Power to Tax is Power to Destroy, and Moscow is Now Deploying It Against Aboriginal Peoples

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 5 – Until last year, non-Russian peoples in the far north and far east were not charged taxes on the land where they practiced their traditional ways of life, such as pastures for reindeer herding and the like. But in 2024, Moscow changed the tax code; and at the end of 2025, these communities were faced with tax bills they couldn’t pay.

            The full impact of the new arrangement is yet to be felt, because the authorities aren’t charging taxes on land if it is in a traditional place as defined by the powers but are if these land plots are beyond the borders of those areas, according to Tatyana Britskaya, an investigative journalist for Novaya Gazeta (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/02/06/chernye-vezhniki).

            In Sakha, she says, officials have defined as “traditional” only places where people actually live and not where they herd animals. That means that only four of 37 land plots the indigenous peoples view as their own are “exempt from tax.” The other 34 “have to pay several million rubles a year for reindeer pastures,” a completely “impossible sum.”

            What this is intended to do, Britskaya says, is to allow the officials to restrict the amount of land that the indigenous peoples can actually call their own without declaring any change in internal borders and thereby open the way to the exploitation of land they in fact have used from times immemorial to development by Russian mining interests.

            What these means is that many indigenous peoples will find that the state has confiscated the lands they need to continue to practice their traditional way of life; and when they give that up, the state will then hand the land over to Russian corporations, which will complete the destruction of these nations.

            The Russian authorities can and undoubtedly will present the new tax arrangements as a matter of simple justice. After all, if other groups use land, they have to pay taxes on it. But in this case, the power to tax is the power to destroy – and with this new tax arrangement, Moscow has accelerated the demise of the numerically smallest peoples of the north and far east. 

‘Daptar’ Portal Launches Bulletin on Femicide in the North Caucasus

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 6 – A dozen years ago, the Mothers of Dagestan for Human Rights organization launched what it described as “the first Internet resource devoted to the problems of Dagestani women” (kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/237901/). In the intervening period, it has expanded its focus on the status of women across the North Caucasus.

            For many stories about this topic, the Daptar portal is the only reliable source; and over the past decade it has achieved some victories against those there who oppress women. But mostly, it has simply chronicled what is going on. Windows on Eurasia has often relied on it to discuss what is happening in the North Caucasus.

            Despite Daptar’s efforts, he tragedies large and small the women of the traditional societies of the North Caucasus suffer because of the attitudes of men and the rulers of these republics both locally and in Moscow that it has chronicled when few others do have only increased in number since 2012. 

            To expand its coverage and protect more women in that region, the Daptar staff has launched a new bullet devoted to the continuing femicide there. Its first issue has now been posted at the Daptar portal side (daptar.ru/2026/02/06/byulleten-daptara-femicid-prodolzhaetsya/).

            Among the stories it features are the following; a Dagestani mullah kills his second wife, rights activists are seeking to get Georgia to investigate kidnaping of a Chechen woman and her forcible removal to Russia, Ingush courts quash charges against a local woman who fled violence for supposedly stealing money, and a Dagestani has been sentenced to eight years in prison upon returning from Syria.

Almost Half of Muslims in Russan Federation At Present want to Have Three or More Children, More than Double the Share of Ethnic Russians who Do

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 5 – Fertility rates have been falling among Muslim nationalities in the Russian Federation just as they have been among traditionally Orthodox Christian ones, but it is still the case, experts say, that nearly half of all Muslins in that country want their families to have three or more children, more than double the share of ethnic Russians. 

            While that does not mean that all the Muslims who do will achieve that goal, it strongly suggests that the Muslim nations of the Russian Federation will have more large families and thus form an ever larger share of the population of that country in the future, especially given the demographic decline of the ethnic Russians.

            That is just one of the findings reported by the Russian Orthodox Church’s Mercy portal in an article explicitly intended to dispel many of the myths about large families that now circulate in that country (miloserdie.ru/article/mnogodetnye-v-rossii-ih-pochti-3-milliona-semej-no-o-nih-vse-eshhe-ochen-malo-znayut/).

            Among the most noteworthy of the portal’s findings are the following:

·       There are now more large families now than there were only a few years ago, 2.9 million as against 1.1 million in 2013, because families with two or more children have been giving birth to 30 percent of all children, while those with fewer or none have been giving birth to smaller shares.

·       Data on families with children are unreliable because until last year the regions were allowed to set the rules for which families were counted as being large. In Kamchatka, only families with five children were counted as large; in the Far North, those with just two; and other regions set different ages to which the families had to raise their children in order to be counted.

·       Russian families have three or more children for a variety of reasons, ranging from desires and plans to accidental pregnancies that lead to an increase in the number of children.

·       Every third Russian family with three or more children is poor, and, according to the portal, “the more children, the higher the risk that the family will be in that income group.

·       A small but growing group of families with three or more children is to be found among richer parents.

·       Psychological studies have found that people in families without any children or who have three or more feel better about themselves than do families with one or two offspring.

Sexual Violence Cases Tripled over Last Year in Russia's Belgorod Oblast Neighboring Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 5 – The Russian interior ministry has reported that sexual violence rose sharply in Belgorod Oblast, which is on the border with Ukraine and where there are many Russian soldiers involved with Putin’s war in Ukraine, in 2022 and 2023, fell slightly in 2024 and then tripled in 2025.

            This trend has attracted widespread attention from independent Russian media (verstka.media/belgorodskaya-oblast-lider-sredi-regionov-rossii-po-chislu-iznasilovanij-v-2025-godu, meduza.io/feature/2026/02/05/belgorodskaya-oblast-lider-po-chislu-zaregistrirovannyh-iznasilovaniy and t.me/tochno_st/752).

            But the Russian government has stopped publishing the data that would be needed to make a definitive diagnosis of why this is happening. Detailed statistics about sexual violence cases stopped being published in 2022, conviction data ended in 2024, and court rulings in such cases are classified and unavailable to researchers.

            The independent researchers say that it is likely that the amount of sexual violence in Belgorod is related to the fact that there are a disproportionate number of Russian men who are being prepared for combat in Ukraine. But they acknowledge that this can’t be conclusively proved because there have not been similar increases in such crimes in other border regions.

            Regional government experts suggest that the rise in numbers over the last several decades there what they call “multi-episode crimes,” such as abuse within families that often a continues for a long time (media.mvd.ru/files/application/5422615). But that explanation calls attention to the fact that many of the victims of such crimes in Belgorod.

            Indeed, according to interior ministry sources, 42 percent of the victims of such crimes were children, a figure that rose to 66 percent in 2023, the first full year of Putin’s expanded war and the last for which such data are available (media.mvd.ru/files/application/5958851). However that may be, many will blame the war for this rise and fear the return of veterans.

Another Result of Putin's War in Ukraine: Violence in Russian Schools Ever More Frequent and More Lethal

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 4 – For most of the past 25 years, Russians have referred to the relatively rare cases of violence in their country’s schools as “Columbines,” a reference to the 1999 mass shooting in an American high school. But as the frequency and lethality of violent attacks has increased, ever more of them have had to confront the domestic roots of Russian school violence.

            London-based Russian commentator Vladimir Pastukhov says that “the surge in attacks by pupils on their classmates” in Russian schools is hardly random. Instead, it is a reflection of the way in which violence now “permeates the atmosphere” of the Russian Federation at a whole (t.me/v_pastukhov/1810 reposted at echofm.online/opinions/to-li-eshhe-budet).

            According to him, “there is a direct link between these outbreaks of violence and the propaganda of war as a universal way to resolve all and sundry conflicts, a law of interconnected violence so to speak.” And that means in countries like Russia where war has become a cult, there is going to be more violence not just in schools but throughout society.

            Just  how widespread such school violence in Russia has become especially in the last few months has been documented by Radio Liberty journalist Maryana Torocheshnikova (svoboda.org/a/strah-i-nenavistj-v-shkole/33670618.html). She reports that there were at least 11 such outbursts in 2025 and that there have been nearly half that many already in 2026.

            What is most disturbing, she reports that in almost a third of these cases, attackers used guns and children were wounded or even killed as a result. Because of these trends, ever fewer Russians are talking about these as imports and instead viewing them as a product of trends that Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine are producing.

Russia’s ‘Hidden Unemployed’ Now Coming Out of Shadows as One in Seven Russians has Fallen into This Group

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 3 – Moscow has long kept its reported unemployment figures extremely low because it counts as fully employed not only those with full-time jobs but those whose employment per day or per week has been cut back as well as those who have been sent on unpaid leave.

            But as the Russian economy has slipped into recession, the share of working-age Russians who form part of what many observers call “hidden unemployment” has risen dramatically. Now, according to Russia’s Federation of Independent Trade Unions, such people form 14.4 percent of the workforce (ehorussia.com/new/node/34057).

            If one adds even half of these to the official unemployment numbers, this means that ten percent of Russians are unemployed, with a majority of those not receiving any compensation from the government or their employers to help them cope and thus falling ever more often and rapidly into poverty.

            As even the Russian government’s Rossiyskaya Gazeta has acknowledged, this figure or at least one close to it better reflects the problems that now plague the country’s civilian economy, even though many Russian propagandists and Western observers continue to cite the much lower “official” unemployment numbers (rg.ru/2026/02/01/v-rezhime-ozhidaniia.html).

 

Ever More Russians Homeschooling Their Children, Many to Escape Kremlin War Propaganda

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 5 – Although relatively few Russian parents homeschool their children, the number who do has been increasing rapidly in recent years, with many of those now deciding to educate their children at home to avoid the increasing militarization of the curriculum in Russia’s government schools.

            Although the some 200,000 Russian children now being homeschooled makes up a miniscule percentage of the roughly 18 million in public schools, the number of those homeschooled has been rising rapidly (ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/02/05/rossiyane-nachali-tisyachami-zabirat-detei-iz-shkol-na-domashnee-obuchenie-posle-usileniya-voennoi-propagandi-a186473

            A decade ago, there were only 17,900 children being homeschooled, roughly one tenth of one percent of the total; now, they form almost one percent of the total, with much of the increase coming in the last four years, the period during which Vladimir Putin has been conducting his expanded war in Ukraine.

            There are few official figures about this – and they do not count homeschooled children not attacked to a public school -- and even less data about why parents choose to homeschool. But there are some obvious reasons: rising violence in schools and especially the militarization of the public educational system, a cause that the Moscow Times identifies as a major reason. 

            Many Russian politicians are opposed to homeschooling believing that it keeps young Russians from being socialized in the directions the Kremlin wants. But few are trying to block it altogether because it remains popular in families where at least one of parents does not work or does not work fulltime and thus can manage this form of instruction.