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Russia Has Mobilized For War Many Times Before – Sometimes It Unified The Nation, Other Times It Ended In Disaster

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A Russian citizen being called up for duty. Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Vladimir Putin’s mobilization of 300,000 additional Russian soldiers to fight in Ukraine has gotten off to a rocky start.

Nominally aimed at calling up reserve forces with prior combat experience, early reports suggest a broader dragnet and widespread resistance against the call-up. Recruitment offices have been torched, protests against the action have dotted Russian cities, and droves of men have reportedly fled the country to avoid being enlisted.

As a scholar of Russian history, I see this latest move by Putin in the context of past mass mobilizations undertaken by Russia throughout its history. Sometimes it has worked, bolstering a force while legitimizing conflict in the eyes of the public and instilling national unity. But it can also backfire, as the Russian president may find to his cost.

Turning the fortunes of war

Putin most often uses World War II as his historical reference point. The Soviet Union suffered tremendous losses during the Nazi invasion but countered by conducting the most extensive mobilization that the world had ever seen and probably will ever see.

As well as mobilizing the entire economy for wartime production and putting women to work in factories in unprecedented numbers, the Soviet Union also mobilized 34 million soldiers, building one of the largest armies ever assembled. This total mobilization led Nazi Germany to suffer four-fifths of its total wartime casualties on the Soviet front and was the single most important reason Germany was defeated.

A poster shows a woman in a red dress gesticulating in front of pointed bayonets.
A World War II Soviet military recruitment poster.
Laski Diffusion/Getty Images

It also served to turn the fortunes of a Soviet state that had entered the war weakened by Josef Stalin’s campaign to force farmers into state-run collective farms, a deadly famine that resulted and waves of police repression that had killed millions of citizens.

Victory gave the Soviet Union a new legitimacy at home and abroad that helped it survive and even thrive as a great power for 45 more years. The powerful Red Army that was assembled swept through half of Europe and brought the Russian Empire’s borders further west than any tsar had done.

A legitimizing, unifying force

The success of this mobilization and the great Soviet victory have been central to Putin’s worldview. He decreed draconian penalties for any attempt to question Soviet conduct in World War II, like the brutal annexation of the Baltic states, mistakes by Stalin and his generals, or occupation policies in Eastern Europe. Putin also obsessed about Ukrainian nationalist partisans who fought against Stalin during the war, conflating them with contemporary Ukrainians who simply desire sovereignty.

Putin seems to have hoped to recreate the unifying, legitimizing results of the great World War II effort.

Indeed, mass mobilizations have periodically unified the nation at other times. In 1612, a mass rising led to a successful war to expel Catholic Polish invaders, ending a period of internal strife and leading to broad unity in favor of the new Romanov dynasty and its autocratic rule.

Two hundred years later, in 1812, Russia mobilized against a foreign invader, Napoleon, and won a decisive victory that brought Russian troops to Paris and made Russia a great power in Europe. It also ended Tsar Alexander I’s dalliance with liberal reforms. Russia became known as the “gendarme of Europe,” the active enforcer of an international alliance against constitutional liberalism.

Resentment and military disaster

But while these mobilizations for war unified the country and brought legitimacy to the regime, others did the opposite.

From 1768 to 1774, Catherine II, Russia’s greatest conqueror, launched a massive war against the Ottoman Empire that led to the conquest of much of modern southern Ukraine and Crimea.

But to win, Cossacks – irregular military groups living in Russia’s borderlands – and peasants bore the brunt. Formerly relatively free to choose the conditions of their service to the tsar, Cossacks were locked into the regular Russian army and sent to the front in large numbers. Peasants felt the twin burdens of ever tightening bonds of serfdom and wartime conscription.

The two groups joined together in a revolt that so seriously threatened the state that Catherine had to rush a peace settlement with the Ottoman Empire to bring the army home to crush the rebels.

In 1904, Russia underestimated the rising power of Japan and stumbled into a war with that country. A subsequent call-up of university students and young men for a very unpopular war proved to be a major cause of the revolution that ensued in 1905. Only when the tsar withdrew from the war and conceded a parliament and constitution was order restored.

Despite an effective mobilization of millions of soldiers at the beginning of World War I, Russia incurred massive losses as Germany and Austria-Hungary drove deep into Russian territory. Street protests against food shortages in February 1917 spurred a broad coalition of elected members of parliament and military commanders to overthrow the tsar. They thought a legitimate, popular government would inspire more fighting spirit among the troops.

A black and white photo shows young looking men and boys in army uniform trudging through the mud.
Young recruits were sent to fight for Russia in World War I.
Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The leaders of the new government doubled down on the war effort, ordering a major new mobilization of troops, calling up people who had been previously exempt, such as heads of households, older men and ethnic minorities. There were even orders to send to the front soldiers who had previously been kept in reserve garrisons because of suspect loyalties or subpar fighting qualities.

On paper, the Russian army swelled to 10 million men, the largest it had been through the entire war to date. With more troops and more weapons than the enemy and newfound legitimacy, the government overestimated popular support for the war and launched an offensive. But after a couple weeks of advances, the unreliable recent recruits were the first to desert, starting an avalanche of 2 million desertions that both destroyed the army and, as armed soldiers went back to their villages, started the agrarian revolution when peasants drove noble landlords out of the countryside and seized the land for themselves.

Fearing counterrevolution, the new government disbanded much of the police force but was unable to create a new one to replace it. The army was pinned down at the front and losing numbers fast as soldiers went home to claim land. It could not protect the state from the small Bolshevik faction of the communist movement, which conducted a successful armed coup in October 1917. The summer offensive has gone down in history as one of the worst military gambles ever.

Putin’s great gamble?

Putin appears to look toward World War II, missing the lessons of the earlier Great War.

The mobilization to fight World War I drew support from national representatives and from a relatively free press. While the population was weary of war by 1917, few questioned the legitimate need to defend the country against the German invaders.

Putin’s war in Ukraine is very different. It is widely seen as unnecessary, public support is tepid, and there is no free press or freely elected representatives to give it legitimate support.

The mobilization of 1917 provides a stark lesson that larger armies are not necessarily stronger ones, and adding large numbers of unreliable soldiers to an army can be an enormous gamble.

The usually cautious military observer Michael Kaufman responded to Putin’s mobilization by declaring that Putin now has staked his regime on the outcome of the war. It is already clear that this war will not be a unifying, legitimizing event like World War II. But it remains to be seen whether this mobilization will go down the 1917 road to military dysfunction and revolution.

The Conversation

Eric Lohr has received funding from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research Fellowship (2012) and the Kennan Institute for Russian studies fellowship (2005). He has served as director of American University’s Carmel Institute for Russian History and Culture (2011-12; 2019-20), an organization that provided scholarships for students to study Russian language and previously included film screenings and cultural events at the Russian Embassy. This past activity in no way influences his scholarship or political views.

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Why Civil Rights Icon Fannie Lou Hamer Was ‘sick And Tired Of Being Sick And Tired’

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Fanny Lou Hamer speaks out against Mississippi’s racist voting laws on Aug. 8, 1964. Bettmann/Getty Images

It wasn’t called voter suppression back then, but civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer knew exactly how white authorities
in Mississippi felt about Black people voting in the 1960s.

At a rally with Malcolm X in Harlem, New York, on Dec. 20, 1964, Hamer described the brutal beatings she and other Black people endured in Mississippi in their fight for civil and voting rights.

A year earlier, in June 1963, Hamer and several of her friends attended a voter education training workshop in Charleston, South Carolina. On their way back to Mississippi, the bus driver called the police to remove Hamer and her colleagues from the whites-only section of the bus where they had been sitting.

When they stopped in Winona, Mississippi, local police were waiting and promptly arrested them for disorderly conduct.

While in jail, Hamer told the Harlem rally, “I began to hear the sounds of licks and I began to hear screams. I couldn’t see the people, but I could hear them. … They would call her awful names. And I would hear when she would hit the floor again.”

After a while, Hamer said, she saw a friend pass her cell.

“Her clothes had been ripped off from the shoulder down to the waist,” Hamer said. “Her hair was standing up on her head. Her mouth was swollen and bleeding. And one of her eyes looked like blood. … And then three men came to my cell.”

Hamer was beaten, too, and sustained injuries that left her with lifelong injuries to her eyes, kidneys and legs. The experience also left her with little choice but to fight back. And fight she did, until her death at the age of 59 on March 14, 1977.

Challenging the status quo

The rally in Harlem was organized to support the political party that Hamer co-founded in 1964 as part of Freedom Summer, which saw hundreds of college students travel to Mississippi and other Southern states to help register Black people to vote.

A Black woman who is smiling and wearing a dress greets a white man wearing a business suit.
Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer meets a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960.
Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was a racially integrated alternative to the state’s segregationist Democratic Party. Hamer was elected vice-chair of the party and also ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In addition to Hamer’s congressional campaign, one of her party’s main goals was to block the seating of the state’s five pro-segregation U.S. congressmen.

In 1964, less than 7% of the state’s Black population in Mississippi was registered to vote, despite the fact that nearly 40% of the state’s population was Black.

LBJ’s Southern problem

Hamer’s challenge of the segregated delegation couldn’t have come at a worse time for President Lyndon Johnson.

Locked at the time in a reelection campaign against right-wing conservative Barry Goldwater, Johnson feared losing Southern Democratic politicians and voters in the upcoming presidential election.

A white man is shaking the hands of a Black man as a crowd of other men stand behind them.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, left, shakes hands with Martin Luther King Jr. after signing the Civil Rights Act on July 3, 1964, at the White House.
AFP via Getty Images

The fight in Mississippi erupted on the national stage when television networks broadcast Hamer’s Aug. 22, 1964, testimony before the Democratic Convention Credentials Committee, which determined who was qualified to serve as a state delegate. In her bid to get the committee to recognize her political party, Hamer talked about the second-class, often violent, treatment afforded Black people.

“All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens,” she said.

To prevent further testimony from Hamer that would further incense Southern Democrats, Johnson immediately held an impromptu press conference that would divert network television attention away from Hamer.

Despite Johnson’s tactics, Hamer’s story still spread throughout the nation in part because of a series of rallies held in Northern cities, including the one in Harlem.

“The truth is the only thing going to free us,” Hamer said during the speech in Harlem. “When I was testifying before the Credentials Committee, I was cut off because they hate to see what they been knowing all the time, and that’s the truth.”

Sick and tired

Born on Oct. 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, Hamer was the 20th and last child of sharecroppers Lou Ella and James Townsend. She began picking cotton at the age of 6, and she would be forced to leave school shortly afterward to help her family eke out a living.

“We would work 10 and 11 hours a day for three lousy dollars,” Hamer once said.

In 1961, while undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor, Hamer received a hysterectomy by a white doctor without her consent. The forced sterilization was one of the things that prompted Hamer to join the Civil Rights Movement.

In the summer of 1962, Hamer attended her first meeting of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights group of mostly Black college students who organized nonviolent protests against racial segregation and provided voter registration training. On Aug. 31, 1962, Hamer and 17 others decided to put their training to use by trying to register to vote at the Indianola, Mississippi, courthouse.

Of the 18 people, 16 were not allowed to take the test required for voter registration. Only Hamer and one other were allowed to take it – and both failed. These literacy tests consisted of reading and interpreting portions of the state constitution, such as the one on habeas corpus, a constitutional right to protect a person against illegal imprisonment.

Dejected, the group was further harassed when local police stopped their bus and fined them $100 for an overblown charge that the bus was too yellow.

The insults and constant fear of violence were examples of day-to-day life for Black people in Mississippi, a story Hamer argued was tragic, unconstitutional and sadly all too well-known.

“And you can always hear this long sob story,” she said. “For 300 years, we’ve given them time. And I’ve been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want a change.”

The Conversation

Marlee Bunch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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How To Have The Hard Conversations About Who Really Won The 2020 Presidential Election − Before Election Day 2024

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It’s important to democracy to have difficult discussions across political lines. MirageC/Moment via Getty Images

Millions of Americans believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. They think Donald Trump won by a landslide in 2020 and lost only because of widespread voter fraud. Some of the people who hold these views are my relatives, neighbors and professional associates. Because I reject these claims, it can be difficult to talk to those who accept them.

Often, we avoid the topic of politics. But as a political science scholar, I expect that as the 2024 election gets closer, conversations about 2020 will become more common, more important and more unavoidable.

So, what does someone like me, who concludes that the last presidential election was legitimately won by Joe Biden, say to those who think that Trump was the actual winner? Here are a few of the questions I raise in my own conversations about 2020.

Rioters climb the walls of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
This is not what democracy looks like.
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Polls and pollsters

I usually begin by asking about polls. Polls and pollsters are often wrong about close elections, and many prominent pollsters tilt toward Democrats. They predicted a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016.

But even those polls and pollsters would be unlikely to have missed a 2020 landslide for Trump – or Biden. Unless, of course, as was the case, the landslide did not exist.

Recent political polling has been less accurate than many people expect. And all polls have margins of error: They provide an imperfect picture of public sentiment in a closely divided nation.

That said, even polls with a sizable margin of error should have been able to find a Trump landslide in 2020 – but they didn’t, because there wasn’t one. The last American presidential landslide, Reagan in 1984, was clearly seen in preelection polling.

If millions of fraudulent votes were cast in 2020, reputable pollsters would have discovered a discrepancy between their data and official election results. This would have been particularly true for the pollsters trusted by Republicans.

Trump himself has often praised the Rasmussen polling organization. But just before Election Day 2020, Rasmussen reported that Trump could win a narrow victory in the Electoral College only if he swept all the toss-up states – a daunting task. Rasmussen found no evidence of a forthcoming Trump landslide and projected that Biden would get 51% of the national popular vote. That’s almost exactly the percentage he received in the official count.

Where is the congressional investigation of 2020 voter fraud?

The House Republicans have not convened a special committee to investigate the 2020 election. Such a committee could summon witnesses, hold high-profile hearings and issue a detailed report. It could explain to the American people exactly what happened in the presidential election, how the election was stolen and who was responsible. If the evidence collected justified it, they could make criminal referrals to the Justice Department. The Democrats did all of these things in connection to the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

What could be more important to the American public than a full and fair account of 2020 voter fraud? Donald Trump calls it “one of the greatest crimes in the history of our country.” Yet the Republicans on Capitol Hill have not authorized a major public and professional investigation of those alleged crimes. Perhaps, as former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney claims, most Republican members of Congress know that Trump’s statements about massive voter fraud are false.

It would be hard, even for Congress, to investigate something that did not happen.

Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney says many Republicans in Congress don’t believe Trump’s lies.

When the big lie goes to court

Like Congress, or professional pollsters, the judicial system has ways to expose election fraud. Immediately after the 2020 election, the Trump campaign went to court more than 60 times to challenge voting procedures and results.

They lost in all but one case.

Related lawsuits have also been decided against those who claimed that the 2020 election was stolen.

For instance, Fox News was sued for defamation because of broadcasts linking Dominion voting machines to allegations of a rigged 2020 election. Fox, a powerful and wealthy corporation, could have taken the case to trial but didn’t. Instead, it paid three-quarters of a billion dollars to settle the case.

In another case, Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to pay $148 million to Georgia election workers he falsely accused of misconduct. More civil suits are pending.

Trump’s claim of a win in 2020 – known by its critics as “The Big Lie” – has regularly and repeatedly lost in court. If there were any truth to what Trump and his supporters say about the 2020 election, shouldn’t there be lawyers who present effective evidence and judges who give it credence? So far, there are not.

Donald Trump doesn’t think the U.S. is a democracy.

Democracy in America?

Hard conversations about election integrity often come around to a more fundamental question: Do we still have democracy in America?

I think we do. Our democracy is fragile and under greater stress than at any time since the Civil War. But it is still a democracy. The rule of law may be slow, but it prevails. Harassed and threatened election officials do their jobs with courage and integrity. Joe Biden, the official winner of the 2020 election, sits in the White House.

Supporters of Donald Trump are likely to think that the U.S. is not a democracy. In their beliefs about how America works, millions of illegal votes are cast and counted on a regular basis; news is fake; violence is justified to halt fraudulent government proceedings; and it’s OK for a presidential candidate to want to be a dictator – if only for a day.

In a functioning democracy, everyone has constitutionally protected rights to hold and express their political opinions. But I believe we should all be willing to discuss and evaluate the evidence that supports, or fails to support, those opinions.

There is no verified evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020. You can’t find it in the polls. You won’t get it from Congress. Claims of election wrongdoing have failed in the courts. I sometimes ask my friends what I am missing. Maybe what’s really missing is a readiness for the hard political conversations that I believe must be had in the 2024 election season.

The Conversation

Robert A. Strong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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I’ve Captained Ships Into Tight Ports Like Baltimore, And This Is How Captains Like Me Work With Harbor Pilots To Avoid Deadly Collisions

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The ship Dali amid the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 26, 2024. AP Photo/Matt Rourke

Details are still emerging about the disaster that happened in the early morning of March 26, 2024, when the Dali, a large cargo ship on its way out of the port of Baltimore, hit a major bridge and caused it to collapse.

The Conversation’s senior politics and democracy editor, Naomi Schalit, spoke with Captain Allan Post, a veteran ship’s officer, about the role a ship pilot plays in bringing a large ship in and out of a harbor. Post, who now directs Marine Education Support and Safety Operations at Texas A&M University at Galveston and is also deputy superintendent of the Texas A&M Maritime Academy, said the disaster was “absolutely” every crew member’s nightmare.

What was your first thought when you heard about the accident?

Post: My first thought was, thank God it happened at night, because of the low amount of traffic on the bridge. If that had happened during the daytime, casualties would be in the thousands. My heart aches for those lives lost.

There were two ship pilots aboard the ship as it left its berth in the Port of Baltimore. Can you tell us what ship pilots do?

Post: Ship pilots are brought on board in what are considered restricted maneuverability or navigation areas. They are local experts who are usually certified by the state or federal government to provide advice to the master of the vessel as to how to control the vessel, safely and adequately, through the pilotage waters, which in this case would be down the river from the Port of Baltimore.

Pilots are well practiced in close-quarters maneuvering, especially with tugboats and docking the vessel alongside the assigned berth.

The moment the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after a container ship slammed into it.

But a pilot doesn’t come aboard the ship and take control of it, do they?

Post: They are just advisers to the captain, who is known as the “master.” The master still has full responsibility for the safe navigation of the vessel. So the pilot will meet the ship out at sea or at the dock if it’s in port and leaving to go to sea. They proceed up to the bridge. Usually they exchange greetings, and usually a little bit of ship’s swag is given, either a hat or something else, or at least a cup of coffee.

They then set up their gear. With the electronics that we now have, they plug into the ship’s electronic chart data information system. And then they conduct the pilot exchange with the master of the vessel, where the master of the vessel describes where they are going, what the characteristics of the ship are, who’s on the bridge, what their first language is and the air draft of the vessel, which refers to how high out of the water the vessel is, so that you know whether you can take the ship under a bridge safely.

Once that’s completed, the pilot then starts instructing the officer of the watch or the captain – those are usually the same person – in how to get to where they need to be to dock the ship, or undock the ship and bring it to sea. This instructing is done during complex maneuvers, not all the time. The pilot can also say he’s not going to do it, and can shut down their operations if conditions are unsafe or if they feel that the vessel is not in condition to be able to transit safely. That happens a lot, especially in fog.

The ship pilot also interacts with the Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Service and other ships in the area, and coordinates with the tugboats and line handlers to be able to safely maneuver the vessel close to the pier or when a ship is leaving the berth.

Can you describe the training of a ship pilot?

Post: Most of them start out at a maritime academy and have to spend many years at sea in command or as a bridge watch-stander on a vessel. From there, they start into the pilot apprentice program that each one of the pilot associations has, and those programs last years. What they do in those programs is use simulators and real, actual hands-on training, so that they can see how the different ships maneuver, how different places along the route have different currents and tides, and how the channels affect the ships.

It’s not something that you can go to a sea school for three weeks to learn and then come out and be a pilot. It’s many years long. They’re really the surgeons of the sea.

So when a ship’s pilot shows up, they’re going to be someone with a minimum of how many years training before they even get onto your ship?

Post: Many have 10-plus years before they are allowed to work on their own.

A man climbing down a rope and wood ladder on the side of a very tall ship.
A Liverpool, England, ship pilot climbing down a ladder from the MSC Sandra to a waiting pilot launch after guiding the container ship out of the Mersey River at the beginning of its voyage to Montreal.
Photo by Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images

They have to be specialists in the place where they work, don’t they?

Post: Most of them are ship’s officers licensed by the U.S. Coast Guard, and they’re licensed for unlimited tonnage vessels. But that’s not the end of training. From there, they are hired into the pilot apprentice programs for the area in which they’re going to gain their pilot endorsement or credentials. One pilot may not be credentialed in another area. They spend many years under the guidance of senior pilots who teach them basically everything that they need to know about the local waterways, about the navigation, current tides, where all the berths are. They become absolute experts in how to do this. And then, when most of them end up taking the pilotage exam, they have to draw the charts that they would be using in the pilotage waters – from memory.

Are there legal requirements for ship pilots to be present both going out of and coming in these restricted areas?

Post: Yes, there are – state law, federal law or both.

This is an almost 1,000-foot-long vessel. Is that big, small or medium?

Post: That’s about standard size these days. Ship sizes have absolutely grown monstrous over the years. But 1,000 feet is just about normal.

Has ship piloting been around for a long time?

Post: It’s been around for almost as long as man has been using the sea for commerce. In the early years of sea travel, and even now, a captain is not going to know every port, so he would bring on a person with local knowledge. It started out a lot of times as local fishermen. In the U.S., the Sandy Hook Pilots Association has been piloting ships in and out of New York Harbor for about 300 years.

Was what happened in Baltimore every captain, pilot and crew’s nightmare?

Post: Absolutely. My initial assumption is that I think it’s going to come down to an electrical fault on the ship that was just terrible timing.

The Conversation

Allan Post does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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