For Putin, Russia’s Isolation is a Strategy Not a Misfortune, Lipsky Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, March 30 – Most analysts have suggested that sanctions and international isolation were a cost Vladimir Putin was willing to pay in order to get his way in Ukraine, but Andrey Lipsky, an editor of “Novaya gazeta,” says that is exactly backwards: the Kremlin leader wanted isolation and launched his Ukrainian campaign to get it.

 

            Indeed, he suggests, Putin’s comments to the FSB leadership last week confirm that interpretation because they suggest that the Russian president is worried that further contacts with the outside world could lead to a repetition of the destabilizing protests of 2011-2012 during the upcoming 2016 and 2018 election seasons (novayagazeta.ru/politics/67833.html).

 

            And to prevent that from happening and thus to ensure the continuation of his own power, the “Novaya gazeta” editor argues, Putin is quite prepared to suffer what he believes will be the short-term costs of sanctions and isolation in order to ensure his own long-term political survival.

 

            Since the Crimean Anschluss and the West’s response, Lipsky points out, people in both Russia and Western capitals have been asking why – why did Putin need to take a step that he might have been expected to understand in advance would entail so many costs and bring what seems to others so few benefits?

 

            Clearly, most of the propagandistic memes – “Russia wants to restore the empire,” “It must defend Russian speakers from the fascist junta,” and “a desire to seize the territories of others is in Russia’s blood” – are now explanations but rather something that must be explained, he continues.

 

            What else is left? Preventing Ukraine from joining NATO and the West establishing a base in Sevastopol? “Strengthening the security of the country? The growth of Russia’s influence in the world? The rallying of the ‘Russian world’? [or] Consolidation in the framework of a ‘Eurasian project’?

 

            Very early on, Lipsky says, it became clear that Putin’s policies in Ukraine had done Russia more harm than good, that Russian influence in the world had declined, its security had been compromised, that NATO had been reinvigorated under expanded American influence, and the status of Russian speakers abroad had gotten worse.

 

            All this happened not because of the West’s desire to box Russia in but because by Putin’s actions in Crimea and Ukraine more generally, “Russia violated the [existing world] order, and the others simply have been defending themselves.” And they now view Moscow as a dangerous source of instability, “unpredictable and unprofitable.”

 

            Given this balance sheet, the commentator says, many have simply decided that Putin miscalculated, but quite possibly there is a better explanation. His actions in Ukraine, Lipsky says, are “only a cover for something more essential for the ruling political command in Russia” – the preservation of its political power.

 

            The Kremlin leader’s remarks to the FSB last week provide a clear indication of this. He talked about “attempts by ‘Western special services’ to use Russian NGOs and ‘politicized unions’ to discredit the authorities and destabilize the situation in Russia in the course of the 2016 Duma and 2018 presidential campaigns.”

 

            In thinking about these words, it is important to remember that “precisely injustice and falsifications during the Duma elections of 2011 in favor of the party of power led angry citizens in Moscow and certain other major cities into the streets,” something that clearly frightened Putin and his entourage and led to a tightening of the screws.

 

            Increasingly, this campaign presented the opponents of the regime as “agents” of the West, something that required presenting the West as an external enemy. Otherwise the moves against the regime’s domestic opponents could go only so far, at least by making use of this ideological paradigm, Lipsky suggests.

 

            But until Crimea, the Kremlin lacked one thing to ensure acceptance by the Russian population of the equating of the opposition with Western agents and that was “the mass mobilization and rallying of the population around the existing authorities. The Ukrainian crisis,” Lipsky says, “and ‘the return of Crimea’ provided this happy possibility.”

 

            Whether Putin can maintain that without doing something more for any length of time remains an open question, but it is clearly the case, the “Novaya gazeta” editor says, that the Kremlin is going to do everything it can to maintain it through the 2016-2018 “political season by propaganda, the actions of the force structures, and new legislation.”

 

            Obviously, “total isolation would not be profitable” for Russia even in pursuit of that goal, Lipsky says. “But partial, with a limitation of harmful contacts and with sanctions which mobilize the population … and explain why the economic situation is deteriorating … is completely useful.”

 

            And indeed, it may “at the present stage only strengthen the arguments of the regime which is seeking to go into the new political season” without having to face any real danger that Putin and his regime will be challenged.

 

 

Ex-Prisoners and Guards Demonstrate to Save Russian Prison Camp and the Town It Supports

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, March 28 – The sad fate of company towns in Russia where the closure of the industry around which they were formed closes down, but there is a special category of these settlements that has so far received less attention: towns built up around prisons or penal camps that are at risk of disappearing if their main “industry” goes away.

 

            That may be about to change thanks to a Dozhd television broadcast last week about the situation in Sos’va, a small settlement in the Urals where former prisoners and their former guards staged a demonstration opposing the closure of the prison camp there, something that would mean the death of the town (snob.ru/selected/entry/90066).

 

            Some 200 people took part, making this “save the prison” effort the largest demonstration in the settlement over the last decade perhaps because it was organized by local business people who will lose out if the camp closes down.  One of the protesters openly acknowledged he’d been inside as a prisoner long ago because of “stupidity.”

 

            Sos’va with a population of a little more than 7,000 is located some 450 kilometers north of Yekaterinburg and exists because of two strict regime camps and a third for prisoners suffering from tuberculosis. The only other industry, a wood processing plant, went bankrupt some time ago.

 

            Rumors that one or more of the camps will be closed have been circulating for some time, although officials say that no decision has been taken because no one is quite sure where the remaining prisoners would be sent. But because almost all Sos’va’s residents are linked to the camps as employees or former inmates, they are very concerned about a possible shut down.

 

            Russian penal officials say that they are indeed closing many camps far from the main cities as part of an efficiency drive. Dozens have been shut down already, and both the inmates and the guards have been taken care of. People don’t need to worry. If things were as bad as the media say, why has there been so little protest? 

 

            But now that there has been a demonstration in Sos’va, that too many change with residents of other such settlements deciding that they have no choice but to go into the streets to try to protect what little they have in what many Russians still call “the big zone” outside of the camps by insisting that the state maintain “the little zone” of them.

 

           

Russian Rights Movement Must Recover Its Roots of a Century Ago, Popkov Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, March 29 – The contemporary human rights movement emerged at a time when its possibilities for action were generally increasing. Now that those possibilities are continuously decreasing, it needs to reinvigorate itself by recalling the efforts of its predecessors, those who fought for the same rights as the Soviet system was institutionalizing itself.

 

            That is the message of Roman Popkov, a former Russian political prisoner who now heads the Nation’s Freedom movement, in an article entitled “Legal Advocates as Predecessors of Rights Defenders” in which he laments that the 50^th anniversary of one of those people, Yekaterina Peshkova, passed largely unnoticed last Thursday (openrussia.org/post/view/3805/).

 

            Russian rights activists today, he writes, and for completely justifiable reasons remember the dissidents of the late Soviet period, protest the closure of the Perm-36 GULAG museum, and object to the erection of statues to Stalin.  But they don’t remember as they should those who laid the foundations for their activities a century ago.

 

            To make his case, he interviews, Yaroslav Leontyev, a Moscow historian, about Peshkova and her work. Her predecessors, he says, include Fyodor Gaaz and Princess Maria Dondukkova-Korsakova who began the fight for the rights of political prisoners in the middle of the 19^th century.

 

            By the early 20^th century, mass political parties had formed in Russia, and many of them created their own “Red Crosses” or “Black Crosses” to come to the aid of their own political prisoners. Peshkova was involved in one of these as early as 1910 when she was living in Nizhny Novgorod as the wife of Maksim Gorky.

 

            During World War I, she was a leader of the Help the Victims of War organization and devoted herself to rescuing children from the front.  After the Soviet-Polish war in 1920, she was involved in the exchange of prisoners and the search for Poles who had been exiled to Siberia. In Soviet Russia and then the Soviet Union, she helped organize groups to help political prisoners.

 

            In the 1920s, the Soviet authorities openly acknowledged that they had political prisoners and allowed those who wanted to help them access to the prisoners to provide them with legal and other forms of assistance.  Because of that focus, Peshkova and others like her did not call themselves “human rights defenders” but rather “legal advocates.”

 

            The Soviet-era Political Red Cross operated quite openly in Moscow between 1917 and 1922 and lasted in some places into the 1930s under the same Pompolit (“Help for Political Prisoners”), an arrangement Peshkova, because of her links to Gorky, was able to negotiate with the secret police.

 

            Peshkova’s granddaughter told him, Leontyev relates, that once Stalin’s secret police chief Yagoda asked Peshkova “when will you finally close up shop?”  Peshkova responded, “That will be on the day after you do!”  There is a certain “black humor” in this recollection, he says. Her group was closed down just after Yagoda was arrested and shot.

 

            Leontyev suggests that Peshkova’s activities have three important lessons for human rights activity in Putin’s Russia.  First, it is absolutely necessary now as then that the political prisoners themselves organize as best they can and with the support of outsiders to defend their rights. Often, they are the only ones in a position to do anything.

 

            Second,  human rights groups must define themselves in the first instance as lobbyists for the political prisoners because that will help create a Russian civil society.  And third, given the rising number of political prisoners, rights activists now need to be concerned with something Peshkova was: the rehabilitation and reintegration of political prisoners after their release.

 

Putin Increasingly Harmed by His Pro-Kadyrov Stance, Piontkovsky Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, March 28 – The FSB continues to disseminate its version of the murder of Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, one that links it to Ramzan Kadyrov, not out of any concern for getting at the truth but rather because of growing anger at the Chechen leader and the backing he continues to receive from Vladimir Putin, according to Andrey Piontkovsky.

 

            The Russian force structures, he writes, “have never had any good feelings for Ramzan Akhmatovich and are extremely skeptical about the Putin ‘Kadyrov’ project which deprived them as they understand it of their ‘victory’ in the Caucasus” by allowing him an autonomy they would never have permitted (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=551673923B9B4).

 

            In addition, Piontkovsky says, the siloviki are anything but happy about the way in which Kadyrov militants are now getting involved in fights for control of economic and even political assets “far beyond the borders of the Chechen Republic,” something no other regional leader has been permitted to do.

 

            But “the last drop apparently because the provincial version of ‘Triumph of the Will’ at the Grozny stadium,” an action that seemed to presage a situation in which it would not be Chechnya within Russia but “’Russian within Chechnya,’” something anathema not only to the siloviki but to ordinary Russians as well.

 

            All this anger poses problems for Putin, Piontkovsky says, but what Kadyrov is doing is posing an even larger one for the Kremlin leader because what the Chechen head has been doing constitutes a direct attack on “the central nucleus of Putin’s mythology,” the notion that Putin is legitimate because he restored order by means of the second Chechen war.

 

            But at the same time, Putin can’t “close down the ‘Kadyrov’ project” because to do so “would be official recognition of Russia’s defeat in [that] war and at the same time a declaration of a third” Chechen war.” That in turn would represent “a return to 1999” but one in which Moscow’s “starting position” would be “much worse.”

 

            Caught between the need for the superficial stability in the North Caucasus that Kadyrov provides in exchange for massive infusions of cash and the right to act on his own as he sees fit and an equal need to maintain his own legitimating myth, Piontkovsky says, the Kremlin leader has not yet come down hard against either Kadyrov or his siloviki opponents.

 

            That “testifies to the weakening of [Putin’s] regime of personal power,” the Russian analyst says, public opinion surveys to the contrary.  Everyone must remember, he suggests, that “the power of a dictator never rests on polls. On the contrary, polls rest on the power” of those who have it.

 

            “Had a sociological survey existed in the USSR at the end of February 1953, it would have found that 99.999 percent” of the population approved of Stalin.  “But several days later,” after the latter died, that all changed not only in the population but within the elite itself, Piontkovsky points out.

 

            That is something Putin has to be concerned about because “the power of a dictator rests on the qualified subordination to him of several dozen [senior] people.” They will support him until they don’t, until a critical mass of these critical people decide they would be better off without him.

 

            By raising questions about the mythology he has used to legitimate his rule, Putin has brought that day closer, leading more people within the elite to question where he is going and more people in the Russian population to wonder how anyone can square the idea of “a Russian world” with one in which “Russia is inside Chechnya.”

 

FSB Increasingly Involved in Misuse of ‘Anti-Extremism’ Laws, SOVA Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, March 29 – In its new 11,500-word report on the ways in which Russian officials are misusing the country’s anti-extremism laws, the SOVA human rights monitoring organization concludes that one of the most important trends of the last year is a dramatic increase in the role of the FSB in such actions.

 

            There are two basic sources of such misuse: excessive actions by poorly trained law enforcement personnel who are given little guidance by the laws themselves and “the conscious formation of mechanisms for suppression of opposition and simply independent forms of activity” (polit.ru/article/2015/03/28/antiextremism/).

 

            The latter has become “much more in evidence from the middle of 2012” when the authorities used anti-extremism laws to suppress opposition protests.  “Unfortunately,” SOVA writes, “with the falloff in opposition activity, the growth of the repressive component did not cease” but in fact increased.

 

            Russia’s involvement in Ukraine has been the occasion if not the cause for five distinct trends that the SOVA report details. First, since the Crimean Anschluss, the anti-extremist laws have been made harsher and “’the space of illegality’ has been broadened,” something Russian courts have not prevented but rather facilitated.

 

            Second, the Russian authorities have extended the application of this legislation into the Internet even though the nature of that sphere makes it almost impossible for them to achieve their ends unless they are prepared to shut down all access to the world wide web, something that would entail serious negative consequences for Russia.

 

            Third, the SOVA report continues, because of Russia’s involvement in Ukraine, Moscow and its officials have used anti-extremist laws as a way of suppressing any criticism of their actions.

 

            Fourth, in the face of an ever more xenophobic environment, Moscow has doubled the number of cases it has brought against people for stirring up hatred of one kind or another. Not only has the number of such cases increased, SOVA says, but the share of them which are unjustified has as well.

 

            And fifth, because the Ukrainian events intersect with concerns about Russian national security, the FSB has significantly increased its involvement in anti-extremist cases, something that has added yet another reason why such cases constitute a misuse of the law for political ends.

 

            But Moscow’s focus on Ukraine in this area has not led to a reduction in the number of cases brought inappropriately under this legislation against religious minorities and against individuals for statements that in no reasonable way can be said to fall within the terms of the poorly drawn laws, SOVA argues.

 

            There are two places where the situation appears to have become somewhat better over the past year, the report suggests. On the one hand, the rate at which items are being added to the Federal List of Extremist Materials has slowed. And on the other, the number of cases being brought against librarians has fallen.

 

            But overall, the SOVA report concludes, Russian officials continue to misuse anti-extremism laws and are “obviously not prepared either to liberalize” them or even work to reduce the most obvious violations of even the formulations of existing laws by the police and the FSB.

 

 

 

Shirinsky-Shikhmatov, Pro-Moscow Russian Fascist Killed at Auschwitz, Possible Source for Putinism

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, March 29 – Just as Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is giving the world a geography lesson about places few knew about earlier, so too the Kremlin leader’s efforts to find an ideological justification for his ever more authoritarian and aggressive political system is offering a lesson in the history of some hitherto neglected political thinkers.

 

            One of the most curious sources for Putinism appears to be a Russian prince who broke with the National Bolsheviks when he discovered they were agents of the Soviet secret police, married Boris Savinkov’s widow, developed his own doctrine about Russian fascism, always defended Russia against Germany, and died in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.

 

            But if Prince Igor Shirinksy-Shikhmatov is a curious source, Pavel Pryanikov argues, he may be an extremely useful one because unlike many better-known Russian emigres who flirted with fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, the prince never allied himself with Hitler and always called for the defense of Russia under whatever name against foreigners (ttolk.ru/?p=23343).

 

            Following their defeat in the Russian civil war, many White Russian emigres tried to find an explanation for their loss. “The overwhelming majority of them,” Pryanikov says, “came to the conclusion that the only ideologies capable of defeating the Bolsheviks were national socialism or fascism (in one or another variant).”

 

            Among these groups were the so-called “national maximalists,” who broke with the national Bolsheviks over the degree of the latter’s cooperation with and subordination to the Soviet security agencies and who formed in the 1930s a Union of Revolutionized Solidarists to promote change in the USSR without violence or cooperation with foreign powers.

 

             The leader of the national maximalists was Prince Yury Alekseyevich Shirinsky-Shikhmatov. The direct descendent of Chingiz Khan, the prince was born in 1892 into the upper reaches of the extreme right of the tsarist bureaucracy, served in the Northwest Army during the Russian Civil War, and lived as a taxi driver in Paris after the defeat of the White Russian cause.

 

            Shirinsky-Shikhmatov married the widow of SR leader Boris Savinkov and even adopted Savinkov’s son, Lev.  As Pryanikov points out, in the early 1920s before his return to the USSR and death, Savinkov was “one of the first Russian fascists and saw Benito Mussolini as his ideal.”

 

            The prince’s group, centered around the journals “Utverzhdeniye” and “Zavtra” never was that large. According to the Tolkovatel blogger, it had about 300 supporters in Europe, half of whom were in France and Belgium, and another 100 or so in the United States, Manchuria, and Australia.

 

            During World War II, Shirinsky-Shikhmatov refused to work for or even cooperate with German occupation authorities in Paris, called for the defense of the Soviet Union against Germany, and as a result was arrested and dispatched to Auschwitz where he was executed sometime in 1942.

 

            Shirinsky-Shikhmatov’s political program called for religious freedom, a confederal state “with a strong central power,” basic freedoms, “the coexistence of state and private property under the general control of the state by planning,” a strong national defense, and support for liberation movements in the colonial world and workers in capitalist countries.

 

            What set him apart from other Russian émigré fascists was Shirinsky-Shikhmatov’s ideas on how these values might be promoted in the USSR.  He rejected the views of the Smenovekhovtsy who believed that the best way was to cooperate with Moscow and those who favored illegal armed struggle or open cooperation with foreign powers.

 

            Shirinsky-Shikhmatov favored a “third path,” what some called “the masonic way.” That involved the promotion of his ideas via the recruitment of supporters from among those within the Soviet elite who had doubts about where the communists were taking the country and rely on them to transform the situation.

 

            The prince and his entourage were certain that his group should count “not on the intelligentsia or the bureaucracy,” both of whom had been “perverted in the worst Westernizer understanding,” but rather on religious sectarians and on those who were “outside of the clientelist corporations.” 

 

            According to Shirinsky-Shikhmatov, “over the last 300 years, the First and Second Rome have externally triumphed over the Third.” But “the Russian messianic idea in its religious form has remained alive” in religious sects and in the Slavophiles and their philosophical and political descendants.”

 

            Moreover, he wrote, “the Bolsheviks have unconsciously fulfilled a certain part of the high task: they have destroyed the inheritance of Peter I, but this is only the first part” of what needs to be done. After them, a future Russian state “must be built not on the foundation of the principles of ‘pagan-Roman morality,’” but rather “on the basis of the ethics of collectivity, cooperation, and ‘the common task.’”

 

            Russia’s eventual fascist revolution, Shirinsky-Shikhmatov was sure, would require the establishment of “a dictatorship of the people” led by a dictator who would emerge from the military or security services and gain the kind of popular support necessary to transform the country.

 

            Such a leader, the Russian émigré thinker suggested, would be capable of throwing off the “false pseudonym” that was the USSR and “proclaim to the entire world the terrible but genuine name of the country – Russia.”  As Pryanikov notes, Shirinsky-Shikhmatov did not live to see his “dream” realized.

 

Doubly Bad News for the Kremlin – Russia Losing Out to More Technically Advanced Arms Sellers

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, March 28 – Moscow got some bad news this week: it is losing out to other more technologically advanced countries in the arms sales sector, something that is costing Russia money but also highlighting the reality that many of its weapons systems are no longer world class as far as potential buyers are concerned.

 

            While it is unlikely that Russia would ever sell its most advanced weapons systems, such losses suggest that in many areas, its weapons may not be as sophisticated as the Kremlin likes to claim and as many of Russia’s neighbors fear, especially since some of those neighbors are now among those edging Russia out of parts of this market.

 

            And consequently, while Russia remains the second largest seller of arms in the world (behind only the US), it may have trouble maintaining its current sales levels, especially of equipment that requires imported parts that may not be available because of sanctions or that uses advanced technologies Russian arms producers have not yet introduced.

 

            This week, Aleksandr Brindikov, the head of the advisory group to Rosoboroneksport, the Russian government’s military equipment exporting arm, said that Russian producers are becoming ever less competitive on the world weapons market and have already exited some 30 of its sectors (top.rbc.ru/business/27/03/2015/55151ae19a7947285badd2a7).

 

            The reason for that, he said, has nothing to do with marketing but rather that the products the Russian defense industry is offering cannot compete with those offered by other countries, he continued. For example, Germany, China and “even Ukraine” are getting sales in the armored area that Russia had assumed it would keep.

 

            .Brindikov’s comments are a sharp departure from those of Vladimir Putin on January 27 when the Kremlin leader celebrated Russia’s prowess in this area, but even Putin acknowledged that the international arms market was becoming increasingly competitive, a possible indication that he is aware of these problems.

 

Anton Mardasov of Svobodnaya pressa queried several other Moscow experts on arms concerning Brindikov’s statements. Most were dismissive, although some did concede that Russia has problems now in the electronics area because it must produce components that it used to be able to import (svpressa.ru/war21/article/116991/).

 

But one of these experts, Vladimir Shvaryev, deputy director of the Moscow Center for the Analysis of the International Arms Trade, suggested that Brindikov was pointing to a problem that goes back much further than the past year.  Russia has had problems in producing and selling high-tech arms, he said, but these problems are have been around for a long time.