The Real Russia. Today. Navalny returns to court

Tuesday, February 15, 2022

• Navalny back in court (with years more in prison at stake)
• The Ukraine crisis: considering recognition for DNR/LNR, a withdrawal (maybe), (opinion) Sergey Poletaev says Russia has unprecedented options, (opinion) Ivan Preobrazhensky eulogizes pacifism, and (opinion) Peter Rutland says we shouldn’t dismiss the veterans’ letters
• Culture: (interview) Alexei Miller weighs reductions to Eurocentrism in history classes

⚖️ Here’s why Alexey Navalny is back in court and facing up to 15 more years behind bars (4-min read)

Russia’s latest criminal trial of jailed Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny got underway on Tuesday, February 15. Already serving a nearly three-year prison sentence, Navalny now stands accused of fraud and contempt of court — charges that could prolong his incarceration by up to 15 years. In a strange twist, Moscow’s Lefortovsky District Court held Tuesday’s hearing offsite, at the penal colony in the Vladimir region where Navalny has been in custody since February 2021. In the following explainer, Meduza asks and answers key questions about the proceedings.

The Ukraine crisis

🌐 Russian State Duma backs resolution calling for recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk ‘people’s republics’ (later in the day, President Putin said his administration remains committed to the “not fully realized opportunities for the implementation of the Minsk agreements”)

👋 Russia announces withdrawal of some troops from Ukraine border after military drills (the announcement led to an immediate jump in the ruble and stock prices)

🕊️ (Opinion) Without nukes or Communism, Russia finally has a chance to avoid another doomed empire

In an essay for Russia in Global Affairs, Vatfor political center founder Sergey Poletaev argues that Moscow has an unprecedented level of freedom today to act internationally, thanks to its nuclear deterrent and the absence of any rigid ideology restraining the Kremlin. Poletaev also says Russia is in no position now to grow its influence or empire in Europe. Whenever such expansion weakens rather than strengthens a nation, he says, the empire will collapse under its own weight.

At the same time, recent experience in Syria, Afghanistan, and Kazakhstan shows that Russia can act outside its borders without triggering major Western responses. Moscow simply lacks the resources and the need to meddle in Europe, and the effort would only interfere with its own more important domestic agenda.

Elites in the West, says Poletaev, have concluded that containment defeated the USSR and can work again against the Russian Federation. While tensions with Russia are a peripheral concern to the West, revising the results of the Cold War remain inconceivable. The crisis has played out largely in information flows, where Poletaev says propaganda on both sides has “primitivized” perceptions, reducing much to Vladimir Putin as an individual. Inside Russia, the public sees the president as the nation’s lone defender. The West, meanwhile, demonizes Putin, believing that Moscow will retreat as soon as he’s gone.

If Russia backs away from Ukraine and let’s the West manage its many internal problems, it’s possible that the government in Kyiv could become a stable energy-transit partner, years from now, not unlike Poland or Belarus, where “permanent Russophobic escalation” and Alexander Lukashenko’s madman antics generally don’t get in the way of business.

The Kremlin, says Poletaev, should view NATO as an alliance that’s more “political-declarative than military-strategic” and ignore it. Constant confrontation with the West simply isn’t in Russia’s interests. Moscow should shore up its “satellites” in Belarus and the region’s various unrecognized republics, where little mafia states now terrorize the locals, who will eventually become susceptible to Western appeals as Moscow abandons them to warlords. “At the moment, we should be quiet opportunists,” says Poletaev, arguing that Russians must “make time work for us.” With borders protected by nukes and the state free from Communism, the country can finally avoid its costly pursuit of deep borders and a European buffer zone.

☮️ (Opinion) Today’s Russian society will reject pacifism — even when it’s hiding inside the military

In an article for Republic, political analyst Ivan Preobrazhensky says the Kremlin has crushed antiwar activism so thoroughly — equating almost any kind of pacifism with disloyalty and even extremism — that a few disgruntled veterans are all that remain of the antiwar movement. Preobrazhensky says the authorities managed this by (1) offering the public a “strong hand” at the end of the troubled 1990s, (2) using the memory of victory in the Second World War to unify Russia’s stratified society, (3) propagating the notion that Russia needs military strength to expand its economic wellbeing geopolitically, and (4) public resentment about Moscow’s diminished influence after the Cold War.

Preobrazhensky says the Russian public generally views pacifist activism as hostile to the national interests and possibly even instigated by foreign powers (in other words: the Kremlin’s propaganda is effective). He notes the two recent open letters (one written by a retired colonel and the other by a retired colonel-general) condemning Russia’s escalation at the Ukrainian border, arguing that any resistance lurking within the military could be expunged with a “trivial officer purge.”

📮 (Opinion) Don’t dismiss veterans’ grumbling too lightly

In an article for PONARS Eurasia, scholar Peter Rutland warns that Western analysts might be too quick to dismiss signs of unease in the Russian military (specifically, the public letters criticizing escalation at Ukraine’s borders, signed by Colonel Mikhail Khodarenok and Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov). Rutland summarizes the veterans’ arguments (overconfidence in airpower, ignorance about Ukrainian hostility toward Russia, and so on), noting that military expert Alexander Golts describes Ivashov as a man with “deep roots in the establishment” who is perhaps serving as a “vehicle” to express the military elite’s views. If Khodarenok and Ivashov speak for many in uniform, it could even “herald the resurgence of a ‘red brown’ alliance of radical nationalists and the Communist Party.”

Culture

🧑‍🏫 (Interview) Ditching Eurocentrism for different reasons than the West itself

In an interview with Profil, Alexei Miller — the head of European University at St. Petersburg’s Center for the Study of Cultural Memory and Symbolic Politics — says it’s still too soon to judge a new initiative by the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences to reduce Eurocentrism in history classes. The project will come before the Education Ministry next month, and it will reportedly lean more on multimedia content than Russia’s current history curriculum.

In the West, Miller notes, the trend to deemphasize the study of Europe is related to critical reexaminations of colonialism. He says there are sometimes “excesses” in this process, but something different is happening in Russia, where education officials aren’t likely trying to imitate the West’s “anticolonial pathos.” Russia has other reasons for wanting to downplay Europe in history textbooks. Miller implies that resentment is a major motivation: bitterness about being portrayed for centuries as either “barbarians at the gates” or as Europe’s understudy.

Miller expresses pessimism about a public discussion of the education reform proposal because (1) liberals who are overrepresented in the media will criticize the plan simply because it’s sponsored by the scholar Aleksandr Oganovich, (2) others will complain about the consequences of such a drastic curriculum change on today’s teachers, and (3) Eurasianist nationalists won’t be satisfied and will demand the total erasure of European history from Russian textbooks.

Miller says any effort to diminish Russia’s Eurocentrism will test the country’s capacity to grasp its own linear national development. There’s no reason, however, that the country can’t adopt its own separate but similar identity (like the British, for example).