ARMS, AUTARKY & AGGRESSION

Russia embarked on the invasion of Ukraine, not for oft repeated claims of ‘nazis’ running the government or god knows how many other infantile excuses, but for one reason only.

In the words of Alexander Dugin – who during this recent interview spoke in English:

“Without Ukraine Russia cannot become once more the empire. With Ukraine inside of Russian zone of control it will become the empire once more. That is a kind of law, nothing personal. This war or special military operation in Ukraine is about that. It is about geopolitics.”

Dugin is the driving force behind Putin’s world view and how Russia fits into it. He’s even been described as ‘Putin’s brain’. I suppose it had to be somewhere.

Let’s break down what this means and why it matters. Ukraine has a population roughly 30% of Russia’s 144 million at around 41 million. Ukraine has the best coastlines, some of the most fertile land, huge potential resources, the capacity for modern heavy industry and a technology base stimulated by the war more now than ever. Morally it is everything Russia is not, and its population alone would represent a huge hike in taxable revenue for the Russian Federation. It would also help correct a worrying, if not near disastrous population pyramid that the war Russia is waging is making even worse. Fewer Russians were born this year – less than 600,000 – than have died fighting.

By way of comparison look at the far more consistent and even spread of US population age groups, and those of Egypt where a genuine pyramid and hyper expansion of the population is largely unsustainable.

Dugin’s war is about old fashioned imperial expansion and in many ways, the Russians see it as a means of survival longer term. Ukraine in the empire gives the empire a chance of survival. Without it, what’s left of the empire seems destined to fall apart and die. It as a hope free, ideology free, morally and socially bankrupt state without a conscience, that like the long gone Emperors of Russia, tries by guile, subterfuge and aggression to take what it wants from others whether they like it or not.

ARMS

In order to expand its empire Russia has always relied on force. Since 1800 it has never truly developed a domestic industrial base that can produce what its population wants because it has never had a free population that can make up its own mind. Slavery (as serfdom) was only abolished in 1861 and it took well into the 1930’s to fully break the ties between the land and subsistence farming, with Stalin’s policies of collectivization. Those resulted in famine and social disruption – Ukraine suffered the most in the Holodomor.

Yet throughout the 1800’s the Russian empire, despite teetering repeatedly on the edge of bankruptcy, almost every time caused by expensive wars against the Turks, the French & British, conquering Central Asia, then in 1904-5 the utterly disastrous war against Japan, left it penniless. Only French investment propped up the economy but it was decades behind everyone else. Always Russia wanted to be seen as and accepted as an imperial power of standing, despite almost completely lacking the ability to be one. It was always big on show and light on substance.

Partly that was down to the system of government, and the over concentration of power in the hands of a line of dimwitted Emperors like Alexander-II, III and Nicholas-II, probably the worst of them all. All of them were convinced it was their divine right and duty to be autocrats and actively maintain the principles of autocracy. Russia ended up in revolution and communism and a government that was little better and vastly more ruthless. Under Stalin it was little more than another kind of hyper-brutal autocracy. Russia never truly developed, everywhere you go you find it using military power to gain influence, control and spread its ideology (when it had one).

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the empire it had largely held on to and even expanded since the Imperial era, lasted barely a decade before the next emperor came along. This one however, has no ideology, although he belatedly seems to be trying to create one, again based on eternal war and imperial ambition.

Throughout all of this the armed forces have been the pillar on which the state rested. The secret services, be they the Imperial Okhrana, to the GRU, NKVD, KGB, FSB, it’s all the same, keeping everyone in check.

Armament’s have played a key role in all of this, they have been major employers, drivers of technological change, and they have cost Russia a disproportionate level of its resources and treasure. It sold Alaska to the US for a mere $7.2 million in 1867 ($138.5m in current money, so a total bargain) to try and balance the state budget. The cost of war and conquest has arguably devastated Russia and held it back time and time again. Yet they keep doing it. Even in 1945 when Russia was so militarily powerful and had such a commanding capability in Europe, it didn’t risk doing what it so easily could have, because America had the atomic bomb. Arms for once, stymied its ambitions.

AUTARKY

Defined as ‘A policy of national self-sufficiency and non-reliance on imports or economic aid’, has never been defined as a Russian aim. Yet its war on Ukraine has forced it into looking at that policy head on, because it has little choice. Yet no matter how hard it tries to be independent of imports and foreign aid, it simply isn’t capable of it, because it has never, ever, developed an economy capable of operating without extensive foreign investment, foreign technology and ideas. Even its modern military industry is nothing in comparison to the system operated by the Soviet Union. Remarkably, Russia has struggled appallingly with turning its military industrial machine back on. Where are the days when whole factories and industries were dismantled and shipped to Siberia, rebuilt and operating again to fight the Nazi invaders of the Great Patriotic War? Where is that Russia?

Simply put the corruption of the Imperial empire was destroyed and eliminated in Stalin’s communist Russia but as soon as he was gone, it returned on an ever increasing scale under the communist secretariat and politburo and that was nothing compared to the level it reached under Yeltsin, then Putin. That level is now seen as a mistake but nobody really has gotten to grips with it. It infests the military at the front and all the way up the line, the entire state works in and is corrupt at every level. The twisted economy survives on lies, false promises, and a heavy hand not easily defied. The emptiness of any real hope for self-sufficiency has been laid bare by the recruitment of N.Korea as both a production ally and source of bodies to hurl into the front lines. Autarky cannot work for Russia much as it would like to think it could.

AGGRESSION

The Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and now Putin’s Federation have done nothing but provoke and inspire aggression their entire existence. Putin’s new imperialism stands out because it’s an expansionist policy in a world where there’s no longer land to expand into that doesn’t already belong to someone else. The western maritime colonial empires of the 1880’s had explored and mapped less than 25% of the African continent. By 1914 all of Africa was marked out as belonging to somebody. By the turn of the century into the 20th, even Central Asia had been mapped – largely under British pressure as they were determined to keep the Russians out of the Indian Empire.

During the same period the Russian Empire went out of its way to deliberately obfuscate the borders of Afghanistan and modern Iran so that it always had an excuse to advance its frontiers further. British persistence because of its own imperial interest, was always there making sure boundaries were drawn and implemented, something the Russians despised. They couldn’t afford a war with the British Empire in India, or anywhere else, to do anything about it. Eventually the Russian Empire had reached its zenith and there was nowhere left to go. It tried to take Manchuria from China, which Japan wouldn’t accept because it wanted it for itself. In 1904 Japan attacked the Russians at their concession in China, Port Arthur (now Dailien), sank their fleet and laid siege. Russia sailed its Baltic fleet around the world – causing a major incident in the North Sea when it attacked British fishing vessels thinking they were Japanese. As they crossed into the Straits of Tsushima, the coal fired battleships of the Russian fleet were crushed in a humiliating defeat by more modern British designed (and often built), Japanese warships.

It was more than just a defeat. It was lesson to all of the powerful colonial powers, that an Asiatic power could and just did, best a white European empire. (In our own time I would ask you to think about the sinking of the Moskva, the assumed impossible achieved by the improbable). Nobody saw, it or what followed coming. The peace treaty signed in Portsmouth in the United States, was a disaster for Russia, a victory for Japan and the whole humiliating spectacle triggered a revolution in 1905 that could just for a moment have sent Russia towards a democratic path. Yet the weak willed Nicholas-II could never let go of the autocratic concept to give it the chance it needed. In the end it cost him and his family their empire and their lives, when in 1917 a true revolution swept the old regime away.

The strangest thing is that the British, despite their marriages and familial relationships with the Royal and Imperial dynasties, were never under any illusion about Russia. They knew it was despotic, underhand and randomly dangerous. They knew it would come for them if they showed weakness. That despotism was why the government was so reluctant to let the Romanov’s flee to Britain in 1917.

In 1914 after the Russians entered the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in alliance with the British and French who had all settled their many differences. The allies were confident that Russia would soon send an army of three million into Germany, ‘who would arrive in Berlin by Christmas with snow on their boots’. Instead at the battle of the Masurian Lakes in East Prussia, a small German army under Hindenburg & Ludendorff (who would jointly end up running the entire German war effort), defeated a large and incompetent Russian army who used unencrypted radio messages often telling the Germans exactly what they were going to do, were short of rifles and food, badly trained and little more than rabble. Does any of this sound familiar?

I’m not trying to teach you history here – most of you know it, but the point is Russia has never truly changed. In 2022-24 they are doing what they did in 1914-17. It’s almost inconceivable that absolutely nothing has at its core, gone beyond the mentality of a century ago. On the wider level it hasn’t changed in almost 200 years (you could even argue it as far back as the mid 1500’s). Why do we think it’s going to change now?

Dugin himself is a monarchist. It’s even been rumored that he’s suggested that Putin declares himself Emperor – a move that the Orthodox patriarchate would support and reinforce. I don’t see it, Putin was too much a product of the Soviet system to ever feel comfortable with that.

Yet this whole concept of imperialism, through conquest? The methods of subterfuge and guile that the ‘decent’ nations of the world – those who run to the concept of the ‘rules based order’ and actually believe in it, would never do? Those are increasingly Russia’s first choice. Yet this isn’t new. They have always chosen this path. Queen Victoria wrote often to the government leaders who served her over decades, that there was no point in signing a treaty with Russia, “because they always break their agreements and cannot be trusted“.

We complain about Russian FSB agents operating in our midst, yet again, not new. Ohkrana agents in Britain (always the preferred place to be) in the 1880’s would monitor anti-government émigrès and those who campaigned against the Emperor, even arranging for mysterious deaths if it was considered necessary.

Causing problems, undermining the rules, saying they don’t while actually doing it right in front of you, in broad daylight while you stand there gawping at them and moaning but doing nothing? This is Russian policy from the last 200 years repeating itself. Only this time, we live in a far more immediate, far more connected world where once what happened in some land far away really didn’t have the slightest impact on our lives, now we all hear about it, see it and even feel its consequences.

Russian micro aggressions that go unanswered are an invitation to them to try harder next time. They might manage to do something seriously damaging that comes with no punishment. Each rung of the ladder, from airspace infringements to multiple cable and power line attacks, is one more step up to see what the punishment is. If there isn’t one they just try something worse. They only stop doing it if it’s no longer good for their interests.

Despite the fact that Russian aggression is now almost a daily occurrence against the west in general, or what it perceives as weaker targets, it still changes nothing about Russia itself. It is fighting an economic war that, once again, is crippling it financially, driving its industry into the ground and feeding the corruption it’s riddled with. Its death rates are beyond anything that can be considered long term acceptable, its weapons production is barely enough to sustain a rolling month of war, and it’s increasingly reliant on N.Korean ammunition. Ukraine claims that 60% of Russian ammo is now from Kim in the North. The whole concept of arms production at home meeting the needs of the war is gone. Autarky is a failure because Russia is unable to get close to it even if it tried, and it’s likely to end up in rebellion if it did. Its aggression is continuous in Ukraine, against her neighbors and its waging a war of subterfuge it can only come to regret against NATO allies. It’s like it wants a fight but knows it cannot possibly win it, the consequences would be too dire, even for Putin.

Putin’s constant nuclear threats are just another example of a country that no longer has any power left to influence what goes on beyond the war its engulfed itself in – as Syria has shown us. the Threats are the empty words of an Emperor without any clothes.

History has a relentless habit of repeating itself because we almost never learn from it. Russia never has. NATO is a lesson that has been learned. Article 5, that creation of British Foreign Secretary Aneurin Bevan, is what marks it apart from every other alliance in history. All for One and One for All. Russia knows that unless it’s willing to test that – and it isn’t, all it can do is create trouble and be a nuisance.

This Russian emperor, as all before him, has failed to learn from history, that he is already doomed. This war will end, and when it does, however it does so, it will be then end of Putin and his failed attempt at embracing the past will once again be a lesson to all future Russians. They can learn from it or repeat it. The end will always be the same if they chose, yet again, repetition. Russian leaders have rarely had a smooth exit from power. Alexander-II was bombed, Nicholas-II overthrown and executed, Lenin died of stress related arteriosclerosis said to have been caused by dozens of assassination attempts, Stalin from paranoia induced stress, stroke and smoking, Khrushchev was removed from power and semi-exiled internally, Yeltsin drank himself into thinking Putin was a good replacement and resigned. Medvedev was pushed aside and now spends his days pretending to be most outrageous brown nose in Russia. Multiple emperors before this lot, were murdered, overthrown or otherwise deposed. Violent, at the least unsavory, endings for Russian leaders are nothing new. Does Putin think he will be any different when he fails?

If Russia again chooses to squander its vast wealth in oil and gas to build weapons for conquest, and not establish a viable post-carbon economy for the future, sustaining the empire as it is will become impossible, its multi-ethnic and religious constituents fed up with dying for some Russian dream of past glory. Yet history shows they know only one way. Perhaps the artificial empire that is Russia has simply failed, unlike the maritime empires of the West, to unravel as completely as it should have. Land borders are a very different level of connectivity. Are we seeing the last gasps of a desperate, dying empire slated for oblivion, as history finally catches up with it, a century after everyone else?

The Analyst