Moscow’s High Interest Rates and Anti-Migrant Moves Slowing Growth in Trade with China Dramatically, Usov Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 2 – Bilateral trade between Russia and China grew only 2.1 percent during the first 11 months of 2024, down from an increase of 26.7 percent during the corresponding period in 2023, a decline that reflects Moscow’s use of high interest rates to fight inflation and its anti-immigrant stance, according to Pavel Usov.
    The Belarusian economist in Warsaw says other factors, including sanctions, played a role but that high interest rates have Russia less attractive to investors than China itself where rates are far lower and Russian attacks on migrants have made it less attractive for Chinese to work (eastrussia.ru/material/do-kitaya-daleko-i-blizko-perspektivy-i-riski-biznes-partnerstva/).
    Usov’s report highlights the interconnected nature of Moscow’s policies and the way in which its pursuit of some is putting its relationship with China at risk, at least in the coming year or two. It helps explain why the Kremlin has defended migrants in recent weeks and opposed further interest rate increases. But for domestic reasons, it can’t afford to do either for long.  
    And that combination leaves Putin in an increasingly difficult position, one in which his pursuit of one set of economic and political goals will undercut his ability to achieve others.

Moscow Losing Another Battle in Alphabet Wars – This Time in Mongolia

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 2 – The Mongolian education ministry has ordered that from now on all official documents in that country will use the national script alongside the Cyrillic alphabet, a change that will further distance Ulan Bator from Moscow and promote closer ties between Mongolia and Mongolian-language speakers in Russia and China.
    The ministry took this step in conformity with the provisions of a 2015 alphabet reform law that had already led to the introduction of the traditional national script in the country’s schools and educational institutions (tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/22813283,  asiarussia.ru/news/44241/ and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/01/ulan-bator-makes-study-of-old-mongolian.html).
    And its move represents yet another slap in the face to Vladimir Putin who has made the maintenance of the Cyrillic alphabet in countries that were once part of the Soviet empire, as well as making it easier for Mongols, Buryats, and Uyghurs living in Mongolia, the Russian Federation and China to interact with one another.
    The classical Mongol vertical writing system was created by Chingiz Khan and was used by Mongols, Buryats and Kalmyks both in Mongolia and the USSR until 1930s. At that time, the Soviet authorities replaced that alphabet first with one based on Latin script and then with one based on Cyrillic.
    The Old Mongolia script as it came to be called remained and remains to this day the second state script in the Chinese Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia; and Beijing’s willingness to support it may be one of the reasons why Russian commentators are not expressing outrage about this latest loss in the alphabet wars.
    But now that Mongolia has made this change, demands for a return to traditional alphabets in Buryatia, Kalmykia and Mongols living in the Russian Federation are likely to increase as some are already doing (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/11/buryats-increasingly-studying-ancient.html).
    And that in turn will spark more concerns in Moscow about the possible revival of pan-Mongolism among them, a trend that has increasingly agitated experts and officials in the Russian capital over the last several years (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/02/moscow-again-fighting-pan-mongolism.html).

Putin Orders Educational Ministry to Drop Key Reference to ‘Native’ Languages

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 2 – In yet another move against non-Russians in the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin has ordered his educational ministry to change the name of the curriculum module about language from “native language and/or state language” to “language of the people of the Russian Federation and/or state language of the republic of the Russian Federation.”
    This may seem on first glance a small thing, but it is likely to cast an enormous shadow on the future (kremlin.ru/acts/assignments/orders/76077 and nazaccent.ru/content/43353-vladimir-putin-poruchil-sozdat-edinuyu-linejku-uchebnikov-po-russkomu-i-drugim-yazykam-narodov-rossii/).
    This dropping the reference to “native” detaches languages from the ethnic communities which speak them and makes it easier for Moscow to insist that these languages are not theirs from time immemorial but those of the republic in which they are spoken, reducing still further the possibilities of those who don’t have a republic or live within its borders.
    The fact that Putin made this announcement at a time when the Russian Federation is in the midst of its mid-winter holiday suggests that the Kremlin is aware of how unhappy many non-Russians will be about this change and decided to take this step at time when most residents of that country are focused on celebrations rather than government actions.

Putin’s Invasion has Led to ‘Almost Complete Disappearance’ of Differences between Eastern and Western Ukraine about West and Russia, Kyiv Sociologist Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 1 – “The only positive consequence of the war is the near-complete disappearance of regional differences [of opinion] in Ukraine,” Volodymyr Paniotto says. “In  2021, there was strong regional differentiation on most issues, now these differences have practically disappeared.
    But in place of these much commented upon regional differences, the director of Kyiv’s International Institute of Sociology says, now grounds for social stratification have emerged, including most prominently differences among those who are refugees in Europe, those who didn’t move, and those in the occupied territories” (meduza.io/feature/2025/01/01/kak-tretiy-god-voyny-izmenil-ukrainu-i-chto-zhdet-stranu-v-2025-m).
    In addition, Paniotto made the following additional comments on changes in Ukrainian society over the last year:
•    Fewer Ukrainians have died in each year since Putin’s expanded invasion began in 2022 than did from the coronavirus pandemic in 2021.
•    Two-thirds of the six million Ukrainians who have moved abroad won’t return to Ukraine even if there is peace, but many of them will retain their Ukrainian passports.
•    Ukrainians continue to use the Russian language but they have dramatically increased their opposition to instruction in Russian in their country’s schools. In 2019, only eight percent favored ending instruction in Russian; by the end of 2023, that share had risen to 52 percent.
•    Ukrainians have been ready to negotiate an end to the war since it began. As of last fall, a third of them said they would be prepared to give up some territories, but there is no talk about recognizing these territories in the course of negotiations as part of Russia.

Putin’s ‘Consensual Democracy’ Quite Adequate for ‘Totally Passive’ Society, Inozemtsev Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 31 – Vladimir Putin was chosen to be Yeltsin’s successor because he shared the disappointment Russian elites had in both democracy and the idea of the rule of law and recognized that he and they could rule the country without the direct participation of the population that commitment to those ideas would require, Vladislav Inozemtsev says.
    At the end of 1999, the Russian commentator continues, “the masters of the country” installed Putin and introduced in place of electoral democracy a “consensual” form (moscowtimes.ru/2024/12/31/soglasitelnaya-demokratiya-ili-glubokoe-ponimanie-rossiiskogo-obschestva-a151736).
    According to Inozemtsev, “consensual democracy is most likely a unique Russian invention, a modernization of the Soviet system in the spirit of the 21st century. In it, a narrow circle of the ruling nomenklatura makes a personnel choice” and then this choice is “confirmed during a national or regional plebiscite.”
    Putting this new system in place took “almost two decades,” the commentator continues; but it moved the country “from the imitation of democratic processes within the framework of a single political course toward an increasingly open rejection of all those who disagree with a policy of terror against ‘enemies of the people,’” just as the Soviet system did.
    But consensual democracy differs from its predecessor in two important ways. On the one hand, it did not involve a complete denial of basic freedoms and rights; and on the other, it “remains a democracy since elections are not eliminated or reduced to voting for a single candidate as was the case in communist times.”
    What matters most, Inozemtsev argues is that consensual democracy is “a form of political regime which is adequate to an absolutely passive society, one fully weighted down by its own problems and not wishing to interfere in political processes.” Russians haven’t acted and won’t act as Belarusians and Ukrainians have to the results of such elections.
    “Of course,” the commentator acknowledges, “such a system is unstable and transient; but it is unstable and transient in exactly the same way that the Soviet system was: it can quickly fall apart but only if the impulse in that direction is given by its creators and beneficiaries” rather than by the population or in any other situation.”
    That justifies the following conclusion, Inozemtsev says. “Those who a quarter of a century ago thought about how to keep a not yet fully privatized country under their stable control found the optimal solution, one based on a fairly deep understanding of the Russian people and how much indifference those in power can count on.”
    This understanding of those who installed Putin was “significantly deeper than that of all the representatives of the Russian opposition … who hoped that the people would rise to their defense.” In fact, as the longevity of the Putin regime shows, “Russian society was and remains only ‘an appendage to power,” something that the responses of Russians to Putin’s war confirms.  

By Calling for a State Register of Languages, Putin Sets the Stage for New Moves against Non-Russian Nations

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 1 – More than any of his Russian or Soviet predecessors, Vladimir Putin clearly believes that the language someone speaks defines his nationality and thus his moves against non-Russian languages both among indigenous peoples and against immigrants is part of a larger campaign against these nations as such.
    He has now taken the next step in this process by ordering the Russian government to compile a state register of the languages of the peoples of the Russian Federation by May 1, 2025 (vedomosti.ru/politics/articles/2025/01/01/1084699-putin-poruchil-sozdat-gosreestr-yazikov-narodov-rossii).
    As there does not appear to be any place in Putin’s mind for people who speak one language but identify as members of another nation, he is likely to use this new register to insist that members of non-Russian groups are in fact Russians in an increasingly ethnic and not just political sense.
    Not only does this approach ignore the reality that there are many people who for one reason or another identify as members of a nation even though they do not speak its titular language and thus to further downgrade the importance of such identities and boost that of languages.
    Given Putin’s Russianizing and Russifying policies, this represents a new and broader attack on non-Russians and sets the stage for both a radical simplification of Russian census data and even of the administrative-territorial map of the Russian Federation in that Putin is likely to use this as the basis for new move against the continued existence of the non-Russian republics.

By 2025, Soviet Leaders Said USSR would have a Base on the Moon, a Bridge to Alaska, and Thousands of Robotic Factories

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 1 – Before their country disintegrated, Soviet leaders routinely predicted a miraculous future for it. Most of those prognostications have been forgotten as has the regime that made them, but what Moscow told its people it would achieve by the middle of the third decade of the 21st century remains important.
    On the one hand, the Soviet leadership’s predictions that it would have by then a base on the moon, a bridge to Alaska and robots operating factories show that Moscow before 1991 was focused on the future not on the past, a very different approach than Putin’s Russia today (mk.ru/politics/2025/01/01/gosudarstvennyy-internet-baza-na-lune-most-na-alyasku-chto-planiroval-sssr-k-2025-godu.html).
    And on the other, such predictions which in almost no case ever came close to being fulfilled help to explain the cynicism of Russians about what Putin and his team predict. They have a long history of being promised the moon, literally, without the Kremlin being able to deliver.

Moscow Boasts about Bridges to China and North Korea but Fails to Build Roads Leading to Them or Train Enough Logistics Experts

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 30 – The week doesn’t go by that one or another Moscow media outlet boasts about highway and rail bridges Russia is opening between itself, on the one hand, and China and North Korea, on the other. But Russian experts concede that these bridges aren’t being used as much as they could be because of the absence of road and rail networks leading to them.
    On the Russian side of these two borders, Moscow has failed to build sufficient highways or rail lines to handle the traffic that the Russian government hopes for and boasts of. As a result, it is now struggling to catch up; but it is unclear whether any crash program will achieve a breakthrough soon (ritmeurasia.ru/news--2024-12-30--mosty-druzhby-rossijanam-stanovitsja-vse-legche-ezdit-v-kitaj-i-kndr-77713).
    But even if Moscow does manage to build more highways and rail lines leading up to these border crossings, it faces another problem which likely means they won’t be as effective at linking these countries together as the Kremlin hopes. At present, it can’t fill 20 percent of number of logistics specialists it needs to make such networks operational.
    These two factors – the lack of adequate infrastructure and the shortage of a sufficient number of specialists – have combined, Russian experts say, to create the kind of bottleneck that will severely limit the value of the much-ballyhooed bridges that Moscow and its neighbors are building.

Russians Outside of Moscow Identify Very Different Stories as Important than Do Muscovites

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 31 – Not surprisingly, in any large country, people in one part of it identify as the most important stories a very different list than do people in other parts. In Russia, this divide is less among the regions than it is between the regions and Moscow, whose residents and rulers set the weather as far as most people are concerned.
    That makes a list of stories the readers of the NeMoskva portal selected as the most important for them particularly significant because it shows that many beyond the ring road have a very different image of what has been going on over the last twelve months than do people in the capital and those who rely on them (nemoskva.net/2024/12/31/oglyanemsya-na-2024-j/).
    It is not based on anything like a representative sample: readers of the portal wrote in with their choices. But it is a useful correction to the end-of-year lists that are now filling up the Russian and Western media about what Russians consider important. Most of them reflect what Muscovites may but not what other Russians do.
The list as reported and described by NeMoskva includes:
•    Turning point of the year: invasion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into the Kursk region
•    Line of the year: farewell to Alexei Navalny in Moscow
•    Protest of the year: street protests in Baymak, Bashkortostan   
•    Aggravation of the year: terrorist attacks in Moscow and Dagestan and conflicts on ethnic grounds in different regions of Russia
•    Disasters of the year: floods and forest fires across the country
•    Solidarity of the year: “Day of Unity of Ingushetia”  
•    Breakthroughs of the year: pipes and dams are breaking all over the country
•    Disasters of the year: the crash of a plane flying to Chechnya and tankers in the Kerch Strait
•    Spit of the year: closure of a center for children with disabilities in Kemerovo Novokuznetsk
•    Resignations of the year: fall of governors in the regions
•    Flashbacks of the year: the return of cards in Kaliningrad and the remains of a murdered journalist in St. Petersburg
•    Attempt of the year: installation and demolition of pillars in memory of those repressed in Tomsk
•    Clash of the year: the dismissal of a teacher from Khabarovsk for dancing in heels - and speeches in his defense
•    Surprise of the year: acquittal of a Buryat human rights activist
•    Trip of the year: Siberian circumnavigation

Arnold Rüütel, ‘a Washington for Estonia,’ Dead at Age of 96

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 1 – Yesterday, at the age of 96, Arnold Rüütel passed away, He served as a senior official in the Estonian SSR during the occupation and later, in a variety of roles, including president of the Estonian Republic, played a key role in helping his country recover its rightful place in the world as part of the West.
    In reporting his death, Postimees noted that he had “not a few supporters and ill-wishers,” with many in both camps focusing only on one aspect of his public activities and ignoring the others (rus.postimees.ee/8161935/bolshaya-galereya-umer-eks-prezident-arnold-ryuytel-tyazheloves-i-dolgozhitel-estonskoy-politiki).
    Many Estonians, especially in the emigration, could never forgive him for statements issued in his name attacking them and defending the Soviet Union; while many others, never forgave him for his role in ending the occupation of Estonia and leading his country into NATO and the European Union.
    That divide has prevented many from seeing him as a man in full.  But that is changing and I believe will continue to change.  Almost a decade ago, I was asked to write a comment about his life for a book Peeter Ernits put together (Viimane Rüütel (Tallinn, 2017). I entitled my submission “A Washington for Estonia.”
    In it, I pointed out that it typically takes three kinds of people to make a successful national revolution, the philosophers who explain why it is necessary, the firebrands who lead the people to make it possible, and the members of the ancien regime who recognize the justice of the pursuit of revolutionary goals and make their institutionalization possible.
    Not surprisingly, in the US and almost all other cases, the philosophers and the firebrands get the better press at least initially. Their stories are more unambiguous and easier to tell, and they dominate the initial histories of the revolution. But over time, it becomes obvious that it is often officials who rose in the old regime but changed sides who are the more important.
    Arnold Rüütel was neither a philosopher nor a firebrand and so he has often been more criticized and less appreciated that those who were one or the other or even in some cases both. But with time, his role as a bridge who made the passage from the old to the new possible is being recognized. I believe that trend will continue.
    For more than 30 years, I have been proud to count myself his admirer and friend. I will miss him; and I believe that as time passes, ever more people will come to recognize just how enormous his contribution was however contradictory it has sometimes been presented..