Rusija i sve vezano za nju

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О ликвидации Международного Мемориала
28.12.2021

28 декабря 2021 года Верховный суд РФ принял решение о ликвидации Международного Мемориала.

Формальный повод, заявленный в иске Генеральной прокуратуры, – отсутствие на некоторых материалах ярлыка «иностранный агент». Во время слушания дела несостоятельность этих претензий была продемонстрирована с полной очевидностью.

Но сегодня в суде был наконец назван не формальный повод, а истинная причина ликвидации Международного Мемориала: Генеральная прокуратура утверждает, что мы неправильно трактуем советскую историю, «создаем лживый образ СССР как террористического государства», «обрушиваем критику на органы государственной власти». А государство, по мнению наших оппонентов, вне критики.

Решение Верховного суда еще раз подтвердило, что история политического террора, организуемого и направляемого государственной властью, остается для России не академической темой, интересующей только специалистов, а острой проблемой современности. Наша страна нуждается в честном и добросовестном осмыслении советского прошлого; в этом – залог ее будущего. Смешно полагать, что судебная ликвидация Международного Мемориала снимет этот вопрос с повестки дня. Память о трагедиях прошлого необходима всему российскому обществу. И не только российскому: память о государственном терроре объединяет все бывшие советские республики.

Разумеется, мы будем опротестовывать решение Верховного суда РФ всеми доступными нам путями. И мы найдем законные способы продолжать нашу работу. Мемориал – это не организация, это даже не общественное движение. Мемориал – это потребность граждан России в правде о ее трагическом прошлом, о судьбах многих миллионов людей. И «ликвидировать» эту потребность ни у кого не получится.

Москва, 28 декабря 2021 года
Международный Мемориал

Protesters have entered city akimat of Almaty https://t.co/3f90UNUFUQ pic.twitter.com/xEqUjz6xdj

— Liveuamap (@Liveuamap) January 5, 2022

The Russia Pundit Problem | Postsocialism

This post was provoked by the rash of new and reheated Russia takes getting a lot of visibility on Twitter recently because of the escalation threat in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. I also got a little ‘triggered’ by Kevin Rothrock’s* ‘head-to-head’ voting competition between Russia experts – also on Twitter. In fact, the whole ‘expert’ thing is weird in the first place. What does it actually mean? There are millions of Russia experts. In Russia, they’re called Russians… We’ve basically just accepted that expert is someone who mediates second-hand sources to buttress their own opinion and usually reinforce preconceived opinions that serve the powerful.


So what’s my beef? It’s twofold: there’s the usual problem of social media grifters. Since Trump and Russiagate they are like mushrooms in an endless late Russian summer – they just keep coming. What’s a grifter? A self-appointed expert who is a fraud; we could even call them ‘hack frauds’ as many are adjacent to a media outlet or think-tank that churns policy and opinion pieces.


The second problem is that Russia coverage on Twitter is dominated by Washington DC policy types who may not be frauds* (although some of them are), but who often have a very narrow, and second-hand, knowledge of Russia the country, and Russia the diverse population, as opposed to Russia the foreign policy problem. I’ve written about ‘imperial’ hierarchies of knowledge production before here. Another issue was the extreme Anglo/US-centric focus of Rothrock’s list. (The finalists of his list were defence and crime/security/military scholars; you couldn’t get a more depressing picture of how Russia is framed).


You can see where I’m going here – I’m making a claim for ‘in-country’ knowledge, and depth and breadth of engagement. For some reason, some people don’t even understand this argument.


In case you think I’m talking exclusively about non-Russians, I’m not. These issues pertain just as much to ‘natives’. There are plenty of Russian Russia experts who have long had a comfortable DC or US media gig and who have a weak direct grasp on events. Just as much as others, they are vulnerable to bad takes due to the secondary, or belated sources of their analysis.


Another hobbyhorse of mine is the extreme self-selection and self-reproduction of this group: in the main they are privileged Russian liberals who are often the last people to ask about the diversity of Russia itself. Think for a moment about who can and who can’t up-sticks and move to the US, regardless of the level of repression in Russia. Think also for a moment about the clustering of political viewpoints that this results in (something I implied in my piece about Navalny-love in 2021)


But that’s not the end of it, the same DC types and ‘expat’ Russians often read the same set of narrow sources and have the same contacts. So not only does their shared relative wealth and class position lead to blobism, but also their lack of interest in exploring other sources or coverage adds to that as well.


Some of these people have spent the majority of their adult life outside Russia, or only visiting Moscow/St Pete. There’s two ‘syndromes’ we could coin: the ‘Marriott-International Russia expert’ (folks who get uncomfortable leaving their hotel in Moscow – yes, I know them); and the ‘not-outside-the-ring road’ native Russian experts who disdain and are often even fearful and incredulous of non-Metropolitan Russia (yes I know them too).


Aside: who do you think is most incredulous about my research and work? Yes, that’s right, it’s privileged Russians. And by incredulous, I mean, they regularly say things like ‘how can you spend so much time outside Moscow?’ ‘What food do you eat?’ ‘How can you talk to ordinary people?’


As this post is already a rant I want to shift the focus. A third thing that prompted me to write this post was that a few people got in touch to say how recent events not only pertaining to Russia express something alarming about how editors and publishers value expertise. They also said things like: ‘I’d love to call out so-and-so, but I need a job in the US’, or ‘Yes we know so-and-so is a fraud, but as part of the community ourselves we can’t say so’. The incestuousness of ‘Russian expertise’ is another problem that as often prevents open debate as stimulates it.


Here’s some of what they said to me and allowed me to report anonymously:

• The shift of so many Russian journalists abroad has actually weakened ‘mainstream’ coverage in English as these experts are unable to adequately filter their own sources back in Russia and they themselves rely on Telegram channels, many of which are not at all reliable. Ex-Lenta editors have been in Riga for 8 years, remember.
  
  
• ‘The worst of Polsci is on Twitter’. There are too many ‘Putin is THE problem’ people there, banging the same drum, year after year. Polsci is partly responsible for the perception that Putin controls the discourse. So stop talking about him, if you don’t like it! People should stop writing books about Putin, but they won’t because they make money. [caveat – there are great polsci people on Twitter like Sam Greene, for example. No, he didn’t contribute to this rant]
  
  
• Detachment from country and embeddedness leads to extremes and tired replication of Cold War Kremlinological approaches. ‘Russia is about to have a revolution because my taxi-driver said so’, or ‘Putin is a puppet-master’ are both outcomes.
  
  
• Presentism (obsession with the news) and the need to be shown to be relevant leads experts to echo conspirological tropes on the one hand, and facile historical analogies on the other (‘Kazakhstan intervention as another 1956’).
  
  
• [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law#:~:text=In economics%2C Gresham's law is,will gradually disappear from circulation.]Gresham’s Law[/url] (bad money drives out good). Particularly with regard to the Blob (DC Foreign policy community). There are great people even at the Atlantic Council, but, to use the example of Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the best people have been crowded out in that space by less informed and highly ideological voices.
  
  
• The obvious paucity of regional coverage in Russia (and on Kazakhstan) as a result of the loss of Area Studies expertise and programmes.
  
  

Why does this matter? Because increasingly ‘experts’, particularly on Twitter, drive media coverage. If they are narrowly wonkish, and narrowly blobby (the DC academic and think-tank community) this only hurts societies’ understanding of Russia. The real tragedy of the ‘Russia discourse’ online is that so many got caught up in the idea that ‘understanding’ a country involves just understanding foreign policy and kremlinology and that ‘understanding’ anything else is seen as secondary.

Russia Issues Subtle Threats More Far-Reaching Than a Ukraine Invasion

If the West fails to meet its security demands, Moscow could take measures like placing nuclear missiles close to the U.S. coastline, Russian officials have hinted.


By Anton Troianovski and David E. Sanger
Jan. 16, 2022
Updated 9:48 a.m. ET

VIENNA — No one expected much progress from this past week’s diplomatic marathon to defuse the security crisis Russia has ignited in Eastern Europe by surrounding Ukraine on three sides with 100,000 troops and then, by the White House’s accounting, sending in saboteurs to create a pretext for invasion.

But as the Biden administration and NATO conduct tabletop simulations about how the next few months could unfold, they are increasingly wary of another set of options for President Vladimir V. Putin, steps that are more far-reaching than simply rolling his troops and armor over Ukraine’s border.

Mr. Putin wants to extend Russia’s sphere of influence to Eastern Europe and secure written commitments that NATO will never again enlarge. If he is frustrated in reaching that goal, some of his aides suggested on the sidelines of the negotiations last week, then he would pursue Russia’s security interests with results that would be felt acutely in Europe and the United States.

There were hints, never quite spelled out, that nuclear weapons could be shifted to places — perhaps not far from the United States coastline — that would reduce warning times after a launch to as little as five minutes, potentially igniting a confrontation with echoes of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

“A hypothetical Russian invasion of Ukraine would not undermine the security of the United States,” said Dmitry Suslov, an analyst in Moscow who gave a closed-door presentation on the standoff to Russian lawmakers last month. “The overall logic of Russian actions is that it is the U.S. and NATO that must pay a high price.”

And as Ukrainians were reminded anew on Friday, as the websites of the country’s ministries were defaced in a somewhat amateurish attack, Russia’s army of hackers can wreak havoc in Ukraine, but also in power grids from Munich to Michigan.

It could all be bluster, part of a Kremlin campaign of intimidation, and a way of reminding President Biden that while he wants to focus American attention on competing and dealing with China, Mr. Putin is still capable of causing enormous disruption.

The Russian leader telegraphed that approach himself by warning repeatedly in the past year that if the West crossed the ever-shifting “red line” that, in Mr. Putin’s mind, threatens Russia’s security, he would order an unexpected response.

“Russia’s response will be asymmetrical, fast and tough,” Mr. Putin said last April, referring to the kinds of unconventional military action that Russia could take if adversaries threatened “our fundamental security interests.”

The current crisis was touched off by the Kremlin’s release of a series of demands that, if the U.S. and its allies agreed, would effectively restore Russia’s sphere of influence close to Soviet-era lines, before NATO expanded into Eastern Europe. It has also demanded that all U.S. nuclear weapons be withdrawn from Europe, saying it felt threatened by their presence — though the types and locations of those weapons haven’t changed in years. And it wants a stop to all Western troop rotations through former Warsaw Pact states that have since joined NATO.

It has reinforced those demands, which the U.S. calls “non-starters,” with a troop buildup near Ukraine and repeated warnings it was prepared to use unspecified “military-technical means” to defend what it considers its legitimate security interests.

In response, the Biden administration has issued warnings of financial and technological sanctions if the Kremlin should follow through with its threats, particularly in regard to Ukraine. American officials say that for all the talk about moving nuclear weapons or using asymmetrical attacks, so far the U.S. has seen little evidence.

At a White House briefing on Thursday, Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, declined to be drawn into the question of what kind of Russian action would trigger a U.S. response — whether, for example, the U.S. would respond to a cyberattack the way it would an incursion into Ukrainian territory.

“The United States and our allies are prepared for any contingency, any eventuality,’’ he said. “We’re prepared to keep moving forward down the diplomatic path in good faith, and we’re prepared to respond to fresh acts. And beyond that, all we can do is get ready. And we are ready.”

Of course, the most obvious scenario given the scale of troop movements on the ground is a Russian invasion of Ukraine — maybe not to take over the entire country but to send troops into the breakaway regions around the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, or to roll all the way to the Dnieper River. At the Pentagon, “five or six different options” for the extent of a Russian invasion are being examined, one senior official reported.

Researchers tracking social-media footage have spotted numerous signs of additional Russian military equipment being shipped westward by train from Siberia. In Russia, state television has been filled with commentators’ warnings that Ukraine could soon attack Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine — fitting with Washington’s allegation on Friday that Russian operatives, with specialties in explosives and urban warfare, have infiltrated Ukraine and might be planning to stage a provocation to justify an invasion. Russia denied the allegation.

Yevgeny Buzhinsky, a retired lieutenant general and a regular Russian television commentator, predicted a looming “limited” war provoked by Ukraine that Russia would win in short order through devastating airstrikes.

“There will be no columns of tanks,” General Buzhinsky said in a phone interview. “They will just destroy all the Ukrainian infrastructure from the air, just like you do it.”

In Geneva, Russian diplomats insisted there were no plans to invade Ukraine. But there were hints of other steps. In one little-noticed remark, a senior Russian diplomat said Moscow was prepared to place unspecified weapons systems in unspecified places. That merged with American intelligence assessments that Russia could be considering new nuclear deployments, perhaps tactical nuclear weapons or a powerful emerging arsenal of hypersonic missiles.

In November, Mr. Putin himself suggested Russia could deploy submarine-based hypersonic missiles within close striking distance of Washington. He has said repeatedly that the prospect of Western military expansion in Ukraine poses an unacceptable risk because it could be used to launch a nuclear strike against Moscow with just a few minutes’ warning. Russia, he made clear, could do the same.

“From the beginning of the year we will have in our arsenal a new sea-based missile, a hypersonic one,” Mr. Putin said, referring to a weapon that travels at more than five times the speed of sound and could likely evade existing missile defenses.

In an apparent reference to the American capital, he added: “The flight time to reach those who give the orders will also be five minutes.”

Mr. Putin said he would deploy such missiles only in response to Western moves, and President Biden told Mr. Putin in their last conversation that the United States has no plans to place offensive strike systems in Ukraine.

Russian officials hinted again in recent days about new missile deployments, and American officials repeated that they have seen no moves in that direction. But any effort to place weapons close to American cities would create conditions similar to the 1962 crisis that was the closest the world ever came to a nuclear exchange.

Asked about the nature of what Mr. Putin has termed a possible “military-technical” response, Sergei A. Ryabkov, a deputy foreign minister, said in Geneva on Monday: “Right now there is no reason to talk about what systems will be deployed, in what quantity, and where exactly.”

And when a Russian reporter asked Mr. Ryabkov in an interview broadcast on Thursday whether Russia was considering deploying military infrastructure in Venezuela or Cuba, he responded: “I don’t want to confirm anything or rule anything out.”

Moving missiles, however, is obvious to the world. And that is why, if the conflict escalates further, American officials believe that Mr. Putin could be drawn to cyberattacks — easy to deny, superbly tailored for disruption and amenable to being ramped up or down, depending on the political temperature.

Mr. Putin doesn’t need to do much to insert computer code, or malware, into American infrastructure; the Department of Homeland Security has long warned that the Russians have already placed malware inside many American power grids.

The Biden administration has sought to shore up U.S. systems and root out malware. The nation’s biggest utilities run an elaborate war game every two years, simulating such an attack.

But much of corporate America remains far less protected.

The fear is that if sanctions were imposed on Moscow, Mr. Putin’s response could be to accelerate the kind of Russian based ransomware attacks that hit Colonial Pipeline, a major beef producer, and cities and towns across the country last year.

The F.S.B., Russia’s powerful security service, on Friday announced the arrest of hackers tied to the REvil ransomware group — a gang connected to some of the most damaging attacks against American targets, including Colonial Pipeline. The move was welcomed by the White House, but it was also a signal that Moscow could flip its cyberwarriors on or off at will.


No one knows Putin’s next move, of course — not even his diplomats — and he likes it that way.

“There could be all sorts of possible responses,” Mr. Putin said when asked last month about the “military-technical” response he warned about.

“The Russian leadership is rather inventive,” said Andrey Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research organization close to the Russian government. “It’s not necessarily only about Ukraine.”

Analysts in Moscow believe that beyond a more threatening Russian military posture, the United States would be particularly sensitive to closer military cooperation between Russia and China. Mr. Putin will travel to Beijing on Feb. 4 to attend the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics and hold a summit meeting with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, Russia said on Friday.

The Kremlin has noted that Mr. Biden sees China, not Russia, as America’s most complex, long-term challenger — an economic, military and technological competitor that plays in a different league from Russia. Yet forcing the United States to increase its investment in a confrontation with Russia, analysts say, would undermine Mr. Biden’s greater strategic goal.

“The United States, objectively, does not want to increase its military presence in Europe,” said Mr. Suslov, the analyst. “This would be done at the cost of containing China.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/16/world/europe/russia-ukraine-invasion.html

disident wrote:

The world is perched on the edge of an abyss.

We may soon see the worst combat in Europe since WW2 – killing thousands of people, and raising the likelihood of nuclear war.

It didn't have to be this way. A thread. 1/N pic.twitter.com/jXWmEzsc5b

— Clint Ehrlich (@ClintEhrlich) January 16, 2022

Медведев: в случае запрета операций в долларах Россия воспользуется юанем

While the focus has been on arrests of political opposition, the politics of fear in Russia, as Guzel Yusupova calls it, goes much further, with public space in cities noticeably securitized since at least 2018. Things are better in the sticks where I live, but people still know not to draw too much attention to themselves if they have any reason to watch out for the police. And let’s face it, no one in their right mind wants to interact with the Russian police. However, I don’t want to overemphasise fear. It’s more discomfort, politically cognitive load and dissonance that incrementally increases year after year. It’s not a full-on police state, it’s not a dictatorship and it’s still not a fully-blown authoritarian state, but a Ukraine escalation would be an admission of the failure of the Putin project to sustain itself without resorting to an anachronistic Russian version of the última dictadura cívico militar. To be clear I’m not saying Russia would have a ‘dirty war’ on such a scale, but history can always rhyme: a declaration of emergency enables further and wider repression of any hint of opposition, further sidelining of even potential institutions, the removal from politics and the state of inconvenient fellow travellers that the paranoid elite would like to replace with clients. Under cover of emergency, widespread unpopular economic measures like wage freezes could be undertaken, as in Argentina. For a take on the wider polycrisis of Ukraine-Russia as a political economy story, Nick Trickett wrote this recently: “Arguing about Russia’s preponderance of military power is of the utmost humanitarian importance, but it misses the plain fact that the regime badly blundered if it thinks it can swallow a whale.” 

Nicos Poulantzas wrote about the rise of authoritarian statism in the Western democracies in the 1970s. While direct comparisons to Russia today are as open to criticism as my Argentinian junta ones, I want you to indulge me a moment longer. Poulantzas’ point was that crisis tends towards forms of state authoritarianism that do not need open repression, but act via the state apparatus in an insidious, creeping way. There is a retreat of the rule of law because of bureaucratic power (or juridical preemptive policing ‘with the law and against the law’), but this is not fascism, there is no ‘break’ and Poulantzas writes in opposition to Foucauldian version of power effects. Further, these forms of authoritarian statism see the executive as much as hostage (to conflicting interests among the elite) as arbiter.

While writing mainly about the French Fifth Republic, Poulantzas has some sobering observations about executives that attempt a monopolistic ‘super apparatus’ with Bonapartist pretensions. Homogenization of the state tends to backfire, as do shifts towards plebiscitary manipulation; contradictions between economic interests are exacerbated, indeed, some negative economic processes of consolidation may accelerate; the ‘masses’ are not integrated (partly because politics is replaced by a single party centre*), and pernicious networks like security interests are ‘crystalized’  in a permanent structure in parallel to the official state. Poulantzas, though he died in 1979, was remarkably prescient about the direction of western democracies. My point is that we should be on the one hand more sensitive to Russian foreign policy as a symptom of domestic crisis in Russia, and on the other that Russia is not an ‘exceptional’ (i.e. fascist) state and is subject to the same cyclical tendency to towards crisis in the power bloc.

Bob Jessop has a critical update to Poulantzas and Stuart Hall here that underlies much of my own thinking about how under Putin Russia developed a form of authoritarian neoliberal statism. You can read my open access piece on that topic here. Unlike my argument that Russia is a kind of vanguard neoliberal state Jessop prefers tracing historical neoliberal regime shifts rather than ‘varieties’ or global neoliberal logics. My final point here is that Ukraine has the potential to accelerate conjunctural tendencies in the Russian state at home, as much as influence Ukrainian and European geopolitics.

* hello there, British politics and welcome to the cartel party era!

Cousin Billy wrote:Žirinovski na respiratoru

Лидер ЛДПР Владимир Жириновский, госпитализированный с COVID-19 в центральную клиническую больницу, не узнает окружающих. Об этом со ссылкой на источники пишет URA.RU в своем Telegram-канале.