THE RUSSIAN FRONT

At the annual meeting of the ASEEES (the organization-formerly-known-as-the-AAASS), I presented some preliminary research on the Great Purges in the Red Army, looking at the specific figure of Iona Yakir, then commander of the Kiev Military District. That made him one of the two men intended to bear the brunt of any future war in Europe, alongside the commander of the Belorussian Military District Ieronym Uborevich. In looking at the process of the purges in 1937, I found links back to the Red Army’s annual maneuvers, particularly the obscure 1933 Antoniny maneuvers of the then-Ukrainian Military District, and then the celebrated 1935 Kiev maneuvers.

Krasnaia zvezda devoted extensive coverage the 1935 maneuvers, which involved four corps, 65,000 men, 1000 tanks, and the drop of an entire paratroop regiment. One thing that jumped out at me from the visuals associated with that coverage was a particular emphasis on individual. As expected, Stalin’s puppet at the head of the Red Army Kliment Voroshilov figured prominently, but Iona Yakir, who’d be dead in two years, was almost as important. Even more surprisingly, there was a pronounced emphasis on a specific troika of individuals: Voroshilov, Yakir, and Ian Gamarnik (nicknamed “The Beard”), head of the Red Army’s Political Directorate.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s the front page of Krasnaia zvezda, 15 September 1935. This picture makes Voroshilov look quite Hitler-like, which is not intentional. It’s an artifact of the original photo, the scanning, and Voroshilov’s mustache, an attribute that seems characteristic of Stalin’s inner circle:

Gamarnik, Yakir, and Voroshilov, KZ 15 September 1935

The next day we get the same three individuals, again on the front page:

Gamarnik, Voroshilov, and Yakir, KZ 16 September 1935

And finally the next day a large shot from an interior page of the same three:

Gamarnik, Voroshilov, and Yakir, KZ 17 September 1935

A couple things to note: there are lots of other high-ranking officials of the Red Army present in Kiev; those particular three are the ones chosen for emphasis. Tukhachevskii, in case you were wondering, is almost invisible. I’m still unclear on precisely how to interpret all this; that’s research still remaining to be done.

The following video surfaced this past week on Youtube in the context of President Dmitrii Medvedev’s recent efforts to reform and professionalize the country’s police force.

Its subject is Col. Aleksei Nikolaevich Isakov the (now former) deputy director of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Lomonosov district (raion) of Lomonosov region (oblast) not far from St. Petersburg.

The video depicts the drunken colonel emerging from his office wearing only his MVD BVDs and…

I seem to post a disproportionate number of pieces complaining about falsification of the problem of falsification of history, but I can’t help myself when I keep being fed new material. The latest evidence: an ITAR-TASS story (hat tip to Johnson’s Russia List) claiming in its headline that “Russian historians shatter WW II myths.”

Here’s the question: where in the piece is there a single specific example of a myth about the war that Russian historians have shattered? I say this not to demean the work of Russian historians, many of whom are doing fine research. I say it to point out a recurring aspect of Russian official and semi-official discourse on World War II, which is that it is plagued by evil-doing historians who mythologize and falsify the war. There’s never any specific indication of who exactly it is that is doing these terrible things, or of what exactly it is they say that is so awful and wrong.

Not particularly Russian, but this does have some military history relevance . . .

In summer travels, I found myself stuck without a wide selection of reading material, but came across an old Modern Library edition of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Since that’s a book far more often referenced than read, and I didn’t have lots of other options, I decided to plow through it.

The book lived down to my expectations. It’s positively Hegelian in its grand rhetorical flights of fancy about capital-H History, and in its impenetrable style. On the bright side, once you get the hang of what Spengler is up to, the book’s easy to skim through very quickly. I may comment on some of his substantive arguments anon, what struck me was a single line on p. 387 in the chapter on “Philosophy of Politics”:

The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.

Thanks to a youthful flirtation with alternative rap, I recognized this as a line from PM Dawn’s 1991 song “Comatose.” I was pretty sure Spengler hadn’t stolen from PM Dawn, but I found it only slightly less surprising that PM Dawn was citing Spengler. To google I turned . . .

. . . to find to my surprise that the quotation is widely attributed to Marcus Aurelius (for example, here, here, here, and here), both in collections of military quotation and especially in business books. One organization even made it their official slogan, complete with a bust of Marcus Aurelius on the home page.

To add insult to injury, Marcus Aurelius wins the citation wars by a ratio of about 5:1 over Spengler.

The problem is that there’s no evidence that Marcus Aurelius ever uttered or wrote the words in question. It’s nowhere in his Meditations, and no one ever gives a real citation. The dubious prize for earliest misattribution to Marcus Aurelius (at least according to google books) goes to Jay Levinson and David Perry’s Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters.

Of course, in terms of the popularity of the quotation, Marcus Aurelius is a lot better than Spengler. The one is a philosophical emperor, one of the last good one the Romans had. The other was an obscurantist pessimist, and while not the Nazi he’s often painted as being, was no friend to democracy, capitalism, or liberalism. It’s tough to imagine management theorists being quite so eager to Spengler for inspiration.

And in other news,

Many attendees of large scholarly gatherings complain that sessions in which long papers are read aloud rarely excite the audience. One solution is the “precirculated paper,” in which scholars give out the paper in advance and spend less time reading aloud at the actual meeting, and more time in discussion. The American Historical Association has been encouraging this option for its annual meeting, but announced this week that it was suspending the practice. Among the problems: those who signed up for the option didn’t submit their papers on time, those papers that were circulated weren’t read in advance, and not enough attendees understood the concept.

It’s been a long time since postings–I thought I’d ease back in with an easy one.