Blogoir

When the Soviet Union broke up, an interesting issue emerged: how should the FCO/HMG name (in English) the many new countries which had appeared on the world scene?

Those of us at the policy coal-face had a radical idea. Go for the simplest option, ie the one most easy to spell and more or less resembling how the name was pronounced in English. Thus we preferred Kirgistan to Kyrgyzstan or even Kyrgystan when describing the territory known as the Kyrgyz Republic (Кыргыз Республикасы).

The FCO Department dealing with Geographical Names were aghast and launched a fierce rearguard action, arguing that the 'correct' way to deal with such problems was to use the formal standards for transliterating (or whatever the word is) the original linguistic form into English. Thus here the (to us) somewhat strangled Russian ы vowel is best represented with a y, not an i.

Tricky. To my ear the ы sounds most like the ur sound in murder, or indeed the ir sound as in fir-cone.

This issue also comes round in Polish. Thus the muted uh sound represented by the y in Kaczynski - in Polish the i vowel is prounced quite strongly as a short ee (as in me).

The brave policy officers lost out to the holders of the purist flame, so now we have Kyrgystan on the FCO website.

This looks like a feeble compromise, to avoid scaring English-speakers by removing a z. There is a definite z sound in the local languages - the people there are Kyrgyz - so if anything it ought to be Kyrgyzstan.

There is no logic to any of this. If there were, we would not call Deutschland 'Germany'. Partly it's fashion and partly some sort of linguistic political correctness: once upon a time we had Peking, then we were told that it was Beijing. The Chinese started to get peeved that we were not using the name of their capital correctly, and said so.

Paree anyone?

The only issue in all this of course is the eternal one. Who decides?

Take the FCO. It had and for all I know still has a team of people who are deemed to be the Deciders, and from whom the FCO and the rest of Whitehall and thereby much of the UK media and schools take a lead. This echoes an earlier tradition when decisions of this sort were issued by an unchallenged authority.

But these days things are different. Authorities are challenged. Not only governments make maps. People themselves do en masse, using Google and other technologies.

Which is in part why Google has different names for different places, depending upon where you make the search.

Geography and borders - like everything else these days, becoming more ... elusive?

As usual there are pros and cons:

Unpopular as it may be, such uncertainty has become a central dynamic of life on the Internet. The erosion of traditional authority is followed quickly by anxiety over its absence, from Google to Wikipedia to the lesser-known precincts of PetitionOnline—where millions of people direct their impassioned grievances not to any official arbiter but straight into the ether.

What results is an irony. The digital culture that encourages the inclusion of multiple names for a single feature on a map is the same digital culture that has encouraged hundreds of thousands of Iranians to voice their discontent. The very medium incites nationalism, yet also frustrates it.

... What is Google? Is it a repository for all of our mutually exclusive claims, or is it a higher power to which we appeal? It cannot be both, and yet we seem to treat it as both. This tension may only heighten going forward.

“In a world where mapmaking is cheap and anyone can do it,” Goodchild says, “you would eventually expect things to become more and more local.” In such a future, either we will reconcile ourselves to the lack of a central arbiter, or the conflicts will be all over the map. 

Great article. Read it. Via Browser.

What was Kim Philby really up to when he started working for the Soviet Union?

Boris Volodarsky follows the complicated story:

Stalin had decided that one of the ways to solve the ‘Spanish problem’ would be to assassinate Franco. In 1937 Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, sent several operatives on a mission to murder the Caudillo.

Before the GRU officers started to move, the NKVD asked Maly in London to find an agent for a risky assignment in the rebel zone. Philby was chosen partly because he had expressed interest in Spain and had holidayed there with his wife in 1935. It was not concealed from Philby that his task would be to find a way to approach Franco and kill him...

Read on ...

Welcome Browser and other new readers. After reading my thoughts below, check out this piece I wrote back in 2008 about inat. If you don't understand inat, you can't understand Kosovo or Serbia or anything about former Yugoslavia. Sorry, but there it is.

* * * * *

The International Court of Justice has ruled that the declaration of independence "is not in conflict with international law".

The ICJ site is overwhelmed so I can not yet share with you my wise thoughts on the full text of the decision.

Quickies anyway.

The ICJ decision was likely in view of the strange question which the UN General Assembly posed at Serbia's request:

Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo in accordance with international law?

Since international law loftily takes no view about declarations of independence, unilateral or otherwise. As I previously wrote:

Because in a trite sense a declaration of independence (or of anything else for that matter) has to be 'in accordance with international law', since it has no relevance in international law. International law does not deign to take any notice of declarations.

Thus, for example, if the town council down the road here in the UK makes a solemn unilateral declaration of the town's independence from the UK, the rest of us will make a wry smile and go back to blogging or working.

The declaration is 'in accordance' with UK law - free speech and all that. But it is just that, and no more. It's what happens afterwards that counts one way or the other in legal terms, in domestic as in international law. 

If citizens of our town en masse support the declaration of independence, put up road-blocks, stop paying taxes to Westminster and proclaim Vladimir Putin their new king with his consent, things begin to get more interesting.

Norms are being created and broken in all directions. Realities start to be created. Loyalties start to shift...   

Why did Serbia pose the Kosovo question in this odd form? Maybe because it did not want to force the ICJ to answer head-on the Kosovo independence question (eg Is Kosovo now a state recognised by international law?) in case the Serbs lost, thereby incurring an epochal defeat?

This 'advisory' ruling on this curiously open-ended question allows Belgrade to say that nothing significant has been decided one way or the other, so its struggle against Kosovo's independence blithely continues.

The ICJ ruling itself confirms that view in a sense, saying that the Court has not taken a view on whether the consequences of Kosovo's independence declaration have included Kosovo acquiring statehood.

According to B92 in Belgrade (in Serbian) Russia has been quick to confirm that it will not recognise Kosovo for (in effect) this very reason.

If other global big-hitters such India and China and Brazil and South Africa likewise decide to stay put and not shift their view, Kosovo's awkward half-in, half-out international status will drag on indefinitely - the map at the link shows how poorly Kosovo has done with the East/South of the planet.

On the other hand, the headlines round the world will tend to present this as a Win for Kosovo's cause, which in due course might well lead a larger number of countries to recognise Kosovo as a full independent state.

Basically, Kosovo falls into the All Too Difficult box for international law and policy.

Why? Because it is astride two huge tectonic plates underpinning global order and so is bang in the middle of a jurisprudential, political and moral earthquake zone. 

One plate is all about the right of identified peoples to be independent - the principle of self-determination).

The other is all about the circumstances under which existing states can split up into smaller or different formations (or not) - the principle of territorial integrity.

So it all wends its way back to the cynical deals done within the EU and between key European capitals and Washington back in the early 1990s. Basically, it was agreed to recognise Slovenia as an independent state since it (sort of) ticked both boxes simultaneously.

Slovenia was dominated overwhelmingly by Slovenes (self-determination).

And it had an undisputed geographical/political identity as a republic within the former Yugoslavia (territorial integrity), so its independence flowed neatly in parallel with the recognition of Russia and the other former Soviet republics as independent states.

Kosovo certainly makes its mark in the self-determination box, but as it was 'only' a province within Serbia (albeit with many attributes of a full republic, including membership of the eight-person SFRY Presidency itself) the territorial integrity issue is far less clear.

The more so since our cherished Helsinki Process norms basically lay down that there shall be no change in borders within Europe without the consent of all concerned. Which in this case there manifestly isn't.

Here is a tidy Russian look at the wider issues of principle at stake for Europe as these two tectonic plates grind away against each other. 

Implications for Bosnia? Not many.

The Republika Srpska leadership (more or less in coordination with Belgrade) will continue to press the self-determination argument: if Kosovo's declaration of independence is not against international law, why should Republika Srpska too not make a similar declaration at some point?

Down the road in Sarajevo the Bosniacs will noisily insist that the territorial integrity principle is supreme, and that RS itself is in different ways 'illegitimate'.

The Balkans. Where nothing is ever settled.

Democratist is someone who follows the goings-on across the former Soviet Union in some depth.

Here he takes up William Hague's recent speech on UK foreign policy, and makes an interesting point about how the UK invests in foreign policy outcomes in that complicated region:

OSCE election observation is about the best value for money currently available to the UK in terms of its overseas aid/foreign policy in relation to the former Soviet Union. Election observation played a key role in the development of the Baltic States in the 1990′s, and more recently in Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova (considerably improving the relationships of each of these countries with the UK, and allowing for far higher levels of co-operation than had previously been possible).

It retains huge potential to positively influence developments in countries as diverse as Belarus,  Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and even (over the longer-term) Russia itself. All this at a total average cost of just over £600,000 per annum (apparently less than the current value of the FCO’s wine cellar).

Sounds reasonable. But is it true?

Election observing has grown into a busy lifeform in the past two decades, with sizeable numbers of international observers using rights under OSCE and other arrangements to watch the conduct of elections across Europe and far beyond.

Good grief, they even look at our beloved UK elections - and find them wanting.

The laudable aim is to bring an outside and supposedly independent eye to bear on elections, to check and confirm that they have indeed been 'free and fair' and thereby (it is hoped) to deter abuses and help 'cement' democratic process and values.

The problem is that observers necessarily observe the observable, and only a tiny proportion of that.

It is not much use international observers dutifully watching voting and counting of an election where some candidates have been unfairly excluded and/or where the media coverage of the campaign has been skewed massively to favour one side (ie the ruling tendency).

On the contrary, the very fact that international observers are observing such an election might be said to give its outcome a legitimacy it richly does not deserve.

Read, for example, this full and frank account of the lot of the Short-Term Observer in an EU-funded observation in Venezuela:

We make our first report of what is to be a long day. Then we move on, spending only 20 or 30 minutes at each polling station. At various intervals we must phone our LTO team and read out, question by question, our results. The tick-box approach is evidence of the EU’s lack of trust in our judgment. We are data collectors, not observers. It speaks of a bureaucracy keen on statistics that it can brandish scientifically.

The trouble is that it is quasi-scientific: a lot of the data we have to take on trust, such as opening times – and the polling staff are rarely going to admit to tardiness.

Which helps explain why in some cases the 'international community' is keen to pronounce an elections outcome 'good enough' despite manifest and radical flaws. There is no obvious alternative to doing so.

Even when an election is obviously unfair and international observers say so (as in Sudan this year), the self-proclaimed winner just brazens out the criticism and carries on regardless of EU hand-wringing:

"These elections have struggled to reach international standards. They have not reached them all," said Veronique de Keyser, the head of the EU observer mission in Sudan.

Mrs De Keyser said that, especially in the oil-producing south, there had been cases of harassment and intimidation of voters "which has nothing to do with a democratic process".

She praised the enthusiasm of voters and said opposition parties had been free to voice complaints throughout the process.

That's a good example of what I hate about such EU or wider 'Western' missions. They typically are loath to say what is blindingly obvious, viz that they have watched a farcical parody of democracy and that no-one should treat the outcome as legitimate.

Why? Because the governments sending and supporting these missions suspect (not unreasonably) that whatever happens they are stuck with a bad outcome dragging in to the indefinite future, and so condemning it outright makes their job harder. Plus there is no outcome so scandalous and unjust that the UN will not proclaim it legitimate.

Thus our Observers act like unhappy chickens and peck in the local dust for crumbs of comfort to include in their Report, such as the fact that 'opposition groups have been free to voice complaints'.

Huh?

That merely shows how bad the abuse is - the ruling elite have skewed the process to the point that they are so confident of winning that they can allow the opposition to make some puny oppositionist noises!

Still, the fact that there is some sort of scrutiny, however limited it might be, arguably cheers up local people a little and does (perhaps) edge things towards less flagrant abuses.

Which often is the best or only scrawny progress available.

One story of British election monitoring.

The Yeltsin administration in 1993 opened up the whole Russian election process to international scrutiny, and an army of observers duly appeared.

We wily Brits decided that it made little sense to limit our effort to staring at lines of stolid Russians casting votes. The only place which really mattered was the national nerve centre where all the regional results were sent and aggregated.

So waving OSCE identity badges a few British obervers including people from the Embassy gained admission to that national election nerve centre in Moscow, much to the bewilderment (and some annoyance) of the Russian officials there. They then had a fascinating time spending the night watching results pour in from all those time-zones and be tallied for overall outcome purposes.

And, indeed, as far as we could see the nation-wide votes as finally announced fully and fairly reflected the results as fed in from local and regional voting centres.

As for the British role in all this, my guess is that for reasons of economy and general reluctance to 'rock the boat', this new coalition government will opt for the quiet life option of doing such exercises through an EU framework, thereby diluting a distinctive steely British voice.

In other words, that Democratist is right to have concerns:

... if the UK does not put people forward to work as observers, it means that certain, perhaps less well-intentioned countries gain proportionately more influence in the process of observation, and will be able to have greater influence on subsequent OSCE  statements and reports over the coming years.

In a worst-case scenario, such an outcome could do significant damage to the OSCE’s reputation – and (as the Foreign Secretary so correctly noted in his speech) such damage is not easily repaired.

Quite.

The Week too looks at the spy story Winners and Losers.

And cites this site as giving one of the Best Opinions on the issues concerned.

Who did better from the spy swap?

Some say the Americans:

“I don’t think there’s any doubt — I think the U.S. won,” NBC National Security Producer Robert Windrem said Friday. He said the four freed by the Russians were coming "with real information and there’s no evidence the guys from the U.S. got anything.”

And here.

Others say the Russians:

With this spy exchange, it seems that we will continue not to understand how the Russian secret service really operates.

The basics, folks:

In any deal there are good things you get.

And bad things you avoid or reduce.

Good things can be traded for other good things - or for reduced bad things.

My sense of this one is that the 'West' achieved some pretty 'good' things: the freedom of several Western agents or suspected agents imprisoned in Russia (an end in itself), who may or may not have excellent information to hand over.

The Russians in turn got some modest good things - their own people back, even if they now have to pretend to be nice to them. Much more importantly, they reduced somewhat the scale of the bad things.

They managed to secure the prompt return to Russia of a large group of people whom they'll want to interrogate for a very long time, to try to find out how much they told the Americans and how much the Americans may have found out about Russian intelligence techniques.

The idea that these Russian illegals/sleepers were spending their time sucking up to Harvard professors or infilitrating the local school group is, of course, trivial disinformation. They also will have had a lot more duties helping other spies set about their business. More often than not, they will have received some instructions - do x and y - without knowing what purpose it served.

Thus if the Americans have been watching them for some time, they will have gained all sorts of leads on much wider Russian intelligence activities in the USA.

And when the ship is sinking, blocking whichever holes you can find in the hull is the number one priority. In slower time you can work out why the holes appeared, and then set the ship back on course.

Bottom line: if the Russians do any deal, they think they've won - in the terms which most matter to them.

And who am I to disagree?

Is the US/Russian likely spy swap a good idea?

Ron Radosh thinks not:

Both the Putin government and the Obama administration, however, are signing on to this charade. The Russians get back their would-be sleeper agents, while the United States avoids an embarrassing trial that might turn U.S. public opinion against rapprochement with Moscow.

Obama can thus pretend that all is well in the American-Russian relationship and that he and Putin have left this little insignificant matter behind them.

And when others try to point out that men like Sutyagin were never guilty of any real offense, Putin can point to his newly signed confession as evidence that he now admitted his guilt.

Radosh also points out that putting these 'sleepers' on trial in the USA could allow defence lawyers to probe away at the techniques used by the FBI to discover them, something the Russians would dearly love to know.

It's hard to give a clear view without knowing a helluva lot more than any of us mere mortals will ever know.

But the speed with which the supposed swap has been set up suggests that the Russians were as guilty as hell.

Which in turn will lead critics of the decision in the USA and elsewhere to wonder whether the Obama administration has not been just a bit too quick to let them off the hook, where they were swinging limply in the wind.

However, let's not forget that in the rarefied world of espionage the fact that one's own especially secret people have been so spectacularly revealed is a ghastly humiliation.

So, that accomplished, and with lots of further operational information uncovered which no doubt leaves the Russian spy effort in the USA both depleted and groggy with embarrassment, maybe the Americans feel that they can be generous this time round.

As they continue not to be in the case of Jay Pollard, my former classmate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He really betrayed trust on a massive scale, in spying for the Israelis. No pardon for him.

Are we about to see a major 'spy swap'?

"Why waste time on all those tedious legal processes and prisons? We get our spies back, and so do you."

Hard for me at least to see why the Russians would want to do this unless the illegals/sleepers rounded up in the USA were likely to spill so many operational beans during their looming long years on trial and then in prison that it is worth Moscow eating great slabs of humble pie to end the agony asap.

Maybe the Americans likewise feel that in fact so many KGB/SVR beans have been spilled already that they can afford to be magnanimous.

However, look at the world from the point of view of the hapless Russian spies.

They have been living agreeable and comfortable lives in leafy US suburbs. Now they face abrupt repatriation to Russia, where they will be regarded as failures and losers for ever.

Plus they face sustained and stressful interrogations from the SVR as the Russian agencies try to find out where it all went wrong - and what they have confessed about Russian operations and methodology.

Gulp. Political asylum bid, anyone?

The more you look at it, the more this looks like a five-star triumph for the Americans in general and the FBI in particular.

My recent observations on the arrest of the network of Russian sleeper/illegal spies in the USA have been noticed and commended by Boris Volodarsky:

Finally, out of a wall of stupid and totally unqualified media reports, including two articles in The Sunday Times (July 4, 2010) not to mention the Independent of the same date, there is something worth reading...

Boris is someone who knows quite a lot about such things:

The role of illegals is threefold:

• to act as cut-outs between important sources and the Center (directly or via the SVR station);
• to serve as talent-spotters finding potential candidates for further intelligence cultivation and possible recruitment (a rather long and complex process, where the illegals only act at its early stage);
• and to establish the right contacts that would allow other intelligence operators (members of the SVR station) or the Center (visiting intelligence officers under different covers, journalists, diplomats or scientists tasked by the SVR) to get intelligence information and/or receive favors that the Center is interested in.

The illegals also have a number of technical tasks like renting accommodations that could be used as safe houses, finding places for dead drops, planning hit operations like assassinations that are also carried out by illegals (but from a different department of the same directorate).

They also collect sample documents that could be used in other covert operations and update Moscow about some standard proceedings (buying a house, getting a job, registering a company, and so on)...

All of which (and plenty more) puts to shame the mass of British media so-called  comment/analysis on this episode in the UK. Although it's hard nowadays to put the facile commentary down to pro-Russian or some other ideological gullibility - more like chronic triviality and sheer laziness.

But the effect is the same, of course.

To belittle a first-class technical intelligence effort by the Western agencies who work hard and diligently to protect our freedom, and thereby to add another lump of moral relativism to the vast stinking pile of it now obscuring the public's view of grown-up issues..

Useful idiots indeed.

It is wearying being peppered with facile media so-called analysis of the Russian spy story featuring this sort of line:

Huh? What's all the fuss about? What's there to spy on in the places these amateur people were living in? Did the Kremlin really want to infiltrate the PTA? Typical Cold War rubbish, recycled now for purely PR reasons, guffaw guffaw

See eg Alexander Chancellor here in the Guardian:

One reason for this must be the complete futility of the alleged Russian operation. The FBI had not only been watching the suspects closely for up to a decade, but it had found no evidence that any of them had furnished Moscow with even a scrap of useful information during that time.

With their elaborately prepared false identities, most of them posing as ordinary American suburbanites, holding barbecues and discussing their children's schools over coffee with their neighbours, they were in regular contact with the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence agency, but don't appear to have had anything much to report that couldn't have been discovered by anybody surfing the internet.

Here's Marina Hyde also in the Guardian, in full titter as she is mercifully spared from knowing anything about the subject:

The minute the news broke, it produced the most nostalgic of frissons. How high did it go? Who had they turned? Were indictments of state department officials merely days away?

No, disappointingly. Without wishing to denigrate the vital work of parent-teacher associations in Boston, it seems fair to hazard this one doesn't go all the way to the top. With the exception of the chap who enterprisingly based himself in Washington, and whose social-networking page shows him smiling gauchely outside the White House, the rest of the accused seem to have infiltrated east coast suburbia.

Let me explain a few things. (I was asked to do so by Reuters and did so, but the published results were a bit, hem, thin.)

What are the many difficulties involved in successful espionage?

Something like this:

• identifying where highly sensitive and useful information might actually be stored or circulated
• identifying weaknesses in its protection (human or technical/physical weaknesses)
• using those weaknesses to get access to the information
• copying it in an undetectable way
• getting that information back to HQ
• all done without anyone noticing or suspecting
• preferably repeatable many times over - a steady flow of good information is likely to be much more useful than a one-off leak

These days a silent arms-race goes on behind the scenes between computer programmers. Those countries and organisations minded to invest huge resources into this sort of thing attack each other through computer networks. The FCO/MI6 are under literally non-stop cyber-bombardment from hostile intelligence services and hackers.

These non-stop computer attacks seek to find technical loopholes in systems and through them to suck out inside information. Even unclassified information can be useful, such as HR data or even the patterns of telephone calls from and within buildings which, once the date are crunched, help narrow down who is doing what job, or not.

The other main approach is to get people to work for you, willingly (bribes, ideology) or unwillingly (blackmail, threats to relatives). It is one thing to attack MI6 electronically from banks of secret computer terminals in Siberia. Quite another to have someone actually inside the building.

NB that such a person may well not be tasked with smuggling key information out of the building - it could be enough that s/he helps you identify personal or other weaknesses which you might try to exploit.

In all this 'human intelligence' or HUMINT work, obvious problems arise.

First, how does a hostile external intelligence service attacking the UK identify potential recruits and then make the fatal pitch, inviting them to work for the 'enemy'? That requires impressive judgement, lest the target feigns acquiescence, pockets the money, and promptly notifies MI5 that this hostile approach has been made. That would allow MI5 to identify said hostile intelligence agent and maybe unravel all sorts of patiently crafted schemes.

Second, if a traitor is successfully recruited how to get hold of any information which the traitor can steal from within? A successful traitor needs to pass useful information maybe for years to come, without being suspected or detected. Not easy.

All of which goes to show where 'sleepers' and 'illegals' come into the picture.

It is not easy for (say) a Russian diplomat or 'businessman' repeatedly to approach a US official or to sniff around a US government agency without some sort of suspicions being raised.

So, why not use people who are really Russians but who look like Americans!

To carry this off requires years of patient, unproductive work as the would-be Americans build false identities and try to manoeuvre themselves into useful places.

Which in turn is why the drivel in the Guardian and elsewhere simply misses the point.

Most will fail to get anywhere significant. That's the point.

In effect the Rusians are hedging their bets, being busy on short-term tactics (massed computer attacks on USA systems) but also investing in long-term strategy.

Some of these people might hit the jackpot and get a job in a sensitive facility, or marry someone whose close friend is in a sensitive facility, or be part of a local community where people who work in sensitive facilities hang out.

The sleepers need not get results by acquiring information. They may do very well for the Russians by helping spot weaknesses ("Joe Jones's cousin Fred works in the Pentagon comms centre and is having a messy divorce and drinking problems. Mary Kennick's husband knows someone in the White House protocol team who has heavy gambling debts...").

Given the phenomenon of the Six Degrees of Separation, it would be surprising if they did not find some such weaknesses.

Plus, think about the problem of conveying stolen information safely to Moscow. It could be dangerous for a Russian mole in the US Air Force to pass information regularly to Russian diplomats - far easier to swing through a leafy suburb and slip it to an unsuspected American-lookalike sleeper.

Or consider the difficulty in setting up an operation, eg to get microphones planted in a building. Not so easy for a Russian to run a recce of that building and see how the security works. But an 'American' sleeper might be able to do that for you.

In short, without looking carefully at the whole production chain of intelligence information, it makes no sense to snigger at the significance of this excellent US power-play against a laboriously established Russian network.

Worse, it is naive and stupid to the point of dishonesty.

Read Edward Lucas who, of course, gets it:

The brilliant work by America's FBI in unearthing the biggest spy ring for decades should be a deafening wake-up call for every country that values its freedom and security.

Sadly, complacency and self-interest still muffle that alarm.

Update: another strong piece by Edward Lucas here, going into expert detail as to why the Russians would want to target UK assets for very well defined reasons.

A Polish reader Ludwik Kowalski now long established in the USA has sent in a link to this unusual free online memoir, namely extracts from his diaries which he wrote while growing up in the USSR then Stalinist Poland:

This is my “book of life.” It is based on what I recorded in diaries, first as a teenager in the USSR and Poland, then as an adult, in Poland, France and the USA. It traces my evolution from a dedicated Stalinist into an active anti-Stalinist. Romantic affairs and other preoccupations are not totally ignored...

My notebooks were kept in an old green metal trunk. In late 2009, at the age of 78, I finally decided to open it. Up to then, I had never re-read the diaries. Their total volume was approximately three cubic feet.

One thing became clear as soon as I started reading. Translating everything made no sense, considering poor composition, numerous repetitions, and too many details. But I began to see my life more clearly, and decided there was enough substance to be of interest to others...

Here is my story in a nutshell. Born in 1931 in Poland, I spent my early childhood, up to age 15, in the Soviet Union. During that time my idealistic father became a victim of the Stalinist regime; like millions of others, he was arrested and sent to die in Siberia.

My mother and I returned to Poland after the end of WWII. That is where my undergraduate and graduate education were completed. In 1957 I went to France for postgraduate studies. After returning to Poland in 1963 with a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics, I was invited to a scientific conference in the US, and became a research associate at Columbia University. My teaching career began in 1969...

Well worth a look.

First, it's free.

And second, it is striking to read about the intellectual and emotional evolution from a boy who wrote cheery poems praising Stalin to ahighly educated man who finally grasped the truth about the Soviet regime and its cruelty to millions of its own people.

How to 'explain' the shootings in Cumbria?

Jeremy Seabrook in the Guardian helpfully shows why he is inexplicable:

The second thing is, in our desire to explain these events solely as examples of personal pathology, we concentrate on the individual, and do not interrogate the role of society and a socially produced ideology of individualism ...

The importance of self-expression, self-indulgence, self-realisation in our society is bound to have its less glamorous form; and for all the exaltations of success, the parade of showy individuals who, by virtue of their beauty or skill, or simply their assertiveness and celebrity, there is bound to be another, suppressed march of misery, frustration, despair and hatred.

The insistent singleminded worship of wealth and power is itself a powerful generator of a darker side of human experience; and all the pathologies of crime, disorder, emotional breakdown, psychiatric illness and depression, are simply the shadow of the excessive adulation offered up to fame, youth or talent...

This is junk journalism, discombobulated sentences filling the available space but based on nothing coherent at all. As far as he is making any claim which is capable of being understood, it appears to be that the horrible shootings committed by Derrick Bird were somehow caused by a socially produced ideology of individualism.

Jeremy. If you want to write for a supposedly serious newspaper by making outlandish claims, try looking at the other side of the argument as well.

Your claim might make some sense if it can be shown that societies which emphasise the Collective over the Individual consistently do better when it comes to mass murderers.

Yet what do we find when we look at the finest example of a society which has made strenuous efforts to suppress any ideology of individualism?

Take the case of hungry Nikolai Dzhumagaliev. And lots of other Soviet-era cannibals. Or even Andrei Chikatilo.

More importantly, those societies which play down the ideology of individualism tend to produce people in positions of authority who really enjoy murdering on a lavish scale for the sake of the ideologically proclaimed common good.

Such as our favourite NKVD killer Vasili Blokhin. Every night for some four weeks he executed Polish prisoners every three minutes, some 250 a night. Then he went home and slept and did whatever NKVD killers did in their free time in those days, before heading back to another busy night's work.

And Che Guevara himself:

"If in doubt, kill him" were Che's instructions. On the eve of victory, according to Costa, Che ordered the execution of a couple dozen people in Santa Clara, in central Cuba, where his column had gone as part of a final assault on the island.

Some of them were shot in a hotel, as Marcelo Fernándes-Zayas, another former revolutionary who later became a journalist, has written--adding that among those executed, known as casquitos, were peasants who had joined the army simply to escape unemployment...

No, Jeremy. You have it exactly the wrong way round.

It's because we live in a civilisation which values individual life that (a) the sort of horrible shootings seen in Cumbria are mercifully rare, and (b) the state does not execute people on a massive scale.

A neat little piece here, getting to the heart of Reality - and where Reality meets Politicians.

Not a place politicians much like, as it shows too much about them:

“Plug the damn hole,” Obama told them.

That’s the politician’s answer to every intractable problem: give orders, issue threats, and wait for obedience. But the creative human mind cannot take orders like that. Notice I didn’t say, “refuses to take orders.” I said, “cannot take orders.”

By that I mean, the task of plugging a leak 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico is an engineering feat. BP’s acknowledged role in causing the leak does not alter the fact that careful study, creative thought, and the exacting deployment of technical and mechanical skills over long distances are all necessary in order to fix the leak.

No amount of jaw clenching or bug-eyed threats from politicians can bring the solution one inch closer to reality.

The human mind does not operate by force from outside. If engineering achievements could be conjured up by barking orders, the Soviet Union would be a thriving nation overflowing with engineering marvels, instead of a dead husk...

Welcome Britblog Roundup readers.

As readers will have noticed, someone describing himself/herself as George Dutton is now following this site closely and commenting with oh-so-clever remarks celebrating Socialism.

He quotes from a remarkable essay by Albert Einstein on Why Socialism? from 1949.

Here is Albert fretting over the survival of the human race (as well he might, given his busy contribution to atom bombs):

The abstract concept "society" means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society -- in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence -- that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society.

It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word "society."

It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished -- just as in the case of ants and bees.

With the state funeral of President Kaczynski completed, attention now will turn to the cause of the crash at Smolensk airport.

Not before a surprisingly weak article by Denis Dutton and Adam Chmielewski appears at Open Democracy:

The air-crash which decapitated Poland’s state elite may owe something to reckless behaviour, official negligence - and the flaws of modern democracy itself

The judgment must be that Polish officialdom has not learned the lesson of this recent tragedy. Indeed, there is a suggestion of grave irresponsibility surrounding this ill-fated trip. The fact that so many people of senior rank were loaded onto a single plane created evident risks and ignored the procedural rule that the president should not travel with others who occupy high state positions...

Polish politicians, as do those in most democratic countries, live in mortal fear of the media and the opposition. For years some of them have mumbled about the necessity of upgrading the government’s air-fleet; but no decision was made, for fear of the response that state officials wish to enjoy the luxuries of new planes at the expense of impoverished taxpayers...

We share the grief of this terrible event. But we also feel angry that a democratic state might have done such damage to itself through the irresponsibility or recklessness of its own officials.

Here is the comment I posted there:

[T]here are many subtle ways in which this accident might have been caused, which operate on a level which do not justify such bold conclusions as " reckless behaviour, official negligence - and the flaws of modern democracy itself".

Thus perhaps the pilot made an unaccountable mistake of fact - he eg misread the aircraft dials and acted accordingly. Or he made a mistake of judgement - eg he read the equipment accurately but made a wrong conclusion. Or as he approached the airport, the scale of the fog a few kilometres ahead on the ground was not evident; he acted properly with the level of information available to him

Or something perhaps was lost momentarily in translation or interpretation of ground crew instructions/suggestions (the crew communicated with the ground in Russian, not the usual English).

Plus there may have been psychological factors in play. President Kaczynski will not have wanted to hear Russian suggestions that the plane divert to Minsk, occasioning a tedious car journey and very late (and therefore humiliating) arrival at Katyn. Did he order the pilot to take an undue risk? Or did the pilot not need to be ordered, preferring not to pose the question and risk a row?

And maybe, all things considered, the risky course would have been safe had it not been for one extra tall tree which happened to be in the flight-path? Had the plane taken a chance yet landed normally, this article would not have been written.

My point is that a huge amount of what we all do, governments included, often comes down to very fine judgements which are tricky to analyse accurately afterwards when things go wrong.

Buying a new expensive aircraft for official civilian travel (and not eg an extra F-16) may or may not be a good decision. But what if a brand new plane had crashed like this one because accumulated micro-decisions combined with abrupt localised thick fog and one very tall tree? Remember the excellent Airbus which crashed over Siberia because the pilot let his child play with the controls?

Are such tragedies really symptomatic of 'deeper' problems? Or just part of the natural way we manage risk at all levels every day everywhere, a consequence of which is that now and again some really bad things happen?

Would striving to prevent every possible accident (as per the ruinous 'precautionary principle') instead create new, different disasters?

Other good comments there too.

It is not clear to me why it takes so long to acquire then publish the data from the Black Box. Some facts are oozing out in an unsatisfactory way.

The Polish/Russian media are saying that the Box did not show that the President urged the pilots to attempt a risky landing, and that there were audible screams in the final seconds. There are suggestions that 'intimate' exchanges from the voice recorder will not be published.

President Kaczynski for sure would have been deeply unimpressed with any suggestion that the plane divert to Minsk or Moscow because of adverse weather conditions.

He would have known that following the successful Katyn commemoration featuring Polish and Russian PMs Tusk and Putin, his separate commemorative event risked being spoiled by media tittering over his 'foggy' foreign policy or somesuch.

Plus he might well have suspected that the Russians somehow were exaggerating the weather conditions if only for the pleasure of seeing him make a long and tedious and embarrassing drive to Katyn.

So were those sentiments or something similar conveyed to the aircrew? Or did they know that and not need to ask the President for a view.

One way or the other, does it matter?

Had the pilot taken a calculated risk of some sort and landed safely, we never would have known.

My own guess is that it was a combination of the absence of normal air traffic control facilities, the fact that conversations were proceeding in Russian, the difficult weather, and maybe (ultimately) some sort of pilot misreading of the altimeter data which brought the aircraft down.

The faster the full data set is made public, the better.

I have written extensively on this site about what the Katyn Massaces represents for Poland, for Russia, for Europe - and for civilisation. Type Katyn into the site's Search function and get the links.

See for example this extract from my final FCO telegram, sent to London from Warsaw as I drove towards the border for the last time as Ambassador:

The days trickle into months and years. It all gets ... difficult. Complicated. Memories fade.

Thus people who slyly presided over or benefited from the communist system are feted as modern European social democrats. Jewish, Polish and other victims of communism who had their property stolen or heroically refused to cooperate appeal to European institutions for justice, and often leave empty-handed. We prosecute elderly Nazis for their crimes. Elderly Communists go free...

... Do Al Qaeda and Hamas look at how Stalin got away with mass murder at Katyn, and think that by being viciously determined enough they can do the same? Do they expect the sheer intensity of their hatred of our pluralism to overwhelm our readiness to defend it? That they too can bring us to Submit?

How might we measure if they are succeeding?

The sheer scale of the Katyn murders ordered personally by Stalin with the endorsement of the top Soviet leadership - and carried out single-mindedly by world champion killer Vasili Blokhin - is hard to grasp.

Look at the numbers.

Some 22,000 Polish prisoners were murdered at Katyn and other sites in 1940. Assume (conservatively) that each Pole had a friends and family circle of (say) 100 people. That means that 2,200,000 Poles knew someone killed at Katyn, which in turn means that almost every Polish family either lost a friend or relative at Katyn or knew someone who did.

This latest tragedy is on a far smaller scale. But given the public roles and seniority of so many people involved, the numbers rise fast here too.

If (conservatively) each crash victim knew professionally or privately 500 people, 45,000 people will feel directly touched by the disaster. Again, most Poles either will know someone killed in the crash, or know someone who knows someone who knows someone who died.

Hence Poland's national grief, all the more intense since it evokes all those appalling memories of Katyn itself.

Returning to Katyn.

Let's do our best and try to have some sympathy for today's Russian leaders. They preside over a huge, rich country, run into the ground by seventy years of stupid collectivist brutality. Most Russians feel pride in the titanic sacrifices made by their parents and grandparents in the Second World War.

How to put Katyn in some sort of modern honest context without calling into question so many other aspects of Stalin's rule and perhaps risking calling into question the sprawling Russian state itself?

A key issue is opening the archives once and for all, if only to reveal the precise chains of command and ascertain which Soviet officials and secret police personnel actually did the killings.

President Yeltsin made big strides in that direction. See this fascinating article by a Russian historian and Katyn expert Natalia Lebedeva on the work done in Russia to explain it all.

Poland of course insists that there are many issues still left unclear, and more papers to be published.

Part of Russia's official defensiveness on this question has centred on categorising the massacre. It obviously was a war crime, if not the war crime. Natalia Lebedeva:

One of these later books was “The Katyn Syndrome” (“The Katyn Syndrome in Soviet-Polish and Russian-Polish Relations” in Russian), co-authored by Anatoly Yablokov, the prosecutor in charge of the Soviet, and then Russian, Katyn investigation from August 1990 to June 1994.

His group classified the Katyn execution as a crime against peace, a war crime and a crime against humanity, in accordance with Clauses A, B and C of Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal for the Nuremberg Trials.

However, the Military Prosecutor’s Office later reversed the ruling, calling the tragedy an “abuse of power that resulted in grave consequences,” if we are to believe the press. I consider this definition inadequate and have openly expressed my disagreement, including in my book, “Katyn: A Crime Against Humanity.”

Should that be conceded by Moscow? Would that open the way to legal action, claims for reparations, clamour about other Soviet WW2 excesses, and so on?

In recent years Russian leader Putin has played hardball on Katyn and Russian/Polish relations, partly in response to unrelenting (and unsubtle) public pressure on the question by President Kaczynski.

Probably the culmination of this approach was Putin's 'Letter to Poles' sent last year on the eve of the commemorations in Gdansk of the start of World War Two, which I analysed here:

The people of Russia, whose destiny was crippled by the totalitarian regime, fully understand the sensitiveness of Poles about Katyn where thousands of Polish servicemen lie. Together we must keep alive the memory of the victims of this crime.

Message:  be very grateful, sensitive Poland, for our liberating you, even though we murdered and imprisoned thousands of Poles to do so. And let's remember the victims of the Katyn crime. But let's not talk about the criminals who committed it.

Katyn and Mednoye memorials, just as the tragic fate of the Russian soldiers taken prisoners in Poland during the 1920 war, should become symbols of common grief and mutual pardon.

Message:  you have your massacre victims, Poland - we have ours. No double standards. OK?

Yet in recent weeks, perhaps because Putin saw Lech Kaczynski's poor ratings and wanted to send a signal to his less strident Polish political rivals in Poland's Presidential election year, the Moscow tone had softened. Putin and Polish PM Donald Tusk together stood at a commemorative event only last week.

Now the scale and horror of the Smolensk plane crash has pushed Russia's relations with Poland in a quite new direction.

While Internet conspiracy theorists on all sides are raving away, most Poles seem impressed by and grateful for the way the Russians have been managing the disaster, not least in extending great generosity to Polish families travelling to Russia for the grim task of identifying bodies.

President Medvedev has sent a powerful message of condolence to the people of Poland promising the closest cooperation with the Polish authorities in establishing the cause of the crash.

And the human sympathy and solidarity shown by Putin himself when he and PM Tusk laid wreaths at the crash site has made a powerful impression in Poland: 

Perhaps most remarkably, Russian TV has now shown the harrowing film Katyn by Andrzej Wajda twice, bringing home to millions of Russians for the first time the scale of this Stalinist villainy and violence.

Is all this disinterested sympathy by the Russian elite?

Of course not. The Russian side have perhaps been just a bit too quick (even insensitive?) publicly to put all blame for the crash on the Polish pilots, as if to stake out up front an immoveable position that neither the ageing Soviet-era Presidential aircraft nor any Russian factors on the ground played any contributory part.

Plus, more generally, the moving images of tough Russian Putin comforting a distressed Polish Tusk suit the Russians' view of themselves as the Father of All Slavs. They send out strong signals of pan-Slavic solidarity which (in effect) offer an important rival vision to European integration on the EU's terms (led by Germany) alone.

So be it.

Huge historic 'open' themes in Polish/Russian relations go back centuries. They need such symbolic gestures of public and personal solidarity and reconciliation if they are to be shifted in a less confrontational direction.

Moscow looks to doing a magnificent job - both the countries concerned and Europe as a whole will benefit if that is carried through into a joint and uncontested official assessment of the cause of the crash, which in turn could open the way to a Big New Start.

Or something gets contested about the crash, bitter disagreements and recriminations break out - and it all spirals the other way.

I'll be optimistic this time. Lech Kaczynski would have wanted that upward path, as long as it was done properly and respectfully.

Here (below) is the text of my appreciation of the life and times of Lech and Maria Kaczynski, now up at Radio Free Europe.

Welcome Steyn Online readers.

* * * * *

I attended a smart Warsaw dinner party in 2006, not long after the Kaczynski twins and their Law and Justice party (PiS) had triumphed in the 2005 Polish parliamentary and Presidential elections. The assembled Poles, distinguished Warsaw intellectuals, united in noisy disgust. The Kaczynskis were portrayed as belonging to that part of the political spectrum which ranges from pathological extremists to the far side of the Antichrist. Poland was hurtling down the road to ruin, even dictatorship.

Feverish attacks on the Kaczynski phenomenon from many Poles (including Solidarity period colleagues) quickly turned into an international liberal media ‘narrative’ drawn from a pick ‘n mix list of disobliging adjectives which is surfacing in some obituary analysis: extreme, nationalist, homophobic, anti-German, anti-European, ultra-Catholic, xenophobic, reactionary, divisive, populist, right-wing.

The worst adjective the patronising Warsaw elite threw at the Kaczynskis was something much more subtly Polish: they were so provincial. They were not ‘one of us’ – too petty and pedantic, too truculent, too self-righteous, too wrapped up in Poland’s own myths, too worried about all those uneducated primitive Poles out there. In short, much too Polish – but in the wrong way.

In my four years in Warsaw from numerous meetings with the Kaczynski family including their mother Jadwiga Kaczynska I drew my own, very different conclusions. They came across as smart, amusing, private but determined and far-sighted Polish patriots who had ‘attitudes’ rather than specific policies.

The Kaczynskis' overriding ambition was for Poland to be strong. (This might sound a curious goal for non-Poles, but remember that since 1795 Poland has been substantively free and independent for only 40 years.) The Kaczynskis looked uncompromisingly at what they saw as key weaknesses in Poland as it had had emerged from its bleak modern history. They identified three themes.

Communism’s Corrupt Legacy

One was the dire moral and institutional legacy of communism. Poles’ heroic heave to end Soviet rule had come with a huge cost. Poles had spied on and betrayed other Poles. Key state institutions had been penetrated by people on the Moscow payroll. Far too many people had prospered dishonestly since communism ended. New foreign investment flooding into Poland was welcome, but it brought too many temptations to cut corners.

Above all, key Solidarity leaders including Lech Walesa himself had pulled punches when communism ended, allowing numerous communist villains to sneak away from their crimes only to return in expensive new suits, whistling nonchalantly as new European ‘social democrats’. It was this argument which so infuriated former Solidarity personalities – how dare the Kaczynskis call into question Poland’s (and Solidarity’s) supreme moral triumph in ending communism peacefully? Heresy.

In my view Lech Kaczynski wanted to win the 2005 Presidential election primarily to see his view of this recent history vindicated, rather than with any clear plans to do much about it. In particular there was no generalised throwing open of the communist archives – some commentators close to the Kaczynskis told me that key Solidarity people and many senior Catholic Church leaders had to be protected from devastating revelations of betrayal or private indiscretions.

As the post-communist Left reeled under one scandal after another, Lech Kaczynski campaigned against corruption at all levels of the state (with sly swipes at unwholesome ‘foreign’ influences), first as Justice Minister in 2000-2001 and then as Mayor of Warsaw.

As Mayor he set a new style. Official processes were meticulously if not painfully respected. Unspectacular but steady improvements were made. Corruption scandals faded away. This unassuming if not boring style went down well with the public.

And, yes, Mayor Kaczynski banned two gay parades. Not so much because he was against homosexuality (decriminalised in Poland decades before the United Kingdom got round to it), but rather because he thought that that sort of thing was just unseemly. The fact that many German and other foreign gay rights activists wanted to use the parades to challenge his authority made him more defiant.

Political Instability

The Kaczynskis also fretted over political instability itself; they did not want Poland slipping back into the ruinous feuding of the 1930s. By 2000 the dozens of political parties which had contested early post-communist elections had been reduced to some ten groupings. However, a quarter or more of Polish voters flirted with overtly populist leaders of a ‘Red-Brown’ inclination. Many were marginalised Poles from families displaced from Ukraine in World War Two and now somehow ‘rootless’ in poor rural areas.

After the Kaczynski PiS party (to their own surprise) became the largest party in the 2005 Parliamentary elections, the twins hit upon a strategy which scandalised many middle-class Poles: they formed a government with these populists, the Self-Defence and Polish Families parties led by Andrzej Lepper and Roman Giertych respectively.

This ridiculous government wobbled along for a year or so then collapsed, prompting the 2007 elections. The main centre right party Citizens Platform swept to power. Far from banging a ‘right wing’ free market drum, PiS talked about ‘social justice’ and strong state support for the less fortunate. PiS sucked in votes from different parts of the left spectrum. Self-Defence and Polish Families were crushed. The former communists struggled to get into double figures.

The result of the Kaczynskis’ crafty machinations has been a spectacular success for Poland and for Europe. Only four political groupings are now in Parliament, all committed to EU membership and modernising pro-Western policies. Polish politics, decision-making and institutions are notably more stable – Poland’s current fine run of economic success while the rest of Europe is faltering is no coincidence.

Poland and Europe

Finally, Lech Kaczynski wanted Poland to be strong in Europe. But he also wanted Western Europe to grasp that while it had prospered after World War Two, Poland had been left at Yalta to rot under Russian/Soviet rule. He insisted that the values of ‘modern Europe’ had been formed without Poland’s rightful participation, so Poland did not see itself as automatically bound by them. Yes, Poland would join the European Union. But it had not thrown off communist Moscow to submit to petty-bureaucratic Brussels.

Thus Poland’s tenacious negotiating positions over the 2005 EU Budget deal and the Lisbon Treaty. Other EU capitals saw the Kaczynskis as blustering amateurs who would quickly fold. I warned London that the Kaczynskis would be stubborn and skilful negotiators, and privately advised Tony Blair how to work with them.

Lech Kaczynski duly played on Angela Merkel’s desperation to get EU voting reweighted in Germany’s favour and extracted a remarkable concession, namely that Poland’s excellent voting weight under the Nice Treaty extend until late 2014. This gives Poland a stronger hand in the 2012/13 EU Budget negotiations. Kaczynski also steered Poland’s Eurozone membership issue into the long grass – again, a perspicacious outcome which has done Poland no harm.

Lech Kaczynski’s Legacy

Lech Kaczynski reminds me of Bill Buckley’s famous ambition for US conservatives, to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop!" His weakness was turning his fiercely held attitudes into policies. Far too often, especially in foreign policy pronouncements, he came across as heaving large lumps of Attitude into the river of current affairs, making an impressive splash but doing nothing to stop the water simply running past again.

Attitudes and policies come and go. For now let’s remember and respect what Lech and Maria Kaczynski did over more than 30 years to build a strong, honest Poland.

Yesterday on BBC and CNN I was asked whether Poland would slump into political instability, so many top people being lost in this disaster. I replied, “of course not”.

Poland is in deep sorrow, yet coping firmly and democratically with this calamity. Lech Kaczynski helped make that happen – a towering moral and political achievement, for Poland and for Europe.

* * * * *

The plaque for Sir Christopher Wren in St Paul's Cathedral says this:

si monumentum requiris, circumspice (if you seek his monument, look around you)

The same goes for Lech Kaczynski in his fine and honourable journey from child film star to law studies through internment and Solidarnosc, and then to his final years as Poland's third democratically elected leader.

Reaction from around the world to my unfortunate collision with Malta is flooding in.

Such as this link sent from the USA to Maltese proverbs.

For example:

Ħamiema bla ħjiena s-seqer itemmha (A pigeon without a wise mind, the falcon eat it)

Għal kull għadma hawn mitt kelb (For every bone there are one hundred dogs)

Aħseb fil-ħażin biex it-tajjeb ma jonqosx (Think in a pessimist way so that good things happen)

Serbian proverbs also tell us a lot about their national character:

Ко с ђаволом тикве сади, о главу му се обију (If one sows pumpkins with the devil, they will bash onto one's head)

Бог је прво себи браду створио (God created the beard on himself first)

And Russian:

Бодли́вой коро́ве Бог рог не даёт (God does not give horns to a cow that likes to gore)

Quite.

RFE/RL is an excellent resource for all sorts of detail about what is happening in the former Soviet Union. See especially The Power Vertical, a blog written especially for Russia wonks and obsessive Kremlin watchers.

Try these pieces:

One about new popular protests against price rises and corruption (even if the 'tide of protests engulfs more Russian cities' title is ridiculous):

Tatyana, a 50-year-old preschool teacher in the central Russian city of Penza, must now spend 5,000 rubles ($168) per month on water, gas, and electricity. This leaves her with just 2,300 rubles ($77) to feed her two teenage children and her husband, an invalid whose health problems prevent him from working

Garry Kasparov always has interesting things to say:

Because sticking to the current form of governance, which is to say guaranteeing the survival of Putin's regime, will necessarily lead to the demise of Russia within its present borders.

The Far East and Eastern Siberia are already developing according to a Chinese scenario, the full scope of which will be revealed in the near future. In the next 10 to 15 years, a lot of Russian territories will become at least de facto Chinese. This will change the situation in Russia fundamentally...

And the (maybe a bit overwritten?) Online Petition against Vladimir Putin:

Bubbling away nicely?

Or just minor hiccups in all that vast space, which as ever changes very slowly in its own very Russian way?

Yesterday in London I was on the stage at the Polish Cultural Centre in West London for a discussion about Solidarity - Thirty Years After.

Others on the panel were Wladyslaw Frasyniuk (former top Solidarity activist and former political prisoner turned politician) - someone whose lively intelligence has left him an influential but quixotic player in Polish politics.

And Dougie Rooney, current President of the Trades Union Congress and a strong supporter of nuclear power.

Wiktor Moszczynski, press officer for the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, presided.

In my own remarks I shamelessly grabbed the opportunity to tease Dougie Rooney and remind the audience, not that most of the people there needed reminding, how the rise of the Solidarnosc movement in Poland in the 1980s had been a ghastly embarrassment for the British Left in general and the TUC in particular.

For many years senior Labour Party and trades unionists had been trooping to Moscow to ask for unobtrusive support from the Soviet leadership in their class struggles in the UK. In an epic act of national betrayal, Edward Kennedy too had travelled to Moscow in the mid-1980s secretly to ask for Moscow's help in defeating Ronald Reagan.

Not to mention that further back in 1920 assorted trades unions in England had mobilised to stop the British government sending weapons and supplies to newly independent Poland, then under attack from the Red Army whose avowed aim was to conquer Poland then move on to Berlin, Paris and London.

"Hands off Russia" had been the progressive cry, just when revolutionary Marxist Russia was greedily laying its own hands on as many territories as it could.

So, I said, there was a long tradition of both useless Useful Idiots and dangerous Useful Idiots in the Labour Movement, who had hated the fact that Polish workers were having the temerity to stand up for freedom against the Soviet empire, and so were threatening 'detente'.

Such attitudes ran deep in British society by the 1980s. By then Soviet Communism was like the weather - it was just there, for better or worse. I had had a problem in the FCO for echoing the Evil Empire language of Ronald Reagan in a speech I had drafted for Sir Geoffrey Howe. All sorts of people popped up pompously to intone that that sort of inflammatory rhetoric was likely to be 'destabilizing'.

Yet the Soviet Union was an empire, and it was (more or less) evil.

Luckily the arrival of Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had created a far-sighted vision for looking at Soviet Communism which created new realities on the ground far beyond these limp official cluckings.

In Reagan's wonderful phrase, "My idea of the Cold War is that we win, they lose." Which was what had happened.

I said that it was not surprising that the British Left had been hopelessly confused on the whole question. Run a Google search now and you see all sorts of squabbles still echoing on between the social-democratic Left, the Communist Left, the Trotskyist Left and the Really Trotskyist Left over who did what to whom back then.

And how appalling it had been for all of them that Margaret Thatcher was greeted by huge crowds of cheering Polish workers in Gdansk after defeating the Miners here in the UK.  

John Prescott (who knows a few things about British socialist and union politics) had found it all very hard to take, as he told me on one of his visits to Warsaw a few years back. Not only had many Poles seen Margaret Thatcher as a vision of hope. Much worse, the new Solidarity members coming to UK for fraternal consultations had all been pointy-head academics, not a real shipworker among them! 

I made one other point which perhaps was less comfortable to Polish ears.

Namely that on the one hand Poland rightly prided itself now on the huge sense of national unity and democratic but disciplined Christian principles which Solidarity came to represent. See eg this meeting itself.

But that mythic representation of Solidarity sat uneasily with the fact that millions of Poles had been more or less loyal to the Communist regime, whose agents and informers had penetrated to the top of Solidarity and indeed the Catholic Church. 

Hence continuing bitter feuding today over the 'deal' done with the Communists in the late 1980s.

Did Solidarity under malevolent influence of senior traitors within its own ranks pull its punches and let the Communists tip-toe away far too easily? And even if that was the case, did Poles now want to force through the final unmasking of all those double-agents in Solidarity and Church ranks?

This prompted shouts of Yes! from a small but noisy contingent of younger Poles in the audience, who appeared to blame Frasyniuk and other Solidarity veterans for the fact that so many young Poles still did not have jobs in Poland, and suspected that Lech Walesa had been a double agent...

* * * * *

It is all 30 years ago now. Ancient History.

Lech Walesa himself is still only 67. All being well he'll be around for Solidarity's 50th birthday party in 2030.