Moscow Names More Russian Outsiders as Minders for North Caucasus

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 30 –Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has named two more outsiders to oversee developments in the North Caucasus, Andrey Kharin, a deputy governor of Nizhny Novgorod, and Oleg Melnichenko, a senator from Penza.  The number of “Moscow minders,” thus rises, Anton Chablin says; but there is no reason to believe they will add to effectiveness.

            Both men have been added to the governmental commission on the social-economic development of the North Caucasus Federal District even though they lack expertise and experience in working with that region, the longtime observer of the North Caucasus says (akcent.site/mneniya/9045).

            Melnichenko’s appointment is more explicable than Kharin as the former worked between 2013 and 2017 as deputy to Mikhail Babich, the presidential plenipotentiary for the Volga region, whom Mishustin has put in charge of supervising the restive region for the central government.

            Babich himself has been anything but effective, Chablin say, noting that the Moscow official said a few days ago that “up to now” no one has a clear picture about the problems of water supplies and sewage in the region, thus raising questions not only about his focus but about the failure of earlier minders to do their jobs.

            Meanwhile, investigations into the killing of a Russian Guard officer in Ingushetia have expanded. Officials say that three men were involved and that they are now looking for them in the region where the attack occurred (capost.media/news/mainhotnews/in-ingushetia-three-out-of-the-woods-and-fired-at-police-lieutenant/, capost.media/news/mainhotnews/killers-resguardar-of-sylivka-looking-for-in-ingushsky-gardens/ and doshdu.com/v-ingushetii-posle-ubijstva-sotrudnika-rosgvardii-vozbuzhdeno-ugolovnoe-delo/).

Income Differentiation Far from the Only Inequality Angering Russians, Mareyeva Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 29 – Russians are increasingly concerned about growing inequality in their country, but because of Soviet arrangements in which access often meant more than income, they view social inequality as being about far more than differences in income, although income leads in in the ranking of concerns about inequality, Svetlana Mareyeva says.

            In an article published two years ago in the Vestnik Instituta Sotsiologii but now summarized on the Polit.ru portal, Mareyeva, head of the Center for Stratification Studies at the Higher School of Economics, describes this pattern (cyberleninka.ru/article/n/sotsialnye-neravenstva-i-sotsialnaya-struktura-sovremennoi-rossii-v-vospriyatii-naseleniya/viewer summarized at polit.ru/article/2020/07/29/inequality/).

            In Soviet times, Russians viewed inequality primarily in terms of access and as an unacceptable side effect of the system under which they lived. Now, they are more concerned about it because it has grown and has come to be viewed as a fundamental feature of post-Soviet reality, Mareyeva says.  

            The increasingly radical differentiation is seen as both illegitimate and wrong, she continues, with “far reaching social consequences” including “the generation of social tension, the worsening of the socio-psychological state of Russians and the creation of bases for the de-legitimation of the powers that be.” 

            According to polling data she cites, 84 percent consider income inequality the most serious kind for Russian society, with 64  percent of the sample saying that it is the most sensitive for them personally, an indication that while income inequality is viewed as the most important form, differences in access remain especially important at the individual level.

            The top five bases for concern among Russians about inequality for their society as a whole are income, access to medical care, living conditions, good working conditions, and access to education; the top four concerns for Russians personally are the same except for the fifth where access to recreation outranks access to education.

            According to Mareyeva, Russians are increasingly concerned about access to medical help and education, with figures between 2015 and 2018 rising from 59 to 70 percent in the first case and 40 to 48 percent in the second, yet more evidence that Russian concerns about inequality remain far broader than concerns about income alone.

            These figures also show that “the problem of inequality not only is not falling to a secondary concern but even is beginning to be felt more sharply because the main changes concern assessments of the situation in   one’s own life and not the situation in society as a whole. And that means that inequality adds to social tension. 

            Her data also show that “the majority of the population considers that the causes of both poverty and wealth lie not in personal qualities or efforts of the individual himself or herself but as the result of the impact of ‘external’ factors” and that the government either directly or indirectly is responsible for this growing divide.

            And 75 percent – three Russians out of four – believe that the government must take steps to reduce inequality in society not only in terms of income but also in terms of access and say that fighting inequality broadly conceived is more important to them than combatting poverty as such. That implies that bringing down the rich is more important to them than lifting up the poor.

Focus of Khabarovsk Protests Shifts from Return of Furgal to Demands for Broader Autonomy

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 29 – When the protests in Khabarovsk began, they were almost entirely about the restoration of office of Sergey Furgal, the governor whom Moscow had removed; but now their focus has shifted from that specific concern to the broader one of greater autonomy from the center, Oleg Teploukhov of the URA news agency says.

            He points out that slogans like “I/We are the Far East,” “Khabarovsk will not be silent,” “This is our region,” and “we will defend our land” have displaced those about Furgal and that “one of the most popular attributes of the protest has become the flag of the Khabarovsk kray (ura.news/articles/1036280753).

            And he cites the words of KPRF deputy Aleksey Korniyenko, who represents four Far Eastern regions in the Duma, to the effect that this is the culmination of a long-term trend and that voters there want real federalization.  They want their own regions to have “more independence in the taking of decisions.”

            Kirill Cherkasov, an LDPR member who represents Khabarovsk Kray in the Duma, says that the federal center doesn’t understand what is happening in the Far East because it relies on reports by officials in the region who tell Moscow what it wants to hear rather than what the people want.

            Anatoly Makarov, a Moscow political analyst, says that is leading the center to make mistakes and that unless if allows the regions to have more power, what has been taking place in Khabarovsk will occur in other regions as well, with the people and regional economic elites coming together to oppose Moscow.

            Mikhail Karyagin, an analyst at the Moscow Center for Political Conjunction, says that there are people in the central government, including Accounting Chamber head Aleksey Kudrin, who believe in greater federalism and who, along with opposition groups, will point to what is happening in Khabarovsk to advance their arguments.

            But others are skeptical about this. Historian Pavel Danilin says that the Far East may have been independent-minded in the past but now is dependent on Moscow making any protests by their nature local and limited. Karyagin agrees and says that Moscow isn’t going to change in the face of demonstrations.

            Indeed, he suggests, given the current economic crisis, centralization will increase because “the center will concentrate in itself all resources and control them” rather than allowing anyone beyond the ring road to have more.

            But perhaps just as important as the Khabarovsk demonstrations themselves as far as what will happen next are discussions in the central media where some are talking about Russia as “a colonial power in the 21^st century” and discussing whether “the decolonization of Russia is approaching?” (krizis-kopilka.ru/archives/78698).

            Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan made the issue of the colonial nature of the USSR central when he described that state as “the evil empire,” although at that time, most people focused only on the ethnic dimension of that reality. However, and especially our time, once people describe a place as an empire, ever more will ask when de-colonization will happen.

            Now, there is growing awareness, thanks to events like the Khabarovsk protests, that the Russian Federation is an empire not just because it has non-Russian republics within it but it has predominantly Russian regions who don’t want their lives to be run by officials in a capital seven or eight time zones away from them.

            The writer of these lines argued that “regionalism is the nationalism of the next revolution” (region.expert/regionalism-next-nationalism/) and very much believes that the events in Khabarovsk like those earlier in Shiyes are providing evidence of that new but as yet largely unrecognized reality.