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 78th 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.
1. Putin’s Election Program – Promise Massive Change But Keep Everything the Same
The post-Crimea consensus having collapsed, and repression having ceased to intimidate and begun to anger Russians, Vladimir Putin has no choice but to promise massive change when he runs for re-election to keep himself in power and thus everything just the same, Moscow commentators say.
This week, commentators laid particular stress on three problems facing the Kremlin leader:
- He is trying to act internationally as if Russia had 22 percent of the world’s GDP and not the two percent it does have
- Popular culture including new cartoon film is narrowing the distance between Putin and his boyars, thus undercutting the assumption that Russians will always support the former as a check on the latter
- And Putin’s talk about not allowing color revolutions in Russia and the former Soviet space has called attention to a risk that he earlier refused to discuss and raised concerns about what may in fact happen next.
2. Trump has Betrayed Russia to Escape Impeachment, Moscow Commentator Says
Maksim Shevchenko says that the only reason Donald Trump did not live up to Moscow’s expectations for better relations between the US and Russia was to avoid being impeached and removed from office by the American establishment. But some Russians think the US president won’t be able to escape that fate: LDNR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky who hosted a champagne celebration on Trump’s election now says that he will drink champagne when Trump is impeached.
Vladimir Putin has suggested relations with Washington have been degraded since Trump took office, but some analysts near the Kremlin say that they still expect Trump to deliver on his election promises.
Other Russians are just angry: some are now blaming Trump rather than Barack Obama for the fact that they aren’t getting their pensions, and a group of Cossacks in St. Petersburg has threatened to strip Trump of his rank of yesaul in their unit because of his bad behavior toward Russia.
But perhaps the most interesting observation about Trump from Moscow this week came from one writer who said that Trump’s reaction to the gas attack in Syria shows that he has a heart, an organ that he suggested Putin lacks.
3. Could Concerns about Inflation Save Russia from Repressive Yarovaya Laws?
Some commentators have pointed out that if the Yarovaya package of repressive measures is enforced, that will cost Moscow some 4.5 trillion rubles (75 billion US dollars), an amount that could threaten to trigger a new round of higher inflation.
Meanwhile, the last week brought another harvest of bad economic news:
- Russia’s foreign debt is up dramatically
- Capital flight doubled from the first quarter of 2016 to the first three months of 2017
- Officials said that as a result of sanctions, Russia can no longer produce its own large gas turbines
- One commentator has offered advice on “how to make money in Russia and stay alive while doing so”
- Corruption has assumed a new form in Russia – it is so much a part of the system that corruption in the usual sense hardly exists anymore
- Losses from financial crimes in Russia in 2016 were the largest ever
- And experts say that the real level of poverty among Russians is now twice as high as the government says.
4. Social Problems Multiply Exponentially
Despite Dmitry Medvedev’s latest entry in the Marie Antoinette sweepstakes by saying that banning Western produces makes Russian life better, the problems Russians face in their daily lives are increasing at a staggering rate. Among the bad news in this sector in the last week alone are the following stories:
- At present, one hospital is closing every day in the Russian Federation and other medical facilities are being cut back at almost the same rate.
- As a result, one in four Russians isn’t getting needed medical help. But there is little likelihood that the medical situation will improve soon.
- According to the Moscow Times, Russian doctors are now paid less than Russian fast food workers.
- Moscow’s pro-natalist policies have exhausted themselves, experts say, and now even millionaire cities are beginning to see their populations decline.
- As for entertainment, Russians face a bleaker future: charter flights to Türkiye may be stopped, and while more vodka is being produced, prices for it are going up.
- One thing that Russian authorities are doing to promote domestic tourism: they are making low-cost prostitution services an integral part of their programs for resorts.
- Young Russians are increasingly unhappy about life in their country, and so the Kremlin has decided to address the problem by creating its own new bureaucracy to deal with it.
Poachers ‘killed 20,000 reindeer – to cut off their tongues’, seen as a culinary delicacy. (Image: WWF Russia) - With the spread of gun ownership, mass poaching is now a serious problem in the Russian North.
- Because their pensions are so small, ever more elderly Russians are going back into the workforce.
- And at the same time, more Central Asian and Caucasian gastarbeiters are leaving Russia but Russians aren’t taking their jobs because they don’t want to occupy such unskilled and low-paying positions, a new study finds.
5. Ethnic Tensions Increase Across Russia
- Reports suggest that ethnic antagonisms between Russians and non-Russians are on the rise and not just tensions among non-Russians as was largely the case earlier.
- In ordering Moscow to pay compensation to the victims of the Beslan disaster, the European Human Rights Court sharply criticized the Russian government for its handling of ethnic relations.
- Chechen officials attacked Novaya gazeta for its coverage of Grozny’s repression of gays and threatened them with physical reprisals, leading the Kremlin to denounce that and other media outlets to come to Novaya’s defense.
- In addition, a Duma committee rejected the idea of allowing federal subject courts to rule on extremism; only federal courts can do that, it said, another sign that popular tensions are having official consequences.
- But there was one piece of good news: longtime and much-hated Mari El governor Leonid Markelov was not only fired but has been charged with massive corruption.
6. Protests on All Kinds of Issues Spread as Officials Try to Contain Them
In addition to the long-haul truckers strike and the fallout from the March 26 Navalny anti-corruption protests, Russian citizens went in the street to protest all manner of things, from access to education in Tomsk to living conditions in Yakutsk to workers who haven’t been paid since 2015.
Under pressure from the Kremlin officials have used all manner of means to block or isolate these protests. In Daghestan, for example, officials are rejecting applications for protest meetings by invoking the terrorist threat they say such meetings present.
7. Student at Russian Military Academy Arrested on Suspicion of Planning to Divert Guns to Terrorists
Russian police arrested a student at the military academy in St. Petersburg on suspicion that he was seeking to seize arms held at that facility and divert them to terrorists. That was not the only security news this week:
- Reports surfaced about dedovshchina and corruption as continuing problems in the Russian armed services
- Russian scientists have developed a robot and the first thing they have taught it to do is to shoot a gun
- And one Moscow commentator pointed out that in any new cold war, Russia does not have any allies, leaving it far more at risk than was the former Soviet Union.
8. Two Really Frightening Messages about War from Moscow
Two Moscow commentaries this week are truly scary:
- The first in reacting to calls for an investigation of the gas attacks in Syria points out that World War I began with calls for an investigation of a terrorist attack, the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, implying that looking into the Syrian matter could have similar consequences.
- And the second suggested that for Russia, despite all the suffering it would experience, a nuclear war has certain “pluses,” the kind of talk that makes it easier for leaders to think they can fight and win a nuclear exchange.
9. Monuments Conflicts Continue to Spark Social Activism in Russia
One commentator suggests that he would welcome a decision by the Russian government to hand back even more churches to the Moscow Patriarchate because public opposition to such moves would help build civil society. There are certainly enough churches left to do so, with some 5,000 now falling apart. St. Isaac’s in St. Petersburg is slated to be handed over to the Orthodox Church on July 12, despite continuing opposition. But the government may slow down this process less to meet public complaints than because of the expense: the Russian Orthodox Church has asked the state to give it 13 billion rubles (200 million US dollars) to rebuild churches, but the authorities are only prepared to give 2.9 billion (50 million US dollars).
Other news this week from the monuments front includes:
- Polish charges that the Russian government is now doing what the Soviet regime did at Katyn by falsifying the list of who was killed there
- Activists plan to erect a statue to the 1920-21 Tambov peasant uprising
- Moscow is planning a memorial to the victims of World War I
- Activists are collecting money to erect in the Russian capital a statue to the victims of Stalin’s repressions
- Moscow says it will move the statue of Gorky back to where it stood in Soviet times
- And will put up a statue to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as well.
10. Work on Rostov Stadium for 2018 World Cup Stopped Because ‘There is No Money”
Officials say they have no funds to continue working on the modernization of the soccer stadium in Rostov that was supposed to be one of the venues for the scheduled 2018 World Cup competition in Russia.
Meanwhile, despite more violence at football matches in Russia this year, Moscow officials promised there would not be any clashes when the World Cup matches take place in their country. They also continued to lash out at the WADA for its investigations on the doping program in Russia.
11. ‘Jewish-Masonic Conspiracy’ Thinking Making a Comeback in Russia
Ever more commentators and media outlets have revived the notion of “a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy” as the force behind the Russian revolutions of 1917 and all of Russia’s misfortunes since then. That tsarist-era staple of those given to conspiracy thinking has been joined recently by talk about “a deep state” on the model some have suggested exists in the United States and opposes Donald Trump. In the Russian version, the deep state consists of and is a weapon for liberals domestic and foreign.
12. Can Moscow Narrow ‘Think Tank Gap’?
Russian commentators argue that one of the reasons Western governments do a better job in addressing many issues is that they have the assistance of experts in think tanks who can speak more freely than government employees usually can. These commentators bemoan the fact that Russia does not have a large think tank community and urge that the government get involved in creating one.
A recent meeting of the Higher School of Economics and Russian officials suggest that there is a possibility that Russia can move in that direction given that the independent scholars felt free to criticize officials and the regime in the harshest terms and the officials sat quietly and took it.
13. Russians Get Porno Site Back but May Lose Facebook
The Russian government agency which regulates the Russian Internet has unblocked the Pornhub site, but a Duma deputy has called for banning access to Facebook in Russia, a clear indication of the Kremlin’s priorities and its assessment of just where the threats to its power come from.
And six more from countries in Russia’s neighborhood:
1. Moscow Sets Up Radar Site in Belarus
Minsk has still refused to allow Moscow to open a military airbase on Belarusian territory, but in an example of the Kremlin’s “creeping” advances, the Russian military under cover of its current operation, West-2017, has set up a radar locator site there.
2. Part of Lithuania’s Hill of Crosses Burns
A small fire damaged an estimated 600 of the wooden memorials at Lithuania’s Hill of Crosses. No foul play is suspected at that world heritage site near Siaulai where more than 400,000 crosses have been erected by Lithuanians and their supporters over the years.
3. Ukrainian Remittances from Russia Home Said Larger than IMF Loans and Foreign Investment
The more than a million Ukrainians living in the Russian Federation are currently sending home more money than the total of IMF loans and grants and direct foreign investment, giving Moscow significant if often ignored leverage.
4. Russia will Not Take Part in or Broadcast Eurovision Competition in Kyiv
The Ukrainian authorities refused to allow Russia’s candidate to take part in the Eurovision singing competition in Kyiv this year because she had violated Ukrainian law by visiting occupied Crimea and making pro-Moscow declarations about it. Efforts to find a workaround have failed, and Moscow has announced that it will not send anyone to participate in the competition this year or cover it on Russian television.
5. Russia Violates International Law by Drafting 20 Crimeans into Its Army
International law prohibits an occupying power from compelling those living under its control to serve in the military. But Moscow, which has routinely ignored international law in recent years, has violated this provision as well by drafting approximately 20 young men from Crimea this year.
6. Kyrgyzstan Closes Four of Its 106 Muslim Medressahs
Saying that they want to prevent the spread of Islamist extremism, Bishkek has closed four of the medrassahs on its territory declaring that their curricula are “incorrect.” At the same time, it has allowed 102 others to remain in operation. They presumably are “correct.”
Related:
- “Syrian strikes transform Trump from ‘ours’ to ‘another Hillary'” and other neglected Russian stories
- Putin is ‘a criminal but not Stalin’ and other neglected Russian stories
- ‘Putin is the Bin Laden of today’ and other neglected Russian stories
- “Even large Russian cities are beginning to die” and other neglected Russian stories
- “Putin is War; Putin is Death” and other neglected Russian stories
- “Kremlin views Trump as ‘stupid, un-strategic, and manipulable,’” and other neglected Russian stories
- ‘Moscow can’t find builder for new military base on Ukrainian border’ and other neglected Russian stories
- ‘Russian spies interfered with Nobel Committee to prevent Poroshenko Peace Prize’ and other neglected Russian stories
- Why did Putin say Russia’s prostitutes were ‘best in the world’ and other neglected Russian stories
- Russians calling Washington ‘Nashington’ and other neglected Russian stories
- Like Crimea, ‘Trump is Ours,’ Russian products proclaim and other neglected Russian stories
