Putin’s Worldview Points to the Return of Stalinism but Without as Many Victims, Pavlova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 31 – Many analysts are focusing on the Russian pseudo-election and suggesting that Russia is moving toward a Brezhnevite stagnation from which will spring a new perestroika or thaw, Irina Pavlova says; but Putin’s worldview points to a very different outcome –the construction of a harsh, authoritarian and anti-Western Brave New World.

            After struggling to come up with an ideology, Putin has now settled on one that equates anti-Stalinism, Russophobia and the rehabilitation with Nazism, a combination that means, the US-based Russian historian says, “only a real Stalinist and state-thinking individual can love Russia and be against Nazism” (ivpavlova.blogspot.com/2017/12/blog-post_31.html).

            Such a view, she continues, presupposes the rise of a reality “significantly harsher than today’s stability.” Instead, it suggests that Putin plans to take the country still further in the direction of “a Brave New World, a world anti-Western, aggressive, and directed toward victory” so as to recover the “great power greatness of Russia, the peak of which occurred under Stalin.”

            To be sure, Pavlova writes, “the present-day powers that be calculate that this time they will be able to achieve their ends without a significant number of victims,” and they plan to rely “not so much on their armed forces and nuclear weapons as on the weakness and unbalanced quality of the contemporary Western world.”

            The Putin leadership assumes that the weaknesses of the leaders of the West will force them to focus on their own problems rather than Russia’s actions and that Russia can exploit this approach for its own ends, intensifying the problems of the West by a clever combination of “provocations, diplomatic combinations and its ability to play on human weaknesses.”

            That makes for a more dangerous and unpredictable world, the historian of Stalinism says, especially if Western publics can be convinced that the Putin regime is evolving toward something different and that its weaknesses will not allow it to act on the cheap against their countries. 

Moscow Finds Violations of Putin’s Language Policy in All Non-Russian Republics

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 30 – Every single one of the non-Russian republics is violating in one way or another Vladimir Putin’s insistence that the study of Russian be compulsory for all and that the study of non-Russian languages be voluntary in every case, according to a report the Procuracy General has prepared for the Presidential Administration.

            The four republics where the violations are greatest judged by the number of complaints from parents are Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Sakha and Chuvashia, according to Kommersant; but there are problems in this regard everywhere. And Moscow expects those responsible to be punished and the situation to be changed (kommersant.ru/doc/3482053).

            In short, this is not the limited “problem” that many in Moscow have talked about but one that affects more than a fifth of the population of the country and more than a fifth of the federal subjects, something that means it matters a great deal more than those within the ring road seem to recognize. 

            On the one hand, this shows that the Kremlin really is committed to its Russianization and Russificaiton campaign and is willing to mobilize ethnic Russians in the non-Russian republics to get its way. But on the other, it shows that despite what many believe the non-Russians remain attached to their languages and will view this policy as an attack on their rights.

            Clearly, Putin is committed to this policy and is prepared to push it through even though it violates the Russian constitution and existing Russian law, although a Kommersant source in the Presidential Administration says that there is no need to change any law, an implicit acknowledgement that Putin’s views are now sufficient to override any legal provisions.

            The republic governments are expected to fall in line and to punish those in their education ministries and schools who have in the past violated what is now policy.  Moscow is unhappy that this issue arose “before the federal elections” and will do everything it can to block education becoming a source of conflict in nationality policy.

            But in fact by overturning the constitution and laws in this area, the Kremlin has promoted what it says it objects to; and it would be well for its denizens to remember that those who view their rights as having been taken away often become more angry than those who never had these rights in the past. 

Three Surprises in 2017 Russia Must Live With in 2018

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 30 – Despite the expectations of many, Sergey Shelin says, the past year has not been as dramatic in Russia as the three immediately preceding; but there did occur three surprising developments with which the country must cope in 2018: continuing economic decline, the regime’s loss of the youth, and the Kremlin’s fears of its ability to control the past.

            First of all, the Rosbalt commentator says, many beginning with the regime initially expressed their belief that the Russian economy was coming out of the crisis; but it soon became clear that if it was no longer falling, the economy was not set to grow either and would remain stagnant into 2018 (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2017/12/29/1672295.html ).

                That stagnation given what is happening elsewhere in the world means that Russia will fall further and further behind most countries, and that development in turn, Shelin suggests, will add pressure on the regime to look for “some kind of new model of government economic behavior.” Indeed, that may be the defining feature of the coming year.

            Second, and more dramatically, the Russian government for the first time lost the country’s young.  “The street actions which took place in the spring and summer” are “only a symptom of this turning away” from the government, a development that is “one of the most important for the entire late Soviet and post-Soviet decades.”

                Perestroika and the reforms after 1991 were the work not of the young but of the middle aged, “and only in 2017 did all this begin to change literally in front of our eyes,” to the surprise of both the regime and specialists on youth attitudes.  Only opposition figure Aleksey Navalny appeared to recognize this shift and even based his campaign on it.

            “Having lost the youth in 2017,” Shelin continues, “the regime reacted to this in the same way that it responded to the loss of the intelligentsia in 2011 or in general to any difficulties be they moral, online, industrial or financial with a Bacchanalia of increased control, supervision, and monitoring, not with even the smallest effort to recognize or change its archaic nature.”

            The Kremlin did try to suggest that it was appointing a new generation of technocrats to positions of authority, but it quickly became obvious that these people were even more “indifferent to the people than their predecessors were. They cannot pretend to any public authority” because trying to gain that is now “strictly prohibited.”

            The third surprise, Shelin says, was perhaps the  most unexpected of all and superficially appeared distinct from the other two but in fact was not. That was the failure of the regime to commemorate in a massive way the centenary of the revolutions of 1917, a commemoration that many had expected for some years.

            But instead of doing so, the regime simply went silent, a reflection of the judgment at the top that any moves by it could be “poorly received by the masses” and create a dangerous situation in which many Russians would begin to question the adequacy of their rulers not a century ago but now.

            “In the eyes of the powers that be, the revolutionary jubilee was distinguished from the only problems only by the fact that it was technically easier to ignore than the banking crisis or the street demonstrations,” Shelin suggests.

                These three surprises marked a year in which the regime did not suffer the major failures many had expected but also “could not achieve any successes either.”  Instead, for the last 12 months, the regime has marched in place, thus pushing the country ever further into a dead end as ever more people could see. But “what the eyes feared, the hands continued to do.”