Shamil Battalion from Daghestan Now Fighting Russian Forces in Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 29 – Moscow’s use of non-Russians and Cossacks in Ukraine has received far more attention than the appearance of non-Russian units there that are taking part in the fight against Russian aggression. But there are a number of them: the latest to appear is the Imam Shamil battalion consisting of Daghestanis.

            Named for the Islamic divine who led the North Caucasian resistance to the advance of tsarist forces in that region in the 19^th century, the new unit is of as yet unknown size but is committed to defeating Russians first in Ukraine and then in Daghestan and across the North Caucasus.

            Its commander, Magomed Saypulayev, says that his group began to fight Russia “ten to fifteen years ago” but recently decided to join the battle in Ukraine against Russian imperialism there  (kavkazr.com/a/dagestanskiy-bataljon-imeni-imama-shamilya-vystupit-v-voyne-na-storone-ukrainy-/32106693.html).

            There are also three Chechen units fighting on the side of Ukraine – the Dudayev Battalion, the Mansur Battalion, and a Chechen unit within the Ukrainian army. Akhmed Zakayev, leader of the Ichkerian government in exile, says these represent the rebirth of the Ichkerian army (newcaucasus.com/nc-other/21761-ahmed-zakaev-v-ukraine-vozrozhdaetsya-armiya-ichkerii.html).

            In addition to these units, there have been numerous non-Russians from elsewhere in the North Caucasus and the Russian Federation who have made their way to Ukraine to fight for Kyiv against Russia in the hopes that Moscow’s defeat there will open the way for their freedom and independence.

Given Official Silence, Russians Desperately Turning to Internet to Find Out Where Bomb Shelters Are

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 1 – Russia has almost 16,000 facilities which can be used as bomb shelters, but officials are not telling the population where they are lest in doing so they might spread panic. But given Putin’s talk about nuclear war, Russians are worried; and every day, ever more are turning to the Internet to find out where the shelters are, Lesya Dudko says.

            One of the problems is that there are many fake news sites about bomb shelters that are already spreading panic, the Sovershenno Sekretno journalist says; and the most people who turn to the Internet, the more frightened they are becoming and the more reluctant officials are to provide any information at all (sovsekretno.ru/articles/v-poiskakh-bomboubezhishcha/).

            But two facts have surfaced that are causing many Russians to be concerned. On the one hand, it is now being widely reported that the government, in order to save money, has not been maintaining existing bomb shelters for the public since 2012 because officials at that time did not believe war was a serious threat.

            And on the other, there has been a boom in the construction of private bomb shelters for those wealthy enough to be able to afford them. (For details on that boom and the costs of the often prohibitive costs of such shelters, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-real-boom-in-russia-rush-to.html.)

            Not only are most Russians discovering yet again that their government has left them in the lurch, but they are almost certainly feeling more hostility toward members of the elite close to the powers that be who have the ability to buy themselves this form of security when the rest of the country is left without it.

One in Every Four Students at Russia’s Top Universities Plans to Move Abroad, Survey Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 1 – A survey of 3500 undergraduate and graduate students at Russia’s leading universities finds that one in every four of them plans to move abroad to live and work, yet another way in which the brain drain from Putin’s Russia is continuing and harming the future of the country.

            Not surprisingly, Russian officials are presenting the results of this survey as an indication that everything is fine, pointing out that most of those saying they plan to leave have no clear intentions and that three out of four of the students say they don’t plan to go (yugtimes.com/news/84420 and thinktanks.by/publication/2022/11/01/iz-rossii-planiruyut-relotsirovatsya-pochti-25-protsentov-studentov.html).

            But even if not all of the 25 percent saying they plan to leave do so, the fact that they are making such declarations in the course of a survey whose participants are likely to be identifiable to officials suggests a level of disaffection with the government among the next generation of the best educated that has to be worrisome to the authorities.

            And if as seems likely a sizeable proportion of that quarter do leave and if as seems possible given the upper trend line in this regard even more do, Russia will have lost much of the replacement generation for the best and the brightest.

‘Every Reich Needs Its ‘Jews’ – and for Putin’s, They are the LGBTs, Khots Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 28 – Fascist regimes desperately need not only foreign enemies against whom they can go to war and blame for any problems within the country but enemies within who can be portrayed as working with these foreigners against the state and its people, Aleksandr Khots says.

            In short, the Russian commentator says, “any Reich is in dire need of having its own “Jews” so it will be able to bind the majority of the population to it on the basis of fear, hatred and blood.” And the Putin regime is using the LGBT community in this role (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=635BA62B8765E).

            Like Germany’s Nuremberg laws which were overturned after Hitler was defeated, Khots says, new legislation against the LGBT community of Russia will be abolished after Putin and his regime are gone. Indeed, this legislation will become yet another reason for bringing Putin and his ilk before an international tribunal.

            At the current stage of imperial collapse and “against the backdrop of a lost war,” the Kremlin is actively seeking some group to channel social hatred away from itself and believes it has found one in the LGBT community. But whatever success the regime has in doing so, it will suffer a far higher price.

            Not only will it guarantee that it will face a future international tribunal for crimes against humanity, but it will suffer because such legislation and programs will spark a new outflow of people from Russia, one that may be far larger and have far more serious consequences for the economy and the country than anyone now believes.

            In fact, Khots argues, the new anti-LGBT legislation, “which imitates protection against the enemy” not only “disfigures the country” but undermines the current regime. “Thank God,” he says, “the regime doesn’t understand this and thus is shooting itself in the foot to the surprise of the world,” another instance of “Kremlin absurdity on the march.”

Divide between Russian and Non-Russian Émigré Opposition Groups Deepens

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 31 – The League of Free Nations of Post-Russia says that it will not recognize “any political forces and centers which seek to justify the preservation of the Russian Federation in its current form” and which insist that deputies chosen under the perverted system of elections in Russia speak for anyone but themselves.

            This declaration comes in response to plans by some former Russian deputies now in emigration to hold a Congress of Peoples Deputies in Poland November 4-7 in order to work out a political agenda (idel-ural.org/archives/zayavlenie-ligi-svobodnyh-naczij-otnositelno-sozyva-sezda-narodnyh-deputatov-rf-v-polshe/ and idelreal.org/a/32109088.html).

            “We do not need arbiters from Moscow whether they are from the powers that be or the opposition,” the League statement continues. “We are open for dialogue and contacts only with those who publicly support the right of enslaved peoples to establish independent states.” Talk with the others would be meaningless.

            According to the League, “the process of forming a new Russian state must be voluntary and take place exclusively on the basis of those subjects, the legislative organs of which call for inclusion in a new federation,” something that would be possible only after separation and the holding of genuine elections.

            The Leagues stresses that regardless of what those meeting at the upcoming Congress think, “elections in the Russian Federation disappeared long before 2014,” something that involved as well the banning of all non-Russian political parties “13 years before the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea.”

            The Russian and non-Russian emigrations have always coexisted in a less than amicable way given that their goals are antithetical, with the Russian one insisting on the preservation of the existing borders of the country and the non-Russian ones insistent that all the peoples of the empire must have the right to choose whether to be part of it or independent.

            The declaration of the League deepens this divide and likely will make it far more difficult for the two sides in this debate to cooperate in the future. 

Putin Returning Russia ‘Not to 1937 but to 1973,’ Cherkasov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 30 – Vladimir Putin and his regime are suppressing independent views not by Stalinist means but by those employed under Brezhnev, according to Aleksandr Cherkasov, the head of the Memorial human rights center. Were the current Kremlin ruler seeking to go back to 1937 rather than 1973, massive protests would be far more likely.

            According to Cherkasov, the number of political prisoners in Russia today as registered by Memorial is 502. That is far closer to the figures of Brezhnev’s time than to those of Stalin’s. Were it otherwise, the regime would either have to become far more repressive or it would face popular risings (idelreal.org/a/32105498.html).

            The reason the Putin system is effective in repressing popular feelings is exactly the same as the reason the Brezhnev one was: the number imprisoned was small but the number who were warned through what has been called “prophylactic” measures short of prison is 100 times greater, something that sends a signal to society that the regime is serious and can get tougher.

            In Brezhnev’s times, in fact, fewer than a hundred Soviet citizens were sent to prison, Cherkasov continues, but far more were warned and thus intimidated. “We have returned not to 1937 but to 1973; and in 1973, there were no Maidans in Moscow or in Kyiv, Vilnius, or Tbilisi … The system of control now has returned to the classical Brezhnev times.”

            As many are now inclined to forget, he points out, “all the mass social movements” which led to the transformation and then demise of the USSR began only after 1987 when Gorbachev ended this Brezhnevite practice of repression which had kept the situation under control for almost 30 years.

            Putin clearly believes and with some justif

Putin has Transformed Russia’s Place in the World: It’s No Longer in the East of Europe but in the West of Asia, Muscovites Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 31 – More than a century ago, Rudyard Kipling famously observed that “the Russian is a delightful person until he tucks in his shirt and imagines he is the most easterly of Europeans rather than the most westerly of Asians.” Now, Muscovites are saying that Putin has corrected Russians who thought otherwise.

            According to an anecdote in the latest collection of Russian jokes collected by Moscow journalist Tatyana Pushkaryova, residents of the Russian capital are suggesting that Putin has changed Russia’s place in the world: their country is no longer in the east of Europe but in the west of Asia (publizist.ru/blogs/107374/44317/-).

            Among the best of the rest:

·       Putin’s special military operation gives Russians both a chance to go to prison if they refuse to serve in it and a chance to get out of jail if they agree to do so.

·       If Ukraine is an American colony where Washington dictates everything, why shouldn’t Russians conclude that their country is a Chinese one in which Beijing decides everything?

·       Putin historians have come up with a brief history of the USSR. According to them, collective farmers travelled to Moscow for sausage but couldn’t go because they didn’t have passports. If they did reach the city anyway, they couldn’t purchase sausages because they didn’t have any money. But if they did manage to buy some, they couldn’t east it because it was made of toilet paper which didn’t exist in the USSR.

·       Moscow’s gay clubs have cancelled the VIP cards of all deputies who are promoting the Duma bill banning LGBT propaganda.

·       The defense ministry demands that all Russians be dressed up as mobilized soldiers for Halloween.

·       The tsars had a law on serfdom; Putin has now introduced in its place the obligations of serfdom.

·       Russians have been divided into two classes: the insane who go to Ward 6 and those who are members of the wrong nationalities as listed on Paragraph Five of their passports.

·       Rulers who surround themselves with pygmies create the illusion that they are kings.