Posts by SeanGuillory:

    Don’t Arm Ukraine

    December 10th, 2014

     

     

    By Sean Guillory.

     

    US Vice President Joe Biden is due to land in Kiev and one topic that the Ukrainians will surely bring up is whether the US will provide weapons to fend off a Russian incursion. After all, Poroshenko asked for weapons when he spoke in front of the US Congress in September when he famously declared, “blankets [and] night-vision goggles are also important. But one cannot win a war with blankets.” He went home with more blankets. Surely he’ll again bring the issue of up with Biden, especially as Russia arms the separatists and rumors swirl of a rebel offensive.

    Already anticipating such a discussion, Moscow has stated that giving Kiev weapons would further destabilize the situation. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevichwarned against “a major change in policy of the [U.S.] administration in regard to the conflict” in Ukraine, adding that sending arms would be “a direct violation of agreements reached, including [agreements reached] with the participation of the U.S.”

    Now putting aside the sheer cynicism of such statements, considering Russia has itself destabilized Ukraine by supplying the separatists with weapons, Lukashevich is sending a clear warning: arming Ukraine would certainly cause the Russians to double down and treat the conflict as the proxy war with the West it already thinks it is. This war is not one Ukraine can ultimately win. Weapons will only exacerbate the bloodletting, further crystallize the new “iron curtain” in eastern Ukraine, and perhaps even drawn the United States into another conflict it neither wants nor needs. Arming Ukraine would be a disaster.

    Yet there’s a chorus of politicians and pundits who think arming Ukraine is a grand idea.

    Over the last few days, the White House has been getting Congressional pressure to supply Ukraine with weapons. In a joint statement on Tuesday, Sen. John McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham said in the joint statement that “The Obama Administration’s policy in Ukraine effectively amounts to an arms embargo on victims of aggression,” and that “the United States and the European Union must provide Ukraine with the arms and related military and intelligence support that its leaders have consistently sought and desperately need.” McCain and Graham essentially want to turn the conflict into an open proxy war between the United States and Russia. “Providing Ukrainians with the ability to defend themselves,” they wrote, “would impose a far greater cost on Putin than he has paid thus far.”

    Pundits have also been weighing on the issue. Writing in the LA Times, Bennett Ramber, who served in the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs under George H.W. Bush,argues that the United States has an obligation to defend Ukraine based on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. He writes:

    History provides two other options: Sit back, pout and watch, the strategy Washington applied to Soviet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The approach concedes Ukraine as part of Moscow’s sphere in influence or more. Or the U.S. can bleed the separatists and Russian intervenors by providing Ukraine with lethal weapons, and not just nonlethal aid, repeating the successful strategy the U.S. applied to Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation.

    “Taking the second option, arming Ukraine, he continues, “would not cross World War I’s mobilization threshold but still overcome the appeasement policy of pre-World War II, and thus presents a prudent path giving Ukraine a better chance to defend itself. It also would restore Washington’s credibility that it will go to bat for countries that, under its imprimatur, give up the bomb and find a tiger — or in this case, a bear — at the gates threatening its survival.”

    In an op-ed in USA Today, Ilan Berman, the Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council, argues that time is running out to take action and arm Ukraine.

    “The window to do so is narrow indeed. Congress has mere weeks to conduct real work ahead of the coming winter recess. And with other pressing issues, such as a reauthorization of the federal budget, now on the legislative agenda, there is a real danger that foreign affairs matters (Ukraine among them) will get crowded out of the deliberations completely. Should that happen, it would be nothing short of a geopolitical victory for Russia, and a moral and operational defeat for Ukraine’s beleaguered pro-Western government.”

    Indeed, Congress is ready to arm Ukraine. It just has to vote. There are two bills before it that have broad bi-partisan support: the Ukraine Freedom Support Act of 2014 and the Ukraine Security Assistance Act of 2014. The first, which has already passed the Foreign Relations Committee, allows for the provision of “defense articles, defense services, and training to the Government of Ukraine for the purpose of countering offensive weapons and reestablishing the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, including anti-tank and anti-armor weapons; crew weapons and ammunition; counter-artillery radars to identify and target artillery batteries; fire control, range finder, and optical and guidance and control equipment; tactical troop-operated surveillance drones, and secure command and communications equipment.”

    The latter provides “Ukraine with appropriate intelligence and other information to determine the location, strength, and capabilities of the military and intelligence forces of the Russian Federation located on Ukraine’s eastern border and within its territorial borders, including Crimea; and take steps to ensure that such intelligence information is protected from further disclosure.”

    It’s unclear which way Obama would go if presented with these bills. It will be really hard for him to veto legislation that has such bi-partisan support. It just doesn’t happen to him very often.

    But this doesn’t make arming Ukraine a good idea. First, it just demonstrates again that Congress only sees throwing guns at a problem is the only viable solution. After all, what do the politicians have to lose? They can all stand up, puff out their chests and say they were tough on Russia. Forget the Ukrainian citizens who will experience the full fury of an escalated conflict.

    Second, Ukraine being as corrupt as it is, there are real concerns how many of these weapons will actually end up in soldiers’ hands and not pilfered and sold on the black market. There is alreadyevidence that some of the United States supplied “meals ready to eat” ended up being sold on black market websites. Could American weapons see a similar fate?

    Third, as I said above, this is a war Ukraine can’t win. Weapons won’t turn the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favor. Sure it will, as John McCain put it, “impose a far greater cost on Putin than he has paid thus far,” but presented with such a challenge Putin will surely double down and commit more to the rebels. This would give Putin reason to push not only to Mariupol, Kharkiv, and Odessa, but perhaps to Kiev and beyond. He would not only dismember Ukraine, he would swallow it. Then what would the US do? It would either have to back down or commit more, sending the situation into a spiral downward to hell.

    Fourth, given this year is the centennial of WWI, many have characterized the tensions between the US, the EU, and Russia as a recipe for another world war. Arming Ukraine has the potential to get that ball rolling. And from there who knows where things will end up.

    I can understand the frustration many feel as they watch Russia flood the east with weapons. Sanctions work slow and don’t really exert the immediate necessary pressure. Also, it’s apparent that the Obama Administration doesn’t have a clear policy concerning Russia. Is it an adversary or enemy? How much does the US need Russia when it comes to Syria and Iran? These questions don’t have clear answers. But throwing more weapons into the mix will only make things worse. The only answer is diplomacy, something both sides have yet to seriously consider. If the United States wants to do something and show it’s leadership, perhaps it’s time to set aside egos and bring everyone to the table for a serious hammering out of issues. A first step would be to silence the hawks in Washington and the “war party” in Kiev.

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    Putin for 15 Years and Counting

    September 1st, 2014

     

     

     

    By Sean Guillory.

    putin-17

    On August 9, 1999, fifteen years ago, Boris Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin, an unknown, ex-KGB man to become Prime Minister of Russia. Then, no one would have guessed that Putin would still be with us today, and likely for many more years to come. For the anniversary, Oleg Kashin has provided long post detailing how the Russian press covered Putin’s appointment. How about the English language press? How did they describe this now historic moment?

    Colin McMahon of The Daily Telegraph wrote:

    Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the man they called “the grey cardinal” in St Petersburg for his careful avoidance of the political limelight, is a blank slate to the average Russian.

    For the third time in the last four tries, Russian President Boris Yeltsin has plucked from relative obscurity a bureaucrat to take over the post of prime minister of the Russian Federation.

    Mr Putin has the added advantage, or handicap, depending on one’s point of view, of being named Mr Yeltsin’s preferred successor as president. . .

    He spoke little, smiled less and, except in the hottest of times, wore over his suit a leather jacket that still says KGB. That deadpan style was on display on Monday night in an extensive interview on the independent station NTV.

    He seemed guarded on just about everything, as if the interview were an interrogation and not a get-to-know-you visit.

    “I have a wife and two children, two girls, ages 13 and 14,” he said. “They study in Moscow.”

    Asked about interests beyond work: “Sport, literature, music. Which sport? Fighting and judo.”

    If Mr Putin lacks charisma, say his supporters, it has yet to hurt his effectiveness. . .

    Mr Chubais, a Yeltsin confidant regarded in the West as one of the smartest free marketers in Russia, opposed Yeltsin’s plan to name Mr Putin to replace Sergei Stepashin as prime minister.

    A source in the political movement Right Cause told Interfax that while Mr Chubais considers Mr Putin a “contemporary politician” and a “powerful leader,” he predicts that public politics will test Mr Putin’s abilities.

    At this stage, Mr Putin would be considered a long shot to win the presidency, no matter how much Mr Yeltsin might wish it.

    Celestine Bohlen of the New York Times:

    Nor do many Russians necessarily believe that Mr. Putin, 46, will still be Mr. Yeltsin’s preferred choice as a successor by the time the presidential elections roll around, several months after December’s parliamentary elections. Russian politics are littered with men who, at one time or another, held the mantle that has now been bestowed on Mr. Putin.

    In Prime Minister Putin, Mr. Yeltsin will have a loyal servant — and a recent boss of Russia’s domestic intelligence service at that — who will be more ready than his predecessor to pull the kind of levers of power that might make even Russia’s most brazen regional bosses, an increasingly independent lot, think twice. Often portrayed as the kingmakers in the coming elections, they are still sensitive to the granting of funds and the release of compromising information — tools at the Kremlin’s disposal.

    Brian Whitmore, now of RFE/RL’s the Power Vertical, wrote in the Moscow Times:

    Vladimir Putin is a former KGB spy, a shrewd bureaucratic operator – and a completely untested public politician. He also has the reputation of a man who is completely loyal to his immediate boss. . .

    But analysts say that Putin, an uninspiring speaker who rarely makes public statements, would be a tough sell in Russia’s presidential elections, scheduled for next July.

    “I can’t imagine that in one year’s time it will be possible to turn Putin into a viable public politician,” said Yevgeny Volk of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Moscow office. Instead, said Volk, “Putin will be a useful and obedient tool in Yeltsin’s hands.” Putin, nominated for prime minister on Monday after Yeltsin fired Sergei Stepashin, has been director of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor agency to the Soviet KGB, and has chaired the Security Council, which advises the president. His views on important matters such as economic policy are not well known.

    Several observers said that Stepashin was sacked in favor of Putin because Putin is a tougher operator, more likely to use all available means against Yeltsin’s opponents – Gennady Zyuganov’s Communists, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, and Russia’s increasingly assertive regional leaders.

    Throughout his career, Putin has been a tough bureaucratic infighter and a master of behind-the-scenes politics who has been able to advance his career and loyally serve various masters.

    Corky Siemaszko in the Daily News:

    Putin, who admitted he had not “been involved in politics,” said he would run for president on his record in office in the coming months.

    Yeltsin, who cannot seek a third term, gave no reason for firing the loyal Stepashin after three months in the job, but Putin suggested Stepashin’s failure to end the standoff with Muslim militants in the Caucasus played a role in his dismissal.

    Political analysts noted the emergence of Moscow mayor and Yeltsin rival, Yuri Luzhkov, and his new political alliance last week as the catalyst. Muscovites were cynical.

    “What do you expect from an ill president and his troupe of clowns?” asked a Muscovite named Marina.

    Kremlin watchers, however, said Yeltsin’s anointing of Putin shows how desperate he is to find a successor who will guarantee immunity from prosecution for him and his allegedly corrupt entourage.

    They also predicted Putin would not last long.

    “He wants his allies to rally around Putin, but it’s too late,” said Columbia University political science Prof. Steven Solnick. “Putin has never even run for political office. . . . He’s not presidential material.”

    Yulia Latynina opined in the Moscow Times:

    Monday morning, it finally became clear who will not become Russia’s president in the year 2000. It will not be Vladimir Putin. He will not become president simply because prime ministers are sacked in Russia these days when they are just ripening. Besides, it’s impossible to stay for a year as an heir apparent to a sultan who is fanatically in love with his power and has only a vague idea of what is happening in reality. The astonishing fact that President Boris Yeltsin seriously considers himself capable of appointing his successor shows how little the president understands the political reality. Any nomination from him would inevitably cause a serious allergic reaction in the voters. The only thing worse for Putin would be an endorsement from a Russian lesbian association.

    The New York Times editors wrote:

    Mr. Yeltsin’s latest selection, Vladimir Putin, shares some of the same questionable qualifications as his immediate predecessors, Sergei Stepashin, who lasted only three months, and Yevgeny Primakov, who served for nine months. All three held senior positions in the Russian security services that succeeded the Soviet K.G.B., organizations not known for teaching the fine points of democracy. During the cold war Mr. Putin, who is 46, worked as a top Russian security officer in Germany, and most recently ran Russia’s internal security service.

    None of these men had experience in economic management when they were appointed Prime Minister, making it difficult for them to devise programs that might revive Russia’s sinking economy. If Mr. Putin is confirmed by the Communist-dominated Duma, he will have to move quickly to show the International Monetary Fund that he is exercising budgetary restraint, collecting taxes effectively and taking other steps to justify a new round of lending.

    Mr. Yeltsin’s clumsy efforts to stage-manage the next presidential election now leave Mr. Putin as his designated candidate in a likely field of far more prominent, seasoned politicians. Other possible contenders include Mr. Primakov; Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow; Gennadi Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader, and Aleksandr Lebed, a former general who is now Governor of a region in Siberia. So far the only prospective candidate with strong democratic credentials is Grigory Yavlinsky, who has had difficulty building a national base. It is hard to imagine how Mr. Putin, with no experience in electoral politics and no organized party behind him, can expect to compete for the presidency.

    Alice Lagnado in the Times London:

    Vladimir Putin, chosen by President Yeltsin yesterday as Russia’s acting Prime Minister and the Kremlin’s favoured presidential candidate, is a loyal but little-known figure known as the “grey cardinal”.

    Mr Putin, 47 and married with two children, graduated from the law faculty of Leningrad University before being recruited into the KGB’s foreign espionage operation. He was posted to Dresden, part of the then East Germany, for 15 years.

    In the 1980s he became an adviser to Anatoli Sobchak, the head of the Leningrad Soviet, or legislative assembly.

    Mr Putin’s conscientious work – he was said to have had the final say in all of Mr Sobchak’s decisions – earned him the post of first deputy head of the St Petersburg city government in 1994, and the “grey cardinal” tag. When Mr Sobchak, St Petersburg’s first Mayor, lost the 1996 elections, Mr Putin moved to Moscow to become deputy to Pavel Borodin, Mr Yeltsin’s administration manager.

    In March 1997 he became head of the Kremlin’s Control Department, a watchdog body, where he oversaw relations with Russia’s 89 regions. There he was dubbed an “imperialist” due to his toughness in preventing regional leaders seceding from Russia.

    In July last year his loyalty paid off when he was promoted to head the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB. But he received only a half-hearted welcome from liberals, who saw him as a reformist intelligence chief. He is believed to be a protege of Anatoli Chubais, the architect of Russian privatisation, It is believed Mr Chubais was a key figure in his promotion. “There are rumours in Moscow that Putin landed his post with the help of influential natives of Leningrad working in the Government and presidential administration,” the Segodnya newspaper wrote of his appointment.

    Since then there has been some disappointment that Mr Putin has failed to meet important challenges. His officers still spend much time and resources on harassing environmentalists. The case continues against Aleksandr Nikitin, a former naval captain accused of spying, after he wrote a report claiming that the Russian Navy dumped nuclear waste in the Arctic Sea.

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    Is Russia Suffering From Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

    April 26th, 2014

     

    By Sean Guillory.

    In Collapse of an Empire, Yegor Gaidar, the Russian economist and 1990s shock therapist, wrote that “the identification of state grandeur with being an empire makes the adaptation to the loss of status of superpower a difficult task for the national consciousness of the former metropolis.” Gaidar likened the loss of the Soviet empire to Germany’s defeat in WWI and warned, like Weimar Germany, Russia could thirst for a strong national leader to right the wrongs of the Soviet collapse.

    Empire, after all, was “an easy-sell product, like Coca-Cola” to a parched population. Gaidar turned out to be premature though prescient. Only now, with the crisis in Ukraine, is the opportunity for Russian revanchism—and the collective trauma that serves as its foundation—fully revealed.

    Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea is a reaction to a trauma experienced by millions of Russians: In his speech to Russia’s Federation Council, Putin called Nikita Khrushchev’s 1954 transfer of Crimea to Ukraine a robbery that made Russians on the peninsula feel “they were handed over like a sack of potatoes.” Crimean Russians simply “could not reconcile themselves to this outrageous historical injustice.”

    This trauma redoubled when the Soviet Union collapsed. “Millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest, ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders,” he said.

     Putin made similar statements about eastern Ukraine during his recent call-in show. “I would like to remind you that what was called Novorossiya back in the tsarist days—Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev and Odessa—were not part of Ukraine back then. These territories were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet government. Why? Who knows. . .  Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained.” Like the Russian Crimeans, Russians in eastern Ukraine were also victims of the Bolsheviks’ willy-nilly mapmaking. “I’ve just mentioned this area, New Russia, which has intertwined its roots with those of the Russian state,” Putin stated. “The local people have a somewhat different mentality. They found themselves part of present-day Ukraine, which had been pieced together in the Soviet period.”

    This talk reverberates in Russian society. “From a clinical standpoint,” Andrew Kuchins recently wrote, “Russia has been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder for the past couple of decades. Putin resonates with many Russians because he is seen as the embodiment of the humiliation, status deprivation and grievances that the country has purportedly suffered.” Alexandr Konkov, a lecturer at Sakhalin State University, likened Russia’s reaction to Ukraine as “post-traumatic syndrome” where “an individual often relives a traumatizing experience he or she once had in their life.

    Something of the kind can be spotted in the Russian societal consciousness, at least in a considerable part of Russians. [The collapse of the USSR and the rise of a diminished Russian state] looked humiliating for many people and hurt their pride in their country. In the 2000s, when talk of restoring Russia’s lost position in the world and a renewed respect for this country reemerged, the seeds of this rhetoric fell on fertile ground.”

    Ukraine is only the latest in a series of traumas. Over the last two decades, the encroachment of the West on former Soviet territory, the expansion of NATO into the Baltics, and perceived dilution of Russian traditional culture by globalization all reproduced the humiliation of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    All of this arouses anxieties in Russian society, which are alleviated through attempts to reconsolidate Russia’s national identity: fervent patriotism, the fear of encroaching “fascism,” calls for vigilance against fifth columnists and traitors, the reassertion of Russian traditional culture against the decadent and corrupt West, and the urgent need for a Russian national idea. All of these reactions are the initial trauma of Soviet collapse displaced on new dangers. Given all this, it’s no coincidence that a group of politicians want Mikhail Gorbachev investigated for his role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    According to psychologists, one the cardinal symptoms of trauma is hyperarrousal. This is when the traumatized person lives on permanent alert fearing danger might return at any moment. The victim startles easily, reacts intensely to small provocations, and exhibits vigilance in the face of danger.

    On the societal level, this results from an event that shatters the bonds of social life and damages the sense of community. One way to overcome this state is to excise those representing threats and reconstitute the sinews of community through solidarity. As the psychologist Judith Herman writes in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, “The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging.” Through these misguided and over-the-top reactions, Russia, as a traumatized society, is simply attempting to recreate a sense of belonging as a nation in order to heal.

    Given this, how should the West respond? In a way, trauma only makes the West’s relationship with Russia more precarious. Seeing Russia as a traumatized society can help us understand its perspective. In this sense, Putin is living “in another world,” as German Chancellor Angela Merkel put it—a world where reality is governed by existential threats. But isolating Russia will only feed its traumatic responses. At the same time, Russia should not be excused for its behavior simply because of the trauma it endured; understanding its perspective does not mean condoning it. Whichever course of treatment the West chooses must have one desired result: to convince Russia that, as Yegor Gaidar stated, “the dreams of returning to another era are illusionary.”

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    The cost of Crimea

    March 13th, 2014

     

    By Sean Guillory.

    If and when Russia absorbs Crimea, acquiring the peninsula isn’t going to come cheap. The real cost of Crimea might not be sanctions from the US and EU but the funding it’s going to take to support the region. Here’s how Leonid Bershidskii breaks down the numbers for subsidizing Crimea in Forbes Russia.

    In the first half of 2013, according to figures from Kyiv Investgazet, Crimea (without Sevastopol) was fifth of 26 Ukrainian regions by the amount of net-assistance from the central budget. (In first place, despite the widespread myth of the “freeloading west” is Kyiv and second and third are Donetsk and Lugansk provinces). For these six months, Crimea received from Ukraine’s state budget 3.78 billion more than it paid in. If you consider 4 rubles to a hryvnia—at the rate until the end of last June—that is 15 billion rubles ($410 million). That’s 30 billion rubles a year.

    According to Ministry of Finance figures on the distribution of aid to Russia’s regions in 2014 there are three regions with higher levels of subsidizing from the federal budget: Yakutia, Dagestan, and Kamchatka. For every Crimean, Ukraine currently allocates the region a subsidy of 15,200 rubles, and in 2014 Russia allocates to Chechnya 14,750 rubles a person.

    There’s also infrastructure costs:

    According to the Ukrainian edition of Insider, currently 65% of gas supplies in the Crimea are delivered by the 100% state Chernomorneftegaz which produces this gas in the Black and Azov Seas. You can, of course, change this proportion and deliver gas directly from Russia, but you have to build the pipeline.

    Approximately 80% of the water comes to the Crimea through the North-Crimean channel from Ukraine. True, no one can cap the channel, but Ukraine is quite able to take more money for water.

    Four-fifths of the electricity to the Crimea is supplied by Zaporizhia Kakhovskaya HPP, located outside the Crimean territory. Rates here could be raised as well.

    Russia will have to either negotiate for the livelihood of Crimea with Ukraine or to build new infrastructure. The first would be difficult: outside of sending troops to Kiev if it drives a hard bargain, something will have to give. And second, it’s expensive.

    Basically, Crimea is potentially a heavy economic burden.

    As Forbes concludes, “imperialism is generally expensive. Imperialism during years of economic stagnation is ruinous.”

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    Interview with Dmytro Yarosh, Leader of Right Sector

    February 22nd, 2014

    By Sean Guillory.

    Yarosh

    Dmytro Yarosh, Leader of Right Sector: When 80% of the Country Does Not Support the Regime, There Can’t be a Civil War

    An Interview by Mustafa Nayyem and Oksana Kovalenko (Translated from Ukrainian by William Risch)

    Dmytro Yarosh, leader of Right Sector, has been the least well-known figure over the past two months. Just two weeks ago, only a narrow circle of people involved with organizing the Euromaidan even knew about the very existence of the Sector and Yarosh. Today, it’s impossible not to describe events in Kyiv without mentioning Right Sector.

    On January 19, after events on Hrushevskyi Street started, world media exploded with fiery scenes of young guys with Molotov cocktails and masks over their faces. Right Sector’s actions tore the term “peaceful protest” to pieces, but at the same time, Right Sector forced the regime to listen to the Maidan and repeal the January 16 laws.

    The headquarters of this still informal group is on the fifth floor of the Trade Unions’ Building. Photography is forbidden in the hallway, numerous matresses are spread on the floor, next to which, besides wood and metal sticks, lay textbooks – most of Right Sector’s members are young guys of university age.

    We met Dmytro Yarosh in one of the floor’s offices – two by three meters – where Right Sector press conferences usually take place. Here, too, is the fully-equipped office for the sector’s leader. Three guys with walkie-talkies, dressed in camouflage, with masks over their heads, man the office’s “reception room.”

    THEY CALL ME A HAWK IN TRIDENT

    What is your personal story, and what have you done with your life?

    I am leader of the all-Ukrainian organization, Stepan Bandera Trident. I have been involved in public life for the past 25 years. I’m from Dniprodzerzhyns’k, in the Dnipropetrovs’k Oblast’ (Region). I raised the first blue-and-yellow flag in April 1989 in Dniprodzerzhyns’k.

    I was one of the founders of the People’s Movement of Ukraine (Rukh). I was a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union; in 1989 I received recommendations (to join it) from Levko Luk’ianenko and Stepan Khmara in Moscow, on the Arbat, where we picketed then for the renewal of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’s activities. Since 1994, as a founder of the Stepan Bandera Trident, I have had various positions in it: first as leader of Trident’s city structure, then as leader of its oblast’ structure, then its regional one, and so on.

    I was commander of the organization from 1996 to 1999, then I was chief inspector of Trident, then I became commander of the organization again, then I passed on my duties as chief commander to my successor, Andriy Stempits’kyi. I’ve actually spent a lifetime in this. I have been trained as an instructor of Ukrainian language and literature, and in 2001, I finished the Drohobych Pedagogical University in the Philological Faculty.

    How did Right Sector emerge?

    There was a big protest in Kyiv on November 24-25 because of the decision to cancel the Eurointegration program. In general, Trident is not an active supporter of any integration processes, but we announced that we would create Right Sector as a platform for coordinating the actions of various revolutionary-oriented groups, because to a considerable degree, from the very beginning, we were perfectly aware that we couldn’t live in the system of state structures that has existed up to now.

    Right Sector fully emerged after the events of November 30, when we went out to protest on Mykhailivs’kyi Square.

    It was there that we started training and getting our defenses ready. Then we were at the Maidan all the time, and we entered the Maidan’s self-defense force. Other organizations that entered Right Sector were Trident, UNA-UNSO (Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian National Self Defense), and Carpathian Sich from the Subcarpathians.

    Have you conducted training before?

    Yes, for 20 years. We already have a lot of generations who have been changed by it. My kids were small at one time, and now my daughter is 20 years old, and she’s spent her whole life in Trident.

    Trident is an organization with narrow operations, like an order of knights. We have three specific tasks: propagandizing the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism as interpreted by Stepan Bandera; raising up Ukrainian youth in a spirit of patriotism; and national defense activity, that is, defending the honor and dignity of the Ukrainian nation in all forms by all methods and means available.

    In general, Ukrainian nationalism and Banderites are not narrow-minded plebs with sadistic tendencies; these are intellectuals, people who write, who publish, who are involved not just in using force. Trident is an organization that produces certain ideas.

    We are not a political party. In Trident, we’re even forbidden from taking state jobs.

    Serhiy Kvit, President of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, is among Trident’s well-known members. He’s my good friend and comrade. At one time, he was a sotnyk in our organization. There’s also Petro Ivanyshyn, a doctor of philology, head of an academic department at the Drohobych Pedagogical University, who was also a sotnyk.

    Where exactly do these training sessions take place?

    At camps throughout Ukraine: Dnipropetrovs’k, Dniprodzerzhyns’k, Kryvyi Rih, Pavlohrad, Nikopol’ and so on. Guys get together, and they have their plan of activities for a month, for half a year, for a year. They go through training and lessons. They conduct various events aimed at the de-communization and decolonization of Ukraine.

    I think you’ve heard about events from 2011, when our mobile group blew up the head of Stalin’s bust in Zaporizhzhia; that was a rather notorious thing.

    We never made PR out of it. We simply do what is for our nation’s good, for our state’s good. Those of us who can do it close down drug dealerships and help law-enforcement organs (if you can call them that, because it seems to me that the police are the most active drug dealers).

    Was what happened on January 19 on Hrushevs’kyi Street something planned in advance?

    No, of course not. We were always on the front lines those two months. The dictatorship laws that were passed January 16 were the stimulous for these events. We couldn’t live under state rules like those. On January 19, Automaidan activists drove up, and they wanted to go to the Supreme Rada and picket it. Right Sector came up there in organized fashion when hundreds of people were already there.

    We tried to talk with the police and get them to agree to let us through. They responded rather aggressively. And what happened next, you know – we committed active deeds, and our guys defended the people. And I think that what happened was very good, because if it hadn’t been for those events on the nineteenth, I don’t think the regime would have made concessions and negotiate with the opposition.

    How many of your people are at the Maidan?

    Around 1,500 people, along with a mobilization reserve from Kyiv. But right now, affiliates are emerging all over Ukraine. They are organizing on their own, they call themselves Right Sector, and we are working to coordinate their activities as much as possible.

    How many people in general can you mobilize across the country?

    I think that for now, we can already mobilize 4,000 – 5,000 people.

    How do you finance your organization?

    I am not involved in that issue, but it’s all financed by people. We even opened up bank cards, but they were blocked right away. And after January 19 – there’s just been a flood of help. We need everything, because we’ve been here for two months already. People bring packs of money. We keep a complete account, everything is transparent, and guys buy equipment with the money.

    Tell us about your organization’s structure.

    The structure will be completely finalized after these events. Right now, Right Sector is a completely orderly organization; it’s not at all an extremist one, or a radical one; in general, I don’t like the word “radical.” Right now there is a unit on the Maidan, there are units in the oblasts, and there are spontaneous groups that have emerged. We invite leaders, we talk with them, we look to see if these are decent people, and then we make decisions about them. Right now we have started coordinating our actions with those of Afghan War veterans, too. They haven’t officially entered Right Sector, but we now coordinate our activities with them completely, because I don’t bring guys together just like that.

    How do you make decisions?

    There are strategic decisions, there are emergency ones, and there are tactical ones. People themselves make them at all levels. Regarding strategic matters, we discuss this or that problem with a leadership group of up to 12 people, including me, and we make a decision. And all the commanders decide all the other things. For example, we have Iranian – he makes a decision in his group whether or not to send people to the barricades.

    Iranian? Is he from Iran?

    No, that’s just his pseudonym. All the guys have pseudonyms for obvious reasons, because we live in such a state system. For example, since 1994, I have had the code name Hawk (Iastrub) in Trident. And we have one Pylypach and one Letun. Everyone chooses his own name, just like in the Cossack Sich.

    AFTER JANUARY 19, NOT A SINGLE OPPOSITION LEADER CAME UP TO SEE OUR GUYS

    Do you coordinate your activities with opposition forces?

    First of all, we have relations with Andriy Parubiy as Maidan commander and de-facto leader of Self Defense (Samooborona), which we formally belong to as the 23rd hundredth (sotnia), though we have over 1,500 people.

    But if you talk about the entire opposition, for the most part, we have no relations with them at all. They don’t recognize our existence. It seems to me that this is a big mistake of the opposition, that they don’t consider the forces of the Afghan veterans, Right Sector, or even Self Defense.

    It seems to me that even Andriy Parubiy doesn’t have such an easy time coordinating actions with the trio of opposition leaders. Because I see some of the remarks that they make there. Andriy says one thing, while the leaders say something slightly different.

    For example, I’m surprised that after January 19, opposition leaders didn’t come upstairs and thank the guys. Approach people, talk with them. These are live people, and they’re good, too.

    Yesterday, a television crew came by, and the cameraman said, “I was surprised. One guy was reading a textbook on materials’ resistance, while the other was fluent in English and was speaking with some foreigner. You have such great guys!”

    Well, it’s true. They’re the flower of the nation. These are people who right now are sacrificing their lives and their freedom for the sake of the Fatherland. This is something else, but politicians close their eyes to it.

    Though there was Vitaliy Klychko – I met with him twice, and we had absolutely normal conversations. However, the opposition often fulfills part of our demands, because they are perfectly aware of our presence, and they see that Right Sector is a certain factor to be reckoned with on the Maidan.

    But didn’t you try to contact them for the sake of coordinating activities?

    We had no direct contacts. I had the impression from the very start of the peaceful Maidan that they operated very much on impulse, not on a system of actions thought through. They didn’t even set up a unified headquarters. From the very beginning, we called for unity at the Maidan so that there would be no divisions between politicians, Civic Sector, and Right Sector. In all interviews I’ve had, I’ve stressed that the uprising must be unified, and that I don’t want to provoke responses from the opposition.

    But everything has its limits. When the country faced a real threat of war, great distrust of opposition leaders surfaced on the Maidan. They just talked for two months. Even though they had been given a mandate – “Take it, decide things!” – they couldn’t do anything. On January 19, we went on the offensive, and they started doing something. Well, we’ll keep putting pressure on them.

    As far as we understand, the Freedom (Svoboda) Party is closest to you in ideological views…

    Yes. We have a lot of common positions when it comes to ideological questions, but there are big differences. For instance, I don’t understand certain racist things they share, I absolutely don’t accept them. A Belarusian died for Ukraine, and an Armenian from Dnipropetrovs’k died for Ukraine. They are much greater comrades of mine than any, sorry, Communist cattle like Symonenko, who play for Russia but are ethnic Ukrainians.

    Stepan Bandera once advocated three ways of dealing with non-Ukrainians. It’s very simple. You deal with them as comrades – and this is for those who fight with you for Ukraine, regardless of their nationality. You deal with them in a tolerant way – for those who live on the land and do not oppose our struggle; thus, we treat them normally, Ukraine has a place for all. The third way of dealing with them is in a hostile way – and this is for those who oppose the Ukrainian people’s national liberation struggle. And this is in any state; any people takes exactly these positions.

    Social nationalism is very complicated for me, because it is my belief that nationalism does not require anything extra; it is enough. Oleh (Tiahnybok – Ukrains’ka Pravda), too, has lately tried to go the way of traditional nationalism. Thank God. Although there isn’t much of a point talking about ideological discussions during a revolution. Finally, our guys stand at the barricades just like guys from Svoboda. This unites us.

    People from the regime say that during negotiations, opposition leaders claimed that people were ready to leave administrative buildings if those arrested and prosecuted were released. Is this true?

    I think the regime lied. I think that the opposition didn’t say any such thing. Before the amnesty law was voted on, we made clear our position, and it was like the same thing the opposition had said. That is, if the regime made a compromise and passed the law for a so-called amnesty drafted by the opposition, then Right Sector was ready to withdraw its fighters from Hrushevs’kyi Street and unblock the street. This would be a reasonable compromise.

    This doesn’t cancel out our political demands. We must change the country at another level. The Maidan is only a Sich (a Cossack military and administrative center – WR), a training ground, but it’s not about constant fighting.

    Your opponents would reply that you were the first ones to open fire and go on an all-out offensive…

    No, no, no! Excuse me, Berkut special forces beat children on the Maidan on November 30, 2013. For two months, people stood at the Maidan and took no action. Then came the regime’s usual provocation – passing the laws of January 16. They started beating activists, kidnapping people. Look what they’ve done with the Automaidan.

    They were the very ones who provoked this situation, and people went on the attack, because people couldn’t take it anymore. How much longer could you stand there and dance on the Maidan? We’re not sheep, Ukrainians must have some pride, and they showed that Ukrainians do have pride.

    What do you think, why did Right Sector have to show up for this, why didn’t the opposition do it?

    Because Right Sector is the Maidan’s most revolutionary structure. Let me emphasize: revolutionary, and not radical. Revolution is reason, a plan, action. When the people are in an uproar, you can’t avoid using this situation for the people’s own benefit. The opposition, unfortunately, is incapable of doing this, maybe because their seats in parliament are very soft and they can’t take decisive steps. We can take such a step.

    Have you spoken with the opposition about this?

    I’m telling you, we have no contact with them. I’ll stress it again – I am for unifying the opposition movement, the one involved in protests and in the general uprising. Thus, any explanation I give will wind up being used against me. They’ll start yelling that I’m a provocateur. If you want my honest opinion, I don’t care what they say about me. Our difference is that I’m not interested in political ratings.

    Right now, representatives of opposition parties are taking part in negotiations with the regime. What do you think, can these people take responsibility for the Maidan’s actions and give some guarantees on its behalf?

    That’s the problem; the Maidan doesn’t control the negotiations process. The levels of trust opposition leaders had at the beginning and now are completely different.

    We demand that not only opposition leaders be in the negotiations, but also representatives from the Maidan. At least as observers. Then you can offer some guarantees and at least articulate here, to people on the Maidan, that we have this agreement reached between the regime and the opposition, and it should be carried out.

    Because otherwise, there’s the impression that they agree on one thing, and then they change something among themselves, and then the result turns out to be completely different.

    Our goal now is to force the opposition to go back to negotiations with specific demands and achieve a certain compromise. But this absolutely must happen with Maidan representatives.

    Those Afghan veterans or Andriy Parubiy as self-defense commander can be in the negotiating group. If they invite me, I’ll go. We see nothing awful in this. We can argue our position and compel both the regime and the opposition to make an agreement, so that there will be no bloodshed, and so that the state will take different actions. I’m ready to go negotiate for this.

    Let’s make this simpler. Imagine that you are in negotiations, and Viktor Yanukovych is sitting across from you. What arguments would you use to convince him to change his actions?

    I would seek a compromise. I would put pressure on him, though I know he wouldn’t like that very much. I’m not sure that Yanukovych is getting reliable information. It seems to me that he has some inadequate understanding of the situation. For example, I think he doesn’t understand that 80% of the people right now do not trust the regime. I think that his advisors are giving him slightly different figures and are showing him different scenarios from the real ones.

    First, I’d start out by saying that he can’t fight his own people. No one yet has defeated his own people. I would explain that those things that law enforcement are doing is a real war against Ukrainians. Second, and this is very important – I would try to explain to him that those thousands of self-defense forces that have already been formed will not give Berkut or riot police an easy time clearing the Maidan and pass through it in parade fashion.

    They don’t understand that the Maidan is a phenomenon with its own army, with its own medical services, with its own structures, and that it’s already a certain state. And they won’t be able to take it over without shedding a lot of blood.

    It’s already impossible to drive it away with clubs. They’ll have to use weapons, real ones, not like the ones they use on Hrushevs’kyi Street. And they’ll really get it from us, that I can guarantee Viktor Yanukovych.

    All right, but what do you want? So you tell Viktor Fedorovych (Yanukvoych) that the situation is like this. What next?

    A precondition for any negotiations must be the freeing of all those arrested. These people aren’t terrorists and they aren’t extremists. I think you even know some of those people. They are absolutely normal, decent people who got fed up. People should be freed. Any talk about normalizing the situation can only happen after this.

    Second, the regime should stop using force. In the regions, above all. Stop kidnapping activists. This is terror against one’s own people.

    They must immediately start investigating crimes that have taken place on the streets. Berkut special forces couldn’t have been shooting without the knowledge of the Minister of Internal Affairs. It’s a military structure; there has to be discipline there, a clear sense of subordination. If they were provocations, then we need to find out who was doing the shooting. Give people information, don’t be silent, don’t close your eyes to what has been going on.

    Yanukovych indeed has fulfilled several of our demands regarding the government’s resignation and the repeal of the laws of January 16. But changing an existing office to another that has the prefix “v.o.” (“acting” – translator) doesn’t solve any problems.

    We need to form a compromise government that could be made up of people who are not leaders of political parties, but professionals. Moreover, all those odious figures – all the Zakharchenkos, the Tabachnyks, and other politicians like them – should be replaced. This is the first step they would need to make, and it would remove the tensions immediately.

    Who do you see heading the Cabinet of Ministers?

    I can’t say, because I’m not an expert at forming governments. Politicians should talk about that.

    But when you don’t have your own proposals, you take away all responsibility from yourself and remove yourself from political developments.

    For 25 years, I’ve avoided public politics. That’s not a problem for me. Although now, we are looking into the possibility that, if there will be peace, Right Sector will grow into a political organization. All the guys have said this. For God’s sake! We can always get involved in politics. For me, they’re the flower of the nation, and they can’t be cannon fodder people use and then forget. But it’s still too early to talk about anything specific. Right Sector today can’t be narrowed down to some political matters.

    But that’s exactly what it looks like right now – you’re being used: you’re standing at the barricades, while they offer government posts to Arseniy Iatseniuk and Vitaliy Klychko.

    The fact is that the life of the state and the life of our people aren’t limited to a sole Cabinet of Ministers. Let them take those positions. If they invite us to help, we will. We’ll take over law enforcement, and we’ll bring order in the state. But I doubt that we’ll get even just one office.

    WE WILL HAVE OUR OWN CANDIDATE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

    What will you propose to Viktor Yanukovych if the revolution is victorious?

    It depends on him. Some time ago, we gave him 24 hours to leave the country, and no one would touch him. Today, if he made a smart decision, we could even grant him safety in his own state. Just so there would be no war, so there would be no bloodshed. Let him stay in Mezhyhir’ia, take care of his ostriches, and no one would bother him there. But that has to be his decision.

    Do you see yourself in some office?  

    Right now, no. I have a really good office right now – I’m leader of Trident. It’s easier for me to speak in front of members in formation, not onstage.

    But that’s not an office that can change the country. What would you do in a time of peace?

    If you want peace, get ready for war. We started Right Sector, and Right Sector has changed the country a little. During peace, I would continue being involved in Trident. Like I’d been doing for the last twenty years.

    You understand, Trident is not a structure that has an unequivocal goal of setting up some armed conflict. No. Any kind of normal state must have state paramilitary structures that prepare youth for service in the army, which gives it a chance to mobilize a certain personnel reserve for defending the people’s interest in times of foreign or domestic peril. It’s a normal thing in most civilized countries of the world. Trident will always be relevant. Even if we have the best president and the best government.

    Do you have any information regarding who’s kidnapping people?

    Unfortunately, we don’t. We are trying to dig this information up, but we’ve had no luck so far. We ask the regime to activate law enforcement, its Security Service (Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU – WR), so that all investigation teams are employed in this search. Finally, [the SBU] is not as compromised in all these events as the MVS (Ministry of Internal Affairs) is. But there’s been nothing so far.

    So you sincerely trust regime structures to investigate this issue?

    I’m not certain that the regime is guilty of these crimes. I don’t rule out foreign special services being responsible for this. For example, the FSB (Federal Security Service). Russia always makes use of instability in Ukraine. As soon as there is instability in Ukraine, they come over here and deal with certain issues they have. Putin has said more than once that Ukraine is not a state. And I am more than convinced that up to the present, there have been plans for splitting Ukraine up into two or three, or five, or six zones of influence.

    But Right Sector and its activities have been called a destabilizing factor.

    It seems to me that it’s the opposite – over the last few months Right Sector has shown that it is a stabilizing factor. If it hadn’t been for Right Sector, there wouldn’t have been any negotiations, radical moods would have increased, and they would have exploded in regions as partisan warfare. Why doesn’t anyone think about that?

    As for now, the situation anyway is under control, and it it is now at some negotiating stage. If they don’t reach an agreement, the risk of partisan warfare in Ukraine will sharply increase. We know Ukrainians have a very glorious tradition of waging partisan warfare. They’ve fought for decades. Only will this be useful for the state?

    But aren’t you afraid that a partisan war could grow into a civil war?

    There can be no civil war. When 80% of the people do not support the regime, it will be a struggle between society, the people, and the regime. And these two things make great differences between a civil war and what we are talking about. This will be a national liberation war. But we’d rather not have one. We have a state, we have a foundation for developing nation building and state building.

    But a lot of people in eastern Ukraine sincerely believe that Banderites and nationalists are gathered here, and they are really convinced that they must fight this. What should we do with these people?

    According to the information I have, this is a very small percentage of people. I myself am from the Dnipropetrovs’k Oblast’, and I completely understand the situation. These are mostly people working for hire. You saw the events near the Dnipropetrovs’k Oblast’ Administration building. There, local (Party of) Regions deputy Stupak for a year and a half got scumbags together and formed fight clubs and guard structures that, together with the police, out of “conviction” defend the Oblast’ Administration.

    Did you see at least one normal citizen among those defenders of the administration building who went out there voluntarily? Or in the Crimea itself, they’ve set up units of hatted Cossacks, chauvinists, who form Black Hundreds and defend the regime. But where are the masses of people? Besides that, Crimean Tatars are completely on the side of the Euromaidan. So none of this is simple.

    If you’d speak with people in the East, they’d say the same thing about the Maidan: that there is a very small percentage of sincere supporters, and that the majority are hired nationalists. Both you and they have very similar rhetoric, which in the end is very unlikely to produce a compromise.

    Let’s consider some examples. The Party of Regions tried to set up an Anti-Maidan by bringing in people from all over Ukraine. Who actually has been standing there? It’s either really asocial elements or state employees and recipients of state aid who simply were forced to come. I spoke with a whole bunch of such people, and when I yelled out, “Get out, crook!” (Zeka het’!), they waved and laughed. It’s a myth that there’s some social support for Yanukovych and his regime.

    The soccer ultras all over Ukraine, the ones who supported the Maidan, are clear examples of this. These are people with real ideas, from Luhans’k Zoria, Simferopil’ Tavriia, Zaporizhzhia Metalurh, Dnipropetrovs’k Dnipro, Kharkiv Metalist, and so on. How many times did Dopa and Hepa (Mykhailo Dobkin, governor of the Kharkiv Oblast’, and Hennadiy Kernes, mayor of Kharkiv – WR) try to gather those hired thugs and send them here to Kyiv, and they haven’t been able to do it. What support can you talk about? This idea about a split in the country is a big lie. There is no split. Yanukovych, bless his heart, united the country.

    All the time there’s been this call made at the Maidan to the three opposition leaders to make a decision on a single candidate. Do you support this call?

    It doesn’t seem that relevant because you more often hear calls to make decisions with Maidan leaders. The leaders of the resistance which is going on. The importance of presidential elections for people has gone down to second or third place.

    During presidential elections – early or regularly scheduled ones – what will be your strategy: will you support someone, or will you run on your own?

    We don’t rule out Right Sector nominating its own candidate for elections. But it’s still too early to talk about this.

    So you sincerely believe that a candidate from Right Sector has a chance at winning across the country?

    If you took at reality, there is always a chance for it. Right Sector became an all-Ukrainian phenomenon in a few weeks. It’s Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovs’k, Donets’k, the Crimea. On the other hand, presidential elections can bring quite a bit of attention to our ideas of revolutionary changes for the state.

    Aren’t you afraid that your electoral campaign could divide up the opposition’s electorate and lead to you being blamed for causing a split?

    Listen, let this process finish, and then we’ll see what’s going on and how things are going. Fairy tales about fragmenting one’s forces, which they tell each other, is some kind of child’s play. They all know that they’re running as three separate candidates, thus breaking up forces from the very beginning.

    Either you sit down and make a real agreement and fulfill what you’d agreed to do, or each should play his own game. For us, at this stage, it’s not that important to take part in presidential elections. We need peace.

    The fact is that there are people who talk a lot and do little, while there are people who act and demonstrate with their sweat and blood that they can change things, that they can act, that they can achieve a result.

    Right Sector is a platform for guys who have demonstrated their ability to change something, to sacrifice the gifts they have received to achieve something higher. Politicians in recent years have not demonstrated this. I don’t see them having demonstrated this kind of sacrifice, the desire and the ability to sacrifice.

    So who for you is the leader of the resistance?

    There is no one for now. I made an announcement that I was ready to bear responsibility for all those things that happened. This doesn’t mean that I have some presidential ambitions. I simply see that there needs to be complete coordination and control over the situation. Let politicians settle those issues for themselves. If one of them is ready to do it, then let him do it, and we will sincerely support him. But I don’t see anyone doing this.

    RIGHT SECTOR DOESN’T FIGHT WITH FAMILIES

    Are you aware of the fact that if you are defeated, or even if there is a compromise between the regime and the opposition, a jail cell might be waiting for you?

    Yes, of course. I’ve been ready for it for the past 25 years. What can you do? That’s life. I go there but for the grace of God. What will be, will be. If there will be a criminal case, then there will be a criminal case. I am ready to fight for Ukraine. Let them try to put me in jail. Finally, we’ve yet to see who will imprison whom.

    Have you been given a police summons?

    No. I live here, what do I need a summons for? They don’t deliver them to the Maidan, and guys don’t let cops enter the fifth floor.

    But something could happen before you’re even arrested. You could face the fate of Ihor Lutsenko or Dmytro Bulatov…

    I know in whose name I’m waging this struggle. Of course, I don’t want that, I’m a living human being, and I have the instinct of self-preservation. But guys are protecting me, they go around with me, and they wear armored flak jackets.

    Do you go outside the Maidan in general?

    I’m rarely outside it. I won’t tell you where I go.

    What is happening with your family right now?

    I last saw my family for Christmas. They’re in Ukraine, but I’ve temporarily changed their residence. The fact is that all information about our addresses has been posted on the Internet, and about our families, so there is a certain danger.

    But there’s also the very same information on the Internet about Berkut forces, for instance. Can you give guarantees to all law enforcement and regime officials that nothing threatens their families?

    I can guarantee that Right Sector in no way will touch any child, or any family, of any law enforcement personnel, from any structure. Right Sector doesn’t fight women and children. We are not beasts from Berkut who beat up journalists and medical personnel. So you don’t have to worry – no one will be taking any actions like those. I can vouch for Right Sector.

    But you still set an ultimatum… you have this demand for the Fourth (of February): either you release everyone, or there will be… Can you say what this is about? Why exactly the Fourth?

    The Fourth of February is the next session of parliament. We demand that the Supreme Rada produce a document announcing the unconditional and complete freeing and rehabilitation of people arrested. And this is no amnesty, because there were no crimes committed.

    We also demand the regime end any use of force – this would be kidnappings, burning cars, and so on. I think that they will listen to us. I am 90 percent certain that they will listen to us.

    Otherwise, we are on the edge of a bloody conflict. I don’t rule out that people who are standing on the Maidan will conduct a very serious mobilization and go to the government offices district. And they will take it – and I am more than convinced of this – though it will be with blood, with great losses. Because we’ve been left with a pathological situation. Then all of them will be taken out: both the regime guards and Yanukovych. That’s why it’s better for them to reach an agreement with us.

    Do you understand that even what you just said now can be used against you?

    Yes, of course. It’s a revolution. There are two sides of the barricades – it’s a basic fact. Right now everything is being used either against us or against them.

    Do you select in some way people who come to you? Do they go through some selection process?

    Without a doubt. We are signing up volunteers all the time, especially during some active campaigns. Regarding criteria, you need to talk directly to the commanders. They work with people. I know exactly that they don’t take in people who are under age. Because they run in packs at age 15-16.

    Do you issue people weapons (that is, ones that are not firearms)?

    They show up on their own with either some baseball bats or with some sticks. We don’t equip them with them. As for the money that we get from people, we use that to buy all kinds of little shields, helmets, shields, a very big arsenal of all that stuff. They get all the necessary equipment, and then they have lessons with them.

    If a person is in poor physical health, then he or she gets other work – in the kitchen, in the medical station, and so on. Our girls are great, simply great; they’ve done so much good already. They even took away the wounded during fighting, and they help us here all the time.

    Regarding firearms, you called on people to bring them to the Maidan. Why have you done that?

    When the MVS issued an order allowing use of firearms against people, I called on people who had legally registered firearms to join us, to create a group for supporting us with firearms in case they came to the Maidan and started shooting. I think that you can only return fire, because there are no other alternatives. But that’s only if they open fire first.

    Has this unit been created?

    That’s a secret, sorry.

    Who has all the information that is now at Right Sector? There is a person who knows everything.

    No one knows everything. The political leadership has the information.

    How do you coordinate your actions? It’s not a secret that all telephone conversations are listened in on, how do you do it?

    Regarding messengers and go-betweens, all the guys have walkie-talkies, but they also monitor them, and we know that. I get the impression that they have listening devices installed in all the buildings around us. Operational vehicles are in place and so on. By the way, I don’t regard guys sitting in them as enemies or something like that. They’re doing their job, and they have to do it.

    Moreover, I am more than convinced that in law enforcement structures, attitudes toward the regime, the opposition, and the Maidan are very, very ambiguous. Some of them hate us, but that’s a small percentage. Others are sympathetic toward us, because we also have been conducting certain negotiations with law enforcement personnel. Guys come to us and talk. The regime is falling apart. You just need to put enough pressure on it so that they take those political steps.

    There are two barricades on Hrushevs’kyi Street. Do you talk at all with Berkut forces? Do you bring them warm tea or coffee? I know that there used to be such initiatives.

    I don’t know if we bring them right now. Earlier, when they blocked us in at the Maidan itself, we gave them food. I was against this, not because these cops, these guys, are not friends. They’re also Ukrainians, they simply are on the other side of the barricades. They serve the enemy. But it’s not worth doing. The more they are driven crazy by not getting enough food and so on, the less chances there are that they will go on the offensive and on the attack, and begin beating people like they’ve done several times. Thus, out of purely pragmatic reasons, I don’t think that we should bring them sandwiches or coffee.

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    The Duma’s Falsification of History

    December 18th, 2013

     

    By Sean Guillory.

     

    It appears that the Soviet practice of erasing history from sight and therefore mind continues in Putin’s Russia.

    Kommersant reports that contrary to the position of the Duma’s Upper Chamber, the State Duma has ruled to remove the hammer and sickle from the WWII Victory Banner, which was raised on the German Reichstag on May 1, 1945.

    Support and opposition to the move surely breaks along generational/political lines. “As the son of a War veteran, I can’t vote for the bill,” Sergey Minorov, speaker of the Federation Council, said before the vote.

    “If our elderly are against it, let’s respect their opinion.”Communists have also opposed the change stating that “symbol of Victory Day now looks more like that of the Day of the People’s Republic of China.”Communist MP Viktor Tyulkin stated before the Duma vote, “The main content was conveyed by the red color, the hammer, sickle and star, which symbolized the unity of the workers, peasants and workers peasants of the Red Army.”

    One can’t help to note the irony of members of the Communist Party complaining about falsifying history.

    However, mention of workers’ and peasants’ unity didn’t spark any nostalgia among members of United Russia, who are spearheading the bill as a way to search for “more efficient models for interaction with the countries on the post-Soviet space.”

    In the case of the Victory Banner, United Russia wants to harness the victories of the Communist past only without the Communists.

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    Mainstreaming Russian Nationalism

    December 3rd, 2013

    By Sean Guillory.

    Nationalists in Vologda. Photo source

    On 26 October about 5-10 youths of “Slavic appearance” attacked a Moscow-Dushanbe bound train as it sat at Ternovka station in Voronezh province. Yelling nationalist slogans, the gang smashed about 20 car windows with rocks. Passengers received minor injuries. “I can’t exactly say why a group of people attacked our train,” a source from the Tajik Railroad told Gazeta.ru. “It’s possible that it’s connected to the intensification of anti-migrant sentiment in the Russian Federation.”

    This incident is the latest in a series of nationalist inspired attacks on migrants in Russia. While commentators sought to identify the reasons for the Biryulyovo race riot, little attention has been paid to the apparent increase in nationalist activity since the government’s anti-migrant campaign in early August. True, while many nationalist attacks are not connected to any organization (the Russian nationalist movement is variegated, decentralized and often spontaneous), there has been an uptick in organized activity. Indeed, two weeks prior to the Biryulyovo riot, the nationalist gangs Moscow Shield and Stop Drugs stormed a migrant dormitory in Moscow’s Kapotnya District. The raid, part of which you can view online, saw of youths roaming floor to floor wielding clubs and traumatic weapons to root out illegal migrants. But migrant raids are only one form of nationalist activity. The Sova Center, which monitors extremism, has recorded a number of incidents in which nationalists declared “white” only buses and trams, staging “people’s assemblies” to protest migrant crime, and individual physical attacks on non-Slavs. In its September report on racism and xenophobia, the Sova Center stated that “the public activities of the far-right are notably higher than in the summer.”

    What is important about Russia’s far rights, though, isn’t just its increase in public activity. More telling is that this activism comes alongside a concerted effort to move nationalism into the political mainstream.

    Since the Duma protests of winter 2011-2012, the Russian far-right has become a normal aspect of Russian politics. Nationalists were an important contingent in the protests and served as key members of now defunct opposition Coordinating Committee. Alexei Navalny has successfully intertwined anti-migrant sentiment with anti-corruption politics. Navalny’s response to the Biryulyovo riot revealed him as a populist opportunist willing to exploit racism.

    Russian nationalists are increasingly adopting the language of democracy to propagate their positions. For example, when asked about the demands of the Russian March planned for Unity Day, Konstantin Krylov, a leader of unregistered National-Democratic Party, said, “The Russian March’s demands will include such inflammatory things as the freedom of conscious, speech, assembly, and unions. These are old demands. The Russian liberation movement also advanced these a hundred years ago. True, if the situation has changed in the last hundred years it has become worse because we were given these freedoms after 1905, but now there are still some problems with them.” For Krylov, the liberal freedoms the Russian March represents are there to protect the freedom to be racist.

    The discourse around the Biryulyovo riot on the Internet appears to have normalized this freedom. A recent Vox Populi study of online references to the Birlyulyovo riot found that over half of the mentions to the riot considered the demands of the rioters “lawful and just.” Those demands included calling for the authorities to find Shcherbakov’s murderer, to close the Pokrovsky fruit and vegetable warehouse, and solve the problem of illegal migrants. On the surface, demanding that the authorities catch murders and address illegal migration is justified. However, the methods residents employed and many on the internet cheered were outside of any notion of liberal legality. If anything they spoke to the illiberalism of the mob. The freedom of speech and assembly coupled with a breakdown of institutions of legal grievance exploded in racist hatred. As Navalny approvingly wrote on his blog, “If there is no fair system to resolve conflicts and problems, then people will create them themselves, in a primitive and wild fashion. That is to be expected: after all, they are the ones being murdered.” This primitive and wild behavior was ratified on the Internet, which became, according to Kirill Rodin, Vox Populi’s director, an instrument “for the spontaneous igniting of interethnic hatred.”

    But stoking nationalism isn’t just the providence of the opposition. The Moscow mayoral election proved that anti-migrant rhetoric is a campaign staple. Even state authorities are tapping nationalist activity in the fight against illegal migrants. In St. Petersburg, for example, migration authorities have recruited Russia Cleanings, a nationalist group that has been conducting sweeps of markets for illegal migrants since August, to participate in official migrant inspections. Politicians are appealing to popular xenophobia as a means to control it. But as Andrei Kolesnikov recently wrote, appeals to nationalism only widen “the bounds of what is permissible in the discussion of what is national.” The real result is that “xenophobia has become commonplace. The everyday rejection of non-Russians has been gently supported from above. The nationalist discourse has become normative and dominant—both above and below. The language of hatred has been sanctioned from the highest floors, meaning that all is permitted.”

    Perhaps sensing that the political spectrum has taken a sharp turn rightward, organizers of the Russian March have extended invitations to Navalny, Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin, Putin and others. “If Navalny comes, excellent, we will be very happy. It will be good if Sobyanin comes as well. We will be very happy to see Putin, Medvedev, or Rogozin. They can consider this an official public invitation. We will not invite homosexuals and pedophiles. We ask them to not bother [coming],” said Vladimir Tor, the chairman of the National-Democratic Party. Then he added, “All Russian people can come to the Russian March. Our doors are open to all. I’m convinced that any rational politician must use the energy of the Russian March.” Indeed, Tor and others hope to unite all Russians under their fourteen word slogan: “We must secure our Russian land for the future of our people and the future of our Russian children.”

    In the wake of August’s anti-migrant campaign and the Biryulyovo riot, this year’s Russian March, which organizers hope to draw 30,000, will be a big test of how mainstream far-right nationalism has become. The Moscow authorities have agreed to the march, but as a precaution relegated it outside the center to the southeastern district of Lyublino. But this might turn out to be a blessing in disguise. The March’s nationalist organizers think that Lyublino is an excellent idea—it’s a working class district and exactly the people nationalists want to appeal to. Come next week, we’ll find out soon how far Tor’s fourteen word slogan reverberates.

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    Volgograd Bomber’s Mysterious Passport

    October 30th, 2013

    By Sean Guillory.

    One of the more curious and controversial aspects of the Volgograd bombing was how quickly the Russian media released the passport of Naida Asiyalova, the suicide bomber. Life Newstweeted an image of Asiyalova’s passport within hours of the bombing. The state channel NTV also broadcast the image. The photo, which quickly appeared throughout Russian media, immediately raised eyebrows. Why did Asiyalova have her passport on her if she was going to carry out a terrorist attack? And more importantly, if the passport was found at the blast site, then why was it undamaged? And what’s up with a picture of her in a hajib!?

    passport1

    As David Burghardt wrote in the Moscow News:

    Though there was literally nothing left of the suicide bomber and the bus was practically gutted by the explosion, the alleged suicide bomber’s passport found on the scene miraculously survived without any damage whatsoever: No torn or burnt pages, no blood, no visible clue that that particular document was even on the bus. The pages of the passport are still bright and shiny as if it had never been in an explosion. Considering the fact that she had her passport on her, one would expect that it would have had some form of damage to it.

    Another curious thing about Asiyalova’s passport is that her photograph shows her in a hijab, a head covering worn by Muslim women. This is an official document and Russia doesn’t allow headgear for pictures in passports (just as any other country). So how did that picture end up in that passport? How did that passport survive the blast? Was this the actual suicide bomber?

    Good questions. Burghardt wasn’t the only one. Russian bloggers asked even more pointedquestions based on close scrutiny of the image.  Slon.ru povided some answers. One of which settled the hijab mystery. Since 2003, Russia allows people to take passport photographs with hajibs as long as the face is visible. Still, it’s pretty clear that this hajib photo was placed up top of another photo.

    As for why the passport wasn’t damages in the blast, well, perhaps because it wasn’t the Asiyalova’s actual passport. At least it wasn’t the passport found at the blast scene. Clearly this first passport was doctored.

    This is “real” one:

    passport2

    So why the initial fake passport? True, the Russian media is under the same pressures media from other countries. They have to get information out fast, and the fastest juiciest news the better. However, Life News is an animal on its own. It’s known for its half-truths, police connections and general subterfuge. It’s well known that the siloviki use Life News to generate black PR to smear oppositionists. Clearly they–Life News and/or the police wanted to get “proof” of Asiyalova’s identity out there. But why? I’m sure there’s a much more surly back story to all this. But on the surface in releasing this counterfeit passport, Life News, the cops, or whoever once again undermined what the Russian police have little of: public trust. Could’ve that been the point?

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    The Cold Civil War

    September 10th, 2013

    By Sean Guillory.

    foragent

    May 6 is the first anniversary of the Bolotnaya protests that erupted in violence. Twenty-eight people and possibly more await prosecution. Bolotnaya has also served as the impetus to link Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov to a wider conspiracy where he, Leonid Razvozzhaev (who confessed then retracted it claiming it was given under torture), and Konstantin Lebedev (who has confessed and is cooperating with the Investigative Committee) of planning a coup financed with Georgian (i.e. American) money. I discussed the significance of Bolotnaya on the Power Verticalpodcast on Friday. There I stressed that what Bolotnaya represents is Putin adopting Stalin’s ominous maxim made in reference to the 1928 Shakhty Trial: “We have internal enemies. We have external enemies.”

    While I caution against any comparison between Putin and Stalin, the existence of the internal/external enemy duumvirate is clearly apparent. In fact, Forbes.ru‘s Aleksandr Morozov put it at the center of his article, “Cold War-2013: What Grew Out of the 2012 Protests.” Morozov makes some interesting observations about the state of things a year after Bolotnaya.

    Namely:

    As I alluded on the podcast, the internal/external enemy is the guiding principle of Putin and Investigative Committee chief Aleksandr Bastrykin’s effort to discredit the opposition. Interestingly, however, there are indications the circle of internal-external enemies might be expanding to include Medvedev’s circle.

    This last point was the subject of a recent Novaya gazeta article that connected the criminal investigation against Aleksey Beltyukov, Senior Vice President of the Skolkovo Fund, and the payment of $750,000 to Just Russia Duma deputy and street oppositionist Ilya Ponomarev to Dmitry Medvedev (who is the face of Skolkovo) and Vladislav Surkov (who supervises Skolkovo). Essentially, paying Ponomarev an enormous amount of money for ten lectures and scientific research is an “indirect but quite transparent hint” that Medevdev and Surkov are funding the street opposition.

    In a similar vein, Morozov notes an effort to connect Medvedev’s “liberalism” and “foreign agents.” This is a further indication that the tandem is dead (did anyone think it was still alive?) and that Medvedev is a “delinquent member of the family” without “the means to win forgiveness.” Hence, the campaign to discredit him and his circle. In one of the stranger facts, a Yandex search for “Dvorkovich is a British agent,” i.e. Arkady Dvorkovich, Medevdev’s right-hand man and silovik mandarin Igor Sechin’s arch-nemesis, unearths 120,000 links. Even weirder is that this claim is attributed to American freakazok-in-chief, Lyndon LaRouche. Yes, that is how kooky the smear campaign has gotten. The message however muddled is clear: Medvedev is not one of “us.”

    The extension of the umbrella of Otherness goes further. Morozov explains there is an effort to dehumanize oppositionists of all stripes. “The enemy must lose human features and be turned into “nonhumans”, beasts, insects, ‘livestock,’ and ‘larva,’” he writes. This effort to dehumanize the enemy is harrowing for anyone who knows Soviet history. Things haven’t gotten to an Andrei Vyshinsky level of dehumanization, though. Vyshinsky was a maestro of bestial adjectives. During the show trials of the 1936-38, the Soviet state prosecutor cast the defendants as rabid dogs, venomous snakes, swine, among others, who “sold themselves to enemy intelligence services.” This is why the “foreign agent” label for Russian NGOs stirs so much controversy, ire, disgust, and foreboding.

    Morozov, however, has a larger characterization of the state of things beyond of the friend-enemy distinction. True to his article’s title, Morozov sees the situation between the authorities and the opposition as a “cold civil war.” And, in his opinion, this only gives Putin the advantage.

    It gives [Putin] the possibility to mobilize the “People’s Front,” a new form of political and electoral support. A year after the inauguration, the features of the new regime are clearly replacing the conception of rule through the “dominant party.” If Putin ruled in his first and second terms relying on the electoral and ideological pseudo-competition between United Russia and other parties respecting the norms of “illiberal democracy,” then there will now be another system.

    In order for the People’s Front to work it’s necessary to permanently keep non-party “forms of the enemy” alive. The People’s Front isn’t facing off against local party structures, but against a global plutocracy with a fifth column inside the country.

    Those who protested a year ago against electoral violations and spoke for institutional reforms think that political inclusion is better than exclusion. But it will be hard to adapt them if you consider them “enemies of the state” and not loyal citizens. But it’s necessary to look at reality in the eyes. There is a “front” and there are “the people.”

    And if we accept Morozov’s diagnosis of the current conjecture, the internal-external enemy matrix will be around for a long time. In fact, it seems to be a basis of Putin’s domestic rule. If true, this places the opposition in a complicit position in Putin’s master plan. Yes, most want a seat at the table. They aren’t revolutionaries. But if that seat is continually denied, or the pressure keeps increasing, as it undoubtedly will, more and more of them will radicalize, giving Putin the perpetual flow of “enemies of the state” he requires.

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    Stalin as Victory’s Unwanted Guest

    August 29th, 2013

     

    By Sean Guillory.

    stalin

    This week’s Russia Magazine! column, “Victory’s Essential, but Unwanted Guest,”

    Victory Day is Russia’s most sacred holiday. The day marks Russia’s most traumatic moment in its turbulent twentieth century. The war supplants all previous traumas: WWI, the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Terror. In many respects it even absorbs the Soviet Union’s collapse, if only because victory over the Nazis makes the whole Soviet experiment worth it. Indeed, Victory Day has such resonance that it provides Russians one of the few means to reconcile their Soviet past with their post-Soviet present. And in an increasingly divided Russia, it is one of the few days of genuine national unity.

    As Lev Gudkov put it in his 2005 essay, “The Fetters of Victory,”

    All [Soviet] components of the positive collective unity of the idea of “us” are eroding. After their devaluation has brought to the fore a range of complexes of hurt self-esteem and inferiority, Victory now stands out as a stone pillar in the desert, the vestige of a weathered rock. All the most important interpretations of the present are concentrated around Victory; it provides them with their standards of evaluation and their rhetorical means of expression.

    A stone pillar for sure, except for one essential capstone in that victory: Stalin.

    Stalin has yet to find his place in contemporary Russian memory of Victory. He is a figure that is evoked at the same time he’s repudiated. In both instances—total embrace and total rejection—Stalin is fetishized as savior or destroyer, angel or demon, neither of which is any less violent. The difference is in who he smites with his sword, not how he wields it. The tension between these two figures makes Stalin eternally split. Thus, he was the leader of the nation during the war. Yet displaying his image is taboo. The system he created facilitated victory with all its attending scars and burns. But to give Stalin credit verges on blasphemy. Stalin embodied the unity of the Soviet people. Yet their victory is not his. On the day to commemorate Russia’s greatest tragedy and triumph, Stalin remains the guest you have to invite, but one you pray doesn’t show.

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    US Prison Industrial Complex Versus the Stalinist Gulag

    May 11th, 2013

    By Sean Guillory.

    In a recent column, “Incarceration Nation, Fareed Zakaria claimed that number of people in the United States under “correctional supervision” exceeded that of Stalinist Russia. The assertion comes via Adam Gopnik, who wrote an extensive article on the US prison system in January. “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America–more than 6 million–,” writes Gopnik, “than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.” Correctional supervision means adults on probation, in jail or prison, and on parole. Zakaria follows Gopnik’s incantation of Stalinism with some horrifying figures:

    Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britain–with a rate among the highest–has 153. Even developing countries that are well known for their crime problems have a third of U.S. numbers. Mexico has 208 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, and Brazil has 242. As Robertson pointed out on his TV show, The 700 Club, “We here in America make up 5% of the world’s population but we make up 25% of the [world’s] jailed prisoners.”

    It is no hyperbole to say that the US prison industrial complex is unacceptable, especially for a country that purports itself the world’s preeminent democracy. But it is hyperbole because placing the US next to Stalinism (and Nazism for that matter) is inherently hyperbolic. The rhetorical move is supposed to provoke an emotional reaction not stimulate critical awareness. And as much as American liberals would like to think that the numbers of bodies ensnared in the US prison industrial complex is as bad, if not worse, than Stalinist Russia, the situation is far more complicated.

    Here I don’t mean the quality of the Stalinist system No one is claiming that the US system is worse than Stalin’s forced labor camps. I only mean the quantity of humans in both systems.

    The Stalinist penal system was a complex network of punishments and detentions: prisons, noncustodial forced labor, corrective labor camps, forced labor detention (katorga) special settlements, and corrective labor colonies. I won’t go into the meanings and various differences between these. Though experts make clear distinctions between these various units, to the popular mind, they all fall under the general name of gulag. The numbers of people, which also included children, in this penal machine at any given period remains partial. Up 20 percent of the gulag population was released every year, new inmates went in, corpses went out, some even managed to escape. But exactly how many people under Stalin’s correctional supervision is unknown.

    Here’s the population of some of these institutions between 1935 and 1940:

    gulag3540

    According to the straight numbers, the Stalinist system did not exceed the US’ six million during the years of the Great Terror. In 1938, there were 2.7 million people in the “gulag.” But this doesn’t include everyone under Stalinist “correctional supervision.” Therefore it doesn’t take account of prisons and released gulag prisoners who were forced to carry “Form A” which detailed their past crime, prison term, the deprivation of civil rights up to five years, and restricted where they could settle. There were roughly 2 million people released from the gulag between 1934 and 1940 which etches the Stalinist number closer to the United States.

    Things change in 1953, the height of the Stalinist gulag. Here are the numbers:

    gulag1953

    This means an estimated 7.4 million people were under Stalinist correctional supervision 1953, exceeding Zakaria’s and Gopnik’s 6 million for the United States. Again the numbers are probably higher since these numbers don’t include everyone in the Stalinist penal system.

    Things get even more complicated when you consider the gulag population per 100,000 citizens.  According to Eugenia Belova and Paul Gregory, the Soviet institutionalized population in 1953 was 2,621,000 or 1,558 per 100.000. When you include special settlements, the numbers jump to 4,301,000 or 2,605 per 100,000. This puts the 760 per 100,000 in the United States into perspective.

    The numbers in the United States should produce outcry. No argument there. But caution is required when Stalinist Russia is thrown into the mix, that is, if you want to go beyond rhetoric and emotion.

    Other Sources:

    Eugenia Belova and Paul Gregory, “Political Economic of Crime and Punishment Under Stalin,”Public Choice, 140, 2009.
    Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society, Princeton, 2011.

    http://seansrussiablog.org/2013/05/11/us-prison-industrial-complex-versus-the-stalinist-gulag/

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    Putin and Russian History

    May 9th, 2013

    By Sean Guillory. 

    34_putin

    Arch Getty’s comment, “Putin in History,” was included in today’s Johnson’s Russia List. I asked him if I could repost it here. He kindly agreed. Full disclosure, Professor Getty was my dissertation advisor and mentor at UCLA.

    Putin and Russian History
    By J. Arch Getty

    An occupational hazard of being a Russian historian is that people often ask “What about Putin?” “What’s going to happen in Russia?” Historians are generally allergic to making predictions, and predicting Russia has a very poor track record; almost nobody predicted the sudden fall of the USSR.  But because we are at least somewhat the products of the past, that past may tell us something about the future. So where does Putin come from?

    In the short-term, Putin’s perception of society is easy to trace to KGB culture in the Brezhnev era: disruptive or unorthodox events were seen as misguided, incomprehensible, or even mentally unbalanced challenges to order. In short, because Soviet society is perfect, protests must originate with foreign enemies, outside agitators or mental illness, so protestors should be ridiculed and punished. This explains Putin’s ludicrous but characteristic reaction that the 2011-2012 winter Bolotnaia election protestors were dupes responding to Hillary Clinton’s “signal,” his offensive mocking of their white ribbons as condoms, and his reflex to punish demonstration leaders.

    But there are historically deeper Russian sources for Putin’s myopic vision and actions. For example, in 1825, following the defeat of Napoleon, noble Russian army officers returned from Paris with subversive French Revolutionary ideas about human rights, elections, constitutions, and the rule of law. In December of that year, they staged a demonstration and abortive coup attempt aimed at overthrowing the Russian monarchy. The “Decembrist Revolt” was quickly put down by royal power deployed by the new tsar, Nicholas I.

    From the official side, tsar Nicholas I (like Putin) could not understand what was happening. Nicholas was so perplexed that while harshly punishing the Decembrists, he (unlike Putin) had jailhouse conversations with several of them in order to understand their motivations. But like Putin, Nicholas’ world view prevented him from seeing that society was changing. He responded with the official slogan “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” a conservative statement that, by the way, Putin could embrace. Instead of understanding the changes around them, both rulers quickly deployed punitive state power against the ringleaders. Since society was basically sound as it was, one could nip change in the bud simply by decapitating it, right?

    It seemed that nothing came of the 1825 revolt. Disappointed observers ridiculed the dilettante noble demonstrators for being unable to transform their opposition into a real revolution: They had no mass support. They were poor planners and organizers. Some of them even overslept or got lost that day and missed the action altogether. In the long run, however, seeds had been planted. The poor, marginalized and imprisoned Decembrists of 1825 would inspire later generations of Russian reformers and revolutionaries of all stripes who gradually attracted broader social support and who eventually brought down the monarchy in 1917. Reformers and revolutionaries would later glorify the memory of the hapless Decembrists as forerunners who planted the seeds of change but could not live to see their flowering.

    Today’s protesters are also ridiculed and belittled, especially by leftists both in Russia and the west, for not becoming more. But in the long view (which we historians are trained to take) change in Russia has always come very slowly, and one wonders if in a future Russia people will not look back at the Bolotnaia and even Pussy Riot demonstrators as the beginnings of something big, something that took a while to mature. Even if we scoff at their lost potential, let us also not forget that these recent demonstrations for democracy were unprecedented in their scale. They dwarf the Soviet dissident movement of the 1970s and 1980s which, as it turned out, planted much smaller seeds.

    Both Nicholas I and Putin represent an old Russian tradition whereby the monarchy doggedly refused to understand or compromise with change. Nicholas’ unbending obsolete vision and inflexibility would do much to radicalize later Russian reformers. Like him, his great-grandson Nicholas II would also be inherently unable to understand the forces for social change around him, and he and the monarchy were eventually swept away by the 1917 revolutions. Nicholas I, Nicholas II, Brezhnev and Putin just didn’t get it. They were constitutionally unable to understand society and how it changes.

    They all had silent majorities behind them at one point. Today, some 65% of the population supports Putin, compared with 1% for demonstration leader Navalny.  But the long clocks of change were and are ticking, even if few notice at the time.  Today it seems that Putin has an unchallenged upper hand and has never been stronger. On the other hand, the Bolotnaia protesters, Pussy Riot women, and possibly leaders like Navalny seem to be fading into obscurity, oblivion and prison. But in the future, the historical results of today’s impotent protests and Putin’s reaction to them could look very different.

    It is possible that Russian strongman monarchy is built into Russian political culture. But it is just as possible that its days are numbered. Polling support for Putin is inversely proportional to educational levels, which are broadly rising. These protesters may mark something big, something ultimately decisive. Putin’s clock is ticking, but he has inherited the deafness of all Russian monarchs. And even if he could hear the ticks he wouldn’t know what to do about them.

    J. Arch Getty is Professor of History at UCLA. He is the author of several books on Russian history, including Practicing Stalinism: Boyars, Bolsheviks and the Persistence of Tradition, (Yale University Press, 2013) will be published in July.

     

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    Russia Seeks to Broaden High Treason

    October 21st, 2012

     

    By Sean Guillory.

    This morning I received a odd question in my daily Vedomosti alert: Would you be more careful associating with foreigners because of increased secrecy in Russia? What a curious question, especially since I am one of those foreigners who relies on Russians help to find places to live, access to archives, academic correspondence etc. Why would they have to suddenly be more careful? A click on the link took me to the Vedomosti article “Law on spies enters its second reading.” The article reports that a new spy law moved to the second pit-stop on the road to legality after the Russian Duma unanimously accepted its first version. Introduced way back in December 2008, left dormant by Medvedev, but now gaining new impetus, the law seeks to revise the existing high treason and espionage statutes (Article 275 and 276 of the Russian Penal Code) by broadening their scope. For the new law’s framers, the need for revision was practical: high treason is too “difficult to prove especially because its necessary to demonstrate the hostile character of the activity.” Among other edits, the new law conveniently removes the phrase “hostile activity” and inserts “harmful to the security of the Russian Federation” in its place. According to Vedomosti the implications are:

    On the details and means of obtaining state secrets: [a secret] can be “entrusted” to the accused or become “known [to them] in service, work, or school,” and “in other instances stipulated by the laws of the Russian Federation.” It’s not specified what these other instances are. It will be considered criminal to provide “financial, material, technical, advice and assistance.” And instead of saying “damage to the external security,” the law now simply says “damage the security” of Russia. This includes activities against the constitutional order, sovereignty, and territorial and state integrity.

    The article continues:

    The new statute expands the punishment for the collection of information deemed a state secret (it describes a case where information is gathered, but not passed along or advanced). One aggravating factor, among others, will be the means of distributing such information (For example, in the media or on the internet.) as well as “the movement of those possessors of information outside the Russian Federation.” In other words, a person in illegal possession of secrets, but does not go abroad will be punished less severely (up to four years) than those who take sensitive information abroad, regardless of the purpose of the trip (for example on vacation or meeting with a resident).” This last instance carries a sentence of three to eight years.

    But let’s not take Vedomosti‘s word for it. Here’s the old Article 275 and 276 and proposed revisions:

    High treason that is espionage, disclosure of state secrets, or any other assistance rendered to a foreign State, a foreign organization, or their representatives in hostile activities to the detriment of the external security of the Russian Federation, committed by a citizen of the Russian Federation.

    Can become:

    High treason that is acts that are hostile to the security of the Russian Federation committed by the citizen of the Russian Federation: espionage, the delivery to a foreign state, international or foreign organization or to their representatives information considered a state secret entrusted to persons or have become known to him in service, work, or education, or rendering financial, material-technical, consultation or any help to foreign states, international or foreign organizations or their representatives in activities directed against the security of the Russian Federation, including its constitutional order, sovereignty, and territorial and state integrity.

    Article 276 goes from:

    The transfer, and also collection, theft, or keeping for the purpose of transfer to a foreign state, a foreign organization, or their representatives of information constituting a state secret, and also transfer or collection of other information under the order of a foreign intelligence service, to the detriment of the external security of the Russian Federation.

    To:

    The transfer and also the compilation, abduction or storage for the purpose of transferring to a foreign state, international or foreign organization or to their representatives information considered a state secret, and also the transfer or compilation by assignment of a foreign secret service or persons acting in its interests any information for their use to harm the security of the Russian Federation (espionage).

    From the pithy to the verbose, and from the “hard to prove” to legal elasticity. It’s no wonder the proposed law has Russian NGOs in the tizzy.

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    Pussy Riot as Modern Day Skomorokhi

    August 25th, 2012

    By Sean Guillory.

    The trial and conviction of Pussy Riot has sparked a number of historical analogies. Never wanting for hyperbole, the Washington Post, among others in the West and Russia, argued that the trial echoed “Stalinism” (an analogy nicely rebutted by Mark Adomanis). The Pussy Riot case has also been likened to the 1964 trial of the Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky, not to mention harking back to the trials of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in 1965. But historical analogies did not end with the Soviet period. Another common refrain was that the accusations and trial of Pussy Riot reflected medieval Russia. This comparison wasn’t hard given that Artem Ranchenkov, one of the case investigators, cited Orthodox canonical rules of proper church dress from the 4th century Council of Laodicea and the 7th century Quinisext Council. Nor was it difficult to call the affair “medieval” since the trial proceedings were often more like an ecclesiastical than a civilian court. The coup de grace for which was when Yelena Pavlova, a lawyer representing nine of Pussy Riot’s “victims,” called feminism a “mortal sin.”

    Another common historical analogy making the rounds were excerpts from Article 231 of the Imperial Russian Criminal Code of 1845, which stated that “improper loud cries, laughter, or any other noise or unseemly conduct that causes temptation, averts attention of worshipers from their duty to God” carried a fine of 50 kopeks to a ruble or detention from three to seven days. If the disturbance occurred during church service, the sentence was prison for a period of three weeks to three months. The irony here was that under the “well-ordered police state” of Nicholas I, Pussy Riot’s sentence would have been far lighter. Yet, others listed other possible laws applicable to Pussy Riot from the 1845 code. One blog post listed 24 satutes, Articles 182-205, concerning blasphemy, sacrilege, and other violations of faith. The sentences varied from corporal punishment, forced labor in factories and mines, jail time and exile to Siberia. The only problem is that blasphemy and sacrilege are not in the Russian Criminal Code of 2012. That is unless it’s disguised as “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”

    But the historical semblances didn’t stop with references to bygone eras or now defunct imperial codes. Some of the more interesting ones were those that placed Pussy Riot within a broader historical tradition of Russian minstrelsy, where hooliganism, art, and protest collided into a staple of Russian medieval culture.

    Indeed, there were two references to Russian medieval minstrels, or skomorokhi, in the trial. When one of the prosecutors asked Stalnisalv Samutsevich, the father of Pussy Rioter Yekaterina, if he believed “it was acceptable to say ‘Holy shit’ in a church”, he compared his daughter’s act to that of the skomorokhi of the sixteenth century. Likewise, in her statement to the court, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said that Pussy Riot were in the tradition of the skomorokhi. “We are jesters, skomorokhi, maybe even, holy fools. We didn’t mean any harm.”


    Skomorokhi were minstrel entertainers in Kievan and Muscovite Russia that performed for public and Tsar alike. They were wildly popular as they performed songs and folktales or acts of trained bears to the delight of onlookers. Despite their entertainment value, like Pussy Riot, they combined entertainment and mockery with unruliness. Unlike the balaclava-clad feminists, however, the lawlessness of the skomorokhi mostly involved theft and pillage. One famous story told of a band of minstrels distracting the peasants of Likovo with their performance, while their comrades were busy rounding up the villagers’ sheep. Other incidents told of skomorokhi ransacking barns, raiding animal pens, and making off with whatever they could grab. According to Russell Zguta, a historian of the minstrels, “The performing minstrels would frequently allude in song and proverb to the mischief their unseen comrades were engaged in, but no one was wiser until it was too late.”

    Sometimes minstrel “hooliganism” was sanctioned, especially by Ivan IV, who was known to use them to mock and heap scorn upon his enemies. These acts were sometimes sacrilegious. One story told of Ivan having Archbishop Pimen of Novgorod placed on a white mare which paraded him around Moscow accompanied by a band of minstrels. In fact, Ivan Grozny was no mere observer. Sometimes he was a participant in the revelry. In the later part of his reign, he was known to put on a mask himself and dance and frolic with the skomorokhi.

    As Ivan’s unleashing of the skomorokhi on the Archbishop suggests, the minstrels had few friends in the Orthodox Church. Church officials viewed the skomorokhi as disseminators of paganism, purveyors of “shameful performances” on street corners and marketplaces, and disruptors of church rituals. Weddings garnered many priests’ ire as the minstrels’ performance often overshadowed the religious sanctity of the nuptials. Sometimes confrontations between priests and skomorokhi descended in fisticuffs. In his biography, Ivan Neronov, a leader of the Orthodox Zealots of Piety, told of an incident in the mid-1640s where he attacked a group of minstrels, seized their instruments and smashed them. Angered, the skomorokhi severely beat clergyman in return. But the zealot was undaunted. As Zhuta reports:

    Henceforth [Neronov] and some of his students patrolled the streets of the town during the major festival periods such as Koliada in order to discourage the skomorokhi from performing. But, says the author, students “received not a few wounds at the hands of the skomorokhi, those servants of the devil, and they bore these bodily wounds with joy as they returned to their homes, bloodied but alive.”

    Avvakum too had confrontations with skomorokhi. When a band of minstrels with dancing bears arrived to his village of Lopatishch in 1648, he quickly set to drive them away. “I, a sinner, being zealous in the service of Christ,” he wrote, “drove them out and destroyed their masks and drums, one against many in the open field, and I took two great bears from them—one I killed but he later revived, the other I set free in the open field.”

    Neronov’s patrols and Avvakum’s clash with the minstrels provide a whole new historical context for the recent call by Ivan Otrakovsky, head of Orthodox Christian movement Holy Rus, for Orthodox activists to form patrol squads to protect worshipers from the “enemies of faith.” “The time has come to remind all apostates and theomachists that it is our land and we forbid blasphemous, offensive actions and statements against the Orthodox religion and our people,” Otrakovsky wrote in his appeal to the faithful. A modern day Zealot of Piety, I’d say.

    Though skomorokhi enjoyed the patronage of Tsars Ivan IV, Fedor I, and Mikhail Romanov, the latter’s son, Alexei, took stringent action against minstrelsy. Urged by his confessor and leader of the Zealots of Piety, Stefan Vonifatev, and pushed to reestablish public order in the wake mob violence in Moscow and revolts in Ustiug, Solvychegodsk, Yaroslavl, Tomsk, Novgorod and Pskov, Alexei issued “On the Righting of Morals and the Abolition of Superstition” in December 1648 against the skomorokhi. Aleksei was alarmed by the “drunkenness and devilish amusements” of the skomorokhi, which turned the people away the Orthodox faith and God and to the worship of the minstrels. The 1648 edict unleashed a wave of repression against minstrels, including the confiscation and destruction of their instruments, and penalties such as knouting and exile for performing skomorokhi entertainments, as well as prohibitions on a whole host of pagan rites, festivity, games, and practices. Even priests questioned confessors about their connection to the skomorokhi. They asked penitents: “Did you seek out the games of the skomorokhi? Did you seek out Satanic games, look upon these, or yourself take part in them?” If they answered yes, the penitent was required to recite, “I have sinned, I delighted in hearing the sound of gusli and the organon, of horns, and all manner of skomoroshestvo, of Satanic sayings, and for this I also paid them [that is, the minstrels].”

    The skomorokhi hobbled along after 1648, but thanks to Alexei’s crackdown, they never regained their popularity, notoriety, or cultural significance. While the practices of the skomorokhi certainly continued in different forms, according to Zhuta, historical references to them died out after 1768.

    But as the Pussy Riot affair shows, the memory of the skomorokhi lives on in Tolokonnikova’s “We are jesters, skomorokhi, maybe even, holy fools.” And perhaps thanks to her, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevitch’s “punk prayer” they will live again, in all their former anarchic glory.

    All references come from:

    Russell Zguta, Russian Minstrels: A History of the Skomorokhi, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978.

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