Russian Assembly Calls for Naming Streets after Muslims Who Died Defending Traditional Values

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 31 – The World Russian Popular Assembly has called for naming streets in Russia in the memory of those Islamic leaders “who at the price of their lives defended traditional values,” an appeal Muslim leaders welcome as highlighting both the strength of Islam in Russia and the convergence of Russian Orthodoxy and the Muslim community.

            “It is deeply symbolic,” Mufti Albir Krganov says, “that on the eve of Kurban Bayram, the World Russian Popular Assembly has come out with this initiative. This is an indicator of the internal situation of our society and a mark of the deep mutual respect between our peoples and religions” (interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=68027).

            Among those who may be candidates for such honors are Valilulla Yakupov, the Tatarstan mufti who was killed in Kazan in July 2012, and Said Atsayev, better known as Said Chirkeyskiy who was killed in Daghestan in the same year. Those are individuals about whom there might be little controversay.

            But in reporting this idea, Krganov points to some others whose names may soon grace Russian streets but only at the price of sparking new controversies.  Among them is Mukhammat-Safar Bayazitov, who opposed the 1917 revolutions and who then in 1937 was executed by Stalin.

            The Moscow mufti says that the Spiritual Assembly of Muslims of Russia which he heads “plans in support of these renamings to conduct a number of actions in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kazan as well as in Makhachkala. 

            “I consider,” the mufti says, “that the stable development of society will be secured not only by the economic growth of the country but also by the good-neighborly coexistence of various cultures and religions” that such renamings will both symbolize and promote.” It very much remains to be seen if Russian Orthodox nationalists will agree with that.

Many Fail to Recognize that the President of a Nuclear Power can Be a Bandit, Shekhtman Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 31 – Many, from the leaders of Western countries to the leaders of the Russian opposition, are failing to recognize that a bandit can play the role of a businessman, an official or “even the president of a nuclear power,” but that whatever role he is in, he nonetheless remains a bandit, Pavel Shekhtman says.

            They must realize that “if something acts like a dog, it is a dog” and that “bandit isn’t a course word, it is simply the name of a profession, which,  like any other profession – bookkeeper, military officer, or prostitute – leaves its mark on the outlook and mentality of an individual,” the Moscow commentator says (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=59A588D2BF8B4).

                And this, rather than the nominal position “is the defining factor: everything else is secondary.”

            “A bandit may turn up in the role of businessman (the majority of bandits are nominally that), a bureaucrat, a policeman, a judge or even the president of a nuclear power.  None of these other positions means that he ceases to be a bandit, and consequently for achieving results in dealing with them one must adopt methods” used to deal with criminals.

            Unfortunately, Shekhtman says, “this is something that neither Obama nor Nemtsov wants to understand.

            He continues: “In the struggle with a bandit, one can appeal only to force. Even when you appeal to legal institutions, you all the same are appealing to force, to the state apparatus of force which by definition is stronger than any band.  Law doesn’t work by itself – law works through a complex system where behind the judge always stands the policeman … and the jailor.”

            But there are circumstances when there is no such force behind the law because the bandits have taken over that as well. This is the case in Russia now, and the only real possibility of salvation is to create “the appearance” of such legality so that the bandits will decide that it is better to adapt to that than to continue as they are.

            “Naturally, this is a very risky method of struggle, but it is the only possible one from a position of weakness” which is where those in Russia are given the current power of the bandits there at the top. Those “who don’t play poker with the bandits is [will otherwise] simply be giving everything away.”

‘Donbass in Gorky Park’ – Moscow’s Use of Violence in Ukraine is Coming Back to Haunt Russia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 31 – The violence Moscow “exported” to Ukraine and other parts of what the Kremlin claims are parts of “the Russian world” is coming back to haunt Russia at home, with Russians ever more inclined to see violence as a legitimate means to solve their problems, Kirill Martynov says.

            In a Novaya gazeta commentary, the Moscow paper’s political observer notes that the war against Ukraine continues but that the Russian propaganda outlets are devoting ever less attention to it, a classic case of cynicism in which one begins a war and then forgets about it when other tasks arise (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2017/08/29/73634-donbass-v-parke-gorkogo).

But almost unnoticed has been the fact that “something new” has appeared on the screen: violence at home. “For three years, the Russian state has succeeded in explaining to its citizens that killing for the right cause is good and acceptable,” Martynov says. Now, Russians are having to live with that in their own lives.

“We have become accustomed to political force,” the use of violence by officials against those they see as their enemies. But that is now “escaping from under the control of the state.”  As a result, “hooligan attacks on activists and even political murders are our new reality,” and one that extends far beyond politics.

A signal indication of that was the recent murder in Moscow’s Gorky Park where blogger Stanislav Dumkin was killed by a group of hooligans because he wasn’t dressed properly in the opinion of the latter and worse a hat and glasses. (Martynov doesn’t point to the Machayevism that this reflects.).

Despite the horror this murder generated in the media, he says, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone because Russians had been well prepared for just such an outrage: “attack ‘a Banderite,’ attack a gay, attack an incorrect theater director, attack a film about the tsar and a ballerina, and finally, attack those dressed not according to expectations.”

Such attacks have “an objective cause” – the decline in incomes “which (together with other signs of social degradation) has continued almost as long as have lasted our geopolitical successes.” When there is no new money, people from top to bottom turn to force to get some of what is left or to compensate for its absence.

The wealthy pray on the less wealthy, and “ordinary citizens, especially young men who have nothing to lose except their chains form gangs and begin to struggle for their place” in what is an ever less bright environment, taught by the regime that force of all kinds is the appropriate way to do that.

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“At the end of the 1980s, as Soviet society was dying, the most promising profession already was service in the rackets.” Now, those who have the means of violence, first the siloviki and then the population, are using those means to compensate for the losses they are suffering. But it is obvious that the siloviki “have already lost the initiative” to the latter.

According to Martynov, “the ideology of the new Russia asserts that there exist entire classes of people whom it is correct to destroy. And neither the magistracy nor the police can speak out against such a situation. The consolidation around ‘the Ukrainian question’ has ended and the taboo on the use of force has been lifted.”

In short, “the Ukrainian war has turned into a war of all against all” in Russia.