Toomas Karmo: Short Open Letter to Russian Diplomats and Russian BGP-Router Administrators

 Quality assessment: 

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 3/5. Justification: I knew just barely enough to treat my subject adequately within the limited scope I set myself.  

Revision history:

UTC=20220320T172025Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo uploaded base version. He then planned to continue producing, in a way not documented here, minor tweaks, over the coming 96 hours, as versions 1.0.1, 1.0.2, ... . . 

In a time of crisis, we must all do what we are able to do, without harbouring illusions regarding our spiritual and intellectual capabilities. Not everyone is cut out to be a hero. God has granted heroism to some, for instance to Jan Palach (1948-1969) in Soviet-occupied Prague and to Sophie Scholl (1921-1943) under the Reich. Both paid the ultimate price for their convictions - Jan Palach through the morally defective means of public suicide, Sophie Scholl through the time-honoured, morally impeccable, means of martyrdom. Most of us are, in contrast, mediocre. 

I would apply this sobering assessment not only to myself, or again to the municipal politicians I dealt with in Canada when helping in vain from 2007 through 2018 (in those years, so many of us strove in vain for the correct conservation of the David Dunlap Observatory woodland), but even to that figure of current public ridicule which is President Vladimir "Special Military Operation" Vladimirovich Putin. 

Former KGB sleeper agent Jack Barsky (1949-; born Albrecht Dittrich; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Barsky) was able to observe a young Mr Putin working in Dresden, I believe with Mr Putin then holding the KGB middle-management rank of pod-polkovnik. Jack Barsky has made it clear that in at any rate his own personal assessment Mr Putin is no genius, but on the contrary is a person who rose in the Cold War intelligence community to a respectably modest rank fitting his respectably modest abilities. 

That assessment is to my mind consistent with Mr Putin's long 2021 essay on the imagined unity of Russia and Ukraine. On reading this all the way through a little rapidly, one has much the same impression as one gains from dipping into Mein Kampf. The impression in both cases is that any B.A. student attaining  Lower Second-Class Honours, and with enough time on his hands, could, if sufficiently nutty, achieve the same literary result. Mr Boris Johnson, himself no Palach or Scholl, summed up the position deftly, a few days ago, at some podium microphone: that long 2021 essay is "Nostradamus meeting the Russian Wikipedia". 

"Kuda sam Tsar eedyot pyeschkom", people say when going to the lavatory: "where the Tsar himself proceeds on foot". Here, then, is a Tsar who rides no horse when in the loo, a Tsar who uses lavatory paper like the rest of us.   

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The Tsar's long-term spiritual welfare I have discussed already at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com/, in an Open Letter to him dated 2022-01-24. I arguably ought soon to discuss it again, if briefly. I wrote that 2022-01-24 letter exactly one month before the Tsar's fatal 2022-02-24 Polenfeldzug. Back then, late in January, it still seemed that the Tsar had enough intellectual and executive ability to refrain from an outright invasion of Ukraine. I thought back then that his downfall and personal disaster impended not immediately but in the medium term. My essential 2022-01-24 points to him still hold, even though he has with his own late-February irrationality now arguably undermined his personal security even in the short term. Who, among even the best analytical minds at FSB, SVR, MI6, and the CIA, can now tell what happens with him over the coming twenty-four months, or even over the coming three?  

The concern of this present essay is not the now-perhaps-doomed Tsar but middle-management persons under him, notably in two crucial cohorts, each comprising perhaps just a few hundred highly educated persons - on the one hand his diplomats, in his embassies and consulates around the globe, and on the other hand the people within Russia who administer a particular component in his nation-wide Internet infrastructure, his ensemble of BGP-conversant routers.  

These two classes of mission-critical officer, having been vetted prior to appointment, are unlikely to include many Jan Palachs or Sophie Scholls. Although we may hope on the one hand for diplomats defecting noisily and nobly at the United Nations and on the other hand for BGP-monitoring router administrators silently leaking root passwords to GCHQ and NSA (traditional papermail, I would suggest, is a refreshingly "retro" alternative to that modern classic which is the VPN), we must not set our hopes high. Politics is in all jurisdictions the art of the possible, the art of the second-best. 

So, Dear Reader, suppose you are a diplomat or a BGP-trained router sysadmin, skilled on the one hand in your foreign languages and on the other hand in such router adjuncts as Astra Linux shell-script programming, but lacking the inner strength of a Jan Palach or a Sophie Scholl. What to do? 

Two ideas come to mind. Firstly, you can do your work not as well as before. You are perhaps in a position to plead to your superior, truthfully if vaguely, something regarding your "private emotional difficulties in the current evolving public situation", as you miss the occasional deadline and allow your diplomatic sitrep cables or the police-and-military end of your Russian BGP communications to degrade a bit. 

Secondly, you can, without attempting outright sabotage, signal quietly and truthfully that your loyalty to Vladimir "Special Military Operation" Vladimirovitch is now conditional, is now becoming a bit shaky. For juridical safety, that signal might be best conveyed not by words but by your facial expression and tone of voice. Words can be used against you in court if the Tsar somehow manages to stay in power, raised eyebrows and an ironic tone of voice not so much. To your superior, your truthful signal, however exactly you may opt to communicate it, means that you cannot now be relied on to execute silly instructions over the coming weeks. You might execute them, and then again you might not: it will all depend, from hour to hour, on the level of silliness being demanded. When this signal game is played skillfully enough, military planning gets undermined. (For what Kremlin politician can plan in confidence, if he is uncertain whom his Paris and London and Vienna and Berlin attachés might be meeting when venturing from one to another convenient First Class compartment on the train? Or what general or police supremo can plan in confidence, when he can no longer predict what his geographically dispersed lieutenants will do, as the networking among his LANs and WANs slowly degrades?) With the progressive undermining,  the current "Special Military Operation" is made progressively more difficult, and lives get saved. 

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I compose this unavoidably troubling letter as a private Estonia-resident Estonian national lacking significant current contacts at any level of government, beyond the merely municipal, in any country. I do ask that readers try to forward the letter to senior levels within the Kremlin government and the Moscow Patriarchy. I will myself quietly bring it to the attention of the Catholic Church. If anyone feels I have overstepped moral boundaries, straying from a sincerely intended corrective messaging into outright sin, I do ask them to contact me. In the particular case of the Moscow Patriarchy, I would envisage publishing their conceivable theological rebuke, and analyzing it, here on this blog. A lack of communication from the Patriarchy to me this spring is to be construed not as an indication of their political agreement, but nevertheless as an indication that they harbour no significant theological concern with my own chosen political stance. 

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