The rise of Vladimir Putin

PUTIN by Philip Short (2022)

Vladimir Putin is, in my opinion, the most impressive and significant statesman of our age—impressive in his ability, and significant in his impact on the world. 

That does not mean I find him admirable.  He is an autocrat and personally corrupt.   He fits the Machiavellian ideal, and I do not mean this as a slur.

When Putin came to power, Russia was falling apart.  A group of oligarchs called the Seven Bankers dominated Russia’s economy.  The mass of Russians were even poorer than they had been under Communism.  The death rate exceeded the birth rate.  

Under Putin, the Russian economy has been transformed.  The government is solvent.  Foreign debt has been paid, and foreign ownership of important Russia assets has been pushed back.  Demographic decline has been reversed.  Russia has re-emerged as an economic power and a military power to be reckoned with.

Not all these things are because of things Putin did himself, but the leader of a country deserves credit (and blame) for things they allow to happen as well as things they make happen.

In order to understand Russia’s rise, I looked for good biography of Putin.  Philip Short’s 676-page book is the best I could find.  It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.

Philip Short is a workmanlike British  journalist who has written biographies of Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and François Mitterrand.  

He is not a Russia expert and doesn’t. have inside information.  Much of Putin’s life is a mystery to him.  But he has assembled the important known facts of Putin’s life in granular detail.  

While mostly agreeing with the USA-UK consensus view of events, Short made a good faith effort to understand how things look from Putin’s point of view, which few if any other biographers have done.

I think this is the best that can be expected for now.

Navalny faces 30 more years in prison

Alexei Navalny, the best-known of the critics of Vladimir Putin, is serving a nine-year-sentence on charges of fraud, contempt of court and parole violations.

Now he faces additional charges of terrorism, which, according to his lawyers, could add up to 30 more years to his prison sentence.  He remains defiant.

The Meduza news service reported that Navalny, who is currently serving a nine-year term at the Sixth maximum-security facility in the Vladimir region, says that the Investigative Committee has just opened yet another criminal case against him. He wrote on Twitter:

I’m a criminal mastermind.  Professor Moriarty is smoking jealously in the corner.  You thought I was isolated in prison, but it turns out that I’m actively committing crimes.  It’s a good thing that the Investigative Committee remains vigilant, and misses nothing.

Got an official notice that a new criminal case has been opened in my regard, connected to the fact that, while in prison, I: promoted terrorism and made public calls to extremism; financed extremist activities; rehabilitated Nazism.

The investigators are framing Navalny as a criminal leader responsible for promoting terrorism and extremism by running the Popular Politics YouTube channel.  That channel is, in fact, run by Navalny’s associates.

According to Meduza, the court in February, 2021, found Alexey Navalny guilty of defaming the World War II veteran Ignat Artyomenko, Meduza reported.  Navalny’s prior suspended sentence in the fabricated “Yves Rocher” case, in which he was accused from embezzling from his own organization, was replaced by a real prison term.  Combined with the defamation penalty, this resulted in a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence.

Following the defamation trial, Navalny was charged with contempt of court. Later, the prosecution merged the contempt case with a fraud case initiated in late 2020, Meduza reported. On March 22, 2022, Navalny was sentenced to nine years in a maximum-security penal colony.

He said his lawyers estimated he could now face a cumulative sentence of 30 years, Al Jazeera reported. There was no immediate official confirmation of the new case from Russia’s Investigative Committee.

Navalny, who rose to prominence during mass anti-Putin protests in 2011, built a huge social media operation exposing the corruption of government officials.  He used witty and slickly produced videos that drew huge audiences.

Two of the most noteworthy were two videos about a billion-dollar palace built for Vladimir Putin with public funds.

Navalny was subsequently poisoned on an airplane fight from Tomsk to Moscow in August, 2020.  He was rushed to Germany for treatment.  He and his supporters published a video pinning the blame for the poisoning in the Russian security services.

He then returned to Russia and was promptly arrested.  To me, that was an incredibly brave thing to do.

His supporters continue to produce videos documenting corruption and criticizing the Putin administration.  There is a YouTube site for the videos with English subtitles.  They’re well-done and worth a look.

Anybody who admires Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for what they’ve suffered in order to tell the truth about high-level crimes has to admire Alexei Navalny.  And vice versa.

LINKS

Alexei Navalny YouTube playlist.

Alexei Navalny official biography and Wikipedia biography.

New criminal charges threaten Alexey Navalny with 30 years in prison by Meduza news service.

Alexey Navalny faces  ‘terrorism’ charges; 30 years jail by Al Jazeera

Navalny facing fresh charges and up to 30 years in prison by Deutsche Welle.

Navalny in prison, but his work goes on

Alexei Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) team are among the best investigative reporters of our time.

They have documented the extreme corruption of Russian politicians and oligarchs, which goes beyond anything I would have imagined. The one on Vladimir Putin’s billion-dollar palace, financed through graft, is just one example.

It is no wonder that Putin fears Navalny, and has railroaded him into prison on trumped-up charges.  

Russians are among the poorest people in Europe, the Russian government is among the most corrupt, and the gap between rich and poor is one of the highest of any advanced nation.

There is nothing more potentially explosive that showing the struggling Russian common people the extreme wealth and luxury in which their rulers live.

Of course rankings change year-by-year, and Ukraine also has extremes of poverty, corruption and inequality.  The point is that such conditions may become intolerable when Russians are asked to make more sacrifices for the sake of winning a war of choice led by their government.

Navalny started the FBK in 2011.  In 2013, he was indicted and convicted of embezzlement from his own foundation and given a suspended sentence.  Most human rights organizations regard the changes as bogus.

In 2020, he was poisoned and received treatment in Germany.  The FBK produced a documentary showing the Russian government was behind the poisoning.  He returned to Russia in January, 2021, and was arrested for parole violation.  He was tried in March on additional charges of embezzlement and sentenced to nine years in prison.  He is appealing that sentence.

Meanwhile the FBK had been shut down and some of its workers arrested on charges of extremism.  But it is continuing to produce videos, most of them with English subtitles, evidently from outside Russia.  The independent Meduza news service has relocated to Latvia and The Moscow Times to the Netherlands.

I worked on newspapers for 24 years, and I especially enjoy FBK videos as great examples of investigative reporting—the ingenuity with which the investigators track down the facts, their professionalism in document the facts, and the clarity and wit with which they present the facts.

In Russia, too, truth-telling can be a crime

] Historian Yuri Dmitriev at work (2008)

Oliver Rolin, writing in the New York Review of Books, told about  the Russian historian, Yuri Dmitriev and his effort to identify the remains of persons killed and thrown into mass graves during the Stalin era.

He told me how he had found his vocation as a researcher—a word that can be understood in several senses: in archives, but also on the ground, in the cemetery-forests of Karelia.

In 1989, he told me, a mechanical digger had unearthed some bones by chance.  Since no one, no authority, was prepared to take on the task of burying with dignity those remains, which he recognized as being of the victims of what is known there as “the repression” (repressia), he undertook to do so himself.  Dmitriev’s father had then revealed to him that his own father, Yuri’s grandfather, had been shot in 1938.

“Then,” Dmitriev told me, “I wanted to find out about the fate of those people.”  After several years’ digging in the FSB archive, he published The Karelian Lists of Remembrance in 2002, which, at the time, contained notes on 15,000 victims of the Terror.

“I was not allowed to photocopy.  I brought a dictaphone to record the names and then I wrote them out at home,” he said. “For four or five years, I went to bed with one word in my head: rastrelian—shot.  Then, I and two fellow researchers from the Memorial association, Irina Flighe and Veniamin Ioffe (and my dog Witch), discovered the Sandarmokh mass burial ground: hundreds of graves in the forest near Medvejegorsk, more than 7,000 so-called enemies of the people killed there with a bullet through the base of the skull at the end of the 1930s.”

Germans have bravely faced up to facts of the Nazi era, and we Americans are starting to face up to our history of slavery and repression of black people and our ethnic cleansing and dispossession of indigenous peoples. 

But Vladimir Putin’s Russia is not willing to face up to the truth about the Stalin terror.  The state’s response was to reailroad Dmitriev on trumped-up charges of sexually abusing his adopted daughter.

Not content to persecute and dishonor the man who discovered Sandarmokh, the Russian authorities are now trying to repeat the same lie the Soviet authorities told about Katyn, the forest in Poland where NKVD troops executed some 22,000 Poles, virtually the country’s entire officer corps and intelligentsia—an atrocity that for decades they blamed on the Nazis. 

Stalin’s heirs today claim that the dead lying there in Karelia were not victims of the Terror but Soviet prisoners of war executed during the Finnish occupation of the region at the beginning of World War II.  Historical revisionism, under Putin, knows no bounds.

LINKS

Yuri Dmitriev: Historian of Stalin’s Gulag, Victim of Putin’s Repression by Olivier Rolin for The New York Review of Books.

The Dmitriev Affair: The Life’s Work and Trials of Yuri Dmitriev.

Russian court extends prison sentence for historian of Stalinist terror to 13 years by Clara Weiss for the World Socialist Web Site [Added 10/26/2020]

Racism and immigration in today’s Russia

Sweeping attacks on migrant workers in Russia amid COVID-19 pandemic by Andrea Peters for the World Socialist Web Site.

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.

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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.

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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.