Russia Destroying Itself by Trying to Maintain Its Former Empire, Eppl Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 12 – Overcoming an imperial past is never easy for any country, Nikolay Eppl says, because it requires the rejection of the imperial ideas that had been at the core of national identity and the acceptance of the genuine independence of former colonies that the metropolitan center had long considered its own.

            The Russian analyst, who now lives in the Netherlands and is the author of the 2020 book An Inconvenient Past, says that Russia has not done either and still believes that what was once Moscow’s must remain part of Russia’s patrimony and control or Russia itself will disintegrate (svoboda.org/a/nikolay-epple-neprorabotannoe-proshloe-privelo-k-voyne-/32941550.html).

            That has led Moscow to war in Ukraine; but that conflict, Eppl insists, will not save Russia but ultimately destroy it -- yet another case in the long history of how dying empires have hastened their end by insisting that the past must remain in place, refusing to recognize new realities, and not redefining itself to fit into the new world.

Putin Refused to Take Advantage of What Elections Can Do for an Authoritarian Regime and Will Suffer as a Result, Belyayeva Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 12 – Elections in autocratic states like Russia today can be extremely useful to their rulers as tests of loyalty among officials and in the population and as guides to changing either officials or policies in order to remain in effective control, Nina Belyayeva argues.

            But if the regimes do not make use of them in that way, the former HSE professor of constitutional law who now lives in the Republic of Georgia says, then those regimes will become ever more repressive and descend into stagnation (nemoskva.net/2024/05/12/vybory-kak-test-sistemy-chego-ne-smog-putin-i-chto-pokazala-protestnaya-publika/).

            Unfortunately, Belyayeva says, the Putin regime is a classic example of a regime that has failed to use elections even in ways useful to its own survival and therefore will become ever more repressive, ever less responsive to changes in society, and ever more stagnant the longer it remains in place, all things that will only hasten its end.

            But the problem is even deeper than that, she continues. Putin so far has been able to maintain control but he is losing the trust of the population. Therefore, while she is not insisting that Putin has “lost the levels of power … he has lost the trust and instead of the expected growth in the level of his legitimacy, it has fallen.”

            And with that decline, Belyayeva argues, there has been an increase in protest sentiments, “something extremely dangerous for an authoritarian regime which relies on obedience, fear and silence.” That is “just the tip of the iceberg” but no less powerful just because it remains covert and takes the form of jokes and memes.

            It may be difficult to imagine just what this protest will look like when it raises its head, but that will definitely happen, she suggests. And as it does, there will be those within the regime will who take notice and press those above them to adapt precisely to save themselves and the regime.

            If the autocrat continues to ignore even their advice, things will end in “an explosion,” Belyayeva concludes.

Russianization of Services in Tatar Mosques Sparking Sharp Debate

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 12 – As recently as the end of Soviet times, the mosques of Moscow conducted services in Tatar because that was the language of the dominant Muslim community in the Russian capital, with the mosques there shifting to the use of Russian only when the influx of immigrants from Central Asian republics made that a requirement.

            In Tatarstan itself, until the last decade or so, the services in almost all mosques were in Tatar; but there too, that has begun to change with many mosques, especially in urban areas, already shifting to Russian or at a minimum offering simultaneous Russian translations of the Tatar service.

            This shift has sparked a sharp debate on a telegram channel, with some saying spreading the faith is more important than the language used and others insisting that this shift in language in the mosques will help kill off Tatar and destroy the nation as well as the faith (milliard.tatar/news/propoved-v-meceti-na-tatarskom-yazyke-kakie-dovody-za-i-protiv-privodyat-protivniki-i-storonniki-5475).

            Those who welcome or at least don’t oppose the shift from Tatar to Russian say that many of the faithful are either Russians or Tatars who no longer use Tatar regularly and that it should not be the job of the mosque to promote the national language but rather to maintain and spread Islam.

            But those who oppose this trend argue that unless the mosques continue to use Tatar, they will be helping Moscow destroy the Tatar language and the Tatar nation and even that the shift to Russian will lead to a shift to Christianity and to an even more rapid destruction of the Tatar nation.

             Among the most interesting suggestions of those who oppose the Russianization of Muslim services in Tatarstan is that Kazan should insist that Tatar should again be written in the Arabic script as it was before 1917, something that would make it easier for Tatars to learn Arabic and would defend them against Russianization more generally.

Is Baku Branch of ROC MP Positioning Itself to Seek Autocephaly?

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 12 – Ever more Russian Orthodox churches in the former union republics, even those where the number of congregants and parishes of such denominations are vanishingly small are putting themselves in position to at the very least threaten to pursue autocephaly. The latest to do so appears to be the Baku bishopric of the ROC MP.

            Problems between the Moscow Patriarchate and its branch in Azerbaijan have been growing. Moscow was furious that the previous head of the ROC MP in Baku had celebrated Azerbaijan’s retaking of Azerbaijan and in choosing a new head earlier this year passed over the cleric most had expected to assume that job and named a locum tens instead (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/03/moscow-patriarchate-faces-mounting.html).

            But since that time, relations between the Baku church and Moscow have deteriorated. Most importantly, the Baku branch has changed the language of services in its churches from Russian to Azerbaijani even though most of its congregants are Russians (versia.ru/dostizheniya-arxiepiskopa-rpc-feofilakta-v-azerbajdzhane-ne-ubedili-sinod).

            Baku took this step reportedly without consulting the influential Muslim Spiritual Directorate of the South Caucasus and apparently without getting the approval of Moscow for a move that puts it on collision course not only with the Patriarchate but with the increasingly active Roman Catholic church there.

            Moreover, according to the Versiya report, the new leaders of the church and along with them the Azerbaijani government very much wanted the head of the ROC MP in Azerbaijan to be headed by a metropolitan rather than a mere bishop but did not get their way, at least up to now; and that is becoming a source of irritation in Baku.

            And there is another issue that separates Baku and Moscow. Some in the Baku church want to stress the Christian nature of Alania, the state that existed prior to the consolidation of nations in the South Caucasus, by celebrating Orthodox saints from that state; but Moscow and some in Baku fear that doing so will add to problems among the countries there.

            None of this necessarily means that the Baku Orthodox leadership is about to pursue autocephaly; but taken together, they suggest that that denomination or at least its leadership in cooperation with the Azerbaijani government wants to pursue a more independent course, another defeat for the Moscow church and one the Ecumenical Patriarchate will certainly exploit.

Putin-Era Official Art Not ‘Socialist Realism 2.0,’ Cultural Specialists Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 12 – Given Putin’s revival of many aspects of the Soviet past, many are quick to label the official art his regime has been promoting as “socialist realism 2.0,” but specialists on Russian culture say that is inappropriate because in two important ways, the situation in Russian art today is fundamentally different than was the case in Soviet times.

            On the one hand, these experts say, socialist realism was about promoting a communist future by downplaying current problems, pointing to the ways in which everything in the USSR was getting better and better and offering up positive heroes looking to the future for emulation (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/05/12/novoe-pokolenie-nuzhdaetsia-v-polozhitelnom-geroe).

            Putin’s official art in contrast is based not on a vision of the future toward which Russia is moving but on a conception of Russia in which continuity with the past defines everything; and as a result, there is no possibility of offering a positive hero who is struggling to achieve a new and better future.

            And on the other hand, the Soviet system was bureaucratized to the point that Kremlin orders for socialist realism could be realized and faced few competitors. The Soviet regime decided what the country was striving for and made sure that any critics were silenced or at least marginalized.

            Today, these organizations are missing, profit seeking dominates over promotion of this or that message, and the regime is so far incapable of excluding other messages provided by art either through the Internet or other means. As a result, official art now can meet demands for escapism but not provide the kind of messaging socialist realism did.

Two Lessons of Soviet Collapse Russian Elites Must Learn to Avoid a Repetition, Delyagin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 11 – Most Russians now recognize that the Soviet system collapsed for political rather than economic reasons, Mikhail Delyagin says; but many of the latter remain unexamined, a pattern that if it continues could threaten the current Russian political system in the future.

            Two are particularly important now given the challenges the Russian Federation currently faces, the Moscow commentator and Duma deputy says, the Soviet Union’s lack of a mechanism for the renewal of elites and the regime’s increasingly out-of-date view of the working class (zavtra.ru/blogs/povestka_dnya_42_znat_i_pomnit_politicheskie_uroki_kraha_sssr).

            According to Delyagin, the lack of a mechanism for the renewal of elites is the more often cited of these, even though most Russians fail to recognize that Stalin sought to introduce competition via the 1936 constitution and that the nomenklatura responded by a fratricidal struggle known to history as “the Great Terror.”

            The failure of the Soviet elite to understand that the working class had fundamentally changed led to a conflict between the Kremlin and the creative class is less often referred to but may be even more critical for what happens in the future given that many at the top of the Russian political spectrum still do not understand the changes in the working class.

            As several commentators have noted, Delyagin says, in Soviet times, “the party apparatus knew that it had to serve the working class but did not see the fundamental change in the nature of that class as a result of the scientific and technological revolutions.” Instead, it continued to base itself on the older industrial image of the working class, a group that was ever smaller.

            The nomenklatura’s focus on the industrial portion of the working class kept the leadership from recognizing that that group had changed “from a progressive force into a reactionary one” and meant that Moscow came in conflict with the state and “the advanced part of society,” the technical intelligentsia, and made it “an involuntary enemy of the state.”

            At the end of Soviet times, he continues, “the hostility of the party nomenklatura toward the technical intelligentsia was also caused by a reorientation of the economy from cost reduction toward income growth” as “inflating costs turned out to be a simpler and more natural way for monopolies to increase income.”

            “That in turn,” Delyagin writes, “reduced the interest of the powers to implement new technologies … Indeed, the very term ‘implementation’ expressed with a discouraging frankness the unnaturalness of any progress for the ossified management system.”  Unfortunately, that lesson has not yet been learned, and the disasters of the past could thus be repeated.

Russian Samizdat Today ‘isn’t Underground Literature as in Soviet Times but a Form of Contemporary Art,’ ‘Meduza’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 10 – Samizdat, the Russian term for self-published material, was widespread in the last decades of the Soviet Union and served as an important means for making available works that communist government didn’t approve of and the ideas of those who hoped to change or even overthrow that regime.

            With the end of censorship and the rise of the Internet, samizdat almost completely disappeared. And the final nail in its coffin appeared to be a 2001 Russian law that allowed anyone to publish any work without official permission as long as some typographer agreed and the number of copies involved was 999 or less.

            But increasing repression under Vladimir Putin and the increasing unwillingness of printing firms to publish materials likely to get those who agree to do so in trouble, samizdat has reemerged in Russia, although much of it is not so much political as artistic, a sharp contrast with Soviet times.

            The Meduza news portal surveys this development by means of an interview with Anna Dial, an artist and the founder of The Unknown Person publishers (unknownperson.art/) (meduza.io/feature/2024/05/10/rossiyskiy-samizdat-segodnya-ne-podpolnaya-literatura-kak-v-sssr-a-vid-sovremennogo-iskusstva).

            Dial, who has chosen to leave Russia, says that most of the materials publishers like hers issue are experimental art rather than political; but she suggests that as repression has increased since the start of Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine that has begun to change and more and more of these publications do feature explicitly political content.

            Among the many points she makes about this phenomenon, one is especially noteworthy. Almost none of the products of this new samizdat ever find their way in the regular media or the Internet. As a result, they remain below the radar screens of both the regime and of those who hope to understand what the Kremlin is doing.