Category: post-soviet

Rusebo!


Rusebo is Georgian for “Russians” in the vocative case. The word is chanted in Tbilisi by demonstrators protesting against the Georgian government’s draft law on “Transparency of Foreign Influence.” The draft law is called the “Russian law” because it is similar to the Russian law on so-called foreign agents, targeting organizations that receive funding from abroad.

In 2023, large-scale protests in Georgia stopped the law from being passed, but now the government is trying to pass it again in order, according to the opposition, to demonstrate loyalty to Russia and distance itself from the European Union.

The chant rusebo! is directed at the police officers dispersing the protests and, more generally, at the Georgian authorities, which the opposition labels pro-Russian. However, the word rusebo is also taken personally by many Russian emigrants who fled to Georgia after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They include persecuted political activists, men fearing mobilization, and ordinary people who disagree with Putin’s politics. The attitude of Georgians toward them is wary and often outright negative, simply because they are from Russia. As one of the emigrants puts it, “Tough people, they resist, I wish they could be like that in Russia too. But I also feel a little bit on the other side. They shout rusebo—that’s literally me.”

Russian emigrants amidst the protests in Georgia is the subject of Rusebo!, a film by Yulia Vishnevetskaya.

Yulia Vishnevetskaya, “Rusebo! Russian Emigrants Amidst the Protests in Georgia”
(2024; in Russian, English and Georgian; no subtitles)

An argument between a Georgian activist and a Russian emigrant

— I was walking down the street, and a Russian was walking towards me. I didn’t know whether tomorrow he would change into a Russian uniform and shoot at me. The people who have no money but who had the opportunity to settle down here in some way I understand very well. But those who could go anywhere in the world because they had money, why did they come here too? They eat khinkali, it’s all they talk about. They post pictures on Facebook of themselves swanning around here, but I don’t understand why they left Russia. Just to tag along?

— Would you just leave your home like that and run away?

— No. The only thing I do know is that running away won’t change anything.

— You think you can change anything by not running away?

— Well, they’d be put in prison.

— So, it’s okay to “emigrate” to a place where people are raped with mops? Wouldn’t that scare you?

— I understand perfectly well. I feel sorry for the people who had to leave their homes, their beloved dachas, and so on. But it doesn’t change my attitude at all. I would not have run off to any country. Maybe I would have sent my son away so that he would not be mobilized, but I would have stayed and continued to fight.

“Russian is terrible.” A still from the film “Rusebo!”

— Do you hold it against us that we ran away?

— Navalny was not afraid: he went back and did the right thing, despite everything that happened afterwards. I respected him after he came back: he knew that he would be imprisoned and killed, but he went back anyway. I’m not encouraging anyone to go back and die in prison, but the man did the right thing. That’s what justified him in my eyes.

— I care more about a living person than symbolic ones….

— A living person who can’t do anything?

— Yes, as opposed to a dead man who wanted to do something. I’m not willing to pay with lives.

— And I’m willing to pay with my life for my freedom.

— You don’t understand how infuriating it is. When you realize that there is Putin, who is ten times stronger than you, who can do anything to you, when people you respect, whom you know perfectly well, are in prison, dying there, and then you come to Georgia and are told, “You are trying badly, we want you to win, but you somehow don’t want it badly enough.” I just don’t understand how you can seriously say this. I am quite offended that you say it.

— You occupied twenty percent of Georgia, your country occupied us.

— I am not responsible for my country.

— But we are responsible for our country, that’s the difference. Why do you take offense at me for complaining? You’ve been letting it happen for three hundred years—all of you, there are many of you and not enough of us. And for three hundred years you’ve been allowing it to happen and occupying us. You speak for everyone now. We have a shitty government, we’ve been sitting in shit for twelve years and we’re fighting our government. Take offense at your fellow Russians, not at me. I’m not at war with you, I’m at war with our regime and your regime. Everything was taken away from us, they took away the place where I had been going since I was a child. I cried, I stood and sobbed, there were Russians standing there with machine guns. And this is my life, this is how we have been living for so many years.

— Everything was taken away from us too, can you understand that?

— No, I can’t. Nothing was taken from you. Did you have a protest rally when we were bombed in 2008, when they took away more Georgian territory? This building shook because a bomb was dropped nearby. I walked around for three months, looking up at the sky to see if any airplanes were flying by. It was a fright. So I understand Ukrainians perfectly well. We will win.

— No.

— Why won’t we win?

— Because you’re outnumbered.

— We are few but we are strong.

— It is just important that there is a moment when you have to start believing.

Monologues of Georgians and Russians

— I had a friend from Russia. We would meet at international conferences. He was a young Russian, very interesting, very fond of Georgia and Georgians. We became friends, and one day, right after the war in 2008, he and I met. He hadn’t written anything to me during the war, which seemed crazy to me. He never once asked how we were doing. And so we met, and I expected him to say something, but he didn’t say anything. So I told him I was very upset about it. And he said, “Oh, come on! Did those few little firecrackers make you scared?” That reinforced my feelings about Russia. If an ordinary, normal, good Russian has these feelings about a war that was terrible, that took people’s lives and people’s homes and divided their lands, and says, “You were scared of a couple of firecrackers,” I thought that it must be true that everyone in Russia thinks that way. Before 2008, my university friends still went to Russia to get their residency training. But if someone went after 2008, everyone said, “What? What are you doing?” That was really a turning point.

I was anti-Russian from the age of eight when I learned that members of my family had been murdered in a single night in 1924. My parents joined the anti-Soviet movement in the 1980s. In 2008, some of my friends went off to fight against the Russians. We have a lot of reasons to hold grudges. But I think this war, which brought so many anti-Putin Russians to Georgia, has shown a different side of Russia. I thought, Okay, these people can bring us know-how and knowledge of how to fight Putin. They came here to survive. I see Russians in Tbilisi, some of them have even opened their own establishments on my street, and if the fact that I buy a cup of coffee from them will help defeat Putin, and if they are here without guns, not killing Ukrainians, then I support that.

— I lived most of my life in Nizhny Novgorod, but the last ten years I lived in Petersburg. I was a carpenter, a joiner: I built ships and did all sorts of renovations. I was involved in the anarchist, anti-fascist and environmentalist movements. Then it all became about helping political prisoners. The rumors that the borders would be closed was the last straw: I realized that I had to move while I had the chance. I hoped that the regime would not withstand such a thing, that there would be mass strikes and so on. No way.

The unemployment here [in Georgia] is serious, of course. There is little purchasing power. The rates for all work are lower than in Russia. While an IT guy can tuck his laptop under his arm and throw everything he has into crypto, I have a workshop and machines. I’m not a little boy anymore: you’ll break down drilling all your life. You can’t go back. If you’ve made that choice, go on pivoting as you wish.

With its values—its love of freedom, love of nature, love of history, and love of human rights—Georgia has everything I need, except that “I am part of the power which forever wills good and forever works evil.”* Georgians have the sense that there is a mighty power on their doorstep and that it is hostile. Accordingly, you can be seen as part of this danger, even amongst those Georgians who are friendly to Russians. I have local friends here who treat me normally: there is nothing imperialist about you, they say to me. But you can’t expect to fit in in a country that has been experiencing Russian aggression essentially nonstop for better or worse since it gained independence. Some Russians intend to stay here, but I don’t think it will be particularly possible.

But we should support the people protesting for their freedom if only out of gratitude to this country that they put up with us here. Anarchists basically have this principle: we are always on the side of the oppressed and against the oppressors. I do not wish any country to suffer the same fate as Russia. I do not want the same idiotic regime to be established here. No one has any use for it, neither the Georgians nor us.

* An inversion of the quotation from Goethe’s Faust that serves as the epigraph to Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita: “I am part of the power which forever wills evil and forever works good.”

Source: “A life for freedom’: Russian emigrants amidst the protests in Georgia,” Radio Svoboda, 12 May 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. The film also features a former auditor from Rostov who moved to Tbilisi after the war started and now works as a cleaner, but her monologue wasn’t included in this online article. I have translated the Georgian doctor’s monologue as reproduced here in Russian, although her original remarks, made in English, are nearly entirely audible through the Russian overdub.

Support openDemocracy’s Coverage of Ukraine, Russia, and the Region!

Hi everyone!

So, oDR – openDemocracy’s Ukraine, Russia and wider region team – is at severe risk of closure.

What can I say apart from the fundraising has not been lucky, to put it mildly.

But we’re fighting: a huge last-ditch effort to turn the ship around and keep some of the best journalists, researchers and activists writing for our audience.

To do that, we’ve launched a crowdfunder to help match £50,000 we’ve already raised from private donors. This will buy us time to sort the long-term financing we need.

I’m not sure if folks want to hear about why we’re important, so I’ll be brief:

– Ukrainian journalists writing about Russia’s war

– Belarusian journalists writing about Russia’s war

– And Russian journalists writing about Russia’s war

And that’s aside from our brilliant collaborators in Central and South Caucasus.

So please help us spread the word, and help us keep fighting. There are so many important causes right now, so if you can’t afford – just push this on to people who can.

Source: Tom Rowley (Facebook), 28 June 2023. I just made a donation to oDR’s crowdfunder via PayPal, and I would urge you to do the same. ||| TRR

Dear readers,

openDemocracy’s dedicated coverage of Russia and Ukraine is one of our greatest achievements. But now, the team behind that work is under threat of closure. 

The two of us helped to found openDemocracy in 2001 to make a space for a global conversation about justice, human rights and democracy and how they are threatened by unaccountable power. Today, at its core is our project on Russia, Ukraine and the wider region. 

The project provides an irreplaceable space for voices from the region that do not represent official Ukrainian, Russian, European or American interests.  

  • It gives prominence to Ukrainian journalists reporting Russia’s invasion and its brutalities, alongside threats to economic rights, social welfare and independent journalism
  • It provides an extremely valuable platform for coverage of Russia from Russian journalists and writers in Russian as well as English
  • It publishes Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians who are fighting for democracy alongside one another, creating a framework for analysis and exchange that is unique during the pain of Russia’s war
  • And because, thanks to openDemocracy, the coverage is translated into Spanish and Portuguese without a paywall, readers across Latin America can learn directly about the experience of what is unfolding 

With three million readers annually, and a world-wide reputation, the coverage, grouped together here, is needed more than ever. 

It is put together by a small team. Focusing on publishing original, vital, stories on the impact of the Ukraine invasion, whilst keeping everyone secure from the consequences of war as well as Covid, means they have struggled to raise the vital funding essential to survival. 

We have to reignite funding fast – very fast. In fact, immediately. 

Or the brilliant team – Katia, Tom, Valeria, Polina and Tanya – will be made redundant. 

We are doing everything we can to secure, enhance and deepen their work.

Please join us. 

We have already secured match-funding of £50,000 from private donors. Now we urgently need your help to unlock this money. Every £10, €10 or $10 you donate will be matched. 

£100,000 will give us the time to negotiate with foundations to ensure this project enjoys a long life – long-enough to outlast Putin! 

When Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, John le Carré was furious and headed a funding campaign for openDemocracy: 

Let’s support openDemocracy to the hilt. Intelligent, unbought, unspun opinion, uncomfortable but necessary truths and a lot of good horsey argument: heaven knows they are in short enough supply!

We love the ‘horsey’. A master of words, le Carré appreciated that some of our articles are untamed. But that’s because they are unbought and unspun.

Never, ever, has there been a greater need for this than now with respect to Ukraine and Russia. Please help the team publish necessary truths, on-the-ground reporting, much needed level-headed debate, and even good horsey argument, so that the irreplaceable media space they have created survives and grows.

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Thank you, 

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Source: openDemocracy. I just made a donation to oDR’s crowdfunder via PayPal, and I would urge you to do the same. ||| TRR

Victimhood

The second explanation that also immediately arises is the persistent sense of victimhood, which is embedded in the language: “we are victims of the West”; “we are victims of the Horde“; “we are victims of the authorities and the regime”; “we are victims of immigrants”; “we are victims of the capitalists”; “we are victims of circumstance”; “we are victims of revolution and war”; “we are victims of the Soviet era”, “we are victims of the 1990s”; and so on and so on. Again, this wide range of culprits who have victimized us enables us to integrate the image of victim into any ideological matrix. But all of these versions of victimhood are united by a sense of resentment, a sense of mediocrity, a sense of lacking something, and these feelings are constantly reproduced and cultivated. This language has no room, of course, for a critique of our own history and culture’s imperialism. We are not to blame: we are victims ourselves, our history is a victim, our culture is a victim. How can our sense of victimhood be squared with the fact that we ourselves have victimized others? The perception of ourselves as victims is one of our privileges, one of our special rights; it is our manifest destiny. However, the criticism of imperialism, the emergence of voices who declare themselves our victims, who want to discern our history and culture’s violence, subjugation, and injustice towards them, undermines this language’s entire foundation and our image of ourselves as victims. It undermines the foundation on which we stand, our privilege of being unique. And this triggers pushback and resistance, of course.

Source: Sergey Abashin (Facebook), 23 June 2023. Translation and photo, above, by the Russian Reader

[…]

The generation of scholars who started studying the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s were also shaped by their firsthand experience of the country. When they travelled as foreign students to Moscow, they found impoverished people. Empty shelves and pervasive poverty made Russians look like victims of the Soviet regime, and financially, Soviet Moscow seemed more like a European periphery than an imperial metropole, which they associated with material affluence.

The wave of decolonisation in Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, which started after World War II, was accompanied by rigorous academic discussions and scholarship of colonial legacies and tools of violence.

By contrast, the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union did not result in similar scrutiny of the Russian imperial legacy.

For metropolitan Western Europe and the United States, Europe stood for metropolitanism – a place from which the world was colonised, not a place of colonisation. Accepting colonial history within Europe made little sense, so the colonial nature of Russia remained unchallenged.

In Russia itself, the dominant narrative was one of victimhood. Russians learned to see themselves as a special nation that sacrificed its own wellbeing for the sake of non-Russians in the Soviet Union. “Let us stop feeding them” was the slogan Russians used to explain Moscow’s decision to let the colonies go in 1991.

[…]

Source: Botakoz Kassymbekova, “How Western scholars overlooked Russian imperialism,” Al Jazeera, 24 January 2023

A recent article from the American Political Science Association (APSA) examined how the words used to describe Central Asia sometimes reinforce the region’s image as being part of Russia or the Soviet Union. Amid growing awareness of Central Asia’s colonial history, some argue it is time to move beyond terms such as “post-Soviet,” “near abroad,” or “Russia’s backyard” when referring to Central Asia today. Join host Bruce Pannier for a thought-provoking conversation on decolonizing Central Asian discourse with the co-authors of the APSA article: Botakoz Kassymbekova, a lecturer and assistant professor of modern history at the University of Basel; and Erica Marat, a professor at the National Defense University’s College of International Security Affairs.

Source: Majlis: Talking Central Asia: “How Colonialism Shapes Our Discussion About Central Asia,” RFE/RL, 18 June 2023

[…]

Putin’s propaganda builds on seeing Russia as both victimized by the West and entitled to regional dominance over Ukraine, Belarus, Central Asia, and the South Caucasus. Russia’s sense of its lost greatness in 1991 after the demise of the Soviet Union fuels a sense that it is the innocent victim of outside powers. Its shrunken geography and collapsing economy made post-Soviet Russia economically poor compared to the wealth accumulated by Western colonial metropoles. Soviet socialism as a global anti-capitalist force had failed to bring the same level of prosperity. Russian intellectuals became preoccupied with their own imagined marginal position vis-à-vis the West fueling the denial of the true colonial nature of the Soviet regime. 

At the same time, Russian political elites expect loyalty from former Russian colonies that includes knowledge of the Russian language and political loyalty, and unity in opposition to Western influence. According to such an imperial view, Russian rule over non-Russian populations is not colonialism but a gift of modernity. It is a deeply altruistic act for the sake of backward people. Rejection of Russian cultural dominance, including building independent foreign policy and contesting the Russian view of Soviet history, is an act of political disloyalty. In Central Asia, for instance, Russian ambassadors routinely condemn states’ prioritization of indigenous languages as attempts to limit the rights of the ethnic Russian population. Such search for independence triggers a sense of victimhood in Russia, as if disagreement with the Russian imperial self-image is an attack on Russian cultural greatness.

Putin coupled Russia’s innocent victim narrative with a historical self-image of a civilizing power against former Soviet republics that sought closer ties with the West. The Russian imperial myth allows identity mobilization around militant patriotism while also helping the state keep the public passive and uncritical. Putin recently spoke about Russia’s imperial identity when announcing the military attack on Ukraine: “It was necessary to immediately stop this nightmare—the genocide against the millions of people living there, who rely only on Russia, hope only on us.” Western leaders’ naming atrocities in Bucha a genocide further deepened the Russian regime’s sense of victimhood. The Russian Defense Ministry stated that the West is collectively attacking Russia. Feeling humiliated by the West, the Russian public was simultaneously supporting Russian aggression in former Soviet territories. Economic hardships can be reframed as a burden unjustly borne by a victim-savior or as an imperial duty of those who humanely seek to liberate the world from evil.

[…]

Source: Botakoz Kassymbekova and Erica Marat, “Time to Question Russia’s Imperial Innocence,” PONARS Russia, 27 April 2022

Speak Speech, Speaker (The Imperialist Mindset)

One day, I hope, someone will explain to me why “progressive” Russians find the English words speak, speaker, speech, etc., so sexy and exciting that they have to incorporate them needlessly into Russian every chance they get.

Do they know that, in English, these words are less evocative than three-day-old bread, duller than dishwater?

In this case, hilariously (and awkwardly, too: “speak” appears after chas, generating an awkward phrase that translates as “hour of speak” or “speak hour,” although it’s supposed to be a play on the idiomatic phrase chas pik, meaning “rush hour”), the word “speak” adorns Sergei Medvedev’s reflections on the “imperialist mindset.”

Indeed.

Thanks to TP for this gem of Rusglish.

Below, you can watch the actual interview (in Russian, not Rusglish — well, almost), which, if for no other reason, is interesting because it was posted almost three months before Russia invaded Ukraine. ||| TRR

Historian and writer Sergei Medvedev is the program’s guest.

In an interview with Nikita Rudakov, he explained:

Why the idea of Russia’s “civilizational superiority” is so popular

Why propaganda encourages the ideological complexes of Russians

How the elite of the 2000s is trying to turn back history.

00:00 Chas Speak: Sergei Medvedev 01:40 The imperialist mindset and the idea of Russia’s greatness 06:10 Is there no place for nationalism in the imperialist mindset? 08:05 “Russia colonized itself” 14:03 The superiority of big ideas: why didn’t the USA become an empire? 21:02 The ideological complexes of Russians 25:41 “We rise from our knees via military achievements and parades on Red Square” 26:50 “Lukashenko does with us what he will”: Russia and Belarus 30:56 “Russia wants to live in the myth of 1945” 34:40 “We were unable to create a nation state”

RTVI News covers all the main events 24/7: https://www.youtube.com/user/myRTVi

Read and watch the news on RTVI’s website: http://www.rtvi.com

Also, see all the most important and interesting items on our Telegram channel: https://t.me/rtvimain

And subscribe to RTVI’s other social media pages:

Facebook: http://facebook.com/myRTVi

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Classmates: https://ok.ru/rtvi

Source: “Sergei Medvedev: ‘We don’t have a state. We only have an imperialist format’ // Chas Speak,” RTVI Entertainment (YouTube), 9 December 2022. Annotation translated by Thomas Campbell

A Little Song about the Physicist Sakharov

The monument to Andrei Sakharov in Petersburg. Photo by István Hargittai

A statue of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov was unveiled Monday in St. Petersburg, despite criticism from his widow who said today’s Russia has failed her husband.

The 10 1/2-foot bronze statue depicts the Nobel peace laureate, slightly stooped but with his head held high, standing with hands tied behind his back atop a stone pedestal on a square that was named after him in 1996.

The monument by sculptor Levon Lazarev’s was unveiled a few weeks after a city commission in Moscow gave the green light to a stalled plan for another statue of Sakharov in the capital.

Yelena Bonner was opposed to both statues, saying Russia has failed to live up to Sakharov’s ideals of freedom and democracy since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

“It is out of place to erect a monument to Sakharov in today’s Russia,″ the Interfax news agency quoted Bonner as saying. She said she was not consulted.

“There’s no money to publish his works widely, so that people would finally read them, but they can put up a monument,″ Bonner told Russia’s TVS television by phone from Boston, where she lives.

The unveiling drew about 100 people, among them intellectuals and former dissidents who supported a transition to democracy at the time of the Soviet collapse.

A physicist who helped design the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Sakharov became a staunch promoter of human rights and world peace, and spent seven years in internal exile for speaking out. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

Source: “Monument to Sakharov Unveiled in Russia,” Associated Press, 5 May 2003

A Little Song about the Physicist Sakharov

The physicist Sakharov
Was one bad dude.
Oh, how he made us seethe!
Why do we suffer that fool?

It later suddenly transpired
That he was a real good cat.
We felt sorry for the poor man
And guiltily ate our hats.

Now it’s been ascertained
That he was bad news after all.
We’re seething once again.
Why did we suffer that fool?

If again it turns out
That he was, in fact, a good egg,
Ah, we'll regret it again,
And put on guilty mugs.

8 August 2022

Source: German Lukomnikov, “New Poems,” Volga 1 (2023). Thanks to ES for the suggestion. Translated by the Russian Reader

Russian prosecutors on Monday declared as “undesirable” the U.S.-based foundation that preserves the legacy of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov as Moscow continues to crack down on dissent in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The activities of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation (ASF) “constitute a threat to the foundation of Russia’s constitutional order and security,” the Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement.

Under Russian law, individuals believed to have cooperated with an “undesirable” international NGO face steep fines and jail terms.

ASF, based in Springfield, Virginia outside Washington, says its goal is to promote Sakharov’s works to “support peace efforts and anti-war events.”

The organization chaired by mathematician Alexei Semyonov has not yet commented on Russia’s latest designation.

Russian authorities have declared more than 70 organizations — including media outlets focused on exposing fraud and corruption in Russia — “undesirable” between mid-2015 and early 2023.

Sakharov, once feted as a hero of the Soviet defense industry for his role in developing the Soviet nuclear bomb, became one of the U.S.S.R.’s most prominent dissidents from the late 1960s. 

He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for his work against the nuclear arms race he had helped precipitate, though he was not permitted to leave the Soviet Union to accept the award.

Sakharov became one of the most distinctive personalities of the perestroika era, rising to the status of a national moral authority.

Arrested in 1980 after denouncing the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Sakharov was sent into internal exile in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, then closed to foreigners.

After six years in exile, during which he undertook several hunger strikes, Sakharov was released over a telephone call by reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Source: “Russia Labels U.S.-Based Sakharov Foundation ‘Undesirable,’” Moscow Times, 24 January 2023

Running: the Numbers

Istanbul, December 2022. Photo courtesy of Republic

[…]

500 vacancies for military registration specialists were advertised from late September to last December last year, according to HeadHunter. Previously, this specialization was considered a rather rare and generally not very sought-after profile in the personnel departments of Russian organizations (private and public). For comparison: only 145 such vacancies were advertised in the whole of 2021. The military mobilization has changed the situation: since September — that is, in just three months — the number of such offers on the labor market has increased by about two and a half times (Superjob’s data also show the same thing). The reasons? One of them (apparently, the main one) is an increase in fines for lapses in paperwork: to avoid them, employers are willing to pay applicants for the popular vacancy 70-80 thousand rubles a month. And this is despite the fact that there is a shortage of a number of other specialists on the labor market (and, presumably, they are no less valuable than SMO-era personnel officers). The number of vacancies on Avito Jobs alone, according to a recent company study, increased by 69% in 2022. Most likely, the trend will continue, serving as a natural continuation of the outflow of people and, ultimately, personnel.

50% — the percentage of last year’s sales of existing housing in the Russian Federation made through a notarized power of attorney. This record figure for the entire observable history of the market, as calculated by investment company Flip, who were commissioned by Kommersant, clearly indicates that the sales trend was primarily shaped by property owners who had emigrated. The high volume of such transactions seems to be an anomalous phenomenon. In 2021, a power of attorney was the basis for sale in no more than 20% of deals. In 2020, this figure was 15%. It was 8% in 2019, and 5% in 2018. You ain’t seen nothing yet, though: the ongoing controversy over whether to confiscate the property of openly anti-war Russians who have left the country must be making an additional contribution to the process of selling apartments and houses, which was gaining momentum as it was.

$81.69 billion — the total amount of deposits by Russian nationals in foreign banks as of the end of November of last year, according to the latest data from the Russian Central Bank. (4.989 trillion rubles were recalculated at the exchange rate in effect on that date.) Over the past eleven months, the amount has more than doubled — and this is even if we rely entirely on the statistics of the Central Bank, which may not have a complete picture of what is happening. (Russian laws oblige citizens to report when they open accounts in foreign banks and move funds in them, but we cannot be absolutely sure that everyone strictly obeys them.) While one part of these funds remains in these bank accounts, the other goes to the purchase of real estate that, for the most part, is also located outside the Russian Federation.

16,300 houses and apartments in Turkey were purchased by Russian nationals in 2022, according to data published by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat), as studied by RBC. This is not just three times more than in 2021 (when Russian nationals purchased 5,400 housing units in the Turkish Republic), but also more than the total volume of such transactions over the past six years (16,200). It is not surprising that last year, for the first time, Russians took first place among foreigners in buying housing in Turkey, producing almost a quarter of the corresponding demand with their money. Earlier, we wrote that our compatriots purchased two thousand houses and apartments in Turkey in October 2022 alone, overtaking all other foreign home buyers in that country, as reported by TurkStat.

At first glance, the advantages of investing in Turkey are not entire obvious. Inflation in the country, according to TurkStat, exceeded 84% in November, once again breaking records previously established in the autumn of 1998. The Inflation Analysis Group, an independent Turkish entity, estimated that inflation had reached a whopping 170.7% . In addition, prices for real estate, which have rising robustly, can at any moment just as vigorously drop, taking into account, in particular, the rather murky prospects for “Erdonomics,” depending on the results of the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections. According to Endeksa, in September, the average price for one square meter of housing in Turkey was about 12 thousand Turkish lira (approx. $644), while the average price per housing unit was just over 1.5 million Turkish lira (approx. $83,700). The term of return on investment in housing is estimated at nineteen years, although in the summer this figure was recalculated to seventeen years.

The intense interest on the part of Russian nationals in buying real estate in Turkey is primarily related to the prospect of obtaining Turkish citizenship, Anna Larina, head of the foreign real estate department at NF Group, explained to Republic. (In turn, having a Turkish passport makes it possible to obtain an American E-2 visa, which speeds up the process of immigrating to the United States.) In this sense, it is logical that Russians have become leaders in terms of the number of residence permits issued in Turkey — 153,000, of which, however, as the Turkish Ministry of Migration clarified, 132,000 are short-term tourist residence permits, which are valid for two years.

Turkey is one of the few countries (but not the only country) that is still open to Russian nationals and their private capital. Thus, as 2022 came to a close, Russian citizens took first place among non-residents in buying real estate in Dubai, Bloomberg recently reported, citing figures provided by the brokerage firm Betterhomes.

Withdrawing funds and setting up a new life abroad eloquently testify to the sentiments prevailing among the Russian urban middle class, primarily. Not all people who sell Russian real estate and buy foreign real estate are necessarily irreconcilable opponents of the regime. And yet, it is clear that the vast majority of these people do not want to live and raise children in Putin’s version of the future, which is practically incompatible with modern civilization. In its own way, it is symptomatic that Russians who support the government and dutifully follow it into its deadly adventures are also dissatisfied with what is happening. If it were possible, they would rather return to the past, to a point in time thirty, forty, or fifty years ago.

63% — the percentage of Russians, according to a December poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), who regret the collapse of the USSR — that is, more than three decades after the event known in Kremlin mythology as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” Strictly speaking, the current longing for Soviet times cannot be considered a record: after the August 1998 ruble default, there were noticeably more Russians nostalgic for the Soviet Union — 85%. Nevertheless, an important indicator of public attitudes (as recorded, we should underscore, by a quasi-state polling service) is on the rise again, having increased by twelve percentage points since 2011.

It is clear that this sentiment is primarily voiced by the 46–60 age group (88% of whom are “nostalgic”) and to some extent, people aged 31–45 years (79% of whom are “nostalgic”), assuming that a considerable portion of these people associate the late USSR with their happy childhoods and wild youths. However, according to the poll, even today’s Russian youth, that is, people aged 18–30, mostly (64%) consider the Soviet era “generally a good time.” Of course, their judgments are based on the stories of older generations, and most importantly, on the inevitable comparison with what is happening with the largest post-Soviet country right now.

Source: Yevgeny Karasyuk, “Salvation in foreign real estate and a new bout of nostalgia for the USSR: timely numbers from Russia… and a few from Turkey,” Republic, 20 January 2023. Translated by Hambone Brewster, who is still implacably opposed to the Russian “pollocracy” and continues to be surprised that even otherwise smart cookies like Mr. Karasyuk continue to cite Russian “public opinion polls” as reliable sources of real information — rather than, at best, records of sustained trauma and unfreedom.

“Why Our Cause Is Just”: Medvedev’s National Unity Day Telegram

Dmitry Medvedev. Photo courtesy of his Telegram channel

WHY OUR CAUSE IS JUST
Answers to simple questions on National Unity Day

What are we fighting for? Russia is a huge, rich country. We don’t need foreign territories; we have plenty of everything. But there is our land, which is sacred to us, on which our ancestors lived and on which our people live today. And which we will not surrender to anyone. We are defending our people. We are fighting for all of our own people, for our land, for our thousand-year history.

Who is fighting against us? We are fighting against those who hate us, who ban our language, our values, and even our faith, who spread hatred towards the history of our Fatherland.

A part of the dying world is against us today. It consists of a bunch of crazy Nazi drug addicts, the common people they have drugged and intimidated, and a large pack of barking dogs from the western kennel. They are joined by motley pack of grunting piggies and narrow-minded philistines from the disintegrated western empire with saliva running down their chins due to degeneration. They have no faith and ideals, except for the harmful vices they have contrived and the standards of doublethink they impose, which deny the morality bestowed on normal people. Therefore, by rising up against them, we have gained sacred power.

Where are our former friends? We have been abandoned by some frightened partners — and I could not give a flying crap about them. That means they were not our friends, but just random fellow travelers, clingers, and hangers-on.

Cowardly traitors and greedy defectors have bugged out for the back of beyond — may their bones rot in a foreign land. They are not among us, but we have become stronger and purer.

Why were we silent for a long time? We were weak and devastated by hard times. And now we have shaken off the sticky sleep and dreary gloom of the last decades, into which the death of the former Fatherland had plunged us. Other countries have been waiting for our awakening, countries raped by the lords of darkness, slaveholders and oppressors who dream of their monstrous colonial past and long to preserve their power over the world. Many countries have long disbelieved their nonsense but are still afraid of them. Soon they will wake up once and for all. And when the rotten world order collapses, it will bury all its arrogant priests, bloodthirsty adepts, mocking henchmen, and tongue-tied mankurts under the multi-ton pile of its own debris.

What is our weapon? There are various weapons. We have the capacity to dispatch all our enemies to a fiery hell, but that is not our mission. We listen to the Creator’s words in our hearts and obey them. These words give us a sacred purpose. The goal is to stop the supreme ruler of hell, no matter what name he uses – Satan, Lucifer, or Iblis. For his goal is destruction. Our goal is life.

His weapon is an elaborate lie.

But our weapon is the Truth.

That is why our cause is just.

That is why the victory will be ours!

Happy Holidays!

Source: Dmitry Medvedev, Telegram, 4 November 2022. Mr. Medvedev, the former Russian president, has 910,612 subscribers on Telegram. For reactions to his National Unity Day post, see Asya Rudina, “‘Iblis crept up unnoticed’: Bloggers on Dmitry Medvedev’s creative work,” Radio Svoboda, 7 November 2022 (in Russian). Translated by Your Answer Needs Demented Examples Xavier, with a little assistance from the Russian Reader. For an alternative vision of Russian patriotism, also prompted by the November 4 National Unity Day holiday, see Kirill Medvedev (no relation), “‘If There Is No People, There Is No Left Either’: Progressive History and Patriotism from Below,” Posle, 2 November 2022. I can endorse neither of these visions, alas. ||| TRR

Ramil Niyazov: This War Didn’t Begin Only Eight Years Ago

Ramil Niyazov, protesting next to the Abai Qunanbaiuly monument in Almaty in July 2019 with a placard that reads, “‘Glasnost exposes the paltriness of authoritarianism,’ N. Nazarbayev, 1987.” Photo courtesy of Vlast (Kazakhstan)

What, for so many centuries, has your soul been seeking here, Rusich? / You have so much land that you cannot embrace it all.

My heart has grown rooted to these bare gorges and cliffs. / So why have you come here to die again?

— Khas-Magomed Hadjimuradov, “New Year’s Eve in Grozny” (1999)

You can point to various dates: fourteen years ago, when Russia invaded Georgia; twenty-eight years ago, when Moscow went to war in Grozny; thirty-one years ago, when the Kremlin got involved in the conflict in Moldova. Or we could quote Timur Mutsurаyev, who sang that “We’ve been three hundred years at war with Russia…” This would also be true, though that is a whole other story, of course. But for me, a person known in Russia as a khach and a churok [common Russian racial slurs for Central Asian, Caucasian, and dark-skinned people], it makes the most sense to say, “Dear Russians, welcome to New Year’s Eve in Grozny! We’ve been waiting for you. It’ll last forever for you, until it ends. And it’ll definitely end soon, and then it will be a New Year.”

What is this “New Year’s Eve in Grozny” on a symbolic level? It’s not just a tragedy. It’s the beginning of History, which, according to Francis Fukuyama, was supposed to have ended already. The tragicomedy is that the “end of history” didn’t occur in 2001. It occurred—as we can see now—in 1995, with the start of the First Chechen War, which painfully resembles the one underway right now in Ukraine. For examples, see here, here, and here, as well as this, of course:

“Grozny. Aleppo. Mariupol. Kharkiv. Fascists Z Murderers.” Image courtesy of Radio Svoboda

But why was the continuation of the Russian Federation’s terrible, bloody, and inhumane war against its former colonies on February 24, 2022, such a shock for me, a Kazakhstani and, I’m sure, for many of you?

The simplest and most correct answer lies in the fact that its previous phases did not affect us. It all happened (I have in mind primarily the Chechen Wars) somewhere else, and involved non-white Muslims, gangsters, and terrorists. It was Russia’s internal affair, to which all so-called progressive humanity more or less gave its blessing. Well and what do you expect? It would hardly have befitted the US, after the Gulf War and in the midst of bombing Iraq, to stand up for Muslim Chechnya. But not everyone let Russia off the hook and forgot about this. The first foreign volunteers in unrecognized Ichkeria were, in fact, not Arabs or Afghanis but Ukrainians (see the interview with Aleksandr Muzychko, a.k.a. Sashko Bily). But even I (as, again, a Kazakhstani) thought before February 24 that if Russia were ever going to change, it would be due to civil war rather than military defeat. And so much more terrifying is the irony in the fact that people who previously didn’t care about the fate of Chechnya massively reposted an interview with [Dzhokhar Dudayev], the first president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, in which he predicted this war with Ukraine a full twenty-seven years ago.

But the reasons that prompted me to write this text have nothing to do with a foreigner’s apparent decolonial attack against white masters, one full of ressentiment along the lines of “Did you really think that the slaughter in Bucha wouldn’t happen after the ‘mopping-up’ (this term actually first came into use then) in the village of Novye Aldy? Did you really think there wouldn’t be a strike on the Kramatorsk train station after the missile strike on the Grozny central market? Did you really think that Russian soldiers wouldn’t commit war crimes if, after two wars in Ichkeria, only two people were convicted of war crimes—Budanov and Lapin? If all the people who gathered evidence and conducted investigations (Anna Politkovskaya, Natalia Estemirova, and Stanislav Markelov) were murdered, all three of them?”

No, not at all. First and foremost, I want to repeat for everyone in Central Asia, the Baltics, the North Caucasus, and Eastern Europe who hasn’t yet understood it (and there are fewer and fewer of these people with every passing day): our life didn’t just change into a “before” and “after” on February 24. Those thirty years since the collapse of the USSR took shape as History. That whole viscous, formless time—in which we had led our private lives, built nation-states, felt that we were, as Sergei Timofeev’s poem has it, “the underbelly of Europe” (or Asia), and watched wars in the Middle East—that whole time the History of the post-Soviet space had been going on outside of our private lives. Every attack by Russian officials on various minorities and every minute of propaganda TV broadcasts (as we all found out after the war was continued) were not just a way of consolidating the electorate of Russia’s ruling party, which allegedly had no ideology. No, they were all drops in the ocean of Russism, as Dzhokhar Dudayev called it, something with which we all collided on February 24, 2022. For thirty-one years it had been growing and maturing, and all of our hopes (including my own) for decolonizing Russian and Russia without a military defeat in a monstrous war, were lost. Future historians will describe this time as “the years of Russism and the struggle against it.” While we thought we had been living in an era of local conflicts, nation-states, and gradual democratization!

I thus declare with confidence that the most decolonial (in all senses) decision right now for everyone, for the whole world, is to completely support Ukraine. Because if it’s permitted to bomb even white Christian Europe, then it’s okay to “not sweat it” like China with the Uyghurs and just build concentration camps in downtown Paris. For anyone you want.

To sum up, I want to quote a poem by the Soviet poet Vladimir Burich, who was born in Kharkiv (cruel irony)—a poem we can all feel right now with our whole bodies:

The world is filling up with

postwar people

postwar things

among my letters I found

a bar of prewar soap

I didn’t know what to do

wash

cry

The prewar era is 

a lost Atlantis 

And we

the miraculous survivors

Our prewar era has truly gone under, and we are its last witnesses. Just as the Second World War turned the Great War into the First World War, the thirty-one years between the collapse of the USSR and the bombing of Kyiv on February 24, 2022, have crystalized. Our political philosophy, historiography, and humanities will change. Our whole understanding of social reality will change, whether we want it to or not. History, as is still often the case, is unfolding before our very eyes. Better not blink and miss it.

Source: Ramil Niyazov-Adyldzhyan, “This War Didn’t Start Eight Years Ago,” Sibir.Realii (Radio Svoboda), 8 July 2022. Mr. Niyazov is a Kazakhstani poet. Translated by the Fabulous AM

We’re Not in the Same Boat

One in a series of photos, taken recently in Petersburg, that the photographer Alexander Petrosyan
posted under the heading “Life goes on”. Source: Alexander Petrosyan, Facebook, 3 July 2022

The main stumbling block in communication between Ukrainians and Russian/Belarusian oppositionists is that the latter believe, for some reason, that they understand the former very well.

As one Belarusian oppositionist (from New York) wrote, “In the areas occupied by the Russian Federation, unarmed people behave the same way, both in Belarus and in Ukraine.”

That’s what they think—that all of us are suffering from an identical disaster. They often go even further and claim that, up until February 24, 2022, people in Ukraine were living the life of Riley, while people in the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus faced crackdowns.

As one Russian oppositionist (from Warsaw) told me, “[Opposition] pickets [in Russia] end stupidly, and [protesters] also get the shit kicked out of them. How long did you [Ukrainians] face such things? From January to February 2014?”

To hear them tell it, they endured misfortunes for years and years while we had an easy time of it here in Ukraine. That is, until February 24, we should have sympathized with them due to their immense suffering. But now, after February 24, we must recognize them as equal sufferers.

Firstly, a lot of different mass protest campaigns and protest rallies have taken place in Ukraine in addition to January-February 2014—from the Revolution on Granite, the miners’ strikes of the 90s, and Ukraine without Kuchma, to the Orange Revolution, the Language Maidan, and the Euromaidan. The fact that Ukrainians were able to learn and reflect on the experience gained during each such event, so that the next one would be even more effective, testifies only to the literal fact that you have to learn from your mistakes and do your homework. There is no doctor who can cure you of the fact that you were not able to do it, dear Russians and Belarusians. It’s certainly not the fault of us Ukrainians.

Secondly, the war began in 2014. While things were generally relatively quiet in the Republic of Belarus, and while oppositionists were being jailed in the Russian Federation, artillery was already destroying villages in Ukraine, albeit in a limited area, in two regions.

And, thirdly: half an hour ago, thunder rumbled somewhere in Kyiv. It was ordinary thunder, presaging a thunderstorm. But everyone tensed up. Passersby scoped out furrows in the terrain where they could take cover. Even the courtyard drunks who could still move their legs after the morning rondel, moved closer to building entrances, fences, and other shelters from shrapnel.

No crackdowns in the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus, no matter how terrible they are, bear any resemblance to what the absolute majority of Ukrainians are enduring now.

War is different. You can’t sign a police charge sheet and hope that they’ll stop pounding you. You can’t make a deal with a police investigator and get off lightly. You can’t even protect yourself by not “getting mixed up in politics” so as to avoid having any problems in future with the police and prosecutor’s office. Because you’re just getting the shit beat out of you. You go to the shopping center for tea and coffee every time a little like it’s the last time. But then you see that no, a shopping center in another city has been bombed today, and the black bile rises from your guts to your throat as you watch it burn.

And this is in the relatively peaceful cities and towns far from the front. In the frontline areas, they pound the fuck out of you as they grind the cities into piles of concrete and rebar.

And no, Belarusians now are not feeling the same things in “occupied territory” as Ukrainians do. As long as there are no camps there which the absolute majority of the population in the occupied villages and cities must go through. And from which buses bearing the “non-filtered” go somewhere, returning empty. Belarusians do not huddle in apartments without windows and electricity, reading the bulletin from the occupation administration that there will be no cold-season heating in any case. And so.

Everyone has their own sufferings, of course. When the weather changes, someone in Miami, even, suffers from pain in a joint that was dislocated by the cops back in the motherland and smears it with ointment. But objectively, no, we are not in a situation that is equivalent to the one the Belarusians and Russians are in currently. Until they understand this, there will be no dialogue.

UPD. I’m not accusing anyone of anything at all. I am pointing out a difference in our plights, which many do not notice. Otherwise, I have nothing against people being different and having different stories. That goes without saying.

UPD2. And I’m not talking about what passports people have or their ethnic background. In my universe, people who are currently fighting [against the Russian army] and working in Ukraine are “our” people.

Source: Dmytro Rayevsky, Facebook, 29 June 2022. Translated, from the Russian, by the Russian Reader

Yurii Brukhal, an electrician by trade, did not have a very dangerous role when he volunteered for Ukraine’s territorial defense forces at the start of the war. He was assigned to make deliveries and staff a checkpoint in the relative safety of his sleepy village.

Weeks later, his unit deployed from his home in the west to a frontline battle in eastern Ukraine, the center of the fiercest fighting against Russian forces. He was killed on June 10.

Andrii Verteev, who worked in a grocery store in the village, spent the first months of the war guarding a small overpass after work and returning home to his wife and daughter at night. Then he, too, volunteered to head east. He died in battle in Luhansk, only weeks before Mr. Brukhal.

Their deaths have driven home the extent to which the war is reaching into every community across the country, even those far from the front. It has also underscored the risks faced by volunteers, with limited training, who are increasingly heading into the kind of battles that test even the most experienced soldiers. Their bodies are being returned to fill up cemeteries in largely peaceful cities and towns in the country’s west.

[…]

Oksana Stepanenko, 44, is also dealing with grief, along with her daughter Mariia, 8. Her husband, Andrii Verteev, was killed on May 15.

Like Mr. Brukhal, he had been a volunteer, tasked with protecting an overpass just up the road during the early weeks of the war. Then he joined an anti-aircraft unit of the military and was redeployed to the east.

His death added a new level of pain to the family. Ms. Stepanenko’s son, Artur, died of an illness at age 13 three years ago. Now a corner of their small living room has become a shrine to the boy and his father.

Ms. Stepanenko said she found solace in her faith and the fact that it was her husband’s choice to go to the front lines. But, like so many others in Ukraine, she asked, “How many guys have to die before this ends?”

Source: Megan Specia, “Ill Prepared for Combat, Volunteers Die in Battles Far from Home,” New York Times, 2 July 2022

Red Flag

As of the morning of May 1, around a hundred billboards featuring the image of the iconic pensioner who gained famed after the events in Ukraine [sic] had been installed in different districts in Petersburg. Fontanka.ru has analyzed the scale of this visual statement. The news-related intrigue lies in the fact that state agencies have nothing to do with the campaign.

“Under the banner of victory!” All images courtesy of Fontanka.ru

In the early hours of May 1, identical posters bearing the image of the famous pensioner holding a Soviet banner were officially installed in about one hundred outdoor media displays in Petersburg.

News about the woman broke out back in April, when she went out with a red banner to greet servicemen in Ukraine, confusing them with Russian soldiers. Her age, her deed, the reaction of the Ukrainian soldiers, and the video that went viral on the Net immediately turned her into a symbol of victory. The old woman’s face has appeared on DPR postage stamps, graffiti artists began to draw her in different cities in Russia, and so on. Even the Russian Federation’s delegate at the UN Security Council talked about her.

Currently, the images of the heroic old woman have been installed in the Central, Admiralty, Petrograd, Vyborg, Maritime, Kalinin, and Moscow districts. These include both large billboards and typical demonstrative surfaces [sic] along the roadways.

The urban spaces chosen for this campaign can be analyzed. The images have been installed near places of authority: on Suvorov Prospekt, next to the Smolny [Petersburg city hall], the seat of the Leningrad Region government, and the Interior Ministry building; on Tapestry Street, near the FSB building; on Horse Guards Boulevard, near St. Isaac’s Cathedral; and around the monument to Alexander Nevsky, outside the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.

However, many similar phenomena [sic] have popped up on Moscow Prospekt, Pulkovo Highway, and the October and Vyborg embankments.

Fontanka.ru has learned that state (regional or federal) agencies did not pay for the campaign. Petersburg advertising market insiders, on terms of confidentiality, informed our correspondent that they had heard about the proposal from representatives of a private individual in mid-April. “It’s definitely a businessman. We are sure of this at least, since we called each other when we began receiving preliminary inquiries,” one of the insiders said.

As for the scale, according to the information we have obtained, the order received was for the placement of one hundred billboards at an approximate cost of around ten million rubles [approx. 139,000 euros]. “And that’s if they got a discount,” one source added. Several of our experts more or less agreed with this figure.

If someone in the advertising market has more accurate information, Fontanka.ru is ready to listen to it with a full guarantee of anonymity.

Source: Fontanka.ru, 1 May 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader

A Cult of Dementia

Putin’s red-brown ideology has taken the worst of Nazism and Bolshevism and mixed it with the cartoonish oligarchy from Dunno on the Moon. The final product has no equals anywhere in the world.

Just think about it. For several months now, Russian propaganda has been chewing over the image of a traitorous old Ukrainian woman who was waiting for the invaders with a Soviet flag. Compassionate Ukrainian soldiers gave her food, but took away her flag. That’s the whole story.

But no, the story didn’t end there. In Russia, the crazy old woman was made a real hero, and her image began to appear on buildings. But the occupiers have driven themselves into an ideological trap: no one except such “young Komsomol women” was looking forward to seeing them in Ukraine. The invaders were not greeted with flowers and bread, but were treated to Molotov cocktails and poisoned pies.

If you think about this story more deeply, the old lady with the Soviet flag perfectly reflects the main watchword of Putin’s Russia, its underlying doctrine, and the true purpose of invading Ukraine: our lives have sucked and we won’t let anyone else live either.

She is thus undoubtedly a hero to Russia, as is Pavlik Morozov. Russia has nothing to offer the world. It offers a rollback to the past and endless attempts to cash in on lost “greatness” instead of progress, old age instead of youth, betrayal instead of loyalty, and humiliation instead of pride. So, an old woman holding a Soviet flag is the most accurate symbolic depiction of modern Russia.

It’s funny, because the propagandists don’t care about Russian pensioners or about veterans of the Second World War. Old people in Russia live out their days (they live them out, they don’t live) in want and humiliation, in terrible conditions and hopelessness.

Source: Andrey Churakov, Facebook, 2 May 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader