The Propagandist and the Censor

National Review, June 21, 2018

In 1936, Oswald Mosley, Britain’s Mussolini-in-waiting, released a question-and-answer book that explained what a Fascist Blighty might look like. Freedom of the press? Fleet Street would “not be free to tell lies.”

Some 80 years on, German chancellor Angela Merkel, infuriated by criticism of her immigration policy (and, rather less so, by Russian disinformation), endorsed a new law, the catchily named Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, under which social-media companies must take down posts that constitute “manifestly unlawful . . . hate speech” and “fake news” from their sites within 24 hours of a complaint. Failure to do so can result in a fine of up to 50 million euros. Fake news is criminally fake if it amounts, say, to an insult, malicious gossip, or defamation — including defamation of a religion or ideology — sufficiently serious to contravene German law.  

Combine the potential size of the fine with offenses that lend themselves to flexible interpretation (much like that “manifestly”) and it’s easy to see that Berlin intended to scare social-media companies into an approach to censorship that goes far further than the letter of the law, a ploy that appears to be working. The government wanted to shut down talk that was not necessarily illegal but — after Merkel flung open her country’s doors in the summer of 2015 — uncomfortably unorthodox. The mainstream media had enthusiastically echoed the chancellor’s Willkommenskultur narrative of kindly Germans cheerfully greeting the migrants, but establishment unanimity was not enough for the instinctively authoritarian Merkel. Her less “welcoming” compatriots had found an audience on social media. That would not do.

Others have taken note. Singapore, no haven of free speech, is taking aim at “deliberate online falsehoods.” Malaysia has criminalized “news, information, data and reports which is or are wholly or partly false.” (Intent seems to be irrelevant.) Russian lawmakers, immune as usual to irony, have proposed their own laws against fake news.

Brussels is on the case — of course it is — urging social-media companies to sign up for a voluntary code of conduct to combat what the European Commission refers to as “verifiably false or misleading information . . . [that is] created, presented and disseminated for economic gain or to intentionally deceive the public, and [that] may cause public harm.” That word “verifiably” has to do a great deal of heavy lifting, and, as for “misleading,” well . . .

Some of Brussels’s proposals, such as more transparency about sponsored commentary, are sensible. Others could conceivably reflect an even more cynical view of the European public’s credulousness than that displayed by the Kremlin. It takes only an elementary understanding of how politics works to grasp that the call for EU member-states “to scale up their support of quality journalism” will be used to justify lucrative handouts for journalism that toes the party line.

Another recommendation, “enhancing media literacy,” isn’t an invitation to corruption, but if the enhancement is to be anything more than a lesson or two in applied skepticism (no bad thing), instruction on how to “read” media will just as likely — thank you, Michel Foucault — enable fake news as do the opposite. Equally, turning to “an independent European network of fact-checkers” is a less-than-reassuring idea: Fact-checkers have all too frequently shown themselves prone to bias. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? was a good question 2,000 years ago, and it’s a good question now, but it’s not one that worries many of those leading the charge against fake news.

Meanwhile, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is pushing a law to battle fake news that includes allowing politicians to complain to a judge about the spreading of supposedly false information online during or shortly before an election. The judge has 48 hours to respond and can, under certain circumstances, block the offending item, a power that — call me a cynic — could, just possibly, be abused. Fake news, Macron told the U.S. Congress in April, is a “virus,” an attack on the spirit of democracy: “Without reason, without truth, there is no real democracy, because democracy is about true choices and rational decisions.” That prettily complimentary, pretty delusional description (take your pick) leaves open the question as to who is to decide what is true — Quis custodiet? again — and where reason is to be found. The madness of crowds is a perennial risk, but a ruling caste convinced that it has all the answers can be more harmful still.

Macron’s words contained the seed of the suggestion that if the electorate votes on a basis its betters find to be flawed, the result is not “really” democratic. To follow that logic through, should such a result be allowed to stand? Macron, it should be remembered, is one of those now steering the EU, an institution with a tradition of either condemning or ignoring electorates that have voted the “wrong” way, or, for that matter, nudging them back to the polling booth for a do-over.  

There is no reason for any complacency here in America. The First Amendment’s protections have never been absolute. While they have been extended a long way, that process can go into reverse. When intellectual fashions change, judicial precedent can be more elastic than is often assumed. And intellectual fashions have changed. The assault on free speech has long since burst out of the academy and, somewhat paradoxically, has been given extra heft by the ubiquity and indispensability of social media, private terrain where the First Amendment has very little application.

On Facebook, on Twitter, and elsewhere, the apparatchiks of Silicon Valley’s new class rule on the limits of free expression, a power they may well eventually have to share — not necessarily unhappily — with politicians who are no fonder of the wrong sort of talk than they are. Fake news could well give Washington a pretext to join in the effort to tame social-media speech. Always on the lookout for another excuse for 2016, Hillary Clinton has described fake news as a “danger that must be addressed,” and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) told social-media companies last fall that if they didn’t sort out the problem, “we will.”

That’s not a threat to take lightly. Social media are now an essential part of the public square. To the extent that social-media comments are policed, the approach taken — arbitrary, opaque, and (at least to a degree) biased — is, given the market power of the social-media giants, disturbing. But the alternatives are worse. What the market gives, the market can take away. What the state takes, it generally keeps. Giving the government the power directly (or indirectly, via proxies) to determine what social-media content is true — and, in some cases, to suppress that which it has decided is false — would be a menace to free speech too obvious to need explaining.

“Regular” media meanwhile would be untouched, protected, as they should be, by the First Amendment. They would also be left to promote their takes (far from monolithic, but still) on events with fewer challenges than they now face, a windfall that would be as unhealthy as it is undeserved. The First Amendment is not a guarantor of objectivity. In an age when the boundaries between reporting and opinion in newspapers, television, and radio have faded, disinformation is, to put it mildly, not confined to games played within the social-media feeds of the unwary.

When Donald Trump describes this more respectably sourced disinformation — and anything else he considers (or pretends to consider) to be disinformation — as “fake news,” he is sending a message that works on several levels. Hijacking a term that was already resonating with the public is not only a clever way of rebottling an old whine — politicians are forever grumbling about the press — but a way of making it stronger. It is not just an attack on the story, but on its source — and on what’s left of its authority. CNN? No better than Facebook.

Broadening the definition of fake news is also a subtle undermining of the argument that Trump owes his presidency to media manipulation. If anything, it carries with it the hint that he was elected despite fake news, not because of it. It may also, one day, provide a way for either Left or Right to begin the erosion of the First Amendment protections the press now enjoys. According to a Harvard-Harris poll from May of last year, two-thirds of voters believe that the mainstream media publish fake news, and that survey was by no means an outlier.

Treating the partisan dishonesty of the news media and the real (so to speak) “fake news” as, basically, the same also risks overlooking the genuine hazard that the latter may represent. For now (but only for now) its most potentially dangerous manifestation comes from the dezinformatsiya orchestrated by a Kremlin once again appreciative of how destabilizing disinformation can be — and clearly aware of how neatly such disinformation can be slipped into social media. How much influence Russian fake news (a handy scapegoat for disconcerting electoral outcomes) has really had so far can be debated, but there is no doubt that the sophistication of its targeting and the quality of its material is going to improve rapidly. The day that a computer-generated Trump makes a fake but (to the right audience) truly incendiary speech mocking, perhaps, the prophet Mohammed is not far away.

The prospect is terrifying. But so is one element in the likely response: the unleashing of censors to block this, ban that, and, presumably, fight a long Pac-Man struggle with bots as the prey. But this cyberwar would probably do more damage to what’s left of the West’s free speech than to the lies of our opponents. Fake news can be suppressed or, infinitely better, rebutted, but, as it speeds through the Web, it can travel many times around the world before the truth has time to boot up.

The Gutenberg galaxy is expanding exponentially, generating unprecedented amounts of information — true, false, and everything in between. To the extent we can trust it — Quis custodiet? — technology may help identify what is reliable and what is not (I met the other day with the CEO of a start-up using artificial intelligence to rate the reliability of those posting on social media), but technology will have to contend with psychology. Our quest for objectivity is less diligent than we like to think. We are all too ready to collaborate in our own deception. Some stories are too good not to believe, some stories are too satisfying to unpack (how many birthers were there again?), some gossip is too good not to pass on, and confirmation bias remains as seductive and reassuring as it ever was.

Skepticism will help, but too much of it — easy enough in an era when old media are regarded with suspicion and new media are difficult to process, let alone trust — can lead to a perverse gullibility. In a 1974 interview, Hannah Arendt observed that “a people that no longer can believe anything . . . is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

Fake news is a challenge that the West must get right. So far, there’s little reason to expect that it will.

Never the Twain

Peter Conradi - Who Lost Russia? How The World Entered a New Cold War.

National Review, July 10, 2017

History has no right or wrong side. There is little about it that is inevitable. But probability cannot be wished away. To read this book by Peter Conradi (the foreign editor of the London Sunday Times) is to be reminded that the odds were always against a durable rapprochement between post-Soviet Russia and the West, but, as Conradi shows, that doesn’t mean that both sides didn’t do their bit to make them even longer.     

The original sin was Russian: The 1991 “revolution” was, as Conradi puts it, “incomplete.” The old regime poured into the supposedly new, unbothered by fresh elections. Conradi maintains that a “short-sighted” West eventually staked too much on an increasingly authoritarian, increasingly erratic Boris Yeltsin. Maybe, but one of the tragedies of the incomplete revolution was that it had thrown up no credible alternative. Russia in 1992 was not Germany in 1945. There was no Stunde Null, no definitive break, no settling of accounts with the past — no Soviet Nuremberg (who, Conradi wonders, in the deeply compromised “ruling class would have wanted such a reckoning”?) — or even any agreement as to what that past had been. Many Russians, writes Conradi, “felt a sense . . . of disorientation after so much of what they had been brought up to believe in had been denounced as a lie”; so much, yes, but not enough.

The survival of countless relics, physical as well as political and psychological, of the Soviet epoch — those Lenins on their plinths, that mummy in that mausoleum — conveyed a message that the old days had not been as bad as all that, a myth made easier to succumb to by the brutally hard times that followed the Soviet collapse. Conradi finds it “difficult to fault the underlying logic” of the economic reforms of the early Yeltsin years, but it was a logic torn apart by an uncooperative reality that, critically, was deformed by a “political class . . . sharply divided between reformers and Communists.” In Poland, by contrast, “a broad . . . consensus” helped smooth the move away from a command economy after 1989.

Conradi asks whether the West, which was less than openhanded to Russia, might have done more to help out, citing sources that suggest, not unreasonably, that at certain moments of crisis it could have. But he appears unconvinced that even significantly more-generous assistance would have made the necessary difference. That seems fair. In all likelihood, a Marshall Plan 2.0 would have struggled to turn around a land ruined by seven decades of Communism. Unlike the battered recipients of American post-war largesse, Russia lacked the habits, the skills, and the institutions needed to make a free market work. An inflow of massive amounts of aid money might well have done nothing more than further entrench the kleptocracy that had viewed privatization as an invitation to pillage. The misery of the many had been accompanied by the enrichment of the few, a looting that discredited liberal reform — economic and political — and did much to pave the way to Putin’s sly despotism.

Adding insult and yet more injury after the loss of Russia’s Eastern European empire came the dismantling of the Rodina itself under conditions — a quick deal struck in a Belorussian hunting lodge — that fed many Russians’ suspicions, as Conradi observes, of a stab in the back, a Dolchstoss, as they used to say in Weimar. And the breakup of the USSR was made more painful by the failure — stressed by Conradi — by large numbers of ordinary Russians, “elder brothers” (so the party had never ceased to insist) in a “socialist family of nations,” to grasp that their homeland too was an empire. Relentlessly repeated propaganda (the lie that the Baltic States had volunteered to join the USSR was just one of many) and also, not least with respect to Ukraine, a genuinely tangled history, had left their mark. And so had geography: Conradi recalls how Russia’s was a “contiguous empire” undivided by the oceans that split up its French or British counterparts. Moving from one Soviet republic to another was no bigger a deal than crossing an American state line. The disintegration of the USSR left millions of ethnic Russians stranded in what overnight became foreign countries, their plight a reproach to their kin back home and an opportunity for future mischief-making in what, years before Putin’s ascendancy, the Yeltsin government rapidly dubbed the “near abroad.” It was a phrase that signaled Russia’s continuing strategic interest in what went on there.

Conradi correctly dismisses the idea that the West should have accepted a Russian veto over NATO membership for countries that had broken free from its vanished imperium. To do so “would have meant a de facto continuation of Europe’s Cold War division” and a denial of a country’s right, enshrined in the 1975 Helsinki Charter, to choose its own alliances. The NATO–Russia Founding Act of 1997 restricted NATO’s ability to base permanent forces closer to Russia’s borders, but only “in the current and foreseeable security environment.” Moscow’s subsequent behavior has since so changed the environment that, as Conradi notes, the door has opened for the argument that that old constraint no longer applies. And, however tentatively, NATO has marched through it.

The West, contends Conradi, misread Russia in the 1990s. “What it chose to interpret as assent . . . to [NATO’s] eastward expansion was, in reality, weakness and an inability to resist,” a humiliation compounded by the manner in which, as he explains, a “triumphalist” America “had become rather too fond of a unipolar world.” It had become too confident as well, beguiled by an interlude that it mistook for an era. It trampled over the sensitivities of a fallen superpower that had not accepted its fall. Russia believed it still merited a seat at the top table, and not only, as Conradi emphasizes, on American terms.

To be sure, it was wildly optimistic of Russia to expect an invitation to join NATO (something for which Putin was angling in his early period in office): There could be no room for the bear in the henhouse. When West Germany was admitted by its former adversaries into NATO in 1955, it was dependent on the U.S. for its defense and had quite clearly learned from the horrors of the past: It was no conceivable danger to those with whom it wanted to team up. The same could not be said of early-21st-century Russia.

Yet Russia’s support for the U.S. after 9/11 was speedy and helpful (and beforehand Moscow had warned Washington that there could be trouble brewing). The threat posed by Islamic extremism might have formed the basis for long-term cooperation between the two, but that promise was sabotaged by America’s unwillingness to reciprocate, not to speak of the attack on (secular) Iraq, a Soviet client for decades.

And Iraq was not the only longstanding Kremlin ally to fall foul of NATO. Orthodox, Slavic Serbia was also battered into submission, and Kosovo, a rebel province of immense historical significance, was later wrested from it. European borders had been shifted by force. After occupying Crimea six years later, Putin referred to the “well-known Kosovo precedent.”

Yeltsin’s relative liberalism, argues Conradi, will prove an aberration. That too is not inevitable, but under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that Russia, nursing the grievances it did, turned into the antagonist it has become. What is surprising is how long it took for it to be taken sufficiently seriously even after the wealth created by a recovering oil price (rather than by the fruits of a well-managed economic restructuring that, had it happened, might have taken the country in a different direction) both entrenched the regime and gave it the resources to punch back. The West was right to pursue the agenda it did in Eastern Europe but was oddly unprepared for countermeasures by the Kremlin, especially after the challenge to the Putin regime posed by the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and then, with catastrophic results, the far greater upheaval in Ukraine in 2014, an upheaval that Conradi chronicles with characteristic evenhandedness.

To Conradi, it’s remarkable that the West has yet to put together the “well-considered and historically relevant” policy that Zbigniew Brzezinski called for over 20 years ago. Well, our statesmen are what they are, but it’s hard to deny that Russia has been treated with striking carelessness and startling complacency, treatment that may not have “lost” Russia but undoubtedly helped make matters worse. The supposition by the Western elite that Russia’s time as a great power had passed played its part in all this, handily reinforced by the pleasantly reassuring assumption that the history it no longer understood had come, as the saying then went, to an end.

Then there was the conviction, particularly within the EU and the Obama administration, that an emerging supranational order was eclipsing “19th century” power politics, a delusion that overlapped with a curious faith in allegedly universal values. What those were was a touch murky, but democracy was ostensibly among them, something George W. Bush declared that he wanted to promote worldwide — a stance incompatible, as Conradi recounts, with Russian calls for “non-interference in the affairs of sovereign countries.” However hypocritical those calls (ask the Balts, the Ukrainians, the Georgians . . .), they revealed a growing ideological dimension to the burgeoning rivalry between Russia and the West.

As President Trump is discovering, that rivalry is unlikely to ease anytime soon, but it could be managed — jostling between great powers is nothing new — and perhaps even reduced. After all, Russia and the West do have interests in common, most notably (but not only) with regard to Islamic extremism. But first the West must learn to toughen up, panic less, preach less, and think more.

How Not to Fix the Euro: More Leftism

Joseph E. Stiglitz - The Euro: How A Common Currency Threatens The Future of Europe

National Review, October 10, 2016

Imagining that a large number of very different economies could be squeezed into a single poorly constructed currency was one fatal conceit. Imagining that the story of what happened next could be squeezed into one rigid “narrative” was another — but that’s what economist Joseph Stiglitz has done in The Euro, a badly flawed book about a disastrous idea.

Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and a Columbia professor, has been crusading for years now against the wickedness of “neoliberalism,” a term that, like “late capitalism,” says more about the person using it than about what it purports to describe. Check out the titles of some of his more recent books: “The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do about Them,” “The Price of Inequality,” “Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.” The Euro is the latest installment in a long leftist tirade.

Stiglitz has valuable points to make on the EU’s dangerous monetary experiment, but it’s easy to lose sight of them amid all the pages devoted to his insistence that the devastation caused by the single currency is another example of the havoc that “market fundamentalism” has wrought.

Yet the euro was, at its core, an exercise in central planning. Stiglitz concedes that it was a “political project” to accelerate the process of European integration. But more than that, it was to be a challenge to the supremacy of the dollar and a permanent brake on the unruliness of foreign-exchange markets, ambitions far removed from market fundamentalism. Indeed, one of the earlier critics of the proposed new currency was Milton Friedman, not that Stiglitz finds the room — or the grace — to mention it.

Stiglitz questions the economic rationale behind the euro (arguing, intriguingly, that, contrary to the claims of its advocates, it was always likely to operate against convergence within the bloc) and the way that it was put together: The structures needed to make it work properly weren’t there. Yet his list of those responsible for the inevitable crisis is tellingly incomplete. To be sure, he acknowledges the important (and often overlooked) fact that individual governments could — even within the constraints of the euro zone — have done more to head off disaster than conventional wisdom now suggests, but, for the most part, he blames the Left’s preferred bogeymen, greedy bubble-blowing bankers and their accomplice, light-touch regulation.

But while there were undoubtedly areas in which regulation was too lax, the greater problem was that regulators were nudging financiers in wrong directions, whether it was toward real-estate-linked lending or into the belief that Greek sovereign risk was not that much greater than German. In the early years of the euro, Greece had to pay (on average) less than 0.3 percent more to borrow than Germany. That was nuts, but those steering the euro zone had persuaded themselves that the economies of the countries now locked into the currency union had truly converged. They hadn’t. And, crucially, the warning signals that would have been sent by the currency markets of old — a drachma crash, say — had been silenced. Ideology trumped reality, politics trumped markets, and the result was catastrophe. There’s a lesson in that, but Stiglitz doesn’t appear to see it.

Stiglitz is on safer ground criticizing the steps, from bullying the Irish government to assume private bank debt to the indiscriminate emphasis on “austerity,” taken by the euro zone’s leadership after the crisis erupted. The former is very hard to defend, and the latter was, in some cases at least, overdone, poorly timed, or both: There’s a limit to the extent to which a country can be expected to deflate its way to recovery. But to attribute — as Stiglitz does — the tough love shown by the “Troika” (the European Central Bank or ECB, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund) responsible for the euro zone’s bailouts to market fundamentalism is, to put it at its kindest, a misreading. What drove it was the complex internal politics of the currency union.

Stiglitz rightly highlights the difficulty of reconciling the management of the single currency and basic democratic principle. As he notes, voters in the euro zone’s laggards were offered no serious alternative to the harsh and sometimes questionable treatment prescribed for their countries. Beyond that essential but unremarkable insight, he touches on a broader, somewhat neglected issue: what it means when a democracy transfers the oversight of key areas of the economy from the legislature to technocrats and, specifically, to “independent” central banks such as the ECB, a practice Stiglitz attributes to the then (supposedly) prevailing “neoliberal ascendancy.”

That’s a debatable proposition to start with and it has next to nothing to do with the independence of the ECB, which echoes (as Stiglitz recognizes) the traditions of the Bundesbank (Buba), Germany’s legendary central bank. Far from being the product of late-20th-century neoliberalism, Buba’s independence — and its inflation-fighting mandate — date back to its origins in a ruined country that believed it knew where debauching a currency could lead.

Without Germany, there would have been no euro. But, proud of their Deutschmark, German voters didn’t want to switch to a new currency. Sadly, they were never given the chance to reject it, but assurances from their government that the ECB would, for all practical purposes, be a Buba 2.0 were part of a package of promises (no bailouts was another) designed to soothe their unease. Stiglitz discusses the fact that Germany shaped the ECB but fails to give enough weight to the democratic concerns that help explain why.

In any event, those promises were broken, and not just by a series of bailouts. Whether by effectively permitting local central banks to “print” new euros, or by allowing unpaid balances to mount up in its clearing system, or, belatedly (Stiglitz would argue), by a series of increasingly elaborate market operations culminating in the European version of “quantitative easing,” the ECB has turned out to be far less stingy a central bank than German voters had been led to believe it would be.

Stiglitz does not seem too bothered by this: Some democratic failures are evidently more equal than others. He is (legitimately) angry about the way that the Troika forced out the socialist Greek premier George Papandreou (his “long-term friend”), but he has nothing to say about the not-dissimilar putsch that replaced a less ideologically sympathetic figure, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, with an unelected, obedient proconsul.

Then again, this is the Stiglitz who claims that the objectives of European integration included “strengthening democracy” — a revealing interpretation of a project born of the notion that Europe’s voters could not be trusted to keep the peace. The idea behind what became the EU was that power should be transferred away from democratic nation-states to a supranational authority staffed by largely unaccountable technocrats. And over the decades, it was, often by the sleight of hand made necessary by European electorates’ stubborn suspicion of Brussels’ relentless drive toward ever closer union.

But a new currency was not something that could be introduced on the sly. People would notice. To a greater or lesser degree, the inhabitants of the future euro zone would have to consent to such a change, and to a greater or lesser degree they did. But they were not prepared to surrender enough sovereignty to give the euro a better chance of success. As much as Stiglitz might wish otherwise, that hasn’t changed. If there is to be any realistic prospect of keeping the current euro zone intact while restoring prosperity to its weaker brethren, it will, one way or another, involve a pooling of resources, but the richer countries won’t agree to that on terms that the poorer could accept. This impasse owes nothing to market fundamentalism and a great deal to the absence of a shared identity: Germans are Germans, Greeks are Greeks; neither are Eurozonian. They lack the needed sense of mutual obligation.

Stiglitz maintains that if the euro zone’s members won’t agree to a more comprehensive monetary union, big trouble lies ahead, threatening not only the euro but, maybe, the broader European project. I’m not convinced: “Muddling through” with what Stiglitz labels a blend of “temporary palliatives” as well as some “justly celebrated” deeper reforms has kept the currency going so far, albeit at a terrible cost. It could continue to do so for quite a while yet. And, despite the best efforts of the rebellious Brits, the EU seems set to endure too.

It’s worth adding that Stiglitz’s definition of that more comprehensive monetary union begins, understandably enough, with a credible “banking union,” debt mutualization, and the like, but then spills over into a vision of a command-and-control euro zone that — if that is what is really required to make the currency union work well — is another good argument for putting a stake through it once and for all.

A different way to go could, reckons Stiglitz, be the creation of a system under which euro-zone countries (or groups of countries) adopt “flexible euros” that trade against each other within a (much) more tightly managed version of Europe’s earlier exchange-rate regimes. He also puts forward yet another solution, some form of “amicable divorce”: Either Germany (alone or in conjunction with other northern European countries) should quit the euro zone, or the currency should be divided into new euros — northern and southern, a division that has, in my view, long been the right way to go. What unites these alternatives is the welcome recognition that one size does not fit all: A currency must reflect the realities of its home economy. Tragically, there’s no sign that the central planners in Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Paris, and Berlin agree. After all, they tell us, the euro-zone crisis is over.

We’ll see

Robot Envy

National Review, August 29, 2016

Karl Marx would have welcomed the advent of our new robot overlords as a trigger for revolution, though one more upscale than he’d hoped for: A rising not of, or for, the working class, but by the well educated and ambitious, furious at being denied what they see as their fair share of the pie. The meek will never inherit the earth; clever people with a grudge just might.     

To understand why “robots” — sexy, sinister shorthand for the increasing automation of work — might drive them to try, “elite overproduction” (a phrase coined by the University of Connecticut’s Peter Turchin) is an excellent place to start. To put it more crudely than Professor Turchin ever would, this occurs when members of the elite (or those with the talents to join it) become too numerous for society to accommodate their aspirations.

Turchin can stretch this concept too far, but he’s correct that it can be a useful indicator of trouble to come. Thus, as he noted in 2012, the Arab Spring was preceded by “a remarkable expansion of the numbers of university-educated youths without job prospects” — in other words, by elite overproduction.

According to Turchin, elite overproduction can cause such fierce competition within the elite that the old order risks being pulled apart. Perhaps that’s so, but there may be a simpler way to look at this. Oppressed masses generally stay oppressed. They may smolder, but it takes the bright to spark a revolution. And if the bright feel they are missing out, that’s what they will be tempted to do.

After the Arab Spring, Occupy: Many of its activists were young and university-educated (“elite aspirants,” in Turchin’s terminology) and enraged by the shambles that (as they saw it) greedy bankers had created, a shambles that threatened their chances of a comfortable future — not that they would have put it quite so selfishly. Even the name “Occupy” evoked a struggle for territory, a struggle that took physical form in places such as Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, but the tent cities downtown were little more than metaphor. The Occupiers’ ambitions went beyond a scrap of real estate: They wanted to take over the political and economic space allegedly held by the “1 percent” they demonized so effectively. Stripped of the revolutionary rhetoric, this was a contest to define the next elite, a contest intended to move from the streets to the legislature — an option, of course, available in America’s democracy but elusive in Egypt.

Occupy’s demonstrations soon faded, but the ideas they represented live on, their persistence testimony to deeper fears about what lies ahead. The suspicion that the American economy is faltering — stagnant incomes, growing structural unemployment, and all the rest — is not new, but up to now those on the way up, or those who were already doing well, have reassured themselves that blue-collar woe was nothing to do with them. Joe Lunchbucket — that slowpoke — just hadn’t kept up. But that complacency is fading, and with reason. To be sure, the college-educated have an edge in the workplace, and that advantage has grown; but, as a benchmark, high school these days is a low bar. Over a third of 25- to 32-year-olds in 2013 had a bachelor’s degree (or above), up from one-eighth in 1965.

A degree is still a route to higher earnings, but it’s not a guarantee. The labor market is not Lake Wobegon: If a third of new entrants to the work force are university graduates, they won’t all be above average, especially those who attended one of academe’s less leafy groves. Their degrees will be the equivalent of the high-school diplomas of half a century ago, a ticket to the ballpark, not the VIP suite. For many graduates, gently shepherded through often undemanding schoolwork and gently burdened with a monstrous debt, dreams will turn into nightmares. There will be no place for them in the track to success. Their expectations were unrealistic, but their disappointment will be real. If their teachers haven’t already radicalized them, life may do the trick.

They will probably find work, but very possibly not of the type they were hoping for. The New York Fed concluded that in 2012 nearly half of all recent graduates were in jobs for which they were, in theory, overqualified. The lingering aftermath of the Great Recession hasn’t helped, but underemployment among recent graduates, the cohort that first Occupied and then felt the Bern, has been on a rising trend since 2000. The New York Fed recounted how “during the first decade of the 2000s, many college graduates were forced to move down the occupational hierarchy to take jobs typically performed by lower-skilled workers.”

Rubbing salt into Millennial wounds, there’s more “under” nowadays in underemployment. The New York Fed divided “non-college” jobs into “good” (“career-oriented, relatively skilled, and fairly well compensated”) and “low-wage.” The share of those stuck in the latter, such as the college-educated barista of contemporary cliché, has risen. Put this all together and it looks a lot like elite overproduction, and the “gig economy,” a hipster euphemism for part-time piece-work, won’t fill the gap.

It’s not clear what will. The information-technology revolution, once seen as a cornucopia of new, well-paid employment, rolls on, and, as revolutions do, it is eating its own. For instance, many IT jobs have disappeared into the Cloud. In his terrifying Rise of the Robots (2015), Martin Ford tells how, thanks to Facebook’s Cyborg software, “a single technician [can] manage as many as 20,000 computers.” Ford points to a 2013 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute that showed that “the number of new graduates with engineering and computer science degrees exceeds the number of graduates who actually find jobs in these fields by 50 percent.” If education — that perpetual panacea — is no longer the answer, what is?

In Player Piano (1952), Kurt Vonnegut depicts an America in which most jobs have been automated away. The country is split between a large underclass and an elite made up of “managers and engineers and civil servants and a few professional people.” In one passage, a member of the elite explains “how the First Industrial Revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work.” He is asked whether there will be a third. He replies that it’s under way and that it involves “thinking machines . . . machines that devaluate human thinking . . . the real brainwork.” He doesn’t, he adds, want to be around to see where it will lead. He would not like the looks of 2016.

By replacing brain as well as brawn, technology is encroaching into ever more elevated areas of employment, menacing those who have good jobs as well as those who are merely searching for them. Real brainwork will be industrialized, subdivided into discrete parts that can be either performed more efficiently or, with the help of algorithms, automated altogether. For example, ask securities traders what this has meant for them. Despite the strong recovery in financial markets since the late unpleasantness, Wall Street employs fewer people than it did in 2007, and many of the jobs that remain are at risk. At its core, the business of finance is about the organization, manipulation, and exploitation of data, and that’s what software is for. As those algorithms increase in sophistication, they will substitute not only intelligence but judgment, vetting customers, spotting opportunities, managing portfolios. Wall Street culls used to be focused mainly on clerical staff; now the “front office” is sharing in much more of the pain.

Lawyers are facing a similar fate. Search engines have long since simplified the trudge through case law. Now other technologies are coming into play, ranging from the use of predictive coding to speed up the pre-discovery process by determining the relevance (or otherwise) of a particular document to the preparation of basic documentation to (soon) advising on the winnability of simple lawsuits. Unemployment among law-school graduates is bad enough as it is. Either it will get worse or the Paper Chase will have far fewer participants: Another gateway to the elite narrows.

And doctors shouldn’t feel smug. Ever more sophisticated data-sorting technology is already leading to more accurate diagnoses, and if it is not yet suggesting more effective treatments, it soon will be. Thus IBM’s Watson, a “cognitive system” that has long since moved on from its Jeopardy! triumph, has now branched out into areas that include medicine. IBM Watson Health, a smarter-than-Sherlock Doctor Watson, is, claims IBM, “pioneering a new partnership between humanity and technology with the goal of transforming global health.” Initially, such advances will deliver no more than an electronic — and unusually erudite — second opinion, but ultimately? And in the meantime, increasing reliance on technology will see a gradual de-skilling of a profession that has long ranked high in the social scale. A decline in pay will not be far behind.

If medicine, finance, and law, three great pillars of the modern elite, are coming under siege from the machines, it’s not unreasonable to ask how much room is going to be left at the top. An additional twist of the knife comes from communications technology. Not only will brainwork be industrialized, but much of it could easily be “exported” to telecommuters based in, say, China and India. Even the possibility that this might happen will drag the wages of the formerly valuable still farther down.

It’s no secret that inequality has widened throughout much of the West (and that automation has contributed to this). What’s less well known is how that inequality is sharpening at the top. In The Second Machine Age (2014), Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee cite research showing that the top 5 percent took 80 percent of the increase in America’s wealth between 1983 and 2009, but the top 1 percent took “over half of that, and so on for ever-finer subdivisions of the wealth distribution.” The middle classes are trailing the upper middle classes, the upper middle classes are falling farther behind the rich, and the rich are lagging the very rich, a process that is likely to accelerate. This is more than a matter of technology eliminating or downgrading previously lucrative work. Technology also broadens access to the skills of the most talented. Their rewards rise. But it reduces demand for the services of the runners-up, the able but not quite able enough. Their rewards fall. TurboTax, for example, has enriched its creators, but has been rather less than splendid news for your local CPA.

Of course, new technology frequently requires significant capital investment. Much of the wealth it generates will go to those who can provide the cash. “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given,” as someone once said. And for “whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.” The winner’s circle will shrink, leaving growing numbers of the talented stranded outside.

If the alarm bells are ringing, they are, so far, being heard by comparatively few. A 2015 survey by the Pew Research Center revealed that “65% of Americans expect that within 50 years robots and computers will ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ do much of the work currently done by humans,” but “an even larger share (80%) expect that their own jobs or professions will remain largely unchanged.” Younger (18- to 29-year-old) Americans — iCocooned perhaps — are even more optimistic despite their deteriorating employment outlook, as are the better paid, and those working in the “government, education and nonprofit sectors.” They are all in for a nasty surprise, and in rather less than 50 years.

When Americans do finally grasp what automation is doing to their prospects, rage against the machines (or, more specifically, their consequences) will blend with existing discontent to form a highly inflammable mix. This broader economic unease is already spreading beyond left-behinds and Millennials, but when we reach the point where even those who are still doing well see robots sending proletarianization their way, there’s a decent chance that something akin to “middle-class panic” (a phenomenon identified by sociologist Theodor Geiger in, ominously, 1930s Germany) will ensue. Many of the best and brightest will face a stark loss of economic and social status, a blow that will sting far more than the humdrum hopelessness that many at the bottom of the pile have, sadly, long learned to accept. They will resist while they still have the clout to do so, and the media, filled with intelligent people who have already found themselves on the wrong side of technology, will have their back.

The endangered upper-middles will not only be talking to themselves. Tough times, and an acute awareness of how well those at the top are making out, have left the battered American working class open to a more radical rearrangement of the status quo. Technology is not solely to blame for what’s happening — far from it — but its capacity to disrupt the workplace is set to increase at an exponential rate. One Oxford study predicts that “about 47 percent of total U.S. employment is at risk” from technological change within the next couple of decades, an estimate that is less of an outlier than might be hoped. Both number and timetable have been challenged, but they give a clue about what may be at stake — and how soon. The implications aren’t pretty. Trump and Sanders may prove to be no more than rats in the coal mine.

Every revolution, whether at the polling station or on the street, needs foot soldiers drawn from the poor and the “left behind.” Still, it’s the leadership that counts. Add the impact of automation to the effects of existing elite overproduction and the result will be that the upheaval to come will be steered by a very large “officer class” — angry, effective, efficient, a “counter-elite” (to borrow another term from Turchin) looking to transform the social order of which, under happier circumstances, it would have been a mainstay.

Some people argue (correctly) that humanity has been able to weather earlier episodes of technological transformation and will do so again. But they need to rebut the argument that this metamorphosis — the replacement of “brain” — really is, as none other than Charles Murray has insisted, different. Past is not always prologue: Google, that colossus of our time, now employs more than 60,000 people worldwide, still considerably fewer than the 80,000 who worked for General Motors in or around Flint, Mich., alone, in the mid 1950s. Needless to say, Google now is not strictly comparable with Flint then (a techie is more than an updated assembly-line worker), but putting those two numbers side by side acts as a poignant reminder that today’s new technology-intensive businesses do not generate jobs in the numbers that the old manufacturers used to do.

It’s also worth adding that past technological transformations sometimes led to more lasting collateral damage than we now remember. We comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the Luddites were proved wrong, but we forget that proof of that was quite a while in coming. Economic historian Robert C. Allen refers to the decades that it took for real wages to rise in Britain after the technological changes of the early 19th century as “Engels’ Pause.” That’s the same Engels who argued in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) that the industrial revolution had made workers worse off. Over the long term, things changed for the better, but what happened in the interim should concern those worried about the political consequences of this latest technological revolution. These were the years not just of the Luddites, but also of the Peterloo Massacre, the Swing Riots, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and the 1842 General Strike. By the time of the Chartists, a mass movement of the working class, an explicitly political agenda had evolved alongside struggles over pay. Engels took things even further. In 1848 he co-wrote The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, not an encouraging thought. The robots might one day deliver almost unlimited bounty, but the road to the Star Trek economy could be very rocky indeed.

We are on a conveyor belt to what Marx described as a “plastic moment,” when old assumptions crumble and everything is up for grabs. There will be no red flag over the White House, but, writes Martin Ford, “we are ultimately headed for a disruption that will demand a far more dramatic policy response.”

That “policy response,” shaped by the demands of that “surplus” elite, will be focused on a largely fruitless (but for a few, fruitful) “war against inequality” centered on a drastic redistributive effort. Taxes will rise steeply, on capital gains as well as income, and, given time, on the mere ownership of capital: We can expect a wealth tax on the living, a foretaste of death taxes to come.

Spending will doubtless soar, on infrastructure (occasionally even sensibly) and on retraining schemes for jobs that will never be. Health care will grow ever closer to single-payer. For the upper middle class squeezed by automation, reinvented as Robin Hoods on the make, all this will combine power play (the opportunity to redistribute away the gains of their more successful competitors) with marvelous career opportunities (someone has to operate the machinery of redistribution) and, of course, claims to the moral high ground.

In all probability, the politics of redistribution will also include ever noisier calls for a universal basic income (UBI), a guaranteed payment from the state to everyone. Finland will start testing a variant of this next year, although the reliably cautious Swiss recently rejected a version of UBI in a referendum in which the effect of technology on employment played a notable role in the debate. To be fair, UBI (with careful caveats) has its supporters on the right, from Friedrich Hayek to Charles Murray, with the latter citing the rise of the robots as part of his justification: “A UBI will be an essential part of the transition to [an] unprecedented world.”

Whatever the arguments in its favor, there’s an obvious danger that a UBI could shatter what’s left of the American ideal of self-help while handing immense and unhealthy power to a state on which too many will depend for too much. Who will fix the level at which the UBI is set? Who will decide who is to pay for it? Viewed from the right, the UBI may be nothing better than the price to be paid to maintain the peace, the lesser of two upheavals. Not every revolution needs blood in the streets.

At the same time, conservatives have to face the possibility that technology will build a world in which wealth will be ever more concentrated, most of the most talented will be cast aside, and unemployment lines will lengthen relentlessly, a dark trifecta that could trash social cohesion and take democracy down with it. Hoping for the best is not the way to head off catastrophe, nor is “standing athwart history.” As to what is, I simply don’t know.

A Slavic Westeros

Simon Sebag-Montefiore: The Romanovs: 1613–1918

National Review, July 11, 2016

Alexander III, St Petersburg, Russia, July 2000 © Andrew Stuttaford

‘It was,” writes Simon Sebag Montefiore, “hard to be a tsar.” But there were compensations. For Alexander II (reigned 1855–81), there was Katya Dolgorukaya, three decades younger and, fretted the tsar’s doctors, such energetic entertainment that, over a century before Nelson Rockefeller’s unHappy demise, they feared for the monarch’s health. Undaunted, Alexander wrote to his “minx” suggesting “bingerle” (a much-used code word) “four times,” “on every piece of furniture . . . in every room.” His minx replied that they could take it easy for a few days if “we overtire ourselves.” Promises, promises: Within twelve hours, Katya was writing to say how she craved her emperor. By the next day: “Everything inside me trembles, I can’t wait till 4.45.”  

Montefiore, the author of The Romanovs, is a gifted, meticulous researcher (an “archive rat,” as Stalin put it), but he’s also a historian in the old, grand manner, a storyteller with a madcap vocabulary (cenobite! Sardanapalian!) and a vivid, often witty, style mercifully free of professorial jargon and ideological hectoring. Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, his two biographical studies of the Soviet tyrant, combined erudition and insight with the deployment of details that illuminated the Kremlin mountaineer to a degree that few have managed to achieve. If those details included the lurid, the grotesque, and the racy, well, Montefiore is not the first biographer to have appreciated the historical (and — unworthy thought — commercial) value of the tabloid touch. In his introduction to The Romanovs, he contrasts the glories of imperial Russia with the excesses of the family that ruled it, a contrast, he notes just a tad smugly, too much for “ascetic academic historians . . . bashfully toning down the truth.”

There’s nothing bashful about Montefiore. The Romanovs is a bodice-ripper, a body-ripper, a Slavic Westeros. And in that introduction he offers a preview: “Brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently, from the dead, barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughtered: Here are fashion-mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian ménages à trois, and an emperor [naughty Alexander II] who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state.”

If you need to know more before hurrying to buy this book, there’s not a lot I can do for you.

But I will try.     

Montefiore’s two volumes on Stalin cover some seven decades. They are a descent into the soul of a monster and the gargoyle empire he made his own. The Romanovs has neither the same depth nor breadth nor context. There isn’t the space. In the course of some 650 pages (excluding footnotes), Montefiore romps through more than three centuries, beginning some time before the coronation of the first Romanov, Michael, in 1613 (he was never going to miss out on the picturesque opportunity presented by Ivan the Terrible’s “spasms of killing, praying, and fornication”), and ending in 1918 with the execution of the deposed Nicholas II by the Bolsheviks.

The Romanovs is a story of family, not empire. The tsars and tsarinas parade by, each deftly depicted in his or her turn. These are sketches more than portraits, although some of those featured — notably the two Greats, Peter, of course, and the unexpectedly enlightened, “regicidal, uxoricidal” Catherine — exude the epic even in outline.    

In an autocracy, the personal — in the form of the autocrat — is political. And the personal is often complicated. Interpreting Peter the Great and, by extension, his Russia, maintains Montefiore, involves understanding that brilliant barbarian’s fondness for the bizarre — naked dwarfs, sacrilegious bacchanalia, and much too much more — as well as Reform and War 101. This approach involves peering behind the malachite door too, not least when an empress was running the show. Grigory Potemkin (the subject of another fine Montefiore biography), “imaginative and visionary . . . voracious and animalistic,” was not the only imperial counselor to end up in the imperial bed. Watching disapprovingly from Prussia, Frederick the Great, a “fastidiously homoerotic warlord,” summed up the entanglement of pillow and political in a phrase that made me laugh and my editor tremble.

Those searching for a comprehensive account of the Romanovs’ vast, rapidly expanding (it advanced by an average of 55 square miles a day) realm will have to look elsewhere: “This book is not meant to be a full history of Russia.” There is plenty about palace camarillas, but rather less about how the empire grew or, for that matter, how this corrupt, chaotic patrimonial state functioned.    

That said, Montefiore begins his book by setting out some useful ground rules for making sense of Romanov rule. Yes, it was hard to be tsar, even if the nature of that challenge changed over the centuries. In the early years in particular, the sovereign had to exude “visceral, almost feral authority.” Getting it wrong — misplaying the court (an “entrepôt of power”) and the clans that prowled through it — could have the most unpleasant of consequences.

The later tsars had still less room for maneuver. They ruled over a country lurching toward the new, becoming too complex and too rich to be safe for autocracy. Romanov absolutism was reinforced by the apparatus of an emerging police state but still rested on archaic pillars — nobility, clergy, and the mystique of the crown — that stood in the way of the reforms that could have preserved the dynasty. To weaken those pillars while protecting the essence of the structure would have been a remarkable feat, and one that would have taken more imagination than Nicholas II or his father, Alexander III (reigned 1881–94), an autocrat’s autocrat, possessed, not to mention the willingness to play ball: “You tell me I must regain the confidence of the people,” grumbled Nicholas just months before he was forced into abdication. “Isn’t it rather for my people to regain my confidence?”

Yet (and Montefiore doesn’t really explain how) this “weirdly obsolete” regime endured until the second decade of the 20th century. Swatting aside notions of what more-liberal (or even not so liberal) Europeans viewed as progress and stifling the stirrings of parliamentary democracy that might have saved him, the hapless, hopelessly unimaginative Nicholas II presided, quite accidentally, over the economic boom that might have propelled Russia into modernity and over the explosion of creativity — badly undersold as a “Silver Age” — that would have continued to adorn the country as it advanced. And, who knows, if he’d been shrewd enough not to stumble into war in 1914, he might have died in his bed, not a cellar.

The ferocity (on both sides) of the 1905 revolution — the “dress rehearsal,” as Trotsky came to call it — and the unease that ran through that Silver Age were harbingers of darkness. Artists, like prophets, can be prone to anticipating an apocalypse, but there was something peculiarly morbid about the culture of early-20th-century St. Petersburg, a dazzling carnival of “wild foreboding” and desperate decadence, chimes at an ominous midnight. The poet Alexander Blok looked around him and saw “a quiet far-spreading fire” that would “consume all.” He was not to survive it.

This sense of an approaching reckoning seeps through the later stages of the book. The passing of centuries blurs the worst of the past, but as Montefiore’s narrative draws closer to modern times, the record fills out. There are more diaries and letters to bear witness: The emperors become human, their fate a matter, to the reader, of more than history’s cold accounting. Learning that yet another revolutionary gang had passed a death sentence upon him, Alexander II, the dynasty’s last best hope, wrote in 1879 that he felt “like a wolf tracked by hunters,” words that still move. The hunters caught up with him two years later.

If the tsars emerge into clearer sight, so do those who wanted to destroy them. In 1869, Sergei Nechayev wrote the Revolutionary Catechism, a paean to mass murder. It was “Leninism before Lenin” and, for that matter, ISIS before ISIS, a manifesto for the nightmares to come and a reprise of ancient millenarian dreams.

The Russian Orthodox Church may have canonized Nicholas II, but Montefiore’s description of that dull, dutiful, fatalistic, sometimes startlingly callous incompetent is measured and objective, free from the glow that his Calvary casts over the memory of the last tsar. To be sure, Citizen Romanov bore his imprisonment with a dignity that transcended its degradation, but he still found the time to study the anti-Semitic tracts that reassured him that his fall was the work of conspiracy rather than failure. In the end, he was shot, and his wife and children were butchered alongside him, “living banners,” argued Lenin, too dangerous to be allowed to survive.

Michael, the first Romanov, would have understood. In 1614, the heir to one of the last serious pretenders to his throne was hanged from the Kremlin walls. Montefiore mentions that this menace was four years old. In fact, he was three.

Through A Glass, Very Darkly

Mark Schrad : Vodka Politics - Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State.

National Review, March 24, 2014

If you cannot face going to Russia to see the real thing — in a dank Moscow underpass perhaps, or a broken attempt at a village — the best introduction to that nation’s drinking culture is to meet up with Venya, the narrator of Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, a strange, bleakly comic, forbidden masterpiece of the early Brezhnev era. In the course of its first page, he drinks four vodkas, two beers, port “straight from the bottle,” and then, more vaguely, “something else.” It’s downhill from there.

In meandering, chaotic prose, Erofeev describes a drink-sodden, phantasmagoric train journey, punctuated by depictions of decay, echoes of Russia’s past, and recipes for cocktails that would make Appalachia blanch. With luck, no Russians ever drank “The Spirit of Geneva” (White Lilac, athlete’s foot remedy, Zhiguli beer, and alcohol varnish), but, as Mark Schrad, an assistant professor at Villanova University, notes in his absorbing, no less drink-sodden, not much less meandering, and even more horrifying Vodka Politics, they came close, not least during the time when Mikhail Gorbachev was cracking down on alcohol production:

“The most hard-up drinkers turned to alcohol surrogates: from mouthwash, eau de cologne, and perfume to gasoline, cockroach poison, brake fluid, medical adhesives, and even shoe polish on a slice of bread [a recipe that requires some additional preparation]. In the city of Volgodonsk, five died from drinking ethylene glycol, which is used in antifreeze. In the military, some set their thirsty sights on the Soviet MiG-25, which — due to the large quantities of alcohol in its hydraulic systems and fuel stores — was affectionately dubbed the “flying restaurant.”

It’s difficult not to smile at that, but then thoughts turn to those five dead in Volgodonsk, just a tiny fraction of a death toll from alcohol poisoning that ran into the tens of thousands, casualties of the burgeoning zapoi (a binge that lasts days or weeks) that finally lurched out of control during the economic implosion that followed the Soviet collapse. Post-Soviet Russia had little realistic alternative to the principle of shock therapy (how it was carried out is a different matter), but Schrad is right to stress the depths to which the country sank. The bottle, often filled with dubious black-market hooch, was one of the few sources of solace left. This, rather literally, added further fuel to the fire already raging through Russia’s demographics: “Average life expectancy for men — 65 at the height of [Gorbachev’s] anti-alcohol campaign in 1987 — plummeted to only 62 in 1992. Two years later, it dipped below 58.”

According to Schrad, “the best estimates are that in the 1990s, Russians quaffed some 15 to 16 liters of pure alcohol annually,” a figure that, tellingly, does not appear to be so different today, and is well above the “eight-liter maximum the World Health Organization deems safe.” These are per capita data, kindly averages that mask the extent to which it is mainly men who are drinking to excess, a fact that helps explain why Ivan can expect to live some ten years less than Natasha.

All those liters might alarm even skeptics legitimately suspicious of the WHO’s nannyish side, but the results for other nations offer context, if not reassurance. According to the WHO, Russia’s alcohol consumption in 2011 was near the top of the international  range, but it was far from the only country to cross the eight-liter threshold (the U.S. clocked in at 9.44 liters, the U.K. at 13.37). Beyond obvious differences in standards of health care, Russia’s catastrophe was clearly due to something subtler than the overall volume of alcohol consumed. What may have mattered more is that so much (6.88 liters) of the Russian tally was accounted for by spirits (the U.K., no stranger to the binge, came in at 2.41). That suggests that what is drunk (and, more specifically, how it is drunk) counts. Schrad quotes another Erofeev, the contemporary writer Viktor: “The result, not the process, is what’s important. You might as well inject vodka into your bloodstream as drink it.”

A disaster of this magnitude — on some estimates as many as half a million Russians each year are dying as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of alcohol abuse — was not the product of economic implosion alone. Other hard-drinking countries in the former Soviet space went through comparable traumas in the 1990s. But none, with the possible exception of Ukraine, a land long exposed to the worst pathologies of Russian rule, tippled quite so far over the edge. There was something that singled Russia out, and it predated the collapse of Communism by a very long time. As early as 1967, the rapid growth of alcohol consumption in the post-war years — something helped along by growing prosperity and a state that had replaced the anti-alcohol militancy of the earlier Soviet period with a sharp appreciation for the revenues that vodka brought in — had taken annual per capita consumption of pure alcohol (exclusive of bootleg samogon) to 9.1 liters. Drinking was an accessible pleasure for a society that had cash, but — in a still-austere Soviet Union — not much to spend it on. There was also something else: Vodka may have been used to soothe the pain associated with the collapse of Communism, but it had also been a way of anaesthetizing people through the dreary decades that preceded that long-overdue change, decades in which aspiration was stifled, life was hard, and futility was the norm. Under the circumstances, why not drink up?

But boozing one’s way through Brezhnev was also a reversion to older patterns of behavior that the early Bolsheviks — in some respects a puritanical bunch — believed they had swept away for good. In 1913, the wicked old empire’s per capita consumption stood at just under that perilous eight liters, and that was less of a gulp than the swigging that had preceded it a few years before. Vodka was not only a familiar presence in the Russian troika, it had also become one of its drivers, a wild, erratic, and destructive driver, to be sure, but one so powerful that attempts to unseat it contributed to the fall of both Gorbachev and (Schrad makes the case well) quite possibly the last czar too.

How demon drink grabbed the reins is the question that lies at the heart of Vodka Politics, which comes with the subtitle “Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State.” That “secret” is something of an overstatement (as Schrad acknowledges, this is far from being the first work on this topic), but it is a claim not inconsistent with his occasionally excitable style (“While the cold wind howled beyond the Kremlin walls . . . ”). As told by a chatty and engaging author, this is Russia’s past seen, one might say, through the bottom of a glass, a perspective that is certainly skewed (sometimes too much so — the liberal Decembrist rebels of 1825 were rather more than an “inebriated Petersburg mob”) but is undeniably fascinating and often enlightening.

Schrad’s central thesis is simple enough: It is the tale of vodka as a “dramatic technological leap” (like a cannon, it has been said, compared with the “bows and arrows” of wine, beer, and more traditional drinks) that was adopted by Russia’s rulers (and how — if it’s epics of alcoholic excess that you are after, this is the book for you) and then ruthlessly exploited by them, a story that, with brief interruptions, has continued essentially unchanged for more than half a millennium.

Ivan III (reigned 1462–1505) was the first to establish a state monopoly on distillation, but Schrad prefers to credit his grandson, a rather more terrible Ivan, with “being perhaps the first to realize the tremendous potential of the liquor trade.” In between debauches and atrocities (if you are on the hunt for Grand Guignol, chronicled with faintly unseemly relish, this is also the book for you), he outlawed privately held taverns and replaced them with state-run kabaks. This was the next stage in, as Schrad describes it, the evolution of a system of “macabre beauty” under which the state built itself up by using mechanisms designed to increase the dependence of its subjects on a product — cheap to produce, profitable to sell, potent to consume — that gave them the illusion of release only to enslave them still further.

The catch was that the state itself became dependent on this dependency. At the height of the Russian empire, vodka funded a third of what became known as the state’s “drunken budget.” Toward the end of Soviet rule, vodka’s contribution was roughly a quarter. And vodka was a pleasure too tempting to be confined to those at the bottom of the heap. It seeped through all social classes, high and low, at immense cost to the country’s progress then and now, its spread facilitated by the unwillingness of the czarist and Soviet regimes to allow room for a civil society strong enough to push back, not to speak of their failure to nurture a nation in which the bottle would not seem like quite such an attractive escape.

So what now? With Russia’s economy in somewhat better shape and (thanks, primarily, to higher oil prices) vodka’s percentage contribution to the state’s income having shrunk to comparatively modest mid single digits, the chances — one might think — ought to be good that something serious could be done to address a public-health cataclysm that has not gone away. After all, the ostentatiously sober Vladimir Putin is at the helm. Some measures have indeed been taken, but this is still Russia, a top-down place where the people come last, where vodka profits accrue to the state and to the well-connected, a country where outside, maybe, some metropolitan centers, hope remains in short supply.

Moscow to the End of the Line draws to a close with the drunken Venya missing his stop and returning to the point at which he began.

And then things get worse.

Vlad The Conservative

National Review, January 9, 2014 (January 27, 2014 issue)

Putin Pop-Up Store, East 20th St, NYC, October, 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

Back in the mid 1980s, Pat Buchanan was the communications director for the Reagan White House, and Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer in East Germany. Times change: The former Soviet secret policeman — if there is such a thing as a “former” Soviet secret policeman — is, after a bogus intermission, now serving a third term as Russia’s president, and the old Cold Warrior seems to have become something of a fan. Writing in his syndicated column in December, Buchanan wondered whether, “in the culture war for mankind’s future,” Putin was in fact “one of us.”

The immediate trigger for Buchanan’s comments was Putin’s state-of-the-nation address just a few days before. Stung, probably, by criticism of gay-bashing legislation in Russia, Putin had taken aim at “the destruction of traditional values” elsewhere in the world — by which he meant the West — and, just so there could be no doubt about what he was referring to, had thrown in a reference to “so-called tolerance, neutered and barren.” No stranger to chutzpah, Putin, an unlikely champion of the ballot box, noted that these changes to “moral values and ethical norms” had come “from above” and were “contrary to the will of the majority.” As such, they were “essentially anti-democratic.”

After years of aggressive judicial activism and dramatic social change at home, those were words likely to appeal to quite a few American conservatives, some of whom might perhaps already have found themselves in unexpected agreement with the Kremlin not so long ago. After all, it was only last summer when Republican congressmen Steve King and Dana Rohrabacher made it clear that Buchanan was by no means the only figure on the American right to be offended by what he has somewhat histrionically described as “half-naked” (by Iranian standards, perhaps) and “obscene” (not so much) protest in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior by the feminist punk-rock group Pussy Riot.

It is, of course, hardly surprising that a protest by an altar — even if brief, and largely mimed (a soundtrack was recorded later for a music video using footage from the protest) — would appall many, and not just the religious, in this country. But Pussy Riot’s critics should have taken a closer look before jumping onto Putin’s sleigh. America is not Russia, a country where an authoritarian regime has suborned the national church for its own purposes, and where that church, bribed with privilege (ask bullied Russian Baptists how that works), a degree of power, and no small amount of mammon, has for the most part gone along. That is why Pussy Riot was protesting in a cathedral. Theirs was an infinitely lesser blasphemy.

Putin may well be a Christian of sorts (the influence of his supposed dukhovnik — spiritual father — Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov is a source of much speculation), but then again so were the Borgias. Divorce and all the rest aside, Putin might even quite genuinely, if in a rather rough-and-ready fashion, be a social conservative, but his public declarations on these topics are likely more a matter of political calculation than moral conviction. Corruption, economic slowdown, and increasingly dictatorial rule have eroded Putin’s support among the intelligentsia and in the more metropolitan centers, and so, Orthodox Church in tow, he has — what’s the term these days? — “pivoted” toward Russia’s “silent majority” (Pussy Riot didn’t have too many local fans), a maneuver that the Buchanan of the Nixon White House would have both recognized and appreciated for its savvy.

It was also a move that dovetailed neatly with a longer-term theme running through the Putin years. The defining mistake of post-Communist Russia has been an unwillingness to come to terms with the reality of its Soviet past. Putin himself infamously referred to the break-up of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Historical truth — uncomfortable, divisive, and shameful — has been replaced with a patriotic confection designed to reconcile the irreconcilable and soothe the national ego. Some excesses and mistakes — too mild words, those — are included, but other horrors are downplayed or have simply gone missing. There is, however, room for both the preservation (or restoration) of Soviet iconography and a lavish biopic about Admiral Kolchak, one of the most prominent of the anti-Bolshevik commanders in the Russian Civil War. In a large national poll organized in 2008, Stolypin, the tough, authoritarian reformer who was the last czar’s most effective prime minister (significantly, Putin gave him a shout-out during his speech), was rated the second-greatest Russian of all time. Stalin (a Georgian and a mass murderer, but no matter) came in third.

It is a narrative intended to put together what history in reality has torn apart, a fable in which czar and commissar can coexist, united in their love for the motherland and a shared sense of the messianic destiny that Holy Russia — home of Moscow, the “Third Rome,” and also the birthplace of Lenin’s radiant future — has long felt is its due, a fantasy reinforced by physical as well as intellectual distance from the Enlightenment West. The fact that such ideas have proved most congenial to authoritarian rule has not escaped Putin’s notice.

Regardless of the nods to the country’s Soviet heritage, the Commies — fear not — will not be coming back anytime soon. Too much loot is being amassed by those in charge for that. Instead, the philosophy that underpins the current regime (an admission of crude self-interest wouldn’t really do the trick) looks more and more like an updated, more subtle, more capitalist variant of the “Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality” first devised as a Russian state ideology for Czar Nicholas I (1825–55) as a response to the liberal challenge at home and abroad.

Well, Orthodoxy is back, what’s left of Russia’s nascent democracy is under pressure, and “nationality” never went away. In his speech Putin acknowledged the multi-ethnic nature of the Russian Federation (albeit with a swipe at “rowdy, insolent people from certain southern Russian regions”), but he went on to emphasize “the all-encompassing, unifying role of Russian culture, history, and language,” terminology that harks back both to czarist-era Russification and to the brutal Soviet approach to “lesser” nationalities.

But as he hymned the rebirth of a strong Russian state, Putin was careful (as Buchanan noted approvingly) to stress that Russia “does not encroach on anyone’s interests . . . or try to teach others how to live their lives.” Unfortunately, the first of those claims is nonsense. To take just a few instances, Russia has been throwing its weight about in northeastern Europe, it has grabbed a slice of Georgia, it is bullying Moldova, and, in what may be Putin’s most impressive coup yet, it may just have “bought” Ukraine. Russia is on a roll, with sporadic humiliations of a directionless America — from Snowden to Syria — for added spice. Yes, Putin’s grip may well be more fragile than it looks, but when Forbes magazine recently designated him as the most powerful person in the world, it was not without reason. The recent release of two Pussy Rioters and Mikhail Khodorkovsky was a declaration of strength, not weakness.

For a retro great power to behave like a retro great power is not particularly shocking, but it is essential to remember that Russia (even more than the U.S.) is a nation that considers that it has the right to play by its own rules. Thus Putin’s insistence that his country is not interested in trying to “teach others how to live their lives” is not only a rebuke (as Buchanan correctly notes) to Western universalism, but also a reminder that Russia has no intention of yielding its sovereignty to the emerging supranationalist order. That’s a reasonable, even commendable, position, but it is no reason for those on the foreign-policy right to think that they have found a friend in Putin. There are areas where American and Russian interests overlap (something that Buchanan has also highlighted). The fault for not taking better advantage of them lies on both sides and so far as is possible should be remedied, but a degree of rivalry, sharpened by Russia’s refusal to accept its loss of empire, is inevitable, natural, and, if handled with an appropriate degree of realism, not particularly dangerous.

And (hesitant as I am to give advice to this constituency) social conservatives should be warier still. To Buchanan, Putin “is seeking to redefine the . . . world conflict of the future as one in which conservatives, traditionalists, and nationalists of all continents and countries stand up against the cultural and ideological imperialism of what he sees as a decadent west,” a piece of wishful thinking on Buchanan’s part that gives Putin’s pronouncements an international significance that they do not deserve and could not sustain.

History, Mark Twain is said to have observed, doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Almost exactly two centuries ago, the devout if possibly unhinged Czar Alexander I (1801–25) was peddling the notion of a reactionary “Holy Alliance” between the nations that had seen off Napoleon. When the czar explained this idea to Lord Castlereagh, Britain’s conservative foreign minister (the no less conservative Duke of Wellington was also in the room), the meeting did not go well. “It was not without difficulty,” wrote Castlereagh later, “that we went through the interview with becoming gravity.”

Translation: It was difficult to keep a straight face.

There’s a lesson there.