Window on Eurasia: Latvia Seeks EU Funding for Full Service Russian-Language TV Channel

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, December 29 – Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics says that Riga is seeking EU funding in order to launch a Russian-language television network for Russian speakers in his country and the region so that they will not turn to Moscow channels that are full of misinformation and anti-Western propaganda.

 

            The new channel, he says, will feature not only news but also entertainment programming because “people do not need news 24 hours a day.”  That reflects his understanding that people often watch news on the same channels they get their entertainment – which is one of the advantages Moscow TV now has over Western outlets which broadcast only news (politobzor.net/show-40588-latviya-zaprosila-u-es-dengi-na-russkoyazychnyy-kanal.html).

 

            Rinkevics adds that Latvia is prepared to work with neighboring countries and with the European Union on the service and is quite prepared to have it operate under EU direction.  Estonia is a potential partner in this: its parliament recently approved 2.5 million euros (3 million US dollars) to start such a television channel next September.

 

These Latvian and Estonian initiatives reflect the increasing understanding of governments there and elsewhere in the region that Moscow has used its advantages in television broadcasting to shape opinion among Russian speakers in neighboring countries who in many cases prefer Russian television to national competitors.

 

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the post-Soviet states have put most of their effort into producing non-Russian language broadcasts, and at least some of them, the Balts in the first instance, have been reluctant for national reasons to produce massive amounts of programming in what they still reasonably view as the “imperial” language.”

 

But Moscow’s success in forming opinion in Ukraine via its television broadcasts has prompted them to change their minds and to recognize that the problem is not the language of broadcasts but their content.  Russian-language programming can be accurate, informative, and supportive of the independence of their countries, even if Moscow TV now is anything but.

 

Window on Eurasia: Kadyrov Says Chechens Ready to Perform Special Tasks for Putin that Other Security Agencies Can’t

Paul Goble

                                                      

            Staunton, December 29 – Speaking to a meeting of 20,000 Chechen volunteers in Grozny yesterday, republic head Ramzan Kadyrov said that he and they are ready to perform tasks for Vladimir Putin “which can be solved only by volunteers” and not by “the regular army, air force, navy or nuclear forces” (interfax.ru/russia/415873).

 

            “Putin has helped [the Chechens] for 15 years,” Kadyrov continued. “tens of ands [of Chechens] who have passed through special preparation ask the national leader of Russia to consider us a volunteer special detachment of the Supreme Commander that is ready to defend Russia, its stability and borders and to fulfill a military task of any complexity.”

 

            And he added that “America and Europe have declared economic war on Russia and are trying to sow chaos, panic, and mass disorders in the country.” But, “the Russian people have united around their leader Vladimir Putin … [and] the Chechen people in this unity occupies one of the central places.”

 

            Kadyrov did not say what special tasks he and his Chechen forces might perform for Putin. He may be saying no more than reiterating his proposal made on NTV two weeks ago to send Chechen volunteers to fight in Ukraine’s Donbas (interfax.ru/world/413478) or reemphasizing his personal loyalty to the Kremlin leader in bombastic terms.

 

But there are at least two other disturbing possibilities. On the one hand, Kadyrov may have been offering to make his Chechen fighters available for irregular warfare or active measures that Moscow may want to maintain plausible deniability of its own direct involvement, including attacks against facilities and individuals beyond the borders of Russia.

 

And on the other, Kadyrov may also have been offering the Chechens to Putin as a special palace guard, a janissary-type force that he is suggesting the Russian president could count on in the event of a challenge to his rule from within the Russian security services themselves.

 

            There is a long tradition of such forces in Russia. In 1917, for example, the so-called Savage Division consisting of North Caucasians came very close to entering Petrograd under the command of General Krymov and drowning the revolution in blood, being dissuaded on the Pulkovo heights by agitators who urged its members to go home and take power there.

            But Kadyrov's offer could backfire on both him and Putin. Many in the Russian government will see this as yet another indication that the Chechen leader has become more an agent of the Russian president than a loyal part of the Russian state. And many more will see this as a dangerous indication of both what Putin may do and of what the Kremlin leader may fear.

 

           

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Publishes Tsarist Émigré Letter Denouncing Western Criticism of Putin on Ukraine

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, December 28 – Three days ago, “Rossiiskaya gazeta” published in full a letter that has been circulating in the internet for some weeks from more than 100 descendants of the first Russian emigration denouncing Western governments for their criticism of Vladimir Putin and Russian policy in Ukraine (rg.ru/2014/12/25/pismo.html).

 

            The authors say that the West suffers from double standards as far as Russia is concerned and asks “where are European values?”  “Russia,” it continues, is accused of all possible crimes and without evidence it is a priori declared guilty,” while at the same time, other countries are given a pass for their violations of human rights.

           

            The authors declare that “we do not in any way separate ourselves from the defense of those values our ancestors, who were condemned to exile after the 1917 revolution, trained us in … but this does not mean that we can sit still given the daily slander of contemporary Russia, its leadership and its president.”

 

            The attacks on Russia at a time when the crimes of Ukrainian officials are ignored are, in the words of the letter, “self-destructive for European countries.”

 

            Moscow has often sought to get one or more émigré to speak out in support of Russian policy both because this reinforces Putin’s notion of a seamless “Russian world” and because these people are citizens of other countries and thus in a position to bring pressure to bear on them. But this letter stands out because it is signed by so many.

 

            In a discussion of this letter today, Natalya Kanevskaya and Dmitry Volchek of RFE/RL ask whether it contents represent “solidarity with the Motherland” or “solidarity with the KGB” and interviews the author of the letter, Prince Dmitry Shakhovskoy and several of the signatories (svoboda.org/content/article/26765506.html).

 

            The number of signatories is impressive, but as Kanevskaya and Volchek point out, far from all Russian emigres and children of same agree with it.  Aleksander von Hahn (Gan) the grandson of a close associate of Admiral Kolchak’s regime in Siberia during the Civil War, is among those. Gan has prepared a letter also in the name of those who left Russia after 1917.

 

            “Yet another year is approaching which we have spent beyond the borders of Russia,” von Hahn’s letter reads in part. “This was not our choice. It was made for us by those who for almost a century have ruled Russia.  KGB Colonel Putin continues the policy of the systematic destruction of Russia.”

 

            “To force Russian people to kill one another is the goal of the current ‘Kremlin dreamers,’” the letter continues. The Kremlin’s “nationalistic propaganda” is filling the minds of the population with “the poison of hatred, nationalism, anger, and suspiciousness.” And under the pretext of the “Russian world,” Moscow is setting everything best about Russia against Europe.

 

            And von Hahn’s letter concludes: “Just like 70 years ago during war communism, Moscow is threatening the world with total destruction. We declare decisively and with complete certainty that these plans are condemned to failure.”

 

.

 

Window on Eurasia: Russian Occupation Wants to Make Pocket Crimean Tatar Group a State Agency

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, December 28 – Vladimir Konstantinov, chairman of the State Council of Crimea, said yesterday that the Kyrym movement, a Crimean Tatar organization the Russian occupation authorities created as an alternative to the Mejlis, “must become part of state power” in order to address the problems of that community.

 

            Konstantinov’s words are clearly intended to wean more Crimean Tatars away from the Mejlis which remains unalterably opposed to the Russian occupation by demonstrating to them and others that Moscow will give that ethnic community a greater voice in the management of its own affairs (qha.com.ua/konstantinov-dvijenie-kirim-doljno-stat-chastyu-vlasti-142112.html).

 

            Indeed, it is likely that his remarks mark the beginning of a propaganda effort to do precisely that. But the Russian official’s words  may have exactly the opposite effect by reminding everyone that Kyrym is in fact nothing more than an administrative arm of the occupation and thus no more to be trusted than any other part of that structure.

 

Window on Eurasia: An Economic Move toward a Greater Buryatia?

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, December 28 – A Buryat scholar has proposed combining Buryatia and the Transbaikal Kray into “a single production district” in order to address the economic problems of both by attracting the attention of Moscow, an idea that Russian critics see as driven by economic desperation in the republic.

 

            But there is another possibility: such a regional amalgamation from below would bring the Buryat communities in the predominantly Russian Transbaikal together with the Republic of Buryatia, a step toward the creation of the Greater Buryatia which Stalin divided up in the 1920s in order to ensure Moscow’s control of the key transportation route south of Lake Baikal.

 

            Last week, Margarita Namkhanova, a scholar at Buryat State University, said that she believes the creation of a new federal district embracing the two was necessary given what she said was “the peripheral status of Buryatia and the Transbaikal relative to the Siberian and Far Eastern Federal Districts” (baikal-daily.ru/news/19/109675/).

 

            Reaction to this idea, which appears to have been percolating in Buryatia for some time, has been largely negative, at least among Russians. Mariya Blokhina of Polit.ru said it was simply a case of a republic trying to reduce economic risks to itself during the current crisis (polit.ru/article/2014/12/28/top9/).

 

            She cited the argument of Yury Kravtsov, an ethnic Russian economist working in Buryatia, who said that the republic had been hit by four different economic crises – structural, conjunction, intellectual and  geopolitical – and was currently looking in every possible direction for help (infpol.ru/ekonomika2/item/8053-ekonomist-v-buryatii-dejstvuyut-srazu-chetyre-krizisa.html).

 

            Blokhina and Kravtsov may be correct that economics is the proximate cause of Namkhanova’s proposal: She herself casts it in economic terms. But it is likely that she and those who share her idea have a broader agenda as well, one that involves recovering Buryatia’s influence over a region which contains otherwise isolated Buryat communities.

 

            Many Buryats were upset when Vladimir Putin engineered the absorption of two Buryat autonomous formations into predominantly ethnic Russian regions almost a decade ago and have been looking for a way to reverse that and expand the influence of the Buryat Republic over its co-ethnics beyond its borders.

 

            It is thus possible and even likely that Namkhanova’s proposal reflects at least in part a belief among some Buryats that they may be able to use the current economic crisis to advance their own national goals as well.

 

           

 

Window on Eurasia: On 71st Anniversary of Their Deportation, Kalmyks Despair of Their Future as a Nation

Paul Goble

           

            Staunton, December 28 – Seventy-one years ago today, Stalin deported the Kalmyks, a Buddhist people living in a territory adjoining the North Caucasus, to Siberia and Central Asia, an action that cost half of them – some 98,000 -- their lives and forced many others to give up their national language in favor of Russian.

 

            But today, despite the fact that they were eventually allowed to return home and to re-establish a national republic within the Russian Federation, many Kalmyks are in despair about the situation their nation finds itself in now and about their ability to survive as a people into the future.

 

             As one Kalmyk activist, Mandzhiyev Naran, puts it, “there are no more than 200,000 Kalmyks in the entire world,” a number small enough to fit inside a Brazilian soccer stadium, and in their homeland, the republic’s leadership has destroyed the economy, closing all the factories from Soviet times, and destroying the Kalmyk language (asiarussia.ru/news/5505/).

 

            One measure of just how far things have deteriorated, he continues, is that Kalmyk language instructors are now using textbooks which are 17 years old, textbooks Naran says are anything but accurate guides to the language. He has circulated an online petition for Moscow to intervene and set things right because he has no confidence in the republic leadership.

 

            Aleksey Ochirov, a pensioner who experienced the deportation as a three-year-old, echoed his complaints. He said that when the Soviet security police rounded up the Kalmyks whom Stalin had denounced as Nazi collaborators, he, his family and all the Kalmyks he knew spoke Kalmyk and did not know Russian (nazaccent.ru/content/14280-gubitelnaya-skorogovorka.html).

 

            While in the places for special resettlers, Ochirov continues, he learned Russian because the local people made fun of the Kalmyks for not knowing Russian. Then, when the ranks of the forced resettlers expanded to include Latvians and Finns, the Russian-speaking Kalmyks made fun of members of those two groups until they too stopped speaking their national languages.

 

            He says he is pleased that the republic authorities have sought to restore the use of Kalmyk, but he complains that the local television broadcasts are in such bad Kalmyk that many people either don’t know what is being said or learn a version of Kalmyk that no one else will understand.

 

 

Window on Eurasia: Gorbachev Praises Putin for Saving Russia from Disintegration

Paul Goble

 

                Staunton, December 28 – Mikhail Gorbachev who presided over the disintegration of the Soviet Union, says that “the main contribution” of Vladimir Putin is that he “saved Russia from the disintegration” which was beginning since “a very great number of regions essentially were no longer recognizing [the Russian] Constitution.”

 

            Gorbachev made that declaration at the launch last week of his new book “After the Kremlin” (lenta.ru/news/2014/12/26/gorbachev/), adding that he had known and been impressed by Putin before the latter became president and that he Gorbachev had made many mistakes because he had operated on the assumption that he had everything under control.

 

            Putin’s reaction to this latest voice of support for the claims of his backers that he stopped the disintegration of Russia is unknown, but given that it comes from Gorbachev and given what the latter’s words say about the nature of the Russian state as such, it is far from clear that the current Russian president would be entirely pleased by the words of the first and only Soviet one.

 

            On the one hand, even if he were to welcome Gorbachev’s suggestion that he has “saved Russia from disintegration,” Putin could hardly be pleased by the former Soviet leader’s suggestion that “a very great number of regions” were essentially outside of the Russian constitutional orbit, a suggestion that implies the threat was far great than Putin has said.

 

            And on the other, coming from Gorbachev who lost control of the Soviet bloc, the occupied Baltic countries, and 11 non-Russian republics as well as the Russian Federation itself, such praise looks dangerously like setting the bar rather low, given Putin’s aspirations not just to end the disintegration of the country but to restore its imperial greatness and extent.

 

            But if one considers Gorbachev’s remarks from a broader perspective than Putin’s, they point to something many in Russia and elsewhere have not wanted to face: Russia’s disintegration did not end in 1991, and the forces threatening its further disintegration have not disappeared, despite Putin’s actions and his ban on any public suggestion that they have.

 

            Instead, they remain strong and may even be growing not only in the North Caucasus where many have identified them to be but also in the Middle Volga and in predominantly Russian regions from St. Petersburg to Siberia, and preventing Russia’s disintegration thus remains the primary task of any Russian leader.

 

            That in turn suggests something that neither Gorbachev nor Putin nor the supporters of either want to acknowledge: Russia is still an empire and not yet a country, however much many would like to think otherwise – and as such, it is subject to the forces both on the periphery and at the center that have torn all empires in the history of the world apart.