Kremlin’s Top Five ‘Propaganda Myths, Fakes and Stupidities’ for the Past Week

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 22 – As he does each week, Dmitry Bukovsky of Kyiv’s “Delovaya stolitsa” compiles a list of “the top five propaganda myths, fakes, and stupidities” for the previous week out of the mass flow of such misinformation and disinformation coming out of Moscow about Ukraine and Russia.

            This week’s harvest (dsnews.ua/politics/top-5-propagandistskih-mifov-feykov-i-glupostey-kremlya-20062015101100) contains the following items:

1.Moscow Commentator Sees Nalivaychenko Leading “Neo-Nazi Underground’ Against Kyiv. According to Kremlin political commentator Semen Uralov, the dismissal of Valentin Nalivaychenko as head of the Ukrainian security police will be followed by his becoming head of “the neo-Nazi underground” in Ukraine and marching on Kyiv,” thus repeating the same prediction Moscow media made following the dismissal of Dmitry Yarosh.  Uralov does add one piquant detail: he says that Nalivaychenko will form a kind of “Euro-ISIS” to destabilize the region (nakanune.ru/news/2015/6/18/22404238/). 

2.Moscow TV Says Americans Preparing to Overthrow Ukrainian President. Moscow media also reported that the US is preparing to overthrow the Ukrainian president, presumably if it can beat Nalivachenko to the punch (tvzvezda.ru/news/vstrane_i_mire/content/201506160032-uev8.htm).  The evidence for this? According to the Russian outlet, it is obvious that Washington has this plan because “the US embassy permitted the leader” of an opposition party to “criticize Poroshenko.”

3.Russian Astrologer Says All Signs Point to End of Ukraine. When its commentators and journalists cannot come up with something useful about Ukraine, the Kremlin can always turn to its astrologers. This week, one of the most prominent of these, Tamara Globa, said that the fires at the Ukrainian oil storage and processing facility earlier are consistent with all signs pointing to the imminent end of Ukraine as a country (novo24.ru/doc/101733_tamara_globa:_ykraina_ryhnet_posle_vzryva_na_neftebaze.html).

4.Stalin Icon Used to Bless Putin’s Strategic Bombers. Russian Orthodox priests used an icon showing “’saint’ Joseph Stalin” to bless Russia’s strategic bombers at the Engels air base even as some Russian nationalists press for the canonization of the former Soviet dictator (rusjev.net/2015/06/16/svyashhennik-v-rossii-osvyatil-bazu-yadernyih-bombardirovshhikov-ikonoy-stalina-foto/).

5.‘DNR’ Looking for a Mountain to Name in Its Honor. In the best Soviet tradition, the mountain climbing club of the Donetsk Peoples Republic is currently looking for a mountain that lacks a name so that it can forever after be known by the name of the self-proclaimed republic. But the alpinists haven’t found one yet that is tall enough and without a name and haven’t said on what passports they will travel to mount an attempt to climb it should one be identified (novorossia.su/ru/node/19678).

Russian Officials Stretch the Law in Effort to Declare Young Karelia a Foreign Agent

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, June 19 – Not having found any evidence that the Young Karelia (“Nuori Karjala”) movement has taken money from Finland as anonymous sources had claimed, justice ministry officials in Petrozavodsk nonetheless argue that it should be declared “a foreign agent”  because it had received a grant from the UN and hosted visitors from abroad.

 

            It remains unclear whether the authorities will succeed in what is a transparent act of intimidation, but this move is a disturbing confirmation of a trend in Russia today: the willingness of officials to use the Soviet-era “analogy” principle to stretch Russian legislation to mean whatever they want it to mean, much like the Red Queen in “Alice in Wonderland.”

 

            In an interview published today in “Guberniya Daily,” Alina Chuburova, the president of Young Karelia, tells Russian regionalist Vadim Shtepa just how absurd and thus how dangerous the situation is becoming in this regard (gubdaily.ru/blog/sociology/interview/molodaya-kareliya-inostrannyj-agent/#more-286055).

 

            She says that the effort to have Young Karelia declared a foreign agent arose in the administration of the Russian justice ministry for the Karelian republic. An anonymous tipster told that office that Young Karelia was getting money from Finland and demanded that Petrozavodsk investigate.

 

            The officials did, Chuburova says, but found no evidence in support of this claim. However, they said that they had decided to pursue the idea that Young Karelia is a foreign agent for three reasons: first, it did get a grant from the UN; second, it hosted a Finnish delegation; and third, it participated in meetings with Finnish experts on youth policy.

 

            The Young Karelia head says that her group “categorically disagrees with the conclusions of the justice ministry.” “How is it possible to consider the UN ‘a foreign source’ if Russia itself is one of the founders and participants of this international organization?” she asks rhetorically. And as for hosting and meeting people, all of this was consistent with the policies of Moscow and Petrozavodsk at the time.

 

            She says she hopes to avoid having her group declared a foreign agent not only because the reporting requirements are far more burdensome and the image such words suggest would limit its ability to cooperate with the authorities but also because “we cannot agree with the assertion that we are something (foreign agents) which we are not.”

 

            Chuburova points out that her group is explicitly non-political. It has worked for “almost 23 years” to promote the development of the culture and language of the Karels, Wepsy, and Finns on the territory of the Republic of Karelia; and to this end, it has cooperated with Finno-Ugric peoples in Russia, Finland, and Estonia.”

 

            Some people in Karelia have even become angry that Young Karelia has avoided all political activities, she continues; but the group decided long ago that getting involved in political conflicts would have a deleterious effect on its ability to fulfill its cultural and linguistic missions.

 

            Karelian officials note that at present, only 69 organizations in the Russian Federation as a whole and one other in Karelia are on the list of foreign agents and that being on the list is not a big burden.  But it is perhaps indicative of the real state of affairs that many of the 69 have been forced to curtail their activities and that the other one in Karelia has already closed.

 

2014 Ukrainian Maidan Affecting Russia Much as 1863 Polish Revolt Did, Moscow Historian Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, June 19 – Drawing on Richard Pipes’ argument that the 1863 Polish revolt was viewed by many Russians as an illegitimate European attack on Russia and led them to conclude that “only the autocracy could preserve the integrity of the country,” Irina Glebova argues that the Ukrainian revolution of 2013-2014 has had “approximately the same influence on Russia.”

 

            Paralleling what happened in Poland 150 years ago, the INION historian says, “the attempt of Ukraine to finally assert its European identity (in opposition to the Soviet-Russian) by completing the process of building independent statehood and an equal nation offended Russian national feelings” (ng.ru/ideas/2015-06-19/5_ukraina.html).

 

            The shock of the Ukrainian choice now, just like that of the Poles in the 19^th century, Glebova argues, “helped promote the final formation in Russia of extreme nationalism based on anti-Western attitudes and having clearly expressed chauvinist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic aspects.” Because it arose as a defensive reaction, it has been “especially aggressive.”

 

            A renewed sense of Russian national pride, combined with a belief that Ukraine had betrayed Russia and that the West was a threat caused “the overwhelming majority of the Russian population” to support “presidential autocracy” and converted the ordinary “Great

Russian” into a nationalist,” who completely dispensed with Soviet-era internationalism.”

 

            This new Russian nationalist also arose in reaction to “the Gorbachev-Yeltsin past” which sought to integrate Russia into Europe and to absorb European values, just as the Russian reaction to the Polish uprising helped trigger reaction to the liberal reforms Tsar Aleksandr II had carried out before the Poles rose up.

 

            As a result, Glebova continues, Russian life dispensed with the ideas of freedom, civic responsibility and social solidarity and turned in just the opposite direction, thereby restoring the traditional Russian relationship between rulers and ruled, a relationship that had been threatened by perestroika and the wild 1990s.

 

            “Typlogically,” the Moscow historian continues, “the construction of the new Russian social values [also] recalls the transition from the post-revolutionary 1920s to the Stalinist USSR.”  That parallel suggests why “in order to kill within itself the 1990s, contemporary Russia requires a ‘Stalin’” and features of his regime, including acceptance of state violence or terror.

 

            One of those features is a willingness to engage in war. For most post-Stalin Russians, Glebova writes, war was an unthinkable horror as a result of their experiences especially in World War II. But “in 2014, war emerged from the realm of ideas, images, and possibilities and became a reality: with the help of the media, war entered into every home.”

 

            War has begun to define domestic affairs as well, “and the policy of the authorities and social relations ever more are being defined by the formula: who is not with us is against us.” This has happened very fast: “over the course of several months, we have moved along a path which recalls the drift of post-imperial Russia from February to October 1917.”

 

            As a result, she says, “an atmosphere was created in the country in which everything is possible,” including some horrors which many had thought Russian would never return to but which like the reaction after the 1863 Polish rising may last a long time before they are ended by a new rising of Russians.

 

 

 

Ukrainians Must Avoid Making the Kind of Mistakes about Russia that Putin has Made about Them, Kirillova Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, June 17 – A few days ago, Mikhail Khodorkovsky said that he was completely certain that those Russian opposition figures who are promising to return Crimea to Ukraine if they come to power will “not receive a mandate” to do so from Russian society, a declaration that has angered many Ukrainians and other Russian opposition figures as well.

 

            Their reaction is understandable but potentially dangerous, Kseniya Kirillova says, because in her view, “Khodorkovsky to a large degree is right regarding the present-day mentality of the Russian people” and a failure to take that into account would be “a serious error similar to Putin’s mistake in Ukraine” (ru.krymr.com/content/article/27080634.html).

 

            xPutin thought he could intimidate the Ukrainians and the West by force having failed to take into account the transformation of the Ukrainians in the course of the Maidan and of the West as a result of his Anschluss of Ukraine’s Crimea, a violation of the international order that few in the West are not horrified by, the Seattle-based blogger says.

 

            “Ignoring these processes has led to a situation in which the entire strategy chosen by the aggressor has turned out to be useless and a losing proposition,” Kirillova continues. “Neither Ukraine nor the entire rest of the world will be able to relate to Russia and to Putin as they did before, and no ‘trades’” however much faith Putin puts in them “will be able to change that.”

 

            Consequently, as Khodorkovsky suggests, it is critically important that the Russian opposition should it come to power should “not repeat the mistakes of its predecessors” but rather pay attention to the attitudes of society – even if those attitudes are “the result of shameful and false propaganda” involving the distortion of facts.

 

            Even more important, Kirillova suggests, is that Ukrainians and their friends and supporters do not continue to ignore “the very fact of this mentality” in making their own plans for the future.

 

            We may not like the attitudes of the Russian majority, she continues; but we are compelled to start with the facts as they are rather than thinking that the situation will miraculously transform itself to fit our desires.  “If we do not accept [reality],” she says, “we become no better than the Kremlin which has created in its fantasies a world of illusion.”

 

            “The present-day realities of Russia are such,” Kirillova says, that it would be “a miracle” if any democratic leader came to power. “Liberal and democratic views have been discredited” in Russia and marginalized.  “More than that, it is obvious that no adequate leader will be able in the current situation to come to power without Western support.”

 

            “’Adequate’” in this case does not mean an agent of the West, as Russian propagandists like to suggest. Rather, such an individual would be “prepared to observe the law and international agreements” and also be “ready to secure the normal development of the country without aggressive manifestations.”

 

            Putin clearly understands this, she continues, and that may be “one of the reasons behind the current hysterical anti-American propaganda” in Russia. Besides generating among Russians the sense of being under threat, such notions contribute to the idea that anyone who wants normal relations with the West “will be viewed by the population as an enemy.”

 

            Should it happen that a democratic leader all the same come to power, that would not be the end of the story, Kirillova says. Such a president would have to hold on to power, and that may not be easy: In 1917, the democratic February revolution was followed by “the bloody October which condemned Russia and the countries neighboring it to decades of communist dictatorship.”

 

            Under current conditions, “the path ‘from February to October’ could with a high degree of probability be repeated.” Consequently, a democratic president would certainly have to take decisions at odds with his convictions lest he be overthrown, and that risk lies behind what Khodorkovsky has said about Crimea.

 

            But to say that is not to say one agrees with Khodorkovsky that the issue of the return of Crimea to Ukraine will necessarily have to go on for decades, Kirillova says.  “If we really admit that the current state of Russian society has been produced artificially by means of lies and manipulations, this means that the new regime if it is adequate must dispel this lie.”

 

            That won’t happen by opposing Putin’s propaganda with an alternative propaganda but rather to changing the discourse about reality, the blogger says.  A post-Putin regime simply must “explain to the people that the death of soldiers, the break with the entire world, including fraternal peoples and the crisis situation of the country are direct consequences of both the war in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea.”

 

            Moreover, she says, Khodorkovsky is wrong to speak about “’the return of Crimea.’” Why couldn’t a “hypothetical” future Russian president simply explain via television that “’Crimea is ours’ is a grandious deception and that as a result of Putin’s actions, Crimea in fact did not become ‘ours’?”

 

          According to international law, “Crimea has belonged and continues to belong to Ukraine.” Consequently, there is nothing to return because “no one can return something that which doesn’t belong to him.” That should not be hard to explain to the Russian people especially as the initial “euphoria” has worn off and the real problems become obvious.

 

            “Yes,” Kirillova concludes, “the consciousness of Russian society is sick, but this doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t or cannot work with it.”  And if conditions such as the passing of Putin from the scene obtain, it is entirely possible that “this work will take much less time than it now appears likely will prove to be the case.”

 

 

Putin Rebuilding the Iron Curtain in His Typical ‘Hybrid’ Fashion

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, June 19 – Many people continue to carry with them an image of the iron curtain as consisting of barbed wire, concrete blocks, raked earth, and KGB guards.  That was certainly part of the institution of isolation that the Soviet government imposed on its own people and its empire in Eastern Europe.

 

            But it was only a part: Moscow’s iron curtain also consisted of rules that restricted the right of people to travel, even to border zones, and sent a message to those under its control that they might be able to flee from the territory of the empire but they would never be able to escape the attentions and possible retribution by the Soviets for their actions.

 

            Both because of the image of the iron curtain that many have and because this deeper and broader meaning of the iron curtain, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Vladimir Putin, with his passion for a “hybrid” approach in all things, one that offers him plausible deniability, is increasingly seeking to send a new message that no one can escape his clutches.

 

            Sometimes that has involved murders of people abroad like the Litvinenko case in London; sometimes it has involved penetration efforts directed against émigré Russian, Cossack, Circassian and other groups; and sometime it has featured stories in the Kremlin-controlled media about the sad fate of those who think they will have a better life and escape the Kremlin if they “go West.”

 

            But increasingly, it involves targeted and superficially legal attacks at individuals and their families who have moved there that typically take place under the radar screens of most Western governments and Western media but that sends the message Putin wants to peoples still within the borders of the Russian Federation.

 

            And all these cases not only reflect the cultural “code” of Russian siloviki like Putin who remember that a tiny group of emigres returned to Russia in 1917 and overthrew the government but also the desire to shut Russia off from the world without doing anything so crude as building a new Berlin wall or erecting barbed wire fences, at least for the time being.

 

            One such case involves the family of Igor Bitkov who founded a major timber company in northwest Russia only to have it raided by banks with close ties to the Kremlin, his daughter kidnapped and drugged by persons unknown and himself threatened as many Russian businessmen have been with criminal charges of corrupt activities.

 

            Bitkov and his wife fled to Guatemala in 2008 – their adult daughter eventually joined them – where they acquired residence and working permits and where they had a son, Vladimir. As Michael Weiss puts it, the Bitkovs fled “7,000 miles” to be safe from “Putin’s people” only to find out they were wrong (thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/17/ran-7-000-miles-putin-still-got-them.html).

 

            They have been pursued by Russian officials, held without bail by Guatemalan officials, had their youngest child taken away from them, and are now threatened with possible extradition even though Russia and Guatemala do not have an extradition treaty.  All of this, Grigory Pasko  reports on Ekho Moskvy,  has received intensive coverage in Kremlin-controlled media (echo.msk.ru/blog/bordo07/1568380-echo/).

 

            As Pasko suggests, many Russians would be inclined to dismiss this as the latest case of “raiding” by Kremlin-linked businesses against other businesses whose leaders didn’t “cooperate” with Putin. But there is more involved than that, he suggests, including Moscow’s heavy-handed use of a UN agency and its own investments in Guatemala to get its way.

 

            And consequently, the real message has been delivered to the population of the Russian Federation: don’t think you can escape the Kremlin just by leaving the country, a message Putin may be especially interested in sending because so many educated and entrepreneurial Russians have already left and polls suggest that more will.

 

            Except for Weiss’ extremely detailed article and a few others which have viewed it through the optic of the Kremlin’s abuse of its power to get its hand on economic assets, the Bitkov case has not attracted the attention in the West that it should given both the human tragedy involved and the broader message Moscow clearly intends.

 

            But there is an online petition circulating which can be signed at supportthebitkovs.com/. It deserves support because the Bitkovs are clearly innocent victims of one of Putin’s most recent crimes and because what he and his regime are doing to them is part and parcel of the construct of a “hybrid” iron curtain.

 

Genetic Testing Proves Putin is Wrong about Crimea and Crimean Tatars

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 19 – Historians, including Russian ones, have pointed out that Vladimir Putin’s claims that Crimea has been Russian from time immemorial are simply wrong, but nonetheless, many Russians and some in the West remain inclined to believe the Kremlin leader or at least not to challenge his latest fantasy.

            But perhaps such people will be convinced by the findings of genographic science which shows that the Crimean Tatars are not some arrivistes from the east but carry the genes of peope from the West as well and that given their genetic makeup they are truly the indigenous people of that Ukrainian peninsula.

            Inci Bowman, a Crimean Tatar all of whose grandparents were also Crimean Tatars, the executive secretary of the International Committee for Crimea and formerly a historian of medicine at the University of Texas at Galveston, recently had herself tested to determine her DNA ancestry.

            She has now posted the results on the ICC portal. They are instructive and underscore why Putin and his supporters are wrong and why the Crimean Tatars have the right to view themselves as the true indigenous people of that land who have nowhere else to go (http://www.iccrimea.org/reports/genographic-results.html).

            After describing her ancestors and her experience using the DNA Ancestry Kit Geno 2.0, Dr. Bowman reports that its findings show that she as a Crimean Tatar has the following genetic background: 28 percent from Northern Asian peoples, 22 percent from Northern European ones, 20 percent from Southwest Asian and Mediterranean ones each, seven percent from Southeast Asians, and two percent from Native Americans.

            She writes that this means that she is “37 percent Asian, 42 percent European, and 20 percent Middle East” and notes that “perhaps the most surprising is the two percent Native American genes” that she carries. “This does not mean,” she continues, that her “ancestors married Native Americans.” Instead, it indicates that “some of [her] very distant ancestors were among those who migrated to the North American continent about 20,000 years ago.”

          “The above DNA test results, Dr. Bowman continues, “reaffirm what we have known from history: that Crimean Tatars are descendants of the various peoples who settled and lived in Crimea for centuries. The Crimean Tatars, indigenous people of Crimea, did not just come from the East, as many are inclined to think. Rather, they are the descendants of the people who moved to Crimea from different directions: Scythians, Goths, Byzantines, Genovese, and Turkic groups such as Khazars, Kipchaks, Tatars and Ottoman Turks.

           “No doubt,” she continues, “there are thousands of Crimean Tatars living in Crimea today who have a similar genetic makeup to [hers]. Some may have more Asian genes or more European genes perhaps. To those ultranationalist Russians who say to Crimean Tatars “Go back to where you came from,” one may respond: “Where should they go? They have nowhere to go but Crimea.”

 

Russian Economy Will Stagnate After Recovery Unless Kremlin Changes Course, Papp Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, June 18 – Even when the Russian economy recovers from its current recession in a year or so, economist Yakov Papp argues, it will remain in recession unless and until the Kremlin changes its approach to the economy, an approach that has already added to Russia’s current difficulties and makes “significant growth” in the future “impossible.”

 

            But the senior specialist at the Moscow Institute for Economic Forecasting says, there is a chance the Kremlin could correct things. After all, “there are many examples when an authoritarian regime has changed its economic policy 180 degrees.” No change in personnel or “even in rhetoric” is required (profile.ru/rossiya/item/97772-perejti-k-rostu-pri-sokhranenii-nyneshnej-ekonomicheskoj-politiki-nevozmozhno).

 

            He tells Irina Fedotova of “Profile” that in order to see what must be changed, however, it is necessary to recognize the mistakes Moscow has made in economic policy and to understand how those mistakes, however tactically justified, have proven to be strategic disasters for the country’s economy, compounding rather than countering the impact of sanctions.

 

            According to Papp, the Russian leadership sent several “very poor signals” in 2012 that meant that the Russian economy would have been in trouble even if there had been no sanctions regime: it nationalized several major companies thus reducing the willingness of foreign and domestic investors to put money in the Russian economy.

 

            Then, later, it tried to prevent the devaluation of the ruble for too long and thus was confronted by a far larger fall over a shorter period.  And, worst of all in the wake of sanctions, it pushed the idea of “import substitution,” “the very worst economic step that could have been proposed.”

 

            The idea spread in Moscow that “as a result of the market transformations, we had become “too open” and needed to quietly shut ourselves off” once again.  That reflected a mistaken judgment that the 2008 crisis was not an ordinary economic event but reflected “the failure of the Western economic model,” Papp says.

           

            In addition, many in Moscow came to believe that the US was reindustrializing and that Russia should follow course. But the Russian government failed to understand that what the US was doing was not a return to the past but rather building on the business model of Silicon Valley. Indeed, the revolution in oil extraction was part of this.

 

            Few in Moscow understood or understand even now, Papp continues, that “not a single country in the world by making use of import substitution has broken out of the developing world in to the developed one.” And they have not understood that openness to the world economy, not closing oneself off from it is the necessary path forward to development

 

            Papp says that Moscow’s policies of import substitution have been especially pernicious in the information technology areas. Russia has numerous good programmers, but if they are cut off from contacts with the outside world, they won’t keep up and “this sector will rapidly degrade.”

 

            Another mistake the Russian authorities have made was to have chosen to launch an anti-corruption drive exactly now.  Fighting corruption is a good thing, but because the government is so involved in the economy, Papp says, the anti-corruption effort has left many officials gun shy about taking risks – and that too has hurt the economy.

 

            What should happen instead, is the reversal of all these policies and the formation of new ones based on the understanding that “now, we are a small open economy” and that “in a market economy, priorities are set by private business and the task of the government is support them.” Instead of import substitution, Moscow should support exports in the non-petroleum sector.

 

            If the Russian government does not make these changes, the future for the Russian economy will be bleak, even when the sanctions regime ends.