Russia Faces Challenge of Moving ‘From a Strong Power to a Strong State,’ Moscow Political Scientist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 13 – Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has constructed “a strong power” (vlast) but now faces the challenges of building “a strong state” (gosudarstvo), Nikolay Mironov says. Otherwise, Moscow will constantly need the intervention of the top leader to ensure that his goals are followed lest being confident that they will be.

            That is no small thing, the political scientist at the Moscow Center for Applied Research and Programs says, because otherwise however strong the vlast may be, it will be compromised by an inability to ensure that its decisions are implemented without the individual leader in charge constantly intervening (ng.ru/ideas/2026-10-13/8_9602_state.html).

            In well-designed modernizing states, Mironov argues, “political leadership sets the long-term direction for development and retains the capacity to ensure that decisions are implemented. But day-to-day management requires a degree of autonomy for the professional administrative apparatus.”

            “Without a political impetus, a bureaucracy may eventually succumb to inertia,” he continues; but “at the same time, if constant interference from above leads the bureaucracy to wait for instructions in situations where it could perfectly well make decisions on its own,” that can compromise the ability of the strong state to act.

            “Different countries have struck this balance in different ways, and not always successfully,” the political scientist continues. He makes his points by talking about countries other than the Russian Federation, but it is obvious that he intends his conclusions about the need for this balance to be applied there.

             Mironov suggests that finding this balance is ever more important because it is ever more a challenge to the political leadership: “As an economy grows more complex, an increasing number of decisions must inevitably be delegated to the professional administrative apparatus.”

But “at the same time, every policy area must have a clearly designated person in charge, vested with sufficient authority. The role of the political leadership is to monitor whether the chosen course is yielding the expected results. If the initial concept does not work, the system should allow for it to be adjusted or abandoned altogether.”

Once this is understood, he suggests, it will be obvious to all that “the strength of a state is ultimately determined not by the scale of its intervention but by its capacity to transform a chosen priority into a functional mechanism—and to modify that mechanism when necessary” Because that is how “a strong government evolves into a strong state.

Migrant Workers in Russia Rely on Family and Friends to Find Work and Housing, Russian Government’s Migration Portal Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 16 – Migrant workers in Russia rely on family and friends to help them find work and housing because they do not trust either government or other private sources of information about such things, according to RosMigratsiya, the Russian government’s portal about migration.

            That was just one of the characteristics of migrants in Russia today that the portal released in the course of preparing a portrait of the average worker migrant there (https://росмиграция.рф/опросы/кто-он-сегодня-трудовой-мигрант-в-россии-актуальный-портрет-по-данным-опроса).

            Other key findings include the following: the average migrant from Central Asia is 32, is not accompanied by members of his immediate family, has a secondary education and is employed almost exclusively to perform physical labor in construction and other related branches.

            In addition to a lack of trust in Russian sources of information, migrants said that they faced problems with the language barrier, bureaucratic procedures, preparing documents, and frequent failures of employers to pay them their wages on a timely basis, especially in cases where they had not signed any official agreement.

Nearly 20 Percent of Articles in Russian Media Now Contain AI Generated Content, Study Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 16 – The share of articles in the Russian media with AI generated content has grown from les than 0.1 percent at the end of 2022 to 18 percent in the second quarter of 2026, according to Kirill Pshinnik who examined more than 250,000 articles from 174 Russian publications.

            The co-founder of the Zerokoder online university used two open AI-text detectors, OpenPangram-2B and Qwen3-4B-Detect and then combined their findings to identify which articles showed the presence of AI-generated materials (forbes.ru/tekhnologii/570361-neceloveceskim-azykom-pocti-20-statej-v-rossijskih-smi-imeut-priznaki-ii-generacii).

            According to Pshinnik, articles with AI-generated content were on average significantly shorter than articles not including such content, less likely to include quotations from anyone, and less commonly found in major news stories than in those about everyday life, although they have been increasing in number in the former as well.

            He and others expect the share of articles with AI-generated content to continue to increase and suggest that such content will allow publications to do more with less and therefore is not always the danger that many think. At the same time, however, journalists, editors and readers need to be aware that this content is different and limit its negative impacts.

Russian Supreme Court Says Batal-Haji Sufi Order a Terrorist Organization and Bans It

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 14 – After years of accusing the Batal-Haji sufi order centered in Ingushetia of being extremist or worst, the Kremlin has now had the Russian Supreme Court declare the order a terrorist organization and banned its functioning on the territory of the Russian Federation.

            The verdict (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/427476 and novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/10/14/verkhovnyi-sud-zapretil-obshchinu-posledovatelei-batal-khadzhi-belkhoroeva-iz-ingushetii-news) is the latest move in a long-running struggle between Russian siloviki, the sufi order itself, and officials in Ingushetia and Chechnya who are members or at least support it.

            Moscow has had to move carefully lest it provoke a response from these well-connected people, but the die was cast in 2022 when the Russian government began accusing the order of murder and involvement in subversion (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/11/russian-officials-accuse-influential.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/01/fsb-arrests-members-of-batal-haji-sufi.html).

            The new ban won’t end the story because the Batal-Haji order has as many as 20,000 members who dominate much of the government in Ingushetia and have the active support of Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov. But it is a sign that at least some in Moscow have concluded that the order is too dangerous not to try to suppress.

            For background on the order and Moscow’s calculations about it in recent years, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/01/moscow-authorities-forced-to-proceed.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/03/rise-and-fall-of-batal-haji-sufi-order.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/12/batal-haji-sufi-order-in-ingushetia-new.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/11/moscow-attacks-ingushetias-batal-haji.html.

Moscow Planning to Use Artificial Intelligence to Identify Most Russians Using VPNs and then Block Them

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct 16 – Russia’s Ministry for Digital Development hopes that by using artificial intelligence (AI), it will be able to identify Russians going on line via virtual private networks (VPNs) and then block them with a 95 percent success rate, according to sources close to the discussions as reported by Kommersant.

            At present, “the intelligent algorithms” the ministry uses and which do not qualify as AI aren’t able to achieve anything like that success rate and even earlier plans to exploit AI for these purposes were predicted to have only a 70 percent success rate, the Moscow newspaper says (kommersant.ru/doc/9027535).

            One source explains that Moscow’s new confidence reflects its judgment that “AI automates and accelerates the analysis of connection patterns—such as packet size and rhythm, session duration, and the ratio of incoming to outgoing traffic and thus make it possible to relatively quickly identify VPN servers based on indirect indicators.”

            Independent experts say that the use of AI will allow Russian officials to identify and block APNs but add that there will be “many false positives,” where individuals who are not using APNs will be identified as having done so and thus will be subject to repressive moves by the authorities.

            If Moscow is able to achieve the 95 percent success rate in blocking the use of APN systems, however, that will put an enormous crimp in the online efforts of opposition and Western sites which regularly encourage and increasingly count on their users to employ APN technologies.

Kremlin’s Threatening Rhetoric about Kaliningrad Not Just about West but also about Attitudes of that Exclave’s Residents, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 15 – Moscow’s threats that it will use nuclear weapons if the West tries to isolate Kaliningrad from the Russian Federation reflect not just its geopolitical agenda but also its continuing concerns about the independent-minded attitudes of that exclave’s residents, according to Vadim Shtepa.

            The longtime specialist on regionalism in Russia who edits the Tallinn-based Region.Expert portal argues that what Moscow is doing is not just about the Western alliance but also about its nervousness that Kaliningrad’s population is anything but the loyal one Moscow claims and that many in the West uncritically accept (rus.postimees.ee/8563901/vadim-shtepa-kak-putin-prevratil-kaliningrad-v-antievropeyskiy-voennyy-placdarm).

            Shtepa concedes that the Kremlin’s threatening language is more about its effort to portray its policies as a response to Western moves than anything else but says that “it is possible that it is connected not with a foreign danger for this region but with Moscow’s fear that the attitudes of residents there can have changed in serious ways.”

            “In the 1990s,” he writes, “Kaliningrad oblast was close to being the most Europeanized region of the Russian Federation.” Its residents almost all of whom had passports traveled more often to neighboring Poland and Lithuania than to the Russian Federation from which it was separated by land and sea.

            Such trips, he argues, “for work, study or simply tourism, essentially changed and Europeanized the consciousness of the residents of the oblast” and set them apart from ethnic Russians elsewhere and even led to the formation in Kaliningrad of the Baltic Republic Party. (On that party, see ps:/windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/05/an-independent-konigsberg-will-be.html.)

            Until Putin banned all regional parties in 2001, that party which advocated that Kaliningrad become “the fourth Baltic republic” elected officials to local and regional bodies. And while it is no longer legally operating, the values it reflected have not disappeared.

            The isolation of Kaliningrad because of Moscow’s moves in Ukraine in fact have intensified such feelings, Shtepa suggests, given that people who once travelled freely to European countries now cannot and that they see Moscow itself is willing to change borders in Ukraine and so ask why they can’t do the same.

            Over the last 25 years, Moscow has militarized the exclave not simply to pose a challenge to the West but also to prevent such attitudes in Kaliningrad from intensifying. But the longer Putin’s war in Ukraine goes on and the more bellicose his behavior becomes, the more likely it is that such attitudes will again be on the rise.

56 Veterans in Duma Assigned to Committees having to Do with Military Concerns and Youth Issues but Not to Key Budgetary and Tax Bodies

Paul Goble                                           

            Staunton, Oct.14 – Committee assignments in the new Duma have been announced, and they show that the 56 veterans of Putin’s war in Ukraine have been assigned having to do with military and military-medical concerns and youth issues but not to the key budgetary and tax bodies.

            Given that committees arise where most of the work of the Duma currently gets done, that speaks volumes about how the Kremlin plans to use veterans there and what it says about Putin’s view that the future of Russia will be much like what it is now. But it also reflects the fact that new legislators in Russia as is the case in other countries rarely are put on key committees.

            For a detailed survey of the 26 Duma committees to which the 56 veterans have been assigned (in eight other committees, no veterans have been named as members and for a discussion of what this says about Putin’s current thinking and future plans, see novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/10/14/natselilis-na-detei.