Having Banned Ingush Republic Muftiate in 2019, Magas Tries to Silence Mufti

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 1 – In September 2019, the Supreme Court of the Republic of Ingushetia liquidated the Muslim Center of Muslims of the Republic of Ingushetia because its head, Mufti Isa Khomkhoyev opposed Yunus-Bek Yevkurov’s handing over 10 percent of the republic to Chechnya in a backroom deal.

            But Khomkhoyev has continued to work as mufti, to deliver homilies in the main mosque of the republic, and to speak out in defense of the Ingush Seven and others detained for protesting the land deal. In response, the republic’s courts have imposed increasingly heavy fines on ever more shaky grounds in the hopes of silencing him.

            The latest and most absurd involves a charge that the mufti had engaged in illegal missionary activity. According to a court in the republic, Khokhoyev is not a member of a legal religious body because the Muslim Center was abolished and therefore he doesn’t have the right to speak about Islam in public (sobkorr.org/news/60B5CC51DADCB.html and kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/364473/).

            His attorney, Magomed-Basir Ozdoyev, says that the mufti has not violated the law violating missionary activity because he spoke only in a mosque where there are only Muslims, “people who have one and the same religion” as he does. Thus, the Russian law does not hold in his case. Ozdoyev says he will appeal this decision as he has appealed the earlier ones.

            This latest move by Magas is disturbing not only because it inappropriately applies the Russian law against missionary activity but also because it means that the mufti is going to find it increasingly difficult to function. That is probably what Magas and Moscow want, but they may be horrified by the consequences of what they are seeking.

            Khomkhoyev is committed to traditional Islam and has worked to prevent the radicalization of the various parishes in his republic. If he is prevented from working, the likelihood is that some of these will turn to more radical mullahs, a development that could exacerbate the religious and civil situation in that North Caucasus republic.

            But there is something even more worrisome. Khomkhoyev, like the leaders of the Council of Teips of Ingushetia which has also been ordered disbanded, has been a leading spokesman for staying within the law in all protests.  Without his and their voices, the likelihood is that future protests, possibly over the sentencing of the Ingush Seven that is expected soon, may cross the line.

            Moscow and Magas may welcome a chance to crack down on any protest, but they may find that unless the crackdown is far more severe than the ones it has visited on other regions and republics, the Ingush response to such actions may very well be to oppose the regime even more forcefully, exactly the opposite of what the powers that be want. 

           

Karelia Becomes First Region to Stop Publishing Daily Coronavirus Data

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 1 – The government of the Republic of Karelia says that it has achieved such success in the fight against the coronavirus that no useful purpose would be served by its continuing to publish daily data on infections, hospitalizations and deaths (regnum.ru/news/3285293.html).

            Other regions and republics are likely to follow suit, ending what has been a remarkable run of more than 16 months in which each of the federal subjects has published data, some of it reliable, some not, but always on a daily basis. If the publication of such data does end in wide swaths of Russia, it will be far more difficult to determine just what the real situation is.

            Today, Russian officials reported registering 9500 new cases of infection and 372 new deaths from the coronavirus over the last 24 hours. The surge in new infections was concentrated in the two capitals and their adjoining regions, as the pandemic levelled out in most other parts of the country (t.me/COVID2019_official/3003, rosbalt.ru/russia/2021/06/01/1904359.html and   regnum.ru/news/society/3277253.html).

            There were two other Russian “coronavirus headline” stories. In the first, people planning to attend the Petersburg International Economic Forum stood in long lines to be tested for the coronavirus. That has been required to protect Vladimir Putin who is scheduled to speak to the group  (regnum.ru/news/3285095.html).

            And in the second, a London-based PR firm that had been putting out stories attacking Western vaccines was found to be a front for the Russian government by Deutsche Welle (trtrussian.com/novosti-mir/dw-rossiya-mozhet-vesti-fejkovuyu-kampaniyu-protiv-biontechpfizer-5624383).

            Meanwhile, in other pandemic-related stories in Russia today,

·         Moscow officials say that the KoviVak vaccine will soon be available to residents of the capital (regnum.ru/news/3284913.html).

·         A group of Russian psychologists say that the quarantine as unpopular as it was nonetheless had the positive effect of exerting an “anti-aging” effect on those forced to remain in their homes (regnum.ru/news/3284697.html).

·         Russia faces a new problem: Some people who get the shots and then test to see how many antibodies they have are getting third, fourth or even more shots in order to boost their immunity, something that plays havoc with data about the number of Russians actually vaccinated (mk.ru/social/health/2021/06/01/okhotniki-za-antitelami-v-rossii-poshla-moda-na-mnogokratnuyu-vakcinaciyu.html).

Belarus Could Become a Normal European Country with Far Less Difficulty than Ukraine, Inozemtsev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 31 – Once Alyaksandr Lukashenka is ousted from power, Belarus would find it far easier to become a normal European country than Ukraine seeking the same thing has, Vladislav Inozemtsev says, something that restrains Moscow from seeking his ouster precisely because it would give the West such an enormous opportunity.

            The Russian economist says that transforming Belarus in that direction would be “much easier than the analogous transformation of Ukraine because of its closer ties with neighboring Poland and Lithuania, its relatively smaller economy, and its lack of the kind of powerful oligarchs Ukraine has (theins.ru/opinions/inozemtsev/242333).

            Indeed, Lukashenka could remain in power only if Vladimir Putin is prepared to sacrifice much treasure and his reputation in the West or if the Western countries, newly energized against him, prove to be indecisive or fail to remain united in their goal of getting rid of what they call “the last dictator in Europe.”

            The Kremlin faces a difficult choice: “either it can refuse the salvation of its unsuccessful ally … in the name of a more effective defense … or it can sharply increase its forces there and carry out a struggle which could become no less dramatic than in Ukraine where Russia already has overrated the strength of its friend and underrated the decisiveness of its opponents.”

            Lukashenka’s meeting with Putin on Sochi shows, Inozemtsev continues, that “Moscow still does not intend to take decisive steps;” but with each day, the costs of not doing so increase and its possibilities for a successful policy in the Western direction decline in number not only in Minsk but in the West as a whole.

            Lukashenka’s last meeting with Putin showed the Russian leader is frustrated with his Belarusian counterpart and is no longer prepared to provide him with anything like the assistance Lukashenka has sought. This time, he needed some seven to eight billion dollars in credits but took away only 500 million.

            According to Inozemtsev, it is ever less likely that Putin will seek to absorb Belarus into the Russian Federation. That would only change a foreign policy problem to a domestic one and might make both worse given the reaction of the West and the likely reaction of the Belarusian people.

            Instead, the Russian economist suggests, “Putin now conceives of Belarus as an ally in opposing ‘the collective West,’ exactly the same way Lukashenka characterizes his role.” But neither leader has taken into full account how much has changed since last August’s presidential vote and the forced landing of a plane in Minsk so Lukashenka could arrest an opponent.

            “The first of these deprived Lukashenka of legitimacy in the eyes of a large part of the world, and the second opened ‘a war for destruction.’” Sanctions against Belarus are now coming thick and fast, undermining Lukashenka but also increasing the costs both direct and in terms of image for Putin.

            “Today,” Inozemtsev says, “the position of ‘the collective West’ is strategically stronger than that of Russia.” Belarusians are tired of Lukashenka, and the West is pleased to go after him because attacking the Minsk dictator compensates for its not having adopted a tougher position against his Moscow ally.

            In this situation, Moscow lacks “a Plan B.” Of course, “it could continue to provide assistance to Moscow out of the public eye, but this would not smooth ties between Lukashenka and the east or between Belarusian society and the West.” And that means that the problems now so obvious would only intensify with time.

            The Kremlin hasn’t figured out how to respond to sanctions policies, in part because it may benefit somewhat in the short term but not longer because ever more Western governments will see the connection and draw the obvious conclusions. What that means is that if Lukashenka does go, the West will win “a crushing victory” in shifting Belarus away from Moscow.

            Over the last two decades,” Inozemtsev argues in conclusion, “Lukashenka has methodically made Putin the hostage of his policies … but now the Belarusian dictator has become a victim of his own success.” He has alienated the West at a time when the East is thinking about a new deal with the West.

            “More than that, “today Europe and the US, albeit for different reasons, have begun to doubt” about whether they can bring Ukraine into the West and so they have even more reason to look to Belarus for a victory that would help them both domestically and internationally, the economist says.

           

Kazakhs Increasingly View Stalin’s Terror Famine There Much as Ukrainians View Holodomor in Their Country, Polovinko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 31 – Today, Kazakhs mark the Day of Memory of Victims of Political Repression, a day that over the last several years has been combined with the Day of Memory of the Victims of the Famine that Stalin visited on their republic at the same time as he inflicted the Holodomor on Ukraine.

            This both reflects and is reinforcing the tendency of Kazakhs to view the Asharshylyk as they refer to the famine that arose from forced sedentarization and collectivization in much the same way that Ukrainians view the Holodomor in their country and to ask many of the same questions about who is responsible.

            Given the centrality of the Holodomor in Ukrainian thinking about Moscow’s responsibility for that horror, Vyacheslav Polovinko, a Novaya gazeta journalist, says, it is now time to reflect on whether the Asharshylyk will have the same impact on Kazakhstan and on its relationship with the Russian Federation (hnovayagazeta.ru/articles/2021/05/31/asharshylyk).

            The relationship of Kazakhs to the Asharshylyk and to Moscow’s responsibility for it is complicated by two things now that more information about those events of almost a century ago is coming out. On the one hand, Moscow officials and historians don’t want a repetition in Kazakhstan of what has occurred in Ukraine; and on the other, Kazakh officials fear pushing the issue too far.

            But over time, Polovinko says, it is quite likely that the Kazakh population will have its way and that Kazakh officials will begin to speak on its behalf when it comes to Moscow’s role, however much the Russian government opposes that happening and however much they may want to avoid angering the Kremlin.

            A step in that direction has come this year with the appearance of a three-volume scholarly study of the asharshylyk, a documentary work that its authors formally presented to the Kazakh president (kursiv.kz/news/obschestvo/2021-05/ashimbaev-prezentoval-tokaevu-knigu-o-golode-v-1928-1934-godakh).

            One of the things that makes the terror famine in Kazakhstan different from that in Ukraine is that it involved not just collectivization but sedentarization of nomadic groups and repression of still active Basmachi groups who organized large-scale protests that Moscow put down with tanks.

            The Kazakh one also involved the flight of some 200,000 Kazakhs to China and more to the cities of Kazakhstan where officials and factory directors left them to die in the streets or to neighboring republics which were anything but interested in assuming the new burdens that such people represented.

            But the Kazakh terror famine shared much in common with the Ukrainian one. There were widespread cases of cannibalism, and there was massive death. While the number of Kazakhs who died as a result of the famine – a million or so – was smaller than that in Ukraine, as a percentage of the republic’s population, the share of deaths in Kazakhstan was much higher.

            “In 1937,” Polovinko says, “a census of the population in the USSR was conducted which showed that the number of Kazakhs had contracted in comparison with 1926 by almost a third, although in this number are included those who were able to flee” the republic to China or elsewhere.

            The Soviet authorities refused to discuss what happened honestly or to admit that Moscow bore any responsibility for the tragedy. The first honest assessments at a government level occurred in the Kazakhstan Supreme Soviet in 1991-1992. From that time onward, Kazakhs have spoken of an ethnocide but generally avoided the more explosive term, genocide.

            Beginning about 20 years ago, Kazakhs began erecting statues to the victims of the terror famine in their country and an increasing number began demanding that officials use the term genocide and demand that Moscow take responsibility for it given that the Kremlin is always insisting the Russia is the legal successor of the USSR.

            According to Polovinko, the Kazakh government is not yet prepared to do so given Moscow’s opposition. But with new books about the events, pressure on the Kazakh authorities to raise the issue is likely to grow, something that will involve not only historical assessment but the possibility of close relations between the two former Soviet republics.

Any Yalta-Like Concessions to Putin would Transform Him into a Sacred Figure like Stalin, Khazin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 31 – Vladimir Putin considers his “main task” to be the restoration of the USSR, Mikhail Khazin says. That is his “mission;” and unlike his Western counterparts, he has a plan to achieve it while they do not have one to stop him from doing so, even though if he achieves a Yalta-like division of the world, he will become “a sacred figure like Stalin.”

            In his Davos speech, the Kremlin leader said directly to the West: “you do not have a plan but we do,” the Moscow economist says, arguing that since the retirement of Nixon, the West has not had anyone who could prepare one and so Putin finds himself in an “ideal” position (business-gazeta.ru/article/511182).

            Except for inflation, which is a problem, the Kremlin now is in the best position it has been “for the last 30 years,” certainly “better than was the case in 1998. It only must act correctly” so that the West will make the kind of concessions that will allow Putin to achieve his goals.

            If the West does make concessions to the Kremlin leader’s demand for a recognition of a Russian sphere of influence covering the former Soviet space, that will be “’a new Yalta’” and Putin “will be transformed into a sacred figure … comparable to Stalin. After that, he can assume any position” and so all the talk about succession will become irrelevant.

            Putin won’t need the presidency. He can call himself anything he likes, but he will control the situation. That is because “sacred figures” resembling what Stalin was and what Putin would like to become don’t need specific titles. They are beyond such petty considerations, even if their opponents obsess about them.

            Such calculations, Khazin suggests, explain why Putin is so interested in gaining Western recognition  of a Russian sphere of influence, starting with but not limited to Belarus and Ukraine, and why the West which  may be ready to make concessions on that point do not appear capable of understanding how far reaching such actions would be.   

Moscow Erects New Iron Curtain between Finno-Ugric Nations inside Russia and Those Beyond Its Borders

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 31 – When people speak of the iron curtain, they usually have in their minds something like the Berlin Wall, but the Iron Curtain consisted of more than just barbed wire and concrete blocks along a border guarded by Soviet border troops. It included a variety of institutions designed to keep peoples on the two sides separate.

            Now, something similar is taking place with Moscow insisting on erecting barriers between members of related ethnic groups inside and outside the Russian Federation. It first did this with Turkic peoples in 2015 when the government demanded Turkic nations within Russia break ties with TURKSOY.

            Now, it has extended this isolationist stance to the Finno-Ugric nations, not only preventing them from taking part in an upcoming world congress of peoples of this cultural-linguistic group set to take place in Estonia June 16-18 but scheduling an alternative one this week which will include only “Russian” Finno-Ugric representatives.

            Moscow has what it sees as compelling reasons to move in this direction, Prague-based commentator Vadim Sidorov says. It wants to hide the russification of Finno-Ugrics inside Russia that it has been promoting and limit complaints from these groups to European structures (trtrussian.com/mnenie/novyj-zheleznyj-zanaves-dlya-finno-ugrov-rossii-5614144).

            At the time of the 1989 census, there were 3.2 million speakers of Finno-Ugric languages in the RSFSR. In 2002, their number had declined to 2.7 million, and in 2010 to 2.3 million. The 2020 census which will in fact take place later this year is expected to show a further and even accelerating decline.

            This is not just a natural process as Moscow routinely insists but one that the Kremlin has actively promoted. Two years ago, Vladimir Putin when asked about the status of one Finno-Ugric nation, the Vod, acknowledged that “they had been assimilating, but I am sure,” he added, “that they will not disappear completely.”

            According to Sidorov, “this is the status of the Finno-Ugric peoples” in Russia today, “between ‘assimilated’ and ‘not disappearing completely.’” Members of these groups have protested and used ties with the three Finno-Ugric nations which are independent to bring their complaints to European institutions.

            Moscow wants both to hide what is going on and to end the ability of Estonia, Finland and Hungary to help the Finno-Ugric nations within the Russian Federation resist. It has used its pocket organization, the Association of Finno-Ugric Peoples of the Russian Federation, to that end.

            In April, the group declared that it wouldn’t take part in the World Finno-Ugric Congress in Estonia because that group had adopted an ever more anti-Moscow position by its support of the Finno-Ugrics within the Russian Federation. And its statement suggested the Russian group won’t take part in such meetings in the future.

            Activists among the Finno-Ugric nations inside Russia say that in this way, Moscow wants “to deprive the Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia of ‘an international arena for talking about their problems and finding support among European partners.” That is what Putin’s new iron curtain really looks like to them, Sidorov suggests.

A Recipe for More Conflict: Yerevan Rejects Corridor between Azerbaijan and Nakhichevan; Baku Insists on It

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 31 – The flurry of statements emanating from Yerevan and Baku in recent days shows that Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders have very different understandings of what is contained in the November and January declarations some have described as peace agreements and that the danger of renewed military conflict has not passed.

            Armenian Vice President Mger Grigoryan and acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stressed that there is no agreement for any corridor between Azerbaijan and Nakhichevan across Armenian territory. Both said that neither declaration calls for creating any corridors when transportation links are restored (ng.ru/cis/2021-05-31/1_8161_armenia.html).

            But Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev spoke about “the inevitability” of such a corridor, the promise of which was and remains a key reason why Baku agreed to a Russian-mediated ceasefire at a time when Azerbaijani forces were on the brink of a complete victory over Armenian ones in Qarabagh.

            On the one hand, this difference in opinion is a difference about the meaning of the reopening of the transportation links for the two sides, with Armenia viewing them as limited to transport and guarded by Russian peacekeepers and Azerbaijan as seeing them as a step toward something broader and deeper and under Azerbaijani control.

            But on the other hand, it is only one of the ways in which the two sides are still far apart, differences that make further progress problematic on all issues as they are invariably interconnected and the role of outside players including Russia, Iran, France and the United State more fraught with difficulties as well.

            That can be seen in discussions following the dispute beginning two weeks ago over whether Azerbaijani forces had crossed into Syunik/Zengezur or not, a conflict that arose because the borders between the two countries have never been delimited and Soviet-era maps are in conflict.

            Armenia appealed for Russian help to force the withdrawal of Azerbaijani forces and to get a demarcation process started in that limited portion of the international border between the two countries. And Iran said that any change in the borders that deprived Iran of direct contact with Armenia would be the crossing of “a red line” as far as Tehran was concerned.

            Russian President Vladimir Putin called his Azerbaijani counterpart and secured an agreement that this dispute and others would be “resolved exclusively by political and diplomatic methods,” which Moscow later specified to mean the formation of a tripartite commission with Russia as mediator to address the border question in Syunik/Zengezur.

            But in the days that followed, Armenia and Azerbaijan traded words about the violation of the border by forces of the other, leading Pashinyan to call for the “synchronous” withdrawal of forces from the borders and the insertion of “international observers from Russia or the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group (the US and France).”

            The Armenian prime minister subsequently clarified that it would be possible to have both Russian peacekeepers and observers from other countries of the Minsk Group after we begin the process of demarcating and delimiting the border.” But commentators suggested Yerevan only wants Russians there as peacekeepers at least in the immediate future.

            Baku in contrast accepts the idea of a tripartite commission on the border, although it has indicated it wants to discuss the entire border rather than just the Syunik/Zengezur portion, a problem for Yerevan given its views on Qarabagh, because it wants to open the transportation corridor to Nakhichevan as quickly as possible.

            And the Azerbaijani side continues to talk about this reopening of the transportation links as the opening of “a corridor,” something with much more far-reaching implications and a prospect Moscow, Yerevan, and Tehran oppose. In short, there is every reason to be concerned that there are likely to be more clashes rather than fewer in the coming weeks.