Russian Complaints about Non-Russian Names of 2023’s First Babies Lead Non-Russians to Call for De-Nazification of Russia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 7 – Most of the time people don’t pay too much attention to babies born to others, but at New Year’s, many media outlets feature stories about the first child to be born in the region where their audience is located. In Russian cities, the first child is often a non-Russian who has been given a non-Russian names, and some Russians are outraged.

            Those angry about the appearance of such children with their names linking them not to Russia but to their own nations have been filling the Internet with complaints so vicious and racist that it has now sparked a response by non-Russians (newizv.ru/news/2023-01-07/russkiy-mir-ili-shabash-novyy-god-v-sotssetyah-nachalsya-s-natsionalisticheskogo-skandala-392708).

            In some cases, the non-Russians have simply called on Russian to show better manners; but in others, they have said that the Russian reaction to their children’s nationality as manifested in their names shows that Russia not Ukraine is where de-Nazification is needed, pointedly reminding the Russians involved that their children are fighting in the Russian army

            And in at least one case, Novyye izvestiya reports, one non-Russian has said that she is so angry about Russian reactions that she will do everything possible to ensure that her children study in a country where fascism has been defeated and denounced, Germany, rather than in Russia, where it hasn’t been either.

For Five Years, Riga-Based Harbin Portal has Sought to Keep Russian Conservatism Alive

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 7 – After the tragic events of 2014, Dimitry Savvin says, many people felt there was “almost nothing left of authentic and historical Russian conservatism.” But in an effort to light a candle rather than curse the darkness, he and others like him created the Harbin internet portal based in Riga but having writers from Russia and around the world.

            “Harbin” has now marked its fifth birthday, a long time in the émigré world, and Savvin, its editor in chief, now offers a commentary about what he and others like him feared after the Crimean Anschluss and what they thought they could achieve by such an effort – and in fact have (harbin.lv/kharbin-pyat-let-puti).

            Five years ago, he writes, it was obvious that “the last islands of White Intransigence which had existed in the emigration were dissolving into the swamp of National-Bolshevik ‘patriotism’ and ideas about ‘the ingathering of Russian lands.’ And those who didn’t fall into that swamp fell into the other extreme merging with liberal and even left liberal milieux.”

            In Russia itself, Savvin notes, “the situation was even worse: Russian nationalism which had appeared to have begun to escape the intellectual and mental quagmire of late-Soviet ‘national patriotism’ fell back into it after an interval of 20 years. The cult of May 9, illiterate conspiracy theories and sectarianism began to be called ‘Russian conservatism.’”

            Those who came together to launch “Harbin” knew they couldn’t “stop this collapse.” But they felt that they could “create an alternative to it,” by launching a completely independent sit beholden to no one and dedicated to the proposition that the Soviet and neo-Soviet state are “the main enemies of the Russian people.”

            The “Harbin” community, Savvin writes, committed itself moreover “not just to ‘the preservation of the conservative tradition” but to its development and to defending the idea that no conservative Russian worldview is possible without a true understanding of Orthodox Christian ideas.

 

            How much have we achieved? he asks rhetorically. Less than we hoped but more than we might have. And so the authors of the “Harbin” portal will continue to work, confident in Jesus’ teaching that “some seeds will surely fall into good ground and bring forth fruit a hundredfold.”

Putin has Lost War He Declared in 2007; His ‘Special Operation’ is Only a Doomed Attempt to Reverse That, El Murid Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 7 – In his 2007 Munich speech, Vladimir Putin presented the West with an ultimatum: if the West wanted Russian oil and gas, it had to give Moscow a veto over decisions about the international system. The West rejected that demand and began taking steps to deny Russia that leverage, Anatoly Nesmiyan who blogs under the screen name “El Murid” says.

            Europe long before Putin invaded Ukraine announced plans to end its dependence on Russian oil and gas, the blogger says; and thus the war Putin declared on the West 15 years ago, he has lost. His “special operation” in Ukraine is only a doomed attempt to reverse that defeat, one that has only exacerbated its consequences (publizist.ru/blogs/113683/44844/-).

            The Kremlin leader thought he could be successful in the war he declared in 2007 because of the enormous influx of money from oil and gas sales abroad. But he was wrong in thinking that he and his policies were responsible for that pattern and that it was sustainable for very long.

            “Putin and his clique,” El Murid argues, “in their intellectual poverty ascribed the successes of the raw materials-based Russian economy to themselves. And when the supercycle came to an end and then went into decline, they were not able to understand this” or find within themselves the ability to change curse

            Because power and property are so closely intertwined in the Putin system, the disappearance of wealth inevitably points to the demise of the current ruling class, something its members naturally fear and oppose; but they haven’t been able to come up with a solution and so they have joined Putin in throwing the dice in Ukraine.

            What this highlights, he continues, is that the old model on which the Putin system rests is coming to an end but no new model has yet been adopted. Those in power today won’t give it up easily, El Murid says; but it is already clear that they have “no more chances to hold on than Hitler had to take part in a victory parade on Red Square.”

            The questions remaining are how and when this change will occur. That there will be a struggle is clear and that it may take some time is certain. Everything depends on whether the current Putin elite will simply try to continue act as it has or instead will read the handwriting on the wall and make plans for a transition to a new order.

            If it does the former, it is headed for self-destruction and the destruction of Russia; if the latter, there is at least a chance that the current elite may find a place in a new Russia and that that Russia will survive rather than disappear.

For Putin, Sovereignty Means He can Do Anything He Wants and No One Must be Allowed to Object, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 7 – In his New Year’s message to the Russian people, Vladimir Putin invoked the word “sovereignty” six times, an indication that he has decided to make the pursuit of that the main goal of his policies and of his war in Ukraine rather than smaller and more mundane things like seizing territories that can be quickly lost, Abbas Gallyamov says.

            The term has the additional advantage, the former Putin speechwriter and commentator says, in that it is nebulous and can be invested with whatever meaning the individual using it wants. And because that is so, it is important to keep in mind exactly what Putin means by it in the current context (publizist.ru/blogs/112974/44853/-).

            For Putin, Gallyamov says, sovereignty is something he and Russia must have but that others must not. Thus, he insists that no one must tell him or Russia what to do but that he and Russia have the perfect right to tell others what they can and cannot do. An obvious contradiction but not one that troubles him.

            The core meaning of sovereignty for Putin is that he can “shamelessly impose his will on others, on his own subjects and also on their neighbors so as to be in a position to steal, oppresses and enjoy power and property – and so that no one will interfere.”

            In short, this is now Russia’s “national idea,” the notion that no one must ever disagree with Putin and in the name of which “people are dying.”

 

 

More than One Russian in a Hundred Still Lives in a Communal Apartment and Many More Don’t have Indoor Toilets

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 7 – In the waning days of 2022, the Russian state statistical agency released the last four volumes of data from the latest census. Information about the way in which Russians live is included, and Rosstat may have decided that the horrific picture it paints of Russia today would escape widespread attention.

            The figures from the census are truly disturbing, Novyye izvestiya journalist Sergey Lvov says. In many ways, the most striking of all is that while there are 64 million households in Russia, only 51 million of them were ready to discuss what are known as “improvements” in them (newizv.ru/news/2023-01-07/tualet-kak-nesbytochnaya-mechta-kakoe-blagoustroystvo-domov-pokazala-perepis-rosstata-392732).

            That 13 million chose not to may reflect either their desire not to let outsiders know about how they live or their shame in existing in conditions many had assumed no longer existed in the 21^st century, Lvov suggests. But even those who did answer questions about such improvements show that the situation is not good.

              More than 12.5 million didn’t mention they have electricity either because they haven’t noticed this, don’t think of it as an improvement, or perhaps because they don’t actually have it. In fact, the census reported, more than 600,000 Russian households were explicit in stating that they are not linked to the electric grid of the country.

             Judging from the census data, 12.5 million Russian households don’t have cold water running through pipes, and 24.4 million don’t have hot water supplied that way. But perhaps most disturbing of all is the fact that 2.675 million households are not connected to sewage lines and don’t have their own indoor toilets.

Only 1.4 Percent of Declared Russian Orthodox Believers Attended Christmas Services This Year

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 7 – Pictures of Vladimir Putin attending Christmas services by himself have spread around the world, with many suggesting that they are a clear illustration of his increasing isolation. But far less attention has been paid to the fact that on this high holy day, those in church were vastly outnumbered by those believers who did not go.

            According to the Interior Ministry – and it is emblematic that it should be the agency to report this fact – only 1.3 million Russians attended services, less than one percent of the population of the country and only about 1.4 percent of the number of Russians who say they are followers of the Russian Orthodox Church (newizv.ru/news/2023-01-07/vopros-dnya-pochemu-v-hramy-na-rozhdestvo-hristovo-prishli-vsego-0-9-protsenta-rossiyan-392739).

            Some observers are blaming this low figure on the abnormally cold temperatures that have spread across the Russian Federation. Others suggest that Russians got out of the habit of attending during the pandemic. But most argue that it is a continuation of a long-term trend of declining interest in Orthodoxy in particular and religion in genera.

            All those factors may have played a role, but there may have been an additional one this year: The ROC MP’s outspoken and uncritical support for Putin’s war in Ukraine may have led some of the faithful not to attend, a way of voting with their feet as it were against the church’s violation of the principles that Christianity was founded on and is supposed to defend.

Ethnic Russians Form about 70 Percent of RF Population and Not the 80 Percent Many Think, Sidorov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 6 – The just released nationality data from the latest Russian census has some bad news for those like Vladimir Putin who say Russia is a nation state with small minorities rather than a multi-national country, a claim that is based on Moscow’s insistence that ethnic Russians form 80 percent of the population of the Russian Federation.

            But that claim is without foundation, Kharun Sidorov, a Prague-based commentator on ethnic affairs, says. In 2010, Russians did form 77.71 percent of the part of the population which declared a nationality; but in 2021, they formed only 71.73 percent of that category  (idelreal.org/a/32211336.html).

            This happened not because of a sudden growth among non-Russians but rather the dramatic increase in the number of people sampled by Russian census takers who did not give their nationality, a figure that rose from 5.6 million in 2010 to almost 11 million in the latest census just reported.

            Some of this reflected the difficulties of conducting a census during a pandemic, difficulties that led many of the census takers to use sources other than interviews to fill out census forms, a practice that meant they were able to fill in most data but not all – and especially not nationality – something the census records only if someone provides it personally.

            But most of it, Sidorov says, reflects the declining importance of ethnicity in ethnically homogeneous areas such as the predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts of central Russia. There the numbers of those not declaring a nationality rose dramatically and thus the share of ethnic Russians in the population fell equally so.

             At the same time, in ethnically mixed areas such as the non-Russian republics, he continues, ethnic Russians continued to declare their nationality and to maintain or even increase their share of the population. But because the former group of Russians vastly outnumbers the latter, their overall share of the population has declined.

            In short, Sidorov points out, “the indigenous and authentic Russian population in its own ethnic regions is dying out at rates like those among other indigenous peoples. But it is being preserved or even grown in national republics, judging from everything by means of the assimilation of other weaker peoples.” (stress supplied)

            In Bashkortostan, the growth in the number of ethnic Russians corresponded with the decline in the number of Finno-Ugric and Orthodox-Turkic peoples, a pattern that was repeated in neighboring Tatarstan. And this growth in the number of Russians thus pushed up their percentage of the republic populations and pushed down that of titular nations.

            A very different trend was in evidence among titular nationalities who had religious and or racial barriers to defend themselves against assimilation, Sidorov says. Among these peoples are the Kalmyks, the Tuvins, and the Sakha, all of whom saw their numbers rise and their size relative to that of ethnic Russians in those republics increase.

            Ethnic Russians had largely disappeared from the populations of the eastern and central North Caucasus even before 2010. In the intercensal period of 2010-2021, the share of ethnic Russians in the population fell everywhere, while that of the titular nationalities increased, Sidorov says.

            Putin’s Russia world thus resembles Schroedinger’s cat. Viewed from one perspective things look pretty good; but from another they look disastrous. Russians have been able to increase only at the expense of non-Russians in only three ways:

            First, Russians have been able to assimilate Finno-Ugric and Orthodox Turkic peoples. Second, Moscow officials have reclassified as Russians Ukrainians in newly occupied areas of Ukraine. And third, they have benefitted from the propensity of non-Russians to conflate ethnic and civic identities and the willingness of the latter to identify as Russians when they aren’t.

            How this will play out in the event of a crisis and the collapse of the Putin regime remains to be seen, but it is already clear that those who think the Russian Federation is 80 percent Russian are deceiving no one but themselves.