Thread by @EddieDu5

From 2018,

”The 1990s were the glory days of the Russian gangsters, and since then, under Putin, gangsterism on the streets has given way to kleptocracy in the state.“
theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/…

In the 1990s, everything was up for grabs, and the new vory reached out with both hands.

State assets were privatized, businesses forced to pay for protection, and as the iron curtain fell, Russian gangsters crashed out into the rest of the world.

The thieves emerged in tsarist times, but it was the Soviet camps that forged their subculture – Galeotti wittily refers to it as a “gangster archipelago” – as mafiosi from around the country got to know each other, exchanging methods and contacts.

Across the world, Russian mafia gangs trafficks drugs and people, arms insurgents and gangsters, and peddles every type of criminal service, from money laundering to computer hacking.

You can hear vor songs and vor slang on the streets. Even Putin uses it from time to time, to reassert his streetwise credentials.

The notorious Alexander Solonik (nicknamed “Alexander the Great” or “Superkiller”) was a former soldier and member of the riot police who became a killer for hire, specializing in assassinating well-guarded gangsters.

Today’s vory are not the crude, tattooed mob of a generation or two ago. They are clever, smooth entrepreneurs, equally at ease with Russian government ministers and Western financiers.

Galeotti suggests not just state practices but even Russian social values have become suffused with the norms of organized crime.

The Russian mafia originated in the Gulag.

Although most of the gulags were shut down by 1960, recent papers have suggested persistent effects on local economic prosperity, social and institutional trust, and election outcomes.

From 2014,

“In many ways the deeply religious private equity maven personifies Western liberals’ worst fears about Russia’s recent turn toward nationalism and social conservatism.”
slate.com/news-and-polit…

For Malofeev, the Russian Empire is both a cultural idea — he speaks approvingly of Russia’s pre-communist birth-rate of seven children per family in contrast to today’s demographic decline — and a geopolitical one.

Malofeev, who has previously cultivated links to far-right parties in Europe, helped set up the "International Sovereign Development Agency" as the Kremlin turned its focus toward boosting ties with Africa.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Malofeev is prominent in the Russian Orthodox Church and, through his online TV channel Tsargrad, has mobilized the anti-globalist moralism that Putin has increasingly drawn from in recent years.
ft.com/content/63e034…

Since the late 2000s, the Russian leadership has projected an image of itself both domestically and abroad as a decisive supporter of moderate conservatism, ideals of stability, controlled growth, and “traditional values.”

The “conservative turn” became especially apparent after the wave of mass protests in winter 2011 and spring 2012.

Conservatism emerged as a convenient, although paradoxical doctrine, combining universalism and particularism.

Russian conservatism oscillates between antagonizing the West and isolating itself from it.

When Russian conservatives include some degree of “Soviet-ness” in their ideological project, they tend toward the most radical forms of geopolitical revanchism and anti-Westernism.

Russia aspires to be a country of traditional values and a traditional way of life while its social realities could be better described as post-modern and non-traditional.

The alliance between nationalism and conservatism is not predestined in a post-imperial country such as Russia, but if this tendency is gaining momentum, the history of Black Hundreds and anti-Jewish pogroms in late imperial Russia should serve as an ominous warning.

Historically conservatives have developed “love-hate” relations with the state, which has always been the major force for modernization and Westernization in Russia.

To a considerable degree, Russia’s traditional values conservatism is just a local manifestation of this new transnational ideology, which itself is a result of a global polarization of values.

Russian meddling in elections in the West is just another example of Moscow asserting its status as a leader of the global crusade against the liberal hegemony of the United States.

Source

The assassination of Walther Rathenau

Putin OKs revised Russian national security strategy - The Independent independent.co.uk/news/world/ame…

The 44-page document stated that “actions of some countries are aimed at instigating disintegration processes in the Commonwealth of Independent States in order to destroy Russia’s ties with its traditional allies."

Moscow “considers it legitimate to take symmetrical and asymmetric measures” to thwart and prevent “unfriendly actions" by foreign states that "threaten the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.”

Stalin’s apparatus discovered during the war that "Jews as a Soviet nationality were now an ethnic diaspora" with too many connections abroad.

The Soviet intelligentsia, in which Jews were the largest group, "was not really Russian — and thus not fully Soviet."

Even before the Soviet troops discovered the Nazi extermination camps in Poland, the chief of Soviet propaganda, Alexander Shcherbakov, on Stalin’s order, launched a secret campaign to "purify" the party and the state from the Jews.

Many Soviet citizens began to look at Jews as those who were the first to flee from the enemy to the rear and the last to go to the front. Grassroots anti-Semitism spread like fire, now encouraged and abetted by officialdom.

Russians praised Stalin, but Ukrainians and other nationalities felt slighted and even offended.

Many officials and public figures, Jews and non-Jews, found the state anti-Semitism a huge blow to their faith in Communist "internationalism."

In January 1944, Ivan Maisky wrote to Stalin and Molotov that the USSR must position itself in such a way after the war as to make it "unthinkable" for any combination of states in Europe and Asia to pose a challenge to Soviet security.

In November 1944, Maxim Litvinov sent a memo to Stalin and Molotov that the postwar Soviet sphere of influence in Europe should include Finland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, "the Slav counties of the Balkan peninsula, and Turkey as well."

Stalin’s rhetoric that all Slavs must be unified against the resurrection of a future German threat found enormous appeal among the majority of Soviet officials.

When the minister of tank industry, Vyacheslav Malyshev, heard Stalin in March 1945 talking about "new Slavophile-Leninists," he wrote enthusiastically in his diary of "a whole program for years ahead."

Russian general Alexander Gundorov, the head of the state-sponsored All-Slav Committee, planned to convene the first Congress of Slavs early in 1946, assuring the Politburo that there was already in existence the mass "new movement of the Slavs."

Marshal Georgy Zhukov turned his homes in Russia into museums of rare china and furs, paintings, velvet, gold, and silk. Air Marshal Alexander Golovanov dismantled Joseph Goebbels’ country villa and flew it to Russia.

For the Soviets, the defeated Nazi Germany was a giant shopping mall where they did not pay for anything.

In the first chaotic months, the Soviets, mostly commanders and officials, sent 100,000 railcars of various "construction materials" and "household goods" from Germany. Among them were 60,000 pianos, 459,000 radios, 188,000 carpets.

Even for less rapacious officials, the enormity of Soviet war suffering and casualties justified postwar reparations from Germany and its satellites.

Maisky referred to the suffering of the Soviet people as an argument for higher reparations and the shipping of German industrial equipment to the Soviet Union.

Historian Yuri Slezkine compared Stalin’s Soviet Union to a "communal apartment," with all major ("title") nationalities in possession of separate "rooms," but with common "shared facilities", including the army, security, and foreign policy.

Yet, just as the inhabitants of real Soviet communal flats harbored their own particularist interests behind expressed loyalty to the collectivist ethos, so did the leadership of the republics.

Soviet officials from Ukraine, White Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan also developed an imperialist itch mixed with nationalist aspirations.

Soviet officials from Ukraine, White Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan also developed an imperialist itch mixed with nationalist aspirations.

Armenian, Azeri, and Georgian officials could not act as nationalist lobbies. But they could promote their agendas as part of building the great Soviet power.

Molotov recalled, during the 1970s, that in 1945 the leaders of Soviet Azerbaijan "wanted to double the territory of their Republic at the expense of Iran."

Hitler’s attack on the USSR on June 22, 1941, and the Japanese attack on the United States on December 7, 1941, brought the two nations together for the first time. The Soviets gained a powerful and resourceful ally.

In order to avoid publicity and criticism from anti-Soviet conservatives, Roosevelt, his confidant Harry Hopkins, and other New Dealers maintained formal and informal channels of communication with the Kremlin.

Soviet officials, representatives of various bureaucratic elites, developed confusing, often contradictory attitudes toward the American ally.

The wartime contacts and especially Lend-Lease deliveries confirmed widespread perceptions of the United States as the country possessing exceptional economic-technological power.

Stalin privately acknowledged that if the Americans and the British "had not helped us with Lend-Lease, we would not have been able to cope with Germany, because we lost too much" in 1941–42.

Hollywood films, including Casablanca, became available to high officials and their families.

At the U.S. Embassy, George Kennan, skeptical about the West’s ability to influence Russia, admitted the amount of goodwill that film screenings generated "cannot be overestimated."

Between 1941 and 1945, thousands of Soviet officials in the military, trade representatives, and intelligence operators crisscrossed the United States.

The dynamism and scale of the American way of life evoked among the Soviet visitors a contradictory range of feelings: ideological hostility, fascination, bewilderment, and envy.

Very few, even senior, Soviet officials understood how the U.S. government and society functioned.

The Soviet ambassador to the United States, Alexander Troyanovsk, who had also served as ambassador in Tokyo, expressed his bewilderment that, "while Japan could be compared to the piano, the United States was an entire symphony orchestra."

Some Soviet functionaries felt that upper-class Americans treated them, at best, with condescension, from a position of material and cultural superiority.

Soviet elites understood American assistance as payback for the enormous Soviet war contribution; for that reason they never bothered to express their gratitude and show reciprocity to their American allies.

In January 1945, Molotov surprised some Americans and outraged others when he presented an o≈cial request for American loans that sounded more like a demand than a request for a favor.

In late 1944, Stalin asked Roosevelt to agree to the restoration of the "former rights of Russia violated by the treacherous attack of Japan in 1904."

Roosevelt gave his blessing and did not even insist on a detailed understanding

Litvinov saw it as a major task of postwar Soviet foreign policy "to prevent the emergence of a bloc of Great Britain and the USA". He envisaged the possibility of "amicable agreement" between London and Moscow, as the United States retreated from Europe.

In fact, Roosevelt died just at the time when his suspicions of Soviet intentions began to clash with his desire for postwar cooperation.

FDR’s sudden death on April 12, 1945, caught the Kremlin by complete surprise. Signing his condolences in the book of visitors at the American residence, Spaso House, in Moscow, Molotov "seemed deeply moved and disturbed."

Stalin preferred to discuss things orally with a few close lieutenants. He put his thoughts on paper only when he had no choice — for example, when he directed diplomatic talks from afar.

cStalin was a man of many identities. His experience growing up in the multi-ethnic, unstable, and vindictive Caucasus had given him an ability to wear many faces and act many roles.

Among Stalin’s self-identities were the Georgian "Kinto" (an honorable bandit in the style of Robin Hood), revolutionary bank robber, Lenin’s modest and devout pupil, "the man of steel" of the Bolshevik Party, great warlord, and "coryphaeus of science."

Averell Harriman, U.S. ambassador in Moscow in 1943–45, recalled that he found Stalin "better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill, in some ways the most e√ective of the war leaders."

Much later, Henry Kissinger wrote that Stalin’s ideas about the conduct of foreign policy were "strictly those of Old World Realpolitik," similar to what Russian statesmen had done for centuries.

Stalin’s dark, mistrusting mind and cruel, vindictive personality made a powerful imprint on his international vision.

A voracious reader of historical literature, Stalin came to believe he inherited the geopolitical problems faced by the czars. He especially liked to read on Russian diplomacy and international affairs on the eve and during World War I.

When the party theoretical journal wanted to print Friedrich Engels’ article in which he described czarist Russia’s foreign policy as expansionist and dangerous, Stalin sided with the czarist policies.

On the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1937, Stalin said that the Russian czars "did do one good thing— they put together an enormous state stretching out to Kamchatka. We inherited this state."

Stalin was convinced that international affairs were characterized by capitalist rivalry and the development of crisis, as well as the inevitable transition to global socialism.

The Soviet-British "percentage agreement" of October 1944 is a classic example of the clash between Stalin’s revolutionary-imperial paradigm and Churchill’s Realpolitik.

In conversations with Yugoslav, Bulgarian, and other Communists, Stalin liked to don his "realist" mantle and teach his inexperienced junior partners a lesson or two.

In Eastern Europe and the Balkans, Stalin moved unilaterally and with complete ruthlessness.

At the same time, he prudently measured his steps, advancing or retreating to avoid an early clash with the Western powers.

Source

The main result of the struggle at the highest levels of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that took place in the 1920s between Lenin’s heirs was the gradual Stalinization of the Politburo.

The essence of this Stalinization was Stalin’s ascent to dominance within a system of collective leadership that nonetheless remained primarily oligarchic in nature.

The Politburo’s acceptance and implementation of the political course that Stalin was advocating — accelerated industrialization and forced mass collectivization — can be seen as the culmination of this process.

The large-scale operations of 1937 and 1938 were a clear demonstration of the essence and capabilities of the Stalinist dictatorship, which achieved its full powers with the onset of the Great Terror.

The Politburo ceased to function as it had in the past. All important questions were decided by Stalin alone, who consulted with other Politburo members in small informal meetings on particular matters as he saw fit.

Mao’s hidden animosity became public when the Soviet military asked Beijing to build joint bases for the Soviet navy and submarine fleet in the Pacific. Mao angrily rejected the proposal.

On July 31, 1958, Khrushchev, in deep secrecy, flew to Beijing with the aim of soothing the Chinese leader. Instead, he was subjected to a barrage of insults and humiliating treatment by the host.

Mao dismissed the nuclear factor by describing it as "a paper tiger."

"I tried to explain to him," recalled Khrushchev, "that one or two missiles could turn all the divisions in China to dust. But he wouldn’t even listen to my arguments and obviously regarded me as a coward."

On August 23, 1958, the People’s Liberation Army, without warning either Moscow or Washington, started shelling Kinmen/Quemoy, one of the offshore islands still held by the KMT.

Mao commented in his private circle: "The islands are two batons that keep Khrushchev and Eisenhower dancing." By staging this provocation, the Chinese leader drew both Washington and Moscow into a game of nuclear brinkmanship.

Khrushchev would not mind helping China with the islands, as long as Chinese actions coordinated with Moscow’s strategy. Yet Mao’s nuclear bravado struck him as either irresponsible dogmatism or "Asiatic cunning."

On June 20, 1959, the Presidium quietly cancelled Sino-Soviet atomic cooperation. An atomic device with complete documentation, ready to be shipped to China, was destroyed. Mao’s challenge to Khrushchev’s authority profoundly troubled the Soviet leader.

Khrushchev’s arms reductions antagonized the military and created an uncertain future for the giant military-industrial complex, which involved, to varying degrees, 80% of the industrial enterprises of the Soviet Union.

Soviet air-defense missiles shot down an American U-2 spy plane on May 1, 1960, and Khrushchev seized this episode to show his toughness not only to the West, but also to the Chinese and his own military.

When Eisenhower unexpectedly claimed responsibility for the flight, Khrushchev felt betrayed and angry. In Paris, he demanded a personal apology from the U.S. president, irrevocably ruining his relationship with the American leader.

Khrushchev wanted some kind of accommodation with the United States, yet ideologically and psychologically he was ill-prepared to negotiate with Eisenhower and other Western leaders.

After the collapse of great power diplomacy in Paris, Khrushchev unleashed all his revolutionary instincts. His long-held conviction that Soviet nuclear power would accelerate the revolutionary process globally now translated into feverish activity to promote decolonization.

Khrushchev personally led the Soviet campaign of support of national-liberation movements in Africa, from Algeria to the Congo.

This peculiar revival of ”revolutionary“ diplomacy, almost in the Comintern style, culminated in Khrushchev’s memorable visit to New York to attend the UN General Assembly in September and October 1960.

Confined by the U.S. government to Manhattan "for security reasons," the Soviet leader spent almost a
month crisscrossing the island. Khrushchev was a whirlwind of energy.

He proposed to radically reform the UN, castigated Western colonialism from the UN podium using his shoe to make a point, dashed to Harlem to meet Fidel Castro, and denounced US imperialism to anyone who would listen.

The victory of John F. Kennedy heartened Khrushchev, because his bête noir, Richard Nixon, lost. Yet he also became convinced that Kennedy was a lightweight, a spoiled rich young man, unready for serious confrontation.

By all indications, Kennedy was not "another Franklin Roosevelt," that is, the kind of partner the Soviets had missed since 1945. Khrushchev felt he could intimidate the new president by his brinkmanship tactics.

Despite the obvious crudity of Soviet behavior in Berlin and the violation of the test moratorium, Khrushchev demonstrated that he, not Ulbricht, was in control in East Germany.

The outcome of the Cuban missile crisis killed Khrushchev’s New Look, although he never admitted it. Public repercussions of the crisis inside the Soviet Union were minimal, and many Soviet citizens did not lose sleep over the crisis until its worst phase was over.

Political elites, however, took the Cuban crisis with utmost seriousness. Moscow party functionaries decided to send their families to the countryside. When provincial officials learned more details, they were shocked.

Khrushchev’s reputation at home suffered disastrously. Many senior military and diplomats were convinced that Khrushchev had lost his nerve and hastily accepted the American ultimatum without any concessions.

To the Cuban leadership and to Khrushchev’s enemies in Beijing, the end of the crisis looked like abject capitulation. Khrushchev even forgot to consult with Castro before the public announcement of Soviet withdrawal.

The Cuban Missile Crisis cast a long shadow; never again would Soviet leaders risk a head-to-head clash "between the two systems" in the manner practiced by Khrushchev.

The head of the nuclear ministry, Efim Slavsky, and the head of the military-industrial commission, Dmitry Ustinov, continued to oppose any limitations on military development. But an influential scientific lobby prepared the ground for this change.

Many Soviet nuclear scientists were sympathetic to the worldwide anti-nuclear campaign. Since the late 1950s and until his death in February 1960, Igor Kurchatov had lobbied hard for a moratorium on nuclear testing.

By 1963, the Soviet atomic program no longer required large-scale atmospheric tests to build a strategic arsenal and achieve strategic parity with the Americans. Most important, the partial test ban did not require on-site inspections.

Meanwhile, Khrushchev openly attacked Chinese "revolutionary" rhetoric on war and peace. In his speech to the Supreme Soviet in December 1962, he ridiculed the Chinese notion of imperialism as "a paper tiger."

These perceptions led to a bizarre episode in Soviet-U.S. relations. The Kennedy administration implicitly and sometimes explicitly proposed combining efforts to thwart the Chinese nuclear program.

Stalin’s regime shaped Soviet intellectual life and mass culture for decades. Many elements of Stalinist propaganda and mass culture outlived terror and even Communism itself and continue to affect people even in today’s Russia.

Stalin essentially acted as the supreme editor of Soviet culture, that is, the narratives of the official discourse defining collective identities, values, and beliefs.

In no other regime in modern history, aside from Nazi Germany, did the promotion of culture (Культура/kultura) preoccupy the political leadership so much and involve such considerable expenditure.

This Cold War rationale would slow down the liberalization of Soviet cultural and educational policies for decades to come.

Many Soviet citizens, avid readers, found their windows to the West in translated literature. After Stalin’s death, a great number of works of American writers in translation were available in thousands of public libraries around the Soviet Union.

Under the impact of de-Stalinization and the cultural Thaw, many educated youngsters sought to distance themselves from the Soviet past. They mistrusted and ignored Soviet propaganda and tried to dress and behave differently, in Western fashion.

"Enlightened" apparatchiks in the Soviet Union skillfully walked the fine line between their openness to humanistic values, on the one hand, and careerism, conformity, and patriotism on the other.

The biggest obstacle in their eyes was the rigid bureaucratic apparatus that blocked innovation and change. Still, the reform-minded Communists hoped this apparatus could be repopulated with "enlightened" cadres and transformed from within.

The Soviet Union still demonstrated impressive economic growth, restoring and expanding its industrial power. In the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the appeal of the Soviet way of modernization reached its peak.

In sympathetic workplaces, in private apartments, in kitchens, people played guitars, drank, fell in love. But in their free time, they also read countless books, both those legally published and those illegally typed by samizdat (publish-ityourself ) enthusiasts.

Within the Soviet scientific community, the yearning for greater freedom from the dominant ideology and nonscientific bureaucracies coexisted with the fierce competition for and total dependence on state funding and resources.

The 1959 revolution in Cuba fuelled new hopes in Moscow that Communism still represented the wave of the future. The victory of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and other barbudos captured the imaginations of many Soviet citizens.

The usual result of peeking out from behind the iron curtain was culture shock at the first glimpse of a free, diverse, and thriving life without ideological uniformity, fear of secret police, and regimented existence.

The post-Stalin peace offensives and new limitations on militarism and military propaganda in the Soviet Union made the revival of anti-militarism and even pacifism possible in Soviet society.

For some Jews, Israel became their main temptation and dream of an alternative existence. In the war of October 1956, Israel was the target of blistering criticism in the Soviet press. Jews with strong Soviet identities denounced Israeli aggression against Egypt.

Khrushchev was trying to straddle the gap between his hatred of Stalin and his preference for Stalinist methods of administration and mobilization. He was never consistent, and he often undermined himself with rambling speeches and reckless behavior.

Khrushchev’s inconsistency in cultural policies made him more enemies than friends among the bureaucracies and influential cultural elites.

During his meetings with the Soviet intelligentsia, Khrushchev wasrambling, rude, and intolerant.

In blunt words, he told the young writers and poets that their modernist, Westernizing, and liberal bent put them on the wrong side of the Cold War divide.

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 substantiated the fears of the Soviet anti-Stalinist intelligentsia that the post-Khrushchev leadership might take the country in a neo-Stalinist direction.

The Khrushchev decade produced a new cohort of social, cultural, and political leaders, the "men and women of the 60s," who aspired to lead the Soviet Union down the path toward "socialism with a human face."

History turned a new page on Christmas Eve of 1979, as columns of Soviet motorized troops crossed the bridges hastily built over the Amu Darya River near the city of Termez and began to pull into the dark gorges between the snowy peaks of Afghanistan.

Experts on the region were not informed about the invasion in advance. Leading scholars from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Science instantly realized that the Kremlin’s old men had committed a fatal policy error.

Around the world, the impact of the sudden Soviet invasion was much greater than the shock of the similar invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The latter did not stop the détente process in Europe and gave only a brief setback to the U.S.- Soviet talks on strategic arms.

In retrospect, the invasion of Afghanistan, despite its initial military success, presents itself as one of the first signs of Soviet imperial overstretch.

Soviet political and military leaders wanted to help Anwar Sadat defeat Israel and to regain Egyptian territories. At the same time, they were certain from the start of the war that the Arabs would lose it.

After 1974, the United States seized the initiative in the Israeli-Egyptian settlement and in the next four years worked out the Camp David accords. The Soviets had already pumped tens of billions of rubles into Egypt and bitterly resented Sadat’s betrayal.

The "loss of Egypt" had a lasting psychological impact on subsequent Politburo decision making with regard to African crises.

Watergate and Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 caused another lasting trauma to Brezhnev. During the last months of Nixon’s presidency, his correspondence with the Soviet leader assumed an increasingly surreal nature.

Nixon signaled via the back channel that the two leaders had common enemies, among them Jewish groups in the United States.

Remarkably, Brezhnev never attempted to exploit Watergate for his own political purposes, as some of Nixon’s advisers feared would happen. In fact, he was the last foreign leader continuing to support Nixon without reservations.

Just as Stalin and Molotov in 1945 could not understand Churchill’s electoral defeat, Brezhnev and his advisers could not fathom how the bugging of a suite in the Watergate Building could cause the resignation of such a formidable statesman after his landslide reelection.

Just three months earlier, in May, Brezhnev had lost another détente partner. West German chancellor Willy Brandt resigned in the wake of a sex scandal and the revelation that one of his closest aides, Günter Guillaume, was a East German spy.

The Soviet military believed they confronted not only U.S. forces on NATO bases near Soviet borders, but also the nuclear forces of Great Britain and France. They also had to deploy some missiles and conventional forces against China.

The U.S.-Soviet scramble for Africa began to intensify at the same time as détente reached its peak. Intelligence services eyed each other in the remotest corners of the African continent.

A senior American diplomat traveled on an inspection mission around Africa in 1974 and found that "the United States wanted to have a full presence everywhere, as befitting the leader of the Western world, and also in particular to keep an eye on Soviet representatives."

Soviet involvement in Angola in 1975, like the previous large-scale Soviet offensive in Africa, lacked any clear strategic plan or goal. This time, however, it also suffered from a dangerous drift in the decision-making process.

Jimmy Carter’s lack of clear assumptions about the Soviet Union played as much a part in the undoing of détente as Brezhnev’s beliefs had in conceiving it.

From the Kremlin’s viewpoint, the proximity of Afghanistan to Soviet borders and Central Asia made ‘‘revolution’’ there different from otherwise similar cases in Africa.

As a former senior KGB officer recalls, he viewed Afghanistan as a Soviet sphere of interest and believed that the Soviet Union "had to do whatever possible to prevent the Americans and the CIA from installing an anti-Soviet regime there."

After the 1978 coup, Soviet-Afghan contacts quickly mushroomed via the channels of the Defense Ministry, the KGB, the Foreign Ministry, and a host of other agencies and ministries dealing with, among others, economy, trade, construction, and education.

In March 1979, a cruel wake-up call reached Moscow. Herat had rebelled against the Khalq regime, and an insurgent mob had brutally killed Soviet advisers. Taraki and Amin made desperate calls to Moscow pleading for Soviet military intervention "to save the revolution."

The Politburo, once again, was caught by surprise and was not adequately equipped to analyze this new development. The Kremlin discussions reveal with startling clarity the perils of the fictitious Brezhnev leadership in a crisis situation.

The superpower confrontation of the early 1980s had a feeling of déjà vu. The rampant arms race, covert battles between secret services around the world, and fierce psychological warfare gave the situation a resemblance to the last years of Stalin’s rule.

On November 10, 1982, Leonid Brezhnev died in his sleep. Almost immediately, the Politburo announced that 68-year-old Yuri Andropov was the new Soviet leader.

Andropov’s influence on Soviet international behavior was a bizarre mixture of grim realism and worst-case mentality, aggravated by his long association with the KGB.

His death on February 9, 1984, however, cut all his undertakings short.

His successor, another septuagenarian, Konstantin Chernenko, was a walking mummy, who suffered from severe asthma and lived on tranquilizers.

During Chernenko’s brief tenure, Ustinov and Gromyko retained a virtual monopoly in military and foreign affairs. Nostalgia for Stalinist times began to surface in Kremlin deliberations.

Ustinov sharply criticized Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization, blaming Soviet international problems on it, and proposed to change the name of Volgograd back to Stalingrad.

Total defense-related expenses, including indirect costs, as Brezhnev admitted in 1976, were around 40% of the state budget.

The huge human resources Stalin had mobilized and squandered, those millions of the collectivized peasantry, young workers, and enthusiastic party cadres, were no longer available.

Since 1985, many Western observers and Gorbachev’s closest assistants have compared Gorbachev to Nikita Khrushchev. Despite a huge difference in generational experience, education, and style, both of them, indeed, had many things in common.

Both reformers believed in the Communist system and in the major tenets of Marxism-Leninism. Both men also had great psychological potential for innovation and were willing to take responsibility for plunging into the unknown.

Gorbachev’s personality, however, was the opposite of that of the fiery Nikita. Gorbachev was a consensus builder, not a fighter.

Khrushchev was impatient; he attacked a problem like a tank attacking enemy defenses. By contrast, Gorbachev procrastinated and wove cobwebs of bureaucratic politics.

The rejection of the Stalinist bipolar worldview became the heart of Gorbachev’s "new thinking." The logical conclusion would be the renunciation of global power games and recognition the security of the Soviet Union was in part compatible with the security interests of the US.

In contrast to Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, who supervised the military-industrial complex and understood the nuts and bolts of Soviet military power, Gorbachev came into contact with nuclear issues only when he became the general secretary of the CPSU.