Putin’s Healthcare Cuts Now to Hit St. Petersburg

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 6 – Putin’s cutting of government spending on healthcare, something he undertook to find more money for his war in Ukraine and has justified by pointing to how few people many medical points in rural areas serve, has now come to St. Petersburg, yet another sign his efforts to isolate the capitals from such policies is failing.

Leaders of the healthcare committee of the city’s parliament say hospitals there must cut their budgets by 15 percent before the end of 2026, a move that means the pain and suffering Putin’s healthcare “optimization” plan has already inflicted on rural Russians will now their fellow citizens in a major urban area (fontanka.ru/2026/08/06/76574835/ and kasparovru.com/material.php?id=6A7572ED370BD&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook).

Putin has generally been able to keep the two Russian capitals quiet since he launched his expanded war in Ukraine in February 2022 by recruiting soldiers from beyond their borders and cutting spending in the regions more than in the capital. But this announcement is a clear sign that the Kremlin leader’s efforts to keep the big cities isolated in this way are no longer working.

And that in turn means that residents of these two large cities may protest the cuts inflicted on them and, connecting the dots, on the leader and his policies that have made those draconian budgetary moves necessary. The first such protest in fact may come soon, at the ballot box in September’s Duma elections. 

De-Imperialization and De-Colonization of Russia Absolutely Necessary but Disintegration of That Country Not Currently Possible, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 6 – Vadim Shtepa, one of the leading theorists of regionalism in the the Russian Federation, argues that the de-imperialization and de-colonization of the Russian Federation are absolutely necessary for that country to progress but that conditions do not currently exist for disintegration to be the path toward those goals.

            Not only are most Russians horrified by the idea of disintegration and ready to back those like Putin who say they are committed to defending the territorial integrity of the country , the editor of the Tallinn-based Region.Expert portal says (mostmedia.org/ru/posts/pochemu-raspad-rossii-segodnja-vygljadit-nevozmozhnym and region.expert/raspad-2/).

            But the federal subjects, both predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts and krays and non-Russian republics and other autonomies do not have the active political parties and genuine legislatures that these places did in the late 1980s which calls for self-determination possible if not ultimately successful.

            All the current governors are appointees of the Kremlin, something very different from the conditions of 1991, and all the regional parliaments are “dominated” by the ruling and pro-Kremlin United Russia, given that regional parties have been banned in the Russian Federation since 2001.

            Moreover, unlike at the end of Soviet times when the non-Russians formed nearly half of the population, today, the non-Russians form only half that share at best; and they have not shown themselves willing to adopt radical positions. Only those in emigration are able to do so; and they have far less influence than media coverage, Shtepa suggests.

            What that means is this, he continues. Residents of Russia’s federal subjects should be working to promote regionalism and democracy rather than thinking they can achieve their goals via independence. That won’t happen without these intermediate steps; and those are why people beyond the ring road should be focusing on.

            Until that shift takes place, all the talk about disintegration of the Russian Federation will remain at best wishful thinking that is unlikely to have any serious impact on life in the Russian Federation beyond leading Russians to rally around the Kremlin and opening the way to more repression against them and the non-Russians alike. 

Cyrillic Dot.RF Domain Now Allows 18 Non-Russian Languages to Register with It Using Some of the 25 Additional Letters They Have

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 6 – After refusing since its launch last year to register sites in anything but a Russian language format, the .RF domain has now opened registration to 18 non-Russian languages which use Cyrillic alphabets and allows them to use one or more of the 25 additional letters they use to capture the sounds of their languages.

            One the one hand, this might appear to be a concession to the non-Russians; but on the other, it may set the stage for an internet world in the Russian Federation in which only .rf addresses are allowed, something that would work powerfully against these very same peoples (75.ru/news/452209 reposted at asiarussia.ru/news/51865/).

            But even if things do not reach such a pass, this action adds to the pressures Moscow has placed on non-Russian languages not written in Cyrillic, including most prominently Karelian, which is the only titular nationality of a non-Russian republic that is not a state language within its territory.

Moscow’s Failure to Give Kazakhstan Union Republic Status Until 1936 Raises Questions Now Far Beyond that Country’s Borders

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 6 – When the Bolsheviks began the dividing up of Central Asia in the 1920s, they gave union republic status to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan but not to Kazakhstan despite the fact that the Kazakhstan autonomy met all the formal qualifications of having such a status, Bakhyt Khanabergen says.

            The Kazakh territory bordered a foreign country, its population was more than a million, and its titular nationality formed a majority of the population, the Kazakh historian says. But in 1936, when no longer met the third of these requirements because of the terror famine in the early 1930s, Stalin nonetheless made it a union republic.

            Kazakhs now should thus focus on the question why Stalin delayed taking this action regarding Kazakhstan in the mid-1920s but changed his mind in 1936, Khanabergen says, especially since Stalin’s 1936 decision allowed Kazakhstan to gain independence  in 1991 (spik.kz/2674-stal-by-kazahstan-nezavisimym-ne-bud-stalinskoj-konstitucii.html).

            According to the historian, this event, the 90^th anniversary of which comes this year, is important because had Stalin decided differently “perhaps today we would not be living in an independent Kazakhstan but in one of the autonomies of the Russian Federation – with all the ensuing consequences.

            Stalin acted as he did because in the 1920s, the elite in Kazakhstan remained deeply divided between those who were genuinely loyal to Moscow and those who weren’t and so he gave the Kazakhs union republic status only after he had renewed that elite by purges and the training in Moscow of a replacement elite.

            Those developments and Stalin’s role in them should force Kazakhs to see the Soviet dictator as something more than an unqualified enemy of their people. After all, with Stalin’s action in 1936, Kazakhstan would not be an independent country now and have all the advantages that confers.

            These questions are likely to spark discussions in the Russian Federation and especially in its non-Russian national republics whom Stalin and subsequent Soviet and Russian leaders did not give union republic status as well as in the West where many now view 1991 as a final act of national self-determination rather than an action dictated by Stalin from beyond the grave.

            That is why it happened that those peoples to whom the Soviet dictator gave union republic status were able to leave who didn’t have it or had been stripped of it, as Abkhazia and Karelo-Finnia were, have remained grouped with the autonomies of the Russian Federation and not allowed to work toward the realization of their right to self-determination.

            That means, of course, that the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 proceeded according to principles laid down by Stalin for his purposes in the 1920s and 1930s and did not represent the triumph of national self-determination. If the right of nations to self-determination is to be realized, the world thus needs to move beyond Stalinism.

            To pose the question in this way either by these non-Russians or in the West, is to challenge the very idea that the Russian Federation is the product of self-determination of peoples and to recognize that it and its relations both with the former union republics and current autonomous ones are based not on that principle but on a very different and more odious one. 

This Year, Some Russian Regions Flooding, Others Face Drought, and Still a Third Group has Water but It is Unsafe to Drink

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 5 – The Russian Federation is such an enormous country that it should not surprise anyone that when it suffers problems with water availability, these vary enormously with some regions experiencing extreme floods, others growing drought and still a third, overlapping but going beyond each of these, a shortage of water that is safe to drink.

            This year alone, Horizontal Russia documents, all three crises have hit Russia, something that might have been at least partially averted if either the federal subjects had more authority and resources to address them or Moscow was more interested in the welfare of the country than in going to war (semnasem.org/articles/2026/08/05/vodnyj-krizis).

            The most severe flooding this year came in the North Caucasus where thousands of people were flooded out of their homes, roads were blocked, and electricity and drinking water supplies cut off for weeks at a time. But other regions suffering severe flooding included Irkutsk, Chelyabinsky and Sverdlovsk oblasts.

            Those areas suffering water shortages were of two kinds, places in south Russia where global warming is spreading drought, and others across the country where aging infrastructure and the failure of the authorities to do anything about it meant people did not have clean and safe water to drink.

            Bodaibo in Irkutsk Oblast became a symbol of the latter when pipes froze and residents had neither heat nor water for more than a month.  Less widely covered disasters of this kind also hit a village in Karelia, one in Primorsky Kray, and thousands of residents in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in the Russian Far East.

            But it is the third category, places where water is flowing but is no longer safe, that is perhaps the most disturbing because it includes places where the authorities could have prevented the problem but failed to do so because they lacked either the funds or the will to do so.

            Problems of this kind hit Russian cities and villages across the country, outraging residents but seldom getting the kind of coverage that other far less damaging developments do because they have not yet had the kind of political consequences or fit into the usual media matrix of what constitutes a problem as opposed to what is viewed as an act of God.

Udmurt Activists Create Parliament in Exile

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 4 – Udmurtia, a Finno-Ugric republic in the Middle Volga, seldom gets much attention, although it has a long tradition of resistance to central power; but that may be about to change given the decision of Udmurt activists abroad to create a parliament in exile and to hold elections to it on the same day Putin is orchestrating his Duma vote.

            Udmurtia, with a population of just under 1.5 million, is a major arms producing center; but the central media typically ignore it except when Moscow intervenes to impose a new republic head as happened recently (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/08/udmurt-case-suggests-putin-may-no.html).

            Otherwise, the republic, whose population is two-thirds ethnic Russian and only one-quarter ethnic Udmurt, is passed over in silence, viewed as a mere appendage to the larger Turkic Muslim republics of the region – Udmurtia is animist by tradition and Orthodox by official count – or even as a republic on its way to becoming little more than a Russian oblast.

            That approach is not justified: Udmurtia has a long tradition of resistance to the center. It was the site in 1918 of the first working-class revolt against the Bolsheviks, the Izhevsk-Votkins rebellion (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/08/russian-authorities-to-block.html). It people blocked a Moscow effort to rename its capital after Ustinov in the mid-1980s (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/02/udmurts-in-1987-forced-moscow-to.html).

            In 2019, the republic was again in the news when Albert Razin, 79, an Udmurt scholar, set himself aflame and burned to death in front of government offices to protest what he said was the destruction of his language and his nation as a result of Moscow’s policies (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/09/udmurt-scholars-self-immolation.html).

            And last year, in the face of rising Russian racism against the Udmurts (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/03/being-dark-skinned-in-todays-russia-can.html), activists issued a new declaration of republic sovereignty (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/09/udmurts-issue-new-declaration-of.html).

            Now, these activists, most but not all are in emigration, have taken another giant step: they are moving to create a parliament representing and consisting only of Udmurts by means of an election that is to take pace on the same date, September 20 as Putin’s electoral exercise for the Duma.

            They have created a committee under the leadership of Andrey Grigoryev, the editor of the émigré journal Vskhody; and despite official moves against those who are cooperating with this project, numerous Udmurts both in the homeland and in emigration have signed up run as candidates (facebook.com/groups/1328401217630901/user/61590157064309/ and facebook.com/groups/1328401217630901/user/61590157064309/).

Unlike in Past Elections, Kremlin Now Not Offering Russians Anything Except More of the Same, Kolesnikov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 4 – In the course of earlier Duma elections, the Kremlin always offered some kind of “social contract” to the Russian population: oil-fueled prosperity in exchange for giving up political rights and great power pride over Crimea in exchange for dealing with a worsening economy, Andrey Kolesnikov says.

            But now, the commentator at Novaya Gazeta says, the Kremlin has nothing to offer: Its promises of security in face of internet restrictions when “there is no security,” of “victory over the entire civilized world” as compensation for belt tightening, and of plunging the country into backwardness in the name of “traditional values” (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/08/04/vybory-v-osazhdennoi-kreposti).

            According to Kolesnikov, “the regime has exhausted its bargaining chips … Nothing matters to anyone anymore … There is no contract to speak of here. And that means there is nothing left to offer in the election either.” All that the Kremlin can offer and without anything in exchange is “an endless stalemate and the atmosphere of a besieged fortress.”

            Any election held in a besieged fortress, he continues, “will not lift the state of siege and more importantly won’t lift ‘the siege mentality’ that views the use of a super weapon as the only way out. And that means the Duma election this time around is a vote “without a choice” and therefore without real meaning.

            This election will create yet more enemies and allow the authorities to further tighten the screws on the population, something the Russians should have come to understand because it is simply an extension of what Putin has been doing since coming to power.

            And it will mean as Orwell observed in 1984, “since a decisive victory is impossible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is for there to be a state of war.” That Putin will continue to supply as long as he is in power, something that will harm not only others but the Russian people as well.