PCR: Here is Gilbert Doctorow, who is actually knowledgeable about Russia, exposing Frederick Starr, a fraud who lies for a living. It is people such as Frederick Starr who, with their lies, expose us to the likelihood of nuclear war. His paymaster is an enemy of humanity.
S. Frederick Starr: once funded by the CIA, always funded by the CIA - all the way to the grave
For those who are not familiar with it, JRL was for a couple of decades a resource in good times and bad for the US academic community, providing a daily digest of material published about Russia and more recently also about Ukraine. Regrettably, David Johnson’s attempts at presenting a balanced content lost him his long-time sponsors sometime earlier in this calendar year and, after a search for money, he seems to have found a new sponsor and kept the JRL afloat. However, judging by what JRL has been carrying of late, it would be fair to conclude that there were strings attached to the funding to ensure that his digest pitched to academics consists mainly of Washington narrative trash that you otherwise find everywhere in mainstream.
Yes, Johnson does throw a bone to the likes of me from time to time, including in yesterday’s issue, but dissonant voices are very clearly now a tiny minority of articles in this digest.
If I may cut to the quick, I write to call attention to the number one article in yesterday’s JRL, by S. Frederick Starr, taken over from The National Interest, “Ukraine and Russia’s Collapsing Home Front.” The link to the original is https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ukraine-and-russia%E2%80%99s-collapsing-home-front-213869
As we know all too well, The National Interest also is a publication that lost what modicum of balanced content it once had when the founder and long-time director of the think tank of the same name to which it belongs, Dmitry Simes, had his fill of fighting the Russophobe madness in Washington and in the first days after the start of the Special Military Operation left for Moscow, where he is today a principal moderator on the talk show The Great Game on Pervy Kanal of Russian state television.
The title of Starr’s article tips you off that you are about to read an account of the present state of the war that totally contradicts what even mainstream publications like The Financial Times or The New York Times today are telling us. Accounts published daily in these Russia-hating mainstream publications make clear that Russia is advancing on the front lines in Donbass by greater advances measured in kilometers than at any time since the war began and that Russia has also recaptured more than half of the Kursk oblast territory that was overrun by Ukrainian forces back in August during their surprise incursion.
No matter. Starr has decided to focus not on the front lines but on the Russian home front. Starr insists that this aspect of the war has not received proper coverage and that those Western reporters who remain in Russia self-censor “in the hope of preserving their accreditation and visas.”
S. Frederick Starr has decided to fill this void with lies and deception that he assumes no one is going to be able to contradict. He did not count on me. I have used my periodic visits to Russia over these past two years precisely to report on the home front, both in terms of what I see on my walking tours of markets and what I hear from various levels of society ranging from taxi drivers and hair dressers to intellectuals from the habitually pro-Western intelligentsia.
As readers of these pages know very well, whether I am in Russia or here in Brussels I follow very closely the leading Russian television talk shows and news wrap-ups. On this basis I denounce here Starr’s total misrepresentation of what the co-presenter of Sixty Minutes, Olga Skabeyeva, has been saying about the war, or what the director of Mosfilm Karen Shakhnazarov says, not to mention what Vladimir Solovyov, the dean of Russian journalists and host to his own Evening with Vladimir Solovyov show is saying every day on air. They are all deeply patriotic personalities. And it is both utterly outrageous and a tip-off of the fraudulent nature of Starr’s observations that he tells us that Solovyov is ‘Shakhnazarov’s boss.’
I quote below one paragraph from this incredibly shabby piece of propaganda from Starr:
“The most audible focus of domestic criticism is what is seen as the disastrous impact of the Ukraine war on the Russian home front. While many in the Western press express amazement that the Russian economy is still functioning, those Russians who bother to follow the televised debates in the Duma know that this has been possible largely due to government contracts with civilian firms to shift production from consumer goods to military hardware.”
I have to ask when was the last time that Starr visited Russia and, if he actually set foot in the country since February 2022, whether he left his 5 star hotel to take a walk around and see for himself what reality is on the ground or he just sat in the bar and listened to Russia-hating Liberals, not all of whom followed the bigwig thieves like Anatoly Chubais who got out with their ill begotten cash when the going was good.
Even the Russia-hating Financial Times a couple of months ago allowed one of their reporters to publish a lengthy article on Russia’s wartime prosperity that has doubled the take-home pay of working-class people over the past year. And any visit to supermarkets or to shopping centers proves to you that Russian production of every variety of foodstuff has largely replaced imports from the West, that a great many articles of clothing and consumer goods of all kinds are now produced in Russia.
I will not begin to list the outrageous lies about the state of the economy that Starr has dredged up from slimy characters that you find in every society. The notion that ‘Russians…are forced to devote a fifth of their income to heating alone’ is total rubbish.
The only negative in his entire narrative that I can agree with is criticism of the director of the Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina that ‘she does everything possible to hinder economic growth.’ But you don’t have to put forward some small bit Duma member Valery Gartung to hear that. You hear it on every second Evening with Vladimir Solovyov television program from the mouth of the non-party Duma member Alexander Babakov, who was formerly linked to the Just Russia opposition party. Fortunately, other members of the Putin administration have found ways to prevent the Bank of Russia’s insanely high interest rate (18%) from strangling the economy by providing heavy loan subsidies to producers of goods essential to the war effort and more broadly to the consumer economy, as well as to mortgage loans to certain strata of the population, particularly young families.
As for the demographic crisis in Russia, Starr lays it on thick, trying to persuade us that the heavy toll of war casualties has greatly aggravated the situation. He speaks of an “enormous loss of lives due to the army’s ‘meat assaults’ and appalling disregard for its soldiers’ lives.” If there were to be one lie more ugly than others in this rotten essay by Starr, that remark takes the prize. Anyone familiar with the conduct of the war knows perfectly well that the Russian military under instruction from Vladimir Putin has conducted the ground advances with greatest caution and at far lesser speed that would have been possible under normal military doctrine. Every effort has been made precisely to spare the lives of Russian men at arms, though this has greatly prolonged the war.
The war has been very costly in soldiers’ lives, but that is in the lives of Ukrainian troops. The commonly accepted ratio of Killed in Action is 7 Ukrainians to 1 Russian.
Starr concludes his essay with the following: “…Putin is operating from weakness, not strength, and..on the home front, his luck is fast running out.”
As those who have followed my published articles over the course of the past dozen years will know, in the distant past I regularly wrote critiques of the writings of contributors to Foreign Affairs and authors of books about Russia and Eastern Europe that were in the public eye, such as by Timothy Snider. However, at a certain point I decided to stop wasting time critiquing others and to devote myself entirely to the constructive task of setting out my own interpretation of current events in the area of my expertise.
Today I have broken with that rule because it is utterly maddening that lies such as Starr is selling on the pages of what was once a respectable publication should appear precisely now when the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine, Russia and NATO is approaching an end-game which may further the collapse of US global hegemony and its replacement by genuine multipolarity, or may, on the contrary take us all over the cliff to nuclear Armageddon. The false message from Starr promotes the latter, tragic denouement.
I have an additional reason for taking on S. Frederick Starr over an article that bears his signature but which, in truth, I doubt he actually wrote given that it is so shabbily researched. That reason is that he was once a true Russia expert who sold his soul to the devil, as so many of his peers in American universities have done.
That he was once a true Russia expert I knew as a graduate student reading the history of Russia’s great reforms in the mid-19th century that he produced based on his dissertation work. I also had a personal contact with him: Starr was a member of the jury that evaluated and gave its complimentary ‘honors’ verdict on my Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University in 1975. We corresponded in the year or two that followed and he very kindly assigned a research contract to me for study of Russian archival materials in private hands in the States. He did this in the name of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, where he took up the position of director after leaving his teaching position at Princeton.
When I left the crisis-hit academic world shortly thereafter and entered international business as a consultant to major corporations trying to establish large scale industrial and commercial operations in the Soviet Union during the waning days of détente, Starr and others of his ilk who were themselves very comfortably situated professionally were quick to look down their noses at those who, like myself, escaped the looming disaster of academic penury and landed on their feet elsewhere. This was perfectly clear when, by chance, we met in a hotel in Tbilisi in September 1979. I was accompanying my corporate client Castle & Cooke to meetings with the Georgian Ministry of Agriculture to pursue a project for raising vegetables to serve consumers in Central Russia. Starr was there accompanying Harrison Salisbury to a writers’ conference. Our relations were already quite frosty.
And in the decades to come, he and I continued our respective climbs in very different mutually distrustful career paths. Starr moved on to the presidency of Tulane University, and then in his late years took charge of think tanks relating to Central Asia – Caucasus. I had little doubt who was paying the fare: a certain three letter Agency. His affiliations with a variety of think tanks on two continents are spelled out in his Eurasia Foundation entry.
Sadly, the dry residue of his expertise is the lies and propaganda published over his name now in The National Interest.
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