Anyone with Courage Can Become a Human Rights Defender Even in Authoritarian Countries, Tajikistan’s Bobonazarova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 29 – Many Central Asians think that only lawyers can become human rights defenders, Oynikhol Bobonazarova says; and some of them do. But because the state licenses them and can end their careers, a large number of them don’t. The situation is similar in many other professions.

            “Not everyone is capable of making the sacrifices” that human rights work requires, the 77-year-old Tajik woman who has been decorated internationally for her work in Tajikistan says; but everyone needs to remember that “anyone can become a human rights advocate.” It isn’t a path that is limited to only those in a few professions (asiaplus.news/2026/08/29/ne-kazhdyj-sposoben-vyderzhat-takuyu-zhertvu-ojnihol-bobonazarova-o-pravozashhitnikah/).

            The closure of more than 2,000 independent organizations in Tajikistan in recent years has certainly reduced the number of those speaking out on human rights issues, often because of state intervention and the decision of the government not to provide them with grants, she continues.

            But that doesn’t mean that individuals can’t achieve a great deal in helping Tajiks to overcome their fears of what will happen if they dissent and at the same time, albeit more slowly, to convince the Tajikistan government that actions in defense of human rights helps the state correct problems before they grow into threats.

            Among the successes she and those working with her have achieved in recent years are ensuring that migrant workers pay alimony to ex-wives left behind in their homeland, reducing torture in the military, and securing the ability of rights activists to visit prisons and publicize problems there.

            One of her greatest worries now is that attacks on the media in the United States and other Western countries, places that had been models for human rights activists in Central Asia, are being exploited by officials to impose even tighter controls over their populations without regard to anyone’s opinion.

            According to Bobonazarova, “until the developed nations of the world restore their former positions and authority in this sphere, it will be extremely difficult to change the situation.”

Chinese Students in Russian Universities Using AI Translations rather than Learning Russian, Moscow Official Complains

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 29 – Even as 47 Russian and Chinese universities celebrated the creation of an Association of Joint Educational Organizations, an official of the Russian ministry overseeing higher education expressed concern that AI translations, which were supposed to integrate scholars from the two countries are having the opposite effect.

            Vera Skorobogatova, who works on educational cooperation at the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education, said that all too often Chinese students at Russian universities are using AI translations rather than learning Russian as Moscow had hoped they would do (asia24.media/news/nikakikh-neudobnykh-voprosov-47-universitetov-dvukh-sverkhderzhav-sozdali-unikalnyy-alyans/).

            They can read texts that have been translated by AI and they can even listen to lectures via headsets where AI-generated translations are provided, she says. Consequently, they see little need to learn Russian and thus are not being integrated with Russia as had been the case earlier. Indeed, now, “they prefer not to learn Russia.”

            “This is a systemic failure,” Skorobogatova continued. “The technology that was supposed to be bridge instead has turned out to be a wall as a student with interpreter headphones may be physically present but intellectually remains thousands of kilometers away” in his or her home country.

            Judging by reports of the meeting at which she spoke, the Russian official did not address what almost certainly is behind the decision of Chinese exchange students not to perfect their language: Russian is no longer a language in which cutting edge research and scholarship is published, and so Chinese students looking to the future are learning other languages instead. 

Putin’s Russia Embodiment Today of Fraenkel’s ‘Dual State’ Theory about Nazi Germany, Lea and Borukh Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 29 – In 1941, Ernst Fraenkel, a German-Jewish legal theorist, described Nazi Germany as “a dual state,” one in which adopted laws and court decisions governed most of the population but in which the state reserved to itself the right to deal with its enemies in any way it saw fit.

            Today, Aaron Lea and Borukh Taskin, two Israeli scholars of Russian origin, say that Putin’s Russia embodies this theory and thus uses law in this way instead of viewing all law as the weapon of the ruling class or in the case of Russia today of the ruling loyalist camarilla (kasparovru.com/material.php?id=6A92D8601945F&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook).

            They are explicit: “The Russian Federation is a modern embodiment of the "dual state." Civil courts, arbitration tribunals, and commercial law operate with a fair degree of predictability -- precisely what ensures the economic stability the regime needs to survive. For decades, foreign investors have worked with Russian counterparts by relying on this "normative state."

            But as the cases of Navalny and Khodorkovsky show, there is the other part of the state as Fraenkel described it, “the prerogative state” in which the rulers decide  how to act. Even in these cases, the Kremlin sought to maintain “a procedural façade” but “behind it, Lea and Borukh say, “the rules were broken.”

            What is critically important, they continue, is to avoid “conflating the normative state with the prerogative state” because that oversimplifies the picture of what is happening in Putin’s Russia now and how different it is from the definition of the role of law in totalitarian states which act as if all law is simply a weapon of the ruling class.

            That is especially important given that today’s “Russian ‘ruling class’” is not a class in the usual sense. Rather, it resembles what Max Weber called “a patrimonial ‘clientele’ – a personalistic network where loyalty to the leader personally supersedes all other criteria for membership.”

            This group is “not a  class defined by background, wealth, or professional affiliation. Rather, It is a collective defined by a single criterion: recognition of the center’s right to set the boundaries of the permissible and a willingness to act within those limits,” Lea and Borukh argue. 

            Today, support for Putin’s war in Ukraine has become “the ultimate litmus test for membership” in the clientele, they say. Those who express any doubt or reservation about Russia’s actions in Ukraine are immediately and necessarily excluded from the normative realm and put at risk as members of the prerogative legal regime.

            They conclude: “the Russian Federation is therefore not a totalitarian state where the entire legal system serves as a political weapon. Instead, it is a dual state in which the ruling clientele employs the prerogative sector against its enemies—while reserving the normative sector for itself and those loyal to it.

Putin’s Monopoly on ‘Russianness’ has Allowed Him to Continue to Wage War in Ukraine and Must Be Challenged, Bilunov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 29 – Ever more people around the world recognize that the Russian Federation includes a variety of non-Russian nations who make up an increasing share of that country’s population and aspire to greater autonomy and in some cases even independence from Moscow.

            But they still treat those whom the Russian census counts as “ethnic Russians” as an undifferentiated whole and even accept the idea that even those who speak Russian should be included part of that community. That is no small thing, and Denis Bilunov argues that it has given the Kremlin the ability to continue its war in Ukraine (region.expert/monopoly/).

            The former editor of Kasparov.ru who is now a graduate student at Prague’s Charles University says that the Kremlin leader’s “monopoly on ‘Russianness’” is so strong that many in both the Russian Federation and the West accept it as somehow natural and fail to recognize that those called Russians are extremely diverse culturally and politically.

            As long as Putin can successfully make this claim, his regime will remain stable and he will be able to conduct aggressive wars as now in Ukraine. But, Bilunov says, “if this monopoly can be challenged convincingly enough, the regime will lose its stability, and the chances for real change for the better will emerge.”

            To that end, the West must adopt “a proactive strategy” aimed at challenging Putin’s claims  to have a monopoly on the representation of ‘Russianness,’” depriving him of the chance to claim to speak for all Russians and Russian speakers and supporting the diversity of people lumped together as ethnic Russians so that these can lead to “an organic process capable of garnering mass support.”

            These must involve first of all the recognition of how diverse those labelled ethnic Russian by Moscow in fact not only politically but culturally and even linguistically as well are and then on “institutional recognition” by such means as allowing representatives of these multiple Russias to compete under their own flags or have their own places in activities of various kinds abroad.

            That is going to be difficult given Moscow’s media campaign and the inertia of western thinking, but the fact that there has been so much change first in recognizing that the union republics of the USSR were different and now in acknowledging that the non-Russian republics within the Russian Federation gives hope that Bilunov’s call will gain support. 

Putin’s ‘Optimization’ Campaign which First Hit Medical Points and Local Governments is Now Leading to School Consolidation – and Parents are Protesting

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 29 – Putin’s “optimization” campaign, a response to declining population in rural parts of the Russian Federation designed to save money for his war in Ukraine, has now moved beyond government offices and medical points and is leading to school consolidation. Outraged parents are protesting against the bussing of their children to distant schools. 

            Villagers in Siberia are especially angry, according to regional commentator Aleksey Aksyutenko. If in European Russia alternative schools are close by, east of the Urals, they are distant; and closing a school means children must travel by bus long distances or parents will have to move, threatening the survival of the villages (svpressa.ru/society/article/529592/).

            Not surprisingly, parents are taking to the streets in villages in Siberia – Svobodnaya pressa gives one example --and equally not surprisingly, officials are threatening those taking part with criminal reprisals if they don’t send their schools to distant places, something that will eliminate much of the savings Russian officials are counting on by the closing of small schools.

            Two things are surprising, however, Aksyutenko says. On the one hand, Russian law requires the parents of children must be given multiple options if schools are closed; but in the current round of school consolidation, officials in the regions have not done so, further angering the people.

            And on the other, these officials are taking this step only a few weeks before the Duma elections, angering people who might otherwise have been expected to vote the way the Kremlin wants. After all, official moves which affect children almost invariably produce a far stronger reaction among Russians than those which affect only adults.

Altay Shamans Say Unearthing of Siberian Mummy Loosed Violence on the World --including War in Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 28 – Shamans in the southern Siberian republic of the Altai are demanding that a Siberian mummy scholars unearthed from the permafrost in 1993 had stood guard at the gates of the underworld and that the body must be reburied or the world will continue to suffer from calamities like the war in Ukraine.

            Many cultures have traditions that disturbing the dead will unleash horrors on those who do so; but the case of what has come to be known as the fate of the “Altai princess” is especially fraught, Leyla Latypova says (themoscowtimes.com/2026/08/28/calls-to-rebury-a-siberian-mummy-unearth-decades-of-distorted-history-a93588).

            When the remains of a fifth century BCE woman were uncovered more than three decades ago, the Russian journalist notes, it was an international sensation and became a tourist attraction. Now, however, shamans in the region are “calling for the mummy to be reburied.”

            They have attracted attention by claining, Latypova writes, that the mummy’s remains had “’stood guard at the gates of the underworld’ and that disturbing them had opened a Pandora’s box of natural disasters and political conflicts, including not least of all the ongoing war in Ukraine.”

            Scholars say that the myth of the Altai princess was developed by the scientists who unearthed her remains and that the idea she was noble and a guard of the underworld are ideas that have attached themselves to her body in the years since. And they point out that she can’t be reburied because of the rapidly melting permafrost.

            At the same time, however, many researchers point out that the removal of the body from the Altai to Novosibirsk for preservation represented a kind of cultural imperialism and that they favor reducing the extent of archaeological expeditions to the Altai because these activities disturb the countryside there.

            Consequently, what might appear to be the kind of story that emerges only during the slow news days of late August has the potential to energize the national movement in the Altai in the future. (On that movement, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/04/another-sign-this-time-in-altai.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-mountainous-altai-where-russians.html.)

As Long as Putin’s War in Ukraine Continues, Russian Economy will Stagnate, ‘Consensus’ Forecast of HSE Economists Holds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 28 – As long as Putin’s war in Ukraine and his standoff with the West continue, the Russian economy will stagnate, leaving the country unable to tackle its most important domestic problems and ensuring that on a wide variety of measures, Russia will fall ever further behind other countries, according to the “consensus” prediction of HSE economists.

            This year, the Moscow economic experts say, Russia’s GDP growth will be no more than 0.6 percent, with no prospects that this metric will rise to more than two percent into the 2030s (dcenter.hse.ru/consensus_forecast discussed at ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/08/28/rossii-predrekli-pochti-desyat-let-ekonomicheskogo-zastoya-a204681).

            Given that the IMF now assumes that the growth in GDP for the world as a whole will rise 3.1 to 3.2 percent a year over the next seven years, this means that Russia will fall ever further behind and will lack the resources and technology to tackle the problems that plague that country.

            Moreover, according to the economists at the Higher School of Economists, Russia will lose over this period whatever remaining technological advantages it has and its best educated people who will either leave or not be able to get the kind of education needed to put Russia on track to renewed growth.

            Government officials and pro-government analysts argue that Russia will be able to avoid such a disaster and even that the war itself is putting Russia on track to grow at a far more rapid rate than the consensus view suggests. But this view, one echoing the conclusions independent Russian scholars abroad (https://case-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/the-dictators-legacy-a-new-zastoy-ru.pdf), is viewed by the consensus as “utopioan.”

            Only if the Kremlin ends the war and its break with the West, those who take the consensus view say will Russia be able to resume anything like the growth it had before 2022.