The Real Russia. Today. Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Estonia arrests Russian political scientist on espionage charges 🇪🇪

Vyacheslav Morozov is a Russian citizen who taught at the University of Tartu until earlier this month when the school dismissed him after learning he faces espionage charges. He was reportedly arrested on January 3 and is currently in state custody in Tallinn. State investigators have not released details about the case against him. In lieu of further information about Morozov’s case, here’s a summary of an extensive interview from last year:

Vyacheslav Morozov’s interview with Novaya Gazeta in September 2023

In an interview last year on September 14, Vyacheslav Morozov spoke at length with Novaya Gazeta Europe about Russia’s historical relationship with Europe. In Russia’s contemporary political context (and perhaps most ironically, given his arrest in Estonia for alleged espionage), Morozov said he hopes Moscow’s current alienation from Europe will end its preoccupation with European identity and convince it to accept its “peripherality.” Russia must recognize that it is a “dependent country that cannot and should not try to assert itself in Europe on equal terms,” said Morozov, explaining that Moscow’s best path to Western integration “is roughly on the same terms that Ukraine is currently undertaking.”

Morozov told Novaya Gazeta that Moscow must acknowledge that Russia is limited by its resource-based economy and corruption-inducing dependence on rents. Without surrendering its sovereignty, he argued, Russia should “build a good life on the baseline conditions it has” and “not compete with the U.S., European Union, NATO, and other giants.”

Morozov’s view of Russian history:

• With somewhat circuitous reasoning, Morozov offered a kind of “resource curse” argument to explain why Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia’s integration into the world capitalist as a “supplier of national resources,” he said, fostered “abuse” by creating a decision-making elite that isn‘t accountable to the people.
• This alone would merely have produced a “classic kleptocracy,” but a combination of European orientalism toward Russia and the Russian elite’s perennial fixation on a lack of recognition from the West (among imperialists and liberals alike, he admits) fueled resentment that boiled into full-fledged ideological grievances that now rationalize Russian aggression against Kyiv.

Morozov on “decolonizing” the Russian Federation:

• Morozov’s views here are also conventionally liberal: he says a “partial disintegration” is possible, but the two most common connotations of “decolonizing” Russia are either undesirable (“simply giving everyone sovereignty” and dis-integrating the Russian political and economic space to the detriment of the residents themselves) or impractical (trying to return to some impossible “pre-colonial utopia”).
• Morozov said his dream is a “de-imperialized” nation where all interest groups enjoy genuine political representation, and Russia observes equal relations with its neighbors, both geopolitically and culturally.

The latest in Russia and Ukraine

Russian law and order

• 🎓 Russian university student who was accused of working for Ukrainian hackers charged with treason
• 🪖 After serving two consecutive jail sentences for misdemeanor offenses following his appearance at Moscow’s infamous “Almost Naked” party in December, Rapper Nikolai Vasiliev (“Vacio”) went free on Tuesday and promptly reported, as summoned, to a military recruitment center. His lawyer told reporters that Vasiliev suffers from an unspecified illness but will nevertheless serve “proudly” if conscripted. According to an unconfirmed report from the Telegram channel Mash, Vasiliev will be conscripted into the Russian military’s band service. 
• 🚨 Alexey Navalny’s lawyer, Olga Mikhailova, says she’s being charged in absentia with the same “extremist” criminal allegations levied against three of Navalny’s other defense attorneys, Vadim Kobzev, Alexey Liptser, and Igor Sergunin, whom police arrested in October 2023. Mikhailova traveled abroad shortly before the arrests and decided not to return after her colleagues ended up in pretrial detention. She says Russia Today reporters followed her to the Moscow airport and later claimed falsely that she knowingly fled the country.
• ⚖️ Russian government commission endorses bill enabling asset seizure for convictions related to “fake news” about army
• 🛜 Citing the need to guard against increased DDoS attacks on Russian state resources, the federal censor Roskomnadzor has drafted a plan to create a geolocation database of all the IP addresses in the country. The agency wants to obtain users’ network addresses in addition to other personal data already supplied by website owners, network owners, and other “information distributors” like Vkontakte, Yandex, Mail.ru, and other popular online resources. The text of the draft project suggests that Roskomnadzor will block access to Russian state websites from abroad and via VPN.

🎙️ Moscow now requires doctors to record audio of patient visits. Officials say it’s nothing to worry about. (4-min read)

In mid-December, the Moscow Health Department issued an order making it mandatory for medical clinics to keep audio recordings of patient visits. City officials said they had decided to implement the rule after conducting a “successful” pilot experiment in two Moscow clinics. Patients will not be allowed to opt out of being recorded. Each institution’s chief physician will choose some of these “depersonalized” audio recordings to be reviewed and evaluated by a specially trained employee.

The war and military matters

• ⚖️ Russian colonel sentenced to six years in prison for failing to defend Crimean Bridge from drone attacks
• 🚨 Child reportedly injured by falling debris after Russian air defenses down eight drones in Voronezh region
• 💥 The pro-invasion Telegram channel Fighterbomber says 11–12 pilots were killed aboard the Beriev A-50 early warning and control aircraft that was shot down earlier this week over the Azov Sea, though the channel denies Ukraine’s claimed responsibility for the attack: “In the special military operation [sic], unfortunately, the most terrible and dangerous enemy for the Air Force has become our air defenses. It always strikes us in the back.” Russia possesses only a handful of the wildly expensive A-50 aircraft, which can allegedly detect the launches of American Patriot missile-defense systems and then target their locations inside Ukraine.
• 🕊️ Switzerland to host global peace summit on Ukraine

(Interview) Mikhail Suslov discusses the themes of ‘Putinism – Post-Soviet Russian Regime Ideology’ 🧠

In an interview published in Republic on January 12, historian Mikhail Suslov fielded questions relevant to his forthcoming book, “Putinism – Post-Soviet Russian Regime Ideology.” It’s hard to count all the different arguments and concepts that Suslov enumerates and divides into multiple subsections, but here are the highlights of his conversation with journalist Farida Kurbangaleeva.

Putinism is an ideology, but it’s ever-evolving and isn’t “monolithic.” So far, there have been four stages: 

1. From 2004 to 2009, Putinism attempted “liberal conservativism,” trying to merge individual freedom, a strong state, and tradition.
2. Putinism then pivoted to “identitarian conservatism,” ditching liberal democracies’ individualism and embracing Russians’ supposed immutable national identity and collectivism.
3. After 2014, Putinism added a geopolitical element, presenting Russia as a distinct civilization.
4. Since the fall of 2022, Putinism has sought appeal abroad in the Global South by adopting certain leftist elements to give it universalist appeal, which it paradoxically embraces while remaining a conservative ideology at home.

Suslov argues that Putinism seizes on a global shift from the freedom-focused agenda of the 1980s and 1990s to a justice-based trend that’s emerged in response to the West’s post-Cold War failure to manage humanity’s uneven economic development. He says Putinism seeks a form of populism wherein Moscow represents the “global majority” against humanity’s “golden billion” living in the West.

Why did Putinism fail to cultivate liberal conservativism? Suslov says Russia lacks a liberal tradition to “conserve” in the first place. Conservativism as a political philosophy in Russia’s context, he argues, lends itself either to revanchist communism or a rejection of the Soviet period so radical that it has no popular support.

Suslov says Putinism (by which he means the 10,000 or so political elites that comprise Russia’s “political mainstream” of experts, politicians, and intellectuals) decided to aim its conservatism not at “specific political forms” but at Russia’s “cultural and values identity,” wrapping the latter in an ahistorical “thousand-year” continuity. From the perspective of an “illiberal, communitarian, or identitarian understanding,” the nation’s actual political process becomes “unnecessary bells and whistles” for a society whose fundamental truths and values have been known for a millennium.

Some of Suslov’s potentially controversial conclusions:

• Putin’s personality is just a small component of Putinism, and the president himself doesn‘t yet enjoy what can be described as a personality cult to rival Stalin’s.
• “Putinism is not some random aberration or mistake”; it’s likely entrenched in Russian politics for at least another two generations. The ideology resonates deeply with most Russians, including in its anti-Westernism and resentment of being “lectured” after the USSR’s collapse. If reasonably free elections follow Putin’s presidency, someone like him (or perhaps a bit more or a bit less radical) will win the race. If the security elites seize control (for example, National Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev), that person would lack Putin’s “social capital” and would have to continue his course.
• Russians’ resentment of Western arrogance (their “sense of secondariness and unoriginality”) isn’t unique — all former empires, including Poland, Hungary, and Turkey, harbor similar bitterness (though bad blood in Russia’s former colonies complicates this picture).
• Putinism lacks three main elements of fascism (though Suslov insists that he’s not saying Putinism is better, and he suggests that it might reject the values of the Enlightenment more than some fascists): (1) Putinism currently rejects ethnic nationalism; (2) there’s no “revolutionary fervor”; and (3) it is actually an “optimistic ideology” that tells adherents that they’re living in a wonderful historical moment (whereas fascists try to mobilize supporters by depicting the present as sliding into hell on Earth).

A bit more about why Putinism isn’t fascism:

Putinism’s logic is “imperial, not national,” says Suslov, arguing that Moscow’s annexations in Ukraine do not aim, as Nazi Germany did in Eastern Europe, to destroy all alien ethnicities and populate the lands with the metropole’s titular nationality. Suslov points out that calls earlier in the war from the likes of Timofei Sergeytsev to carry out “de-Ukrainification” have not entered mainstream Putinism (though he acknowledges that Putin could later “be steered” in this direction, given nationalism’s dangerous unwieldiness). If Russia is seriously defeated in Ukraine, warns Suslov, ethnic Russian nationalism could get a “historic opportunity.”

So, what’s the future hold?

Suslov thinks the Kremlin will be able to justify even a defeat in Ukraine to the Russian public by presenting the war as a conflict with the entire West, where having lasted this long is already a triumph of sorts.

Putinism’s political base comprises roughly 75–80 percent of Russians in a combination of the 35–40 percent of people who want a strong leader (the “natural Putinists”) and the 40 percent of Russians who want “justice.” Suslov says an “alternative ideological configuration” for Russia is possible wherein the 30–35 percent of people who value human rights can break the “justice” faction away from the hardcore Putinists. But that won’t happen for at least 40 years due to the absence of social-democrat institutions in Russian politics, says Suslov.

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Just business

• ✈️ Russian airline S7 cuts Moscow staff amid aircraft repair challenges due to sanctions
• 🎮 Ukrainian video game developer GSC Game World announced that it will release the fourth installment of its S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series (“2: Heart of Chornobyl”) on September 5, 2024. After multiple delays, the game now features a Ukrainian transliteration of “Chernobyl” and will include no Russian audio track. In response to the changes, hacker groups threatened to leak several gigabytes of unfinished studio materials in the spring of 2023, demanding an apology for “mistreating players from Belarus and Russia.”
• 🍺 A State Duma committee chairman has petitioned Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin to ban beer imports from countries on Russia’s “unfriendly nations” list. If adopted, the policy would block beer supplies from the U.S., the E.U., Canada, Australia, Norway, and many other countries. Lawmaker Alexey Didenko reasons that beer is as vital an export for Germany as apples are for Poland, but Russia blocks only the latter. He also warned that Western breweries are taxed on their profits in Russia and that money is sent to Ukraine as military aid. Russian federal officials reportedly discussed a ban on Western beer imports in December 2022, reports Kommersant.
• 💘 Tinder to stop working in Belarus
• 🇨🇳 Following a report from Bloomberg that China’s state-owned banks are stepping up due diligence on funding to Russian clients after the U.S. authorized secondary sanctions on overseas financial firms that aid Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists that the Kremlin isn’t directly involved in such financial matters but stressed that the issue is “very sensitive” and said that the responsible state agencies won’t likely discuss the matter in public. 
• 🇹🇷 On Tuesday, Turkish Exporters Assembly Chairman Mustafa Gultepe told Reuters that Turkish exporters to Russia have faced payment problems in recent weeks due to year-end auditing, but the situation should improve next month, he said. Russian companies not included in Western sanctions previously encountered no problems when attempting money transfers. Last year, Russia ranked seventh on the list of Turkey’s export destinations, with some $9.4 billion in exported goods, reports Reuters.

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