Under Putin, Russia has Become ‘Two Nations Living in One Country,’ Commentators Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 1 – One of the most powerful ideological memes of Soviet times was the notion that capitalism divided the population of any country into “two nations,” a small one possessing all the wealth and a huge one whose production was confiscated by the first for its benefit and not that of the people.

            The term was lifted by Marxists from Benjamin Disraeli’s 1845 novel, “Sybil or the Two Nations,” a book that appeared in the same year as Friedrich Engels’ “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,” a work that has had significant influence not only on Marxists but on others as well.

            Now, some commentators in Russia are suggesting that their country as it has developed under the rule of Vladimir Putin has become one in which there are two peoples rather than one, a situation that is not only morally indefensible but dangerous as far as the future of their land is concerned.

            Earlier this year, Moscow writer Mikhail Berg wrote in his blog that “we live in one country but we have two peoples,” a small number of “thinking people” who need “greater freedom and honest elections” and “an enormous mass” of those who have been intimidated into silent acquiescence or support of the current regime (mberg.net/dva_naroda).

            That idea has more recently been developed by film director Andrey Konchalovsky who has issued a cry of despair from someone who wants to be proud of his country and his people but finds that increasingly difficult as Russia slides into an unprecedented “demographic and moral” disaster (xexe.club/101015-kuda-my-katimsya.html).

            Many are debating whether Russia is part of Europe or Asia, but in fact, he writes, “by the level of corruption, by life expectancy, and by the level of investment in science and the like,” Russia today has become as if “we are in Africa” and without the colonial experiences that long held that continent back. 

            To make his point, Konchalovsky provides a collection of devastating statistics that Russians seem all too ready to ignore.  Among them are the following:

·         Mortality in Russia. “Over the last 20 years, more than seven million Russians have died off … Every year, Russia loses as many people as the population of a whole oblast the size of Pskov ... The number of suicides, murders and accidents in Russia is comparable with the level of mortality in Angola and Burundi  … Life expectancy of Russian men is approximately 160^th among the countries of the world, just ahead of Bangladesh.”

·         A Crisis in the Russian Family. “Eight of ten older Russians who live in homes for the elderly have relatives capable of supporting them … The country has from two to five million unsupervised children,” 100 times as many as China.  “80 percent of the 370,000 children in orphanages having living parents … and we are first in the world in terms of the number of children abandoned by their parents.”

Crimes against Children.  In 2010, 1700 of every 100,000 children were raped or killed, a figure that is higher than “even in South Africa” and one that means that “every day in Russia four or five children are murdered. In the same year, there were 9500 sex crimes against minors, a figure exceeded only in South Africa.

·         Drug Abuse and Alcoholism. 30,000 Russians die each year from overdoses of narcotics, and 70,000 from alcoholism directly. These figures compare with the loss of 14,000 Soviet soldiers in all the years of the Afghan war. Russians now consume 15 liters of pure alcohol annually, even though the WHO says that consuming 8 liters a year threatens the survival of the nation.

·         Corruption.  Corruption is so massive and so widespread that it surpasses this plague in any other country.  The misuse of the courts has become tragic: now Russian courts are even prepared to try the dead, something that happened in Europe the last time in the 17^th century when Oliver Cromwell was dug up and tried.

·         Hollowing Out of the Country. “Over the last ten years, 11,000 villages and 290 cities in Siberia have disappeared,” opening the way for China and Japan whose population densities far exceed those of Russia east of the Urals. “For whom did we conquer and develop Siberia and the Kuriles? It turns out, it was for the Chinese or the Japanese,” Konchalovsky says.

·         Rising Poverty. Despite its enormous natural wealth, “it is shamefully the case” that half of the Russian population consists of poor people.

These are horrific figures, the writer says, and he is “certain that Putin knows all these facts,” which prompts the questions: What does he think about them? And what is he prepared to do? Especially at a time when Russia is “approaching a demographic and moral catastrophe which it has never experienced before.”

            There are many explanations for Russia’s sad state and current division into two nations, Konchalovsky continues. “The chief among them is the irresponsible economic policy of the 1990s” when “people with a feudal consciousness who never knew private property in land or capitalism’ and who had lost the spirit of entrepreneurialism under 70 years of communist rule.

            But perhaps the most horrific explanation for what is wrong in Russia today, is that Russia’s oppressors have come not from abroad as was the case in Africa but  “out of the ranks” of Russia’s own citizens, something that ultimately makes what has happened even sadder and more unforgiveable.

            If only a third of Russians were to recognize this and stand up behind it, he suggests, “RUSSIA WOULD BE A DIFFERENT COUNTRY.” But unfortunately that has not happened. For it to occur, Konchalovsky says, “Russia needs a leader who would have the courage of Peter the Great to tell people words which they have not heard for a long time.”

            Those words would convey “a bitter truth,” one that Russians must hear if they are to have any hope of moving forward because at present, the vast majority of Russians “do not want to understand how far they lag behind Europe in their civilizational development.”

            “I understand,” Konchalovsky continues, “that the leader of the nation … cannot speak freely.” But now Russia faces a crisis that can be addressed only if he speaks the truth.  And he adds that he “doesn’t know whether Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is capable of such a suicidal act.”

            “I am a Russian,” the film director says. “I pine for my Motherland, but I ‘don’t see’ her! I do not see a country in which I can take pride. I see only crowds of dissatisfied and angry people so alienated from one another that they fear each other” rather than being willing to work together.

            “I want to be proud of my Motherland,” he concludes, “but I am ashamed of what it has become.” He adds that he can’t remember the last time he felt pride in it but can assure everyone that it wasn’t when the Russian hockey team won at the Sochi Olympiad.

Russia Remains a Byzantine State and that May Doom It, ‘Gazeta’ Editors Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 1 – The photographs of Vladimir Putin sitting on what many falsely supposed was the throne of Byzantine emperors have prompted many to laugh but others to note that “Russia even today in many ways remains an heir of the Byzantine empire,” according to the editors of Moscow’s “Gazeta.”

            Russians “borrowed from this lost empire not only their main religion but also its political habits” in both foreign and domestic policy,” the paper says, noting that these include “saying one thing, thinking another and doing a third” thereby making the relationship of words and actions extremely problematic (gazeta.ru/comments/2016/05/30_e_8271917.shtml).

            But it also means that whenever the authorities act, people immediately ask themselves what the action “really” means because no one can be sure that the reasons the authorities give are the real ones.  And this form of doubletalk, the paper says, is rapidly becoming “the norm of our present-day life rather than an exception.”

            “Byzantine politics,” the editors say, “is when criminal prosecutions can serve not only as an effective means of sharing out property but also can be used for removing an unsuitable politician.”  But they have the effect of making any honest discussion of what should be done almost impossible.

            That is because such politics are “impossible without a cult of the abstract,” as was shown by the recent exchange between Aleksey Kudrin and Vladimir Putin. Kudrin, the first in several years to challenge Putin’s foreign policies of isolation, was put in his place by the Kremlin ruler because of the latter’s ideological understanding of sovereignty.

            Putin told Kudrin that Russia would not be the first to work to lessen “tensions” with the West because to do so would be to call into question its “millennium of history” and represent a kind of “’trading [away] of sovereignty.’”

            “Byzantium by the way also constantly appealed to its great history as the preserver of the Hellenic world,” “Gazeta” says. It existed in the end for 1058 years, a long time but “far from a record among empires.” 

            But the main thing about the exchange between Kudrin and Putin is the question it raises: why should political and economic cooperation with other countries necessarily “lead to ‘the selling off of sovereignty?’” In reality, no one is trying to take it away from Russia or to buy it as this exchange might suggest.

            “If, however, “one understands under sovereignty only the right to do whatever one wants regardless of others, then it is extremely strange to constantly complain that ‘the West is trying to contain Russia,’” the paper says.  “Even in ordinary life, if someone violates the accepted social order, people try to somehow stop him.”

            Moreover, “if you consider sovereignty the strength of borders and state power, then the current policy of isolation and confrontation is making [Russia] weaker and thus strategically weakening [its] sovereignty.”  Cooperation can be the basis for strengthening both, something that in words at least, Putin believes is “the highest value.”

            Russians have held on to the Byzantine tradition even though they have passed through “at a minimum” four different states – the Moscow principality, the Russian Empire, the USSR and “now post-Soviet Russia.”  They do not appear to have reflected on what that means or on the fact that “Byzantium is not the most successful” of models.

            “In the end,” the editors say, “in large measure thanks to its ‘Byzantine policy,’ it lost sovereignty” and its capital became a city in Turkey. And that happened, they continue, because the Byzantine rulers remained too suspicious of the traders and merchants who could have built up and defended the state.

            Many Byzantine survivals attract visitors – the icons, the churches, and the pompous ceremonies – but none of them offers any guarantees. When Putin sat on what he thought was the Byzantine throne, he forgot that in 2012 Viktor Yanukovich had done the same – and now Ukraine is fighting “a real war for the preservation of its sovereignty in the most literal sense.”

Is Ukraine about to Face ‘a Parade of Sovereignties’?

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 1 – In the early 1990s, the Russian Federation faced what came to be known as “a parade of sovereignties” with various regions and republics declaring their sovereignty and demanding treaty relations with Moscow.  That promoted first decentralization and a federation treaty and then, in reaction, the construction of an even more centralized state.

            Now, Tatyana Ivzhenko, a “Nezavisimaya gazeta” correspondent in Ukraine, says that that country is threatened by a new “parade of sovereignties,” a trend that Moscow might exploit to weaken Kyiv at least in the short term. But as she doesn’t say, that could have longer term results much like those in Russia (ng.ru/cis/2016-06-01/1_ukraina.html).

            Tensions between Ukraine’s regions and the center have only intensified in recent times, Ivzhenko says, even though many in the regions have been unwilling to press the case out of fears that this would legitimate the status of Russian-occupied regions in the east and weaken the hand of Kyiv against Moscow.

            But because plans for moves toward federalization appear to be on hold, ever more regions are appealing to the center for the creation of special arrangements between each of them and Kyiv. The elected legislators in Zhitomir and Kirovohrad took this step earlier; now, this week, those in Odessa have done the same.

            According to a source in Kyiv, Ivzhenko says, “the identical appeals to the Ukrainian authorities from various oblasts are connected with the start of the process of decentralization,” one that has already given the regions partial financial flexibility given that they now retain some of the tax money they collect rather than transfer all of it to Kyiv and then get money back.

            But this system requires development, the source says, because there are conflicts between regional deputies who are elected by the population and governors who are appointed by Kyiv. The two do not agree in many instances about how the tax monies they now control should be spent.

            The constitutional reform on offer in the Verkhovna Rada would do away with the current “’dual power’” in the regions by eliminating the office of governor and creating prefects instead, who would ensure that federal laws were implemented but would not have the power to block the actions of the oblast assemblies.

            But this proposal appears dead in the water in the national assembly because the 300 deputies needed to pass it can’t be found since many Ukrainian politicians consider that this would open the way for “’a special status’” for the Donetsk and Luhansk “peoples republics in the east.

            Igor Koliushko, the head of the Kyiv Center for Political Legal Reforms, says that current law does not allow for “treaty relations between the central authorities and the oblast organs” but that “administrative agreements are another matter” and that even now such agreements could grow in number and importance.

            Such a scenario is perhaps more likely, Koliushko suggests, given that the Moscow-controlled DNR and LNR have been insisting on treaty relations with Kyiv, something that would transform the current unitary Ukrainian state into a confederation rather than a federal one.

            Another Kyiv analyst, Aleksey Leshenko, the vice president of the Gorshenin Institute, is convinced, the “Nezavisimaya gazeta” journalist writes, that “citizens of Ukraine will oppose ‘a parade of sovereignties.’” He cites a poll in which the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians support decentralization but oppose “’special statuses’” for this or that region.

            The opposition in the Verkhovna Rada has proposed having elected governors and creating a mechanism of treaty relations between each of them and the center.  That doesn’t appear to be going anywhere in Kyiv, but it does open the way for more meddling by Moscow from below.

            As in so many areas, Russian officials are drawing on their own past to come up with ideas on how to promote Moscow’s goals in the post-Soviet republics. They remember how the parade of sovereignties weakened Russia in the early 1990s and would be pleased to see that happen in Ukraine and elsewhere.

            But what they have clearly forgotten is that it was precisely the parade of sovereignties that caused the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction, toward a state more unitary and centralized than it had even been before.  If as often happens they overplay their hand in Ukraine, they could easily produce the same outcome there, yielding another defeat for Moscow.