Sufi Order in Bashkortostan Comes Out in Favor of Putin’s War in Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 11 – The Hakkanites, a branch of the Naqshbandi sufi order in Bashkortostan with many followers in the cultural elite there, has come out in support of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine; and their activities in that regard have been joined by Mufti Talgat Tajuddin, head of the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate in Ufa.

            But Bashkir observers say that neither has taken this step from religious motives but rather out of a desire to curry favor with the authorities in Ufa and Moscow who have sometimes looked at both in less than entirely positive terms, an explanation that undoubtedly applies to others as well (idelreal.org/a/31900771.html).

            However that may be, it is nonetheless striking that a branch of the Naqshbandi sufi order is taking such a public position in this way. After all, it was that order which played a key role in the defense of the Muslim communities against the advance of Russian forces in the 19^th century and of Soviet ones in the 20^th. 

‘You’re Not Peter I! You’re Adolf II,’ Russians Say of Putin

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 11 – Vladimir Putin’s efforts to promote himself as a Russian leader in the style of Peter I are backfiring with at least some Russians now saying “you’re not Peter I; you’re Adolf II,” an obvious reference to the similarities between the current Kremlin leader and the fuehrer of the Third Reich.

            This is perhaps the sharpest but far from the only suggestive Russian anecdote Moscow journalist Tatyana Pushkaryova offers in her latest collection (publizist.ru/blogs/107374/43161/i). Among the best of the rest are the following:

·       Putin has transformed Russia into a real wonderland where everything means something other than it is supposed to, but his greatest achievement is still ahead: after he dies, the entire country will immediately fly to a paradise of one kind or another.

 ·       A senior Duma deputy has propose doing away with science-based medicine and using traditional cures instead. He may not succeed in doing that, but he has made an important contribution to the task of giving the deputies yet another victory over those who write anecdotes.

 

·       A young Muscovite woman escaped arrest for having a backpack showing the colors of the Ukrainian flag when she was able to show that her New Balance sneakers had something that looked like “a z.” The police knew they didn’t dare arrest her given that.

 ·       The Russian government has finally show that it favors torture and will support jailors who use it. It has done so by banning the Committee against Torture. If the regime is against that group, it is all too obvious what it is for.

 ·       Yet another Russian paradox is emerging: Putin’s friends are stealing, but Navalny’s friends are the ones the police search.

 ·       Librarians are taking books off the shelves if they offend the regime. The time has not yet come for burning them, however.

 ·       Now that Russia is producing its own laptops without foreign components there are only a few problems: sometimes the carburetor jams.

 ·       Russia has zero chance of becoming like North Korea. First, it would have to stop all the stealing going on, something that is beyond the realm of the possible.

 ·       Creating a government in exile is not as hard as many imagine. Russian police do it all the time. All they need is an order and money to pay the guards. 

At Current Rate of Losses, Russian Army Can Continue to Fight in Ukraine for a Very Long Time to Come Unless Ukraine Gets More Arms from the West, Sokolov Says

Paul Goble,

            Staunton, June 11 – Boris Sokolov, a Russian scholar who has specialized in the study of Russian military losses in the past, says the figures Kyiv is providing about Russian losses are accurate but those losses, which now amount to 53,000 dead, will not be sufficient to force Russia to end the war.

            Only if Ukraine gets more and better weapons from the West will it have the chance to increase Russian losses from about 200 to 300 a day to 1,000 a day as they were in the first weeks of the Russian invasion and thus force Moscow to consider pulling out or negotiating an end to the conflict on that basis (graniru.org/War/m.285295.html).

            Sokolov, author of perhaps the most authoritative study of Russian war losses over the past century (Human Losses of Russia and the USSR in the Wars of the 20^th and 21^st Century (in Russian; Moscow, 2022), presents data showing that Kyiv has been telling the truth about Russian losses, despite some criticism in the West that it has not.

            His most important conclusions, however, are these: “at the current level of losses, Russia will be able to fight in Ukraine for many years even without a general mobilization” and “Ukraine can defeat Russia on the battlefield only if it has a better army and at least a parity in arms.”

            Ukraine has achieved the former, but the achievement of the second “depends entirely on the United States and other NATO countries.”

Unlike in Other Countries, Wealthier Russians Consume More Fast Food than Poorer Ones Do, HSE Study Finds

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 11 – In most countries, scholars says, most of the consumers of fast food are either young or poor, but in Russia, the patrons of fast food restaurants are older and better off, a reflection of both the need for greater income to purchase such food and the more rapid pace of life of those better off, a newly published HSE study says.

            The study, based on a survey of 4008 Russian adults in 2017, has now been published in the current issue of Economics and Human Biology (sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1570677X22000430?dgcid=author) and summarized on the HSE webpage (iq.hse.ru/news/655003753.html).

            The study concluded that even though older and better off adults are concerned about the health consequences of fast food, most adult fast-food consumers in Russia are working full time at one or more jobs. It also found that the probability of consuming fast food increased with city size, limited only if workplaces had canteens of their own.

            The findings of this study explain both why the closure of Western fast-food establishments hit a more influential part of the population than many might have expected and also why this group was successful in lobbying the Kremlin to open Russian substitutes for Western firms now shuttered there.

            The regime had its own reasons for opening the substitute shops: time is money, and fast-food establishments allow people to take less time off from work. Over the longer term, of course, this pattern may mean that better off Russians will suffer the heath consequences of this kind of diet.

Moscow May Re-Establish SMERSH for Work in Russian-Occupied Portions of Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 11 – Igor Korotchenko, a retired Russian colonel who edits the National Defense journal and serves on the defense ministry’s social council, says that Moscow should create a structure within the special services analogous to the Soviet SMERSH to combat diversionary activities on Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine.

            He says Russia needs such a structure to fight diversionary and partisan activities in these places and that it should resemble “the fourth chief directorate of the NKVD of the USSR which also carried out the struggle against Ukrainian nationalists” and be part of the Russian FSB (ura.news/news/1052561084).

            Korotchenko’s proposal is interesting not only because it represents yet another effort to revive Soviet institutions but also because of what it says about Moscow assessments of the situation in the occupied regions of Ukraine. It suggests that at least some in the Russian capital have a far more negative view of conditions there than Kremlin propagandists are suggesting.

            The original SMERSH – a Russian acronym for “Death to Spies” – was directed not only against espionage and partisan activity but also at disloyal elements within the Soviet military and was involved in checking on the reliability of soldiers and civilians returning from captivity whom Stalin suspected were a threat to his rule.

            The editor does not mention this second set of functions – to do so would undoubtedly appear to be defeatist and disloyal – but SMERSH during its activities between 1943 and 1946 was far more involved with than with the first. And that raises the possibility that Putin and his regime may be almost as suspicious about conditions in the army as Stalin was earlier.

            If that is the case, then such a body would likely be involved in searching out and punishing, quite possibly in extra-legal means, anyone the FSB deems disloyal in any way first in the civilian population of Ukraine but then and particularly in Russian military and civilian personnel sent into Ukraine.

Belarusian NCA in Moscow Links Ethnic Belarusians in Russian Structures with Those Arriving from Belarus

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 11 – Many ethnic minorities and diasporas in the Russian Federation have their own national cultural autonomies, organizations intended to provide a sense of community and to engage in various forms of social and publicistic activity. But there is one that is especially interesting because it challenges Putin’s vision and his policies.

            That is the National Cultural Association of Belarusians in Moscow and the all-Russian federation of which it is a part because the group promotes Belarusian identity even though the Kremlin leader denies that Belarusians are a separate nation and is seeking to promote a union state that will effectively absorb Belarus into the Russian Federation.

            And this conflict between what the Belarusian groups in the Russian Federation are doing and what the Kremlin says it wants makes a new article on the Nazaccent portal, “The Belarusians of Moscow Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” especially intriguing (nazaccent.ru/content/38444-belorusy-moskvy-vchera-segodnya-zavtra.html).

            While most of its activities are unlikely to cause the Putin regime concern – such as public shows, holiday celebrations, and dance groups – three are more problematic: the linking of ethnic Belarusians in the Moscow elite with newly arrived Belarusians, the promotion of the Belarusian language, and the maintenance of an active Internet portal at belros.org/.

 

            Russian officials not surprisingly view NCAs as a means of integrating non-Russians into Russian society and in many cases there is little doubt that they do just that. But the Belarusian one is nonetheless worth attention because it would seem under the circumstances to be supporting an identity that Putin is not prepared to admit even exists.

 

To Defend Nation under Attack, Tatars Must Focus on Original Meaning of ‘Republic,’ Garayev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 11 – With its republic structures under attack, Danis Garayev says, Tatars must focus on the original meaning of “republic” and work to strengthen that so that Moscow’s attacks on the more recent meaning of that term will not have such a negative impact and may even be turned back.

            The head of the Kazan Laboratory of Social Prediction and Warning at the Institute of Pedagogy, Psychology and Social Problems points out that the origin of the term “republic” is to be found in the Latin “res publica,” that is “the public thing” or more generally “the common task” (milliard.tatar/news/cto-znacit-byt-respublikoi-pocemu-dlya-tatarstana-eto-osobenno-vazno-1754).

            It referred to efforts by the community to build shared infrastructure and thus to acquire a sense of community. Only much later, in modern times, did republic take on the meaning of a political community that was able to govern itself through popular vote. Tatarstan was created when that definition was ascendant but now that it isn’t, Tatars need to remember the earlier one.

             The Tatars both in the republic itself and in the diaspora must now focus on the construction of public facilities which can support the nation even if its “republic” institutions are under attack because the very act of coming together to build such things will help maintain the nation until the time comes when it can recover the republic in the modern sense.

             This is less a defeatist message than an acknowledge that at a time when the Kremlin seems committed to the destruction of the formal institutions of the republics and even of the republics themselves, there is a great deal that the Tatars and other non-Russians can do to support national identity and thus be ready to recover what they are losing eventually.