FSB Offices in Regions Get Creative to Keep Their Extremism Arrests Up, Orekh Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 10 – In order to boost arrests on extremism charges and thus to win advancement, FSB offices in Russia’s regions dream up ways to link almost anything to extremism, a creative process more necessary in the regions because there is less extremism and easier because there aren’t the constraints that exist in Moscow, Anton Orekh says.

            And it is that combination, the Moscow commentator says, that explain the flood of absurd and otherwise inexplicable cases that get reported from the periphery of the country, cases that often reflect nothing more than officials’ sense of entitlement and the desire of FSB officers to get promoted (rosbalt.ru/posts/2018/11/09/1745427.html).

                But however absurd the cases such officers may bring, they are at least acting rationally, even intelligently, given the existing rules of the game. The same thing, however, cannot be said of the country’s leaders, according to two other Moscow observers, Mikhail Pozharsky and Andrey Nikulin.

            In language that recalls the immortal advice Deep Throat gives Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in the movie about Watergate – “forget what you know about the White House. These people aren’t very smart and things got out of hand” – Pozharsky says Russians should stop treating their rulers as “rational subjects” (t.me/whalesgohigh/3647).

                The actions of the Kremlin elite, he says, show that they re acting impulsively rather than rationally, as if they are perhaps suffering from a hormonal imbalance. That can’t be explained by ill intentions but simply by their lack of a clear understanding of reality and the relative importance of things. Consequently, today they “attack a Facebook post, and tomorrow Syria.”

            Nikulin makes a similar point on the existential question of war or peace.  What is one to make of people who think they can fight and win against who have economies 20 times that of Russia, ten times as many people, 1.5 times the territory, and three to four times more arms? (facebook.com/andrej.aleksandrovic.14/posts/1916581418377144).

                They can’t use economic pressure or military action unless they want to lose, he continues.  And politically the links between Russian elites and those abroad are too strong to allow for effective political manipulation either.  Can anyone really explain what those who want to go on the offensive hope to achieve?

            Perhaps, Nikulin says, Russia is the Spain of today, a country that won wars but only at the price of falling further and further behind everyone else until finally it was not in a position to compete with anyone.