Torture Only One of Problems in Russian Prisons, Former Inmate Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 17 – The appearance of video files documenting torture in Russian prisons has sparked widespread discussion and expressions of dismay, but torture is only one of the many problems in the Russian prison system, according to Sergey Udaltsov, a dissident who was an inmate between 2013 and 2017.

            These must be recognized and addressed, he says, because to a large degree the use of force against prisoners is directly connected with “the poor and at times torturous in themselves conditions in which those arrested and convicted are held.” Attacking torture thus requires that these conditions be addressed as well (svpressa.ru/blogs/article/313287/).

            Many prison guards and indeed many civilians have little interest in overcoming these problems because they believe that prisoners don’t deserve better and that those incarcerated are “’second-class people’” and deserve abuse, attitudes that often serve as the basis for the conviction that torture is appropriate as well, Udaltsov says.

            The problems begin with the physical condition of the prisons and detention centers themselves, he continues. Most were built 50 or more years ago and thus are “survivals of the past which are categorically incapable of providing normal conditions for those under arrest” even if the will to provide that were present.

            Prisons and detention centers lack adequate space, plumbing, and heating. “All this creates unhealthy conditions for those incarcerated who were sentenced to a loss of freedom but not to maintenance in conditions of too little space, too much cold and without adequate sanitary arrangements.”

            In most Russians, those confined can take a shower no more than once a week, live in overcrowded rooms without adequate toilet arrangements, and can’t get access to medical care or psychological assistance. Some may see this as appropriate punishment, but it defeats the purpose of such punishment, Udaltsov says.

            “I myself observed all these problems which serving a sentence in a corrective labor colony of general regime in Tambov Oblast,” one that was far from the worst. Among the things he observed was that long-term prisoners often had lost all their teeth because they could not gain access to any dental care that might have saved the situation.

            The story is the same for prisoners with other illnesses. They can’t get treatment and die or receive medical attention only when it is too late to save the situation. What needs to be done is the provision of far more medical services within prisons so that this doesn’t continue to happen.

            Solving these problems will be easier if the number of those behind bars is reduced further, Udaltsov says. In his view, “about 30 percent” of inmates shouldn’t be incarcerated because they do not represent any danger for society. Cutting the prison population by 30 percent would make it possible to spend more per prisoner at the same cost.

            And reducing the prison population can be achieved quickly and easily via a general amnesty. In that event, conditions in places of confinement in Russia will improve, and together with that, the number of cases of torture by guards and other prison officials will be significantly reduced as well.

           

 

 

Russia Remains Bottleneck in Western Europe-Western China Railway

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 17 – Construction of pipelines and railways connecting China and Europe have received enormous attention, but plans for a super highway between the two economic powers have attracted less notice even though the highway, if and when it is completed, may allow goods to move faster than even the railroad promises.

            China completed the 3425 kilometers of this 8445 km route that are on its territory in 2016, but Russia which is responsible for 2233 km and Kazakhstan which has 2787 km of the total have not yet. Kazakhstan has made significant progress, while Russia has made less because of controversies over funding and even the route of this road (ritmeurasia.org/news--2021-11-18--mezhdunarodnaja-trassa-zapadnaja-evropa-zapadnyj-kitaj-nastojaschee-i-perspektivy-57418).

            Moscow promises to have its construction completed by 2024, but it will achieve that goal only if it finds the necessary funding from international banks and overcomes controversies over the route. As originally planned, the route would not link Russian cities in many cases but instead be a direct path from China to Europe.

            Many Russian cities and the Russian government would like to see the route modified so that Russia would benefit domestically while China, which has provided much of the funding so far, prefers the direct and much quicker route. Unless those differences are overcome, the current deadline is unlikely to be met.

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China Would have Fallen Apart had USSR Not Disintegrated First, Vavilov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 17 – By the 1980s, China was experiencing many of the same problems that the Soviet Union was and likely would have fallen into pieces had the USSR not disintegrated first and had Beijing not learned from that event what it must not allow to happen, Russian sinologist Nikolay Vavilov says.

            In a comment for Caucasus Today, Vavilov says that before the USSR collapsed, “the domestic political problems in China were no less than with us” in the USSR. “The same ‘glasnost’ was taking place and the rehabilitation of the victims of ‘the cultural revolution which led to the events in Tiananmen Square” (kavtoday.ru/article/6581).

            According to the sinologist, “both the USSR and China at practically the same time found themselves in a period of great political turbulence. However, the army suppressed the actions of the students in Tiananmen,” and that made all the difference for the very different futures of the two countries.

            The suppression of the student rising led to “’the freezing’” of democratization for several years, and “during this time, China was able to observe how democratization was affecting the USSR. The Soviet Union disintegrated,” he continues, “and a series of intra-state conflicts began.

            This led the Chinese leadership to conclude that it must “defend the Communist Party and consensus within the elites. And this became a kind of vaccine against the disintegration of China. Had the USSR not gone the way it did, China itself would have collapsed after only a year or two,” Vavilov says.

Russian Orthodoxy Did Not Experience a Genuine Rebirth after Fall of Communism, Father Solovyev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 17 – Many suggest that after the fall of communism, Russia experienced a religious rebirth, one comparable in many ways to the increase in the role of Orthodoxy in Russian thinking at the end of the tsarist period, Father Ilya Solovyev writes in the independent Orthodox portal Akhilla.

            But that comparison is misplaced. Before 1917, Russian Orthodoxy was experiencing a genuine rebirth, one in which many in the clergy and the population were taking the basic aspects of their faith more seriously. What has happened since 1991 is very different, and the differences are fundamental (ahilla.ru/vozrozhdenie-ili-ozhivlenie/).

What has happened over the last 30 years, Solovyev says, is not the revival of faith but rather “a sharp in crease in the so-called ‘external’ indicators of church life,” in the number of churches, bishoprics, clergy and even those who identify as Orthodox. What has not happened is a genuine religious revival.

Over the last generation, the priest continues, “an obvious sympathy for religion and the Church has appeared,” but “the majority of the population conceives religion not according tot heir personal experience or the experience of church life but under the influence of external informational such as the media.”

Under those conditions, Solovyev argues, “an individual can define himself as an Orthodox Christian, but the fruits of faith are given through religious experience, and this experience is something that in the overwhelming majority of cases, people do not now have.” Instead, they focus on rituals and on collective identities.

In fact, he says, “the peoples of Russia have conceived religion as a cultural phenomenon assisting in the formation of ‘ethno-cultural and civic identity’” rather than as something involving individual spirituality and behavior. In the absence of the latter, it is wrong to speak of a religious revival. Instead, what there has been is a lot of activity but little spiritual growth.

Much of this view of religion and of this religious activity enjoys the active support of the government, and both these things too set the situation today at odds with the end of the tsarist period when the regime sought to control the growth of religious faith rather than allowing it to flourish.

This is a bitter lesson for today, Father Solovyev says; but it is an important one. And it is a reminder that “in church life, triumphalism [of the kind that the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian government now display] is just as dangerous as alarmism” that characterized Orthodoxy more than a century ago.   

Russian Media in Former Soviet Republics Not Promoting Russian World, Khatuntsev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 17 -- Many in the non-Russian countries around the Russian Federation and many who analyze the situation there assume that the Russian-language media in those countries represents a kind of “soft power” for Moscow. On occasion that may be true, but a new survey of this media in three countries reaches the opposite conclusion.

            APN commentator Stanislav Khatuntsev says that “on the whole, in the ‘Russian’ press” of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, “there is nothing really Russian” besides the language and even that is being compromised and that what Moscow thinks is promoting pro-Russian positions in fact is promoting the reverse (apn.ru/index.php?newsid=40505).

            “There is absolutely nothing to be surprised at in this,” the Russian nationalist says. Today, the Russian state doesn’t promote Russian national interests but serves only as, in the worse of V.L. Tsymbursky, “a corporation for the disposal” of the natural wealth of “Great Russia.”

            Russia today “does not protect either the Russian media abroad or Russia’s deepest interests,” Khatuntsev says, “but only the interests of corporations like Gazprom and Rosatom and privileged members of this corporation.” It doesn’t both “even to formulate national interests,” as anyone who considers the Russian-language media abroad can see.

            In support of this argument, the APN writer gives examples from papers in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. In Ukraine, Argumenty i fakty. Ukraina doesn’t follow Russian orthographic rules but rather writes “v Ukraine” and not “na Ukraine.” But that is the least of its problems from a Russian point of view.

            It celebrates Ukrainian nationalists and Kyiv’s drive to become part of the West, it treats Russia as the enemy and talks about the Russian occupation of Crimea and the Donbass, and it presents only bad news about Russia while featuring positive stories about Ukraine itself and its Western “partners.”

            Before it was shuttered a month ago, Komsomolskaya prava v Belarusi was no better. It too violated Russian orthography by referring to that republic as Belarus rather than Belorussia as Russians do, and it did not display any positive sympathies for Russia preferring instead to talk about Belarus and the West, Khatuntsev says.

            Komsomolskaya pravda v Kazakhstane doesn’t violate Russian spelling rules as often but it promotes Kazakhstan values rather than Russian ones. It covers the Kazakh president almost as much as the Russian media in the Russian Federation cover Vladimir Putin, and it talks about Kazakhstan’s ties with the West rather than its historic links with Russia.

            Khatuntsev’s article represents a useful correction to the sometimes true but all-too-easy assumption that Russian media in the non-Russian countries is invariably pro-Moscow in its messaging at least from a Russian nationalist perspective. What is worrisome is that such articles in the Russian capital may be harbingers of a change in Moscow’s policies toward these papers.

            If that should prove to be the case and if they should become nothing more than Moscow mouthpieces, the odds are that they would see their readership decline even more than it has and that the Russian state would be forced to recognize that it has lost yet another channel for influencing opinion in these countries.

Are Depopulating Russian Regions around Moscow about to be Amalgamated?

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 17 – The Russian population is set to decline by more than a million people each year, the result of excess deaths over births and the failure of immigration to make up the shortfall. The impact of this decline is perhaps greatest in Siberia and the Far East, but it is hitting the predominantly ethnic Russian regions around Moscow.

            They are seeing their population decline rapidly with ever more people choosing to work in the capital and ultimately move there, and that in turn has sparked discussions within the government about amalgamating some or all of them into a single Moscow-centered “conurbation,” the Nezygar telegram channel says (t.me/russica2/41800).

            The Russian oblast most likely to be absorbed into this new structure, the channel says, are Kaluga, Tula, Yaroslavl, Ryazan, Vladimir and Smolensk, whose combined population is approximately five million people but whose working age adults increasingly are part of the capital’s economy.

            The possibility that they might be absorbed by Moscow has generated a debate among independent experts. Sergey Skripnikov of the Higher School of Economics says that in his view there is no reason to unite them administratively even though economically they are already forming a single unit (akcent.site/mneniya/16987).

            But Konstantin Kalachev, head of the Political Experts Group, says that depopulation of these oblasts represents a serious threat, one that the center does not have any obvious answer for. As a result, the Russian capital could be surrounded by a depopulated region, something that would isolate it even more than it is at present.

            Given that the differences in population between Moscow and these regions are only going to increase, it is likely that ever more officials will see regional amalgamation of these predominantly ethnic Russian regions as an entirely natural and reasonable step, however much it will further imbalance what is left of federal arrangements in the country.

Bolsheviks Made Russians an Ethnic Group, But Many Russian Nationalists Today Reject That

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 17 – Yevgeny Fyodorov, a United Russia Duma deputy, argues that “not everyone understands that initially there was no such thing as a Russian ethnos; rather, Russians were a unifying term for the entire state” and that the Bolsheviks, by making Russians an ethnic group, “destroyed the Russian state” (t.me/DvuglavyiOrel/5504).

            His words, of course, reflect the fact that in the only pre-1917 census, there was no question about nationality because the tsarist authorities did not divide people on that basis and instead viewed the tsar’s subjects as Russians. The ethnic data later researchers have derived from the 1896 census are derived from declarations about language and religion.

            Only after the Bolsheviks came to power did the authorities make nationality a key identity. Typically, Russian nationalists, including Vladimir Putin, criticize this action because they believe that nationality became the basis for the formation of the union republics which in turn ultimately led to the demise of the USSR.

            But Fyodorov’s observation reflects something else as well, the efforts of the Putin administration to downgrade the importance of ethnicity by promoting a common non-ethnic Russian (rossiisky) identity, by reducing the importance of ethnicity relative to language, and by allowing citizens of Russia to declare more than one ethnicity.

            These three things have all come to a head in the current Russian census, and the last has opened the door to a contest between those who want to do anything to keep the share of Russians above 80 percent and those who hope to cut the share of ethnic Russians so as to protect both non-Russians and the multi-national status of the Russian society and state.

            In a path-breaking article on the Idel.Real portal, Prague-based commentator Kharun Sidorov argues that this division has created a new contest with new participants over what nationalities Russian citizens declare themselves to be not only for the census but more generally (idelreal.org/a/31502982.html).

            Traditionally, both ethnic Russians and non-Russian nationalities have called on those in their respective categories to identify as Russians or non-Russians. But now members of both are urging anyone who has at least some ancestors in one or the other to identify not as they have but in terms of those ancestors regardless of what they feel themselves to be.

            Some non-Russian activists have called on people who have any non-Russian background to identify as members of their ancestors’ nationality both to defend these non-Russian nationalities but also to ensure that the share of those identifying as Russians does not rise and give rise to a Russian nation state in which their rights will be compromised.

            Non-Russians took the lead in this effort, but not surprisingly, Russian nationalists have responded with many urging people with any Russian background or even a sense of being Russian in terms of values to identify as ethnic Russians. Such efforts have attracted less attention, but they may matter more.

            On the one hand, by calling on those with any Russian background to identify as Russian, Russian nationalists may succeed in keeping the share of ethnic Russians in the population above 80 percent, the level they insist means that Russia is a nation state with minorities rather than the multi-national state the Soviets and the Russian government have proclaimed.

            But on the other, as Sidorov also points out, this effort means a change in the meaning of the Russian nation. It will no longer consist of people with certain objective characteristics like language but rather include some who identify in terms of the values of what the nationalists see as the state nation.

            Those calling on anyone with any Russian ties to identify as an ethnic Russian “constantly assert that Russian is not a nationality but some special state of the spirit” and cite the observation of philosopher Ivan Ilin who said that his father was a Turk, his mother was a Greek, but he was “a Russian man.”

            In the short term, this may have the Kremlin the 80 percent Russian share of the population it wants and even provide new fuel for the center’s drive against non-Russian republics, languages, and nations. But in the longer term, as other Russian nationalists recognize, it will dilute the meaning of the Russian nation.

            At a minimum, it will return Russia to the situation in was in before 1917 when the state identified people not on ethnic grounds but on linguistic and religious ones. But it will do so after a period in which many non-Russians have developed their identity and thus will view such an effort to turn the clock back as a threat to themselves.

            They will resist, and the center will then discover that the Russian nation on which the Kremlin thought it could rely to dominate non-Russians and attract ethnic Russians from abroad will be replaced by a shadow of its former self, one that will prove incapable of performing either of the tasks the current rulers of Russia have set for it.