Volume V, Part 5, George Papadopoulos

 

Part 5 of Volume V, pages 464-526 (62 pages) concerns George Papadopoulos, the minor advisor whose unguarded comments about his contacts with the Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud started the FBI investigation in the first place.  George Papadopoulos was a young up-and-comer (29 at the age of the campaign) who appears to have had some ties in Europe, particularly Greece (as his name suggests, Papadopoulos is Greek-American and appears to have active ties to his ancestral country).  He ended up marrying one of his contacts -- an Italian attorney who (for what it is worth) also knew Mifsud (p 470).  

He also appears to have been young and inexperienced, but highly ambitious, and eager to have a larger role and greater influence than he had the experience to handle. This made him vulnerable to getting in over his head and being manipulated by more experienced operators.  The Committee certainly did not find that Papadopoulos every wittingly served Russians interests, but they regarded him as a useful idiot for the Russians (p. 467).  He appears to have wanted to be the campaign conduit for various high-ranking foreign contacts, conveying information between his contacts and the campaign, but never putting the parties into direct contact, lest he undermine his own importance.  The Committee did not have to opportunity to interview Papadopoulos or many of his foreign contacts directly, but they did have access to his e-mails and also interviewed his contacts with the campaign.

George Papadopoulos

Papadopoulos reported to Sam Clovis, Team Trump's senior policy advisor.  He got the job largely because Team Trump had a dearth of policy advisors and could not afford to be too demanding.  In March, 2016, about the time he joined Team Trump, Papadopoulos met Joseph Mifsud, a British-Maltese professor believed to have significant ties to the Russian government and Russian intelligence services.  Mifsud seemed initially uninterested in Papadopoulos until he learned that the later was a member of the Trump campaign, at which point he became interested.  Mifsud introduce Papadopoulos to Olga Polonskaya, a Russian national whose exact role the Committee was unable to determine.  Mifsud, however, appears to have greatly exaggerated Polonskaya's role and led Papadopoulos to believe that she was Putin's niece.  She appears to have served as an intermediary between the two men.  In April, Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to another intermediary -- Ivan Timofeev, Director of Programs at the Russian International Affairs Council (whatever that is, p. 481).  Mifsud also sought to arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin, which Papadopoulos eagerly pitched to the Trump Campaign, but was regularly rebuffed.

On April 26, 2016, after returning from a conference in Moscow, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, in the form of "thousands" of e-mails. When Papadopoulos asked Mifsud how he knew, Mifsud answered, "They told me."

What are we to make of that?  First, this was just two weeks after Fancy Bear's first breach of the DNC server.  This would have been quite recent news at the time.*  At this time neither Papadopoulos nor any other member of the Trump campaign (with the possible exception of Manafort) knew about the DNC or Podesta hacks.  They did know about the deleted e-mails from Hillary's server. Since Mifsud did not specify which e-mails, it seems most likely that Papadopoulos assumed that he was referring to the deleted e-mails and not the suspected hack. Indeed, it is not even clear that Mifsud knew the source of the e-mails.  It seems mind-boggling to think that the Russians would have let a foreigner in on such sensitive information.  

Second, this looks very much like an attempt to set up the kind of back channel of communications that so many people suspected. A foreign national with ties to Russian intelligence is reaching out to a low-level campaign staffer operating outside the US with highly sensitive information.  Indeed, Mifsud even offered to be the campaign's liaison to Europe and/or Russia (p. 495).  While it is far from clear what is going on here, it certainly looks like an attempt to set up a back channel of clandestine communication that would be too obscure to attract attention.  Third, it that was what was being attempted, it failed.  And fourth, if this was an attempt that failed, it seems odd that no further attempt was made to set up a back channel.  Yet there is no evidence of any further such attempt.**

Sam Clovis

Interestingly, if this was a failed attempt to set up a back channel of communications, it appears to have failed for two reasons.  One is that Papadopoulos does not appear ever to have informed the campaign of the lead he received.  The other is that the campaign in general, and Paul Manafort in particular, rebuffed all attempts to set up a meeting with Putin.

Famously, Papadopoulos did tell the Australian Ambassador to Britain about this communication.  (Meeting described in tedious detail, with about three paragraphs redacted).  It was this conversation that ultimately led to the investigation.  Papadopoulos also continued to attempt, unsuccessfully, to set up a meeting between Russian leadership and the Trump campaign. He also mentioned the emails to the Greek Foreign Minister who (according to Papadopoulos) seemed strangely unsurprised, as if he already knew (pp. 497-498).  The Committee found no evidence that Papadopoulos ever passed on this information to the campaign (p. 498).

This seems very strange.  It fairly boggles the mind that Papadopoulos would tell two foreign diplomats about the extraordinary tip, yet never pass the news on to his superiors in the campaign.  Yet no such evidence was ever found.  No e-mails or texts ever conveyed this information to the campaign.  Granted, Papadopoulos may have recognized that such sensitive materials should not be committed to writing.  (And yet he blurted them out to two foreign diplomats?).  But no one with the campaign appears to remember such a conversation either.  And yes, granted, campaign members had motives to lie.  But remember the danger of the conspiratorial mindset.  If there is evidence of such communications, that is proof that they took place.  If there is not evidence, that shows how well it was hidden.  That way lies madness.  The fact that nothing -- for better or worse -- ever came of such an imagined communication, is strong reason to believe they never took place.***

Manafort in particular seems to have opposed any meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government.  This appears to be a pattern.  It was Manafort who warned the Trump campaign not to contact Wikileaks directly, but to go through Roger Stone.  It was Manafort who warned Junior and Jared not to expect too much to come of the meeting with Russians.  And now Manafort is working to quash any effort by Papadopoulos to set up a meeting with the Russians.  Given that even as he was doing these things, Manafort was also secretly sending campaign date to a Russian spy, it seems safe to assume that he did not have any legal or moral objections to any of these things.  What is going on here?

I can see two possible explanations.  One is that Manafort was loyal to the campaign, even if he was not loyal to his country, and believed that Russian contacts were best left to a professional, like himself, and that involving amateurs was dangerous.  The other was that he was pursuing his own, self-serving agenda and feared being found out if the campaign opened any other Russia contacts.  I have no idea which is more plausible.

Nothing else in the report seems significant.  After Manafort departed, the campaign seems to have seen Papadopoulos as a dangerous loose cannon and told him not to make public statements without clearing them first.  Pages 509-511 are mostly redacted, but are a rare case in which it is easy to tell what is under the redaction. This section appears to be about the conversation with an FBI informant that was detailed in the Inspector General's Report.  Finally, the section on Papadopoulos (pp. 524-526) addresses counter-intelligence concerns about his activities.  The Committee clearly has such concerns.  However, those concerns are redacted, except for one paragraph addressing Papadopoulos' lies to the FBI and one that Mifsud departed the US on February 11, 2017 and has not returned.

NEXT:  Carter Page

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*Recall also that Russia's civilian intelligence service, a/k/a Cozy Bear, had broken into the DNC server months earlier, but never used the information to sway the campaign.

**Except, of course, for Paul Manafort secretly channeling polling data and perhaps other information to a Russian spy, and the campaign encouraging Roger Stone to pass on information about Wikileaks.

***At one point Papadopoulos apparently told the FBI that he told Clovis about the e-mails and Clovis was "upset."   However, he also said he was not sure the memory was accurate.  (P. 486, footnote 3159.  Main text giving context to the footnote is redacted).

Some Final Thoughts on Opposition to Aiding Ukraine and the Federal Budget

So, as the House gears up for a budget fight and government shutdown, this seems like a good time to raise the issue of budget wars in general an opposition to aid to Ukraine in particular.  The House Freedom Caucus has put out a statement of extremely vague demands, most of which have nothing in particular to do with the budget.  The Freedom Caucus wants:

1. Tougher border measures;
2. An end to "weaponization" of the Justice Department;
3. An end to "woke" military policies;
4. No "blank check" in military aid to Ukrain
5. Funding in separate bills, rather than one omnibus bill..

Look, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, none of these are, in any meaningful way, budget cuts.  Tougher border measures means spending more, not less.  Defunding investigations of Donald Trump and whatever the Freedom Caucus deems "woke" in the military are sums so miniscule that they scarcely even count as cuts.  Ending aid to Ukraine (which the statement hints at but does not actually call for) would be a cut spending, but not a significant one.  And separate bills might give more opportunities for cuts, but so far the Freedom Caucus does not appear to have offered specifics that would make any difference.  COVID funding is also a favorite, but so far the best Republicans can offer in terms of real cuts is general, across the board spending cuts, with the exception of a few favored programs.

In other words, the government shutdown is not, in fact, about the budget.  Government shutdown is a convenient hostage for the Freedom Caucus to use in order to demand and end to a few select programs that it has ideological objections to, in the guise of budgetary concerns.

And just to be clear, there is nothing wrong or hypocritical with having ideological objections to any particular government program.  I strongly disagree with the Freedom Caucus in their ideological objections, but I do not see a problem with ideological objections per se.  What is hypocritical is to phrase objections to a very narrow and specific sub-section of government spending in terms of budget cutting.  The fact is that cutting out everything anyone sees ad ideologically objectionable is not going to make even a dent in the total deficit.  Any serious attempt to reduce spending is going to mean cutting programs that people like.  

I can only assume that the Republican Party has had a libertarian branch opposed to all government spending in blanket terms for so long that many Republicans only know how to express their opposition to a government program in terms of blanket opposition to spending, rather than expressing their particular ideological concerns to a particular item.

All of which lead to the question of military aid to Ukraine.  Again, I get that Republicans tend to express their opposition in terms of a blanket opposition to spending, but once again, we are not going to make even minimal impact on the budget deficit by ending military aid to Ukraine.  That is a sign that the real objection is ideological and not budgetary.

So what is the ideological objection?  I will assume that some really do fear WWIII and some really do want Russia to win.  But my guess is that this is not the primary issue for most, and certainly not for the base, which also broadly opposes such aid.

My guess is that the primary reason so many Republicans oppose aid to Ukraine is a longstanding opposition to any foreign aid of any kind whatever.  Any underlying that appears to be a belief that spending US taxpayer money on people who are not US taxpayer is a kind of theft.  Keep in mind here that spending money in ways that harm non-citizens, i.e., wars, such as absurd proposals to invade Mexico, is not seen as theft, on the assumption that any harm to non-citizens is done in order to advance the interests of US citizens.  But the thought that anything could benefit both non-citizens and US citizens (or at least interests) is unthinkable.

And, I will add, that this outlook closely matches Trump's general approach to foreign policy, which assumes that the US should not have allies because having allies means taking actions for the benefit of other countries, and not solely for the US. And that it is this outlook, rather than a general opposition to war in general, that underlies the long-term rightwing tradition of isolationism.

The Other Reason Republicans Have it out for Hunter Biden

 It's simple, really.  It is a warning to any Democrat who dares to seek the presidency that that if you go after an office that Republicans regard as theirs by right, they won't just bring the full weight of the Great Right Wing Noise Machine down on you.

They're coming after your children, too.

Volume V, Part 4, Trump Tower, Moscow

 

Remember the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on contacts between the Trump Campaign and Russia?  Part 4 deals with attempts to build a Trump Towner in Moscow and takes up 55 pages, from 407 to 462. As always, reality is never as juicy as your imagination, but some things in the report are suggestive.

Michael Cohen had no role in the campaign, but was responsible for negotiating the building of a Trump Tower in Moscow.  (The Mueller team indicted him for lying to them about it, but not for any action in connection with the negotiations).  

The Trump Organization had been attempting to build a Trump Tower in Moscow for decades and never gotten anywhere.  In September, 2015, about three months after Trump announced his run for President, and shortly after Cohen attempted to set up a Trump-Putin meeting at the United Nations, Cohen received two offers, with another materializing soon after.  The first was from Felix Sater, a decidedly sleazy character who nonetheless could not be prosecuted because he was an FBI informant and was able to give information on all manner of sinister activities, including cyber crime, al-Qaeda, Russian organized crime, and the GRU, i.e., the Russian Military Intelligence, which was behind the hack and leak operation.  (Two pages redacted).  Sater also had a business partner suspect of human trafficking (one page redacted).  He was also a longtime business associate of Donald Trump.

The second offer came from Georgi Rtskhiladze (I have no idea how to pronounce that!), a Georgian businessman and longtime Trump associate.  A third offer came in November, 2015 from Dmitry Klokov, a Russian weight lifter with no real business ties, who nonetheless attempted to broker a meeting between Trump and Putin.  Nothing came of the attempt.  There is not proof that these offers were related to Trump's announcement, or Cohen's attempt to arrange a meeting, but Cohen acknowledged that he had never before received two offers for the same building in the same location at (about) the same time (p. 422).

Cohen decided to go with Sater.  As always, Volume V goes over their negotiations in excruciating detail. The agreement was to require the Russian developer to finance and build the tower, while the Trump Organization would receive fees and payments for the Trump brand.  Many people have commented that that smacks of a sweetheart deal, giving Trump all the advantages and none of the risks.  The tower required approval from the Moscow city government, and probably from the Kremlin. The parties signed a Letter of Intent in October, 2015. Cohen reported that Sater told him that Putin was "interested" in the project, and that the prospective deal may have influenced Trump's glowing talk about better relations with Russia (pp. 430-431).  Trump also called his campaign "the greatest infomercial in the history of politics," suggesting that he saw his run for President primarily as publicity for his business ventures.  Sater, by contrast, said that he thought Trump could win and that Putin could sway the election for him with an endorsement (p. 432).  

Dmitry Peskov

By the beginning of 2016, Cohen started becoming frustrated with the slow pace of the project.  Difficulty in getting approval from the Kremlin appeared to be a holdup, so Cohen attempted to reach out to the Kremlin.  Further delay and confusion followed because the Kremlin is, of course, an immense, bureaucratic organization that Cohen had no experience in navigating.  Nonetheless, Cohen was eventually directed to the office of Dmitry Peskov, Putin's press secretary, and spoke to Peskov's chief of staff, Elena Poliakova. Cohen found Poliakova to be highly professional, competent, and extremely well informed.  She clearly knew about the deal and discussed the project in detail, including area, size, and square footage.  (p. 444).  Cohen commented that she had done her homework, and he wished that some Trump Organization assistants were as well-prepared.  Sater continued to attempt to set up a meeting between Cohen and Putin.

Efforts continued through June, but after the Republican Convention in July, 2016, it became that the project created too much appearance of conflict for a presidential candidate.  Negotiations ceased.

So, what are we to make of that?  Well, after Trump Tower Moscow had languished for years, if not decades, within three months after Trump announcing his run for President and even less time after Cohen attempted to set a meeting with Putin, two essentially risk-free offers came in, a most unusual circumstance.  Nothing is proven here, but it is suggestive.  Trump's eager praise of Putin came at a time he planning a Trump Tower in Moscow and appears to have seen his presidential campaign as little more than a public relations campaign for the tower.  There were initial holdups in approval by the Kremlin, suggesting that the Kremlin may not have been aware of the project, or the knowledge may not have worked its way up the hierarchy.  However, when Cohen finally got an inside line to a Kremlin bigwig's chief of staff, he found her to be extremely well-informed, suggesting that the Kremlin knew a whole lot more than it was letting on, and that knowledge of the project had made its way up to the highest levels.*

It all feels a bit unsettling, but without access to the Russian side of events, there is no way to know.  

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*This is not to suggest that Peskov or other bigwigs were familiar with the same level of detail.  One of the jobs of chiefs of staff is to know details so the boss can focus on the big picture.

All Right, I'll Address the Age Issue

 So, is Joe Biden too old to be President?  Should he step aside and let somebody younger take over?

It's a tough call. I do think the concern is legitimate.  I also think there are things he can do to reassure people that he is still all there, like get out more. He should not give formal speeches, which can be dismissed as just reading off the teleprompter, but should do more informal, give-and-take events that clearly demonstrate thinking on his feet.  He should not focus on a single dramatic event to change that narrative.  That doesn't work.  What does work is the slow drip, drip, drip of being regularly seen in public and showing he can think on his feet.

This is not without risk.  Biden walks like an old man, and that creates an impression.  And it is really not possible to avoid doing something -- anything -- that can be shown out of context.  But above all else, even if Biden convinces people he is able to handle being President now, there is no guarantee that he will still be up to the job through the end of 2028.  The government can run itself reasonably well without leadership at the top -- the Reagan and Trump Administrations both demonstrate that -- but leadership at the top really is useful, especially in a crisis.

But here is the real deciding factor for me.  I might favor running a new candidate if I thought it would matter. But it won't.  I 100% guarantee, it does not matter who the candidate is, any Democratic candidate will immediately walk straight into the crosshairs of the Right Wing Noise Machine and become the worst person who ever lived, and definitely the worst possible candidate.  Don't forget that Democrats picked Biden in 2020 because he was the Won't Freak Out MAGA candidate.  It took a while, but MAGA started freaking out soon enough.  

Democrats need to learn that and learn it now.  Stop focusing on the candidate and start figuring out how to deal with the Great Right Wing Noise Machine.  Because until you learn a strategy for that, you are operating at a hopeless disadvantage, regardless of candidate.

Can Invading Neighbors Be a Neutral Principle?

Politics makes for some strange bedfellows, and right now they are never so strange as in foreign policy.  What does it mean when people like me find ourselves on the same side a deranged warmonger like John Bolton warning about Trump's general lawlessness?  Or agreeing with the ultra-MAGA Madison Cawthorn when he posts the anti-war tweet on the side.  

And what happens when right wingers start echoing our distrust of the FBI, the criminal justice system, the intelligence agencies and surveillance?  Are we just being hypocrites in defending these things?  Is it just a matter of whose ox is being gored?  And I suppose my answer is two-fold.  First of all, if you ever want to advance to cause of civil liberties, violate the rights of a right-winger.  Suddenly you will see a mass outpouring of civil libertarian sentiment.  The other is that we are going to have to hold to contradictory notions in our heads.  First of all, our intelligence/ surveillance/law enforcement establishment should not be trusted and should be kept on a tight leash to protect everyone's liberties, right wingers included.  And second, our institutions, flawed as they are, are still much preferable to giving unrestricted power to one man.  Especially if that man is named Donald Trump.

All of which leads me into the matter of foreign policy, and especially of the war in Ukraine. In the case of Ukraine, our side finds itself with the choice of siding with neocons like Bolton who support military aid, or MAGA types who oppose it.  

So let me state my position clearly.  I support military aid to Ukraine.  And I do not see this in any way as inconsistent with opposing our invasion of Iraq (which I did).  It means that I oppose countries invading other countries, and that I oppose invasions as a neutral principle. There may be an exception in cases of humanitarian intervention -- invasion to stop civil war or genocide, although these are extremely difficulty to pull off successfully, and highly labor intensive.*  But complaints about corruption in Ukraine, as if this somehow justified invasion, are absurd. A country does not require a good government certification to earn the right to resist an invasion.  We backed the Soviet Union under Stalin when the Nazis invaded.  Backing a flawed and somewhat corrupt democracy is a no-brainer by comparison.

So what about people who oppose military aid to Ukraine.  They fit into several categories.

Some fear escalation and nuclear war.  I feared that myself at the outset.  But given what the Russians have taken without going nuclear, such fears appear to be overblown.  And more than that.  The danger of nuclear war has to be weighed against the danger of yielding to nuclear blackmail.  Refuse to aid Ukraine for fear of nuclear war, and you encourage aggression by other nuclear powers, secure in their arsenals.  And you encourage nuclear proliferation as countries across the world rush to obtain nuclear weapons as their only possible defense.

Some far left opponents like Noam Chomsky or Glenn Greenwald, argue that the real danger is from the US.  The US is the only power seeking global hegemony.  Any attempt to "protect" other countries from regional hegemons is simply an attempt to bring more countries under US domination.  Sure, it would be best if there were no hegemons and every country had complete autonomy.  But barring such a utopia, in order to thwart US global hegemony, it is sometimes necessary to back the lesser hegemon as the lesser evil.  As to arguments that countries seeking to escape Russian domination don't seem to mind US domination, or point to the Russians' cruelty and brutality, Chomsky or Greenwald would presumably point to example of US cruelty and brutality and domination of unwilling countries,and tell us to take the beam out of our own eye before we criticize the mote in someone else's.  Or they dismiss the whole thing as unimportant since, as Lenin said, when you cut down a tree the chips will fly.  (That's Russian for saying you can't make omelets without breaking eggs).**

Others says that sure, one country invading another is a bad thing, but this one is a long way away and no concern of ours. I must admit that I once held this view myself.  I argued that the Russians were prepared to start WWIII over Ukraine and we were not, so the best the Ukrainians could hope for was to follow the Finnish example of domestic freedom in exchange for submission in foreign affairs.  Well, even Finland has decided that is no longer viable and has joined NATO.

But the one that interests me most is the viewpoint (increasingly common among the MAGA crowd) that we should not defend Ukraine from invasion, which Russia had every right to do, but should use our military strength to invade Mexico instead. In other words, some people appear to favor countries invading their neighbors as a neutral principle.  This is a spheres of influence viewpoint.  Certain regional hegemons should impose their will on their weaker neighbors and invade if their neighbors step out of line.  This view would condemn our invasion of Iraq, not because there is anything inherently wrong with invading other countries, but only because Iraq is outside our sphere of influence.  Instead, we should observe the Monroe Doctrine and limit ourselves to invading countries in the Western Hemisphere, all of which are fair game if they step out of line.  This viewpoint would also mean withdrawing from NATO and the Middle East.  Taken to its logical conclusion, it would also mean severing alliances with Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan, all of which are presumably in the Chinese sphere of influence, although somehow the MAGA crowd is actually strongly anti-China.  And, in all fairness to the MAGA crowd, this is a fair assessment of our pre-WWII foreign policy.  Though often derided as "isolationist," our isolationism was only from Europe.  The US quite regularly sent the Marines into Central American and Caribbean countries.  

But enough is enough.  There is a world of difference between invading another country and helping another country to resist invaders.  How hard is that to understand?

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*Russians and their apologists sometimes offer this justification to excuse the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine.  They argue that the Russians were not invading, but intervening in an incipient civil war and head off a disastrous defeat for the pro-Russian faction.  The situation in 2014 really was chaotic, but to the extent that the Russians were seeking to quash an incipient civil war, they were highly successful.  No civil war occurred, and by 2022, Ukraine was not only at civil peace, but strongly united in opposition to any further Russian aggression.
**In some ways, by the way, the Russian metaphor is more honest than ours.  Ours is a creative metaphor -- to build an omelet (the new order) it is necessary to destroy some eggs (the old order).  Russians use a purely destructive metaphor.  When you cut down a tree (the old order), it is inevitable that flying chips will cause some collateral damage.

The Specter of Lenin

 

As I understand it, that last point -- that seeing a war as a mistake and wanting to lose are entirely different things -- informs our policy.  

The war that becomes unpopular is invariably a war that one is losing.  Victory is never unpopular.  When a war is not going too well and does not show any immediate prospects of getting better, the population often becomes war-weary and wants out.  But very rarely are they willing to take that all the way to its logical conclusion and actually lose.  

Our own experience in Afghanistan is instructive. The war had become unpopular, mostly because there seemed to be no end in sight and no prospect of victory.  The American public wanted out.  We just didn't want to lose. So the war dragged on, year after year, as Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump were unable to win but unwilling to lose.  When Biden decided it was time to bite the bullet and lose, his decision proved highly unpopular, and his popularity never recovered.  Granted, the loss was messy.  One likes to think we could have gotten out more cleanly.  But in the end, losing does tend to be messy.  That is why it is so unpopular.

Reports are coming out of the White House (not going to find them) that the Biden Administration is holding back to some degree and is trying to avoid too overwhelming a win for fear of the consequences.  Their fear is not of nuclear war, but of all-out social breakdown in a defeated Russia with unforeseeable but dire consequences.  

They are thinking about the breakup of the Soviet Union following 1991, which is a reasonable concern. Any attempt to understand Vladimir Putin and his appear has to begin with an understanding of just how painful the breakup of the Soviet Union was for the country's inhabitants. It wasn't just that all the different republics declared their independence.  The economy suffered a deeper decline that the US during the Great Depression.  Government largely broke down, and a Mafia-like oligarchy became a law unto itself, rising to obscene levels of wealth while the rest of the country fell into ruin.  Life expectancy fell by as much as six years, as perhaps 70% of the male population responded to unbearable conditions by falling into alcoholism. In short, conditions were really bad.

This also raises the same question.  The Soviets were trapped in the Cold War and ultimately could not win.  But considering that this was what losing looked like, continuing seemed like a better choice by comparison.

One can argue how much credit Putin deserved for turning things around, but the improvement did start about when he came to power. Underlying the fear of a repeat of 1991 is a realization that, bad as Putin has been, a whole lot worse things could have emerged.

And I must admit that ever since Yevgeny Prigozhin launched his failed putsch, I have been thinking about something considerably worse, something that no one today is old enough to remember.  I have been thinking about Lenin and the civil war that he set off and wondering if anything short of that can end the war.

And just to be clear, I am not a scholar of Lenin and his revolution and civil war.  I no more than a Wikipedia level familiarity with the subject, but some of its horrors come through.  Revolution broke out in Russia in 1917.  The revolution was not so much against the Czar as against a ruinous war -- WWI -- that Russia had no hope of winning but could not get out of.  Conditions seemed unbearable.  The army was in retreat, suffering devastating rates of death and desertion.  Petrograd suffered severe inflation and food shortages.  The people revolted, and the Czarist government quickly fell -- and no good came of it.  The war continued, food shortages in no way abated, and the Provisional Government remained paralyzed, incapable of taking action. Lenin certainly spoke for the aspirations of most Russians when he proclaimed, "Peace!  Bread!  Land!"  There was just one problem -- he had no idea how to achieve any of these things.

Armistice line vs. Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

Peace proved elusive for the usual reason.  Russia was trapped in a desperately unpopular war that it had no chance of winning.  The only way out was to lose.  And if one thing was even less popular than continuing the war, it was losing. Lenin, in exile at the time the war began, had actually advocated Russia's defeat as a way of bringing about revolution.  Well, now revolution had occurred, and Lenin found himself in charge of the Russian state and in the position of somehow having to achieve peace.  He began, promisingly enough, with an armistice, achieved in about a month and a half.  That put an end to the killing for a time, but was established in place with German and Austrian forces occupying large portions of the Soviet Union, and no permanent peace.  Negotiations stalled, as the Germans sought to annex the lands they were already occupying and the Bolsheviks held out, hoping that revolution would break out in Germany any day and render the matter moot.  

In the end, the Bolsheviks took the worst possible option -- they declared the end of the war an demobilized without a peace treaty.  The Germans, predictably, went on the offensive, effortless capturing territory from the demobilized Bolsheviks, and demanding even greater annexations with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.  Lenin recognized that he had no choice and capitulated. This led to the rupture with the Bolsheviks' last coalition partners, the beginning of the Bolsheviks' one-party state, and all-out civil war.

To be clear, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was not the sole cause of Russia's civil war.  With the collapse of the Czarist government, some sort of civil war among people with very different notions about what should follow it was probably inevitable. Certainly Lenin saw such a war as inevitable.  Along with his slogan "Pease! Bread! Land!" was a much darker slogan, "Turn the imperialist war into a civil war!"  

But Lenin's hardline policies did much to worsen the situation.  He sought to deliver "bread" to urban areas by forced seizure of grain from the rural population.  Instead, this led to food shortages so severe that half or more of the urban population fled to the countryside.  The territories captured by Germany and Austria had populations that were happy to throw off the yoke of Russian domination, but by no means willing to submit to German control.  Widespread guerrilla warfare broke out against both.  At the end of the war, numerous new countries were carved out of the ruins of the Russian, German, and Austrian empires.  The Civil War was devastating.  By the end of the war, the "unbearable" conditions that led to revolution seemed mild by comparison.  Russia saw more people killed in the Civil War than its WWI losses that started the revolution.  The urban food shortages that led to the revolt became so bad that half or more of the urban population fled to the countryside.  Industrial production fell to 20% of its pre-war levels.  In short, it made the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union look very mild by comparison.

Russia, present-day borders

And I have to think that most Russians are well aware of this history.  And that, while they may dread a return to pre-Putin days, the thought of their WWI defeat and the horrors that followed must be in the back of their minds, and haunt their fears of what might happen if they lose.  Many people might answer with an obvious rejoinder.  The Russo-Ukrainian war is nothing like WWI.  Far from being an attempt by Western powers (as Russians would see the Germans) to alter borders by force, this time the Western powers are simply seeking to prevent any forcible change in border.  The Ukrainians have no desire to take even one step across the border and no designs on any Russian territory whatever.  They simply want to return to the pre-2014 borders.

To this Russians might have a few rejoinders. One is that they have annexed Crimea and consider it sovereign Russian territory.  But, more chillingly, they might point out that Russia's present-day borders are not so far from the borders set by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk -- borders that everyone at the time saw as unduly harsh and unreasonable.