Russian Justice Ministry Calls for Declaring Non-Existent ‘Anti-Russian Separatist Movement’ an ‘Extremist’ Organization

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Apr. 26 – Last fall, Grigory Golosov, a professor at St. Petersburg’s European University, said that Moscow has come up with a new means of going after those it doesn’t like: first declaring that those the Kremlin doesn’t like are part of an international movement and then declaring that movement to be “an extremist group” even if no such organization exists.

            It did that with the LGBT community, Golosov says, adding that it is likely to do so with feminism, a move many Kremlin supporters already are calling for and noting that such moves will make it easier for Moscow to prosecute those advancing ideas at odds with Putin and his regime (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/11/kremlin-deploying-two-more-means-of.html).

            The latest victim of such an approach consists of those who promote regionalist and nationalist ideas. They do not form a single organization, but Moscow has decided that they do and thus can be treated in the same way that it has been persecuting the LGBT community in Russia.

            Nine days ago, the Russian justice ministry called on the Russian Supreme Court to declare the Anti-Russian Separatist Movement and it structures extremist organization at a hearing on June 7 (minjust.gov.ru/ru/pages/izveshenie-o-vremeni-i-meste-rassmotreniya-administrativnogo-dela-7-iyunya-2024-g/).

            In its letter to the Court, the justice ministry said that “the Anti-Russian Separatist Movement is an international movement for the destruction of the multi-national unity and territorial integrity of Russia;” but it did not provide any details about just what this Movement is and what its organizations international or local may be.

            The Sova-Center monitoring and analysis group in reporting this development said that the experience of the LGBT movement strongly suggests that the Russian authorities will use this declaration as an “elastic” means of bringing new and additional charges against activists the Kremlin doesn’t like (sova-center.ru/misuse/news/persecution/2024/04/d49736/).

            Russian prosecutors will no longer have to point to specific actions to bring charges of separatism against anyone. Simply declaring that someone is a member of this “Anti-Russian Separatist Movement” will be enough -- even though as the Sova-Center points out no such “movement” exists.

            According to the Sova-Center, Moscow is likely to use such a declaration against regionalist as well as nationalist groups and also against people outside of Moscow who are not interested in separatism at all but rather only in creating genuine federalism in the increasingly unitary Russian state.

           This has sparked a large number of sharply critical comments by Russian independent news organizations and bloggers (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=662C9F2C5D0E6). 

Moscow May Restart Regional Amalgamation Effort but Unlikely to Touch North Caucasus, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Apr. 24 – Federation Council speaker Valentina Matviyenko says that there are several regions in the Russian Federation which should be combined with their neighbors to make it easier for Moscow to administer the country but that such efforts must be carefully prepared lest amalgamation spark resistance.

            Her comments now (ria.ru/20240424/obedinenie-1941914211.html and versia.ru/valentina-matvienko-zayavila-o-neobxodimosti-obedinit-neskolko-rossijskix-regionov) are almost an exact repetition of those she made more than a decade ago (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/02/window-on-eurasia-are-russias-non.html).

            But although amalgamation has long been on hold, Matviyenko’s call for unifying federal subjects may take off. On the one hand, there have been increasing rumblings about that among non-Russians who fear that Putin will follow his latest “re-election” with a move against them (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/03/before-end-of-2024-putin-will-abolish.html).

            And on the other, there have been similar calls by some officials in the Russian government in recent months, also repeating earlier arguments made by the same people (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/01/kremlin-now-planning-to-combine.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/01/if-moscow-restarts-regional.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/04/deputy-prime-minister-wants-to-replace.html).

            Nonetheless, resistance to such moves continues to arise even when officials seek to combine cities and towns (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/04/local-resistance-spreads-and.html). And experts warn that Moscow would again face opposition if it sought to combine regions or republics, slowing or even killing such moves (svpressa.ru/politic/article/412973/).

            However that may be, Putin has shown himself much enamored of the idea of combining federal subjects and may indeed move ahead now to distract attention and demonstrate his control. Given that, Stavropol’s Center for the Support of Social and Civic Initiatives has issued a report about the regions and republics most likely to be combined (akcent.site/novosti/31161).

            As summarized by Aksent’s Anton Chablin, the Center provides the following checklist for the next 18 months:

·       In the Far East, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast is the most likely candidate for unification and may be combined with Khabarovsk Kray. Combining Khabarovsk Kray with Primorsky Kray or Primorsky Kray with Sakhalin are unlikely.

·       In the Urals, Moscow may seek to unite the Tyumen matryoshka of Tyumen Oblast, Yamal, and Yurga but that would face serious local resistance. More realistic is the combination of Kurgan and Chelyanvsk Oblasts.

·       In the North-West, Moscow is unlikely to repeat its failed effot to unite the Nenets Autonomous District with Arkhangelsk Oblast; but it may seek to combine Pskov Obalast with Novgorod Oblast and Leningrad Oblast with St. Petersburg which has the status of a federal subject.

·       In the South, no changes are likely in the North Caucasus because of local resistance; but Moscow may try to combine Sebastopol and Crimea in those occupied portions of Ukraine.

·       And in Central Russia, some of the poorer oblasts which are losing population may be combined to form larger ones and give Moscow a victory on the amalgamation front, the Center says.

 

Media Stories Promoting Ethnic Divisions in Russia have Grown by Orders of Magnitude Since Launch of Expanded War in Ukraine, FADN’s Bulatov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Apr. 24 – Since February 2022, the number of stories promoting ethnic divisions within Russian has increased by more than 15 times for the country as a whole and more than a thousand times in some republics, according to Abulgamid Bulatov, who monitors media for the Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs (FADN).

            He said that the number of such stories in 2023 exceeded the number in 2021 by 15 times and that this growth was far greater in the non-Russian republics. There the increase was by a factor of “500, 600 and in some cases more than a thousand times” what it had been before the war (tass.ru/proisshestviya/20648187).

            The worst examples of this growth, Bulatov continued, were in Buryatia, Daghestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia. And he added that the focus of these articles typically was on questions of historical memory with authors questioning established versions of historical events and thus trying to set the non-Russians against the ethnic Russians.

            Bulatov did not provide more specifics or define the way in which his monitoring group decides which articles are guilty of the offenses he is concerned with. But his numbers are striking especially since Moscow has closed down many media outlets in the republics and elsewhere during this period and tightened controls over most of the others.

            It is possible that FADN is now counting stories which appear on Internet platforms that are based abroad. But even if that is the case, this trend highlights the way in which many non-Russians are responding to Putin’s continued insistence on a single stream of Russian history in which all its peoples now share a common view of the past.

Secret Poll Results on Russian Attitudes toward Migrants have Kremlin Worried, ‘Verstka' Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Apr. 22 – After the Crocus City Hall terrorists attack, the Kremlin ordered VTsIOM to conduct a secret poll of Russian attitudes toward migrants. It showed a sharp decline in positive attitudes toward immigrants and a sharp increase in negative ones, a shift the Kremlin hopes will be short-lived lest it using migrants to deal with Russia’s labor shortage impossible.

            That is the conclusion of a Kremlin source who on the basis of anonymity shared the results of the poll and discussed concerns in the Russian leadership about its findings with journalists from the Verstka media outlet (verstka.media/v-rossii-sekretno-izmerili-ksenofobiyu-posle-terakta-v-krokus-city-hall).

            According to this source, Verstka says, Russian attitudes toward immigrants shifted from an even split in positive and negative ones to a situation in which those who oppose migrant workers and want them limited or expelled outnumbered those who don’t and aren’t focused on restricting their presence in Russia because of the country’s economic needs.

            Those results, in the wake of the terrorist attack, are consistent with the trends polls conducted by more independent agencies have reported. But precisely because this survey was ordered by the Kremlin itself, it is likely to have greater impact on the thinking of Russian leaders.

            Many Russian outlets and politicians have been calling for tighter controls over migration and even expelling some of those already there, policies that if they were to be adopted in toto would have the direst consequences for the Russian economy given worker shortages in a variety of key industries.

            The Kremlin has little choice but to try to show that it takes popular attitudes on this issue seriously; but it has to hope, the source says, that such demands will cool and the regime will be able to continue to attract and use migrants, something that will become ever more important given demographic trends and the need for manpower for Putin’s war in Ukraine.

 

Kremlin’s Refusal to Break with Soviet Identity has Led to War and Will Lead to Russia’s Collapse, Eppl Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Apr. 22 – Had the Kremlin honestly faced up to and then rejected the failed Soviet past, Russia could have joined the West; but instead, it decided that its own survival depended on ensuring that Russia would continue in the Soviet tradition, a decision that has led directly to the war in Ukraine and will lead to Russia’s collapse, Nikolay Eppl says.

            In an essay for the Carnegie Endowment’s Berlin Center,, the Russian philologist and translator argues that “the unresolved question about “the identity of Russia as the heir of the USSR has defined all the zigzags of the country’s existence over the last 30 years” (carnegieendowment.org/politika/92259).

            The reformist course Moscow adopted in the early 1990s, Eppl continues, “increasingly came into contradiction with the unpreparedness of the New Russia to turn away from the identification of itself as an empire and from the former administrative practices as well as dissatisfaction with democratic institutes both by the state and by the society.”

            “The experience of criticizing one’s own past could show the Russian leadership that reinventing oneself without committing suicide is possible, that admitting crimes and being willing to take responsibility for them is a manifestation of strength, not weakness,” he argues.

“The refusal to follow this path determined what is happening now with the Russian state.”

        Many Soviet crimes were so heinous that there was at the end of Soviet times and the beginning of post-Soviet ones a real demand for condemning that past, but the regime soon refused to go beyond “cosmetic” and indeed “fictional” denunciations lest the involvement of many of its members in those crimes led to attacks on them.

 

               According to Eppl, “the real dilemma for the Kremlin was whether to turn away from identifying with the USSR and Soviet practices and receive for this the advantages of compete entrance into the club of Western democracies or openly recognize that the former model hadn’t gone anywhere and continues to define the nature of the political regime in Russia.”

              

               For a few years, “the Kremlin allowed itself to avoid making a final choice and balanced between authoritarian and liberal-democratic models,” doing just enough to convince some that it was still headed to reform but protecting itself by using many of the methods drawn from the Soviet past.

 

               But after the protests of 2011-2012, the Kremlin recognized that a choice had to be made; and it made one, by launching the war in Ukraine by seizing Crimea and then using that to make the system inside the Russian Federation fully congruent with what had existed in Soviet times.

 

               “Without functioning democratic mechanisms,” he continues, “there was nothing to legitimate the regime besides patriotic mobilization,” first in Crimea, then in Syria, and then in Ukraine again with Putin’s launch of an expanded invasion of that former Soviet republic in February 2022.

 

               The collapse of an empire is always difficult, Eppl points out, noting that even between 1991 and 2014, the much-ballyhooed collapse of the USSR claimed “no fewer than 200,000 lives.” But collapses can be more or less difficult depending on whether the successor regime breaks with the past or refuses to do so.

 

               When it doesn’t and when it assumes its own survival and that of its own country is at risk if it were to do so, then the situation becomes worse. And for the Putin regime, the war in Ukraine is “critical to the survival of Russia in the form in which its leaders would like to keep it in a deep freeze.”

 

               That explains both the decision to go to war against Ukraine and the way Moscow has explained and fought this war, Eppl says. The Kremlin’s decision to refuse to break with Soviet identity did not and does not “leave it with any possibility besides a return to the USSR with all or at least very many of the characteristics of this process.”

 

               That reality “defines both the official explanations of the goals of this war and the particular ways it is being conducted,” he argues. If there is a war, it must be against fascism and so Ukraine must be declared a fascist state, however absurd that is; and Russian forces in Ukraine must act to restore Soviet symbols, including erecting Lenin statues in occupied areas.

 

               But there is an even more serious consequence of the Russian leadership’s refusal to give up Soviet identity and its efforts to recreate Soviet conditions and it is this, Eppl concludes. These efforts are restoring a system that already failed and will lead in the end to the final destruction of that system and the country that follows this mistaken past.

The Caspian Sea on Its Way to Becoming a Desert, Kazakh Political Scientist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Apr. 22 – The Caspian Sea is “shrinking dramatically,” Aida Amangeldina says, a development that puts it at risk of desertification, a development that threatens not only the flora and fauna of the sea itself but also and potentially far more seriously “the socio-economic situation” of the five littoral states.

            Experts have been sounding the alarm about the Caspian following the Aral Sea into extinction for some time (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/03/water-level-of-caspian-sea-falling-at.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/10/declining-water-levels-in-caspian-plus.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/07/northern-sections-of-caspian-sea.html).

            But the Kazakh political scientist’s discussion of this issue at a conference at the end of 2023 (which has now been published in a 3,000-word heavily footnoted article at beda.media/en/articles/caspian-sea) is a sign that alarm about the fate of the Caspian is now moving from marginal groups to the center of policy concerns.

            Amangeldina says that water level of the Caspian has been declining more or less constantly since the beginning of the 20^th century, although a slight rise two and three decades ago led many to conclude that the problem would go away on its own. But in 2023, the sea’s water level reached the lowest level ever, 29 meters below sea level.

            Most of the decline can be attributed to climate change, with precipitation in the region falling and evaporation increasing. But human causes are also critical: ever more people in the area are taking water from rivers that feed the sea and are desalinating the water of the sea itself to meet their needs.

            The situation is not yet irreversible, Amangeldina says; but it will require both the agreement of all five littoral states and international involvement. So far, such agreement has been in short supply. Even the 2018 convention on the delimitation of the sea remains unratified (by Iran) and has not gone into effect, and most governments are focused on their specific needs.

            Unless that changes and soon, the Caspian will likely “repeat the fate of the Aral Sea,” with far larger ecological, economic and political consequences given the size and importance of the Caspian Sea not only for the littoral countries but for the international community as well, she says.

 

Moscow Increasingly Worried about Rise of Roman Catholicism in Belarus

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Apr. 22 – Both the Kremlin and the Moscow Patriarchate are increasingly worried about the rise of Roman Catholicism in Belarus, with the former concerned primarily about the possibility that the church’s rise will threaten Putin ally Alyaksandr Lukashenka and the latter about the danger that it will weaken the Moscow church in Belarus.

            These fears have been growing over the last several years, following the prominent role Catholics played in the protests following the last “elections” in Belarus and the spread of autocephaly movements among Orthodox churches in the post-Soviet states (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/04/moscows-greatest-fear-about-orthodox.html).

            These fears have fed anti-Catholic attitudes both in Moscow and in Minsk (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/01/anti-catholicism-spreading-in-moscow.html) and have now led to direct attacks on the Vatican for what one Russian author says is its direct involvement in the rise of an anti-Russian and anti-Belarusian Catholic movement in Belarus.

            On the Rhythm of Eurasia portal, Moscow religious affairs commentator Artyom Karpovich directly attacks the Vatican and Pope Francis for what he says is Rome’s efforts in Belarus  to overthrow both Russian Orthodox and Russia’s ally Lukashenka (ritmeurasia.ru/news--2024-04-22--vatikan-aktivizirovalsja-v-belorussii-72858).

            He argues that the Roman Catholic Church has always been anti-Russian, although he notes the Pope Francis has promised in public not to interfere in Orthodox affairs. But he says that pledge has been undermined by the increasing activity in Belarus of an apostolic administration set up last year to coordinate Catholic churches in that country. (On that body, see vaticannews.va/ru/church/news/2023-03/belarus-novaya-struktura-dlya-katolikov-vizantijskogo-obryada.html).

            According to Karpovich, the pope has taken this position because he fears retaliation from Moscow and Minsk; but the pope’s subordinates believe that they can proceed and that the Holy Father will eventually change his position and allow the creation of a Roman Catholic exarchate in Belarus.

            To that end, the Catholic apostolic administrator has become increasingly active in meeting with Belarusian officials and in providing financial support and guidance to the growing number of Catholic churches in Belarus (eadaily.com/ru/news/2023/04/07/pochemu-v-belorussii-aktivizirovalis-grekokatoliki).

            The Belarusian Catholic church is closely connected with the Greek Catholics of Ukraine. Many of its priests were trained in western Ukraine, and not surprisingly, they and their flocks have supported Ukraine since Putin launched his expanded invasion of that country in February 2022, yet another reason for Moscow’s opposition to Catholicism in Belarus. (On these interrelationships, see dekoder.org/ru/gnose/greko-katolicheskaya-cerkov-v-belarusi.)

            The Belarusian government and the Russian church in Belarus recognize the dangers that this “fifth column,” to use Karpovich’s expression, poses to both. And the former has adopted new laws that give Minsk far greater powers to interfere in and limit the growth of Roman Catholicism in Belarus (apnews.com/article/belarus-lukashenko-religion-repression-dissent-58428374005dd0da383fbac7ad2c5d57).

            Karpovich would clearly like to see the Belarusian government do even more and the Moscow church there become increasingly active in opposing what he believes is a Catholic threat to both.