Putin’s National Guard Alarmed by Rising Tide of Gun Ownership among Russians

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 1 – Vladimir Putin’s National Guard is alarmed by the rapidly rising tide of gun ownership by private individuals in Russian and shortcomings in the companies that are supposed to store these weapons, but the figures the Guard cites likely understate the problem by a factor of five.

            According to the figures its first deputy commander provided TASS yesterday, some 4.5 million Russians own 7.3 million firearms, up from 4.4 and 6.7 million respectively a year ago (newsru.com/russia/31mar2017/arms.html  and rg.ru/2016/06/10/v-rossii-zaregistrirovano-67-milliona-edinic-ognestrelnogo-oruzhiia.html).

            But these figures are only for guns registered with the authorities. According to independent experts, there are at least four times as many more unregistered guns in Russia, a share and a number that has likely gone up since the invasion of Ukraine (See windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/01/80-percent-of-25-million-guns-now-in.html  and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/07/putins-war-in-ukraine-metasticizing-in.html).

            Col.Gen. Sergey Melikov, the officer in question, said that his institution plans to tighten the rules governing enterprises financed by the state that provide protective services. He said such a step was needed because “there are a very large number of weapons in private hands now.”

            There are more than 23,000 such services in Russia today, of which “about 6,000” areknow to have approximately 80,000 guns for their officers.  Moscow shut down 904 such agencies last year because of violations of existing law.      

            Melikov added that “the number of crimes committed with registered weapons rose four times in 2015 from the number in 2014.” These mostly involved the illegal use of pneumatic pistols. There were reports earlier this year that such weapons would soon be banned (newsru.com/russia/10jan2017/travmaty.html), but those reports have been denied.

            What is perhaps most disturbing about this is that the National Guard is going after those who have at least nominally tried to obey the law by registering their weapons as required rather than the much larger number who have guns illegally because they have never sought registration with the state.

            In many ways, that is typical of gun control efforts in many countries: It is far easier for police forces to go after those who register their weapons than after those who do not, even though it is almost certain that in Russia as in other countries, the larger number of illegally held weapons is a far greater problem – but one far more difficult for the authorities to tackle.

Kremlin has Lost Control Not Only of the Future but the Past, Shelin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 1 – Russia, it is sometime said, is a country with an unpredictable past; but Russian governments have worked hard to try to control not only the future but also the past.  Now, however, Sergey Shelin says, the Kremlin “no longer controls either the future or the past” – and that leaves Putin “without the two accustomed instruments” for manipulating the people.

            Many have pointed out that Putin’s team now doesn’t have “any model for the future” as it heads into the presidential elections, the Rosbalt commentator says. “This is true, but it is far from the whole truth.”  The Kremlin has also lost control over the past as well and thus is increasingly unable to hold people in check (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2017/03/31/1603794.html).

            Indeed, Shelin argues, “the present-day situation is absolutely new for post-Soviet Russia.” Occasionally, it has been unable to present “an attractive picture of the future … But never has this been combined with an inability to speak in the role” of either an opponent of a hated past or a defender of one Russians as a whole like.

            Instead, the regime’s constant revisions of its views of the past and the transparent falsification and exploitation of themes, combined with the indifference of Russians to a past that is ever more distant from and less significant to them than before make the regime’s failure to talk about the future even more critical.

            “Ever less time remains until March 2018,” Shelin points out, “and the mechanisms of control over the past and over the future are misfiring again and again. [As a result,] Vladimir Putin is approaching his re-election without either of the traditional instruments for manipulating the minds” of the voters.

                He gives several examples to support these conclusions. What, he asks rhetorically, can a regime propagandist say about the anti-corruption “disorders?” Besides referring to the Arab Spring or Western machinations, two things few Russians pay attention to, he will be driven to talk “about the horrors of all Russian coups and revolutions, from the earlier up to 1991.”

            This propagandist will do so because he “imagines that this is a completely irresistible intellectual weapon. And he will then be surprised when his listeners simply yawn.” His shock will be greater because “earlier this wasn’t the case: images of the past occupied a central place in the propaganda of our regime at all of its turning points. And they worked. People responded.”

            In 1996, for example, Boris Yeltsin was reelected not because he enjoyed real support but because he successfully portrayed Gennady Zyuganov as someone who would restore Soviet times – and not just Brezhnevite stagnation but Stalinist terror. 

            In 2000 and 2004, Putin was elected and then re-elected on a platform of “moderate restorationism” which promised to turn away “from the cursed 1990s” and return to the relative well-being and stability of the late Brezhnev years.

            In 2008, Dmitry Medvedev was elected with the support of both those who hoped for “a continuation of Putin restorationism” and those who wanted “a return” to the greater freedoms of th3e 1990s.  “Both the one and the other, however, instead of the past they wanted go the past which they wanted somewhat less – the return of Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin throne.”

            And thus it is no accident that 2012 and the years following “became a time of grandiose militant mobilization of history with the goal of having it serve the interests of the bosses.” Not only was the traditional celebration of victory in World War II but also of all kinds of other victories from the times of Ivan the Terrible onward.

            But today, none of this has the same effect. Russians see how often the regime is prepared to rewrite the past and how difficult a time it faces in confronting the complexities of earlier times. And they see that the regime uses these things only to try to distract attention from its failure to address their real problems now.

            The reason Russians have changed is not only that the young people “going into the streets don’t remember even ‘the cursed 1990s’ not to speak about the times of Gorbachev and Brezhnev,” Shelin argues.  Instead, it is rooted in the fact that all events have a certain “to be used by” date, after which they don’t play the same role.

            Instead, they are met with indifference bordering on contempt.  “Don’t believe pollsters” who talk about the rising rating of Stalin, he says. “Pollsters simply can’t capture the indifference with which the masses view today both Stalinism and anti-Stalinism.” Those are increasingly issues of the distant past.

            And efforts to use even more distant pasts – such as the revolutionary year of 1917 – not only highlight that problem but show that the regime can’t make up its mind about how it wants to treat this or that issue. The Kremlin’s failure to take a clear line only makes it easier for Russians to go their own way, ignoring the past and focusing only on current problems.

No Law by Itself Can Make a Russian Civic Nation or Any Other Kind, Drobizheva Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 1 – Leokadiya Drobizheva, Russia’s senior ethno-sociologist and a member of the Presidential council on ethnic relations, says that no law can make a nation civic or otherwise because “a nation is formed over the course of centuries” and “collective mentality and historical memory aren’t governed by legislation.”

            In an interview with Vladimir Yemelyanenko of Rossiiskaya gazeta, Drobizheva says that she and her colleagues at the direction of the president were working on “a project about the strengthening of a civic nation and suddenly the theme of a law about the civic Russian nation surfaced” (rg.ru/2017/03/28/sociolog-o-tom-nuzhen-li-v-rossii-zakon-o-rossijskoj-nacii.html).

            Russians feel themselves citizens of their country, but “don’t call this a nation,” she continues. “We have a historic term ‘nation’” that defines that in ethnic terms.  Civic identity “is a recognition of oneself as a Rossiyanin, a member of a political community which includes people of various nationalities.”

            Drobizheva points out that this sense of civic identity, just like a sense of ethnic identity, varies over time. In the 1990s, she recalls, the Moscow Institute of Sociology “conducted the first surveys on whether Russians felt themselves to be” members of a civic nation. At that time, in Moscow, only 25-27 percent of Muscovites answered “yes.”

            Today, however, 75 to 80 percent of all residents of the Russian Federation answer that question positively. The very highest percentages, “more than 91 percent,” are found in Tomsk, Yekaterinburg and Sverdlovsk oblasts, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Kaliningrad, and Astrakhan. The lowest – 63-67 percent – are reported in the Caucasus, the Far East and Kamchatka.”

            Asked whether as many as a third of people in the latter group of federal subjects don’t feel themselves to be members of a civic Russian nation, Drobizheva says, that this misreads the situation: “Russian civic identity has regional and intra-corporate hierarchies,” and thus in some places other identities are predominant.

            “In Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, Sochi, and Siberia (Omsk and Novosibirsk),” she says, “urban or scientific cultural identity may predominate over all-Russian identities.” In some places a peasant identity or a religious identity may be more important for residents, but that doesn’t mean that a civic Russian identity isn’t there as well.

             According to Drobizheva, “the task of the new law or action about the nation is to combine these hierarchies,” rather than to eliminate important parts of them.

            In most countries, civic identities have emerged first in major cities; but in Russia, there has been a problem, at least from the point of view of the state. There, “the Russian center of European identity … is [also] a leader of opposition attitudes,” and that makes both the state and other ethnic and religious groups suspicious of it.

            But the opposition attitudes in Moscow are not the problem, the sociologist argues. “We have said for a long time that the threat of social storms comes not from the creative opposition, not from the fall in oil prices and not from nationalists but from extra-judicial reprisals.”  Data show that inter-ethnic and inter-religious levels of trust are quite high.

            “Trust in the parliament and judicial system is low, but it does exist,” Drobizheva says. “We have a very high level of trust in the president. [And] inter-confessional and inter=ethnic trust is much higher than usually thought. [But] on the other hand, only 30 percent of citizens feel personal responsibility for the fate of the country and understand that it depends on them.”

            In some places, like Sakha, the major cities of Siberia, and St. Petersburg, this sense of civic responsibility is higher.  In those places, “people are not afraid to assume the burden of forming volunteer or their own mini-communities and organizations.” Such attitudes need to be encouraged and spread.

            The reason for that is obvious: “it is impossible to form a civic nation only ‘from above.’ One must have a response ‘from below.’”

            Russia is becoming “a nation of nations,” the sociologist says. “No one will take the title of nation from the people. But a nation has as well the function of uniting people of various nationalities and various cultural interests into [such a] nation of nations.”

            Russians often look to the US or Western Europe for models of the formation of a civic nation, but Drobizheva suggests that the Russian experience if closed to that of Spain.  “There there are the nations of Catalonians, Castillians, and Basques but all of them together are Spaniards.”

            She points out further that “a sense of unity with people of one’s own nationality experience 80 percent of ethnic Russians and 83-87 percent of Russian residents of other nationalities.” Research also shows the great significance of religious identity, not only on its own but as a promoter of ethnic solidarity.

            Russians should not be afraid of this but rather welcome it, Drobizheva concludes, because “the ethnic solidarity of all peoples is, as research shows, a resource for the future.”