Russia’s Birthrate will Continue to Fall Unless State Planners Return to Soviet Arrangement where Apartment Blocks were Surrounded by Common Yards, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – Many believe that Moscow can boost birthrates by increasing the size of apartments or building individual houses, but experts at a meeting in Yekaterinburg suggest that neither will do the job because they fail to provide state support for children growing up and thus shift that burden almost entirely to potential parents, Elena Rychkova says.

            In Soviet times, the Nakanune journalist says, the government kept the birthrate higher than it would otherwise be by creating yards around apartment blocks so that the community would bear the cost of supervising children rather than that burden being shifted to parents alone (nakanune.ru/articles/125115/).

            As land prices have increased, banks have favored construction of buildings closer together, a move that has destroyed parks and means that parents by themselves must bear all the costs of supervising children. Consequently, demographers say, larger apartments or separate ho        mes will do little to change that part of their calculation.

            For parks to return and thus for birthrates to rise, the experts continued, the state must take a larger role in urban planning and insist on parks around buildings rather than using up all the available land because of its rising costs. That way young people can have children confident that the community will bear much of the cost of supervising them.

            This judgment is critically important because it highlights the reality that larger apartments aren’t the real solution and that banks and builders will remain in opposition to almost any policies that might reverse the accelerating decline of the birthrate in the Russian Federation.

More than Half of Internet Cables in Russia Aging and Must Be Replaced, ‘Izvestiya’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – More than 50 percent of the internet cables linking computers together in the Russian Federation are older than their guaranteed life of 25 years and need to be replaced if the system is not going to be subject to repeated breakdowns, according to Russian government documents examined by Izvestiya.

            That finding (iz.ru/2176122/valerii-kodachigov/v-rf-mozhet-potrebovatsya-zamena-poloviny-linij-svyazi) not only because it suggests that the Russian internet system is at risk not just from Kremlin efforts to restrict access but for three larger reasons that call attention to problems a much larger problem.

            And that is this: Moscow has not been maintaining even those infrastructure investments it has made and thus is now seeing them begin to fail as well as those which the Soviet system had made earlier and on which the Putin regime and its immediate Russian predecessor has been living most of the time.

            That is because most internet cable in the Russian Federation as in other countries was laid not 40 or 50 years ago but less than 30. That means that the Kremlin, to ensure it has enough money to fight wars abroad, has not invested in infrastructure that it or its immediate Russian predecessors installed.

            Consequently, the Putin regime at least in this area but likely in many others as well is living off its own past as well as off the Soviet one, an approach for which the bill is certainly coming true, a bill that if the Kremlin doesn’t change course, is going to hurt ever more Russians and the prospect for the development of that country. 

If Russians Really Supported Repression, Kremlin Wouldn’t Be Restricting Release of Data about Such Policies, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 3 – It is an article of faith among many that Russians on the whole support the repressive policies of their government; but if that were so, Abbas Gallyamov says, the Kremlin would be less likely than it is to block the release of data about repression and might even be hyping it.

            To be sure, the decision to restrict such data also reflects a desire not to spark more criticism from its opponents abroad or to offend potential allies there, the Putin speechwriter turned Putin critic says; but that isn’t the whole story (t.me/abbasgallyamovpolitics/11225 reposted at echofm.online/opinions/esli-rossiyane-odobryayut-repressii-zachem-skryvat-ih-statistiku).

            Many people, especially liberals, believe that Russians “approve of repression,” Gallyamov says. “I have repeatedly said that this is not exactly the case and even rather not so at all. That the authorities have decided to hide relevant statistics” and block movies about siloviki misbehavior “confirms this once again.”

            According to the commentator, “the myth of approval for repression was born from the high ratings of early Putin and positive attitude towards Stalin. But in fact, a large part of the fans of both respect them not for repression, but rather the relationship of repression and other things.”

Russians in many cases believe that the achievements of the two leaders outweigh the costs of their use of repression, something that leads them to downplay or ignore repression but does not mean they actively support it. If a leader achieves a victory, Russians will forgive repression; if not, then not

That attitude does not represent unqualified support for repression but rather a contingent calculation, Gallyamov says. Consequently, a Russian regime not sure that it is achieving victory will try to hide its repressive moves lest information about them exacerbate popular anger about the failure to achieve some goal or another.

De-Colonization Broader and More Important than Other Terms Used to Discuss Russia’s Future, Orlova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – De-Colonization subsumes de-imperialization, sovereignization, federalization, and decentralization and allows for addressing all the questions they raise at one and the same time, Vasilina Orlova says. It is thus the most useful term to employ in discussing the future of the peoples now within the borders of the Russian Federation.

            “De-imperialization,” an anthropologist from Vladivostok now in the US says, “is about the abandonment of empire and imperial domination. Sovereignization concerns the acquisition of political subjectivity. Federalization focuses on a certain way of distributing power within a common state; and de-centralization is about the emergence of new centers of power” (wschody.net/federalizacziya-ili-dekolonizacziya-kto-reshaet-gde-periferiya/).

            According to her, de-colonization involves not only all of these issues but “also calls into question why a number of meanings have a culturally established and unquestioned primacy, one that can be explained only by established traditions, norms and values as dictated by colonial history.” As a result, de-colonization is the best framework to think about the Russian Federation.

            “De-imperialization,” Orlova continues, “is probably closest to the concept of de-colonization” given that as Russia arose as an empire, “it is natural to assume that the dismantling of the empire and its imperial implications should take place” to allow for all the peoples of the region, including Russians, to find a new place in the sun.

            She argues that it involves “the state’s rejection of imperial claims from the right to establish the boundaries of foreign subjectivity, from the idea of neighboring countries being within a sphere of its special interests, and from viewing some peoples as parts of a single historical whole which as a result of misunderstandings were split apart by state borders.

            De-imperialization is thus “a necessary part of de-colonization;” but it is far from all that is covered by the later term. That is because “the empire may disappear as a political struggle but the relations and perceptions it created will continue to exist.” That has certainly happened in Russia since 1991.

              Sovereignization is also close to de-colonization, Orlova writes; but it too is not the same thing. It is about who has the right to make decisions and thus may or may not involve the pursuit of independence by a group but also consider possibilities of federation or confederation.

              Those two concepts are also involved in such discussions especially as the Russian state is “already called ‘the Russian Federation.’” But most of those who advocate this do not challenge Moscow as the center of that state that will make the decisions for all other centers.

              Instead, she says, “federalization usually begins within the context of an already pre-existing map, one that says here is the Russian Federation and its subjects. Now, it is necessary to distribute power more fairly among them. The de-colonial view allows us to see that this map itself is the result of colonial history.”

              “Federalization can give the periphery more power,” Orlova continues; but “declonization calls into question the very right of the center to determine who is the periphery” and insists that “the center does not have some natural right to decide the fate of the territories because it has been able to govern them historically.”

Russia’s Parliamentary Parties Attract Different People Not So Much by Different Programs as by Different Emotional Appeals, INSOMAR Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 1 – INSOMAR, the Moscow Institute of Social Marketing on the basis of a survey says that Russians divide in their votes for the country’s parliamentary parties not because these parties offer radically different political programs than because they appeal to very different emotions.

            Using INSOMAR’s findings (t.me/insomar/499), the Club of the Regions identifies what it says are the differences among the parties in terms of the emotional appeals they have made to voters (club-rf.ru/theme/733). Here is how the Club’s experts describe the basic voters of four of these groups:

·       United Russia voters have enormous pride in their country and most of them expect positive changes in the country in the coming years.

·       KPRF voters in contrast are unhappy with the state of things in the country and a majority believe that worse times are ahead.

·       LDPR voters are proud of their country but say they are fed up with government news and are more likely than any of the others to articulate local and regional identities.

·       The New Peoples Party voters are the only party a majority of whom does not consider themselves supporters of any political powers. They are more economically active and want the state to stop interfering with the internet and let people work.

Neither INSOMAR nor the Party of the Regions talked much about Just Russia, a reflection of the fact that that party had a less clearly defined emotional content and thus was unable to set itself apart and attract voters on that basis than were the other four.  

Another Revenant from Soviet Past – Private Plots Provide Half the Potatoes Russian Eat

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – In Soviet times, much of the food Russians consumed was grown not in the fields of state and collective farms but on the small private plots that rural residents were allowed nominally for personal use but in fact to feed not only the rural population but to keep urban residents from starving.

            At that time, this was a source of shame in the Soviet Union; but it was regularly pointed to by commentators in the West as a sign that the collectivist approach to agriculture didn’t work and that capitalism would lead to expanded production and a better life for those who raised this food and those who consumed it.

            But today, despite the spread of capitalism throughout rural Russia, it is not the enormous farms controlled by large corporations but the small private plots that farmers and dacha owners maintain that is delivering a disproportionate share of food for residents of the Russian Federation.

            According to new research by the To Be Precise portal, a large share of the foods Russians consume comes not from the big farms but from private plots owned either by those with dachas or who work for the big agricultural firms (tochno.st/materials/bolse-poloviny-kartofelia-v-strane-vyrashhivaiut-na-licnyx-ucastkax-razbiraemsia-kak-ustroeny-ogorody-v-rossii).

            It reported that “more than half of the potatoes, about half of the vegetables and most of the berries in the country are now being produced not by agricultural holdings but by people on their personal plots” as private plots are now known. These figures are in fact less than they were in the 1990s when the private plots were responsible for up to 90 percent of such production.

            In some federal subjects – Dagestan, the Altai Republic, Karelia, and Kirov Oblast – more than 90 percent of all vegetables are produced on such plots, while in others the figures are much smaller. There and elsewhere, some of the private plot production comes from small farms; but most of it comes instead from dacha lands or gardens of agricultural workers.

            This pattern reflects the fact that large but now private farms produce mostly for export and the kind of output that Russians actually consumes requires the personal involvement and commitment of farmers rather than just a change in the formal ownership of the property that so many have claimed will give rise to more food production by itself. 

Having Closed Thousands of Rural Libraries before 2022, Putin is Now Purging the Shelves of Those Still Operating, ‘Veter’ Journalist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – Having closed an average of 1,000 rural libraries a year even before he invaded Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin is now overseeing the purging of the books those still hanging on have on their shelves, an action that is a tragic echo of what Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya did in the first years of Soviet power.

            That action, described by the late Bertram Wolfe in his classic 1969 Survey article “Krupskaya Purges the People’s Libraries” describes how the Bolsheviks put a straightjacket on intellectual life in the USSR. What Putin is doing now is at least as instructive and reprehensible but not yet nearly as widely condemned.

            An important exception to this restrained reaction is provided by Veter journalist Yulia Kulikova in an article which quotes one rural librarian as saying Putin is removing from the shelves “all of our classics” (veter.info/posts/eRnmWyJBAJb6 reposted at novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/10/02/my-takimi-tempami-izbavimsia-ot-vsekh-nashikh-klassikov).

            Unlike Krupskaya’s attack, Putin’s is easily hidden from prying eyes because money is still going to libraries, albeit from businesses working in the area rather than the state but for furniture and computers but not books and because the censorship is not imposed all at once but rather gradually as more and more authors are deemed foreign agents or worse.

            Rural libraries in the Komi Republic which Kulikova examined remove books the state doesn’t approve of, don’t buy books that it fears will get them in trouble such as anything about LGBT+ people, but also doesn’t buy even what the regime wants disseminated such as books about Putin’s war in Ukraine.

            As a result, the intellectual life of rural Russia is being strangled. And it is not just books: most rural libraries aren’t connected to the internet and so the computers businesses help pay for can’t be used to access the broader world that the web promises, limiting their educational role to preparing local people to work for businesses rather than broadening their horizons.

            These actions are typically justified by the Putin regime as “optimization,” the reduction in funding to libraries and schools which service relatively few people; and that justification is accepted by all too many people in Russia and the West. But the reality is worse: optimization in this case is simply a euphemism for destruction.