Protest and dissent in Putin’s Russia

In Russia, the Fight Is Alive by Ilya Matveev for Jacobin.

The best way to retaliate against Russia

Robert Mueller’s latest indictment charges Russian covert agents with conspiring to reveal e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta.

These e-mails reveal embarrassing truthful information about Hillary Clinton’s ties to Wall Street and manipulation of the Democratic Party to thwart the candidacy of Bernie Sanders.

An appropriate way to retaliate is for the U.S. government and the American press to reveal embarrassing true information about Vladimir Putin and his government’s corruption and human rights violations.  It is certainly more focused and less dangerous than economic warfare or escalating a nuclear arms race.

The video above and links below indicate some things Putin doesn’t want discussed.  The video is from 2012.

I don’t think U.S. sanctions and the U.S.-backed military buildup on Russia’s borders will improve anything in Russia.  Rather they will make Russians think they need to rally behind their strong leader.

And if Putin were somehow to be struck by lightning, I don’t think his successor would be any better, either from the standpoint of honest government and human rights or from the standpoint of U.S. interests.

One of my mother’s favorite sayings was, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”   The crimes of other countries’ leaders are not a justification for U.S. militarism and war.  I focus on my own country partly because the United States has more impact on the world, at least for now, than any other country, but mainly because the U.S. government is the one that I as an American citizen am responsible for.

LINKS

Vladimir Putin and Russian Human Rights Violations by David Satter for National Review.

Here are 10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways by David Filipov for The Washington Post.

Alexander Litvinenko: the man who solved his own murder by Luke Harding for The Guardian.

Who Killed Boris Nemtsov? by David Satter for National Review.

Putin and the Panama Papers, an interview with Alexey Navalny for Süddeustsche Zeitung.  An example of leaked information embarrassing to Vladimir Putin.

Central Asian migrants describe injustice, racism in Russia by Arman Kaliyev for Caravanserai

The Unsolved Mystery Behind the Apartment House Bombings That Brought Putin to Power by David Satter for National Review.

Finally We Know About the Moscow Bombings by Amy Knight for the New York Review of Books.

Putin’s Russia is playing defense, not offense

I don’t see Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a threat.  He has been backed into a difficult corner.

Russia’s economy suffers under economic sanctions, the Russian intervention in Syria isn’t going as well as hoped, and the Russian governmental structure is riddled with corruption.

But Russia has a nuclear force second only to the USA.  Russia is the only national in the world with the power to bring about the mutual destruction of itself and the USA.

It is a bad idea to back Vladimir Putin into a corner in which he thinks Russia is threatened, over matters in which the United States has no vital interests.

President Obama says Putin is an aggressor.   If so, he is a highly unsuccessful aggressor.

Russia’s position is much weaker than it was five years ago.  Back then, Russia had good relations with Ukraine and it was integrated into Russia’s economy.  Now the best Putin can hope for is continued Russian occupation of Crimea, a devastated eastern Ukraine friendly to Russia and a hostile western Ukraine.

Comrade capitalism: Putin and the oligarchs

A new hereditary oligarchy of wealth is emerging in Russia.  But it does not consist of the sons and daughters of millionaires and billionaires.  Rather it consists of the sons and daughters of influential officials in the government security apparatus, starting with President Vladimir Putin’s daughter.

They are much like the so-called nomenklatura, the privileged sons and daughters of high-ranking Communist Party officials in the old Soviet Union.

Many of Russia’s millionaires and billionaires got rich by buying up government-owned factories and resources cheap right after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Reportedly when Putin took power, he called in Russia’s richest business people and told them he would not inquire into how they got their wealth—provided they did not oppose his policies.

He meant what he said.  Those who did oppose him have been crushed.  But even those who keep their heads down and their mouths shut do not feel secure.  Many wealthy Russians are investing outside Russia because they don’t think their assets are safe at home.

This is what people in Third World dictatorships do.  It doesn’t speak well for Russia’s future.

LINKS

Comrade Capitalism: Putin’s daughter, a young billionaire and the president’s friends by Stephen Grey, Audrey Kuzmin and Elizabeth Piper for Reuters.  (Hat tip to O).

Remote Control: Can an exiled oligarch persuade Russia that Putin must go? by Julia Ioffe for The New Yorker.  Profile of Mikhail Khodorovsky.

Alexandra Tolstoy interview: “Sergei must have planned his escape.  He didn’t tell me so I didn’t have to lie about it” by Kim Wilsher for The Guardian.  (Hat tip to O).

Half of Russia’s Richest People Are Planning to Cash Out by Alexander Sazanov for Bloomberg News.

 

Russia, the surveillance state

With unlimited warrent-less surveillance and unchecked governmental power, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is an example of what I fear the United States will become.

I was reminded of this by a couple of recent articles I came across this week—two reviews of a book entitled The Red Web (which I haven’t read myself) and an interview with Edward Snowden on the occasion of him receiving a human rights award.

I’m not sure that “red” is the right adjective.  Putin is the heir of the Soviet state but not of the ideology of Communism.  I wouldn’t want to live under his government, but I see my own government becoming more Putin-like.

I don’t think the United States government has helped matters by confronting Russian power close to Russia’s borders.  This could culminate in another global Cold War, but as a pure struggle for power, minus  ideological conflict.   Both nations would suffer.  The best that could be hoped would be the good fortune to once again avoid nuclear catastrophe.

LINKS

The Red Web by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan: review – Russia’s attack on Internet freedoms by Luke Harding for The Guardian.

How Putin Controls the Internet and Popular Opinion in Russia by Masha Gessen for The Intercept.

Edward Snowden attacks Russia rights curbs, would prefer to go home by Agence France-Presse via LiveMint.

Why the United States needs Saudi Arabia

This chart, which I found on Ukraine’s Euromaiden Press web site, indicates how much Russia is suffering from the world decline in oil prices.

But why are oil prices falling?  It is because Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, is committed to pumping oil in large volume instead of shutting back in order to prop up the price.

What gives the Saudis so much leverage is that their production costs are low, and they can make a profit at a lower price than can Russians, Venezuelans or others.

That’s why the U.S. supports Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy, and why President Obama recently reassured King Salman that the U.S. will continue its cold war against Iran despite the agreement with Iran over sanctions and nuclear facilities inspections.

My question is whether it is in the U.S. interest to wage cold war against either Iran or Russia.  There is no moral issue here.  The Iranian and Russian regimes are bad enough, but everything bad you can truthfully say about them goes double or triple or maybe 10 times for Saudi Arabia.

Can Russia diversify away from oil and gas?

Russia is a land rich in natural resources and human talent.  It has been an industrial nation for more than a century.  Why hasn’t it developed a world-class manufacturing industry in anything but armaments?  If it had, Russia would not be jeopardized by falling oil prices.

One explanation is that Russia has been held back by world trade treaties, which restrict Moscow’s right to subsidize its infant industries—even though that has been the method by which every new industrial nation, except Great Britain, which was the first, has made up the head start of the older industrial nations.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the young United States was cut off from trade with Europe, which New England manufacturers used as an opportunity to develop our domestic manufacturing industry.

Another is that the Russian economy is controlled by a corrupt financial oligarchy, which is interested only in extracting profit for themselves and not in building for the future.   Probably the truth lies somewhere in between.

I don’t think that having a strong oil industry in itself is a curse that prevents development of  manufacturing.

The United States was a leading oil producer and exporter in the first half of the 20th century, and Americans leveraged that advantage to develop an mass-produced auto industry, a chemical industry and other industries based on cheap and plentiful oil.

To the extent that Russia is shackled by the international economic system, the current crisis represents an opportunity to break free of that system.

To the extent that Russia’s problem is its own dysfunctional political and economic system, it means the country must either reform or become a satellite of China or the West.   Or, in the worst case, Russia could become a Ukraine writ large, a prize for other, more powerful states to fight over.

∞∞∞

Plummeting Oil Prices Could Bring Radical Change to Russia.  What Comes Next? by David M. Kotz for The Nation.  [Hat tip to Bill Harvey]

There are no good guys in the Ukraine conflict

My e-mail pen pal Bill Harvey sent me links to a couple of articles with good information about U.S. policy in Ukraine and the folly of the U.S. covert war, economic war and military confrontation against Russia.  But, by omission, they imply an overly favorable impression of Vladimir Putin and Putin’s Russia.

The Russian Federation is dominated by a corrupt financial oligarchy, as was Ukraine before last year’s overthrow.   The original Maidan protests were a thoroughly justified movement representing a broad base of Ukrainian society and including ethnic Tatars, Jews and other minorities as well as ethnic Ukrainians and Russians.

The government in Moscow is as chauvinistic as the government in Kiev and neither has the best interests of the Ukrainian people at heart.

Pro-Russian bloggers such as Dmitry Orlov inadvertently illustrate Russian chauvinism when they say on the one hand that Ukrainians are no different from Russians, and, at the same time, dismiss Ukrainians as an inferior people with no culture worthy of respect.  Ukrainians have good reason to want to be free of Russian domination.

I oppose President Obama’s risky confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, and hope for compromise peace—but I don’t see President Putin as a liberator.  Quite the contrary.

∞∞∞

Obama Says He Is Improving the World by Eric Zuesse for RINF Alternative News.  (Bill Harvey)

U.S. National Public Radio Propagandizes Against Putin, for Regime Change in Russia by Eric Zuesse for RINF Alternative News.  (Bill Harvey)

Don’t back Russia into a desperate corner

It is a grave mistake to put President Vladimir Putin or the leader of any nation with nuclear weapons into a situation in which they think they have nothing to lose.

I wrote a post Wednesday on the danger of nuclear war with Russia.  Pepe Escobar pointed out that Russia has other means of Mutually Assured Destruction.

One would be to default on Russia’s debts, or even suspend payment on the debts, pending the end of the current emergency.  This would threaten major banks in Western Europe that have extended credit to Russia.

Another would be to cut off gas exports to Ukraine and the countries of the European Union.

Either of these things would hurt Russia as much as it hurts Russia’s enemies.  Russia needs credit, and Russia needs foreign markets.

But if the country has been brought to the brink of collapse anyway, then its leaders have nothing left to lose by striking back.

Putinization in Russia and the USA

Putinization is a word I first came across when I read an interview of Julian Assange in 2011. It means a society that is in the process of having a market economy and a democratic government taken over by patronage networks—people in positions of power doing favors for the less powerful, the less powerful being loyal to the powerful patrons.

I think Vladimir Putin is a statesman Machiavelli or Bismarck would have respected—a realist, not a moralist.   I think what he said about international law in his Valdai speech is true and important, and, as an American, I find it humiliating that a former KGB official is in a position to lecture my country’s leders on international norms of conduct.

But I don’t think Putin is a good person, I don’t think Putin’s Russia is a good place.  My great fear for my country is Putinization, as characterized by Julian Assange below.

When I was in Russia in the 1990s, I used to watch NTV in Moscow. NTV was the freest TV I have ever seen. … At that time, Russia had something like 10 independent points of power.  It had the army.  It had the remnants of the KGB and the external KGB, which ended up becoming the SVR.  It had Yeltsin and his daughter, and the mob.  It had some broader mish-mash of bureaucracy left over from the Soviet Union.  It had seven oligarchs.

In terms of media control, that meant the state plus the oligarchs with their own independent media.  The result was, you could actually put out almost anything you wanted under the patronage or protection of one of these groups.…

[Then] Putin came in.  He tamed the oligarchs.  Some were arrested, some had their assets seized, and some were exiled. The result was, they fell in under Putin’s centralized patronage pyramid.  The ownership of the TV stations also reined [in] popular democracy under Putin’s pyramid.  Now, in order to get anything of scale done in Russia, you have to have a sponsor in the pyramid somewhere.