Archive for the ‘Russia’ Category
The Book
Red Plenty is a fictionalised history, or possibly a work of hard historical science fiction, which covers what it describes as the “fifties’ Soviet dream” but which might be better termed the Soviet sixties – the period from Khrushchev’s consolidation of power to the first crackdown on the dissidents and the intervention in Czechoslovakia. This is a big book in a Russian way – it’s always been a science-fiction prerogative to work with the vastness of space, the depth of history, and the wonder and terror of science and technology, but it’s also been fairly common that science-fiction has had a bit of a problem with people. The characters who re-fire the S-IVB main engine for translunar injection, with nothing but a survival pack of big ideas for use on arrival, tend to vanish in the cosmos. At its best, this has given the genre a disturbingly calm new perspective – chuck out your literary chintz, the rocket equation will not be fooled. At worst, well, OH NO JOHN RINGO.
Red Plenty covers a lot of big ideas, some serious hardware and even more serious software, and great swaths of the Soviet Union. But you will also need to be prepared to meet quite a lot of difficult but rewarding people, rather like the geneticist character Zoya Vaynshtayn does at the party Leonid Kantorovich’s students throw in Akademgorodok. In that sense, it has a genuinely Russian scale to it. The characters are a mixture of historical figures (as well as Kantorovich, you will spend some time in Nikita Khrushchev’s interior monologue), pure fictions, and shadow characters for some historical ones. (Emil Shaidullin roughly represents Gorbachev’s adviser Abel Aganbegyan; Vaynshtayn the historical geneticist Raissa Berg.)
So what are they up to?
Rebooting Science
Kantorovich, a central figure of the book, is remembered as the only Soviet citizen to win a Nobel Prize in economics, and the inventor of the mathematical technique of linear programming. As a character, he’s a sort of Soviet Richard Feynman – an egghead and expert dancer and ladies’ man, a collaborator on the nuclear bomb, and a lecturer so cantankerous his students make a myth of him. Politically, it’s never clear if he’s being deliberately provocative or completely naive, or perhaps whether the naivety is protective camouflage.
A major theme of the book is the re-creation of real science in the Soviet Union after the Stalinist era; biology has to start up afresh, economics has to do much the same, and everyone is working in a large degree of ignorance about the history of their fields. Some things simply can’t be restarted – as Spufford points out, despite all the compulsory Marxism-Leninism, even genetics hadn’t been erased as thoroughly as independent Marxist thought, and nobody in charge was willing to even think of opening that particular can of worms. On the other hand, the re-opening of economics as a field of study led to what the biologists would have called an adaptive radiation. Pioneers from engineering, maths, biology and physics began to lay spores in the new territory.
Comrades, let’s optimise!
The new ecosystem was known as cybernetics, which was given a wider meaning than the same word was in the West. Kantorovich’s significance in this is that his work provided both a theoretical framework and a critical technology – if the problem was to allocate the Soviet Union’s economic resources optimally, could it be possible to solve this by considering the economy as a huge system of linear production functions, and then optimising the lot? The idea had been tried before, in the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s, although without the same mathematical tools.
This is one of those events whose significance has changed a great deal over time. The question was whether it was possible for a planned economy to achieve an optimal allocation of resources. The socialists thought so; their critics held that it was impossible, and elaborated a set of criteria for optimal allocation very similar to the ones that are familiar as the standard assumptions in the economic theory of the firm in perfect competition. These days, it’s often presented as if this was a knockout argument. From the firm in perfect competition, we hop to Hayek’s idea that a market economy is better at making use of dispersed, implicit knowledge. Basta. We won.
The socialists weren’t without intellectual originality. In fact, they did actually formulate a mathematical rebuttal to the firm in perfect competition – the Lange model, which demonstrated that optimal allocation was a possibility in theory. The Hayekian critique wasn’t considered that great at the time – it was thought a much better point that the barrier to effective planning was a practical one, not a fundamental one. And even then, it was well known that the standard assumptions don’t, actually, describe any known economy. It would simply be impossible to process all the data with the technology available. Even with the new tools of linear optimisation, who was going to do all those sums, especially as the process is an iterative rather than a formal one? Stalin and Hitler had their own way of solving these arguments – no man, no problem – and the whole thing ended up moot for some time.
Computers: a technical fix
But if it had been impossible to run the numbers with pen and paper in 1920, or with Hollerith machines and input-output tables in 1940, what about computers in 1960? Computers could blast through millions of iterations for hundreds of thousands of production processes in tens of thousands of supply chains; computers were only likely to get better at it, too. Red Plenty is about the moment when it seemed that the new territory of cybernetics was going to give rise to a synthesis between mathematics, market-socialist thinking, and computing that would replace GOSPLAN and deliver Economics II: True Communism.
After all, by the mid-60s it was known that the enormous system of equations could be broken down into its components, providing that the constraints in each sub-system were consistent with the others. If each production unit had its own computer, and the computers in each region or functional organisation were networked, and then the networks were….were internetworked? In fact, the military was already using big computer networks for its command-and-control systems, borrowing a lot of ideas from the US Air Force’s SAGE; by 1964, there were plans for a huge national timesharing computer network, for both military and civilian use, as a horizontal system cutting across all the ministries and organisations. Every town would get a data centre.
The Economics Fairy Strikes Again
But, of course, it didn’t happen. There’s a good paper on the fate of the Soviet internetworkers here; Spufford has a fascinating document on the end of indigenous general-purpose computer development in the USSR here. Eventually, during the 1970s, it became increasingly obvious that the Soviet economy was not going to catch up with and outstrip anyone, let alone the United States, and the Austrian economists were retroactively crowned as having obviously been right all along, and given their own chance to fail. Spufford frames the story as a Russian fairytale; perhaps we can say that in fact, economics is the fairytale, or rather the fairy. Successive groups of intellectuals have fought their way through the stacks of books, past the ideological monsters, and eventually reached the fairy’s grotto, to be granted their greatest wish. And it’s always the same one – a chance to fail.
Why did the Soviet economists fail? Red Plenty gives a spectacular sweep through the Soviet economy as it actually was; from the workings of GOSPLAN, to the management of a viscose factory, to the world of semi-criminal side payments that actually handled the problems of day-to-day survival. In the 1990s, the descendants of one half of the socialist calculation debate swept into Russia as advisers paid by the Thatcher Foundation. Arriving on the fairy’s magic cloud, they knew little of how the Soviet economy worked in practice, and duly got their opportunity to fail. The GOSPLAN officials of the 60s were reliant on data that was both completely unreliable, being the product of political bargaining more than anything else, and typically slightly less than a year out of date. And the market socialists were just as reliant on the management of Soviet industry for the production cost data they needed to make sure all those budget constraints really were consistent.
That’s a technical explanation. But there are others available. Once communism was achieved the state was meant to wither away, and not many of the people in charge of it were at all keen on this as a pension plan. Without the power to intervene in the economy, what was the point of the Party, again? Also, what was that stuff about letting people connect computers to the telephone network and pass messages from factory to factory? Where will it end? The central government, the Politburo, GOSPLAN, STAVKA – they would never accept it.
Another, more radical, is that the eventual promise of Red Plenty was to render not so much the top of the pyramid, but the middle management, redundant. The rapid industrialisation had created a new management class who had every intention of getting rich and staying that way. (This was the Yugoslavs’ take on the Soviet Union – the new class had simply taken over from the capitalists.) What would happen to their bonuses, and their prerogative to control the planners by telling them what they wanted to hear?
And yet another is that the whole project was flawed. Even if it was possible to discern the economy’s underlying cost-structure, write the software, and optimise the whole thing, how would this system deal with dynamic economics? How would it allocate investment? How would it cope with technological change? It’s no help to point out that, in fact, a lot of the questions are nowhere near being solved in any economics.
Soviet History
One view of the USSR’s history is a succession of escape attempts. The NEP of the mid-20s, Nikolai Voznezhensky’s term at GOSPLAN in the 1940s, the Soviet 60s. Each saw a real effort to get away from a political economy which was in many ways a wild caricature of the Industrial Revolution, screwing down the labour share of income in order to boost capital investment and hence industrial output, answering any protest against this with the pistol of the state. As well as trying new economic ideas, they also saw surges of creativity in other fields. They were all crushed.
Arguably, you could say the same thing about perestroika. The people who signed the Alma-Ata protocol to arrange the end of the Soviet Union and the dismissal of Gorbachev were not, in fact, heroic dissidents, but rather career communist bureaucrats, some of whom went on to become their own little Stalins. Spufford says in the endnotes to Red Plenty that part of the book’s aim is a prehistory of perestroika – one view of the characters is that many of them are developing into the people who will eventually transform the country in the 1980s. Green politics was an important strand in the great dissident wave, right across the USSR and Central Europe; Zoya Vaynshteyn’s genetic research, which turns up some very unpleasant facts, is a case in point. Valentin, the programmer and cadre, is going to retain his self-image as a bohemian hacker into the future. Another Party figure in the book is the man who refuses to get used to violence, which will also turn out to be important in 1989.
Anyway, go read the damn book.
I have some problems with “10:10”, the latest timebound big media campaign. The first one is symbols and aesthetics. They are handing out tags made of aluminium alloy cut out of a retired B737 down at Hurn. This is meant to be recycling, and wonderfully symbolic.
No. A superbly engineered artefact has been reduced to trinkets that will very likely go into landfill. Couldn’t they have made the bits into wind turbine blades, or solar stoves, or bicycle frames if you must, or even just wiggly tin roofing? Or something, at least? Instead, it’s a poster example of what Bill McKibben calls “downcycling”. And, of course, it’s the wrong bloody problem anyway; we could shut down aviation tomorrow and not meet the 10:10 goal, but lose fast international travel anywhere but a smallish chunk of Western Europe.
Another example; the climate campers apparently held a course on running a 12v power supply for a sound system, driven by someone pedalling. Well…engineering FAIL. If the only possible source of power is pedalling a bloody bike, wouldn’t it be better to keep the bike and the calories for transport? Would a stereo be a high priority then? Wouldn’t it be better to use the wind, the water, or the fire with a Sterling engine? In context, solar PV would be way out of the question. (I was pretty impressed by the edit your own sousveillance vids one, though.)
Not so sure about content, either. The Guardian is of course a biased source here; but they only found one person who wanted to build anything. An architect, of course. The front page coverage made me want to give up and buy a huge car; here’s blonde Daisy, 16 and mugging for 14, suggesting we “grow veg on the balcony”. Darling. Couldn’t they have found Keisha-Tigrette from Tottenham who wants to KILL OIL IN THE EAR? I think they probably couldn’t, and we’ll get to that later.
As with most British media green pushes, there’s little sign of any interest in anything physical or lasting. Not an inch of rockwool. Everything is about changing your behaviour, and specifically micro-behaviour – what you buy, or turning off lights, not how you work or where you live or how society works. Worse, it’s a demand for entirely free-floating behavioural change – nobody seems to be suggesting any way of monitoring or measuring the change, or any incentives. This isn’t going to work. And, again, it’s all consumer guff.
The problem with consumer guff is that it’s a limited way of approaching the problem. It’s arguable whether or not investment is the defining value in the macro-economy – it’s pretty clear that it’s crucial to the climate/energy position. It is defined by the stuff we build. And further, without any mechanism to keep up to it, nothing is more evanescent than promises to do better. It doesn’t even take backsliding to break them; what if you lose your job, and have to move somewhere where you need to commute 40 miles to work? Alas poor 10% saved by being nicer.
It’s tough, however, to suck insulation out of the walls; this is one of the reasons I’m keen on retrofits as an alternative to winter fuel payments. The Tories can’t take them away once they’re done.
My third problem is this: where is the optimism? Everyone’s talking about demog-friendly nostalgia for rationing that the demographic in question doesn’t remember. That’s not a sacrifice; woodbines, box at the Empire, sixpence, yadda yadda. Nobody is saying: Let’s do BETTER this time. Let’s build something BIGGER and SHINY and DRAMATIC and FANTASTIC and OUTRAGEOUS that doesn’t just meet a 10% target but SMASHES it.
Where is the future in all this? What kind of a future is it? How are we meant to be full of confidence and aggression without it?
Actually there are some other options, chiefly RAGE and HATRED. No sign of them, either; but identifying an enemy is the oldest motivator in the book. There’s no sign of a stinking mob hunting British Gas fatcats or an army of Rosie the Riveters basting Vladimir Putin like a turkey with their sealant guns. Why the hell not? We have enemies – why not make the most of them. I bet Keisha would be delighted to have King Abdullah and the CEO of Exxon burned in effigy, or perhaps just burned…after the block gets superinsulated.
Unfortunately, we’re relying on self-righteousness as the driving emotion; not optimism (shorthand: lust), not greed, not rage, not hatred. Mind you, it is clearly an infinitely renewable resource, just like stupidity.
And while I’m on the point, where are the workers in this? Who’s monitoring what exactly the council, or the diddly-dee semi-privatised thingy organisation, does when they refurbish the estate? Does anyone care about the “fuel poor” if they can’t offer them a cash handout just before the elections?
There is, actually, a powerful response to some of this. That is: 10:10 looks a bit like a vacuous PR stunt because it’s a PR stunt. The aim is to influence the deliberatiwoos in Copenhagen. Superistical. Das ist gut so. But this done, treaty signed, etc, we’ve got to go implement. With the North Sea gas running down, we’ve got to do that quicksmart anyway.
So, you ask, where are my positive proposals? The D-word? Well, I’m interested to hear what anyone else thinks about a campaign for an answer to climate and energy issues that points forward, that leans left, and that isn’t based on whose-kid-are-you media bullshit. I’m planning to squirt sealant into every corner of my own place before this winter, too.
Whilst I’m on the VBeat, it’s probably about time for an update on the extradition hearings. Here’s the AP wire story on the last court appearance on the 4th of November. Bout’s lawyer is now pursuing a defence based on challenging the legality of extradition, after the main man apparently gave up stalling tactics. The first warrant for his arrest is apparently controversial because it was undated; the prosecution claims it was irrelevant because the state withdrew it and issued another.
Alternatively, here’s Russian state TV’s version. It’s unsurprisingly more sympathetic, but it provides a lot more detail. Specifically, I reckon the first document they mention as not being a request for extradition was actually a “request for legal assistance”. Everyone’s going to be back in court on the 18th of November, and the actual extradition hearing is set for the 22nd-24th of December.
Meanwhile, you might want to check out Russia Today‘s wolf webcams. I’m not sure if that’s meant to be a subtle propaganda exercise or whether it’s just because, well, webcams! with wolves! Man is the wolf to man, famously, so you might also want to check out the libertarian case for Viktor Bout. It had to happen.
Ooh, more Iran-war nonsense, this time from none other than mouthpieceful Russia Today, via this thread. There seems to be a meme floating around that there was a war between Russia and Georgia because the Russians intervened to prevent the Americans using Georgian airbases to attack Iran (obviously, a war with Iran is the universal explicator for everything). Quote:
Shortly after that, a phone call came from a college friend who had just come back from Kandahar in Afghanistan, where he had seen American battle tanks being unloaded from a Ukrainian-registered Antonov-124 “Ruslan”, the heaviest and largest cargo airplane in the world. The friend asked if I had any idea what tanks would be good for in Afghanistan, and I said I didn’t. It’s an established fact from the Soviet war in Afghanistan that tanks are no good for most of the country’s mountainous territory. They are good for flatlands, and the main body of flat land in the region is right across the border in Iran.
Later in August there was another bit of unofficial information from a Russian military source: more than a thousand American tanks and armored vehicles had been shipped to Eastern Afghanistan by Ukrainian “Ruslans” flying in three to five shipments a day, and more flights were expected.
Wrong! For a start, the Canadian and Danish armies brought their Leopard 2 tanks to Afghanistan. But far more importantly; there are 26 active An-124s in the world (not counting ones operated by the Russian air force). You could load, at the very most, two M1A1 Abrams tanks in one plane. To move a thousand tanks – if the US Army has that many spare, which sounds unlikely – you’d therefore need 500 flights, or 19 sorties for the complete available fleet.
You couldn’t get the complete fleet anyway, as it has regular contractual commitments; if you could round up 12 An-124s for the job…well, with 122 tonnes of cargo, the plane has a still air range of 2,335 miles. This means it will need to make multiple stops between Kabul and anywhere in the US; at a cruising speed of 490mph, each hop would be about 4h 45mins long, so at least a 13 hour haul, which implies you’re only going to get one trip every two days. So that would be about 83 days’ work. At a cost of about $20,000 an hour that’s $478 million in air chartering alone.
So this is evidently drivel. But why would Russia Today be pushing it? Perhaps this story in Le Monde might tell us something. Despite all the buffoonery, the Russian government has decided not to break off an agreement permitting NATO to send supplies through Russia to Afghanistan, and will further be providing 4 Mi-8 helicopters for EUFOR in Chad. Now that it’s all out of the papers, both parties are paying the price for their harder statements by trimming back their actions. Although, you have to wonder what Sarko offered or threatened to get them out of Poti.
Douglas Farah reckons the Russians are trying to press the US State Department to press for Viktor Bout’s release, or rather his extradition to Russia, which would amount to the same thing. It’s an interesting suggestion, although usual caveats apply to a story sourced to Bill “WMD to Syria!!” Gertz. I can imagine them pitching it as a sort of grown-ups’ conspiracy, driven by the prospect of sensational revelations.
Just how sensational might be judged by this fine piece of work by the South African Mail & Guardian on the Khalid Rashid case, from back in 2006 (I blogged). Meanwhile, everyone’s worried about the fact Bout was offering portable SAMs for sale. I’m not at all surprised that he could source them; hell, he had in the past sold complete attack helicopters. Further, the weapons used in an attempt to bring down an Israeli Boeing 757-300 in Kenya originated in Bulgaria via Somalia, at a period when Irbis Air Co was sending off several flights a day from the UAE to northern Somalia and to ports on the Yemeni coast.
The Economist has a good story on the whole affair; they take the line that Russia has decided to be more helpful on the arms trade, pointing to the arrest of Monzer al-Kassar and the extradition of Yar Klein. That can await early confirmation, as far as I’m concerned. The Economist also points out that it’s worrying that he apparently thought he could still use Bulgaria and Romania as he did in the late 90s, now they’ve joined the EU; some interesting reports are coming out of Romania, for example here. And if anyone could translate this one I’d be very much obliged.
In other news, Bout’s brother Sergei, founder of CET Aviation in Malabo back in the 90s, appeared on Russian radio protesting Viktor’s innocence and asking “How could the American authorities behave in such an unprincipled way?”. He must be the last man on earth who couldn’t answer that one.
Meanwhile, z-list wingnut barkie and professional fuckwit Gateway Pundit tries to sneak in on the glory as part of a smear. Glad I’m not you. (In fact, he has given me the germ of an interesting idea. More soon.)
Russian air force out again, in some strength; and exercising a whole range of types, including the White Swan…sorry…Tu-160 BLACKJACK, BEAR, BACKFIRE, and MiG31 and Su27 fighters into the bargain, to say nothing of jet tankers. For people who aren’t making a political point, they certainly look like it.
Meanwhile, the French Air Force has deployed a flight of Mirage 2000 fighters to Iceland under the NATO agreement; obviously no connection there.
Not just Alissa this time; the Il-78 tankers, A-50 AWACSki, Bears and Backfires got to come out and play with the entire Russian navy. I think they’re trying to make some sort of point.
It hasn’t been in the papers much since the summer, but did you know that the Russian air force has been around the North Sea a hell of a lot lately? Between October and December, I’m aware of at least five visits to the UK or Norwegian ADIZ (Air Defence Identification Zone). Not just that, but the aircraft involved have included not just the usual Tu-95 Bear-D reconnaissance planes but also Tu-160 strategic bombers, known as “Alissa” (White Swan) in Russia and Blackjack to NATO.
It’s an old and somewhat sick tradition that NORAD issues a press release about tracking Santa Claus on Christmas night, but this Christmas the RAF Northern QRA was out and it certainly wasn’t Santa they were after, but a group of Blackjacks. They have also been spreading the irritation around; in October, the first Blackjack flight came down the North Sea further than ever before, being successively watched by the Norwegians, the RAF, the Danes and eventually Dutch F-16s as the aircraft headed for the northwestern tip of Holland before turning back, being escorted back up the North Sea by the same RAF QRA flight. It is assumed that this was meant to impress the North Atlantic Council, which met in Holland the same day.
On Christmas night, they ran into Danish airspace and then turned back, then being intercepted by the RAF. (You can see an intercept from the Bear here.)
Most of the RAF sorties also involve a quick-reaction alert VC10 tanker, provided by 101 Squadron at RAF Brize Norton. As well as being extremely noisy, this points up yet another procurement fiasco, one that is timed to go off any minute now. The contracts between the Ministry of Defence and the AirTanker consortium to provide the RAF’s new Airbus A330 tanker/transport planes have been delayed for many months; the last known data was December 2007, which we can safely conclude is “no longer operative”.
But the real shocker in here is that the procurement process for the tankers has been going on since 1996. Back then the RAF was offered 24 converted A310s, which could have been delivered very speedily as the Airbus rework line at Finkenwerder in Germany was soon to start delivering identical aircraft for Germany and Canada – it would have been a matter of adding 24 to the production run. However, the scheme was held up by a hunt for ways of getting the cost off the books; this was the mid-90s heyday of Sir Steve “Railtrack” Robson’s fancy public financing, after all.
So the eventual outcome, years later, is that the RAF is meant to get 14 A330s, or rather, the right to have a percentage of the 14 available at any time and the rest with a notice period. The aircraft are to be owned by the private sector partners, who are meant to be able to charter them out to the holiday business when not required. Of course, it’s ridiculous; who would sign a contract giving the government the right to grab your assets at any time and take them into combat? Would the aircraft be on the civilian or military register? What about insurance – would the partners be able to treat them as civil aircraft? Who will insure the partners against the RAF losing them? Who will insure the RAF against the partners losing them? Who will fly them – civilians? RAF personnel? Eventually they decided that the crews would be reservists, but this obviously hasn’t reassured the partners.
And the kicker? Well, if the deal falls through, the government is vaguely thinking of running the VC10s on to 2020, at which point they will be 60 years old. They are already half the age of the squadron that operates them and older than most of the crews. There is, however, an ugly rumour that the airframes won’t take it; several other aircraft built by Vickers in the 1950s and 60s were retired early due to fatigue cracking.
Apparently, the Red Army in Afghanistan called the kind of raid it calls a “zachistka” in Chechnya a “prichyoska” or haircut. “An unnecessarily brutal cordon-and-search operation, sir, and something for the weekend?”
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