In 1879, anti-monopolist Henry George published Progress and Poverty, one of the most important books on the politics of industrialization. At the time, unparalleled technological progress through the deployment of railroads and telegraphs had generated massive wealth. But instead of broadly shared prosperity, Americans saw deep poverty in the midst of all the bounty. George asked why. In the tradition of Anglo-American land reformers, he concluded that the root cause of radical inequality was neither labor nor capital, but land. George’s argument went as follows. While mankind could pool its labor and efforts to create a surfeit of new consumer goods, the amount of land – an input into everything – was fixed. Moreover, the value of land had no relationship to work. Simply owning a lot around which a city grew up meant you’d get rich, where if your lot remained in a sparsely populated area, you wouldn’t. Conversely, if you ran a business or a factory to help build that city, or lived in a rented apartment, your income would be increasingly sucked up by the landowner profiting from the value you created by operating or living there. It was the social community that generated the wealth of the landowner, not the landowner itself.The result, George argued, was an entire rentier class of landowners, men who did nothing but grow fat on the backs of both capital and labor. The solution was to tax land, because such a tax, unlike taxes on incomes or tariffs, couldn’t be avoided. The book was a runaway bestseller, not just in America, but worldwide. Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet had many Georgeists, and the National Park system, among other American institutions, was shaped in part by it, as was in some ways the mid-20th century libertarian movement. The profession of economics formed in opposition to George’s popularity. There are still Georgeists today.And indeed, George has a lot to teach us about one of the key drivers of inflation for the middle class – housing. While inflation isn’t as high as it was in 2022, prices are still the number one concern for voters. And it’s not hard to see why. Yesterday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics came out with inflation statistics, showing that though price aren’t going up as fast, costs are still rising, especially in a category of something everyone needs. “The index for shelter rose 0.4 percent in July,” wrote the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “accounting for nearly 90 percent of the monthly increase in the all items index.” That’s… a lot.Prices for housing are already at a record high, because of a pervasive long-term structural housing shortage in America. Since 2022, interest rates have increased, so homeowners with a locked in low mortgage rate don’t want to sell their homes and move, the result being fewer existing homes on the market. One would think that the response would simply be to build more housing, especially on the cheap end. And yet, that’s not happening. The traditional “starter home” for a young family just doesn’t exist anymore.And it’s puzzling why there isn’t more construction. One reason, posited by a noisy group who self-identify as “YIMBY’s,” which stands for “yes in my backyard,” argue there are too many local rules limiting development put forward by annoying people that want to maintain the local character and high housing values of their neighborhood by keeping others out. And yet, just pointing at over-regulation in and of itself isn’t a satisfying explanation. After all, the collapse in housing starts really began in 2007, and it hasn’t rebounded. Something is wrong with the market, as price signals aren’t working.To understand what is going on, the low output of housing production in the face of high demand, let’s start with a slide in the most recent investor presentation from the number one homebuilder in America, D.R. Horton. Here the corporation maps its market share – on the right – with the number of homes sold – on the left.In 2005, when D.R. Horton sold a record number of homes, it made $1.47 billion. In 2023, when it built roughly half as many, its profit was a little over three times as high, or $4.7 billion. And this dynamic isn’t because it focused on the high end, its overall market share was twice as high in 2023! D.R. Horton isn’t some anomaly, it’s the market leader, along with Lennar, PulteGroup, Toll Brothers, and NVR, who round out the top five. In fact, these firms have gained so much pricing power and margin that Warren Buffett, who prefers purchasing firms with what he calls a competitive “moat,” aka market power, recently bought stakes in D.R. Horton, Lennar, and NVR.The story here, in other words, is consolidation. In 1994, the ten largest builders had just 10% of the national market. By 2018, the top ten builders had a little less than a third. Partly this consolidation is due to a credit crunch. During the financial crisis from 2007-2012, 55% of residential developers disappeared. There were also post-crisis mergers, like Pulte Homes and Centex, Lennar and CalAtlantic, Tri Pointe and Weyerhauser, and so forth, but many of the acquisitions these days are smaller roll-ups, like D.R. Horton buying an Arkansas specialty builder Riggins Custom Homes, Gulf Coast builder Truland Homes, or lot developer Forestar Group, or Lennar acquiring developer WCI Communities. Analysts are projecting 2024 to be another strong year for M&A.Of course, such numbers understate consolidation; national shares matter very little, since housing is local, and concentration is higher when you get to local levels. In Miami-Fort Lauderdale, for instance, Lennar has 47% of the market for new homes, in Los Angeles, D.R. Horton has about a third. As economist Luis Quintero noted in a paper, 60% of local markets are now “highly concentrated,” a new phenomenon. In 25 of the top 82 markets, one builder controls at least 25% of the market. That’s 60% of the housing markets in “Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and western Pennsylvania.”D.R. Horton brags to its investors about this fact, because local dominance is the name of the game.So why all the consolidation? And more importantly, why hasn’t the number of builders bounced back? If margins are up, why aren’t there new entrants coming in to take profit and share? To answer this question I started by reading a bunch of investor documents from the big homebuilders. And I realized that to call these businesses “homebuilders” is misleading. It’s striking how little of their business has to do with, well, building. For instance, here’s D.R. Horton in 2023: “Substantially all of our land development and home construction work is performed by subcontractors.” Here’s Lennar in 2023: “We use independent subcontractors for most aspects of land development and home construction.” I suspect most of the other big guys would say something similar. These aren’t builders, they are financiers that borrow cheaper than real developers and use that cheap credit to speculate in land, hiring contractors to do the work. They are, in other words, middlemen.These are large financial institutions that own a bunch of land which appreciates in value, and then build on it and sell homes. It can be quite risky, since they have to hold land on their books and that land can go down in value. But for the last fifteen years or so, it’s been a bull market.A centralized industrial structure for building is a new phenomenon in America. Homebuilding used to be decentralized, with hundreds of thousands of contractors. And to some extent, it still is. You can hire a contractor to build a house. However, smaller developers increasingly struggle, as going to a bank to borrow and start or grow a development is difficult. So is access to land. And that means that over the past three decades, the center of the industry, the construction of the starter home that millions of people need, has been centralized in the hands of a small number of players. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2017. “By the Commerce Department’s count,” wrote Justin Lahart, “there were about 368,000 construction firms operating in the U.S. as of 2014 (the last year with available data). That compares with about 530,000 in 2005, and is the lowest number on record going back to 1977.” The big homebuilders are clear about their advantages, which have nothing to do with operational efficiency. Here’s D.R. Horton:“We believe that our national, regional and local scale of operations provides us with benefits that may not be available to the same degree to some other smaller homebuilders, such as greater access to and lower cost of capital due to our balance sheet strength and our lending and capital markets relationships and volume discounts and rebates from national, regional and local materials suppliers and lower labor rates from certain subcontractors.”Capital, construction supplies, and labor are all cheaper for the big guys. Neat trick. And then there’s land. “New builders also have to secure land to build on,” reported the WSJ, “which is difficult in areas where large builders have already secured the most attractive lots.” Large builders with access to capital can hold land for long periods of time, especially in a period like the post-financial crisis era when the Fed held interest rates quite low. In May of this year, the CEO of Toll Brothers described this dynamic to investors, discussing how their advantage in capital leads smaller players to sell out their land holdings.So, what we’re actually seeing more from the smaller builders who are facing some capital crunch is land deals that they have tied up, they’ve processed approvals on, they thought about building homes on, they’re having a hard time finding the regional banks to finance them. And while they can’t make a full profit they would have made had they built homes, they can make a fair profit by flipping the land to us. And so, we’re seeing quite a few deals like that out of the smaller, more local and regional builders.In other words, these middlemen are really all about financing. From 2008-2022, the Federal Reserve held interest rates at zero, which allowed those who could borrow to do so very cheaply. But of course, whether you could borrow makes all the difference in the world, as I noted when discussing the Cantillon effect. Big middlemen can borrow, whereas smaller players or new entrants cannot, so land ends up in the hands of those with strong balance sheets.In 2022, the Fed raised rates, changing the industry. Big builders no longer want to hold billions of dollars of land on their balance sheet because financing costs have gone up. So what they’ve done is pay a financier, often private equity, to hold the land for them and take the risk of the land dropping in value, which is called a “land light” strategy. In return the financier gets a fee. Builders retain the right to buy the land back if they want it, through a “right of first offer” contract. Here’s an example of a deal between D.R. Horton and lot management company Forestar.Here’s how D.R. Horton characterizes their control of housing lots.Interestingly, I suspect there’s a cartelization effect going on as well. Here’s Toll Brothers CEO Doug Yearley a few years ago:“We’re doing significantly more third-party land banking where we assign a contract to a professional land banker, who then feeds us land back on an as-needed basis,” Yearley said. “And then, we’re doing joint ventures with either Wall Street private equity or with our friends in the home building industry, the other builders.”What exactly does that quote mean? I don’t know, but it seems kind of crazy that large homebuilders would be doing joint ventures with each other on land acquisition, when that could very easily lead to holding supply off the market and preventing smaller developers from competing to build cheaper homes. More broadly, the story here is the differentiation of homebuilding into two different groups. The first are the financial middlemen who contract everything out and control the industry, buying cheap and hoarding land. The second are actual developers who want to build, but are boxed out because they can’t borrow money. I suspect that in this dynamic we might find an incentive for local overregulation. I don’t know much about the political strategy of the homebuilders, but it would be weird if they didn’t use such a competitive weapon. And we do see some elements of that, such as when D.R. Horton and its private equity partner Brookfield were able to get valuable underpriced land in Arizona because of their financing advantages.Regardless, the net effect of consolidation of homebuilders is significant, estimated at keeping 150,000 new homes from being built every year, which is roughly $100 billion of construction. So what’s the solution?Well, in this case, the answer is likely a combination of policy interventions. The most important is to equalize credit access for smaller and local developers. We should foster the creation of more local banks, or offer local subsidies or preferential treatment of local developers in buying public land. Another big part of this dynamic is a lack of knowledge. Policymakers and smaller developers need more information about who holds local land lots and who are the big builders, especially at a municipal or regional level.There aren’t great sources of data for who holds undeveloped parcels off the market. Another is to impose land limitations to prevent land hoarding, or tax the land of lot developers so they don’t hold land off the market. Finally, the Federal Trade Commission and Antitrust Division have a loophole in their merger disclosure form, which is called the Hart Scott Rodino form, which allows big firms to avoid telling the Federal government when they make acquisitions of real estate. That’s a problem, considering the likelihood of consolidation.Regardless, it’s important to move the discussion about housing away from the focus on local regulations, as this dynamic is clearly a national problem involving a market structure where price signals are not bringing in more supply, but are bringing higher margins to a small group of players. In some ways, the land monopoly is the very first monopoly America ever addressed, through the equal parsing out of land lots through the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. In the 1850s, Frederick Douglass ascribed the cause of slavery as consolidation of “land monopoly” and called for “land limitation” in response. Many states today still have land limits on the books, though these are often ignored. Henry George, in other words, was just representing an American tradition. And it’s one we should take seriously.,  Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. 2024 Matt Stoller

(Courtesy PUCK–Julia Joffe)

Putin’s Kharkiv Head Fake & Cabinet Kremlinology

Notes on Putin’s game theory for pressuring Kharkiv and the real reasons behind his wartime cabinet reshuffle.

Russian troops are advancing quickly in part because they haven’t yet reached Ukraine’s main defensive lines, but also because the offensive comes after key problems have been allowed to fester on the Ukrainian side. Photo: Contributor/Getty Images

JULIA IOFFE

May 14, 2024

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In the last few days, Russian troops have launched an offensive in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, advancing around 5 kilometers and seizing a few border villages along the way. None of this is surprising: Ukrainian forces have been shelling the neighboring Russian region of Belgorod for months, and Russian officials have been openly discussing creating a buffer zone to protect the territory and its residents. Troops have been massing on the Russian side for weeks. The only thing left was for Vladimir Putin to approve the order to move in. 

The Kharkiv offensive is likely designed to achieve two parallel political and tactical goals. “Moving the border a few kilometers is not necessarily going to prevent Ukraine from launching drones and missiles at Belgorod,” noted the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Michael Kofman. “When they’re discussing a buffer zone, what they are attempting to do is shift the line so that they can threaten Kharkiv and force a partial evacuation, which would prove politically significant.” Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second-largest city and, until the war, was primarily Russian-speaking. “It’s not the Russians’ intention to take Kharkiv, nor do they have the forces for it,” Kofman explained. “The point is to draw Ukrainian forces to its defense, fix their reserves there, potentially weakening the front line in Donetsk for a Russian attack.”

Russian troops are advancing quickly in part because they haven’t yet reached Ukraine’s main defensive lines, but also because the offensive comes after key problems have been allowed to fester on the Ukrainian side, both in Washington and in Kyiv. In Washington, it took seven months to finally approve critical military aid for Ukraine, during which Ukrainian forces steadily ran out of ammunition, both to shoot back at the enemy and to intercept the drones and missiles attacking its cities and civilian infrastructure. 

But, as I’ve written before, Kyiv’s problems aren’t all Washington’s fault. Volodymyr Zelensky dawdled on the politically sensitive question of expanding the military draft, allowing the Ukrainian military’s manpower shortage to grow acute. Now that the draft law has finally been signed and implemented (just this month), it will take many more months to find these new soldiers, equip and train them, and get them to the battlefield. In the meantime, Ukraine is uniquely vulnerable, and it had long been expected that Moscow would take advantage of this window to launch a new offensive. “The Russian military can see what everybody else sees: Ukraine has a deficit of manpower and reserves to cover the front,” Kofman explained. “Their goal is to create a dilemma whereby the Ukrainian military cannot reinforce the defense of Kharkiv without weakening the front line elsewhere.”

There is some hope in the West that Ukraine might be saved now that American aid is flowing again. But, as Kofman told me, “the supplemental is not talismanic.” It hasn’t helped with manpower—nor was it supposed to. It doesn’t help with the building of fortifications—and it wasn’t supposed to do that either. And it certainly can’t do anything to help Ukraine address the systemic problems within its own military, like poor communication, training, cohesiveness, and the unwillingness to report bad news up the chain of command. The supplemental, Kofman said, “will help Ukraine avoid the worst-case scenario this year, but things are likely to get worse before they get better.”

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Kremlin Musical Chairs

By law, a Russian president must form a new government after his inauguration. By custom, since Russian law is a hazy concept, the Russian president—who, for the last two decades, has almost always been Putin—has used the opportunity to reshuffle his friends and allies among the various ministerial positions. It’s a game of musical chairs in which demotions are masked as lateral moves, and in which a simulacrum of change at the top is used to paper over the fact that there is only a finite number of people Putin trusts with the ship of state. 

And because loyalty is, for Putin, the key qualification for government service, he has a hard time getting rid of anyone for incompetence. Such people are not fired but simply moved to another powerful (and lucrative) position, where he can continue to keep an eye on them. 

This is why Putin removed Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu from his post on Sunday and scooted him over to the National Security Council. Under Shoigu’s leadership, the Russian army failed to execute Putin’s harebrained scheme to take Kyiv in 72 hours—or in the ensuing two-plus years. The amount of corruption and theft in the Russian military meant recruits were poorly equipped after Russia began its “partial mobilization” in September 2022—remember the video of a commander telling the men to stock up on their wives’ tampons because they’re handy in treating bullet wounds? Ammunition was often in short supply. Who can forget the late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rants at Shoigu, asking him, crudely, where the artillery shells were?

Prigozhin then led a march on Moscow to demand the defense minister’s ouster. Putin, with the help of Aleksandr Lukashenko, defused the immediate crisis, then killed Prigozhin two months to the day he began his anti-Shoigu mutiny. But despite the allegations of corruption and ineffectiveness, Putin left Shoigu in place. After all, Shoigu was a good friend—the two often vacation and partake in shamanistic rituals together—and a loyal servant. 

But then, last month, several ultra-high-ranking military officials were arrested for corruption and for taking eye-popping bribes. One of them, Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, was a close associate of Shoigu’s. The noose was clearly tightening, and now, eleven months after Prigozhin called for his firing, Shoigu is finally out, replaced with economist Andrei Belousov, who will work as the head beancounter at M.O.D., making sure the generals and the bureaucrats don’t steal quite as much, quite as openly—and that the artillery shells get to the front.

This, of course, is classic Putin. “Putin is someone who generally thinks that revenge is a dish best served cold,” C.I.A. director Bill Burns said last summer at the Aspen Security Forum, and he’s right. Putin believes in punishment delayed, meted out slowly and deliberately, on his terms, on his timeline, and never under public pressure. Which is why Shoigu’s firing may have seemed like a surprise to anyone who thought Putin had moved on and forgiven. He never really does.

The real surprise, though, was the ouster of Nikolai Patrushev as the head of Russia’s National Security Council. Patrushev, a silovik’s silovik, was a K.G.B. man like Putin and shares many of Putin’s hard-line, paranoiac—and increasingly millenarian—views of the world. He was a member of Putin’s innermost circle, one of the very few people who knew about and encouraged Putin’s plans for conquering Ukraine. 

And then, bam, just like that, he was out, replaced by… Shoigu. (Today, it was announced that Patrushev would be one of the president’s special “assistants” in charge of… shipbuilding.) This one really puzzled me, so I called my good friend Mikhail Zygar, an immaculately connected Russian journalist and author of All the Kremlin’s Men. Zygar, who now lives in New York (Moscow recently issued a warrant for his arrest), has just started writing The Last Pioneer, a Substack on the inner workings of the Kremlin. It has quickly become my favorite and most illuminating source on how that byzantine place really operates. 

“They’re very close in terms of their point of view, but Patrushev has a big personal agenda,” Zygar explained when I asked him, essentially, Why Patrushev? “Even though they share a worldview, it’s a personal thing. As [Putin] gets older, he wants less and less that [others] burden him with their opinions. Patrushev is someone who is constantly buttonholing him.” This demotion, Zygar believes, is a way of shutting Patrushev up. Shoigu, Zygar added, is another example of someone who is a kindred spirit but whose opinions Putin no longer values since he now envisions himself as the generalissimo. “Putin needs fewer and fewer people,” said Zygar. “You can tell by all these arrangements that he doesn’t need people who will say anything to him. He needs people who will listen, not talk. Putin is acting like someone who is fucking fed up with people’s opinions. He already knows everything by himself.” 

Another interesting point here: Patrushev had been advocating for his son, Dmitry, who until Sunday was the agricultural minister. Patrushev apparently—and incredibly—told Putin that his son would make an excellent prime minister. (Zygar has more on Dmitry Patrushev and the other “princes” of Russia here and here; don’t miss it.) Instead, over the weekend, the younger Patrushev was promoted to vice premier at the same time that his father, Putin’s old friend Nikolai, was demoted. 

This too, Zygar points out, is classic Putin: Putin the referee, who makes sure that no one sinks too low or rises too high. “In some ways, this is a strengthening of the Patrushev clan’s influence,” Zygar said of Dmitry’s promotion (along with the promotion of another Patrushev acolyte). “In that case, if you add something in this column, you have to take something away from the other column.” By demoting Patrushev senior, Putin was able to maintain an equilibrium and show that only his own power is endless. This, Zygar explained, was a way to show both Patrushev and everyone else in the system that, in the czar’s palace, “no one’s influence is unlimited.”

 AGENT -X-V-CCCLXIV   (15364)

                  September 12, 2023, Dan Townsend

   In 1953, a peek under the curtain enveloping what Churchill called “a mystery wrapped in an enigma”—his definition of the Soviet Union, revealed the following events. First “Stalin” (Josef Djugashvili) died of a “stroke”? while dreaming up yet another purge. Then Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s “executioner in chief”, begging for his life, joined his pal in the afterlife via numerous bullets administered by various likely purge targets, and, according to N. Kruschev, himself among them.

    After the brief appearance on the scene of Stalin’s “heir” soon enough exiled to managing a power plant in Siberia, the team of “Bulgy and Krush”, as they were referred to in the Western press, Nicolai Bulganin and Nikita Kruschev—later only Kruschev, emerged as the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, the office formerly held by Stalin.

      Over time, the feared NKVD, renamed the KGB,  settled into a slightly relaxed relationship with, among others, the US CIA. During this time Kruschev and his family traveled to the US as a guest of President Eisenhower, participating in the famous “Kitchen Debate” with his “minder”, Vice President Richard Nixon.

       The agent of the title, assigned to the US Embassy in Moscow, officially a protocol officer, known in this capacity as Micheal Phillips, performed his tasks with the usual efficiency and dispatch. 

         His wife accompanied him in this assignment, whose biography referred to her as a former schoolteacher, complimented his role with forbearance (Spaso House, our embassy in Moscow was no holiday hotel) and an unusual ability to read her husband’s unspoken signals and expressions along with passing skill in the Russian language, enabling both to regularly be found mixing with Russian crowds, habitués, venues and the natural landscapes present in the city of Moscow, “minders” from the KGB always on watch.

            Unusually for a foreign service officer, Micheal, whose hobby involves restoring and maintaining collector cars during his respites in the US, drove around in a second hand Pobeda typical of the make used by his KGB minders, necessitating random visits to various service garages around Moscow.

       It was a little odd to see an aging Russian car with US diplomatic plates running around here and there among the thousands of Pobedas in Moscow’s roads, usually messy with the “mud” of melting snow making it impossible to distinguish one from the other. Besides that, an assortment of plates from the “Union’s” band of captive nations sometimes replaced the diplomatic plates on Micheal’s car. No doubt that “losing the yankee’s car” led to a number of embarrassments and likely demotions among Micheal’s minders.

       Suddenly it was realized that there was a “mole” in our embassy leaking secrets to the KGB. Micheal, among his other duties, was assigned to track down the mole. Tricky business, finding a traitor among colleagues tightly bound to each other socially in the confines of embassy life in an officially hostile country. 

         Not long after Micheal’s assignment, he and Margaret, his wife, drove to their usual service garage for maintenance. They waited in a reception area for customers—this being a “high-end” service facility, while work was being done. As usual, someone would roll a cart with glasses of tea into the reception area. This time however, instead of the usual low-ranking employee doing this job, a rather more upscale character propelled the cart, clearly more attuned to the social graces of an educated person.

          Micheal paid special attention to the shoes of this individual, clearly free of traces of the muddy sidewalks a worker would have on his shoes, not to mention the light color of the soles of the man’s shoes—clearly never having gone near a puddle or splash, not to mention the floors of the service garage.

           With something of a flourish, the attendant carefully placed the glasses of tea before the two Americans. As he was leaving, the attendant looked back as if to see the Americans enjoying their “gift”. Micheal coughed as he raised his glass, which Margaret interpreted as his “don’t do that” signal. The attendant went on his way, satisfied that his “gift” would have its planned effect. Quickly, thanks to the carpet in the reception area, Micheal quickly emptied his glass behind his chair, as Margaret, on cue, did the same.

         It was clear to Micheal that the mole was a person who knew of Micheal’s new assignment, which narrowed the list of suspects down to no more than the fingers on one hand—one of whom was Micheal’s section chief. 

                            The Dénouement

          In the spooky world of “Intelligence”, reporting on suspicious activity on the part of a friend and colleague is a requirement of the job. Confrontation however, of whatever sort is never used in such cases. The best route to resolution is actually to use the spy organization which handles the mole to expose him or her. Micheal was well versed in this process. 

           The time, 1 minute into May 9 Moscow time, is celebrated in the Soviet Union as “Victory Day”, when Germany’s surrender in WWII actually took effect. Micheal was unusual in the CIA because he was, for more than a decade, despite being offered several promotions, remaining in his Moscow post (with annual “vacations” in the US). 

              “Long termers” such as Micheal were the real professionals in the intelligence trade, cultivating deep relations with their assigned country and even, in some cases, developing virtual relationships with counterparts in the host country’s intelligence service as a sometimes useful “back channel” in, for example, hostage and sometimes spy exchanges. 

                 Nameless on both sides, Micheal’s and his counterpart engaged in an annual gift exchange to coincide with Russia’s Victory Day holiday. The following is a typical scenario: On an agreed upon time and date, Micheal would carry a mesh bag containing 6 bottles of Johnnie Walker Red to a tea vendor whose cart was stationed along a walking path in one of Moscow’s parks. While exchanging pleasantries with the tea vendor, Micheal’s mesh bag would be traded for a similar mesh bag containing six cans of the same caviar served at tables of the Kremlin’s highest officials. 

         This exchange however contained a twist. The night before, Micheal carefully removed the cover over the bottle caps, placing an english word on each bottle before carefully restoring the cover. The words were, when assembled: “the mole has seen the light”. This, of course, is not a lie because moles (the animal variety) experience light even as they are blind when dug up by humans or animals, or facing obstacles forcing them to surface and start another tunnel in a new direction. 

          Human moles, just like animal ones don’t always understand the meaning of their exposure, and can be used to convey bogus information to their handlers which, when intercepted, confirms their treachery. 

            Of course, Micheal’s nameless counterpart knows this scenario well, and suspects that he may be being “set up” to receive information designed to mislead, which his superiors might blame him for passing on. 

             At this point, the mole is totally useless to his Russian handlers, besides being a source, when exposed and interrogated, of Russian tactics and methods. At some point the “mole” will realize that every minute he spends in Russia might be his last and will suddenly seek a new posting elsewhere, if not forfeiting his career by resigning—an admission of guilt like no other.    

              Whatever happens, Micheal got the result he was assigned to get, in exchange for which he got two more months leave in the US, enough time to finally finish restoring the Morgan 4/4 and taking it on a long road trip with Margaret—a lot more fun than driving his battered, rusty Pobeda on the polluted roads of Moscow.

               Following are photos of, first, the various models of the Pobeda, Russia’s first “mass produced” automobile, then a view of the Morgan 4/4, featured in the Agent/Micheal story.

1946 Pobeda, Russia’s first mass-produced car

1936 Morgan 4/4, handbuilt, ordered years in advance, this model beyond price.

per Kilroy–with all the craziness out there in 2023, the following seemed appropriate to lighten the mood. I hope you agree.

Emily Palmer

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?

Well, because that’s the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads. Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that’s the gauge they used. So, why did ‘they’ use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing. Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often on some of the old, long distance roads in England . You see, that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts. So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.

And what about the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder ‘What horse’s ass came up with this?’, you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses’ asses.)



Now, the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass.

And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important? Ancient horse’s asses control almost everything.

The Mongol invasion was the reason Russia was formed

JUNE 14 2020

GEORGY MANAEV

A still from “The Mongol,” 2007Sergey Bodrov Sn./STV production, 2007

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It is wrong to think that Mongol-Tatars invaded Russia as a single state, because the state actually formed as a response to the invasion, to resist and overthrow it. It was Peter the Great who formally ended Russia’s tributes to the Khans.

Knyaz’ Yaroslav II of Vladimir was poisoned by Güyük Khan’s wife. At the age of 67, Knyaz’ Mikhail of Chernigov was executed in the capital of the Golden Horde (Mongol khaganate) for refusing to worship Mongol idols. Knyaz’ Mikhail of Tver had his heart ripped out in the same capital, the chronicle says. The Russian population was forced to pay substantial tributes, and Russian princes were only allowed to rule their duchies by the permission of the Khan of the Golden Horde. That’s how it was under the Mongol rule, or, as we call it in Russia, the Tatar-Mongol Igo (Yoke).

Prince Alexander Nevsky begging Batu Khan for mercy for Russia, End of the 19th century. Found in the collection of Russian State Library, MoscowGetty Images

It’s hard to believe that events such as these were instrumental in the formation of the Russian state. But it was opposition to these actions that united the Russian princes – unfortunately, not with friendship, but under the iron fist of the strongest of them. “Moscow owes its greatness to the Khans,” wrote the great Russian historian Nikolay Karamzin (1766-1826).

At the time of the Mongol invasion of Rus’, the Mongols were advanced both in the military and in the systems of governance. Only unity could help the Russians to overthrow Mongol rule. How did it begin in the first place?

1. What prompted the Mongol Invasion?

Genghis KhanPublic domain

It all started when Genghis Khan (1155-1227), the founder of the Mongol Empire, sent his son Jochi (1182-1227) to conquer the lands of what is now Siberia, Central Russia, and Eastern Europe. Giant armies of Mongol warriors (clearly over 100,000, an enormous number in the 13th century) easily defeated the weak and ill-numbered forces of the Russian princes, who were at war with each other before the invasion.

In 1237, the Mongols, led by Batu Khan, invaded Rus’. They took, ravaged and burned Ryazan’, Kolomna, Moscow, Vladimir, Tver – all the main Russian cities. The invasion continued until 1242 and was a terrible blow for the Russian lands – it took almost 100 years to fully recover from the damage the Mongol army did. Also, the lands and cities of the South – Kiev, Chernigov, Halych were burned to the ground. The North-Eastern lands, most notably Tver, Moscow, Vladimir, and Suzdal became the main cities after the invasion.

However, the Mongols didn’t want to conquer the land fully – they just wanted stable tributes. And they knew how to get what they wanted.

2. How did Mongol rule work?

Batu Khan as seen on a Middle Ages Chinese etchingPublic domain

In 1243, Yaroslav II of Vladimir (1191-1246) was the first Russian prince to receive permission to rule – he was summoned to Batu Khan, swore his allegiance to him and was named the “biggest knyaz’ of all Russians.”

The ceremony of swearing allegiance to Mongols was very similar to the French ceremony of homage, where the liege kneeled on one knee at the feet of his seated sovereign. But in the Horde’s capital Saray, Russian princes were sometimes forced to walk on their knees to the Khan’s throne and overall treated like inferiors. It was this same Yaroslav II, by the way, who received the first jarlik and later was poisoned.

Jarlik (a shout-out, an announcement in the ancient Mongol language) was how Mongols called diplomatic credentials – protective charters they wrote and handed over to the Russian princes and priests. The important part of the Mongols’ policy was that they protected the Russian Orthodox churches, never ravaged them, and kept the clergy safe. For protection, the church was obliged to preach allegiance to the Mongol Tatars to their parishioners.

A typical Mongol jarlik dating back to 1397Лапоть (CC0 1.0)

The tributes were controlled and collected at first by the baskaks, the Mongol taxmen, who lived in Russian cities with their suite and security guards. To collect the tributes, the Mongols performed a census of the population of the subdued duchies. The tributes went to the Mongol Empire, and after 1266, when the Tatar-Mongol state of Golden Horde divided itself from the Mongols, tributes went to the Golden Horde’s capital Saray. Later, after multiple local revolts and following the Russian princes’ pleas, the tribute collection was handed over to the princes themselves. Otherwise, the Russians were left to live their life.

3. How did the Russians USE the Mongols to their benefit?

“The Baskaks”Sergey Ivanov

There was never any constant military presence of the Mongols, but if the Russians revolted against their rule, they could send armies. However, the cunning and politically sophisticated Mongol khans manipulated Russians, incited hatred and wars among them to better control the weak, divided states. Soon, the princes learned this tactic and started applying it against the Mongols.

For a century, there were innumerable military campaigns between Mongols and Russians. In 1328, Tver duchy revolted against the Mongols, killing the Uzbek Khan’s cousin. Tver was burned and destroyed by the Horde, and Moscow and Suzdal princes helped the Mongols. Why? How could they?

In a war between the duchies, the Moscow princes understood that somebody has to take the lead against the Mongols by subduing others to his rule. After Tver’s demise, Ivan I “Kalita” of Moscow became the first prince to collect the tributes from the Russian lands instead of the baskaks – that’s what he got for helping the Mongols to murder his compatriots – and at the same time, his enemies. However, this helped bring the famous “40-year peace” when Mongols didn’t attack the lands of Moscow (but ravaged other duchies). Meanwhile, Moscow used the defeats of other princes for their own means.

The sacking of Suzdal by Batu Khan in February 1238. Mongol Invasion of Russia. A miniature from the sixteenth-century chroniclePublic domain

READ MORE:Lessons in warfare Russians learned from the Golden Horde

Russians also quickly learned from the Mongols to use written contracts, sign acts, enact laws; Russians used the system of yams – road stations, employed first by Genghis Khan for multiple purposes: shelter for travelers, places to hold spare horses for army messengers, and so on. This system was installed in the Russian lands by the Mongols for their purposes but eventually started being used by Russians for their own good – to connect their lands.

4. How did the Mongol rule end?  

The Tver uprising of 1328 as seen in a Russian chronicle of the 16th centuryPublic domain

What Moscow princes learned from the ruthless Mongols was that you either kill your enemy or disable him so he can’t take revenge. Simultaneously with the strengthening of Moscow princes, the Golden Horde fell into a political crisis. In 1378, Dmitry of Moscow, known as Donskoy (1350-1389) for the first time in a long while, crushed one of the Horde’s armies.

In 1380, Dmitry Donskoy, who had earlier stopped paying tributes to the Horde, defeated the 60,000-110,000-strong army of Khan Mamay in the Battle of Kulikovo, a great moment of high spirits for all the Russian lands. However, in 1382, Moscow was burned by Tokhtamysh, a Khan of another part of the dismantled Horde.

For the next hundred years or so, Russian lands on and off paid tributes to different Khans of the Horde, but in 1472, Ivan the Great of Moscow (1440-1505) refused again to pay tributes to the Tatar Mongols. This time, the Great Duchy of Moscow was really great. Ivan and his father Vasily II the Blind had collected lands and princes and subdued them to Moscow.

READ MORE: How a 15th-century strange battle put Russia on the map

Ahmed bin Küchük, Khan of the Golden Horde, tried to wage war against Ivan, but after the famous standoff at the Ugra river in 1480, he returned home. This battle marked the end of the Mongol rule and control – but not the tributes. Russia continued sending money and valuable goods to different parts of the Horde just to make peace with militant Tatars. This was called “pominki” (appr. ‘memorables’) in Russian.

Dmitry Donskoy, an image from a Russian chroniclePublic domain

Russia paid pominki to different former Horde dynasties until 1685. Formally, the tributes were banned by Peter the Great only in 1700, according to the Treaty of Constantinople between the Russian Tsardom and the Ottoman Empire. The Khan of Crimea, one of the last of the Khans at the time, and the Ottoman Empire’s vassal, was also the last to whom Russia paid. The treaty said:

“…Because the State of Moscow is autonomous and free – the tribute that annually was given to the Crimean Khans until now, henceforward shall not be given from His Holy Greatness of the Tsar of Moscow, nor from his descendants…”

It is very symbolic that Peter, the last great tsar of Moscow and the future first Emperor of Russia, signed this treaty in 1700, the first year that began in Russia not from the 1st of September, like in ancient Russia, but from January 1st – just like in Europe.

Hyperlink to the original article: https://www.rbth.com/history/332313-mongol-invasion-was-reason-russia-formed

Further observations:

Ronald M. Walker · Jan 22

Interesting, but after applying Occam’s Razor (the simplest explanation is very probably the correct one) I’m inclined to stick wth my OWN theory, that Russia and many of its people are as they are thanks to conquest by the Mongols. The Mongol invaders treated their enemies with abolutely no mercy, and the penalty for defiance was extermination. The wisest course of action when it even LOOKED like you might be attacked was…. Immediate surrender. And the Mongols, curously, didn’t even bother to leave behind a garrison in their conquests, which remained free to administer themselves. BUT, as a conquered posession, the man task of that admniistration was to gather “tribute” to send to the Khanate. Fail to deliver, and… they’d be back – and you would be dead. So would your family, your friends, your neighbours, your livestock and your pets… So you DIDN’T provoke them. And faced with collective punishment, you didn’t allow anyone else to do so. And the level of “tribute” demanded left the starving people in absolute poverty. Not very different from being a prisoner in Auschwitz. Except Russia’s experience of being prisoners in their OWN COUNTRY lasted for generations. No surprise that it influenced the culture at a VERY basic level. And what makes that “character change” plausible is what happened when the Mongol Empire imploded… Which is basically… NOTHING. Generations of children who had been carefully taught by their parents how to avoid getting the whole family killed had in turn taught THEIR children, who taught their children lessons on how to behave in a totally warped reality. It had become their “Normal”.And the laws that they passed in their newly freed country reflected that. “Just keep on doing what you’ve been doing, and your parents did, and their parents and grandparents…” The rationale for the behaviour was lost. You no longer behaved like that BECAUSE “otherwise the Mongols will come back and kill us all”, but because NOW it had just become the NORMAL way to behave. And for things to become as warped a THAT takes many generations.. ALL of the peculiarities listed above are explained by that MUCH simpler cause. When a tiger, or a lion is kept in caged captivity or long enough, pacing the limits of their cage… when the physical bars are taken away, the tiger may continue to pace the limits of a cage that exist only in its mind. Same basic idea. A Russian named Trofim Lysenko managed to convince the leaders (under Stalin) that it is possible, through controling the environment, to bring about permanent genetic changes. Complete BS of course.That’s NOT how genetics works!!

Timofey Vorobyov · Jan 22

According to Oleksandr Paliy, it begins with the Stone Age, which ended in these lands only 1500 years ago.

Benghabrit: The Muslim Rector who saved Jews from the Gestapo

Posted on May 31, 2017

by Susan Cahill

The Grand Mosque of Paris was built between 1922 and 1926 to symbolize the eternal friendship between France and Islam. It was also meant to express gratitude to the half-million Muslims of the French Empire’s North African colonies who had fought against the Germans in World War I. A hundred thousand Muslims died for France; without their sacrifice, it is said, the victory of Verdun would not have happened. The Mosque was particularly meant to honor the fallen Muslim tirailleurs (sharpshooters) from Algeria.

Si Kaddour Benghabrit. Image is in the public domain via

After the war many Algerians relocated to France, working in factories and on construction jobs mostly, sending money home to their families. Known as Kabyles—Berbers from Kabylia, the treacherous Atlas Mountains and impoverished villages of Algeria that Albert Camus wrote about — the Kabyles became the dominant Muslim population in Paris. Many lived in slum housing in Belleville in northeastern Paris, forming bonds with their other immigrant neighbors and coworkers: Chinese and Vietnamese, Tunisians, Moroccans, Jews from North Africa, Russia, eastern Europe.

When the Nazis invaded in 1940 and began rounding up Jews for deportation, many Kabyles joined the French Resistance. (It is also true that like Christians, many Arabs in North Africa and Paris collaborated with the anti-Semitic Vichy and German authorities.)

Benghabrit saves Jews from the Gestapo

The successes of the Kabyle Resistance were intimately connected with the clandestine antifascist operations in daily progress in the cellars of the Grand Mosque where the Kabyles worshipped. Thanks to the heroism of the Mosque’s rector, Si Kaddour Benghabrit (1868–1954), the Kabyles were free to bring their Jewish friends and coworkers to the Mosque for safe haven.

The first prayer offered at the Paris Mosque in 1926, in the presence of the president of France, was given by this rector who was also the Mosque’s founder. Benghabrit, born in Algeria, a cultured diplomat in Paris and North Africa who wrote books, enjoyed Parisian salon culture, and loved music became the most important Muslim in Paris and the most influential Arab in Europe. Benghabrit has now become a figure of historical interest and some acclaim because of his actions during the Holocaust.

When the Nazis and the Vichy government began arresting and deporting the Jews of Paris, Benghabrit committed himself and his congregation to making the Grand Mosque a sanctuary for endangered Jews. He devised a threefold rescue operation: first, he offered European and Algerian Jews shelter in the same apartments inhabited by Muslim families; second, he gave them fake identity certificates, to prove they were Muslims, not Jews; finally, he initiated the use of the cellars and tunnels beneath the Mosque as escape routes.

The Jews-in-hiding crawled and dug their way through the sewers and tunnels (souterrains) under the Mosque to the banks of the Seine where empty wine barges and boats operated by Kabyles were waiting to smuggle them out of Occupied Paris. Benghabrit was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo a number of times as rumors of the Mosque’s resistance inevitably got out. A higher German command, however, ordered him released each time: The Germans could not risk Algerian riots in North Africa or Paris if the Reich was to hold North Africa against the allies. It was important that the Muslims on both fronts stayed submissive.

Salim Halali, a Berber Jew from Algeria, popular singer of North African songs and friend of Benghabrit, sought and found safety in the Mosque. The rector not only made him a Certificate of Conversion to show—falsely—that Salim’s grandfather had converted to Islam; he also had an unmarked tombstone in the Muslim cemetery in Bobigny inscribed with the family name of Halali’s grandfather.

After the Nazis checked it out, they left Halali alone. He lived out the war in the Mosque, passing as a Muslim when the Nazis, responding to rumors of a Mosque underground, barged in regularly on a search-and- deport mission. (Benghabrit had a warning bell hidden in the floor under his desk that alerted everyone of another Nazi raid in progress.) After the Liberation, Halali went on to become the most popular “oriental” singer in Europe. He and Benghabrit remained good friends.

Albert Assouline, a North African Jew who with a Muslim friend escaped from a POW camp in Germany, surfaced in Paris without identity papers. The Mosque welcomed him and his friend. While hiding out in the basement, Assouline saw many other Jews in hiding: the children lived in the upstairs apartments with Muslim families, the adults in the basement. Because North African Jews and Muslims looked alike, had similar surnames, were circumcised, and spoke Arabic, the Jews, with their fake Muslim identity certificates, were able to pass as Muslim when the Gestapo came searching for evidence of a Jewish sanctuary movement. After the war, Assouline gave testimony that he witnessed 1,600 Jews passing through the basements and sub-basements of the Mosque and descending into the dark labyrinthine tunnels, eventually making it out onto the boats waiting at the Halles aux Vins on the Seine to carry them to safety in the Maghreb and Spain. In addition to Jewish refugees, the Kabyle boatmen also carried messages between the French Resistance in Paris and the Free French Army in Algeria.

The Grand Mosque of Paris: Place du Puits de l’Ermite. Image is taken from the book The Streets of Paris

Some sources dispute Assouline’s estimate, claiming that at most five hundred Jews were given a home and then safe passage by Benghabrit and the Mosque. One Israeli scholar dismisses the story as exaggerated from start to finish. There is not much data available to provide the actual numbers of Jews rescued by the Mosque. But what there is—old newspapers, scholarly research,* and personal testimonies from Jews who after the war told of hiding for its duration in the Mosque’s basements—supports the details of this hidden history.

Benghabrit was given the Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur after the war. But Eva Wiesel has noted in The New York Times that getting Yad Vashem in Israel to grant the honorific of “Righteous Among Nations” to a Muslim, even the Oskar Schindler–like Benghabrit, is and will remain very difficult. This heroic unsung leader of the Paris Mosque Resistance died in 1954 in the early stages of the war of Algerian independence.

He is buried in the Mosque, facing in the direction of Mecca, as are all Muslims.

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SUSAN CAHILL has published several travel books on France, Italy, and Ireland, including Hidden Gardens of Paris and The Streets of Paris. She is the editor of the bestselling Women and Fiction series and author of the novel Earth Angels. She spends a few months in Paris every year.

MARION RANOUX, a native Parisienne, is an experienced freelance photographer and translator into French of Czech literature.Tags: Benghabrit, French History, Jewish, Jewish History, Kabyles, Nazi, Paris, Susan Cahill, World War II, WWII

The Putin Doctrine

A Move on Ukraine Has Always Been Part of the Plan

By Angela Stent

January 27, 2022

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The current crisis between Russia and Ukraine is a reckoning that has been 30 years in the making. It is about much more than Ukraine and its possible NATO membership. It is about the future of the European order crafted after the Soviet Union’s collapse. During the 1990s, the United States and its allies designed a Euro-Atlantic security architecture in which Russia had no clear commitment or stake, and since Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia has been challenging that system. Putin has routinely complained that the global order ignores Russia’s security concerns, and he has demanded that the West recognize Moscow’s right to a sphere of privileged interests in the post-Soviet space. He has staged incursions into neighboring states, such as Georgia, that have moved out of Russia’s orbit in order to prevent them from fully reorienting.

Putin has now taken this approach one step further. He is threatening a far more comprehensive invasion of Ukraine than the annexation of Crimea and the intervention in the Donbas that Russia carried out in 2014, an invasion that would undermine the current order and potentially reassert Russia’s preeminence in what he insists is its “rightful” place on the European continent and in world affairs. He sees this as a good time to act. In his view, the United States is weak, divided, and less able to pursue a coherent foreign policy. His decades in office have made him more cynical about the United States’ staying power. Putin is now dealing with his fifth U.S. president, and he has come to see Washington as an unreliable interlocutor. The new German government is still finding its political feet, Europe on the whole is focused on its domestic challenges, and the tight energy market gives Russia more leverage over the continent. The Kremlin believes that it can bank on Beijing’s support, just as China supported Russia after the West tried to isolate it in 2014.

Putin may still decide not to invade. But whether he does or not, the Russian president’s behavior is being driven by an interlocking set of foreign policy principles that suggest Moscow will be disruptive in the years to come. Call it “the Putin doctrine.” The core element of this doctrine is getting the West to treat Russia as if it were the Soviet Union, a power to be respected and feared, with special rights in its neighborhood and a voice in every serious international matter. The doctrine holds that only a few states should have this kind of authority, along with complete sovereignty, and that others must bow to their wishes. It entails defending incumbent authoritarian regimes and undermining democracies. And the doctrine is tied together by Putin’s overarching aim: reversing the consequences of the Soviet collapse, splitting the transatlantic alliance, and renegotiating the geographic settlement that ended the Cold War.

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BLAST FROM THE PAST

Russia, according to Putin, has an absolute right to a seat at the table on all major international decisions. The West should recognize that Russia belongs to the global board of directors. After what Putin portrays as the humiliation of the 1990s, when a greatly weakened Russia was forced to accede to an agenda set by the United States and its European allies, he has largely achieved this goal. Even though Moscow was ejected from the G-8 after its annexation of Crimea, its veto on the United Nations Security Council and role as an energy, nuclear, and geographic superpower ensure that the rest of the world must take its views into account. Russia successfully rebuilt its military after the 2008 war with Georgia, and it is now the preeminent regional military power, with the capability to project power globally. Moscow’s ability to threaten its neighbors enables it to force the West to the negotiating table, as has been so evident in the past few weeks.

As far as Putin is concerned, the use of force is perfectly appropriate if Russia believes that its security is threatened: Russia’s interests are as legitimate as those of the West, and Putin asserts that the United States and Europe have been disregarding them. For the most part, the United States and Europe have rejected the Kremlin’s narrative of grievance, which centers most notably on the breakup of the Soviet Union and especially the separation of Ukraine from Russia. When Putin described the Soviet collapse as a “great geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” he was lamenting the fact that 25 million Russians found themselves outside of Russia, and he particularly criticized the fact that 12 million Russians found themselves in the new Ukrainian state. As he wrote in a 5,000-word treatise published last summer and titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” in 1991, “people found themselves abroad overnight, taken away, this time indeed, from their historical motherland.” His essay has recently been distributed to Russian troops.

In an essay last year, Putin wrote that Ukraine was being turned into “a springboard against Russia.”

This narrative of loss to the West is tied in to a particular obsession of Putin’s: the idea that NATO, not content to merely admit or aid post-Soviet states, might threaten Russia itself. The Kremlin insists that this preoccupation is based on real concerns. Russia, after all, has been repeatedly invaded from the West. In the twentieth century, it was invaded by anti-Bolshevik allied forces, including some from the United States, during its civil war from 1917 to 1922. Germany invaded twice, leading to the loss of 26 million Soviet citizens in World War II. Putin has explicitly linked this history to Russia’s current concerns about NATO infrastructure nearing Russia’s borders and Moscow’s resulting demands for security guarantees.

Today, however, Russia is a nuclear superpower brandishing new, hypersonic missiles. No country—least of all its smaller, weaker neighbors—has any intention of invading Russia. Indeed, the country’s neighbors to its west have a different narrative and stress their vulnerability over the centuries to invasion from Russia. The United States would also never attack, although Putin has accused it of seeking to “cut a juicy piece of our pie.” Nevertheless, the historical self-perception of Russia’s vulnerability resonates with the country’s population. Government-controlled media are filled with claims that Ukraine could be a launching pad for NATO aggression. Indeed, in his essay last year, Putin wrote that Ukraine was being turned into “a springboard against Russia.”

Putin also believes that Russia has an absolute right to a sphere of privileged interests in the post-Soviet space. This means its former Soviet neighbors should not join any alliances that are deemed hostile to Moscow, particularly NATO or the European Union. Putin has made this demand clear in the two treaties proposed by the Kremlin on December 17, which require that Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries—as well as Sweden and Finland—commit to permanent neutrality and eschew seeking NATO membership. NATO would also have to retreat to its 1997 military posture, before its first enlargement, by removing all troops and equipment in central and eastern Europe. (This would reduce NATO’s military presence to what it was when the Soviet Union disintegrated.) Russia would also have veto power over the foreign policy choices of its non-NATO neighbors. This would ensure that pro-Russian governments are in power in countries bordering Russia—including, foremost, Ukraine.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

So far, no Western government has been prepared to accept these extraordinary demands. The United States and Europe widely embrace the premise that nations are free to determine both their domestic systems and their foreign policy affiliations. From 1945 to 1989, the Soviet Union denied self-determination to central and eastern Europe and exercised control over both the domestic and foreign policies of Warsaw Pact members through local communist parties, the secret police, and the Red Army. When a country strayed too far from the Soviet model—Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968—its leaders were ousted by force. The Warsaw Pact was an alliance that had a unique track record: it invaded only its own members.

The modern Kremlin’s interpretation of sovereignty has notable parallels to that of the Soviet Union. It holds, to paraphrase George Orwell, that some states are more sovereign than others. Putin has said that only a few great powers—Russia, China, India, and the United States—enjoy absolute sovereignty, free to choose which alliances they join or reject. Smaller countries such as Ukraine or Georgia are not fully sovereign and must respect Russia’s strictures, just as Central America and South America, according to Putin, must heed their large northern neighbor. Russia also does not seek allies in the Western sense of the word but instead looks for mutually beneficial instrumental and transactional partnerships with countries, such as China, that do not restrict Russia’s freedom to act or pass judgment on its internal politics.

Such authoritarian partnerships are an element of the Putin doctrine. The president presents Russia as a supporter of the status quo, an advocate of conservative values, and an international player that respects established leaders, especially autocrats. As recent events in Belarus and Kazakhstan have shown, Russia is the go-to power to support embattled authoritarian rulers. It has defended autocrats both in its neighborhood and far beyond—including in Cuba, Libya, Syria, and Venezuela. The West, according to the Kremlin, instead supports chaos and regime change, as happened during the 2003 Iraq war and the Arab Spring in 2011.

The Warsaw Pact was an alliance that had a unique track record: it invaded only its own members.

But in its own “sphere of privileged interests,” Russia can act as a revisionist power when it considers its interests threatened or when it wants to advance its interests, as the annexation of Crimea and the invasions of Georgia and Ukraine demonstrated. Russia’s drive to be acknowledged as a leader and backer of strongmen regimes has been increasingly successful in recent years as Kremlin-backed mercenary groups have acted on behalf of Russia in many parts of the world, as is the case in Ukraine.

Moscow’s revisionist interference also isn’t limited to what it considers its privileged domain. Putin believes Russia’s interests are best served by a fractured transatlantic alliance. Accordingly, he has supported anti-American and Euroskeptic groups in Europe; backed populist movements of the left and right on both sides of the Atlantic; engaged in election interference; and generally worked to exacerbate discord within Western societies. One of his major goals is to get the United States to withdraw from Europe. U.S. President Donald Trump was contemptuous of the NATO alliance and dismissive of some of the United States’ key European allies—notably then German Chancellor Angela Merkel—and spoke openly of pulling the United States out of the organization. The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has assiduously sought to repair the alliance, and indeed Putin’s manufactured crisis over Ukraine has reinforced alliance unity. But there is enough doubt within Europe about the durability of U.S. commitment after 2024 that Russia has found some success reinforcing skepticism, particularly through social media.

Weakening the transatlantic alliance could pave the way for Putin to realize his ultimate aim: jettisoning the post–Cold War, liberal, rules-based international order promoted by Europe, Japan, and the United States in favor of one more amenable to Russia. For Moscow, this new system might resemble the nineteenth-century concert of powers. It could also turn into a new incarnation of the Yalta system, where Russia, the United States, and now China divide the world into tripolar spheres of influence. Moscow’s growing rapprochement with Beijing has indeed reinforced Russia’s call for a post-West order. Both Russia and China demand a new system in which they exercise more influence in a multipolar world.

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century systems both recognized certain rules of the game. After all, during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union mostly respected each other’s spheres of influence. The two most dangerous crises of that era—Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1958 Berlin ultimatum and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis—were defused before military conflict broke out. But if the present is any indication, it looks as if Putin’s post-West “order” would be a disordered Hobbesian world with few rules of the game. In pursuit of his new system, Putin’s modus operandi is to keep the West off balance, guessing about his true intentions, and then surprising it when he acts.

THE RUSSIAN RESET

Given Putin’s ultimate goal, and given his belief that now is the time to force the West to respond to his ultimatums, can Russia be deterred from launching another military incursion into Ukraine? No one knows what Putin will ultimately decide. But his conviction that the West has ignored what he deems Russia’s legitimate interests for three decades continues to drive his actions. He is determined to reassert Russia’s right to limit the sovereign choices of its neighbors and its former Warsaw Pact allies and to force the West to accept these limits—be that by diplomacy or military force.

That doesn’t mean the West is powerless. The United States should continue to pursue diplomacy with Russia and seek to craft a modus vivendi that is acceptable to both sides without compromising the sovereignty of its allies and partners. At the same time, it should keep coordinating with the Europeans to respond and impose costs on Russia. But it is clear that even if Europe avoids war, there is no going back to the situation as it was before Russia began massing its troops in March 2021. The ultimate result of this crisis could be the third reorganization of Euro-Atlantic security since the late 1940s. The first came with the consolidation of the Yalta system into two rival blocs in Europe after World War II. The second emerged from 1989 to 1991, with the collapse of the communist bloc and then the Soviet Union itself, followed by the West’s subsequent drive to create a Europe “whole and free.” Putin now directly challenges that order with his moves against Ukraine.

As the United States and its allies await Russia’s next move and try to deter an invasion with diplomacy and the threat of heavy sanctions, they need to understand Putin’s motives and what they portend. The current crisis is ultimately about Russia redrawing the post–Cold War map and seeking to reassert its influence over half of Europe, based on the claim that it is guaranteeing its own security. It may be possible to avert a military conflict this time. But as long as Putin remains in power, so will his doctrine.

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• ANGELA STENT is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia. She is the author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest.

German Kurt Henke had lived part of his childhood in Norway. On February 16th 1945, 10 days after his arrival in Denmark, he started passing information to the local Danish resistance group, who called him “The Norwegian”. He succcesfully prevented the Gestapo in destroying a resistance weapons depot and workshop and arresting the resistance members.
Being able to speak German and Norwegian/Danish, he worked as an enterpreter between the Wehrmacht and the towns people.
Post-war he was allowed to stay in Denmark, and he worked for the Danish Brigade’s occupation forces in Germany. He married a German refugee woman in Denmark and settled in Germany, but he still visited Denmark to go fishing with his old friends.

Thanks to our Norwegian brothers who gave Kurt Henke a good upbringing!

Granted, Denmark was not the most dangerous “frontline”, but if he had been found passing warnings to the resistance, he would have have been a dead man.

Sabotaged railway that Kurt Henke was to protect (unknown date).

The following contains disturbing details about the German refugees that died in Denmark post-WWII:

German soldier who in 1945 was stationed in Skanderborg, where he helped the Danish resistance movement.

Kurt Henke was an interpreter for the German Security Police in Skanderborg and Århus. With his life in extreme danger he passed on the information he as an interpreter received, to the resistance movement via an intermediary and thereby saved several resistance fighters from arrest. Furthermore, he prevented the Gestapo from carrying out reprisals against Brigadir Nielsen’s mechanic’s workshop, Banegårdsvej 23 in Skanderborg, where the resistance movement had stored weapons.

Kurt Henke was born in 1914 in Berlin. In the years 1924 to 1939 he was in family care in Norway with several long stays, where he went to school in Tromsø.

I dec. In 1939, he was called up for service at Siemens, which manufactured parts for airplanes. In late 1943, he was drafted into the army and deployed to Poland.

Later he was transferred to Ers as a member of Und Ausbildungsbataillon O 292 (effort and training battalion) in Rostock. The letter O referred to that it consisted of people with ear disorders from deafness to total deafness in one ear.

On February 6, 1945, the battalion, which consisted of 550 men, was relocated to Skanderborg. The task was to secure the railway line Skanderborg – Hørning, Skanderborg – Hylke against sabotage.

The soldiers were accommodated at Skanderborg Kommuneskole, Hylke Forsamlingshus, Vrold Forsamlingshus, Forsamlingshotellet and Håndværkerforeningen.

When Kurt Henke spoke both German and Norwegian / Danish, he got the job as an interpreter in the dialogue between the armed forces and the population and the city management.

The “Norwegian”, as he was called, gradually developed a good relationship with many people in Skanderborg, and based on his pacifist attitude to life, he opposed the occupying power. He contacted the local Danish resistance movement as early as 16 February 1945, and he was associated with it until it was abolished on 15 July 1945.

At the capitulation (the term for Germany’s surrender), Kurt Henke was given permission to stay in the city at the request of the city leader of the resistance movement, Munch Carlsen, and the air defense chief. The Danish air defense chief offered him the place as an office assistant at the refugee camp “Sølund”, where he was to act as an intermediary between the air defense chief and the German refugees.

Later, Kurt Henke got a job as an interpreter at the Danish Brigade in Germany, where he worked until 1948.

Excerpts from Gefreiter Kurt Henke’s memoirs:

The strange thing was that after the capitulation, we had a whole lot of children here at Sølund who died. It was because of the milk. The doctor said to the mothers: “You must not give the children the milk”. They got a daily ration of half a liter, as far as I remember, and the mothers got a quarter of a liter. But the mothers were so crazy that they also gave the quarter liter to the child.

But the doctor said that the only way to save the children was that they did not get any fats, because they were not used to it. The nutrition they had received as Germany’s forces collapsed might have consisted of dry bread and perhaps some coffee substitute, but no fats. I myself was completely sick of the milk. I first started drinking milk again a few years ago. But then the refugees came. It was also a problem.

It was a fucking job, it was, because I was the one who had to requisition schools, youth centers and everything around here in the city, receive refugees at the train station. There was a whole train, probably from Copenhagen, with a couple of hundred refugees. And then I say to the general “Where should I send them, all those people”? And then he said: “Henke, difficulties are too much to overcome!” (Difficulties exist to be overcome). “Well, what should I do?” “Yes,” he said, “make a big pit, throw everything in there!” (“Yes,” he said, “dig a big hole and throw them all in there!”).

It was also a kind of solution. But then I got hold of the different schools, but it was difficult. We used the gym at the private school down here. We got bunk beds, I dont know where we picked them up. There were three beds on top of each other, and it had to be taken into account, an old lady could not be put in the upper bed. It was nonsense. I was actually a nanny for all of them. I organized a library and some musical instruments.

They got sick in the head if they just had to sit at school and “pick their nose” all day! With the money I got from the German Consulate in Aarhus, I drove around to different cities and bought coffins.

Because we had a whole lot of dead here at school, children, and out on Sølund later. No matter what size! I had to be happy with every single coffin I could get until the mayor said: “Now you have to stop buying coffins, because we also need someone ourselves”. So we had to save on the coffins.

So we did it in the way that I put the corpses in the coffin – there were many children – and then we drove them to Aarhus. Then we put the coffins in place, and the family – mostly the mother and maybe siblings were there – but then they were not buried after the ceremony while the relatives were there. We said they would be buried later.

The reason was that when the family was gone, we opened the coffin, you see, and just poured them into the ground, for we were going to use the box for someone else. Eventually we had to bury them in cement bags and that sort of thing. There was a mother who lost two children in 24 hours.

I only had a single coffin that was too small. The parents were going to Aarhus. We had to transport the children out to the morgue in the cots on a trailer. But because of the rough roads the bottom fell out of the beds and the children lay there crosswise. There was lots of old coke dust in the barn where the children lived and the kids were full of it.

They looked absolutely awful. I could not allow the parents to look at the children, I was so startled. I had to unplug the car, and then I said to the driver, “Drive! The parents must not get out of the carriage ”. And he gave it gas and drove away, and I stood alone with that cart. Then I had to clean the kids, and what was I supposed to do? I had to take a water hose and rinse them off, clean it out of their eyes. It looked so ugly you understand.

And then it is also a different feeling if you see an adult human being lying there as dead than you see a child. It’s so cruel. The last one I buried, it went pretty solemnly until I was about to wrap the little one. I do not remember if it was a girl or a boy, but ….. he was at least 20 cm taller than the coffin. So the only option was to pull his legs up so high he could be there. It was the last one I buried.

But then I have also experienced some fun things at Sølund. We also had a wedding. One day a woman came and said: “Tell me, Henke, is it possible that we can get married here in Skanderborg?” I did not know. I went to the mayor and said, “Is it possible for German refugees to get married here?” “Yes, why not?” He said. The groom was a hairdresser. “Did they have papers?” “Yes,” they had. And then they got married here at City Hall. The mayor is coming, he was a nice guy, he was gracious, he was a human being. Strict on the one hand, absolutely sovereign and strict, but he was a human being. Then he gets into his car after they had been married and returned with a large layer cake.

And then you can say: A layer cake, it’s nothing! But then one must understand that people who have not seen layer cake for 5-6 years, whipped cream, a cake that tastes great. At home, (in rationed wartime Germany) they were given 20 grams of butter or margarine. Here they get a whole layer cake! It is like the dear God coming from heaven. And the people of the resistance movement – they were completely unique.

They made sure that the soldiers from the occupying forces (German soldiers imprisoned in Denmark or left behind when Germany surrendered) got their food every day from Skanderborg – all the way down to the border! We drove two trucks with bread and sausage and horse ham. Of course it was not first quality, that is clear, but they got food at least. We picked up people who had bad legs and could not walk anymore, and drove them to the next station … It was strange conditions, but that was it …, why should we shoot at each other? It’s no use. Why should we be unfriends? The ordinary German soldier would be a thousand times better off at home as a prewar civilian than a day in Skanderborg. It is true. You can not blame the ordinary soldier …