kremlinology

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1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall by Peter Millar

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, urban sprawl, working-age population

, the traditional, militarised old Prussian version of ‘Hip, Hip, Hooray!’ The East German and Soviet leaders still greeted each other on arrival and departure with the old comrades’ kiss – just as they had done in Brezhnev’s day – even if those of us who considered Soviet kisses another branch of Kremlinology couldn’t help but notice that Gorbachev puckered up as if kissing a lemon. Only a week later US President Ronald Reagan visited West Berlin and delivered a challenge to the Soviet leader that would, more than two years later, seem like a prophetic demand: ‘General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation, come here to this gate.

Andropov had suffered from kidney problems for years but they were now acute. Within months of taking the top job he almost totally disappeared from view, leaving keynote speeches to be given by other politburo members, eagerly watched by those of us who styled ourselves – like Connie in John LeCarré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy trilogy – Kremlinologists. We would hatch theories as to what speech on which occasion, which nuance and what announcement of policy gave hints as to who might be next in line of succession to the all-important role of general secretary of the Communist Party. The American correspondents had barely managed to get their New York anchors to pronounce the Soviet leader’s name properly, with the stress on the second rather than first syllable when Andropov finally dropped off.

Sooner or later – and the way things were going it looked like sooner – there would have to be a switch to a new generation. Even so, there were still a few of the older generation lingering in the corridors of power hoping for a chance to step into the big office, if they didn’t fall off their perch first. As a result every Kremlinologist in Moscow was constantly on the watch for changes in television programming – a switch from regular broadcasts to classical music was a surefire indicator someone big had snuffed it – or for Red Square being closed off at an unusual time (a preparation for a funeral). In November 1984 the defence minister Dmitry Ustinov, who had been in the job for eighteen years and was already in his mid-seventies, was added to the communal at-risk list after he failed to turn up at the annual Red Square parade to commemorate the 1917 revolution.


The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor

activist lawyer, banking crisis, corporate governance, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, financial innovation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, kremlinology, land reform, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, one-China policy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, reserve currency, risk/return, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Upton Sinclair

For visitors like MacKenzie, the only time they might stumble across the Little Red Book would be on an excursion to a weekend flea market en route to the airport to fly home. Western elites were once familiar with the order of battle in communist politics, mainly through study of the pioneering model in the former Soviet Union, and the mini-industry in academia, think-tanks and journalism known as Kremlinology. The collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s took with it much of the deep knowledge of communist systems. Sinology has always been a different beast in any case, as much dedicated to Chinese history, culture, science and language as to modern politics. The transformation of China’s economy and society and its impact on the rest of the world during the same period has diverted attention from formal politics in Beijing even further.

The party committees (known as ‘leading small groups’) which guide and dictate policy to ministries, which in turn have the job of executing them, work out of sight. The make-up of all these committees, and in many cases even their existence, is rarely referred to in the state-controlled media, let alone any discussion of how they arrive at decisions. The membership of these groups can only be deduced by painstaking Kremlinological compilations from scouring the Chinese press, sometimes over years. ‘The only instance in the entire post-Mao era in which the [Chinese] media listed the current members of any of these groups was in 2003, when the party-controlled newspaper Wen Wei Bao in Hong Kong publicized a membership list of the Central Committee Taiwan Work Leading Small Group,’ said Alice Miller, of the Hoover Institution.

., 43 Caijing on bankers, 68–9 Guo Shuqing’s interview, 51 on Rio-Tinto bid, 60 on Shanghai corruption cases, 161 car number-plates, of Party officials, 14 car sales, 2009, xvi Casino Royale (film), 238 Catholic Church, 11–12 CCTV, 185, 250 cell-phones, 39 censuses, 258–9 Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, 137–8 beneficiaries of, 147 failing of, 145–7 investigation procedure, 142–5, 168–9 on Shanghai corruption cases, 160–61, 164–6, 167–9 structure and staffing, 141–2 Central Committee, 12 Central Committee Taiwan Work Leading Small Group, 21 Central Guards Unit, 12 Central Military Commission, 107 Central Organization Department, 17 appointment and promotion, 81, 82–3 and ethnic minorities and other parties, 79 internal tension, 74–6 invisibility, 71–2, 73, 74, 280n against local authority, 90–93 members’ files, 77–8 nature of, 69 origin and historical background, 76–7 on Party’s disaster relief, 192–3 refined and tightened, 41 and state enterprises, 46, 72–4, 84–9 see also nomenklatura system Central Party School, 226–8 Central Politics and Law Committee, 25, 189, 190 Central Propaganda Department, 17, 229 media control, 184, 186, 237, 248–9; see also media, censorship military propaganda, 121–2 reinforced, 41 roles of, 235–7, 248–52, 253 in Sanlu case, 189 Taiwan mission, 122 centrally planned economy, metaphor for, 37 CEOs, 89 reshuffled, 84–5 status symbol, 8–9, 10 stock options of, 100–103 Chai Junyong, 164 Chan, Hon, 80, 81 Changchun Chen’s trial in, 166 corruption cases, 139 Changzhou, 220–22 Charter 08, 261–2 Chen Ailian, 5 Chen Deming, 83–4 Chen Jinhua, 55 Chen Liangyu, 135, 136, 161 background, 155–6 confronts Wen Jiabao, 163–4 defends Shanghai, 151 investigation on, 138, 164–6 trial and prison life, 166 Chen Shui-bian, 124 Chen Tonghai, 64 Chen Xiaodan, 65–6 Chen Xitong, 144, 168 Chen Yuan, 40, 64–5, 66 on communism, 34, 37 daughter of, 65–6 ideas of, 38–9 Chen Yun, 37–8, 200, 239 Chen Zhili, 140 Cheung, Steven, 41, 176–7 children, poisoned by milk powder, 172, 183, 184, 185, 186 China Construction Bank corruption cases, 145–6 mass lay-offs, 50 Party’s role in, 51, 52 China Development Bank, 59, 65 China Executive Leadership Academy, Pudong, 29, 30 China Inc. see state enterprises China Investment Corporation, x–xi China Mobile, 84, 85, 101 China National Petroleum Corp. see PetroChina China Netcom, 84, 86–8 China People’s Political Consultative Conference, 204 China Pudong Cadre College, 29, 30 China Telecom, 84, 87 China Unicom, 84, 85 China Youth Daily, 248, 250–51 Chinalco, 57–61, 62, 224–6 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 109 Chongqing, corruption cases, 139 Clinton, Hillary, xiv–xv CLSA, 199 CNOOC, 54, 62 Cole, Bud, 121 communism, 18, 35, 76 redefined, 34, 37 Confucius, 32–3 congress see National People’s Congress corruption see bribery/corruption COSCO, 102 cover-up strategy, 233–4 Crillon Ball, 66 Cultural Revolution, 14 launching of, 149 Party’s verdict, 234, 245 Dai Bingguo, xii, 277n Dai Guofang, 220–21, 222, 223 dairy industry, 181–2, 183 see also Sanlu Dalai Lama, xvi Dandong, 174–5 Daqing, 113, 115 decentralization, 177–8 defence budget, 111–12 democracy Chinese leader’s interpretation, 20 demand of, 31, 261 pro-democracy protests see Tiananmen Square massacre in Taiwan, 123–4, 125, 126, 128, 130 democratic parties, 15 Dench, Dame Judi, 238 Deng Xiaoping, 74, 239 on Idiot Seeds, 195 image of, 6 as leader of liberalizers, 34 on Mao, 245 new model of reform, 41–2 partnership with private sector, 197, 198 perfects socialism, 194, 196 photos of, 38 power behind the scenes, 154 priorities economy, 106 returns to Leninist roots, 14 rural reform, 200 Shanghai policy, 150 southern tour, 41, 201–2 stratagem, xv and Tiananmen Square Massacre, 105 Dickson, Bruce, 214, 218–19 Ding, James, 227 Ding Guan’gen, 17 direct sales industry, 209–13 Director of the Beijing Representative Office (Wang Xiaofang), 95–6 Dongfeng, 216–17 Downs, Erica, 63 Dukakis, Michael, 104 East Eight Blocks, 158 East Hope see Liu Yongxing economy impact of reform on, 42–3 unsustainability of, 269 education institutions Party control of appointment, 79 textbook censorship, 235, 245–6, 249–50 elite networks, 8–9 entrepreneurs Party membership, 31, 32 in Party schools, 226–8 rich list, 205–7 see also individual members environment as benchmark for promotion, 90 central vs. local, 90–93 Party policy on, 269 ethnic protests, 111, 264 European Union, xi Falun Gong, 82, 173, 211, 212, 264, 269 famine, 229–30, 231–4, 254, 255–60, 292n Fang Ning, 33 Far Eastern Economic Review,, 46 farmers, 200, 202 Feng Jun, 227 Fengyang, 258–9 Fewsmith, Joseph, 270 Fidelity, 101 financial system, 44–6 see also banks Fonterra, 182, 183, 186–7, 188 food safety, scandals, 183–5, 191 see also Sanlu foreign bankers, ix–xii, 277n foreign enterprises joint venture, 216–17 number of employees, 214 Fortune 500, 56 France elite networks, 9 Tibet issue, xvi Freezing Point, 248, 250–52 Friedman, Milton, 40–41 Fu Chengyu, 54, 56 Fu Furong, 213 Fu Jianfeng, 170, 186 Gang of Four, 149 global financial crisis, 266 banks’ response, 68, 269 Beijing’s response, 163, 269 global financiers, ix–xii, 277n global reserve currency, xv Global Times, 272–3 Goldman Sachs, 61, 181 golf, 145 Gome, 207 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 35 government imperial officialdom, 77 secret Party rule of, 14–17, 21–5, 33 see also public sector Great Leap Forward, 231–4, 254, 255–60, 292n Lushan verdict, 243 Gu Mingzhi, Major General, 104, 108–9 Guangdong, corruption cases, 139 Guinea, xv Guo Shuqing, 50–52, 53, 67 Gutierrez, Carlos, 83 Gymkhana Club, 9 Haier, 194, 198–9, 202–3 Han Dynasty (ad 25–220), Civil Service Ministry, 77 He Guoqiang, 279n He Weifang, 22–3, 26, 125 heavy industry, 219, 221 Henan, 255–8 history, Party’s verdict, 235, 236–9, 245–6, 248–51 Ho, Herbert, 211 Holwill, Richard, 210, 211 Hong Kong, 21 Hoogerwerf, Rupert, 157 rich list, 205–7 Hope, 215 HSBC, 52–3 Hu Angang, 40 Hu Haifeng, 148 Hu Jia, 25–6 Hu Jintao, 74–5, 108, 148, 248 claims to be elected, 4 on corruption, 138–9 development policies, 178–80 domestic problems, 272 and economy/military, 105, 106–7, 116, 117 image-management, 5–6 on Mao, 246 meets Abe, 271–2 political career, 7 rivalry with Jiang, 154–5 and Shanghai, 153 speech in congress, 8 succession, 153–4, 163 on Taiwan issue, 127, 129–31 theory of, 172 titles of, 15–16, 279n Hu Shuli, 51–2, 282n Hu Yaobang, 74, 154, 248 encourages political reform, 36 rural reform, 200 Hua Guofeng, 154 Huang, Alex, 130 Huang, Yasheng, 151, 199, 200 Huang Guangyu, 207 Huang Hongfang, 32 Huang Ju, 154 Huawei, 204 Hubei, 179 Hum, Sir Christopher, 157 ‘human flesh search engines’, 180–81 Human Organization Department see Organization Department, Human Hunan, 177 hybrid market economy, xiii Idiot Seeds, 194, 195, 201 India, elite networks, 9 Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, 45, 50 inequality, 266–7 International Monetary Fund, xv internet controlled for political events, 2 against corruption, 144, 180–81 on history textbook, 245–6, 252 lack of Party website, 20–21 on Sanlu, 185 search for democracy, 20 Iraq, 116 iron ore, 58 Japan, 271–2 elite networks, 9 protests against, 238–9, 269–70 Ji Haisheng, 102, 103 Jia Qinglin, 7–8, 25, 154, 279n Jiang Chaoliang, 52–3 Jiang Mianheng, 87, 283n Jiang Ping, 41 Jiang Qing, 149 Jiang Sixian, 205 Jiang Yanyong, 239 Jiang Zemin, 107–8, 269 at Beijing University centenary, 79 careers, 81 and Chen Xitong, 144 claims to be elected, 4 defends Zhou Zhengyi, 161 image of, 6 and military apparatus, 105–6, 116, 117 and private sector, 197, 200–201, 208–9, 217 rehearses his marching drills, 104 retires to Shanghai, 163 rivalry with Hu, 154–5 Selected Works, 165 and Shanghai gang, 148–9 Taiwan policy, 128–9 takes up and hands over power, 153–4 theory of, 172 on Zhu Rongji, 43 Jiang Zhenghua, 260 Jiangsu Tieben Iron & Steel, 220–23 Jin Zhong, 148 joint venture, 216–17 journalists, 184, 190, 252 and corruption reports, 160 demand freedom, 30, 80 on local officials, 180 judges, 15, 24, 25, 93, 114, 137 June 4 protest see Tiananmen Square massacre Justice Bureau, 190 Kremlinology, 18 Kuomintang, 123–5 labour law, 214 Ladany, Laszlo, 77 Lai Changxing, 159 law firms, Party control of, 23 lawyers, 15, 25, 30, 265 Party membership, 23 in Sanlu case, 189, 190, 193 leadership battles over, 3 succession, 153–4, 163 Lee Teng-hui, 127–8 Legal Daily, on Sanlu case, 187 legal professionals see judges; lawyers legal system Party control of, 15, 22–5 PLA members in, 114 see also judges; lawyers Lenin, Vladimir establishes Orgburo, 76 ruling model, xiii, 12, 14 Lenovo, 204 ‘les énarques’, 9 ‘Li Bu’, 77 Li Changchun, 279n Li Changjiang, 183, 191 Li Datong, 235, 248, 249–52 Li Fangping, 189, 190 Li Fanping, 264, 265 Li Gang, 70, 98–9 Li Jijun, Lieutenant-General, 245 Li Jinai, General, 107 Li Ka-shing, 158 Li Keqiang, 23–4, 279n Li Lihui, 53 Li Liming, 101, 102, 103 Li Peng, 81, 148, 239 Li Rucheng, 216 Li Rui, 240–41, 242–4, 247 Li Ruigang, 238 Li Ruihuan, 253 Li Weimin (fictional), 95–6 Li Wenyao, 257–8 Li Xiaopeng, 283n Li Yongzhong, 146 Li Youxing, 142 Li Yuanchao, 72, 75, 89–90, 91–2 Li Zhaoxing, 125 Liang Jing, 179 liberal economics, 28–9 Liberation Army Daily, 107–8 Liberation Daily, 242 life style of top-ranked party members, 10 of urban citizens, 27 The Lighthorseman, 242 Lin Chong-pin, 134 Linfen, 82 Liu Baiyu, 78 Liu Mingkang, 66–7 Liu Shihui, 265 Liu Xiaobo, 261–2 Liu Yonghao, 215 Liu Yongxing, 194, 219, 220, 223–5 Liu Zhihua, 138 Liu Zhongde, 229, 237 local economy, 174–5 localities vs. central, 90–93, 172–4, 180–81 competitiveness, 175–7, 178 and new tax policy, 179–80 Lou Jiwei, x–xi, 59–60 Lu Hao, 236 Lu Weidong, 20–21 Luo Gan, 25 Lushan meeting, 243 Ma De, 93–4, 97–8, 99–100, 103 Ma Jinlong, 218 Ma Ying-jeou, 126, 130 Mackenzie, Kelvin, 18 Major, Bob, 186 Mao Yushi, 261 Mao Zedong, 105, 253 and Central Organization Department, 76 death, body preservation and verdict on, 244–6, 247 and Gang of Four, 149 and Great Leap Forward, 231 image of, 6, 246–7 at Lushan meeting, 243 nominates successor, 154 on Party and people, 13–14 status of, 241–2 market reforms, outcomes of, 42 Marketing Dictatorship (Brady), 236 McKinsey & Co, 88, 181 meals, invitation for, 71 media on anti-Japanese protests, 271 censorship, 235–6, 237–8, 247–8, 250–52 on corruption, 144, 155, 160, 161, 166 focus of, 18–19 on food scandals, 183, 184 less restriction on, 268 official campaigns on military loyalty to Party, 107–9 Party’s guidelines for, 237, 248–9 Sanlu’s PR effect on, 185 on Taiwan issue, 127 uniformed announcement of new leadership, 4 melamine, 184–5 Mengniu, 181–2 Merrill Lynch, 47, 48–9 Miao Shouliang, 206 middle class, 205, 266 money worship, 132–3 rich list, 205–7 size of, 28 milk powder case see Sanlu Miller, Alice, 21 mining, 82, 192–3 Ministry of Personnel, 80 minying, 200 Mitsubishi, 54–5 Moeller Villa, 161 money worship, 132–4 Morgan Stanley, 52, 181 Mulvenon, James, 108 Murdoch, Rupert, 17 Naipaul, V.S., 30 name cards, 70 Namibia case, 148 Nanjing, 180–81 National Day parade, 263–4 National People’s Congress, 49 1977, 44 1987, 36 2002, 153, 154, 208 2004, 129 2007, 1–4, 11–12, 67, 125, 137 2009, 24, 25 Nationalist Party, 123–5 navy, xvi NCO system, 117, 118 new conservatives, 38–9 New York Times, 245 New Zealand, in milk scandal, 188 NGOs, 211 Ni Hanwei, 31 Nian Guangjiu, 194–6, 201 9/11, 270 Ningbo, 162 Nissan, 216–17 Niu Yuqing, 146 Nixon, Richard, 19–20 nomenklatura system, 78–81 North Korea, 174, 175 novels, genre of, 144 Obama, Barack, xvi oil legacy of Daqing, 113, 115 overseas interest, 116 shortage, 63 old boy network’, 9 Olympics, 170–71, 186 one-child policy, 280n O’Neill, Jim, 277n Organization Department, Human, 71 Orgburo, 76 Ouroussoff, Nicolai, 19 Ouyang Song, 192 Pan Junxiang, 234–5 Pan Yue, 39–40 Paris, Crillon Ball, 66 Party membership as a commitment, 11 change of political attire, 66 mid-2009, xiv personal files, 77–8 promotion of, 32 students and the rich expand, 31–2 Party schools, 29, 30, 226–8 patriotism campaign, 236, 270 Paulson, Hank, xi peanut products scandals, 191 Pei, Minxin, 267 Peking University, centenary, 79, 80 Peng Dehuai, 243 People’s Armed Police, 111 People’s Daily on banking system, xi on Japan, 238 People’s Liberation Army, 103 challenges of modern society, 111–12 commercial empire, 114 dual leadership system, 117–20, 121 founding principle of, 105 media campaigns on PLA’a loyalty to Party, 107–9 modernization of, 105–6, 111 officer class, 120–21 Party’s control of, 110 propaganda, 121–2 refuses Tiananmen Square crackdown, 109–10 security and domestic duty, 111, 113–14, 115 on Taiwan issue, 128–9 personal consumption, 269 pet food scandals, 183, 184–5 Petitioner’s Village, 2 PetroChina, 61–3, 116 Ping’an, 204–5 Politburo members above corruption investigation, 147 biography of, 7–8 responsibilities of, 13 selecting of, 12 similarity of appearance and career history, 1–2 structure, 278 9n political commissar system, 118–20 political liberals, 38 political opponents controlled for political events, 2–3 less confrontational treatment of, 268 marginalization of, xiv punishment of, 232 Political Struggles in the Age of China’s Reform and Opening Up (Yang Jisheng), 254 post-Maoist governing model, xii, xiii poverty definition, 278n number of poor declines, xvii, 28 power-worship, 96 private sector, 39, 194 confusion of status, 199–200, 203–4 relationship with Party, 31, 32, 79, 193, 196–8, 200–202, 206–9, 215–19 in Shanghai, 151 see also entrepreneurs; individual companies Procrustes, 235 protests anti-Japanese protests, 270–72 to Shanghai building development, 135–7, 164, 167–8 see also ethnic protests; Tiananmen Square massacre public sector appointment, 73–5, 81, 82–3, 284–5n; see also nomenklatura system bribery/corruption, 75, 93–100, 138–41, 172, 183, 191; see also Central Commission for Discipline Inspection system in history, 77 Pudong, 150 Qian Lieyang, 143, 222 Qian Qichen, 17 Qin Yu, 156, 165 Qingdao, 202–3 Qinheng prison, 166 raw materials, 219 see also oil real estate, 155, 179 scandals, 135–7, 158–60, 164, 167 Red Army see People’s Liberation Army ‘red machines’, 8–10, 13 religions, 211 Ren Zhengfei, 204, 206 Renminbi, xv, 244 rich list, 205–7 rich-poor gap, 30 Rio-Tinto, 58–61 Robinson, Tom, 37 rural free-market, 36, 200, 202, 267 Russia China’s loan to, xv cost of disintegration, 131 Sanlu, 169, 172, 181, 182, 264 cover-up strategy, 186–7, 233 emergency meeting, 170, 171 media appearance, 185–6, 187 parent complants, 184, 185, 188–9 Party’s control of, 193 product tests, 186 trial and verdicts, 190–91 Sapio, Flora, 141, 142–3 SARS, 16, 233, 239, 268 SASAC, 86 Schapira, Paul, 61 school textbooks, censorship, 235, 245–6 security, for political events, 2–3, 263 Seeking Truth, 107 Service, Robert, xiii Shagang steelworks, 207 Shambaugh, David, 121, 265–6 Shanghai city development, 29, 162–3 corruption cases, 135–7, 139, 144, 158–61, 164, 167–9 leadership compound, 14 past and present, 149–53, 234–5 status, 138 Shanghai gang, 149–53 crashed, 166–7 in Standing Committee, 154 see also Chen Liangyu Shanghai History Museum, 234–5 Shanghai Industrial, 101 Shanghai Petrochemical Corp., 47–9 Shanghainese, 152–3 land disputes, 135–7, 158–60, 164, 167 Shao Daosheng, 98 Shao Depeng, 217 Shen Ting, 159, 164, 167–8 Shen Wenrong, 207 Shenzhen corruption cases, 181 Deng’s tour to, 41 Shijiazhuang, 174 Shirk, Susan, 129 shuanggui (double regulation), 142–3 Sichuan corruption cases, 139 earthquake, 192 Singapore COSCO in, 102 Suzhou industrial park, 83 Sinified Marxism, 67 Sinology, 18–19 Sinopec, 63–4 society, infiltrates Party, 30 Song Ping, 36 Song Xiaojun, 119–20, 125, 132 southern tour, 41 Southern Weekend, 185–6 Soviet Union disintegration of, 35, 131 nomenklatura system, 78, 79 Orgburo, 76 Party’s verdict on collapse of, 237–8 succession, 154 Stalin, Joseph, 76 Standing Committee, 13, 278–9n above corruption investigation, 147 Shanghai gang in, 154 state assets debates over, 40 Deng’s model on, 42 new conservatives on, 35, 39 state enterprises competition and profitability, 53–6 Deng’s model on, 42 new conservatives on, 39 Party’s low profile in, 21–2, 49 pay structure for CEOs, 102–3 personnel control of, 46, 68–9, 73–4, 84–9 reform, 44, 67–8 split personalities of, 53, 64 stock options, 100–101 tax from, 267 workers lay-offs, 42–3, 50 see also individual enterprises steel industry, 220, 221, 222 Stewart, Jackie, 162 Storming the Barricades (Zhou Tianyong), 69 students loans, 173 money worship, 133 view of Party, 31–2 Su Shulin, 64 Su Zhiliang, 245, 246 Sudan, 62 Suihua, 97–9, 116 Sun Jingkan, 160 Suzhou, 83 corruption cases, 139–40 Tai lake (Taihu), 89, 90, 91–2 Taiwan issue Jiang and Hu’s policies, 106–7, 127–30, 134 nationalist stand on, 131–2 nature of, 122–3 one-China policy, 127–8 Taiwanese opinions, 125–8 see also Kuomintang Tang Dynasty (ad 618–907), official vetting, 77 tax policy, 178, 179 telecommunication, 233–4 telecoms companies, 84–9 terror, 265 textbook censorship, 249–50 Thatcher, Margaret, 202 38th Army, 109–10 Thornton, John, 88 Tian, Edward, 84, 86–9 Tian Fengshan, 98 Tian Wenhua charged, 172 downfall, 188 dual responsibility dilemma, 186 leads emergency meeting, 171 titles of, 182–3 trial and charge, 190–91 Tiananmen Square massacre, 105, 253, 262 discussion suppressed, 35 impact of, 34–5, 36, 201, 202 Party’s verdict, 239 post-event investigation, 36 splits Party and PLA, 109–10 Tibet, 111 Tieben see Jiangsu Tieben Iron & Steel The Times of Deng Xiaoping (Yang Jisheng), 253–4 Todai elite, 9 Tombstone (Yang Jisheng), 229, 230–31, 232 sourcing of, 254–5 trade union, 213–14 Tsai, George, 126–7, 130 Tsang Yok-sing, 21 21st-Century World Herald, 247 ‘Twenty-Seven Perfections’, 77 UBS, 199 Unhappy China (Wang and Song), 112, 132 United Front Department, 17 United Front department, 235 United Kingsom, elite networks, 9 United States aircraft carrier patrols seas around Taiwan, 128 elite networks, 9 official appointment, 74 patriotism, 270 pet food scandals, 183, 184–5 universities, 79–80 Unocal, 54 urban citizens, 27 Urumqi, 111, 139 Vatican, and China, 11–12 vertushka, 13 voting, 11–12 wages, 56 Wal-Mart, 213–14 Wan Yanhai, 3 Wang Jianzhou, 85 Wang Juntao, 23–4 Wang Minggao, 140, 144 on corruption cases, 148 interview with, 71, 72 lack of name card, 70–71 Wang Qishan, ix, xvi Wang Shengjun, 24 Wang Shenyi, 99 Wang Shi, 207–8 Wang Weizhi, 231, 258–60 Wang Xiaodong, 112 Wang Xiaofang, 95, 96 Wang Xuebing, 158 Wang Yang, 234 Watergate scandal, 164 Wen Jiabao, xvi, 7, 279n confronted by Chen Liangyu, 163 on democracy, 20 development policies, 178–80 solves Sinopec oil dispute, 63 on Tieben case, 221 titles of, 15–16 visits earthquake zone, 192 wife and son of, 147–8 on Zhang Enzhao’s case, 145 Wen Wei Bao, 21 Wenzhou, 215, 217–18 ‘west mountain meeting’, 22–3 Wolf, Martin, 237, 269 World Trade Organization, 202, 266 Wrath of Heaven, 144, 168, 169 writers/artists, 96 Wu, Joseph, 123, 124 Wu Bangguo, 7, 279n Wu Lihong, 90–91 Wu Si, 74 Wu Xiaobo, 209 Xi Jinping, 8, 228, 279n Xia Chuntao, 247, 251–2 Xia Jianming, 30 Xiamen, corruption cases, 139, 159 Xiang river, 92–3 Xiao Chaoxuan (fictional), 95–6 Xiao Yaqing, 57, 58, 60–61 Xinhua news agency interview with Zhang Ruimin, 198 on peanut product scandal, 191 secret internal reports, 230, 253 on Tian’s downfall, 188 Xinjiang, 111, 139 Xinjiang Soldier Corps, 114 Xintiandi, Shanghai, 29 Xinyang, 255–8 Xu Guanhua, 140 Xu Haiming, 135–6, 137, 153, 157, 160, 164, 167 Xu Kuangdi, 151, 156 Xu Qinxian, Lieutenant-General, 109–10 Yan Xuetong, 104 on diplomatic policy, 132 on Hu’s policies, 107 on military, 122 on money worship, 132–4 on Taiwan issue, 131–2 Yan’an rectification, 77–8 Yang, Andrew, 120 on Taiwan issue, 122, 126, 129 Yang Bin, 206 Yang Jiechi, 277n Yang Jisheng, 229–31, 232, 239–40, 252–6, 258, 259–61, 265 Yang Mianmian, 203 Yang Ping, 39, 40 Yang Rong, 206 Yang Shangkun, 239 Yang Yuanqing, 204 Yingkou, 175 You Ji, 121 Youngor, 216 Yu Dehong, 232, 255–7, 260 Yu Jianrong, 179 Yu Jie, 246–7 Yu Minhong, 227 Yu Qiuli, 113 Yuan Weishi, 70, 78–9, 249–50, 252 Yuanhua case, 7–8 Yung Chunchang, 119 Yunnan, 181 Zeng Qinghong, 74, 81–2 Zhang Baoqing, 170, 173 Zhang Chunjiang, 88 Zhang Dahong, 216 Zhang Dejiang, 208–9 Zhang Enzhao, 145–6 Zhang Peili, 147–8 Zhang Quanjing, 75 Zhang Ruimin, 194, 198, 203 Zhang Yimou, 121–2 Zhao Ziyang, 80, 154, 254 encourages political reform, 36 image blackout, 35 rural reform, 200 Zhejiang, 209 Zheng Bijian, 106 Zheng Enchong, 135, 137, 159, 161, 167 Zheng Xiaoyu, 183 Zhengtai Group, 218 Zhou Enlai, 113, 123, 253 Zhou Qiren, 220, 223 Zhou Ruijin, 31, 154 Zhou Tianyong, 69 Zhou Yongkang, 24–5, 81–2, 279n Zhou Zhengyi, 157–8, 159, 161–2, 167 Zhu Feng, 62–3 Zhu Peikun, 32 Zhu Rongji, 148 careers, 81 financial system reform, 44–6 misread by Western leaders, 43 state enterprise reform, 44 visits Huawei, 204 Acknowledgements Journalists rely on the charity, goodwill and democratic impulse of people the world over.


pages: 400 words: 121,708

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink by Taylor Downing

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herman Kahn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear paranoia, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Yom Kippur War

The world waited to see what Andropov’s rule would bring. In the 1970s and 1980s, Western observers of events behind the closed doors of the Politburo and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were known as Kremlinologists. They tried hard to figure out who was on his way up and who was on his way down in the secretive world of the Soviet hierarchy. The Kremlinologists were out in force at Brezhnev’s funeral. The dignitaries at the funeral included Vice President George Bush and Secretary of State George Shultz, West Germany’s President Karl Carstens, French Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy and British Foreign Secretary Francis Pym along with four princes, thirty-two heads of state and thirteen other foreign ministers.

However, the doctors were still encouraging about his prospects, and Andropov managed to keep up with his relentless workload. His son remembered that he still hoped he had several years left, to complete some of the reforms he had started.1 The health of the senior leadership of the Soviet Union had been of concern for some time and was not just the subject of much speculation by Kremlinologists looking in from the outside and trying to follow the ups and downs. In March 1983, the elderly members of the Politburo discussed in secret their own concerns about the effects on themselves of pressure of work. It was proposed that the working day be limited to nine-to-five and that members attend fewer evening engagements and receptions.

Edgar 24 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 24 Howe, Sir Geoffrey 211, 218, 259, 270, 271, 272, 288 Hubbard, Carroll 149 human intelligence (HUMINT) operations 82 human rights issues 14, 48–9, 114, 270, 303, 306, 313, 314, 322 Hungary 42, 264 Hungarian Revolution 43–4 political reforms 328 HVA 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 251–2, 253, 336 and Operation RYaN 85–6 hybrid warfare 342 Ikle, Fred 142 India, nuclear arsenal 343 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) 9, 12–13, 34, 53, 60, 194, 198, 239, 313 Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty 320, 321–2, 333 verification processes 322 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) 13 Iran 209 Iranian Revolution 29, 202 Tehran embassy hostage crisis 20, 29 Iran-Contra scandal 319–20 Iraq, US military incursions 342, 343 Irgun 203 Iron Curtain 23, 24, 332 Islamic fundamentalism 76, 202, 209, 323 Israel Israel Defence Forces (IDF) 203–4, 205, 206–7 Israeli Air Force 205 nuclear arsenal 343 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 202–9 Ivy League 82 exercise 59, 61–3, 97 Japan Hiroshima and Nagasaki 1–4, 93 listening stations 161–2, 183 Joan (MI6 case officer) 121–2, 291 John Birch Society 149 Johnson, Lyndon B. 26 Jones, General David 56 Jones, Nate 348–9 Kádár, János 43 Kalinin 159 Kalugin, Oleg 85, 240 Kamchatka peninsula 136, 138, 139–40, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 168, 180, 183 Kardunov, Marshal Alexandr 163 Karelian Republic 40–2 Kazakhstan 5, 333, 334 KC-135 tanker aircraft 191 Kennedy, John F. 10, 11, 320 Kennedy, Robert 114 KGB 43, 45–7, 49, 338 and the Able Archer 83 exercise 250–1 Andropov as head of 35, 45, 46–7, 48, 69, 74, 80, 83, 106, 341 directorates 73 First Chief Directorate (FCD) (Foreign Intelligence) 73–4 foreign residencies 46, 81, 118–20, 122–5, 218, 227, 228, 277, 278, 279 intelligence successes 125–8, 134–5 moles within see Gordievsky, Oleg; Martynov, Valery; Vetrov, Captain Vladimir role 45–6, 70 see also Operation RYaN Kharbarovsk 161, 163, 164 Khomeini, Ayatollah 29, 202 Khrushchev, Nikita 9, 10, 42, 43, 45 Cuban missile crisis 11, 114 denounces Stalin 42 Kim Eui-dong 150, 152 Kirghizia 333 Kirkpatrick, Jeane 183 Kissinger, Henry 99, 114 Kline, Major John 56 Kohl, Helmut 319 Korean Air Lines (KAL) Flight 007 149–56, 157–88, 165 downing of 157–69 intelligence community’s verdict on 187 Soviet defence of action 181–2, 183–5, 186–7, 216 Soviet propaganda disaster 176–7, 180 US response 169–79, 187–8 Kosygin, Aleksei 68–9 Kremlinologists 37, 214 Kryuchkov, Vladimir Aleksandrovich 74, 75, 80, 127, 229, 255, 279, 281, 282, 333 Kuklinski, Colonel 110–11 Kulikov, Marshal Viktor 248 Kuntsevo Clinic 234–5, 236, 242, 250, 255, 275 Kurchatov, Igor 5 Kurile islands 136, 139, 155, 171, 187 labour camps 46 Lang, Admiral 137 Laos 29 Latvia 329 Launch Under Attack option 15, 60, 238–9 Leahy, Patrick 176 Lebanon 202–9, 220 Israeli bombardment of Beirut 205–7, 228 Israeli invasion of 203–4 Multinational Force 206, 207, 208, 209 UN peacekeepers 203 Lee Kuan Yew 259 LeMay, General Curtis 8 Libya 110, 310 limited nuclear war concept 10, 15, 55, 88, 343 Line X operation 123, 143, 144, 285 listening stations 163–4, 168, 170, 176, 183, 217, 227, 231, 267–8 lithium H-bomb 7–8 Lithuania 329 Lockheed 54 Lokot, Sergei 246–7 Los Angeles Olympic Games (1984) 268 Lubyanka 46, 284 M-1 Abrams Main Battle Tank 53 McDonald, Larry 149–50, 171 McFarlane, Robert ‘Bud’ 208–9, 262, 297, 320 and Able Archer exercise 231, 260, 261, 265–6 and SDI 99, 100 McNamara, Robert 12 malware 144–5 Manchuria 4, 330 Mao Zedong 44–5 Martynov, Valery 285–6 Marxism-Leninism 36, 45, 50, 65, 69, 71, 134 maskirovka 160, 227, 253 Massive Retaliation doctrine 8, 9, 10 Matlock, Jack 312 Mauroy, Pierre 37 Meese, Edwin 32, 169 MI6 (British Secret Intelligence Service) 110, 121, 122, 126, 281, 336 exfiltration of Oleg Gordievsky 286–92 MiG 204, 205 MiG-23 248 military-industrial complex 74, 303, 310 Minsk 138 Minuteman missiles 195 Misawa 162, 170, 171, 172 missile silos 13, 194, 195, 200, 239, 242–3 Mitterrand, François 143 Moldavia 333 Mondale, Walter 269 Mons 223–4, 225, 229, 250, 256 Moorestown 193 Morrow, Douglas 91 Moscow Olympics (1980) 30, 49, 268 Moscow summit (1988) 323–5 Mozambique 29 Mujahideen 76, 77, 110, 310, 323 multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) 12, 242, 244 Munich Olympic Games (1972) 203 Murmansk 126 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) 12, 13, 15, 17, 63, 93, 97, 103, 114, 344 MX missiles 53, 98, 99 Nagasaki, bombing of (1945) 4, 93 Nagy, Imre 43 Nakasone, Yasuhiro 183 National Association of Evangelicals 66 National Command Authority 241 National Emergency Airborne Command Post (Boeing 747) 59, 61 National Intelligence Council 269 National Military Command Center 61, 91, 193 National Security Advisors 189, 309, 320 National Security Agency (NSA) 141, 156, 161, 187, 258, 299 expansion of 54–5 National Security Archive (NSA) 17, 348–9, 350 National Security Council 144, 145, 208, 209, 231 NATO 55, 82, 86, 88, 100, 124, 126, 127, 130, 131, 140, 318, 320 Abel Archer 83 exercise 222–56, 344 Allied Command Europe (ACE) 222 Autumn Forge 83 exercises 223 Current Intelligence Group 131 East German agent in 130–5 MC 161 document 132–3 Political Affairs Directorate 131 response to SDI 134 neo-Nazis 129 Nicaragua 29, 70, 319, 323 Contras 110, 319–20 Nicholson, Major Arthur 295–6 Nine Lives exercise 61, 63 9/11 241 1983–The Brink of Apocalypse (documentary) 346 Nitze, Paul 313 Nixon, Richard 32, 114, 298, 320 anti-ballistic missiles (ABM) Treaty 92 signs Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) 13 Watergate 14, 28, 74 NKVD 5 nomenklatura 70, 220 North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) 90–1, 145, 189, 190, 193 North Korea 4, 44 nuclear capability 343 North, Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver 320 Norway 126, 127 intelligence service 157 Norwegian Labour Party 127 nuclear accidents 190–2 Chernobyl nuclear disaster 310–11 nuclear arms race 6–9, 12–13 nuclear arsenal 200 Soviet 223 US 8 nuclear ‘football’ system 55–6, 240–1 Nuclear Freeze peace movement 96, 103 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 13 nuclear war Counterforce strategy 10 Defense Readiness Condition (DEFCON) 204, 230 false alerts 189–201, 239 Launch Under Attack option 15, 60, 238–9 limited nuclear war 10, 15, 55, 88, 343 Massive Retaliation doctrine 8, 9, 10 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) 12, 13, 15, 17, 63, 93, 97, 103, 114, 344 probable consequences 8, 60, 63, 68, 248–9 protocols for launching nuclear weapons 10, 15–16, 55–6, 62–3, 240–1 simulated nuclear attack 61–2 Withhold Options 60 nuclear war scare (1983) 344 Able Archer 83 exercise and 222–56, 344 CIA report on 339–40 Soviet arsenal on maximum alert 16, 240, 242, 243–9, 255, 257, 307 Soviet paranoia and miscalculation 16, 224, 227–9, 232–3, 239, 240, 242, 250–1, 254, 256, 258–61, 344 nuclear winter 16, 249 Nyerere, Julius 259 Obama, Barack 256, 343 observation satellites 90, 111, 194–5, 196, 248, 256 October War (1973) 204, 230 Odom, William 189 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 107 Ogarkov, Marshal Nikolai 73, 183–4, 184, 198, 236, 241, 245, 250, 255 oil and gas pipelines 65, 143, 145, 285 Okinawa 138 Oko satellite network 194–5 O’Malley, General 173 ‘open labs’ proposal 304, 314 Operation Barbarossa 80–1, 247 Operation Chrome Dome 190–2 Operation RYaN 80, 81–7, 88, 105, 118, 124–5, 216, 217–18, 227, 228–9, 237, 251, 255, 257, 340 categories of intelligence 81–2 confirmation bias 81, 86 information processing 83–4 spurious reports 81, 84, 86, 124–5, 227–8, 250–1 Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States 210 Ossipovich, Major Gennady 162–3, 164–7, 168, 178, 184–5 Pakistan, nuclear arsenal 343 Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) 203–4, 205, 206 Palestinian-Israeli conflict 202–9 Palmerston, Lord 273 Palomares incident (1966) 191–2 Parr, Jerry 56–7 Partial Test Ban Treaty 13 peace movement 66, 95–7, 96, 103, 123–4, 237 Pelše, Arvids 214 Pentecostal Christians 59, 116 perestroika 311, 325, 329 Perroots, Lieutenant-General Leonard 253–5 Pershing II missiles 14, 53, 78, 79, 88, 94, 95, 123, 135, 216, 220, 239, 258, 270, 299, 309, 319, 321 Petropavlosk 138, 158 Petrov, Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav 195–200, 239 Pfautz, Major General James 172–3 Phalangist militiamen 207 Philby, Kim 278, 292 PL-5 missiles 157 plutonium implosion bomb 4, 6 Podgorny, Nikolai 69 Poindexter, Admiral John 320 Poland 65, 94 political reforms 328 popular protests 42–3 Solidarity 65, 110, 111, 328 Polaris 13 Politburo 34, 47–8, 64, 70, 76, 78, 181, 214, 215, 236, 255, 264, 275, 312, 317, 319 Prague Spring 47 President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) 339, 349–50 protective missile system see Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) psychological operations (PSYOPS) 139–43, 147, 162, 182, 187, 310, 340 Putin, Vladimir 341 Pym, Francis 37 radiation sickness 3–4, 249 radioactive contamination 192 RAF Lakenheath 190 Ramstein Air Force Base 253 RAND Corporation 12 RC-135 spy planes 140–1, 156–7, 170, 178, 182 Reagan, Nancy 19, 25, 32, 66, 114, 302, 306 Reagan, Ronald 108 and Able Archer 83 exercise 231–2, 261, 262, 263, 265–6 anti-communism and anti-Soviet rhetoric 23, 24, 25, 26, 30–1, 51–2, 64–7, 77–8, 93, 94–5, 110, 114–15, 116, 177, 182, 216, 266 appearance and personality 21, 22, 33 approval ratings 28, 97, 265, 323 approves technological sabotage 144 attempted assassination of 56–8 background of 20–2 belief in personal diplomacy 51, 93–4, 268 ‘bombing Russia’ poor-taste joke 267–8 and Brezhnev 59 Cold War warrior 31, 267, 321 on the decision to launch nuclear weapons 15–16 demands Berlin Wall be pulled down 321 diary entries 64–5, 98, 99–100, 102, 116, 206, 262, 268, 294, 308 and the downing of KAL 007 169, 174, 177, 178, 179, 182, 188 economic policies 27–8, 31 elected President 15, 31–2 ‘evil empire’ rhetoric 66–7, 89, 117, 176, 182, 216, 324 film career 22, 25–6, 301 Geneva summit 297–9, 300–9, 305 Governor of California 27–8 ‘Great Communicator’ 268 and human rights issues 114, 270, 303, 306, 313, 314, 322 and invasion of Grenada 210, 211, 212 and Israeli-Palestinian conflict 202–9 leadership style 27 and Margaret Thatcher 211–12 meets Gordievsky 337, 337 Moscow summit 323–5 and nuclear policy 51, 58–9, 63–4, 91–3, 97–101, 103–4, 114, 261 political philosophy 22–3, 26 populism 19, 27, 33 president of Screen Actors Guild 24, 25 presidential inauguration 19–20, 21, 32–3 protocol for launching nuclear weapons 55–6, 62–3 re-election 265, 266–7, 269 Reykjavik summit 311, 312–18, 317 and SDI 98, 99–105, 117, 134, 298, 306, 313–14, 324 secret meeting with Soviet ambassador 115–17 signs INF Treaty 321 spouses see Reagan, Nancy; Wyman, Jane suggests rapprochement with Soviet Union 266–7, 268, 294 and total abolition of nuclear weapons 51, 93, 315, 318 visits Berlin 320–1 visits London 65 visits NORAD base 90, 91 war games, participation in 61–3, 62, 97, 262 Washington summit 321–3 Reagan Doctrine 110 Red Integrated Strategic Offensive Plan (RISOP) 55, 60 Red Scares 23, 24–5 Reed, Thomas 61, 62, 143–4 Reforger 83 exercise 223 Regan, Don 208 reunification of Germany 332 Rex 82 Alpha exercise 61, 63 Reykjavik summit 311, 312–18, 317 Rivet Joint operations 141, 162 Rogers, William 61 Romania 332 Romanov, Grigory 238, 270 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 27, 146 Rubin, Professor 213 Rupp, Rainer 128–34, 135, 251–3, 336 Russia 334 hybrid warfare capabilities 342 military exercises 342 Sabra and Shatila massacres (1982) 207 Sadat, Anwar 202 Sakhalin island 136, 160, 168, 171, 172, 173, 180, 183, 184 Sakharov, Andrei 48 Sandinistas 29 Saudi Arabia 208, 343 Scarlett, John 121, 125, 218, 259 Schmidt, Helmut 94 Schneider, Dr William 142 Scowcroft, Brent 327 Screen Actors Guild 24, 25 Sea of Okhotsk 136, 138, 156, 159, 162, 168, 180, 187, 299 Second World War 40–1, 107, 146, 255 end of 4 German invasion of Soviet Union 40, 80–1, 247 Serpukhov-15 194, 195–200 Severomorsk 245 Sharansky, Anatoly 49 Sharon, Ariel 203, 207 Shchelokov, Nikolai 88 Shemya 156, 157 Shevardnadze, Eduard 297, 309, 313, 320, 330 Shultz, George 37, 113–16, 117, 146–7, 208, 219, 262 and the downing of KAL 007 169, 174, 175, 176, 179, 185 and the Geneva summit 297, 303 on Gorbachev 295 and the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty 320 meets with Gromyko 185, 240, 296–7 meets with Shevardnadze 320 and the Reykjavik summit 313, 314, 315, 318 and SDI 100, 298 and the Soviet ‘peace offensive’ 309 signals intelligence (SIGINT) 82, 141, 170, 176, 183 Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) 10, 11, 55, 56, 60, 62, 262 Six Day War (1967) 203 ‘snap-ons’ 161, 163, 164, 170 Snow, Jon 324 Sokol 164 Solidarity 65, 110, 111, 328 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 48 Son Dong-hui 150, 155, 161, 166, 167 South Korea 138 South Korean Navy 137 US-South Korean Mutual Defense Treaty 149 Soviet Air Force 247–8 expansion of 138 Far East Air Defence Command 139, 158, 162, 163, 180–1 Soviet embassy, London 81, 118–20, 122, 218, 228, 279 Soviet embassy, Washington 81, 277, 278 Soviet Far East 136–40, 137, 149–88 Soviet missile systems intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) 9, 34, 194, 239 PL-5 missiles 157 SS-18 missiles 90 SS-19 missiles 242 SS-20 missiles 29, 53, 75, 75, 78, 94, 238, 244, 254, 299, 309, 314, 321 SS-N-8 missiles 246 SS-N-20 missiles 246 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) 161 Soviet Navy Northern Fleet 126, 140, 245, 246 Pacific Fleet 138 submarine fleet 245–7 Soviet Union anti-Jewish purges 46 centralised planning 6, 69 civil defence programme 30 communist orthodoxy 36–7 Congress of People’s Deputies 329 corruption and organised crime 87–8, 333 defence budget 30 dismantling of 329, 333 economic stagnation 37, 48, 50, 64–5, 69, 71, 111 Five Year Plans 39–40 German invasion of 40, 80–1, 247 Great Terror 36, 39–40 human rights issues 14, 48–9, 114, 270, 303, 306, 313, 314, 322 intelligence community see GRU; KGB; SVR invasion and occupation of Afghanistan 30, 76–7 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 204–5 Kremlin nuclear paranoia 85, 86, 112, 125, 233, 238, 240 see also Able Archer 83 exercise; Operation RYaN Middle East policies 220 military strength and personnel 222–3 nuclear arsenal 223 nuclear programme 4–6, 8, 9, 12 office of head of state 35, 36 oil and gas pipelines 65, 143, 285 outrage over Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) launch 104–5, 106 political reforms 311–12, 329 post-Soviet problems 333 post-war reconstruction 41 reduced nuclear stockpile 333–4 reduction of Soviet forces in Europe 328, 333–4 Second World War 4, 40–1, 80–1, 247, 255 Sino-Soviet relations 44, 45, 220, 330 social conditions 69–70 support for global liberation struggles 29, 30, 52, 70, 94, 109, 301 suspected of influencing American presidential elections 269, 342 suspicion and fear of the West 14, 71–2, 73, 78, 80, 85, 240 technology gap 72, 73, 104, 120, 143, 144 The Soviet War Scare, 1983 (documentary) 346 Soyuz spacecraft 14 space weapons see Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) Speakes, Larry 169, 176 Sputnik 9, 194 SS-18 missiles 90 SS-19 missiles 242 SS-20 missiles 29, 53, 75, 75, 78, 94, 238, 244, 254, 299, 309, 314, 321 SS-N-8 missiles 246 SS-N-20 missiles 246 stagflation 28–9 Stalin, Joseph 5, 23, 24, 35, 146, 237, 329 anti-Jewish purges 47 death of 42 and the Great Terror 36, 39–40 ‘Star Wars’ see Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) Stasi 85, 128, 130, 133, 335 Stewart, Nina 349 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles 310 Stombaugh, Paul, Jr 284 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) 13, 14, 94, 156 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) 30, 77 Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) 94, 105, 270, 334 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) 103 costs 102 Geneva summit and 298, 299, 304 Gorbachev’s hostility to 273, 298, 299, 304, 305, 306, 309, 313, 314, 315, 316, 319 ‘open labs’ proposal 304, 314 origins of 97–100 proposed limits on 313 public attitudes towards 102 Reagan’s enthusiasm for 98, 99–105, 117, 134, 298, 306, 313–14, 324 Soviet fears of 104–5, 106, 117, 216 ‘strip alert’ 248, 254 Su-24 248 submarines Delta class 138, 246 nuclear weapon-carrying submarines 13, 136, 140, 200, 246 Ohio class 54 Typhoon class 246 suicide bombers 208–9 Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) 223, 229 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) 140–1, 161 Suslov, Mikhail 45 SVR 285, 334 Symms, Steve 149 Syria 204, 205, 209, 220 Syrian Air Force 205 systems failures 192, 193, 200, 201, 239 T-72 tank 204 Tadzhikistan 333 Taliban 77, 323 Tass news agency 182 Tehran embassy hostage crisis (1979–81) 20, 29 telemetry intelligence (TELINT) 156 Teller, Edward 6–7, 97–8, 101 ter Woerds, Margreet 347 terrorism 108–9 Thatcher, Denis 272 Thatcher, Margaret 124, 134, 210, 211–12, 217, 218, 231, 259, 264, 293 and British–Soviet relations 270 and Gordievsky 337, 338 meets Gorbachev 272–4, 274 on nuclear deterrence 318–19 thermonuclear weapons 7–8, 45, 190–1 Thor missiles 13 Thule 192 Tiananmen Square massacre (1989) 330 Titan missiles 13 Titov, Gennadi 127 Tkachenko, Captain Viktor 243–4 Tolkachev, Adolf 283–4 Tomahawk Cruise missiles 53 Topaz see Rupp, Rainer Treholt, Arne 127–8 Trident missiles 54, 319 ‘Trinity’ atomic test 5 Tripoli 310 ‘Trojan horses’ 144–5 Trudeau, Pierre 271 Truman, Harry 6, 7, 107 Trump, Donald 31, 269, 342, 343 Tsygichko, Vitalii 239 Tupolev TU-22M ‘Backfire’ bomber 138, 247 United States budget deficit 55, 102 Ukraine 333, 334, 341 United Nations 185 Lebanese operations 203 peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) 203 Security Council 183 United States declining superpower role 342–3 defence budget 52, 66, 79, 342 intelligence community see Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); National Security Agency (NSA); Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 203–4 military rearmament 52–4, 116 military-industrial complex 74, 303, 310 nuclear arsenal 8 nuclear programme 6–8, 9, 12 peace movement 66, 96, 96, 103 Red Scares 23, 24–5 Second World War 107 Washington KGB residency 81, 277, 278 US Air Force Air Force Intelligence 172–3, 178 PSYOPS 140–1, 142 Strategic Air Command 8, 10, 58, 90–1, 156, 190–1, 193 US Marines 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 217 US missile systems anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs) 12, 13 Cruise missiles 53, 78, 88, 94, 95, 123, 135, 216, 220, 258, 270, 299, 309, 321 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) 12–13, 53, 198 Minuteman missiles 195 multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) 12 MX missiles 53, 98, 99 Pershing II missiles 14, 53, 78, 79, 88, 94, 95, 123, 135, 216, 220, 239, 258, 270, 299, 309, 319, 321 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles 310 submarine-launched ballistic missiles 13 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) 140–1 Trident missiles 54 Vanguard missiles 9 US Navy 142 expansion 54, 138 Pacific Fleet 138 PSYOPS 142 US presidential elections 1964 26 1976 28 1980 30–1 1984 265–9 2016 269, 342 suspected Soviet influence 269, 342 USS Coral Sea 137 USS Eisenhower 140 USS Enterprise 136–7 USS Midway 137, 139 USS New Jersey 208 Ustinov, Marshal Dmitri 34–5, 87, 180, 181, 198, 215, 236, 241, 242, 255 US-South Korean Mutual Defense Treaty 149 Uzbekistan 333 Vanguard missiles 9 Velikhov, Yevgeny 104 Velvet Revolution 332 Vessey, Admiral 262 Vetrov, Captain Vladimir 143 Vietnam war 27, 29 Vladivostok 138 Volk Field Air Base 192–3 Wakkanai 162, 168, 170, 172, 174 Warsaw Pact 43, 47, 55, 86, 88, 132, 222, 318 Washington summit (1987) 321–3 Watergate 14, 28, 74 Watkins, Admiral James D. 98–9, 139–40 Weinberger, Caspar 32, 52, 58, 100, 131, 179, 262, 296, 320 Weiss, Dr Gus 144, 145 West Germany 14, 128, 319 peace movement 95 Winter War (1939–40) 40 Withhold Options 60 Wolf, Markus 85, 86, 135, 335 Wright, Oliver 260 Wyman, Jane 22, 25 Yeltsin, Boris 329, 333, 338 Yesin, General-Colonel Ivan 245 Yom Kippur War (1973) 204, 230 Yugoslavia 44 Yurchenko, Vitaly 299–300 Zapad 17 exercise 342 Zeleny 139 zero-zero option 94–5, 315, 316, 318, 321, 321–2 Zil limousines 74, 111, 112, 236 Zionists 74, 202, 203 US lobby 204 Zubok, Vlad 348


A United Ireland: Why Unification Is Inevitable and How It Will Come About by Kevin Meagher

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, kremlinology, land reform, Nelson Mandela, period drama, Right to Buy, trade route, transaction costs

During the 1970s and 1980s, the figures that followed were often stern-looking types with military bearing. Men like Humphrey Atkins, Tom King and Patrick Mayhew fitted the part perfectly. Occasionally, someone more imaginative was appointed, like Jim Prior, or Peter Brook, but there was little political buy-in at the time to progress the dialogue they sought. The Kremlinology is instructive. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the Northern Ireland brief was a political backwater, with ministers expected to remain wedded to the grim status quo that Northern Ireland simply needed a sufficiently robust security response to bring it into line. Indeed, British government policy towards Northern Ireland from the early 1970s to the late 1980s met Einstein’s classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.


pages: 816 words: 191,889

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

The focus on the Party may at times feel anachronistic to some in the press or media, but not long ago it was widely understood that such a focus would be important. “Western elites were once familiar with the order of battle in communist politics” during the struggle with the Soviet Union, notes the journalist Richard McGregor, and they benefited from and invested in “the mini-industry in academia, think-tanks and journalism known as Kremlinology.”9 But “the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s took with it much of the deep knowledge of communist systems,” with a steadily diminishing number of experts from academia and the intelligence community left to pass on that knowledge as funding declined.10 China’s economic ascent, for a time, obscured public interest in the Party’s inner workings too, though all this has begun to change.

., 334 Khrushchev, Nikita, 50–51 Kiev (Soviet aircraft carrier), 95–96, 194–95 Kilby, Christopher, 216, 217–18 Kilo-class submarines, 84–85 Kirchner, Jonathan, 249 Kirshner, Jonathan, 250 Kissinger, Henry, 10, 330–31, 332 Ko, Blackie, 191–92 Korean Peninsula, 4, 70–71, 81–82, 132–33, 188–89, 302. See also North Korea; South Korea Korean War, 273–74 Kosovo War, 65–66, 68, 80, 91–92, 111, 132–33, 164–65 Kremlinology, 26 Kristof, Nicholas, 311 Krugman, Paul, 154 Kyrgyzstan, 129, 132 Ladany, Lazlow, 39–41 Lampton, David, 34 Laos, 125–26, 204–5 Latin America, 23 Leading Small Groups, 17, 33–34, 222 leaked documents, 43–44, 56 Lee Kuan Yew, 5–6 legitimacy, 3–4, 19–20 Lenin, Vladimir, 32, 35 Leninism, 25–26, 27, 32–39, 136, 308, 329 Lenovo, 290 Lepore, Jill, 334 Ley, Simon, 40 Le Yucheng, 265–66 Liang Fang, 206–7 Liang Qichao, 28–29 Liaoning aircraft carrier, 191, 199–200 libel laws, 322–23 liberalism, 225, 301–2, 333, 334.


pages: 266 words: 80,018

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding

affirmative action, air gap, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, disinformation, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Firefox, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job-hopping, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, undersea cable, web application, WikiLeaks

He asserted: ‘Intelligence professionals should pursue actual leads – not dig through haystacks of our private data.’ Meanwhile, Senators Wyden and Udall, the two critics of the NSA in pre-Snowden times, introduced their own draft legislation to stop warrantless snooping on Americans. Wyden suggested that the Senate should have the power to confirm the NSA’s new director. In Kremlinological fashion, the White House had let it be known that it favoured a clear-out at the top. Alexander – a four-star general – confirmed his departure from the NSA in March 2014. (The Wall Street Journal, citing a senior US official, said Alexander offered his resignation in June. The White House declined it.)


pages: 258 words: 63,367

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

Containing Iran August 20, 2007 In Washington a remarkable and ominous campaign is under way to “contain Iran,” which turns out to mean “containing Iranian influence,” in a confrontation that Washington Post correspondent Robin Wright calls “Cold War II.” The sequel bears close scrutiny as it unfolds under the direction of former Kremlinologists Condoleezza Rice and Robert M. Gates, according to Wright. Stalin had imposed an Iron Curtain to bar Western influence; Bush-Rice-Gates are imposing a Green Curtain to bar Iranian influence. Washington’s concerns are understandable. In Iraq, Iranian support is welcomed by much of the majority Shiite population.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

It repeated the denials to Representative Gonzalez last fall, when he pointedly asked about the existence of tapes or transcripts. Facing intensified Congressional scrutiny, Fedsters enjoyed a sudden onrush of recovered memory and acknowledged the existence of the tapes and transcripts. Such secrecy has spawned the Fed-watching industry, a racket reminiscent of Kremlinology, in which every institutional twitch is scrutinized for clues to policy changes. Fed watchers, many of them recent alumni of the central bank, “earn” salaries well into the six figures for their work; greater openness at the Fed would reduce their importance, if not put them out of business, a rare form of unemployment that would be entirely welcome.


Girlfriend in a coma by Douglas Coupland

Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, kremlinology

She provided the idea that some frail essence from a now long-vanished era still existed, that the brutality and extremes of the modern world were not the way the world ought to be - a world of gentle Pacific rains, down-filled jackets, bitter red wine in goatskins, and naive charms. 11 DESTINY IS CORNY After four years of drifting, Linus returned in late 1992.In that time he'd become more remote than ever. "Reading his facial expressions is an exercise in Kremlinology," Hamilton said. "Direct inquiry's no help: Gee,Linus,you'resoremote thesedays-gee,what'sthereason?"Discussion was awkward indeed, and in the end it was simply avoided. His years away were treated as though he'd popped out to get a pack of cigarettes and returned a few minutes later. Wendy met Linus for dinner a week after his low-key return.


pages: 342 words: 90,734

Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays by Witold Rybczynski

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", additive manufacturing, airport security, Buckminster Fuller, City Beautiful movement, classic study, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Jane Jacobs, kremlinology, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Eisenman, rent control, Silicon Valley, the High Line, urban renewal, young professional

Although the term “iconic” is increasingly used to mean simply prominent or attention-getting buildings, architectural icons embody specific messages. The White House, for example, symbolizes the office of the presidency, just as that other iconic big house, Buckingham Palace, represents the British monarchy. During the Cold War, the Kremlin, a walled citadel on the Moscow River, stood for the Soviet regime—and gave us “Kremlinology.” Icons are not only national. Some, such as the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower, symbolize cities; “Black Rock,” the spooky granite skyscraper in New York that is the headquarters of CBS, represents a corporation; so did the Chrysler Building and Lever House. Icons can have more than one meaning; the Washington Monument, for example, not only commemorates the first president but also symbolizes the capital city that bears his name and, because it’s overlarge and self-confident, Americanness itself.


pages: 247 words: 78,961

The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, always be closing, California gold rush, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, kremlinology, load shedding, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, one-China policy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, the long tail, trade route, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

American church groups, liberal and conservative alike, have united to support Christians fighting for human rights in China, and against Muslims slaughtering Christians in Sudan. Huntington’s ability to account for these and so many other phenomena within a general theory points up the lasting importance of his work. Meanwhile, where are the Kremlinologists who during the Cold War told us that the Soviet system was basically stable; or the Africanists who in the 1960s and 1970s predicted growth and development in places that have since been torn apart by war? How do Huntington’s ideas apply to the current crisis stemming from the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington?


pages: 289 words: 85,315

Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, kremlinology, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Wolfskehl Prize

Conway remembers the atmosphere in the department’s tea-room: ‘We’d gather for tea at 3 o’clock and make a rush for the cookies. Sometimes we’d discuss mathematical problems, sometimes we’d discuss the O.J. Simpson trial, and sometimes we’d discuss Andrew’s progress. Because nobody actually liked to come out and ask him how he’s getting on with the proof, we were behaving a little bit like Kremlinologists. So somebody would say: “I saw Andrew this morning” – “Did he smile?” – “Well, yes, but he didn’t look too happy.” We could only gauge his feelings by his face.’ The Nightmare E-mail As winter deepened, hopes of a breakthrough faded, and more mathematicians argued that it was Wiles’s duty to release the manuscript.


pages: 300 words: 87,374

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

After watching Mikhalkov’s remake of Lumet’s film at the Russian President’s suburban residence in Novo-Ogarevo, together with Chechnya’s strongman president, Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin allegedly said that the film ‘brought a tear to the eye’.70 Explaining Putin’s tears may be the last refuge of the underemployed Kremlinologist.71 But from Putin’s perspective, if we may be allowed to speculate freely, Mikhalkov’s ironic Russian adaptation of a classic American paean to liberalism captured the dramatic choice facing his country: Russia will either put an end to American-led globalization or American-led globalization will put an end to Russia.


pages: 332 words: 109,213

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

Once more Over the enemy camp the winging Of swans is heard, swans trumpeting War.2 Ten years later, in January 1918, three months after the Bolshevik seizure of power, amid the chaos and cold of revolutionary Petrograd, Blok wrote his greatest poem, “The Twelve,” which told us more about the nature of Soviet power than a whole library of Kremlinology. The twelve are a group of young soldiers of the Red Guard, marching through the city in a snowstorm, rough and tough and profane and trigger-happy: “Grip your gun like a man, brother. We’ll pump some lead into Holy Russia, Ancient, peasant-ridden, fat-arsed Mother Russia. Freedom, Freedom!


pages: 913 words: 219,078

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, imperial preference, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, open economy, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, structural adjustment programs, the market place, trade liberalization, Transnistria, Winter of Discontent, Works Progress Administration, éminence grise

But in the end, the statement explained, Truman “decided not to take this step” owing to “the possibilities of misunderstanding.”110 Though the mission was now scotched, Marshall thought his efforts in Paris badly undermined. Indeed, Bevin and Schuman were now less sure than ever whether Truman wanted to start a war, abandon them to one, or both. On October 14, State Department Kremlinologist Foy Kohler cabled Marshall from Paris: Stalin, he said, had concluded that there was now “no chance of preventing” the creation of a West German state “by negotiation, even at the price of concessions with respect to Berlin.” The only way he saw to “[bring] about the destruction of the London decisions and [disrupt] the . . . unity of Western Powers” was, therefore, to undermine their governments.

Confronted with a problem, he would insist that “if you can’t do anything about it, just stop thinking about it,” recalled his daughter Mary. “Get on with something!”118 Though Kennan’s office continued to adjoin the secretary of state’s, he would lose the access he had under Marshall. Acheson dismissed Kremlinologists like Kennan as “dangerous” soothsayers pushing “uncommunicable” guesses that “must be accepted by those who have not the same occult power of divination.”119 He ordered that Policy Planning Staff director memos should go to the assistant secretaries rather than to himself personally. Thus seeing his influence wane toward irrelevance, feeling at times like “a court jester,”120 Kennan would in December 1949 choose to depart from the think tank he had fathered at State.121 Under his successor, the less cerebral but more fashionably hawkish Paul Nitze, PPS would be more tank and less think.


pages: 383 words: 105,021

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan

air gap, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, computer age, data acquisition, drone strike, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, game design, hiring and firing, index card, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Morris worm, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, packet switching, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stuxnet, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Wargames Reagan, Y2K, zero day

It concluded that the change wouldn’t take place all at once or uniformly; that the NSA would have to innovate in order to meet the demands (and intercept the communications) of the new world, while still monitoring the present landscape of telephone, radio, and microwave signals. Studeman’s second paper, an analysis of NSA personnel and their skill sets, concluded that the balance was wrong: there were too many Kremlinologists, not enough computer scientists. When Inman was director, he’d taken a few small steps to bring the technicians into the same room as the SIGINT operators and analysts, but the effort had since stalled. Most of the agency’s computer experts worked in IT or maintenance. No one in SIGINT was tapping their expertise for advice on vulnerabilities in new hardware and software.


pages: 372 words: 115,094

Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War by Ken Adelman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, It's morning again in America, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative, summit fever, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

The years before Reykjavik had been a bad patch for Soviet leaders. Some hope sprang, after nearly twenty years of stagnation under Leonid Brezhnev, in the spring of 1983 when Yuri Andropov came to power. The former KGB head was seen as the man who could modernize the U.S.S.R. at home and abroad. Kremlinologists proclaimed his elevation a good thing, because Andropov would be both ready and able to change things. Ready because only the KGB had access to the information that was available abroad, showing just how far behind the U.S.S.R. had slipped—compared not only with other industrialized nations, but also with its satellite minions in Eastern Europe.


pages: 390 words: 119,527

Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge

Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, European colonialism, failed state, friendly fire, Golden arches theory, IFF: identification friend or foe, jobless men, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, old-boy network, operational security, Potemkin village, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, walking around money

.* The U.S. military, Barnett was basically saying, wanted bellum: a straightforward fight against an enemy whose soldiers wore uniforms and had regular military formations. What it was engaged in, however, was guerra, the thankless, ambivalent task of playing globo-cop. And it was not equipped to handle the latter. Had the Berlin Wall never come down, Barnett probably would probably have made a career as a Kremlinologist, counting ICBM payloads in advance of arms control talks with the Soviets. But his timing was off: He graduated from Harvard University’s Soviet area studies program in 1986, just as Mikhail Gorbachev began accidentally dismantling the Soviet system through perestroika and glasnost. He completed his Ph.D. in 1990—his dissertation compared Romanian and East German policies in the Third World—just a year before the final collapse of the Soviet Union.


pages: 443 words: 116,832

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

They can die heroically, dramatically, and in a manner that guarantees that the action cannot stop there.”7 The Soviets knew that no president could suffer the loss of thousands of Americans and not retaliate. The troops lent credibility to the United States’ signal of commitment to the continent. Their presence helped keep the peace. The importance of signaling resonated in the highest levels of government. Some senior foreign policy decision-makers fancied themselves Kremlinologists who could interpret the signals of Soviet leaders and deduce how best to respond. Presidents and premiers signaled to each other, too: the most iconic moments of statecraft in the Cold War were Kennedy and Khrushchev’s battle of wills in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Reagan and Gorbachev’s tense negotiations at Reykjavik.


pages: 414 words: 121,243

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, centre right, critical race theory, DeepMind, disinformation, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, kremlinology, liberal world order, light touch regulation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, the scientific method, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

Their record as Nazi Germany’s most implacable enemy allowed anti-fascist leftists to ignore Stalin’s crimes and excoriate Britain and France for failing to stand beside him in the struggle against Hitler. When Britain and France finally inched towards doing what they wanted by telling Hitler that an invasion of Poland would mean war, Kremlinologists noticed that the Soviet Union was toning down its condemnations of Hitler. The diplomatic traffic between Berlin and Moscow increased through the summer of 1939, and diplomats started to reflect on an incredible thought: perhaps the communists and the fascists were preparing to form an alliance.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The original PageRank patent, open for all to see, clandestinely accumulated a thick crust of tweaks and adjustments intended to combat web baddies: the “link farms” (sites that link to other sites only to goose their Google rankings), the “splogs” (spam blogs, which farm links in the more dynamic weblog format); and the “content farms” (which rapidly and clumsily aggregate content based on trending Google searches, so as to appear at the top of search engine result pages, or SERPs). Beneath the façade of sleek interfaces and neatly ordered results, guerrilla war simmers between the search engineers and the spammers.39 The war with legitimate content providers is just as real, if colder. Search engine optimizers parse speeches from Google the way Kremlinologists used to pore over the communiqués of Soviet premiers, looking for ways to improve their showing without provoking the “Google Death Penalty” that de-indexes sites caught gaming the system. And just as wartime gives governments reasons (and excuses) to hide their plans from the public, Google has used the endless battle against spam and manipulation to justify its refusal to account for controversial ranking decisions.40 Google is an ambitious company.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

The threat of subpoenas from Gonzalez caused a sudden bout of recovered memory syndrome at the Fed; for 17 years, it had denied that it even took detailed minutes at FOMC meetings; in fact, it had been taping and transcribing them all along. The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, however, ended Gonzalez' reign of terror. Still, despite this whiff of glasnost, the Fed remains an intensely secretive institution. This opaqueness has spawned an entire Fed-watching industry, a trade reminiscent of Kremlinology, in which every institutional twitch is scrutinized for clues to policy changes. Fed watchers "earn" salaries well into the six figures for such work; greater openness at the Fed would reduce their importance, if not put them out of business, a rare form of unemployment that would be entirely welcome.


pages: 471 words: 127,852

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs by Mark Hollingsworth, Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Geldof, Bullingdon Club, business intelligence, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Global Witness, income inequality, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, Londongrad, mass immigration, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, paper trading, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, power law, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger

An American citizen, he made his fortune in Russia, and became a founding investor of the London business newspaper City AM and an outspoken critic of Putin. He vanished from his holiday home in Latvia on 16 March 2008, leaving behind a pool of blood. To this day no body has been found. One theory circulating among Kremlinologists was that he was murdered over a business dispute with a senior figure in Putin’s administration. Others speculated that he was about to make public details of fortunes acquired by top Kremlin officials. The mystery deepened further when, in October, his wife, the model Natalya Belova, and their three-year-old son also vanished.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

Pye, “Tiananmen and Chinese Political Culture,” Asian Survey 30, no. 4 (April 1990b): 331-347. 18 This was suggested by Henry Kissinger in “The Caricature of Deng as Tyrant Is Unfair,” Washington Post (August 1, 1989), p. A21. 19 Ian Wilson and You Ji, “Leadership by ‘Lines’: China’s Unresolved Succession,” Problems of Communism 39, no. 1 (January-February 1990): 28-44. 20 Indeed, these societies were regarded as so different that they were studied by separate disciplines of “Sinology,” “Sovietology,” or “Kremlinology,” that paid attention not to the broad sweep of civil society, but only to politics, its supposed sovereign, and often the politics of a group of ten or twelve powerful men at that. Chapter 4. The Worldwide Liberal Revolution 1 Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Stuttgart, 1936), p. 352. 2 An overview of this change is given, inter alia, in Sylvia Nasar, “Third World Embracing Reforms to Encourage Economic Growth,” New York Times (July 8, 1991) p.


pages: 575 words: 171,599

The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund by Anita Raghavan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, delayed gratification, estate planning, Etonian, glass ceiling, high net worth, junk bonds, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, McMansion, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, technology bubble, too big to fail

After the jurors pick a restaurant and put in their food orders, William Donald, Judge Holwell’s courtroom deputy, heads downstairs to collect the food deliveries, which pass tight security: they are X-rayed. Over the past two weeks, ever since the jury had started its deliberations, word of the jury’s lunch plans took on a form of legal Kremlinology. As long as the jury was ordering lunch, deliberations would likely drag into the afternoon. At 10 a.m., the jury foreman handed back the menus. He told the court security officer they wouldn’t be needing them. Twenty minutes later, the jury foreman sent a note to Judge Holwell. After eleven days of deliberations that were restarted midway because a sick juror had to be replaced, the jury of eight women and four men had reached a verdict.


Killing Hope: Us Military and Cia Interventions Since World War 2 by William Blum

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, kremlinology, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, nuremberg principles, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, trickle-down economics, union organizing

The former president chose not to offer the slightest hint that the United States had anything to do with the planning or instigation of the coup, and indicated that his administration had only the most tangential of connections to its execution.49 (When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs were published in the West, the publisher saw fit to employ a noted Kremlinologist to annotate the work, pointing out errors of omission and commission.) Thus it was that the educated, urbane men of the State Department, the CIA and the United Fruit Company, the pipe-smoking, comfortable men of Princeton, Harvard and Wall Street, assured each other that the illiterate peasants of Guatemala did not deserve the land which had been given to them, that the workers did not need their unions, that hunger and torture were a small price to pay for being rid of the scourge of communism.


pages: 485 words: 148,662

Farewell by Sergei Kostin, Eric Raynaud

active measures, car-free, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, index card, invisible hand, kremlinology, Lao Tzu, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

Vetrov’s probable reasoning about the situation matched most of his compatriots and contemporaries: the Brezhnevian regime was a disgrace, but Marxism-Leninism was a just cause. Or, as went a popular sarcasm about Marxist theories at the time, “Communism is inevitable.” The feeling that communism was deeply entrenched in the USSR was shared not only by the Soviets but also by most “Kremlinologists.” From the Russian standpoint, nothing in Vetrov’s behavior substantiated the assumption that he was a shadow fighter against the communist system or a trailblazer for perestroika. That assumption, which seemed to be a certitude for the DST and the French media, was laughable to the Soviets who had known Vetrov.


Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

The Post understood this dilemma, and did something unexpected: it ran two remarkable articles in the following two days, articles that would agree with the Soviets, and challenge the authenticity of The Penkovsky Papers. Victor Zorza had devoured an advance copy of Penkovsky’s book. Zorza, a Polish-born Briton, was a prolific investigative journalist with a microscopic attention to detail, and one of the world’s foremost Kremlinologists. He quickly noticed that something was off. A small Russian publishing house based in West Germany had noticed the announcements of the memoirs in the international press. The press reached out to Doubleday, the book’s U.S. publisher, offered DM 1,000 for the Russian-language rights, and requested the original manuscript in Russian.


pages: 554 words: 168,114

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century by Tom Bower

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, bonus culture, California energy crisis, corporate governance, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Global Witness, index fund, interest rate swap, John Deuss, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, land bank, LNG terminal, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, megaproject, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, passive investing, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, price stability, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Chevron’s alignment with the Kazakh government against Moscow offended Putin, who refused to meet O’Reilly. Frustrated by John Browne’s smooth diplomacy in using Tony Blair to engage Putin and finalize his deal, O’Reilly urged former US secretary of state George Shultz and Condoleezza Rice to advance Chevron’s case. But, like the diplomats at the American embassy and the Kremlinologists hired by Chevron, they were unable to offer insight or access to Sechin or Putin. “It’s too early to see Putin,” O’Reilly told Khodorkovsky, to conceal Chevron’s exclusion. “We’ve got to keep these negotiations confidential.” In essence, Chevron’s executives were offering Khodorkovsky shares for nearly the same valuation in a merged company as Raymond was proffering in cash.


pages: 631 words: 171,391

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs

air freight, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, global village, Google Earth, Herman Kahn, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, yellow journalism

Over at the CIA, officials noted that the premier had not been seen in public for two days. Nobody guessed the truth, which was that Khrushchev himself had detected a wavering in the U.S. position and decided to exploit it. One thing was certain, said Llewellyn Thompson, the ExComm's inhouse Kremlinologist. The latest missive from Khrushchev was the official position of the Soviet leadership. "The Politburo intended this one." 11:17 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (10:17 A.M. HAVANA) A U.S. Navy Crusader flew over the Soviet command post in El Chico almost at the same time the generals decided to shoot down Target Number 33.


Inside British Intelligence by Gordon Thomas

active measures, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, country house hotel, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, job satisfaction, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, lateral thinking, license plate recognition, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, operational security, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Despite the high risks when, as Asquith later said, “a hundred things could have gone wrong,” the operation had passed without incident. Waiting across the Finnish border was the Helsinki station commander, Margaret “Meta” Ramsay. She drove Gordievsky to Oslo, from where he caught a flight to London the next day. Waiting for him at Heathrow were Curwen, Scarlett, and MI6’s principal Kremlinologist, Gordon Barrass. AFTER LUNCH SCARLETT DROVE Gordievsky and Barrass to Fort Monkton, the MI6 training school at Gosport on the south coast. For several weeks he was debriefed, and his revelations created a fifty-page document titled “Soviet Perception of Nuclear Warfare.” A copy was sent to William Casey, the director of the CIA, the thirteenth to hold the position.


pages: 580 words: 194,144

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia by Peter Hopkirk

British Empire, classic study, disinformation, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Another British visitor, Thomas Raikes, writing in 1838, drew attention to the menace of Russia’s rapidly growing military and naval power, and forecast that Britain and Russia would very soon be at war. Nor were such views confined to the British: A celebrated French observer, the Marquis de Custine, who toured Russia in 1839, returned with similar forebodings about St Petersburg’s ambitions. In his La Russe en 1839, a work still quoted by Kremlinologists today, he warned: ‘They wish to rule the world by conquest. They mean to seize by armed force the countries accessible to them, and thence to oppress the rest of the world by terror. The extension of power they dream of . . . if God grants it to them, will be for the woe of the world.’ The British press largely shared this sense of doom.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

No one will lend Dubai no-questions-asked money ever again. It will have to pay its own way. Dubai Inc. has endured heavy restructuring since. Many of Sheikh Mo’s top lieutenants have been merged or purged; high-profile developers have been jailed for fraud. Financial markets wait for the other shoe to drop, while emirates Kremlinologists wonder what price Abu Dhabi will ultimately charge for its help. (Naming the onetime Burj Dubai after its ruler Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan is suspected to be a down payment.) In hindsight, Dubai was almost fatally overleveraged in hype as well as debt. Unwinding its untenable positions entailed the world’s awe cur-dling into schadenfreude.


pages: 721 words: 238,678

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem by Tim Shipman

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Kickstarter, kremlinology, land value tax, low interest rates, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, working poor

Barnier had already shown himself an assiduous reader of the British newspapers, quoting back stories about the prospect of queues at the border in his conversations with British officials. The Shard event resolved very little, but it allowed Davis and Hammond to be pictured together. ‘What mattered more was the photo,’ a minister said. ‘Because everyone was trying to do their Kremlinology and saying, “Davis is in one corner and Hammond is in the other.” And they weren’t.’ Davis’s support emboldened Hammond to push things further. On 12 December, in front of the Treasury select committee, the chancellor announced that a transitional arrangement would be necessary after Brexit because there was not time to secure a full deal in the two-year period of negotiations.


pages: 944 words: 243,883

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, disinformation, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, kremlinology, market fundamentalism, McMansion, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart meter, statistical model, Steve Jobs, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

Retired executives of the Raymond era took one another out to dinner in Houston, Dallas, and elsewhere and talked about whether Tillerson had enough of the guts and firmness that Raymond had mustered to drive ExxonMobil’s financial performance. Tillerson’s remarks to Wall Street analysts increasingly made it clear that he was aware of these dissenters. It required the equivalent of Kremlinology to perceive Tillerson’s public replies to these dissenting factions, but his rejoinders were detectable. At analyst meetings, Tillerson started to use 2006, the year he took the top job, as the basis for reporting about—and boasting about—ExxonMobil’s financial performance. He ignored the Raymond years, and he went so far as to explain how his leadership had extracted profitability from one tough project, the Kearl oil sands play in Canada, because he had made flexible analytical judgments about projected rates of return that would not have been taken “five, six, eight years ago,” when Raymond was in charge.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Then he assigned homework: provide a written evaluation of the loyalty of staffers in their employ; and tender him letters of resignation, which he would subsequently decide whether to accept or reject. A president firing people was routine. Doing it en masse and without warning was shocking. “Had a purge like the president’s taken place in the Soviet Union,” the Nation observed, “Kremlinologists would have been pontificating about the problems of transition in a totalitarian state.” The next forty-eight hours were a deathwatch. Speaking of Kremlinologists, NPR brought in Izvestia’s Washington correspondent to study where officials were standing in photographs of public events to discern who was in President Carter’s favor and who was not—like American Soviet Union experts did on May Day in Moscow.


pages: 945 words: 292,893

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Apollo 13, Biosphere 2, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Danny Hillis, digital map, double helix, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, kremlinology, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, machine readable, microbiome, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, phenotype, Potemkin village, pre–internet, random walk, remote working, selection bias, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, statistical model, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tunguska event, VTOL, zero day, éminence grise

At the same time, she and the others got very little information from the planet, and had to piece things together from a jumble of clues. She’d compared notes on this with Ivy, who had confirmed that even she had little to go on, and what she did hear contradicted itself from hour to hour. It had all become Kremlinology. Back in the heyday of the Soviet Union, the only way for Westerners to guess what was going on there was to look at the lineup of dignitaries on Lenin’s Tomb in the May Day parade, and riddle it out from the seating chart and who shook hands with whom. Now Dinah was doing the same thing with these three faces on the screen.


pages: 1,150 words: 338,839

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, George Santayana, guns versus butter model, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, uranium enrichment, éminence grise

Only one figure in the Democrats’ inner council was able to “maintain credibility” and still insist that it was possible to reason with the Soviets. Averell Harriman, recalls Galbraith, would begin discussions by talking about “what a bunch of bastards the Soviets were” but then he would say, “but we’ve got to deal with them.” Like his tutors in Kremlinology, Kennan and Bohlen, Harriman believed that the Soviets were paranoid, dangerous, yet ultimately conservative and not eager to start a war by invading Europe. Harriman argued that it was possible, by diligence and patience, to negotiate agreements with the Soviets, especially if he was the negotiator.


pages: 1,509 words: 416,377

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Ford Model T, four colour theorem, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, informal economy, kremlinology, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Potemkin village, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, stakhanovite, two and twenty, UNCLOS, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

No outsider can know for sure about much of anything that happens in North Korea, of course. But there are always the Pyongyang-watcher’s fallback techniques of analysis based on scraps of information from all kinds of sources including defector testimony and the regime’s news media and propaganda—the sort of “tea leaf reading” that also characterized the work of kremlinologists and sinologists. Thus, my attempt to solve another, seemingly unrelated mystery—-why the DPRK had barred United Nations World Food Program aid monitors from thirty-nine of the North’s counties—turned out to be instructive. My findings suggested that Kim Jong-il and company so far might have avoided falling into the trap of Phase Four, as Collins defined it.