted in the US. In the late 1980s the Pepsi company—mindful that seven billion Russians were drinking Pepsi each year—hit upon a new and more unorthodox US/Soviet exchange deal.
To keep the Pepsi flowing to Russian consumers, Pepsi accepted a flotilla of ageing Soviet warships in lieu. Taking possession of 17 rusty Soviet warships plus a few other auxiliary naval vessels. The fleet was far from being in A1 shipshape condition, but it enabled the soft drink giant to boast that it possessed the world 6th most powerful navy at the time – on paper if not on water!
(Source: www.naval-encylopedia.com)
Pepsi’s move earned the displeasure of the US military but the company CEO’s slightly disingenuous rejoinder to the Pentagon was that it was dismantling the Soviet fleet faster than they were!*
Pepsi didn’t hang on to the decidedly decrepit Russian fleet for long, selling the warships to a Swedish scrap-recycling business in the early 1990s. A few years later Coca-Cola usurped it’s place in the Russian market.
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* undoubtedly Pepsi’s billion-dollar stake in the USSR remained it’s primary motive
Sites/works consulted: 👁🗨👁🗨👁🗨
’When the Soviet Union Paid Pepsi in Warships’, (Anne Ewbank), Atlas Obscura, 12-Jan-2018, www.atlasobscura.com)
‘ How Pepsi became the 6th largest military in the world‘, (Tom Kirkpatrick, We Are The Mighty, 28-Jan-2019, www.wearethemighty.com
‘Pepsi Navy: When the Soviets Traded Warships for Soft Drinks’, Sandboxx, 06-Nov-2020, www.sandboxx.com
India v China, the Road to War, 1962: An Early Flexing of Regional Muscle by Two Future Asian Superpower Rivals
Just last month there was a border flare-up on isolated Himalayan territory between northern India and China (Tibet)…one with familiar echoes of the past. A seemingly random clash of troops on the banks of Pangong Tso (eastern Ladakh) apparently initiated by the Chinese, some injuries, accusations of trespassing and of illegal building of defence facilities, a serious face-off between two bodies of troops 〚’China vs India: Beijing troops take control of border accusing India of trespassing’, (Brian McGleenon), Express, 18-May-2020, www.express.co.uk〛.
Nathu La border, 2020 (Photo: AFP / Getty Images)
Though the incident is concerning of itself—two Asian military superpowers with nuclear empowerment going head-to-head—this is nothing new, there have been a number of such “minor incidents“ between the two countries over the past six decadesφ. Similar incidents to this occurred in 2017 at the same location and at the Doklam tri-junction (India/Tibet/Bhutan). Small incursions across the contested borderlands by both sides have long been a common occurrence 〚‘Chinese Troops Have Entered Disputed India Territory Several Times in Recent Days’, (AFP), Business Insider, 19-Aug-2014, www.businessinsider.com〛.
Asian brotherhood – before the strains Independent post-colonial India and the People’s Republic of China both emerged in the late 1940s. Initially the relationship between them was cordial, India even fulfilling a role as a diplomatic go-between for communist China to voice the isolated Peking regime’s concerns on world bodies like the UN〚‘India-China War of 1962: How it started and what happened later’, India Today, 21-Nov-2016, www.indiatoday.in〛. Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru pursued a pragmatic approach to the gigantic northern neighbour, entering into the Panchsheel Pact (“Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence”) with China, eventually even recognising Peking’s right to rule Tibet. Nehru’s expression or slogan for the relationship during these “glass half-full” days was Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai (Indian-Chinese brotherhood) (India Today).
Deterioration of Sino-Indian relations
In 1959 the relationship started to turn for the worst. The Lhasa Uprising and the Dalai Lama’s subsequent exile into India didn’t endear India to China and its leader Mao Zedong. But much more permanently troubling has been the ongoing spat between China and India over their shared and disputed borders. India inherited one nightmare of a border mess from the British colonials⌫…on two separate fronts – in the northwest of the country it has several contested boundaries with Pakistan and China (ranging over Kashmir, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand), and in the northeast with China (Arunachal Pradesh (“South Tibet”), Assam, Sikkim).
Border clashes and the road to war In 1959 there were clashes on India’s North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) – at Kongka Pass, Ladakh (nine Indian and one Chinese soldiers killed) and at Longju, on the disputed McMahon Line (one Indian border guard killed). Both sides argued that the other transgressed into its territory first, a standard refrain in the Indo-Chinese confrontations. Mao was rebuked by Soviet leader Khrushchev at the time for harming the relationship with India〚’China’s India War: How the Chinese Saw the Conflict’, (Neville Maxwell), May 2011, www.chinaindiaborderdispute.files.wordpress.com〛.
From sabre-rattling to open war Within three years the continuing border fracas developed into a full-blown border war between China and India…in October 1962 the Chinese People’s Liberation Army attacked the concentration of Indian border posts in Ladakh. The brief war itself was an unmitigated disaster for New Delhi and Nehru. The Indian army was badly led, out-manoeuvred and out-fought by the disciplined, efficient Chinese soldiers. Having spectacularly pushed the Indians back, Peking unilaterally called a ceasefire after one month of fighting and withdrew to the Line of Actual Control (a demarcation line separating the territory controlled by each side) leaving China in control of Aksai Chin (the location of Peking’s principal claim).
The Sino-Indian war subsumed within the broader context of the Cold War As India licked its wounds and tried to compose itself after the shock of the military debacle, Nehru set about portraying China as the belligerent aggressor and India as the aggrieved party merely trying to defend its own territory. Given the prevailing political climate of the time, the US and the UK readily agreed with New Delhi’s assessment of China‘s actions as “bellicose and expansionist”. Peking was almost universally depicted as the villain in the piece with many Western countries adopting the “knee-jerk” anti-communist response, automatically denouncing Chinese aggression and offering support for the victim India. Both the US and the Soviet Union, who had just emerged from a superpower nuclear stand-off over the Cuban Missile Crisis, funnelled lavished amounts of aid to India in the war’s wash-up〚Gregory Clark, Book Review of ‘India’s China War’, www.gregoryclark.net/; Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (1971)〛.
“Forward Policy” The subsequent investigative work of Anglo-Australian journalist Neville Maxwell on the lead-up to the war turned this hitherto-accepted view of the conflict on its head. Maxwell obtained a copy of the top-secret, classified Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report⊗ leaked from an ‘insider’ and published its findings in a book in 1971. Maxwell and the HBB Report exploded the “convenient military mythology” of the 1962 war as being caused by China’s unprovoked aggression 〚’National Interest: Who’s afraid of Neville Maxwell?’, (Shekhar Gupta), The Indian Express, 22-Mar-2014, www.indianexpress.com〛.
Aksai Chin (Source: www.thediplomat.com)
The documents revealed that India from the end of the Fifties pursued “Forward Policy’, an aggressive strategy of military patrolling of disputed land claimed by China (provocatively and repeatedly setting up military posts ever more forward, so that the Indian post troops found themselves eyeballing the Chinese ones✦), Also disclosed was the folly of India’s complete unpreparedness for war at the time 〚’Burying Open Secrets: India’s 1962 War and the Henderson-Brooks Report’, (Shruti Pandalai), The South Asia Channel, 02-Apr-2014, www.archive.org/〛. The classified report and Maxwell show an ill-conceived plan from go to woe on India’s part…Nehru and members of the government pushed the military into a course of reckless adventurism on the northern borders (with Nehru urging the Indian army to drive the Chinese invaders out of the Dhola Strip)(Clark).
Peking showed itself willing to negotiate border disputes with it’s other southern neighbours, working through obstacles and doing so amicably with Burma, Nepal and Pakistan (the latter only too happy to reach a settlement with the PRC, seeing it as buying an insurance policy against it’s number one enemy, India).
(Image: www.differentbetween.info/)
Failure of diplomacy, a negotiating cul-de-sac In negotiations with India, China made it clear that it was prepared to exchange it’s claims to NEFA in it’s entirety for New Delhi’s recognition of it’s claim to Aksai Chin (important to China as a route between it’s northwest province Xinjiang and Xizang (Tibet)). Eminently fair and reasonable as that appeared, Nehru was unwaveringly intransigent and refused to budge on an inflexible, previously-stated position that the frontier and boundaries were already delimited. Nehru presented the Chinese with what was tantamount to a fait accompli, saying effectively, this is what we insist upon, agree to this and then negotiate the rest. Or equally unhelpfully Nehru would insist that the Chinese evacuate Aksai Chin but without making a reciprocal concession on India’s part (Clark).
An alternate view to Nehru’s refusal to countenance any degree of compromise at the negotiating table (Maxwell) has it that at least up until 1959 the Indian PM was favourably disposed to Chou En-Lai’s Aksai Chin/NEFA exchange proposal (Clark).
Chou En-Lai in India (Source: www.indiandefencereview.com)
A calamitous miscalculation The approach of Nehru and his defence minister, Menon, was predicated on the assumption that Peking under no circumstances would resort to war¤ — this transpired to be a fatal misreading of the Peking mindset. Equipped with this (false) sense of security the Nehru government felt free to push the envelope as much as it liked, getting closer and closer to the Chinese posts, raising the stakes each time. Premier Chou from the Chinese side tried repeatedly to negotiate a solution with the Indian PM, while all the time fortifying China’s military position on the disputed borders.
Extra-cabinet Policy-making Nehru, intent on projecting an unwavering show of strength, insisted that the retention of “India’s territories” were non-negotiable, a question of “national prestige and dignity”. With the domestic opposition egging on the government to take an even more aggressive stance on the border issue, Nehru set the stakes too high, as the situation proceeded relentlessly, he could not back down without risking great loss of face. As India plunged deeper into the diplomatic crisis, Nehru monopolised decision-making in his own hands, often by-passing cabinet and parliament altogether (‘India’s China War‘).
Ultimately, a frustrated Peking lost all patience with such bloody-minded stonewalling by the Indian side and took the drastic step that to Nehru and New Delhi had been previously unthinkable 〚’China Was The Aggrieved; India, Aggressor In ‘62’, Outlook, (Interview with N Maxwell, 22-Oct-2012, www.outlookindia.com; ‘India’s China War’〛.
(Source: www.firstpost.com/)
India’s ”Pollyanna approach” to the military situation India blundered into a war it was wholly unprepared for. As Maxwell pointed out, India’s championing of a non-aligned position in world politics and the prestige that afforded it, led it to let it’s guard down defence-wise. During the Fifties the strength of the country’s armed forces was allowed to become depleted. The complacency circa 1960 was manifest in Indians’ characterisation of the border confrontations with the PRC as a “police action”, and in Nehru’s comments that the Himalayas represented an “effective barrier“ to stop China. The effortless annexation of Portuguese Goa in 1961, against hardly any opposing forces, further lulled India into an unrealistic assessment of its own military capability. Signs of hubris even! When it came to the actual conflict in October 1962, the contrast was stark. India had maybe a quarter of the strength of China stationed in the conflict zone. India was deficient to the Chinese in many other areas: in weaponry (shortage of tanks and artillery; it’s jawans (soldiers) lacked the warm clothing essential for the weather and were unacclimatised to the altitude; the Chinese had the advantages of location and communications; and the Indians underestimated the difficulty of the terrain 〚’’Reassessing the Soviet Stand on the Indo-China conflict’, (Arun Mohanty), Russia Beyond, 25-Oct-2012, www.rbth.com; ‘India’s China War’〛.
Blame for the military fiasco also lands heavily on the generals themselves…Lt-General Kaul in particular comes badly out of the report’s findings. The politicians did not get realistic advice from the military commanders on India’s capacity to handle the border conflict, in part because they themselves had dismissed the unfavourable but accurate advice they were getting from subordinate officers at the front concerning the army’s clear lack of combat readiness (‘India’s China War’).
Drifting away from non-alignment There had been an Indian eagerness to engage in reckless war rhetoric in the lead-up to the Himalayan war. India was awash with a mood of nationalistic jingoism…following Pandit Nehru’s lead very few were talking about negotiation, inside and outside the government. This, together with it’s swift recourse to warfare to secure Goa just ten months earlier, lost India credibility in the eyes of other countries in the non-aligned camp, and as Nehru was very much the embodiment of non-alignment statesmanship, this diminished him as well⊟. The fracturing of Indian non-alignment was further underscored with the country gravitating towards both Moscow and Washington at the conflict’s end (‘India’s China War’).
As we have seen since 1962, the posturing and muscle-flexing by India and China on the mountainous border continues to the present. These fracas may on the surface be ‘contained’ shows of bluster, but the geo-strategic importance of the China-Indian border, and its proximity to another unresolved latent border flashpoint in Kashmir (India v Pakistan), remains a very real concern for all three players to avoid the errors of the past 〚’India’s two-front conundrum’, (Shahzad Chaudhry), The Express Tribune, 31-May-2020, www.tribune.com.pk〛.
PostScript: An emerging rift in the “fraternal socialist states” The Indo-Chinese War had piquant ramifications for the Soviet/PRC relationship. When the conflict took a serious turn, China’s expectation would be that it’d get the support of its fellow socialist state against a capitalist democracy, but the USSR annoyed Peking by adopting a neutral stance (a sign to the PRC of emerging “Soviet revisionism”)◊. Moscow’s position shifted over the course of the conflict, initially tilting slightly toward the PRC then back more openly toward India. The Soviets saw friendship with India and Nehru as useful—in a Russian global strategy that was moving towards a peaceful co-existence with the capitalist world—culminating in the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation. The war signalled the emerging ideological gap between the two communist powers which would splinter further apart in 1963 (Mohanty).
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Φ the former Indian army chief VK Singh has stated that he is unconcerned by the most recent fracas, attributing Chinese aggression to an attempt to deflect attention away from it’s current problems at home〚’Amid India-China border stand off, Army Commanders Conference begins’, The Hindu, 27-May-2020, www.thehindu.com〛
⌫ “(India) inherited frontiers…(but) no boundaries”, as Maxwell pithily put it
⊗ the report to this day has not been officially released by any Indian government, it is said, due to its “extremely sensitive” nature and “current operational value” (Pandalal)
✦ in the sensitive Chip Chap Valley almost 40 Indian posts were positioned on territory claimed by China.
¤ this was a massive fail on the part of the Indian bureaucrats too. The Congress government was acting on advice from Intelligence Bureau director BN Mullik who assured it China would not react militarily to Indian advance movements.
⊟ in the trauma and shock of the catastrophic military reversals, a despairing Nehru tried to talk the US and Formosa (Taiwan) into attacking China. As Maxwell noted of India’s curious dualism in this: to Nehru the use of force was “reprehensible in the abstract and in the service of others, but justifiably both politically and morally when employed by India in disputes” (‘India’s China War’)
◊ the USSR had its own boundary disputes with China in the Far East which weren’t resolved until the early Nineties
The 1961 Annexation of Goa: Taking a Decolonising Broom to the Remnants of Estado Portugués da Índia
Having cut itself adrift of British colonial imperialism after WWII, the newly independent Union of India still had a few pieces of the Sub-continent’s geographical jigsaw it wanted to replace. Portugal, a waning colonising power had retained some small fragments of it’s once great empire within the territory of India. Principal among these was Goa on the western coastline of India, held by Portugal since 1510. Together with the tinier exclaves of Daman, Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, they comprised what parent Portugal called the Estado da Índia✥.
In the early Fifties India tried to negotiate with Portugal to get it to hand over Goa and the other exclaves, but Portugal and its dictatorial leader António de Salazar point-blank refused to relinquish the territories. Lisbon’s position was that Goa, Daman, etc were not Portuguese colonies but provinces and an integral part of metropolitan Portugal, and that furthermore the Republic of India did not exist at the time Portugal acquired them. Indian prime minister, Pandit Nehru, having failed to arrive at a diplomatic solution, soon adopted a more direct approach to bring about decolonisation. In 1954 3,000 unarmed Indian activists captured landlocked Dadra and Nagar Haveli unopposed and it was governed as a de facto state until incorporated into the Indian Union in 1961◘ [‘Dadra and Nagar Haveli: When an IAS officer became the instrument of accession’, (RR Dasgupta), Economic Times, 10-Aug-2019, www.economictimes.com]. Primeiro Ministro Salazar
Issue heats up: India ratchets up pressure on Portuguese Goa The shooting of Indian activists in 1955 by Portuguese police for trying to enter Goa only hardened public opinion against the Portuguese colony, spurring on a Goan resistance movement which had been active for decades. Resistance took the form of Gandhi-esque non-violence as well as armed conflict targeting colonial officials (funded and aided by the Indian government). Groups like the “Free Goa Party” were fighting an intermittent guerrilla war against Portuguese control of Goa [‘1961 Indian annexation of Goa’, Military Wiki, http://military.wikia.org].
Lisbon dug it’s heels in, rejecting a call for a referendum to decide the colony’s future. The government worked the diplomatic channels to try to drum up international support for its cause, with scant success. Britain, reminded of its 1899 alliance with Portugal by Salazar, choose to stay out of the dispute [‘Goa Falls to Indian Troops’, (Richard Cavendish), History Today, 61(12), Dec 2011, www.historytoday.com].
Nationalist fervour spills over into full-blown invasion By late 1961 the Goa situation was at flashpoint, especially after an Indian passenger vessel was fired on by Portuguese shore artillery (killing one passenger and injuring the boat’s chief engineer). In December an out-of-patience Nehru, ignoring calls from the US and the UK not to use force to achieve India’s neo-colonialist aims, launched “Operation Vijay” (Victory). A two-pronged assault, one detachment of forces invaded the enclave Daman and the second, Goa itself. With overwhelming military superiority on land, sea and air, the Indians overran the Portuguese forces within two days…the Portuguese commanders once they assessed the hopelessness of their situation surrendered quickly, disobeying Salazar’s order to fight to the last (a prudent decision which kept the casualty toll on both sides of the conflict low (52))✪ (Military Wiki).
Portuguese POWs in Goa, 1961
(Photo: AP)
Aftermath of “Goa’s Liberation”: Legal perspective A motion in the UN Security Council to censure India’s unilateral aggression and demand it withdraw it’s troops from Goa was vetoed by the USSR. Delhi attempted to deflect international criticism by justifying the invasion as “self-defence” (Nehru later conceded this line of argument had been a sham) and held to the view that the UN’s commitment to the goal of decolonisation gave it the right to ‘liberate’ what was India’s “sovereign territory” [‘What not to do in Hong Kong: Lessons from Goa, 1961’, (Bruce Gilley), The Article, 02-Sep-2019, www.thearticle.com]. Some legal observers have described the 1961 takeover as a case of legitimacy overriding legality (the yardstick of which Delhi’s act of force didn’t meet) [‘The annexation of Goa’, Australian Magna Carta Institute, www.ruleoflaw.org.au].
Indian stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Goa annexation 🔻
Lisbon’s reaction: Propaganda, “fifth column” mobilisation and terror
Portugal made no attempt to retaliate militarily but immediately severed all diplomatic ties with India, refusing to recognise the de facto takeover of Goa by Delhi, and offered the territory’s 650,000 residents Portuguese citizenship. Salazar took the loss of Goa and the other possession very hard, feeling let down by the UK and betrayed by a UN “controlled by communist countries and an African-Asian bloc”. The Portuguese did not let it rest there though, Lisbon devised a scheme to undermine India’s position in Goa. The Plano Gralha was launched at a time when India‘s attention was focused on the worsening confrontation with China (which would erupt into open border war in October 1962). Utilising the Portuguese national radio station, Emissona Nacional, the regime’ propaganda channels reached out to disaffected Goans—many of whom were Catholic and wary of integration into a Hindu-dominated nation—in the hope of fomenting active resistance to Indian rule. The plan also called for a series of terrorist attacks on Indian ports – planting bombs on ships anchored in Bombay and Mormugao (Goa), other targets were identified. In 1964 bombs were planted at two locations in Goa by Portuguese PIDE agents to create havoc and spread terror in the province [‘Records show colonizers were not done with Goa”, Times Of India, 19-Dec-2011, www.timesofindia.com].
Salazar’s Portugal eventually gave up it’s campaign of subversion but relations between India and Portugal remained estranged until after the Carnation Revolution in 1974 which saw Portugal’s authoritarian Estado Novo regime overthrown and the country set on the path to democracy and full decolonisation. With the new government in Lisbon, finally came recognition of India’s sovereignty over Goa and the exclaves and the restoration of diplomatic relations between the two former enemies.
(Source: Flickr)
Footnote: India did not emerge from it’s 1961 act of annexation with its reputation unscathed. The US, the UK, the Netherlands and Pakistan were particularly vehement in their criticisms …charges of “naked militarism”, “reckless adventurism” and hypocrisy (for having previously preached the non-use of force to pursue national agendas) abounded. The anachronistic behaviour of Portugal didn’t escape international criticism either, pilloried for hanging on to its colonies way too long [‘Annexation of Portuguese India’, http://infogalactic.com/].
——————————————————————————————————————- ✥ originally there were many more enclaves making up the Portuguese State of India, but by the time of India’s independence these were the ones still in Lisbon’s possession ◘ Portugal disputed the takeover in the International Court of Justice, which in its 1960 (mixed message) judgement ruled that Portugal did have sovereign rights over the territories but that India also had the right to deny Portugal passage to Dadra and Nagar Haveli across Indian territory ✪ they also refused to carry out Salazar’s “Scorched Earth” orders to destroy everything of worth in Goa rather than let it fall into Indian hands (upon repatriation to Portugal the senior officers from Goa were punished for their failure to comply with the PM’s directives)
Republica Moldova, a Not Very Well Known European State in Post-Soviet Space: The Disadvantages of Being Geographically Contiguous with a Latent Russian Hot Spot
Geo-coordinates: 47°0’N 28°55’E. Area: 33,851 sq km. Pop: between 3.5 & 4 million (2018 est). Languages: Moldovan (Romanian), Russian; (minority languages) Gagauz, Bulgarian, Ukrainian. Capital: Chișinău (Rus: Kishinev)
Moldova is a small, basically flat, landlocked country situated on the Moldavian plateau, which forms a part of the Sub-Carpathian mountain system, bordered on its west by Romania and on its east by Ukraine. Most of Moldova’s territory lies between the area’s two main rivers, the Nistru and the Prut.
Moldova (or as it is formally titled, the Republic of Moldova) is one of Europe’s least known countries, it is just about the antithesis of turismo centro on the continent’s ratings board! Of the 44 sovereign countries in Europe recognised by the UN, it was the least visited country in 2016 (UN World Tourism Organisation). Historically, small and nondescript Moldova has tended to be a pawn shifted around from one competing imperial power to another over the centuries, valued only by the big power players for its geo-strategic importance in the region.
Moldavia, under the Soviet era ⇩
Pre-independence Moldova: a revolving door of designations and destinies In 1346 Moldova became the Romanian Principality of Moldavia which included the Duchy of Bukovina, eventually the territory was subsumed under the expanding imperial reach of the Ottomans. In 1812 the sultan ceded it to Russia and it became an outer-lying enclave of the tsar’s empire known as the Governorate of Bessarabia. Freed from Russian rule in 1917 as a consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution, it briefly became the Moldavian Democratic Republic before being united with the Kingdom of Romania (as a federated part of Greater Romania). In 1924 the entity’s status and name changed again, becoming the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic❅. In 1940, in the wash-up of the USSR/Nazi Germany’s Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin consolidated the territory after a land grab of parts of Romania, forming the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. During the war Nazi Germany together with its Romanian ally captured Moldova and held it until the Red Army launched a successful counter-offensive in 1944. Once again in Russian (Soviet) hands, the USSR implemented a postwar process of Russification in the Moldavian ‘Republic’ (enforced socio-economic reforms, especially urbanisation and migration). The status quo persisted until 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After this seismic political transformation Moldova along with many other Soviet SSRs gained its independence from the Russian empire [The Times Guide to Eastern Europe, (Ed. by Keith Sword), 1991; ‘Moldova between Russia and the West: A Delicate Balance’, (Eugene Rumer), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 23-May-2017, www.carnegieendowment.org].
Moldavia – the “Land of Aurochs” Since 1991 Republica Moldova’s path on the road to a viable and independent democracy has been obstructed by a myriad of challenges. From the start, like other former Soviet SSRs in Central Asia and the Caucasus, its long-term viability was hamstrung by the lack of a tradition of self-government and sovereignty. A major challenge has been trying to find political leaders not tainted by association with the Soviet era. The political inexperience also manifested itself in ongoing constitutional problems for the country. Economics is equally significant a hurdle for the still embryonic democracy…Moldova is a poor, agriculturally-based country, reliance on the former masters, the Russians, has come at a cost. The USSR’s legacy for the new country of a concentration of state and collective farms has made transitioning from a controlled to a free market economy a more rocky passage [‘Moldova’, (KA Hitchins, B Buckmaster, E Latham & F Nikolayevich Sukhopara), Encyclopaedic Britannia, www.britannia.com]. What pre-existing industry there was in Moldova, was concentrated in the Transdniestria corridor (see below).
Multiethnic identities and allegiances Roughly two-thirds of Moldova’s population is of Romanian descent with the remainder a mix of ethnicities…in the tiny eastern region of Transdniestria there is a block of predominantly Russian and Ukrainian speakers. Moldavia’s experience under the Soviets’ republics policy has included episodes of expulsions of native Moldovans, Gaguaz, Bulgarians and Jews, and the parachuting in of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. One regional specialist has described it as “a product of ethnopolitical-administrative experimentation” (Rumer).
⇧ Old Orhei monastery, Moldova (Source: Calin Stan/Adobe Stock)
The challenge of stable government Since independence Moldova has managed to establish a reasonably acceptable level of political pluralism…awarded by Freedom House a rating of “partially free” (because of government corruption and deficiencies in the rule of law scoring 58 out of 100) [‘Freedom in the World 2019 – Moldova’, Freedom House, www.freedomhouse.org]. Power has tended to alternate between pro-Russian and pro-European leaders, comprising the (pro-Russian) socialist and communist parties, the centre-left Democratic Party and liberal reformists. At one point the country’s governance functioned for three years without an elected president. Regular changes of government and direction in Moldova reflects public disaffection with the inability of both sides of parliament to address the country’s problems (poor living standards, unemployment, high-level corruption especially involving a national banking scandal✪).
Transdniestria – the crux of conflict within the state (Image: www.joksankolikot.net) Transdniestria (officially Pridnestrovskaja Moldavskaja Respublika) Area: 4,163 sq km. Pop: 469,000 (2018 est) Languages: Russian, Moldovan, Ukrainian. Capital: Tiraspol
The highest profile issue undermining Moldova’s efforts to establish a stable, cohesive national entity has been the lingering problem of a separate Transdniestria. This narrow strip of land within the Moldovan state comprising significant percentages of Russians and Ukrainians□ broke away from Moldova soon after independence. A brief civil war ensued, Moldovan forces attempted to quash the Transdniestria revolt but was thwarted by the intervention of the Russian 14th Army. A cease-fire in 1992 brought the conflict to a halt and a security zone was established with a peace-keeping force (including Russian troops) in occupation. The Transdniestria enclave has continued to assert its putative sovereign independence, however neither Moldova or any other sovereign state including Russia has recognised its claims. Recently, there having been no resumption of the armed conflict, political onlookers have characterised the situation as a “frozen conflict”…some analysts in the West view it as “de facto settled”. Although the dispute remains unresolved, there is a perception that the combatants have learned over the intervening years “to peacefully co-exist” with one another (Rumer).
This is not to say that the Russian bear has relinquished its political ambitions or interest in the disputed territory, far from it! Transdniestria—and Moldova as a whole—remain geo-politically important to Russia vis-a-vis the Black Sea (more so after the aggressive Russian incursion into the Ukraine in 2014) and in its proximity to the Balkans. Russia supports a “special status” for Transdniestria (announced by then Russian PM Medvedev from Kiev). Meanwhile patterns of intent can be discerned, Moscow continues to maintain a presence in Transdniestria which it sees as a Russian outpost in that region. And there has been a clear effort to forge a new Soviet-Moldovan identity distinct from the Romanian one, eg, by the promotion of the Cyrillic alphabet in preference to the incumbent Latin script (Rumer).
A secondary separatist movement Transdniestria is not the only irredentist or ethnic breakaway movement that the government in Chișinău has had to contend with. From the late 1980s the Gagauz halki (people), a Turkic-speaking Christian minority in Russian Moldavia, experienced an upsurge in nationalist feeling. In 1990 the Gagauz, apparently concerned about the preservation of its own cultural identity within the new Moldovan state, unilaterally proclaimed itself an autonomous republic (Gaguazia, capital Comrat), followed one year later by a full declaration of independence. Intriguingly, despite this, the Gagauz are inclined to harbour a nostalgia for the old USSR [‘Moldova country profile’, BBC News, (15-Nov-2019), www.bbc.com]. The Moldovan republic has steadfastly refused to countenance independence for the Gagauz but in 1994 it did grant the region a form of autonomy (as a “national-territorial autonomous unit”) and it’s own governor (bașman) [‘Gaguazia’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Gagauzia ⇧
Russia’s role and influence in Moldova Heavily overlaying Moldova’s attempts to establish good governance and national viability is the gravitational pull exerted on it by both Russia and Romania. Successive Chișinău administrations have—to varying degrees—striven to free themselves from too much reliance on Russia. The relatively undeveloped nation has nonetheless had to acknowledge the economic realities of it’s situation: making a clean break from Russian dependence is something extremely difficult to accomplish. Clearly, the plan of Moldovan reformers was to move closer to the orbit of the EU and this has progressively happened after the country satisfied the EU of its willingness to make democratic and economic reforms. The outcome? Today, the EU is Moldova’s major trading partner (worth US$3.5 bn in 2016), making great strides in turning the country’s international trade matrix around [‘The World Factbook: Moldova’, (Central Intelligence Agency), www.cia.gov]. Nonetheless, economic dependence on Russia—through a complicated set of existing conditions—remains crucial and seemingly unavoidable for the time being.
Remittances, energy and wine The abysmally low GDP per capital by European standards of Moldovans (US$5,237, 2017) forces large numbers of them into becoming guest workers overseas. Many of these go to Europe especially Italy, but Russia remains the main source of external employment. Remittances by these workers back to their families in Moldova amount to about US$1.2 bn each year (15% of the country’s GDP), the third highest in the world. By far the largest portion of Moldovan Gastarbeiter, about 500,000 guest workers, rely on Russia each year for their income (Rumer; ‘World Factbook’).
Access to energy for Moldova compounds its fragile interdependence. The country is in debt to Russia’s giant Gasprom corporation to the tune of US$6 bn for it’s supply of natural gas (ironically the greater part of this debt to Moscow was incurred by Transdniestria). This energy situation persists because Romania has been able to meet at this time only a small portion of Moldova’s gas needs (‘World Factbook’).
(Photo credit: AP)
Wine-making, on the surface of it, is Moldova’s one bright light. In 2014 the small southeastern European country was the world’s 20th largest producer of wine (mainly reds). Easily it is—together with remittances—Moldova’s most important export. Again however Russia is at the core of the matter. Up to 90% of Moldovan wine goes to Russia. Good for Moldova’s export earnings sure, but the downside of such over-dependence on Russia is fraught with hazards. This places Russia in the position of being able to inflict damage on the Moldovan economy, were it to harbour a whim to do so. And this is not a purely theoretical consideration: twice this century (most recently in 2013), the Russian Republic banned the import of wine from Moldova with predictable effects on the latter’s economy. Russia offered up a pretext, alleging that the Moldovan wine was contaminated with plastic, but it doesn’t require a lot of imagination to see a thinly-veiled warning of disapproval aimed at it’s small regional neighbour [‘Why Russian wine ban is putting pressure on Moldova’, (Tessa Dunlop), BBC News, 21-Nov-2013, www.bbcnews.com; ‘Moldova country profile’].
Closer ties with Romania? Linguistic homogeneity does bind Moldova closer to Romania but the Moldovans are in no hurry to formalise the nexus through unification with it’s western neighbour. Romania does provide something of a counter-pull for Moldova against the leverage exerted by Russia and a strong Moldovan-Bulgarian nationalist movement has been fostered (Rumer). However, only between seven and fifteen percent of Moldovans have indicated that they are in favour of union with Romania✜ [‘A union between Moldova and Romania: On the cards?’, (Michael Bird), EU Observer, 05-Mar-2015, www.euobserver.com]. Moldovans, it appears, despite the linguistic cord binding them to Romania, don’t tend to possess the sort of irredentist urges that Transdniestrians do for Russia.
The murmurings of unification advocacy have been confined to some sectors on the Romanian side. Even these mostly have tended to be tentative ones. One proposal calls for Romania to reunify with the former geographical entity of ‘Bessarabia’, which is highly problematic – such a union would include parts of present day Ukraine and would exclude Transdniestria! In 2015 a group of Romanian MPs under the banner “Friends of the Union” called for closer economic and cultural ties between the two homophonic countries. Bucharest has, since 2010, started to provided significant amounts of aid to Moldova (€100 M), including for education. For the most part though, Romania’s greatest value to ordinary Moldovan citizens lies in it being a gateway to the EU…since 1991 around half-a-million Moldovans have obtained Romanian passports which allows them entry to the wider Western Europe through the prevailing Schengen arrangements (Bird; Rumer).
PostScript: Sole remaining remnant of the Soviet Union? Transdniestria is the only political entity in Europe which still bears the “hammer and sickle” on it’s flag—and the only Eastern European entity which still calls it’s secret service the KGB! Tiraspol’s “House of Soviets” proudly honours the tradition of Lenin and Stalin with busts and pictures and the enclave’s various patriotic hommages to the Soviet past lead many outsiders to not take Transdniestria particularly seriously…”a fossilised piece of the former USSR” (Lonely Planet), “a collective hallucination” shaped like a “small worm squashed between two larger creatures” [‘Hopes Rise in Transnistria of a Russian Annexation’, (Alexander Smoltczyk), Spiegel International, 24-Apr-2014, www.spiegel.de/international/]. But dieheart Transdniestrian irredentists were encouraged by Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and cling to a (slim) hope that Russia will some day follow suit with Transdniestria, or at the very least, make it a non-contiguous exclave on the model of Kaliningrad (Smoltczyk).
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❅ an “autonomous republic” under the jurisdiction of Ukraine – an “artificial political creation” inspired by Moscow’s ideological rhetoric of “world revolution” [‘Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
✪ the failure of successive administrations to prosecute suspects of a US$1 bn bank embezzlement (‘Moldova country profile’). The scandal is known within the country as the “Great Moldovan Bank Robbery”
□ 34% and 26.7% respectively (2015 census)
✜ Romania presents a perception problem for some Moldovans for who, a less than favourable image of a backward country with a scruffy gypsy culture, persists (Bird)
The Russian Far East: Russia’s Far Flung Territory in North-East Asia 1
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”