Journalists at Petersburg Channel Five have endorsed the idea of a number of western leaders of moving the WWII Victory Parade to Poland.
In her program, TV presenter Nika Strizhak said that Russian tanks could easily reach not only Warsaw but also Washington.
According to the broadcast segment, it is only 1,300 kilometers from Moscow to Warsaw, so the T-90 tank could enter the suburbs in less than twenty-four hours. During this time, airborne troops, who need only two hours for redeployment, would be able to rehearse the parade, rest, iron their parade uniforms, and cook a festive meal of buckwheat porridge and stewed meat.
The TV journalists also reminded viewers that it is only 1,800 kilometers to Berlin: “For a modern army, that is no distance, all the more so because many Russian officers know their way around the city.” Well, and Prague, Helsinki, and Vilnius are all very close, so the Russian Army could go there on foot, the journalists added.
Channel Five also pondered more distant routes, such as London and Washington.
“Planning for them would have to be done well in advance, and here one cannot do without the air force and navy. But there is still time, and applications are being accepted,” it says in the segment.
Extractive nationalism is a machine for turning the nation into a resource for the imaginary regeneration of empire (whose present prospects are, nevertheless, ever more real). Hence the demographic policies of the 2000s, the concept of the “Russian world” (now also equipped with the right to intervene militarily on behalf of compatriots abroad), and the precedent of territorial expansion. In this case, there is another, geopolitical aspect to the resource state’s demodernization: a return to the imperial idea, which ignores both the postmodernist model of globalization and the modernist model of the nation-state. (Although the new empire has been assembled under the quasi-national cover of the “Russian world,” the Russian language, and Russian culture, thus papering over the conflict between the national and the imperial.) The conversion of fossil fuels into one of the main instruments in the war for imperial influence is only the most brutal and aggressive version of the total resource-driven mentality we are discussing.
Thus, the logic of the resource state is deeper than Alexander Etkind writes.* It is not merely that the elite triggers demodernization, turning the populace into an object of paternalistic care based on the charitable redistribution of income derived from the sale of natural resources. It also has to do with the fact that the “modernization project,” the official agenda of the 2000s and 2010s, consists in transforming the populace itself into a natural resource, as it comes to be seen in terms of the same pragmatic struggle for limited resources.
“There is increasing competition for resources. And I want to assure you, dear colleagues, and emphasize that [it is a competition] not just for metals, oil, and gas, but primarily for human resources, for intelligence. Who shoots ahead, and who remains an outsider and inevitably loses their independence, will depend not only on economic potential, but first and foremost on the will of every nation, on its intrinsic energy; as Lev Gumilev said, on its passionarity.”**
We are confronted here with a typical example of translating the discourse of nation into the organicist language of energy resources. Victory in international competition is vouchsafed to those who realize that not only natural but also symbolic resources (“spiritual bonds”) are limited and also need to be placed under state control. If Russia’s economic potential is based on metals, oil, and gas, its human resource consists in the capacity for appropriating “intrinsic energy,” the “will of the nation.” Thus the Russian state’s superextractivity can be described not only as the economic exploitation of “natural resources […] almost without the populace’s involvement” (Etkind, p. 164) but also as the political exploitation of the populace, turned into raw material for the reproduction of the elite.
The values to which the elite appeals in its search for national identity—the historical past, Russian culture, the Russian language—are turned into the exact same sort of raw materials.*** Its ideological obsession with “spiritual principles,” “historical origins,” “tradition,” and “cultural foundations” is defined by the selfsame chthonic horizon of the earth’s depths as the mineral resources on which the elite’s material prosperity and political stability objectively depend. The dialectic of current Russian (de)modernization involves making Russia’s future dependent on intensively exploiting its past (represented as its natural or cultural heritage). A resource is a condensation of the past; it inhabits the present in concentrated form.
The constructed “national tradition” and de(modernization) are deployed in keeping with a simplified version of the Marxist dogma of base and superstructure. In our case, the base is occupied by resources (mineral resources fuel the economy, while the resources of national tradition drive ideology and cultural policy), while the superstructure emerges through modernizing technology for exploiting these same resources. That is why, in a resource state, modernization inevitably devolves into demodernization—a circular movement that over the longer term will increasingly deplete material resources and thus become more dependent on symbolic resources. Hence the increasingly strident attempts to put them under state control: as the final victory of the resource-driven mentality approaches, the struggle for resources has only exacerbated. Natural resources, public institutions, people, and values are converted into raw materials for strengthening the current political order’s stability.
In the end, extractive nationalism itself is a resource for the production of raw petropatriotism. The petropatria is a homeland for the petromacho in which everyone else has to live as well, that same populace for whom it is time to make their choice between their country and oil.
Kirill, white-bearded and bespectacled, clad in a black monk’s robe and a white cowl topped with a golden cross, started his Duma speech [in January 2015] by lambasting western liberalism, same-sex marriages, legalisation of euthanasia and other “pseudo-values” that are being “propagated in and even imposed on Russia”.
Kirill praised what he called the “Russian civilisation” rooted in the religious and political principles adopted from the Byzantine Empire. Comparing this “civilisation” to today’s West, he claimed the latter is doomed.
“The idea of absolute value and priority of freedom, the freedom of choice, and the refusal from the priority of ethical standards have become some sort of a time bomb for western civilisation,” Kirill said.
Kirill also offered his views on a kaleidoscope of topics that included statehood, ethics, family values and Russia’s plunging birth rates. He called on the lawmakers to ban free abortions at government health clinics. He urged them to increase the number of public school lessons on the Orthodox doctrine, provide state funding for Orthodox colleges, and include theology in the list of scientific disciplines.
One of the strangest shocks I’ve had over the past couple years was discovering an advert for this sprightly academic tome in my favorite biweekly review of books:
In this unique volume from the World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations and the Social Science Research Council, some of the world’s greatest minds—from Nobel Prize winners to long-time activists—explore what the prolonged instability of the so-called Great Recession means for our traditional understanding of how governments can and should function. Through interviews that are sure to spark lively debate, 22 Ideas to Fix the World presents both analysis of past geopolitical events and possible solutions and predictions for the future.
[…]
Interviews with: Zygmunt Bauman, Shimshon Bichler & Jonathan Nitzan, Craig Calhoun, Ha-Joon Chang, Fred Dallmayr, Mike Davis, Bob Deacon, Kemal Dervis, Jiemian Yang, Peter J. Katzenstein, Ivan Krastev, Will Kymlicka, Manuel F. Montes, José Antonio Ocampo, Vladimir Popov, Joseph Stiglitz, Olzhas Suleimenov, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Immanuel Wallerstein, Paul Watson, Vladimir Yakunin, Muhammad Yunus
Vladimir and Yakunin are common enough first names and surnames in Russia, so I thought that maybe the Vladimir Yakunin in question was a previously obscure philosopher or economist working in the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences or Tempe, Arizona.
What I didn’t know then was that the cumbersomely named World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations was a soft-power vehicle, vigorously headed by the one and only Vladimir Yakunin, for advancing Putinism 3.0’s new Cominternist “conservative” agenda, a wild melange of militant homophobia, “traditional Christian family values” (this from veterans of an organization previously and murderously committed to “militant atheism”), “anti-imperialism,” post-capitalism, “anti-fascism,” “anti-globalism,” anti-Americanism, anti-liberalism, a yearning for the (perpetual) “decline of the west,” etc. You name the flavor, they had it (almost).
The main thing, apparently, for the hundreds and thousands of “foremost” thinkers, pols, players, NGOists, bored middle-aged academics, IR chancers, and “youth leaders” invited by Yakunin to dialogue and confab in exotic locations like Rhodes was never to ask too hard (or at all) who was footing the bill for all this grassroots diplomacy and heavy thinking.
What a rare, perceptive friend Mr. Ruse had! At the time, the only other person on planet Earth, apparently, to notice that something was amiss with Yakunin’s largesse and the seating arrangements at his tea parties was Richard Bartholemew, who writes about religious affairs:
That’s quite a line-up of intellectuals. However, the key name here is not the most famous, and it has the penultimate position: Vladimir Yakunin runs Russia’s state-owned railways, and he is a part of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. He also co-founded the World Public Forum, which co-produced the book and which perhaps therefore has some bearing on why he’s among the “World’s Foremost Thinkers”.
As I’ve discussed previously, the WPF holds regular “Dialogue of Civilizations” events involving academics, activists, and religious leaders. The range of those involved is unusually broad – recent events have included input from figures ranging from Noam Chomsky, whose critical view of the place of American power in the world is doubtless congenial to Russia, through to Don Feder, an arch-conservative “family values” fulminator whose social views fit well with Yakunin’s activism on behalf of Russian Orthodoxy. WPF events have also involved Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and it is claimed that Yakunin has cited her husband Lyndon LaRouche favourably. More on all these links here and here. There’s also apparently some interest at the WPF in extra-terrestrial matters.
Another oddity I’ve noted before is that one of Yakunin’s fellow WFP co-founders is a US-based businessman who is closely involved with the neo-Pentecostal sector of the Christian Right, particularly Rick Joyner and William “Jerry” Boykin. More on that here.
* * * * *
Further shocks to my feeble mental health were to come as, intrigued by my chance discovery of the nexus between leftist grandees like Wallerstein and Russian’s head railwayman, I plunged into the weird and distinctly unwonderful world of the Yakuninshchina.
For example, when I visited the website of the WFP-affiliated Rhodes Forum in July of last year, I was greeted by the following surreal collage:
Far be it from me to cast aspersions on Professor Chomsky’s deservedly sterling reputation. In any case, it is clear the positive associations and cultural capital the website’s designers were trying to generate for Yakunin with this juxtaposition, probably made without Chomsky’s permission. (The site seems to have been completely redesigned since then, and the offending collage has vanished.)
But what prevented Chomsky or any other of Yakunin’s many forum guests and co-authors from doing a bit of due diligence into Yakunin and his ilk, and deciding whether their progressive causes and scholarly research were well served by dialoguing or associating with him in any way?
On March 30, 2014, Yakunin popped up as the headliner and co-chair of a timely international conference in Petersburg entitled “Neo-Fascism in Europe: 70 Years Later.” As can been seen in a news report aired on local channel TV 100, Yakunin predictably inveighed against the dangers of “Ukrainian fascism,” even as his own country had tens of thousands of troops amassed along the Ukrainian border.
Petersburg governor Georgy Poltavchenko and Vladimir Yakunin (right) at “anti-fascist” conference in Petersburg, March 30, 2014
Piskorksi later helpfully turned up in Petersburg again in the autumn, this time not as an “anti-fascist” but as an “elections observer.” He was part of an international team putting its facile stamp of (pre-)approval on a farcical but successful bid to transform the “incumbent,” Putin appointee Georgy Poltavchenko, into a “popularly elected” governor, and, by the by, stack the mostly powerless municipal councils with the right sort of folk. (If, unlike ninety-nine percent of the population and the world, you’re actually interested in how it all went down, read this eyewitness account.)
On the other end, presumably, of the political spectrum, 22 Ideas to Fix the World co-editor Richard Sakwa has recently published a hilarious op-ed in The Guardian arguing that Putin may actually be planning to do an end-around on his detractors and liberalize the regime.
So, the furious networking Yakunin has been doing over the past ten years or so has not been without its dividends.
* * * * *
But the really unfunny thing is that Yakunin has a day job as head of Russian Railways. What have they been up to lately?
Russia analyst Paul Goble explained the likely impact the cuts would have on people in rural and small-town Russia:
The importance of local and regional train service in Russia is far greater than in almost any other country, given the lack of decent roads in much of the country and the availability of critical services only in the oblast capitals. Without train service, for example, diabetics who need insulin face enormous difficulties in getting it in a timely fashion.
Indeed, in some cases, as in Pskov oblast over the last two decades, the increasing difficulty rural residents face in getting to the capital – there the authorities earlier cut back bus service and then snow removal efforts – has sent mortality rates skyrocketing, reducing life expectancy among rural residents by a decade or more.
Now that Russian Railways is posed to cut back rail services elsewhere, a similar pattern is likely to obtain, and a Russian government which claims that it is acting on behalf of ethnic Russians and what it calls “the Russian world” in Ukraine will be harming ethnic Russians at home in the most serious and immediate ways.
Ordinary Russians, of course, didn’t need Paul Goble to help them see how their lives would be drastically altered for the worse, as The Moscow Times reported on February 4:
“I am a schoolboy in Class 11 and I need to prepare for the Unified State Exams. Most students have tutors that live in Tver,” Yury Arakcheev wrote on petition site change.org after local trains from his town to regional capital Tver north of Moscow were canceled.
“A large number of people work or study in Tver and to leave at five o’clock in the morning and returning at 10 o’clock at night is not an option, especially if a person has a family or small child,” Arakcheev said in a petition addressed to the regional governor that has now 7,700 signatures.
Cancellations of suburban trains have launched a wave of popular anger in Russia, a country where social protests are rare.
Last month, residents of a small village in Zabaikalsky Krai threatened to block Russia’s East-West rail artery, the Trans-Siberian Railroad, after suburban train services were cut, local media reported.
Other protests have taken place against the cuts in particularly-badly affected regions.
Opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, currently under house arrest, has repeatedly raised the topic in his popular blog, dubbing the cancellation of train services a “genocide of Russians.”
On Jan. 12 Navalny said in a blog entry that a Facebook post he wrote about the issue was seen by almost 1 million people, making it one of his most popular posts on the social networking site ever.
But what if there is a connection between all his generosity and persistence on the soft-power front and the miseries endured by Yuri Arakcheev and people like him as they try and travel between home and work and school in Russia’s regions? (I won’t even mention the possible connections between those things and allegations of Yakunin’s family’s living large outside of Russia.)
What I mean to say is that it takes a lot of chutzpah to imagine that your academic career or political/moral cause or balance sheet is so earth-shatteringly important that you can’t even be bothered to do an elementary background check on who exactly is paying your junket to sunny Rhodes or using your university press’s good name to publish his cultural-capital-generating vanity volume.
Although in the space of this blog post and with the limited means at my disposal, I can’t strictly get from here to there today, I do mean to suggest that you might have been visiting harm on people like Yuri Arakcheev by pretending none of these considerations mattered or even existed when you were getting ready to hobnob with the world’s “foremost” whomevers, who rarely have to worry about reduced public services.
At any rate, I don’t think anymore, after digging a bit into Yakunin’s high-powered glad-handing, that it is exactly an accident there is so much “confusion” in the west over recent events in Russia and Ukraine.
There are less charitable ways of putting this, but I’ll stop while I’m ahead. I really can’t get there from here yet.
One of the joys of the web is being able to catch glimpses of life on different planets.
Gieselman dumped the girlie name bestowed at birth, asked friends and teachers to use Rocko, the tough-sounding nickname friends had come up with, and told people to use “they” instead of “he” or “she.” “They” has become an increasingly popular substitute for “he” or “she” in the transgender community, and the University of Vermont, a public institution of some 12,700 students, has agreed to use it.
While colleges across the country have been grappling with concerns related to students transitioning from one gender to another, Vermont is at the forefront in recognizing the next step in identity politics: the validation of a third gender.
The university allows students like Gieselman to select their own identity — a new first name, regardless of whether they’ve legally changed it, as well as a chosen pronoun — and records these details in the campuswide information system so that professors have the correct terminology at their fingertips.
A Russian web site that served as a support group for LGBT teenagers has been blacklisted by the authorities and will likely be blocked within the country, news reports said Monday.
The site’s name Deti-404 (Children 404), after the online HTTP error message for “page not found,” may prove portentous if Russia’s Internet watchdog Roskomnadzor considers the site to be in violation of a federal law that regulates online content.
Russian news site Ura.ru reported on Monday, citing Roskomnadzor, that the Deti-404 web site will be blocked because it disseminated information on committing suicide.
Deti-404.com and as its eponymous groups on social networks Facebook and VKontakte were still accessible in Moscow at press time Monday evening.
Ura.ru published a post contained on Deti-404’s Facebook page showing a young woman’s scratched-up arm with the numbers “404” writing in black ink. The caption reads: “I want to die, to disappear, so that I simply never existed.”
Deti-404’s founder, Yelena Klimova, said last week that she was fined 50,000 rubles ($780) for violating Russia’s controversial law against the “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors.” The site’s blacklisting may be linked to that case.
Roskomnadzor opened a case against Klimova last November after it claimed to have received some 150 complaints from “citizens and organizations” about Deti-404’s pages on social media networks.
Even today, January 30, 2015, the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service maintains lists of volunteers obliged, if necessary, to shoot those sentenced to death. The moratorium, after all, is a temporary understanding. State Duma deputy speaker Lebedev’s comment that if Russia exits the Council of Europe, it will have the right to restore capital punishment, is a good occasion to discuss how executions technically happen. The door to secret room 2/0 has not creaked for a long time in the depths of the Crosses Prison.
[…]
In the second cross at the Crosses there is a wing that previously held prisoners sentenced to death. Now those sentenced to life imprisonment wait there to be transferred.
The wing is known as 2/1. It is harder to access than the other sections of the prison. The corridor is shorter than in the others, containing not thirty cells, but something like twenty-five. One “cell” there is exceptional. Its door looks like the other doors, but it leads into a secret basement codenamed 2/0.
I have no idea what governs departmental orders in early 2015, but under the Soviet regime the guidelines for selecting executioners had an ideological tinge. Only volunteers could execute prisoners. The guidelines stressed that volunteers would receive no perks or, God forbid, any monetary remuneration.
The takers were few, of course. Age and length of service also had to be taken into account. You could not send a young officer to do the job. Thus, when drawing up the annual lists, the warden at the Crosses would summon veterans and tell them someone had to do it.
People at the prison would guess who was on the list, but it was bad form to gab about it. The incognitos [sic] themselves signed nondisclosure agreements.
When the time came, the officer had the right to examine the case file, to peruse photo records of dismembered bodies or strangled children. It mattered that hand and heart did not tremble in doubt.
At the right time in the evening, the condemned man was visited in solitary confinement by the prison warden, the responsible prosecutor, a doctor, two attending officers and himself [sic]. The prosecutor would briefly read out the Supreme Court’s final decision and denial of clemency. The guards quickly snapped handcuffs on the criminal. Hands behind the back.
At this moment the condemned man’s behavior would become clear. Some would go into a trance and become wobbly, while others would go berserk. It was then that a towel would be thrown over their heads and tied at the back so their screams and curses would be inaudible.
“What kind of towel?” I asked, somewhat surprised, in my conversation with a prison officer.
“A white honeycomb towel, the kind issued to all the prisoners,” he replied.
And the man would be dragged to where he no longer existed [sic], to the door of “cell” 2/0.
It is [sic] already open, the steps leading down. He [?] didn’t count how many. The march ends. A dimly lit basement space with a container in it, something like a trough. The head is bent down, the command is given, a shot from a Makarov pistol, the doctor’s diagnosis.
They say that it would happen that the first bullet didn’t kill. Then it would happen again: command, shot, diagnosis.
The body would be wrapped and, accompanied by a document reading “This transport not subject to checks,” would be taken in a prison vehicle to a cemetery. In Soviet times, this would have been [Petersburg’s] Northern Cemetery. A pit had already been dug in advance, whose significance only the cemetery director knew. The body would be buried and forgotten.
In the archives, this place will forever be designated by a three-digit secret number.
It’s all humdrum. None of the myths about drawing lots or firing squads in which only man’s gun is loaded with live rounds [is true.]
“I come home once after this, and my wife is partying with guests in the kitchen. They’re listening to ABBA on a tape recorder. I take off my coat, sit down, and peck at a salad. My wife starts in on me: ‘Why are you spoiling our mood?’ What could I say to her?” an executioner recalled to me twenty-five years ago or so.
That’s right: if you destroy a dozen unknown boys in battle you’re a hero, but if you kill a maniac you’re a hangman.
That door—to cell 2/0—has not opened since the moratorium was announced in 1996.
The state is sturdily organized: the moratorium is not a dogma, but a timeout. The formal lists of firing squad members are constantly drawn up and amended depending on personnel changes at the Federal Penitentiary Service for Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Region.
So if push comes to shove, they could be ready today, January 30, by nightfall.
Since I’m not a very good translator, it is hard for me to convey the hard-boiled relish with which Fontanka.ru journalist Yevgeny Vyshenkov, an ex-cop, contemplates the return of capital punishment in Russia. Maybe this will do the trick instead:
Here, Alexei Didenko, deputy leader of the LDPR faction in the Russian State Duma, excitedly reports that within “24 hours” of exiting the Council of Europe and its Parliamentary Assembly all the legal mechanisms would be in place for executing “millions and millions of perverts, rapists, and pedophiles.”
Since the prison population in Russia was reported as 671,700 inmates as of December 1, 2014, one wonders where Didenko is going to find all those “millions and millions of perverts.”
One of the joys of the web is being able to catch glimpses of life on different planets.
Photo courtesy of