Sakha Gas Field Protest Shows How Pandemic and Economic Crisis Can Combine to Produce an Explosion

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 28 – Several hundred oil and gas workers protested yesterday in the Chayan oil and gas field in the Sakha Republic against the failure of managers and officials to protect them from the coronavirus and the horrific working conditions they have long suffered, an example of the ways in which these twin challenges can combine to produce an explosion.

            This is perhaps why an event in a place so far away that most Russians have never heard of it has attracted so much attention (sibreal.org/a/30580929.html, svpressa.ru/politic/article/264005/, novayagazeta.ru/articles/2020/04/28/85139-sektor-gaza  and newtimes.ru/articles/detail/193714).

            Workers at the site have long been unhappy with their working conditions, food supplies and isolation, but Gazprom which controls the place has done almost nothing to meet them except make promises which it then doesn’t keep. The same thing is now happening with the deadly pandemic (svpressa.ru/society/article/264018/).

            In normal times, the company and not the republic government has the power to act at this federal site; but the coronavirus has upended this arrangement and prompted the Sakha authorities to get involved, imposing ultimately an isolation lockdown and evacuating some of the workers while introducing more medical help (news.ykt.ru/article/100117).

            The reason for this intervention was that the workers demonstrated and also took the now-customary step of posting their complaints online in an open letter with all their signatures, two actions that ensured that officials even in Moscow would have to take some notice (vesti14.ru/2020/04/28/vahtovikov-chayandy-nachnut-vyvozit-iz-yakutii-v-blizhajshie-dni/).

            In reporting all this, Olga Slabada of Svobodnaya pressa says that “the main thing which disturbs the workers now is the unknown. No one knows whether his neighbor is ill or he is threatened by the illness himself and no one knows when something will change (svpressa.ru/politic/article/264005/).

            Fedor Tumusov, a Duma deputy from Sakha, asks Russians to imagine: “you live in a closed space, in a barracks where there constantly exists the danger of infection, and no real help is being offered … For the last two weeks, the situation has not changed radically” despite some evacuations and many promises.

            Gazprom could have organized things and taken measures, he continues. “But it didn’t. I think that thanks to the effort of the leadership of the republic, measures are being taken. It is very sad that the situation has reached this point.” Other local people, such as activist Stepan Petrov, say the same (svpressa.ru/society/article/264018/).

            Moskovsky komsomolets commentator Aleksandr Minkin argues that this event highlights an even deeper problem in Russia today: people in Moscow whether they are in the government or in giant corporations only pay attention when people go into the streets and make demands (mk.ru/politics/2020/04/29/v-rossii-vlast-slyshit-i-boitsya-tolko-vosstavshikh.html).

            Across the country, there are “thousands of cases of the crudest violation of the law, thousands of cases of crimes against the environment, and against the lives of people” that “become known only because citizens in despair begin to rise up, in defense of the forests, the rives, Golunov, Baikal, the parks” or their own lives.

            “The long-haul truckers, the academics, the doctors, the teachers, and the mothers of those under arrest have protested. But always, the protests end either because money is handed out or people fall under the clubs of the police or they are deceived” or they cannot figure how to take the next step, Minkin says. 

            But “all these risings have one thing in common: society doesn’t join them. The workers in Chayan did not say a word in defense of Shiyes, and Shiyes is silent about them.” The authorities count on this “lack of solidarity” because they know they can crush any one rising as long as it doesn’t grow into a rising of the people as a whole.

            “It is well said,” Minkin continues, “’don’t fear your enemies: in the worst case, they can kill you. Don’t fear your friends: in the worst case, they can betray you. Fear the indifferent: they do not kill and do not betray but only with their silent assent can betrayal and murder take place.” 

100 Years Ago Today, Red Army Occupied Azerbaijan, Ending Its Independence

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 28 – Since 1991, both Russian and Western analysts have tended to draw a hard line between those countries that existed as independent states before they were occupied by the Soviets, including the East Europeans and the Baltic countries, and all the others who were classed as “newly independent states.”

            Because the former could view the Soviet period as an occupation and faced the task of restoring their statehood rather than creating something new, it was assumed, they were in a much easier position and would do better than “the newly independent states.” And over the last 30 years, that has generally proved to be the case.

            But there is a third group of countries who were briefly independent after the 1917 revolution before being reabsorbed into the now Soviet empire. Since 1991, people in some of them have stressed that history while those in others have treated it as a brief interlude with little relevance to the present.

            Perhaps the one that has looked back to its previous experience as an independent country most often is Azerbaijan, which existed as an independent state between May 1918 and April 1920 and which represented not only the first democracy in the Muslim world but also played an important role in international relations at the time of the Versailles peace conference.

            Today is the 100^th anniversary of the occupation of Azerbaijan by the Red Army, a brutal and bloody operation. During Soviet times, this date was marked as an official holiday. Only in 1991 did it come to be marked as the date of occupation, with May 28^th, the day the Azerbaijani Peoples Republic was established, as the Day of the Republic.  

            Over the last 30 years, the Azerbaijani government has devoted more or less attention to the occupation day and to its own relationship with the country that existed prior to the Soviet occupation depending on the political winds. But ever more Azerbaijani scholars and ordinary people recall it each year (yenicag.ru/proshlo-100-let-so-dnya-okkupacii-azerbayd/343011/).

            Sometimes as now this recovered memory is used only to stress Russian perfidy and Armenian complicity in this event, but more important, it provides the foundation for an Azerbaijani future that builds on that previous period of independence and on the remarkable democratic and foreign policy steps Baku took at that time.

Key Figure in Boeing Shootdown Identified as Deputy Head of FSB Border Service

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 28 – Just as some leaders seek to distract attention from their old lies by telling new ones, so the Putin regime regularly commits new crimes so that those who are investigating old ones are often viewed as cranks concerned about what some view as a distant and unimportant past that everyone needs to “look beyond.”

            In many respects, that is what has happened to investigations into Russian involvement in the July 2014 shooting down of the Malaysian jetliner over Ukraine, an event that in the minds of some has been eclipsed by Moscow actions like the poisoning of the Skripals in Great Britain or the attempted poisoning more recently of the mayor of Prague.

            But documenting Kremlin malfeasance regardless of its date remains important, and the world owes a debt of gratitude to researchers at The Insider and Bellingcat for documenting to a near certainty that FSB Lt.Gen. Andrey Burlak, deputy head of the Russian Border Service, was directly involved in the Malaysian plane case.

            Hitherto, he had been hidden behind the name “Vladimir Ivanovich” in the documents that had been prepared by the Joint Investigation Group that has been looking into the shootdown. But an examination of telephone and travel records shows he and his colleagues were actively involved in this affair (theins.ru/politika/216447).

                As students of conspiracies know, it is important to build from the outside to the center lest those who organized the conspiracy escape being held responsible while their underlings take the rap. The identification of Burlak and his role in supplying heavy weapons to pro-Moscow forces before the shootdown is an important step in that process.