Who is ordering torture and execution in Ukraine?

With the retreat of Russian forces from Kherson this month, new evidence of gruesome atrocities against civilians has become visible (link). A very important question arises: What organization and what commanders have directed this campaign of atrocity, murder, rape, mutilation, torture, and abduction? Is there good investigative reporting on where orders for these unspeakable atrocities and crimes against humanity are coming from? 

Any list of possible suspects in ordering and committing systemic and horrific atrocities in Kherson and other Ukraine locations will certainly include these potential actors: rogue low-level occupation units, mid- to high-level military commanders, the Wagner Group and its presumed commander, Dmitri Utkin, forces commanded by Chechen militia leader Ramzan Kadyrov, and Putin's secret security serve, the FSB. It goes without saying that Vladimir Putin bears ultimate responsibility for these atrocities, since he knows full well that Russian forces are committing these horrendous acts, and we can therefore infer either explicit or implicit consent on his part. But we still need to know more about the organizations and commanders who are directing this campaign of deliberate atrocity against civilians in Ukraine.

A leading candidate is the Russian security service, the FSB, which is the successor to Stalin's NKVD and has been enormously empowered under Putin's rule. Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan provide a detailed and highly concerning analysis of Putin's FSB in their 2011 book, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB. The book provides detailed information about the organization and functions of the FSB, as well as informed estimates of its overall size (more than 200,000; p. 2). The book also provides a detailed historical chronology of the evolution of the FSB since Gorbachev's dissolution of the KGB in 1991. 

Soldatov and Borogan document the wide extent of extra-judicial killing in the war in Chechnya and Dagestan by the security services.

Neighboring Dagestan has seen twenty-five kidnappings since February 2009 by Memorial’s count, twelve of which resulted in the murder of victims. A week after the press conference, Sirazhudin Umarov, 32, a construction worker, was kidnapped from Qala, a Derbent district of Dagestan. On September 9 he was called to a meeting by an acquaintance named Azer, a police officer. There Umarov was captured by unidentified masked men. The following day his badly mutilated body was discovered. The security forces confirmed that he had been killed by the authorities, though they claimed he had died during an antiterrorism operation. “His face was so badly smashed from beating that I had difficulty recognizing him,” said Gulbenis Badurova, 33, his wife. “His eye was missing, and both hands had been broken.” (184)

(Soldatov's account of his own interrogation at Lefortovo Prison is chilling, and expresses the nature of the Russian police state.) 

There is a direct lineage connecting Stalin's NKVD (the primary agent of Stalin's terror and repression) and the contemporary FSB, and Soldatov makes the case that the parallels are even more striking today than they were twenty years ago. The lineage from the NKVD to the FSB is important, because the NKVD carried out horrific atrocities and massacres throughout the Stalin period: in 1940 it carried out the Katyn Forest massacre of at least 20,000 Polish army officers (prisoners of war), and in 1941 it carried out a series of massacres of political prisoners in Kiev and other locations in Ukraine (link). (Here is some background on NKVD atrocities in Ukraine in1941; link.) There is no basis for doubting that the NKVD was the author of great atrocity and evil in the 1930s through 1950s and was the primary instrument of Stalin's will throughout those decades.

It is reasonable to ask, therefore, what role FSB directors and special forces agents have played in the atrocities of torture, rape, kidnapping, and murder that have become evident in multiple locations in Ukraine recovered from Russian occupation in recent months.

In a recent article in Foreign Affairs (link) Andrei Soldatov documents the increasing role of repression that has been assigned to the FSB during Putin's rule -- including in the occupation of territory seized from Ukraine since February 2022. The conclusion that Soldatov draws is stark: the FSB is moving closer and closer to the repressive omnipresent arm of a police state that the NKVD was for Stalin:

Since the war in began, Putin’s rapidly growing security state seems to be inching closer to its Stalinist predecessor. The militarization of the FSB, its new recruitment camps, its increasingly open and brutal tactics all suggest that Putin is looking more closely at the approach of the NKVD—an agency that was forged by a totalitarian state in wartime. And the long war is what the Kremlin is priming the country for.

Here is how Soldatov describes the new focus of the FSB, both in Russia and in its war aims in Ukraine:

As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in enters its sixth month, a dramatic shift has occurred in the Kremlin’s security bureaucracy, and it has centered on the agency closest to Putin himself: the Federal Security Service, or FSB. When the war began, the Kremlin planned to use the FSB mainly in Ukraine, as a special operations force that would consolidate a rapid Russian conquest. According to the plan, the Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine would trigger regime change in Kyiv, and a new pro-Moscow leadership, sponsored by FSB spymasters, would take control of the country. At the time, it was the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch—the Fifth Service—that was to carry out this task. It was the only major FSB department, out of a dozen, that was directly involved in preparing for the war.

As those plans, however, Putin crafted a different, far more comprehensive mission for the FSB: it would be at the forefront of Russia’s total war effort at home as well as its intelligence operations in Ukraine. And every branch of the service would now be involved. Running the new crackdowns in are the FSB’s counterterrorism unit, its counterintelligence service, and its investigative department. Meanwhile, FSB special forces and the military counterintelligence branch are running operations targeting Ukrainian service people in occupied territories and beyond, recruiting Ukrainian agents, and processing those whom the FSB hopes to see prosecuted in show trials.

Notice that Soldatov's description in the paragraphs quoted here specifically outlines a substantial role for the FSB in occupied Ukraine, according to Putin's pre-war planning. 

My question here is a simple one: how extensive is the involvement of the FSB in the widespread and horrific atrocities that have come to light in Kherson, Bucha, and many other locations in previously occupied Ukraine? These acts of rape, murder, and torture against innocent civilians are generally attributed to "troops" in news stories, which perhaps leads the reader to imagine "rogue low-level army units"; but this is implausible. The atrocities are too widespread to reflect a few sadistic killers among the Russian army of occupation. Therefore we need to know more about the command and control of this horrific way of waging a war of terror and atrocity against civilians in Ukraine. And the world must hold Russia and its bureaucrats of atrocity accountable for their actions during this war.

River warfare in the US Civil War

The mental images that most Americans have of the American Civil War involve the scenes of major land battles -- Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg. Armies marched dozens of miles, prepared encampments and defensive works, and either attacked the enemy in its own prepared defenses or awaited contact with the enemy. The picture is Napoleonic: an army marching across terrain to fight other slow-moving armies.

It is therefore highly interesting to realize that naval warfare on rivers -- especially the Mississippi River -- played a key role in the success of Union forces in 1862-1865, and that armored steamships were critical to victory. To an extent that is now hard to imagine, with modern transportation networks including dense highway networks, as well as air and rail systems, how important control and navigation of the Mississippi River was to both Union and Confederate war fighting. General Ulysses S. Grant's strategy for bringing the war to the South was dependent on the objective of gaining control of the Mississippi River; and the river was a key component in the movements of troops, supplies, and field headquarters around the contested territories.

maps: Feis, Grant's Secret Service, p. 12

The reason for this importance of control of the Mississippi has to do with speed of deployment and logistics. (There was also a major economic consideration: if the South could close the Mississippi, it would cause great hardship for the Northern population.) But consider the logistics and speed issues. The speed of advance of an army on the march through water-logged terrain with poor roads -- conditions that obtained during much of Grant's campaign in the west -- was minuscule in comparison to a steamship moving unhindered several hundred miles along the river. As a rough estimate, it would take an army 21 days to march from Cairo, Illinois to Vicksburg, Mississippi, whereas it would take a steam-powered riverboat about three days to travel the same distance. And steamships could carry all the materiel required for the campaign. (Travel up-river the same distance would take longer.) Maintaining a supply line for the mountains of food, horse fodder, ammunition, replacement equipment, and evacuation of the wounded required by an army in the field depended on heavy transport -- by rail or river boat. Rail transport was substantially faster than riverboat transport -- the average rail speed unhindered by sabotage of tracks, etc. was 25 mph, compared to 5-7 mph for river transport. So rail transport was preferable. However, controlling and maintaining rail networks in hostile territory was extremely difficult, since local sympathizers could sabotage tracks and bridges in dozens of remote places. As a result, naval operations were a key part of the Union's war fighting in the west of the country. The Mississippi River represented the great north-south highway along which the war in the west was fought.

The strategic importance of strong fortifications with heavy guns at locations along the river permitting control of traffic was plain to all sides; so major battles developed involving attempts to seize fortified places like Vicksburg, Mississippi. Grant's persistent effort to besiege and occupy Vicksburg was a mark of his strength as a general, and the eventual success of his plans represented a turning point in the Civil War. But key to success at Vicksburg (and Fort Henry a year earlier) was the availability of a growing force of river warships, from lightly armed gunboats to ironclad and timber-clad steamships with heavy armaments capable of assaulting land-based fortifications. And almost none of this range of river craft existed before the onset of war. The use armored river steamboats of the Civil War thus represented a major technological shift in warfare -- perhaps as dramatic in 1861 as high-precision artillery has been in Ukraine in 2022.

The high end of these armored vessels were the City-class gunboats ("turtles"). These were ironclad vessels designed for service in rivers rather than open seas. They had shallow draft of six feet, were armed with thirteen guns, and could cruise at eight knots. Seven boats were delivered by January, 1862, and they played a significant role in major battles along the Mississippi River, including Vicksburg. These ships included the USS Baron DeKalb, Cairo, Carondelet, Cincinnati, Louisville, Mound City, and Pittsburgh.

Complementing these ironclads was a larger group of wooden vessels that also played a major role in river warfare during the Civil War. Angus Konstam's book Mississippi River Gunboats of the American Civil War 1861-65 provides a review of the rapid development of armored wooden gunboats as the war in the west heated up. These craft needed to be shallow-draft, and they needed to be maneuverable enough to manage the twisting courses of the midwestern rivers. They were steam-powered and relatively slow, but provided both heavy mobile armaments and heavy transport for the strategic thrusts of the army. They could be used to transport troops, and they therefore permitted rapid shifts in the location of land-based attacks.

A rapid effort at ship-building and conversion ensued by both Confederate and Union militaries after the outbreak of war, and within a year each side had a number of river-based warships. The earliest heavy gunboats in the Union arsenal were converted commercial vessels -- the Conestoga (572 tons), the Lexington (362 tons), and the Tyler (420 tons), launched in summer 1861 and shielded with thick timber. In addition to the heavy gunboats, the armies also needed a larger number of smaller river gunboats (150-250 tons) that could be used to patrol the river and serve as transport up and down the river (9). The flagship of the river navy, also converted from commercial use, was the USS Black Hawk (902 tons). (All these data are drawn from Konstam's table of ships operated by both sides.) These wooden river warships were immediately thrown into the struggle.

What emerged was a campaign involving the attack on these Confederate naval and riverside defenses by two fleets: One descending the river from Cairo, Illinois, and the other (after the fall of New Orleans in April 1862) working its way up from the Gulf of Mexico. After a brilliantly executed attack on Fort Henry and Fort Donelson [by forces commanded by Grant] on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, Union naval forces in the upper Mississippi faced a series of imposing fortifications. (Konstam, 5)

Fortifications and heavy guns at Vicksburg were the most significant of these Confederate capabilities on the Mississippi River, and it took great fortitude for army and naval forces to eventually take Vicksburg in July 1863. This represented a major turning point in the Civil War.

What is particularly interesting to me about this quick exposure to river warfare in the 1860s is the fact that there were several tempos of operations in the Civil War -- the movements of armies at 15-20 miles per day, the movements of troops, officers, and materiel by steamship at perhaps 100 miles per day and by rail when available at 400 miles per day, and the transmission of messages at Internet speed by telegraph. The faster pace of steamboat and rail warfare fundamentally changed the challenges and opportunities confronting the generals. It is plain, then, that the American Civil War was a high-tech war, with innovations and adaptations introduced into war fighting in real time. (Even the evolution of heavy weaponry and ammunition moved forward quickly during the five years of fighting.) Here again, the similarity to the Ukraine war is striking.

(Here is an interesting photo essay on the evolution of Civil War gunboats; link. And here is a National Parks historical video on the battle of Vicksburg; link.)

Can we avoid catastrophe?

The three greatest threats we face today seem almost insurmountable. They include global climate change, whose consequences are potentially catastrophic for the whole planet, from Bangladesh to California and Florida; the rise of anti-democratic right-wing extremism in the United States and other liberal democracies, whose consequences threaten the viability of liberal democracy; and the resurgence of aggressive war.

Further, these threats are interconnected. Climate change will produce vast numbers of "climate refugees" and will deepen international conflicts over water and agriculture. Economic insecurity has the potential for worsening the trend toward right-wing extremism. Illiberal dictatorships are less constrained against the use force against their neighbors, and they are less likely to extend assistance to other countries in times when they are subject to powerful aggression by other dictators. And conservative ideologies have shown themselves to be indifferent to sober scientific studies of the dynamics of climate change. Climate scepticism is part of the canon for the far right.

Each of these challenges involves horrendously difficult problems of mobilization and coordination. Addressing climate change is perhaps the most difficult because of its global scope and long time duration. The root cause of global warming is the rapid rise of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, largely the result of burning fossil fuels, along with massive deforestation (reducing the earth's capacity to remove CO2 from the atmosphere).

source: J. G. Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World

As the graphs indicate, CO2 concentration and rainforest depletion have increased exponentially since 1800, the beginning of the industrial age. But for many poor and middle-income countries, the urgent problems of poverty and low standard-of-living for much of their population demand solutions, and expansion of industrialization, manufacturing, and transportation all require growth in carbon production. ("Require" is probably too strong a word here, since we know that there are alternative low-emission energy sources; but those sources involve higher costs of infrastructure and operations.) So poor countries are unlikely to successfully support commitments to genuine carbon reduction. Further, about 50% of CO2 emissions are created by three countries, China, the United States, and India (link):

If these three countries fail to substantially reduce their CO2 emissions by 2060, it is hard to see how global goals can be met in time to avoid climate disaster. In the United States, there is an astounding level of resistance by the conservative right to the goal of reducing CO2 emissions (link). Here is the European Union plan for carbon neutrality by 2050 (link), and here are reviews of China's commitments (link) and India's commitments (link) to containment of carbon emissions.

What about the second challenge, the rise of right-wing extremist and nationalist political movements that explicitly threaten democratic institutions? Here the problem is twofold. First, rightwing Republican majorities in Red states have already succeeded in gerrymandering their populations in such a way as to make their electoral majorities essentially immune from future threats; and second, there is a well-orchestrated mobilization of rightwing extremist ideologies among a significant percentage of the public that has made "true believers" of these anti-democratic advocates. Therefore the political challenge of winning back a durable majority of the population in support of democratic institutions and a legislative and political agenda that enhances freedom and wellbeing of the whole population is difficult from the start. The politics of conspiracy theories, lies, and aggressive resistance to government action have created a high level of resistance to democratic change on the part of large portions of the US electorate. At the moment the organized politics of authoritarianism seem to have the advantage (link).

Finally, war. Vladimir Putin made it evident in 2014 that he was an opportunistic power-seeking autocrat, through his invasion and annexation of Crimea. His aggressive and atrocious war against Ukraine since February simply demonstrates how far he -- and the Russian state that he commands -- is willing to go to impose his will on his neighbors. Along with the courage and tenacity of the Ukrainian people, it is the surprisingly strong political will of the NATO alliance in supporting Ukraine that has frustrated Putin's war aims to date. Imagine the world situation if Donald Trump had succeeded in gutting NATO during his presidency. Trump, Orban, and other right-wing rulers have shown that they are only too willing to see the world through Putin's eyes. And that leads to a very worrisome implication: if the extremist GOP wins majorities in the Congress in 2022 and 2024, and possibly wins the presidency in 2024, then the United States could no longer be regarded as a staunch opponent and ally against the aggression of countries like Russia against their neighbors.

We have our tasks in front of us. Most immediately, we must prevail in defending the institutions of our liberal democracy, we must support the US government in establishment of effective climate change goals, and we must understand that military aggression must be confronted effectively, swiftly, and with courage. These tasks begin with electoral politics. We need a Democratic Party that can formulate and articulate an agenda that can inspire voters of every stripe, and we need candidates who can communicate our values effectively and show the mendacity of their Republican opponents. We need a presidential candidate with the brains and values of an Elizabeth Warren, the quick wit of a Jon Stewart, and the courage of an Abraham Lincoln.

Soviet atrocities in Ukraine, 1941

In light of the horrific information now available about atrocities committed in Ukraine by occupying Russian forces in towns such as Bucha -- rape, torture, summary execution, as well as mass deportations to "filtration camps" -- it is grimly important to recognize that there was a prior period of fantastic brutality and atrocity committed by Russians against Ukraine over eighty years ago. The NKVD -- the secret police of the Soviet Union and Stalin's reliable enforcers of murder and mayhem -- carried out mass executions of tens of thousands of prisoners in prisons in western Ukraine in June 1941. At least 70% of these victims were Ukrainians, with 20% estimated to be Poles and the remainder Jews and other nationalities (Kiebuzinski and Motyl 28). The bulk of these prisoners were accused of political crimes or nationalist "anti-Soviet conspiracies". These were prisoners whom the Soviet authorities took to be a threat to Soviet rule. These massacres were comparable in magnitude and ferocity to the executions of Polish prisoners of war and other members of the Polish elite undertaken by the NKVD in April 1940 in Katyn Forest and other locations. They were unforgivable crimes of war against innocent and unarmed people.

Surprisingly, the NKVD prison massacres have not been very extensively documented or noted until the past decade. One exception is John-Paul Himka, who takes note of the NKVD massacre of thousands of political prisoners in three prisons in Lviv in June 1941 in his article "The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd" (2011 link):

The pogrom in Lviv occurred against the background of the proclamation of a Ukrainian state in that city on the first day of the German occupation, a subject to which we shall return. The other important contextual circumstance of the Lviv pogrom of 1941 was the discovery of thousands of decomposing corpses of political prisoners who had been murdered by the NKVD in the days previous, as the Soviets realized that the Germans were advancing too rapidly for them to evacuate the prisons. The stench of bodies emanated from the prisons, which were on fire when the Germans arrived on Monday 30 June. Many Ukrainian nationalists were among the victims. The Germans had the corpses retrieved, by Jews, and laid out for public display. Relatives of the prisoners searched among the bodies, looking for their loved ones. The bodies were found in three prisons: the Zamarstyniv street prison; the Brygidki prison; and the prison on Lontskoho. (Himka 2011: 210-211)

Himka provides further details about this Lviv massacre in "The Lontsky Street Prison Museum" (2015 link):

The history of the Lontsky St. prison during the Second World War is a brutal, tangled tale that this study will seek to clarify in order to show how the current museum presents a one-sided, politically motivated version of what transpired on its site. In brief, Lviv, and with it the prison, came under Soviet rule from September 1939 until June 1941. In addition to severe maltreatment of prisoners at Lontsky St. and at other prisons in Lviv, a maltreatment that was typical enough of Stalinist incarceration, the Soviets ended their control of the prisons in June 1941 with a horrific crime. Unable to evacuate the prisoners fast enough after the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, the NKVD prison administration murdered the political prisoners to prevent their cooperation with the German enemy. As the posters in the museum inform visitors, in the last days of June 1941, the Soviets killed 1,681 prisoners at the Lontsky St. prison, 971 in the prison on Zamarstyniv St., and 739 in the Brygidki prison in Lviv. These killings, known as the NKVD murders, are the primary focus of the memorial museum today. (Himka 2015: 137-138)

But these references provide little detail or context of the broader massacre that occurred in many sites across western Ukraine. Soviet and Russian secrecy -- especially about the criminal activities of the NKVD and its successors -- has worked hard to conceal the human realities of these crimes.

Map: Kiebuzinski and Motyl 2017, Figure 1

Some of the obscurity of this period of murder by the NKVD came to an end in 2017 with the publication of The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941 by Ksenya Kiebuzinski and Alexander Motyl, family members and descendants of victims of this series of massacres. The volume is primarily a collection of documents that will permit other researchers to investigate the events more fully.

The editors note that Ukraine suffered enormously at the hands of Russians during the first half of the twentieth century:

According to a study published by the Moscow-based Institute of Demography, Ukraine suffered close to 15 million ‘excess deaths’ between 1914 and 1948. Of that number, about 7.5 million were attributable to Soviet policies and 6.5 million to Nazi policies. According to Nicolas Werth, meanwhile, the Stalinist regime killed some 12 million of its people. When we consider that over half of them were Ukrainian (far in excess of Ukrainians’ share of the total Soviet population), it is hard not to register outrage at this monstrous system’s hostility to its people in general and Ukrainians in particular. (Kiebuzinski and Motyl 2017: 27)

The volume provides a brief history of the events in an extensive introduction, but its primary goal is to provide archival materials that will permit other scholars to discover more of the details of this organized and deliberate slaughter. The planned purposiveness and cruelty of the slaughter is evident in the record:

The Massacre was not a spontaneous action by the retreating Red Army and NKVD, but, as numerous official documents attest, had been coordinated and planned by Soviet authorities. Especially striking is the fact that many prisoners were, as their obviously mutilated bodies suggested, viciously tortured before they were killed. (31)

And -- like Russian military atrocities today in Bucha and elsewhere in Ukraine today -- the victims of torture and murder of the great Massacre were immediately visible as the Red Army retreated:

No less important than the number of dead is that they were discovered within the space of little more than one week, in a single sustained, relentless wave. Every time the Soviets evacuated and/or the Germans entered a city or town, heaps of rotting corpses were found in prisons, ditches, or rivers. And since this was the height of summer, memoirists and eyewitnesses invariably mention the unbearable stench. (42)

In addition to wholesale murder, the NKVD organized mass deportations from the territories it seized following Germany's invasion of Poland, in order to incorporate the territories into the USSR without popular opposition.

Fearful of national, anti-Soviet elements and an educated class in the new lands, and of their potential influence on Ukrainians to the east, the NKVD entered the territory in force. Mass arrests and deportations of formerly Polish citizens ensued, targeting first Poles and Jews, and then Ukrainians. (37)

The authors estimate at least one million deportations from these occupied territories (38). Again -- there are reports of largescale deportations of Ukrainian people from eastern Ukraine today by Russian military and political forces.

Both Himka and Kiebuzinski and Motyl draw a connection between the NKVD atrocities and the surge of Ukrainian anti-Semitic violence and murder in 1941. German propaganda linking Communism and the Jewish populations of Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states -- the myth of "Judeo-Bolshevism" conveyed by Hitler and the Nazi propaganda machine -- played into the trauma of NKVD atrocities in Poland and western Ukraine, perhaps fueling pogroms (as in Lviv) and collaboration with Nazi extermination units. Indeed, in his review of Kiebuzinski and Motyl Thomas Chopard (link) takes the editors to task for their overly forgiving treatment of Ukrainian nationalism (OUN) and its anti-Semitic foundations:

On retrouve en filigrane la disculpation des mouvements nationalistes ukrainiens quant à leur antisémitisme ou leur participation aux violences antisémites, portée par le narratif ukrainien nationaliste contemporain. Ainsi qu’une ethnicisation à marche forcée des acteurs (des victimes comme des bourreaux), déjà à l’œuvre dans le discours nationaliste des années 1940. Les pogromistes sont renvoyés à leur individualité, masse indistincte et indocile. (Chopard, 710)

Explaining the Holocaust is hard enough, and assigning responsibility for mass murder, collaboration, and pogrom is an important ongoing task for the historian. But the prison massacres conducted by the NKVD in 1940 in western Ukraine -- as well as the atrocious massacres in Katyn Forest in the prior year in Poland -- must be recognized, investigated, and accounted for. And most importantly -- nothing like them can be allowed to occur again. And yet here is a very specific reason to focus on those days in 1941 today. The rapes, torture, mutilations, and murder of the innocent that have been documented in Bucha today (link) are very similar in their horror to those atrocities that occurred at the orders of another Russian (Soviet) government in 1940 and 1941.

It is tempting to ask whether local memories, passed down in communities and families, of these unspeakable crimes by Russians against Ukrainians in 1941 -- as well as memories of the Stalinist war of hunger against Ukraine in 1931-32 -- are an important component of the fierce resistance and courage shown by Ukrainian people throughout the country today.

How will Russia's fascist aggression end?

Ukraine has demonstrated a truly singular level of competence and commitment in its armed resistance to Russia's war since February 24. Much credit goes to President Zelenskyy. And much of the world -- including especially the NATO partners -- have been decisive and forthcoming in material support for Ukraine's ability to continue to resist, and to successfully destroy a remarkable fraction of Russia's military forces. Powerful economic sanctions are playing a key role as well, putting meaningful economic pressure on Russia for its continuing aggression and atrocious acts of violence in Ukraine.

It is plain that Russia's longterm interests have already been very badly harmed by this war. There will be greater European energy independence, reducing a major source of Russian exports; there is a greatly strengthened commitment among NATO members for collective defense -- as well as the possibility of Finland and Sweden's accession to the organization; the economic relationships that have been broken with western companies will be hard or impossible to restore; and Russia has been shamed by an almost worldwide condemnation for its atrocious and aggressive war. Russia's manufacturing sector has shown itself to be incapable of producing the high-technology components needed for its devices and weapons; and yet western sanctions are likely to make import of these components difficult for years to come. Russia is much worse off today than it was on February 23.

And yet it is difficult to see how this war will end. There is really only one satisfactory end: the withdrawal of Russian military forces from all Ukrainian territory, an end of the maritime blockade of Ukraine's ports, and permanent ceasing of air, rocket, and artillery attacks agains targets in Ukraine. Some level of reparations for war damage to Ukraine's cities would also be appropriate. Russia should not be rewarded in any way for its aggression; and Ukraine should not be forced to surrender territory to Russia to provide a face-saving exit for Russia's leaders.

However, it is all but inconceivable that Vladimir Putin would ever willingly decide to simply give up the war without some kind of military gain that can be described as a victory.

The plain truth seems to be that Putin is largely immune from pressure and consequences as a result of this war. He plainly does not care about the massive casualties suffered by his own forces -- "cannon fodder". He is content to write off the losses of tanks, artillery pieces, rockets, drones, and other materiel of war as simply the cost of pursuing important "national" goals. And Russian territory and population have been largely immune from the consequences of the war. Russia is not suffering attacks against its own cities, towns, military bases, airfields, or (with a very few exceptions) fuel depots. Russia is in a position to bring the catastrophic sufferings of war to the Ukrainian people through long-range artillery, missiles, and air strikes in a way that is without any possible reply for the Ukrainian forces. So the logic of reciprocity and deterrence does not find a foothold in this conflict: Russia's horrific actions against Kiev, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and other towns and cities have no reciprocal cost for Russia. The war does not exist for most Russian citizens, and therefore Russian citizens do not care very much about the war.

Here is the most basic point: the forces that make costly war difficult to sustain in an institutionalized democracy are entirely lacking in the contemporary Russian political and economic system. Russia is a dictatorship, and Vladimir Putin is its uncompromising dictator. (Timothy Snyder provides an accounting of the ways in which contemporary Russia is a fascist state; link.) Fundamental decisions about the war rest with Putin alone -- in fact, recent reports suggest that Putin even attempts to manage mid-level tactical decisions as well. There are no effective institutional restraints on Putin's decision-making. He appears to have secure control of the military and the security services, and there is almost no evidence of open disagreement or opposition with the military or political elites about Putin's actions. It does not seem likely that senior generals have the power to compel Putin to change course; and the political institutions of the Russian Federation plainly leave Putin entirely unfettered. Just as Hitler terrorized and dominated the senior commanders of the Wehrmacht, so Putin seems to have complete and unilateral power over his generals.

So the kinds of processes that have led to a change of direction in decisions of war and peace in other countries -- for example, President Lyndon Johnson in 1968, whose conduct of the war in Vietnam led to mass political protest and rising opposition among legislators in his own party, and who was brought down as president by these forces -- those processes of public opinion and independent centers of political power do not exist in Russia. Having crushed the institutions and organizations of civil society, Putin is unhampered in his decision-making. Russian public opinion will not end the war; independent media will not end the war; independent powerful political figures will not end the war; and it is now apparent that the oligarchs will not end the war.

So it comes back to Putin: what could motivate or incentivize Putin to make the decision to end the war and withdraw? He has plainly invested his prestige, reputation, and self-image (hyper-masculine bare-chested warrior) in being successful in this war. He is determined to be perceived as a successful historical figure changing the role of his country in world affairs. He plainly refuses the humiliation that would follow from defeat. So no considerations of "costs and benefits of continuing the war" will influence him. Rather, his decisions have to do with his own interests, property, and self-image. Putin's psychology seems to be similar to Hitler's when it comes to making decisions about war and peace.

But is there a "Godfather" strategy available? Is there any group of powerful figures in Russia, behind the scenes, who could make an offer that Putin cannot refuse? If so, then possibly we might imagine a change of direction. Here is how it might play out in the Netflix miniseries: "We have a choice for you, Vladimir. You can step down as president and keep your wealth (in the Western idiom, perhaps you are resigning to spend more time with your family); or we will depose you, prosecute you for the many acts of corruption that you have committed, and strip you of your wealth. You may even go to prison. So here is the choice: exit now and take the golden parachute; or refuse, and lose everything." We might call this the "Marcos" strategy.

The problem with this scenario is evident. It requires a coalition of individuals who are collectively more powerful than Putin, and who can credibly threaten to remove him. And at present, that seems all but impossible.

Another scenario is more feasible but grossly less acceptable: Russian forces manage to occupy and secure a larger portion of eastern and southern Ukraine; the Ukrainian government decides that the continuing suffering of its citizens must be brought to an end and therefore accepts a territorial settlement; and Putin announces a historic victory. Putin's self-esteem is saved; many thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed or maimed, and many thousands of civilians and soldiers in Ukraine have been killed; vast swaths of destruction have been inflicted on Ukraine during months of atrocious fighting; and Ukraine loses part of its sovereign territory. Not a very good outcome, from any point of view except Putin's.

Is there a third possible scenario -- unambiguous military victory for Ukraine? Given the imbalance of population and national wealth between the two countries, it is hard to see how Ukraine can continue to wage a war of attrition indefinitely, to the point where Russia is forced to withdraw unilaterally. However, there is a precedent in the Soviet Union's abrupt exit from Afghanistan. (The analogy is not entirely apt, given that the USSR was then led by Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, a figure quite unlike Vladimir Putin.) The current rate of destruction of Russian military forces is unsustainable for the Russians; so it is not entirely inconceivable that Russia would turn its positions over to friendly "militias", declare victory, and withdraw its regular military forces.

Russia's aggression against Ukraine as a war crime

When Nazi Germany attacked Poland in 1939 it committed a war crime, codified by the standards established in preparation for the Nuremberg Trials in 1945. Here is a very useful summary of the Nuremberg process ("The Influence of the Nuremberg Trial on International Criminal Law", edited by Tove Rosen) at the Robert H. Jackson Center (link), and here is a summary of the Nuremberg Trial process provided by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (link). Useful discussion and definitions are provided by the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect (link). The principles established for the Nuremberg Trials have served as the basis for subsequent war crimes prosecutions since World War II, including the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in response to crimes against humanity in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda following the genocide in Rwanda.

The key charges to be considered in the Nuremberg Trials included these:

Principle VI

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

1. Crimes Against Peace:

a. Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

2. War Crimes:

Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave- labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war, of persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

3. Crimes Against Humanity:

Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

The first charge is "initiating or waging of a war of aggression". It is perfectly evident that this phrase describes Russia's fullscale invasion and assault on Ukraine perfectly. War crime #1, planning and waging a war of aggression, should be immediately pursued against the Russian state, its leaders, and its military commanders, by the appropriate international tribunal.

The category of misconduct referred to in clause 2 is more complex. But evidence from numerous cities in Ukraine supports application of this article to Russia's military conduct as well. The fact of "murder, ill-treatment, or deportation to slave labor ... of civilian population" appears to be occurring through the use of bombs, rockets, and artillery against city centers, targeting civilians, and the apparent deliberate killings of refugees and news reporters by Russian soldiers and aircraft appear to be documented as well. "Wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity" is clearly taking place as well. The videos currently available of apartment buildings ablaze after rocket, shell, and bomb attacks seem to provide prima facie evidence of "wanton destruction of cities" as mentioned in article 2. The kidnapping of mayors of several Ukraine cities possibly fall under this article as crimes as well.

Clause 3 involves "genocide" and mass crimes against human beings, when based on "political, racial or religious grounds". The fact that Russian attacks on almost all of Ukraine's largest cities have led to massive refugee movements (currently more than four million displaced persons and refugees) suggests "ethnic cleansing" -- an effort to push out of Ukraine's territory the segment of Ukraine's population that is most unwilling to accept Russia's hegemony and domination.

Two important principles were codified in 1950 to reflect the legal practice of the Nuremberg Trials: the principle of the legal responsibility of heads of state and the invalidity of the defense of "following orders".

Principle III

The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

Principle IV

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

These principles imply that the individual leaders of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine are personally vulnerable to charges of war crimes. Principle III explicitly declares that the head of state (Vladimir Putin) is appropriately subject to charges of war crimes under international law. Perhaps more importantly, Principle IV implies that military commanders themselves are liable to charges based on the crime of waging aggressive war. This strongly suggests that military commanders need to be considering their own liability for their actions in Ukraine.

Atrocious and evil -- Russian aggressive war in Ukraine

The moment has come, after months of insistent, indignant jabber from Vladimir Putin that he has no intention of invading Ukraine: Russian forces have invaded Ukraine across a broad front.

This act by Vladimir Putin and his military is atrocious in precisely the way that Adolph Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 was atrocious. In fact, Putin's playbook is very similar to Hitler's playbook: spurious claims about ancestral rights to territory, phony claims about provocative attacks by Poland (1939) and Ukraine (2022), defiant histrionics to the world about Russia's right to the territory of Ukraine. This is an atrocity for a fundamental reason: it involves attack against a non-aggressor nation, it is unprovoked, it will undoubtedly lead to massive suffering, dislocation, and death of innocent Ukrainian citizens. Putin demonstrates that he -- and now the country for which he is unopposed dictator -- have complete disregard for international law, the rights and dignity of non-combatants, and the legal and moral importance of sovereignty.

The point deserves to be underlined: Putin is a dictator, and contemporary Russia is a dictatorship. Independent critics are imprisoned, persecuted, and assassinated; political organizations that dissent from Putin's rule are suppressed; and ordinary citizens are intimidated. Even oligarchs are treated harshly if they fail to support Putin's regime.

And what about Ukraine? Ukraine's history since 1920 is a story of vast suffering, much of it at the hands of Russians and the Soviet regime. The mass and deliberate starvation campaign conducted by Stalin in 1931-33, the Holodomor (link), led to the deaths of perhaps four million Ukrainian villagers during the famine years. Stalin's campaign of terror against his own people took a major toll on Ukrainians before and after World War II. The dictatorship of Soviet rule was harsh and unforgotten in Ukraine today. The devastation and death toll of fighting and Holocaust in 1941-43 in Ukraine against invading Nazi armies and Einsatzgruppen led to over a million deaths of Ukraine's Jewish population, and vast military and prisoner-of-war casualties. Kiev itself was the site of the largest single site of mass killings of the Ukrainian Jewish population, Babi Yar. To be aware that once again, artillery fire, air strikes, and missiles are in the skies of Ukraine is unbearably sad for the Ukrainian people and for everyone who cares about peace and human wellbeing.

The great Ukrainian writer Vasily Grossman, citizen of Berdichev, had greater wisdom, even as he witnessed the atrocities of Nazi extermination of the Jews of eastern Europe, the defense of Stalingrad, and the eventual defeat of the Nazi regime. In Life and Fate he wrote:

I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer. (Life and Fate, Part II, chapter 15)

Grossman never surrendered his belief in freedom, peace, and the dignity of the individual human being -- even as he witnessed the atrocities of the Gulag, the anti-Semitic campaigns of the 1950s, and the reckless and despotic behavior of the Soviet dictatorship.

Putin's decision is the act of an international outlaw and cannot be forgiven. Massive, enduring, and punishing sanctions must be the response of the rest of the world. And perhaps Ukrainians can take some hope from the anthem of their countryman: "evil will never conquer".

Strange defeat

One of the consequential puzzles of the Second World War was the sudden, catastrophic collapse of the French army following German invasion in 1940. This is the subject of Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat, written in 1940, and it is an event of major historical importance and mystery. The mystery is this: France was a powerful military force, it had declared war against Germany following the Nazi invasion of Poland, it had ample warning that Germany would wage war against it soon following the invasion of Poland, and it had invested heavily in defensive materiel against an anticipated German attack. And yet when the attack came in May 1940, France was surprised, French armies were quickly defeated, and France capitulated after only six weeks of fighting.

Most people who have written on Bloch's account have focused on the high-level hypotheses to be found in the book: incompetence in the French high command, political dysfunction within the French elite, and a predilection for "Hitler rather than Blum" among the elites. However, upon rereading, it is evident that Bloch has other ideas about the failure of the French military besides these large conflicts within French politics and society. As a staff officer with responsibilities for the organization of logistics, Bloch had ample opportunity to observe the behavior and decision-making of line officers and staff officers. And he focuses a great deal of attention on issues having to do with the mindset and expectations of French military men: what they understand about the battle situation, how they anticipate future needs, and how they communicate with other important actors.

The 'thinking oneself into the other fellow's shoes' is always a very difficult form of mental gymnastics, and it is not confined to men who occupy a special position in the military hierarchy. But it would be foolish to deny that staff officers as a whole have been a good deal to blame in this matter of sympathetic understanding. Their failure, when they did fail, was, however, due--I feel pretty sure--not so much to contempt as to lack of imagination and a tendency to take refuge from the urgency of fact in abstractions. (34)

So cognitive and mental framework shortcomings rise to the very top in Bloch's analysis of French army failures in the conduct of the war:

What drove our armies to disaster was the cumulative effect of a great number of different mistakes. One glaring characteristic is, however, common to all of them. Our leaders, or those who acted for them, were incapable of thinking in terms of a new war. In other words, the German triumph was, essentially, a triumph of intellect -- and it is that which makes it so peculiarly serious. (36)

These limitations of imagination and worldview issues were worsened by what Bloch identifies as a crippling organizational deficiency in the French army -- the strict separation between line officers and staff officers. This led to a very large separation in their worldviews, expectations, and ways of thinking about military matters between line and staff officers. Neither group knew what the other group was thinking or presupposing about the complex conditions of war in which they operated.

One simple and obvious remedy for this state of affairs would have been to establish a system which would have made it possible for small groups of officers to serve, turn and turn about, in the front line and at H.Q. But senior generals dislike having the personnel of their staffs changed too often. It should be remembered that in 1915 and 1916 their opposition to any reform along these lines led to an almost complete divorce between the outlook of the regimental and the staff officer. (35)

Associated with these cognitive framework failures was the French military's failure to adjust to the new "tempo of war" created by German tactics. Bloch recognized through his own experience that the German strategy relied on a tempo of action that outpaced the ability of the French high command and army to react effectively. "From the beginning to the end of the war, the metronome at headquarters was always set at too slow a beat" (43).

This "tempo" problem was not restricted only to the high command:

But it would not be fair to confine these criticisms to the High Command. Generally speaking, the combatant troops were no more successful than the staff in adjusting their movements or their tactical appreciations to the speed at which the Germans moved. (47)

This too can be unpacked into an organizational point: the line officers throughout the chain of command had too little training and readiness for initiative and adaptation; and when plans went wrong, chaos ensued. "They [the Germans] relied on action and on improvisation. We, on the other hand, believed in doing nothing and in behaving as we always had behaved" (49). Bloch is explicit in recognizing that initiative and improvisation could have substantially improved the French position:

That is why the Germans, true to their doctrine of speed, tended more and more to move their shock elements along the main arteries. It was, therefore, absolutely unnecessary to cover our front with a line extending for hundreds of kilometres, almost impossible to man, and terribly easy to pierce. On the other hand, the invader might have been badly mauled by a few islands of resistance well sited along the main roads, adequately camouflaged, sufficiently mobile, and armed with a few machine-guns and anti-tank artillery, or even with the humble 75! (50-51)

And the battlefield consequences of the French military's organizational discouragement of initiative and adaptation were severe:

But I am very much afraid that where this sort of self-government and mutual understanding did not exist, contacts between units and their senior formations, or, on the same level, between one unit and another, left a good deal to be desired. I have more than once heard regimental officers complain that they were left too long without orders, and it is very certain--as I have already shown by citing notorious examples--that the staff was imperfectly informed about what was happening on their section of the front. (66)

Bloch's account has many other strands of organizational observation concerning features of the French army that led to poor performance -- about "discipline of troops", about the intelligence organization, and about the poor liaison relationships that had been developed between French and British army staff.

There is an important lesson to draw here: Bloch's account is usually read as an indictment of French politics and society in the 1930s, but not as a detailed military and organizational study of failure. And yet, it is clear that Bloch has provided a great deal of content that contributes to exactly this kind of micro-level analysis of military dysfunction. Bloch, it turns out, was an astute organizational observer.

There is an interesting parallel between the collapse in 1940 and the comparably dramatic collapse of French armies in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian war (link). In both wars there was an obstinate rigidity in the French general staff that impeded adaptiveness to the changing and unexpected circumstances of the war that quickly engulfed them. Michael Howard's excellent history, The Franco-Prussian War provides extensive details about the sources of military failure in 1870.

It is worth observing that the defeat of France was not the only "strange defeat" that occurred between 1939 and 1941. Poland's very weak defense against Hitler's invasion in 1939, Stalin's unconvincing effort to invade Finland in 1939, and the stunning successes of Hitler's Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 all represent military catastrophes that were on their face unlikely. In the Barbarossa case, much of the explanation falls on Stalin directly: his murderous purges of the Red Army officer corps in 1937, his mulish refusal to accept intelligence about a likely German invasion in summer 1941, his disastrous interference in strategy, placement of armies, and his unconditional orders that made maneuver impossible all combined to produce catastrophe in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Russia itself in the first six months of the invasion. This suggests that perhaps explaining successful largescale military undertakings is harder than explaining failure and defeat. There are many ways to fail in a large, complex and highly coordinated activity like an invasion, and only a few ways to succeed.

A Socratic morality of war?

An earlier post raised the question of whether Socrates had participated, directly or indirectly, in atrocities in war during his celebrated service as hoplite in numerous campaigns in the Peloponnesian War. And, further, it seems that Socrates never explicitly criticized the practice of massacring and enslaving the defeated foe (as was practiced by Cleon). Several readers offered useful suggestions about other places in the Platonic corpus where moral ideas about the conduct of war are discussed by Socrates. There are a few passages in the Republic, Book 5, that are relevant to the moral limits on the conduct of war, and the first Alcibiades dialogue has some relevance as well. Here I want to consider those passages to see if these passages provide principles that are relevant to violence against the innocent — massacres, slaughter of prisoners, enslavement of women and children, devastation of cities. Here the question is not “what circumstances justify a state's decision to go to war against an antagonist”, but rather the moral limits that govern acts and targets of violence in war -- the difference between legitimate acts of war and atrocities.

Here are a few relevant lines of dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon from Republic, Book 5 (link):

“But again, how will our soldiers conduct themselves toward enemies?” “In what respect?” “First, in the matter of making slaves of the defeated, do you think it right for Greeks to reduce Greek cities to slavery, or rather that so far as they are able, they should not suffer any other city to do so, but should accustom Greeks [469c] to spare Greeks, foreseeing the danger of enslavement by the barbarians?” “Sparing them is wholly and altogether the better,” said he. “They are not, then, themselves to own Greek slaves, either, and they should advise the other Greeks not to?” “By all means,” he said; “at any rate in that way they would be more likely to turn against the barbarians and keep their hands from one another.” “And how about stripping the dead after victory of anything except their weapons: is that well? Does it not furnish a pretext to cowards [469d] not to advance on the living foe, as if they were doing something needful when poking about the dead? Has not this snatching at the spoils ere new destroyed many an army?” “Yes, indeed.” “And don't you think it illiberal and greedy to plunder a corpse, and is it not the mark of a womanish and petty spirit to deem the body of the dead an enemy when the real foeman has flown away and left behind only the instrument with which he fought? [469e] Do you see any difference between such conduct and that of the dogs who snarl at the stones that hit them but don't touch the thrower?” “Not the slightest.” “We must abandon, then, the plundering of corpses and the refusal to permit their burial.” “By heaven, we certainly must,” he said.

And a few lines later:

“And in the matter of devastating the land of Greeks and burning their houses, how will your soldiers deal with their enemies.” “I would gladly hear your opinion of that.” “In my view,” [470b] said I, “they ought to do neither, but confine themselves to taking away the annual harvest. Shall I tell you why?” “Do.” “In my opinion, just as we have the two terms, war and faction, so there are also two things, distinguished by two differentiae. The two things I mean are the friendly and kindred on the one hand and the alien and foreign on the other. Now the term employed for the hostility of the friendly is faction, and for that of the alien is war.” “What you say is in nothing beside the mark,” he replied. “Consider, then, [470c] if this goes to the mark. I affirm that the Hellenic race is friendly to itself and akin, and foreign and alien to the barbarian.” “Rightly,” he said. “We shall then say that Greeks fight and wage war with barbarians, and barbarians with Greeks, and are enemies by nature, and that war is the fit name for this enmity and hatred. Greeks, however, we shall say, are still by nature the friends of Greeks when they act in this way, but that Greece is sick in that case and divided by faction, [470d] and faction is the name we must give to that enmity.” “I will allow you that habit of speech,” he said. “Then observe,” said I, “that when anything of this sort occurs in faction, as the word is now used, and a state is divided against itself, if either party devastates the land and burns the houses of the other such factional strife is thought to be an accursed thing and neither party to be true patriots. Otherwise, they would never have endured thus to outrage their nurse and mother. But the moderate and reasonable thing is thought to be that the victors [470e] shall take away the crops of the vanquished, but that their temper shall be that of men who expect to be reconciled and not always to wage war.” “That way of feeling,” he said, “is far less savage than the other.” “Well, then,” said I, “is not the city that you are founding to be a Greek city?” “It must be,” he said. “Will they then not be good and gentle?” “Indeed they will.” “And won't they be philhellenes, lovers of Greeks, and will they not regard all Greece as their own and not renounce their part in the holy places common to all Greeks ?” “Most certainly.” “Will they not then regard any difference with Greeks [471a] who are their own people as a form of faction and refuse even to speak of it as war?” “Most certainly.” “And they will conduct their quarrels always looking forward to a reconciliation?” “By all means.” “They will correct them, then, for their own good, not chastising them with a view to their enslavement or their destruction, but acting as correctors, not as enemies.” “They will,” he said. “They will not, being Greeks, ravage Greek territory nor burn habitations, and they will not admit that in any city all the population are their enemies, men, women and children, but will say that only a few at any time are their foes, [471b] those, namely, who are to blame for the quarrel. And on all these considerations they will not be willing to lay waste the soil, since the majority are their friends, nor to destroy the houses, but will carry the conflict only to the point of compelling the guilty to do justice by the pressure of the suffering of the innocent.” “I,” he said, “agree that our citizens ought to deal with their Greek opponents on this wise, while treating barbarians as Greeks now treat Greeks.” “Shall we lay down this law also, then, [471c] for our guardians that they are not to lay waste the land or burn the houses?” “Let us so decree,” he said, “and assume that this and our preceding prescriptions are right."

Several moral ideas about limits on the use of violence in warfare are evident here. First, there is the distinction between waging war against other Greeks and against barbarians (non-Greeks). And second, there is a principle of moderation applied, first to acts within war against Greeks, and then partially extended to non-Greeks.

The first passage is concerned with the case of war between Greeks. Socrates is explicit in saying that vanquished Greeks should not be enslaved; vanquished Greek cities should not be burned and annihilated; and (by implication) surrendered Greek soldiers should not be massacred. Despoiling the dead is also considered and rejected. These claims are limited to the case of war between Greek parties. They seem to express an idea of "Hellenic patriotism" over and above loyalty and obligation to one's own polity (city). The primary rationale that Socrates provides in the first passage for these limits on the conduct of war is prudential: Greek enemies will fight differently if they are confident they will not be massacred or enslaved, and will be more likely to fight the barbarians than the Athenians. But the second passage raises a different consideration: war between Greeks should not be considered to be total or irresolvable, but should be conducted in such a way that a peaceful future can be imagined on both sides -- "... their temper shall be that of men who expect to be reconciled ...". It should be seen as a matter of faction rather than war, of measured disagreement rather than unlimited efforts at annihilation of the antagonist. Eventual reconciliation should be the goal. This is the "pan-hellenism" that Socrates and Glaucon both seem to endorse.

An even more important distinction is introduced in the second passage, though not by name: the distinction between combatant and non-combatant. And the principle that is articulated is, essentially, that violence should be restricted to combatants and not aimed at non-combatants. "They will not admit that in any city all the population are their enemies, men, women and children, but will say that only a few at any time are their foes, those, namely, who are to blame for the quarrel." Or in more modern terms, the violence of war should be used only against those who provoked and conducted war, not those who simply inhabit the city that is at war. This is a significant limit on the conduct of war as practiced by Cleon. As we saw in the previous posts, Cleon's proposed treatment of Mytilene was an instance of annihilation rather than eventual reconciliation.

The only statement about war against non-Greeks in these passages is this: "our citizens ought to deal with their Greek opponents on this wise, while treating barbarians as Greeks now treat Greeks." But since Greek warfare against Greeks during the Peloponnesian War involved massacre of adult men, destruction of cities, and enslavement of women and children, this passage appears to permit these practices against "barbarians". Moreover, the sharp distinction that Socrates draws between "fellow Greek" and "alien barbarian" is ominous, suggesting that in war against barbarians there are essentially no moral limitations. "I affirm that the Hellenic race is friendly to itself and akin, and foreign and alien to the barbarian.” “Rightly,” he said. “We shall then say that Greeks fight and wage war with barbarians, and barbarians with Greeks, and are enemies by nature, and that war is the fit name for this enmity and hatred." Enemies by nature ... enmity and hatred. These are phrases that lead to the legitimacy of wars of annihilation.

We might say that Socrates' moral universe was fundamentally constrained by a "philosophical anthropology" that we would today describe as xenophobic, racist, or imperialist. It was a worldview that systematically regarded other groups as sub-human and less worthy of moral consideration than one's own group. But once "barbarians" are recognized as fully and equally human, the arguments given above for moderation in war between Greek adversaries apply with equal force to war between Greek and non-Greek adversaries. The distinction between combatants and non-combatants is just as compelling to the case of warfare against Persians or Phoenicians. And the case for moderation and reconciliation in war is just as valid as well. It is shared humanity rather than shared "Hellenic race" that is a legitimate basis for moderation and reconciliation. But the virulence of the Greek concept of "barbarian" and its fundamental contrast with "Hellenic" presents a huge barrier to the creation of a universalist human morality -- a morality based on the traits of the human being rather than the Persian, the Greek, or the Egyptian. 

There is a basis, then, for thinking that the seeds of a more universal theory of moral limitations on the conduct of war exist in these Socratic ideas. What is missing is a recognition of the shared humanity of all social groups and civilizations -- and their equal worthiness to being treated with compassion, equality, and consideration. But clearly, Plato and Socrates have not come to that insight.

The relevance of the Alcibiades dialogue (link) is more limited, because it concerns almost exclusively the question of what considerations of prudence and virtue should underlie a decision for a city to go to war against an adversary. This dialogue has relevance for the question of "just causes for war", but almost nothing specific to say about "moral limitations on actions and strategies within war".

Therefore neither the passages from the Republic nor the Alcibiades dialogue shed a great deal of light on the question of "Socrates and atrocity". There is no strong statement about the fundamental moral unacceptability of the massacre of the men of a city or the enslavement of the children and women of the conquered city as human beings. Rather, there is a much weaker argument about the harmful consequences of harsh treatment towards fellow Greeks (permanent enmity and resistance) and the beneficial consequences of limits on violence (eventual reconciliation). But this is far from a clear and principled rejection of the use of massacre and enslavement as a tool of coercion in war -- let alone a rejection of these uses of violence against "alien enemies". To the charge of "participant in atrocity" we might then add the charge of "xenophobe!" to our critique of the historic Socrates. If only Glaucon had had the moral sense to press Socrates along these lines:

Glaucon: "But Socrates, when a Greek general orders the massacre of a Persian city, does he not in that act do great injustice by condemning innocent human beings to death?" Socrates: "But these are barbarians; they do not have the moral standing of Greek citizens." Glaucon: "Do these Persian men and women not feel pain, love their children, and flourish in their freedoms?" Socrates: "What you say is true, dear Glaucon. But they are not Greek." Glaucon: "But, dear Socrates, have you not taught that sentience, reason, language, and social feeling are the features that distinguish the Greek adult from the animal?" Socrates: "Yes, of course." Glaucon: "And have you not agreed that Persian men and women, like the Greeks, feel, think, speak, and love one another?" Socrates: "Yes, that is obviously true, why do you repeat it?" Glaucon: "Are you not forced to agree, then, that the Persian is just as worthy of our moral consideration as the Athenian?" Socrates: "Now that you express yourself so clearly, Glaucon, I see your meaning. I am forced to agree." Glaucon: "And so we agree, Socrates, my teacher, that all human beings must be treated virtuously, not just Greeks." Socrates: "It is so." Glaucon: "So, then, Socrates, we are in agreement that armies must never massacre the innocent or enslave the women and children." Socrates: "That is the requirement of virtue."

(Norwegian philosopher Henrik Syse has written several very interesting articles on Plato's contributions to the theory of the morality of war here, here, and here.)

Turing's journey

A recent post comments on the value of biography as a source of insight into history and thought. Currently I am reading Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), which I am finding fascinating both for its portrayal of the evolution of a brilliant and unconventional mathematician as well as the honest efforts Hodges makes to describe Turing's sexual evolution and the tragedy in which it eventuated. Hodges makes a serious effort to give the reader some understanding of Turing's important contributions, including his enormously important "computable numbers" paper. (Here is a nice discussion of computability in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; link.) The book also offers a reasonably technical account of the Enigma code-breaking process.

Hilbert's mathematical imagination plays an important role in Turing's development. Hilbert's speculation that all mathematical statements would turn out to be derivable or disprovable turned out to be wrong, and Turing's computable numbers paper (along with Godel and Church) demonstrated the incompleteness of mathematics. But it was Hilbert's formulation of the idea that permitted the precise and conclusive refutations that came later. (Here is Richard Zack's account in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Hilbert's program; link.)

And then there were the machines. I had always thought of the Turing machine as a pure thought experiment designed to give specific meaning to the idea of computability. It has been eye-opening to learn of the innovative and path-breaking work that Turing did at Bletchley Park, Bell Labs, and other places in developing real computational machines. Turing's development of real computing machines and his invention of the activity of "programming" ("construction of tables") make his contributions to the development of digital computing machines much more advanced and technical than I had previously understood. His work late in the war on the difficult problem of encrypting speech for secure telephone conversation was also very interesting and innovative. Further, his understanding of the priority of creating a technology that would support "random access memory" was especially prescient. Here is Hodges' summary of Turing's view in 1947:

Considering the storage problem, he listed every form of discrete store that he and Don Bayley had thought of, including film, plugboards, wheels, relays, paper tape, punched cards, magnetic tape, and ‘cerebral cortex’, each with an estimate, in some cases obviously fanciful, of access time, and of the number of digits that could be stored per pound sterling. At one extreme, the storage could all be on electronic valves, giving access within a microsecond, but this would be prohibitively expensive. As he put it in his 1947 elaboration, ‘To store the content of an ordinary novel by such means would cost many millions of pounds.’ It was necessary to make a trade-off between cost and speed of access. He agreed with von Neumann, who in the EDVAC report had referred to the future possibility of developing a special ‘Iconoscope’ or television screen, for storing digits in the form of a pattern of spots. This he described as ‘much the most hopeful scheme, for economy combined with speed.’ (403)

These contributions are no doubt well known by experts on the history of computing. But for me it was eye-opening to learn how directly Turing was involved in the design and implementation of various automatic computing engines, including the British ACE machine itself at the National Physical Laboratory (link). Here is Turing's description of the evolution of his thinking on this topic, extracted from a lecture in 1947:

Some years ago I was researching on what might now be described as an investigation of the theoretical possibilities and limitations of digital computing machines. I considered a type of machine which had a central mechanism and an infinite memory which was contained on an infinite tape. This type of machine appeared to be sufficiently general. One of my conclusions was that the idea of a ‘rule of thumb’ process and a ‘machine process’ were synonymous. The expression ‘machine process’ of course means one which could be carried out by the type of machine I was considering…. Machines such as the ACE may be regarded as practical versions of this same type of machine. There is at least a very close analogy. (399)

At the same time his clear logical understanding of the implications of a universal computing machine was genuinely visionary. He was evangelical in his advocacy of the goal of creating a machine with a minimalist and simple architecture where all the complexity and specificity of the use of the machine derives from its instructions (programming), not its specialized hardware.

Also interesting is the fact that Turing had a literary impulse (not often exercised), and wrote at least one semi-autobiographical short story about a sexual encounter. Only a few pages survive. Here is a paragraph quoted by Hodges:

Alec had been working rather hard until two or three weeks before. It was about interplanetary travel. Alec had always been rather keen on such crackpot problems, but although he rather liked to let himself go rather wildly to newspapermen or on the Third Programme when he got the chance, when he wrote for technically trained readers, his work was quite sound, or had been when he was younger. This last paper was real good stuff, better than he'd done since his mid twenties when he had introduced the idea which is now becoming known as 'Pryce's buoy'. Alec always felt a glow of pride when this phrase was used. The rather obvious double-entendre rather pleased him too. He always liked to parade his homosexuality, and in suitable company Alec could pretend that the word was spelt without the 'u'. It was quite some time now since he had 'had' anyone, in fact not since he had met that soldier in Paris last summer. Now that his paper was finished he might justifiably consider that he had earned another gay man, and he knew where he might find one who might be suitable. (564)

The passage is striking for several reasons; but most obviously, it brings together the two leading themes of his life, his scientific imagination and his sexuality.

This biography of Turing reinforces for me the value of the genre more generally. The reader gets a better understanding of the important developments in mathematics and computing that Turing achieved, it presents a vivid view of the high stakes in the secret conflict that Turing was a crucial part of in the use of cryptographic advances to defeat the Nazi submarine threat, and it gives personal insights into the very unique individual who developed into such a world-changing logician, engineer, and scientist.