Russia's Revolutions

BBC Radio three is presenting a series of programmes of Russian and Soviet-era music in commemoration of the centenary of what they call 'the Russian revolution': and the presenters have called the series "Breaking Free". Who exactly these denizens of the BBC reckon became 'free' as a result of the second - the Bolshevik, or Soviet - Revolution is not clear. By the mid-twenties, after the death of Lenin and the rise of Stalin to almost-complete power, composers, playwrights, and artists had to become careful about their output. As Stalin and his significant army of associates consolidated their hold over the new order, with the purges of the 'thirties and the 'forties, musicians and other cultural figures - who were allowed to be named in the media - were persecuted by imprisonment and worse [assignment to slave labour camps and the constant risk of 'administrative' death sentences] if they exposed themselves to the suspicion that they might have dissented from actions by the party and its current leaders.

Only the party leaders, the commentators who praised them and the artistic community were named in the media and thus known to the mass of the populace. Therefore any deviation from the sort of 'socialist realism' that Stalin approved was likely to result in the victimisation of a perpetrator who was one of the nomenklatura. Stalin considered himself an aficionado of music and ballet, enjoyed theatre [when he approved of the content of the play] and was a voracious reader, making a massive number of marginal comments in his books: both fiction and non-fiction: so no writer or performer could escape his critical oversight. He also followed Lenin in being a massively prolific writer. In speeches several hours long, in newspaper articles [often written anonymously] and in longer texts Stalin set out the party line. There is no doubt that Stalin worked hard, often far into the night: after which he was often ready to booze until dawn with the changing cohort of his intimates. Over the decades the tenor of his output changed, according to circumstances and to the writer's changing moods; therefore the literate classes had to review continuously what they kept openly on their bookshelves, hiding away [preferably, destroying] editions and items which expressed views that were no longer acknowledged by their originator.

Stalin himself was not 'free'. He had to lug his impedimenta of Marxist-Leninist dogma - as reinterpreted on an almost-daily basis by himself - everywhere he went, because he saw that as his legitimating authority. Provided he wrapped up everything that he said and wrote in party-speak, he felt that his utterances were authoritative. An added difficulty with this arose from the fact that he was not a native Russian speaker, and apparently some aspects of sentence construction always eluded him when setting out his stall in the prevailing language. Thus his followers sometimes had to develop their own exposition of what they assumed he had said, in handing down the message to the underfed, tired cohorts of heroic proletarians whom they sought to urge on to ever-greater efforts in the cause of 'socialist construction'.

By the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Imperial Russia was already the world's ninth-greatest industrial producer, and the fourth-biggest economy in the world [by estimated turnover, or GNP]. During the war massive investments were made in mines, steelworks and industrial plant in the Ural mountains, well away from the old industrial areas of Russian-ruled Poland and the Ukraine which were dangerously close to the front. There was a constant danger during the war that the Germans and/or the Austrians would be able to capture the long-established heavy industry around St Petersburg and in the western provinces. So the Tsarist regime promoted massive development of industry  in the east, much of which Stalin was later to claim had been built on virgin territory under the succession of five-year plans by which the Stalin regime claimed to be 'transforming' the USSR. It is unclear how much of the 'new industry' that turned out the tanks and the guns for the Red Army after the Nazi invasion of 1941 was actually new under Stalin, and how much came from the Tsarist war economy: and at this distance in time the resources of economic historians may never be sufficient to find out.

This blog can only scratch - very slightly - at the surface of the massive issues that are disclosed as soon as the Russian Revolutions of 1917 is to be studied. In the coming days I intend to look as just a few aspects of economy and society in an era that should have been exciting, but which was made massively more oppressive and depressing than the society and the regime that had existed before the first revolution.

Corruption Catch-All

In the coming week I will revert to the theme of the Russian Revolutions and their consequences; but the overnight News about Saudi Arabia, combined with discussions of the current situation in China as President Trump attends the apotheosis of President Xi, raises an omnipresent global issue.

The Saudi Crown Prince has emerged in that role after an elaborate process to bring [at last] a grandson of the hugely prolific founder of the country, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, into the pole position to be the next king: the first of the next generation to have a high degree of probability of succeeding to the notionally absolutely powerful top position. From the nineteen fifties until now a succession of sons of the first king, by a succession of his wives [many of whom were sisters, cousins and other close relations of each other], have held the post; but the lastborn among them are now in extreme old age. There is probably a registrar of the dynasty who knows exactly how many princes and princesses there are, including the offspring of Ibn Saud's brothers; many of whom are intermarried with each other. The international media report their number to be some thousands as, unlike the British Royal Family, all the family members have royal titles.

The contrasting British position is that sons and daughters of monarchs are princes and princesses, but that children of princesses and children of daughters of the monarch's sons and sons of the sons of the monarch who do not stand in the direct line of succession are not princes or princesses. Thus the children of Princess Anne, and of the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent [sons of sons of George V] are not princes or princesses. This keeps the 'inner' or 'close' royal family manageably small.

The contrasting situation in Saudi Arabia means that these thousands of royal persons expect high status and high incomes; which were affordable when the family was smaller, the oil price was higher and the monarchy was able to use its position as the 'swing producer' in OPEC to enforce the price control system that they established in 1973. With ever-more royalty and shrinking oil prices as Russia increases its influence as an oil producer and fracking develops in the USA, the Saudi model of the past century is redundant. The new Crown Prince has spent the last two years securing his position among this thousands of cousins, and is now making moves to modernise the system. There are bound to be winners and losers from such a revolution, and alliances have been formed that may or may not prove strong enough for the Crown Prince to consolidate his position for a reign of up to half a century. He has now made the big move: the arrest of dozens of individuals [including several royalty] some of whom have been ministers in the government: all of them charged with corruption.

In a system like the Saudi, where the term Byzantine denotes a situation insufficiently arcane to explain the regime in operation, almost anybody - high or lowly in terms of hierarchy - can be charged with what a German or a Belgian would recognise to be corrupt practice. Charges of corruption will be upheld against many [if not all] of the arrested parties; and the purge can go on indefinitely, as in the Stalin era in the USSR where ever-wider definitions of crimes against the state can be used simply to keep all the survivors in a state of abject subordination to the dominant power. It will be the greatest challenge for the Crown Prince, if he succeeds i holding his position through this exercise, to stop when the purge has gone far enough.

President Xi's situation in China is similar to that which the Crown Prince clearly intends to prevail in Saudi Arabia. In his first five-year term as head of the party and head of state Xi has ensured that nobody stands to challenge him during the coming five years in a way that could ensure that he is forced to stand down after his second quinquennium.  China's rise to wealth has been faster and much more broadly-based than in the case of Saudi Arabia. The control of the country by the party has meant that the power-brokers in every region have been able to grant and deny licenses and permissions for every kind of activity; thus successful individuals in the buccaneering capitalism that has emerged have necessarily squared themselves with the power structure. Some people in power have held to the standards of Confucian and Leninist integrity that have been expected of them: some have not. Some can have cases manufactured against them, in what is ultimately a dictatorship: some guilty people can be so useful to the top men that their crimes can - pro tem , at least - be ignored.

Precisely the same sorts of process are happening in China and Saudi: the consolidation of the power of the dictator is secured - and gains at least a good measure of popular support - by bringing guilty exploiters of public office to account. Simple!

Catalonia and the European Union

The Spanish state, with the specific endorsement of the King, has made very heavy weather of the ongoing attempt by a bunch of Catalan nationalists to set up an independent state. These Nationalists have achieved a majority in the regional parliament; but there is no reason for an external observer to believe that there would be a majority vote of eligible electors in Catalonia in favour of full international statehood if a full and fair referendum was held. Many Catalans are dubious about the prospect; many other Spaniards live within Catalonia who value to unity of the state, and many non-Spanish EU citizens may have voting rights.

The regional government was crazy to hold a 'referendum' that the central government simply had to declare illegal and disrupt. The very heavy-handed methods used by some police will affect the debate for months to come, and will scar some people for life [and some of them will pass on visceral hatred of 'Madrid' to future generations].

It appears that up to a quarter of the population did manage to fill in ballot forms - the exact number will never be known - and the regional authorities announced that 90% of the votes they have received were in favour of a split. Thus they claim that they will declare 'independence' within a few days; and bring their region under Spanish martial law. A few individuals will leap onto a bandwagon from being demonstrators to seeking 'martyrdom', mostly by getting themselves imprisoned but some  may put themselves at risk of being killed, either in skirmishes or by committing terrorist offences which could be subject to the death penalty.

The exclusive responsibility for bringing the situation to such a crisis point lies on the regional government. It has no evidence that even a narrow majority of the population wants this high level of confrontation; even if they do resent the net payment that is extracted from their taxes to support the less-affluent areas of a large and complex country. The regional hotheads have mistaken a populist fad for a massive and well-founded 'national' consensus of the Catalans: and in so doing have set back the negotiation of a well-justified extension of their region's autonomy for a generation.

While individual politicians all over the EU have expressed regret at the heavy approach from Madrid, the EU institutions have been united in support of the central government, which is the member of the Union. There are far too many minorities, all over Europe, who would claim various degrees of separation - ranging from autonomous status to full sovereignty and EU membership - or their allegedly separate status. Hence the Union shrugs off such disruptive aspirations, and [in the way of all bureaucracies] discounts the claims of populist 'nationalism'. Left over from the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, a couple of million 'ethnic Hungarians' live in Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine. Slovakia grants minority rights to the Hungarian language and to Hungarians, but takes careful steps constantly to adjust county boundaries so that none of then ever shows a majority Hungarian population that could then opt for secession [notionally taking their Slovak minority into an alien state]. Left over from Stalin's ruthless realignment of frontiers and populations in 1944-8 are at least twenty million German descendants of the expelled populations of East Prussia, eastern Pomerania, Danzig, Sliesia, the Saxon settlements of Transylvania, Sudetenland and many more areas that were ethnically cleared.

Bundled into a single country as Belgium, Netherlandish-speaking Catholics were allocated with French-speaking Walloons and given a foreign king to 'unite' them: a bizarre settlement that just about works, but is repeatedly threatened. Two small German-speaking areas were allocated to Belgium by the Versailles Treaty, and remain within the state with local linguistic exceptionalism. It is now a strange thought that most of Napoleon's 'French' subjects did not speak Ille-de-France French, but used a whole host of regional languages; many of which are related to what is spoken in other territories under different governments, as was his own native Corsican patois. A rigorous policy of enforced use of French was imposed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: most notably on the Germans of Alsace and Lorriane between the two world wars. Several regions of Italy are home to vissiparous movements; and there is no clear linguistic frontier of demarcation between Poland and Belorussia or Ukraine. Latvia and [to a lesser extent] Lithuania and Estonia have an uneasy endowment of Russian-speakers whose families were settled there by Stalin.

Ireland is providing a serious sticking-point in the Brexit negotiations. Brittany and Cornwall have minorities who cherish a fondly romantic view of their common separateness from the states in which they subsist. Hundreds of thousands of Austrians were given Italian first names by decree in the South Tyrol when it was ceded to Italy as a shabby reward for its belated entry into the First World War on the winning side. Greece still prevents the statelet of Macedonia from using that name because it has its own province of Macedonia, complete with a suppressed Slav minority population.

In the ignoble but undoubtedly aristocratic tradition of Metternich, the EU simply prefers not to know about these nationalist issues. In the high-level scenario building around Brexit, some ScotNats though that there was a chance that a suddenly-independent Scotland could retain the UK's membership of the EU. The fact that there has been a decline in support for independence since the referendum on that subject opted for retention of the UK made a snap referendum too risky; and EU sources made it clear that a post-Brexit breakaway Scotland would have to go to be back of the queue for EU membership applications.

Spain has now been brought to the brink of a massive and wholly unnecessary confrontation, by a minority of a minority who are trying to impose a new constitutional order on a putative statelet. They are more appallingly ignorant even than they are overwhelmed by ambition. It will be tragic when people start getting hurt as a result of their irrational ambition.

North Korea: Utter Pointlessness

Stalin argued throughout his political career that all the privations that his regime placed on tens of millions of of people, and the punishments and penalties inflicted on millions, were all necessary impositions on the route towards creating a better society than humanity had ever provided in the past. It is impossible to know how much he believed it at the successive phases of his career, but there are many metres-length of the books in which his writings and speeches were recorded, still lying in the deeper stacks of many libraries. He spent a huge amount of his time giving massive speeches, writing for the press, and producing ideological tomes: and there is good reason to believe that most of this output is genuinely his own. He was obsessively concerned that the gulags and the torture chambers served a positive purpose: and  many intelligent and able people believed him; or, at least, were prepared to acquiesce in both his regime and his ideology.

No such motivation has been claimed for the North Korean dictator, who was pictured yesterday 'inspecting' what was said to be a hydrogen bomb that was capable of being fitted into an existing model of ballistic missile. Then, within hours, seismologists were announcing that there had been an earth tremor under North Korea that was consistent with a deeply buried nuclear weapon test.

The immense achievement in such a deprived country making such weaponry is quite extraordinary. It is built on three generations of enslaving the people both physically and mentally, while the regime has steadily built up its destructive capabilities. Russia and China are two of the countries that have land borders with North Korea, so there can be no doubt that the threat of nuclear attack can apply to them as well as to South Korea. Yet it is the USA, and to a much lesser extent Japan, that are most obviously threatened, along with South Korea.

Hereditary dictator Kim III has never pretended to any idealistic objective. No attempt is made to mitigate the appalling living conditions in which his half-starved subjects are made to conduct their lives. The Chinese have continued in broad terms to support his continuance in power, as have the Russians: President Xi and President Putin would probably very much rather not have this troublesome neighbour plaguing them, but they do nothing materially to weaken him.

Diplomats and experts on world affairs, in large numbers, assert that North Korea's weapons buildup is intended to force the US [and, by implication, its dependencies and allies] to enter into talks with the regime. The object of such talks would be blackmail: Kim would [so the peaceniks say] agree somehow to 'neutralise' his weapons in return for assurances that he, and presumably Kim IV and Kim V in due course, would continue to hold his power and access the west's luxury goods for himself and his courtiers. Perpetual immunity to enjoy power, and to oppress the millions of his subjects, is an utterly squalid objective. There is no idealistic pretence about it, as there was about the Chinese cultural revolution and even Hitler's gas chambers.

This is a new step towards a deeper hell than terror states have ever achieved before. It is highly dangerous. China presumably wishes that the rogue regime had been killed off a few decades ago, but the clock cannot be turned back. The Chinese are glad that the maniac's target is the USA and not the Han mainland, but given the instability of the situation in Pyongyang, Beijing must be more acutely worried by the nuisance neighbour as his destructive capability is developed. This is a world problem; but the world's institutions do not have any answer to it: and Mr Trump is on the front line.

Spinning Batteries

Stalin called it 'agitation and propaganda', Goebbels was 'Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment', the post-war democracies developed 'spin' and David Cameron was enamoured of 'nudge'. The present shoddy government does not really 'do' spin or nudge: they simply issue press releases or advance copies of ministerial speeches and leave it to the media to make the rest of the story.

A lead item for the BBC on the early News today was the story that Britain was to experience a 'revolution' in how electricity is generated and stored. It is well known to the nation, and deeply embarrassing to the political class - especially Tories and LibDems who have been in power for the past seven years - that there is no viable energy policy in the UK. The government [of any party] is compelled by law to get rid of 'polluting' coal-fired power stations by 2025, unless they are converted to burning wood-chip that has to be imported at vast expense [and may be depleting forests in less-developed countries]. One attempt to address the resultant shortage of energy is the madcap scheme from the Osborne era, whereby the Hinckley point scheme is supposed to construct an unproven type of French reactor [with Chinese funding] for which British taxpayers and/or electricity users will be charged a ridiculous amount over and above the predicted world price for power for the next two generations. A massive amount of money has been spent on windmills, afloat, settled on the seabed and ashore; all of which have the intrinsic disadvantage that they don't work when there is no wind, and they may produce more power than is needed at other times. The firms who have constructed the majority of windmills have been promised a price for the resultant power that involves a heavy subsidy of the provider by the consumers.

British firms, including Rolls-Royce, have been providing the power units for nuclear submarines for half a century, and could offer land-based mini nuclear power plant virtually ad lib; but the politicians are scared on the anti-nuclear lobby. Also, the politicians are scared of the responsibility for guaranteeing the costs of the construction and insurance of the potential nuclear solution; especially in the light of the row about Hinckley Point.

So they have spun the idea of diffused electricity supply, of individual owners of homes and small businesses installing solar panels and batteries. Solar panels are efficient and are becoming cost-effective, up to a point. But they only respond to the sun: so that they can make no direct contribution to the national grid in the dark. Householders can only sell power into the grid from their solar array when the grid wants it. Somebody in government has at long length realised that in the universities and in many firms high-quality brains have been working for years on improving battery technologies. In the USA Mr Musk has marketed his Tesla battery-powered cars very effectively, but worldwide motor manufacturers have been investing in battery powered engines and in battery technology. As a graduate of two universities I am battered with booklets boasting of their research achievements [and asking me for money] and it is clear that very significant steps have been taken over a long period, and that several of them are showing success. So the government has decided to present as a brilliant plan for the future a shabby little scheme to persuade the population themselves to buy and install panels and batteries from which the households can derive some of their electricity, and sell the surplus to the grid. The mass of the population would pay directly for this 'solution', with the stimulus of government-backed loans [probably provided by the commercial banks]; so that none of the cost would add to the statistics of direct government spending or borrowing.

If you believe that this is "the answer", you'll believe anything!

Little and Large

There is no doubt that the USSR regarded Britain as a potent enemy during and after the Second World War. After Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg on The Soviet Union, Churchill openly said that if Hitler invaded Hell the British coalition government would make a pact with the Devil: the read-across from 'Devil' to 'Stalin' was unambiguous.

While Churchill ran the war with the support of his inner War Cabinet, the Lord President of the Privy Council - Clement Attlee, the Labour Leader - effectively ran the home affairs of the nation as Chairman of the Lord President's Committee of the Cabinet. When the war ended, Attlee became the Prime Minister, pledged to a programme of specifically democratic socialism in which he was constantly harassed by Moscow-supporting Communists who campaigned overtly and covertly, most obviously by infiltrating the trade unions which both provided funding of the national Labour Party and local support for MPs and Councillors through Trades Councils. Other significant fields of infiltration were the expanding universities and 'higher journalism': a very limited number of people wrote editorials and think-pieces in the broadsheet newspapers and in the upper-end periodical magazines. In those pre-television days the fashionable commentators also got a platform on BBC radio. Among their un-idealogical pupils and followers the 'fellow travellers' disseminated a dogma that Britain had done magnificent things in the war, but that this had been the last hurrah of an exhausted political and economic system: Britain was now finished. We should give up the Empire - let tiny cohorts of Marxist guerillas take over one colony after another, just as quickly as Moscow could train and equip them, and thereby save British soldiers from risk in confronting them. The government should reduce the defence establishment while it taxed incomes and inheritances so heavily that the aristocratic and capitalist cohorts would be squeezed out of existence in a few decades. This would leave the country to be led by a 'meritocracy' of people whose qualifications for power would be based on education and experience: assessed and monitored by the cohorts who were most heavily penetrated by the inspired left.

The political right was too powerful to be submerged. There was a strong corps of right-wing intellectuals, especially in the older universities, who could keep key posts from capture by disruptives. The military and the civil service mostly stuck to the plain meaning of their oaths of loyalty to the Crown. Religious institutions remained strong and largely uninfluenced by the left; and the most powerful trade union leaders had obtained and retained their positions by confronting assaults from the left, which left people like Ernest Bevin among the strongest and most-aware resistants to left-wing 'entryism'. This resistance did not defeat the left; it forced them to adopt Fabian tactics [named after a Roman commander who waited for the right moment to strike, despite the frustration that his approach provoked in many of his contemporaries].

The right also settled down to a long and largely unheralded strategy of defence: by a mixture of influence and 'philanthropy' conservative graduates influenced appointments in universities; magazines [most notably Time and Tide] were funded heavily by UK and US institutions to counterbalance the prevalent left tendency in 'heavy' journalism.

Meanwhile the mass of the population was presented with a policy that was essentially the Roman model: bread and circuses, paid for by exploiting the empire. As the empire shrank in area as as Britain's former preponderance in global trade shrank with it, the limits to taxing the rich were quickly exposed. Spending on investment [which had largely been paid through defence procurement] was reduced dramatically, leading to the decline of shipbuilding, aviation, computing and a massive range of other industries over four decades between the 'sixties and the 'nineties. As industry declined, the options of allowing credit inflation and 'selling the family silver' - disposing of the nationalised industries - became the preferred methods for balancing the books as the state spent vastly more than the economy earned.

This came to a head in 2007-8, but it had been inevitable since at least the mid-sixties, when the policy of handouts regardless of earning-power became evident. The major factor in making this bizarre impossibility the reality was the charade of democracy by which politicians acted out a shadowy conflict that blinded almost everyone to the economic reality. In this they were abetted by Economists, whose normative models transcended material reality. This blog has spent a lot of words on trying to present that situation in palatable doses. it has repeatedly been pointed out that a major component of the current incomprehension is the fact that the inventors of Economics progressively dropped the older and mature science of Political Economy as the fantasies supported by Economists became increasingly discordant with the truths exposed by the older science. Over the next couple of weeks I will lay out the Principles of Political Economy for the twenty-first century. People may now become willing to pay attention, as the evidence of failure of Economics and of charade-Politics becomes more blatant.

Mismanaging News

George Osborne has committed a major gaffe in public relations, by describing his biggest tax 'raid' in this year's Budget as a mere simplification of the tax system. The resentment that this has set in train will mature slowly, and be disastrous for the man's image and for his party. Meanwhile, in the twenty-four hours since he made the cock-up he has resorted to an item of crude propaganda. In the tradition of Potemkin, Stalin and Putin, his sycophants have arranged with Glaxo Smithkline to announce their decision to extend factories in the UK on Budget Day, and even to say that decisions in the Budget were favourable to the decision. Osborne touted his sneer around the TV and radio studios to extol the great investment, and suggest that it was vastly more important than the granny tax.

The company's plans must have been in train for many months. It would have been outrageously improper if the Treasury had shared their plans for setting rates of corporation tax with the company over that period. The actual reasons for the Glaxo decision British manufacturing is becoming 'affordable' again to international companies, as has been evident over many months past in the motor and fashion industries. The company owns sites and has infrastructure with skilled staff around the UK. It will be easier and possibly cheaper to invest in the UK, with or without tinkering the tax system. One can speculate what inducement was offered to the company to arrange its announcement to coincide with Budget Day, but it was probably trivial.

Osborne used the same trick a few weeks earlier, when he grabbed for his own publicity machine the announcement that a Chinese Wealth Fund was buying a block of shares in Thames Water. This transaction had been arranged as a business deal over some months but the announcement was arranged to coincide with the Chancellor's 'triumphant' return from a nugatory visit to China. There was no correlation between the visit and the deal: the announcement was crude propaganda. Such are the standards and practices that impress the current crop of puerile politicians: indeed a country gets the government that it deserves!