Tag Archives: An Rúis (Russia)

Lessons From The First Chechen War

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For military analysts like myself the two most interesting conflicts of the last twenty years have been the First Chechen War of 1994-1996 and the Second Lebanese War of 2006. In the former conflict the tiny Chechen Republic of Ichkeria found itself taking on the decaying colossus of the Russian Federation in the aftermath of the collapse of the old Soviet Union. Despite the received wisdom of popular myth guerrilla armies do not always defeat regular armies, no matter how lengthy the conflict. In fact more often than not it is the irregular forces that succumb in one form or another, unless they manage to gain support from significant backers, invariably meaning a nation-state or states.

The United States lost in Vietnam because of the political, military and financial backing for the Viet Cong guerrillas and party in the south by the government of North Vietnam as well as the USSR and the Peoples Republic of China. The USSR was defeated in Afghanistan because of the support for the Mujahideen that flowed from the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Britain and China. Likewise the support from Iran for the insurgency in Iraq was a major cause of the precipitous withdrawal of Coalition forces there.The evolving “defeat” (or at least “drawdown”) of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan was and is in part due to the backing of the Taliban / anti-Kabul forces by Pakistan and latterly Iran.

Without a national backer most historic insurgencies simply fizzle out. A notable exception is to be found in Ireland’s War of Independence which was fought by the revolutionary Irish Republic through Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and the British Empire as a whole. Despite considerable sympathy around the globe, especially in the United States, Australia, France, Germany and Italy, very little direct aid was supplied to the Irish cause, and none from government sources. Instead the Irish Revolution was largely self reliant and self-sustaining, with help from individual Irish emigrant communities overseas, making its (partial) success all the more remarkable.

In contrast both the Chechen and Lebanese wars mentioned above relied on the succour of one or more nation-states to succeed. The Chechen guerillas had at their core the resources of their former Republic and initially the struggle was fought between two conventional military forces. They also had sympathetic neighbouring states, at least in the early stages of the conflict. When the Israeli Defence Forces or IDF invaded (or was lured into) southern Lebanon in July of 2006 it found itself confronted by Islamic Resistance, the military wing of Hezbollah, a nominally guerilla grouping. However thanks to the military and financial aid supplied by the Islamic Republic of Iran the Israelis were delivered a series of tactical defeats by a force that bordered the line between irregular and regular eventually producing something of an ignoble retreat by Israel.

The links below lead to PDF downloads of chapters from “Russia’s Chechen Wars 1994-2000: Lessons from Urban Combat“ by Olga Oliker for the RAND Corporation. They present a detailed military and political analysis of the failures (and successes)  surrounding Russia’s military expeditions in Chechnya.

Contents:

  • Preface PDF
  • Figures PDF
  • Summary PDF
  • Acknowledgments PDF
  • Glossary PDF
  • Chapter 1 Introduction PDF
  • Chapter 2 Grozny I: 1994-1995 PDF
  • Chapter 3 Return to Grozny: 1999-2000 PDF
  • Chapter 4 Conclusions PDF
  • Bibliography PDF
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Putin’s Russia – Annexation Through Language

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A quick post to highlight the current political troubles in the Ukraine where the Russian Federation’s attempt to reassert control of the former Soviet state has entered the arena of language and culture. Russian chauvinism towards its Slavic and non-Slavic neighbours is a reoccurring source of conflict throughout the modern history of Eastern Europe and no more so than in the assumed superiority of Russian “civilization”. Now Putin’s Moscow is once again flexing its colonial muscles and Ukraine is but the latest country to succumb, giving the Russian language official status and almost certainly ensuring the erosion of Ukrainian as the majority tongue in the Black Sea state. Viktor Tkachuk in The Kyiv Post has more.

Estonia – Defending What Anglo-Ireland Won’t

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I’ve drawn attention to the Baltic nations of Eastern Europe before and how they have successfully mounted a defence of their respective languages and cultures over the last century and more despite the proximity of far greater and more influential neighbours: and contrasted this with Ireland’s abysmal record over the last one hundred years.

Now the Guardian examines Estonia and its emergence as a new global “cyberhub”, a remarkable feat which has seen the tiny country of less than one-and-a-half million souls embrace modernity while retaining its own distinct national identity.

“In 1995, four years after Estonia broke free from the USSR, Toomas Hendrik Ilves read a “very Luddite” book by Jeremy Rifkin called The End of Work.”It argued that with greater computerisation there would be fewer jobs,” remembered Ilves, then a senior diplomat, now the country’s president, “which from his point of view was terrible.”

Ilves and many of his colleagues saw it differently. In a tiny (population: 1.4 million) and newly independent country like Estonia, politicians realised computers could help quickly compensate for both a minuscule workforce and a chronic lack of physical infrastructure.

Seventeen years on, the internet has done more than just help. It is now tightly entwined with Estonia’s identity. “For other countries, the internet is just another service, like tap water, or clean streets,” said Linnar Viik, a lecturer at the Estonian IT College, a government adviser and a man almost synonymous in Estonia with the rise of the web.

“But for young Estonians, the internet is a manifestation of something more than a service – it’s a symbol of democracy and freedom.”

To see why, you just have to go outside. Free Wi-Fi is everywhere, and has been for a decade.

Viik says you could walk 100 miles – from the pastel-coloured turrets here in medieval Tallinn to the university spires of Tartu – and never lose internet connection.

“We realised that if the government was going to use the internet, the internet had to be available to everybody,” Viik said. “So we built a huge network of public internet access points for people who couldn’t afford them at home.”

The country took a similar approach to education. By 1997, thanks to a campaign led in part by Ilves, a staggering 97% of Estonian schools already had internet. Now 42 Estonian services are now managed mainly through the internet. Last year, 94% of tax returns were made online, usually within five minutes. You can vote on your laptop (at the last election, Ilves did it from Macedonia) and sign legal documents on a smartphone. Cabinet meetings have been paperless since 2000.

Doctors only issue prescriptions electronically, while in the main cities you can pay by text for bus tickets, parking, and – in some cases – a pint of beer. Not bad for country where, two decades ago, half the population had no phone line.

To an outsider, it is not immediately clear why Estonia took to the internet so much faster than its Baltic cousins, Latvia and Lithuania. All three won independence at the same time. All three needed quick ways of revamping their ailing infrastructure. But to Estonians, the reason is simple. Estonia has a sizeable Russian-speaking minority, but the country’s ethnic Estonian majority feel Nordic, rather than Slavic or eastern European. In the early 90s, this meant they looked to tech-happy Scandinavia for both inspiration and investment.”

Indeed it was the presence of a significant, and hostile, ethnic Russian minority that led the Estonians to emphasise their distinctiveness as a nation and people, not least through the planned modernisation of their country and society. An example that Ireland could take to heart? We are told that we cannot have an Irish Ireland because we live in an English-speaking world culture. Perforce we must have an English Ireland. Yet the Estonians (like the Finns) have shown that argument to be just another ramshackle excuse for wallowing in a post-colonial inferiority complex.

Unlike us they have had their cake – and eaten it too.

(NÓTA: Of course, one might argue that in Estonia a community we could very loosely term as “ethnic” Estonians came to power with the regaining of independence from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, and so restored and reshaped the nation in their image. In Ireland, on the other hand, it is at least debatable whether or not a community that we might generally describe as “ethnic” Irish took power in the 1920s. In fact it could be suggested that what came to power in post-independence Ireland was an Anglicised-Irish or Anglo-Irish ethnicity, a minority of whom loosely identified with an “ethnic Irish” identity. But that is a story for another day).

NÓTA: Thanks to Siôn for this great link, with some more information on the story above.

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From Königsberg To Kaliningrad – The Mutable Nature Of European Borders

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A fascinating article from Der Spiegel on the visit of the veteran 81 year old German and Hollywood actor Armin Mueller-Stahl to the city of his birth in what was once the German territory of East Prussia but is now the Russian region of Kaliningrad. His former hometown of Tilsit has been called Sovetsk for the last six decades but the echoes of its German past are still visible beneath the grim Stalinesque reminders of its more recent history.

“The situation probably wouldn’t have been very different in the Middle Ages if you had wanted to enter a town in the evening through one of the city gates. A grumpy man, in this case wearing the uniform of a Russian border guard, casts one last glance at the passport, grabs a large bunch of keys, shuffles off the bridge that spans the Neman River between Lithuania and Russia, and walks down to an iron gate, where he inserts a key into the lock and pushes both sides wide open.

Suddenly the newcomer finds himself in the center of what must be the ugliest square in all of Russia, even though it was once the finest square in the East Prussian town of Tilsit, now known as Sovetsk.

The splendid Church of the Teutonic Order once stood at this very spot, its spire resting on eight orbs, so beautiful that Napoleon wanted to take it back to Paris. Right behind there is Deutsche Strasse (literally: German Street) — now called Gagarin Street — where Czar Alexander stayed in 1807 when he visited Tilsit, as it was known then, to sign a peace treaty with the French. The small house inhabited by the Prussian queen consort, Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, no longer exists.

Not a single stone of Tilsit’s once grand Fletcherplatz remains. Today, the square is occupied by the border post that separates the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad from Lithuania. Gray, unplastered Soviet-era buildings surround the square. The washing-lines on the balconies are used to dry fish while, down below, trucks line up on their way in the other direction, across the Neman River to Lithuania.

German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl has embarked on an experiment, though he’s not sure what he’ll gain from it. “I don’t want to go to Tilsit, where I was born,” he wrote in his 1997 book “Unterwegs nach Hause” (the title translates roughly as “On the Way Back Home”). “Nor do I want to know how the houses, streets and towns have shrunk. I don’t want to see unfamiliar people opening familiar houses and familiar doors.”

Now he has gone there after all, 81 years after he was born and 73 years after he left Tilsit, the town the Russians renamed Sovetsk after they marched in, which has now made him an honorary citizen.”

The article is a timely reminder of the fluid nature of nations and states, of borders and boundaries, and how the seemingly solid can ebb and flow. The ending is wonderful, and makes one wonder how far the hegemony of Germany in the European Union will sway future political realignments. While the eyes of many have been focused on China’s so-called “land-grab” in Africa, in Central Europe German companies, co-operatives and private individuals have been purchasing huge swathes of land and property in what were formerly German-speaking areas of Poland, Lithuania and the Czech Republic. Will Germany be content with the borders it now has or will it use its financial and economic influence to slowly reabsorb the “lost” German lands of Eastern Europe?

“Then the next man stands and admits that, for decades after World War II, none of them believed Sovetsk would remain Russian.”That’s why we destroyed everything that was German, everything that didn’t have a roof anymore. In 1988, representatives of the cities that wanted their old name back held a meeting. That was already in Gorbachev’s time. They also decided Sovetsk should be given its old name back,” he explains. “When I told the town council here about the decision, they thought I was crazy.”

Then he turns to the mayor and says, “Apparently the town was once really beautiful. All native Tilsiters say it could never be rebuilt as it was. But you, mayor, have to do that.”

Suddenly 80-year-old Zinaida Rutman taps on her glass, pushes her chair back and stands up. Immediately, a broad grin spreads right across her previously expressionless face. She announces to the mayor and all the other guests: “I definitely want to live long enough to see this town called Tilsit again.” And she sits down again.

Everyone falls silent. And stares.”

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The Book Smugglers. Ireland, Lithuania, And The Freedom Of Language

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One of the most interesting, and thought-provoking, Irish language documentaries of recent years will be screened at a film festival in Estonia, reports IFTN:

“Irish production companies Planet Korda Pictures and Vinegar Hill’s co-production with Lithuanian production company Era Films, ‘The Book Smugglers’, a documentary which was directed and written by Jeremiah Cullinane (Hitler’s Irish Movies, Dangerous Curves) co-founder of Planet Korda, will be screened at the 15th Estonian Black Nights Festival on the 26th November.

‘The Book Smugglers’ sees Irish poet Gearóid Mac Lochlainn and Lithuanian dramatist Albertas Vidžiūnas retrace the steps of the 19th century Lithuanian book smugglers who resisted Russification to save their language from extinction and asks why in Ireland, another small country at the edge of Europe with its own language and occupied by its larger neighbour, families were abandoning their mother tongue and teaching their children English?”

Originally shown on TG4, there is more information on this wonderful, challenging documentary at the Book Smugglers website.

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