The Real Russia. Today. Saving ‘The New Times’; defense industry construction workers betrayed in Kamchatka; and the West's failed Russia sanctions

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

This day in history. On November 13, 2000, Vladimir Putin proposed drastic cuts to U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals beyond the 1,500-warhead limits that were later adopted with the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 2010.

• Five reasons why Russians just donated 25.4 million rubles to save an independent news magazine
• Dozens of construction workers at a Russian military installation outside Kamchatka have been threatened and marooned without pay
• Batenka.ru reports from Ingushetia about why locals care so much about losing territory to Chechnya
• Political scientist Alexander Kynev on how regional ‘self-respect’ fuels Russia's gubernatorial upsets
• ‘Sova’ director Alexander Verkhovsky looks at compromises on policing online extremism
• The Financial Times says Western sanctions against Russia have failed to isolate Moscow
• Russia says it will consider boycotting the upcoming World Economic Forum meeting in Davos
• Political scientist Lilia Shevtsova says Russian businessmen expelled from the West are headed home, where they're still vulnerable
• Supposed ‘troll factory’ founder and mercenary kingpin attends talks between Russia's defense minister and the head of the Libyan National Army
• Ryan Gosling's fans in Siberia take him on a birthday tour of their city

Five reason to rescue ⛑️

On October 26, Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court imposed a fine of 22.3 million rubles ($329,150) on The New Times for late paperwork (plus an additional 30,000 rubles, or $490, on chief editor Yevgenia Albats), after the magazine didn’t report its foreign funding to Russia’s media regulator on time. Editors at The New Times say the fine — the biggest in the history of Russian media regulation — is politically motivated, and lawyers for the outlet will challenge the ruling in appellate court on November 20. The magazine also announced a crowdfunding initiative to raise the money needed to pay the fine. Four days later, at 8:31 a.m. EST, Albats announced that supporters had donated 25,443,090 rubles ($376,293). Meduza recalls the stories over the years that made The New Times one of Russia’s top independent news outlets.

• Russian political parties were financed with cash from the presidential administration
• Pro-Kremlin youth groups had combat units
• Moscow riot police protected mobsters and participated in illegal business seizures
• The structure of payments and kickbacks inside Vladimir Putin’s inner circle 
• The skinny on Vladimir Putin’s older daughter

Read Meduza's full report here.

Say thank you and shut up 👷

Dozens of construction workers came to the closed town of Vilyuchinsk to build military facilities. Now they aren’t being paid, and they’re not allowed to leave. This isn’t the first time workers in Vilyuchinsk have complained about wage arrears. Russia previously abolished its entire Federal Special Construction Agency because of corruption in the construction of naval installations. Workers in Vilyuchinsk have gone on strike. Employers are referring them to the Federal Special Construction Agency and threatening staff. One of the contractors in Vilyuchinsk is Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s old ski instructor. Russia’s Defense Ministry ordered the construction.

Read the full story here: “Dozens of construction workers at a Russian military installation outside Kamchatka have been threatened and marooned without pay”

Why the Ingush care ✊

In a long report for Batenka.ru, journalist and North Caucasus specialist Vladimir Sevrinovsky writes about the protests last month in Ingushetia against a controversial agreement to hand over almost one tenth of the republic’s territory to Chechnya, which has already begun developing the land. The protests, Sevrinovsky says, were packed with contradictions: they were simultaneously both peaceful and militant, oppositionist and loyal. Despite Ingushetia’s deeply traditional grasp of women in society, women played prominent, sometimes aggressive roles in the protests. Ingush opponents of the border agreement also managed to bridge much of the divide between Sufis and Salafis, despite the latter’s general aversion to street demonstrations.

Sevrinovsky says the dispute over lands in the Sunzhensky District is so heated in large part because of bloodshed in the early 1990s over Prigorodny District, an arable region on the other side of Ingushetia, which the republic lost to North Ossetia during the Soviet deportations in 1944. According to Sevrinovsky, some protesters in Ingushetia see today’s decision to cede territory to Chechnya as a catastrophe similar to the Second World War, when “national borders were also violated.”

Sevrinovsky also visited Dattykh, a settlement on the Fortanga River, inside the territory that Chechnya now claims. In 2015, a bombing knocked out the area’s access to heating oil, and security troops blocked all the roads into the village for two months, last winter. (When residents finally returned home to take part in Russia’s presidential election, they handed Vladimir Putin 90 percent of their votes.)

While Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov appears to be getting everything he wants in this conflict, Sevrinovsky says he overplayed his hand when he sent Chechen Parliament head Magomed Daudov to demand that Akhmed Barakhoev stand trial in Sharia court in Chechnya. (Barakhoev said he would gladly face judgement — in Ingushetia — and Kadyrov’s next motorcade visit ended in tea and mutual apologies.) Sevrinovsky says he thinks this will be Kadyrov’s last motorcade visit to Ingushetia for the time being.

No respect 😒

In an op-ed for Republic, political scientist Alexander Kynev says the special element that energized some gubernatorial races and swept in nominally oppositionist candidates was the “personalization” of alternative viewpoints. This process, Kynev says, is the catalyst for transforming “technical candidates” (politicians selected by the Kremlin to lose) into symbols of regional self-consciousness and self-respect, and it’s what moves elections into “moral, ethical” territory. Kynev says this phenomenon played a role in past Russian elections, as well, citing races in Sergiev Posad, Vladivostok, Evenkia, Krasnodar, and the Amur region.

When self-respect is at stake, there’s a chance voters will elect a dangerously unprepared or truly odious person, in order to assert their dignity. Until the Kremlin simply starts letting voters elect their leaders freely, Kynev argues, the authorities need a lesson in respecting their own citizens, to avoid these toxic situations and the risks they present.

Fighting for a compromise on policing the internets 🚨

In an op-ed for Republic, “Sova” Information and Analytical Center director Alexander Verkhovsky argues that online social media networks are now duking out anti-extremism policy with three distinct groups: (1) advocates of maximum state control, (2) free speech devotees defending complete Internet freedom, and (3) anti-racist activists and opponents of “all other established evils.” All of these groups, Verkhovsky says, are “maximalists hoping to impose their ideas of the norm on reality,” though nobody can actually win this dispute, he says. According to Verkhovsky, all groups are currently unhappy with social networks’ present self-regulation (groups one and three think not enough content is filtered, and group two believes there’s too much censorship).

Meanwhile, social networks face escalating demands from national governments (in Germany and Russia, for example). Verkhovsky says the current regulatory pressure from different countries taxes networks’ resources and challenges their commitment to free speech, and could either end global Internet services as we know them today, or it could prove ineffective, further boosting “public demand for content regulation” that would only fuel more aggressive efforts to crack down on “extremism.”

Verkhovsky’s compromise is greater self-regulation in the industry, inspired in Europe by the EU’s “Framework Decision” in 2008 “on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law.” This code of conduct, he says, is broad enough to accommodate users globally (while hopefully satisfying national demands), and narrow enough to preserve the principle of free speech online as we’ve come to know and appreciate it today.

Russia's elusive isolation

🤥 Dream on, the West

In a report for The Financial Times, journalist Henry Foy argues that “reality has not matched rhetoric,” when it comes to Western sanctions designed to isolate Russia. “[I]f the measures were designed to make Moscow an international pariah, friendless and toxic, they are falling short of achieving their goal,” Foy writes, saying that Russia has been expanding its influence in the Middle East, India, and China “at a time of American hesitation.”

Additionally, Moscow has continued to draw more foreign direct investment from European corporations and continued demand for Russia’s oil and gas exports. Western officials blame the sanctions’ shortcomings on “staggered implementation,” the rebounding value of oil since 2016, and countries’ lack of resolve to follow through with measures that might damage their own companies. “All the activity suggests that for company executives, Russia is too large and lucrative to let politics get in the way,” Foy writes.

😤 How dare you nay-say, good sir

On Twitter, economist Anders Åslund took issue with the article in The Financial Times, calling it “shockingly one-sided and incorrect,” and accusing Foy of citing only “pro-Putin sources.” Åslund also pointed out that Russia’s real GDP has been stagnant since 2009 — an observation Bear Market Brief chief editor Nick Trickett called “own-goaling,” because it bolsters speculation that Western sanctions aren’t responsible for slowing down the Russian economy. (Trickett did add, however, that he believes the sanctions “are having an effect.”)

⛔ Brace yourself for the boycott

“Russia says it will consider boycotting the upcoming World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, if Russian tycoons are kept out of the prestigious gathering,” reports RFE/RL. Read about Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s response to the blacklisting of several Russian billionaires (including Oleg Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg) here.

🍬 Oh, sweet irony

In a new Facebook post, political scientist Lilia Shevtsova argues that the isolation of Russian business elites in the West will force these individuals to repatriate where they will embrace “totalitarianism, not democracy,” as a form of self-preservation. Western policymakers hoping to squeeze Russian oligarchs into turning on Putin will be disappointed, Shevtsova says. This is ironic, moreover, because Russia’s “oligarch-appointees” and “bureaucrat-oligarchs” are just as despised and vulnerable at home as in the West today, she argues. “They’re still under the authorities’ protection,” Shevtsova says, “but at any moment they could be thrown to the crowd inside the Russian Coliseum.”

Let's do lunch 🥪

Billionaire Evgeny Prigozhin attended talks between Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the head of the Libyan National Army, in Moscow on November 7, according to video footage published on the Libyan military’s official YouTube channel. The newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which has recently published two revelatory articles about Prigozhin, was the first to notice the catering tycoon’s presence at the negotiations.

Shoigu and Haftar met to discuss security issues in the Middle East and North Africa. Prigozhin’s participation in the talks was not announced in advance. After Novaya Gazeta’s report, a “military-diplomatic” source told the news agency Interfax that Prigozhin “organized an official lunch” during the negotiations, and “participated in a discussion about the visiting Libyan delegation’s cultural program.”

Need a refresher on this Prigozhin guy? Evgeny Prigozhin is a businessman based in St. Petersburg who owns restaurants and several companies that provide catering services to public schools and Russia’s armed forces. U.S. official accuse him of overseeing the Internet Research Agency“troll factory,” which supposedly employed at least a dozen translators, analysts, and office managers who interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, allegedly committing conspiracy to defraud the U.S., conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. Journalists have also linked Prigozhin to the “Wagner” private military

Hey girl 😘

Ryan Gosling turned 38 on November 12. The Tyumen-based news outlet Moi Portal says it wanted to gift the actor something memorable for his birthday. “We decided that the best gift Ryan Gosling could get on his birthday is a stroll through the best city on Earth,” Moi Portal editors told Meduza, referring to Tyumen.

Gosling didn’t make it to the Siberian city, but that didn’t stop Moi Portal from celebrating his special day. Staff got their hands on a plastic cut-out of the actor, and posed the object in front of Tyumen’s many attractions, including the wooden homes on Dzerzhinsky Street, the “Oiler” Community Center, and the Tura River waterfront. To protect “Plastic Gosling” from the city’s subfreezing temperatures, Moi Portal also dressed the cut-out in a fur coat and scarf.

Plastic Gosling’s Tyumen adventure continues on Instagram, where his copy continues to gallivant about town in new posts.