THE RUSSIAN FRONT

I realize that this has nothing to do with Russian history, but it did happen to an historian of Russia.  I’ve lived twenty years in Indiana, and eight years in Kansas, but last night was my first encounter with a tornado.  My house sustained some holes in the roof, a broken window, and a sprung garage door.  At least twenty of my neighbors weren’t so lucky, and had their houses leveled.  The best presentation of what I’ve seen is this aerial footage:

http://www.ksn.com/news/local/19822559.html

The only thing it doesn’t show is the extent of damage to the houses still standing.

I actually appear in the video for the first 1.5 seconds.  I’m the guy at the bottom of the screen walking with a hand in pocket, wearing purple t-shirt with white lettering and ridiculously large boots  (give me a break–lots of nails and broken glass around).

William Odom has just died.

He was a giant of our field, but he was more than that to me. I did my Ph.D in Soviet military history at a school (Yale) that didn’t have anything you could describe as a program in Soviet military history. As a result, I was enormously fortunate in my fellow graduate students, and particularly in more senior scholars who were willing to form an advising kollektiv of wonderful helpfulness and flexibility–Jeff Burds, Paul Bushkovitch, Paul Kennedy, and . . . William Odom.

Though Odom was a political scientist, and a career military man, he was tremendously giving of his time and support to me and to a number of other graduate students headed through Yale. What struck me most, particularly in comparison to other academics, was Odom’s fearlessness. It’s always seemed to me that the professoriate as a group has startlingly little to fear. Once we’re tenured, provided we manage to keep our hands off the undergrads, we are cursed with a living wage, near complete control over how we apply our time and energy, and the privilege of reading and talking and writing about subjects we love, not to mention job security unheard of in other walks of life.

What I always marvel at, though, is how many academics seem to be pathologically afraid of what people might think of them if they were to say the wrong thing, hold the wrong view, offend the wrong scholar. What’s the worst that could happen? We keep the great deal we’ve already got?

Odom never cared. He was always willing to say precisely what he thought, blunt but never vindictive, and I found (and find) that inspiring. My fondest memories of him are sitting in his borrowed office at Yale and hearing his precisely expressed conclusions, accompanied by a cheshire-cat grin, a hyena-like laugh, and a well-chewed cigar.

I’ll have more to say on a couple of issues that have particularly stayed with me: his model of Soviet civil-military relations, his interpretation of the eternal problems of Russian history, and his magnus opus on the collapse of the Soviet military. But that’s for another day. For now, I’m sorry he’s gone, and I miss him.

I hope my colleagues will forgive me a brief digression from Russian history, though it does concern academia and the teaching of history.

In between grad school at Yale and my current position at Kansas State, I had a one-year visiting position at Hamilton College at upstate New York. In every respect but the weather, it was a wonderful opportunity. I got a lot of lecture writing done, met some very bright students, had supportive colleagues, and worked out the kinks in my teaching before I was at a place where it counted for tenure. The library even delivered books to the departmental office on request.

The chair of the department when I taught there was Bob Paquette. His students worshiped him, though he made them work like dogs. It was no secret, since he and everyone else in the department acknowledged it, that in political and ideological terms he was far apart from most of his fellow faculty. In all dealings I had with him, he was utterly and fully professional, in the best sense of the word, and prized that in others.

Which makes this triply ironic that he was penalized in May 2007 with a zero percent raise–not because the school was suffering from financial exigency, but for lack of service and collegiality. This lack of service involved raising large sums of money for an academic center at Hamilton, and then going public when the plug was pulled. There’s a long history of the disputes around this center and the academic politics involved, and anyone interested can track down the sordid story very easily. My point is that this action by Hamilton is clearly a penalty for ideological nonconformity, precisely what academic freedom and intellectual inquiry are supposed to celebrate. For the particulars, see this story.

What makes it even more ironic is that Paquette is mates in the History Department with Maurice Isserman. Isserman, likewise an exemplary colleague in my brief time at Hamilton, is an outlier to the left as Paquette is an outlier to the right, and has likewise critiqued Hamilton College and its intellectual culture. Has Isserman suffered for his views? If yes, we have even better evidence of mandated conformity; if no, a double standard for dissent on the left and on the right.

Once more on the recognition of Kosovar independence and its ramifications . . .

Today’s Johnson’s Russia List#74 includes an enlightening interview with Sergei Shamba, Foreign Minister of Abkhazia. He hails Kosovar independence as something that makes Abkhazia’s break-away from Georgia more likely than ever before. To quote him at length,

After February 17, after Kosovo’s recognition, the second wave of recognition of the former Soviet and Yugoslavian autonomous states begins.

Certainly, we hope to be in this second wave. We can now discern a direct analogy between Kosovo and Abkhazia, even though Abkhazia has much greater legal, historical, and moral reasons for having its independence recognized than Kosovo does.

We live on our native land. We ourselves obtained our independence without any foreign military aid, in contrast to Kosovo. The Abkhazians ourselves drove out the Georgian aggressors from our territory.

In contrast to Kosovo we have developed all structures of state and government authority, developed civil society, a multiparty political system, an independent mass media, and non-governmental funds and organizations. During the last twenty years we have had presidential and parliamentary elections.

But Kosovo’s precedent gives us hope that the process of recognition can develop more quickly. In global affairs things develop unexpectedly and quickly. Almost anything can happen as a result of present events.

I do not happen to support the break-up of Georgia, and I am certain that the current administration in Washington feels the same way.  My point is that the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state, and the precedent it sets for national self-determination trumping the sovereignty and integrity of states, has pernicious consequences for precisely those governments that pushed Kosovo independence.

One hears a lot about frozen conflicts around the former Soviet Union.  While frozen conflicts are bad things, they sure beat the thawed ones, much like the Cold War was a heck of a lot better than its Hot equivalent would have been.  By thawing Kosovo, the US and EU have made life much more difficult for putative Western allies in the former Soviet block.

Late last week I went back home to deliver a couple of talks at the University of Kansas.

While there, I took a side trip to downtown Kansas City, MO in order to spend a couple of hours at the National World War One Museum.

As it has only been open since December 2006, many folks may not yet be aware of its existence.

The museum has state-of-the-art facilities, extremely well done displays, and what may well be the world’s second largest collection of WWI artifacts (after the Imperial War Museum in Great Britain) all housed in a fantastic complex built beneath Kansas City’s Liberty Memorial. (The museum was designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the same firm responsible for the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC)

Given that it’s America’s official museum to the Great War, it shouldn’t some as a surprise that the collection leans toward the USA’s role in the conflict. Still, there’s plenty material for those interested in the Western Front. For the time being, the museum’s holdings on Russia and Eastern Europe are slim, but if you live near Kansas City (or will be coming through sometime in the future) you really should plan to visit. It’s an important, though still unheralded, American treasure.

P.S.

Rock Chalk Jayhawk!

US News is the latest venue to weigh in on the sad state of military history. What I am struck by, once again, is the relentless failure to quantify, coupled by a distinct lack of historical perspective. The money quote, from my point of view, is this:

The field that inspired the work of writers from Thucydides to Winston Churchill is, today, only a shell of its former self. The number of high-profile military history experts in the Ivy League can be counted on one hand. Of the more than 150 colleges and universities that offer a Ph.D. in history, only a dozen offer full-fledged military history programs. Most military historians are scattered across a collection of midwestern and southern schools, from Kansas State to Southern Mississippi. “Each of us is pretty much a one-man shop,” says Carol Reardon, a professor of military history at Penn State University and the current president of the Society for Military History.

Several things leap out at me. First of all, the claim that the field is a shadow of its formal self has absolutely no documentation. That claim requires showing what was the case in the past, and what is the case now, and there’s no effort to do that. At what point in the past did the Ivies have lots of military historians on staff? At what point were there more than a dozen full-fledged military history programs? I apologize for ruthless self-promotion, but I’m waiting for someone to come up with better numbers than the ones I’ve presented on this blog and on H-War, suggesting that MORE institutions have military historians today than in 1975, and that the absolute number of military historians has tripled.

Carol Reardon is of course correct that the vast majority of military historians are one-man shops, but the vast majority of all types of historians at the vast majority of institutions are one-man shops.

Clearly lots of people want to show that military history is a field in decline. Can they produce some numbers, instead of anecdotes, to show that?

Have I mentioned that I love Johnson’s Russia List?  Among other things, it gives a nice sense of the conventional wisdom about Russia by citing enormous amounts of it.  It also allows the parlor game (in the boring parlors I frequent) of tracking down diametrically opposed headlines.  The New Republic used to do this–it might still, but I haven’t looked at an issue recently.

Anyway, the 28 March JRL had these headlines on offer:

1. Interfax: Medvedev Certain Tandem With Putin Will
Be Efficient.
. . . .
3. Reuters: Russia’s Medvedev hints at Kremlin power
struggle.

I can imagine a world in which both are true, but it’s a pretty strange one.

From today’s RFE/RL Newsline:

NATO CHIEF CALLS ON MACEDONIA TO COMPROMISE ON NAME ISSUE. NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said in Athens on March 3 that the Macedonian authorities should take the first step in resolving the long-standing dispute with Greece over Macedonia’s official name, news agencies reported. He stressed that “we have to realize that Greece is a staunch member of NATO. Aspiring nations are not members of NATO, and that is the basic difference.” Macedonia hopes to receive an invitation to join NATO at the alliance’s Bucharest summit in April. The name issue has bedeviled relations between the two countries ever since Macedonia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. It was admitted to the UN in 1993 under the name Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). Greece maintains that the name “Macedonia” alone implies a claim on the northern Greek province of the same name. PM

The merits of this particular case aside, I have to admire de Hoop Scheffer’s frankness. It makes me think of a great Greek authority on matters military and political. In the Melian dialogue, Thucydides writes

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Which is more or less de Hoop Scheffer’s point. Of course, Thucydides puts this argument in the mouth of those who massacre the men of Melos and sell the women and children into slavery.

Brian Whitmore has  just written a piece for RFE/RL on Russia’s new version of dual power, parroting Roy Medvedev’s examples of successful political collaboration in Russian history: Nicholas II / Stolypin and Brezhnev / Kosygin. I thought that was wrong a week ago, and I still think it’s wrong.

On the bright side, Whitmore brings in another example courtesy of Edward Keenan: Filaret and Mikhail Romanov. This one I like better. For those who haven’t followed early modern Russian politics closely, Mikhail Romanov was the first tsar in the Romanov dynasty, and took the throne in 1613 at the age of 16 after the apocalyptic Time of Troubles almost destroyed the Russian state. Real power was in the hands of Mikhail’s father Filaret, who had been forcibly made a monk and so couldn’t rule directly.

Two comments, though: first, the analogy isn’t that complimentary to Putin. Filaret had established himself during the Time of Troubles as a double-dealer and backstabber, standing out for such qualities even during the Troubles, when the bar for sleaziness was set pretty high. Indeed, as I read Chester Dunning on the Time of Troubles, it’s conceivable that the Romanovs were behind the First False Dmitrii who set off the Troubles to begin with.

Second, Putin has been quite clear in his public comments that he as Prime Minister will be subordinate to Medvedev as President. The power relationship between Filaret and Mikhail ran in the opposite, and indeed more natural, direction, and settles no questions about whether the Putin-Medvedev dynamic is sustainable.

Back in December, over at Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, Mark Grimsley posted a brief essay by Andrew Rigney arguing that Russia’s complaints about independence for Kosovo weren’t backed up by the ability to do anything about it. I disagreed then (and said so in the comments) and I disagree now.

Russia has plenty of ways to make the US and US allies squirm by manipulating parallel cases of national self-determination. If we allow the principle that regional self-determination and popular sovereignty (of, say, the Kosovar Albanians) can trump the territorial integrity of a sovereign state (say, Serbia), then I’m not sure how we oppose the same logic in the cases Transdniester vs. Moldova, or South Ossetia and Abkhazia vs. Georgia. The Russians have drawn the same conclusion, as you can see here. I don’t know how one makes an argument with a straight face that the corrupt and violent politicians are all on the side we don’t like (Serbia, Transdniester, South Ossetia, Abkhazia) and the democratic freedom fighters are all on the side we do (Kosovo, Moldova, Georgia).

But what I did NOT see coming was how exactly Russia might play the self-determination card in Ukraine. But Russia’s TV Tsentr (program V tsentre sobytii) just ran a show on the implications of Kosovo for the national aspirations of the Tatars and Russians of the Crimea. (No internet link–my source on this is BBC Monitoring relayed in Johnson’s Russia List)

What’s done is done, but Kosovo independence was a cause best kicked down the road a few years. No pressing need to resolve the issue now, and (as we have seen) several reasons to wait.