Putin Regime Likely to End by Only One of Five Scenarios Now On Offer, Eidman Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 1 – Many analysts in Russia and the West are now openly talking about how the regime of Vladimir Putin could come to an end, making predictions that in many cases appear to be more an expression of their preferences than of the actual prospects of any one of them coming true.

            Igor Eidman, a Russian commentator for Deutsche Welle, suggests that only one of the five predictions now on offer, all based on analogies with events in Russian or European history, has much of a chance of coming true if one examines all of them with any care history   (facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1502752253121082&id=100001589654713).

            The first prediction about the end of the Putin era is what he calls “the ‘bunker’ scenario” in which Putin is destroyed as Hitler was by “complete international isolation.” However, the West doesn’t seem prepared for such an “uncompromising” stand, and even Putin isn’t “inadequate” enough to launch a suicidal global war.

            The second set of predictions involves Putin being pushed aside or even killed by a palace coup, much as Paul I was, Eidman says. But that is unlikely: the Kremlin leader has had the time to select only those most loyal to his person to be in top jobs, and he has made sure that all the members of the elite know that their positions would be at risk if he were overthrown.

            The third is perhaps the most hopeful and most unrealistic, involving as it does the notion that Putin and his siloviki will launch a new perestroika and bring reforms.  He and they hate that idea more than anything else and they know that their system, like the Soviet one, would “inevitably collapse” if it reformed to the point of not relying on violence.

            The fourth prediction, popular now among some Russian political emigres, is that Putin will ultimately “be forced” to take part in a roundtable with the opposition much as Marshal Jaruzelski was in Poland. But who in the Putin regime would sit down as an equal with Navalny or fail to remember that Jaruzelski was simply a half-way house to regime collapse.

            And the fifth prediction, the only one that has much chance, Eidman suggests, is a popular explosion on the lines of February 1917.  There is growing social discontent and anger about both rising income inequality and the increasingly hereditary nature of power and property in Putin’s Russia.

            At some point “as was the case in 1917,” popular discontent will break out and some in the elite will decide that they can’t suppress the demonstrators and that their best chance for survival is to join them.  When and how this might happen is far from clear, but the chances that it could are at least in evidence.

            And this has one positive consequence, Eidman says.  “Under certain circumstances,” a popular revolution in Russia could but not necessarily would set “the country on the European democratic path.”  Whether that would be subverted as the February 1917 revolution was, of course, remains to be seen.

Many Russians Will Not Live to See End of Country’s Economic Crisis, Moscow Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 1 – Most Russians will not live long enough to see the end of their country’s economic crisis. Their real incomes will continue to stagnate at least for another decade, the divergence between rich and poor will increase, and Russian pensions may not rise in real terms for two decades, according to Moscow experts.

            Those conclusions, offered by Nezavisimaya gazeta and Vedomosti this week, reflect both worldwide economic trends and specific Russian conditions, and they won’t be fundamentally changed by the government’s expected pump priming in advance of the presidential elections (ng.ru/economics/2017-05-30/4_6999_distrofia.html and vedomosti.ru/economics/articles/2017/05/31/692224-dohodi-vernutsya).

            In Nezavisimaya gazeta, Anastasiya Bashkatova, an economics reporter, directly asserts that “a significant part of Russians will not get out of the crisis” because what she and others call “income dystrophy”—stagnant pay and rising income inequality -- is now “an illness characteristic of the Russian economy.

            In the “fat” years before 2008, the trends were going in the other direction. But since 2013, “the real incomes of citizens have begun to contract and this tendency has not stopped,” although it may not be quite as bad as official statistics show, Bashkatova says, because many Russians do get money from the shadow economy.

            “It is possible that this helps citizens to soften the consequences of the crisis but this does not reduce the risk for them that an employer may cut also those in the gray sectors, where neither pay nor bonuses are fixed.”

            The Moscow experts she surveyed were unanimously pessimistic about the future, although some expected an uptick next year when the Kremlin will try to boost figures in advance of the presidential elections.

            Kirill Yakovenko of the Alor Broker Company, says that “the reduction of real incomes of the population bears a long-term character and it is hardly likely that this problem will exhaust itself in the next 1.5 to 2 years.” And Pavel Sigal, vice president of Russia Reliance, says that he does not exclude the possibility that by 2025, the number of poor in Russia will reach 30 million.

            The report in Vedomosti yesterday was even more damning. Its headline says that “incomes of Russians will return to pre-crisis levels only in 2022 and pensions will never” recover to that level as far out as anyone can now predict or even as the government expects (vedomosti.ru/economics/articles/2017/05/31/692224-dohodi-vernutsya).

            Indeed, the paper continues, the economic development ministry has prepared a report, a copy of which Vedomosti says it has, showing that it does not expect any growth in the real value of pensions over the next 20 years, even as it anticipates a rise in the pension ages to 65 for men and 63 for women.

            Importantly, the ministry report notes the demographic impact of this: “The number of pensioners will decline 23 percent by 2035,” seven million fewer than now. If pension ages aren’t raised, in contrast, the number of pensioners would go up by 5.4 million.  The age increase will mean there will be one million more workers. Without it, there would be 3.2 million fewer.

            At the same time, the increase in pension ages will be accompanied by “a sharp fall in the level of pensions: they will decline from the current 35 percent to 22 percent” relative to wages paid, something that reduces “the burden” on workers but does nothing to boost consumer demand and thus a major reason for companies to increase investments.

           

            According to the ministry report, the Moscow paper continues, “wages and incomes for the next two decades will grow more slowly than the economy,” but the growth of the economy “also will be far from outstanding.”  And the combination of these two trends may have serious consequences for Russia’s future.

            On the one hand, Oksana Sinyavskaya of the Moscow Institute of Social Policy, says, the notion that pensions can be “frozen” for 20 years is unrealistic and “socially dangerous.”  And on the other, Vladimir Tikhomirov, an economist at the BKS Brokerage, says that the ministry’s notion that there can be economic growth while pensions are cut is unrealistic.

            If there is no increase in demand – and there won’t be if wages and pensions are stagnant – he says, there won’t be much investment. That is an economic truism in all countries, and Russia isn’t going to be able to escape it.  He does not say, but there is one way out: the way Stalin adopted in the 1930s: totalitarian control and radical extraction of money from the people.

Moscow Must Stress Commonality Not Diversity of Russia as a Whole but Divisions Not Unity of Each Nation within It, Tishkov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 1 – In his latest argument for the formation of “a civic Russian nation” [rossiiskaya natsiya], Valery Tishkov argues that the only way forward is for Moscow to lay more stress on commonality rather than diversity for the Russian population as a whole and more stress on divisions within its component nations than on communalities within any of them.

            In a lengthy article in NG-Tsenarii, the former nationalities minister and former director of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology says that for too long many in Russia have been too “obsessed” with ethnic differences rather than with commonalities of the people of the Russian Federation as a whole (ng.ru/stsenarii/2017-05-30/13_6998_edinstvo.html).

            And he says that those who say that national republics within the Russian Federation are “our inheritance from the USSR and that no one must occupy themselves with such risky things again” are wrong and that changes in such arrangements, reflecting changes in the broader society are not only inevitable but valuable in promoting broader unity.

            As is often the case, Tishkov stops short of drawing the obvious conclusions from his argument for Russia, preferring in almost every case to talk about them for other countries, as when he complains that no other post-Soviet state has become a federation and when he says that others are taking the lead in recognizing the complexities of ethnic identities.

            But from the perspective of the non-Russian nations within the borders of the Russian Federation and even what Moscow often dismissively calls “the sub-ethnoses” of the Russian nation, Tishkov’s argument here provides the intellectual basis for a new and broader attack on the integrity of both and even on the current ethno-federal structure of the country.

            The ethnographer begins his argument by pointing to the conclusions of a new book his institute has released, The Cultural Complexity of Contemporary Nations. That study stressed the ways that urbanization, migration, and the mixing of peoples have changed how many people see themselves, increasingly viewing themselves as of mixed ethnicity or as cosmopolitans.

            “This phenomenon of contemporary cultural complexity or super-complexity at the individual and collective levels … forces us to rethink the content of categories according to which the population has in the past been divided in various countries of the world,” Tishkov continues.

            He acknowledges that “the most powerful of these categories is of course the category of the nation,” but he insists that today the nation is the population of any state as a whole: “I do not know of any countries which have joined the UN and do not consider themselves nation states,” Tishkov says.

            The implications of that, of course, are that those who have states now can and should make their populations into single nations, while those nations that don’t have statehood now are to be absorbed or amalgamated into the nation defined in terms of the state they live in, a backdoor restoration of Friedrich Engels’ discredited concept of ‘history-less nations.”

            Tishkov talks about the value of the formula “unity in diversity” but it seems he is more supportive of that in countries beyond the borders of the Russian Federation – Ukraine should become a federal state with Russian as an official language, he says – than he is for peoples within the Russian state.

            “We have been held back by the creation of diversity,” he says, with many in Russia talking about the need to come up with a film about each nation and “show its distinctiveness relative to other peoples. This of course is also interesting but why are we do little itneressted in the common whole, in what makes us strong and friendly.”

            Might it not be the case that “it is time to speak not only about ‘friendship of the peoples,’” as the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation have, “but also about ‘a friendly people,’” thus stressing the commonality of the whole while downplaying the distinctions of the nations who make it up?