Staunton, September 23 -- 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 50th
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 Retires ‘Last
Dictator in Europe’ Competition Undefeated.
Many in the West have long denounced Alyaksandr Lukashenka as “the last
dictator in Europe.” But to the extent that part of Russia is in Europe,
Vladimir Putin has taken that title away from the Belarusian leader on a
permanent basis. After the latest elections in the two countries, there are
more opposition figures in the Belarusian parliament – two – than there are in
the Russian one – zero (qha.com.ua/ru/politika/vibori-v-gosdumu-bez-syurprizv-no-s-posledstviyami/165835/). Other signs of the Kremlin leader’s victory
in that race are reports that the author of the notorious Yarovaya repressive
laws will head the Duma’s constitutional affairs committee and the head of
Putin’s “Russian world” project will head the Duma’s foreign affairs committee
(echo.msk.ru/news/1842886-echo.html
and themoscowtimes.com/news/ex-kgb-man-nikonov-to-head-duma-foreign-affairs-committee-55444). And in this week’s Russian Marie Antoinette
moment, Dmitry Medvedev again came on top but this time for what he didn’t say:
he talked at length about Russia’s economic problems and never mentioned
overcoming corruption and bribery (newsru.com/finance/22sep2016/medvedev.html).
2. Patriarch Wants Fewer but Larger Churches. Moscow Patriarch
Kirill has triggered many protests because he has sought to build ever more
churches including in parks where Russians have been accustomed to relaxing.
Now, in what may be a concession to those protests, the church leader says he
favors fewer but bitter churches, thus dispensing with his earlier call that
there should be an Orthodox church within walking distance of every Russian (rusk.ru/newsdata.php?idar=75975).
Meanwhile, in other religious affairs developments, the Russian siloviki have
come up with a guide for their officers on how to struggle with missionaries (ansar.ru/rfsng/dlya-silovikov-razrabotayut-rekomendacii-po-borbe-s-missionerami),
and a Pussy Riot-style scandal has broken out in Kazan after a young woman
danced in front of a mosque there in what many thought were excessively
revealing clothes (life.ru/t/%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B3%D0%B8%D1%8F/906550/oni_sdielali_eto_v_miechieti_v_ghlavnoi_miechieti_tatarstana).
3. More Instances
of Russian Racism. Even as Valery Tishkov says that things are
getting better on the inter-ethnic scene in Russia thanks to the Sochi Olympiad
and the Anschluss of Crimea (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2016/09/tishkov-says-crimean-anschluss-and.html),
more instances of Russian racism continue to surface. The two worst this week:
officials at a St. Petersburg university photoshopped a picture to remove a
Bashkir face and to replace it with a Russian one (m.business-gazeta.ru/news/323636/), and Russian siloviki hung from a rope dangling
from a helicopter the bodies of Daghestani militants in order to intimidate
people in that North Caucasus republic who live in isolated areas (news-important.ru/rossiyane-v-dagestane-dlya-ustrasheniya-mestnyx-zhitelej-demonstriruyut-im-s-vertoleta-tela-pogibshix-povstancev/).
More such racism is likely to surface given Putin’s plan to move up to one
million predominantly Muslim North Caucasians to Slavic areas of the Russian
Far East (znak.com/2016-09-21/sibir_i_dalniy_vostok_predlagayut_zaselit_rossiyanami_s_severnogo_kavkaza).
4.
Chechnya
to Gain Control of Its Oil Industry. Ramzan Kadyrov
is about to get what Moscow when it launched its first war against Chechnya said
Grozny must never have: independent control of its oil industry, as the Russian
firm that owns it prepares to hand it over to the Chechen authorities (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/289703/).
5.
Moscow Announces
Visa Free Travel with Vanuatu. Ukraine and many other post-Soviet
states are getting visa-free travel arrangements with the EU and other Western
countries. Not to be outdone, Moscow has announced that it now has similar
arrangements not with a Western country but with one of its smallest allies,
the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, a measure of Russia’s isolation and decline
(znak.com/201
fwer6-09-21/rossiya_i_vanuatu_zaklyuchili_soglashenie_ob_otmene_viz).
6.
The Avalanche of
Bad Economic News Continues. Russian
incomes last month fell not only in real terms but in nominal ones as well, something
even more Russians will notice (ng.ru/economics/2016-09-21/4_august.html).
Surveys show that almost half of Russians couldn’t afford to take vacations
this year (regnum.ru/news/ratings/2184124.html).
And for some in Russia, the situation is beyond bad: they have been forced into
slavery (ansar.ru/society/kak-volontery-spasayut-ot-rabstva-v-dagestane).This
decline in incomes is hitting Russians in other ways as well: Russians now rank
alongside North Korea in terms of their health, according to a British study (rufabula.com/news/2016/09/22/health).
The World Bank and other expert organizations say that things are only going to
get worse in the near term, with the bank’s analysts pointing out that the only
regions in Russia that are going to do at all well are those which somehow have
been able to maintain links with foreign firms (rbc.ru/economics/17/09/2016/57dc1c649a7947834a1d1f01?from=main,
vedomosti.ru/economics/articles/2016/09/22/658062-rossiiskaya-ekonomika
and kasparov.ru/material.php?id=57E29B520DCED).
The deteriorating situation in forcing some Russian women to go to China where
they are earning high pay as prostitutes (asiarussia.ru/persons/13632/), but it has also forced Moscow to decide not to pay
ethnic Russians living abroad the onetime pension bonus it had promised, thus
further undermining the Russian world idea (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=57E14E440FD69).
Russian flight has become such a problem that the Kremlin has blocked sites
which explain to Russians how they can flee the country illegally (vk.com/rkn?w=wall-76229642_103449). Many Russians have given up and come to terms
with their new lower standard of living (ej.ru/?a=note&id=30209),
but others are protesting even if their demonstrations seldom attract the
attention of the Moscow and Western media (novayagazeta.ru/politics/74659.html).
7.
In Chicago, the
Cemeteries Sometimes Vote; in Russia, the Jails Always Do. Russian jails reported that 100 percent of
their inmates had voted in the recent Duma elections. That not only boosted
participation rates in the vote but also likely gave the party of power more
support (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=57E29E6F7E89A). Ever more stories about the election suggest
that falsification of the results was widespread, with United Russia winning up
to 45 percent of its vote via that means (znak.com/2016-09-21/ne_menee_45_golosov_za_er_yavlyayutsya_falsifikatom_podschital_fizik_sergey_shpilkin). In addition, while the campaign does not
appear to have exacerbated ethnic tensions as much as many expected, the day of
voting may have done more: Those who asked for ballots in their native language,
something they have the right to do under the Russian Constitution, were abused
in often ugly ways (idelreal.org/a/28002331.html).
8.
Russian Officials
Complete Destruction of Ukrainian Library in Moscow. Having arrested
the director of the Ukrainian library in the Russian capital, Moscow officials
have now closed it completely and amalgamated it into a pan-Slavic facility, something
consistent with Putin’s insistence that Ukrainians are not a separate people (nazaccent.ru/content/21927-biblioteku-ukrainskoj-literatury-otdadut-pod-centr.html).
9. Baron Wrangel Statue Goes Up in Kerch; Lenin Statue
Goes Down in New York. The statue wars continue: Some Russians are
anything but happy by the decision to put up a statue to Baron Wrangel, the
leader of the anti-Bolshevik White Russian movement at the end of the Russian
civil war, in Kerch (publizist.ru/blogs/109404/14836/-).
Others are still fuming about the decision to put up a statue of Ivan the
Terrible in Oryol, suggesting that officials there sparked the controversy to
hide their corruption (newizv.ru/society/2016-09-18/246950-car-neprikajannyj-za-za-figuroj-ivana-groznogo-vidny-finansovye-skandaly.html). But there was one piece of good news this week:
the statue of Lenin that had been in New York since the early 1990s has finally
been taken down (wacotrib.com/opinion/columns/guest_columns/leonid-bershidsky-bloomberg-view-new-york-s-statue-of-lenin/article_f879f1a9-db9a-51ae-9533-40c4c577e4c4.html).
10.
Putin’s Separatist
Congress Having Trouble Finding a Venue. Moscow’s President Hotel has announced
that it is not prepared to be the venue this year for Putin’s Separatist
Congress that brings together activists from around the world who are promoting
secession, an action that if they were doing it inside Russia would be subject
to criminal penalties (ru.apa.az/politika-azerbaydjana/vneshnyaya-politika-azerbaydjana/moskovskij-otel-prezident-otkazalsya-provodit-sobranie-separatistov.html).
11.
Moscow Won’t
Negotiate with Terrorists But Will with Pornographers. The Russian media and Internet have had a
field day with the fact that the Russian officials who blocked the Russian
version of Pornhub were quite prepared to enter into negotiations with the
operators of that international pornography site about its reopening (versia.ru/kak-roskomnadzor-proigral-yepicheskuyu-sxvatku-s-pornoresursom
and zhartun.me/2016/09/pornhub.html).
12. Return of KGB Will Lead to Return of the GULAG and
That will Lead to …
Reports that Putin plans to consolidate the security agencies into something
like the Soviet-era KGB has led some Russians to predict that this will lead to
a reopening of the GULAG (business-gazeta.ru/article/323334), and others to discuss the ways in which a new KGB
will penetrate all aspects of Russian life. Some have pointed to the creation
of a special office in the education ministry to work with the siloviki as
evidence that officials are getting ready for this return to the Soviet past (echo.msk.ru/news/1839996-echo.html)
and to the fact that police in Moscow are using torture to boost their
crime-fighting statistics (kavpolit.com/articles/zverstva_sobra_v_zakone-28281/). But members
of the Duma seem quite prepared to support this recrudescence of the past. One
newly elected deputy has called on Russians to view 1937 in positive terms (znak.com/2016-09-22/izbrannaya_v_gosdumu_ot_yuga_urala_redaktor_gazety_kultura_prizvala_ne_rugat_37_god)
13.
Oil Coming Out of
Taps in Sakha Apartments as Another Lake Turns Red from Pollution. Last week a
river turned red because of the discharge of chemicals from a Russian plant in
the far north. Now another body of water in Russia has turned red, apparently
from a similar source (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=57E10D1B4D23F). But some in Russia are getting a more immediate
taste of the pollution Moscow’s policies have allowed: in Sakha, some residents
now find that when they turn on the water taps in their apartments, oil, not
water, flows out of them (versia.ru/kakoe-budushhee-gotovit-yakutii-glava-egor-borisov).
And six more from countries neighboring
Russia:
14.
Russia’s Neighbors
Must Make Themselves ‘Unfuckwithable,’ Estonian President Says. In an interview
with Buzzfeed, Toomas Hendrik Ilves has introduced a new term that Russia’s
neighbors need to become familiar with. To resist Russian aggressive, they must
make themselves into states that are “unfuckwithable” from Moscow’s perspective
(buzzfeed.com/miriamelder/estonias-president-wants-some-of-his-fellow-leaders-to-end-).
15. Activists Urge Senior Kazakhstan Leaders Be Supplied
with ‘Sex Secretaries.’ To help the leaders of Kazakhstan better cope with the
pressures of office, some nationalist activists say, the country should supply
them with new assistants to service their sexual needs (asiarussia.ru/news/13601/). Others in Kazakhstan may now face a less
solicitous regime: many ethnic Russians there now have to leave the country to
get medical treatment (stoletie.ru/rossiya_i_mir/bez_prava_na_pomoshh_833.htm).
16.
Deported
Tajik Gastarbeiters Try to Walk Back to Russia. The situation in Tajikistan is now so dire that some
Tajiks who had been working in Russia until they were expelled have tried to
return to that country on foot (centrasia.ru/news.php?st=1474034580).
17. Annexation of Western Belarus Led to
1991, Belarusian Activists Say. Many have argued that
Stalin made a major mistake in annexing the Baltic countries and Western
Ukraine under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but far fewer have
pointed to his annexation of Western Belarus as one of the causes of the ultimate
collapse of the USSR. Now,, some Belarusian activists are making that point for
their nation (charter97.org/ru/news/2016/9/17/222950/).
18.
‘We’re
Out of Putin’s. Would you Like a Stalin?’ Visitors to a
gift shop in occupied Crimea have been told that statues of Vladimir Putin have
been sold out but that it still has busts of Stalin (facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10210594023037383&set=a.3645139297705.160149.1551072626&type=3&theater).
19. Kissing Putin and Trump are Smoking
Something, Lithuanian Graffiti Now Suggests. Graffiti artists
in Lithuania have embellished a picture showing Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump
embracing and kissing in the manner of Brezhnev and an East German leader with
additions suggesting that the two current leaders are smoking marijuana (nr2.lt/mad_World/Novoe-graffiti-s-Trampom-i-Putinym-Teper-oni-kuryat-marihuanu-123688.html ).
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