Russian Orthodox Church in Belarus Training Fighters for Russian World in Special Camps

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 2 – Moscow may or may not get the airbase it wants in Belarus, but the Russian Orthodox Church is training young people in that country in special “military-patriotic” clubs for young people to be fighters for Russia and the Russian world, and these groups may be an even greater threat to Mensk than a base would be.

            That Alyaksandr Lukashenka has not closed these things down suggests that he either doesn’t want to or may not for one reason or another to do so, but if he is not concerned about these extreme Russian nationalist groups, their anti-Belarusian and anti-Western attitudes, and their possession and use of advanced weapons, others are or should be.

            This week, “Nasha Niva” has published a detailed look inside some of these 14 clubs and organizations that exist near or in all major Belarusian cities, focusing in particular on one such operation in the extreme western Belarusian oblast of Grodno (nn.by/?c=ar&i=158906&lang=ru and belaruspartisan.org/politic/322755/).

            These “doubtful ‘military-patriotic’ clubs for youth operate under the patronage of the Orthodox Church in Belarus and are making out of [Belarusian] school children ‘black berets’ and ‘true children of the Holy Russian Orthodox Church,” the Belarusian journal reports.

            In these camps, young people are taught to handle weapons, to be loyal to Russia and to support the Donbas militants. Moreover, they are shown maps “where Belarus is shown as part of Russia.” Belarusian figures ranging from Poznyak to Shushkevich to Lukashenka are presented as failures or traitors or worse.

            Those instructing the young people treat Belarus as an artificial creation, openly call for dividing it up, and treat the Belarusian language with contempt. Of particular concern is the fact, “Nasha Niva” reports, two of the instructors at the camp its journalists visited were serving officers of the government militia.

            That such camps exist in Grodno may strike many as strange. It is “the most catholic region of Belarus, and the share of Orthodox beievers is less than in other oblasts. But the Grodno bishopric leads in another way: by its activity in the establishment of so-called ‘military-patriotic’ clubs.

            There are now five such clubs in that oblast. There are nine others in or near Vitebsk, Mensk, Brest, Turov, Berezino, Mohilev, Homel, Polotsk, and Bobruisk. Given that Belarus is a peaceful country and that there is no threat to Orthodoxy, why are such clubs being organized, the magazine asks.

            “Nasha Niva” telephoned Archpriest Yevgeny Pavelchuk, who is the Grodno bishopric official responsible for relations with the military and law enforcement bodies and who oversees the camps there. He initially refused to talk with the journalists but later agreed to speak with them after the bishopric’s public affairs officer arranged things.

            “We teach the children patriotism, Belarusian patriotism,” he said, “and if you evaluate this work only by pictures on the Internet, this isn’t correct You must know the work of the clubs from the inside. We are offended that you accuse us of what we are not guilty. We are preparing believing citizens of Belarus.”

            Pavelchuk said that it was not true that among the instructors at these camps were Russian chauvinists. But “he changed his tone when we reminded him of the photographic reports posted on the site of the Cossack Spas organization.” Then he said that he “does not see anything negative in this.”

            These militarized organizations recruit “primarily ‘difficult’ and aggressive youths,” the journal says. They have meetings four times a week and then practice with handguns once or twice a month in the woods.  When they have passed enough tests, they are rewarded with the right to wear black berets and get to take part in adult military exercises, including parachuting.

            Enormous sums of money are being spent on uniforms, food, arms and so on, the jurnal continues.  And it seems unlikely it is coming from Mensk especially as the camps invariably feature Russian flags, Russian slogans, and Russian declarations like “we are the strongest nation in the world; we are Russians.”

            The heroes of those who take place are Nicholas II and the Russian national Demushkin, and many of those involved see themselves as part of the RNE (Russian National Unity) organization or as part of a Cossack group, even though the only time when there were Belarusian Cossacks was in the 17^th century in Ukraine.

            “Present-day Cossack organizations of Belarus,” “Nasha Niva” says, “are a doubtful collection of militarized structures, not one of whom has any relationship to the real historical Cossacks.” Instead, they are radical Russian nationalist militants of the kind the Belarusian police earlier moved against.

            “If Belarusian children at the age of ten are handed over for ‘training’ by instructors who do not recognize the Belarusians as a nation and who would be glad to see the liquidation of Belarus as a state, is this not a delayed action bomb?” the journal asks – especially if these people include serving members of the Belarusian militia.

White Russian Officer and Vlasovite Source of Putin’s ‘Hybrid War’ Strategy, Former KGB Psychoanalyst Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 2 – Yevgeny Messner (1891-1974), last chief of staff of the Kornilov Division of Baron Wrangel’s White Russian Army and later a member of the Russian Liberation Army during World War II, wrote the book that forms the basis for what is now known as Vladimir Putin’s “hybrid war” strategy.

            That book, Mutiny – the Name of the Third World War (in Russian, Buenos Aires, 1960), and his other writings as an émigré military theorist, Aleksandr Zelenko, who served as a KGB psychoanalyst and now works at Kyiv’s Shevchenko National Univerity, says, had a major influence on Soviet military thinking from the 1980s (ord-ua.com/2015/10/27/kak-ulanova-stupka-i-razrabotki-kgb-pomogli-russkomu-gopniku-ottyapat-donbass-i-kryim/?page=2).

            If anything, Messner’s influence has even grown since then and is now a core element of Vladimir Putin’s approach, Zelenko argues. (On Messner’s influence, see If You Want Peace, Win the Mutiny War! The Creative Inheritance of Ye.E. Messner (in Russian, Moscow: Voyenny universitet, 2005, 696 pp.; reviewed at centrasia.ru/newsA.php?st=1120869960).

            Zelenko says that when he was at the KGB, he helped develop the application of Messner’s ideas and their extention to various networks subordinate to each other matryoshka-doll fashion. He suggests as well that Moscow could apply them not just in Ukraine but rather “at any point up to Gibralter.”

            According to the psychoanalyst, there are currently between 4,000 and 7,000 Russian informers in Kyiv and up to 5,000 in militant position. He added that at present there are in Kyiv alone “about 18,000 militants prepared to create a [pro-Moscow] ‘Kyiv Republic’” as a means of underming Ukraine’s independence.

            Moscow has not exploited this resource, Zelenko suggests, because it doesn’t have enough resources inside Russia to exploit the situation. It thus has gone slower than it might have in Ukraine because of its troubles at home, even though it had laid the groundwork for much more dramatic moves.

            One has to recognize, he continues, that in the Donbas, in everey district,”there was a Russian agent” who primary task was to recruit 50 people to serve the pro-Moscow cause. Kyiv, he says, knew all about this because Ukrainian border guards were being corrupted to allow Russian agents to pass easily into Ukraine.

                Asked by his interviewer Tatyana Zarovaya why Russians are not “ashamed” to seize the territory of others, Zelenko says that because they lack any real ownership of property, they project that situation on others: “If I do not have property, then you can’t either. Therefore, Putin didn’t steal Crimea from you; he took it.”

            Russians are people of the Horde, he says. They are “the product of evolution of a particular type.” Western civilization is based on the right to life, freedom and property, and law is their instrument. For the Russians as a people of the Horde, “law has no importance and the word of the strong and the master is above everything else.”

            The people of the Donbass have a similar psychological type, he says, one that respects the strong and feels that those who talk about justice are weak and do not deserve any respect. Unfortunately, it is “impossible to hange this type” of person. “For peoples of the Horde, a neighbor can be either an enemy not yet suppressed or a slave.”

            “Partiy for them is impossible, equal rights for Horde types means something undefined.” And that is why, Zelenko continues, that “the very best tsar from the point of view of Russians is he who oppresses them: Ivan the Terrible, Stalin … [and now] Putin.” Opposing such rulers for such people is “madness,” as is viewing any ruler as the servant of the people.

            Many in Ukraine and the West do not recognize this divide between them and the Horde peoples, but the latter do very clearly and even proudly, Zelenko says. In the lead up to the Donbas violence, some there even talked about the people of that region as being of a distinct anthropological type.

            And if Ukraine reabsorbs the Donbass, it will have to deal directly with “the bearers of an alien mental system and an alien psychological type.” And right now this will be especially difficult because the Donbas people think that they have won: “Ukraine is withdrawing first, asked for peace first, and is conducting itself as the losing side.”

            Only when they discover that this is not the case and that they are not wanted or needed by the Russia with which they have identified will there be a chance, he suggests. 

            Meanwhile, Ukrainians need to unite as a nation. At present, “we have a feudal state, and nations like political parties arose under capitalism.” The only way forward is to recover what Ukraine lost in 1654 and overcome the sense of “incompleteness” that has infected Ukrainian thinking ever since. There is hope this can happen, but there is much to be done.

Russia Suffering Staggering Indirect Human Losses from Its Wars, Retired Colonel Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 2 – The Russian government may succeed in keeping secret figures about the casualties from its various wars, but it is powerless to conceal the staggering indirect losses from those conflicts, including among other things an increasing number of single-parent families and orphans, according to Marat Syrtlanov, a retired Russian colonel.

            “To speak only about those who have fallen or been wounded on the battlefield,” he says, “is to minimize the misfortune [of war] and its consequences” for Russian society, consequences that will only grow as Moscow pursues its increasingly “active foreign policy” abroad (nvo.ng.ru/realty/2015-10-30/8_loss.html).

            “Nowhere else is observed such obvious demographic problems connected with intensified efforts for the defense of national interests,” the retired officer says. “No one takes into account that in connection with operations to ‘force the sides to peace,’ ‘to restore historic justice,’ or ‘to help a fraternal people,’ Russian also bears indirect but no less murderous losses.”

            Syrtlanov, who served almost 40 years as an officer and participated in Russian military operations in seven “hot spots,” says he draws that conclusion “not from any little book” but rather from his personal experience.

            At least some of the rising divorce rate in Russia, one in which now every other marriage dissolves among the young, is at least in part a reflection of the requirement that many men are forced to move often or go off to fight and are not at home to help their wives and children, the retired colonel continues. And those who die in combat leave behind widows and orphans.

            “Into which category of losses should the widowhood of warrior internationalists, medal winners, and simple Russian soldiers be put?” he asks. But perhaps the greatest victims are the children left without fathers as a result of these conflicts, children who are now asked to grow up without the government even being willing to talk about how their fathers died.

            Ethnic Russians abroad can see this, and one Russian relative of his in Kazakhstan said she decided that she wouldn’t take Russian citizenship and move to the Russian Federation, because there “you have war after war” and her sons would undoubtedly be called up to serve and possibly die. That too involves human losses and has demographic consequences.

            Every year some 200,000 to 220,000 young people become “social orphans” when their parents divorce or when one of them deserts the family or his killed in battle, Syrtlanov says. And “almost 700,000 children at present” are in orphanages of one kind another – a figure that means “that every fifth child in the country” is in them rather than at home in a family.

            These figures are “twice as large as after the Great Fatherland War,” the retired colonel says, and they do not include the additional horror that today, as many as five to seven million Russian children are living on the streets as “bezprizorniki,” who seldom go to school and often turn to drugs and crime.

            They too are the collateral damage of Russia’s wars.