by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D

 

Our 5 week stay at our home in the Russian countryside was approaching its conclusion when I got an email from a friend in France asking me to comment on an article in The New York Times entitled “Russia’s Villages, and Their Way of Life, Are ‘Melting Away’” (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/world/europe/russia-population-changes.html?_r=0).

The article surely met the expectations of its editors by painting a grim picture of decline and fall of the Russian countryside in line with what the author sees as very unfavorable demographic trends in the Russian Federation as a whole. The fact that his own statistics do not justify the generalization (a net population loss of a few thousand deaths over live births in 2016 for a population of 146 million) does not get in the way of the paint-by-color canvas.  Nor does the author explain why what he has observed in a village off the beaten track in Northwest Russia, in precisely the still poor region of Pskov, gives an accurate account of country life across the vast territory of Russia, the world’s largest nation-state.

As the author notes, the main source of income from the land of the town he visited was in the past linen. That cultivation turned unprofitable and was discontinued. Consequently, the able-bodied part of the population has been looking for employment and making their lives elsewhere.

The author fails to mention that linen production is not a major agricultural indicator in Russia today, whereas many other crops are booming.  Linen goes into the lovely traditional handicraft tablecloths and napkins sold to tourists at riverboat landings, and that is the extent of demand.

I could respond to the overriding portrait of countryside decay in the NYT article by drawing on my observations a year ago from the deck of one of those riverboats navigating the canals and rivers connecting St Petersburg and Moscow.  From that deck and from the experience of walking around the little picturesque towns where we made stops, I understand that growing domestic Russian tourism has pumped financial resources into historic centers, like Uglich. They are coming alive, with infrastructure improvements and reviving trade.

However, tourist sites are not going to be representative of the country at large.  So I will instead use two sources of information that I am confident have greater relevance to the issue at hand.  The first, and surely the most politically significant, comes from a couple of family friends who for nearly 50 years have spent summers at a parcel of land deep in the hinterland, 280 km southeast of St Petersburg, close to regional industrial center of Pikalyovo, (Leningradskaya Oblast) with its train station along the line linking the northern capital to Vologda. The second source is my own experience in and around our property in Orlino, a hamlet numbering 300 inhabitants in the Gatchina district, also Leningradskaya Oblast, but 80 km due south of Petersburg.

The homesteads around Pikalyovo were always hard to get to, with very poor local roads. There was no commercial infrastructure, so the bold and determined vacationers coming here had to bring most provisions for their stay with them. They were rewarded for their efforts by the produce grown in their gardens and by foraging for berries and highly desirable boletes and other wild mushrooms in the surrounding forests.

When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Russian economy followed suit in the 1990s, the Pikalyovo region suffered the kind of economic misery and population loss that the NYT describes today in the Pskov region.  Our friends saw that normal folks left, and the concentration of drunkards and thieves rose proportionately.  The theft of anything of value in common space became acute when scrap metal scavengers pulled up kilometers of electrical cables for their copper content, leaving swathes of the district temporarily without electricity.

Pikalyovo came to the attention of national news during the 2008 – 2009 financial crisis when its three main industrial enterprises shut down, causing widespread misery.  The best known of these enterprises, a clay processing plant owned by the oligarch Oleg Derispaska’s conglomerate Basic Element, caused a major scandal when state television carried reports on how the factory had not paid its employees for months while the boss was seeking and obtaining government assistance with repayment, rescheduling of his foreign loans.  In the spring of 2009, there were protest demonstrations in Pikalyovo that resulted in both Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin personally entering the dispute to pressure Deripaska to do the right thing.

The economic woes of the regional economic hub did nothing to improve the living conditions in nearby hamlets like the one where our friends have their parcel.  Our friends started cutting back on their visits and missed a year or two altogether. All of this would seem to confirm the story line of the Times reporter, but the latest word from Volodya and Tamara overturns the story line completely.

A few weeks ago our friends decided to go back to the property to prepare it for sale. They had had enough, they thought.

However, once there they discovered things were definitely looking up.  A newly completed 35 km highway makes their settlement much more accessible.  But more importantly, the neighbors have changed – for the better.  A retired colonel moved in a couple of years ago and started raising pigs, cows and chickens, offering meat, eggs and dairy products for sale, thereby ending our friends’ need for brought-in provisions. His example attracted others. New and dynamic settlers are putting into practice the ‘return to the land’ trend that is an undeniable feature of current Russian social life.  Our friends have decided not to sell, and to spend more time on their property.

 

 

In legal terms, the parcel of land my wife owns in the hamlet of Orlino (population 300) is categorized as a “subsistence farm.” The nature of the farming to be done there even features in the plan attached to the cadastral registry: the 700 square meters where the house was built facing the “Central Street” can be used for fruit trees and vegetable garden; the back field of another 700 square meters is allocated for potatoes, cabbage and similar crops. 

In the vernacular, however, together with the two-story planed log house we built here 5 years ago, the property is considered a “dacha,” a summer residence. Nearly one in two urban Russian households has a dacha.

 Young people think of dachas as weekend get-away locations to hold a barbecue for friends and family.  If they have a feeling for Russian traditions, it is where they take their Saturday banya, or sauna in dedicated outhouses heated by wood burning stoves and then socialize over a beer. Older folks and pensioners find this frivolous. In their view, the dacha is not so much a place to idle time away as it is a place of honest toil, working the land and communing with nature. And even some of the younger generation buys into the concept of growing their own organic foods on their land, thus getting along without industrially farmed supermarket produce, whether domestic or imported. 

One hundred years ago, Orlino was populated mostly by wealthy merchants whose businesses were in the extended district. They lived here year-round in substantial houses, some of which have survived to this day. To the back of the houses, what were essentially barns were built on, and there they kept some small livestock.  No one in Orlino today keeps chickens, pigs, goats, not to mention cows.  But they do till the land with great enthusiasm and look after their fruit trees and red berry shrubs.

The notion of subsistence farming suggests border-line poverty. But Orlino was never poor, and its residents are not indigent today.  Oldsters whose pensions are inadequate are supported by their children or nephews/nieces’ families living in the local towns, in the district capital of Gatchina 50 km away, or even in St Petersburg.  In return, these relatives visit in the summer to spend some days of vacation and take advantage of the large lake on the edge of the hamlet, which is lovely for swimming or boating when the weather is cooperative.

The notion of subsistence farming also suggests tough practicality.  But making good use of the land does not exclude aesthetic pleasures, and every parcel of land in the hamlet is decorated by flower beds showing great ingenuity and effort.  Similarly, in the last year the Orlino farmers have all gone the way of their brethren across Russia and invested in greenhouses made of pre-formed polycarbonate walls, most commonly resembling hoops in profile.  Here they put in tomatoes, cucumbers and other highly prized vegetables for their dining table which do not do well in the short growing season of the North, and in the very adverse climatic conditions which were exemplary this year in terms of cool temperatures and incessant rains.  Given the expense of these greenhouses, the investment is not so much economically justified as it is a point of pride in self-sufficiency and green-thumb skills.

Electricity is the only utility that spells dependency for Orlino residents.  Otherwise, each household has its own well, its own septic tank system, its own gas cylinder for the cooking stove and its own supply of birch logs for a wood burning stove that is the mainstay of heating.

Many households have cars.  The most recent arrivals, being by far the most prosperous, often have four-wheel drive utility vehicles. This is a valuable benefit given the deplorable condition of many local roads.  But then there are a significant minority who depend on the local bus system to get around. It is cheap, runs to schedule and gets you from point A to point B without fuss. 

The hamlet has a couple of grocery stores, so that staples are always available within easy walking distance. For luxuries, there is the town of Siversk 10 km away.  Numbering perhaps 10,000 it is the local economic hub, with several factories, including a manufacturer of good quality upholstered furniture. Siversk has a train station with hourly connections to Gatchina and St Petersburg.  It also has several supermarkets run by major national retail chains, so that you will find exactly the same product assortment as in St Petersburg or Moscow. And there are a number of high quality specialty food stores and at least one bakery which is indistinguishable from what you might find in Vienna or Frankfurt

In the not so distant past, even urban Russians had not much interest in salads or in fish. Chicken legs or sausages or pork  cutlets for the barbecue were what folks shopped for as main courses.  Now even our Siversk stores offer pre-packaged mixed lettuce salads or rucola coming from greenhouse complexes in Greater St Petersburg.  And for its part, the leading fish store offers not only salmon steaks from Scandinavian producers, but several varieties of delicacy fish from Europe’s largest fresh water lake, situated 50 km to the east of Petersburg. Still more impressive is the assortment of fish coming down each day from Murmansk: excellent flounder and superb gorbusha, a wild salmon usually considered to be a Pacific Ocean variety but also available in the waters north and west of Siberia. And for those with deeper pockets, the fish vendor in little Siversk occasionally offers a fresh sterlet, the magnificent 1 kg size representative of the sturgeon family that is farmed on the Volga in Astrakhan, far to the South.

I offer these observations from shopping to make the following point about the Russian country life as I see it:  a lively economy with a population growing ever more sophisticated and aspiring to the good life.

When I shared these thoughts with my friend in France, he shot back:  what about the lower strata of society? How are they faring?

My ready response draws on my 5 year acquaintance with our “average Joe” neighbor in Orlino,  Sergei. When we settled here five years ago, he drilled our artesian well, installed the electric pump and all sanitary plumbing in our house. Now he winterizes the house each year and keeps an eye on the property when we are away, for compensation to be sure, but more out of friendship, because he has other, more lucrative sources of income as a subcontractor or day worker on local construction projects. There is a lot of work of this kind now that Orlino’s fallow fields are slowly being converted into housing estates.  Sergei is a master of several building trades. He also drives a tractor. He is mechanically gifted.

Sergei is about 55, the father of a grown son and daughter, the grandfather of two. When we first met, he was living in an apartment in a multi-unit wooden house dating back 60 or 70 years that was neither comfortable nor attractive. In the past three years he has realized a long time dream and built for himself a two-story cement block house, now clad in siding. The interior space is perhaps 250 square meters. When you pass it from the road, in a row of several other very substantial recent houses, you would place it as solidly upper middle class.  And next to his house Sergei has put up a very fine and large greenhouse. Beyond that is an extensive field of splendid potatoes and vegetables.

To be sure, the second story of Sergei’s house still needs work and he and his wife live now only on the ground floor.  Moreover, the investment of all spare cash into the house has scuttled other needs. When Sergei’s ancient Toyota pick-up finally rusted into irreparable condition, he found himself without motorized transport. Until further notice, until he can put together the down payment for a new vehicle, he gets around town on a bicycle.

Sergei is no fool. He gripes about local corruption and terrible roads.  But on the whole he is satisfied with his lot and optimistic about the future. Any belt-tightening that has been made necessary by Western sanctions he takes in his stride. He is resolutely patriotic.

I realize full well that the observations taken from my personal experience of the Russian countryside and from the experience of close friends is anecdotal and so not statistically significant.  But then neither are the observations of The New York Times reporter. Russia is a vast land and you can pretty much find what you are looking for there.  Nonetheless, the gross economic statistics published by Rosstat are upbeat and fully contradict the notion of a country in decline, including its rural component.

 

 

 

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2017

 

  * * * *

 

 

Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015. His forthcoming book Does the United States Have a Future? will be published in the autumn of 2017.

By his violation of the principles of the U.S. Constitution, Donald Trump is setting the stage for his own lawful removal from power.

Continue reading “Can a President ignore and override the whole U.S. federal government? Donald Trump’s approach to governing…” →

 

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D,

 

The much-anticipated first face-to-face meeting of Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin finally took place on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit in Hamburg on July 7. The attention of the world and even of the other participants of Summit was so riveted to the Trump-Putin meeting, and the Summit schedule was so interrupted by that meeting, that clever tongues are speaking of the G-20 having taken place at the sidelines of the Trump-Putin talks.

The two big news items to emerge in U.S. media concerned a) the length of the meeting and b) Trump’s having raised the issue of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign, thus addressing the demands for confronting the Kremlin on the issue that came out of the hysterical “Russiagate” campaign of Trump’s detractors and political enemies.

Indeed, the meeting went on for two hours and fifteen minutes, as opposed to the 25 minutes advised in advance by the White House. There were a total of six participants:  the two presidents, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, his counterpart Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and the interpreters.This is important, because Trump dispensed with the large delegation of “advisers” and Russophobes, like Fiona Hill, whom he was urged to take along to the meeting to keep him on the straight and narrow.

As for Russian hacking and other alleged interference in the U.S. elections, we are told that the subject took up 40 minutes, nearly a third of the meeting time. The New York Times  confides that the discussion was tense and heated.   In answer to journalists’ questions following the meeting, Sergei Lavrov and then later Vladimir Putin himself expressed confidence that the Russian’s vehement denials of any involvement were persuasive and were accepted. So far, the Trump camp has been quiet on the persuasiveness.

Regrettably, this very tightly focused attention of U.S. media has left unreported what was actually achieved during the meeting.  To be sure, that was not much of substance, because substance requires detailed advance preparation by teams from both sides, something which could not and did not occur due to the intense pressure of Trump’s political opponents and even of several of his own advisers, who wanted no meeting at all or a confrontational meeting as opposed to constructive meeting if any. 

That being said, there was one concrete piece of business which Lavrov mentioned in his press briefing immediately afterwards: the creation of a joint U.S.-Russian center for deconfliction in Jordan, where the U.S. military coordination of the Syrian theater is located, to look after the implementation of a local pacification and return to civilian life in the southwest region of Syria. Moreover, the supervision on the ground of this deconfliction will be performed by Russian military police.  That all appears to be a very positive development, adding to the 6 deconfliction areas in Syria that were agreed in Astana at meetings of all warring parties and are under the guaranty of Turkey, Iran and Russia.

 It would be still better if there had been some progress on the more dangerous zone of eastern and southeastern Syria along the Euphrates, where U.S. backed forces of the Free Syrian Army have clashed with Assad’s forces and where the U.S. shot down a Syrian bomber a couple of weeks ago, causing the Russians to cut military hot lines and to threaten to target all U.S. and Allied planes flying West of the Euphrates.

We also are informed that the United States will now be taking an active role in pressing for the implementation of the Minsk Accords for the sake of a properly observed cease-fire and a political solution. A point man for relations with Ukraine has been named.  In practice, this will likely mean applying pressure on Kiev to live up to its commitments – on voting in the Donbass, on decentralization….

There was also an agreement to set up a joint body to deal with cyber security so as to ensure there will be no possible attacks on electoral processes in either country.  The Russians, in particular, seek such cooperation in the knowledge that cyber attacks are considered a causus belli by the Americans.

More generally, what seems to have been achieved at the Putin-Trump meeting was agreement on procedures to begin a normalization of bilateral relations, including the early appointment of new ambassadors in both capitals.  No agreements on anything specific as yet, but the identification of outstanding issues and the start of assignment of responsibility on both sides to enter into detailed discussion to find solutions.   If followed up, that could turn out to be a turning point in relations.

Before the meeting took place, journalists and pundits were looking for scenarios from the past which might characterize the emerging relationship of the two presidents.  Optimists, in particular, spoke of the enormously important example set by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, which led to very significant agreements on arms limitation and to the resolution of the underlying cause of the Cold War: Europe’s division into Russian and Allied spheres of control. Donald Trump’s repeated indications on the campaign trail that he believed Putin was someone with whom he could do business was redolent of Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s views of Gorbachev.

But I think that this conceptualization of what may lie ahead is deceptive and a cul de sac.   Today there is no Soviet Union, no Russian empire in Europe and nothing of the kind to resolve. Moreover, with all of the negative associations for today’s Kremlin coming from the naïve and unjustified trust of Gorbachev in the good intentions and fair play of his interlocutors, references to that political duo is a nonstarter for the Russian side. 

 

 

Instead, I see the frame of reference for what lies ahead in the Nixon-Brezhnev detente.  One of the great implementers of that détente was Henry Kissinger, whose Realpolitik underlies Trump’s America First thinking.  And Kissinger himself has been very visible in the Trump foreign policy circle.  He was with Trump when he received Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Kislyak in the Oval Office a couple of months ago.  He was Trump’s messenger to Putin a week ago when he arrived in Moscow and was taken to a tête-à-tête with the Russian President that Russian state television considered newsworthy.  

 

Nixon-era détente was all about peaceful coexistence between two world super-powers pursuing their own national interest, not about cozy friendship.

 

We do not have today an ideological divide driving the competition of these two powers, but we do have heightened and currently malicious or malignant competitiveness that can run amok. The objective is to agree on national interests of the sides, a polite way of saying the unspeakable in American politics, “spheres of influence.”  At the highest level of abstraction, we are talking about an agreement on world governance.

 

In the heyday of detente, and even as late as 1978 or so, Brezhnev offered Nixon a condominium:  if we and you agree, said Leonid Il’ich, no one else in the world will dare raise a finger.    The Americans did not buy it.  Nixon could not have accepted that even if he wished to because Congress would never agree.   Putin is not offering such a condominium, but instead is offering mutual responsibility for governance through the UN and other fora like the G20.  Maybe, just maybe Trump will go for it.

 

* * * *

 In trying to understand how the Russians have assessed the Putin-Trump meeting, as usual I have found the country’s highest level political talk show, Sunday Evening with Vladimir Soloviev, to be an invaluable aid.

Opinion is divided between politicians and think tank intellectuals who are openly optimistic and those who are guardedly optimistic.

The openly optimistic believe that Trump and Putin got off to a good start, with good “personal chemistry” which promises an improvement of bilateral relations. And in general they believe that Russia did well from the encounter, with the eyes of the world directed respectfully at their President. The world had returned to the good old days when everyone looked to Washington and Moscow as the arbiters of global stresses.

The guardedly optimistic believe that the meeting does not hold the promise of good relations, but marks the end of deterioration and so averts war, which otherwise was quite possibly on the horizon.  The meeting and its duration highlight the understanding in the United States that maintaining working relations and open dialogue with Russia is essential for world peace. But the sanctions will remain, and the major power blocs of the United States and Europe, Russia and China will vie for influence and keep their distance from one another for many years to come.

It also bears mention that the Russians were bemused by the insistent implicit and sometimes explicit criticism of Trump from American journalists and other attendees of the Summit for being incompetent, something of a deranged fool.  No one in living memory had witnessed such contempt for the Commander in Chief from his own fellow citizens.  This fact curbed Russian expectations that anything promised by Trump could be realized.

 

* * * *

Apart from the meeting of the Russian and American presidents and from the obvious isolation of the US delegation at the conclusion of the summit when the other 19 members joined in a common statement reaffirming their countries’ commitment to the Paris Climate Change treaty from which Trump has withdrawn the United States, the other main aspect of the G-20 in Hamburg that captured the headlines of U.S. and European press was the violence of the demonstrators who, as is now customary at such events, came to curse globalization and the free trade pacts that G-20 members have traditionally subscribed to.  More than 100 German police fell victim to the demonstrators actions.

The very curious thing is that no one from the opponents of globalization took notice of an extraordinary fact:  that Donald Trump is the first American President ever to have taken a policy stand AGAINST globalization. If logic had any place in these political struggles, the demonstrators should have been lined up to shake Trump’s hand, wish him well in deconstructing the trade pacts, and asked for autographs. 

 

But logic and politics often part company, and the demonstrators ‘did their thing’ without a nod of any kind to their American ally in the White House.

 

 

 

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2017

 

 

 * * * *

 

 

Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015. His forthcoming book Does the United States Have a Future? will be published on 1 September 2017.

If the U.S. military continues to run amok, it is hard to see how armed conflict with Russia in Syria can be avoided

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Dear NBC News Team,

 

Congratulations! You have graduated from fake news to falsified news, arriving at a journalistic level that is identical to that in the Soviet Union in its heyday.

 

A couple of days ago, the political talk show moderated by Vladimir Soloviev on state television channel Rossiya 1 broadcast two versions of a segment from Megyn Kelly’s interview with Vladimir Putin last Friday in the St Petersburg on the sidelines of the International Economic Forum.  One was the complete, uncut version that was aired on RT. The other was the cut-to-shreds version that you put on air for the American audience. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxqGoXNI_gw beginning 4 minutes into the program.

 

The segment was Megyn Kelly’s aggressive question to Putin, asking his response to what she said was Americans’ understanding of his government, namely one that murders journalists, suppresses political opposition, is rife with corruption, etc., etc.  In the NBC version, Putin’s answer has been cut to one empty introductory statement that “Russia is on its way to becoming a democracy” bracketed by an equally empty closing sentence.  In the full, uncut version , Putin responds to Kelly’s allegations point by point and then turns the question around asking what right the USA and the West have to question Russia’s record when they have been actively doing much worse than what was in Kelly’s charges. He asks where is Occupy Wall Street today, why US and European police use billy clubs and tear gas to break up demonstrations, when Russian police do nothing of the sort, and so on.

In a word, you intentionally made Putin sound like an empty authoritarian, when he is in fact a very sophisticated debater who outranked your Megyn at every turn during the open panel discussion in the Forum, to the point she was the laughing stock of the day.

 

Who wins from these games?    You are only preconditioning the American public for the war that is coming, whether by intention or by accident.   And there will be no one left to have the last laugh after the first day of that war.  So you can forget about your stock options and retirement schemes, ladies and gentlemen of the News Team.

 

have a nice day

 

Gilbert Doctorow

Brussels

 

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

 

 

For many decades America’s most prestigious universities have invited outstanding personalities from diverse fields of public life including the arts, business, politics and scholarship to speak to their graduating classes at commencement exercises.  None is more closely watched by American media than Harvard, and the speakers in the open-air Tercentenary Theatre of Harvard Yard on Wednesday, May 24 (Class Day) and on Thursday, May 25 (Harvard Alumni Association) did not disappoint. The appearances by former Vice President Joe Biden on the first day and by Facebook founder and largest shareholder Mark Zuckerberg on the second day have been widely reported. Both are readily available in video on youtube.com.

However, as an eyewitness, being present at both events in my capacity as member of the Class of 1967 Reunion, I gathered some impressions of their speeches, and especially of how there were received by the audience, that I will share at the start of this essay. Then I will proceed to the third featured speech of those two days, delivered by University President Drew Faust.   I firmly believe that hers was a speech of national importance that should set the tone for discussion on the limits and practice of free speech, of our civil liberties, more broadly, and on the stultifying effect political correctness is having on America’s ability to think straight and respond to challenges at home and abroad. Sadly it has been ignored by major media. A full transcript is available on the Harvard website:: http://www.harvard.edu/president/speech/2017/2017-commencement-speech

The distinction between Class Day and Commencement Day speakers must be explained before we go any further.  The Class Day speaker is chosen by the graduating class, whereas the Commencement Day speaker is selected by the University Administration.

Joe Biden is an accomplished public speaker and he used the opening minutes of his speech to call attention to who had invited him.  In what was intended to be pure fun and to warm up the audience, he noted that the Class already knew Zuckerberg would be the University’s choice for Commencement and decided they “needed someone who is more in tune with your generation.” In fact, this offhand and counter-intuitive joke rang true:  Biden enjoyed much better rapport with the audience and received far more applause than did Zuckerberg the next day. It is remarkable that this was so given the age discrepancies between the two. 

In my Harvard of the 1960s, the University administration was already heavily committed to social engineering, to opening the gates of admission to an ever wider distribution of students from different geographic backgrounds, religious affiliation, race, financial status.  That process has never stopped.  Earlier in the week, President Faust had explained to our reunion participants during Q&A that the entering class of 2021 will be the first to have a majority of minorities, that is to say, WASPs will be in the minority of the class. And more than 60% of the students will be receiving financial aid that is granted solely on the basis of need to all students who have been admitted on the basis of merit.  Yet, at the end of the day, this policy of progressive and unrelenting cooptation has yielded a political mood on campus that might be described as just to the left of center, firmly within the Democratic Party mainstream. That is precisely where my Class of 1967 stood.  I would submit this is a splendid case of managed democracy.

One of the rules of successful speaking is to flatter your audience, and Joe Biden was unstinting in praising the graduating class of 2017. They are part of the best educated, best prepared generation America has ever seen. They can be proud of their Harvard diploma, which will open many doors for them in the years ahead, because they earned it.  Moreover, they are part of a politically and socially engaged student body which gave notable support to the labor action of Harvard’s dining service workers, leading to their gaining important benefits.

And yet, a few minutes later in the same speech Biden remarked on the single digit support for making a career in the federal service among Harvard undergrads. 

In the write-up of Joe Biden’s speech, the Harvard University Gazette has given it the heading “Apathy not an option.” In what was often a rambling talk drawing on stock segments from Biden’s public appearances everywhere and anywhere, combined with some carefully researched segments connecting with Harvard College students’ experiences over the past 4 years, Joe Biden contradicted himself more than once.  We may nonetheless say that overall Biden sought to rouse the students from their shock and dismay over Donald Trump’s electoral victory last November. He reminded them that he and his generation had lived through worse setbacks, including the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The point was that one must soldier on and go beyond personal ambition to work for the common good through public service. There is more than a hint at JFK and “ask not what your country can do for you” in this message.

 

That was close, but certainly not identical with the vision that Mark Zuckerberg set out in his inspirational speech the next day.  His byword was the flip side of apathy, namely purpose:  he insisted that we all need to have a sense we are part of a cause greater than ourselves where, among other things, we can engage in charitable activities assisting our fellow mankind.  Zuckerberg introduced into his speech many observations from his travels around the United States which have brought him to more than 30 states in the past year.  The New York Times’ Friday article on his speech correctly identified this as the start of a political campaign.  Yahoo.com financial news still more precisely identified it as a “stump speech,” which typically draws on personal vignettes such as Zuckerberg has been gathering in his travels and been documenting on his Facebook page. There could be little doubt that Zuckerberg will be aiming for the presidency once he passes the minimum age requirement in two years.

Like Donald Trump, Zuckerberg comes from the business world, he has ten times the personal wealth of Trump and he has a very big social media presence. In principle, all of this can be traded for votes.  But Zuckerberg’s speech had few clear political markers. It is hard to place him on a Left – Right scale.  He described his business as a facilitator in formation of communities, in knitting people together, in allowing them to find purpose. But these are all connections at the personal or social level, not at a political level.  Government as such was mentioned specifically by Biden as something inseparable from public service.  Government does not appear in Zuckerberg’s speaking vocabulary.  This is not big government, it is not small government, it is no government.

A US-run global community is Implicit in Zuckerberg’s thinking, but he would surely object if directly challenged on this. He is the quintessential Davos Man, exponent of globalist Davos Culture, which is supra-national by definition.  In that sense only can we say that Zuckerberg, like most everyone in the audience, is opposed to Donald Trump’s America First political movement.

 The absence of political markers other than environmentalism and universal basic income left the audience confused and uncertain whether he is really one of them. Zuckerberg paused repeatedly in his speech waiting for applause.  However, the only steady and enthusiastic applause came from behind him, from the Harvard University administrators seated on stage who had been waiting for this prodigal son to come home and hoping for generous financial contributions from his cash hoard.  They are the ones who conferred on him his honorary doctor of laws degree that same morning.  The audience did not buy in.  Not yet….

 

Harvard President Drew Faust is an academic, an historian of the American Civil War whose latest work in that subject was the basis for a series of programs by Public Broadcasting that brought her wider national recognition. She has ex officio been a frequent visitor to Washington, D.C. in recent months,  lobbying on behalf of foreign students facing restrictions under the new presidential orders and also working to defend federal spending on higher education.

But political speechmaking is not her stock in trade and the politically bold statements she made in her address to the Alumni Association immediately before the microphone was passed to Mark Zuckerberg are all the more striking in that context. She delivered an impassioned defense of free speech which deserves the full attention of her colleagues at Harvard and across the nation, since they are all in violation of the definition she set out. It is no accident that she was the only speaker of the two days who made reference to Veritas, the university’s motto, which otherwise provided the backdrop to the speakers’ stage.  She spoke about the institution and its obligations as generator and protector of “truth” and knowledge arrived at by free debate and challenge of ideas.

This is not to say that there was perfect clarity in her message. As an effective speaker, she left us somewhat uncertain as to whose rights of free speech she was defending and against what sort of challenge.  Given the political persuasion of students and faculty to which I alluded already, one might think she had in mind such causes célèbres as the ongoing verbal attacks against Linda Sarsour, a Muslim (Palestinian) graduation speaker at CUNY.  Indeed, in her speech Drew Faust pointed to the more vulnerable members of the student body, those from minorities, those from among first generation college students who might be intimidated by hurtful speech directed against them.

However, I have no doubt that the main weight of her argument was directed elsewhere. Mainly, to the processes by which truth is arrived. She was defending the very notion of the appropriateness of sharp debate and airing of views one may dislike intensely on campus:

“Universities must model a commitment to the notion that truth cannot simply be claimed, but must be established – established through reasoned argument, assessment, and even sometimes uncomfortable challenges that provide the foundation for truth.” 

This is unheard of in American polite society.  From my experience as an organizer of public events going back 5 years, I learned that the very word “debate” finds no defenders. Debate suggests conflict rather than consensus.  The politically correct term for public discussions of even hot issues today is “round tables.” No sharp corners.

Instead we find Faust saying:

“Ensuring freedom of speech is not just about allowing speech. It is about actively creating a community where everyone can contribute and flourish, a community where argument is relisted, not feared. Freedom of speech is not just freedom from censorship; it is freedom to actively join the debate as a full participant. It is about creating a context in which genuine debate can happen.”

And why, one might ask, has President Faust come out with this vibrant defense of free speech precisely now, 10 years into her tenure at Harvard? The answer is the Donald Trump factor. She is very specific about this and her words deserve full citation:

“Silencing ideas or basking in intellectual orthodoxy independent of facts and evidence impedes our access to new and better ideas, and it inhibits a full and considered rejection of bad ones. From at least the time of Galileo, we can see how repressing seemingly heretical ideas has blinded societies and nations to the enhanced knowledge and understanding on which progress depend. Far more recently, we can see here at Harvard how our inattentiveness to the power and appeal of conservative voices left much of our community astonished – blindsided by the outcome of last fall’s election. We must work to ensure that universities do not become bubbles isolated from the concerns and discourse of the society that surrounds them.”

 

With all due respect for this remarkable speech, I am obliged to say that Harvard University has long been a “bubble” in the area of policy research that interests me, and should interest you, the reader, if you plan to survive the present New Cold War:  Russian studies. Over the past couple of years of growing confrontation between the U.S.A. and Russia, during a time of ever more scandalous vilification of the Russian President and the Russian people up to the present hysteria over “Russiagate,” colleagues with long-standing and widely acknowledged expertise in Russian affairs including Ambassador Jack Matlock and Professor Stephen Cohen have been repeatedly denied any possibility of participating in “round tables” dedicated to relations with Russia that might be organized at the Kennedy Center or at the Davis Center on the Harvard campus. These policy centers are strictly pulpits for expounding orthodoxy per the Washington consensus.  Veritas is the big but not the only loser.  The flaccid argumentation and complacency of U.S. foreign policy is aided and abetted by one of the universities, which, like Columbia, created the very discipline of Russian studies in 1949 and remains at the forefront of public attention.

No doubt there are other faculties at Harvard which also are desperately in need of renewal following President Drew Faust’s call for debate and free speech.

In closing, I would like to draw attention to another issue of political and social awareness at Harvard that goes straight back to the very start of President Faust’s 10 year tenure in office, and surely can be traced back still further: apathy.

In December 2007 twelve other alumni of the Class of 1967 and I, meaning approximately 1% of our cohorts, issued an open letter to President Faust which was picked up by the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, by the Boston Globe and other media. See

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/12/4/alums-protest-student-apathy-thirteen-members/

This was the time of an escalating U.S. military campaign in Iraq. It was a time when the Patriot Act and Homeland Security were still riding high. It was a time of complete docility among the Harvard student body. We called upon the University President to set up a committee to foster an environment conducive to “civic courage and political engagement.”

Nothing was done about it, of course. The student newspaper snottily rejected advice or implicit criticism from the burned out generation of Vietnam War protesters.

The nature of the speeches delivered by Messrs Zuckerberg and Biden show that a culture of “steady as she goes’’ continues to be installed in these ivy-clad halls.  Charitable activity and pietism are the rule, defense of free speech or other civil liberties that have been under challenge across America since 2001 are the rare exception.  Perhaps Harvard does not need a committee to investigate remedies, but the question remains:  how to raise the concerns of Harvard and other university communities from the community level to the national and global level apart from the much-beloved subject of global warming.  This is all the more pressing now that a substantial share of the undergraduate student body is  not just foreign-born but foreigners. The diversity of thinking on the issues of global governance should be brought into play, as it clearly has not been till now.

 

 

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2017

 

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Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015. His forthcoming book Does the United States Have a Future? will be published on 1 September 2017.

The correlation between the bombing of Syria and Trump’s friendly meeting with Lavrov in the Oval Office two days ago is linear. Hitting the Shayrat air base, under any pretext, real or manufactured, was precisely the kind of policy that Kissinger would support, and possibly authored to drive back the hyena-like press and political enemies who had formed a circle around Trump.

Continue reading “The correlation between Trump’s cruise missile attack in Syria and the possible emergence of a new détente” →

Looking at the throngs around me on march in St Petersburg, I understood that you have to be utterly mad to want to pin all of our problems with Russia on one man.  This is not a nation to be trifled with whatever its many weaknesses and faults.

Continue reading “Letter from St. Petersburg: An eye-witness account of the Immortal Regiment march, 9 May 2017” →

 

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

 

Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of truth by rendering it of “secondary” importance.

In 2016, “post-truth” was chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year, due to its prevalence in the context of that year’s Brexit referendum and U.S. presidential election.

 

It is very important to the argument I make in the second half of this essay that the Wikipedia definition of “post-truth” cited above gives “post-factual” as an alternative reading of the term. The authors-editors of the entry have understood truth as something supported by facts. That is not self-evident, because there are various kinds of truth. Scientific truth, scholarly truth are surely fact-based. But religious truth, still a major influence on American society and culture, is faith-based, not fact-based.  And artistic truth, to take another example, is highly personal and subjective; facts as building blocks play no role. 

Politically speaking, the concept of post-truth has had a distinctly partisan flavor in the United States. It relates not just to the 2016 U.S. presidential election as stated above but to the Republican candidate in that election and to the Republican President who now sits in the Oval Office.  That is to say, the word has been instrumentalized, another fashionable concept of our day, to attack Donald J. Trump, whom its framers consider to be the embodiment of post-truth.

Put more bluntly, Trump’s Democratic opponents and the media have been saying in effect that Trump is a serial and impudent liar.  In that connection, let us recall The Washington Post’s daily front-page fact-check on the candidate’s assertions during the campaign for the presidency and the Pinocchio caricatures that were featured elsewhere in the media. Much more ink was spent detailing Trump’s whoppers than those of his Republican peers in the primaries or than those of Hillary Clinton in the final election.

This is not to say that such attention to Trump’s character weakness for self-serving tall stories did not and does not justify attention and severe criticism.  It was not for nothing that in his prepared statement at the opening of his confirmation hearings in the Senate, Rex Tillerson chose to stress the truth as something he would always make a guiding principle in his State Department operations, and said that from his training as an engineer, he would follow the facts wherever they led him.  It is very sad to note that once in office Tillerson’s loyalty to his boss outweighed his personal convictions and professional methodology so that he has become a willing mouthpiece for outrageous lies, as in his justification for the cruise missile strikes in Syria over alleged but unproven chemical attack by the Assad forces in Idlib province.

Meanwhile, for anyone observing the ongoing Democratic Party led witch-hunt in Washington over suspected collusion between Trump administration personnel and the Russians to throw the election his way, or otherwise to compromise U.S. security interests, it is patently clear that the concept of “post-truth” is fully descriptive of what is being practiced in the camp of Trump’s opponents and detractors.  We have smears, slurs allegations unsupported by facts in what have become general “fishing expeditions” to find wrongdoing that fits previously prepared indictments and prepares the way for further impairment of Executive powers if not actual impeachment of Trump. No amount of factual counter-argument by the minority of experts and politicians daring to stand up to the mob on Capitol Hill aided and abetted by mainstream media counts for anything.

However, it would be a mistake to allow our understanding of “post –truth” to be defined strictly by the vagaries of partisan politics, or to blame it on the character defects of this or that public personality. “Post-truth” is a natural concomitant of populist politics:  “facts” are produced by elites, who are by definition prepared by their superior educations for this task.  Those “facts” may and often do contradict the realities by which the vast majority of the population live. Given that the vast majority of the population also has a strong anti-intellectual current in its midst, there are ready to hand solid reasons to reject what the elites cum intellectuals are presenting to the public via the media every day.

But there is another dimension to the current ascendancy of “post-truth” which I wish to explore based on personal experience of working more than twenty-five years in international business:  that “post-truth” has for decades been enshrined in Anglo-Saxon business culture. Its unapologetic spill-over into politics today is a side-effect of the rise of a maverick business mogul to the apex of American politics and his bringing on board an entourage of fellow moguls as described in an article of the April 22, 2017 edition of The New York Times entitled “Trump Reaches Beyond West Wing for Counsel.”

On the basis of all the Masters of Business Administration degrees that American institutions of higher learning have granted during the last 40 years when the degree became a prerequisite for successful corporate careers, one might assume that facts and figures drive our businesses.  Indeed, at middle management levels of multinational U.S. and U.K. companies, where I spent about two-thirds of my business career, that is very much the case. The strategic business planning cycle of marketing departments in a broad range of industries typically draws the basic narrative from outside fact-based reference materials like the Economist Intelligence Unit. Moreover, big corporate investment projects presented to senior management by middle managers in Power Point or its equivalent in sophistication today are preferably defended on the basis of hard historic numbers, not back of an envelope guesses.

However, the one-third of my business career spent as an outside consultant to the Boards of Directors of twenty or more major corporations in a broad spectrum of industries ranging from fast moving consumer goods to food and beverages to parcel delivery and even to hi-tech, showed that something very different was going on. The top managers operate in a different value system, where highest appreciation is given not to facts but to “gut instincts,” particularly when the subject at hand is not routine business but high profile projects entailing new investment or business activity.

In my experience as outside consultant time and again it emerged that the main purpose of such assignments was to serve as a support to top management for ideas they arrived at by gut instinct rather than fact. The challenge was to overcome resistance to their initiatives from petty-fogging, fact-wielding middle management by reference to greater expertise of the consultant, who might be allowed to argue with smoke and mirrors that would never pass if put up by employees

If I had any doubts about my suspicions regarding the rating of intuition as opposed to facts in top management circles, they were dispelled by a psychological report I received back during my own vetting for a country manager position at the world’s biggest distiller back in 1998. The report’s preparer was a Ph.D. in psychology and surely had a clear eyed understanding of corporate culture.

His lengthy analysis of my strengths and areas for development, as weakness are termed, boiled down to one sentence:

“Gilbert tends to be rational rather than intuitive.”

The positives – intellect, strategic grasp, tenacious worker, flexibility in ambiguous environments, experience and knowledge of local conditions – were fine, but the nagging drawback was intuition, otherwise called gut feeling.

I got the job,  but my understanding of which levers worked in the company and which didn’t for decisions surrounding major new projects was changed forever. With intuition one cannot argue.  As the old Russian folk saying has it:  I am the boss and you are an idiot; you are the boss and I am an idiot.

In big business, as I saw from the inside, very often blunders which occur due to intuition-based rather than fact-based decision making can be very expensive but are rarely ruinous.  Very large companies are usually able to recoup these losses from their routine, profitable operations, meaning from the paying public, using their market strength. They then tweak the new activities over time and bring them into profit.

The open question is how this approach to management will work out as it is implemented at the level of the U.S. federal government, both by the Trump team on one side and by those who are trying to bring him down on the other.

 

 

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2017

 

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G. Doctorow is a Brussels-based political analyst. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015

 

 

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

 

It is curious that the vast majority of commentary in U.S. and West European media about the French presidential vote on Sunday, 23 April concurred: this was an unprecedented repudiation of the political establishment.  After all, neither of the winners, Marine Le Pen and Emanuel Macron, belongs to the major center right or center left parties, the Republicans and the Socialists respectively. Much ado is made over the supposedly unprecedented nature of the whole electoral campaign, which was noteworthy for ugly character assassination.

And yet, if we exercise a modicum of detachment, the French election and its outcome from the first round is precisely “precedented” within French experience if we look back 5 years to the election that brought Francois Hollande to power and, still more, within the U.S. experience if we look back over the several “bait and switch” presidential elections we have had during the past quarter century.

In 2012, the presidential candidate best prepared by experience and knowledge to lead France out of its economic and social woes was Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at the time Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. He was widely expected to receive the nomination of the Socialist Party. But he was brought down by a sex scandal that many believed at the time was an entrapment set up by his enemies, not least of them in the United States. Instead, the majority of French who had their fill of Nicolas Sarkozy were left with the Socialists’ poor second candidate, Francois Hollande, who proved over the last five years that he was witless and utterly lacking in substance.  During his tenure, France has limped along and played a supporting role to Continent’s hegemon, Germany.

In 2016, the presidential candidate best prepared by experience and knowledge to lead France was Francois Fillon.  He offered both domestic and foreign policy programs that would mark a significant departure from the wishy-washy and ineffectual programs of Hollande and of Sarkozy before him. Perhaps most unorthodox of these policies within the Center Right from which he came, was his advocacy of good, constructive relations with Russia.

But Fillon was brought down by a concerted campaign of character assassination.  Yes, he was likely guilty of abusing the hiring privileges of his office to assign state compensation to his wife and sons.  However, that has been a very widespread abuse in the French political establishment and represents institutionalized corruption that did not begin with and will not end with Fillon.

Democratic politics is not for Boy Scouts.  It has always and will always have rough edges.  The question which should count above all is whether the candidate has the programs that will change people’s lives for the better and the force of will and political skills to realize them. 

Meanwhile, the administrative resources of the French government and the media have been used to promote the candidacy of a total nonentity, Emanuel Macron, whose main virtue is that he is NOT Marine Le Pen, the great nightmare candidate for the French Establishment, and beyond its borders, for the European Union Establishment, as well for of all enemies of sovereign nations and all supporters of globalization around the world. 

Macron’s second featured attribute is his youth. At 39, he will be the Fifth Republic’s youngest ever President.  In this sense his candidacy parallels electoral politics in the United States, where being a black or being a woman has been used to draw votes to candidates who otherwise do not stand up to scrutiny for their personal quality or the persuasiveness of their electoral platforms. 

Macron’s taking the lead position in the first round has been greeted with jubilation by world stock markets. The Nasdaq finally broke through the 6,000 level.  European bourses also did well. Bank shares soared in reaction to the prospect of France being run by a former investment banker.

If he wins the second round of the elections,  Macron will come to office without an organization to govern, without a parliamentary majority.  He will be obliged to form a coalition, meaning there will be little coherence in his government and its policies.  Coalitions are formed to share the spoils of office, not to get things done. We may expect France to muddle along, and to continue to be subservient to Berlin and Brussels.  The big loser will be the French nation.

 

 

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2017

 

 

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 G. Doctorow is a Brussels-based political analyst. His latest book Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015