Aletho News

WRITING AND READING

BY PAUL ROBINSON | IRRUSSIANALITY | MAY 22, 2024

In case anybody is interested in the inputs and outputs of my intellectual life, here is a little update on what I have been writing and reading.

Reading

Here are a few things I have read recently that might be of interested to purveyors of this site:

Ian Proud is a former British diplomat who served in the UK’s embassy in Moscow and was also responsible for organizing British sanctions against the Russian Federation. He has since left the Foreign Office, written his memoirs. and started a blog on which he regularly criticizes British policy towards Russia and declares the sanctions he enacted to be a total failure. You can read his blog here.

The memoirs are written in a light, engaging style, but contain a serious message. Proud argues that successive British governments have for a long time been totally uninterested in talking to Russia. He also paints a picture of British diplomats who not only mostly didn’t speak Russian but also weren’t interested in doing so. Dispatches to London, he claims, consisted largely of bits cut and paste out of media articles. One has to wonder about the quality of the intelligence that London was receiving.

Worth a read.

I used to teach a course titled ‘Irrationality and Foreign Policy Decision-Making’, which looked at all the ways that foreign policy decision processes deviated from the kind of rational actor models that public policy students are taught to follow.

It’s interesting, therefore, to come across a book that claims that all the stuff I taught is wrong and foreign policy is for the most part a rational endeavour. I can’t say that I was 100% convinced by this book, which I found a bit repetitive, and perhaps worthy more of an extended article than a full-length book. Still, if I ever teach that course again, I will have to bear what this says in mind and suggest it to my students.

This one got a stinker of a review from Joy Neumeyer in the New Left Review, in which, among other things, Neumeyer accused author Jade McGlynn of plagiarizing her work. You can read that review here.

McGlynn’s basic argument is that the war in Ukraine is not Putin’s war but Russia’s war, as Putin and the war have broad support from the Russian population. I would generally agree, but the problem is that McGlynn then goes beyond this and tries to explain this phenomenon by recourse to a sort of Homo Sovieticus argument, namely that the reason why the Russian masses support Putin and the war is that they are psychologically retrograde.

Personally, I don’t see why it’s even necessary to write a whole book explaining the phenomenon. Populations everywhere tend to rally around the flag. It’s natural. And when they do, we don’t have to resort to explanations of the masses’ psychological failings. Why does Russians’ support for Putin mean that Russians are psychologically twisted in a way that Americans’ support for George W. Bush or Britons’ support for Tony Blair during the war in Iraq doesn’t?

By all means read ‘Russia’s War’ if you want, but I can’t say that I got anything useful from it.

This one I haven’t actually read yet. It’s on my shelf awaiting a moment when I have spare time on my hands. The reason I got it is that the description of the book’s thesis seems fascinating. If I am understanding it right, author Tomila Lankina is claiming that there was an astonishing lack of social mobility in the upper middle classes in Russia in the twentieth century. It was more or less the same families who made up that class in Imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, and post-Soviet Russia. This existed alongside a newer, ‘inferior, second-class middle-class’ (as Lankina calls it) made up of ex-workers and peasants and their children, who rose up in the Soviet era. The two middle classes remained distinct, however, and it was the former that transmitted liberal values from the late Imperial era into the early post-Soviet one.

If true, this casts enormous doubt on the ability of governments of any hue to promote social mobility. Wealth and privilege, it seems, have a way of surviving even regimes dedicated to destroying them. Is it true? I guess I’ll have to read the book to find out.

The title of this book – also still to be read – says it all. ‘The Stupidity of War’. Amen to that!

Writing

Some good news! I have another book on the way. It’s title has been confirmed as Russia’s World Order: How Civilizationism Explains the Conflict with the West. It will be published by Northern Illinois University Press (now an imprint of Cornell Univesity Press) on 15 April next year. It will be published as a trade book, and thus should be available at an easily affordable price. I will post the cover once it is available.

May 23, 2024 - Posted by aletho | Book Review, Militarism | Russia, UK