From the Tsars to the Bolsheviks, Putin is just the latest incarnation of Russia's lust to dominate its borderlands with bloodshed: War historian ANTONY BEEVOR on why the horror in Ukraine was all too predictable

Daily Mail ^ | 5.14.2022 | Antony Beevor

[libh8er]

No country is as much a prisoner of its past as Russia. And no leader has become as much a victim of his own obsessive lies as Vladimir Putin. But where did this tragedy for the Russian people as well as Ukraine begin? And why did we not see this coming after the unspeakable brutality of Putin's conduct of war in Chechnya and Syria, deliberately using barrel bombs and nerve gas against civilian populations?

I certainly cannot claim to be one of the very few who had foreseen Putin's reckless gamble of invading Ukraine. I also underestimated the lingering resentment against the West among the majority of largely older Russians who get all their news from Kremlin-controlled media.

Putin is famous for his pronouncement that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geo-political disaster of the 20th Century. This was backed by a widespread conviction in Russia that the Cold War had been lost through a dirty trick after the US under Ronald Reagan deliberately outspent them on armaments.

The consequence of that collapse was war veterans and widows begging in the Metro, after their pensions became worth less than £4 a week.

Mikhail Gorbachev was blamed bitterly, partly because of the rapturous welcome he had received in the West, but also for his wife Raisa's conspicuous spending on their trips. In the Russian Ministry of Defence archives at Podolsk, my researcher and I overheard a conversation between cleaning women viciously welcoming the news that Mrs Gorbachev she had cancer. 'I hope she dies in agony', said one. 'It would serve them right'.

[kiryandil]

You, too, can have it: just download the PDFs. They're free of charge.

Breakout And Pursuit
https://history.army.mil/html/books/007/7-5-1/CMH_Pub_7-5-1_fixed.pdf

[kiryandil]

25Mb to 50Mb in size each.

A normal 15 minute MP4 video is about 150Mb to 180Mb.

75 x 50 = 3750Mb (3.8Gb). A DVD is anywhere between 4GB and 7.75GB.

Normal hard drives these days are 1000Gb on the low end (1Tb).

[kiryandil]

[kiryandil]

[Jim Noble]

“ As I said… Russia is not the threat. The Democrats are the threat”

Half right. The regime is the threat, the regime is much, much more than “the Democrats”, in fact the Democrats and the Republicans have the same bosses.

[Allegra]

Ra ra…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VmkySNDX4dU

[NFHale]

Bingo.

There’s a certain point where you have to look beyond sheer incompetence and say “this is intentional… Nobody could be that f***i g stupid and incompetent…”

[Dr. Franklin]

American schools and universities do a very poor job of teaching this part of the world. There was a great opportunity to deconstruct Tsarist Russia and deny key former parts to the Bolsheviks. Lenin offered the Poles all of Belarus and half of modern Ukraine at Riga in 1921. The allies were against it. Separating Belarus and Western Ukraine from Russia to that allies looked too much like the German plan from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The allies secretly hoped that the Bolsheviks revolution would simply collapse by itself, and wished for a restoration of, the Russian Empire in some form.

So, they recreated Poland by itself, without the benefit of of its partners in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This left the new Polish nation lightly industrialized with the highly industrialized Germans on one side, and the backward, giant neighbor on the other. It also left Poland extremely dependent on the French, and later British, for defense against the Germans. When the allies abandoned Poland in 1939, it was lost.

Something else was possible, especially if Poland had been part of a larger political union. Pilsudski, the master of Poland's rebirth, had attempted to create an alliance of states like Finland, Hungary and Romania, to counter balance both Germany and the USSR, but that ultimately failed. The Hungarians and Romanians were at odds over their borders, and the Finns, and others were not interested in forming a mutual defense alliance. The result of Putin's aggression is that Ukraine has been pushed into a much closer alliance with Poland, and Finland is looking to join NATO. Perhaps the leaders in the region have finally started to learn the lessons of history.

[ought-six]

I read “Breakout And Pursuit.” (I thought it was just called “Breakout”.

[NFHale]

They’re lumped in under democrats.

There are Americans… And then there are Democrats (and those that aid and abet the subversion).

And they need to be dealt with as such

[dfwgator]

American schools and universities do a very poor job of teaching this part of the world.

Is there any part of the world they don't do a piss poor job of teaching?

[ought-six]

I’ll check with the library for a hardback copy; if my local library doesn’t have any of them they can get them from other libraries, though it may take some time.

I’m old school: I like reading the actual books, not an on-line or PDF copy. I have some old book markers that I’ve had for around fifty years, handmade things from an old
girlfriend. Even my wife uses them!

[kiryandil]

Try a university library - that's where I first saw them.

I like the electronic copy for reference.

In the case of these, they're cost and space prohibitive in physical format.

[saintgermaine]

Amen to that on!

[saintgermaine]

Amen to that on!

[Dr. Franklin]

Well, most American schools traditionally only taught about early Western European history. So, the history of Poland, Ukraine, Russia and the Baltics gets missed. Then there is the issue of ethnic bias of many North American history profs. Many Jewish profs focus on the Holocaust, while de-emphasizing other very important matters, and in Canada the profs tend to have a pro-Ukrainian bias, and Ukraine was neither a state nor a recognized ethnicity before WWI. The leading Polish historian in the U.S., Jan Marek Chodkiewicz, teaches at The Institute of World Politics, which although affiliated with Boston University, is not itself a university. Chodkiewicz is well known for his work Intermarium: The Land between the Black and Baltic Seas . Because he has a different perspective than most other North American history profs, he is not well received by them.

[Cronos]

There are multiple threats.

In eastern Europe Putin is the threat.

In tha the USA the Democrats are the threat.

Globally Islam is the threat.

[Cronos]

And the Muscowy government is derived from the Mongol khaganate.

[pierrem15]

There’s a certain point where you have to look beyond sheer incompetence and say “this is intentional… Nobody could be that f***i g stupid and incompetent…”

Maybe. But to me this is more what happens when you get regulatory agencies roaming wild with no control from an elected government. There's no one at home at the White House and all the agencies feel free to do whatever they want because no blowback directed at the White house or even at Dem Congressmen results in closer supervision. There's no President, so there's no one to control the bureaucracies.