Tag: nationalization

Em Uyaya’am (Things I Saw, Read and Watched This Week)

Asilomar State Beach, 21 July 2023. Photo by the Russian Reader

Who is Girkin?

Igor Girkin (Strelkov) is an ethno-fascist FSB officer and the warlord who prepared the ground and then launched the war in Donbas in 2014. He stated that without him, “there wouldn’t be any war”. He is also responsible for ordering the execution of numerous civilians, for which he still face justice. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia by the International Criminal Court on November 17, 2022 as perpetrator of the downing of Malaysian Airlines 17 and the murder of 298 people—a war criminal.

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Source: Monique Camarra, “Igor Girkin arrested in Moscow: the Kremlin is clamping down,” EuroFile, 22 July 2023

“The all-clear hasn’t sounded, the fight continues.”

Source: Sergey Abashin (Facebook), 21 July 2023

Stunning drone footage has revealed details of the Batagaika crater, a one-kilometer-long gash in Russia’s Far East that forms the world’s biggest permafrost crater.

In the video two explorers clamber across uneven terrain at the base of the depression, marked by irregular surfaces and small hummocks, which began to form after the surrounding forest was cleared in the 1960s and the permafrost underground began to melt, causing the land to sink.

“We locals call it ‘the cave-in,'” local resident and crater explorer Erel Struchkov told Reuters as he stood on the crater’s rim. “It developed in the 1970s, first as a ravine. Then by thawing in the heat of sunny days, it started to expand.”

Scientists say Russia is warming at least 2.5 times faster than the rest of the world, melting the long-frozen tundra that covers about 65% of the country’s landmass and releasing greenhouse gases stored in the thawed soil.

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Source: “World’s biggest permafrost crater in Russia’s Far East thaws as planet warms,” Reuters, 21 July 2023

“Let’s remember these people”

After the court hearing [in his criminal case], Oleg Orlov read out a long list of names of people convicted of “disseminating fake news” or “discrediting the army.” He mentioned Alexei Gorinov, Dmitry Ivanov, Samiel Vedel (aka Sergei Klokov), Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin, Maxim Lypkan, and many others.

“I am not imprisoned, and I can say what I deem necessary. I can answer your questions. But how many of my and your kindred spirits are deprived of this opportunity,” Orlov reminded. “I consider it my duty to read out the list. These are only some of the people who have been imprisoned for their anti-war stance.”

After reading out the names, Orlov cited data from OVD Info. “634 people from 78 regions [of Russia] have faced criminal charges for anti-war protests, for words and statements,” the human rights activist said. “And 200 of them have already been incarcerated. Let’s remember these people.”

Orlov stressed that he was fighting not only for his own sake. “Both my lawyer Katerina Tertukhina and my public defender Dmitry Muratov — we are fighting like this and trying to prove the nullity of the charges [against him], the nullity of the [prosecution’s] expert witness analysis, because we are trying to fight for all people.”

Video courtesy of SOTA

Source: memorial.hrc (Instagram), 21 July 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader

Crimean Tatar-led underground movement is already active behind Russian lines and hundreds of young Tatar men are ready to take up arms to liberate the occupied peninsula, a veteran community leader has said.

Mustafa Dzemilev, widely seen as the godfather of the Crimean Tatar rights movement, pointed to operations by the Atesh guerrilla group, comprising Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians and Russians, in Crimea and other occupied Ukrainian regions.

Atesh, which means “fire” in Crimean Tatar, was created in September last year, primarily to carry out acts of sabotage from within the ranks of the Russian army. It claims more than 4,000 Russian soldiers have already enrolled in an online course on how to “survive the war” by wrecking their own equipment.

There is no evidence linking the group to the latest attack on the Kerch Bridge, early on Monday morning, but the group has claimed a string of smaller-scale attacks, blowing up Russian checkpoints, assassinating Russian officers, setting fire to barracks and feeding sensitive information to Ukrainian intelligence. It recently accused Russian sappers of laying mines in the Krymskyi Titan chemical works in Armiansk, northern Crimea. An explosion there could spread an ammonia cloud across the land bridge between the peninsula and mainland Ukraine.

“Atesh is very deep underground,” Dzhemilev, 79, told the Guardian in an interview in Kyiv. “There was not a single arrest among Atesh members, but they are working inside Crimea territory blowing up targets.”

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Source: Julian Borger, “The underground Crimean Tatar group taking up arms against Russia,” Guardian, 17 July 2023

Hello! This is Alexandra Prokopenko with your weekly guide to the Russian economy — brought to you by The Bell. In this newsletter we focus on the Kremlin’s decision to seize the Russian assets of two major foreign companies and what it means for the business climate and the other Western businesses who cannot — or will not — leave Russia. We also look at Friday’s interest rate hike and new Western sanctions on Russia.

Nationalization of Western assets heralds broader property redistribution

Finland’s Fortum and Germany’s Uniper saw their Russian assets seized by the Kremlin earlier this year. This week was the turn of France’s Danone and Denmark’s Carlsberg. It feels like we are witnessing the final chapter in the history of Western business in post-Soviet Russia. If the transfer of Fortum and Uniper’s energy assets to external management was explained as a response to the European Union’s treatment of Russian energy companies, there is no such obvious reason for the behavior toward Carlsberg and Danone and it likely reveals the Kremlin’s real intentions. This is direct nationalization — and opens the door to a new distribution of property in Russia.

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Source: Alexandra Prokopenko, “Kremlin asset seizures the new normal,” The Bell, 21 July 2023

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“Russia, forward!”

Source: Marina Varchenko (Facebook), 14 July 2023. She writes: “In our hood) Petersburg, Razyezzhaya Street.“

The Arkhangelsk Region has allocated 800 million rubles to the occupied Ukrainian city of Melitopol, which will be used to repair the city, which has suffered from Russia’s invasion. However, the region itself does not have enough money to repair its own housing. Arkhangelsk is considered the capital of the Russian North, but has been informally dubbed the “capital of dilapidated housing.” Many people live in substandard housing: the city is chockablock with barracks and crumbling wooden houses. Watch Valeria Ratnikova’s report on how the region copes with a budget deficit while its money is spent on the war.

00:00 Opening 02:15 Ruins, barracks, and crumbling houses 06:00 Brevennik Island: expensive prices and derelict housing 10:56 Natalia Zubarevich about the lack of money in the region 12:04 The campaign against waste haulage to the region 16:18 The authorities are taking revenge on opposition activists opposed to landfills 31:35 Denunciations and criminal cases for statements about the war 33:22 One of the protesters went to the war 36:15 What residents say about the war 38:26 Getting fired for criticizing the war 39:40 A female student fled to Lithuania — the authorities wanted to jail her for talking about the war 46:25 The region’s environmental problems 49:10 Journalists detained during Putin’s visit 51:11 How the war has affected life in the region

Source: “The ruins of Arkhangelsk: how people whose money was given to occupied city live,” TV Rain (YouTube), 16 July 2023. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader

Nationalizing Russia’s Middle Class

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAIn the last decade or two, Russia’s monied classes and middle classes have been wildly enriched or merely kept afloat by cheap, disenfranchised labor from Central Asia. I took this photo on April 10, 2017, in the container village inhabited by Central Asian migrant workers building Petersburg’s so-called Marine Façade on 476 hectares of reclaimed land in the Neva Bay next to Vasilyevsky Island.  

Nationalizing the Middle Class: Society’s Previously Most Dynamic Group Seeks to Rely on the State
Vladimir Ruvinsky
Vedomosti
June 26, 2019

Analysts at Alfa Bank have concluded Russia’s middle class has been shrinking. More importantly, it is being nationalized, which distances the prospects of qualitative economic growth.

What constitutes the Russian middle class is mostly a philosophical question: a specific definition of it has never gained a foothold. Some researchers argue it never emerged in the social sense and remains akin to a folklore character. Other researchers, focusing on income levels, have claimed to have sighted it in Russia, but in recent years their observations have been suffused with sadness.

In a new report, “The Russian Middle Class: Lowering the Appetite for Risk,” analysts at Alfa Banks have defined the middle class as a group of people whose monthly income is between 39,000 and 99,000 rubles per person [i.e., between 546 euros and 1,387 euros at current rates], that is, 110–250% of the median income in Russia, and who are able to buy durable goods.

In the noughties, the middle class grew. By 2014, it constituted 37% of the Russian populace. In four years, however, all of this growth had been forfeited. In 2017, only 30% of the populace could be counted as middle class, which was less than in 2004 (34%). Simultaneously, the group’s share in the populace’s total income dropped from 48% in 2014 to 39% in 2017.

The middle class has lost its economic clout, becoming more vulnerable. In some ways, it has lost more than other classes. Alfa Bank’s analysts write that the middle class’s real incomes stagnated in the ten-year period between 2008 and 2018, while the incomes of the country’s most impoverished groups rose by four percent, and the incomes of the wealthiest Russians increased by eleven percent. An indicator of the middle class’s fading fortunes was that its core spent three percentage points more on groceries during the ten-year period, just like the country’s lower classes, while its expenditures on holidays and education dropped by one to two percentage points. In 2014–2018, the middle class’s loan payments grew by 20% in nominal terms. This is probably why it has not been involved in the new consumer loan boom.

Simultaneously, the middle class has been undergoing nationalization. It is a commonplace the middle class consists of people independent of the state and living on their own means. Its progress has been regarded as a vital driver of economic growth, including in Russia.

Its potential, however, appears to have weakened. Whereas in 2003 approximately ten percent of the middle class was employed in the state sector, this figure had grown to fifteen percent in 2017, according to Alfa Bank.

This is not a disaster yet, especially since middle-class employment in commerce, the restaurant business, finance, real estate, and health care has grown. However, the middle class’s share of business income has decreased more than it has among the general populace.

Traditionally considered the core of civil society, the middle class has come to rely more and more on the state for employment, claims Natalya Orlova, Alfa Bank’s chief economist. Even if the middle class does not shrink anymore, its nationalization worsens the prospects for Russia’s progress, since its ranks will be replenished by people who do not power the economy but count on the regime for their livelihoods.

Translated by the Russian Reader