Window on Eurasia: Putin has Put Together a New and Different Majority, Bunin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 5 – Having seen his original social compact with the Russian population become shaky – deference to his unrestricted power in exchange for a guarantee of rising incomes – Vladimir Putin has assembled a new majority, according to Igor Bunin, head of the Moscow Center for Political Technologies.

            The wave of protests that hit Russian cities in 2011-2012, Bunin says, showed that Putin’s original compact was insufficient to guarantee his position and consequently the Kremlin leader embarked on a three-stage plan to put a new majority in place on which he can rely.  That has now happened (politcom.ru/17679.html).

            The first step in this process, the Moscow analyst suggests, took place during the presidential campaign when “the authorities mobilized their supporters under the slogans of order,” positioning Putin and themselves as an alternative to continuing unruly demonstrations in the streets.

            The second stage involved the promotion of “a conservative wave” that was based on “fears about a new time of troubles” among “the traditionalist segment of society,” separated “the moderate modernists from the opposition,” and had the effect of marginalizing the opposition groups of all kinds.

            Exploiting the fears of many Russian parents that their children were being harmed by exposure to “mainstream western trends,” the Putin regime was able to prevent “the demobilization of the Putin majority” achieved during the elections and redirect it toward a broader range of moral issues.

            This conservative wave, Bunin continues, “created not only a positive (defense of traditional values) but also negative agenda, connected with the formation of an image of the enemy” in the form of the West and “Russian ‘westerners.’”

            And the third stage, which is taking place now ‘is directly connected with the annexation of Crimea and the conflict with Ukraine.”  Those actions have added “new groups to the Putin majority,” the Moscow analyst says. “Among them are modernists who are skeptical about the basic components of the conservative wave, but who want to be ‘with the people.’”

            Another addition consists of the supporters of Soviet values who believe that Putin’s actions point to the rebirth of the USSR.  Left wing groups who had until recently been “clients of human rights organizations now accuse them of ‘national betrayal’” and back a war for the Union.

            In the case of these groups, “Soviet identity has turned out to be stronger than the traditional opposition dislike of the authorities.” That dislike continues “only in part of the elite and intelligentsia circles which traditionally have many resources,” but who now have watched as “their influence on public opinion has been minimalized.”

            All this has increased “the collective consensus” of Russian society because it has played on the sense many have about what they see as “the revision of the geopolitical results of the Great Fatherland War, the key event in all of Russian history from the point of view of the majority of Russians.” 

            The future stability of this new Putin majority depends on four things, Bunin says. First, it depends on the social-economic situation. As long as that remains relatively stable and the costs of Crimea and Western sanctions are not too high, this majority is likely to hold together.

            Second, it depends on how well the regime can balance the demands of its various parts.  Thus, “the soviet patriots call for a further advance in the East of Ukraine and will be disappointed if Russia stops and doesn’t create at a minimum a new Transdniestria.” But the modernists will be upset if that happens and new sanctions are imposed.

            Third, it depends on the Kremlin’s ability to continue to use the media as a mobilizing tool as effectively as it has over the last several months.  In the nature of things, the impact of such campaigns wear off with time, and that may spark new questions about what Putin and his regime are doing.

            And fourth – and this is “a deeper global problem,” Bunin suggests – “the Putin majority is consolidating and mobilizing on the basis of defensive and conservative values directed at the protection of it on identity, defense against foreign and domestic threats from Bandera to Concita.”

            This is the first time in a century that Russia has found itself in that position, the Moscow analyst says. Earlier, regardless of the leadership or ideology, Russia thought itself of being a country moving “along the path of progress” only to see that blocked by war or revolution or decay.

            Now under Putin, however, “a bet is being made on an approach that is different in principle, on the combination of power with conservative and defense values which make use of phobias and defensive reflexes.” Such an approach may be “tactically successful,” but in today’s more global context, one has to ask whether it can succeed strategically for very long.

Window on Eurasia: Coup against Putin Possible, Could Spark Disintegration of Russia, Cemilev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 4 – Mustafa Cemilev, the Crimean Tatar leader, said in an interview to the Belarusian television channel “Belsat” that people close to Vladimir Putin are growing so angry at the Kremlin leader because of sanctions that they are ready to rise in revolt against him, an action that could lead to the disintegration of the Russian Federation.

            Cemilev said that “not everything is in order in Putin’s entourage, that sanctions are having an impact, [that] the more sanctions there will be, the more quickly this will happen, [and that it]  will most likely occur” from within that group, and that it could lead to the disintegration of Russia (obozrevatel.com/politics/68034-dzhemilev-v-okruzhenii-putina-nazrevaet-bunt-kotoryij-mozhet-privesti-k-raspadu-rossii.htm).

            Such a coup, he continued, could lead to the disintegration of the Russian Federation, something that is of concern to him and in his view to everyone because that country is a nuclear power and its sudden demise could have unpredictable and potentially extremely dangerous consequences. “We are afraid” of this outcome, Cemilev added.

            Asked about Russia’s Anschluss of Crimea, Cemilev responded that “the Crimean Tatars at one time seized Moscow. Does that mean that we should be saying that Moscow should be returned to the Crimean Tatars?”  That is the kind of thinking that is characteristic “not of the 21^st century but of the 17^th and 18^th” where countries operated “by right of conquest.”

            “We don’t accept this,” the Crimean Tatar leader said.

 

Window on Eurasia: Russians under 18 Form Declining Share of Country’s Population

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 4 – There are many ways to measure Russia’s demographic decline, but perhaps the most striking is a figure Ada Gorbacheva, a “Nezavisimaya gazeta” commentator, offered yesterday:  Over the last 10 to 15 years, the share children in the Russian population has fallen from 25 percent to 16 percent.

            The number of youths aged 15 to 17 has declined the most precipitously, Gorbacheva says, there are only a few more than three million of the group that will soon form the prime draft pool and the new entrants to the prime child-bearing age cohort (ng.ru/health/2014-06-03/8_kids.html).

            While there is some good news concerning this age group – infant mortality in Russia has fallen to levels comparable with the more advanced Western countries – most of the trends among children aged one to 18 are negative and cannot be changed by medical intervention alone, Gorbacheva says.

            Over the last decade, she reports, chronic diseases among young Russians have increased by 30 percent and their spread in the course of studying has gone up “by more than 50 percent.”  They are also less physically fit generally than the same cohort in the past: eight to nine percent have low body weight and about the same percentage are obese.

            According to Gorbacheva, “from 30 to 40 percent” of pupils in the upper grades must limit their choice of profession because of health. And last year, 59 percent of draftees were found suffering from one or another illness, with about a third of the total deemed “unfit for military service.”

            Still more worrisome for the future, she says, is the fact that “now practically a third of girls and boys suffer from defects in the reproductive sphere.”  That will exacerbate the country’s growth rate still further.

            Moreover, mortality rates among Russian young people are high. Currently, some 7,000 to 8,000 young people die each year, a rate “three times greater than in European countries.” Seventy percent of these are the result of traumas of various kinds.  Russia is among the world “leaders” in terms of the number of suicides among the young.

            Russian government and academic experts point out, Gorbacheva says, that such accidents and suicides among Russian teenagers are often the result of parental neglect or inattention rather than the lack of medical service.  Where medicine can play the biggest role – among newborns and those under one – the country’s doctors have done a good job, they add.

            But among older children, parents are typically to blame because they must now take responsibility for their children.  A change in the mentality of parents, the “Nezavimaya gazeta” writer says, is needed if thing are to get better. Given cutbacks in government financing, “there are practically now after school activities” or sports sections “as a rule.”

            That means young people have “a great deal of free time. How they spend it,” Gorbacheva says, “depends on the family.”

Window on Eurasia: Putin Transforming Near Abroad into Near East, Mitrokhin Suggests

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 4 – Vladimir Putin’s approach in Ukraine appears to be modelled on what he believes the West been doing in Syria, an approach that he hopes to use as the basis of a swap between Moscow and the G-7 but one that could transform what many in Russia continue to call “the near abroad” into an unstable “Near East,”  Nikolay Mitrokhin suggests.

            In a Grani.ru article this week, Mitrokhin points out that “the armed conflict in the Donbass no longer is a clash between the central authorities of Ukraine and regional separatists.  The level of involvement in it by the Russian side is so great that many analysts now say Russia is conducting a new type of war” (grani.ru/Politics/World/Europe/Ukraine/m.229890.html).

            However that may be, Mitrokhin continues, there is a related political question that analysts and officials should be focusing on: Why is Moscow “so openly” supporting “small groups of Russian citizens” who continue to attack “’the fascists of Kyiv’” despite being in a situation where “sooner or later” they will be defeated by the Ukrainian army?

            The Moscow analyst suggests that the answer to that may lie in how Moscow has been behaving in “another place on the earth where now many are also shooting, where a weak central government is also struggling with groups of militants who are motivated by various things but who are united in their effort to remove the illegitimate, in their view, head of the country.”

            That country, of course, is Syria, Mitrokhin continues.  The Syrian case is “close to the Donbas by virtue of the fact that in an internal conflict in a country with a complex mix of population there are now involved various external forces,” with Russia and Iran supporting the Asad regime and various countries or at least groups in them backing the opposition.

            That parallel in turn suggests something else. “In the current Russian political lexicon, the term “little answer” [“otvetka”] which comes from criminal jargon and means a forcible response to certain actions or challenges by a competitor.”

            Those who use this term, he argues, see “Crimea, for example, as ‘a little answer’ for Kosovo,” and they qualify other Russian actions “which violate international law” as “’little answers’ for Kosovo, Qaddafi, the ‘NATO bombing’ of Serbia and even for the collapse of the USSR.”

            The Kremlin is unhappy with what it believes the West is doing in Syria just as it is “by any other attempt at overthrowing a dictator by a pro-Western opposition.  Consequently, Mitrokhin says, “it is possible that [Putin et al.] hope to use the Donbass as the basis for an exchange in the course of its global conflict with the West.”

            Such a possibility is suggested, he continues, by “Putin’s silence regarding the election of Poroshenko” as president of Ukraine, a silence which suggests that “in the eyes of the Russian authorities, the elected Ukrainian president is no more legitimate than [Syria’s] Asad is in the eyes of the West.”

            Moreover, Mitrokhin notes, “the Orthodox terrorists and Chechen volunteers” ostensibly fighting on their own in the Donbass are “partially the very same people who already fought in Syria.”  And the announcement of plans by the US to provide military equipment to Ukraine is likely to reinforce a Kremlin view that Ukraine and Syria are analogous.

            An invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces “still looks improbable,” the analyst argues, “although such a threat (again by analogy with the actions of Western countries in Syria) constantly hangs in the air, sometimes materialize in the form of Russian drones.”  Putin simply wants the conflict to continue, until he can use it for his own geopolitical goals.

            “What price will Putin set for peace making in Eastern Ukraine?” Mitrokhin says that he believes that the Kremlin leader will propose to the West a “package” deal: Western recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and a non-bloc status for Ukraine and an end to “military support for the anti-Asad opposition in Syria.”

            The G-7 leaders are hardly like to agree, the Moscow analyst continues, particularly because “the Ukrainian government has begun to show some success in the military arena. But what this means is that no one should expect news about peace in the Donbass anytime soon.”