Tim Worstall

Richard Gott

Gottie has a piece on the legacy of Empire. Everything bad was a result of the British Empire, no other countries did the same, we’re all evil and before imperialism everybody was a happy little ray of sunshine.

In the comments:

Richard,

Obviously, a late-arriving cheque has just come through from Moscow.
You should have waited to see if it was honoured before writing the
piece.

Or did they have a final-salary pension scheme and just
occasionally, to keep your hand in, you offer a piece to keep your
former masters happy?

What, you didn’t know? That he was in fact a KGB agent?

In

13 responses

  1. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    “Before imperialism” means before recorded history. Since records began, most of mankind has lived in empires. A more interesting topic is why Americans seem to object to Empires spread by ship – e.g. British, French, Spanish – but not by horse – e.g. Russian. Or is the answer entirely obvious?

    Reply
  2. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Unlike other British spies for the Soviet cause – especially Fuchs and the Cambridge five – I seriously doubt that Gott was ever placed to do much harm to British interests beyond disseminating misinformation and the Soviet perspective on events.
    In that respect, Gott perhaps counter-balanced Victor Zorza, the distinguished kremlinologist who wrote a weekly column for the Guardian dedicated to unravelling and interpreting the minutiae of Soviet news.
    Zorza had an extensive dedicated following on both sides of the Atlantic which was perpetually anxious to discover what interpretation could be put on such arcane mysteries as changes in the order in which the Soviet leaders trooped out to stand on the Lenin mausoleum in Red Square on official occasions. Gott was obliged to resign from his post as literary editor of Guardian staff in 1994 as soon as his name came out in the Spectator. Thereafter, he was taken even less seriously than he was before.
    If my perception is anything to go by, few folks nowadays know or can recall much from those heady times during the Cold War when Soviet spies were suspected of lurking in nooks and crannies. For almost an encyclopaedic reference source on spies and spying, try:
    http://intellit.muskingum.edu/maintoc.html

    Reply
  3. Pete Avatar
    Pete

    ‘If Britain made such a success of its colonies, why are so many in an unholy mess half a century later, major sources of violence and unrest?’
    Because they now ‘govern’ themselves.

    Reply
  4. Bob Doney Avatar
    Bob Doney

    Gosh, yes, Victor Zorza. Used to read him avidly. Was he really in the Guardian? Thanks for reminding me of him. Not a big one for jokes though, if I remember correctly.

    Reply
  5. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Kreminlogy was fertile territory for dark humour. I’m very willing to believe that changes in the order in which the Soviet hierarchy walked out onto the Lenin mausoleum on ceremonial occasions held some deep political significance not readily discernable by most of us. I’m even prepared to believe that the interpetations of such events should inform our foreign policy but we were never really placed to offer intelligent comment – in much that way that most of us are not placed to intervene in learned discussions about, say, the interpretation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
    But it could be deadly serious. Gordievsky, the KGB colonel who defected to Britain about 20 years ago with the help of John Scarlett, now head of MI6 (the SIS) but then head of the UK’s Moscow station, relates how he calmed Soviet fears in the early 1980s about the likelihood of of a pre-emptive nuclear strike ordered by the Reagan administration. We’ve just had much fun turning over the implications of the chat between Bush and Blair at the St Petersburg G8 Summit:
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2280528,00.html
    Think of what might have transpired from this entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations reporting a microphone test by President Reagan prior to a broadcast in August 1984: “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.” Suppose by some slip that had been broadcast?
    Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr Strangelove (1964) was uncomfortably near reality.

    Reply
  6. Tim Newman Avatar
    Tim Newman

    Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr Strangelove (1964) was uncomfortably near reality.
    It was, although Reagan’s jokes or indeed anything the West did brought the reality any closer. It was people like Castro and Mao, both of whom proposed preemtive nuclear attacks on the West, dealing with people like Khrushchev who were the ones putting the world on a tightrope. Combine this with the paranoia which was the central feature of every Soviet leadership and a military chain of command where frightened individuals had to make major decisions on the spot (remember the shooting down of the Korean airliner?), and it is a wonder the balloon never went up.
    Reagan leaving his mike on is small potatos.

    Reply
  7. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    I’ve few delusions about the Soviet system but Khrushchev deserves a better press for denouncing Stalin in 1956 and for backing off in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Amongst other issues, that finally cost him his job in 1964 after an earlier, unsuccessful attempt by a clique led by Molotov to depose him in 1957. By some recent accounts, Khrushchev’s successor Brezhnev considered having him assassinated. I was fascinated to read a few years ago that his son is a naturalised US citizen and has a job as an academic at Brown University in the US.
    The mainstream view is that this is all just history now. Not so. In the early 1960s, I went to some seminars by Alec Nove, a distinguished Sovietologist of those times. One of his “narratives” – to use the latest fashionable jargon – was about the distortions in resource allocation induced by the Soviet centralised planning system as the result of output targets.
    Typically, GOSPLAN would set annual industry and enterprise targets and enterprises would be rewarded by bonuses for exceeding the targets. Nove tracked the consequences, as reported in the Soviet press, of setting output targets for roofing materials in metric tonnes. The result was that enterprises making roofing materials tended to over-produce units of heavy duty roofing because it was easier to achieve their output targets that way. The inevitable consequence was a continuing shortage of light duty roofing. Corresponding problems arose with output targets set in roubles which created an incentive to produce fewer units of more costly items (as sale prices were officially fixed) than more units of cheaper items. Hence the welter of anecdotal stories about the chronic shortages of parts and goods in the Soviet system.
    The Soviets were aware of these problems in the 1950s and attempted reforms after Brezhnev’s succession in 1964 but the system just stagnated by the late 1970s and never really recovered with the pressures to keep up with the like of the cruise missiles based at Greenham Common.
    I recall being at the margins of the official NATO embargo on the sale of microprocessors to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. That was a farce when Soviet embassy staff in Britain could go down the road, buy an Atari computer in Dixons and ship it back home in the diplomatic bag for the Motorola 680000 processor to be extracted. Of course, that was a costly way of getting processors but the embargo wasn’t a serious barrier.
    All just fascinating stuff about the past? It’s a pity that those who set up all those targets for our NHS were not better informed about the problems the Soviets got themselves into from setting targets. (Try: Alec Nove on: The Soviet Economy)
    Richard Gott could perform a valuable service by telling us about the problems of the Soviet planning system. I’m surprised at his line on the British empire. Surely, the more repressive the empire was the faster would come the inevitable social revolution to overthrow the iniquitous capitalist-colonialist system. As it is, Marxists have the challenging task of explaining why the inevitable social revolution incurred in countries like Russia and China where the advance of capitalism had made much less progress than in countries like the US and Britain. Strange that. What went wrong?

    Reply
  8. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    Tim,
    You say Gott says:
    “no other countries did the same”
    Does he? I can’t face reading it again but could you point to this ludicrous (Belgium?! France?!) statement.

    Reply
  9. Tim Newman Avatar
    Tim Newman

    I’ve few delusions about the Soviet system but Khrushchev deserves a better press for denouncing Stalin in 1956 and for backing off in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
    I see what you mean, but I think any historian who doesn’t have an axe to grind (most of the Russian ones did) acknowledges that Khrushchev did many good things as well as many terrible things. I tend not to care what idiot journalists think, but he seems to have had plenty of recognition from quarters that matter that his 1956 speech denouncing Stalin was the bravest thing he ever did. His reasons for doing so, as ever with Krushchev, remain opaque. Sadly, such hope was soon dashed with his invasion of Hungary, an event directly linked to his Secret Speech.
    Interestingly, Krushchev himself knew he was a man who had done things good and things bad. In his later life he admitted such, and expressed a wish that history will judge that he did more good than bad. Indeed, his headstone consists of two interlocking halves of stone, one black (representing the bad) and the other white (the good).
    I can highly recommend Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman. No other book explores Krushchev in such depth and makes such splendid use of the archival material which has come available following the demise of the USSR. You will come away hoping that never again will such a man find himself in such a position with such unpreparedness.

    Reply
  10. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Thanks for that book recommendation. I’m up for a balanced assessment of Khrushchev.
    He was a dedicated – and highly effective – party apparatchik during the terrible repression in the Ukraine in the 1930s, which is how he likely earned his elevation to the Party hierarchy in Moscow. I’d like some insight into when and how K came to realise that Stalin was just another brutal despot after a long Russian tradition. It wasn’t coincidental that Stalin decided to invoke the image of Ivan the Terrible as the archetypal national hero in Soviet home front propaganda for the Great Patriotic War – which most of us know as WW2. Eisenstein (director of Strike, Battleship Potemkin, October etc) was duly commissioned to produce a multi-part, epic movie celebrating the life and achievements of Ivan but even he ran into censorship problems after Part I.
    I’m hardly a dedicated follower of Soviet history but I suspect that Zhukov somehow ties into Khrushchev’s Damascene conversion to recognising Stalin’s psychotic character for what it was. Zhukov – by a huge consensus the outstanding battlefield commander on the Soviet front in WW2 – was demoted by Stalin after the war to run some minor military outfit in the Crimea to keep him away from Moscow. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, while the likes of Malenkov and Bulganin were evidently lining up to assume the responsibilities of leadership, Khrushchev and Zhukov seem to have moved sharply to round up the odious Beria (head of the predecessor to the KGB) with his henchmen and have them shot after brief, secret trials. That was a smart and sensible move but there was nothing remotely “liberal” about it.
    According to Russian history published in the Yeltsin era, in the attempt by Molotov and others to depose Khrushchev in 1957, Zhukov emerges to remind the Central Committee that in the late 1930s, Molotov, in his capacity as state president, and Stalin were signing off execution warrants by the hundreds and thousands. Between 1937 and 1938, 98 out of the 139 members of the Central Committee were shot on Stalin’s orders – and they were all dedicated Communist Party members by definition, many having been through the October revolution in 1917 and therefore placed to compare Stalin’s and Trotsky’s respective contributions.
    K was finally deposed in 1964 not just because of him backing off in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 but also for many and arguably valid complaints about his administration: he hadn’t sorted out the perennial agrarian problems and had taken to announcing policy changes on the hoof without consulting ministries etc. His detractors were also rather apt to remind others about K’s incapacity to speak or write a grammatical sentence in Russian and his frequent resort to expletives. In short, he had rather conspicuous proletarian shortcomings.

    Reply
  11. Tim Newman Avatar
    Tim Newman

    Bob,
    You already seem to know a lot about Krushchev, I can only recommend you read Taubman’s book to fill in the gaps. It is very objective.

    Reply
  12. The Remittance Man Avatar
    The Remittance Man

    I’ve always found the assertion that we, the wicked imperialist brits, are entirely to blame for some of our former colonies woes a little bit iffy. Especially as we are never given the credit for the successes of some of the others.
    By this way of thinking either the poor, benighted, brown people we oppressed should all be suffering. But they aren’t. Some former British colonies are complete basket cases and others look likely to overtake the UK in economic performance and standard of living. To my mind this means that there are other factors at work.
    Of course to acknowledge this, Gott would have to recognise that the basket cases generally followed his beloved Soviet model post-independence whereas the ones doing better didn’t.
    RM

    Reply
  13. Charle Morris Avatar
    Charle Morris

    Mr. Gott: If you like Castro and his friends so much why don’t you go to Cuba to live and you will see how comfortable socialism really is.

    Reply

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