THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Evidently, 1200 words taken without proper attribution aren’t enough to lose you a Ph.D. As previously posted here and here, I found that much in Saif Gaddafi’s dissertation in a hour or so with google. The Saif Gaddafi plagiarism wiki has more. So we now know a lower bound for the acceptable level of cheating –the question that remains to be determined is how high you can go.

This morning, the London School of Economics released its Woolf report on its ties to the Gaddafi family and how that subverted its academic integrity.

Prominent by its absence in the report is any real discussion of the plagiarism in Saif Gaddafi’s Ph.D thesis. Granted, Saif Gaddafi has more serious problems at this point, but I’d like to think an institution of the standing of the London School of Economics would pay a bit more attention to the issue of plagiarism. The text of the report itself uses the word “plagiarism” once, though there are a few more references in footnotes. There’s no substantive discussion of what happened in Gaddafi’s dissertation.

The reason seems to be that the question of plagiarism was outsourced from the London School of Economics to the University of London, which had authority over LSE Ph.Ds at the time Gaddafi did his work. In contrast to the voluminous Woolf report, the University of London’s discussion of the matter is laughably short. In a page with the ironic heading of “1836-2011: Celebrating 175 Years of Academic Excellence,” the University of London explains that it has investigated the plagiarism allegations, passed them on to the LSE, and any details (what was found, who found it, what standards for acceptable plagiarism were employed) are confidential.

So what did the University of London conclude? Since it won’t say, we have to turn to the LSE for an answer. It’s not much of an answer. The LSE tells us “The University of London has concluded that the PhD should not be revoked. The PhD thesis has been annotated to show where attribution or references should have been made.” Move along, nothing to see here.

As you might expect, this leaves me with a couple of questions. What exactly were the grounds for concluding that the Ph.D shouldn’t be revoked? Do we now have a precedent for acceptable levels of plagiarism? Granted, I live in a more litigious society, but if I were disciplined for plagiarism at the LSE or the University of London, I’d be counting words and prepping my case.

But here’s what I really wonder: who’s the poor graduate student who got to go through Saif Qaddafi’s Ph.D thesis and fix his faulty footnotes? I’ve heard of some bad jobs in grad school, but that would seem particularly soul-destroying. In a more self-serving vein, I found at least some of the plagiarism that’s floating out there: when do I get my thank-you note from the LSE for helping them with their corrections?

One last piquant note. David Held, one of Qaddafi’s advisers at the LSE, said “The evidence for plagiarism is not as great as people think and the issue will be: to what extent did he have help from an outsider? I don’t know what the evidence is at this stage.” Held is now heading to the University of Durham. That’s the home of Joe Painter, one of the people Qaddafi plagiarized. AWKWARD!

I heard about a lot of interesting new work at the ASEEES conference this year, and one of the exciting things ASEEES was the way in which research at one panel complemented and extended research presented in an entirely different context. The way in which the Russian Empire handled the medical demands of war is one of those serendipitous moments.

I served as commenter on a panel loosely defined as veterans in Russian and Soviet history, but ended up being a wider ranging discussion on war and society in broad terms. One paper by Andrew Ringlee, a graduate student at North Carolina, looked at the Red Cross and its de facto role as the Russian Army’s medical service prior to World War I.

Though Ringlee’s research is still in its early stages, he has some intriguing findings. The Russian Red Cross might have been the largest and most significant of the various national chapters, and likewise might have invented the modern concept of disaster relief: stay tuned for the dissertation for full discussion of that point. On the specific question of the Russian military, the Russian Red Cross had its first experience handling sick and wounded soldiers in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, where its performance was remarkably good and well-regarded by the Russian educated public. Despite the normal frictions and difficulties we extent under such circumstances, the results were clearly positive. In 1904-05, however, the Russo-Japanese War proved quite different. The Red Cross was less effective, in part because of the remote theater of war and in part because the Russian Army’s failure to properly integrate the Red Cross into its planning. More importantly, the Russian public believed the Red Cross to have failed, and to have squandered its resources through incompetence and corruption.

What struck me about the story Ringlee told was the way in which the Russian high command expected its medical needs to be met by the Red Cross, and yet made no effort to integrate the Red Cross into its contingency planning or to provide it with the information and resources it would require to deal successfully with the challenges of war. Part of the reason seems to have been a deep official mistrust of Russian civil society. Though Ringlee has not yet taken his research into the First World War, there are clear parallels to the poisonous relationship between state and civil society we see in that period.

Peter Waldron (University of East Anglia) picked up the story in a roundtable on health and living standards in World War I and World War II by looking specifically at epidemic disease in the First World War. Many of the themes of Ringlee’s work–relatively successful efforts by Russian civil society to deal with a crisis, and tsarist indifference or hostility–were equally clear in Waldron’s.

Waldron provided a wealth of welcome data on the nature of disease in the war–of the five million hospitalized Russian soldiers during the war, just under half were there because of contagious disease. The biggest killer was cholera, which killed a third of all those it infected and accounted for 20% of all disease fatalities, but the most prevalent disease was typhoid. Despite the difficult conditions of wartime, Russian public health had made remarkable strides even since the 1890s. A cholera epidemic in 1892 had killed half of those it infected, rather than the third who succumbed during the war.

The pattern of disease is what we might predict: concentrated behind Russian front lines and in big cities, particularly Moscow. Though the precise reasons for this remain to be determined, Waldron found that while wounded soldiers were widely scattered around Russia, infected soldiers were concentrated in Moscow. It’s difficult to know what to make of this: given the city’s importance as an industrial and transportation center, and the huge numbers of vulnerable refugees in Moscow, dumping disease-carriers there would seem a really bad idea. This is hard to imagine as a result of deliberate policy. Of course, we are talking about Nicholas II, so deliberate policy is certainly a possibility.

In terms of the bigger theme, though, Waldron amply confirmed the pattern of the Russian state having a terrible time working effectively and productively with private initiatives. While Waldron did not discuss the Red Cross, he did bring in the Union of Towns, which had a great deal of responsibility for aiding the sick. Desperate for assistance, the Union of Towns begged for help in setting up hospitals, only to find the the tsarist government slow and grudging in its responses. In a remarkable range of circumstances, not simply care for sick and wounded soldiers, this seems to be the rule.

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.