(The centerpiece of this entry is General Mikhail Abramovich Milstein, an intelligence officer and strategist of the highest magnitude and a very wise man. I had the privilege of knowing him personally long before I joined the USA Institute in Moscow, where he would become a senior colleague of mine. Milstein was also our neighbor in the country house community of Zhukovka near Moscow, where we occasionally took quiet walks in the woods together. Nothing of what I know about General Milstein has ever come from him. Men of Intelligence (in all senses of the word) never talk about themselves, and it would have been both rude and stupid to ask him any personal questions. But there were others, who knew things about him, and, luckily for me, I learned from them.
Talking about the Cold War, as to who exactly started it and when,-- here is the generally unknown and thus even more remarkable historical episode centering around the great military intelligence operative, strategist and scholar Lieutenant General/Professor Mikhail Abramovich Milstein.
Men, like Milstein, enjoyed the shade (I am purposely avoiding the expected word shadows). Publicity was a dirty word in his lexicon. Yet, he was by no means a hermit. He was a well-known and respected scholar in the international academic and political communities. But his most amazing accomplishments, and also his pivotal role in crucial historical events, were conspicuously left out of the limelight, which allowed him to chuckle with satisfaction, like some mighty sovereign king walking incognito among his respectful, but totally unsuspecting subjects.
On the eve of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, the thirty-year-old Milstein was a midlevel officer of the GRU/Soviet Military Intelligence, already with an exciting past, naturally kept under wraps even inside the GRU, except for the fact that he was perhaps the most knowledgeable man in everything that concerned the United States of America. The most revealing fact about Milstein’s preoccupation with the United States was his apparent obsession with the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville and his peculiar prophesy about the imminent rise of America and Russia as the two towering giants of the future world order… Everybody else having Germany on their mind, Milstein’s all-American hobby seemed occasionally annoying. But his little weakness could be easily forgiven, because of his brilliant mind and photographic memory.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s troops invaded the USSR with a lightning speed, savagely overpowering Soviet defenses, scattering Soviet armies and reducing Russia’s military hardware to smoking piles of scrap metal. This seemingly unstoppable onslaught broke down Moscow’s communications with the front and Moscow’s fate, after the first weeks of war, appeared in mortal danger.
The name of Field Marshal Kutuzov was now whispered around the Kremlin more and more often. Kutuzov was the Russian military genius who in 1812 had abandoned Moscow to Napoleon as the only way to defeat him.
Under such unpleasant circumstances, Stalin convened a meeting, in July 1941, in the Kremlin with his top military and intelligence officials.
What troubled Stalin the most in those days was not the loss of Soviet troops. In the nation of 150,000,000 he could afford the loss of a few million. Nor was it the destruction of Soviet military equipment, which had been outdated anyway. As a practical philosopher, Stalin had been struck by the realization of how, after so much calculated effort, so much was now hanging on the whim of chance...
…What was the pace of the German advance? How capable was the Soviet defense to hold on until Mother Nature would slow Hitler down with pouring rains and impassable roads? Where were the Germans right now, this very minute?
Comrade Stalin was asking hard questions, and his top brass felt like fools. The war room was like a scene of doom and gloom, where the telling sign of an impending catastrophe was the glaring ignorance of those whose business was to know.
"Has anybody anything else to say?" Stalin asked, not without sarcasm, at the end of this short and rather uninspiring session. “...Yes, Comrade Stalin. I have a report to make.”
The speaker was not one of Stalin’s advisers. He was a previously silent GRU auxiliary, whose sole purpose at this meeting was to carry papers for his GRU boss and to help him out with facts and figures, when asked. Quite a few participants of this meeting were flabbergasted by Milstein’s unwarranted enterprise. They now expected Stalin promptly to make mincemeat of this impudent little opportunist. And that was before any of them knew what he was going to say...
But Comrade Stalin seldom refused to give a man one chance to be out of line: “Yes, Comrade Milstein, go on!”
…Cold War would not begin at Fulton, Mo., in 1946, with the famous “Iron Curtain” speech of Sir Winston Churchill. Its opening salvo was made in the Kremlin in the desperate days of July 1941, when, amidst the horrific panic, caused by Hitler’s armies pouring into Russia toward Moscow, the obscure Colonel Milstein “declared a war” ...on the United States of America!
…The fate of Moscow was hanging in the balance. Everybody in his right mind had Hitler in his thoughts. What was this poor man thinking about?… Well, some people refuse to be normal, and break the barrier of common sense with a big bang. Such men, in their madness, transcend time and space, and start thinking in cosmic terms. Milstein was one of those.
He was taking an awful risk. Thinking big was by no means enough. You also needed to say what Comrade Stalin wanted to hear. As it turned out, Milstein’s four-hour presentation, which included Stalin's questions and Milstein’s answers, hit the bull between the eyes and struck gold. What must have appealed to Stalin the most, this Milstein allowed him to divert his attention from the depressing reality of the German offensive, to much brighter horizons. The Russians have a wonderful way of describing such situations, thanks to the title of a Pushkin play: A Feast During the Plague.
Milstein began with a modest, almost trivial, assessment of his mission: The role of the military strategist was not to defend a city, but to look ahead into the future, and there was no Hitler in the future. Hitler had overbid his hand, and he was bound to lose. Germany could not afford the war on two fronts and under the current conditions could not afford to make peace on either. So, Hitler might take a few more Soviet cities, but eventually he would run out of tricks, and find himself going under.
In the not-so-distant future there was a great Russian victory. The Russian troops would sweep Europe, as her liberators from the Nazi yoke. They would triumphantly enter Berlin... So what? More than a hundred years before, the scourge of Napoleon, Czar Alexander I of Russia, had gone even farther. He had entered Paris on a white horse, but had ended up as a loser anyway, when the grateful Europe ganged up on him and cheated him out of his laurels.
The challenge, therefore, was not to enter Berlin, but to stay there. To accomplish this task, Russia had to reckon with her greatest detractor in the modern world: the United States of America.
After this war, America should become Russia’s great rival in a bipolar world, where every nation on the face of the earth would have to choose sides. Russia’s role was not to defeat America (this would be both impossible and insane to suggest), but to achieve a respectable strategic equilibrium. In other words, Russia must do everything to prevent America from achieving a decisive military and political superiority! As for right now, judging from the experience of World War One (that the United States would enter this war some time anyway), Russia’s immediate task must be drawing America into a war with Germany and with Japan, as quickly as possible, using all available means.
Colonel Milstein proceeded to demonstrate that he had not been wasting all those years studying America. He gave Stalin his professional assessments of the principal figures in American leadership, his analysis of pertinent intelligence information, and some valuable insights.
Stalin’s old suspicion that in World War Two the Soviet Union was not fighting just Hitler, but the whole West, had met a welcome champion. From now on, Comrade Milstein would be in charge of all intelligence operations and covert action targeting the United States. In this capacity, Comrade Milstein had outgrown his GRU shoes. His immediate boss would now be Comrade Beria, whom Stalin had appointed Supervisor in Chief of all national security activities. (That did not mean, of course, that Milstein was to be removed from the here and now with Germany. Colonel Milstein’s advice would also be needed to outsmart Hitler’s team in the ongoing military operations.)
…General Milstein was a great man by any standards, and a veritable legend to all who knew about him sub rosa. Therefore, the folkloric name “Ded Moroz/Father Frost,” which I jokingly gave him a long time ago, as the principal architect of the Cold War with the United States, is not only an apt metaphor for him as a professional, but also one that well becomes him as a legend.
(On General Milstein’s later role in ending the Cold War on Russian terms, to which task he had devoted the last ten years of his life, see my later entry The Trojan Horse.)
Talking about the Cold War, as to who exactly started it and when,-- here is the generally unknown and thus even more remarkable historical episode centering around the great military intelligence operative, strategist and scholar Lieutenant General/Professor Mikhail Abramovich Milstein.
Men, like Milstein, enjoyed the shade (I am purposely avoiding the expected word shadows). Publicity was a dirty word in his lexicon. Yet, he was by no means a hermit. He was a well-known and respected scholar in the international academic and political communities. But his most amazing accomplishments, and also his pivotal role in crucial historical events, were conspicuously left out of the limelight, which allowed him to chuckle with satisfaction, like some mighty sovereign king walking incognito among his respectful, but totally unsuspecting subjects.
On the eve of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, the thirty-year-old Milstein was a midlevel officer of the GRU/Soviet Military Intelligence, already with an exciting past, naturally kept under wraps even inside the GRU, except for the fact that he was perhaps the most knowledgeable man in everything that concerned the United States of America. The most revealing fact about Milstein’s preoccupation with the United States was his apparent obsession with the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville and his peculiar prophesy about the imminent rise of America and Russia as the two towering giants of the future world order… Everybody else having Germany on their mind, Milstein’s all-American hobby seemed occasionally annoying. But his little weakness could be easily forgiven, because of his brilliant mind and photographic memory.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s troops invaded the USSR with a lightning speed, savagely overpowering Soviet defenses, scattering Soviet armies and reducing Russia’s military hardware to smoking piles of scrap metal. This seemingly unstoppable onslaught broke down Moscow’s communications with the front and Moscow’s fate, after the first weeks of war, appeared in mortal danger.
The name of Field Marshal Kutuzov was now whispered around the Kremlin more and more often. Kutuzov was the Russian military genius who in 1812 had abandoned Moscow to Napoleon as the only way to defeat him.
Under such unpleasant circumstances, Stalin convened a meeting, in July 1941, in the Kremlin with his top military and intelligence officials.
What troubled Stalin the most in those days was not the loss of Soviet troops. In the nation of 150,000,000 he could afford the loss of a few million. Nor was it the destruction of Soviet military equipment, which had been outdated anyway. As a practical philosopher, Stalin had been struck by the realization of how, after so much calculated effort, so much was now hanging on the whim of chance...
…What was the pace of the German advance? How capable was the Soviet defense to hold on until Mother Nature would slow Hitler down with pouring rains and impassable roads? Where were the Germans right now, this very minute?
Comrade Stalin was asking hard questions, and his top brass felt like fools. The war room was like a scene of doom and gloom, where the telling sign of an impending catastrophe was the glaring ignorance of those whose business was to know.
"Has anybody anything else to say?" Stalin asked, not without sarcasm, at the end of this short and rather uninspiring session. “...Yes, Comrade Stalin. I have a report to make.”
The speaker was not one of Stalin’s advisers. He was a previously silent GRU auxiliary, whose sole purpose at this meeting was to carry papers for his GRU boss and to help him out with facts and figures, when asked. Quite a few participants of this meeting were flabbergasted by Milstein’s unwarranted enterprise. They now expected Stalin promptly to make mincemeat of this impudent little opportunist. And that was before any of them knew what he was going to say...
But Comrade Stalin seldom refused to give a man one chance to be out of line: “Yes, Comrade Milstein, go on!”
…Cold War would not begin at Fulton, Mo., in 1946, with the famous “Iron Curtain” speech of Sir Winston Churchill. Its opening salvo was made in the Kremlin in the desperate days of July 1941, when, amidst the horrific panic, caused by Hitler’s armies pouring into Russia toward Moscow, the obscure Colonel Milstein “declared a war” ...on the United States of America!
…The fate of Moscow was hanging in the balance. Everybody in his right mind had Hitler in his thoughts. What was this poor man thinking about?… Well, some people refuse to be normal, and break the barrier of common sense with a big bang. Such men, in their madness, transcend time and space, and start thinking in cosmic terms. Milstein was one of those.
He was taking an awful risk. Thinking big was by no means enough. You also needed to say what Comrade Stalin wanted to hear. As it turned out, Milstein’s four-hour presentation, which included Stalin's questions and Milstein’s answers, hit the bull between the eyes and struck gold. What must have appealed to Stalin the most, this Milstein allowed him to divert his attention from the depressing reality of the German offensive, to much brighter horizons. The Russians have a wonderful way of describing such situations, thanks to the title of a Pushkin play: A Feast During the Plague.
Milstein began with a modest, almost trivial, assessment of his mission: The role of the military strategist was not to defend a city, but to look ahead into the future, and there was no Hitler in the future. Hitler had overbid his hand, and he was bound to lose. Germany could not afford the war on two fronts and under the current conditions could not afford to make peace on either. So, Hitler might take a few more Soviet cities, but eventually he would run out of tricks, and find himself going under.
In the not-so-distant future there was a great Russian victory. The Russian troops would sweep Europe, as her liberators from the Nazi yoke. They would triumphantly enter Berlin... So what? More than a hundred years before, the scourge of Napoleon, Czar Alexander I of Russia, had gone even farther. He had entered Paris on a white horse, but had ended up as a loser anyway, when the grateful Europe ganged up on him and cheated him out of his laurels.
The challenge, therefore, was not to enter Berlin, but to stay there. To accomplish this task, Russia had to reckon with her greatest detractor in the modern world: the United States of America.
After this war, America should become Russia’s great rival in a bipolar world, where every nation on the face of the earth would have to choose sides. Russia’s role was not to defeat America (this would be both impossible and insane to suggest), but to achieve a respectable strategic equilibrium. In other words, Russia must do everything to prevent America from achieving a decisive military and political superiority! As for right now, judging from the experience of World War One (that the United States would enter this war some time anyway), Russia’s immediate task must be drawing America into a war with Germany and with Japan, as quickly as possible, using all available means.
Colonel Milstein proceeded to demonstrate that he had not been wasting all those years studying America. He gave Stalin his professional assessments of the principal figures in American leadership, his analysis of pertinent intelligence information, and some valuable insights.
Stalin’s old suspicion that in World War Two the Soviet Union was not fighting just Hitler, but the whole West, had met a welcome champion. From now on, Comrade Milstein would be in charge of all intelligence operations and covert action targeting the United States. In this capacity, Comrade Milstein had outgrown his GRU shoes. His immediate boss would now be Comrade Beria, whom Stalin had appointed Supervisor in Chief of all national security activities. (That did not mean, of course, that Milstein was to be removed from the here and now with Germany. Colonel Milstein’s advice would also be needed to outsmart Hitler’s team in the ongoing military operations.)
…General Milstein was a great man by any standards, and a veritable legend to all who knew about him sub rosa. Therefore, the folkloric name “Ded Moroz/Father Frost,” which I jokingly gave him a long time ago, as the principal architect of the Cold War with the United States, is not only an apt metaphor for him as a professional, but also one that well becomes him as a legend.
(On General Milstein’s later role in ending the Cold War on Russian terms, to which task he had devoted the last ten years of his life, see my later entry The Trojan Horse.)
Sir,
ReplyDeleteA delightful piece of article, indeed. I have met M. Milstein several times in the early 80's and I grew very fond of the old man. He was deadly witty, passionate about ballet( wondering why Nureev had chosen to become a citizen of Austria "of all countries"),and very discrete about himself. Yet, he loved to tell his parents' story, his own one as a gang kid in Moscow as he said. One evening in Mexico City, as conversation was about the Kurile Islands, a former Japanese minister of foreign affairs bluntly stated that Japan had
no IS. "Not even to monitor what the USSR is doing in that region ?" I asked. He said no. "That's another lie, Milstein cut in, every country has an IS, EVEN Luxemburg!"
Everyone laughed around the table, of course. The Japanese laughed along half heartedly. That was Milstein.