Putin’s ‘Russian World’ Comes Not from Russian Culture but from Uncultured Lumpen and the Views of that Class Must be Changed, Pastukhov Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 4 --  The intellectual framework, if one can call it that, behind Putin’s “Russian world,” Vladimir Pastukhov says, does not come from Russian culture but from the lack of culture of the Russian lumpen which wants to see everyone else as inferior in order to reassure itself of its own superiority.

            The London-based Russian analyst says that understanding this is fundamentally important because “Putin’s strength is not that he doesn’t idealize the Russian people but that he consciously and intentionally uses its dormant vicious instincts for the strengthening of his own power over the country” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=63B58DDCD0A3B).

            And consequently, even when Putin leaves the scene and the actuarial tables make that inevitable and when the imperialism he is promoting no longer is the focus of state media, this kind of imperialism won’t disappear. It will simply “fall asleep, go underground and survive like the moral outcast” it is.

            Because that is so, any real guarantee against a future return to “national Bolshevik practices won’t be a change in the political regime – that is, after all, a minimum requirement – but rather a long-term effort to eradicate the ‘imperial’ stereotypes which have been formed over centuries in the consciousness” of the Russian people.

            Achieving that, even if everything is done correctly, will take a minimum of decades, Pastukhov concludes.

Putin Attacked Ukraine because World Refused to Acknowledge His Right to Do So, Skobov Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 4 – Many in Russia and the West do not believe Putin when he says that with his special military operation in Ukraine, he is seeking to restore the complete sovereignty of Russia, Aleksandr Skobov says. And not believing that, such people keep hoping that the Kremlin leader is simply bluffing and will come to his senses over time.

            But those are fundamental mistakes, the Moscow commentator says. Putin wants a world in which the strong can attack the weak and invaded Ukraine precisely because the current international system refuses to recognize his right to do so. Therefore, he feels compelled to destroy that system (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=63B5CE39032AF).

            Once that is recognized, Skobov continues, it becomes far clearer what Putin is really about, why he has no intention of stopping no matter how much suffering his army and people have to undergo, and why the only sensible reaction to what he is about is to help Ukraine secure his complete military defeat.

            Putin has no real goal other than achieving the power to rule over others both at home and abroad, something that sets him apart from Soviet leaders who actually did have ideological goals, however horrific. And what he thinks and is doing is simply an updated version of Nazism, the commentator and frequent Putin critic says.

            What the Kremlin leader is doing and what must be stopped as soon as possible is the formation of “a new society,” one “free from the cultural and moral restrictions of the modern world and not embarrassed by its cynicism, cruelty and aggressiveness.” If his war in Ukraine goes on for a long time, he may succeewd in making this a self-sustaining trend.

            Because that is the case, those who say Putin can be changed by depleting Russian resources are “fundamentally wrong.” That “won’t force Putin to ‘return to common sense and begin looking for peace.” Instead, “only  complete victory” over his forces “can stop the destruction of the international legal order.”

            According to Skobov, “the longer this war drags on, the more forces such a victory will require,” exactly the opposite of what many in the West have now convinced themselves of. And that means that the best strategy for the West is to give Ukraine enough weapons to go on the offensive everywhere and defeat Putin and his invaders.

            The West needs to recognize that it is still necessary to fight in order to have a world in which stronger countries will not assume that they have the right to invade others, he argues. And once Russia is defeated in this war, then the West can take up the task of curing Russia from its infection with the Putin version of Nazism.

            The more complete and the more rapid the Russian defeat and the Ukrainian victory are, the easier this will be.

1918 German Revolution Contains Important Lessons for Russians when Putin Regime Collapses, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 4 – In the Russian of Vladimir Putin, the present and the future are discussed almost exclusively in terms of the past even by those who oppose the current Kremlin leader. Sometimes this leads to a dead end, but sometimes the past can offer extremely valuable lessons for Russians.

            An example of this is provided by Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter, in an article today in which he discussed the lessons the 1918 German revolution contains for Russians worried about what will happen when the Putin regime collapses and who want to avoid chaos and revolutionary change (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=63B58A6F7DA8E).

            When the Putin regime finally collapses – and this will happen next year or perhaps a little later, the commentator says – one of two groups will come to power, the moderates or the radicals. Given Russian experience, most people now fear that the radicals will win out and that everything now in place will be swept away as has happened twice since 1917.

            But it can happen that moderates will win the day if they recognize that they need to cooperate with the forces of order in the existing Putin regime and if those forces recognize that holding on to the current system to the bitter end will not only ensure that the radicals will win but that they, the current stakeholders, will be swept away.

            Germany in 1918 benefited from the fact that there were both moderates who recognized they had to make common cause with some in the existing regime to prevent radicalization and revolution and leaders within the existing government machine who understood that they could survive only by making alliances with the moderates whom they had always hated.

            Had one of the other of these forces not been present and not been willing to compromise to prevent collapse and disaster, an extreme revolution almost certainly would have broken out. And that carries lessons for both Russian moderates and for current regime supporters as to how they should act when the Putin regime enters its death agony.

            If moderates refuse to cooperate with those within the regime or if those within the regime refuse to have anything to do with the moderates, then the future is bleak, Gallyamov says, with another destructive revolution almost inevitable, one that will again sweep away the moderates, those within the current elites, and Russia’s future along with them.

Eight Years Ago, Moscow began Shift from Promoting a Non-Ethnic Russian Nation to Building an Ethnic Russian One that Included Non-Russians, Gaponenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 4 – In Soviet times, communist ideology required that Moscow always make publicly distinguish between an ethnic Russian nation and the supra-ethnic multi-national Soviet people, Aleksandr Gaponenko says. But in fact, he continues, the Soviets created a Soviet nation despite making that distinction.

            That might be a matter of historical curiosity, the Riga-based Russian commentator says, were it not for one thing: After some initial confusion, post-Soviet elites about eight years ago shifted from trying to create a non-ethnic Russian nation to forming an ethnic Russian one that includes the non-Russian nations as well (apn.ru/index.php?newsid=42929).

            Non-Russians have always suspected that what the Soviets actually meant when they talked about a Soviet people was in fact a Russian nation that would assimilate all the others; and they believe now that talk about a non-ethnic Russian nation is in the same way a cover for the promotion of an ethnic Russian nation to which they are doomed to assimilate.

            Now, Gaponenko has acknowledged that they are right; and that at least since 2014 when Putin carried out his Anschluss of Ukraine’s Crimea, Moscow has been actively and increasingly openly focusing on the formation of an ethnic Russian nation that is charged with assimilating all the others.

            His comments are likely to be taken by many non-Russians as a rare open admission by those close to the Kremlin that what the non-Russians have always feared is in fact government policy and to cause some of them to resist even more strongly efforts to have them identify with a non-ethnic Russian nation they now have more reason to believe is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

            Gaponenko makes two other arguments that are also going to play into the debate about collective identity in the Russian Federation. On the one hand, he insists that a nation is always built from above by elites rather than from below as the result of the recognition of a common fate by large segments of a population.

            And on the other, he says that the real possibility for the construction of an ethnic Russian nation including the non-Russians came only this past year when the Western-oriented media elite fled to the West to avoid service in Ukraine, a flight that has opened the way for the creation of a genuine Russian nation committed to absorbing everyone else.

Soviets Drew Borders in Central Asia Not to Create Conflicts Among Republics but to Prevent Elites and Masses in Any of Them from Uniting, Umarov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 4 – Because the lack of correspondence between political and ethnic borders among the countries of Central Asia has sparked so many border disputes, Temur Umarov says, many assume that the reason the Soviets drew those borders in the 1920s was to prevent any effort to unite the region against Moscow.

            “I don’t think the Soviets initially tried to lay the seeds for these conflicts,” the regional specialist at the Carnegie Endowment says. “Instead, they “wanted to make it more difficult for the population and the powers within them to negotiate with each other” (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2023/01/03/rossiia-nikogda-ne-byla-tak-uiazvima-pered-stranami-tsentralnoi-azii).

            Umarov’s observation is an important one. The general view is that Moscow divided up Central Asia to prevent the spread of pan-Turkism which the Soviet government viewed as a threat to itself. There can be little doubt that such fears about forestalling outside influences were part of Moscow’s calculations.

            But it is certainly true that the Bolsheviks were interested in preventing any fusion of elites and masses in non-Russian areas and that including significant minorities within each republic was an effective way of blocking that, an approach that reflected among other things the fact that Stalin was simultaneously a party leader and people’s commissar for nationality affairs.

            By not having ethnic and political borders correspond then, Moscow left two poison pills in Central Asia, one that makes it almost certain that elites and masses will have anything but an easy time of reaching an accord and that the elites and masses will each be interested in border wars, albeit for different reasons. 

Putin Wants Russia to Be ‘an Orthodox Iran’ and Himself Its Ayatollah, Orthodox Archpriest Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 4 – Vladimir Putin’s simultaneous commitment to institutionalizing traditional values and his statement that “Orthodoxy is closer to Islam than it is to Catholicism’ show that the Kremlin leader’s “ideal Russia” would be “an Orthodox Iran,’ according to Archpriest Andrey Kudochkin.

            The cleric who is part of the Spanish-Portuguese Bishopric of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Western European exarchate says that if Putin achieves that goal, it would be “a catastrophe” for Russia (ahilla.ru/protoierej-andrej-kordochkin-idealnaya-rossiya-postroennaya-na-traditsionnyh-tsennostyah-eto-pravoslavnyj-iran/).

            The world of those who like Putin want to institutionalize “traditional values” is that of the Middle Ages, Father Andrey says. “Medieval man is religious,” but “at the same time, he has no moral problem with torture, public executions, or starving a city by means of blockade. None of this conflicts with religious rhetoric or talk about morality.”

            Following this paradigm, the cleric continues, “the head of state is not just a manager but an ayatollah who independently interprets spiritual matters while the Church acts as his amplifier. And that is precisely why Putin said that Orthodoxy is closer to Islam than Roman Catholicism.”

            It is also why the Kremlin leader has proclaimed “the martyr’s principle that ‘we as martyrs will go to heaven while our enemies will simply die.’ And it is why Iran’s Shahid drone has become one of the most recognizable symbols” of Putin’s vicious military campaign against Ukrainian cities.

            This is an appalling grotesque, Father Andrey concludes. And a tragedy because one can hardly advance into the future while locking oneself into a mythologized past, a position that portends disaster ahead for Russia just as it has brought disaster to Iran. 

Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic Peoples Declined in Size by 50 Percent between End of Soviet Times and Now, Newly Released Russian Census Results Show

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 4 – The 20 Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic peoples within the current borders of the Russian Federation declined from 3.2 million in 1989, the date of the last Soviet census, to 1.6 million in 2021, the date of the most recent Russian one, according to data released last week by Rosstat, Russia’s state statistical agency.

            The data have been assembled by Finnish scholar Seppo Lallukka and published by the MariUver portal (mariuver.com/2023/01/03/perepis-2021/#more-71674). All but two of these nations declined in number, the exceptions being the Nentsy who increased from 34,200 to 49,600 and the Khanty who increased from 22,300 to 31,500.

            Lallukka also noted that the rate of decline of these groups was far greater than that of the Tatars and the ethnic Russians, yet another indication of just how dire their demographic situation has become.