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December 1942 – Expert: A Soviet Occupation Of Stalingrad Would Be Too Costly
Stalingrad, December 1942.
The German 6th Army and attached allied forces under General Paulus are surrounded and besieged by the Soviet Red Army. A relief attack from the outside of the cauldron has failed. The besieged have few supplies and can not hold out on their own.
But Karl Auflister, a Soviet Union expert working at the Slavic Institute in Berlin, does not believe that the Red Army will storm the city.
“The Soviets are hedging their bets. They would prefer to make a deal with the German forces,” he said. “If Stalingrad were to fall, the Soviet regime would need so many troops to hold the city that its forces would be left thin elsewhere in the country.“
Some readers may have problems with the logic Mr. Auflister applied. Why would the Soviets need more troops to hold a reconquered Stalingrad than they need to besiege it?
But what do you know. You ain’t an expert.
Mr Auflister, the expert, is very serious. Here is the relevant snippet from the Financial Times.
Washington experts are delusional…
In a way, everybody has some delusions because we cannot afford in-depth analysis of available facts and pseudo-facts. And when we sift facts from pseudo-facts, we must have plausibility criteria which may fail and so on. Therefore branding folks delusional is typically safe, but un-interesting. However, clear errors are quite valuable, because they reveal mental patterns.
For example, misspellings on Attic pottery etc. gives good clues about the pronunciation in antiquity. For that matters my own misspellings can be used similarly. In our case, Lister is interesting because he is a representative of “common sense” of Anglo-Saxon establishment (later referred to as ASE) if you are weary of it, you should invest in learning some language different than English, Spanish is a good bet because of ideological variety of Spanish-speaking countries. E.g. Billy the Kid moved to Bolivia). So we can consider few questions.
What prompts the search for “differences between Russia, Syria and Iran”?
Conjecture: ASE stratifies the world as a continuum from good to evil, where good is “Anglo-Saxon liberalism/democratic values” and bad is the opposition to it, and the “Pole of Evility” is slowly migrating. Thus Russia is not at the pole, nor is Communism, instead we have self-styled “anti-Zionist resistance”. Therefore Russians, however deluded by the Slavic psychology, however influenced by despotic traditions, are expected to be a bit more reasonable than Syria and Iran. And there is some kernel of truth here if “reasonable” means the actions that ASE dislikes.
Is there any truth to the starting observation, namely, that Russia advocates some accommodation with the opposition fighters in Aleppo?
Yes. But in the provided quotes, the accommodation is simply the “reconciliation process” avidly used by Assad, letting the fighters evacuate to Idlib province, to save their lives, as well as precious ammunition, buildings and last but not least, the lives of the civilians. Russians make a big deal of being a “trusted intermediary” whenever possible, but it seems to me that Assad has actually decent record: I do not recall any instances of enticing rebels to disarm by giving some promises, only to slaughter them or imprison (unlike the rebels). But the truth is that rebels and the government hate each other with passion, so it can be useful to have some kind of intermediary, lest the negotiation dissolve into name calling, fisticuffs etc.
Does it add up to “different visions”?
Hard to tell. Indeed, there were numerous signals that Russia tries to set goals that can be attained sooner, which basically means some kind of federated governance structure in Syria, as opposed to centralism that existed before 2011. But to see more details, one has to inspect Russian experience: Russia is a federation, after all, and quite notably, Chechnya seems to operate with very high degree of autonomy. There was a deal between Putin and Kadyrov (the father of the current Kadyrov) which may have lamentable details, but definitely solved Russian problems with Chechnya (barring some lamentable details). However, Kadyrovtsy emerged as a splinter group of Islamist rebels, and part of the deal was that Russia and Kadyrovtsy cooperate to eliminate the rest of the rebels, disliked by Russia as secessionists and by Kadyrov as personal competitors, theological heretics and so on.
Russia has also experience with “independent Chechnya” between 1st Chechen War and 2nd Chechen War, it is was an unhappy experience. Tolerating quasi-independent or independent “jihadist republics” can lead only to grief, and thus it can be only a short term solution, if at all.
Both Iran and pre-2011 Syria are strictly centralized, so there is some difference in perspective. But it is a much more narrow difference that ASE hopes to see (hoping for strife among the enemies).
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Dec 3 2016 3:00 utc | 17
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