Putin’s Constitutional Changes Sent a Dangerous Message to Business, Zaostrovtsev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 3 – Vladimir Putin’s constitutional changes last year already are having a negative impact on the economy, not the specific provisions as much as the fact that what Putin did shows businesses that they have no reason to count on the rule of law because laws and even the constitution will be changed at the whim of the rulers, Andrey Zaostrovtsev says.

            “The changes introduced in the preamble in fact blocked the section about human rights,” the European University economist says;” “and this is a signal for business and the economy: if the basic law can be changed to easily, then everything else can be changed as well. Thus, there is no stability in the legal situation, not to speak about the supremacy of law.”

            That makes it impossible for businesses or anyone else to make long-term plans, plans needed if the economy is going to escape from its fundamental dependence on the export of raw materials and develop in ways that will allow for a serious recovery after the damage that has been done by the pandemic (severreal.org/a/31014650.html).

            Much of the Russian economy was not devastated by the coronavirus and so should be able to recover, and inflation is likely to remain below five percent. But the increasing role of the government and uncertainty about what that role will remain are going to limit the recovery, especially as “freedom is becoming ever more a deficit good.”

            What lies ahead for the Russian economy, the economist suggests, is stagnation; but this is not something that threatens the rulers because they have the tools necessary to punish any challenger and all potential challengers know that if they act, they risk losing their property or even their freedom.

            This reflects the fact that Russia, like China, is based on a civilization where state power is primary and property secondary rather than the other way around as is the case in the West. At the same time, Russia and China cannot simply develop on their own but must seek to undermine the West lest its development undermine the legitimacy of those in power.

            “If you can’t catch up,” Zaostrovtsev says, “then one must make things worse for those who are ahead of you” – and given the resources Russia and China have, using covert means, including cyber attacks are the most effective way to do that. But for the foreseeable future, the West will remain ahead, and Russia and China behind even with these attacks.

            Moreover, Russia is not about to change and become free, the economist says. One of his colleagues has argued that “Russia will be free,” to which the economist says he has responded: “if it is free, then it won’t be Russia, and if it is Russia, then it won’t be free.” As long as the empire is so extensive, “it cannot be a free democratic country.”

            Zaostrovstsev addresses two more immediate foreign policy issues. He argues that Belarus is already “a semi-subject of the Russian Federation and Lukashenka a kind of Western Kadyrov.” As a result, the Belarusian leader is irritating but cannot be removed lest the West move in and fill the vacuum.

            That Moscow is worried about that happening next door and not in Cuba shows just how much Moscow’s real influence abroad has declined.

            At the same time, however, the St. Petersburg economist argues that Moscow has come out the winner in the recent war in the South Caucasus. Armenia’s economy was already “completely Russian,” and its political leadership will come back in line with that after Nikol Pashinyan leaves office.

            Therefore, Zaostrovtsev says, Moscow “has won Armenia, which now will be still more dependent on Russia.” And at the same time, Moscow has “gotten a military base in Azerbaijan” and because it is guarding not just Qarabagh and the Lachin corridor but the corridor from Azerbaijan to Nakhichevan, Russia can exert real influence more broadly.

Khabarovsk Actions Shouldn’t Be Called Protests, Local Lawyer Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 3 – Russians elsewhere have been surprised by the continuing street actions in Khabarovsk, Konstantin Bubon, a lawyer from there says, in part because they insist on calling these demonstrations “protests.” If they were protests, they would have ended long ago; but because they are something else, they continue.

            In a comment for the SibReal portal, the lawyer argues that what has been going on in his city is a broad demand by its people that they be recognized as full partners with the state rather than reduced to its plaything. They are not against Moscow as such but only against the center ignoring them as a subject of politics (sibreal.org/a/31030482.html).

            Bubon suggests that what is happening therefore can best be understood in terms of a metaphor. “Let’s try to compare relations between the Khabarovsk demonstrations and professional politicians with the interrelationships between demand and supply in the marketplace.” Those in streets are demanding “honest and open politics.”

            By continuing their actions, “the people of Khabarovsk have shown that the struggle for their votes has meaning to the same degree that the struggle of entrepreneurs for their spending in the market has.” That is why by remaining in the streets they have shown that they are not just “protesting” something but seeking recognition as political actors worthy of recognition.

            Put another way, the people of Khabarovsk have shown themselves to be “grateful voters who actively support those they have voted for,” something that sends a message to their successors and to Moscow that those who do respond to the people will gain support and those who don’t won’t.

            That is why, Bubon continues, he “from the very beginning did not like the description of the Khabarovsk events only as ‘a protest.’” Those who have gone into the streets there aren’t objecting to one action by the powers and are not so much in conflict with the powers that be as seeking to enter into an exchange with them.

            “Khabarovsk residents are seeking to show themselves to be subjects and participants of social life and are endowed with their own will. Far Easterners are tried of being the objects of a one-sided, command and not always competent and well-intentioned administration” by others. And that attitude has been reflected by the diversity of those going into the streets.

            What Khabarovsk understand but Moscow does not yet, the lawyer concludes, is that “relations based on voluntary exchange are always more effective than those based on giving orders, force and central planning.” The collapse of the Soviet system showed that, and Moscow now, albeit unwillingly is going to have to recognize that reality.

            The people of Khabarovsk will stay in the streets until Moscow comes to its senses.

KGB Archives Document Red Army’s Bestial Behavior Against Soviet Citizens in USSR after 1945

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 3 – The vicious behavior of the Red Army in eastern Europe in the last days of World War II has been widely documented but all too often excused because of the crimes committed by German forces in the USSR. But the crimes the Red Army visited on Soviet citizens in the Soviet West after the war was over have attracted less attention.

            Two days ago, the Feldgrau.info portal published a selection of documents from the archives of the former KGB of the Ukrainian SSR which detail many such crimes by Soviet soldiers against Soviet citizens after the war was over and show that senior Soviet officials knew and did little to curb this viciousness (feldgrau.info/dokumenty2/22624-dokumenty-81).  

            They were initially declassified by the Ukrainian authorities in 2013 but only now have been processed and made available for a broader audience. They may for horrific reading especially since the children of at least some of the victims of the Red Army rampage in 1946 are still alive.

            The Soviet soldiers burned villages to the ground often with the residents killed in the process. They raped women, beat villagers and even took hostages. And all these things were reported by the Soviet secret police up the line to senior CPSU officials like Nikita Khrushchev who was then in charge of the Ukrainian SSR.

            Many Russians, reading these documents, will feel they are reading about Nazi crimes against Soviet citizens, monstrous crimes that occurred only a few years or even months earlier. “But” as Novyye izvestiya notes in reporting the publication of these document, “this was after the end of the war, and these were not Germans but their own” (newizv.ru/news/society/02-01-2021/shokiruyuschaya-zhestokost-opublikovany-dokumenty-o-zverstvah-krasnoy-armii-posle-voyny).

            Often among the victims of this bacchanalia of violence were invalided out Soviet soldiers or the widows of Red Army men who had died at the front. They were either killed or left without the means of existence because the Red Army men burned all their food supplies, animals, and houses, the documents show.

            Whether the reports of this violence led to punishment or a change in policy unfortunately can’t be established. Information on that is available only in other military archives. And they at present are closed, making a final determination impossible, Novyye izvestiya says with obvious bitterness and regret.

 

Unlike Fascism, Putin’s Modernized Serf-Holding Regime Doesn’t Offer Any Possibility of a Return to a Law-Based State, Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 3 – Many have accused Vladimir Putin of creating a fascist state, but he is in fact doing something even worse, Vladimir Pastukhov says. He is restoring a modernized version of the serf-holding regime based on arbitrary and unrestrained power of the owners and the largely willing support of the philistine masses.

            What makes that worse, the London-based Russian analyst says, is that fascism represents a perversion of a European law-based state and thus those countries which have turned to it can ultimately turn away from it and go back to where they were before, immunized against fascism (mbk-news.appspot.com/sences/god-modernizirovannogo/).

            Putinist serfdom, on the contrary, has nothing of the kind to go back to. Instead, it rests on naked force over a population that will put up with it until a certain but unknown point and then insist on overthrowing that system completely rather than constructing a future based on the restoration of an earlier set of arrangements.

            Pastukhov argues that the events of the past 12 months, beginning with the attack on the “anti-constitutional” constitutional reforms and ending with the exposure of the regime’s attempt to poison Aleksey Navalny, provide a way into the understanding of what the authoritarian and neo-totalitarian Putinist state is all about.

            In essence, 2020 did not lead to the change of the country in any fundamental way, “but now,” Putin and his entourage are sufficiently satisfied with where things are that they are immensely proud of their use of extraordinary and unconstrained force and have a population which for the time being supports them in that.

            In 2020, Pastukhov continues, the Putin regime stopped trying to conceal in any way its nature and “demonstratively” began to use force. “An era of ‘police exhibitionism’ began,” and the Navalny case, both the regime’s attempt to poison the opposition figure and its statement that if it had wanted to kill him, it would have, say all that needs to be said.

            Putin’s Russia is thus very different from that of Gorbachev or Yeltsin. But it “is very similar to Nikolayevan Russia, a regime that flaunted its power without shame. Today’s Kremlin is doing the same, and so today it is much easier to see what the defining characteristic of Putin’s regime is.

            This system is stable for the time being because it rests on the loyalty of “the philistine masses,” a group “guided not by ideas but by prejudices” and whose concerns “do not go beyond the boundaries of its little tiny immediate world. It deifies power as a source of all the good things it values and at the same time hates power” because it feels it hasn’t been given enough.

            The ideal of this category of the population is to go “from the gutter to the throne” without changing anything. It dreams of being ‘on top’ and happy when it sees the formerly strong of this world thrown down ‘below.’”

            Who are these people? Pastukhov asks rhetorically. “This is our old historical acquaintance – the Neolithic (patriarchal) peasantry” that only superficially was changed by all the tragedies of the Soviet era – collectivization, industrialization, urbanization and so on – and thus retains the values of that time.

            These aren’t the happy peasants of literature, they are “a distrustful and indifferent heir of the Russian peasantry” who are “not only indifferent about how poisoned Navalny but in the depth of their souls do not have a drop of sympathy for either him or them.”

            “The Kremlin understands this perfectly well” and further understands that the Russian opposition is viewed with just as much hostility by this modernized population of serfs as the government or any authority is. Putin can base his power on that because he is prepared to ignore all laws and constitutions and use force in an arbitrary and unconstrained manner.

            Putin’s problem is elsewhere: “building on long-term plans, basing oneself on the loyalty of the Russian peasant masses, is even less comfortable than sitting on bayonets.” One moment it will slavishly bow down before you and the next it will do what it must to wipe you off the face of the earth. Unfortunately for him, Putin doesn’t fully comprehend this.

            The Kremlin leader is inspired by European ultra-right politicians like the elder LePen, but the clearest and fullest description of the ideology and road map he and his entourage are following was presented in a series of books under the general title “The Russian Project” which appeared about 15 years ago. (On this see ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Проект_Россия_(книги).)

            These publicistic books made it appear that the regime wanted to construct a fascist state, but “in a certain sense, this was a fantasy” because “building European fascism in an Asian peasant country would be a no more realistic project that building European socialism in it.” It would be doomed to fail.

            “All despotic regimes which cultivate force,” Pastukhov argues, “resemble one another externally, and in this sense one can uncover in contemporary Russia aspects of similarity also with the pharaohs of ancient Egypt.” But in essence, what Putin is putting in place “is an entirely different social and state system than European fascism.”

            The difference is this: “Fascism is an inversion of European liberal ideology. It is liberalism turned inside out.” That explains why it attracted legal theorists like Karl Schmidt and also why countries that went fascist ultimately were able to reconstruct a democratic legal order because there was something to go back to.

            But that is not the case in Russia, the Russian analyst says. “The Putin regime does not have in its genesis any liberalism and never will even after Putin. Russia will not return to that because it is impossible to return to where one never was.” Instead, the Putin “despotism” is “’anti-legalist’ and denies the very spirit of European law.”

            Russian serfs in the past and in their modernized form now accept this. That is their “normal everyday reality.” And what one can say is that these Russians are a kind of “social permafrost,” with only two extreme states – complete solidity or gaseous explosions, support for a regime of the Putinist kind or efforts to demolish altogether.

            “Fascism is anti-democratic and based on force but at the same time it strengthens precisely that which later becomes the building materials for a legal state … Putin’s Russia has no exit strategy of that kind.” Instead, its “modernized serf-holding system is wild force without any constructive element.”

            “It is anti-institutional, strengthens nothing, and destroying whatever it can leaves in the end fear and deception as the two real social bindings” holding things together. History shows that the force most likely to unthaw the permafrost layer supporting this system is a war and not necessarily a world war.

            But if this layer thaws, it will not give rise to democracy or a law-based state. Instead, it will destroy what was without being in a position to create anything but a copy of precisely what it thought it was doing away with, Pastukhov concludes.

Five Developments in Russia during 2020 Likely to Play Out in and Define 2021, Serenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 3 – According to Andrey Serenko, head of Volgograd’s Analytic Center on Russian society, there were five developments in the Russian Federation during the last 12 months that are likely to play out with potentially serious consequences during 2021 (realtribune.ru/news/authority/5686).

            They are:

1.      The quarantine regime and vaccinations. By late summer or early fall, the political analyst says, these will have passed and the result could become “a sharp increase in the amount of public protest actions” in response to the release of the stress people have been under. It remains unclear just how large this trend will be and how the powers will respond.

2.      The appointment of Mikhail Mishustin as prime minister. Mishustin has proven remarkably effective and recalls Viktor Chernomyrdin’s role in the 1990s. It is possible that he will be considered as a replacement for Putin, but it is also possible that his very skills will lead others near the center of power to unite against him just as they did against Chernomyrdin.

3.      The modernization of election procedures. Extended voting will be put to a further test during theDuma elections and possibly the holding of early presidential ones. At present, acceptance of these changes in procedures has not been universal, Serenko says.

4.      A crisis in the party system. “The covid virus in 2020 ‘killed’ the parties in Russia,” driving them out of the public eye and making them largely irrelevant. Party leaders will try to recoup in the coming months, with United Russia using administrative measures. But there is a danger that this absence of parties will open the way to a Belarusian scenario in Russia.

5.      Russians are tired of Putin but don’t have a favored alternative. 2020 was marked by the growing “tiredness” of Russians with the longtime Kremlin leader. He has stayed too long and has not changed as much as public opinion has. It would like a change but hasn’t fastened on anyone else, allowing Putin some breathing space.

“Sooner or later,” Serenko says, “this contradiction will grow in intensity and require a major response. It is not to be excluded,” he continues, “that this will happen already in 2021.”

Only 22.57 Percent of Borders between Republics in North Caucasus have been Registered with Moscow as Required

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 3 – Despite the existence of a federal requirement, republics in the North Caucasus have delimited only 22.57 percent of their borders; and Daghestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Stavropol Kray have yet to file any such data with the center, thus setting the stage for more disputes in the years ahead.

            The deadline for registration of the borders of federal subjects passed four days ago without most of the republics and regions of the North Caucasus meeting them, officials in Moscow said, creating yet another case when Moscow has given a much-ballyhooed order and the federal subjects have simply not obeyed it (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/358250/).

            As of December 1, 2020, according to the Unified Government Property Registry, Ingushetia and Chechnya had registered 50 percent of their borders, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, 33 percent, and North Ossetia, 25 percent. The other three federal subjects, Daghestan, Kabardino-Balkaria and Stavropol Kray had not registered any data at all.

            The failure to register borders extends beyond those of the republics themselves. The federal subjects in this region have not fully registered with borders of the population points inside each. Chechnya has registered 78 percent, Ingushetia, 62 percewnt, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, 47 percent, North Ossetia, 38 percent, Stavropol Kray, 30 percent, Daghestan, five percent, and Kabardino-Balkaria, four percent.

            The figures for internal territorial divisions are even lower.

            Despite the passing of the deadline, officials are continuing to put off even talking about the borders. The latest such delay came on December 18 when officials from North Ossetia and Ingushetia, who dispute the Prigorodny District, put off talks without scheduling new negotiations.

            Changing borders can lead to explosive outcomes as in the case of the transfer of territory from Ingushetia to Chechnya, but even talking about what the borders should be is dangerous. And apparently officials not only in the region but in Moscow have decided that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie rather than provoke them into action. 

Moscow TV News Stops Reporting Coronavirus Deaths

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 3 – With the turn of the new year, Moscow television’s Vremya news program, from which most Russians get their news, has stopped reporting the number of deaths from the pandemic. It still reports new infections and other pandemic news but not deaths, “as if people aren’t dying,” one observer says (echo.msk.ru/blog/nikolaev_i/2768120-echo/).

            The Russian authorities are still putting out this data but now people have to search for it. Today, officials reported registering 24,150 new cases and 502 new deaths, bringing the cumulative totals respectively to 3,236,787 and 58,506 (t.me/COVID2019_official/2302).

            But many Russians are suspicious of these figures because the numbers in the two capitals track so closely in terms of rises and falls (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5FF17590D5B6E). One would expect a different pattern at least some of the time, they say.

            Meanwhile, even during the holidays, the pandemic continues to ebb and flow with new restrictions still outnumbering relaxations (regnum.ru/news/society/3154313.html), and officials warning that there will be further spikes after the holidays (regnum.ru/news/3156477.html, regnum.ru/news/3156387.html and regnum.ru/news/3156460.html).

            Russians are reacting extremely negative to the decision of the Ukrainian authorities not to use the Sputnik-5 vaccine until all tests are completed. They say that Kyiv is acting not on the basis of science but out of Russophobia (regnum.ru/news/3156422.html).

            The city of Moscow has opened free vaccinations to additional categories of citizenry (echo.msk.ru/blog/ssobyanin/2768284-echo/). But some Russians may wait until after the holidays given that health officials are saying they shouldn’t drink for at least three days after getting their shots (versia.ru/za-sutki-v-rf-zafiksirovano-24-150-sluchaev-zarazheniya-covid-19-i-504-letalnyx-isxoda).

            On the economic front, the news was mixed. Officials said agricultural production had gone up in 2020 despite the pandemic, but polls showed that most Russians are now worried that their jobs may be at risk in 2021 (vz.ru/economy/2021/1/3/1077579.html and svpressa.ru/economy/article/286304/).

            Meanwhile, in other pandemic-related developments in Russia today,

·         Russian scientists rejected as without proof claims by African researchers that they have identified a new “Disease X” that is even more dangerous than ebola or the coronavirus (ura.news/news/1052465873 and https://ura.news/news/1052465855).

·         A senior Moscow doctor has come out in opposition of closing churches or restricting access to them by the  elderly because he says doing either takes from Russians what may be their last hope (newizv.ru/news/society/03-01-2021/lishayut-lyudey-posledney-opory-vrach-myasnikov-protiv-zakrytiya-hramov-na-rozhdestvo).  

·         Funeral industry workers in Arkhangelsk are collecting more money from the families of those who have died by claiming, incorrectly, that Moscow has introduced a special tax on those who die from the coronavirus (readovka.ru/news/67185).