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| A new Russian robot called FEDOR can shoot with both hands. Photo via @Rogozin |
Staunton, VA, April 14, 2017 - The flood of news stories from a country
as large, diverse and strange as the Russian Federation often appears to be is
far too large for anyone to keep up with. But there needs to be a way to mark
those which can’t be discussed in detail but which are too indicative of
broader developments to ignore.
Consequently, Windows on Eurasia presents a selection of
13 of these other and typically neglected stories at the end of each week. This
is the 78th such compilation. It is only suggestive and far from complete –
indeed, once again, one could have put out such a listing every day -- but
perhaps one or more of these stories will prove of broader interest.
1. Putin’s Election Program – Promise Massive Change But Keep
Everything the Same. The post-Crimea consensus having collapsed,
and repression having ceased to intimidate and begun to anger Russians, Vladimir
Putin has no choice but to promise massive change when he runs for re-election
to keep himself in power and thus everything just the same, Moscow commentators say. This week,
commentators laid particular stress on three problems facing the Kremlin
leader: he is trying to act internationally as if Russia had 22 percent of the
world’s GDP and not the two percent it does
have, popular culture including new cartoon film is narrowing the
distance between Putin and his boyars, thus undercutting the assumption that Russians will always support the former as a check on the latter,
and Putin’s talk about not allowing color revolutions in Russia and the former
Soviet space has called attention to a risk that he earlier refused to discuss and raised concerns about what may in
fact happen next.
2. Trump has Betrayed Russia to Escape Impeachment, Moscow
Commentator Says. Maksim Shevchenko says that the only reason
Donald Trump did not live up to Moscow’s expectations for better relations
between the US and Russia was to avoid being impeached and
removed from office by the American establishment. But some Russians
think the US president won’t be able to escape that fate: LDPR leader Vladimir
Zhirinovsky who hosted a champagne celebration on Trump’s election now says
that he will drink champagne when Trump is impeached. Vladimir Putin has
suggested relations with Washington have been degraded since Trump took
office, but some analysts near the Kremlin say that they still expect Trump to deliver on his
election promises. Other Russians are just angry: some are now blaming Trump rather than Barack
Obama for the fact that they aren’t getting their pensions, and
a group of Cossacks in St. Petersburg has decided to strip Trump of
his rank of esaul in their unit because of his bad behavior toward Russia. But perhaps the most interesting
observation about Trump from Moscow this week came from one writer who said that Trump’s reaction to the
gas attack in Syria shows that he has a heart, an organ that he suggested Putin
lacks.
3. Could Concerns about Inflation Save Russia from Repressive
Yarovaya Laws? Some commentators have pointed out that if the
Yarovaya package of repressive measures is enforced, that will cost Moscow some 4.5
trillion rubles (US $75 billion), an amount that could threaten to trigger a new
round of higher inflation. Meanwhile, the last week brought another
harvest of bad economic news: Russia’s foreign debt is up dramatically, capital
flight doubled from the first quarter of 2016 to the first
three months of 2017, officials said that as a result of sanctions,
Russia can no longer produce its own large gas
turbines, one
commentator has offered advice on “how to make money in Russia and stay alive
while doing so”, corruption has assumed a new form in Russia – it is
so much a part of the system that corruption in the usual sense hardly exists anymore,
losses from financial crimes in Russia
in 2016 were the largest ever, and experts say that the real level
of poverty among Russians is now twice as high as the government
says.
4. Social Problems Multiply Exponentially. Despite
Dmitry Medvedev’s latest entry in the Marie Antoinette sweepstakes by saying
that banning Western produces makes Russian life better,
the problems Russians face in their daily lives are increasing at a staggering
rate. Among the bad news in this sector in the last week alone are the
following stories: At present, one hospital is closing every
day in the Russian Federation and other medical facilities are
being cut back at almost the same rate. As a result, one in four Russians isn’t
getting needed medical help. But
there is little likelihood that the medical situation will improve soon.
According to the Moscow times, Russian doctors are now paid less than Russian fast
food workers. Moscow’s pro-natalist policies have exhausted
themselves, experts say, and now even millionaire cities are
beginning to see their populations decline. As for entertainment, Russians face a bleaker
future: charter flights to Turkey may be stopped,
and while more vodka is being produced, prices for it are going up.
One thing that Russian authorities are doing to promote domestic tourism: they
are making low-cost prostitution services an integral
part of their programs for resorts. Young
Russians are increasingly unhappy about life in their country, and so the Kremlin has decided to address the problem by creating its own new bureaucracy to deal
with it. With the spread of gun ownership, mass poaching is now a serious problem in the Russian North. Because
their pensions are so small, ever more elderly Russians are going back into
the workforce. And at
the same time, more Central Asian and Caucasian labor migrants are leaving
Russia but Russians aren’t taking their jobs because they don’t want to occupy such unskilled and
low-paying positions, a new study finds.
5. Ethnic Tensions Increase Across Russia. Reports
suggest that ethnic antagonisms between
Russians and non-Russians are on the rise and not just tensions among
non-Russians as was largely the case earlier and. In ordering
Moscow to pay compensation to the victims of the Beslan disaster, the European
Human Rights Court sharply criticized the Russian government for
its handling of ethnic relations. Chechen officials attacked Novaya gazeta for its coverage of
Grozny’s repression of gays and
threatened them with physical reprisals, leading the Kremlin to denounce
that and other media outlets to come to Novaya’s defense. In
addition, a Duma committee rejected the idea of allowing federal subject courts
to rule on extremism; only federal courts can do
that, it said, another sign that popular tensions are having official
consequences. But there was one piece of good news:
longtime and much-hated Mari El governor Leonid Markelov was not only fired but has been charged with massive corruption.
6. Protests on All Kinds of Issues Spread as Officials Try to Contain
Them. In addition to the
long-haul truckers strike and the fallout from the March 26 Navalny
anti-corruption protests, Russian citizens went in the street to
protest all manner of things, from access to education in Tomsk to
living conditions in Yakutsk to workers who haven’t been paid since 2015. Under
pressure from the Kremlin officials have used all manner of means to block or
isolate these protests. In Dagestan, for example, officials are rejecting
applications for protest meetings by invoking the terrorist threat they say
such meetings present.
7. Student at Russian Military Academy Arrested on Suspicion of
Planning to Divert Guns to Terrorists. Russian police arrested a
student at the military academy in St. Petersburg on suspicion that he was seeking to seize arms held at
that facility and divert them to terrorists. That was not the only security news
this week: Reports surfaced about dedovshchina and
corruption as continuing problems in the Russian armed services, Russian
scientists have developed a robot and the first thing they have taught it to do is
to shoot a gun, and
one Moscow commentator pointed out that in any new cold war, Russia have not
have any allies, leaving it far more at risk than was the former Soviet
Union.
8. Two Really Frightening Messages about War from Moscow. Two
Moscow commentaries this week are truly scary: The first in reacting to calls
for an investigation of the gas attacks in Syria points out that World War I
began with calls for an investigation of a terrorist attack, the
killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, implying that looking into the Syrian
matter could have similar consequences. And the second suggested that for
Russia, despite all the suffering it would experience, a nuclear war has
certain “pluses,” the kind of talk that makes it easier for leaders
to think they can fight and win a nuclear exchange.
9. Monuments Conflicts Continue to Spark Social Activism in Russia. One
commentator suggests that he would welcome a decision by the Russian government
to hand back even more churches to the Moscow Patriarchate because public opposition to such moves would help
build civil society. There
are certainly enough churches left to do so, with some 5,000 now falling
apart. St. Isaac’s in St.
Petersburg is slated to be handed over to the Orthodox Church on July 12,
despite continuing opposition. But the government may
slow down this process less to meet public complaints
than because of the expense: the
Russian Orthodox Church has asked the state to give it 13 billion rubles (US
$200 million) to rebuild churches, but the authorities are only prepared to
give 2.9 billion (US $50 million). Other news this week from the monuments
front includes Polish charges that the Russian government is now doing what the
Soviet regime did at Khatyn by falsifying the list of who was
killed there. Activists plan to erect a statue to the
1920-21 Tambov peasant uprising, Moscow is planning a memorial to the victims of World War I. Activists are
collecting money to erect in the Russian
capital a statue to the victims of Stalin’s repressions, Moscow says it will move the statue of Gorky back to where
it stood in Soviet times and will put up a statue to
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as well.
10. Work on Rostov Stadium for 2018 World Cup Stopped Because ‘There
is No Money.” Officials say they have no funds to
continue working on the modernization of the soccer stadium in Rostov that was supposed to be one of the venues for
the scheduled 2018 World Cup competition in Russia. Meanwhile, despite more violence at football matches in
Russia this year, Moscow officials promised there would not be any clashes when
the World Cup matches take place in their country. They
also continued to lash out at the WADA for its
investigations on the doping program in Russia.
11. ‘Jewish-Masonic Conspiracy’ Thinking Making a Comeback in Russia. Ever
more commentators and media outlets have revived the notion of “a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy” as the force behind the Russian revolutions of
1917 and all of Russia’s misfortunes since then. That tsarist-era
staple of those given to conspiracy thinking has been joined recently by talk
about “a deep state” on the model some have suggested exists in the United
States and opposes Donald Trump. In the Russian version, the deep state consists or and is a weapon for
liberals domestic and foreign.
12. Can Moscow Narrow ‘Think Tank Gap’? Russian
commentators argue that one of the reasons Western governments do a better job
in addressing many issues is that they have the assistance of experts in think
tanks who can speak more freely than government employees usually can. These
commentators bemoan the fact that Russia does not have a large think tank
community and urge that
the government get involved in creating one. A recent meeting of the
Higher School of Economics and Russian officials suggest that there is a
possibility that Russia can move in that direction given that the independent
scholars felt free to criticize officials and the regime in the harshest terms
and the officials sat quietly and took it.
13. Russians Get Porno Site Back but May Lose Facebook. The
Russian government agency which regulates the Russian Internet has unblocked the Pornhub site,
but a Duma deputy has called for banning access to Facebook in Russia, a clear indication of the Kremlin’s
priorities and its assessment of just where the threats to its power come
from.
And six more from countries in Russia’s
neighborhood:
1. Moscow Sets Up Radar Site in Belarus. Minsk
has still refused to allow Moscow to open a military airbase on Belarusian
territory, but in an example of the Kremlin’s “creeping” advances, the Russian
military under cover of its current operation, West-2017, has set up a radar locator site there.
2. Part of Lithuania’s Hill of Crosses Burns. A small fire damaged an
estimated 600 of the
wooden memorials at Lithuania’s Hill of Crosses. No foul play is suspected at
that world heritage site near Siaulai where more than 400,000 crosses have been
erected by Lithuanians and their supporters over the years.
3. Ukrainian Remittances from Russia Home Said Larger than IMF Loans
and Foreign Investment. The more than a million Ukrainians
living in the Russian Federation are currently sending home more
money than the total of IMF loans and grants and direct foreign investment,
giving Moscow significant if often ignored leverage.
4. Russia will Not Take Part in or Broadcast Eurovision Competition
in Kyiv. The Ukrainian authorities refused to allow Russia’s candidate to take part in the Eurovision
competition in Kyiv this
year because she had violated Ukrainian law by visiting occupied Crimea and
making pro-Moscow declarations about it. Efforts to find a workaround have
failed, and Moscow has announced that it will not send anyone to participate in
the competition this year or cover it on Russian television.
5. Russia Violates International Law by Drafting 20 Crimeans into Its
Army. International law prohibits an occupying power from
compelling those living under its control to serve in the military. But Moscow,
which has routinely ignored international law in recent years, has violated
this provision as well by drafting approximately 20 young men from
Crimea this year.
6. Kyrgyzstan Closes Four of Its 106 Muslim Madrasas.
Saying that they want to prevent the spread of Islamist extremism, Bishkek has
closed four of the madrasas on its territory declaring that their curricula are
“incorrect.” At the same time, it has allowed 102 others to remain in operation.
They presumably are “correct”.
Published in Press-Stream April 14, 2017 in Publication Windows on Eurasia
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