IS RUSSIA AN EVIL EMPIRE YES OR NO

US accuses Russia of 'barbarism' in Aleppo:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37468080

Zbigniew Brzezinski
‏@zbig
In its waning months, Obama admin should privately reiterate to Russia that any Baltic incursion would mean war. Not a threat, simply fact.

@DougHenwood
Dems are hot to go to war with Russia. Nuts.

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/chechen-leader-accused-of-child-cruelty-after-entering-preteen-sons-in-televised-cage-fights-35111673.html#-/web/-1475840635130-trackingCode-l8TGeQ69BeNyeYeWN/nX2fel4BLVnZvK2r9qbEIVsgQ=-articleId-372714925-vv-7ff13765-61dc-4069-8a08-c3ab1ef5da15

“Little Adam proved that he is a real lion!” Mr Kadyrov wrote under one Instagram video of the fighting.

"World Star!" Mr Kadyrov wrote under one Instagram video of the fighting.

As someone who lives on the coast of the Baltic sea, I would really really like a security commitment in this area...

There is a small security commitment called NATO that you may be familiar with. idk if hyping up a risk that pretty much only exists in the minds of pundits would make a great deal of sense - particularly with a live and real risk of conflagration over Syria on the horizon.

This stuff isn't neutral. Russia isn't going to invade Estonia but continually emphasising the idea that Russian Estonians are a nefarious fifth column is going to have an impact on their already appalling treatment.

A very good friend of mine is a Russian Lithuanian, and she would like security commitments as well. I'm familiar with NATO, but I've also seen people, including a presidential candidate, say that it perhaps shouldn't really count with regards to the Baltics.

given putin's demonstrated imperial ambition i think it's understandable for people in the region to be anxious, and especially in the context of this american election wherected nato commitment has been something of a talking point

If Trump got in, I'm not sure what assurances Obama gave now would be worth. Russia invading the EU would and should lead to an armed response from NATO - it isn't a matter of serious discussion and is one of the many reasons Russia isn't going to invade the EU. The commitments are already in place. The rest is hot air. If Obama wanted to send a strong message, making the same commitment to Georgia, where there is an existing territorial dispute, would have more substance.

Weeeelllll let's not get carried away...

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/10/russia-and-the-2016-campaign

...And then Trump happened, and suddenly a massive vulnerability of the Democratic candidate became a significant asset. Just as suddenly, the Russian state suddenly had an ideologically sympathetic candidate to support. Crazy. To all appearances, this opportunity seems to have just dropped into Russia’s lap; to my mind, there’s little plausible evidence to indicate that Russia played any significant role in inspiring Trump to run, or in helping him prevail in the GOP primary. But given such an opportunity, the Russian intelligence services are running with it. Allies such as Wikileaks (I still think it’s wrong to refer to Assange as a Russian proxy; he has his own reasons, personal and ideological, for disliking Clinton) have actively supported this effort.

As an aside, it’s worth discussing against this backdrop the still-puzzling affinity that some leftish outfits (the Nation, obviously, but others) still have for Russian state propaganda. The reluctance in these quarters to grant that Russia has preferences regarding the 2016 US presidential election, and that it is actively pursuing those preferences, is genuinely odd. Part of this (paging Stephen Cohen) can be ascribed to the long-term habits of the Cold War, and a failure to notice that Russia had ceased to be even a rump revolutionary state, and had become an activist reactionary power. Some undoubtedly results from the fact that Putin was, indeed, on the correct side of the Iraq War debate, and that Russian media outlets in the United States (RT most notably) actively took an antagonistic stance towards the Bush administration. Some surely stems from residual gratitude for Russia’s role in promoting Julian Assange and harboring Edward Snowden, even as it has become apparent that Assange, at least, is more reactionary crank than progressive force. And related to this, there seems to be an implicit, undercurrent belief in some quarters that any political actor capable of resisting US foreign policy, even one which has become as actively pernicious and anti-progressive as Russia, is worth offering at least measured support. In any case, it sure would be nice if one of the flagship magazines of the American left was capable of noticing what the Russian state has become.

What would the main three or four flagship magazines of the American left be, in this context?

Other than cranks like Stop The War, most of the high-volume pushback i've seen against the Trump / Putin narrative has been from people who have also been historically critical of Putin, as has been discussed in the past. I don't think i could name a single credible left-wing outlet that genuinely seems to think that Russia is part of the international left.

Counterpunch, maybe, though idk if they're particularly credible.

Intercept?

Intercept is owned by the guy demonised in Russia for working with USAID to foment the Maidan uprising. It also publishes one of the most extreme of the mainstream Putin critics, in Masha Gessen, or has in the past:

https://theintercept.com/2015/09/08/how-putin-controls-the-russian-internet/

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/15/putin-doesnt-need-to-censor-books-publishers-do-it-for-him/

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/19/for-russia-censors-only-suicide-is-worse-than-homosexuality/

etc, etc

Greenwald himself has been critical:

https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/whats-behind-obamas-ongoing-accommodation-of-vladimir-putin/

The Intercept has also published a hell of a lot of softball pieces on Al-Nusra and ex-Soviet fighters in Syria.

Yet Greenwald keeps describing claims of ties to Russia as McCarthyite, which is pretty nonsensical.

The term "McCarthyite" has been used pretty extensively for the last fifty years to describe irrational political witch-hunts irrespective of whether leftism is involved.

There is also a line of continuity with that irrational paranoia from the 80s, even if Russia has changed. The perception that Russia never actually de-Communised and the Soviet government just morphed into the present one is more common on the liberal centre-right than on the left imo.

that is not an opinion i've ever heard. i think the conventional liberal wisdom about russia is that after the fall of communism it devolved into an oligarchic society w/ a strongman fascist leader.

if you can find a liberal pundit who says that today's russia is just a new form of soviet communism i'd be very interested to read it

I think the thinking is more that the late eighties Soviet government was more authoritarian oligarchy anyways, so no difference there? Putin being a KGB officer and all that.

feel like that's substantively different from communism as an ideological threat

Joy Ann Reid described Putin as "communist" fairly recently, but that's beside the point.

Not so much a new form of Soviet communism but there are two fairly mainstream views about the continuity of power. The starting point for both is that late-era communist Russia was never actually communist - it was a vehicle to feed privilege and power through to a small elite. The first, put across in a well-reviewed academic book that i can't remember the author of at 2am, is that the whole process of the breakup of the Soviet union was stage-managed by the KGB. The oligarchs are KGB tools and all post-Soviet leaders have been effectively reporting back to them, with Putin the first to step out from behind the curtain and rule directly.

The second is that there was a brief experiment with democracy but the post-KGB intelligence services and siloviki, headed by Putin, siezed power and have embarked on a kind of Soviet revanchism. In both theories, the nature of Russian political thought, and the threat posed by Russia, is pretty much the same now as it was in 1982.

Aside from that, and a much weaker thread, is the idea that Putin's protectionism, the limited redistribution that has taken place, the return of the idea of the paternal state and a hostility to some forms of foreign capital constitutes a kind of return to Soviet orthodoxy.

Communism was never much of an ideological threat from the 70s onward. The threat was military and in the race for influence over client states.

the two mainstream opinions you're citing seem pretty reasonable and not like irrational paranoia but what do i know

McCarthyite as a descriptor always had two main points, but as a term now it makes little sense because it's referring to one or the other. McCarthy's ostensible purpose in his demented crusade was to ferret out Russia sympathizers within the public sphere, but he did so with the assumption that any group advocating for socialist/communist political stances was inherently allied with the USSR.

I can't imagine any of the people who had those stances being allied with today's Russian state, nor can I imagine many of the people who like to deal with the oligarchs advocating communist causes.

as much as I want to keep Trump's name out of everything, I have to say that his recent debate shenanigans where he denied any Russian influence, cast Russia as a power to be worked with, and then lamented the fact the US was falling behind in developing nuclear weapons (?!?) was really o_O

Having to appeal to one set of Republicans who want to team up to fight ISIS at the same time as another set who are still hypersensitive to any potential challenge to US dominance is always going to create a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.

His position that US jets should fly alongside Russian ones in Syria, but Russian jets should be shot out of the sky if they fly too close to US warships, is another example.

a certain amount of cognitive dissonance

the same thing that Clinton's been accused of with claims that she's somehow two-faced when the majority of things cited are her presenting the same situation and proposed action to different groups with arguments that appeal to that specific group

Keeping Russia from expanding its influence as a stance can be supported with arguments about sovereignty, humanitarian rights, and economic influence, among others, but not everyone buys into all of those points. Telling Wall Street that we have to make sure the ruble isn't the default currency for oil pricing sounds gross and sets off all my internal "war for oil" alarm bells but it's something they'd listen to.

The second is that there was a brief experiment with democracy but the post-KGB intelligence services and siloviki, headed by Putin, siezed power and have embarked on a kind of Soviet revanchism. In both theories, the nature of Russian political thought, and the threat posed by Russia, is pretty much the same now as it was in 1982.

this is my impression, w "experiment with democracy" qualified of course by the destabilizing inequity and churn following from the public-sector fire sale, "shock therapy", a sudden new class of warring gangsters, etc.; arguably democracy cannot function under these circumstances but of course the period is different from the authoritarian-monopole systems that precede and follow it and share a lot of staff.

had never read about the literal-conspiracy possibility! it seems unnecessary to me from an occam's perspective but of course unnecessary stuff happens all the time.

would set the point at which the cold war became solely a great-power game about spheres of imperial influence back even further than the '70s tbh. maybe all the way. even when the ideological war is at its hottest, its actual expression is still as a jockeying over influence. a peculiar nuclear-age interest in projections of strength arguably distinguishes the cold war from balances of power past but that's not ideological either. i guess, earlier on, you did have more american leftists who thought the ussr was still part of the struggle. but idk that they were ever a threat to anyone.

(well spies are a threat. what i mean is despite people's personal reasons for recruitment i don't see much difference between a soviet spy in postwar america and, like, an austrian spy in fin-de-siecle france.)

I kinda want to set the demarcation line as when Stalin came to power, and exiled Trotsky. From then on it all became about Soviet imperialist interests first instead of any ideological worldwide revolution. That's obviously an oversimplification, but it feels good. Then in fifties-seventies there's a period of third-world socialism, but a lot of that isn't controlled by Soviets, and even back then was mostly called Maoism (right?) which is a bad name as well. From the mid seventies, after the failure of first May 68, the violent repression of leftism in Latin America, Asian communism failing with Mao meeting Nixon and Pol Pot turning insanely murderous, and the Arab world turning to either terrorism or impotent oil diplomacy, it's over.

Then in fifties-seventies there's a period of third-world socialism, but a lot of that isn't controlled by Soviets

yeah -- USA reacts to it as if it is, but underneath the grand ideological conflict the prime motives for these reactions seem to be, if not about corporate profit (as in latin america), about demonstrating "will" so as to preserve the MAD balance (as in vietnam) -- classic great-power motivations, if in the latter case inflamed by nukes. so even when there is a US/USSR proxy conflict that involves actual ideologically battling capitalist/communist forces within a state, there's plenty of impetus for the proxy war that has nothing to do on either imperial side w angels vs demons.

dunno that i'd put the shift right at the moment of stalin's ascension but agree that the events of his reign -- the terror and the war, one of them straight from his brain and the other merely under his management -- are what transforms the country. arguably similar tho not as dramatic or grim is the transformation the war effects on the US, which comes out the other side in the national-security-state form we know today.

I think Stalin's Socialism In One Country was a nice little pep-talk slogan for his gruelling 5 year plan and good bait to troll his party enemies to make the first move against him. But I don't think it was a watershed of ideological abandonment, the awkward temp capitalism of the NEP and lots of other shit during the civil war had already shown they were broadly a party of pragmatists or least could be bent that way when necessary.

oh if you wanna fix the point at which the party lost its Soul you can make a case for kronstadt or even for the menshevik split. (tho not saying pragmatism like NEP is a loss of soul; referring here to the party's growing tendency to antidemocratic authoritarianism.) but ussr as a reincarnated russian empire whose foreign policy is about imperial power rather than global revolution (lenin wants more of europe than he gets in the civil war, but that's toward the explicit end of supporting the german revolution he expects and requires) prob dates to stalin imo -- the reabsorption of the baltics (in collab w communism's worst enemies); the conquest of eastern europe; the kind of state that's left when that's all over.

this is my impression, w "experiment with democracy" qualified of course by the destabilizing inequity and churn following from the public-sector fire sale, "shock therapy", a sudden new class of warring gangsters, etc.; arguably democracy cannot function under these circumstances but of course the period is different from the authoritarian-monopole systems that precede and follow it and share a lot of staff.

There are points of commonality, for sure, but - as you say - the context is important. Not just the trauma and ongoing scars of shock therapy but all the other things that have happened in, to or around Russia over the last twenty-something years - the oil boom, the return of the orthodox church as a political power, the ongoing positives and negatives of a deregulated market, the opening up of Russia to the world and vice versa (both through freedom of travel and, importantly, the internet), the solidification of a liberal middle class in the major cities vs a perceived growing social conservatism elsewhere, Chechnya, issues of national identity, NATO expansion, Serbia, Iraq, etc, etc.

Some of the major players in Russian politics - like Putin and Fradkov - do have a security / military background, others like Medvedev don't. Even if the personnel hadn't changed, the country and the rest of the world definitely has. A lot of the commentary, particularly from journalists who haven't paid much attention to Russia until the recent election cycle, misses that.

It also has a bearing on what kind of Russia western politicians and commentators want to see in the future - whether the objective is isolating and containing Russia as-is, pushing for the further democratisation of the country - so Putin winning fairer elections, or a wholesale 'regime change'. The suspicion in Russia is that Clinton favours the latter. Context is important here too - the perception is that the main turning point in relations with the US (having ignored war crimes in Chechnya, etc) was the renationalisation of Yukos and the interference with international business interests which, in combination with fawning over people like Khodorkovsky, leads a lot of people - particularly on the left - to think the democratic / human rights focus is largely a sham. It's that, rather than sympathy for Putin himself, that drives most of the pushback imo.

Oh good now we can view all this through the lens of Robbie Williams and his uncompromising insistence on the meaninglessness of language

http://www.nme.com/news/robbie-williams/96877

I remember when everybody bashing on wikileaks right now loved wikileaks

that's til their Hil hack revealed "nothing," like her reassuring of Goldman Sachs

https://twitter.com/opendemocracyru/status/785966283871236096

"Presidential administration recommends officials to return their children, studying overseas, to Russia."

I remember when everybody bashing on wikileaks right now loved wikileaks

― punksishippies, 12. oktober 2016 08:37 (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, all you hypocrites! I bet you also liked Bill Cosby before you found out he was a rapist. How dare you!!

xp, the university thing is overstated and has been going on for a while.

Russia has a goal of getting 5 universities into the global top 100 by 2020 and part of that is trying to encourage high-performing students to stay within Russia rather than looking to go to the US if they're wealthy or Finland if they can get good entry grades. The other risk is that when they go abroad, as with students from a lot of countries - particularly in tech / science, they might not come back. There's nothing much they can do to stop people but the idea that future employment in state industries might be easier if you go to MGU or MGIMO rather than LSE is one of the things they can potentially hold over them - and there's an expectation that people within government should lead by example.

The interesting thing is that high-achieving, relatively wealthy people are actively competing for prestige jobs in state industries rather than going to work for Microsoft or w/e. There's a similar trend in China and, to some extent India, of the best domestic universities being more competitive than high-profile foreign ones and an easier access point for good domestic jobs in the future.

after how many rapes did you stop liking Bill Clinton, Fred?

In all honesty I never particularly liked Bill Clinton... It was, like, an example, maaaaan.

How is the university system in Russia run (mostly)?

If you want 5 in the top 100 (in the very near term) shouldn't the focus be on faculty recruitment and retention first? I suppose student retention and career opportunities are in parallel, not competing priorities, though.

Russians probably get more higher education than anyone outside of Germany - iirc over 50% of people have degrees and there's a strong bias towards either traditional five / six year diplomas or three-year undergraduate degrees topped up with MAs. There's a huge number of universities, so quality varies, but they tend to be good and the best state institutions are of a very high international standard. When they figure in the international rankings it will usually be for hard sciences, engineering, maths and comp sci, though, rather than overall quality.

Partly due to the way in which the rankings are compiled, there's a perception that you're at a disadvantage if post-grad courses aren't taught in English (research citations contribute significantly and it's much harder to get cited if you are publishing in Russian) so there's a push to deliver more programmes in English - which, in theory, will also make courses more attractive to foreign research students.

Academics tend to be fairly badly paid in an international context - which is why there are so many Russians teaching in the US - but i think they're trying to look at retention at the top institutions at the same time. I'd be surprised if they get more than two (Lomonosov is hovering just outside already) but the target is pretty arbitrary. It's really just an excuse to get universities to internationalise and to avoid a research brain drain.

XP Some Russian universities are trying to recruit international faculty to boost their research portfolios. I almost ended up going to one, since the academic job market is so difficult!

I hope my really verbose coworker who immigrated from russia is in the office sometime soon so I can wind him up with a couple questions and hear some long-form ranting

I was kind of a dick a couple years ago because apparently he has a brother doing some russian armed services stint and kept asking "So you're suuuuure he's not in Ukraine?"

Ideal Christmas gift

Nick Butler, ex of BP, with an unusually honest statement on where a lot of the international / business community would like to go next:

https://s16.postimg.org/ipa45ldlx/Russia.jpg

Rigging the 1996 election was good. Disbursing most of Russia's state assets to organised crime in return for that assistance was good. Democracy is problematic. Let the 'businessmen' rule by fiat.