The flood of news stories from a country as large, diverse and strange as the Russian Federation often appears to be is far too large for anyone to keep up with. But there needs to be a way to mark those which can’t be discussed in detail but which are too indicative of broader developments to ignore.
Consequently, Windows on Eurasia presents a selection of 13 of these other and typically neglected stories at the end of each week. This is the 56th such compilation. It is only suggestive and far from complete – indeed, once again, one could have put out such a listing every day -- but perhaps one or more of these stories will prove of broader interest.
Is Putin a Russian Trump?
Trump / Putin (Image: Slate)
Many in Russia and the West have suggested that US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is an American Vladimir Putin, but now there are indications that the reverse may be true as well. This week, the Kremlin leader fell victim to one of his own propaganda stories -- which wasn’t true -- because no one around him is prepared to speak truth to power. Putin had a bad week in other respects as well: he was named one of the world’s greatest enemies of media freedom by Reporters without Borders, and a Russian commentator suggested that Putin couldn’t stop talking about the Boston marathon bombers because he has a guilty conscience about the case. In response, Putin has taken the step so many world leaders have when they find themselves in trouble. He’s making no effort to change his policies, but he is hiring Western public relations firms to improve his image.
More Bad Economic News on All Fronts. Bankruptcies have become so frequent that Kommersant has been forced to publish additional pages this week just to list all of them. China been able to purchase a quarter of Russia’s goldmining industry at firesale prices while Ford has announced that it is ending production at its St. Petersburg plant. The Russian state is now slated to run a deficit until at least 2034 and even military pensioners aren’t getting the one-time payments they were promised because their pensions were not inflation-adjusted. Still worse, 60 percent of Russian employers say they will be cutting back on employment, and the real value of pensions fell by 3.3 percent in September alone. Not surprisingly almost half of Russians are prepared to be paid off the clock and in the shadow sector of the economy. For some Russians, the situation is becoming truly dire: there are reports that school children in Chelyabinsk are being fed with soup with worms, that deaths from flu are up by 300 percent because there isn’t enough medicine available, and that ever more Russians are choosing to die at home rather than go to the hospital for possible treatment.
Lenin and Stalin Mausoleum on the Red Square in MoscowWill Russia’s Statue Wars Never End? Each week brings fresh evidence that fighting over statues and other memorials is for many Russians the most important thing going on in their lives both because of what it says about the past of their country and its future. Among the most notable developments in this sector over the last seven days: LDNR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky wants to rename Moscow’s Lenin Prospekt for Ivan the Terrible. Others want to declare Ivan the forefather of Putin’s new Russian nation. Another commentator has suggested that everything started going wrong when Stalin was removed from the mausoleum on Red Square. At the same time, some statues are being taken down or vandalized, sometimes by the population and sometimes by the authorities. There are also more complaints among Russians that some of the statues reflect the elite’s interest in monarchism.
Russians Increasingly Uneasy about Putin’s War in Syria. While support among Russians for the military operation in Syria remains above 50 percent, according to a Levada poll, there are signs that it is softening with fewer people expressing unqualified backing for the effort than did earlier.
Instagram Beats Out Facebook in North Caucasus. Ramzan Kadyrov’s use of Instagram has attracted the most attention, but people in the region say that that social medium is vastly more popular in the North Caucasus generally than is Facebook, with the number of friends on it ten times or more than the number on Facebook. Meanwhile, some of the smaller language communities in the Russian Federation are exploring the ways they may be able to use the Internet to save their endangered languages.
In many ways, Russia behaves like a small country rather than a great power and is obsessed with the attention good or bad it receives anywhere in the world. Some websites track how many articles appear about Russia in this or that country. Now, Novaya Gazeta has published a large survey of what it calls “the return of Sovietology” in the United States. In a not necessarily related development, the Russian media have begun talking about the supposed existence of a Russian military medal to be awarded for “the occupation of Washington, D.C.”
Russia’s Buddhists Say They have Law but Not Always Officials on Their Side. Russia’s Buddhist community is becoming increasingly active, and its leaders say that now they have law on their side but not yet officials who are charged with enforcing it. As a result, there is open discrimination against them in places where they are supposed to have full rights. Unfortunately, that pattern holds for most of Russia’s religions where new laws are being used by officials not to go after extremism but rather after those Christian denominations that the Russian Orthodox Church - Moscow Patriarchate doesn’t like.
For Russian Media, Liberals Play the Role Witches Did in Earlier Centuries. A Novaya Gazeta commentary suggests that under Putin, liberals have come to play the role witches did in earlier centuries, a powerful and evil force that must be vanquished again and again. Meanwhile, on Halloween, parents in Moscow were urged not to let their children wear Hitler, Stalin or Putin masks because these might prove too frightening for others.
Russian Blogger Suggests Opening Danzig-Like Corridor to Kaliningrad. A Russian blogger says that Moscow should use force to create a Russian corridor through Belarus and/or Lithuania so that the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad won’t be isolated. He argues that this is especially important because of rising military tensions in the Baltic region. That Kaliningrad is now in trouble is suggested by reports that the city’s mayor has put his town hall on the market in order to try to raise money to bridge a budget gap.
Russians Don’t Recognize Russians Wearing Traditional Dress as Russians. There is a famous story about two 19th century Slavophiles who dressed up as Russian peasants and who each assumed that the other was a Persian or some other foreigner as a result. Now, in an updated version of the same story, a group of Russians has tried wearing traditional Russian dress in Russian cities only to discover that other Russians can’t imagine where they are coming from.
And six more from countries in Russia’s neighborhood:
Ukrainian Intelligence Agency Symbol Appears to Be Striking Russia with a Sword.
Symbol of the Ukrainian military intelligence adopted in November 2016: an owl carrying a sword over Eurasia. Top phrase in Ukrainian says "Military Intelligence of Ukraine." Bottom phrase in Latin means "The wise man will master the stars."
Ukraine’s national intelligence service has adopted a new symbol and because it appears to have a sword ready to strike Russia, many in Moscow are furious.
Ukraine Finds Pulling Down Communist Symbols May Not Be Having Desired Effect. Some Ukrainians are concerned and some Russians are delighted by new polls showing that in Ukraine, the pulling down of communist-era statues is not at least yet contributing to the elimination of all sympathy for the Soviet past.
Tajik Officials No Longer Allowed to Have Russian Dual Citizenship. In yet another sign of the unpacking of empire, Dushanbe has ruled that Tajik officials must not have dual Russian citizenship. If they want to keep their jobs, they must give up such attachments.
Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan Reach Border Accord. Tashkent and Bishkek have defused a potentially explosive situation by reaching agreement on 49 disputed areas along their common border. Those have been the site of violence in the last several months.
Kazakhstan Should Be Written as Qazakstan in English, Astana Officials Say. Senior parliamentarians in Kazakhstan say that the name of their country should be written in English as Qazakstan and not Kazakhstan. That may seem a small thing, but it in fact opens the way to a larger shift away from the Russian script to a Latin script in that Central Asian country.
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