Johnson's Russia List
2015-#159
17 August 2015
[email protected]
A project sponsored through the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs*
www.ieres.org
JRL homepage: www.russialist.org
Constant Contact JRL archive:
 http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs053/1102820649387/archive/1102911694293.html
JRL on Facebook: www.facebook.com/russialist
JRL on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnsonRussiaLi
Support JRL: http://russialist.org/funding.php
Your source for news and analysis since 1996n0
*Support for JRL is provided in part by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations to the George Washington University and by voluntary contributions from readers. The contents do not necessarily represent the views of IERES or the George Washington University.

"We don't see things as they are, but as we are"

"Don't believe everything you think"

In this issue
 
  #1
Jounalitico
http://journalitico.com
August 11, 2015
Recommended reading for the BBC [re 2008 Georgia-Russia war]
By Danielle Ryan
Danielle Ryan is an Irish journalist and blogger. She has a degree in Business and German from Trinity College Dublin and studied political reporting at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism in Washington, DC.

A very quick example of how outright falsehoods continue to weasel their way into the mainstream, despite all factual evidence to the contrary.

This recent piece from the BBC:

Viewpoint: What's behind Russia's actions in Georgia? [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33675488]

It may be a 'viewpoint' piece, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't entitle the author to present his own set of facts.

Here is the problematic section:

"Moscow has been doing this in the internationally recognised Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia since the late days of the Soviet Union. This policy culminated in the 2008 war that saw both territories occupied by Russian troops. Russia subsequently proclaimed them as independent states.

"As in 2008, when Moscow began its invasion on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, the timing of the latest provocation was skilfully chosen. Tied down with the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the nuclear talks with Iran and Greece's financial woes, the West has a lot on its plate."

The timing of Moscow's "invasion" of Georgia was "skilfully chosen" the author says.

This leaves the distinct impression that the "invasion" was something which happened entirely on Russia's terms, decided in Moscow and then acted upon with no warning, out of the blue. Nowhere does the piece explain that Moscow's "skilful timing" was in fact a response, that Russia did not initiate the conflict itself.

And that's not just Kremlin spin.

An EU report published a year after the five-day war confirmed it. Maybe the BBC should give it a re-read.

The report found that the conflict "started with a massive Georgian artillery attack" and, as reported by The Guardian at the time, "flatly dismissed" then Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili's version of events. ["Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili blamed for starting Russian war" http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/30/georgia-attacks-unjustifiable-eu]

The report (which you can read here) also said: [http://web.archive.org/web/20091007030130/http://www.ceiig.ch/pdf/IIFFMCG_Volume_I.pdf]

"There was no ongoing armed attack by Russia before the start of the Georgian operation - Georgian claims of a large-scale presence of Russian armed forces in South Ossetia prior to the Georgian offensive could not be substantiated ... It could also not be verified that Russia was on the verge of such a major attack."

To recap:

no armed attack by Russia to provoke the Georgian operation
no large-scale presence of Russian troops, despite Georgian claims
no evidence any such Russian attack was imminent

So why is the BBC, seven years on, publishing articles that tell an entirely different story?

This kind of omission, which is often unnoticeable to most, is how news organisations perpetuate myths under the guise of noble truth-telling.

A Newsweek article this week criticized Moscow's "cunningly contrived" propaganda over Ukraine.

Russian propagandists, the author wrote, "offer a selection of facts and put them in a framework that naturally leads the audience to the desired conclusions".

That sounds awfully familiar to me.
 
#2
Lavrov: Recent events in Ukraine resemble Kiev's preparation for hostilities

MOSCOW, August 17. /TASS/. Russia is concerned about the developments in Ukraine, which are reminiscent of Kiev's preparation for hostilities, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday following talks with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif.

"As for the situation with the implementation of the Minsk agreements of February 12, we are really very much concerned about the current state of affairs," he noted. "I regularly discuss the issue with my colleagues. The other day I spoke with [US Secretary of State] John Kerry and [German Foreign Minister] Frank-Walter Steinmeier. We also conveyed the appropriate assessments to Paris as another country, which, along with Germany and Russia, is a guarantor of the Minsk agreements."

"The situation at the frontlines is alarming," the minister went on to say. "Unfortunately, one may already talk not about the line of contact, but in actual fact about the frontline. Talks were under way for a long time in response to calls from the 'Normandy Four' to demilitarize Shirokino and withdraw weapons with caliber under 100 mm to a distance of 15 kilometers on each side. The parties could not agree on the issue for a long time because of Kiev's changing stance. Then the militias took some unilateral steps, withdrawing all their units from Shirokino and pulling back weapons to a distance of 3 kilometers. We hoped that such a goodwill gesture would prompt similar steps by the Ukrainian armed forces, but this did not happen. Combatants of the Azov volunteer battalion, which were withdrawn from the area, were immediately replaced by the units of the regular Ukrainian Armed Forces. There is information that the marines appeared there as well, which also gives food for thought."

According to the minister, the agreement on withdrawal of weaponry from the line of contact was not signed at the Contact Group meeting, because the Ukrainian side at the last moment changed its stance abandoning the previous agreements. "We are concerned about the recent developments, which strongly resemble preparations for hostilities," Lavrov said. "That was the way it happened last August, when the Ukrainian army was ordered to launch an offensive, that was the way it happened in January, when there was another attempt to resolve the situation by force."

According to Lavrov, Moscow hopes that the meetings of Contact Group and its sub-groups scheduled for next week will change the worrisome situation in Ukraine and help establish direct dialogue between Kiev, Donetsk and Luhansk.

Lavrov stressed that direct talks between Kiev, Donetsk and Luhansk "are the essence of all agreements that were made in Minsk." "We will definitely not move anywhere without this. There is Contact Group, its four sub-groups, in the framework of which all work should be done on overcoming obstacles on the way of implementing the package of measures from February 12," he added.

The foreign minister noted that "the Ukrainian side is always trying to avoid such contacts or impose an approach, according to which all issues should be solved without Donetsk and Luhansk, and they should just informed after the decision is made," Lavrov said. "All this evokes very troublesome thoughts. I hope that the meetings of Contact Group and its sub-groups planned for next week will somehow change this tendency of Kiev's refusal of direct dialogue. And together with our partners from the 'Normandy format', together with American colleagues who assured us that they sincerely want to see the full implementation of Minsk-2, we will be able to help establish such dialogue," he concluded.
 
 
#3
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
August 14, 2015
Do think tanks fall into ideological divide separating Russia, US?
Given the rising tensions between Russia and the U.S., it is becoming even more difficult for think tanks in these two countries to avoid being pulled into an emotionally charged ideological debate over the Kremlin's policy in Ukraine.
By Pavel Koshkin

At a time of increasing U.S.-Russia confrontation and partisan thinking over Ukraine, it is becoming difficult for think tanks in these two countries to straddle between two extreme viewpoints. In some cases, these think tanks are even coming under media criticism for their stances or political pressure from top policymakers.

Case in point: recent accusations in the Western media that the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow branch is becoming a channel of pro-Kremlin analysis. The Daily Beast characterized subtle policy shifts by the Carnegie Moscow Center that appear to be more sympathetic to the Kremlin as a form of "appeasement." These accusations have been met with mixed reactions: some experts found them fair and well-researched, with others saw these accusations as a case of selectively cherry-picking specific columns or papers.

Yet, most importantly, the situation with the Carnegie Moscow Center reflects a broader, more troublesome trend: the partisan thinking of experts both in the U.S. and Russia. This controversy, which some describe as an "ideological divide," has been catalyzed by the events in Ukraine and the Kremlin's response to them.

This divide has been marked with the emergence of iconoclast experts in the media. And Russia and the U.S. each have had their own mavericks: Princeton Professor Stephen F. Cohen in the U.S. and Andrei Zubov, a former professor of Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO-University) in Russia.

In March 2014, Zubov was reported by the media to have lost his job for coming up with an opinion in Vedomosti in which he compared Russia's policy in Ukraine with Nazi Germany's Anschluss with Austria in 1938. Earlier this year, Cohen was also severely ridiculed by American media and his peers as an "apologist" for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The reason is that he expressed a non-mainstream view in his article "Distorted Russia" warning against the demonization of the Russian president and calling for a more nuanced approach to understand his motives and interests in Ukraine.

Evgeny Minchenko, the president of the International Institute for Political Expertise, argues that there is "a headlong increase" in the "ideological divide" among Americans and Russians. He saw it for himself during his recent trip to the U.S. and after his return to Russia.

He visited America in 2014 to study the experience of U.S. political campaigns and gave a number of talks at American universities and think tanks, including the Carnegie Endowment for International Piece (CEIP). Minchenko witnessed the reluctance of some people to listen to another position and discuss alternative views.

"During one of my speeches an expert raised his hand and asked me: 'Do you see Putin as a criminal?' 'No, I don't,' I said. He stood up and left the room. It is not the best way to talk," Minchenko told Russia Direct.

Minchenko argues that today, under pressure of their convictions, some pundits are losing the ability to look at international challenges and Russia objectively, with those pundits who try to straddle between two extremes facing "serous pressure."

Likewise, in Russia, ideology steps in where a healthy balance steps down. In fact, there is a great deal of demand on one-sided ideology-driven analysis, which Minchenko describes as "cavemen anti-Americanism." And it stems from an inability and, most importantly, lack of desire, of some pundits to understand the position of the United States and this country, Minchenko argues.

Any attempts to understand the West and their political system are usually met with more skepticism from ideology-driven Russian experts. As Minchenko said, some of his peers responded with a great deal of suspicion about his initiative to study the American and British parliamentary elections, when he presented his reports about how Western democracy works during political campaigns.

On the other hand, some pro-Western experts in Russia are also reluctant to negotiate with their pro-Kremlin peers and blindly support the Western narrative, Minchenko added pointing out that "there are still some middle-of-the-road pundits like me, who try to find a healthy balance in such a polarized atmosphere."

At the same time, Mikhail Troitskiy, a Moscow-based political and international affairs analyst, doesn't think that there is "any serious 'ideological divides' these days in the world in general and certainly between the United States and Russia." He finds such comparison "elusive" and exaggerated.

Likewise, Ivan Kurilla, a former Kennan Institute fellow and a professor at European University at St. Petersburg, hasn't witnessed a significant ideological schism among his colleagues.    

"I didn't see that academics were in open confrontation because of their political views," he told Russia Direct. "If we talk about academics, not about propagandists, they always take into account different points of views and models."

However, in the times of social tensions and differences, these models and explanations offered by experts might become dangerously closer to those used by propagandists. And this is the space where an ideological conflict might come about, Kurilla warns.  

Making sense of the accusations about the Carnegie Moscow Center  

Although there is no agreement on the question of an ideological divide among pundits, the case of the Carnegie Endowment is indicative. It sends a warning message to the academic and expert community in both Russia and the U.S. And the message is that the credibility crisis in Moscow-Washington relations is becoming a matter of national interest of both Russia and the U.S.

The fact that there is no agreement on the nature and fairness of the accusations about the Carnegie also means that experts find it increasingly challenging to straddle between two extremes.

For example, Jeffrey Mankoff, deputy director and fellow with the Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS) Russia and Eurasia Program, described the Daily Beast article as a "good analysis of the Carnegie Moscow Center's sad decline" in his Facebook post, while many Russian and American experts pointed to the high level of political bias of the story.  

At the same time, Gregory Feifer, a writer and the former Moscow correspondent for Radio Free Europe and National Public Radio, sees the article as "well-researched" and "provocative." He argues that it "paves new ground by inserting a topic into public debate" and raises "a sensitive issue" that illustrates "the extent to which analysis of Russian politics and foreign policy is affected by an almost ideological split fueled by Putin's challenge to Western policymakers."

"You don't have to agree with the conclusions to acknowledge its serious questions about the role corporate money plays in the debate about Russiaas well as the quandary facing Western institutions that want to engage with influential Russians," Feifer told Russia Direct. "It's relevant because you can be sure the Kremlin is considering every possibility of influencing foreign organizations."

In contrast, Nicolai N. Petro, professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island specializing in Russia, argues that the story "is laced with emotional judgments-Russian policies are 'xenophobic,' the Crimean annexation is an 'Anschluss'-while gathering 'insights' about purportedly dramatic changes in the Carnegie Endowment's views from disenchanted ex-employees with an axe to grind."

Columbia University Professor Emeritus Robert Legvold sees the "attacks" on the Carnegie Moscow Center as a wrong move that "will actually weaken the resources available to U.S. policy makers." Likewise, many Russian experts, including Minchenko, Andrei Sushentsov of MGIMO-University and Andrei Kortunov, General Director of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), don't take seriously the accusations about Carnegie.

Sushentsov argues the lack of realistic thinking in the U.S. today is one of the reasons behind the attack on the Carnegie Moscow Center. According to him, those who try to understand the logic of the Kremlin's policy, like the Carnegie Endowment does, are met with criticism by those who don't care about the future of U.S.-Russia relations.

"Their thinking is based on the zero-sum game or black-and-white categories: for them, if Russia is winning, the U.S. is losing. And they have a lot of public space to maneuver," Sushentsov told Russia Direct.

"If you look through the website [of the Carnegie Moscow Center] and read articles, you can easily find there people with critical thinking and attitude toward many aspects of what is currently going on in Russia," said Kortunov, pointing out that such accusations stem from the lack of understanding of how the Carnegie Moscow Center works.

But what brings experts with different views together is the recognition that the attacks on the Carnegie Center (and the ways of how they are made in the media) are not a good sign. Like his Russian counterpart, Feifer admits that The Carnegie Endowment "often provides excellent analysis of Kremlin policy" and he is very concerned about the very nature of the debate in the U.S. about Russia.

"No one has a monopoly on the truth, and that's why the real issue for me is the breakdown of constructive debate between both sides," he said. "It's the loss of civility, the increasing scarceness of respectful disagreements that I worry about. Putin's propaganda machine is successful in this case because it's helping weaken the implicit trust that's a necessary part of open debate in free societies."

Legvold is also very disappointed with such a trend. "Of the many characteristics marking the contemporary U.S.-Russian confrontation reminiscent of the Cold War, one of the more disagreeable is the poisoning of the discourse in both countries," he told Russia Direct. "Too many Americans who disagree with fellow Americans and too many Russians who disagree with fellow Russians prefer to slander rather than argue with those with whom they disagree."

What challenges does partisan thinking pose for pundits?

The Carnegie Moscow Center case also reveals the challenges facing think tanks and drives the expert community to assess the role that an analytical center should play in the current situation.  

"The Carnegie Center's experience is unique," explains Kortunov. "After all, it is an American organization, it is the branch of The Carnegie Endowment in Washington, it is funded with U.S. money, but it is located in Moscow and it is comprised of mostly Russian experts. So, it is a non-standard organization with its own specific aspects, challenges and opportunities."

Indeed, the Center was created as a platform for U.S.-Russia dialogue to bring together people with different views and foster a good debate over issues that matter. Yet, what is most intriguing is that some observers even suspect that the Center is a CIA agent, a "fifth column" or a home for spies from the U.S. Department of State.

"Criticism from both sides means that the Center does its job well and keeps its balance," Kortunov said, adding that keeping a balance in a highly polarized discourse will inevitably lead to attacks.
 
It is also becoming very difficult to work for Russian think tanks during times of highly partisan thinking, but they have other challenges. As RIAC general director Kortunov certainly knows. One of the main problems is the perception of think tanks by Russia's political elites and pundits themselves.

"A certain part of Russian society and political establishment see think tanks as other channels of propaganda," Kortunov said. "But it seems to me not to be the case. Unlike some media, the function of think tanks is not to propagandize the official position of the government, but rather to analyze it, find drawbacks in it, propose some recommendations, contribute to resolving problems and forming the foreign policy agenda. If you don't do it and become the mouthpiece of official elites, so, does it make sense to establish analytical centers?"

Other challenges mentioned by Kortunov and some of his Russian and American peers are the difficulties of straddling between patriotism and criticism, between financial independence and political bias. All these balances are very subtle and delicate, because usually independence and partisan politics are at odds.

"I believe that all think tanks incline to the biases of their funders. One might imagine that being overcome by obtaining diverse funders, including possibly government funding. I suspect that this model has never worked because, to paraphrase [Prussian military strategist Carl von] Clausewitz, "think tank production is merely war by other means," Petro told Russia Direct.

Think tanks must respond to challenges

The more challenges think tanks face today, the more relevant the need to respond to these challenges becomes. Troitskiy argues that international analytical centers should demonstrate "full analytical rigor" to prove that it is not a channel of anyone's agenda.

"That includes, first and foremost, being driven in research by the most natural, unavoidable questions dictated by reality. Slipping towards secondary issues would always be perceived as an attempt to avoid a discussion of an obvious yet politically sensitive or otherwise difficult subject," he said.
Kortunov agrees. He believes that think tanks should talk about the problems without whitewashing them or passing over inconvenient aspects. Yet while criticizing, it is necessary to come up with specific, critical and practical recommendations of how to resolve challenges.

"And this is the main difference between those who really seek to resolve the problem on the one hand and those who are glad that these problems exist, angry when these problems go away" and who are ready to blindly criticize just for sake of criticism - on the other hand," he said.

Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and now a professor at Stanford University, argues think tanks "probably need a little less opinion and a little more research these days, where data plays a bigger role in these discussions."

"In academia, you can't get away with just stating an opinion strongly and calling that an argument," he told Russia Direct. "You need a hypothesis and then evidence to support that claim. What I find missing in the debate about U.S.-Russia relations these days are academic voices."
 
 #4
Los Angeles Review of Books
https://lareviewofbooks.org
Adrian Bonenberger interviews Jochen Hellbeck
What Really Happened at Stalingrad?
Adrian Bonenberger is the author of Afghan Post, his war memoirs, and he writes for and co-edits The Wrath Bearing Tree, a pro-intellectual, anti-narrative project in dialogue curation.

WORLD WAR II was decided in and around a city on the Volga River, named for the titular head of the Soviet Empire: Stalingrad. From August 1942 until January 1943, the Soviet Union and Germany bitterly contested this industrial city, losing nearly 2 million soldiers and civilians in the process. The Germans had been heavy favorites: they'd experienced battlefield setbacks but never suffered a serious defeat, and were considered the premier fighting force in the world. How did the Soviet defenders prevail?

Most accounts - historical, fictional, and cinematic - claim that the Russians were able to overcome the Germans through superior numbers and brute force. That story is wrong, according to Rutgers historian Jochen Hellbeck. In Stalingrad, his groundbreaking (and extraordinarily timely) analysis of the decisive battle by the same name, Hellbeck uses a unique archive of lost first-person accounts of the battle to argue - quite convincingly - that the prevailing story of World War II needs to be adjusted. In a day and age when Western relationships with Russia seem to be reverting to Cold War stereotypes based on that basic story of World War II, Stalingrad offers an important new perspective on the conflict as it occurred, to the participants. I sat down with Professor Hellbeck at his Brooklyn home on a sunny day in May to discuss Stalingrad.

ADRIAN BONENBERGER: This isn't the first book about World War II, or the Russians. What makes your Stalingrad different, and what do you hope people will get from reading it?

JOCHEN HELLBECK: What makes Stalingrad different? Well - there are four primary views of the Red Army soldier that inform Western scholarship as well as popular culture. First, that of the Nazis, who viewed Soviet soldiers as subhuman, savage, and primitive. An enemy both cunning and cruel - a picture contrived in part by Nazi propaganda, in part also through German perceptions of their experience fighting the Red Army. Second, there is a more recent British and American view of the Soviet soldier as a prisoner of the Stalinist system. Silent, slave-like, in bondage to a savage and murderous political tyranny, prodded forward by fear of certain death at the hands of a commissar versus likely death by German machine gun. You see this idea expressed in movies like Enemy at the Gates. There is a more positive Western view as well: this third view links the tenacity of the Red Army soldier to the imagined qualities of the Russian peasant soldier as described by Leo Tolstoy, and argues that essential character traits were decisive to the Soviet victory. This view holds that simple, unreflected, but deep love for the homeland was native to common soldiers and was the source of their courage. There is something deeply compelling and emotionally satisfying about this interpretation, but it fails to explain how these timeless Russian features came alive in the Communist Red Army.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communist party was discredited, and with it fell the idea of the Soviet soldier-hero. The opening of the Russian archives brought a much darker reality into view, and it was readily embraced by many researchers as expressing the total truth about the Soviet past: these analyses tended to focus on the punitive nature of the Red Army. This view, the fourth, gave rise to a belief that the Red Army soldiers (and Soviet citizens) successfully defended their homeland in spite of Stalin and the Party, rather than because of them.

Q: And you don't subscribe to any of those views?

I'm skeptical about each of them. I think that with the revisionist zeal of the 1990s, we threw the baby out with the bathwater. Academics lost view of the party state apparatus that organized the war effort, which quite successfully mobilized millions of Soviet citizens. The party was a huge and largely positive part of the Red Army - it shaped its recruiting to include the military's best soldiers. So much so that by the end of the war, the Communist party was a party comprised largely of soldiers.

I don't want to suggest that there was no massive state violence - the interviews and other sources speak of many executions of commanders and soldiers who had been accused of cowardice or treason. These were often conducted in front of the troops, to work as a deterrent. The principal point, however, is that an army of slaves could not have possibly prevailed over the Germans, the most advanced and respected armed force of its time. The documents reveal an astonishing degree of individual heroism: "pull yourself back together, get ready to fight, and even if you're half dead, if you've only got one good arm, use it to shoot the enemy. Deal with that first one coming on the attack. Just deal with that first one. Your first shot will encourage your comrades." This is the practical advice a Soviet lieutenant gives his soldiers, and it is rooted in Soviet culture, which appealed to individuals to release their innate heroic essence. These cultural resources proved particularly effective in a war against a terrible invader. I don't see a timeless Russian trait at work here, but rather the results of specific educational efforts that the state cultivated with increasing efficiency as the war went on. Such mobilizing practices registered mostly not with peasant soldiers, but with urban youth - those who had received a Soviet education.

Based on my research, I believe there's a fifth view. There's an illogical and paradoxical presumption on all sides, Western and Soviet, that the regime was ineffective, yet simultaneously somehow the only mechanism capable of defeating the Germans. When you read the firsthand accounts from the people who were there - the soldiers, officers, and civilians who were present at Stalingrad for the battle between August of 1942 and January of 1943 - you get this sense of a powerful motivating energy, part of which came from the self, but part of which was undeniably tied to the Stalinist Soviet State.

Q: How did you find the archive that houses these soldiers' voices? And when did you know you had discovered something special?

The archive was compiled by a historical commission headed by a Moscow professor, Isaak Mints. Members of the commission were allowed into Stalingrad in late December 1942 - this was more than a month before the battle would end, and there was bitter fighting going on in the city. Over the next weeks they conducted more than 200 interviews with soldiers and other eyewitnesses. These first-person accounts were so frank and multifaceted that they couldn't be published at the time. They were locked away, but not destroyed.

I found them quite by chance. Several Russian colleagues who knew about my interest in first-person accounts told me about entire boxes filled with memoirs, somewhere in the basement of a Moscow archive. When I finally received permission to study these documents, my jaw dropped. I first assumed they were recollections of the war written in the 1960s or 1970s - but the archive was full of first-person statements delivered during the war. It shows the interviewed soldiers steeped in the events that they describe. In 1942 nobody knew when or how the Second World War would end, and the interviews show you the horizons of people at war, they bring you closer to their thoughts and emotions than any other source.

Take this account by a young man, Alexander Averbukh - an infantry lieutenant, not a political officer - a nobody, really. But for the tanks, he could easily be an American soldier describing an attack in Vietnam or Afghanistan:

"I went with a platoon to the right. We agreed that in the event of an attack we'd fight to the last, neither of us would make a move without the other. We were going to complete our mission or die trying. I briefly explained our task to the men, saying that we had to keep up the defense despite the enemy's superior strength. At night we made sure the soldiers were all fed, and then we tried to get some rest.

[...]

"We fought to the last. When we ran out of ammunition, we used grenades to destroy the tanks. Men were dropping off left and right. We'd lost contact with the battalion. I moved to Lizunov's command post. All I had left was one rifle and eight cartridges. I ordered the men to hold on to them."

This is only one of countless combat episodes described in the interviews, and it feels quite typical. There is no one pointing his gun at Averbukh and ordering him to fight - he's fighting for the same reason many other soldiers fight, and doing so bravely and well.

I remember one moment in particular with the archives, when I realized I had something really exceptional: reading the portion where Army commander Vasily Chuikov casually discussed executing several commanders who did not implement his orders. Such episodes are not in his published memoirs from later - and they confirm the immediacy of the interviews, and help validate their authenticity.

Q: How much of this is personal for you?

This may be a particularly American idea, that it would be exceptional for World War II to be personal for some people - it involved everyone in Europe! My father was conscripted into the Wehrmacht at the end of the war, and fought in a series of losses to the Soviets, but was able to limp to safety with a leg wound. My grandfather was too old to serve at the beginning of the war, but by the end was drafted into the "Volkssturm" and taken prisoner by the Soviets, but was released - he was old and infirm, they must have taken pity on him. Nevertheless, I am a historian, and I try to practice what one of my teachers taught me early on: "A historian knows no fatherland." In writing this book, I have stepped back from single national perspectives and instead sought to show how Soviet and German soldiers viewed each other and how the two war cultures compared and interacted.

Q: Can you say more about that, the different ways in which nations tend to view World War II, themselves, and their character - what that says about us today?

Germans' views of the soldier and of war shifted fundamentally after World War II. The soldier hero of the Nazi period was a twisted but recognizable form of the old Prussian ideal that still resonated with the inter-war population - after 1945, this gives way to the ideal of the anti-hero. Here I think that the Germans and Britons may have had something in common. Their experience in World War I was very similar, and while the Germans lost World War II and the British were on the winning side, the end of World War II coincided with the beginning of the end for the British Empire. So there's a sense of doom there as well. The Soviet Union and the United States, on the other hand, emerged from World War II as superpowers. Both countries represented themselves centrally through their battle against Nazi Germany, and both presented it as an essentially moral story.

Russian and American writers seem equally prone to romanticizing or valorizing their soldiers. It's interesting that two nations that seem so similar ended up as ideological enemies.

Q: How does Stalingrad read in the context of our current conflict with Russia?

I think that the history of the Second World War directly intrudes on the terms of our relationship with Russia. Soviet and Russian leaders have complained for decades that the West does not acknowledge the Red Army's preeminent role in liberating Europe from fascism. These complaints have sharpened recently, as post-Soviet nations that left the Russian sphere of influence (Poland, Estonia, now Ukraine) perform historical revisionism. These countries are nationalizing their history textbooks, and accordingly the Soviet Red Army is slighted or even cast as the true enemy. There is a real and understandable sense that Russians, as the successors to the Soviet Union, feel that their role in World War II is being downplayed by groups or individuals seeking political gain. This does not justify President Putin's reckless policies and especially his invocation of history for aggressive ends. But it explains why Russians respond to his message so passionately. Politicians and intellectuals in the West have two choices: either acknowledge these sentiments and express respect for the other side, or overlook this fact - but at their own peril. Well - our collective peril!

Q: How has Stalingrad been received in Russia?

As the book has just appeared, it's too early to tell. I expect a great deal of interest in these personal accounts. There has been a recent trend in Russia: since the fall of the Soviet Union, people have become very interested in biographies of individual soldiers and other participants of the war. This is the same as in Germany and America, and has to do in part with the imminent passing of a generation - so schoolchildren are videotaping testimonies of the very aged veterans at an accelerated pace. There is also a movement of volunteers that travels to Second World War battlefields to recover the remains of fallen soldiers, in an effort to identify them. The Russian Ministry of Defense runs a searchable website with millions of documents that record the dates and circumstances of countless Red Army soldiers' death or disappearance.

When I began my project I initially wanted to compare the voices and emotions of German and Soviet soldiers. There are many diaries available on the German side, but hardly any from the Soviet perspective. The Red Army forbade personal diaries, and Soviet censors ensured that soldiers wrote only bland letters along the lines of, "Hello, I'm well and alive," so that the letters couldn't be used for intelligence or propaganda if they fell into German hands. Consequently there are few sources that present us with a full record of unmediated wartime voices.

The discovery of the Mints archive changed everything, and eventually pushed the Germans into the background, which didn't trouble me as their side has been covered extensively. One of the things that struck me most was the level of admiration Soviet citizens held for the Germans - their discipline and order in particular. This was mixed with outrage - over German racism (for instance toilets in Stalingrad that bore the inscription "no entry for Russians"), and the invaders' arrogance and cruelty. Still, the underlying respect for the Germans by the Soviet soldiers who speak on record is touching, especially their desire to be acknowledged by the Germans as "first-class" opponents. And the Germans never accorded the Soviets this respect, as they continued to portray the enemy as beastlike and subhuman after the war, and helped (successfully) transplant this stereotype into Western Cold War propaganda.

To this day, Germans remember the rapes committed by Red Army soldiers, but not the massive violence inflicted by Germans during their invasion and occupation of the Soviet Union. I think the revenge on the Germans could have been much worse, had it not been contained by a longstanding tradition in Russia of looking up to the Germans as an "educated" and "cultured" people. If that image had not been operative, Soviet troops would have been much more brutal. Think of Russia's recent wars in Chechnya. Russian troops in Chechnya went wild. They went on a rampage in Berlin in 1945 as well, but were reined in after two weeks. And now apply this perspective to the Germans: the Soviet Union was to Germans in 1941 what Chechnya has been to Russia.

Q: What made Stalingrad exceptional for the Soviets? What was different about this battle?

David Glantz has shown that from the beginning of the German invasion of Russia, Red Army units fought bitterly, and German casualty rates were high - though always only a fraction of Red Army losses. Stalin ordered time and again that the Red Army fight back and not retreat without a fight.

In Stalingrad, there were several things happening at once. Firstly, Stalin issued "Order 227," the famous "not one step back" order. This had been in operation before, but now resonated with the Russians in a way that it hadn't previously. Secondly, there was a symbolic political importance to the city beyond its strategic value - it occupied a special significance in everyone's mind. The early parts of the battle preceded the landing of the Western Allies in North Africa, and so people in Great Britain were listening to the broadcasts from Stalingrad with enormous interest. There was a sense that if the city fell, all would be lost. Hitler himself imagined that the city was filled with a million staunch communists. And, of course, Stalin could not afford to let the city named after himself be destroyed. Thirdly, it was the first time that Germans had been forced into street fighting - something to which, it turned out, they were ill suited. In terms of urban combat, street-to-street fighting, the Soviets were probably superior to the Germans - Red Army commanders in my book time and again comment on how cautious ("cowardly") the Germans were in this respect, and how their Soviet soldiers were much more daring. Chuikov and others talk a great deal about the successful tactics of using storm troops, small units often operating at night, with surprise attacks. That was a Soviet kind of Blitzkrieg tactic in miniature; it was demoralizing for the Germans, a permanent source of fear. Compare this to the extreme inefficiency of Soviet fighting in the open plains. Here, Stalin's orders to keep attacking entrenched, fortified opponents or maneuvering German units were catastrophic. In 1941 the Germans had managed to encircle and destroy the Soviet defenders of Kiev, before entering the city without much of a fight; they acted similarly with Rostov in summer 1942. With Leningrad, the plan was to starve it to death before Germans would enter. They did not like urban warfare.

Look at where Stalingrad is on the map. It's on the edge of Europe, not far from the Kazakh border. At Stalingrad, the Soviets fought desperately for very tangible things: their loved ones, their homeland, and even their freedom against an enemy who was executing Communists and Jews, and enslaving and starving Russians. Compare this to the lack of moral goals on the part of German soldiers and the fact that they fought more than 1000 miles away from their homes. And add the fact that the Soviets kept learning from their adversary in military terms and that they fought much better in fall 1942 than a year before. All along, though, their tenacity deserves respect. It's something that most Western histories of the war do not properly acknowledge. In the account I mentioned earlier, the otherwise unexceptional Lieutenant Averbukh fell back from his command post after it was overrun and, shot, retreated while carrying his dying unit commander:

"Captain Lizunov was showing little sign of life, but I could hear him whispering, saying that I should leave him and save myself. Obviously I didn't leave him. We crawled to Verkhnyaya Elshanka, in the area of the radio station. I sat up to get my bearings and got hit again. Submachinegun fire to the left side of my chest and my left arm. I lost consciousness. I don't know how long I was out. I woke up because it got really cold. It was late, around four in the morning. It was already starting to get light. I could hear people speaking German all around me. I couldn't see Lizunov anywhere. I decided to shoot myself because I didn't have any strength left, and I didn't want them to take me alive. I figured there was no way out. I pulled the trigger, but the Mauser was clogged with sand and wouldn't fire. My right arm was still okay. With my right arm I crawled away and by some miracle made it to the division command post. It was already midday."
 
 #5
Kyiv Post
August 14, 2015
Students hand professor over to security service for making pro-separatist statements

The peculiar nature of the conflict in Ukraine, which has not officially been declared a war but has now killed nearly 7,000 people, has produced a strange result: an air of suspicion along the front line so strong it prompts ordinary residents to hunt for "separatists" among their own neighbors and friends.

On Aug. 13, the Security Service of Ukraine announced it had issued an official warning to a university professor in the western city of Zhytomyr after his own students ratted him out for expressing support for Russia's actions in eastern Ukraine.

SBU spokeswoman Irina Martynyuk said in a statement that "if (the professor) repeats these actions he will be detained and his actions will be prosecuted under the Criminal Code."

The grassroots initiative to root out separatist sympathizers is nothing new. Throughout the conflict, the Security Service of Ukraine has regularly announced the detention of residents near the front line who collaborate with separatists, either for monetary gain or for political reasons.

The widespread practice of separatist forces using informants from among the local population has now apparently fueled so much paranoia among ordinary citizens that it has reached the west of the country, hundreds of kilometers from the front.

Alexander Demchenko, the head of the "Stop Separatism" volunteer group, has taken the initiative a step further and begun serving as a go-between for ordinary residents and the SBU.

"People living near the front are often afraid to call the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) or just can't get through, and some don't even know where to send such information. My partner and I have been collecting complaints (about separatists) for a year now and passing them on to the SBU," Demchenko said.

When he first started, he said, most of the calls came from Odesa, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv, with several tips a day, whereas now most calls come from Kyiv.

In one case, he said, a man had called to complain about his mother-in-law defending Russia's actions over dinner.

The SBU has repeatedly encouraged residents to look out for separatist collaborators, offering a hotline for tips and setting up eye-catching billboards in the east. The Donetsk regional police department has joined in and set up a special email tip line as well.

"People of various ages write to us - young people, pensioners," Natalya Shiman, spokeswoman for the Donetsk regional administration, was cited as saying by Segodnya.ua.

"Each day we get 3-4 messages. For example, work is now under way to catch a recruiter for the separatists. We learned of this from the driver of a postal truck," she said, adding that the recruiter had offered money for information on Ukrainian troop movements.

In the Ukrainian-controlled part of Donetsk Oblast, billboards and signs line the streets with appeals to residents to watch out for the warning signs of an "ordinary separatist." They are said to "defile national symbols" and "are awaiting the arrival of the Russian world," according to the signs, which offer the phone number of a hotline to call should you encounter such a person.

The signs politely inform passersby that collaborating with separatist forces will get you between 7-12 years in prison.

Not everyone is supportive of the widespread initiative to track down separatist collaborators, however.

In an editorial published by Inforesist.org on Aug. 14, Semyon Gluzman, a former Soviet dissident and the head of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, warned that people could abuse the hotline to settle personal scores.

"With us, separatism is starting to be rooted out and persecuted using the recipe of Yozhov and Beria. (Nikolai Yozhov and Lavrentiy Beria, two heads of the Soviet secret police under dictator Josef Stalin). Publicly calling for the population to spot those who are not content (with the current situation). I would like to ask one question: what percentage of people living in shelled, starving and socially deprived villages in Donbas are content? And what percentage of the so-called content people wouldn't use the opportunity to tattle on "separatists" to settle scores with their previous enemies, their annoying neighbor or ex-husband who doesn't want to pay alimony?"

Deputy police chief of Donetsk Oblast Ilya Kiva, who in comments to the Kyiv Post described separatism as a "plague that needs to be stamped out before it spreads further," refused to say whether the police tip line had ever been abused by local residents seeking to settle scores.

"Of course, it's human nature that these things would happen. I wouldn't rule out that it is happening. But in each case the information provided is thoroughly and carefully investigated to ensure that the system is not abused," Kiva said.

He declined to specify whether or not police had documented any such cases since starting the tip line.

A request for comment sent to the SBU on whether or not its tip line had ever been abused was not immediately answered.
 
 #6
Russia Insider
August 15, 2015
Questions a Real MH17 Report Would Answer
If it doesn't, it's a coverup
By Patrick Armstrong
Patrick Armstrong received a PhD from Kings College, University of London, England in 1976 and retired in 2008 after 30 years as an analyst for the Canadian government, specializing in first the USSR and then Russia. He was a Political Counselor in the Canadian Embassy in Moscow from 1993 to 1996. He has been a frequent speaker at the Wilton Park conferences in the UK.

We are promised a report of the MH17 crash by October. Or is it already completed but you and I can't see it? Anyway, something that we can all see is supposed to appear in a couple of months - which would be about 15 months after it happened.

Personally, I don't expect much: the "Putin killed my son" meme has been implanted by thousands of MSM expectorations and nailed down by politicians like Australia's Julie Bishop demanding that Moscow "accept responsibility for the death of 298 people". I do not expect a report produced by Ukraine (a beneficiary of that meme), two NATO members, Bishop's Australia and Malaysia (especially as it was added to the group as an afterthought four months later) to dissent. And I expect even less form the report now that we know that "All parties to the criminal investigation have signed a non-disclosure agreement, which requires consensus among the parties before information regarding the investigation will be released".

Furthermore we all know perfectly well that if there were radar tracks or satellite photos or air traffic controller conversations or electronic intercepts or "black box" data supporting Bishop's assertions we would have heard about them. More than once. The fact that we have not is eloquent: "a dog that did not bark in the night".

But one can hope.

I enumerate here some issues that a real report would discuss and that a coverup would ignore. In my opinion the list can be used to assess the seriousness of the report. If few or none are addressed, then it's just not a real investigation. If all we have is "must haves..." or "might haves..." or "large number of high-energy objects" or twitter, or Bellingcat, then it's a coverup. After more than a year, with all the access claimed by the Joint Investigation Team, there should be real evidence and real conclusions based on that evidence.

There's lots of stuff I don't think we need to worry about. I don't believe that it was really MH370; there's no need to take anything Bellingcat says seriously; this is obviously not a Boeing 777 crashing; this so-called missile launch video is fake; this photo of a fighter and MH17 that appeared in one Russian media outlet probably is too; this alleged recording from a Russian newspaper doesn't convince me. I know there's a whole industry of fakery out there and a lot of incentives. On the other hand, the Western news media told plenty of lies about "looting the site" and so on. While it's not in the remit of the JIT to apologise, it might be honourable if it were to acknowledge that as good and respectful a job as possible was done.

The report must address the questions listed below. Maybe the answers can't be known, but there must at least be indication that the investigators took them into account and either accepted or dismissed them for logical or evidential reasons. For example, pretending that the people who say they saw MH17 shot down by fighter planes do not exist is not acceptable. Drawings like this, or "social media" are not good enough: we have to be shown some boulders from the famous "mountain of evidence".

Real evidence, real discussion, real consideration, real answers. A real investigation.

I have noted below in italics what, in my opinion, are the truly unavoidable issues. But here's the summary, if you don't want to read it all.

IN SUMMARY

The "black boxes" and other data available to the JIT will tell us where MH17 was when it was hit, what direction it was going in, what speed it was travelling.

Analysis of the damage pattern of the wreckage will show where the missile was when it detonated.

Backtracking from that point will show from where it was launched.

Lethal fragments will show what weapon hit it.

These facts, and the route change, are the most important of the important facts.

A report that doesn't deal with these is a coverup.

BEFORE

Earlier routes of this daily Amsterdam-Kuala Lumpur flight travelled well south of the fighting area, over the Sea of Azov. This day the plane was sent over the fighting area. Who did it? Then the Flight Aware tracks were changed. Who did that? (Note: this question is very important. First the re-direction and then the falsification. Prima facie evidence of a purposeful conspiracy and one that could not possibly be attributed to Moscow or to the rebels. At the time I looked the routes up on FlightAware and saw the earlier ones well south of the fighting. Then, a few days later, I saw that all the earlier tracks had been moved north. But I didn't have the wit to make screen captures of the earlier tracks. Others did, however, and here they are.)

Does Carlos the Spanish traffic controller exist? If so, what he says is extremely important evidence. Effort should be made to track down the story.

Where are the recordings of flight traffic controllers' communications with MH17 in the zones it passed through?

DURING

The Russians have provided radar plots showing the route of MH 17. Where are those from Ukrainian or Polish air traffic controllers? Were there fighter planes near it? (Especially important is the Russian-alleged presence of fighter planes near MH17. That cannot be sloughed over: true or false?)

We know US/NATO exercises were being carried out within radar or satellite observation. Where is this information?

Robert Perry says his contacts in the US intelligence establishment have evidence that the missile was fired from Kiev-held territory. Yes or no?

Numerous people claim to have seen MH17 shot down by fighter planes. Conversations of the first people on the scene reiterate this. "Carlos the flight controller" says it. These testimonies must be investigated and verified or rejected; if the latter, with reasons. (Another of the key points: all this would have been visible on radar. Is it, or isn't it?)

Many people claim the phone intercepts and social media cited by the US State Department are fakes. True or false?

It is claimed that a Ukrainian air force ground staff member, now in Russia, says he saw Ukrainian fighter planes take off that day, one returning without missiles. Perhaps he's lying, but the investigation cannot ignore his testimony: he must be interviewed and his statement assessed.

A Buk missile leaves a very prominent trail. Where are the witnesses?

Here's a report that sources in the Ukrainian security structure say Ukrainian forces shot it down by accident. Why should this particular story, of the innumerable assertions of this and that, be considered, you ask? Because it wouldn't be the first time Ukrainian air defence units shot down a civilian aircraft by accident and then lied about it. That fact alone makes it worthy of at least a paragraph in a real report.

THE WRECKAGE

If the cause was an internal explosion, the wreckage should show unmistakeable evidence. This possibility must be ruled out. (Of course an internal explosion - which no one expects to have been the case - would change everything.)

Graham Phillips tells us the area still has many fragments and that the investigators seem to be incurious about them. Is this true?

What do the autopsies on the pilots tell us? Is this story about a coverup true? Are those bullet holes in the pilot's chair? Are those bullet holes in the pilots' section of the nose? These questions should be fairly easily answered one way or the other. (A serious report must account for the apparently circular holes shown in many photographs).

The wreckage probably contains missile warhead fragments and/or bullets. These are carefully designed - they are not random bits of langrage. A Buk warhead has thousands of distinctive fragments; depending on their shape, the type of Buk warhead can be determined. Likewise a piece of linked rod warhead would be apodictic evidence of an air to air missile (is this one? source). A cannon round would be apodictic evidence of gunfire. The shape, composition and weight of lethal fragments are diagnostic in identifying the weapon that brought it down. (If bullets or non-Buk warhead fragments are found, the conventional Western accusation is decisively contradicted.)

There should be enough evidence from the destruction pattern of the wreckage to show where the warhead was when it detonated. That combined with the location and direction of travel of MH17 at the moment of detonation will tell us from where the missile was fired. The omission of this information would be another fatal flaw. (Another key piece of evidence: for example Almaz-Antey's analysis concludes it was a Buk, of a model no longer possessed by Russian air defence forces, and that it could only have been fired from Kiev-held territory).

THE INVESTIGATION

Why does Ukraine have a veto on publication?

Why was Malaysia - the owner of the aircraft, after all - only added to the JIT in November 2014?

Why are Belgium and Australia on the investigation team at all? Especially after the Foreign Minister of the latter already decided Russia was culpable?

We had remarkably full information on the Germanwings crash in the Alps within weeks, with many details from the "black boxes" including sound in the cockpit. Why has this investigation taken so long?

AND...

We are told (recently) that the investigators believe they may have recovered fragments of a Buk missile from the crash site. Does this make sense to you? It doesn't to me. MH17 was heading south-east at an altitude of 10,000 metres. The US scenario has the missile fired from north-west (head on), the Almaz-Antey reconstruction has the missile coming from the south-west (starboard side). The fragments of the aircraft would continue with their momentum, the fragments of the missile body and engine with their momentum; in neither case would one expect to see wreckage from the two very close to each other.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

(especially when you know that any real evidence would have been
plastered on every front page, news program and op-ed piece.)
 #7
Running for Office in Siberia
A series on the District #35 Election for Novosibirsk City Council: Part II: Next Generation
By Sarah Lindemann-Komarova
[Founder, Siberian Civic Initiatives Support Center 1995 - 2014. Helped to establish this as the hub for the first civil society development support network in the former Soviet Union.]

Article with pictures: https://medium.com/@ECHOSiberia/running-for-office-in-siberia-959d59bf2737
Part I: https://medium.com/@ECHOSiberia/running-for-office-in-siberia-7b426f574249

A generation can be as much about a state of mind as years.  In this way Natalia Pinus, the focus of this series, reflects what could be the next generation of candidates in Russia in three important ways:  

-As the only representative of the non-profit sector, a predominantly female sector in Russia, and the only woman in the #35 District field (currently only three of the 39 sitting Council deputies are women) her candidacy demonstrates a new way for women to gain the experience and public profile necessary to be a viable candidate.

-Her status, Director of the Community Foundation for the Development of Akademgorodok, a grassroots NGO, brings with it a constituency base that includes all stakeholder groups.  This is another departure from the norm where candidates tend to represent the interests of a particular power base. In post- perestroika Akademgorodok there were two of these, the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Siberian Division) and a group of local businessmen who somehow gained control over key commercial assets during the transition.   The deputy Natalia hopes to succeed is Head of a scientific institute and General Secretary of the Siberian Division, and the man who preceded him was a leading local businessman.  These core constituencies are also represented by six of the seven other candidates running (Vice Director of a scientific institute, two from construction companies, one from a utilities provider, one owns an auto parts business, another is the executive director of an engineering, building design company).  The other outlier is a Tai Kwan Do trainer but sports in general and martial arts in particular have always been closely associated with people in power.  In Novosibirsk this is even more pronounced because of its most famous politician, three time Olympic Champion in Greco-Roman wrestling, Alexander Karelin. ''
 
-Whatever the male candidates have achieved for their businesses, institutes, employees or clients, their contributions to the broader community have not been noticeable.  In addition to the visibility her five years of experience in community development provided, it inspired Natalia to focus on governance over politics that meant choosing to run as an independent, one of three in the District election.  
 
Governance is all about making things work.  The skills and attitudes necessary to get results in a society with raised expectations can run counter to the skill set legacy from the Soviet era as well as what evolved during the 90's transition to capitalism.   There is often a deficit in openness, accessibility and willingness to compromise among elected officials and their constituents. These practices are promoted by NGOs that serve as civil society development centers with a community development focus. When Natalia decided to leave business for the non-profit sector, this resource infrastructure was in place to provide information, training, contacts and partnership with other development activists and professionals.   Initially supported by western donors, these NGOs and programs are now, to some degree, financed by Russian government and corporations.  This funding transition was well underway prior to the expulsion of western donors.  

Despite an offer from a foreign donor to provide funding, Natalia's strategy for the Foundation was always to concentrate on generating local resources while inviting anyone to bring a project to the organization for moral and promotional support, if nothing else.   The big tent approach was critical in a community as complex as Akademgorodok and made it possible for the Eureka Science Caf� that hosts weekly lectures to flourish along with computer training for the elderly.  Another focus has been to revive the creative spirit of the community that decayed along with the common spaces and amenities.  Natalia invited artists to submit designs for "one of a kind" benches and then found donors willing to pay for their construction.  The first created a sensation because it was placed outside the University and replicated the infamous Russian cheat sheet.  

Another popular bench has an upper and lower level.  The ladder connecting the two disappeared recently and before volunteers could replace it, a new one appeared along with a plaque from a man with the following dedication, "Happy Birthday Sweetheart".    The mystery was covered on the local news giving Natalia some free press and a chance to talk about how this Foundation project continues to surprise and enrich life in the community.  
 
The benches also laid the groundwork for a more expansive beautification project that brought together government, the science elite, business and neighborhood volunteers.  Together a swamp was transformed into a duck pond park that has become the most popular place for an evening stroll.   

Natalia's ability to navigate through the entrenched interests and apathy to get results was noticed and she was invited to serve on numerous public committees established by the government including the Novosibirsk Mayor's Town Planning council and cultural committees for the Regional Ministry and Governor.  In a recent interview Natalia gave her impressions of these entities, "Unfortunately the existing mechanisms to include citizens in governance are not effective and, in some cases, simply serve the function of legitimizing government decisions."

In 2013 she had her first election experience when she beat three other candidates to become a member of the Regional Public Chamber.  The questions asked by the auditorium at that time, "where does your money come from, why don't you have to work?" and "how can a mother with three children have time to be so active?" continue to be key concerns for some elements of the electorate in her current campaign.

In the midst of all of this activity, Novosibirsk became a focal point for the conservative cultural backlash happening in Russia.  While one would expect Natalia to support actions promoting freedom for artists and NGOs, it was surprising to see her ignore the possibility of risking the social capital accrued, by becoming an organizer or prominent participant in three 2015 actions organized in response.  Two of them challenged Federal actions. The first meeting objected to the Minister of Culture firing the Director of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre for producing a version of the Tannhauser opera that Russian Orthodox activists were offended by.  The second was a protest to support the Dynasty Foundation. The organization was labeled a "Foreign Agent" because the money its Russian founder used to provide stipends for students and promote science was being held off-shore.  The third protest activity took the form of civil disobedience when the Mayor moved the annual "Monstration" creative class alternative to the May Day march to a marginal location.  Organizers decided to ignore the City order and marched, as always, on the main street, Red Prospect. Natalia's sign said, "Taste and color are great reasons for friendship".

The culmination of Natalia's last five years as an active citizen was the decision to run in the United Russia (party in power) primary for the September Novosibirsk City Council election.  "My desire to run was sincere and an organic progression. I was prepared internally for this step so when the Association of Novosibirsk State University Graduates suggested I run, I agreed.... I want to continue to bring together government, business and the people to solve problems....If I become a Deputy it will give me more opportunities to support development and introduce me to a whole new circle of people."  

Next week Part III of this series will cover Natalia's participation in the United Russia primary, why she decided to run as an independent and how she made that happen.
 #8
The Kremlin Stooge
https://marknesop.wordpress.com
August 13, 2015
How's Life At The Economist? Not Grate.
By Mark Chapman

When some trendy new atrocity
Has brought you to your knees
Come with us we'll sail the
Seas of Cheese

Primus, from "Sailing the Seas of Cheese"

Recently, The Economist was swept away by a riptide of rennet and teary boo-hoo over the appalling waste of good food displayed by, no surprise, Russia; the latest episode of Russia's disgracing itself in front of an aghast world occurred at various points of entry to the Russian Federation on August 6th. On that day, we are told by a shocked Economist, Russia burned and otherwise destroyed 300 tonnes of food; incinerating pork, pulping tomatoes and driving bulldozers over shipments of European cheese.

I realize you're probably more used to "tons". A ton, in non-U.S. measure, is 2000 pounds. The "tonne" is its metric bigger sibling, at 1000 kg, or 2,204.6 pounds. So, simple math tells us the Russian Federation destroyed 6,613,80 pounds of delicious European imported food.

Why would Putin do such a thing? Because naturally it was Putin, Russia is Putin, and The Economist gets lots of mileage out of the order to destroy these delicacies having come from Putin himself. "All of this is being done with the blessing of Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. Last year the government banned imports of food from countries which had imposed sanctions on Russia. Now food that slips through the embargo is being destroyed in the name of Russian sovereignty."

This runs under the subheading, "A famine-prone country tests its citizens' loyalty by destroying food". Apparently if your country has ever had a famine - The Economist is clear that this was in the 1930's - you are famine-prone forever. Since there is no time limit and famine was more regular than the post in medieval Europe, I guess France and England are famine-prone as well.

Obviously, The Economist would prefer that banned goods were simply allowed to proceed unimpeded to Russian market shelves, where they would be sold as usual to the Russian public, resulting in profit for their European vendors. Because laws like that are just stupid, and when the government makes stupid laws, citizens should feel free to ignore them. That's the way it's done in democratic non-slave countries. You better believe that's the way it's done in France, which makes one hell of a lot of cheese, and would like to sell more of it to Russia and to hell with what Putin says. Right?

Actually, non. In France you can marry a dead person, so long as you can demonstrate that you were planning to marry that person before he or she died. If you meet someone else later, you'll need a divorce to be able to marry them. That should be easy, though, because it would be...ummm...uncontested. I bet The Economist had a tantrum when French farmers dumped millions of liters of milk into fields adjacent to one of France's most popular tourist sites, because they were not making enough profit. What? No, apparently they didn't mention it.

Well, why didn't Russia just give that food to the poor? Shocking, is what it is. I'll tell you why, Economist; because an embargo means the entry of that fancy European food into the Russian Federation is illegal. If Russia were to confiscate it and then give it to the poor, The Economist and other silly pseudo-analysis publications would have a field day proclaiming that Putin cannot feed his people, and has to steal from Europe to feed the starving multitudes. If Russia paid for it and then gave it to the poor, European vendors would reap the profits, which would only encourage them to new heights of creative lawbreaking, such as trying to smuggle prohibited food products by shipping them without labels, or false labeling suggesting they originated in a country not affected by the ban.

The Economist is registered in London and New York. How do those countries react to the discovery of food products whose vendors try to slip them into the country as contraband? Well, "Imports of animal origin coming into the European Union are subjected to import checks by veterinary officers at designated ports. Advance notice of the shipments is required, documents are inspected and a percentage of consignments physically examined. These costs are met by the importer." In fact, if The Telegraph is to be believed, more than 10 tons of smuggled meat and animal products are intercepted at Heathrow in an average year. In the USA, dogs help customs inspectors sniff out contraband food products, which are confiscated for health reasons and destroyed. Nobody asks these countries if their health regulations are politically motivated, or why they exclude products from certain countries. Similarly, nobody suggests that food confiscated for public health reasons should be given to the poor.

Judging by the pages and pages of outrage directed at Russia for destroying this prohibited food - said destruction to be recorded to prevent local officials from simply feasting on it instead or reselling it for their own profit - the European Union is pretty ticked off about it. Probably because it will prove to be an effective deterrent to European marketers who have continued to realize profits by smuggling contraband food into Russia. Which is the purpose of an embargo. I'm sure it is political. So what? Europe is a big boy, and can take responsibility for its own actions as well as accept their consequences, which devolve directly from letting itself be pushed into sanctions against Russia by Washington, using the expedient of accusing Russia of having shot down MH-17. Despite zero credible evidence having been offered that such was actually the case, Ukraine - the prime suspect - is accorded full access to all of the evidence, a veto over the release of any results of the investigation, and is permitted to run the disciplinary investigation which will theoretically find and punish the guilty party. When that wasn't enough, Joint Investigative Team (JIT) members Australia, the Netherlands, Ukraine and Belgium floated the idea of a UN Tribunal, which would be empowered to review ongoing investigations and make a determination of guilt, pass sentence and award punishment although the UN has no judicial powers whatsoever. This was obvious grandstanding calculated to push Russia into vetoing it. Which it did, opening a floodgate to a torrent of lurid press asserting this must mean Russia is guilty, otherwise why would they want to impede the investigation, bla, bla, bla, oblivious that refusing to accept a judgment awarded by its enemies as an excuse to stop investigating is in no way an impediment to investigation continuing.

After a visit to India, President Bush lifted a 17-year ban on the American import of Indian mangoes. Evidently there was no health reason for the ban, and lifting it was a quid pro quo for India's relaxation of the restriction on the import of California almonds. Seven years later, the EU banned import of Indian mangoes and some other fruits and vegetables, stating that some shipments contained the tobacco whitefly, which could threaten the UK's tomato and cucumber crops. Nobody wrote articles suggesting the move was political and that the UK government was just making up some phony excuse to punish India. Stuff like that happens, all the time. The Economist said not a dickie-bird about mangoes being burned in India because they had lost market share.

Get used to it, Europe. Russia is not letting itself be rolled by the European Union, and if European markets suffer from sanctions against their agricultural products, tough tit. If you can't muster up the sack to stand up to Washington, instead letting Uncle Sam run his hand up the back of your pyjamas and move your mouth, the economic relationship is only going to get tougher. You have yourself a nice winter, now.
 #9
The Nation
www.thenation.com
August 14, 2015
Letter From Belgorod
70 years of victory in Russia and Ukraine.
By Sophie Pinkham
Sophie Pinkham studies Russian literature at Columbia University.

On May 9, the shell-shocked Eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk celebrated. It was Victory Day, the annual commemoration of Germany's surrender to the Soviet Union in 1945. Kiev, which is struggling to escape its Soviet past, no longer treats the day as a festive occasion; for the People's Republic of Donetsk, or DNR, the holiday was yet another opportunity to side with Russia and the Soviet Union, and against Kiev. It had been a year since the DNR had declared its independence from Kiev, following the Maidan protests-which began with then-president Viktor Yanukovych's decision not to sign an EU Association Agreement and ended with him fleeing the country after a series of armed clashes in the center of Kiev-and a year since Kiev's prosecutor general had classified the DNR as a terrorist organization. Thousands of people have since been killed: fighters on both sides, and civilians caught in the middle. More than a million people have been displaced, in a horrible echo of the Second World War's mass evacuations.

Prime Minister Aleksandr Zakharchenko, who was wounded in the battle of Debaltseve last winter, stood in the rain and made a speech. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he slurred his words; pro-Ukrainians later accused him of being drunk, but maybe he was just tired. Seventy years ago, Soviet heroes had defeated the fascists, he declared, and now their children and grandchildren were fighting fascists once again; the generation of victors had raised a generation of heroes. The past bled into the present, as the victories and losses of the Second World War mingled with those of the most recent war-or "antiterrorist operation," as Kiev calls it.

Onlookers stood under umbrellas, cheering "Thank you!" and throwing flowers at the stony-faced new heroes of Donbass, the region that became Eastern Ukraine after the Russian Revolution. Men with fighting names like Givi and Motorola held their white-gloved hands in fixed salutes as they rode by on tanks painted with orange-and-black St. George ribbons, a mark of Russian patriotism. In the evening, there were fireworks, as is customary on Victory Day, though one might have expected the residents of Donetsk to be tired of explosions after nearly a year of intermittent shelling.

It didn't rain on Moscow's Victory Day parade. The Kremlin spent millions of dollars to make sure of it: A few days before the holiday, a spokesman at Russia's Federal Air Transport Agency announced that a group of planes would be ready to "attack" any rain clouds with cement particles and silver iodide. When Vladimir Putin made his speech on Red Square, he was surrounded by veterans and foreign dignitaries from China, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and Egypt, as well as Winston Churchill's grandson, a Tory MP. Most European leaders skipped the parade to protest Russia's actions in Ukraine. For many Russians, it looked as though the once-Allied nations had forgotten that it was the Soviet Union that rescued them from Nazism, at the cost of tens of millions of Soviet lives. Putin thanked the Allied countries graciously for their help winning the Great Patriotic War, as it is known in Russia, but had harsh words for those who were violating the postwar principles of international cooperation. Intercontinental ballistic-missile carriers rolled through the streets, and fighter jets formed a huge "70" in the sky.

Seventy Years of Victory! posters all over Russia cried, as if Victory were not a historical event but a permanent state of exaltation. The St. George ribbon snaked across walls, windows, cars, trains, lounge chairs, bread loaves, dog collars, vodka bottles, flip-flops, fingernails, and even sex toys. On nearly every Moscow street corner, a Russian flag waved beside the red Soviet Banner of Victory, the one raised over the Reichstag in 1945. Kiosks around the city sold T-shirts showing Putin dressed as a Soviet soldier.

"When Brezhnev's generation died-the generation of leaders who actually fought in the war-the legitimacy of the Soviet government disappeared with it," Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements, told me in an interview at his Moscow office. "Now Putin's government is trying to establish legitimacy not based on any real historical experience, but by using late-Soviet style and aesthetics. On television, you see dancing girls in uniforms of the Second World War-half of the girls with the red Soviet flag, and half with the tricolor Russian flag. The message is very clear: Russia is the successor of the Soviet Union, the heir to Victory. It looks like a mockery, a way of hiding the fact that the war was won by a different government, a different political and social system. They're claiming a historical inheritance to which they don't have sufficient rights."

Just before Victory Day, Radio Svoboda reported that Anatoly Ptitsyn, a 90-year-old veteran in Kaliningrad, hoped his Victory Day wouldn't be spoiled by rain, as his roof was full of holes. He didn't have the money to fix it, and the local administration refused to help. "Our country only needs dead heroes," he told a journalist.

The media used stories like Ptitsyn's to illustrate government hypocrisy, but such reports also point to the dismantling of what remains of the Soviet-era social safety net. Universal education, medical care, housing, and pensions for the disabled and the elderly were some of the most cherished achievements of the Soviet Union, even if the systems had many problems, including low salaries and a lack of up-to-date training and technology. But today, with less money to spare on populist gestures, Putin is continuing the process of privatization that began with Yeltsin. Even as the Russian government insists on its symbolic association with the Soviet past, it is moving toward a neoliberal social model antithetical to Communist ideals. The real value of pensions is falling; increasing numbers of Russians are living below the poverty line; and there have been strikes by healthcare providers, teachers, factory workers, and construction workers, often because of unpaid wages. For many, Russia's orgy of patriotism looks like a tactic to divert attention from the country's economic troubles.

November 7, 1941, marked the anniversary of the October Revolution. Just days after German planes had bombed the Kremlin, Stalin ordered a parade that would be watched around the world. It was an extraordinarily risky way to raise morale and cow the enemy.

In his speech, Stalin invoked the great minds of Russian art and science and Russia's military heroes, from Aleksandr Nevsky to the generals who defeated Napoleon. The symbolic union of the USSR with imperialist-Orthodox Russia was uncongenial to some revolutionaries, but it was a reliable crowd-pleaser. Much as Putin is working to harness the symbolic power of Soviet Victory, Stalin harnessed the energy of all the victories of the Russian Empire. It didn't matter that the revolution had promised to abolish the imperial system for good. The old victories, heroes, and gods were too potent to be discarded.

This year, as part of its attempt to align itself with Europe rather than Russia, Ukraine declared May 8 "Victory in Europe Day" and replaced the Soviet term "Great Patriotic War" with "Second World War." May 9 became "Victory Day Over Nazism in World War II," a solemn rather than a festive affair. Kiev's traditional Victory march was replaced by a peace march, without fireworks. The Motherland statue, a war memorial in the shape of a giant woman with a sword, was crowned with a garland of red poppies, which are used in Europe to commemorate the war dead. St. George ribbons were frowned upon, or worse. A video circulated online showed two Ukrainian nationalists berating an older man trying to leave his home wearing a ribbon; when he refused to go back inside, they doused him in kefir.

Shortly after Victory Day, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed new laws that attached criminal penalties to the display of Soviet and Nazi symbols in almost any context, and to denial of the "criminal character of the communist totalitarian regime of 1917-1991 in Ukraine." A second law recognized the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as "independence fighters" and made it a criminal offense to deny the legitimacy of their actions. Soviet people were taught to despise UPA and OUN as collaborators and murderers, and not without reason: During the Second World War, the groups made alliances with the Nazis and massacred tens of thousands of Poles and Jews as part of their plan to cleanse Ukraine of foreign occupiers. They also killed a number of Soviet (as well as Polish) political figures, notably Nikolai Vatutin, one of the Soviet Union's most important generals.

The new "memory laws" are an act of symbolic violence against the civilization in which many Ukrainians, Russians, and other Soviet people grew up, and for which millions lost their lives fighting the Germans. Poles, Jews, leftists, historians, and advocates of free speech and human rights are among those who have criticized the legislation. Many have pointed to the irony of the fact that the so-called "decommunization" laws use Soviet-style tactics: the suppression of political speech and debate, and the official imposition of a redacted version of history.

Last year, on May 2, pro-Russian protesters attacked an Odessa demonstration in support of a united Ukraine. After several hours of street fighting and a chase, the pro-Russian activists took refuge inside the Odessa Trade Unions building. When the building caught fire, most likely from a Molotov cocktail, 42 people inside were killed. The police did not intervene, firefighters arrived only after a long delay, and after more than a year, Ukraine's official investigation has yielded few results. The "Odessa massacre," as it is usually called in Russia, provoked fear and fury among Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians, becoming a central justification, in the Russian media and popular imagination, for Russian intervention in Ukraine. It has been used as proof of Maidan's murderous intent, and of the necessity of Russia's "rescue" of the people of Crimea and support for the Eastern Ukrainian separatists. (Though the Kremlin adamantly denies sending soldiers and military equipment to Eastern Ukraine, there is increasing evidence to the contrary.)

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has the bitter intimacy of a family feud. The two countries are bound together by geography, trade, culture, history, and language. Russians have long cast themselves in the role of "older brother" to Ukraine: It's a blood relationship, if not an equal one. In the hierarchy of Soviet nationalities, Ukrainians were second only to Russians; if the Soviet Union was a communal apartment, as one Communist Party official described it in 1924, Ukraine got the second-biggest room.

World War II tested the friendship between the two nations. Western Ukraine was incorporated into the USSR in 1939-40, and many of its inhabitants had no desire to join the Soviet family. The Germans exploited this enmity, striking deals with Ukrainian nationalists. At the same time, a large proportion of Red Army soldiers, officers, and generals were Ukrainian, and many of the war's decisive battles were fought on Ukrainian territory. Stalin described the Red Army as the defender of "peace and friendship between the peoples of every land." Ukrainian people and Ukrainian land were at the heart of this friendship, and at the heart of Victory.

After the war, the Ukrainian Republic played a correspondingly central role in the emerging Victory cult. War commemoration was incorporated into coming-of-age rites, wedding processions, and national holidays. This helped counteract the wartime surge of Ukrainian nationalist sentiment, some of which the Party had encouraged for reasons of morale. Remembering wartime triumphs also served to dull the memory of the violent collectivization of farms and the resulting famine of 1932-33, which killed millions of Ukrainians. According to Party rhetoric, Victory was the final proof that it had been necessary to unite the Soviet republics, whatever the cost. The Soviet family had been the only possible road to the (relative) autonomy of its members; it was the Soviet project that had granted the freedom to be Ukrainian, and that unified Ukrainian territory for the first time in history.

Stalin died in 1953, but the friendship of the peoples lived on. In 1954, the Soviet Union celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Treaty between Russia and the Cossack Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky, which resulted in the incorporation of most of what is now Ukraine (not including its western regions) into Russia. Much as Russians this spring could purchase nearly anything in St. George orange and black, in 1954 Ukrainians could buy a wide variety of items sold in wrappers decorated with images of the Kremlin and of Kiev's statue of Khmelnitsky astride a rearing horse, and the words "300 Years": underwear and cigarettes, wine glasses, a specially brewed beer. Russia and Ukraine held parades and concerts and exchanged symbolic gifts. The most valuable of these was Crimea, a province that had never been part of Ukraine.

Belgorod is a midsize city 25 miles from the northeastern Ukrainian border, just 50 miles from the Ukrainian city of Kharkov. Because of its location, Belgorod was especially hard hit during the Second World War. It was occupied by the Germans from October 1941 until early 1943, and was recaptured by the Germans in 1943, at the culmination of the Third Battle of Kharkov. The Red Army liberated it in the summer of 1943, after the Battle of Kursk, the world's largest tank battle, which saw 863,000 Soviet and nearly 200,000 German casualties. British-Russian journalist Alexander Werth wrote that when he arrived in the area north of the city, the earth was dead for miles around and "the air was filled with the stench of half-buried corpses."

Belgorod has always had close ties to Ukraine. In 1918, it was part of the short-lived Ukrainian State established by German-backed Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky. When Skoropadsky was overthrown, Belgorod became the seat of a provisional government. Some residents speak with guttural accents, like those common in Eastern Ukraine, and drop the occasional Ukrainian word into their speech.

Until recently, people moved freely and frequently between Belgorod and Kharkov. Olga and Sanya, a married couple I met in Crimea five years ago, used to visit friends in Kharkov on a whim, for an overnight visit or a birthday party. Now a border crossing requires time, documents, and money, and many who crossed in the last year were refugees escaping the violence in Eastern Ukraine. Olga and Sanya told me sadly that many of their Ukrainian friends no longer speak to Russians on principle, and that one friend from Kiev disowned her sister for returning to Crimea after it became Russian. Families have been divided by the conflict, or destroyed; Sanya told me that at Easter there were long lines at the border, because so many people went to visit the graves of relatives who'd been killed in the fighting in Eastern Ukraine. Now Ukraine is planning to erect barbed-wire fences, watchtowers, and tank traps along its entire border with Russia, in an effort to keep out Russian fighters, weapons, and supplies.

Olga and I woke early on the morning of Victory Day to go to Belgorod's Immortal Regiment march. Organized several years ago by journalists from the respected independent station Tomsk TV-2, the Immortal Regiment began as a nonpolitical, nongovernmental initiative to encourage people to collect and share information about family members who had served in the war. On Victory Day, participants march carrying pictures of their relatives. It's an attempt to focus attention on the real people who fought in the real war, on historical truth rather than jingoistic fantasy. Not all of the stories on the Immortal Regiment's website are about heroic feats: One person wrote, for example, about how his grandfather arrived late to the draft office and was never seen again.

In Belgorod, where the streets had been empty the day before, we were astonished by the number of people marching. Olga kept seeing acquaintances carrying portraits of their grandparents or great-grandparents. Many of the portraits we saw were handmade, often with carefully assembled collages of photographs and words.

"I have goose bumps," Olga said.

A group walked by carrying a huge red Victory Banner and a large portrait of Stalin. Nearby, a man in a mass-produced red Stalin T-shirt was waving a Soviet flag and carrying a bunch of red roses. Another man in an identical shirt soon joined him. A heavily made-up young woman paired the same top with red high heels. One of the slogans of Victory Day was "We are proud and we remember," but some people seemed to have forgotten quite a lot.

Balloon vendors sold tanks and helicopters alongside SpongeBob SquarePants dolls and hearts that said I Love You This Much in English. Men dressed as Cossacks stood on guard, whips in hand. Whole families wore Soviet uniforms or camouflage; one woman pushed her uniformed toddler in a stroller, looking like a parody of a war nurse. Family members of all ages competed to see who could assemble and disassemble a rifle fastest, and posed for photos with an actor-soldier on a vintage military motorcycle. Antique tanks swarmed with little children, and a boy in uniform marched in circles on the back of a military truck.

After the parade, we went to grill sausages and chicken with some of Olga's friends. Dima, an old acquaintance, told me that his grandfather had made it all the way to Berlin, where he fell in love with a German woman, married her, and brought her back to Russia with him. Then they were repressed, sent first to the taiga and then to Kazakhstan. They were lucky they weren't shot.

Dima had been working in construction, building houses on the Russian-Ukrainian border. Now no one wanted houses there, and Dima was broke.

"Death to traitors," he said ironically, lifting his glass of vodka, "and to fascists."

We went up to the roof to watch the fireworks, which were just across the street. The explosions were deafening, and the air was thick with smoke.

When we went back downstairs, I asked Lyosha, another old acquaintance, what he thought about the conflict in Ukraine.

He leaned in close to me, speaking softly, and told me he'd been feeling paranoid. He was so bombarded with propaganda that he'd started to see conspiracies everywhere he looked.

"When I heard about the fire in Odessa," he said, "I wanted to drop everything and go and fight for Donbass. But now I think about how I reacted, and I wonder if the whole thing was just a Russian provocation. I get a weak signal from a Ukrainian TV station. Sometimes I watch it and then watch the Russian news, just to compare. They're all lying. They tell you everything is black and white, but it's not that way at all. There are no heroes in this. In Belgorod, we all know people who've come from Eastern Ukraine. They tell us about being attacked by Ukrainian forces and by the rebels-by both sides. They saw it with their own eyes. They were as close to the fighting as we were to the fireworks."

He held his palm up to his face to demonstrate.

"Do you think Russian soldiers are fighting in Donbass?" I asked.

He lowered his voice to a whisper. "I think so. But everyone thinks I'm wrong-even my friends. Even my mother."

We drank to peace, again and again.   

 
 
#10
UNIAN (Kyiv)
www.unian.info
August 15, 2015
Over 100 suicides among Ukrainian soldiers reported since beginning of ATO

At present, about 136 suicides have been reported since the beginning of the Anti-Terrorist Operation implementation, according to a source in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, Ukrainian news agency TSN reported.

However, the problem of suicide and depression among Ukrainian soldiers has not been officially commented.

At the same time, volunteer services, currently dealing with soldiers, sound the alarm, because no relevant activity on psychological diagnostics and rehabilitation of the soldiers has been sufficiently carried out. Even more, Ukraine does not have an established mechanism of psychological assistance provision, so this issue is most often tackled by volunteers.

In most countries, soldiers are not sent home directly after their return from combat zones. For example, the military in France are sent to Cyprus on holiday. While in Ukraine, such people are often left alone to deal with emotional effects of war.

Svitlana Kaminska, the psychologist at Psychological Crisis Service, gives recommendations to families when service members return home.

"First of all, it is to be near them. To sit down and listen to this person. Invite a priest, when he [serviceman] returns home and he is a religious person. A lot of information is available online," she said.

Experts note that assistance of mental health professionals provided in due time can prevent the irretrievable act.
 
 #11
Washington Post
August 15, 2015
Letters to the Editor
Eastern Ukraine needs help, not isolation

The Aug. 9 editorial "An untenable position" recommended Kiev continue isolating the rebel-controlled provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine. The area is home to 3 million people, or, more specifically, 3 million Ukrainian citizens. The United Nations classified 1.4 million of them as "highly vulnerable and in need of assistance." The majority of those left inside the blockade are the old, the infirm and the financially destitute - the ones who can't leave.

These people are not terrorists or Russian collaborators. They are Ukrainian citizens, and their only crime is having the misfortune of living in what became a war zone. Their dead friends and relatives make up the lion's share of the 7,000 casualties in this conflict. They continue to die from lack of access to food and medicine. International aid organizations keep issuing warnings about a looming humanitarian catastrophe in the next few months.

Twenty-five years ago, my family was stuck in then-Soviet Ukraine. We had nothing, and the West, including the United States, helped us and hundreds of thousands of other refugees even though we were technically "Soviet puppets," born on the wrong side of the line. Today is a different story. Isolating a region for geopolitical considerations is one thing; withholding life-saving supplies from innocent civilians is quite another.

Lev Golinkin, East Windsor, N.J.
 
 #12
Sputnik
August 15, 2015
'Loss of Crimea is Good Thing' - Director of Ukrainian TV Channel
[Video interview here http://m.sputniknews.com/politics/20150815/1025793827.html]

Crimea's reunification with Russia is actually a good thing and will benefit Ukraine, Ostap Drozdov, the media director of Ukrainian TV channel ZIK, told Canadian-based Ukrainian TV Vancouver.

The loss of Crimea is a positive thing for Ukraine, as the country got rid of "pro-Russian voters" that prevented Ukraine from the process of European integration, Drozdov said in an interview.

"We finally got rid of the moronic fifth column with remnant Russian grandmothers who always voted for Putin. When they were in Ukraine, they always voted for the Party of Regions and thuggish, twisted Communists. Finally, we don't have two million delusional folks, who would always spoil everything and keep pulling Ukraine down," Drozdov told the Canadian channel.

The media director from Lvov also hinted that it'll be better for Ukraine if the Donbass region left the country as well, since their population is also "pro-Russian."

Crimea seceded from Ukraine and reunified with Russia following a March 2014 referendum in which over 96 percent of voters supported the move. The vote was labelled an illegal annexation by Kiev and the West.

 
#13
Sputnik
August 15, 2015
Ukraine Can't Survive Winter Without Russian Gas - Minister

Ukraine will have to resume the import of Russian gas to last through the winter season, the country's energy minister warned on Friday.

In August, Ukraine had 13 billion cubic meters of gas in its underground storages, six billion short of the 19 billion it needs for the winter season, Coal and Energy Minister Vladimir Demchyshyn said in a newspaper interview on Friday adding that the country would have to turn to Russia to fill the gap.

The minister said that Ukraine was not ready to pay Russia's asking price of $247 per 1,000 cubic meters arguing that Kiev wanted to have a fixed price for the entire winter season and a trilateral agreement with the EU - something he said Russia would not go for.

"What we need now is more than just a low price, but also guarantees that the price will not change throughout the entire heating season, because otherwise we could find ourselves without a contract halfway through the winter season, which would be a real problem for us," Demchyshyn said.

He added, however, that he was positive that an agreement would eventually be reached.

"We are buying nuclear fuel, coal and electricity from Russia... We have to maintain business ties despite the war. We have no other options because, otherwise, we'll have to cut off heating and electricity," the minister  admitted.

Vladimir Demchyshyn said that Kiev could buy reverse gas at $255 per 1,000 cubic meters but did not have the $1.2 billion needed to pay the bill.

On July 1, 2015, Ukraine, which expected a price of around $200 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas, rejected Moscow's price offer of $247 and suspended all gas imports from Russia. Right now the country relies entirely on reverse gas supplies from the EU.
 
 #14
Forbes.com
August 14, 2015
Time Is Not On Ukraine's Side
By Mark Adomanis
[Chart here http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2015/08/14/time-is-not-on-ukraines-side/]

Among Ukraine supporters there appears to be an emerging consensus that the current situation favors Kiev at the expense of Moscow. According to Radio Liberty "There is no compromise here that could satisfy both sides. It's a deadlock - and a deadlock essentially favors Ukraine." Alexander Motyl, one of the most consistently hawkish voices, recently wrote that "Time is on Ukraine's side, not Russia's. With every day, Ukraine's economy strengthens."

Whether or not this should be the case, even a cursory look at the relevant economic data shows that Ukraine is faring massively worse than Russia (which is hardly the picture of economic health at the moment). Courtesy of data from their respective statistical agencies, here's how the Russian and Ukrainian economies have fared since the first quarter of 2014. Note that the Ukrainian figures exclude Crimea, Sevastopol, and various parts of the "anti-terrorist" operation in Donetsk and Lugansk so that the actual performance is likely substantially worse.

Even as Russia's economy has turned sour, the gap between Russian and Ukrainian economic performance has grown not shrank. That is to say that Ukraine's economy has not simply fared worse than Russia's, it has fared increasingly worse. I simply cannot grasp how the above graph depicts a situation that "increasingly favors Ukraine." If that is a situation that favors Ukraine, I would hate to see one that doesn't.

None of the above has anything to do with justification or blame. Anyone can see that the Russian government is doing everything in its considerable power to inflict the maximum possible damage on Ukraine's economy. It seems obvious that most of what has happened is in no way the "fault" of the new government in Kiev and that responsibility for the cataclysm now roiling the country rightly lies with the Kremlin.

But here's the thing: at the end of the day, none of that matters. Economies aren't morality plays, and GDP figures aren't determined by catalogs of sins. In a just world the Russians would presumably "pay a price" for their aggression in Ukraine, and would suffer proportionally far greater economic harm. But we do not live in such a world. Pretending that we do helps no one, least of all a Ukrainian government that is hanging on by its fingernails.

The United States and the European Union could very easily provide Ukraine with financial assistance sufficient to bolster its economy. It is entirely in the West's power to ensure that the Ukrainian economy fares better than Russia's, even in the short term. All it would require is writing a check. But that has not happened. The West has done almost nothing to assist Ukraine, pawning off the responsibility for doing so on the IMF and Ukraine's private bondholders.

It would be nice to think that Ukraine was surging to triumph over a retrograde, collapsing Russia. But it isn't. That might happen at some the future, but in mid 2015 Ukraine is spiraling ever closer to economic collapse. If you find that upsetting  don't blame me, instead blame those Western officials who have talked a big game about "supporting Ukraine's European choice" but who have steadfastly refused to open their purse-strings.
 
 #15
Sputnik
August 16, 2015
Don't Mess With Uncle Sam: US Gov't in Total Control of Ukraine Parliament

The future of all high-ranking positions in the Ukrainian government depends on decisions made by the US government, RBK Ukraine information agency reported.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk announced that he will propose the new list of the cabinet ministers in September for the country's parliament to approve.

Members of the Ukrainian parliament, Verkhovna Rada, say that the future resignations and appointments must be coordinated with the US Embassy in Kiev.

"In America we saw the assessment of [Ukrainian] ministers. We understand that among those with whose work the US government is satisfied are Natalie Jaresko [an American-born investment banker and the current Finance Minister of Ukraine], the Minister of Economic Development (Aivaras Abromavicius), the Minister for Agriculture and Food (Oleksiy Pavlenko), who promised to privatize the public land, and the Minister of Infrastructure (Andriy Pyvovarsky). American and European businesses have their own interests, and they don't hide it," said Mykola Tomenko, a member of the Verkhovna Rada, as cited by RBK Ukraine.

According to one of the deputies of ministers, Geoffrey Pyatt, the US Ambassador to Ukraine is a regular guest at the offices of Kiev politicians.

"The Ambassador [Pyatt] took out his notes and in a stern tone listed things that we had to do, then my boss briefly told him what has been done so far," the deputy minister said as cited by RBK Ukraine.

US lobbyists also regularly visit Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers. Martin Nunn, CEO of Whites Communication, constantly hangs around the parliament.
 
 #16
Interfax-Ukraine
August 17, 2015
Most Ukrainians would vote for joining NATO in referendum - poll
 
If Ukraine held a referendum regarding NATO membership in July 2015, more than half of Ukrainians casting their ballots would vote for joining the alliance, as is evident from a sociological survey of 2,011 respondents conducted by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives foundation and the Razumkov Center sociological service on July 22-27, 2015.

The poll showed that 64% of those who would go to the polling stations in a referendum would vote for joining NATO, while 28.5% would be against it.

At the same time, a press release issued to comment on the poll's findings on Friday says that "such a high result is due in large part to the fact that voter turnout in such a referendum would be higher in the regions where most people support NATO membership."

In particular, while voter turnout on average for Ukraine would be 62%, it would be 77% in the western part of the country and 65% in the central part, compared to only 49% in Donbas, where a majority of the population is against Ukraine's NATO membership.

The poll also revealed significant differences on issues related to NATO between Ukraine's regions.

As many as 89% of those polled would vote for NATO membership and 4% against it in the western part of Ukraine, 73% for and 19% against in the central part, and 61% for and 40% against in the southern part.

At the same time, only 30% would vote for NATO membership and 64% against it in the eastern part of Ukraine; in Donbas, these figures are 36% and 54% respectively.

"The main motive in supporting NATO membership is security issue: among those who support Ukraine's membership of NATO, the role of this motive grew to 82% in 2015 from 65% in 2012. The second reason is the belief that NATO would help strengthen and modernize the Ukrainian armed forces [the role of this motive grew to 49% in 2015 from 38% in 2012]," the press release says.

The principal motive of the opponents remains the same as in previous years: in the opinion of 50% of those polled, "this could drag Ukraine into NATO's military actions." However, the number of those sharing this motive has declined from 63% in 2012.

The role of another motive, that is, the long-standing stereotype that the alliance is "an aggressive imperialistic bloc," is currently shared by 37%, having declined from 46% in 2012.

A new argument appeared in 2015, that is, that NATO membership "could provoke Russia into direct military aggression" (29%).

At the same time, the number of NATO opponents convinced that "Ukraine should be a non-aligned state" has remained virtually the same (32% in 2015 compared to 34% in 2012).

Speaking of Ukraine's neutral status, sociologists noted that most Ukrainians were convinced for a long time that this status guaranteed the country's security (the opinion was shared by over 42% in April 2012). Moreover, a significant number of those polled (26% in 2012) saw a military alliance with Russia and other CIS countries as a guarantee of Ukraine's security, while only 12% believed that NATO could be such a security guarantee.

However, after events in Crimea and Donbas, public opinion has shifted. "Non-aligned status has significantly lost its popularity, while support for NATO as the most reliable way to guarantee security has dramatically grown from 13% in 2012 to 33% in May 2014 to 44% in September 2014, and to 46% in December 2014; true, it declined to 36% in July 2015," the press release says.

The number of those supporting a military alliance with Russia and other former Soviet republics has dramatically dropped to 8% from 26%.

At the same time, most of the respondents in some regions of Ukraine still prefer non-aligned status. In particular, 49% of those polled in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions controlled by Kyiv and 43% in the eastern part of Ukraine in general are sure that the best option for Ukraine is not to belong to any alliances.

The poll was conducted in all regions of Ukraine except Crimea and the occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
 
 #17
Moscow Times
August 17, 2015
Stagnation Rearing Its Ugly Head in Russia
By Mark Adomanis
Mark Adomanis is an MA/MBA candidate at the University of Pennsylvania's Lauder Institute.

Ever since I first started to study Russia, I've read that is it on the verge of "stagnation." Virtually every other week, even as Russia's economy was rocketing along at 7 percent annual growth, The Economist, The Guardian, or The Wall Street Journal would write an aggrieved editorial bemoaning the country's descent into a mire of corruption and inefficiency and the weakening of vital reforms passed during the 1990s.

Now stagnation is, in every country, an extremely negative term. But Russia is the only country that I know of where "stagnation" refers not just to some kind of vague abstract malaise, but to a very specific historical context: the late Brezhnev years.

Russia's period of stagnation wasn't just an economic problem - although the Soviet economy did begin to noticeably slow down - it was an all-encompassing sense of political, social, and moral decay. The Soviet state had always been brutal, but during the Khrushchev years from 1953 to 1964, there was a brief moment where it appeared that a better future was, if not imminent, then at least possible.

It's easy to exaggerate the impact of Khrushchev's Thaw - the Khrushchev years also saw a renewed and quite brutal crackdown on religious expression, and the mechanisms of state control remained completely unreformed - but the Brezhnev years saw the end of any illusions about progress via the system. The party was on top, it wasn't going anywhere, and it was increasingly disinterested in justifying its control through anything other than force and inertia.

But what has always fascinated me about the Brezhnev stagnation was that, even though it had a moral and cultural component, it manifested itself in very concrete, measurable ways. This is particularly true when it comes to demography.

Under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union experienced deterioration in an enormous range of social indicators. The number of alcohol poisonings began to slowly increase. The infant mortality rate began to creep upwards. Life expectancy started to tick downwards. Death rates from a host of diseases - particularly cancer and heart disease - began a relentless march upwards.

The situation got so bad that the Soviet authorities, who despite their incompetence and corruption were able to recognize failure when they saw it, resorted to classifying demographic data. That's right: the government was so humiliated that it simply banned the publication of the offending figures.

In order to calculate basic data points, Western researchers were forced to consult a bewildering array of specialized medical journals, painstakingly assembling data in much the same way a jigsaw puzzle is put together.

From a comparative perspective, the Brezhnev-era trends were unprecedented for a modern country. Even in the worst years of 1970's "stagflation," Western countries continued to achieve modest annual improvements in public health. For a country to suddenly start marching in reverse, as the Soviet Union did under Brezhnev, bordered on the inexplicable.

And this is why, throughout most President Vladimir Putin's leadership, I found the constant exclamations about "stagnation" to be so tiresome: they just weren't being reflected in any of the places that you would expect them to be. When you looked at the data, regardless of what you wanted to believe, it simply was not true that public health was deteriorating. In fact, public health measures were improving rapidly.

Over the past few years Russia actually reached a new record high average life expectancy. The death rate from alcohol poisoning, although still much higher than in any Western country, was falling by almost 10 percent a year, and in 2013 hit the lowest level on record. Russia was even starting to make modest progress in confronting its out-of-control epidemic of cardiovascular disease.

But nothing is set in stone. Recent data suggest that the improvements in public health which have broadly characterized the past 15 years of Russian history are now coming to an end. Throughout the first six months of 2015, the overall mortality rate has increased by about 2.3 percent.

From 2013-2014, state statistics service Rosstat data indicate that the death rate from alcohol poisoning shot up by almost 6 percent (though this figure is likely complicated by the recent inclusion of Crimea and Sevastopol) while in the first half of 2015 it is up by a further 1.5 percent.

The actual levels of mortality are still much better than at any other point in recent history, and vastly better than the 1990s, but for the first time since Putin came to power, the overall demographic trend is not of improvement but of decline.

Does that mean that Russia is fated to reprise the 1970s? I don't know. It is entirely possible that the data from 2014 and 2015 reflect unique one-off circumstances (the annexation of Crimea, the crisis in Ukraine) rather than genuine long-term trends.

But in Russia "stagnation" isn't just a state of mind: based on historical experience it is a condition that is easily identifiable via public health statistics. And for the first time in a long time, those statistics are suggesting that, on average, things are getting worse, not better.
 
 #18
www.opendemocracy.net
August 14, 2015
Why are we so worried about the Russian doping scandal?
Fresh allegations over doping in international athletics have cast plenty of shame and doubt. They also reveal the west's political prejudices and ignorance.
By Rolf Fretheim and Thomas Rowley
Rolf Fredheim is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, where he works on the Conspiracy and Democracy project. Tom Rowley is Deputy Editor at oDR. He recently completed a PhD on Soviet dissent at the University of Cambridge.
 
The notion of conspiracy has entered much academic and journalistic writing about Russia, through a popular perception that Putin is pulling all the strings, controlling events domestic and foreign.

So strong is this prejudice that even Russia's doping problem is attributed to the President's machinations.

On 1 August, The Sunday Times and documentary maker Hajo Seppelt broke the latest in a series of stories pointing to widespread doping in top international sport. This particular report, based on a leaked dataset of 12,000 blood tests, suggests a third of athletes who won medals in endurance events at major athletics championships from 2001 to 2012 had registered abnormal blood values. Of the 800 athletes deemed suspicious, more than half (415) were Russian citizens.

This material is pieced together to create a compelling thriller, exposing a conspiracy to dope-for personal profit and a nation's pride. The central question is: how deep does the conspiracy go?

Systematic doping

Seppelt's 2015 documentary Doping - Top Secret: The Shadowy World of Athletics follows a familiar pattern: audio-transcripts of athletes discuss the various doping products, secret recordings of corrupt doctors administering drug injections to aspiring athletes, bank transcripts suggestive of corrupt actions on behalf of officials, and expert assessment of blood values that point to aggregate anomalous patterns.

Doping - Top Secret follows on from another film released by Seppelt last year, Doping - Top Secret : How Russia makes its winners. Taken together, these two films tell three different but related stories about doping, which are worth exploring further.

The first takes us to Kenya, where individuals dope out of desperation and officials seek to profit through bribes and shares of prize money. The second revolves around international athletics bodies, which invest little in catching drugs cheats, and thus appear complicit in doping.

And finally, the third involves Russia, where a national doping project maximises success in sport in an effort to restore national pride.

Kenya and the IAAF

The first story follows doping in long distance running, with particular reference to Geoffrey Tarno, a promising young athlete who collapsed and died during a Kenyan marathon in 2013. The death of Tarno may have been caused by a poorly timed dose of EPO (erythropoietin).

Success in a national (never mind international) marathon can provide financial security for an athlete's entire extended family. In order to succeed in a cut-throat discipline, many aspiring Kenyan athletes seek out doctors willing to dispense EPO. The documentary makers claim that athletes who are caught often pay bribes or hand over slices of their winnings to local officials charged with policing the sport.

In brief, Seppelt contends, there may be no national doping structure, but the Kenyan athletics federation is undermining the anti-doping project for the personal gain of its senior members. Athletics Kenya dismissed the claims, labelling them libellous.

Meanwhile, the second story, the one that has made the biggest headlines recently, revolves around the World Athletics Federation's inability or unwillingness to ban dopers. And here the documentary makers don't pull their punches, cutting to footage of the IAAF's recent gala in Monte Carlo: 'The World Athletics Federation likes to celebrate.' The narrator comments on the IAAF's income ($58m in the last four years) to insinuate that the IAAF is more interested in extracting profit from the sport than in exposing doping.

The implicit argument is that exposing cheats only negatively impacts the engagement of an audience that wants to believe they are seeing 'the real deal'. Less engagement results in less revenue. Unsurprisingly, the IAAF bristled at the claims; Seb Coe branded the accusations a 'declaration of war'.

Incentive structures

David Runciman explains doping in terms of incentives: 'What matters is how the incentives are aligned: the incentives of the people who might take them and the incentives of the people who might stop them.'

The stories about Kenya and the anti-doping efforts can both be explained by incentive structures which are way out of whack: athletes can win thousands in prize money and millions through sponsorship deals; sports officials in positions of power might profit by turning a blind eye to offenders.

Anti-doping agencies, meanwhile, are underfunded, understaffed, and hamstrung by rules about who can test athletes when, and the evidence needed to prove doping. There are also disincentives to ban athletes unless the evidence is rock solid (imagine the defamation lawsuits).

Should athletics invest more in doping? Everything seems to suggest 'yes'. Are the doping-hunters doing their best, with limited resources and within a tough operating framework? Again, they probably are.

The Russian story

The third story, the one about Russia, is not about incentives, corruption, or bribe-taking. Instead, this story is of a sophisticated national anti-doping programme, with Seppelt claiming, for the first time since the steroid-fuelled excesses of East Germany, that there is evidence of a state-backed doping policy.

The film cloaks these assertions in conspiracy speak: 'We must assume that in Russia a state-backed doping system is supported by a big cover-up apparatus that pulls the strings in the background.'

As Seppelt describes it, Russia's extensive system of doping tests is a smokescreen (Augenwischerei). The Russian anti-doping-agency, the anti-doping-laboratories, and the sports associations are all part of a system that appear to serve the national interest by covering-up doping.

According to Seppelt, this system was all made possible through legislation introduced by Putin in 2010, which stipulates that Russian athletes could not leave the country without being declared clean. The Russian anti-doping agency would test athletes before major competitions to ensure they could not be caught when representing Russia abroad.

These tests were designed to prevent doping scandals, rather than doping per se, as was testified to by whistle-blowers who sourced their drugs from the very same labs charged with testing the athletes.

Clearly, there are systemic failures within the Russian anti-doping structure. But Seppelt does not see these as failures. Instead the system is working the way it was intended. The way Putin intended: 'I believe that Putin, more than anyone else, has recognised how to conduct politics through sport.'

As the documentary suggests, sport, after all, is a source of national prestige: 'In Russia, sport is fully under government control and the Ministry of Sport. As in every country seeking to raise its image and prestige, sport is an ideal instrument of self-marketing.'

Just to be clear: Russia does have a doping problem. The former Russian Sports Minister has even acknowledged that children at sports academies are pressured into doping by overzealous coaches.

We know conspiracies happen in Russia as elsewhere. And in recent years we have seen many situations where the Russian administration appears complicit in criminal or illegal activity. But this cannot be the whole story, every time: it's not humanly possible for one man to control everything.

But take a minute to imagine a counterfactual. What if the allegations that the majority of the nation's athletes used doping were made by, say, disgraced British athletes, following the London Olympics? Would journalists jump to the conclusion that David Cameron was personally behind the scheme? Probably not. Our views about doping are, in large part, determined by our political prejudices.

The Finnish episode

Take a notorious episode from cross-country skiing, a discipline requiring strength and endurance, much like cycling.

At the world championships in Lahti in 2001, the entire Finnish cross-country skiing team tested positive for HES, a plasma expander, which draws water into the blood stream and masks the effects of EPO by reducing the tell-tale spike in haemoglobin levels.

The incident left question marks over historic Finnish successes in the sport. Was doping systematic in Finnish cross-country skiing? There appears to be some evidence it was: Finnish athletes interviewed for a Finnish documentary describe EPO being in common use in 1989. One trainer describes going to Russia to buy drugs, and smuggling them back across the border, concealed in empty Swix ski-wax boxes. Finnish skiing legend Mika Myllyl� admitted to taking EPO throughout his career.

Despite being the subject of media reports, articles in sports science journals, and of documentaries, there is no suggestion that the Finnish doping programme was a state initiative. Instead, the practice is described as evolving within a closed team structure: coaches undertook apprenticeships with known doping-doctors and brought cutting-edge doping technology back to the national setup. Athletes new to the national setup would struggle for a while, before being initiated into the secrets of 'how it is done': steroids, testosterone, and EPO, together with a cocktail to conceal the substances.

There is the suggestion of collusion-some officials may have known about the practice, may have applied pressure on coaches to achieve results to fuel a sense of national pride, and that they may have looked the other way when evidence of doping reached them. The conspiracy, though, is not seen as extending into the fabric of government.

This line of reasoning requires a lot of faith in Finnish institutions. The type of faith few have when discussing Russia.

Why do we see a conspiracy in Russia?

Why do we-academics, journalists, politicians-see a political conspiracy in Russia, but not in Kenya or Finland?

We suspect the reason is that we are yet to understand the structures and incentives that make a certain outcome likely.

As Sean Guillory argued following the murder of Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, we tend to see the Russian power structure as a smoothly oiled machine. The 'Putin did it' reaction reflects a view where orders flow from the Kremlin down the power vertical. The power vertical epitomises Putin's personal power, positing that Putin asserts his authority through a direct, personalised chain of command structure. At the same time, it implies the weakness of formal institutions: what matters is personal ties, not rules or structures.

This assumption underlies much recent academic writing about Russia. Karen Dawisha's latest book Putin's Kleptocracy being the most eye-catching example: for instance, Dawisha describes how 'Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal with embedded interests, plans, and capabilities, who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.'

A recent report by Michael Weiss and Peter Pomerantsev uses the same conspiracy prism: 'While elites were secured through a "power vertical" which traded corruption for loyalty, the political technologists helped create a simulacrum of political discourse to keep the nation pliant. Fake "opposition" political parties were set up to make Putin look more reasonable by contrast; pseudo-independent civil society organisations such as the Civic Forum created an imitation of civil society; fake courts gave fake verdicts, fake journalists delivered fake news'.

This totalising vision, though clearly accurate in places, recalls the doping system, in which the failures are so large, that rather than discussing incentives, corruption, or systemic failures, the temptation is to say the system is the way it is because it was designed to be that way.

If all formal institutions are fake, it becomes hard to find any meaningful actors beyond Putin and his inner circle. The result is that far too much power is attributed to them. Faced by an apparently impenetrable and incomprehensible set of practices, it is easy to focus on outcomes and to assume they came about as a result of deliberate planning.

When hidden mechanisms lead to less-than-transparent outcomes, the tendency is to see the tentacles of power behind everything. And from here it is but a short step to positing that hidden forces, perhaps because they are less constrained than overt ones, are able to control the game, to achieve their ambitions.

By now we are close to describing Putin as omnipotent. As a result, we in the west see his hand in unrelated places, even behind the problem of doping in high-end sport.
 
 #19
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
August 15, 2015
RUSSIA'S BRIEF, SHINING MOMENT
Mark MacKinnon visits the unassuming city in the shadow of the Urals where, not long ago and for not very long, free expression was allowed to flourish. In fact, it was encouraged and even financed by the state. Then something happened.
Mark MacKinnon is The Globe and Mail's senior international correspondent, based in London.
[Photos here http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/russias-brief-shining-moment-the-city-of-perm-and-its-meandering-dance-withhistory/article25968031/]

The era feels impossible now, in a Russia that's increasingly closed, controlled and paranoid: Crowds dancing as buskers played world beats in a muddy field outside the governor's office. A government-supported contemporary art gallery displaying exhibits daringly mocking of the Kremlin. An independently run museum that kept alive memories of the gulag and held an annual festival of opposition politics, on premises that warned against the dangers of totalitarianism.

For several years, Perm - a city of brutal Soviet architecture that is home to just under a million people - was an anomaly in this country, a special political space. While the Kremlin was crushing opposition parties and the last independent media elsewhere, in Perm artists were encouraged to experiment, journalists could criticize, and visitors might think they were in Western Europe, rather than middle Russia.

Project Perm, as it became known, was the brainchild of a reformist regional governor and an art curator cum political strategist who had played a role in Vladimir Putin's rise to power, something he has come to rue. Together - and with the tacit support of Dmitry Medvedev, who swapped jobs with Mr. Putin and served as president between 2008 and 2012 - they decided to build a showcase of how a different Russia might look, an alternative to the throwback authoritarianism on the rise in Moscow.

And they succeeded - for a while.

Perm's summers were transformed by the launch of the month-long White Nights festival, named for the endless summer evenings here on the plains just west of the Ural Mountains. Some years, as many as a million visitors were drawn to its mix of street art, theatre and live music. Each June, musicians and graffiti artists, some from as far away Western Europe and Latin America, descended on the city.
The heart of Project Perm was the Museum of Contemporary Art established in the city's disused River Station, a Stalinist hulk of a building where passengers once bought tickets for boat trips along the placid Kama River. Among the provocative works the museum displayed was a blood-red wall, spattered with black paint to look like clouds of smoke, entitled simply Maidan - a reference to the central square in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, where the pro-Western protest that was to overthrow a Russian-backed government had just begun.

The Perm-36 gulag museum - already the only place in Vladimir Putin's Russia where visitors could experience the mix of monotony and terror that was life inside a Soviet labour camp - launched Pilorama (the name means "sawing bench," a reference to the woodworking done by inmates), an annual festival featuring opposition politics and folk music.

The media also felt free enough to criticize Oleg Chirkunov, the reformist governor, and even Project Perm itself, although local journalists still knew better than to pay too much attention to national politics.

"The idea was they would allow Perm to become a democratic region. When people would come to Perm, they would see democracy and think: 'All of Russia could be like this,' " says Marat Gelman, the Moscow political scientist and art curator tasked by Mr. Chirkunov in 2008 with turning this little-known city into a renowned cultural centre, akin to Edinburgh or Bilbao. Over the next three years, Mr. Gelman recalls, Perm "made such important steps forward." He dreamed of spreading the model to other cities, of fathering an "artistic perestroika."

Then things started to unravel. Mr. Putin announced at a United Russia party conference in the fall of 2011 that he intended to return to the presidency the following year, and that Mr. Medvedev was stepping aside to clear the path. When anti-Putin protests erupted later that year, Mr. Gelman returned to Moscow to join them.

But middle Russia wasn't ready for the revolution Mr. Gelman and Mr. Chirkunov wanted to see. The protests foundered, and Mr. Putin won the 2012 election with precisely 63 per cent of the vote, both in Perm and across the country.

One of Mr. Medvedev's last acts in the Kremlin was to accept Mr. Chirkunov's resignation that spring - three years before the governor's term was to end. Project Perm was over.

Soon afterward, funding for White Nights and Pilorama was ended, and this year, the state moved to take control of the management of Perm-36. The new administration - arguing that residents of the city never wanted the avant-garde art and Western-style freedoms that Mr. Chirkunov and Mr. Gelman brought - seems possessed with trying to erase all traces of the brief period when Perm was ruled by liberal ideals.

Gone now are the art installations that mock the state, and the accompanying warnings about the dangers of returning to the Soviet past. In their place are endless billboards celebrating the Second World War victory over Nazi Germany - with scant mention that the country had allies in that fight - as well as the new symbol of pan-Russian nationalism, the orange-and-black St. George's ribbon used by Joseph Stalin to reward the heroes of his wars.

"The moment now is a moment for going back to spiritual and religious traditions, about restoring and renewing Russia's historical code of values," says Igor Gladnyev, the new regional minister of culture, youth policy and mass communication, his voice echoing through the empty caf� of the city's biggest hotel. "Some would call this conservatism. I would call it common sense."

But Mr. Gelman says the move against Perm is a microcosm of how the state has tightened control over how Russians think about themselves, substituting any desire to be part of Europe and the West with a belief in Russian exceptionalism and an accompanying willingness to stand alone.

"It's like some kind of conservative cultural revolution," he explains during an interview in Budva, the resort town on Montenegro's Adriatic coast where he now lives. "They are going back to the past, saying everything modern is bad, and everything old is good. In this way, the [Communist] revolution is a good thing, the monarchy was a good thing, and Stalin's labour camps were also good."

SAME STORY, NEW SCRIPT

Sergey Kovalev still remembers how the cold got into his bones - how guards told prisoners their barracks were warm enough, even as ice coated the inside walls - while he was an inmate in Perm-36, one of the lesser-known spots in the Soviet Union's infamous gulag archipelago.

Now, four decades later, Perm-36 is in the process of forgetting him.

Mr. Kovalev, one of the Soviet Union's more famous dissidents, spent seven years at the labour camp after being arrested in 1975 for publishing a samizdat journal chronicling human-rights abuses. After the Soviet collapse, he was among the founders of Memorial, a group that took over the management of Perm-36 and preserved it as a museum, a lonely testament to the horrors of a system that swallowed millions of citizens.

For 20 years, Perm-36 was simultaneously ignored, tolerated and partly funded by the state. But it was never promoted as an important tourist attraction, and the government never bothered to improve the potholed dirt road from the city to the camp, making the 120-kilometre trip a forbidding 2 1/2 hour journey.

Now the state, which was renting the site to the human-rights activists, has taken charge of the museum (which had already stopped accepting grants from abroad to avoid being labelled a "foreign agent"). These days, Perm-36 is directly controlled by the regional ministry of culture, which seeks to tell a "neutral" story of what happened there, giving the testimony of prison guards equal weight with that of inmates.

The Soviet authorities, visitors are now told, had reasons for doing what they did.

To a first-time visitor, the tour given today at Perm-36 seems thorough enough. The violence and repression of the Stalin era are grimly illustrated with statistics and maps. Nothing is glossed over about the backbreaking work done here, or the claustrophobic isolation cells. For inmates who broke the camp's often-inane regulations, "outdoor time" simply meant being escorted to another small room, this one with barbed wire for a roof.

Only if armed with Mr. Kovalev's recollections can you spot how the story is now told differently. In the new version, the prisoners' cells were warmer, the beds softer and the guards less cruel than Mr. Kovalev remembers.

"Sometimes the prisoners just wanted to find reasons to complain. But in the 1970s and eighties, the conditions were okay," says burly tour guide Sergey Spodin. A former member of the Red Army, he remembers that his unit used to conduct shooting drills outside the barbed wire that surrounded Perm-36, knowing it would scare those inside, whom, they'd been told, were enemies of the state.

And some really were Russia's enemies, Mr. Spodin insists. Perm-36 held members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the militia founded by Stepan Bandera that briefly fought alongside the Nazis, and against the Red Army, during the Second World War. More than 50 years after he was assassinated by the KGB, Mr. Bandera has been resurrected by Kremlin-controlled media as the core reason for Russia's involvement in Ukraine.

Today, his collaboration with the Nazis has been exaggerated to the point that in Russia his name has the same ring as Hitler's. Russia claims it needed to annex the Crimean Peninsula to save residents from Mr. Bandera's modern followers, portrayed as having genocidal intentions toward those who speak Russian rather than Ukrainian. The Kremlin-supported separatist armies of eastern Ukraine's Donetsk and Lugansk regions say they are fighting for freedom from the "fascist Banderites" who now rule in Kiev.

As Mr. Spodin continues his tour, it becomes clear that Perm-36 was brought under state control not to hide what happened here, but to make sure the story being told fits in with the government's narrative about the war in Ukraine. As in Soviet times, not even a museum is allowed to challenge the official version of the truth.

"What's happening to the museum is the same as what's happening to Perm, is the same as what's happening to the entire country," Mr. Gelman says.

KNOWN BY ANOTHER NAME

Perm could have been famous, were it not for the Russian literary tradition of bestowing pseudonyms on cities.

Set in the forest approach to the Urals, which separate Russia's European and Asian halves, the city was founded by Catherine the Great during her 18th-century quest to secure Russia's influence over Siberia. Perm has been identified as the "uncultured and behind-the-times" town that playwright Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters are desperate to escape, and novelist Boris Pasternak set part of his Nobel-winning Dr. Zhivago here, although he called it Yuriatin.

During the Cold War, Perm sank deeper into anonymity as one of the Soviet Union's closed cities. Its Motovilikha artillery plant and Aviadvigatel aircraft-engine factory were deemed too sensitive for foreign eyes, and tourists came only after the Iron Curtain fell.

Today, the city is still the industrial heart of central Russia, although a rusting one. The Motovilikha and Aviadvigatel plants remain, but don't employ as many people. Part of the slack has been taken up by the oil and gas industry, but the city feels mired in stagnation. A construction crane is a head-turning sight.

Critics say Mr. Chirkunov and Mr. Gelman, neither of whom had lived in Perm, failed to grasp the region's essentially conservative and working-class nature. Locals wanted culture that was connected to their lives, not high-brow installations that mocked institutions they respected, such as the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church.

Nikolai Novichkov worked as Mr. Chirkunov's chief of staff, and then as the region's deputy minister of culture, during the time of Project Perm. He was a supporter, until Mr. Gelman refused any censorship of an exhibit mocking the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The show included a poster showing five nooses hanging in the shape of the Olympic rings, and another depicting a snarling Stalin wearing the suit of Misha the Bear, the Sochi mascot. Mr. Gelman's gallery displayed the exhibit during the White Nights festival in the summer of 2013, ensuring the maximum number of people would see the critique of a project deeply personal to Mr. Putin.

But by then Mr. Chirkunov was gone. The exhibit was closed and Mr. Gelman fired.

The pressure then escalated when he returned to Moscow and became one of the few public figures to openly support Pussy Riot, the female punk-rock trio jailed for singing a profanity-laced, anti-Putin song in Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral. His name began to appear on "enemies of Russia" lists posted online, not far below that of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader gunned down in February outside the Kremlin walls.

By then Mr. Gelman had already decided it was time to leave. "Until 2012, the situation was that 'if you're not with us, don't speak out, but [otherwise] you can do what you want.'" After Mr. Putin's return to the presidency, however, "it became 'You are with with us or against us and, if you are against us, you will have problems.' There was no more place for neutrality."

It was quite a comeuppance for a man who had played a key role in Mr. Putin's rise to power 15 years before. In 1999 and 2000, Mr. Gelman was the deputy director of state television, tasked with the sensitive project of introducing Russians to Mr. Putin and convincing them that this previously unknown man was the solution to the country's many problems.

He succeeded, helping to orchestrate fawning media coverage of such stunts as Mr. Putin piloting a fighter jet into Grozny during the war in Chechnya. But by the end of his first four-year term in the Kremlin, the President's evident authoritarian streak had begin to concern Mr. Gelman. He left politics and focused on his Moscow gallery until Mr. Chirkunov lured him to Perm.

"I think that, yes, [Mr. Gelman] made a mistake. ... He gave them a reason to fire him," Mr. Novichkov now says of the ill-fated Sochi show. "I think, if you're going to put on an exhibit that a million people will see, you have to take into account the opinion of the Putin Majority."

That majority, Mr. Novichkov explains, is the 63 per cent of Perm who voted for Mr. Putin in 2012, and the much greater share who back him now on the annexation of Crimea and the standoff with the West. They are the ordinary Russians who feel their lives have improved economically over the 15 years of Mr. Putin's rule, and who support him politically in exchange.

The Western sanctions imposed since the start of the conflict in Ukraine have yet to alter that social compact. Italian cheese and French mineral water have disappeared from store shelves and restaurant menus in Perm as elsewhere (Russian countersanctions ban most Western agricultural products), and residents keep a keen eye on the bouncing value of the ruble, now worth about 40 per cent less than a year ago. But Russians are known for stoic suffering, and Mr. Novichkov says that most blame the West, not their own government, for the conflict in Ukraine, and for the sanctions. His own understanding of the Putin Majority perhaps explains why he now has a high-ranking post in the capital.

"Some call it self-censorship, I call it marketing. No one denies that you have to know your audience and how they will perceive your art," he explains, sitting in a Moscow caf�. "I feel strongly that the Putin Majority are inclined to like this imperial state of mind. Being an empire is comfortable, and the annexation of Crimea is an act of being an empire."

'SOVIET UNION 2.0'

Sergey Kurginyan rejects the idea that the Kremlin is guiding Russia back to the past. Instead, the leader of a neo-Soviet movement called Essence of Time says the government has changed course to be in line with the majority.

Mr. Kurginyan is proud of the role Essence of Time played in the state's takeover of Perm-36, a move he says was essential to ending the "anti-Soviet propaganda" that was weakening Russia's sense of national identity.

Essence of Time is a new force in Russian politics. Mr. Kurginyan is an old one. Now 65, he was a gadfly in the last days of the Soviet Union, telling anyone who would listen that Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika program was part of a CIA plot.

Later, Mr. Kurginyan became part of the leftist reactionary movement that challenged then-president Boris Yeltsin's hold on power; he was inside Russia's White House when Mr. Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on it in 1993 during his deadly power struggle with the Communist-dominated parliament.

After that, Mr. Kurginyan was confined to the political fringe. But the ideas he championed - he says he is hoping to see a "Soviet Union 2.0" - never went away. He took to posting lectures on YouTube. Despite their dry content (most feature Mr. Kurginyan just sitting at a desk and talking into the camera), some gained over 100,000 views. Most popular have been his recent lectures on why the Kremlin was right to seize Crimea, and why it should do more to support the separatist armies in Donetsk and Lugansk.

Mr. Kurginyan appears to have captured the political zeitgeist by working to reconcile two powerful forces that have long been in conflict: the Communist Party and the Russian Orthodox Church.

In 2012, when the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg were filled with tens of thousands of protestors, Mr. Kurginyan called for his online followers to defend Mr. Putin. They did, forming the backbone of a big pro-Putin rally, which Mr. Kurginyan opened by telling the crowd that "patriotic forces" needed to save the country.

Mr. Kurginyan believes the episode taught Mr. Putin that his support base was not the Moscow liberals who wanted the country to be friends with the West, but the deeply conservative millions who lived in the rest of the country.

Twenty years after his political career seemed over, Mr. Kurginyan was back with an army of motivated, Internet-savvy young people. And the Kremlin owed him a favour.

He says Essence of Time was responsible for starting the petition that led to a 2013 law banning U.S. citizens from adopting Russian children. He's also an outspoken supporter of the law against "homosexual propaganda" that Mr. Putin signed the same year.

After those victories, Mr. Kurginyan and his movement turned to Perm-36, unleashing an Internet campaign against the former prisoners who ran it. The local chapter of Memorial says that it was Essence of Time who pushed the government to run the museum.

"It was not a museum of history; it was a museum of propaganda, of anti-Soviet propaganda," Mr. Kurginyan now says, claiming - as the official tour guides now do - that conditions were not that bad. "This prison was the best in the whole Soviet Union."

While some historians say nearly 40 million people passed through the gulag system, Mr. Kurginyan says the real number is closer to 700,000. In Germany, questioning the extent of the Holocaust is a crime. In Russia, saying the gulags weren't so bad is now mainstream.

Mr. Kurginyan says only two ideologies can control Russia - extreme nationalism, which risks turning into facism, or a neo-communism that resurrects what he calls "the good in the Soviet Union."

The new Soviet Union, he says, would necessarily include territories populated by Russian-speakers beyond Russia's current borders. An aide says Essence of Time has actively been recruiting volunteers to help fight the Ukrainian army in Donetsk and Lugansk.

Despite Western accusations that Mr. Putin has become a dictator, Mr. Kurginyan says the President still needs and actively seeks popular support.

"If you have an anti-Soviet ideology in modern Russia, [to rule] you would have to be some military person who kills all the communists," Mr. Kurginyan says, reclining with a smile at the end of a two-hour interview that was much like listening to one of his lectures. "Putin is not as Soviet as I am. But he wants to be elected."

'LIKE 1936 IN GERMANY'

Instead of the White Nights festival that briefly drew crowds of tourists, Perm this year held Kaleidoscope, a much smaller offering focused on an amusement park stuffed with roller coasters and shoot-'em-up games in the city's central Gorky Park.

At the park's entrance, there is a canvas military tent where visitors can listen to a soundtrack of falling bombs mixed with martial music - and cries of "Glory to Stalin" - as they peruse 70 black-and-white photos from the war (which in the Russian telling began with Nazis invading the Soviet Union in 1941).

In most of the photographs, Soviet soldiers are driving back the enemy, or relaxing behind the lines. Only one shows someone killed in the fighting.

Many of those who visit the tent wear the orange-and-black ribbon that has - in its most recent resurrection - come to imply support for Mr. Putin and his policies in Ukraine. On the average street in Perm (or Moscow), half the cars and buses that pass will have an orange-and-black ribbon hanging from their rearview mirror.

"It feels like all the tragedy is gone and we only have success and this balloon of celebration. This is a problem, because it makes it seem as though war is good," says Nailya Allakhverdieva, who took over the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art after Mr. Gelman left.

The gallery has moved from the River Station premises - which the regional government declared officially derelict - to a smaller location far from the city centre. While Ms. Allakhverdieva prefers a lower-key and less provocative approach, the museum remains a hub of alternative thought.

"War won't come if we all say no," reads a message painted on the sidewalk outside the main entrance.

But Mr. Gelman thinks more war is coming. "People who were perfectly normal yesterday are going crazy today, saying 'Crimea is ours!'" he says as he walks through the quiet cobblestoned streets of his new home in Montenegro. "It's like 1936 in Germany. By 1939, everyone could see what was going on. But in 1936 there were still intellectuals who were rationalizing, explaining that Germans really did need Lebensraum" - more room to live.

In Mr. Gelman's telling, the closure of Project Perm and the state takeover of Perm-36 are akin to what the Nazis did in the 1930s: burning any books that didn't fit their official ideology. "For them, culture is an instrument of propaganda. An artist is just a hooligan - you have to limit and control them, to tell them what they can and cannot do. In fact, it would be better if there were no artists at all."

THE TROUBLE WITH 'BANDERITES'

The guided tour of Perm-36 is exactly the same as 12 years ago (when I took it while on vacation with friends) - except for one room.

They call it the Black Room now, and it's behind a padlocked door, avoided by the guides. The walls are covered with the biographies and photos of some of Perm-36's most famous inmates, including Mr. Kovalev, the human-rights activist. Also honoured were two heroes of the Ukrainian nationalist movement: poet Vasyl Stus, who died in a hunger strike and is buried inside Perm-36, and Levko Lukyanenko, who survived to co-author Ukraine's declaration of independence and to serve as the new nation's first ambassador to Canada.

A senior member of the museum's new management team, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says neither man should ever have been celebrated in public, and the Black Room will reopen only when it no longer features "Banderites."

"If we talk about the gulag and political repressions, we have to consider the context that created the situation on the territory of the Soviet Union," says Mr. Gladnyev, the minister of culture.

"It's not a question of avoiding something, or of bias. But within the framework of historical events there were people who helped the fascists, and committed crimes. And there were those who protected their homeland and thought about the future."

Those involved in running it before the state takeover say that, without the material in the Black Room, Perm-36 has lost its meaning.

"The museum was dedicated to the political prisoners," says Robert Latypov, who heads the Perm chapter of Memorial. "Now they say: 'If you had Banderites in this prison, then the museum is a Banderite museum.' It's pure manipulation."

He, like Mr. Gelman, sees the takeover as one of the last acts in Russia's slide back to totalitarianism. "The process is almost over. The media is almost completely under control. Our power structure is purely vertical. In the regions, the governors don't answer to the local communities. They answer to just one person," he says, pointing up at his ceiling. "I'm sure that someone's listening to us at this very moment. I don't doubt it."

Now 85 and living in anonymity in Moscow's suburbs, Mr. Kovalev, the former inmate, is even harsher in his assessment.

"The differences between Putin's Russia and Stalin's time are just one. There are not mass political repressions. The victims of the gulag camps were millions. Now the number of political arrests are just a few hundred," he says, his voice filled with the anger of someone who has spent decades issuing warnings that few have heeded.

"But the nature of this state hasn't changed one bit."
 
#20
Politkom.ru
August 6, 2015
Russian opposition seen expanding focus beyond Moscow
Roman Larionov, senior researcher at Centre for Political Technologies, Nonestablishment Opposition: Brief Observations on 'March to Regions'

The nonestablishment opposition has not been allowed to run in September's regional and local elections. Nevertheless, the experience of these unfinished campaigns in four regions has turned out to be not just extremely useful, but also revealing. The key aspect of this is that the liberal opposition, which is used to operating in the capital and to regarding protest activity in the regions with scepticism, has this time tested the waters beyond the boundaries of the Moscow Ring Road.

The Russian liberal opposition rarely take part in elections outside the capital and are often criticized for this by the expert community. Just a few isolated cases of active campaigns in recent years come to mind. For example, in 2013 RPR-Parnas won a single seat on each of the city dumas of Barnaul and Kyzyl, and a seat in the Yaroslavskaya Oblast Duma a year later. The 2013 campaign for the Saratov City Duma elections, in which RPR-Parnas formed a coalition with Yabloko and Democratic Choice, can also be seen as relatively successful. And that is the extent of its track record. Yabloko's record is slightly better, as having state funding it regularly tried to "cover" all the electoral regions, although it has not had many more truly successful campaigns than the other members of the opposition camp.

This year, however, the nonestablishment opposition changed its usual tactic of focussing on the major cities while neglecting peripheral areas, and simultaneously took part in four regional election campaigns and elections in several regional administrative centres. Also the scale of the undertaking actually turned out to be unprecedented: "Primaries" and the widespread collection of signatures were organized in three regions; a lot of media attention was attracted; and a team of prominent Moscow opposition activists went out "into the field". This effort did not make it to the "finishing line", however - the opposition parties were refused registration,with the exception of Yabloko, and it is difficult believe in a broad coalition forming around [Grigoriy] Yavlinskiy's party. This means it is now already possible to draw a few conclusions.

The initial idea of creating a single coalition around Parnas went wrong right at the start - after a public row A. [Andrey] Nechayev's Civil Initiative (the leadership of which also includes such high profile figures as [Vladimir] Ryzhkov and [Gennadiy] Gudkov) put forward its own separate list of candidates in Kaluzhskaya and Magdanskaya Oblasts, and from the beginning it seemed unlikely that Yabloko would join the coalition.

Nevertheless, the latest display of its tendency towards infighting was not the opposition's main problem in these elections. Right at the beginning a more serious problem was highlighted - the difficulty of forming a coalition with local political activists. And although the format of the primaries is the most acceptable way of deciding the party lists to the local elites, nevertheless they did not manage to avoid a major dispute in Kaluzhskaya Oblast, which resulted in local opposition activists refusing to cooperate with Parnas and turning to Civil Initiative and Yabloko.

This dispute was not a surprise and it exposed one of the Russian opposition's fundamental systemic problems - the scarcity of good candidates in the regions. Tatyana Kotlyar, a former Kaluzhskaya Oblast Duma deputy from a single-seat constituency in Obninsk and now an Obninsk city council deputy, did not win the support of those voting in the primaries, who preferred the "outsider" from Moscow [Andrey] Zayakin to her, which is a telling indication of this politician's poor election potential. The electability of the other representatives of the local opposition elite - Vitality Chernikov, who was Kaluga mayor at the start of the 1990s, and activist Sergey Fadeyev - can be judged from their results in recent municipal elections. For instance, in the 2013 Kaluga city duma by-election Chernikov managed to win just 4.6 per cent of the votes, and in the elections for Pyatovskiy rural council Fadeyev won 6 per cent of the votes.

Things are not any better for Yabloko, which also cannot boast about the election potential of its candidates and also has tarnished its reputation with disputes with its own local party branches. Only in Novosibirskaya Oblast did the party manage to attract relatively respectable figures onto its ticket, in particular former high-profile SPS [Union of Right Forces] functionary Ivan Starikov, however, thanks to Novosibirsk's traditionally greater tendency to protest, Parnas also had a stronger list of candidates there than in other regions.

Admittedly, the problem of the shortage of strong candidates in the regions is perfectly natural: Where there is low demand, there will be low supply, and it is well-known that the potential for democratic  protest in the regions significantly lags behind that of major cities, as its main drivers come from the urban middle class. Consequently it is hard for the Russian liberal opposition to find a strong political foothold in the regions.

A separate matter is that of the high-profile local politicians who for one reason or another are not part of the ruling team. They could be one of the things that could fundamentally change the situation - a coalition with such figures would allow the opposition to break out of the electoral ghetto, would give it respectability, and provide the impetus for splits within the elite in the future. On the other hand, because of the great political risks, such politicians are not rushing to throw their lots in with the nonestablishment opposition parties. Having not joined United Russia or having lost the support of the oblast administration, they prefer to cooperate with the Duma opposition parties and new party projects such as Motherland, or use a party "franchise" from the so-called "Bogdanov pool". In the 2013 regional elections, many "aggrieved" members of the elite took a chance on Mikhail Prokhorov's Civil Platform - the project appeared to have resources and prospects, and the political risks were low because Prokhorov was acceptable to the Kremlin. Nevertheless, in most regions this party's candidates were not allowed to run in the elections, which has acted as strong deterrent for local elites - since then it has become even more difficult for the opposition to attract high-profile local politicians.

This leaves the Russian liberal opposition stuck in a vicious circle: It is not attractive to strong local politicians because of the high risks and the low chance of being elected, and at the same time without such politicians it is difficult to achieve the decent election results that would make it more attractive. It will not be easy to find a way out of this. The strategy chosen by the opposition, based on sending Moscow-based leaders into the regions in an attempt to "stir up" social protest there and in doing so boost the work of local branches, appears to be perhaps the only possible one at the present stage.
 
 
 #21
London School of Economics
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk
August 17, 2015
Nobody loves Russia: how western media have perpetuated the myth of Putin's 'neo-Soviet autocracy'
By Andrei P. Tsygankov
Andrei P. Tsygankov is Professor in the Departments of Political Science and International Relations at San Francisco State University. He is the author of The Strong State in Russia (OUP, 2015).

Russia's political system has frequently been criticised by Western politicians and commentators, with some observers drawing parallels between the rule of Vladimir Putin and the old Soviet regime during the communist-era. But how accurate are these criticisms? Andrei P. Tsygankov writes that a particular narrative which views Russia as a 'neo-Soviet autocracy' has built up in western media sources. He argues that this narrative ignores the reality of Putin's regime and serves simply to legitimise the identity of the United States and the American-led 'free world' relative to that of an 'oppressive' Russia.

Advocates of Western-style democracy frequently assert that Russia has built a neo-Soviet 'autocratic' political system with elements of totalitarianism. Struggling to understand the country's transition from the USSR, Western media commonly describe Russia in terms of its fitting with the old pattern. Contemporary Russian politics is assessed not on the scale of how far it has gotten away from the Soviet Union, but, rather, how much Russia became a Soviet-like 'one-party state' driven by a 'KGB mentality' and dependent on the use of propaganda, 'Cold War rhetoric', and repressions against internal opposition in order to consolidate state power.

Surveying editorials in leading American newspapers, it is easy to be struck by the power of the neo-Soviet autocracy narrative. Violations, irregularities, and improvisations in Russia's political life are now typically attributed by the U.S. media to the Kremlin's fear of opposition and the overly centralised, non-accountable system of governance.

Such consistency is accomplished by the presence of a coherent narrative of Russia. In particular, the U.S. media sustains and promotes the binary narrative that juxtaposes and contrasts the vision of a morally inferior neo-Soviet Russia with that of a superior American system. For example, while explaining the Kremlin's growing mistrust in the United States, the Washington Post advanced the following interpretation:

"With former KGB officer Vladimir Putin in charge, Russia has become increasingly closed in many ways. Historical archives that after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 welcomed scholars from all nations have re-shut their doors. Television has fallen back under government control. International organizations have been pushed out of Russia, and independent nonprofit groups in Russia have been squeezed, harassed and threatened. Russia is essentially a one-party state, as it was 20 years ago.

"The United States by contrast is wide open. Unlike American organizations in Russia, the Russian government is welcome to hire public relations firms here, put Russian programming on cable television and distribute its message as it sees fit. Its diplomats are welcome to attend think-tank seminars in Washington, and the give-and-take of American politics is an open book for them."

Key references here include characterisations of Russia as "closed", associated with the KGB, the Soviet Union, and "government control" as well as presentation of the United States as "by contrast" "wide open" including to influences by the Russian government.

Overall, while promising not 'to ignore the dark side' of Russia's political system with its corruption, selective use of law, and low tolerance for opposition, the American press has ignored all other sides of Russia by making the 'dark side' central to its coverage. By exploiting misleading historical analogies, it has offered one-sided interpretations of complex processes, and ignored areas of political development that do not fit the narrative. In particular, the U.S. media has failed to notice political areas not controlled by the government, sources of support for Putin not related to the Kremlin's 'relentless propaganda', and actions by the Russian state that do not fit the description of 'dictatorial power'.

Parallels to Soviet (totalitarian) practices are misleading not only because they make no distinction between Stalin and post-Stalin developments, but also because they present the Soviet experience as the only significant one for understanding Russia's historical trajectory. If, however, the contemporary Russian system does not fit expectations of a Western-style democracy, this does not yet make this system a Soviet or neo-Soviet one.

Instead, Russia reaches back to its centuries-long political experience before communism. After the stifling decades of communism, historical thinking is being revived inside the country. Rather than making references to the Soviet past, Russian analysts more commonly resort to analogies of the Times of Trouble (smuta), Dual Power (dvoyevlastiye), In-Between-Tsardom (mezhdutsarstviye), or other historically meaningful terms. Although the U.S. media makes occasional references to 'czarist' practices, it is much more comfortable with the Soviet parallels - arguably, because it knows too little of Russia's pre-Soviet history and its differences from the Soviet period.

The strong state system Russia is aiming to revive is not what the editors of the New York Times or Washington Post have in mind when they discuss Russia's 'autocracy'. The strong state is not to be confused with totalitarianism or unlimited control over private and public life. Even tsarist autocracy (samoderzhaviye) was largely respectful of established social and political boundaries, as the Church, nationality, and the self-governing institutions served as informal constraints on the Tsar's power.

The post-Soviet state also does not seek to eliminate competition in economic and political life, as the Soviet regime did. Instead, the Kremlin wants to shape and influence such competition. State shares in economic corporations, the designation of Dmitry Medvedev as Putin's successor, attempts to influence institutions of civil society by creating the Public Chamber from above, providing grants to Russian NGOs though a competitive process, and initiating changes in the legislature to limit foreign influences in Russian politics are all examples of such state efforts to influence competition.

As Graeme Robertson writes, under such a hybrid regime, "competition is less something that authoritarians have failed to eliminate, but rather something that they consciously allow and try to control". Despite additional limitations placed by the state on political competition in the country following the Ukraine crisis, areas of freedom in Russia are significant, especially when compared to the Soviet period. Alternative news coverage remains available, as the internet, newspapers, and some radio and television channels are largely free of state control.

The U.S. media is also incorrect to assume that high levels of public support for Putin predominantly results from the Kremlin's 'relentless propaganda' and that 'when given a real democratic choice, millions of Russians will reject Putinism'. Perceiving a strong state rule as illegitimate and backed up primarily by propaganda and force has been a common Western error in judging bases of political stability in Russia. In practice, many Russians historically supported a strong state and did not view it as internally oppressive.

They justified such a system by the needs of internal development and security from outside threats. Russia's vast size, geopolitical vulnerability, and economic underdevelopment dictated that the ruled ones would have considerable support for a highly centralised system. Of course, Russian rulers differed. Some of them neglected the need for internal development and engaged in risky international adventures, while others used their time wisely by formulating long-term objectives and mobilising the required resources. Public support for rulers varied too, but it has been largely supportive of a 'good' or 'bad' strong state, rather than a Western-style democracy.

Finally, it is misleading to view Putin as a ruler with dictatorial power responsible for all the achievements and flaws of Russia's political system. Comparisons between Putin and Stalin are common in the U.S. media, yet there is little appreciation of Putin's administrative weakness and inability to deliver on his own promises. The Russian state is frequently ineffective in dealing with serious problems: from mobilising economic resources to solving crimes. The U.S. media occasionally alludes to this, but it is more typical to assign Putin responsibility for the murders of journalists or opposition politicians, terrorist acts, and other grave developments in Russian politics.

In cultural and political terms, the neo-Soviet autocracy narrative serves to legitimise the identity of the United States and the American-led 'free world' relative to that of the 'oppressive' Russia. To American elites, Russia makes an important public enemy because, arguably, no other country has challenged U.S. values and interests as vigorously and persistently as Russia. The U.S. media reflects fear of the strong state system by presenting it as a mirror image of the American system and grossly simplifying Russia's complex transformation. The narrative assists the media in engaging with the U.S. public in part because old Cold War views have not entirely disappeared from the public mind and have not been replaced by a different understanding of new realities. As the media has not presented an alternative Russian narrative, American society remains receptive to the dominant perspective.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP - European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.
 
 #22
http://russianuniverse.org
August 15, 2015
THE 'WESTERN CUNNING PLAN' (IN RUSSIA) & THE 'RUSSIAN CUNNING PLAN' (IN THE WEST)
By Sergey Armeyskov

I've recently stumbled on several articles (published on BuzzFeed or something) in which their respected authors besides the general the-Russkies-are-coming Cold War 2.0 discourse articulated a statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union was actually... a Putin's Russian cunning plan to re-shape Russia's image as a peaceful and democratic country, then - take the best from the West (technologies, etc.), and in the form of the Trojan Horse Bear - finally - conquer the world. Oh, my stars and garters!

It's a very common thing in the MSM to mock the Russians, especially their - our - love for conspiracy theories. This may be true in some or even many cases but it's also hard to dismiss that the term 'conspiracy theory' itself became sort of a 'dismissing label'. As the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you. The Russian history (especially of the 20th century) has taught Russians to be suspicious and prone to reading between the lines. Thus, just like the Western MSM journos/propagandists (and some of their Russian colleagues too) see the Putin's cunning plan in every Russia-related topic, similarly, it's not surprising that a number of Russians sees only the 'Western cunning plan' in every process going on in the West.

What if the Western сunning plan is just a combination of the-grass-is-always-greener... sentiment with a standard Russian �idealization of the West? What if the unicorns don't eat marshmallow pies? What if they... don't exist?! Is the unicorn denial a conspiracy theory?
 
 #23
Foreign Policy Journal
www.foreignpolicyjournal.com
August 14, 2015
In A War Of Misinformation, Everybody Loses
There is a re-emergence of the dirty tactics of the Cold War, where information is weaponized and truth becomes the first casualty.
By Theodoros Papadopoulos       

Normally, a Russian worker suing their employer on the grounds that they failed to provide her with the requisite paperwork detailing the terms of her contract and subsequent dismissal would not make international news. But when that worker, Lyudmila Savchuk, was a self-confessed internet troll, and the firm she worked for, Internet Research, is , then one can understand why this would become a matter of international interest.

Savchuk is rightly being feted as a brave whistleblower, casting a light into the dark heart of the Kremlin�s campaign to bombard international news sites with pro-Putin rhetoric and drown out opposing voices.

If only she had a Western counterpart who could likewise reveal the extent of digital foul play being perpetrated by the West in its ongoing propaganda campaign against Russia and other perceived enemies....

But she does, of course, and his name is Edward Snowden, who is ironically seeking political asylum in Russia for exposing very similar tactics on behalf of his own government.

Part of the treasure trove of files leaked by Snowden relate to the existence of a number of clandestine programs aimed at doing exactly the same thing as the Russian troll factories: manipulating online debates to cast the Western foreign policy in a more favorable light.

Included in these are project Gateway, a tool for artificially increasing traffic to a website; Clean Sweep, a program aimed at creating fake Facebook accounts to post pro-Western messages to websites (essentially performing the same function as the Russian Troll factory); Scrapheap Challenge, for sending fake emails from targeted Blackberry users; Underpass, for changing the results of online polls; and Spring Bishop, for accessing the private Facebook photos of targeted individuals.

What this points to is the re-emergence of the dirty tactics of the Cold War, where information is weaponized, and truth becomes the first casualty.

Added to this toxic mix is the Trans Regional Web Initiative emanating from the US Department of Defense and constituting a more nuanced approach to guiding public opinion. The TRWI consists of several websites located in strategic hotspots around the world like the Middle East, the horn of Africa, and central Asia which purport to deliver an unbiased view of global events to counter radical opinions. That would be all fine and dandy, if it were in fact the case, but the reality is that these US government funded news websites tend to keep silent about human rights abuses committed by client states like Uzbekistan while making much of perceived Russian aggression.

Perhaps even more pernicious than the manipulation of the online political discourse, however, is the use of NGOs to do the same thing in the real world. When the Kremlin made foreign NGOs operating in Russia register as foreign agents it was easy to paint this as a throwback to the paranoia of the Cold War;but this is one conspiracy theory that Putin could be forgiven for indulging in. This is not tinfoil-hat political science. Even respected academics are calling on Washington to pack up its bags. A recent study conducted by two professors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the ex-Soviet space called on the U.S to stop funneling money into local civil society organizations, as aiding NGOs has made it easier for local strongmen to accuse the U.S of fomenting regime change.

USAID, which explicitly states on its website that its "foreign assistance has always had the twofold purpose of furthering America's interests while improving lives in the developing world", was expelled from Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic on the grounds that it was being used as a tool to destabilize those governments.

In Russia itself, leaked emails surfaced showing that Russian opposition groups were receiving funding from USAID, despite their claims to independence.

What good can come of all this subterfuge? What little trust people have in the Internet will be completely destroyed as genuine citizens are left to wade through reams of misinformation being churned out by biased websites and commented on by fake account holders. Using agencies like USAID for these kinds of purposes in the real world is especially underhanded and counterproductive as it compromises the work of genuine aid agencies that will come under suspicion of being Trojan horses for political meddling.

If the West was really interested in selflessly helping emerging democracies, it would have left those countries to find their own way. Intervening in a country's political evolution hijacks the process and blocks new elites from rising up and standing on their own two feet.

in the aftermath of the Euromaidan, real, homegrown NGOs (in contrast to "Ukrainian NGOs" that are heavily financed by the West) sprang up and managed to keep the country on an even keel. When the state foundered, civil society stepped in: grassroots volunteers kept order and distributed aid alike. Volunteerism is on the rise, especially in Eastern Ukraine, where youth platforms such as Freedom Home, Teplytsia, Center UA or the Lviv Education Foundation have helped businesses and IDPs to cope with the fallout from the war. One such homegrown initiative, Restoring Donbass, has sought to unearth such groups and give them a bully pulpit to reach out to Ukrainians in need. People rallied round the flag out of the sheer desire to help their compatriots, building patriotism and hope for a better tomorrow in the process-you don't need USAID for that.

If the claim that America is the leader of the free world claim is to be anything more than the obnoxious, self-serving, lie that all empires spout to legitimize might over right, then Washington would do well to lead by example. The problem until now of course is that they have been doing just that: setting an atrocious example which their vassal states and adversaries have been only to eager to follow to further their own ends.
 
 #24
http://gordonhahn.com
August 16, 2015
WaPo's Whopper, Russia's Unpopularity Problem, and the Potential Threat from the West
By Gordon M. Hahn
Gordon M. Hahn is an Analyst and Advisory Board Member of the Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, Chicago, Illinois; Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View - Russia Media Watch; and Senior Researcher and Adjunct Professor, MonTREP, Monterey, California.

While I am not a fan of Russian President Vladimir Putin or any active politician, I am a fan of accuracy in reporting. In that regard I am no fan whatsoever of the Democratic Party mouthpiece, The Washington Post, or any U.S. or Russian mainstream media institutions (with the exception of Russia's Ekho Moskvy radio and several daily newspapers, in particular Nezavisimaya gazeta). Here's a good reason why.

On August 5th WP published an article on a Pew Center survey of public opinion around the world regarding Russia and Putin. The Pew Center's headline was actually even more misleading than WP's: "Russia, Putin held in Low Regard Around the World" (www.pewglobal.org/2015/08/05/russia-putin-held-in-low-regard-around-the-world/). Pew's own data, which I will get to in a second, somewhat refutes this claim when you give China and India their proper weight.

WaPo's Adam Taylor delivered the WaPo 'whopper': "Of the 39 countries polled, Pew found only three where the majority of people felt 'a lot of confidence' or 'some confidence' that Putin would do the right thing regarding world affairs" (www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/08/05/russia-loves-putin-the-rest-of-the-world-not-so-much/). The author's slight of hand is to focus on the 'majority' in separate countries, emphasizing that only three countries have a majority trusting Putin. The problem is that in several more countries than just three, including the world's two largest countries by population, more people trust than do not trust Putin. In China 54 percent trust Putin, 29 percent do not. In the world's larges democracy, India, 35 percent - trust, 16 percent do not. That means that the countries making up 36 percent of the world's population trust more than distrust Putin, and countries comprising a large majority of the population of the 39 countries survey do likewise. Moreover, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Philippines, Tanzania, and Vietnam trust more than they distrust Putin. Thus, 8 of the 39 surveyed countries trust more than distrust Putin - hardly a win but not the near unanimous distrust spun by WaPo. Moreover, when country population is considered, Putin does notch a win.  (www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/08/05/russia-loves-putin-the-rest-of-the-world-not-so-much/).

If we unpack the meme 'Putin's Russia' and just focus on Russia's favorability/unfavorability in the eyes of the world, the picture is better for Russia but still not very good. Ten countries have a more favorable than unfavorable view of Russia, including China and India again: South Korea (46-43 percent), China (51-37), India (43-17), Vietnam (75-10), Nigeria (39-38), Uganda (37-34), Burkina Faso (34-29), Ghana (56-27), Tanzania (38-24), and Ethiopia (37-10). Three countries are split evenly: Philippines, Peru, and Senegal. The most unfavorable dispositions towards Russia are found in Poland and Jordan (80 percent), followed by Israel (74), Japan (73), and Ukraine (72) (www.pewglobal.org/2015/08/05/russia-putin-held-in-low-regard-around-the-world/).

There are some biases against Russia written into the methodology. There are numerous Russian allies and historically friendly countries that were not included in the survey. Not a single Slavic country besides antagonistic Poland and Ukraine is included (along with Russia). Besides Russia itself, again antagonistic Ukraine is the only country among the post-Soviet countries included. Excluding the Baltic states and Georgia, most of the post-Soviet states are favorably disposed towards Russia (www.pewglobal.org/2015/08/05/russia-putin-held-in-low-regard-around-the-world/).

Clearly Russia loses out to the U.S. in popularity by a large margin. Only 7 of the 39 countries viewed the U.S. more unfavorably than favorably. In order of unfavorability they are: Jordan (83 percent unfavorable), Russia (81), Palestinian Territories (70), Pakistan (62), Lebanon (60), Turkey (58), and China (49 unfavorable, 44 favorable) (www.pewglobal.org/2015/06/23/1-americas-global-image/). Thus, Russia's population may be the most antagonistic to the U.S. in the world since the 2 percent difference between Russia and Jordan is within the margin of error.

Numerous commentators have asserted that Russia has nothing to fear from the West and NATO and that the real threats to Russia come from China in the east and jihadism from the south. However, if the attitudes of countries' populations matter than Russia faces an axis of antagonism to its immediate west through the northern-central plain of running through Poland and Ukraine. Russia's unfavorability in western Europe and the US is high extending that axis through Europe and across the Atlantic to the U.S. and Canada with their influential Polish and Ukrainian lobbies, wherefrom a good part of the pressure for NATO expansion first emerged two decades ago.
 
 #25
The Unz Review
www.unz.com
August 14, 2015
Russia Moves to Protect Her Arctic Interests
By The Saker
[Map here http://www.unz.com/tsaker/russia-moves-to-protect-her-arctic-interests/]

Russia has embarked on a massive and much publicized effort to secure the 6,200 km of her northern border and to be ready to defend her interests in the Arctic shelf up to 500 km from her border. This means that 3,100,000 square kilometers of extremely difficult and inhospitable terrain will have to be secured. Why such a huge effort?

First and foremost, because of the need to protect the huge resources contained in the Siberian and Arctic shelves and waters, estimated at 15 percent of remaining oil and up to 30 percent of gas deposits. Second, Russia wants to expand the so-called "northern sea route" which, courtesy of the global warming phenomenon, is becoming much safer to navigate. Currently, only 4 million tons of cargo transit through that shortcut (the northern sea route from Europe to Asia takes 35 days vs 48-day via the Suez Canal) between Europe and Asia, but in the future the Russians estimate that this figure could be increased 20 times to a total of 80 million tons. The resources allocated to protect this route are huge and they include drones, space-based satellites, underwater monitoring stations and a network of radars. Russia is also building 14 new icebreakers, including several nuclear powered ones. But the biggest effort will be a military one.

Russia has decided to create a "Joint Strategic Command - North" (JSCN) which will be based on the Northern Fleet (which used to be subordinated to the Western Military District). The JSCN will not have the official status of a military district or strategic direction, but for all practical purposes this will become a single, independent, operational-strategic command with a powerful naval component (the Northern Fleet has always been the most powerful of the 4 fleets or Russia) and a large aviation component which will include search and rescue, anti-submarine warfare, early warning aircraft and helicopters and, of course, long-range interceptors, including the formidable MiG-31BM. Coastal defense missiles of the "Rubezh" class will also be deployed.

The air-defense component will immediately include the Pantsir-S1 system but in the future Russia plans to deploy her newest S-400 Triumf on her northern borders. Units from the various military districts have now been re-subordinated to the JSCN and a Joint Tactical Group (JTG) force has been created. It is too early to predict the size of this JTG but the Arctic maneuvers launched by Russia this summer included 80,000 troops, 220 aircraft, 41 ships, and 15 submarines, which probably gives us a decent indication of what is being planned for the future.

Finally, both the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Anti-Terrorism Committee (ATK) have announced that because of the huge, fragile, and very expensive infrastructure being deployed by Russia, the Russian security services will make a special effort to prevent any terrorist attacks in this sensitive sector. Considering the ecological fragility of the Arctic, this is a very sound measure.

Please take a look at this map which illustrates the current situation:

(a big "thank you!" to SouthFront that created the map for this analysis)

Predictably, the West is quite horrified as these Russian efforts. Reactions typically range from concern, to bafflement to outright panic. The sheer hypocrisy of all that whining is breathtaking.

In reality, of course, the West has been planning to take control of the Arctic resources for years. Actors in this planning stage have included the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pentagon and the US Navy. In fact, there is clearly a consensus in Washington - Uncle Sam wants to grab as much of the Arctic as possible. The problem is that, unlike Russia, Uncle Sam has neither the know-how, nor the financial resources nor the means to do so. Take, for example, the US Navy.

The US Navy has always been primarily a "warm waters" navy. With anywhere between 10 to 14 aircraft carriers the main purpose of the US Navy has always been to place a few runways off the shores of any country daring to defy the self-appointed World Hegemon. The US Navy is, therefore, the most powerful "blue water navy" on the planet. In contrast, the Soviet/Russian navy, a "green water navy", has always had a totally different purpose: first and foremost, to protect the Russian nuclear submarines (SSBNs) with intercontinental missiles (SLBN) and to protect the Russian coastlines. The two biggest Soviet/Russian fleets have traditionally been the Northern Fleet and the Pacific Fleet and they have always operated in high latitudes, primarily the Arctic and the Sea of Okhotsk, where the Russian submarine bastions are located. The two smaller fleets - the Baltic Fleet and the Black Sea Fleet) had a much more modest role. Thus we can say that the largest and most capable part of the Soviet/Russian Navy has always been an high latitude, Arctic, one. Even the single Russian aircraft carrier was designed primarily with an air-defense mission and initially had no strike-aircraft on board at all.

This is also generally true for the rest of the US and Russian armed forces: the former were mostly designed to operate in low latitudes (below 50o) while the latter are much more used to operating in much colder conditions. This specialization is even reflected in the US and Russian navigation systems where the US GPS is more accurate in low latitudes, and the Russian GLONASS more accurate in the high latitudes.

This specialization is now coming to haunt US force planners who have to design almost from scratch a polar capable force to try to catch-up with the Russians who have had a 80+ years head start. There is no doubt that the US, Canada, Norway and others will catch up, at least to some degree and with time, but the big difference is this: Russian military capabilities in the Arctic are already a reality today, not a goal to achieve in a decade or more.

Western politicians have, of course, tried to present these developments as yet another sign of the Russian "assertiveness" or even "aggressiveness", but the reality is of course that this Russian policy is in full conformity with the new Russian strategic course which now prioritizes the northern and eastern directions: Siberia, the Arctic and, of course, China. Besides, it is not like Russia is trying to exclude anybody from collaborating in the Arctic. Western oil/gas companies have been actively investing in Russian exploration efforts and Russia has greatly benefited form western know-how acquired in these joint projects. Russia will gladly continue to collaborate with the West in the Arctic region, but Russia will also make darn sure that she has the means to protect and defend her interests in a strategically vital region.

The prospects for the Arctic are, in reality, pretty good. As soon as the western leaders come to terms with the reality that the Arctic is "russkie territory" and that negotiations, not unilateral and hostile actions, are the way to getting things done up there, negotiations will ensue and they will be profitable for all the parties involved.
 
 #26
The National Interest
August 14, 2015
Revealed: Russia's Mighty Pivot to Africa
By Eugene Steinberg
Assistant editor at the Council on Foreign Relations.

From 1961 to 1992, one of Moscow's most prestigious schools bore the name of Patrice Lumumba, the Soviet-supported Congolese independence leader brutally executed in 1961. Patrice Lumumba University recruited and educated generations of foreign leaders, especially African leaders, and was just one of the many ways in which the Soviet Union cultivated ties with Africa. Then with the fall of the Soviet Union, after years of pouring money, arms, and manpower into left-leaning anticolonial movements, Russia's presence in Africa, and Lumumba University, nearly disappeared overnight. But today, two decades later, Russia is once again working to establish a foothold on the continent.

Russia's interests in Africa are manifold. As economic sanctions constrict its trade with the West, Africa is becoming an increasingly attractive investment opportunity. At the same time, Africa's fifty-four countries represent a political opportunity to relieve Russia's isolation and build support for its actions in the UN. Finally, Russia's prominence in Africa lends credibility to its reassertion of world power status. The effectiveness of Russia's re-engagement policy is still in question, but its progress is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

According to the Atlantic Center's Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham, between 2000 and 2012, Russia's trade with Africa increased ten times over. Russia has invested heavily in raw resource megaprojects, signing a $4 billion deal with Uganda in February to build and operate a crude oil refinery and $3 billion deal with Zimbabwe to develop a platinum mine.

Some of its trade has been more overtly political. Russia is a major supplier of arms to both North and sub-Saharan Africa. Russian arms are an increasingly popular alternative to U.S. weaponry, which still dominates the market despite higher monetary and political costs. When the United States rejected a Nigerian request for Cobra attack helicopters in 2014 for instance, Nigeria responded by cancelling a U.S. military training program to fight Boko Haram and investing in Russian aircraft. Now, Russia trains Nigerian Special Forces. The true extent of Russian security deals is difficult to measure because their opaqueness. In at least one case, an African country's civilian intelligence agency was forced to spy on its own military counterpart and Russia just to figure out what kind of surveillance system they had purchased for $100 million.

There are still some transparent indicators of Russian military presence in Africa that speak to the scale of Russia's commitment. As Pham has noted, Russian soldiers involved in peacekeeping operations in Africa surpass those of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States combined.

Russia's outreach goes further than financial and military bonds. Russian leaders visiting Africa capitalize on a narrative that emphasizes their historical support for African independence. At a time when the United States designated Nelson Mandela a terrorist for fear of his socialist sympathies, the Soviet Union actively trained and armed the African National Congress, now the ruling party of South Africa, to fight apartheid. Soviet support helped fuel liberation struggles across Africa. At the same time, Russia today pays little attention to undemocratic practices and human rights abuses that often hinder U.S. efforts on the continent. This strategy of combining historical moralism with present-day moral relativism has had some limited success. Although the UN General Assembly voted to condemn Russian intervention in Ukraine by a large margin, two of the ten countries that voted with Russia were African, while a large portion of the rest of Africa abstained.

Despite formidable investments in Africa, Russia is still eclipsed by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and China. Unlike those countries however, Russia's own abundance of natural resources may convince it to focus more on exporting arms. These weapons seem as likely to enforce stability and repress militants, as they are to fall into the wrong hands and spread instability. Russia's deteriorating economic situation, and more pressing concerns on its borders, may mean the current relationship won't be sustainable. Nevertheless, the current trend seems toward greater involvement, which makes Russia an important player in any long-term view of U.S. policy in Africa.

This piece first appeared in CFR's blog Africa in Transition
 
 #27
Jounalitico
http://journalitico.com
August 14, 2015
Pentagon using spectre of war with Russia to stave off budget cuts, media complies
By Danielle Ryan
Danielle Ryan is an Irish journalist and blogger. She has a degree in Business and German from Trinity College Dublin and studied political reporting at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism in Washington, DC.

This piece from The Daily Beast [DJ: below] is getting a lot of Twitter reaction today -  mostly because it is absolutely ludicrous on at least three different levels.

The first bit of reaction I saw came from FAIR.org writer Adam Johnson, who pointed out a.) that the claim is obviously a massive exaggeration and b.) the propagandistic nature of the headline.

Pando writer Mark Ames got to the crux of it; the spectre of war with Russia is the Pentagon's rallying cry in the face of any potential budget cuts.

And others also pointed out the obvious:

So, let's recap:

The Pentagon, which spends 10 times more than Russia spends ($600 billion vs. $60 billion), is "worried" that it might lose a war against Russia.

This war would be "Putin's war" because, remember, American presidents never start wars, they are either 'forced to act' or in many cases they simply 'inherit' wars.

The US, with its $600m military budget is "struggling to respond" to a problem that isn't really a problem.

None of this is to say that fighting Russia would be a cake walk just because the Pentagon has the bigger budget. Many less dramatic assessments have come to the same conclusion; that Russia would, in some ways, have the upper hand in Europe in any sustained direct conflict with NATO.

But that's besides the point.

What's going on here is the Pentagon blatantly taking advantage of "Russian aggression" to put a stop to budget cuts and The Daily Beast unquestioningly advocating on their behalf, despite the fact that a direct conflict with Russia is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future, by any sane assessment.

But that might not even the worst thing about this piece. That might be the fact that the DB is still obsessing over a Russian invasion of the Baltics: The Pentagon, the author claims, is "scrambling" to respond to Russia, "especially if Putin makes a move for America's NATO allies in the Baltics".

So here again, for dramatic effect, the DB speculates on an almost a non-existent possibility; two scenarios that are at this point still so unlikely that they happen only in the salivating daydreams of neo-cons.
 
 
#28
www.thedailybeast.com
August 14, 2015
Pentagon Fears It's Not Ready for a War With Putin
The U.S. military has run the numbers on a sustained fight with Moscow, and they do not look good for the American side.
By Nancy A. Youssef

A series of classified exercises over the summer has raised concerns inside the Defense Department that its forces are not prepared for a sustained military campaign against Russia, two defense officials told The Daily Beast.

Many within the military believe that 15 years of counter-terrorism warfare has left the ground troops ill prepared to maintain logistics or troop levels should Russia make an advance on NATO allies, the officials said.

Among the challenges the exercises revealed were that the number of precision-guided munitions available across the force were short of the war plans and it would be difficult to sustain a large troop presence.

"Could we probably beat the Russians today [in a sustained battle]? Sure, but it would take everything we had," one defense official said. "What we are saying is that we are not as ready as we want to be."

One classified "tabletop exercise" or "TTX"-a kind of in-office war game-"told us that the wars [in Iraq and Afghanistan] have depleted our sustainment capability," a second defense official explained, using military jargon for the ability to maintain a fight. The exercise was led by the Department of Defense and involved several other federal agencies.

In recent months, the top officers of the military have begun to call Putin's Russia an "existential threat" to the United States. The results of those exercises-and Russian-backed forces' latest advance in Ukraine-didn't exactly tamp down those fears.

But these concerns about readiness and sustainability are not universally held-not even inside the Pentagon. Nor is there a consensus about the kind of risk Putin's Russia really poses. Everyone in the U.S. security establishment acknowledges that Moscow has roughly 4,000 nuclear weapons, the world's third-largest military budget, and an increasingly bellicose leader. There's little agreement on how likely that threat could be.

"A war between Russian and NATO is an unlikely scenario given the severe repercussions Russia would face. In addition to the overwhelming reaction it would provoke, Russia's aging military equipment and strained logistical capabilities make a successful offensive attack a very difficult proposition for them," one U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast. "In short, direct conflict with Russia is a low-probability, high-risk situation. The challenge of Putin's erratic leadership is that low-probability events are slightly more probable."

The U.S. military still has the upper hand in so many ways, after all. But there are limits-severe limits-on those advantages. For its airpower, for example, the U.S. military would be leaning on worn out fighter pilots and limited maintenance abilities for their planes. And the surveillance drones needed would have to be drawn from other conflict zones.

"Against an adversary like Russia, we can't take the kind of air dominance we've had in conflicts since 9/11 for granted," a second defense official explained. "Any conflict of significant magnitude against an adversary like Russia means we'd need to commit airmen and resources that are now operating in other parts of the world at a rate that minimizes their ability to train for that kind of fight."

The official added, "We may very well be able to provide the airpower that would allow us and our allies to prevail in a high-end fight, but the current state of our air forces definitely doesn't make that a sure bet."

Around the time of that TTX, in June, the U.S. military also conducted four major field exercises with its NATO counterparts, called Allied Shield, consisting of 15,000 troops and 19 member countries. In March, Russia conducted its own exercises, at one point deploying as many as 80,000 personnel.

"The focus of the exercises is on what each side sees as its most exposed areas, with NATO concentrating on the Baltic States and Poland whilst Russia is focusing primarily on the Arctic and High North, Kaliningrad, occupied Crimea, and its border areas with NATO members Estonia and Latvia," is how one report summarized the dueling manuevers (PDF).

And like the tabletop exercise, Allied Shield suggested the U.S. could not maintain a sustained fight against the Russians.

Moreover, Russia's blend of special forces, local proxies, weaponized propaganda, cyber espionage, and sneak attacks has many in the U.S. military struggling to figure out how to respond. Of course, they want to check Russian aggression-especially if Putin makes a move for America's NATO allies in the Baltics. They're not sure how do to that without starting down the path toward World War III. Especially now that Russia has declared itself open to the notion of using first-strike nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict.

The Daily Beast's Anna Nemtsova, who is currently with U.S. military trainers in Ukraine, asked one of them what they would they do if their units were suddenly surrounded by Russian-backed forces.

"Let me think for a moment, that is a difficult one," the American soldier said.

At his last briefing with reporters, Army General Raymond Odierno, the outgoing Chief of Staff of the Army, said NATO exercises conducted in Europe exposed even small challenges that could have outsized impact in a fight against Russia.

"One of the things we learned is the logistical challenges we have in Eastern Europe. For example, Eastern Europe has a different gauge railroad than Western Europe [where U.S. has traditionally trained] does so moving supplies is a more difficult. So we are learning great lessons like that," Odierno said.

More serious was Odierno's warning that "only 33 percent" of the U.S. Army's brigades are sufficiently trained to confront Russia. That's far short of the 60 percent needed. Odierno said that he does not believe the Army will reach those levels for several more years.

During the height of the Cold War, there were roughly 250,000 U.S. troops deployed to Europe. After the first Gulf War, that number fell to roughly to 91,000. That number today stands at 31,000-although some additional troops have been added since the stealth invasion of Ukraine.

And yet, many throughout government are not nearly as worried as the military. In fact, these insiders suspect that the Pentagon's warning is more a means to seek leverage amid threats of budget cuts. The military is hoping to stave off major cuts to its ground force and cash flow as the war in Afghanistan winds down.

Lawrence Korb-a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for American Progress, which is closely aligned with the Obama White House and the Hillary Clinton campaign, said he believes the military is taking advantage of Russian aggressions over the last two years to fight its budget battles.

Further, Korb is not convinced the exercises reflect reality, noting the U.S. spends roughly $600 billion on its defense compared to Russia's $60 billion. Russian weapons are far less modern, and Putin had to abandon his $400 billion plan to upgrade them earlier this year as the Russian ruble fell.

"We'd clean their clocks. [Russian troops are] not that good. They are not as modern," Korb said. "I think [the military] took advantage of recent Russian aggression because it has become clear we would not use large ground armies" to confront groups like the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

The U.S. military is now worried about Russia "in the same way the Navy [once] talked about the Chinese" to stop cuts to its budget, he added.

But Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, who retired in 2012 as the commander of U.S. Army Europe, said the Russian threat existed far before the latest budget squabbles. And when he raised them in 2010, they fell on deaf ears.

"We were beating the drum of Russia in 2010 and we were told [by Washington officials], 'You are still in the Cold War.' All the things we predicted would happen, happened, but it wasn't at the forefront of the time," Hertling said.

"This gets to a lack of trust between the government and the military," Hertling added. "We were monitoring Russian movement and they were increasing not only their budget but their pace of operation and their development of new equipment. They were repeatedly aggressive and provocative even though we were trying to work with them."

Since then, the Army has shrunk rapidly-by 80,000 troops. Should Congress enact the across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration, the Army could fall from 450,000 soldiers to 420,000, making it the smallest U.S. ground force since the end of World War II. Odierno has called such figures dangerous.

"The unrelenting budget impasse has compelled us to degrade readiness to historically low levels," Odierno said last month at a conference.

Either way, the London-based European Leadership Network released a report Wednesday, and concluded the dueling large-scale military exercises are aggravating tensions, not deterring the opposing side, as intended.

"Russia is preparing for a conflict with NATO, and NATO is preparing for a possible confrontation with Russia. We do not suggest that the leadership of either side has made a decision to go to war or that a military conflict between the two is inevitable, but that the changed profile of exercises is a fact and it does play a role in sustaining the current climate of tensions in Europe," found the report, titled "Preparing for the Worst: Are Russian and NATO Military Exercises Making War in Europe more Likely?"
 
 #29
Sic Semper Tyrannis
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis
August 14, 2015
Re Ivan Krastev, Gleb Pavlovsky, and George Kennan
By David Habakkuk
David Habakkuk lives in London, and is a former television current affairs producer. After studying economics and history at Cambridge, he lived in Mexico, and then worked on the Liverpool Daily Post newspaper and the Financial Times.  Subsequently he produced programmes for London Weekend Television and the BBC, and as an independent television producer.  

I was amused to see this article restating the common myth that the 'Long Telegram' sent by George Kennan on 22 February 1946 'laid the foundations for America's containment policy'. And I was even more amused to discover that this book by Pavlovsky 'relies heavily on Mr. Kennan's ideas to offer a timely critique of the West's assumptions about Mr. Putin's Russia'. [New York Times, August 13, Ivan Kristen, What the West Gets Wrong About Russia]

If you read the transcripts of the interviews for the CNN Cold War series which was rebroadcast last year, you will find different accounts of Stalin's restatement of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the inevitability of war in his 9 February 1946 election speech, which was the occasion for the 'Long Telegram'.

From the interview with Paul Nitze:

'I read the speech with care and interpreted it as being a delayed declaration of war against the United States ... Why this enormous effort for three years - three five year plans? And it could only mean that he was getting ready for the contingency of war with the United States at the end of fifteen years ... In fact if you read it today you'll see that it is, can't be interpreted any other way.'

This interview was recorded in 1995. Almost half a century after the events, one of the most influential American Cold War strategists had not grasped that the Leninist theory of the relationship of war originated as an attempt to explain a war between capitalist states.

As amended to define the security problems of a lone socialist state in 'capitalist encirclement', the supposedly inevitable war could be a direct attack on the Soviet Union, or the result of its being drawn into a war between capitalist states. The degree of sheer ignorance required to believe, half a century later, that Stalin, in 1946, had decided he would be fighting the United States at some time around 1961 almost passes belief.

When moreover the programme-makers interviewed the historian Robert C. Tucker, who had at the time been a subordinate of Kennan's in the American Moscow Embassy, he suggested that Stalin had the contingency of the Soviet Union being drawn into war between 'imperialists' primarily in mind:

'And what Stalin was saying in February 9, 1946 is that because of the nature of imperialism, as it was called, wars are inevitable. They will usually begin between two sets of imperialist states. As World War Two had begun between the British and the French on the one hand, and the Germans and the Italians on the other. But, as the experience of World War Two showed, he didn't say this in the speech, one of these sets of belligerents had then turned upon Russia in 1941 when Hitler launched his aggression.'

(See http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/coldwar/interviews/episode-2/nitze1.html ;http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/coldwar/interviews/episode-2/tucker1.html .)

So what seems to have happened is that a principal part of Kennan's influence lay in enabling Nitze and James Forrestal to claim the 'Long Telegram' vindicated a sophomoric misreading of Stalin's thinking which actually its author knew to be false, but made no attempt to correct. The idea that Kennan's thinking was moving in harmony with that of his colleagues at any point is a myth making the understanding of the early Cold War impossible.

To understand what happened, one needs to go back to the arguments of the Thirties. The interview with Nitze actually gives you a vivid picture of the very many genuine reasons that American policymakers had to be apprehensive about communist encroachment in the chaotic circumstances immediately following the end of the war. Precisely the scenarios that had materialised were those that the supporters of 'appeasement' had feared - and had believed that Stalin was consciously scheming to bring about.

So what Tucker does not point out is that the study of 'Stalin in Power' he had published some years before he was interviewed for the programme is a major restatement of the view of the 'appeasers' that the war 'between two sets of imperialist states' which had broken out in 1939 had been one that the Soviets had been deliberately trying to precipitate.

As I have argued commenting on the views of 'Fred82' on another thread, this was why, in the 'Long Telegram', Kennan presented the propaganda position taken by the Soviets back in 1931 as though it was still the current position. Before Hitler's rise, the 'false friends of the people' - aka the SPD, otherwise described as 'social fascists' - had indeed been portrayed as 'most dangerous elements' in 'bourgeois-capitalist society' against whom 'relentless battle' had to be waged.

But the 'popular front' strategy had replaced this approach following Hitler's consolidation of power - a fact Kennan obscured from his audience.

When Kennan realised that - contrary to what the 'appeasers' had anticipated - Stalin intended to stick with the 'Popular Front' strategy, he could have fallen in with Roosevelt's more sanguine view of Soviet policy. Instead, he rethought his view of what Stalin had been playing for in 1931.

Rather than a failed attempt to communise Germany, he now concluded that Stalin had been all too happy to encourage the coming to power of Hitler, as the opening move in his supposed strategy to finesse Germany and the Western powers into war. One can see indications of Kennan coming to this view as early as February 1947, and it is the view set out in Tucker's study.

Unfortunately, as I noted in my earlier comments, the 1999 study 'Grand Delusion' by the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky completely demolished Tucker. And, as the 'h-net' reviewer writes:

'Critical to the argument is the compelling portrayal of Stalin as a scared and delusional practioner of realpolitik. This portrait of Stalin as a realpolitiker in foreign policy not only fits with the evidence discussed in the book, but is also quite consistent with Stalin's foreign policy before, during, and especially after the war, which was hardly indicative of a fomenter of world revolution. Of course, Stalin's foreign-policy decisions were shaped by ideological concerns and visions, but the range of choices within his ideological framework permitted policies of relative accommodation with the West in order to preserve Soviet security, even if those relations were also marked by extreme suspicion and hostility. Then, too, it is important to remember that even pragmatists can be self-delusional, and can make mistakes.'

(See http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=7659 .)

After 1945, Stalin was not prepared to abandon his vision of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe consolidated as a Soviet sphere of influence in the interests of good relations with the West. Moreover, he was - probably, from his own point of view, with good reason - obsessively suspicious of contact between his subjects and Westerners. And - last but hardly least, with a characteristic brutalism and lack of self-control, he pushed his luck with regard to Iran and Turkey, which was foolish. Likewise, while he was right in not interpreting the Marshall Plan as a purely defensive move, his characteristically brutal response did immense damage to Soviet interests.

Ironically, however, in the same year that the interviews with Nitze and Tucker were published, policy papers prepared in the Soviet Foreign Ministry in 1944-5 were analysed in an account by the contemporary Russian historian Vladimir Pechatnov in 1995, entitled 'The Big Three After World War II'. These show conclusively that the central argument of the 'Long Telegram' - that Stalin believed his security depended on the destruction of the United States - was simply wrong.

(See http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ACF17F.PDF .)

The papers - by Maisky, Litvinov, and Gromyko were the work of 'westernisers' predisposed to cooperation with the West. But what is striking about them is not simply the emphasis on the continuation of the 'Popular Front', and on spheres of influence and Big Three cooperation - it is, as Pechatnov notes, the absence of any contingency planning about alternatives to these options.

This was the result of the patient effort which Roosevelt had put into alleviating the 'extreme suspicion' of the Soviet leaders. However difficult the problems of dealing with Stalin were, it is eminently possible that, had Roosevelt survived, something more of a 'modus vivendi' might have been worked out.

After all, the State Department Soviet expert co-opted into his entourage was Charles 'Chip' Bohlen, who learned much of his Sovietology from contact with his German Embassy colleagues in Moscow, among whom was one of the most incisive and courageous of the opponents of 'appeasement', Hans 'Johnnie' von Herwarth.

If Pavlovsky thinks that Kennan's analyses of 1946-7 are right about Stalin, he is wrong. If he thinks they have any relevance to Putin, he is delusional.
 
 #30
The Boston Globe
August 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
'The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution' by Dominic Lieven
By David M. Shribman

Czarist Russia in the early 20th century was growing faster than any other country in Europe. So promising was Russia's economic and military future that Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, the German chancellor, proclaimed darkly that the "future belongs to Russia which grows and grows and lies on us like an ever-heavier nightmare.''

That was but one of the many things Germany got wrong in what we now know was the run-up to World War I. Yet the notion that Russia, lying at the periphery of Europe, was at the center of things infuses Dominic Lieven's masterly new view of World War I, "The End of Tsarist Russia,'' which offers this persuasive new perspective on the conflict: World War I, though remembered chiefly for combat in France and Germany, was essentially an Eastern European affair, beginning there and, because of the Russian Revolution it helped spawn, having perhaps its most consequential effect there.

Lieven, a senior research fellow at Trinity College in Cambridge, England, who taught Russian studies at the London School of Economics for a third of a century, has produced what is basically a Russian history of the origins of World War I, though with ample and appropriate recognition of the role of Western Europe in the fighting. After all, as he writes, "Before 1914, a world war was always likeliest to originate in Europe, where six of the eight great powers lived in proximity and where their most essential interests were to be found.''

And yet for Russia, World War I was the cause of all the tragedy that befell the nation all the way through to the end of the 20th century, from revolution, civil war, collectivization, new and brutal conflict in World War II, and the Cold War. Taken together, Lieven reckons, Russia's move into World War I set in motion the death of more than 50 million of its people and millions of foreigners.

The empire of the Romanov czars was, as he put it, "remarkably successful and remarkably ruthless,'' both attributable to the (outwardly contradictory) factors of 18th- and 19th-century Russian serfdom and the westernization of the Russian elite. Both these factors became tinder for the revolutionary fires that would burn in 1905 and then, fatefully, in 1917. "This was not a society that would put up with being governed by a political regime still rooted in eighteenth-century principles of absolute monarchy,'' Lieven notes.

A principal point of vulnerability was the denial of civil rights and political representation to educated Russians. For the Russia that Lieven paints is a portrait of a nation facing either modernization or revolution. As the 20th century dawned, Russia responded to Germany's affinity for Austria - and Great Britain's natural ties with the United States - with a burst of Slav solidarity, a fragile notion given Poland's antagonism toward Russia and the enduring hostility between the Serbs and Bulgarians.

Russia was ruled by an autocrat with anachronistic powers; the Romanovs possessed a doomed faith in what Lieven calls "the link between paternal tsar and his loyal people.'' "In 1900,'' he writes of Nicholas II, "the last Russian tsar was attempting to uphold principles of divine-right monarchy for which Charles I had lost his head some 250 years before.''

Now join this regime - rooted in a romantic, agrarian past - to antagonisms also rooted in the past of Eastern Europe's feuding nations, all festering violently in the years leading to 1914, and the result is incendiary if not inevitable.

Humiliated in the Russo-Japanese war and then again in the various complex Balkan conflicts that occupy the center of this account, Russia grew especially sensitive to its dignity on the international stage and especially eager to no longer be viewed the way an Italian foreign minister described it: as a "great powerless country.''

Finally a temporary "peace born of exhaustion'' settled over Eastern Europe, a fragile peace Russia was determined to use to rebuild its status as a great power and to affirm its role as champion of the Slavs, all while preoccupied with Ottoman affairs and labor strife within its borders.

Lieven believes that nationalism in the region was "a great long-term challenge to the stability of a global order dominated by empires.'' Thus did Europe slide into war, on a rail greased by ethnic antagonism and pride plus ethnic insecurity and national interest. Food shortages, weak political leadership, and disintegrating respect for the monarchy - in short, what Lieven characterizes as the "sheer lunacy of Russian politics'' - weakened Russia at a time of maximum vulnerability. The result was maximum tragedy.
 
 #31
Sputnik
August 17, 2015
Ukrainian Media 'Burn Down 140 Passengers' at Moscow Airport

When it comes to news about Russia, Ukrainian media are pretty good at making things up. The more frightening - the better, their logic is, TV Channel Zvezda said.

Ukrainian portal News Daily reported that in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport the lightning struck at a plane and burned to death 140 passengers flying from Moscow to Astrakhan on Sunday.

"At the height of about 3,500 meters, the plane's crew saw a bright flash and felt a strong blow. Then the plane burst into flame and literally burned in the air. Wreckage and the remains of burned passengers are being gathered around the entire the airport," Ukrainian News Daily reported.

The source also concluded that pilots were under the influence of drug and neglected safety measures.

Needless to say, no plane burned down and nobody died in the Sheremetyevo airport on Sunday. With the availability of Internet and social media, news about the burned down plane and the death of 140 people would have made the headlines of all major news agencies within minutes.

Just wow. The amount of lies and anti-Russian propaganda in the Ukrainian media is disturbing. Not only do Ukrainian news channels misinterpret facts and details, but they've started to make up stories that have nothing to do with reality. The above-mentioned story could only be taken from a script of a Hollywood movie. With their vivid description of the bodies of passengers burned to the ashes scattered all over the Sheremetyevo airport, editors of News Daily should perhaps try getting into the B-level movie industry. You've got the talent, folks!
 
 
#32
Nextgov
www.nextgov.com
August 17, 2015
THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY KEYS IN ON THE RUSSIAN 'TROLL ARMY' MANIPULATING SOCIAL MEDIA
By Aliya Sternstein

When Facebook posts and tweets blamed Ukrainian rebels for downing a Malaysian jet there last year, U.S. spies studied social media trend lines to gauge public opinion of the Kiev-Moscow conflict.

The number of Facebook "likes"; statistics on retweets and "favorited" tweets; and other social media analytics told one story.

But intelligence officials know that, increasingly, autocracies are deploying "trolls" - robotic feeds or paid commentators - to sway social media trends.  So officials say they were cautious when compiling situation assessments.

Such messaging can become dangerous when it casts doubt on ground truth.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper depends on open source information in addition to classified material, to provide American decision-makers with objective information. There is a concern that social media campaigns orchestrated by overseas powers could distort open-source intelligence gathering, some U.S. officials say.

"As various situations unfold in other countries -- and Clapper has got to be able to advise the president and other senior leaders in the government on what are the likely outcomes, what are the range of possibilities -- having the best information possible is crucial," ODNI Science and Technology Director David Honey told Nextgov.

"There are rigorous, rigorous processes to try and always make sure that the information is correct," he added. "That's where I would worry: If one of our tools gave an incorrect forecast, it could lead to giving bad advice to the senior leadership."

Already, adversaries have tried to distort online perceptions, he acknowledged, providing the example of the social media swirl around the July 2014 crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

"There may be a disagreement on the part of Russia on what happened on the aircraft that was downed in that part of the world. And so people will take different data sources and try to use them to their own purposes," Honey said.

Facebook and Twitter analytics help with "sentiment analysis," or understanding how certain groups observe and feel about current events.  

The actual cause of the disaster, which killed all 298 people on board, has become a flashpoint. U.S. ally Ukraine alleges pro-Russian separatists shot down the plane over territory they controlled.

"Russia may be motivated to try and create one impression," Honey said. "Coupled to that is the issue of Ukraine, and again sentiment analysis -- what are the opinions of the people on the ground? What are the opinions of people in Russia? It's all important to us to be able to give an understanding of what does it mean."

As the Sydney Morning Herald notes, the counter-narrative promoted by Moscow's "troll army" of patriotic bloggers has been that a Ukrainian plane -- not Russian-backed rebels -- shot down MH17.

Right now, foreign investigators are probing parts from what might be a Russian-made Buk antiaircraft missile system that were recently discovered near the crash site, according to CNN.

Reality Checks

The process of differentiating between a real, grassroots social media storm and astroturf campaigns in the blogosphere is not an exact science yet, Honey said.

The trickiness of discerning fact from fiction also crops up in online punditry during campaign season, for instance, he said. "Is somebody going and blogging 100 times under different names? How do you figure that out? That's a challenge. And so with any of these technologies, you really have to think through how they can be used, how somebody could game them and make sure that you are getting accurate answers," Honey added.  

This is especially true now, because it's fairly easy for computer programmers to create bots -- formulas that chatter online like real users.

To do a reality check, "there are statistical approaches to be able to try to figure out if there are correlations between posts that are just a little too close to be different people," Honey said. While Twitter and Facebook try to police fraud, "the ability to spoof the algorithms that check if it's a human" is a different matter.

The DNI earlier this month published an unclassified five-year science and technology strategy for startups to read, partly so that intelligence analysts can gain insight into tech inventions before nefarious hands do.  

"The people who are developing them at the time aren't the kind of people to abuse technology, so they don't necessarily think through how a bad actor might try to manipulate any of the technology," Honey said. "You've got to be able to think through at some point, hopefully in advance, how they might be misused or how somebody might try to trick you into thinking you've got one thing when in fact you've got something else?"

More than half a decade ago, China pioneered the practice of falsifying social media communications to influence perceptions of Beijing's ruling party.

Chinese Facebook and Twitter conversations surrounding Tibetan civil liberties were a common target.

"This has involved creating fake accounts that publish and/or retweet stories on economic development and ethnic harmony in the region and the use of bots to drown out other voices," said Adam Segal, who researches China and cybersecurity at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2012, several hundred bots flooded Twitter discussions using the hashtags #Tibet and #Freetibet with meaningless tweets and spam, Segal noted on the think tank's blog at the time. "If you were someone trying to learn more about Tibet, you kept bumping up against these threads, and eventually you may have given up and moved on to some other subject," he said.

The Associated Press reported in late May that Serbs receive most of their information about Russia from coerced typists that parrot the Kremlin party line. As a result, there is a widespread belief in Serbia that Kiev officials are neo-Nazi, according to the AP.

Last month, Forbes columnist Paul Roderick Gregory said an article he wrote the day after the MH17 incident, in which he alleged Russian separatists shot down the plane, has received more than 100 comments from Russian trolls.

Putin's keyboard operatives "assert the offending bloggers are CIA spies, professional photoshoppers, forgers, Russia haters, hokhols (a derogatory expression for Ukrainians) -- perhaps even insane," Gregory wrote in July. "These trolls keep busy by poking holes in the evidence, and the more absurd, the better (false facts, photoshopped images). Their job is to raise doubts and cause confusion"

A Captive Audience

Now other countries, including Middle Eastern regimes not too happy about the Arab Spring, are staging messaging operations to counter Western views.

Advocacy group Freedom House noticed that, last year, 24 of the 65 countries the organization monitors for online censorship were engaging in some form of pro-government social media tampering, said Sanja Kelly, director of the group's Freedom on the Net project.

One recent example: Azerbaijan, which hosted this summer's European Games, took to Twitter to deflect international criticism of its human rights record.

At several points in the run-up to the games, pro-government tweets from multiple accounts appeared at roughly the same time, the BBC reported.

The official organizing committee and a coordinated fleet of users tweeted positive images of Azerbaijan's capital, Baku. A large group photo of participants crouching and standing, with national flags from across Europe in the background, carried the message:
#Azerbaijan athletes with @azpresident #Azerbaijan
#baku2015 #realbaku2015 #europeangames #biginbaku #ilove azerbaijan"

It's hard to quantify the success rate of fabricated online campaigns but anecdotal evidence suggests the oppressors are winning the hearts and minds of the citizenry, Kelly said.

"Just looking at it more from a qualitative perspective, it seems that it is being effective -- because most people cannot tell the difference between a legitimate tweet or a legitimate comment and comments made by these trolls," she said. "If you are the average reader, there would be no reason for you to believe that this exchange" tarnishing the reputation of a dissident "is not legit."

Based on general studies of regimes that filter Internet content, the governments "are able to propagate their message and hold their population captive, in a way, because they are not able to get alternative sources of information," Kelly added.

 
 #33
Kyiv Post
August 16, 2015
Don't expect Russia's policy to change
By Alexei Bayer
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, lives in New York. His detective novel "Murder at the Dacha" was published by Russian Life Books in 2013.

Poet Boris Khersonsky recently cited Ivan Bunin's memoir, "Cursed Days", where the writer recalls how in the months after the Bolshevik coup in 1917 sane people kept expecting Lenin's government to collapse or be swept away. Khersonsky, who as a life-long "odessit" has spent the past year in a city where Russia stirs ethnic tensions, sends in terrorists and lays the groundwork for a possible invasion, dismissed hopes expressed by many Russians that, if Putin is somehow removed, the current nightmare will be over and everything will be back to normal.

Actually, a view that communism could not be viable endured for much longer. The Whites and the liberal intelligentsia took this conviction along as they went into exile after the end of the Civil War. Throughout the 1920s and the 1930s, the emigre press in Paris, Berlin, Prague and elsewhere was full of predictions of the Soviet regime's imminent demise. It was too bloody, its economic notions were hare-brained, pauperized the population. Even worse: the country was literally starving. The communist ideology was laughable and reading Soviet newspapers made one think they had been written by inmates in an loony bin. The pious Russian people would not tolerate an atheist government run mostly by Jews and other ethnic minorities that was systematically destroying their churches. The death knell for the regime was rung when, in a feat of apparent madness, the revolution began devouring its own children, executing the military brass, party cadres and loyal citizens, and even purging its own repressive apparatus.

When I emigrated from the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, I met some of the elderly White emigres still living at the time in Rome and New York. They were nostalgic for the country of their youth and still, in their hearts of hearts, they could not believe that the monstrous experiment to which Russia had subjected itself was real. I stayed briefly with the noble Zolotnitsky family in Rome and the grandmother, who had left Crimea on one of the overcrowded refugee boats when she was in her mid-twenties, kept querying me eagerly about various aspects of life in the Soviet Union. She kept shaking her head as though she couldn't quite fathom that people in the Soviet Union could be born, grow up, get an education, raise a family and die peacefully in their beds.

According to 1st century B.C. Chinese general Sun Zi, if you wait by the river long enough, the body of your enemy will eventually float by. In time, the unlamented dead body of the Soviet Union - if not Lenin's mummy - finally floated by the descendants of those Whites who by then were scattered around the world and only dimly aware of their Russian heritage. But the system turned out to be far more durable than anyone had expected. After a half-hearted attempt to join the community of civilized nations, Russia gleefully turned itself into a kind of neo-communist proto-fascist state. Unlike the final years of the Soviet Union, when the population was emotionally and physically drained, demoralized and browbeaten, today's reincarnation of that state is brimming with negative energy. The new generation of Russians is in some ways closer to the generation of the 1920s, the ones who became Stalin's power base, who enthusiastically gave him absolute power and who wept and stampeded at his funeral even though he had killed millions of them and filled the rest with deadly fear.

The 1920s' generation consisted of semi-literate boys and girls born on the countryside and living in recently created industrial suburbs. They were raised during the years of World War I and the Civil War and became infected with Lenin's vulgarized Marxism. Not only were they given the one and only "correct" ideology, but they were also told that they had to show the way to the rest of the world. And if smarter and more educated people didn't want to follow them, they were enemies that had to be destroyed.

For the current generation of Russians, the corrupting role of leninism was played by the easy petrodollar prosperity, which gave them an illusion of greatness and a huge sense of entitlement. They form the backbone of Putin's support, a know-nothing generation that grew up on lies and distortions supplied by television and became imbued with a sense of national exclusivity.

In the 1930s, Stalin sicked his communist masses on the old-style intelligentsia - all those engineers who got a professional education and therefore thought they knew better how to run factories, on prosperous, hard-working peasants, on experienced military commanders and on the educated party elite. After World War II came the turn of the Jews and other "rootless cosmopolitans".

Invariably, the targets were eggheads - the ones who claimed that the world was too complex to be explained away by marxism-leninism and that solving some problems required education and professional training, not just love for the Great Leader.

I have no doubt that in Putin's Russia, the turn of "domestic enemies" and the "Fifth Column" will also eventually come. For now, however, Putin is channelling the national anger out of the country. It's the Anglo-Saxons - the British and the Americans - who have always conspired to keep Russia down. The perfidious Anglo-Americans bought everyone up and turned other nations into their lackeys in order to keep Russia from assuming its rightful role as a global leader.

Russia has accumulated a long litany of historical grievances, going back to the dawn of history. They include facts cited by "serious" political analysis as well as downright silliness and craziness - such as a recently advanced claim that Jesus travelled to Northern Russia, where he developed his teachings. There is an entire branch of history in Russia which has discovered that Western Europe was a Russian-speaking federation during the Middle Ages.

Today, those Anglo-Saxons and the West in general are flaunting their advanced technologies, their well-engineered cars, their dollar-based financial system and their control over commodity markets. Their movies, music, fashions and McDonald's have insidiously spread into Russia, corrupting and weakening it. They are proud of their prosperity, tolerance and civil rights, claiming it to be a mark of an advanced civilization.

Russia can't harm the United States and its allies in any real way - because indeed, the West's military, technological, financial and economic superiority over Russia is at this point overwhelming. Vladimir Putin thought he could rile up EU farmers if he banned their products from the Russian market. But Russia turned out to be too insignificant to make a difference. While Brussels made up the farmers' losses, Russia's own economic decline meant that its imports were going to shrink anyway. All Russia can do is to burn banned food products brought into the country illegally in a kind of a voodoo ritual in which cheese, ham, fruit and vegetables become stand-ins for Western politicians.

More ominously, ex-Soviet nations that are hoping to join the West but do not yet enjoy NATO protection have also become stand-ins for the hated Americans. Ukrainians, along with Georgians, Moldovans and, in time, othersl, can expect to bear the brunt of Russia's impotent rage.

All this suggests that the Russian madness can't be expected to end painlessly merely if Putin goes. Stalin's generation outlived its patron saint by three decades. Mikhail Suslov, the party ideologist of the Brezhnev era, is a classic example of a young Stalinist. He died in 1982.

Even if the Russian economy crumbles - as it is likely to do in the near-to-medium term, just as the Russian economy collapsed under Bolshevism - it will not result in any kind of a new beginning. There may be changes, but probably not for the better.

Khersonsky, the poet, put it best: "I think that this regime will endure for a long time (not necessarily its principal, but the regime). We must go on living and making plans for the future based on this assumption. And if all of a sudden Putinism starts to crumble, we must do everything possible to avoid being buried alive under its ruins."
 
 #34
Wall Street Journal
August 17, 2015
Book Review
Russian Roulette
The regime has replaced institutions with one-man rule and treats criticism as treason. But it could get even worse.
By EDWARD LUCAS
Mr. Lucas is the author of "The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West." He is a senior vice president at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

PUTINISM
By Walter Laqueur
Thomas Dunne, 271 pages, $27.99

PUTIN'S RUSSIA
Edited by Leon Aron
American Enterprise Institute, $0.99

Making sense of Putinism is rather like trying to analyze a Russian salad. Unappetizing cubes of meat and vegetables lurk in a sea of gloop. Eat it and you may be ill, which is certainly the effect of 15 years of the stuff on Russia's body politic. The country may not be quite a dictatorship, but it is certainly no kind of democracy. Vladimir Putin's regime is more than kleptocracy crossed with cynical populism-but what is it exactly, and what does it stand for?

The opening pages of Walter Laqueur's "Putinism" take on the subject with promising panache. Putinism is not fascism, he says-that is not a "helpful" analogy; and it is not quite an ideology. He prefers to call it a doctrine. It mixes anti-Westernism, conspiracy theories, religion and nationalism to support a worldview in which Russia (along with its leadership) is virtuous, the outside world malign, and sacrifices are necessary to protect one from the other.

Mr. Laqueur makes some telling points. Geopolitics (a Russian obsession) is a mostly meaningless term; Putinist thinkers might as well try to explain world politics with thermodynamics. Russian conspiracy theorists' ideas of who runs the world (the Rothschilds) are ludicrously outdated; they should, he suggests, subscribe to Bloomberg to see who really holds economic power. Russia's "neo-Eurasianists" hate Europe; but they conspicuously lack interest in, or knowledge of, Asia. The sympathy of foreign left-wingers for Russia suggests inattentiveness; the regime's best friends abroad are the extreme right.

But the book disappoints more often than it delights. Mr. Laqueur's always elegant prose does not make up for factual errors. The author asserts that the European Union is "unable to agree" on a common energy policy. In fact, the European Commission's liberalization of energy markets and antitrust action against Gazprom, the Kremlin gas behemoth, were striking successes. The corrupt and politicized export of gas was at the heart of the Kremlin's business model. Bureaucrats in Brussels drove a stake through it.

The book's greatest weakness is Mr. Laqueur's infuriating habit of ducking the most interesting question: Where is all this leading? Again and again he says that predicting the future is difficult and it is all too early to tell. He highlights the sinister and eccentric philosopher Alexander Dugin, but does not explain whether his star is rising or falling. He describes the even more bonkers ultra-nationalist Ivan Ilyin as Putin's "prophet" and rightly decries the "madness and persecution mania" among such writers and thinkers. But do they actually matter? "It is impossible to say how far this affliction will spread or has spread already," writes Mr. Laqueur limply.

The final paragraph of the book is even more disappointing. "There is bound to be change. But when and how and in what direction no one can say with any certainty. Will it be for the better or the worse?" Readers paying $27.99 for a volume by one of America's most eminent foreign-policy thinkers might reasonably expect something less flaccid.

A more rewarding read is a slim collection of essays by Russians, edited by one of America's best Russia-watchers, Leon Aron. (It's available as an e-book on Amazon or for free on the American Enterprise Institute website.) The contributions to "Putin's Russia: How It Rose, How It Is Maintained, and How It Might End" are informative and mostly gloomy. The war in Ukraine is not the cause of Russia's woes, they argue, but it has accelerated corrosive trends. The economy is stagnating because corruption chokes investment and because Russia has failed to diversify from natural-resource extraction. The shrinking economic pie heightens tensions between the center and the periphery. It also increases the rifts between different segments of Russian society-those that profit from crony capitalism or relish the anti-Western fervor and those disenfranchised groups worst hit by ailing public services and crumbling infrastructure.

Far from trying to assuage these problems, the regime makes them worse. It has replaced institutions with one-man rule, treats even constructive criticism as treason, and is inventing enemies at home and abroad to distract attention from its own failings. But centralizing power in a country as big as Russia creates the seeds of its own destruction. The quality of decision-making, notes Evgeny Gontmakher, one of the book's nine contributors, is being compromised by distorted feedback from the regions and by selective implementation of the center's decisions by quietly rebellious local leaders. He foresees a "systemic crisis" in Moscow's ability to govern Russia. Repression has cowed direct political challenges to Putinism, but civil society is not crushed. Despair at the corruption, incompetence and unaccountability of the state has led to the rise of "self-governing" groups to fill the vacuum. These pragmatic, "ideologically inclusive" outfits advocate for causes ranging from improving traffic safety to combating the falsification of educational credentials.

Mr. Aron concludes bleakly: "Although it is able to increase domestic repression, harass its neighbors and heighten tensions with the West, the Putin regime finds itself at a loss when it comes to . . . confronting (much less reversing) structural threats of an economic, social, political and religious nature." However much you may dislike the way Russia is run now, it is useful to remember that it could get a whole lot worse.
 
 #35
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Newsnet
August 2015
Assessment of the state of Russian studies in the US on behalf of ASEEES

Current tensions between the United States and Russia over Ukraine and other issues have prompted discussions in the media and in policymaking circles about the state of expertise on Russia in the United States. Some observers argue that since the collapse of the Soviet Union the quantity and quality of Russia-related research and graduate training at US-based universities have declined and also that American perceptions of Russia remain stuck in a Cold War frame, leaving the American public and government poorly informed about contemporary Russia. However, there has been little or no concrete data that can be used to assess these arguments.

ASEEES commissioned a study, with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to assess the state of the research and graduate training on Russia in USbased academic institutions. The study, which was carried out January-April 2015, included the following components: an institutional survey of 36 US-based universities that provide graduate-level training in Russian studies; an individual survey of 660 researchers who have conducted work on Russia during the last five years; qualitative interviews of nine current and former US government officials and scholars who work in think tanks, foundations, and networks that focus on Russia in Washington DC; and qualitative case studies of four institutions recognized to be among the top centers for graduate training in Russia-related research. The full report on the results of the study is now available on the ASEEES website. This article summarizes the main findings and conclusions....

Read More:
ASEEES newsletter http://aseees.org/sites/default/files/downloads/august-2015_1.pdf

Full report: https://pitt.app.box.com/FINAL-ASEEES-assessment


 
 #36
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Newsnet
August 2015
Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship Program for Russian Historical Studies

The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies announces the establishment of the Stephen F. Cohen-Robert C. Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship
(CTDRF) Program for Russian Historical Studies. The Fellowship
Program is made possible by a generous donation
from the KAT Charitable Foundation.

Beginning in the academic year 2016-2017, the CTDRF Program will provide up to six annual fellowships, with a maximum stipend of $22,000, for doctoral students at US universities who are citizens or permanent residents of the US to conduct their dissertation research in Russia. The program will be open to students in any discipline whose research topics are within the scope of 19th-early 21st century
Russian historical studies, as listed below.

FELLOWSHIP RESEARCH SCOPE

The research topic must be in 19th-early 21st century Russian historical studies; in cases of equally qualified applications, some preference may be given to research on the Soviet era. The research topic can be in cultural, economic, intellectual, political, or social historical studies.

The geographic focus of the research must be predominantly within the current boundaries of the Russian Federation NOTE: This does not exclude research related to other former Soviet Republics or territories of the 19th c. Russian Empire, but the research topic must still be predominantly historical study of Russia.

The research must be conducted primarily in the Russian Federation, but the fellowship may be used to conduct research for a briefer period in secondary site(s) in one other former Soviet republic or territory once forming part of the Russian empire (NOTE: The fellowship does not support research in North America). The duration of research travel must be at least nine (9) months.

ELIGIBILITY
Applicant must:
* be a doctoral student at a US university
* have a dissertation research topic that falls within the fellowship
research scope, but may be in any discipline
* have language proficiency to conduct research in Russia
* have successfully achieved PhD candidacy (ABD status)
by the start of the proposed research travel
* be citizen or permanent resident of the US
* be a student member of ASEEES at the time of the application
submission
* be able to receive and maintain a visa to the Russian
Federation (and any other site of research that requires
a visa). NOTE: Applicant MUST be able to obtain a visa
through an affiliation with a Russian research institution
* plan to start the research travel within the same calendar
year following the receipt of the fellowship (Ex: Upon
notification of the fellowship in 2016, the recipient must
start research travel no later than December 31, 2016

FELLOWSHIP AMOUNT

The fellowship amount will be a maximum of $22,000, which can be spent on expenses incurred while conducting research in Russia, including living expenses,
research expenses, international airfare, visa expenses, and evacuation and health insurance.

NOTE: The fellowship does not support tuition payments to the applicant's US home institution.

SELECTION CRITERIA

The fellowship will be awarded on the basis of:
* the applicant's scholarly qualifications
* the scholarly significance of the project and its capacity
to advance Russian historical studies
* the feasibility of the research proposal

APPLICATION REQUIREMENT

* Completed Online Application form
* Research Proposal (Max. 2000 words)
* Curriculum Vitae
* Graduate Transcript
* Two (2) Letters of Reference
* Language Proficiency Reference Form

APPLICATION DEADLINE
December 11, 2015

2015-16 FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM SELECTION PANEL
Alexander Rabinowitch, Indiana University, Chair
Katerina Clark, Yale University
Richard Wortman, Columbia University

CONTACT

For more information contact Lynda Park, Executive Director,
[email protected].
Additional details can be found on our website:
http://www.aseees.org/programs/cohen-tucker-research-fellowship


 
 #37
Columbia University
Harriman Institute
SAVE THE DATE: CATHARINE THEIMER NEPOMNYASHCHY'S MEMORIAL SERVICE

Friday, October 2, 2015
2:00 - 4:00 pm

James Memorial Chapel at Union Theological Seminary (3041 Broadway at 121st St)
A memorial service will be held for Professor Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy on Friday, October 2, 2015 in the James Memorial Chapel at Union Theological Seminary (3041 Broadway at 121st St). The service will be followed by a reception at the Diana Center, Barnard College (3009 Broadway at 119th St). All are welcome to attend.

Professor Nepomnyashchy has been a cherished member of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, and Barnard College communities since she enrolled as a doctoral student in Columbia's Slavic Department in 1973. Nepomnyashchy was the first woman to direct the Harriman Institute (2001 - 2009), and was honored as the Institute's Alumna of the Year in 2012. She was a member of the Barnard Slavic Languages Department since 1987, and its chair since 2000.