Kremlin Needs Migrants Both to Keep Economy Moving and to Give Russians a Way to Relieve Stress that Doesn’t Threaten Regime, Panfilova Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 1 – The Kremlin needs immigrants not just to keep the Russian economy operating but as a convenient and safe target ordinary Russians can vent their anger about many aspects of their lives in ways that relieve their own stress without threatening the interests of the regime, Elena Panfilova says.
    The independent Russian journalist and anti-corruption fighter says that if the first of these needs for more immigrants is obvious, the second of having them as a safe target for the population is less so but beyond doubt is at least equally important to the regime (gorby.media/articles/2024/11/01/chto-delat-s-ponaekhavshimi).
    She draws that conclusion on the basis of conversations in a series of focus groups organized jointly by Novaya Gazeta and the Levada Center whose participants made clear that Russians focus their anger about many things on the migrants and thus relieve tensions in ways that do not bring them into conflict with the Putin regime.
    That doesn’t mean that the powers that be have invented migration as an issue, Panfilova continues, but they are using it because the stress of life in Russia today could lead to an explosion if there was no outlet. Attacking migrants provides precisely such an outlet and thus helps the Kremlin keep anger in the population from building up against itself.

Patrushev Denounces Western Moves on World’s Oceans, Europe’s Internal Waterways, and the Montreux Convention

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 1 – Nikolay Patrushev, former secretary of the Russian Security Council who now heads the Naval Collegium, has denounced Western moves on the world’s oceans and Europe’s internal waterways and regarding the Montreux Convention governing the Turkish straits as anti-Russian and says Moscow will respond (fedpress.ru/news/77/policy/3346147).
    On the one hand, his comments fall within the remit of his new position; but on the other, they are a sign that he continues to play a key role in the formation of Moscow’s foreign policy as Russia’s leading hawk and in many ways may have increased that role since his widely supposed “demotion” to the Naval Collegium.
    Three of Patrushev’s comments are particularly noteworthy. First, he is especially concerned with the use of rivers by the West having overseen the conduct of the Oceans 2024 exercise which despite its name focused on the use of the internal waterways of the Russian Federation.
    A major reason for that focus may be that Russia can put pressure on other countries regarding the military use of transborder rivers like the Danube in particular without having to wait until Moscow can overcome its problems with its blue water navy.
    Second, Patrushev is focused above all on the balance of power in the Black Sea. While that may be little more than a reflection of the fact that he made these remarks at a meeting devoted to that sea, his words suggest that Moscow will now seek to build up its presence there even before it expands elsewhere, to challenge both Ukraine and its Western supporters.
    Such a focus could presage a much more aggressive response to Ukraine’s victories over the Russian navy there than anyone has seen in recent months. If so, naval activity even more than land force movements may define Moscow’s approach in the coming months.
    And third, his reference to the Montreux Convention which governs the use of the Turkish straits speaks to a Russian obsession going back more than a century, one based on fears that the West will advance against Russia via the straits into the Black Sea, something the convention, in force since 1936, makes far less possible.
    Patrushev’s suggestions that the West wants to change Montreux, a kind of code word for the development of a canal that bypasses the Turkish straits, makes it likely that Moscow will step up its pressure on Turkey not to agree to any change in the convention’s limits.

Moscow Attacks Ingushetia’s Batal-Haji Sufi Order, a Group Some have Called ‘a State within a State’ in that North Caucasus Republic

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 2 – Moscow officials have accused four members of Ingushetia’s Batal-Haji Sufi brotherhood of taking part in the March 2022 attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, an action that threatens both to destabilize that North Caucasus republic and worsen relations between Moscow and Chechnya which has defended the order in the past.
    That is because the brotherhood is so large that its members dominate much of the government of the Republic of Ingushetia and because Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov has sought to use some of its members to allow him to dominate Magas (kavkazr.com/a/batalhadzhintsy-iz-ingushetii-stali-figurantami-dela-o-terakte-v-krokuse-/33184799.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/11/chechnyas-kadyrov-takes-up-cause-of.html).
    The latest Russian accusations are likely to cause the order to close ranks against Moscow, although it is unclear as of this writing whether the Russian government will press these cases in court or quietly pull back from an open break as it did two years ago (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/11/russian-officials-accuse-influential.html).
    But in either case, Magas officials are certainly going to be angry and on the defensive all the more so because of corruption charges against the brother of the official head of the republic; and Chechnya’s Kadyrov is certain to try to exploit the situation by positioning himself once again as a defender of Islamic institutions.
    As a result, there is a growing risk of serious conflicts both in government offices behind the scenes and in the streets where the Ingush population is already furious at Moscow for its continuing repression of those who led the opposition to yielding 10 percent of the republic to Chechnya in 2018 and their current status as the poorest federal subject in the Federation.  

Xinjiang’s Growth Involves Few Risks and Many Rewards for Kazakhstan, Two Kazakh Experts Say

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 1 – Many countries are able to develop more easily if they are doing significantly better than their neighbors because their residents focus on their own countries rather than on their neighbors and some of them fear that if a neighbor develops more rapidly, that will entail real risks for such nation building.
    That has been a concern in Kazakhstan which for most of the last 30 years has been far more developed than the neighboring Chinese territory of Xinjiang but is now seeing its neighbor grow far more rapidly and thus becoming of greater interest to Kazakhs (spik.kz/2050-rascvet-sosednego-sinczjana-blago-ili-ugroza-dlja-kazahstana.html).
    But two experts, Vyacheslav Dodonov, a political scientist, and Arman Baiganov, an economic advisor, say that in the current case, Kazakhstan had far more problems with Xinjiang when its economy was doing less well than it does at the present time when Xinjiang’s is doing significantly better.
    There are two reasons for that, the experts say. On the one hand, the economic growth of Xinjiang has overshadowed the ethnic and religious problems that Xinjiang has experienced and that Kazakhs had focused on and this growth has meant that Kazakhstan’s trade with China has expanded as a result.
    And on the other, the two countries have complementary economies with Kazakhstan providing raw materials, services and transit to Xinjiang and China more generally while China’s Xinjiang is providing consumer goods to Kazakhstan. That relationship has only been strengthened by Western sanctions, Dodonov and Baiganov say.

Moscow’s Suppression of Efforts to Form a Union Republic of Siberian Turks Recalled

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Oct. 31 – One of the biggest challenges the numerically smallest peoples of the Russian Federation face is combining together so that they are sufficiently large to be able to defend themselves against Moscow’s assimilationist agenda. Not surprisingly, many of them are looking back to the 1920s when such efforts seemed possible.
    The Asians of Russia portal discusses how the indigenous Turkic peoples of Southern Siberia – the Khakass, the Altai, the Shors, and others tried to form a single common Turkic state within the USSR but one that Moscow viewed as secession and stamped out during the Great Terror (asiansofrussia.com/delo-soyuza-sibirskih-tyurok-obedinenie-narodov-sayano-altaya/).
    The details the portal provides are primarily of interest only to experts and to members of these communities. What is important and noteworthy, however, is that the Turkic peoples then and now recognized that they would have to form a common state structure in order to survive and that Moscow was committed then and now not to allowing that to happen.
    This is a challenge many of the smaller nations within the current borders of the Russian Federation face to this day and will face if Russia moves toward a genuine federation or disintegrates. And it is important that the peoples involved both recognize this obstacle to their survival and that Moscow has in the past and will in the future make sure remains in place.
 

Uzbek Leaders Stalin Purged in 1938 Deserved to Be Because of Their Links to Prometheanism, Mendkovich Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 1 – A Russian nationalist commentator says that the Uzbek leaders Stalin purged in 1938 deserved to be because of their links to the Promethee movement, a declaration that both highlights Moscow’s increasingly negative reaction to non-Russian charges against the Soviet dictator and the reach of the Promethee movement into Central Asia.
    In a commentary for the Strategic Culture Foundation portal, Nikita Mendkovich lashes out at Uzbek commentaries declaring the leading victims of Stalin’s purges in that republic to have been “the flower of the nation” and says they deserved to be imprisoned and killed   fondsk.ru/news/2024/11/02/1938-god-repressii-v-uzbekistane-ili-novaya-revolyuciya.html).   
    On the one hand, he insists, the Uzbek party leaders whom Stalin purged were corrupt and needed to be weeded out to block the restoration of a class society in that Central Asian country. And on the other, they were closely linked to the Promethee movement that he says the West established in order to promote the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.
    If Mendkovich’s first argument is an old one – it was first advanced by Soviet propagandists at the time of the Great Terror – his second represents an increasingly important theme in more recent commentaries about those events, one that seeks to link the victims of Stalin’s crimes to Western intelligence services.
    That has long been a staple of Russian commentaries about nationalists in Ukraine and the western republics of the former Soviet Union, but its extension to Central Asia, while not unprecedented, is an increasing focus of the attention of Russian nationalists in Moscow alarmed by growing support for the memory of Stalin’s victims there.
    For background on the Polish Promethean movement, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/04/prometheanism-showed-that-joint.html and the sources cited there; and for the increasingly negative Russian reaction to that movement and its followers in the USSR, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/12/revival-of-prometheanism-outrages.html.

Kremlin Less Interested in Promoting Any One Candidate in Elections Abroad than in Undermining Democracy as Such, Yakhno Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 3 – The Kremlin is far less interested in promoting any particular candidate in elections abroad than it is in undermining public trust in democracy, a system of governance which Putin and his team view as a threat to their power both internationally and at home, according to Olesya Yakhno.
    According to the Ukrainian political scientist, the Kremlin recognizes that democracies help create the kind of solidarity between governments and peoples that dictatorships like Putin cannot hope to achieve and thus can stand up to regimes like his (uatv.ua/rossiya-delaet-stavku-ne-na-konkretnogo-kandidata-na-vyborah-v-ssha-a-na-podryv-doveriya-k-demokratii-yahno/).
    And at the same time, Putin and his team see the discrediting of democracy as essential to maintaining their rule in Russia itself. If Moscow can present democratic systems as ineffective and conflicted, far fewer Russians will be interested in that form of governance for themselves and instead will not oppose what Putin is doing.
    Yakhno’s comments are a useful counterpoint to the efforts of many in the United States and elsewhere to identify which candidate there the Kremlin supports. It is likely that the Putin regime really does have a preference, but promoting that preference is less important in its mind than undermining democracy as such.