stuff 'n other stuff

No, not another long post about the the post October 1917 civil war in Russia or the importance of early twentieth century East Asian history.

I have, over the past couple of years, accumulated too much leave. So much that I now get emails from HR asking me to get rid of some of it.

Well J and I could do with a long holiday somewhere. We’ve had various plans, Spain, Central Europe, and the like, or perhaps Vietnam and Cambodia but we’re feeling the need for the exotic, genuine travelling like our Lao trip.

We had had plans for Syria to look at Byzantine and Crusader remains and then to travel down through Jordan to end up at St Catherine’s in Egypt.

We started planning that trip before the Arab spring, but even if there was to be a peace settlement in Syria tomorrow, there has been too much blood to make the trip practical or enjoyable, even though the Jordanian and Egyptian portions are certainly possible.

So we thought about South America. And then we saw an article in the weekend paper about someone who went horse riding in Mongolia.

Now I tend to consider horses nasty smelly bitey dangerous things, but perhaps because I’d been reading about Ungern von Sternberg and Mongolia I read the article.

And that sparked the thought, why don’t we go to Europe via the Transiberian ? We like trains, it’s most definitely exotic, and we’ll have a range of experiences to blog and write about?

The man in seat 61 confirmed we weren’t being in the least bit stupid, so we’re now planning a trip for next year, starting from Beijing – we did think about Ho-ChiMinh as a starting point, but thought that might be better as a S E Asia trip -with the aim of ending up in London for a week or so’s R+R before flying back …

I’ve been watching Rory Stewart’s programs on the new great game on SBS. Yes, I know they were on over a month ago but as we watch very little television we tend to accumulate shows – for example we’ll probably end up watching Boardwalk Empire in January despite the fact it started running three or four weeks ago.

Mr Stewart has produced an extremely intelligent and literate account of the Great Game and engagement by Britain and Russia in Central Asia.

And running through his account is the unspoken assumption that in order to understand a region you also need to know something of its languages and culture – something that appears a little out of fashion these days.

Now as I’ve said at length I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the post 1917 civil war in Russia as part of my ongoing fascination with the place.

In the course of this I’ve just finished a biography of Baron Ungern von Sternberg, who was clearly a sociopath, a sadist, and someone we would nowadays lock up for a very long time.

However, Sternberg despite his many faults was probably responsible for Mongolia not being assimilated into China in the 1920’s as had happened earlier with what we now call inner Mongolia.

Mongolia is comparitively rich in mineral resources and next to resource hungry China. There is also a railway line across it that would allow easy trasnshipment of minerals from Siberia.

Now I live in Australia. Our economy is resource dependent – ie we dig stuff out of the ground and sell it to China, Japan and Korea. It would be better for our economy if we made things here but in the main we sell raw materials.

This means that our major competitors are other raw material suppliers, and Russia and Mongolia.

Understanding about Mongolia’s history is part of the process of understanding why Mongolia may not wish to be dependent on China just as understanding the story of the Japanese occupation of Korea and Manchuria is useful for understanding current antipathies. And of course why China may prefer to buy from Australia rather than Russia and Mongolia who my be more averse to a close economic relationship than we are.

And to understand these things needs an understanding of history languages and cultures, and often quite esoteric knowledge.

We seem to be going through a phase where studies of other cultures, languages and histories are not esteemed. Mr Stewart’s programmes give us one reason why we should esteem them more. New footage of people in China trashing Toyotas gives us another.

While we would be stupid not to pay attention to economic realities focusing on the short term economic benefits of downplaying the humanities and allied subjects risks prejudicing our long term economic well being

I’ve been doing quite a lot of reading around the history of the Russian civil war, renewing my fascination with that period. Given the upcoming centenary of the first world war, and the probable emphasis in anglophone countries on the events of the western front, it’s probably worth also remembering the scale of the changes wrought in the east with the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires and the emergence of new states and polities, not to mention the various conflicts and revolutions that came in its wake, the most important of which, for its impact on the history of twentieth century was the October revolution in Russia.

Working through the history of the Russian Civil War and the Allied intervention can be daunting. So many acronyms, places and absolutely stupendous scale can reduce one to a state of complete confusion. So much so that I’ve put together this spreadsheet to put events in sequence. I don’t claim it to be comprehensive, but it’s as accurate as I can get it from the sources available to me.

It has also got to be remembered that this was not a simple green versus blue civil war like the American Civil War or the Spanish Civil war.

In very simple terms, the Bolsheviks mounted a coup against Kerensky’s Provisional Government. In some place the local authorities declared for Lenin, in other places Kerensky. Army officers, who were in a mutinous state anyway individually turned their attentions on the Bolsheviks in part because they were propped up by western aid. It is an open question how many of the white generals might in time have rebelled against Kerensky.

At the same time, various political groupings, mostly in Siberia, tried to stitch together a Provisional Government mark 2, which was in turn deposed by White forces under Kolchak. It is telling that after Kolchak’s coup parts of the Provisional Government’s forces defected to the Bolsheviks rather than fight for the old order.

In other places, in the Baltic, in the Caucasus various former polities tried to re-establish their former states which had been absorbed into the Russian empire, much as happened in the post 1992 break-up of the Soviet Union.

It also has to be remembered that the dramatic changes in this period affected the lives of millions and was built of many individual tragedies.

The most obvious of the tragedies was the extra judicial execution of the Tsar and his family in the basement of the Ipatiev house in July 1918.

We now know that they were all shot or otherwise murdered. We’ve found the bones. Modern DNA testing has disproved all of the imposters no matter how plausible. In the 1920’s when Shanghai was full of taxi-dancers claiming to have been countesses or princesses and ex-countesses working as nightclub entertainers the various imposters probably seemed a quite a bit more plausible.

Not now, we’ve found the bones.

It’s interesting however to look at how the myths might have come about. If you look at the July 18 1918 New York Times it has a report of the execution of the Tsar. Interestingly it says quite explicitly that only Nicholas has been shot and that the rest of the Imperial Family was in detention.

It also states that Nicholas may have been shot by the Ural Soviet to prevent capture by the Czechoslovak legion. (Strangely there have been whispers that the British in Murmansk had a house prepared for important personages – certainly one of the original plans was to evacuate the Czechs via Murmansk – and it would be only natural to speculate that someone thought that they might be taking the Tsar and his family into exile via Murmansk. How they were going to get them from Ekaterinburg to Murmansk is another mystery,)

Searching the newspapers of the time it’s also clear that no one had any real idea of what had happened with various fictitious accounts circulating, and even after the capture of Ekaterinburg by the White forces there was still a lack of clarity, as well as perhaps a reluctance to believe the extent of the murders.

And while the original investigators did not find the bones of Alexis, there was a report put out by the Bolsheviks a few days after the extra judicial killing that Alexis had died of exposure – the circumstances of suffering from exposure being unexplained.

In short no one at the time had any real idea what was happening, and if that was true for the imperial family it must have been so much more true for individuals and an opportunity to perhaps reinvent themselves.

Truth be told I’m a little squeamish about eating rabbit.  No matter how well disguised I have a definite withdrawal response about it.

Totally irrational, I know. I put it down to being told that skinned, deheaded, defooted and detailed a cat looks very like a rabbit when you see it on a butcher’s slab.

And that was just a little irrational kink of mine until J came across this story that in Italy, immediately after the second world war, butchers used to leave one foot, with the fur on, on rabbits that they sold dressed ready for cooking – just to show that they really were rabbit and not cat …

What seems a long time ago I bought myself an e-reader, and I’ve used successfully over the last two or so years with books from Project Gutenberg and with books bought through Borders (when they existed) and BookDepository (when they sold e-books).

I’ve no complaints about the Cool-er, it works well, it’s reliable, and it’s a shame that the parent company went west a year or so ago. In fact I expect to continue to use it for some of my more technical reading due to its use of epub as a native format and one in which quite a few technical books are beginning to appear.

The Cool-er also gave me a chance to teach myself about epub, which definitely has been a valuable experience.

So why the Kindle?

I’ve simply just reached the point when it makes sense to buy ebooks over paperbacks when possible, and of all the retailers out there I’m afraid the only one left standing in Amazon – no one else has as easy to use, or as effective or comprehensive e-book distribution platform.

Technically, other that the fact that the Kindle has wi-fi for book download and the Cool-er had an SD card slot to let you download books to a computer and then transfer them to the Cool-er – an excellent solution for Project Gutenberg books, there’s almost no difference in the capability of the devices. Both have e-ink 6″ screens and 2GB internal storage, and similarly long  battery life.

It’s simply market share and market access. Amazon has it and the others don’t.

simple as that ….

Having read Bruce Lockhart’s autobiography I’m now about halfway through Clifford Kinvig’s military history of the British intervention in post 1917 Russia.

It’s a sorry tale of how what started as an effort to stiffen the Kerensky government’s resolve to continue Russia’s participation in the first world war morphed from a straightforward military assistance mission into a badly thought out and under resourced effort to support the White forces in the post revolutionary civil war, principally Denikin in the south and the pro-SR pro-Menshevik government in Archangel.

While Britain did lend support to the provisional government in Omsk and to Kolchak after his coup support was on a much smaller scale, and essentially confined to military and political advisers. The Americans, Canadians, and of course the Japanese were much more involved as they had easier geographic access to Vladivostok, which was the only way of sending supplies to the Omsk government.

One of the other themes to emerge is the mutinous state of some of the British soldiers – war weary and expecting to be demobbed they were less than charmed to be shipped off to somewhere far away, hostile, and in the case Archangel, cold. Ben Isitt details similar rebelliousness on the part of the Canadian forces in the east.

The other real themes are that the British never really reached an internal consensus as to why they were in Russia and what they hoped to accomplish

Initially it was to stop valuable supplies falling into the hands of the German forces after the treaty of Brest Litovsk. Somewhere it turned into first protecting these supplies from the Bolshevik government and then into something more than tacitly supporting the White forces.

Supporting the White forces was in itself problematical as there was no coherent opposition – Russia had fractured into a set of polities and armies with changing allegiances. Of the opposition, the Omsk government looked the most plausible but even then they lacked a coherent plan. Bernard Pares, who was attached to the British mission to the Omsk government was more than a little scathing about their organisational abilities, or their ability to cope with the new realities

The incoherence of the opposition is what of course allowed the Bolsehvik government to prevail – not only did it control the two largest cities, and consequently industrial centres, they managed to build an army, hold on to a degree of popular support, and manage to pick off the opposing polities one by one.

Trotsky once said that during the revolution power fell into the streets. The Bolshevik achievement was putting an end to the chaos.

There are implications for the wars and civil wars of our time. In Afghanistan we see a government ridden by factionalism, unable to maintain order and reliant on foreign forces for its existence. In the Middle East we see governments unable to govern and opposition factions unable to maintain even a facade of unity.

I’ve just finished reading Bruce Lockhart’s autobiography.

It’s a moderately entertaining read, but it is remarkable for what it doesn’t say. As a witness to great events as the unofficial British representative in Moscow during 1918 he was uniquely placed to report on the machinations around the conclusion of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the reaction to the murder of the tsar and his family, and the allied intervention.

And yet there is almost nothing.

Instead a self portrait of a slightly bumptious individual emerges, eager to justify his importance by saying who he met rather than what he discussed.

One imagines that his official reports back to London had rather more detail. Lockhart obviously felt himself bound by official secrecy when he wrote his autobiography.

What is interesting is the description of the first days of the Bolshevik government and its initial incoherent and chaotic nature, and his conclusion that compared to everyone else, it was the Bolshevik government that was most likely to win out, as they had at least half a plan, compared to the SR or any of the ‘white’ opposition groups – something at variance with the opinions of his lords and masters in London….

As part of the colonial history theme I’ve been reading Barbara Crossette’s ‘Great Hill Stations of Asia’.

Like me, she has been charmed by Beth Ellis’s An English Girl’s First Impressions of Burmah… and was equally puzzled about Beth’s referring to Maymyo as Remyo.

One other interesting little snippet was that the lake at Maymyo was dug by Turkish prisoners of war during World War One – something that at first seems surreal, but actually has a bizarre logic to it.

The Mesopotamian campaign was run by the British colonial command in India, not from Whitehall, using in the main Indian troops. So of course, when they had a large number of prisoners their natural inclination ws to ship them off to a prison camp in India, rather than Egypt or the Sudan. And Burma was of course governed as part of British India …

What the Turks made of being shipped to upcountry Burma is anyone’s guess …

It wasn’t just the Mesopotamian Campaign. Much of Britains involvement in the Gulf was run from India in colonial times with the Trucial States – the precursor to today’s UAE – initially being governed from Delhi and using Indian rupees as currency, as did the early British settlements in Kenya – purely because it was geographically convenient.

One also sees the converse today, with the US using vraious of the Gulf States as staging posts for shipping troops to Afghanistan and with the Taliban opening an office in Qatar as a precursor to possible peace talks …

I came across this little snippet this morning:

For a BBC program in 1954, Sir Mortimer Wheeler tasted a reconstruction of the Tollund Man’s last supper, which turned out to be a tasteless mush. This led him to announce: “I believe that the poor chap of Tollund committed suicide because he could stand his wife’s cooking no longer!”

having once had girlfriend who was pursuing a PhD in Ethnobotany, and more to the point liked to experiment with what we’ll call exotic food plants I could only sympathise with Sir Mortimer.

Let’s just say that the traditional Inca potatoes were a fun addition to dinner but that ground-elder must have been a significant contribution to the end of the western Roman empire – a tasteless chewy spinach like green gluck.

However it did get me thinking about mental experimentation, the art of trying to think yourself as living at another time or in another culture – and what it means for digital preservation.

The obvious use for mental experimentation is in historical fiction. The past is a different country, where not only do they do things differently but also one we can never visit. We can guess, we can re-enact, we can experiment, but we can never visit.

We can read the literature of the time but we can never quite put ourselves in the same place as someone who lived at the time, no matter how much barley mush and ground elder we eat.

The reason for this is disruptive change. I’ve written previously about how life the Victorian era was quite different from life fifty years previously, due to the disruptive changes caused by large scale industrialisation and the impact of steam ships, railways, the penny post in changing the nature of communication.

So it s with our own time. The postal service is dying, communication is via the internet and more and more our life is going digital. We may not realise it but we are living through a period of disruptive change much as the Victorians did. Because we now do things differently. Our workflows may still be the same but techologies used have changed immeasurably.

And that creates a discontinuity.

There are those who can remember how things were and those who can’t because they were never there.

For example, I can remember pounds shillings and pence, eight inch floppy disks, steam trains, punched cards. I remember Wordstar. I even taught it. I remember when international calls were shockingly expensive and the fax machine was the latest in cutting edge communications technology. I even remember thinking Modula-2 was cool.

No one under thirty five will remember such things. And indeed why should they.

But this does create an interesting problem for writing history (or indeed historical fiction). Before 1980 most documents were either handwritten or typescript, and most books were printed. Despite all the changes and disruptions of the twentieth century the world worked more or less the same in 1960 as it did in 1880. Governments may have changed, empires disappeared but the mechanics of daily life were similar, which made the interpretation of documents simpler as we were operating on the same set of assumptions. It also means that we can read them.

To explain the importance of shared assumptions take this example:

Australian post boxes are red because once all post boxes in the British Empire were red. In Laos, despite the Indochinese wars and nearly forty years of the People’s Democratic Republic they’re blue. Because once all post boxes in France and the French colonies were blue, even though now in France they are yellow. Thus if some one talks about ‘putting something in the big red box’ you know they mean posting a letter if they’re in Australia or the UK. If you were in Laos it might mean something completely different.

Today, documents are almost universally written using Word, and are either emailed or come on a USB stick. We have an expectation that we can read any recent document. And if they aren’t AbiWord or Open/Libre Office can open them. In other words we can probably recover documents written in the last few years, or if we can’t we can use OCR to recover the text from a scanned version.

However, that’s not the case with legacy data.

I was recently trying to recover some data from the 1990’s. The data was tables of numbers and the documentation that described which column contained what was written in TeX.

Fortunately, someone had had the sense to copy everything to CD sometime around the end of the nineties so recovering the information was a simple matter of installing OzTeX and generating a PDF. And we could read it because the media was a type that was still in common use and hadn’t changed during the intervening decade and a half.

If it was still on an IoMega Zip drive it could have been a problem. Same is true of the box of floppy disks we all have in our garages. Or indeed the three inch Amstrad disk cartridges from the late eighties. The media could well still be readable, but with what?

The reason being that in the eighties and nineties we had a period of disruptive chaotic change during the widespread adoption of information technology.

Wordprocessing applications came and went. First it was Wordstar, then WordPerfect and finally Word, with AmiPro getting in on the act. Media formats equally changed. Single sided to double sided, from eight inch through five and a quarter to three and a half inch disks. Macs of course used an 800k rather than 720k format etc etc.

For example, in the mid eighties I project managed a number of small ecological surveys, that would give species abundance data for then. At the time we were concerned with the impact of acid rain and what it might have done to the relative abundance of various species compared to earlier surveys stretching back to the nineteenth century.

Nowadays we are more interested in global warming than acid rain, but the data collected in the nineteen eighties would still be valuable. Except we took the survey sheets and typed the species data into a set of flat data files on a CP/M based machine. We did upload the files to a Vax for statistical analysis but we deleted them to save space, keeping the primary files stayed on a set of five and a quarter inch disks. I have no idea if the disks still exist.

The implication is that documents written and data collected during these decades will be difficult to recover even if we have the original files and media. And as such we have lost part of the story of how we got from there to here …