The Real Russia. Today. Outrage about losing Lenin and mocking Muhammad, Putin ponders gay marriage, and Russia learns strategic restraint

Thursday, October 29, 2020

• How a small town in Russia triggered outrage by ditching a few of its Soviet street names
• Barcelona judge investigates Russian links to separatism in Spain
• Putin compares Russia’s attitude towards unconventional monetary policy to its stance on same-sex marriage
• Photo: Protesters rally outside French Embassy in Moscow against cartoons of Islamic prophet
• Opinion and analysis: Frolov on strategic restraint, Titaev and Kuznetsova on prosecutorial harassment, Mozhegov on the UN’s good ol’ days, and Batyuk on U.S.- Russian policy convergence
• News briefs: not-gagged doctors, the Golunov case, naming the dead, closing Belarus, and the 2020 Pushkin House Russian book prize

Feature stories

Goodbye, Lenin

In October 2020, acting at the behest of their district administrator, the city council of Tarusa restored the pre-revolutionary names of several Old Town streets. Proponents of the idea say the measure was necessary for reclaiming the town’s “historical authenticity” and ending the glorification of Bolsheviks and KGB agents, but many residents have been less than thrilled to lose what they consider to be Tarusa’s truly “traditional” street names. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev visited the town (about two hours south of Moscow) to find out how a handful of road signs sparked a political crisis.

Catalonia sings ‘Kalinka’

According to a Barcelona judge leading an investigation into the illegal financing of the Catalan independence referendum that was attempted in 2017, Russia offered military and material assistance to promoters of the region’s secession. This was reported by the Catalan newspaper El Periodico, which cited a court order that led to the arrest of 21 suspected Catalan separatists in Catalonia on October 28. 

Cautiously, but with understanding

At the annual “Russia is Calling” investment forum on Thursday, Vladimir Putin took a question about unconventional monetary policy as an opportunity to comment on why Russia treats same-sex marriages “with some caution.” The president’s speech was broadcast live by the state television channel Rossiya 24. So instead of trying to explain how Putin maneuvered around the original question, we’re sharing a direct translation of what he said. Read it here.

Je suis Muhammad 

Several dozen demonstrators rallied outside of the French Embassy in Moscow on Thursday to protest the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad by the French weekly Charlie Hebdo. According to a RIA Novosti correspondent, the demonstrators shouted “No!” and “Macaron” — distorting the name of French President Emmanuel Macron. After police officers intervened, the protesters organized a series of single-person pickets. Today’s protest took place against the backdrop of the Chechen leadership’s spat with the French president over history teacher Samuel Paty, who was killed by an 18-year-old Chechen man (a Russian national) after giving a lecture on free speech that featured Muhammad cartoons.

Opinion and analysis

🕊️ Russia is learning to cut back on ‘stupid shit’

In an op-ed for Republic, columnist and former diplomat Vladimir Frolov echoes sentiments expressed a day earlier in an article by Carnegie Moscow Center director Dmitri Trenin, arguing that unrest along Russia’s periphery requires new “strategic restraint” akin to Barack Obama’s doctrine of “don’t do stupid shit.” In other words, the Kremlin has begun streamlining its ambitions in its near abroad and reconsidering what it really needs from former Soviet republics.

Frolov says the Kremlin needs to lower the costs of regional leadership by (1) reducing its actions arising from contractual obligations and (2) redirecting spare resources to partners that will subordinate their own sovereignty to Moscow’s geopolitical goals. Relationships with “high-maintenance girlfriends,” like Armenia and Belarus, need to be revisited. When projecting Russian power to other areas around the world, like in Syria, Moscow must realize that it limits its own freedom of action in the post-Soviet space by binding itself to other regional powers, like Turkey. These partnerships, moreover, aren’t as elastic as the Kremlin’s “simulated, controlled escalations” with the West, where direct military confrontation is virtually unthinkable. 

So far, Frolov says, Russia’s new strategic restraint has held up well under the current stress tests in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Nagorno-Karabakh. In Belarus, Moscow has defended its geopolitical position “without risking irreversible steps.” At the same time, the Kremlin is free to reassess the utility of the Union State and the advantage of having Belarus as a forward operating base.

Frolov is particularly critical of Yerevan’s irredentist posturing in the renewed Nagorno-Karabakh War, warning that hostilities have forced Moscow to reconsider the benefits of its defense pact with Armenia, where its military base in Gyumri could become a “tripwire” that drags Russia into the war (the base is really only valuable as an “observation post,” he says). Frolov dismisses the idea that superficial cultural similarities should determine Moscow’s foreign policy, arguing that relations with Baku matter because Azerbaijan is a contiguous neighbor bordering the “delicate” regions of Dagestan and the Caspian Sea. Both Yerevan and Baku have complicated Russian rhetoric on Ukrainian separatism, interpreting self-determination too liberally (Armenia) or rejecting it too absolutely (Azerbaijan) in Karabakh.

Though he cautions that Turkey’s expanded military cooperation with Ukraine or the spread of political Islam and pan-Turkism could endanger Moscow’s relationship with Ankara, Frolov says the two states have become too “symbiotic” to each other’s foreign policy goals to make a shooting war likely. In Nagorno-Karabakh, in the face of Armenian decline, Azerbaijani resolve, and winter’s onset, Russian-Turkish cooperation will be necessary to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. 

👮 Prosecutorial supervision is a systemic problem in Russia, not a sometime thing

In an op-ed for VTimes, European University at St. Petersburg scholars Kirill Titaev and Darya Kuznetsova say a recent (quickly disavowed) effort by a branch of Moscow’s District Attorney to force an audit of political activity by students and faculty at RANKhiGS (the [deep breath] Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation) wasn’t a policing aberration but a demonstration of how invasive state prosecutors often are in Russia. “General supervision” empowers district attorneys to cripple whole institutions with paperwork requirements, even in industries where prosecutors have no clue what is happening. More importantly, Russian laws are enforced so broadly that virtually anything can trigger or justify a prosecutorial inquiry. To end this pressure on Russian organizations and bring sanity to regulatory oversight, say Titaev and Kuznetsova, “general supervision” needs to be curtailed big time.

🕊️ What we need is a good, cold war

In an op-ed for Vzglyad, columnist Vladimir Mozhegov strolls down memory lane on the 75th anniversary of the United Nations Charter entering force, arguing that the organization is weaker now than ever before. Donald Trump “publicly wipes his feet on the UN,” but Mozhegov doesn’t blame the U.S. president for the “global elite” transforming the United Nations into an “obedient toy” that perpetuates an agenda focused on “climate change, feminism, LGBT issues, and endless calls for appeasement” (all priorities that Mozhegov clearly rejects).

Even in the UN’s early days, however, it wasn’t all roses. Mozhegov recalls American financier Bernard Baruch’s insidious scheme to regulate atomic energy internationally and decommission all nuclear weapons through the UNAEC. The Baruch Plan, of course, was an attempt to impose world government and lock the planet in a “concentration camp.” Luckily for humanity, the USSR soon developed its own nukes, which led to what Mozhegov believes was the UN’s golden age: the Cold War. In fact, should the world find itself caught in another such confrontation, the United Nations might matter again.

🥂 Birds of a feather

In an op-ed for Kommersant, Vladimir Batyuk (who heads the Department for Military-Political Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies) argues that the South Caucasus is one of the few exceptions in the U.S.-Russian rivalry where both states have roughly the same foreign policy aims. When it comes to negotiations over the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, Mike Pompeo and Sergey Lavrov are nearly interchangeable in their insistence on a diplomatic solution, says Batyuk, recalling the consensus America and the USSR managed to reach during the Cold War on nuclear nonproliferation and the refusal to pay equatorial African nations for satellites in equatorial orbit. He doesn’t offer any other examples, but — hey — these are the exceptions, not the rule.

Other news in brief

• 🤐 Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes? Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says recent federal orders requiring major healthcare institutions to coordinate all public comments about the coronavirus through the Health Ministry’s press service are not a gag order.
• ⚖️ The public gets a seat. The Moscow City Court will hold an open trial of the former police officers accused of staging Meduza correspondent Ivan Golunov’s false arrest last summer. The hearings should begin on November 11.
• 🕯️ Now a virtual affair. Moscow’s “Returning the Names” commemoration is taking place online this year. Participants traditionally read aloud the names, execution dates, and other biographical information about Terror victims.
• 🛂 Pool’s closed. Belarus has shut down entry through its land borders with Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. The decision was not announced in advance. Departures from Belarus, meanwhile, remain uninhibited.
• 🏆 And the winner is… “The Return of the Russian Leviathan” by Sergei Medvedev has claimed the 2020 Pushkin House Russian book prize, which honors English-language nonfiction about the Russian-speaking world.

💥 This day in history: 65 years ago today, on October 29, 1955, the Soviet battleship “Novorossiysk” (originally a dreadnought battleship named “Giulio Cesare,” built for the Royal Italian Navy) struck a WWII German mine in the harbor at Sevastopol and capsized, resulting in the deaths of 608 men.