Contemporary listeners of Kino’s hit album Blood Type (1988) would have had no trouble identifying the war alluded to in the title track: the Soviet-Afghan War was still ongoing. The war was one of the causes of the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse in 1991. Unless it is stopped in short order, the Trump regime’s just-as-needless war against U.S. cities will lead to the collapse of the United States. ||||| TRR
The Soviet–Afghan War took place in Afghanistan from December 1979 to February 1989. Marking the beginning of the 47-year-long Afghan conflict, it saw the Soviet Union and the Afghan military fight against the rebelling Afghan mujahideen, aided by Pakistan. While they were backed by various countries and organizations, the majority of the mujahideen’s support came from Pakistan, the United States (as part of Operation Cyclone), the United Kingdom, China, Iran, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, in addition to a large influx of foreign fighters known as the Afghan Arabs. American and British involvement on the side of the mujahideen escalated the Cold War, ending a short period of relaxed Soviet Union–United States relations.
Combat took place throughout the 1980s, mostly in the Afghan countryside, as most of the country’s cities remained under Soviet control. The conflict resulted in the deaths of one to three million Afghans, while millions more fled from the country as refugees; most externally displaced Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan and in Iran. Between 6.5 and 11.5% of Afghanistan’s population of 13.5 million people (per the 1979 census) is estimated to have been killed over the course of the Soviet–Afghan War. The decade-long confrontation between the mujahideen and the Soviet and Afghan militaries inflicted grave destruction throughout Afghanistan, and has been cited by scholars as a significant factor contributing to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991; it is for this reason that the conflict is sometimes referred to as “the Soviet Union’s Vietnam”.
Source: Wikipedia. The emphasis, in the last paragraph, is mine. ||||| TRR
[…]
The pretext for this war, of course, has always been a bogus premise. Yet federal agents treat it with the dogma of settled fact. But I keep wondering: How does the average CBP or ICE agent convince themselves of this? Even now, I can’t help shake the absurdity of anyone—Trump, Gregory Bovino, whomever—hoping to convince a thinking person, even themselves, to believe that places like Minneapolis have ever required an armed occupation. It’s against this genuine perplexity that I keep coming back to how these officers look and what mirrors might reflect back to them when they dress up for war.
“Anybody who’s had a fun evening on Halloween can understand what happens when somebody fully dresses up in paramilitary gear with flash-bang grenades hanging off of them,” said Peter Kraska, a justice studies professor at Eastern Kentucky University. “They’re going to walk out in public and say to themselves, ‘I am different from all these people.’ They become the enforcer. And when they look out and see the other, they see an enemy. The [paramilitary gear] gets them to react differently and think differently than they normally would.”
The role of military-style uniforms in helping the Trump administration create a theater of war where none exists cannot be overstated. It marks a stark evolution from the early days of Trump’s mass deportation plans, when plainclothed agents looked a lot like your best friend’s worst boyfriend—the guy who moved to rural Pennsylvania and discovered the basement levels of gun culture. Now, agents march into town in the costume of a foreign invasion.
Consider the camouflage now ubiquitous across the cities ICE occupies. At first, the pattern’s technical science might seem like a natural extension of the Trump administration’s increasingly illegal efforts to shield the identities of the men carrying out its vision of cruelty. But the theory breaks down when you look at the urban landscapes where ICE hunts down immigrants. Simply put, wearing camo in places like Lake Street or Hyde Park defies its central aim. If camo’s built-in purpose is to avoid detection, ICE’s embrace of it is the opposite: They want maximum visibility. They want to show they are soldiers. And they want to do so to make it seem reasonable, if only to themselves, to act like an invading army.
When I reached out to the Department of Homeland Security about the use of military gear among ICE agents, spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin responded with her own question: “Why do ICE agents wear tactical gear when they are facing rampant assaults and vehicular attacks? Is that the question you’re asking?” No, not really. But the snark with which McLaughlin replied was enough to grasp that questioning why DHS employs camo when lush woodlands do not exist in the cities its agents invade was irrelevant. They are dressing for the war they want.
What other way was there to interpret the coat of the former envoy of terror, Bovino? The commentariat spent much time deliberating its lineage, whether or not Bovino’s hulking olive garb was in fact true Nazi wear. (It turns out it was not.) But in roaming around Minneapolis in the fashions of Hugo Boss circa 1933, Bovino, who reportedly travels with his own film crew, succeeded in pushing the optics of war where it does not exist.
“What you’re seeing is the functionality of gear for legitimate, militarized purposes versus a type of postmodern, performative imagery,” Kraska said. “It makes them feel a particular way, to tap into those warrior fantasies and masculine drive of, ‘I’m a real man, I’m a real badass.’”
Federal agents stand outside the Whipple Federal Building in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on 8 January 2026. Photo: Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty/Mother Jones
The same holds for the men under Bovino. These are federal agents who wear hats intended for jungle warfare—again, in Minneapolis, where no such jungle exists—as well as blood-type patches, despite little evidence that they would ever be needed. After all, they are in Minneapolis, an American city with American hospitals, where doctors provide blood transfusions without the help of uniform instructions, the way a soldier on a remote battlefield might actually need. Furthermore, ICE’s own data strongly undercuts the notion that the job of an ICE officer is even uniquely dangerous work. In the absence of peril, federal agents turn to costume to legitimize their presence.
A Chechen refugee in front of her destroyed apartment building in downtown Grozny, February 17, 1995. Photo: Reuters (via Julia Khazagaeva)
On the thirtieth anniversary of the storming of Grozny, the liberal Russian media reminded the Russophone audience that there had been such a war—the Chechen War. When I see this title, I don’t even open the movie, I flip through it. A couple of excerpts are basically enough for me to be convinced that these people have still understood nothing after three decades. Even over the three years of the recent, utterly treacherous imperial war in Ukraine, the obvious facts about what Chechnya means to Russia have not became obvious to them.
Almost any decent Russian would point out to you, of course, that bombing towns chockablock with civilians was a bad thing to do and foul play. Carrying out mop-ups in villages and burying the victims in mass graves was also outrageous. But then the exclamation “but!” is sure to follow. They will tell you about Chechen bandits, forged letters of credit, and the intransigent Dudayev. Yes, it was wrong to destroy a third of Chechnya’s population, this notional Russian would lament, but the Chechens were bad eggs themselves and were asking for it.
If you ever do open a Russian [documentary] film reconstructing the events in Chechnya thirty years ago, you will find that it is about the enlisted lads who on New Year’s Eve 1994 were thrown into the epicenter of hell. Not properly trained to shoot or drive a tank, alone against hordes of heavily armed rebels, they were unfortunate sons of the Motherland: may their memory live forever. This artistic device is deployed, for example, by the Maxim Katz-affiliated project Minute by Minute. The [YouTube] channels Current Time and Popular Politics have also recalled this selfsame “Chechen War.”
Minute by Minute, “The New Year’s Eve Storming of Grozny: A Minute by Minute Reconstruction” (December 31, 2024)
Semantically, the construction “Chechen War” operates the same way as the coinage “captive of the Caucasus.” It conceals the aggressor, suggesting we look at the object of the aggression as the aggression’s cause. In this logical trap, Chechnya seems to have gone up in flames by itself. It was its inhabitants who shelled and bombed themselves silly. It was not Russia that invaded the Caucasus, it was the Caucasus which for some reason held Russia’s soldiers in captivity. It is not without reason that when people say “he was killed in Chechnya,” it is the place where he was killed that appears to be the malefactor. The listener is not prompted to wonder what this soldier was doing under arms in a foreign land. It is as if Chechnya had shown up in Samara and killed an innocent tanker.
When we think, write and say “Chechen War,” we automatically interpret it from the point of view of the colonizer and the aggressor. We accept the interpretation imposed by Moscow, which insists that Chechnya is part of Russia, not a sovereign country it attacked. If Russia is not mentioned in the nomenclaturee of this historical event, Chechnya is automatically read as an undeniable part of the empire, and the conflict itself sounds akin to the November Uprising or the Tambov Rebellion.
In fact, it was the Russo-Chechen War which began on December 11, 1994. The war deserves to be identified as such both in terms of the nature of the hostilities and the status of the warring parties, because by the time the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria was invaded by Russian troops, it had been three years since it had legally, by popular vote and a declaration of independence, withdrawn from the USSR on an equal footing with the RSFSR. The Chechens had NOT been part of the newly minted Russian Federation for a single day.
The independent journalist Vadym Zaydman has written about this better and more clearly than anyone else. There is no need to paraphrase him when I can instead quote what he has written:
“At the time of the USSR’s death/colllapse, Chechnya was no longer legally related either to the defunct Soviet empire or to the RSFSR. By that time the Chechen-Ingush ASSR had existed as a Union Republic for over a year. Thus, by definition it could not be a part of the Russian Federation, as proclaimed on December 25, 1991. When the Russian Federation was born, Chechnya was initially not a part of it.
“Russia itself did not regard Chechnya as part of Russia during this period. On March 31, 1992, the Federation Treaty was incorporated into the Russian Constitution. It changed the status of autonomous republics to sovereign republics within the Russian Federation. The treaty was signed by representatives of twenty federal subjects of the Russian Federation. Neither the Chechen-Ingush Republic nor Chechnya was involved in the treaty.
“It was only in the wake of the notorious events of October 1993, when Yeltsin was adopting a new Russian constitution, that he unilaterally incorporated Chechnya into the Russian Federation. In fact, Yeltsin committed a fraud like the one committed by the Russian authorities when, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, they declared Russia a member of the UN Security Council as the USSR’s legal successor, although Russia was not even a rank-and-file member of the UN. Ukraine and Belarus were members of the UN, but Russia aka the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was not! Having incorporated Chechnya, a year later Russia started to establish ‘constitutional order’ in Chechnya as its own fiefdom! Clever, isn’t it?!”
End quote.
The term “Chechen War” is thus as illegitimate as the use of the term “Ukrainian War” is unacceptable. Ukrainians would not allow the latter, and the entire civilized world would not agree to it. For everyone, the current war is the Russo-Ukrainian War. But the same thing should happen in our minds when describing the war in Chechnya. It is the Russo-Chechen War.
Many Russians would understandably prefer it go down in history in a more modest way—ideally, not as a war at all, but as a “special military operation,” or a “counter-terrorist operation,” for it is the security forces, not the simple folk, who are responsible for such operations. “SMO” and “CTO” sound mundane and localized, like a police “amber alert,” nor are they freighted with collective guilt and responsibility. Most vitally, if correlated with these Putinist terms, western sanctions come to be regarded as an exorbitant and unwarranted punishment, since they make “ordinary people suffer.”
Why do you think various Putinist and anti-Putinist institutions have spent the last three years relentlessly measuring public opinion on whether Russians want war? Yes, it’s simple: because of the sanctions—and Russia’s slightly tarnished image in the eyes of the international community. But if the West is shown the relevant polls quite often and reminded that “public opinion polls don’t work in a totalitarian society,” this mantra will work like a charm the thousandth time. It will then be much easier for Brussels officials to explain to themselves and their electorate why they are lifting restrictions: because they oppress an already “downtrodden” civil society, which in no way wanted war, but which was forced by Putin to want it.
Meanwhile, to answer the question of how much the Russian populace shares its leadership’s imperial mindset, it is enough to take the case of the Russo-Chechen War. From the sociological viewpoint, it is a scientifically pristine experiment. In 1994 (as in 1999, when the second phase of the war began) there was no totalitarianism in Russia. There were no western sanctions, and there were no Russian émigréscriticizing the regime from abroad. U.S. President Bill Clinton expressed “concern” when he learned that civilians were being killed in Chechnya. France supported the establishment of constitutional order on Russia’s own territory. They all thought that the new Russian Czar Yeltsin was better than any Communist, even if he fought like one.
Enjoying the full favor of the international community, Russia razed Grozny to the ground along with the remnants of its civilian population on New Year’s Eve 1994. This did not cause any outcry in Russian society. The first protest rally in Moscow took place on January 10, 1995: organized by Yegor Gaidar, it was a partisan affair and sparsely attended. Noticeable civil protests against the war in Chechnya would not begin until 2001—that is, five years later. [My comrade Antti Rautiainen, who was very much in the thick of things in those years (he was a co-organizer of the first antiwar street protest in Moscow, in November 1999), has pointed out to me (in a comment to Ms. Khazagaeva’s original post in Russian) that the biggest protest in Moscow against the Second Chechen War took place in January 2000, not in 2001 — TRR.] However, even then, according to Radio Svoboda, which interviewed passersby, “Muscovites were in no hurry to join the protesters: everyone was rushing about their business.”
Protests during the first phase of the Russo-Chechen War were isolated and (one might say) personal in nature. From the very first days of the invasion, the Soviet dissident, Russian human rights activist and Russian human rights commissioner Sergei Kovalev traveled to Grozny. He tried to stop the bombing of the city. In March 1995, he was removed from the post of human rights commissioner for supporting the “wrong” side. TV news presenter Svetlana Sorokina took liberties on air: after a commercial break she emotionally remarked that “no laundry detergent can wash clean the conscience of the Russian generals.” Independent Chechnya and its legally elected presidents Dzhokhar Dudayev and Aslan Maskhadov were subsequently supported by Valeria Novodvorskaya. Boris Nemtsov tried to stop the war by circulating a petition [which was allegedly signed by a million Russians—TRR]. But there was no grassroots public outrage in Russia, apart from the campaign led by the mothers of the conscripts, neither in the first phase of the war, much less in the second.
This was how sociologist Yuri Levada described attitudes to the war in Chechnya in 2001: “Sentiments against the war are strong in [Russia], but unfortunately we cannot overestimate their significance. The fact is that many people think that more decisive actions, with greater loss of life, perhaps could have led to success. Disavowing the war does not exclude, for example, approving such savage measures as ‘mop-ups,’ which are now quite difficult for the authorities in Chechnya and Russia to cope with. So, an unwillingness to continue the war is an expression of fatigue, not an expression of conscious, directed protest.”
Sociologist Lev Gudkov described Russians who supported Chechnya’s return to the bosom of the empire as follows: “They are younger and better educated Russians who argue that the Chechens must be crushed at any cost and this problem must be solved by force, that no negotiations with Maskhadov are possible, that he represents no one, and that there is only one solution—the total, crushing defeat [of the Chechens]. On the contrary, those who argue that it is necessary to seek a peaceful resolution however possible, including entering into negotiations with Maskhadov, are people of an older age, somewhat wiser and more experienced, and in this sense more tolerant, inclined to recognize Chechnya’s independence as long as the war is brought an end.”
So when Russian liberals, society’s cream of the crop, write and talk about the “Chechen War,” you now know their attitude toward the empire and its conquests. Were it not for the unprecedented western sanctions for invading the European country of Ukraine, you would be surprised to learn what Russians really think about the war. As a gentleman who left Russia twenty years ago once told me in a private conversation: “I still feel sorry for our guys. After all, the Ukrainians have killed more Russians in this war than the Russians have killed Ukrainians.”
Since Putin couldn’t smash Aleppo with his pal Bashar Assad, he is now going to provoke all-out war with Ukraine. Or he is going to play at provoking all-out war. Either way, he is going to have some fun.
In 1939, the Finns likewise “provoked” Stalin into invading Finland. Meaning that Stalin pretended to be provoked, and then went in guns blazing, getting three hundred thousand Soviet soldiers killed or wounded in the process.
There are oodles of serious problems with the Russian economy, which Putin shows no interest in solving, because really solving them would involve the self-liquidation of the current elites. Although pumping up defense spending and, hence, the military-industrial complex, which is what he has been doing in the past few years, has been a temporary patch on some of those problems, of course.
It is funny and sad that Russians themselves don’t get tired of this merry-go-round, but they seem to be sinking ever deeper into various species of emigration, internal or actual, or what they themselves call a “second childhood.”
It is even funnier that Jill Stein, presidential candidate of the US Green Party, could believe she was doing the work of peace or “anti-imperialism” or whatever she thought she was doing when she dined with Putin in Moscow or that she could imagine the “crisis” in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine was caused by anything other than domestic Russian politics or, rather, the snowballing contradictions spinning off the tiny, eccentric orbit inhabited by the country’s president-for-life in all but name and his retinue of oligarchs and FSB veterans.
Anyone who thinks the Kremlin’s policies are a rational or predictable response to the “international situation” or the bad deal Russia allegedly got when the Soviet Union broke up is a complete fool or a bought-and-paid useful idiot. You can be traumatized by the “bad things” your parents did to you (unless they really were bad things) for only so long.
When, however, you have reached the ripe enough age of twenty-five, as the new Russia has this year, it is time to stop telling stories about your bad upbringing or how you grew up on the wrong side of the tracks.
In other words, this is all about the dead end Putin and his pals from the FSB and the Ozero Dacha Co-op drove the country into when they decided they would run Russia like Tony Soprano and his crew ran whatever they were pretending to be running in the fictional TV New Jersey.
Putin has flagrantly and criminally misruled Russia for seventeen years as of August 9. That is one year less than Brezhnev reigned as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. But Putin, to all appearances, is fit as a cello, unlike Brezhnev was in 1981, the year before he died.
Ugh. Happy new year.
Thanks to Comrade MT for the felicitous line about the cello. Photo by the Russian Reader
Participants of the national Miss Russia 2016 beauty pageant on the stage of the Barvikha Luxury Village concert hall. Courtesy of Sputnik/Iliya Pitalev
I really like it when a big man in uniform speaks out with fanfare on perennial topics like the structure of society. You think it’s funny they all get Ph.D.s, but they really do consider themselves major theorists and are always willing to teach lessons in wisdom in their spare time. An entire genre has even emerged in Russian newspapers: lessons in political philosophy by generals.
For example, in today’s issue of Kommersant, General Bastrykin casually gives readers an unexpected lesson in democracy.
“For democracy or people power is nothing other than the power of the people itself, realized in its interests. It is possible to achieve these interests only by means of the common good, and not through the absolute freedom and arbitrary will of individual members of society,” he writes.
It must be admitted that this is the pure, unadulterated truth. We might rejoice that democracy in Russia has found a new supporter.
Then, however, Bastrykin the democrat’s argument takes an unexpected turn. He proposes setting things up so that he, Bastrykin, would decide himself what information should be considered extremist, and would limit Internet access without a court order! In addition, he would also decide in which cases providers are obliged to provide him with the personal information of their clients.
There are lots of other tasty tidbits in his article, including innovative tactics for fighting terrorism by confiscating property, but that does not concern us here.
So somebody comes and says, Now I am going to decide who is an extremist and who can read what. You will also be informing me everyone’s personal information. If this is not “absolute freedom and the arbitrary will of an individual member of society,” then what else would you call it?
I am going to have to upset Mr. Bastrykin. Democracy is, in fact, people power. Therefore, the main objective of democratic governance has been and will be preventing the usurpation of power, not defending the people from the machinations of external foes, not hunting down traitors, not surveilling unreliables, but combating usurpers. And so democracy’s main enemy is the guy who comes out and says he is going to decide who the extremists are round here.
The problem with these scholarly generals is that the only form of social organization they are capable of conceiving is the prison camp. And so whether they write about democracy, traditional values or economic progress, the same speech in defense of the prison camp always comes out.
* * * * *
“It’s time to erect an effective barrier against the information war” Alexander Bastrykin, chair of the Russian Federal Investigative Committee, on methods of combating extremism in Russia Kommersant
April 18, 2016
Chair of the Russian Federal Investigative Committee, general of justice of the Russian Federation, doctor of juridical sciences, Professor Alexander Bastrykin, special to Vlast magazine, on the ways and methods of combating extremism in Russia
In 2015, the Russian Federation witnessed negative trends in criminal extremism and terrorism.
1,329 extremist crimes were recorded, which was 28.5% higher than in 2014 (1,034 crimes). A growth in this type of crime was noted in fifty-six regions of the Russian Federation.
The numbers of such crimes as public calls to extremist activity (Russian Federal Criminal Code Article 280) and inciting hatred or hostility, and humiliation of human dignity has soared by nearly forty percent in comparison with 2014.
The crime of organizing an extremist organization was recorded 42 times (+2,4%).
A significant increase (+36.3%) in terrorist crimes committed in the Russian Federation has been noted. A total of 1,538 such crimes was recorded in 2015 (as opposed to 1,128 in 2014).
Seventy such crimes were prevented at the stage of planning or during the attempt. 133 terrorist crimes were committed with the help of the Internet network.
A particularly difficult situation has been observed in the North Caucasus Federal District, which accounts for the bulk of terrorist crimes: 1,168 crimes or 75.9% of all such crimes (leading to an increase of 32.3%). (In 2014, 883 such crimes were committed.)
Both external (geopolitical) and domestic political factors have contributed to the growth of this type of crime.
Over the past decade, Russia and a number of other countries have been living through a so-called hybrid war, unleashed by the US and its allies. The war has been conducted on various fronts, political, economic, informational, and legal. In recent years, it has moved into a new phase of open confrontation.
Professor Bastrykin
The main elements of economic pressure have been commercial and financial sanctions, dumping wars on the hydrocarbons market, and currency wars. Skillfully manipulating the huge number of dollars in circulation, the States have brought down the national currencies of developing countries. Russian organizations have had their access to channels of external long-term financing blocked, channels that formed the basis of investment for developing the real (productive) sectors of the economy. It is noteworthy that restrictions on the movement of financing have not affected short-term financing, which currently has been widedly employed to exert speculative pressure on our national currency. In many respects, the outcome of these measures has been the deep devaluation of the ruble, falling real incomes, a decline in industrial production, and economic recession. There has been a budget deficit and ensuing consequences in the form of cuts in expenditures, as well as an increasing fiscal burden to raise revenues.
Unfortunately, international law and the justice based on it have increasingly become tools of this war.
Obvious examples are the decisions in the Yukos cases, the decision in the murder case of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, the report of the Security Council of Netherlands on the investigation into the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, the FBI’s investigation of the legitimacy of awarding the right to hold the World Cup to Russia and Qatar in 2018 and 2022, and the extradition of our citizens Victor Bout and Konstanin Yaroshenko to the US and their sentencing to long terms of imprisonment.
However, the information war has caused the most devastating effects. By supporting radical Islamists and other radical ideological tendencies, the US has completely destabilized the situation in the Middle East. The effects of artificially initiated coups, revolutions, and crises in this region are still being experienced by Europe, overrun by mobs of refugees who profess qualitatively alien sociocultural traditions and have displaced the local population. Islamic State, the Al-Nusra Front, Al Qaida, and other terrorist organizations involved in the armed conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic have also been an effect of this policy. Manpower for replenishing these organizations are recruited all over the world, including in Russia.
More than a thousand Russian citizens have gone to the Syrian Arab Republic to participate in the armed conflict. 469 criminal cases have been filed against these persons. 135 of them have been killed in armed clashes with Syrian government troops.
The main channels of entry for Russian citizens into areas of heightened terrorist activity have been Turkey and Egypt, where they travel both directly and through third countries (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova) under the pretext of holidaymaking, receiving theological education, doing business, etc.
The main technique of the information war is the manipulation of an ideology that a particular social group finds congenial by radicalizing it. It is clear that the system of religious, ethnocultural, and confessional values is the segment of social existence that defines the most significant feature of any nation (ethnic group) and other such social groups as self-identification. Many of these values were shaped, preserved, and passed from generation to generation for centuries. Therefore, no nation is willing to give up its identity. Perhaps it is the only universal value it is willing to defend with arms and, as they say, until the last drop of blood is spilled.
Aware of the devastating effect of conflicts based on ethnic hatred, the US has bet on this informational element. At the current level of understanding of the issue, it is clear that the subversion of the Soviet Union’s ideological foundations, which were based on the principle of the brotherhood of nations, was also initiated from the outside and based on methods of ethnic strife. It was no accident that in the early 1990s numerous ethnic conflicts (Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgia-Abkhazia, Ossetia-Ingushetia, Transnistria) broke almost simultaneously. At this time, the first mass rallies of nationalist-minded citizens took place in Kiev. In addition, the subversion of state power was carried out by means of anti-Soviet agitation and financing of the political opposition in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, and other countries.
Of course, in the minds of the local populace, those events were then regarded as local conflicts. However, it is now completely obvious that all these clashes were elements of the initial, as-yet-hidden phase of the information war.
Undoubtedly, the informational-ideological “weapon” will be deployed in the future. This is evidenced by the increase in US government spending on programs for the so-called development of democratic institutions in countries bordering on Russia and in the Central Asian states. The true meaning of these assets becomes clear from the name of this budget item, “Countering Russian aggression through public diplomacy and foreign aid programs, and the creation of stable government in Europe.”
About 4.3 billion dollars have been allocated under his item in 2017, and around a billion dollars will go to programs for the so-called fight against corruption and supporting democracy in countries neighboring Russia.
Funds already received under this program have been spent by by various non-governmental organizations under the guise of promoting education, developing civil society, and other seemingly useful purposes. The outcome has been the incitement of anti-Russian moods in neighboring countries, the shaping of the pro-American and pro-western so-called non-systemic opposition in Russia, and the spread of inter-confessional and political extremism within our country.
Recent events in Nagorno-Karabakh witness to the repeated attempts of forces opposed to Russia to undermine the peace between the Armenian and Azerbaijani peoples and establish yet another hotbed of war on Russian’s borders.
It seems it is time to erect an effective barrier against this information war. We need a tough, appropriate, and balanced response. This is especially relevant in light of the upcoming elections and the possible risks presented by the stepping up of efforts by destabilizing political forces. Enough of playing at pseudo-democracy and following pseudo-liberal values. For democracy or people power is nothing other than the power of the people itself, realized in its interests. It is possible to achieve these interests only by means of the common good, and not through the absolute freedom and arbitrary will of individual members of society.
The following measures can be proposed to counter extremism.
It is extremely important to establish a concept of state ideological policy. Its basic element could be a national idea that would genuinely unite Russia’s unified multinational people. The concept could stipulate specific long-term and medium-term measures, aimed at the ideological education of our younger generation. Conscious resistance to radical religious and other ideologies could knock out the foundations on which current extremist ideologies are constructed. With this protection in place, even the most generous outside financing of destabilizing the situation in Russia will prove useless.
It is also important that youth are regarded by terrorist groups as a natural reserve. From this it follows that everything must be done to seize the initiative, to include young people at risk in the development and implementation of programs for countering armed extremism.
It seems appropriate for the supervisory and regulatory authorities to organize a wide-ranging and detailed verification of the compliance with federal legislation of all religious, ethnocultural, and youth organizations, suspected of engaging in banned extremist activity.
Using the know-how of the Northern Caucasus, we should organize specific and narrowly targeted preventive work with members of informal youth associations in order to adopt measures aimed at procuring information about negative processes underway in the youth milieu and identifying the ideologues and leaders of radical organizations who involved young people in extremist activity.
The positive know-how of the Republic of Ingushetia is also worthy of support. They have established a military-patriotic club that unites the children of law enforcement officers who were killed in the line of duty and children of neutralized members of the bandit underground, which facilitates their rapprochement and shapes an atmosphere of mutual understanding among them.
The proposed concept sees it as expedient to define the limits of censoring the global Internet network in Russia, since at present this problem is causing a heated debate in the light of the stepping up of efforts by advocates of the right to the free receipt and dissemination of information. Interesting in this sense is the know-how of foreign states, opposing the US and its allies. Due to unprecedented pressure from information, they have taken steps to restrict foreign media in order to protect the national information space. Thus, for example, on March 10, 2016, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology introduced a ban on electronic media fully or partly owned by foreign residents. These media will no longer be able to disseminate information through the Internet and, in the best case, by means of print publications. Chinese media will cooperate with foreign online media only with the permission of the ministry. Only Chinese nationals will be able to work in the management of national media. Online media servers can be located only in the People’s Republic of China.
It seems this know-how could be employed in Russia to a reasonable extent.
Internet providers must be furnished with a integrated set of rules for storing the personal information of their clients and users in the right amount in the event that such information is required when investigating cyber security violations.
In public places (libraries, schools, and other educational institutions) with access to the World Wide Web, filters restricting access to sites containing extremist content should be established.
In addition, it seems appropriate to stipulate an extrajudicial (administrative) procedure for including information in the federal list of extremist content and blocking the domain names of sites that disseminate extremist and radical nationalist information. However, if the proprietors of this information do not consider it extremist, they can appeal the relevant actions of the authorized government agencies in court and prove their innocence there. This procedure will enable a faster and more effective response to the promotion of extremism on the Internet. It is necessary to step up work on introducing modern technology for the effective monitoring of the radio waves and the Internet.
It is necessary to expand the range of criminal law measures to stop the illegal actions of terrorist organizations committed on the Internet network involving recruiting. To this end, we should consider the criminalization of possessing such materials, collecting them or uploading them from a computer. Modern evidence technologies make it possible to present to the court and confirm technical elements of intercourse on social networks that testify to the connections between the accused and the relevant electronic messages.
To expose the real aims and intentions of Islamic extremists and establish the insolvency of their theoretical approaches, which contradict the realities of the modern world and the fundamental interests of Islamic countries, it would seem useful for the State Duma to regularly hold special hearings involving experts from the Federal Security Service (FSB), eminent Islamic scholars and authorities, and scholars of Islam. The hearings should be widely covered in the press.
Particular attention should be paid to the migration process. Migrants are often targets of espionage recruiting and radicalization. Many of them have overstayed their limit in Russia, dropping out of the sight of law enforcement. We must analyze the regulatory acts governing the presence of foreign nationals and persons without citizenship in the Russian Federation. Based on our analysis, we should take additional measures for improving the legislation.
It is necessary to improve the work of precinct police with foreign nationals in the realm of monitoring compliance with the established rules of residence in Russia (monitoring of persons letting and renting residential premises in the precinct, and obtaining information about the nature of these persons’ employment). The internal affairs departments of agencies should exclude possible corruption here. Full use of the public’s assistance should be made.
Certain features of extremist activity have taken shape in the Crimea Federal District, where attempts have been made to mold anti-Russian moods, by means of falsifying historical facts and distorting the interpretation of modern events, and call into question the outcome of the referendum on Crimea’s accession to the Russian Federation. This act of the legal expression of the Crimean population’s popular will has become an integral part of Russian constitutionalism. Considering the place of this act in the hierarchal system of values of Russian state and society, it is certainly in need of special legal protection, including by means of criminal legal coercion.
It should be noted that criminalizing the denial or falsification of historical events of particular importance to a state and society is a widespread practice. For example, in many countries, including Russia, criminal punishment is stipulated for promoting fascism. France and a number of other countries have introduced criminal liability for denying the Armenian genocide. The State Duma of the Russian Federal Assembly is considering a similar law bill, No. 938567-6 (“On Criminalization of Public Denial of the Genocide of the Armenian People in Western Armenia and Ottoman Turkey in 1915-1922”). In Israel, it is a crime to deny the Holocaust.
In view of the above, it seems necessary to supplement the notion of extremist activity (extremism) contained in the federal law “On Countering Extremist Activity” with such a manifestation as denial of the outcome of a national referendum. It is necessary to decisively counteract the deliberate falsification of the history of our state. In this connection, we might also propose that Russian Federal Criminal Code Article 280 (public calls for extremist activity) include an additional stipulation, which would qualify the falsification of historical facts and events as a call for extremist activity.
In addition to countering the ideological component of the information war being waged against Russia, it is important to step up efforts to combat financial support for this activity, including tightening control over cross-border capital flows. As experience has shown, terrorism is often financed by virtual cryptocurrency, which has no central issuer, no single point of transactional control, and features anonymous payments. In addition, as a result of their wide dissemination, these currencies can displace legal money from the market, which threatens the state’s financial stability. It is therefore suggested that criminal liability be introduced for the illegal issuance and circulation of cryptocurrency and other money substitutes.
We should also review social security legislation concerning the close relatives of persons involved in terrorism, entitlement to survivor’s pensions, and other benefits. A person who is going to commit such crimes should know that in the event of death not only will he be buried in an unmarked grave but he will also deprive his loved ones of support from the state.
Another measure that would contribute to the effective fight against extremism, terrorism, and other dangerous criminal manifestations is confiscation of property as a form of criminal punishment. As we know, the relevant legislative proposals have been prepared and are in need of speedy legislative implementation. Unfortunately, this process has been unduly delayed.
No less important is improvement of the legal mechanism of international cooperation among law enforcement and other state bodies empowered to counter terrorism and extremism.
Russian law regulates only the procedure for submitting an international request for legal assistance, whereas international acts in this field stipulate the possibility of closer integration, including the establishment of international investigative teams. Such cooperation would help in cases where Russian investigative authorities need to perform a number of investigative procedures or even perform a preliminary investigation in a foreign country and that country has agreed to provide such assistance. This gap became apparent during investigation of the armed conflict between Georgia and South Ossetia in 2008 and the terrorist act committed on board the Russian Airbus 321 over the Sinai Peninsula.
Translated by the Island of Misfit Toys. Thanks to Greg Yudin for his courage.
Factory wall, Krasnoye Selo, October 25, 2015. Photo by the Russian Reader
Alexander Reznik Back to the Future: Why Putin Criticizes Lenin RBC
January 26, 2016
Vladimir Putin has condemned Lenin for ideas that, in the president’s opinion, led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, the ideas were those of Stalin, whom the head of state has avoided criticizing.
The Flow of Thought
On January 21, 2016, Vladimir Putin gave rise to another round of quasi-historical debate. Summarizing a discussion on reforming the Russian Academy of Sciences at a session of the Council for Science and Education, the president reacted to an excerpt from a poem by Pasternak, as quoted by the head of the Kurchatov Institute: “He managed the flow of thought[s] and, only thus, the country.”
Pasternak was writing about Lenin, and the president ventured his opinion of Lenin, too.
“It is right to manage the flow of thought. Only it is important that the thought leads to the desired result, not as it did in the case of Vladimir Ilyich. But the idea itself is correct. Ultimately, the idea led to the Soviet Union’s collapse, that is what. There were many such thoughts: autonomization and so on. They planted an atomic bomb under the edifice known as Russia. It did, in fact, blow up later. And we had no need of world revolution.”
Thus, consciously or not, the president marked the anniversary of the death of the Soviet Union’s founder. Many observers were quick to detect a hidden message in his remarks and once again raised the question of burying Lenin’s body. (Dmitry Peskov, the president’s press secretary, had to quickly announce that this issue “was not on the agenda.”) It is more likely that the remarks, delivered as the curtain was falling on a boring meeting, were made on the spur of the moment.
Putin had obviously specially prepared for his speech at the January 25 interregional forum of the Russian Popular Front in order to smooth over the impression made by his previous remarks. Replying to a question about Lenin’s reburial, he outlined his views on socialism in more detail. He admitted he had always “liked communist and socialist ideas,” and he compared the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism to the Bible. Later, the president mentioned mass repressions, including the “most egregious example,” the execution of the tsar and his family, the “breakdown of the front” during the First World War, and the inefficiency of the planned economy. Finally, Putin separately addressed the question of why, from his viewpoint, Lenin had been wrong in his dispute with Stalin over the nationalities question: Lenin had wanted “full equality, with the right to secede from the Soviet Union” for the republics.
“And that [was like] a time bomb under the edifice of our state,” said Putin, literally repeating what he had said in an 1991 interview. To strengthen the effect, he mentioned the transfer of Donbass to Ukraine.
Who Planted the Bomb and What Kind of Bomb Was It
Historians will find it difficult to ignore that in the first instance Putin has mistakenly attributed to Lenin the idea of autonomization, which meant the inclusion of territorial entities in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. In reality, on December 30 and 31, 1922, Lenin dictated a few notes, which were included in the leader’s so-called political testament.
“I suppose I have been very remiss with respect to the workers of Russia for not having intervened energetically and decisively enough in the notorious question of autonomization, which, it appears, is officially called the question of the Soviet socialist republics,” wrote Lenin.
His secretaries called these notes a “bomb,” so evident was their explosive effect, since they were directed against the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Joseph Stalin, who was accused of a “Great-Russian nationalist campaign.” As a centralist principle, Lenin wrote, autonomization was “radically wrong and badly timed.” It was necessary to “maintain and strengthen the union of socialist republics” and be more sensitive to the nationalism of “oppressed peoples.” The union’s republics were granted the constitutional right to secede from the Soviet Union.
Formally, Lenin’s policy was approved, and thanks to the policy of indigenization, which historian Terry Martin has christened “affirmative action,” the 1920s were the heyday of national cultures. But by bypassing the Constitution and Party Congress resolutions, Stalin’s project gradually emerged victorious. By the late 1980s, the federal principles of Soviet power had been discredited as a screen concealing Moscow’s omnipotence as the center. So it is, at least, naive to believe that the presence of the constitutional right to secede from the Soviet Union (and Lenin’s responsibility for it) played a crucial role in the disintegration of the Soviet state.
At the Russian Popular Front forum, Putin clarified that, from the outset, he “had in mind the discussion between Stalin and Lenin about how to build a new state, the Soviet Union.” His speech showed that Putin’s attitude towards Lenin’s revolutionary project as a whole was not very different from that of establishment experts and commentators. Liberals, conservatives, members of the opposition, and “patriots” can forge a bond in their rejection of socialism, radicalism, and similar -isms. It suffices to carefully examine the responses to Putin’s speech to notice that dislike of Lenin is quite sincere and sometimes jealously competitive. Setting aside conservative fetishists of all things Soviet, sympathy for Lenin, on the other hand, remains the bailiwick of leftist intellectuals.
Putin’s activist dislike of Lenin is noteworthy, given his demonstrative neutrality towards Stalin. In Putin’s view, although Stalin was a dictator guilty of mass repressions, he de facto rejected Lenin’s revolutionary maximalism. We cannot rule out that the president has taken into account the growth of public sympathy for Stalin, warmed by the economic crisis and political developments in Syria and Ukraine.
Interest in the topic of the Soviet Union’s collapse may well be regarded as the hint of a veiled threat to today’s Russia that at some point can be used as the ideological basis, for example, of a public mobilization against “enemies.”
A Revolution for New Needs
The excitement generated by the statements of leading politicians about the distant past casts a negative light on Russia’s intellectual and political culture. The centennial of the 1917 Revolution is approaching. We can hardly expect success from the government’s project of reconciling the Whites, Reds, and Greens, as proposed by the culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky. Rather, the symbolic resources of the Russian Civil War will be exploited for the production of more and more new conflicts, as was the case with the Great Patriotic War. On the lines of the Banderites, it will be easy to construct new imaginary enemies of Russia. The president has discovered one such group of national traitors, revolutionaries and especially Bolsheviks. It will be harder to find heroes, but here the market, which previously has been successful in selling the image of Admiral Kolchak, will lend a helping hand.
In these memory wars, academic scholarship, which cultivates the specific language of dialogue and therefore seldom provides simple and definitive answers to debatable issues, will hardly be heard. Thus, Pasternak’s line about “managing the flow of thoughts,” which flustered Vladimir Putin, takes on a particularly alarming ring.
Alexander Reznik is a senior researcher at Perm State University and a member of the Free Historical Society. Translated by the Russian Reader
I spoke recently with a radio journalist from Cologne. A pleasant woman, she was one of those western leftists who try and “understand” Russia. She just could not believe that the Putin regime’s ideology was anti-communist and was based on condemnation of all revolutions, whether the October Revolution or the French Revolution.
“How can that be? We are walking here on Insurrection Square. Monuments to Lenin are not demolished in Russia as they are in Ukraine. And you tell me the regime is anti-communist?” she said.
I hope that after Putin’s remarks that Lenin planted an atomic bomb under Russia and was responsible for the Soviet Union’s collapse, my companion will see the light. I no longer have such hopes for Russian liberals who believe that under Putin we are living through a new edition of the Soviet Union.
In fact, Putin has been very consistent albeit historically ignorant. The 1917 Revolution is as hateful to him as the collapse of the Soviet Union, as hateful as any other subversion of Power with a capital p, which in the eyes of the people should remain sacred if only because it is Power, and all power comes from God. From the viewpoint of legitimists like Putin, the destruction of monuments to Lenin or the renaming of streets is a break with the mystical continuity of Power and thus almost a revolutionary gesture.
In Putin’s eyes, Lenin and the Bolsheviks really were devils incarnate, for they radically asserted the right of the masses to revolt and abolished continuity with the past, thus demolishing the mystique around the notion of the state.
During the Stalinist period, however, the Bolshevik Revolution itself was incorporated into the national myth. It is in this bronzed, mythologized form that attempts have been made to adapt all things Soviet to the needs of the new oligarchy, who have imagined themselves the successors of the Rurikids, the Romanovs, Stalin, Yeltsin, and all manner of saviors of the Fatherland and guardians of stability. Fortunately, this stunt does not work with Lenin and never will.
Ivan Ovsyannikov is an activist with the Interregional Trade Union Workers Association (ITUWA/MPRA) and the Russian Socialist Movement (RSD). Translated by the Russian Reader. See my previous post on this topic, “Crumbling Down.”
Some people ain’t no damn good You can’t trust ’em, you can’t love ’em No good deed goes unpunished And I don’t mind being their whipping boy
I’ve had that pleasure for years and years No no, I never was a sinner, tell me what else can I do Second best is what you get till you learn to bend the rules And time respects no person and what you lift up must fall They’re waiting outside to claim my tumbling walls
Saw my picture in the paper Read the news around my face And some people don’t want to Treat me the same
When the walls come tumbling down When the walls come crumbling, crumbling When the walls come tumbling, tumbling down
Cover of Yevgeny Satanovsky, If I Were the Russian Tsar: Advice to the President. Image courtesy of LitRes
Yesterday was a rough day for the anti-imperialist pro-Putin western left (which is basically all that is left of the western left). First, there was the publication of Sir Robert Owen’s report on his inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, in which Owen concluded that Putin “probably” approved Litvinenko’s murder in 2006.
Then the day got rougher.
Vladimir Putin publicly blamed Vladimir Lenin for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
President Vladimir Putin on Thursday blamed Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin for planting the ideas that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Interfax news agency reported.
During a meeting of the Presidential Council for Science and Education, one of the attendees quoted a poem by Boris Pasternak describing Lenin as someone who had managed the flow of his thoughts to rule the country.
“Letting your rule be guided by thoughts is right, but only when that idea leads to the right results, not like it did with Vladimir Ilich,” Putin quipped in reply. “In the end that idea led to the fall of the Soviet Union,” he added.
“There were many such ideas as providing regions with autonomy, and so on. They planted an atomic bomb under the building that is called Russia which later exploded. We did not need a global revolution,” he said.
Putin has in the past famously described the fall of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.”
Oh my, it turns out Lenin planted the “bomb under the building known as Russia,” and what he had in mind was the collapse of the Soviet Union as a consequence of “ethnic autonomization”! So said the leader!
There are a few curious points in this statement.
First, the leader has equated Russia with the Soviet Union. Meaning that he has dubbed Central Asia, for example, a part of Russia. But he probably did not even notice it.
Second, the leader clearly indicated that the ideal is the Russian Empire, where, apparently, there were no problems, and which fell apart, apparently, as a result of the revolution and not the imperial elite’s wrongheaded policies.
Busts of the Tsesarevich Alexei, Emperor Nicholas II, and Empress Alexandra, all identified as “holy martyrs,” outside the Theotokos of Tikhvin (Tikhvin Icon of the Mother of God) Church. Petrograd, April 25, 2015. Photo by the Russian Reader
Outdoor display case describing the “Russian economic miracle” that was, allegedly, swept away by the October Revolution. Theotokos of Tikhvin Church, Petrograd, April 25, 2015. Photo by the Russian Reader
The leader has clearly ignored the fact that Lenin, whatever you might think of him, attempted to reassemble the lands of the former empire, which by that time had virtually collapsed. And he was able to do this (reassemble the former empire) only by making certain compromises with the ethnic elites, by granting them “autonomy.”
Third, the leader’s rhetoric is obvious preparation for the 100th anniversary of the revolution, which is likely to be depicted as a tragedy, imposed [on the country] from the outside.
Sergey Abashin is British Petroleum Professor of Migration Studies at the European University in Saint Petersburg. His most recent book is Sovetskii kishlak: Mezhdu kolonializmom i modernizatsiei [The Soviet Central Asian village: between colonialism and modernization], Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015. Translated by the Russian Reader
