Word Russians Use Most Often Isn’t Russian but Borrowed from English, Moscow Institute Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 12 – The Moscow Institute of Russian Studies says that the word Russians use most often is “OK,” saying that Russians appear to like it because it is clear and unambiguous. But some Russian nationalists, including those in the Kremlin, may be unhappy because the word is not originally Russian but borrowed from English.

            Another reason that “OK” is so popular, experts at the institute say, is that it is short; and for many years, Russians have been drawn to the use of words and phrases that are extremely brief (ria.ru/20260110/slovo-2067067914.html and nazaccent.ru/content/45020-nazvano-samoe-upotrebimoe-slovo-v-russkom-yazyke/).

            Perhaps because “OK” doesn’t have the ideologically correct Russian origin, none of the institutions that named words of the year at the end of 2025 identified it as such. Instead, they reported that words deserving that honor included anxiety, victory and birthrate (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/12/russian-governments-word-of-year-is.html).

Pskov Governor Suggests Lack of Heat in Region’s Homes May be Result of ‘Sabotage’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 11 – After residents of a village suffering from a lack of heat complained, Pskov Governor Mikhail Vedernikov promised “a thorough investigation” and suggested that among the possible causes of this disaster are “criminal negligence,” “incompetence,” and “sabotage” (using the Russian word often translated as “wrecking.”

            He is the first but likely won’t be the last Russian regional head to revive what was typically the explanation for any problems in Stalin’s time (echofm.online/news/pskovskij-gubernator-posle-zhaloby-zhitelej-zamerzayushhego-posyolka-nazval-vreditelstvo-sredi-vozmozhnyh-prichin-otsutstviya-tepla).

            In fact, the lack of heat thousands of Russians across the country are now suffering from almost certainly are the result of the failure of the Russian government to repair and replace aging infrastructure. But suggesting that there are “wreckers” about, exactly what the Soviet state would have said in Stalin’s time, may be as good a way as any to distract them.  

            But doing so comes with a risk: the use of this loaded term will remind everyone in that region and elsewhere of just how far the Putin regime has gone in reviving the totalitarianism of Stalin’s time when as in Mussolini’s Italy the ruler is always right and problems are the work of criminal “wreckers.” 

Russia’s Federal Subjects have Cut Back or Stopped Publishing Statistics at Different Times than Moscow or than Each Other, 'Sibirsky Ekspress' Says

Paul Goble

Staunton, Jan. 11 – Many likely assume that the governments of Russia’s federal subjects have followed in lockstep Moscow’s decisions to reduce or end the publication of key statistics as was typically the case in Soviet times. But that is not the case now. Many republic, kray and oblast officials have varied their timing not only with Moscow’s moves but with each other.

These decisions haven’t been announced, but they have become clear in an article in the Sibirsky Ekspress telegram channel on crime in various parts of Russia east of the Urals (t.me/Sib_EXpress/69812 reposted at echofm.online/news/v-tyve-buryatii-i-hakasii-rezko-vyroslo-chislo-ubijstv).

In addition to publishing details on differences in crime among them, the telegram channel reports that “far from all Siberian procuracies publish relatively detailed statistics on crime or do so at the same time as one another or at the same time that central officials have stopped publishing such statistics.

Novosibirsk Oblast issued the last crime statistics in May 2025. Omsk did so in July of htat year. But Tomsk Oblast continued to put out statistics on crime through September, although it did not provide comparisons with last year or any data at all on crime rates in previous years.

In the Kuzbass, however, the last crime reports are dated 2023 and the Transbaikal Kray stopped issuing data in 2020.  The telegram channel provides official sources for each of these events. It also points out that Moscow stopped reporting new crime data in January 2023, something that means some federal subjects did so before Moscow and some afterward.

This pattern is critically important for at least two reasons. On the one hand, it is an indication that in something as important as crime data, Moscow is exercising less tight control over how the regional governments handle things. That raises some important questions about the Kremlin’s control of these governments.

And on the other, it suggests that those who want to get data on issues the central Russian authorities have stopped publishing must not fail to look at the regions even if their primary concern is not the regions but Russia as a whole. Regional data will be only partial, but it will help fill a gap that all too many observers have accepted as definitive. 

Domestic Tourism in Russia Likely Fall Smaller and Growing Less Quickly than Moscow Routinely Claims

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 10 – Russians often say that their country is remarkable in that all of its domestic policies have led to the growth of tourism abroad while all of its foreign policies lead to more tourism within its borders (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/11/moscows-foreign-policy-always-promotes.html).

            And so it is no surprise that, as foreign travel has become more difficult following the launch of Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine, Moscow has promoted travel within the country and routinely declares that it has had enormous success and will continue to do so (e.g., readovka.news/news/236401/).

            But reports from Russia’s federal subjects suggest that such claims are problematic, sometimes for understandable reasons as in Krasnodar where tourism is down 15 percent because of oil spills last year (kavkaz-uzel.info/articles/419811) and perhaps more generally because of statistical sleight of hand.

            Writing in The Siberian Economist, journalist Artyom Aleksandrov says that residents of Kamchatka have long assumed they are experiencing a tourist boom because of Moscow’s claims but the facts on the ground are likely otherwise given that no reliable numbers about tourism are being released (sibmix.com/?doc=19417).

            According to the Kamchatka authorities, the number of tourists coming to Kamchatka has grown from approximately 240,000 in 2019 to over 300,000 in 2021 and to some 800,000 last year. “Formally,” Aleksandrov says, “all these data are correct – if one considers anyone who flies to Kamchatka to be a tourist.”

            These figures in fact reflect all the passengers handled by Kamchatka’s main airport who have not immediately flown on to other destinations, he continues; but they include many people who are coming or going to the region for other than touristic reasons, including businessmen and officials and local people travelling to other federal subjects.

            The Russian emergency situations ministry which tracks people who are visiting the kind of sites tourists do come to Kamchatka to see gives figures vastly lower because it doesn’t count the other categories that Kamchatka officials and likely Moscow officials speaking about the growth of domestic tourism include as well.

            Aleksandrov does not speculate as to how widespread this form of self-congratulatory fabrication of data is in Russia; but it is likely to be found in many places – and that in turn makes the summary numbers claimed in Moscow almost certainly wildly inflated and quite incorrect.

Putin’s Expanded War in Ukraine Now Longer than Stalin’s Great Fatherland War – and Russians are Tired, Kolesnikov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 11 – At 4:00 am this morning Moscow time, Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine passed an important milestone: it has now lasted more time than that the Soviet Union’s Great Fatherland War did eighty years ago and shows no sign of ending anytime soon, Andrey Kolesnikov says.

            The war has left Russia “a semi-totalitarian state with an archaic national-imperial messianic ideology and a militarized economy … the status as a global … the loss of soft power even or especially within the radius of the former empire, and demographic collapse,” the commentator says (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/01/11/peredoz).

            “But what is surprising” is that “this extraordinary duration of rule and the conduct of hostilities” has been “combined with an unprecedently short planning horizon as no one knows what will happen tomorrow and the habit of setting goals has been lost.” After all, why should anyone make plans about a future he or she can’t control?

            According to Kolesnikov, “the result is a tied society, a society of inverted morality, and a closed society, turned away from the world in every sense of the word, hiding in its hole.” It was “weary and passive” even before February 2022; but now it has “no strength for anything and even less for resistance.”

            He continues: “The longer the era of late Putinism lasts, the more tired and therefore distanced from events society will become. Empathy has been replaced by complicity, but even that is weary – just to be left alone,” a state that can be maintained only by propaganda of conformity and rituals of unification” that “inject social poison every day.”

            For a time at least, “The bubble of national superiority keeps all the boats afloat. The fight against external and internal enemies compensates for the disappearance of soft power and investment attractiveness.” But “less soft power means a fiercer struggle with the West and harsher domestic political repression.”

“As a result,” Kolesnikov says, “the Kremlin will prolong the hot phase of the confrontation, insisting on its terms for negotiations, which no one will ever agree to. It's their business. Only inflation will still have to be kept within single-digit figures with great difficulty, and the somewhat abstract stagnation will turn into a very concrete technical recession.”

And he concludes: “This slow overdose of permanent militarization can, of course, be prolonged for some time, but no political astrologer or social architect will be able to predict when a natural limit to further intoxication will be reached -- just as no one could predict the erosion and collapse of the Soviet project.”

Are Massage Parlor Discounts for Veterans of War in Ukraine a Moscow Effort to Get More Recruits or the Result of a Shortage of Customers Because of Combat Deaths? Vladimirov Asks

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 10 – In his latest post under the rubric “Notes of a Provincial” on the Kasparov portal, Lev Vladimirov, a Russian writer now living in Israel, argues that residents of Samara, his native city, “like all Russians are the serfs of the 21^st century” and that their servility and viciousness have only “intensified” since Putin launched his expanded war in Ukraine.

            He says that returning veterans are openly contemptuous of the rights of others and even insist that they “have all the rights” and that those who didn’t fight in Ukraine for Putin are “just rear-echelon scum,” an attitude that the Kremlin has encouraged by proclaiming the veterans the new elite of Russia (kasparovru.com/material.php?id=69623E89C706B).

            Such attitudes, of course, didn’t begin in this decade, Vladimirov says. “Anti-Semitism, Russian nationalism (under the guise of patriotism), envy, denunciations and provocations against those who disagree with the Kremlin regime” have been “waiting for so long to flourish.” But “now they have openly blossomed.”

            And as a result, he says, “these serfs of the 21^st century know now shame.” Vladimirov points to an advertisement on a Samara news website for the services of massage parlors in Samara which he says is “the icing on the cake” as far as this intensification of these qualities is concerned.

            The ad promises “participants of the special military operation a discount.” That prompts the question: “Is this an additional incentive, secretly funded by the government to get men to go and fight in Ukraine or are the escort girls in Samara facing a shortage of men” at least in part because of the deaths of so many in Ukraine?

Kunayev Entitled His Memoirs ‘From Stalin to Gorbachev’ But He Should have Called Them ‘Without Stalin or Gorbachev,’ Olzhas Suleymenov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 8 – On the 114^th anniversary of Dinmukhamed Kunayev, who was first secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan between 1960 and 1962 and again between 1964 and 1986, Olzhas Suleymenov, the Kazakh poet who was his friend and supporter, recalls how Kunayev transformed the republic from Stalin’s time only to be ousted by Gorbachev.

            Because of history, Suleymenov says, the events of Kunayev’s career mean that the former party leader should have chosen as the title of his memoirs not the anodyne From Stalin to Gorbachev but rather the more meaningful Without Stalin or Gorbachev (novgaz.com/index.php/2-news/4102-время-культурного-роста).

            As someone who lived through much of Soviet time, the poet suggests that he and others of his generation “divide” the history of their land in the 20^th century between “before the death of Stalin and after.” The former was a tie when the intelligentsia and much of the population was destroyed.

            Kunayev was “a man of great internal culture,” someone who “loved creative peoples and really supported them,” Suleymenov says. “Never before or after the Kunayev era did an artist, director, writer, or architech feel himself so needed to the people and so valued by the government.” And much of the reason for that was Kunayev’s doing.

            As a result, the poet says, “the Kunayev years were a good time of recovery for the Kazakhs, but they were followed by a disastrous perestroika which ruined the country and negatived much of what had been achieved.” And because many in Moscow wanted to act unilaterally, Kunyaev fell under attack and was ultimately removed by Gorbachev in 1986.

            In his article, Suleymenov provides numerous details about the Kunayev period and why he values it so highly relative not only to the Stalinist past but to the Gorbachev period that followed and why he hopes that Kunayev will be remembered by residents of that country for his contributions rather than forgotten as a person of the past.

            Many of these details will be of importance only to specialists on Kazakhstan, but the fact that Suleymenov is reminding everyone of them now is something those interested in the Soviet Union in its final decades should not forget but rather pay the closest attention to because such a detailed and differentiated account is necessary to avoid going from one extreme to another.

            The number of such memoir articles unfortunately is not large, but there are far more than are gaining attention either in the post-Soviet countries or among Western specialists on the USSR and its successor states. Suleymenov’s article provides the best possible argument as to why that is so.