Putin’s ‘Kadyrov Problem’ Coming to a Head at Home and Abroad

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, April 28 – Vladimir Putin’s use of Ramzan Kadyrov brought a kind of stability in the North Caucasus – professions of loyalty by the latter to the former and an unprecedented grant of money and power by the former to the latter – but now the arrangement is breaking down both domestically and internationally; and the Kremlin leader faces some stark choices.

 

            If Putin moves to sack Kadyrov, he may provoke another war in the North Caucasus, one that he may find it far harder to win this time around than last; but if he doesn’t, Putin will lose support from Kadyrov’s enemies in the Russian security services and suffer an even greater defeat as a result of his proposal that Kyiv adopt a Kadyrov approach to the Donbas.

 

            In a commentary in “Kommersant,” journalist Maksim Shevchenko observes that Kadyrov’s directive to his forces that they should fire on anyone coming in from outside not only demonstrated that Chechnya is no longer really part of Russia but also prompted the Russian interior ministry to issue an unprecedented statement (kommersant.ru/doc/2715345).

 

            The Moscow ministry pointed out that calls like Kadyrov’s were impermissible. But it is perhaps understandable why Kadyrov issued one. Not only has there been the disagreement with Moscow over who was responsible for Boris Nemtsov’s murder, but there are indications that some Russian agencies have sent hit squads into Chechnya not to arrest Dadayev but to kill him.

 

            Indeed, Chechnya’s ombudsman Nurdi Nukhazhiyev has pointed out that those going in to Chechnya have behaved in precisely that way. “The operation of the [Russian] siloviki reminds one more of the work of killers” than of law enforcement personnel.  They wouldn’t have done this unless they were well paid or well-connected.

 

            Someone is going to have to be replaced or back down, either the Russian interior ministry or the Chechen side. “It is evident,” Shevchenko said, “that the situation has taken a serious turn: Kadyrov is ready to retire.”  Certainly, in the end, “either he will go or the leadership of the MVD.” 

 

            Which one leaves may depend entirely on Putin, but whatever he decides will have fateful consequences for his future.

 

            Meanwhile, Yevgeny Kiselyov writes in a blog post for Ekho Moskvy, Putin’s “Kadyrov problem” has spread to Ukraine and affected how people there view their future, all in ways that are exactly the opposite of the ones Vladimir Putin has been hoping to promote (echo.msk.ru/blog/kiselev/1538590-echo/).

 

            “Only the blind,” he says “do not see that in real life, Chechnya has a level of independence which the late Dzhokhar Dudayev did not aspire to even in his most courageous dreams.” It has “in fact” stopped “living in the Russian legal space,” something that has consequences not only within Russia but internationally.

 

            Putin and his foreign minister are now talking about the need to fight ISIS, Kiselyov says. “Mr. Putin, on the one hand, hypocritically expressing concern about this same ISIS; on the other hand, has cynically proposed to German Chancellor Merkel” that she suggest to Kyiv that it deal with the DNR and LNR as he has dealt with Chechnya.

 

            That proposal was “not some kind of abstraction but a fully concrete attempt to impose on European leaders ‘the Chechen model’ of resolving the situation in Ukraine.” Although it was made last November, Kisilyov says he “fears that it has not been buried.” Kadyrov’s recent actions raise a dangerous specter.

 

            “The Orthodox-Stalinist khalifate” which might arise if the Europeans were to try to force the Ukrainian government to accept it would create “in the center of Europe” a force that “in the short term would eclipse any ISIS.”  But even before that, the very possibility is driving more and more Ukrainians to view NATO membership as their only real choice.

 

            Polls show that support in Ukraine for that step is growing daily, Kisilyov says, adding that “of course, from a poll and even from a referendum” about this and “the real entrance of Ukraine” into the Western alliance “is a distance of enormous size. But the beginning has occurred,” and for this, the commentator says, “enormous thanks to Putin” and his man Kadyrov.

 

 

 

 

Moscow Failed to Learn from Perestroika and Keeps Repeating Its Mistakes, Inozemtsev Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, April 28 – Perestroika, begun 30 years ago, “became an irreversible process,” one that “destroyed both the communist system and the Soviet empire, Vladislav Inozemtsev says. But as is now clear, “it did not put an end to its age-old authoritarian traditions of Russia itself and did not transform it economically, socially or politically into a ‘normal country.’”

 

            It ended, the Moscow economist continues, “not because it achieved all its goals but because the history of the Soviet Union ended.” As a result, “the processes unleased in those years continue now,” and those who want to guide Russia need to focus on the lessons of perestroika (daily.rbc.ru/opinions/society/27/04/2015/553a32e39a794758ad212202).

 

            That is all the more so if Russia begins as it is likely to sometime in the future to launch “’Perestroika 2.0.’” Otherwise, without a full appreciation of those lessons, it is likely that Russia will repeat them with potentially even more fateful consequences in the course of the latest historical cycle.”

 

            In a commentary on RBK.ru yesterday, Inosemtsev discusses what he sees as the five chief lessons or even what one might call cautionary tales that Perestroika 1.0 offers:

 

            The first of these involves the process of economic reform as a whole. Mikhail Gorbachev sought to achieve two things at once, radical reform and acceleration, but his pursuit of these two simultaneously became “the most important reason why neither of these goals was achieved,” Inozemtsev says.

 

            If an economy needs to be restructured, Inozemtsev argues, promoting acceleration will only lead to “the production of unneeded goods” and “the deepening of disproportions. If, on the other hand, ‘perestroika’ is needed, then it should be carried out under conditions of lower tempos,” thus allowing new centers of growth to emerge.

 

            Now as in perestroika times, the authorities are trying to do both at the same time, something that means Russia is now far more dependent on the export of oil and gas than was the USSR and that private enterprise, the chief driver of real economic reform and development, “is ever more actively viewed as an enemy.”

 

The second of these lessons that Moscow has not yet learned is economic but also political: the question of how to deal with property. What happened during perestroika was “not only unjust but economically ineffective,” reinforcing the bad from the past rather than opening the way for the good in the future.

 

China has shown how a country ought to proceed but the USSR and now Russia have “gone along another path,” one that has hurt them both.  Instead of promoting new companies by creating legal arrangements allowing them to emerge and compete, Moscow has focused ont eh redistribution of the existing infrastructure.

 

“Of the 100 largest companies in present-day China, only five,” Inozemtsev says, are based on those created before 1980.  In Russia, 70 of the largest firms are those which were created then. As a result, in Russia, “structures most of all interested in preserving the status quo occupy the dominant positions;” in China, the innovators do.

 

The third lesson of perestroika that has not been learned is about “the ‘democratization’ of society.” Democratization, of course, did not lead to democracy. Instead and “to the contrary, in the 1990s, we saw the manipulation of public opinion by the oligarchs, and in the 2000s and especially in 2010, the same thing by the authoritarian political hierarchy.”

 

Democratization and economic reform are extraordinarily difficult to implement in the short term as they tend to create a situation in which they conflict.  In the USSR, democratization was carried out where there was no “responsible civil society. Today its absence is even more visible.”

 

Thus, “the third lesson of perestroika consists in the idea that appealing to society when there are economic problems or even a crisis can lead to results diametrically opposed.” In Russia today, “the liberal order which neither perestroika nor the new Russia gave birth to” is a matter of “the imitation of democracy” and “democratic chaos.”

 

Instead of developing the Soviet Union as the unitary state it was and devolving powers to the regions to the point of satisfying republic elites, “the Soviet authorities decided to ‘restructure’ the USSR,” a decision that “became the beginning of its end.” That lesson is “especially important for Russia today,” Inozemtsev says, given that it is more centralized than was the USSR and how many centrifugal forces are emerging.

 

“On the one hand,” he writes, the annexation of Crimea “is analogous to the Baltics” in Soviet times. “And on the other, Chechnya has raised its head, ready to begin the process of such ‘a federalization’ about which no one even thought about in the late Soviet Union.”  Russia needs “a new regional policy,” and it must be based on economic and social levers rather than force alone.

 

The fifth lesson involves foreign policy.  Under Gorbachev, Moscow achieved a serious rapprochement with the West, but current events which point to the unleashing of a second cold war “indicate that even here something didn’t go as planned.”

 

            The reason, Inozemtsev says, is that “having begun a dialogue with the West, the USSR did not start from a recognition of its defeat in the global contest. When people say that the cold war was not lost, this is in many ways just.” But the problem was that “Soviet leaders were not concerned about a clear legal strengthening of the results of rapprochement.”

 

            The West should have embraced Russia to prevent it from falling into the trap of its own phobias as it has done, the Moscow economist says, but Russia in its turn “should ‘sell’ its turning away from aggression for a much higher integration price than was done at the turn of the 1990s.”

Tolerance for Evil and Permanent Fear Block Development of Russian Society, Schulmann Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, April 28 – Russia is unlikely to develop into a fundamentalist country like Iran with Orthodox radicals playing the role of mullahs, but “the moral permissiveness [toward evil] in combination with permanent fear for one’s life and well-being is blocking the development of both [Russian] society and its individual members, according to Ekaterina Schulmann.

 

            In an essay in today’s “Vedomosti,” the Moscow political analyst points out that proposals by Duma members to prohibit abortions or otherwise impose what their authors believe are Orthodox values receive a great deal of media attention and generate fears in some quarters about the future (vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2015/04/28/krivaya-skrepa-o-tschete-russkogo-fundamentalizma).

 

            But few notice, Schulmann observes, that “not a single such initiative advanced further than the first reading. All of them have been either rejected, returned to their authors, or withdrawn by them” – a pattern that says a great deal about where Russia is and where it is heading.

 

            Supporters of the Putin regime can make as any “sexist or traditionalist public pronouncements” as they like, “but officially, [the regime] avoids the slogan ‘Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,’” she continues, and that shows the gap between these public positions and what is actually occurring.

 

            “Why is it impossible in Russia,” she asks rhetorically, “to imagine politically influential organizations struggling with abortions and promiscuity in general on the model of numerous structures within the orbit of the Republican Party of the US or the Catholic church in the countries of southern Europe?”

 

            The reason is to be found in the fact that “’Russian fundamentalism’ and the degree of its realization in reality and not just in propaganda” are two different things. Russian society is too diverse and its history too complicated to imagine Russia reversing itself in the way Afghanistan and Iran have.

 

            “In Russia,” she observes, “a difficult-to-describe ‘lower matriachate’ functions, soethign which does not make the lives of women wealthier or better defended.” Moreover the gradual disappearance of the non-nuclear family is combined with a cult of children” which uniquely features things like divorce in favor of children and the handing over of children to orphanages.

 

            Homosexuality is “understood not as ‘an orientation,’ a personal characteristic, but as a social stigma which is connected with the acceptance everywhere of a criminal ethos.” As a result, many Russians see homosexuals as “wreckers” who threaten children, Schulmann continues.

 

            “All these things,” the Moscow scholar says, “intuitively understood” by people in Russia “poorly translate into the language of the social sciences. Our values are defined by the lack of a Reformation, of amoral-religious revolt of the lower orders against the upper ones – and consequently by the non-existence of ‘Russian puritans’ and their corresponding moral system.”

 

            In Russia, the church remains subordinate to the state, and religious figures “are influential only to the extent that they are close to the ruling bureaucracy rather than the other way around.” And that in turn means, that “the inheritance of the Soviet authorities – the atomization of society, the collapse of family ties, secularism, the total involvement of women in the workplace and hyper-urbanization – dominates the situation.”

 

             According to the World Values Survey, she notes, “Russian society combines secular rational values with a high priority for the values of expression,” a pattern that shows Russia has chosen survival over development and broken with traditionalism far more not only in comparison with “all Islamic and Latin American countries and Catholic southern Europe but also from the majority of English-speaking countries – Canada, the UK and the US.”

 

            This means, Schulmann argues, that “in Russia few are agitated by moral problems as such, but all are agitated by issues of security … [Russians] don’t feel righteous anger: they imitate it. It isn’t morality that agitates them, but survival at any price – in other words by a certain ideological opposition to any moral code, traditionalist or liberal.”

 

            There is a positive side to this, she says. It is unlikely that there will appear in Central Russia the kind of radical priests and their fundamentalism that many might expect.  But tyhere is a negative one as well: “moral permissiveness in combination with permanent fear for one’s life and well-being blocks the development of both society and the individual.”

 

            In sum, Schulmann says, “Russian society, for completely understandable reasons, does have display the feelings of fundamental security which, psychologists say, ought to form in a child during the first year of life and allow him to develop his abilities, take risks and acknowledge the new.”

 

Putin Gives the World His Geography Lesson: ‘All the Former USSR is Russia’

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, April 28 – The 150-minute film “The President” about Vladimir Putin is mostly boring and predictable in that it insists that “without Vladimir Vladimirovich nothing in the country will work,” Kseniya Kirillova notes. But she points out that there are three “lessons” contained in the film that must not be ignored.

 

            First, she argues, despite all the anti-Americanism he has promoted, Putin clearly indicates in the film that the model of the world order he would like to see is one in which Russia and the US would jointly decide all of the world’s “most important” geopolitical issues and divide up the world into “spheres of influence” (nr2.com.ua/blogs/Ksenija_Kirillova/Putin-fakticheski-nazval-Ukrainu-territoriey-Rossii-95566.html).

 

            While the Kremlin leader does not say so, this would be a return to what he now sees as the way the world worked between the Yalta and Potsdam conferences at the end of World War II and the time of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and one in which other countries, especially small ones, would have little or no voice about their fates.

 

            Second, in the film, Putin offered the clearest indication yet that not only does he consider the disintegration of the USSR the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the last century but views it in a way that is absolutely at variance with the facts, one that points to more trouble ahead for all of the former Soviet republics and occupied Baltic states.

 

            According to Putin, “all of us had illusions: it seemed then that after the destruction of the Soviet Union and after Russia voluntarily – I stress this – voluntarily and consciously” gave up its “own territory, productive capacity and so on, with the departure of the ideological component which separated the former Soviet Union and the entire rest of the civilized world, than now the fetters would fall and ‘freedom would great us joyously at the entrance.”

 

            Such ideas have been circulating in the Moscow elite for some time, Kirillova says, pointing to a recent essay by Pavel Kazarin who noted that “in the consciousness of many representatives of the Russia elite, Moscow did not lose ‘the cold war.’ More than that, in their opinion, the division of the Union took place not so much as a result of the collapse of the Soviet model … but rather as a result of the Kremlin voluntarily agreeing to join the club of western players” (ru.tsn.ua/analitika/boytes-svoih-zhelaniy-422136.html).

 

            As a result, Kazarin says, “Moscow conducts itself as if the Soviet Union had not fallen apart, as if it had only been reformatted but with relations between the vassals and sovereign retained in their former state.” (For a discussion of Kazarin’s argument and its implications, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/04/russia-looks-in-mirror-and-sees-ussr.html.)

 

            In “The President,” Putin goes even further and declares that “Russia voluntarily gave up its own territories,” Kirillova says, an assertion so sweepingly at odds with reality that it is important to remember what actually happened 25 years ago.

 

            “In fact,” Kirillova observes, “the present-day Russian Federation exists in the very same border that the RSFSR had; that is there were no territorial changes in Russia itself in connection with the collapse of the USSR. The republics which acquired independence after 1991 were never part of the RSFSR.”

 

            From this it follows, she continues, “when Putin speaks about the territorial losses of Russia, he is directly declaring that all the former union republics are Russian territories! Note bene: he designates them already not as ‘zone of influence’ … but as [his country’s] ‘own territory,’ from which Russia ‘voluntarily withdrew.”

 

            That is simply an Orwellian retelling of what happened: In reality, “all the union republics, including even Ukraine and Belarus the closest to Russia, proclaimed their sovereignty in 1989-1990, that is, before 1991, and this phenomenon even received a name, ‘the parade of sovereignties.’”

 

            There was nothing voluntary in Moscow’s response: It tried to crush Lithuania first by an economic blockade and then by the direct application of military force. But it failed to stop “the movement for exit from the USSR” that was “born in all the union republics.” As a result, after the failure of the August 1991 putsch, “the disintegration of the Union was inevitable.”

 

                The Beloveshchaya accords of December 8, 1991, usually seen as the death certificate of the USSR simply put on paper what had already taken place, a reminder that “even when these republics were in the USSR, none of them called themselves ‘Russia’s own territory.’”  That is a Putinism that goes back to tsarist times.

 

            And finally third, Putin’s film underscored how isolated Russia is in the former Soviet space, not how much the peoples and countries of that territory continue to look to Moscow as Vladimir Putin suggests they should.  The only foreign leader who gets a positive reference in the film is Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev.

 

            One might have expected there to be some reference to Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the leader of a country that is part of Putin’s union state of Russia and Belarus. But “obviously, the prospects of considering his country Russia’s territory do not generate any pleasure” with the Belarusian leader who has been distancing himself from Moscow over and as a result of Ukraine.

 

            Putin’s “myth about the voluntary, carried out ‘from above’ demise of the USSR, which completely ignores the will of the peoples populating it, shows,” Kirillova concludes, “that the Kremlin has not drawn any conclusions from its collapse, and lessons which are not learned as is well known, have a tendency to be repeated.”

 

 

Russian Parents Still Spending ‘Billions of Rubles’ Each Year to Help Sons to Avoid the Draft

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, April 27 – Despite the growth of contract service, the decline in the size of the military, and the fall in the number of men the Russian army hopes to draft, Russian parents are still spending “billions of rubles” every year so that their sons can avoid performing military service, an indication that public support for the army is not as high as Moscow claims.

 

            According to the calculations of Aleksey Boyarsky, a “Kommersant-Dengi” journalist, the exact sum is on the order of eight billion rubles (160 million US dollars), a figure so large that it has not only placed real burdens on parents but spawned an entire industry devoted to helping young men avoid the draft (kommersant.ru/doc/2703354).

 

            The journalist telephoned several companies promising to help people avoid military service. He found them by using an Internet search engine, with the words “don’t go” enough to generate as the most popular response “don’t go into the army.” He spoke several times with representatives of the Service for Helping Draftees, a firm with branches throughout Russia.

 

            For fees averaging 150,000 rubles (3,000 US dollars), the firm promised to prepare all the necessary documentation, organize medical checks, and handle legal appeals in order to get a permanent or at least temporary deferment – and to refund the client’s money if it was not successful.

 

            In addition, people in such firms give advice on what potential draftees should do in advance of medical testing to make sure they fail and thus get deferments that way.  If all else fails, potential draftees can turn to the courts or give bribes to officers involved in the military draft, including doctors.

 

            But that hardly covers the extent of bribery involving military service, Boyarsky says.  In the North Caucasus in particular, many who should be deferred bribe their way into service so that they can work in the police. And many who are drafted pay bribes directly to officers to avoid punishment, including having their terms of service extended.

 

Putin’s Power Resembles a Witch Doctor’s, Pain Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, April 27 – Totalitarianism can emerge in any society if conditions are created to promote the restoration of “social and cultural archaism” as a result of “a lack of choice in politics” and the promotion of “irrationalism in mass consciousness,” according to Moscow sociologist Emil Pain.

 

            Exactly that dynamic, one that promoted “barbarism” as opposed to the triumph of rationality that Max Weber saw as the hallmark of modernity, is on view in contemporary Russia and helps to explain both what Vladimir Putin is doing and why his ratings are so astronomically high (colta.ru/articles/society/7139).

 

            Over the last two years – and Pain insists that the events in Ukraine have been the occasion rather than the cause of this – such archaism, including the desecularizaiton of society, the expansion of zones of the sacred which cannot be criticized by anyone, and hostility to the surrounding world, has been Putin’s policy and has boosted his standing.

 

            After the annexation of Crimea, Pain rights, mass consciousness in Russia increasingly acquired a messianic aspect: the notion “Great Russia is called upon to defend the Russian world from any enemies: fascists, liberals and the West” and the related notion that Stalin and any real leader – and by implication, Putin -- is justified in taking any actions if he does so

 

             To understand this, Pain suggests, one should consider the ideas of English anthropologist E. Evans-Pritchard who argued 60 years ago that the study of witch doctors in Africa helps to explain “the nature of totalitarianism” and its leader cults.  Now, it is clear why that is so.

 

            “The cult of a leader of the nation for life and that of the witch doctor are based on one nad the same thing – recognition of the unachievable and mystical power of a particular individual in whom resides a magical and supernatural force or ability” without which the nation or the tribe would die, the Moscow sociologist writes.

 

            According to Pain, “the witch doctor and the leader use similar mechanisms of subordinating the masses to themselves, appealing not to the reason of the latter but to the emotions of a pre-cultural stratum and above all to fears and phobias.” That is exactly what Putin is doing now.

 

            The totalitarian leader just like the witch doctor is able to give comfort and eliminate fears “again by the same mystical path, above all by the elimination of an impure force on which all attacks depend. Such mystical comfort is best of all demonstrated by contemporary Russian propaganda.”

 

            That propaganda creates “the image of the horrific enemy who with the help of magic is capable of calling forth ‘color revolutions’ in any country but then comfortsits audience by showing that it is not difficult to convert this enemy into ‘atomic dust’(somehow without a return threat to one’s own country).”

 

            Indeed, Pain argues, statements by Russian military experts about the use of nuclear weapons recall the incantations of shamans” more than any other kind of analysis. Nonetheless, they can help consolidate Russian society around Putin, although such “negative consolidation” is something that is very narrow and likely short-lived.

 

            “For positive consolidation,” one would need goals that elevated people rather than drove them back to atavistic positions, but there are no such goals on offer or even currently available in Russia, Pain says.

 

            Internationally, Russians now know who their enemies are but not their friends. Economically, they are in the position of someone who is happy only when his neighbor’s cow dies.  And culturally, they are told they should come out in defense of traditional values. But there is the problem: most Russians may protest the new but no longer support the old.

 

             As Pain notes, “classical totalitarian regimes guaranteed social support for themselves by advancing global goals: ‘world revolutions,’ ‘the thousand-year Recih,’ the universal Islamic khalifate,’ and so on.” But Putin’s Russia is “positioning itself as an outsider, fighting not ‘for’ anything, but only ‘against.’”

 

            Maintaining this is a problem given that the enemies or obstacles keep changing, Pain says, although promoting the idea is “one of the simplest tasks for propaganda.”  But when the country can’t attack others or cannot achieve economic growth and when the leader doesn’t offer anything else, his backing will fall.

 

            The magic of the leader like the magic of the witch doctors around him allows for the manipulation of public opinion for a time. “For the time being, it guarantees the self-preservation of power but this magic is not total or firm.”  Indeed, “the current ‘uncompleted (and perhaps unachievable) totalitarianism’” is closer to its end than its beginning.

 

            “Historically,” he says, “all processes are accelerating,and as a result, the lifetime of mobilization regimes is now measured not in decades but in years.”

‘Hell is Ours’ and Other Absurd but Applicable Slogans for Russia Today

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, April 27 – Since 2004, Novosbirsk artist and activist Artem Loskutov has been organizing on May Day a “Monstration” in which people march through the streets of his city with absurd slogans that in the minds of many “are beginning to truly describe reality,” according to a Radio Liberty report.

 

            But Loskutov faces two new challenges, the station’s Valentin Baryshnikov says on the basis of an interview with him. On the other hand, the mayor wants to keep those with such slogans from marching in the city center. And on the other, the possibilities for absurdity are so great that Loskutov has not yet selected his own (svoboda.org/content/article/26978811.html).

 

            The artist says that the mayor has proposed that he move the Monstration from the center to the embankment of the Ob, near “the monument to Nicholas II, which we don’t have in the city. There is a monument to Alexander III,” however, and perhaps that is what the mayor was referring to, another case of the confusion of reality and absurdity.

 

            Because he has been focusing on these organizational questions, Loskutov says, he hasn’t come up with his personal slogan yet.  Recent events in Novosibirsk, including the Tannhauser scandal, provide plenty of possibilities. He notes that some of the slogans protesters carried about that opera could easily appear on Monstration signs.

 

            But of course, there is always the war in Ukraine just as there was last year, the artist continues. Last year, with the “Crimea is Ours” propaganda firestorm, it was impossible not to take note of it by carrying a sign that “Hell is Ours” – something he says that was “a little prophetic, not only about Crimea but also about Hell.”

 

            When he first organized such marches a decade ago, Russia was a different country, and the Monstrations were almost entirely happy because people felt that they were living in kind  of “stagnation” in which nothing much was happening and they had not yet been subjected to mind-altering propaganda.  Now things are different – at least in some respects.

 

            One year, Loskutov says, marchers carried a sign that simply said “Anti-Globalist Slogan” and nothing else. Another placard read “A Slogan calling for the overthrow of the constitutional order.” The police wanted to know what that meant and whether it was in fact a threat to the Russian state.

 

            These are the games which Russians have to play, Loskutov says. “We live in Novosibirsk in a kind of vacuum, far from events, from from Moscow, far from those with whom it would be possible to speak. We cannot appeal to politicians and we cannot demand anything from them.” The only possible response is an ironic one.

 

            Loskutov says he was prompted to launch the Monstration project after attending a real May Day demonstration. The slogans “were absurd but were trying to look real.” One slogan involved the shoe factory of a man who wanted a political career; all that was on his placards was a picture of his brand symbol.

 

            Other posters were even more absurd, he continues. The KPRF had signs declaring that “the only force which can oppose the fascists, the West and liberals is the Soviet people,” a true absurdity “because there is no Soviet people.” Another was from a nightclub and promised “100 grams” of vodka to all who came.

 

            There were even placards with slogans from strip clubs. One simply had pictures and was entitled “Capitulation.”  Apparently, on May 9, Loskutov says, “the strippers will capitulate before someone or other.”

 

            He says that he cannot escape from “the sense that I live in an absurd world” and that “the ‘Monstration’ is more honest and adequate” than the official slogans. “We do not conceal that we want to achieve something. We simply register the facts and serve as a litmus test of our society.”

 

            Monstration slogans sometimes pass into the hands of others. Several years ago, during the height of anti-Putin demonstrations, one appeared in Moscow and other cities declaring “You do not even represent us,” a declaration directed at deputies “who do not represent anyone” and an indication of how cut off politicians are from society.

 

            Loskutov says he agrees with Baryshnikov’s formulation that “now absurd posters are an incarnation of good sense and posters which show reality are a complete absurdity.” He suggests that the Monstration is “a living phenomenon. It changes. Each year we begin with one desire and it is transformed” by events.

 

            That is a stark contrast, he suggests, with the official marches on May Day which use the same posters year after year and thus show themselves to be “cut off from life.”