Kremlin Denies Vaccine Shortage Regional Officials and Medical Experts are Reporting

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 26 – Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says that there is no shortage of vaccines in the Russian Federation, a statement he was compelled to make because many regional officials and medical experts are now saying Russia still isn’t producing enough of the medication for domestic needs, even though four million Russians have been vaccinated  (regnum.ru/news/3201428.html, novayagazeta.ru/articles/2021/02/26/89394-evolyutsionnaya-situatsiya  and regnum.ru/news/3201350.html).

            The number of new cases and deaths from the pandemic as recorded by the Russian government continue to drift downward with only 1,086 new cases of infection and 428 new deaths being reported over the last 24 hours for the country as a whole, even though in some places the numbers are going in the opposite direction (t.me/COVID2019_official/2521 and  regnum.ru/news/society/3195444.html).

            Vladimir Putin spoke by telephone with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz about the possible production of Russia’s Sputnik-5 vaccine in Austria (regnum.ru/news/3201732.html). Through Peskov, Putin indicated he is prepared to talk with the EU about the introduction of coronavirus vaccine passports (regnum.ru/news/3201404.html).

            According to one Moscow commentator, Putin wants to force the EU to register for use all Russian vaccines even if the preliminary testing of them has not yet been completed (echo.msk.ru/blog/ganapolsky/2796904-echo/). The Financial Times reports Moscow is overcharging African countries for the vaccine (echo.msk.ru/news/2796492-echo.html).

            Russian spokesman continue to attack Western vaccines as unsafe and say that the West is trying to undermine confidence in Russia’s vaccines, even though most people in the West now view Russia more positively because of its success with Sputnik-5 (regnum.ru/news/3201377.html, svpressa.ru/blogs/article/291054/ and svpressa.ru/blogs/article/290966/).

            On the economic front, the debate over whether the pandemic or the Kremlin is to blame for Russia’s economic problems is intensifying (https://svpressa.ru/society/article/290976/), as a new poll shows that 79 percent of Russians feared losing their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic (novayagazeta.ru/news/2021/02/26/168179-issledovanie-koronavirus-rabota).

Moscow TV Removes Most Powerful Lines of Eisenstein’s ‘Aleksandr Nevsky’ Lest Russians Get Ideas

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 25 – For most Russians, the most powerful lines of Sergey Eisenstein’s 1938 classic film Aleksandr Nevsky are when the chorus sings “Arise, Russian People/For a Glorious Battle/For a Battle to the Death./Arise, Free People/for Your Honable Land!”

            But this year, the 800^th anniversary of the birth of Nevsky and at a time when many were pressing for his statue rather than Felix Dzerzhinsky to be erected in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square, the Russian state TV channel Kultura edited out precisely those lines when it showed the film.

            Stoletiye commentator Vladimr Malyshev said this action was “a sacrilege,” and it is likely that other Russians had even stronger negative reactions to this act of censorship, especially as it suggests that some in the Kremlin now fear a rising by the Russian people against them and don’t want that encouraged (stoletie.ru/obschestvo/vot_i_dozhili_do_cenzury_446.htm).

            Russian nationalist publicist Yegor Kholmogorov said that many are circulating petitions demanding that the government reverse its decision because the film is “one of the crowning heights of our inheritance in cinematography.” Tsargrad founder Konstantin Malofeyev says that such editing undermines the Russian basis of the state.

            Stalin understood that and approved the film with Prokofyev’s powerful lines in them, Malyshev continues. But in recent years, some Russians have not. This is the second time Kultura has edited out these lines, the commentator says. The first came in November 2006, a reflection of the ideas of the powerful liberal lobby within the television industry.  

            “It is perfectly obvious,” Sergey Mikheyev, another Russian commentator says, “that if the Russian people does not feel itself to be the state-forming nation of the country, then Russia will come to an end.” That’s why the Constitution was amended to include a nod to this reality by speaking about the Russian language as the language of the state-forming people.

            Obviously, not everyone has gotten the message; and some have even used Putin’s attack on the idea of “Russia for the Russians” to engage in such anti-Moscow and Russophobic actions, Malyshev concludes. He doesn’t say but clearly implies that some in positions of power fear the Russian people more than represent their interests.

Russia’s Party of Power and Its Partners Promoting National Socialism to Distract People from Their Problems, Zhelenin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 25 – Because the Duma elections are ever closer and the pandemic has not yet come to an end, the Kremlin and its systemic parties are increasingly engaging in social demagogy, combining intensified nationalism with calls for greater social justice, to distract Russians from their problems, according to Rosbalt commentator Aleksandr Zhelenin.

            The unification of Just Russia, Patriots of Russia, and the For Truth Party, he argues, reflects the fact that all the systemic parties have concluded that they can be most effective if they promote what is best described as “a well-articulated national socialism” (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2021/02/25/1889396.html).

            “One must recognize,” Zhelenin says, “that when speaking about the Russian ‘party of power’ in the braod sense, we start from the fact that the majority of the political formations registered by the justice ministry and in particular the Duma quartet – United Russia, the KPRF, the LDPR and the SR – are not in fact independent political organizations.”

            Ideologically, the four parties are “almost indistinguishable – all are patriots, and all are for a market economy adjusted for social needs. That is, the differences among them are only in details like their names, programs and the names of their leaders,” Zhelenin argues. And by orchestrating the latest unification of parties, the Kremlin has reduced the differences further.

            The communists and Just Russia leaders do mention socialism in their program, but they do not seek power or even try to implement from the position of a political minority some of the goals that being for socialism implies such as opposing privatization of firms. Instead, they back the nationalism of the regime and do not challenge its capitalist oligarchic character.

            Because the parties supposedly on the left don’t fight for socialism, what they are really doing as the Kremlin intends is to “strengthen capitalist statehood in a bourgeois parliament” and promoting what must be openly called national socialism. As everyone knows Hitler’s NSDAP – the National Socialist German Workers Party – had socialism in its title but not in its actions.

            The last socialist elements in the Nazi Party were destroyed in the Night of the Long Knivces on June 30, 1934. After that, the Nazis while occasionally giving crumbs to the workers institutionalized a national capitalistic system for the benefit of big business in the first instance and smaller business on occasion.

            In Putin’s Russia now, it would be appropriate if the party of power acknowledged that it is national capitalist. United Russia and the LDPR certainly meet all the requirements for such a label. But the KPRF and Just Russia should be fighting this set of goals. The sad fact is that they are not fighting even for that.

            That is another indication of the extent to which they are creatures of the Kremlin and its party of power and helps explain the reason why the powers that be promoted the latest party combination nominally on the left, thus giving the Kremlin constellation of power the chance to gain support from an increasingly impoverished and angry population.

            In short, the Kremlin is engaging in demagogy which is exactly what social nationalist unions and their leaders do when things get tough. And it has particular reason to do so. Russians no longer believe that the West is responsible for their problems. They know that those who are to blame are much closer at hand.

            So it should surprise no one, Zhelenin says, that “within one of the fractions of the party of power has been inserted [Zakhar Prilepin] who not only for a long time has been a former member of the National-Bolshevik Party but has openly backed military aggression as a permissible instrument of international politics.”

            Putin and his entourage in the Kremlin could not want anything better for what some still insist on thinking of his opposition.

If Lapis Lazuli Corridor Opens, Georgia Could Be a Big Loser from Latest Karabakh War

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 25 – When east-west corridors have been discussed in the South Caucasus, Georgia has always assumed that the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan and the international isolation of Iran would mean that such routes would have to pass through its territory and provide it with income and links to the outside world.

            As long as the Karabakh conflict lasted, that was a good bet; but now discussions about the creation of new transit routes through Armenia and Azerbaijan and even Iran means that Georgia could be left out in the cold, according to Irina Khachidze (casp-geo.ru/novaya-realnost-na-kavkaze-pojdet-li-lazuritovyj-koridor-v-obhod-gruzii/).

            The route bypassing Georgia is not a done deal. Baku backs a Georgian route, and it will be several years before rail and road links can be constructed across the Zengezur corridor between Azerbaijan and its Nakhichevan autonomy. Moreover, many Western countries will oppose any route through Iran.

            But while all this is true, the January meeting must be a wakeup call for Tbilisi and its supporters, especially because it reflects a shift in opinion in some capitals in the wake of Azerbaijan’s defeat of Armenia in last summer and fall’s fighting over Qarabagh and other portions of Azerbaijan that Yerevan had occupied.

            The routes operational so far between Azerbaijan and Turkey do pass through Georgia, and discussions about the Lapis Lazuli Corridor linking South Asia and Europe initially assumed that this route would do so as well (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2016/11/russia-lacks-transportation.html). Now, the Georgian analyst says, that has changed.

            At the end of January, she points out, the future of the Lapis Lazuli Corridor was discussed at a video conference which linked officials from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, a grouping that came up with “’a road map’” for the next moves toward the development of this route. Georgia wasn’t invited, and it is no longer on the route.

            Tbilisi which has been embroiled in domestic problems hasn’t yet focused on this outcome, but if Georgia is eliminated from the route, Kachidze continues, this will mark a major failure of “one of those few projects which were born and began to be realized during the period of the rule of the Georgian Dream.”

            Under both Eduard Shevardnadze and Mikhail Saakashvili, Tbilisi actively participated in discussions about all such east-west routes, but in recent months, the analyst says, it has adopted a more passive stance, something that means others have taken the initiative and Georgia has failed to respond to the new post-Qarabagh conflict realities.

            Vakhtang Maisaya, a Georgian security expert, says that if the Lapis Lazuli route does bypass Georgia, something the current arrangements among Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan make possible, “the Georgian railway and the country’s Black Sea ports will lose a significant portion of their cargos and hence their profits and income for the Georgian budget.”

            All this means, Khachidze says, that the Georgian government must become more active and more insistent that the Lapis Lazuli corridor go through the republic as originally planned. Unless that happens, Georgia could find itself on the outside looking in, yet another “casualty” of the Qarabagh fighting.

Putin’s Speech to Chekists Highlights His Increased Focus on Domestic Opponents and Foreign Enemies

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 25 – Vladimir Putin’s speeches to the FSB are often the most important he delivers because he speaks more frankly and openly to his colleagues in the security agency and thus signals what his real thinking is and where he is heading, Moscow commentator Roman Popkov says.

            In these speeches, Putin inevitably talks about the need for “a struggle against extremism” and for countering foreign enemies. But in his remarks yesterday, Popkov says, “for the first time he devoted his primary attention to the struggle with ‘the internal enemy’ directed by the foreign one” (mbk-news.appspot.com/sences/vystuplenie-putina-pered-chekistami/).

            Specifically, he said that Russia must be concerned about a linking up of these two elements because the West wants to weaken the country and “put it under outside control” and has decided that using the domestic opponents of the Kremlin as one of the best means to do just that.

            It is interesting and instructive, Popkov says, that Putin made use of the notion of conspiracy theories now so popular in the West to suggest that it is the link between Western enemies and domestic ones that is the most important thing for the security agencies to be thinking about and working against.

            Indeed, because he discussed the possibility that foreign governments could use terrorism against Russia, it is entirely possible that “our president completely seriously considers that the special services of the US and Western Europe will use terrorists against us,” a perspective that raises the stakes of any case of terrorism, even one that could be a provocation.

            That perspective suggests that the Kremlin will be inclined to link any domestic actors to foreigners and thus impose the far harsher punishments Russian law provides for and many Russians will accept as legitimate than those which can be imposed for the actions of Russians on their own.

            Such an approach becomes “even more disturbing because Putin refuses to recognize the political standing of individual citizens and indeed, entire nations, including the Russian.” In his speech to the Chekists, Popkov points out, the Kremlin leader did not call for them to analyze and make sense of the reasons behind the growing protest wave in the country.

            Instead, Putin’s words mean that he expects them to see these developments not as arising from domestic causes but as a result of the machinations of foreign intelligence services whose only goal is to work against the Russian Federation. In such a worldview, “there is no place for people, their interests or their right to insist upon their interests.”

            Instead, everything is reduced to  a struggle between Russia and the outside world and  especially the United States, the commentator concludes, something that makes clashes between the people and powers in Russia far more explosive, dangerous and fateful than would otherwise be the case.

Putin Cult Unlikely Ever to Be Exposed as Stalin’s Was in 1956, Sinelnikov-Orishak Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 25 – Sixty-five years ago, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his secret speech in which he denounced Stalin’s cult of personality and opened the way for a partial reassessment of the Soviet dictator. This round anniversary has led to the assemblage of new details about the speech and its meaning (e.g., news.tut.by/culture/719946.html?c).

            Not surprisingly, it has also led to speculation as to whether more recent cults and especially the cult around Vladimir Putin will suffer the same fate, with some convinced that that is the fate of all such leader worship in Russia and others insisting equally strongly that the situation with regard to Putin is different not because of him but because of his party.

            One of those in the latter camp is Svobodnaya pressa commentator Mikhail Sinelnikov-Orishak who says the reason for his pessimism about any future exposure of Putin by his party is that his party is completely different than the CPSU was and has a far smaller time horizon (svpressa.ru/politic/article/290898/).

            Members of the CPSU and especially the leadership viewed themselves as part of a social movement with a long history and an even more important future and thus they were able at various points to level criticism at part leaders, especially after their deaths, who had impeded the overall goal of the party.

            But members of the current ruling party, United Russia, are different. They have no long-term program, exist only to advance their own selfish goals, and thus cannot be expected to view the leader who created their party and their opportunities for power and self-enrichment in terms of some larger matrix.

            Consequently, Sinelnikov-Orishak says, he does not expect any historical reckoning by the country’s political elite like the one that Khrushchev initiated against Stalin in 1956. Putin may be forgotten in the race to curry favor with a successor, but he probably doesn’t need to worry about being subject to denunciation in the future from those around him now.

Kadyrov Again Highlights His Territorial Ambitions by Focusing on Daghestan’s Chechens, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 25 – Ramzan Kadyrov sent a senior official to Daghestan to take part in the commemoration of the anniversary of the deportation of Chechens from that republic to underscore his self-appointed role as the leader of all Chechens, Moscow Caucasus specialist Akhmet Yarlypakov says.

            The Grozny leader had that opportunity because some local officials although not republic ones decided to allow such a commemoration this year  to curry favor both with their own population and with Grozny and Moscow as well, Caucasus specialist Mikhail Roshchin and rights activist Ruslan Kutayev add (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/361165/).

            On the anniversary two days ago, more than 10,000 people came from Chechnya and Ingushetia to the Novolak district of Daghestan. Among those in attendance was Shaid Zhamaldayev, the deputy speaker of the Chechen Republic parliament. He and all other speakers called for the restoration of the Chechen-dominated Aukhov District in Daghestan.

            A year ago, Daghestan’s Chechens with the support of Grozny had planned to hold a congress on that subject, but it was cancelled because of the pandemic. This year, the memorial meeting served as a substitute, although Daghestan leader Sergey Melikov ignored the session (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/361098/).

            Yarlypkapv, a specialist on the Caucasus at MGIMO, says that Grozny has never hidden its interest in the Chechens of Daghestan even though that subgroup of Chechens, who call themselves Akkintsy and speak a language intermediate between Chechen and Ingush do not reciprocate with expressions of loyalty to Kadyrov.

            He suggests that the participation of Grozny officials in the memorial meeting in Daghestan had yet another purpose, to help Kadyrov back away from his earlier insistence that the anniversary of the deportation should be marked in May rather than on February 23 when it is in conflict with the Russian holiday, the Day of the Defender of the Fatherland.

            But mostly, the Moscow specialist continues, Kadyrov wants to give content to his insistence that he is “president of all Chechens, not only in Russia but more generally, including even European Chechens who formally already are not Russian citizens.”

            While Kadyrov feels free to appeal to Chechens elsewhere, he continues to do everything he can to block the interest of others in ethnic minorities in his own republic. And he has been successful in that: “Not one of the neighboring republics has been raising such questions,” Yarlykapov says.

            Mikhail Roshchin, a specialist on the region at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies says that what Grozny is doing in Daghestan is first and foremost about channeling historical memories along lines that do not present a threat to the current powers that be especially given that Chechens in Daghestan aren’t always supportive of Kadyrov’s policies in Chechnya itself.

            Ruslan Kutayev, president of the Assembly of Peoples of the Caucasus, says that Kadyrov is acting according to the old principle that “when it is impossible to prohibit something, one must head it” lest it go in unwelcome directions. Kadyrov couldn’t stop the February 23 meetings and now he has found a way to have them.

            At the same time, the activist says that “all the actions of the leadership of Chechnya, including support for the restoration of the Aukhov district and participation in memorial meetings in Daghestan is not its own initiative.” Moscow decided this could happen just as it decided about the controversial border changes between Chechnya and Ingushetia.