WhirledView

Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie – A Book Review Essay

By PHK

During the 1990s, it was clear that Russia’s path to democracy would be strewn with thorns. The country’s ability to shed Communism in favor of a capitalist economy along European, not American, lines I thought, however, would be a foregone conclusion.

Maybe, maybe not

I – and most others – do not expect the Russian Federation to attempt to recreate the Soviet Union’s failed seventy year twentieth century foray into Communism, but the country’s development of a modern economic system based on recognizable commercial law any time soon is equally questionable. The impediments to the development of a strong, independent merchant class run too deep in the veins of Russian history.

Here’s the story: even in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Czars felt far more comfortable by creating and nurturing industrialists in St. Petersburg dependent upon their rule than in helping Moscow’s independent capitalists flourish. In the end, of course, the Bolsheviks destroyed them all after 1917 – or at the very least their wealth and growing influence - but enough relics of Moscow’s turn of the century bourgeoisie remain to provide glimpses of their lives and times thus making possible the book Merchant Moscow.

The back story

In 1978 shortly after I arrived in Moscow to work in the U.S. Embassy’s Cultural Section as Academic Exchanges Officer, James West, then an American professor of Russian history at Connecticut’s Trinity College, now a senior professor at Vermont’s Middlebury College, walked into my office. He had come on a research fellowship as part of the official US-Soviet exchange of senior scholars. He dropped by my office in the Embassy’s Cultural Section to introduce himself and retrieve his mail.

This was West’s third time in the Soviet Union. He went there first as a student, then a graduate student and again in 1978 as a senior researcher. He was studying a subject which ultimately became a basis for Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie, the book he later co-edited with Iurii Petrov. Princeton University Press published Merchant Moscow twenty years later.

West told me – a newcomer to the Soviet Union that fall – that to understand the Soviet Union one needed to understand the Russian Empire. By this he meant that underneath the grit, grime, and grungy paint of 1978 Moscow was a thousand years of history, culture and tradition – and that much of the seemingly incomprehensible behavior, in fact had lengthy and gnarled roots.

Soon after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992, Jay and I had another conversation on a very similar topic. This time it was about the new Russia. He said to understand the new Russian Federation one needed to understand the Soviet Union.

Certainly one of the defining characteristics of the Soviet Union was its abhorrence of anything that smacked of capitalism. What I had almost forgotten, however, was the shallowness of capitalism’s roots in the Russian Empire but understanding this helps me put in better context Vladimir Putin’s approach to the Russian economy. This includes his treatment of “the oligarchs,” the large, homegrown mostly Jewish capitalists who arose in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and his government’s increasing control over large scale enterprise.

Back to the Czars

Wednesday First Junco Blogging

by CKR

Yesterday, at the feeder.

We have two kinds of migration in New Mexico: north-south and up-down. Some birds, like hummingbirds, winter in Mexico and points south and join us only in the summer. Others move up and down the mountains with the temperatures. That's what dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) do. We've had a couple of cold fronts move through in the past week, another today again, and that probably gave this one (Oregon form) the idea to check out the lower altitudes. You can see them all summer if you hike high enough.

But still, winter is coming.

I took my feeders down a few weeks back, when a pack of squirrels moved into the yard. They would gather on one of my walls every morning to confer on who would destroy which vegetation, or perhaps their scheduling. You get to eat greens first, I get the feeder. One was particularly persistent, I suspect resistant to the poison I leave for them. The hardware store had a new version, and that seemed to do the trick. I don't mind sharing my yard; the rabbits still roam and I smell the occasional skunk. But the squirrels destroy too much of the vegetation. And carry plague.

After a few days without squirrels, I decided it was safe to restore the feeders. The first visitor was a north-south migrant, a female tanager. Probably a Western (Piranga ludoviciana), but the females are hard to tell apart. The piñon jays (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus) have moved on, leaving the resident scrub jays (Aphelocoma californica) to relative peace.

The mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli) have been popping around the feeders, and this is the first time I've seen pine siskins (Carduelis pinus), little drab goldfinch cousins, in the yard. They move up and down the mountains too, but more randomly than do the juncos.

And check out those links! The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has a new bird guide. Or new to me, anyway. Very nice.

Everyone Should Have Access

By PLS

You haven't seen my initials much recently because (1) I was far far away, (2) I'm having serious computer problems and (3) when I got back from the remote valleys of the Himalaya I was informed that a routine physical had revealed a possibly life-threatening condition.

Suddenly the question of setting priorities became anything but academic. What if the surgery I possibly faced went wrong? So I set about trying to get a backlog of fiction and poetry into the publication pipeline. In the process, I neglected WhirledView, which put a considerable burden on my colleagues.

Meanwhile, I underwent a few more expensive diagnostic procedures and set about looking for the best place to go to reduce (if not eliminate) the risk of dying in the process of trying to get better.

Good Care is Out There

After I had traveled to the medical center that seemed optimal, I saw some top surgeons and diagnosticians, who decided to begin by repeating a key test.

In the end, I was pronounced supremely healthy, while discovering that my body had evolved some entirely functional but unusual plumbing, which had flummoxed the locals. Needless to say, I was ecstatic.

But that's not why I am posting this item. I am sharing this with you because I am well aware that millions of Americans would be unable to afford the diagnostic procedures that my insurance makes possible. They don't have access to effective preventive care, so they don't know if something is going badly wrong inside until it's too late. When they do discover a problem it's a lot harder for them to get the second opinions I was able to obtain---opinions that saved money for the insurers while eliminating risk for me, since the need for the invasive tests recommended locally (to say nothing of eventual surgery) was entirely ruled out.

Everyone Deserves Good Care

So I'm fine. But I'm not comfortable with the fact that I can maximize the length and quality of my life without significant financial anxiety, while others are lucky to have access to an emergency room once in a while. Access to state-of-the-art care, including prevention,diagnosis and treatment, should be routinely available to every American citizen. Residents, too, as in the case in other industrialized countries.

The Democrats Agree

Thus, I am delighted that the Democratic presidential candidates seems to agree that the time for universal access to health care has come, although they differ on significant details. U.S. industry, for that matter has also reached this conclusion (withness the latest negotiations between GM and its workers). The exception is notable: the self-interested medical industrial/commercial/insurance complex.

OF course, the dinosaurs are still with us. There are more than a few well-financed Republicans ranting about socialism and touting fantasy versions of the benevolence of wholly unregulated private enterprise, which the rest of us know can't even be counted on to provide safe tooth paste or toys.

Two Good Plans Already Exist

The fact is that the U.S. already has at least two superb (and well-tested) models for achieving universal coverage:

(1) Social Security, which has a well-validated record of providing excellent care with low low low administrative costs.

(2) the Federal Employee Benefits system, which provides affordable coverage for every U.S. government worker, including immediate family members, from senator to clerk.

Each of these plans requires contributions from the covered. Neither permits exclusions on any grounds. Both rely on the private sector and both permit people to choose their own doctors and treatment centers. The Federal benefits system even has robust competition built into the model, while also mandating Federally-established criteria and careful oversight to prevent a rush to the bottom.

Pending universality, I propose that any Senator or Member of Congress or any elected or politically appointed member of the Executive Branch who objects to getting all Americans insured under a plan ressembling (1) or (2), and soon, be required immediately to renounce his or her own claim to such coverage.

For life.

Which might be shorter and nastier.

It's Kind of in the Middle of the Speech...

by CKR

I'm wondering if Barack Obama really means this:

That’s why I’ve worked with Republican Senator Dick Lugar to pass a law accelerating our pursuit of loose nuclear materials. And that’s why I’ll lead a global effort to secure all loose nuclear materials during my first term in office.

But we need to do much more. We need to change our nuclear policy and our posture, which is still focused on deterring the Soviet Union – a country that doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan and North Korea have joined the club of nuclear-armed nations, and Iran is knocking on the door. More nuclear weapons and more nuclear-armed nations mean more danger to us all.

Here’s what I’ll say as President: America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons.

We will not pursue unilateral disarmament. As long as nuclear weapons exist, we’ll retain a strong nuclear deterrent. But we’ll keep our commitment under the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty on the long road towards eliminating nuclear weapons. We’ll work with Russia to take U.S. and Russian ballistic missiles off hair-trigger alert, and to dramatically reduce the stockpiles of our nuclear weapons and material. We’ll start by seeking a global ban on the production of fissile material for weapons. And we’ll set a goal to expand the U.S.-Russian ban on intermediate-range missiles so that the agreement is global.

As we do this, we’ll be in a better position to lead the world in enforcing the rules of the road if we firmly abide by those rules. It’s time to stop giving countries like Iran and North Korea an excuse. It’s time for America to lead. When I’m President, we’ll strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty so that nations that don’t comply will automatically face strong international sanctions.

It's sandwiched between many, many more words on Obama's being against the Iraq war before everyone else and on not being cynical. Now we've heard all that before. If he really means this little diversion about nuclear policy, that should be the news in this speech.

Or maybe it's just a trial balloon that will be fleshed out if not too many people shoot at it and if there was some applause. It does need to be fleshed out; what he said is pretty much common wisdom in the nonproliferation community. Is he accepting that common wisdom or would he prefer a waffle? Or does he even have some new ideas? How would he go about doing some of those things? Talk? Or more?

Let us know, Mr. Obama. And don't bury the news.

Many thanks to Cernig for digging this gem out.

No Contract!

by CKR

It appears, among all the misuses of contracting we’re hearing about lately, that the government has actually rejected a proposal that seems to have been aimed at the well-being of a couple of private companies at the expense of the public.

The Department of Energy rejected an unsolicited proposal from USEC and Energy Solutions to decommission the Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Kentucky, uranium enrichment plants.

According to the House Committee on Commerce and Energy, which congratulated the DOE on its action, the proposal also called for Energy Solutions to acquire USEC and invest in USEC’s American Centrifuge Project. In August, John D. Dingell (D-MI), Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Bart Stupak (D–MI), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations questioned whether the modification of the Government’s lease with USEC as a means to enter into a sole source contract would violate the Competition in Contracting Act and whether this arrangement constituted an indirect Government subsidy to Energy Solutions to finance the acquisition of USEC’s stock. The House press release notes that after being notified of the turndown by the DOE, USEC sought financing through a public stock and debt offering.

Some time ago, the United States decided that private corporations can do the job of enrichment better than the government. The Portsmouth and Paducah plants operate under lease to USEC. But centrifuges are the wave of the future. USEC has been developing centrifuges in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I’m guessing that is the government facility (now leased to USEC?) that I visited a number of years ago. They plan to convert Paducah to a centrifuge facility. The decommissioning probably would be of the enormous gaseous diffusion plants and probably some cleanup of contaminated soil and smaller buildings.

A distorted picture of a fraying Foreign Service

By PHK

A link to Jeff Stein’s September 21, 2007 Congressional Quarterly article “State Department Cajoles Young Diplomats into Iraq Service” on the State Department’s difficulties in recruiting first tour officers for Iraq assignments appeared in my inbox last week. Mine is far from the first commentary on it in the blogosphere. But I seem to be the first so far as I can tell who has actually experienced State’s assignments process close up.

Unfortunately, this article is littered with half-truths that too often turn into unbecoming slurs. In short, Stein paints a distorted picture of a spoiled U.S. Foreign Service replete with disloyal Generation Yers in the most junior ranks leading the pack. US Foreign Service hater Jesse Helms would have been proud.

The half-truths in Stein’s article begin with an interview of retired Ambassador Skip Gnehm who is quoted as saying that when he joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1969, “Every (entering) class went to Vietnam.” It was, he apparently told Stein and the new recruits, the price of admission.

The reality: That was true in 1969, but by January 3, 1970, the State Department had changed its assignments policy for first tour officers. None were sent to Vietnam for the last five and one-quarter years of the war. At the time, US Information Agency junior officers trained with State junior officers. I was in that January 1970 class when we learned of State’s new policy. None of my first tour State Department colleagues – or those in future classes – was force assigned to Vietnam unless they had agreed to the condition before entering. This only happened to one person who had agreed and had previously served there in the military. Journalistic lesson: don’t base a story on a single interview even if, as is the case with Ambassador Gnehm, the person is well known and highly respected.

Few of my State colleagues went to Brussels, Madrid, or Bern – but none were sent to a war zone and very few to a Communist country first time around. In fact, some of the most satisfying and career enhancing assignments happened outside the “cushy” US Embassies in Europe. USIA, meanwhile, had dropped the forced Vietnam assignments policy for first tour officers at least a year or more before State because personnel had decided it was counter-productive to send inexperienced press and cultural officers into combat areas. Second tour officers, however, were fair game. I did have one USIA classmate who served an abbreviated tour in Danang. At the end, he and his family were evacuated from Saigon during those last hectic weeks in April 1975.

To continue

Jeff Stein quotes a recent Government Accountability Office study (to which he should have linked but did not) that suggests that “today’s crop of young diplomats don’t want to go to anywhere hot and dirty” because “posts in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia continue to receive the lowest number of bids, while posts in Europe and “the Western Hemisphere receive the highest.” In 2005, Stein noted, “67 positions in Africa and the Middle East went begging” and that “the State Department has too often had to fill critical, Third World slots with inexperienced officers who . . . can’t read or speak the local language” and as a consequence do a lousy job. This, he tells us happens at the senior level also.

Let’s break this apart: first positions – then foreign language competency

Positions: So what else isn’t new? European posts have always been the most popular for US diplomats and, therefore, the most competitive. I’ll bet most American military, journalists and business people would also prefer to serve in Europe all things being equal. In the Foreign Service, however, such assignments do not necessarily lead to rapid career advancement in part because of the way the system operates. Likewise, assignments that require hard language training have made promotions even slower.

Furthermore, bid wish-lists, training and the realities of State’s Byzantine-like assignments process do not necessarily coincide.

Stein omits the fact that Foreign Service Officers must also bid on jobs in those “hot and dirty” posts. He also seems to have forgotten, or not known that there are comparatively more of them these days – in part thanks to Condoleezza Rice’s decision to move mid-level and junior positions from “cushy” places like Moscow to Delhi and elsewhere.

I’ll bet the 67 positions that went unfilled (a fair number were press and cultural) in 2005 was because the State Department did not have the personnel to fill them. The Foreign Service was literally gutted during the 1990s, a casualty of mistaken post Cold War euphoria when peace and democracy were thought to be breaking out all over.

Colin Powell worked hard to restore the ranks (but experienced diplomats and especially those who speak a hard language are not made in a day). Once Rice took State’s reins in 2004, she exponentially increased demands for personnel because of Iraq and Afghanistan but failed to add the requisite additional positions and people to fill them.

So what do you expect? You get what you pay for.

The reappearance of the Ugly American?

As for a deficit of language trained, culturally aware, experienced US diplomats assigned to posts where the language they speak is spoken, the problem is far more complex and deeply rooted than Stein or the GAO study indicates. This is – and has been - a costly and major weakness throughout the service for years. It is one both Congress and the Department need to address beginning now. In reality, it need not have happened.

The Government Contracting Morass

by CKR

The Washington Post has been doing a good job of covering the various misuses of government contracting. Their latest outlines how Charles Reichers, while waiting to be confirmed as Air Force principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition, was paid by a supposedly nonprofit corporation. He didn’t do any work for the corporation, but rather for the Air Force.

I’ve experienced the government contracting process from both sides: managing contracts to others working for me and working on contracts to the government. I haven’t blogged on these issues much because it’s hard to know where to begin in today’s morass. What the Washington Post article uncovers is wrong in so many ways, I could probably spend a couple of weeks writing it up. But I won’t. I’ll enumerate, in the order I find stuff in the article and then comment minimally.

Commonwealth Research and its parent company, Concurrent Technologies, are registered with the Internal Revenue Service as tax-exempt charities, even though their primary work is for the Pentagon and other government agencies.

The company reported lobbying expenditures of $302,000 for the year ending in June 2006, more than double what it spent on lobbying four years earlier.

Concurrent and its subsidiaries receive grants and contracts for an eclectic variety of other activities, including support of faith-based initiatives and specialized welding work.

Specialists in federal contracting law said Commonwealth Research's arrangement with Riechers may have violated regulations governing how the Air Force is permitted to hire and use contractors, including a prohibition on certain uses of consultants to augment the federal workforce.

The principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and management should not be making himself into a glaring example of what not to do with acquisition and management.

"We needed some way to kind of gap me," Riechers said about the temporary job.