Putin’s New Nationalities Chief Says His Job is to ‘Prevent Pogroms in Biryulevo'

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, April 3 – Vladimir Putin has chosen a Duma deputy from Sverdlovsk with an FSB background and service in the notorious Alpha Group during his Chechen wars to be the head of the new Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs, an indication of how the Kremlin leader intends to use this new tool and why Igor Barinov may be just the man to do it.

 

            When Putin called for the creation of the new agency last month, many were skeptical it would amount to more than a new arrangement of bureaucratic chairs, especially given that Putin disbanded the nationalities ministry more than a decade ago and that for such an agency to deal with ethnic issues generally would require more power than he would be willing to cede.

 

            But now, far more than the listing of its duties in Putin’s decree (kremlin.ru/news/48055),

Putin has given a clear indication of what he expects the agency to do by his appointment of the former FSB officer, one that Barinov himself has reinforced in his first interview since his appointment (ura.ru/articles/1036264473).

 

            Barinov, a native of the North Caucasus, will be working with other North Caucasians now in Moscow on ethnic issues, including Magomedsalam Magomedov, the former Daghestani president who serves as a nationalities advisor to Putin, Gadzhimet Safraliyev, who chairs the Duma’s nationalities committee, and Ilyas Umakhanov, vice speaker of the Federation Council.

 

            But Barinov, an ethnic Russian (something many Russian commentators argued was an absolute necessity for this position), denied that he would be spending “80 percent” of his time on the North Caucasus. Instead, he said, his focus will be “above all” on not allowing pogroms like those which broke out in Moscow’s Biryulevo area to occur. (On the Biryulevo one, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/10/window-on-eurasia-biryulevo-violence.html.)

 

            To do that, Barinov said, he will “monitor inter-ethnic conflicts” in order to be in a position to intervene in a timely fashion and prevent them from becoming explosive.  He added that it is still too soon to say exactly how that will be done given that as yet “there is no agency, no building and no staff.”

 

            Asked  by URA.ru whether he had taken his views on nationality policy arose from his service in Chechnya, Barinov replied “not only then. Let us begin with the fact that I was born in the North Caucasus, in Novocherkassk.” Moreover, during various jobs, he said he had gotten to know the local population in many places of the country.

 

            “We [in Russia],” he argued, “have many centuries of experience with a successful nationality policy.”  If that is what he believes and if he sees himself more as a policeman than anything else, the future of nationalities policy under Putin is likely to prove even more repressive and thus dangerously explosive than the present.

 

Is Ukraine 2015 Going to Be a Repetition of Hungary 1956?

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, April 3 – Moscow’s actions in Ukraine now “strikingly recall the behavior of the Soviet Union” during the Cold War which “put down with blood any manifestations of independent thinking and freedom in the countries of Eastern Europe,” most notoriously given the West’s behavior at the time in Hungary in 1956, Kseniya Kirillova says.

 

            In a commentary for Novy Region-2 today, the Seattle-based journalist points out that all historical analogies are limited but says that what Moscow did in 1956 in Hungary and what it has been doing in Ukraine in the last year are so similar that one cannot fail to draw comparisons (nr2.com.ua/blogs/Ksenija_Kirillova/Vengerskoe-dezhavyu-ukrainskih-sobytiy-93788.html).

 

            After World War II, the Hungarians voted for a non-communist government, but Stalin intervened and imposed a Soviet one on it headed by Mátyás Rákosi who copied the repressive measures of his Moscow master. Not surprisingly, he was hated by the Hungarian people, and after Stalin’s death, he was replaced by Imre Nagy, who launched reforms.

 

            But Rákosi and his hardline followers were not through, and in April 1955, he and they succeeded in ousting Nagy from his post as prime minister and stripping him of his positions in the Communist Party. After that, Budapest resumed the Stalinist approach that it had followed earlier.

 

            The anger of Hungarians then at this turn events resembled the anger of Ukrainians when Viktor Yanukovich reneged, under pressure from Vladimir Putin, on his promise to sign an integration agreement with the European Union. Indeed, “using contemporary language, instead of the expected entrance into Europe, the Hungarians received a ‘Tariff Union’” with Moscow.

 

            “Foreign forces continued to remain on [Hungarian] lands,” just as Russia’s Black Sea Fleet does in Ukraine, but just as Ukrainians were furious at Yanukovich with all his Moscow backing, so too Hungarians were angry at his Stalinist predecessor and launched what can now be seen as a Maidan of their own.

 

            The Hungarian Maidan grew “into a mass uprising,” including “a bloody confrontation” in which “for the sake of justice one must note that there was cruelty on both sides.”  Things might not have gotten out of hand, however, if Moscow had not put 6,000 Soviet soldiers into Budapest on the night of October 24.

 

            The following day, these Soviet forces opened fire on the Hungarian demonstrators, at least 61 of whom were killed and 284 wounded – a remarkably close analogy to what happened with the Heavenly Hundred in Kyiv last year.  But despite this Soviet aciton, “it had becoe clear that the Hungarian Revolution had triumphed.”

 

            Nagy returned to power and abolished the communist party. “Street battled ceased, and for the first time in five days, quiet reigned in the streets of Budapest,” as “Soviet forces began to leave” the Hungarian capital. Hungarians were jubilant, but it was too soon to declare victory because “as we already known from recent history, the Soviet (Russian) authorities are accustoed to take revenge and very harshly indeed.”

 

            On October 31, 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided not to pull Soviet forces out of Hungary but rather to dispatch 60,000 more in order to suppress the Hungarian Revolution.  They arrived four days later in what Moscow called “Operation ‘Whirlwind’” and quickly moved to restore communist and soviet control.

 

            When the Soviet government announced its decision in 1956, it used language that is strikingly similar to that which it has used about Ukraine: “Events have shown,” Moscow said, “that the active participation in this adventure of former Horthyists is leading to the revival of fascism in Hungary and creating a direct threat to our Fatherland and the entire socialist camp.”

 

            “It must not be forgotten,” the Soviet declaration continued, “that in the past war, Horthy’s Hungary opposed our motherland together with Hitlerite Germany.”

 

            According to Moscow, its forces were not invaders but rather were entering Hungary at the request of the legitimate government that had been set up in short order by Janos Kadar. “It is obvious,” Kirillova says, that Kadar’s first declaration was something in the nature of ‘I am alive and I am legitimate.’”

 

            By November 8, Soviet forces had suppressed the Hungarian Revolution, arresting many and sentencing Nagy and 350 others to death for their role in it. Thirteen thousand were imprisoned. And Hungary was once again firmly in the “socialist bloc.”

 

            Despite the hopes of many Hungarians that the West would come to their aid and the explicit request from Nagy for help, international reaction to what Moscow was doing was limited to expressions of “deep concern,” especially given that the Western powers were distracted by the Suez Crisis.  

 

            In 1956,Moscow used these appeals from Budapest and these expressions of concern to suggest that Nagy and his government were working “in close cooperation with Western intelligence services” who, Soviet propagandists insisted, were supplying Hungary with arms – rhetoric which Moscow has repeated about Ukraine and the West now.

 

            Fortunately, there are “important differences” between Hungary in 1956 and Ukraine now, and consequently, the outcome may be different. “Russia is not as strong as the Soviet Union was, and the international community still has a chance to defend the victims of aggression” with something more than expressions of “deep concern.”

 

            If indeed, the international community and the West does do more, Kirillova concludes, it will offer to Ukraine and the  other countries of Eastern Europe a chance to “break out” of a situation in which they will experience an infinite repetition of the kind of  “’groundhog day’” that “Soviet-Russian foreign policy” continues to try to “celebrate.”

 

Recent Sharp Rise in Russian Military Spending Shows Putin Preparing for Bigger War, Illarionov Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, April 3 – Russian military spending, even as officially given by the finance ministry, provides a remarkably accurate early warning indicator of Russian intentions, Andrey Illarionov says, and a dramatic increase in spending since January of this year thus suggests that Vladimir Putin is preparing for a larger war in Ukraine and/or elsewhere.

 

            Between the time that Putin came to power up to January 2014, the Moscow economist and commentator says, Moscow has spent on average 2.5 to 3.2 percent of GDP on the military, with the figure tending to rise over time. During the first 13 years of his rule, Illarionov says, spending in constant prices went up 2.6 times (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=551E192F7CF46).

 

            But over the 14 months – the period of Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine – Russian spending on its military has not only gone up significantly as one would expect at a time of military operations but has tracked in a way that provides insights on Russian intentions for the future, the Moscow analyst says.

 

            After Putin made his final decision to intervene in Ukraine in February 2014, he says, Moscow’s military expenditures “were increased by more than twice,” a figure that suggested the Russian government intended not only to seize and occupy Crimea but all of what it calls “Novorossiya.”

 

In February, March and April of last year, Russian military spending amounted to 6.7 percent of GDP and 27.7 percent of all budget expenditures.

 

At the end of April, the Kremlin halted its most ambitious plans and reduced its monthly military spending for the rest of 2014 by approximately a third compared to the first three months of last year, reductions that were possible even though Moscow increased its exercises near the Ukrainian border and supported military action within Ukraine.

 

According to Illarionov, official Russian government figures show that “the situation radically changed” in the first two months of this year, the latest period for which figures are available. Average monthly military spending increased 2.3 times, compared to the May-Deceber 2014 period, 3.3. times compared  to the last pre-war period, and 8.8 times compared to 2000.

 

For those two months alone, he says, military spending was more than 1.3 trillion rubles – that is, more than 20 billion US dollars – and it constituted 43.3. percent of the federal budget and 12.7 percent of Russia’s admittedly diminished GDP.

 

Such a “sharp increase” in military spending provides addition evidence that Putin is preparing for military actions “on a far larger scale and much higher level of intensity than even those which [the world] has seen over the course of the last 14 months.” In short, Illarionov says, the Kremlin leader is preparing for a major war in Ukraine and/or elsewhere.

Karelia ‘First Region in Russia’ Where Local People Demand Ouster of Republic Leader

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, April 3 – More than 1,000 residents of Petrazovodsk took part in a demonstration there yesterday which called for the ouster of the Karelia’s current head Aleksandr Khudilaynen, “the first region in Russia” in Putin’s times where the local population has demanded such a step, according to Karelian republic television.

            (The television station's assertion is not literally true: the people in several North Caucasian republics have demonstrated for the same ends at various points in the last decade. What is true is that by asserting this, the station has raised the stakes for both Petrozavodsk and Moscow in what might otherwise have been a minor issue.) 

 

            The protest was sparked by the arrest of Olga Zaletskaya, a Yabloko deputy in the city council, and Aleksandra Kornilova, another Yabloko activist who is the director of a local trading firm, for what the demonstrators said were trumped up charges intended to remove two of Khudilaynen’s critics (currenttime.tv/content/article/26930088.html).

 

            The Yabloko Party council in Moscow and its Petrozavodsk section are demanding that the two be immediately released, saying that their arrests are politically motivated in advance of elections there and promising that a demonstration to be held on April 9 will repeat and extend the demands of Karelian residents.

 

            Dmitry Rybakov of the Moscow council said that “the April 9 meeting will be “against political repressions in Karelia and for the retirement of Aleksandr Petrovich Khudilaynen as head of the republic.”  Moreover, like the one yesterday, it will call for an elected rather than a Moscow-appointed leadership.

 

            Anatoly Tsygankov, the head of the Center for Political and Social Research in Karelia, suggested that the arrests, which were supposedly triggered by an investigation into land sales there, may not be as baseless as the demonstrators suggest, given that there are always conflicts about such things.

 

            But as the Petrozavodsk television station put it, there is general agreement among city residents that the 13-day arrest of Zaletskaya, who has two young children and an elderly father, is “impermissible” and that “her detention will hardly increase support for the current leadership.”

 

            Both these arrests and the protests they have triggered will only exacerbate tensions in Karelia and concerns in Moscow. In recent months, several Russian legislators in Petrozavodsk and Moscow security officials have suggested that separatism is on the rise there, and they will almost certainly view these protests as evidence that they are right.

 

            Such fears mean the Russian authorities are likely to try to block the demonstration planned for April 9, possibly by arresting more opponents of the Putin-installed regime and stepping up their campaign against what they see as Finnish-inspired separatist attitudes there. (“Separatism in Karelia More Serious than Many Think, Petrozavodsk Deputy Says” (December 17, 2014) windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2014/12/window-on-eurasia-separatism-in-karelia.html).

Seven Moscow Perspectives that Should Not to Be Ignored

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 2 – Despite or perhaps because of the April Fools holiday, the last 48 hours have produced a banner crop of insightful Russian commentaries on a wide range of subjects.  Seven of these essays seem especially important, and, lest any of them are lost, brief summaries are offered below in the hopes that readers will turn to the fuller and richer originals.

1. Nemtsov’s Murder Resembles Mikhoels’ in 1948. Yury Magarshak argues that the murder of Boris Nemtsov in Moscow earlier this year and the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, the Jewish Anti-Fascist leader, in Stalin’s times share much in common both in why they occurred, how they were carried out, how the investigations were structured, and what they ushered in as a result. Indeed, he says, the major difference is that the names of those involved had been changed and definitely not to protect the innocent (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=551C1E1D3DE4E).
    
2. Russia Cannot Revive Its Empire and Prosper. Vladimir Putin’s attempt to restore a Russian empire of whatever kind is doomed to ultimate failure, Elizaveta Pokrovskaya argues, because such a state would throw Russia backwards in a world that is moving forward and recreate many of the same forces which tore the country apart in 1917 and again in 1991.  The only reason that he might get some support for a time is “if present-day Russian society” doesn’t believe it has a future and thus seeks escape in the past.  But that won’t last in the inter-dependent world that now exists (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=551C2FE37FFA8).
    
3. Is Another Philosophers Ship about to Sail from Russia? In 1922, Vladimir Lenin, recognizing that his ideology could not hope to compete with the ideas of Pitirim Sorokin, Nikolay Lossky, and Nicholas Berdyaev, sent them and more than 100 other leading thinkers of Russia into exile on what came to be known as the Philosophers Ship.  Now, another Vladimir, this time Putin, may be thinking about doing the same thing given the suggestion by Boris Mezhuyev in “Izvestiya” that those who oppose Putin and the annexation of Crimea can have no play in Russia’s future, according to Igor Yakovenko (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=551CC354C27C2).
    
4. Putin’s Russia Moving from Left Fascism to Right Fascism. “Over the last 70 years, Russian society has evolved from communism (sovietism) to left fascism (stagnation and Andropov’s rule) and then from left fascism to right fascism,” Yevgeny Ikhlov argues, noting that this evolution has “twice” been interrupted by turns toward democracy.  At present, however, there is a real risk of movement toward the especially dangerous right fascism because it will arise when the regime manages to eliminate humanism, democracy and cosmopolitanism (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=551C25E736CE4).
    
5. The Putin Majority is a Myth. Despite the Kremlin’s claims to the contrary, the notion of “a Putin majority” is a myth, one carefully cultivated but that fails to acknowledge the role of repression and fear, the passivity of the population, and the certainty that it would disappear overnight should another leader take power and use television to promote another “majority” in its place, according to Igor Eidman (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=551C1770082FF).
    
6. Could a Brazilian Scenario Prevent a Disaster in Russia? Many Russians are afraid to take steps to replace Vladimir Putin fearing that his ouster in a coup or revolution would only bring something even worse, Tatyana Vorozheykina says. But there is another possibility, a pact between some in the ruling elite and a newly mobilized mass opposition that could pave the way for a transition to something better.  But for that to happen, opposition leaders must be prepared for a continuing fight with their counterparts in such a pact rather than self-confidently assuming that once an agreement was reached, it would stick. Brazil provides a model of what might be done, and that country is not as different from Russia as many imagine (slon.ru/posts/49946).
    
7. The West Won’t Stop Putin. According to Mikhail Berg, the West won’t stop Putin not only because it is less concerned with the destruction of Ukraine – it has already swallowed the loss of Crimea and would be prepared to accept even greater losses than the Donbas -- than with the possible collapse of the Russian Federation with its oil, gas and markets but also because the West, which clearly does not understand “with whom it is dealing,” believes that the Kremlin leader’s aggressiveness serves their own interests of re-armament and expanding the Western sphere of influence (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=551BBF0C6CEB8).

West Can Stop Putin Only by Focusing on the Dirty Money Moscow Keeps and Uses Abroad, Shevtsova Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, April 2 – Sanctions against Putin’s Russia and other authoritarian regimes are like those imposed in the past against apartheid in South Africa: morally necessary but insufficient by themselves to cause political change. And moving up forces to areas threatened by Russia is also limited in its impact on the Kremlin leader’s behavior, Liliya Shevtsova says.

            If the West is to contain Putin, she says, it must begin by recognizing that it needs a new paradigm, one that reflects the centrality for the Putin elite of money, generally illegally obtained, the desire of that elite to keep it in safe havens abroad, and Moscow’s willingness and ability to buy support among Western elites (charter97.org/ru/news/2015/4/1/145727/).

 

            Only by recognizing this and taking action to expose and then limit such financial operations, the Moscow commentator says, can the West hope to “liquidate the cancerous tumor” within itself and establish new post-Cold War rules of the game that the Kremlin will have an interest in not violating.

 

            Moreover, Shevtsova argues, Western governments and especially European ones should adopt a similar strategy against the authoritarian regimes in “Belarus, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and other [post-Soviet] countries lest they exploit the openings the West has provided them by using methods that no longer affect key elites directly.

            In an interview with Charter 97’s Natalya Radina, Shevtsova says that Europe has undergone a stress test over the last year because of Putin’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas. It has shown far more unity and gumption than many might have expected given all its internal divisions.

 

            But the statements it has made and the sanctions it has employed against Putin’s Russia are “only a tactic and not a strategy,” and they are unlikely to be effective on their own unless combined with a clearly developed range of measures designed to “force a regime which is crossing a red line not to do something bad.”

 

            The place to start for thinking about what such a strategy should look like, Shevtsova says, is to recognize that “the Soviet Union survived on account of its confrontation with the West. But the post-Soviet Russia of Yeltsin and now Putin survives by integration with the West, by the formation inside it of a source of enrichment, a ‘fifth column’ and spheres of influence.”

 

            That is “a completely new model of survival,” she says, and consequently, “it is impossible to cope with the Putin Kremlin, to contain and limit his freedom of action by applying to Russia only economic and military sanctions, by sending five armored vehicles or tanks to Lithuania, by creating rapid deployment forces” or something similar.

 

            What needs to happen, the Moscow analyst says, is for Europe and the West more generally to investigate Russian money abroad, where it is being invested, and to whom it is being paid, and then block the flows of money that Putin and his entourage have illegally obtained, as is the case with much of it.

 

            That won’t easy for Europe to do, she says, because many in Europe are profiting from the existence of this Russian money; but Europe will not succeed in containing Putin if it does not focus on this issue and take decisions.  “The situation is completely new, and one must not compare it with ‘the cold war.’” A new “system of taboos” must be developed.

 

            Had Western analysts been paying attention, Shevtsova says, they would have noticed that the Kremlin well before Ukraine, indeed as early as 2007, had developed and ultimately formally approved a new concept of its foreign relations which reflected its new concerns with money and its placement abroad.

 

            Before the Crimean Anschluss, Moscow saw as the matrix of its approach integration with Europe and the Western community on the basis of dialogue. Now, Shevtsova argues, it sees this wealth as a means of survival, of “containing the West inside and beyond the borders of Russia,” an approach in which Ukraine has become “a laboratory for testing this doctrine.”

Russian ‘Federalism’ Now Means as Little as It Did in Soviet Times, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, April 2 –  Moscow now runs the federal subjects in much the same hyper-centralized way the Soviet Politburo did before Gorbachev’s perestroika, despite the name of the country now being the Russian Federation and Moscow routinely insisting that Ukraine which is less centralized than Russia must “federalize,” according to Vadim Shtepa.

 

            After the USSR disintegrated, he writes, Moscow dropped the references to “soviet” and “socialist” that were part of the Soviet-era RSFSR but continued to include the term “federation” in the name of the country.  But despite the hopes of many, the center worked hard to strip that term of any real content (forbes.ru/mneniya-column/vertikal/284247-zakat-federatsii-kogda-rossiya-vernulas-k-imperskomu-ustroistvu).

 

            The way in which that happened deserves to be remembered, the Russian regionalist says, especially this week on the 23^rd anniversary of the Federal Treaty between Moscow and 19 of the 21 non-Russian republics – neither Tatarstan nor Chechnya signed -- that the latter hoped would mark the end of Russia’s imperial traditions.

 

            The reason they were disappointed, he suggests, lies not only in the attitudes of the country’s rulers in Moscow who still wanted to control everything but also in the diverse status of the republics and regions in Russia, something that had not been and did not become “a mark of [genuine] federalism,” even though the adjective remained in the name of the country.

 

            The March 1992 Federal Treaty gave the non-Russian republics “much more authority than the [predominantly ethnic Russian] oblasts and krays,” a reflection of Boris Yeltsin’s suggestion two years earlier that the republics should take “as much sovereignty as they could swallow,” something he never said to the oblasts and krays.

 

            That meant, Shtepa points out, that there was always a constituency for gutting the Federation Treaty and that when Vladimir Putin began to construct his “power vertical,” “the representatives of the oblasts in the Federation Council (where they were the majority) easily voted for doing away with republic sovereignties and for the appointment of regional heads.”

 

            In 1992, however, the Federal Treaty represented an effort to “synthesize” republic sovereignty declarations with “all-Russian interests.”  But it was fundamentally flaws in at least two respects.  On the one hand, it violated the federal principle of subsidiarity with its voluntary delegation of power by the regions to the center.

 

            And on the other, the agreement itself reflected Russia’s imperial tradition in what it “was concluded not among the regions directly but between them and the center,” an arrangement that “contradicts the historical experience of federations” in other countries. In Russia as before, “the interests of the center were primary and sufficient on to themselves.”

 

            Had the non-Russian republics concluded a treaty among themselves, Stepa says, they would “have acquired the status of state-forming” institutions and “this would have marked the birth of a new federation.” But that did not happen, and as a result, many have “continued to live with the illusion” that the empire disappeared with the USSR.

 

            “The supporters of imperial centralism typically insist that in the event of such a governmental transformation, Russia would have shared the fate of the USSR.”  But there is no basis for that assumption, Shtepa says, noting that in their declarations of sovereignty in 1990-1991, the non-Russian republics indicated that they were prepared for “a single Russian space” to continue as long as their interests were recognized.

           

            Today, their interests, economic as well as political, are less respected than they were in the last two or three years of Soviet times, something they certainly could have seen was a threat as early as the adoption of the Russian Constitution in 1993 which rejected in principle the notion that the federation was to be based on agreement rather than centralized force.

 

            At the present time, Shtepa notes, “it is not fashionable to recall the republic declarations of sovereignty.” Indeed, it may even be dangerous given the new laws “’about the struggle with separatism,’” although some republics such as Tatarstan continue to mark as national holidays the anniversary of their adoption of a sovereignty declaration.

 

            “To overcome the imperial tradition in Russia,” he concludes, could occur were there to be “a new federal treaty. But here the main problem is that today, in contrast to 1992, there are no legitimate subjects to sign it. Governors entirely dependent on the center do not need any [such] reforms.”