Tag Archives: Ukraine

War in Ukraine

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Asked to predict the future of the war in the Ukraine, I took another look at a book I wrote a couple of years ago. English title, Looking into the Future: A History of Prediction. Working on it taught me two things. First, as everyone knows prediction is extremely difficult and often misses the mark. Not seldom with disastrous consequences; as happened in 1914 when statesmen and soldiers predicted a short and easy war (“you will be home before the leaves fall form the trees,” the Kaiser told his soldiers) but found themselves involved in the largest, most deadly, armed conflict in history until then. And second, the methods we use today—questionnaires among experts (the so-called Delphi method), mathematical models, artificial intelligence, what have you—are no better than those that people used thousands of years ago. Such as astrology (Babylon), manipulating yarrow stalks (China), watching birds and consulting oracles (Greece), reading the entrails of sacrificial animals (Rome), interpreting dreams (in all known civilizations), and so on.

I am a historian, so readers will have to forgive me for basing my thought on historical methods. Primarily analogies on one hand and trends on the other.

Here goes.

* Ukraine is surrounded by Russia on all sides except the west, where it borders on Poland, Moldavia and Romania. It consists almost entirely of flat, open country (the famous “Black Earth”). The only mountains are the Carpathians in the southwest and the Crimean Mountains in the extreme south along the coast. There are some large rivers which can form serious obstacles for an attacker. But only if they are properly defended; which, owing to their length, would be hard to do. Here and there are some low. One also encounters quite a number of deep ravines, the best known of which is Babi Yar. But neither form serious obstacles to traffic, particularly tracked traffic. The roads are better than they used to be during World War II and there are more of them; however, with just 2.8 kilometers of them per square kilometer of territory (versus 1.5 in Germany) they are still not up to West European standards. The climate is continental, meaning hot and dry (often uncomfortably so) in summer, extremely cold (with lots of snow) in winter, and rain spread during most of the year.

* Russia has nuclear weapons, whereas Ukraine does not. That is a pity; had it had such weapons as well as a secure second strike force of vehicles to deliver them, war would almost certainly have been out of the question. However, for Putin’s present purpose it does not matter. The last things he wants to do before he occupies Ukraine is to turn it into a radioactive desert. Thanks in part to the help they get from NATO, during recent years the Ukrainian armed forces have grown considerably stronger and better equipped. Fighting morale, based primarily on popular memory of the way Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians in 1930-32, is said to be high. Nevertheless, neither quantitatively nor qualitatively are the forces in question a match for the Russian ones.

* Initially at any rate both sides will rely primarily on the usual conventional weapons: aircraft (which are particularly useful over open terrain as opposed to such as is mountainous or forested), tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery, as well as the motorized columns they need to sustain them. However, they will also make heavy use of less traditional methods. Such as maskirovska (deception), signals warfare, electronic warfare, and, last not least, cyberwarfare. All these are fields in which the Russians have specialized for a long time past and in which they are acknowledged masters; in this respect they are in tune with their master, Putin, who himself rose by way of the intelligence services.

* At the moment the Russians the Russians are attacking Ukraine from all directions simultaneously without any clear Schwerpunkt. The Donbas apart, objectives include Kharkov, Kiev, several other key cities, and perhaps the Black Sea and Sea of Azov coasts. Faithful to their long-standing doctrine of “battle in depth,” the Russians attack not just at the front but far behind it as well.

* The Russians will not find it too difficult to “overrun” (whatever that may mean) most of a country as large and as sparsely populated as Ukraine. However, taking the most important cities—Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa—will be a different matter and will surely only be accomplished by heavy and very destructive fighting. Followed, most probably by guerrilla and terrorism. The way, say, things happened in Iraq.
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* Forget about sanctions. They will not deter the Russians. Just as Stalin used to give enormous banquets even during the height of World War II, so Putin and his clique will barely notice them. Whereas the people are used to make do without almost everything. Except vodka, of course, and even consumption of that is said to have fallen over the last few years.

* NATO, with the US at its head, will be involved in the war, but only marginally and without sending troops to participate in the fighting. Instead it will dispatch “defensive” weapons (whatever those may be), provide supplies and intelligence, and perhaps help evacuate some of the wounded as well as assist Ukrainian refugees. All the while continuing to tell anyone who wants to listen, and some of those who do not want to listen, how bad the Russians are, etc. etc.

* China can be expected to make some sympathetic noises. That apart, it will get involved only lightly by expanding trade so as to offset some of the sanctions. It may also use the opportunity to do something about Taiwan. Or not.

* Should the war turn into guerrilla and terrorism, as it very likely will, it may very well open the door to the death of perhaps fifty Ukrainians for every soldier the Russians lose (in Vietnam the ratio was about 75 to one). Even so Putin will still be unable to end the war, which he can do only by setting up a new collaborationist Ukrainian government.

* Though it is likely to happen later rather than sooner, there is a good chance that Putin will find Ukraine stuck in his throat; to quote a Hebrew saying, neither to swallow nor to puke. Given enough time, the outcome will assuredly be to make the war less and less popular inside Russia itself. The Russians will end by withdrawing.

* Just as the defeat in Afghanistan played a key role in the collapse of Communism, so a defeat in Ukraine will almost certainly mean the end of Putin’s regime. Much worse for Russia, it may well cause it to fall back into one of those terrible periods of anarchy it has gone through in the past and which it is Putin’s supreme objective to prevent. He can barely conceal his anxiety in this respect; as by assuring his listeners that 2022 is not 1919 (the year in which Lenin and the Bolsheviks came closest to defeat).

Finally:

Though based on history, in truth all this is little better than guesswork. It is as Woody Allen said: Do you want to make God laugh? Tell him about your plans.

No Deception without Self-Deception

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Months after the Ukrainian crisis broke out, the long-expected Russian invasion of that country still had not taken place. Depending on which analyst you choose, there are many possible explanations for this. The first was that, at a time when his dear ally Xi was doing whatever he could to make a success of the winter games in Beijing, Putin did not want to ruffle his feathers too much. The second, that he needed time to try and sow dissension among his opponents, not all of whom were equally enthusiastic about fighting him; as, for example, became clear when Germany refused to provide Ukraine with weapons. The third, that his preparations were insufficient and needed to be completed. The fourth, that the weather, with the spring muddy season (rasputitsa, as it is called) around the corner, was unsuitable. It might, indeed, play havoc; if not with Putin’s tanks then with the follow-up columns that carry the ammunition they fire, the fuel they need, the spare parts on which they depend, and so on.

The fifth, explanation is that he was deterred by NATO’s declarations and demonstrations of support for Ukraine; including, in particular, the threat of sanctions. The sixth, that military action would be unpopular with Russia’s own people who are unhappy with the way things are going. The seventh, which seems to be gathering favor, that he has maneuvered himself into a pickle and is increasingly desperate to find a way out of the adventure on which he embarked. One, which, even if it succeeds, is quite likely to involve his country in a long and costly war against desperate resistance. And which, if it fails, may bring about not only the fall of his own rule but the disintegration of Russia itself; considering that, out of its population of about 145.000,000 18 percent consists of minorities some of which are just waiting for an opportunity to break free.

No more than any of the analysts whose views I keep reading do I have an answer to the question. I do, however, think I know the point when all of us in Washington, in London, in Paris, in Berlin, in NATO’s remaining capitals, and in many other places should really get worried. Namely, when Putin’s tanks start moving: not forward towards their Ukrainian objectives but away from them, back towards their peacetime bases and depots.

Consider:

Thursday, 2 August 1990. Saddam Hussein’s army invades and occupies Kuwait. Not, however before some days had passed during which he or his assistants claimed to be preparing to withdraw Iraq’s forces from the border area where he had deployed them. Needless to say, each time he did so the news was flashed around the world. Needless to say, each time it was received with a deep sigh of relief. And needless to say, each time it was false.
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Saturday, 6 October 1973. In the midst of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, all over Israel the air alert sirens start howling. This quickly turns out to be the signal for a combined offensive by several hundreds of thousands Egyptian and Syrian troops against Israel. Repeatedly during the previous months, the Egyptian army in particular had been holding exercises that they could have used as cover for starting a war. Repeatedly they did not—until, on the day in question, they did.

Wednesday, 21 August 1968. Warsaw Pact forces, including Soviet, East German, Polish and Hungarian units, invade Czechoslovakia. Meeting hardly any resistance, they quickly occupy the country. The crisis, which followed on what was known as the Prague Spring, had been going on for months. It climaxed in mid-August when the Warsaw Pact units, having completed maneuvers on Czechoslovak territory, left the country—only to immediately turn around and return.

Monday, 5 June 1967. Israel attacks Egypt and annihilates its air force, thereby opening the way towards its crushing victory in the Six Day War. At that time the crisis in the Middle East, which got under way when Egypt’s ruler Abel Nasser sent his forces into the Sinai, had been ongoing for three weeks. The climax came on the weekend of 2-3 June when many Israeli reservists were suddenly sent home on leave and could be seen on the beaches of Tel Aviv, thus creating the impression that war was not imminent and might indeed not break out at all. A bad error, as it turned out.

Needless to say the Soviets, as they then were, were aware of these precedents. The more so because they themselves had made use of the technique. And the more so because they were historically-minded; starting already in 1917, no army has ever put a greater emphasis on military history than the Red-Russian one. Starting with the Biblical Israelites’ capture of the city of Ai, and proceeding through the Greek one of Troy, any number of commanders and armies have owed their success to this simple trick.

As I’ve written before, whether Putin is going to invade Ukraine I have no idea. I do, however, suggest that two points be kept in mind. First, beware of any Russian troop withdrawal—that may well be the most dangerous moment of all. And second, no deception without self-deception.

The Master and Kiev

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Whether or not Vladimir (“World-Owner,” according to one translation) Putin is going to march on Kiev I do not know. However, it seems to me that, having invested so much in making ready for such an invasion—propaganda, money, political capital, and all kinds of military moves—he cannot now simply order a retreat without having achieved anything. Even at best, such a retreat would deal a grievous blow to his prestige and his future ability to get anything out of anybody. At worst it might lead to his removal from office and, since Russia is not and never has been a democracy, a political shakeup. One whose consequences, first for Russia and then for large parts of the rest of the world, could be incalculable.

Such being the case, in this post I shall assume that an invasion is being planned and, unless the West makes some important concessions, will be carried out. Sooner rather than later, and perhaps under the guise of a response to some Ukrainian “provocation.” What might such an invasion look like? The obvious starting point would be the Donbas, a Ukrainian province now under the rule two different self-proclaimed pro-Russian governments.. It has everything an invader could wish for: agriculture, industry, minerals (coal), and the kind of flat terrain that used to be occupied by the Cossacks and now offers few serious obstacles to a modern mechanized army.

Seen from Moscow, an offensive directed at this part of Ukraine would also have the advantage that it is located hundreds of miles east of Russia’s frontier with NATO. As a result, for the latter to assist the government in Kiev would be limited at best; the more so because the Black Sea is now little more than a Russian lake. The invasion might, indeed, form a stepping stone towards a deeper one aimed at forming a land bridge between Russia and the Crimea which it has been occupying for the last seven years.

On the other hand, such a half-measure would hardly suffice to achieve Putin’s objective, which is to halt and if possible reverse the eastward expansion of NATO. And it would almost certainly mean a prolonged war with Ukraine and its population of 35-40 million. Coming from the north (Russia proper), the west (Belorussia) or the south (the Crimea), the Russian forces allocated for such a war would be able to move almost anywhere. The Ukrainian army is said to number about 200,000. However, it is not terribly well equipped with modern heavy weapons in particular; and indeed it is hard to see where it could have got them, given that it cannot buy them from Russia (of course) and has been too poor to buy many of them from the West.

In short, pushing the Ukrainians aside while reaching for the country’s principal cities—Dnipropetrovsk, Odessa, Kharkov, and of course Kiev itself—should present the Russian forces with no particular problem. The more so because they will have near complete command of the air. Probably the most important difficulty facing them would be operational. Meaning, the inability of their widely-spread attacking columns to quickly come to each other’s aid in case of need. This fact might well cause the Russian High command to think in terms of trying to achieve its objectives not in a single massive lunge but in two or, supposing things go well, even three sequential ones. First in the west, in order to stop NATO from interfering and achieve local superiority. And then shifting the center of gravity further south and east. In that case the space between the Russian columns would be partly filled by special units capable of independent operations and designed primarily to spread confusion and chaos.

However, simply defeating the Ukrainian army and reaching Ukraine’s main cities would hardly be enough to end the conflict. Partly that is because Ukraine would still have an estimated 300,000 more or less trained men left. And partly because modern urban warfare can and often will shift the balance against the attacker and in favor of the defender. The main reasons for this are as follows:

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Second, complex terrain will reduce the attacker’s advantages in terms of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, the utility of aerial assets, and his ability to engage at a distance.

Third the profusion of buildings, perhaps including some quite tall ones, means that much of the fighting will take place at close quarters. To make things even more difficult for the attacker, often it will be necessary to engage simultaneously over the ground, on the ground, and under the ground.

Fourth, the attacker must move and, by doing so, expose himself. Not so the defender, who can remain in his prepared positions. Should those positions be targeted by artillery or from the air the defender, provided he keeps his flexibility and does not wait too long, can always abandon them and retreat to others further back.

Fifth, the kind of massive firepower that reduces buildings and even entire neighborhoods to rubble will not necessarily deprive the defender of cover. Often, indeed, the rubble will provide the defender with as much, if not more, concealment and cover than intact neighborhoods can; just think of Stalingrad. The larger the city, the more true this is.

Occupying the cities in question will not solve these problems; to the contrary, doing so may well aggravate them. Briefly, urban warfare tends to act as a meat grinder. The outcome is likely to be attrition and stalemate. But stalemate will demand from the attacker exactly that of which, unlike the defender, he only has a limited supply: time.

To be sure, death and destruction in the Ukraine would be horrendous. But to see what time can do to an invader, ask the Americans in Vietnam (1964-75), Afghanistan (2002-21), and Iraq (2003-21; not to mention the Soviets in Afghanistan (1980-88).

The Good, the Bad, and the Befuddled

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Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, New York, NY, Tim Duggan, 2018

First, the story. If the author a well-known American historian with several other books to his credit, is to be believed, there are three kinds of people in the world. At the top of the heap are the Ukrainians. No one, perhaps not even the Jews, have suffered more! First, in 1914-17, they were occupied by the Germans as part of World War I. Next came the Civil War, which was fought in Iarge part on their territory. Next came Stalin’s war on the “kulaks” which resulted in millions starving to death. Next came the horrors of another German occupation about which nothing more need to be said.

Yet somehow, amidst all this, the Ukrainians managed to preserve their pristine virtues. A nation ancient and proud, for all the tremendous losses they took they never ceased hankering for democracy, socio-economic equality, and the rule of law. And ties with the West, of course. It was this people which, faced with a Russian invasion in 2014, threw aside any existing internal divisions between Ukrainian- and Russian speakers. Like one man they rose, defending their rights. True, the small Ukrainian Army was no match for the Russian one. The good Ukrainians did, however, manage to stave off the worst. While Russia’s wicked legions, firing at women and children, did tear off and overrun the Crimea and some of their southeastern provinces, their resistance, including several months’ worth of demonstrations at Kiev’s (which Snyder consistently spells, Kyiv) man square, sufficed to convince the bad people in Moscow that, in trying to re-absorb the country, they had taken on more than they could swallow.

Next, the Russians. Snyder has comparatively little to say about the people as such; instead he focuses on their leader, Vladimir Putin, who emerges as a diabolic figure with few equals in history. A sort of Hitler without (so far) the gas chambers, one might say. Originally he was a rather mediocre KGB officer who enjoyed life in East Germany but had no special attainments to his name. Assigned to St Petersburg after the Soviet Union’s fall, somehow he managed both to enrich himself and to have himself appointed Yeltsin’s successor as president. Once in power he set up a kleptocracy that easily made him the richest man in the word (by some accounts, his pile of about $ 200 billion is twice as large as the one figures such as Warren Buffet are sitting on). On the way anyone who resisted got crushed.

Putin’s ambition is to enter history as the savior of his people. Unable to improve the quality of their lives—not only is Russia the most unequal country in the world, but it also has a low standard of living and a low life expectancy—he turned to what Snyder calls “eternity politics.” By this view, whose chief propagator used to be one Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), it is the Russians who have always been a victim of others. Including, to mention but a few, the Mongols, the Poles, the Swedes, the French, the Germans, and, most recently, the West. The latter, using its wealth and its alleged democratic values as battering rams, has consistently sought to set them against each other and weaken them. Yet in all this it was the Russians who somehow managed to maintain their pristine virtues, including patience, endurance, and sexual purity (which, Snyder says, is why Putin has turned to denouncing and persecuting homosexuals).

Starting a thousand or go years ago, Snyder’s Putin story continues, Russians and Ukrainians have always been one people. Hence the first order of business is to restore unity and prevent any more peoples forming part of the Russian Federation from breaking away. Putin’s efforts to achieve this goal have been truly Herculean. He has had his army fire at, and invade, parts of the Ukraine, ruthlessly killing civilian men, women and children on its way. He has engaged in every kind of bribery, corruption and deceit. And he has lied, of course. So much so, in fact, as to construct an entirely imaginary world in words not only mean exactly what he and his henchmen want them to mean but have often lost all link to reality.
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While the Ukrainians are Putin’s first target they are by no means the only one. It is here that Snyder’s third kind of people, meaning those of the West, enter the picture. So far Putin has not waged open war on any Western nation. Using every one of the remaining methods at his disposal, though, he has run any number of campaigns to undermine them all. And he is succeeding, Snyder claims. Not only has Moscow become a Mecca for European “Fascists” and “extreme right wingers”—in Snyder’s view, anyone who does not scrape and bow to the tenets of political correctness is an extreme right winger—but by bombing Syria so as to produce more refugees he has weakened the position of Angela Merkel who was forced to accept them. He has even succeeded in putting his candidate, a failed real estate mogul, into the White House. Quite an achievement, one must admit.

Still following this line of thought, Westerners seem to fall into two categories. On one hand are the scoundrels. With Trump at their head they will do every- and anything to gain power and set up their own version of kleptocratic rule. On the other are hundreds of millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic. Law-respecting and generally full of goodwill, they are too innocent and/or befuddled to understand what they are up against. At the time Synder wrote they still put their hope in Hillary Clinton. Clinton, however, went down to defeat. With Trump and his awful Republicans—Snyder does not try to hide his Democratic sympathies—in the saddle and the influence of European “fascist” parties growing almost by the day, things are going downhill fast. Indeed there is a real possibility that, instead of Russia becoming more like the West as many people in the early 1990s hoped, the West will become more like Russia.

Let others decide how credible this thesis is. In particular, let them ponder how good the Ukrainians (many of whom, as Snyder does not say, would have been more than happy to cooperate with Hitler in 1941-45 if only he had allowed them to do so) and how weak and deluded the West, really are. I, however, found the book fascinating in another way. It can be read as a sort of handbook for what is usually called hybrid war, what my friend Bill Lind calls fourth-generation war, and what I myself have long ago called non-trinitarian war.

In particular, the term hybrid war is misleading. As Snyder rightly says, though it may sound like war minus in reality it is war plus. Including, apart from the usual open clashes between regular armies (which, in the Ukraine, only played a relatively minor role) military operations mounted by every sort of militia, identifiable or not; assassinations, subversion, and bribery; cyberattacks aimed at every kind of hostile political organization as well as infrastructure targets such as websites, factories, electricity grids, and power plant; and, above all, propaganda. Partly generated by bots, launched both by way of the social networks and by more traditional means such as TV, that propaganda so massive as to eliminate the distinction between the real and the unreal, truth and falsehood—which, Snyder says, is just how “eternity” politics work. And so massive as to make one wonder how those who design it and spread it are able to retain their sanity among all the lies they themselves invent.

All in all, in spite of my doubts about whether the good are really as good, the bad really as bad (and clever), and the befuddled really as befuddlded, as Snyder makes them out to be, a thought-provoking work.

The First Casualty—But Not the Last

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The first casualty of war, it has been said, is always the truth. At no time was this more true that in the Ukraine right now. In the eastern districts of the country a civil war has broken out. Stories and images that deal with it, many of them of dubious origins and contradictory, are being flashed around the world. The one certain thing is that Ukrainian government troops are involved, not too successfully if one judges by the number of helicopters that have been shot down (assuming the reports are true). Whom they are fighting is anything but clear. Judging by media reports there is more than one “separatist” militia. That in fact, is what one would expect in such a situation. But just how they differ and how they relate to each other may be unclear not only to the outside world but even to many of their own leaders.

Nor does the confusion end at this point. Russian volunteers may, or may not, be taking part in the fighting. Russia may, or may not, have withdrawn its troops from Ukraine’s frontiers (even if it did, it could easily put them back). It may or may not be providing the “separatists” with weapons and other equipment. The head of the CIA may or may not have visited Kiev. If he did, then presumably in an attempt to find out what kind of assistance the U.S can provide to the government there. “Heavily armed” American mercenaries may or may not be assisting the Ukrainian troops. Chechenian militias are said to have entered the Ukraine, presumably in an attempt to avenge themselves on the Russians who brutally suppressed their own country’s bid for independence. Yet war is an expensive business. Supposing the story is true, who pays the militiamen is another mystery—is it Iran, is it Saudi Arabia?

With the situation as confused as it is, making predictions is extremely difficult. Still, a few things may perhaps be said. First, unless some miracle happens, this is going to be a long and bloody war. There will be no end to civilian casualties, rapes, destruction, economic deprivation, and, perhaps, ethnic cleansing. Second, the war will be fought primarily on the ground rather than at sea—given the geographical facts, that is a matter of course—and in the air. One may also safely predict that the newfangled forms of war which so preoccupy American analysts in particular, such as space war and cyberwar, will only play a very minor role, if any.

Two recent examples, Syria and the former Yugoslavia, provide useful analogies. The Syrian Civil War has now lasted for over three years. As in the Ukraine, the beginnings were small. Since then the number of dead is said to have risen to 160,000, though in truth nobody knows. On one side are President Assad’s armed forces which get their equipment and perhaps other things from Moscow and Tehran. At one point they were assisted by Hezbollah troops coming from Lebanon, though whether the latter are still involved on any scale is not clear. Arrayed against them are any number of militias, some “liberal”—supposing that term can be applied to any Arab group or country—others Islamic. The latter are joined by volunteers originating not only in the Arab world but in Islamic communities resident in various Western countries. British Moslems, or Moslem Brits, are said to have a particularly ferocious reputation. Many militiamen—there seem to be practically no women among the fighters—keep butchering each other even as they clash with Assad’s army. All are said to be assisted by Saudi money and American weapons reaching them by way of Jordan. How it will end, if it will end, only Allah knows.

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Another close analogy is the war in the former Yugoslavia. The war there has often been presented as if it were a question of nation—Serbs, Croats, Christian Bosnians, Moslem Bosnians, and others—fighting nation. It was that, of course, but just like the Syrian civil war it was many other things as well. Local politicians, many of them veterans of Tito’s Communist regime, fought other local politicians. Private armies fought other private armies. Gangs fought other gangs. Many did so with a strong admixture of criminal elements with no other objective in mind than to enrich themselves by murder, kidnapping, ransom, robbery, and smuggling. Most wars are supposed to be directed from the top down; it is governments which give the orders, armies that fight, kill and die, and civilian population that pay and suffer. Not so these two. To use a useful phrase coined by a British veteran of another such war, the one in Afghanistan, they were driven, to a considerable extent, from the ground up.

Bristling with atrocities as they did and do, both wars cast doubt on the idea that the better angels are on the march. Both were and are catastrophic to the countries in which they were fought. In the end, the Yugoslav war was resolved without spilling over into other countries. In spite of some attacks by anti-Assad forces on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, so far the same applies to Syria. It is here that the situation in the Ukraine may develop in a different way. Should ethnic Russians in the Ukraine start dying in large numbers, then Mr. Putin may have no choice but to intervene even against his will. His forces, which are far stronger than any the Ukraine can mount, should be able to overrun the disputed provinces in a matter of weeks, perhaps less. The question is, what comes next? If they succeed in imposing peace and setting up some puppet government, well and good. If not, then just as the War in Afghanistan helped bring about the collapse of the former Soviet Union so the one in the Ukraine may bring about that of the Russian Federation.

That Federation in turn already contains about 32 million non-Russian people not all of whom are happy to be governed from Moscow. Should some of them try to use the opportunity to liberate themselves, then the first casualty would hardly be the last. In this connection it is worth recalling that rarely has an empire collapsed without massive bloodshed. However much many people in Moscow may detest Mr. Gorbachev, the former Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party, his ability to avoid such bloodshed is one achievement history will remember him for.

The question is, will Mr. Putin be able to follow in his footsteps?