Paul Goble
Vienna, May 15 – Even as Condoleezza Rice was denying Moscow’s suggestion that the West has launched “a new cold war” -- a charge Russians have long used to put the West on the defensive -- three articles in the Russian media call attention to how much has changed in Russia since 1991 and, at the same time, how little.
First, in an interview published in today’s “Novyye izvestiya,” Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the former Soviet dissident and longtime head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, was explicitly asked to compare the actions of the security organs in Soviet times with the actions of the same bodies now (http://www.newizv.ru/print/69155).
“The actions of the law enforcement organs are just the same as they were under Soviet power,” she says. “But what is noteworthy is that [Russia’s] citizens have changed. In Soviet times, it would have been impossible even to imagine that thousands of people would take part in a march not sanctioned by the authorities.”
“That is not because then the law enforcement officers acted more harshly – they acted exactly the same way,” Alekseyeva said. “But because the people were different. We ourselves don’t notice that we’ve changed over this short time! In the Soviet period, people entirely relied on the state, figuring that by themselves they could do nothing.”
“In principle, that was the way it was,” she added. “Now, however, the state already does nothing positive for its citizens and what is more interferes with their activities.” Having been forced to act independently and without relying on the state has “changed our psychology.
And that in turn, Alekseyeva says, means that Russians today, unlike their parents and grandparents or even themselves in Soviet times, are not prepared to “humbly” accept what the authorities do, especially when police and security officials ride roughshod over their rights.
Second, in an article published in the same Moscow newspaper, commentator Aleksandr Kolesnichenko notes that just as was the case in the Soviet past, the Russian state now has difficult, tense, and complicated relations with 11 of the 17 states along its borders (http://wwwnewizv.ru/print/69146).
Some of these troubled bilateral relationships, Kolesnichenko argues, reflect longstanding territorial and demographic tensions (Japan, China and Norway), the consequences of the breakup of the Warsaw Pact (Poland), and Russia’s problems in dealing with the three Baltic countries and most of the non-Russian republics.
Indeed, it is only within the very last category, he says, that Russia enjoys good relationships – and then only with Armenia, whose people still view Moscow as their protector, and the five increasingly authoritarian regimes in Central Asia, whose leaders if not whose populations are comfortable with the way the Kremlin now operates.
But some of the less than positive relationships reflect the continuing influence of Soviet values in the formation of policies toward the country’s neighbors. And he cites three observations that suggest just how strong this continuity of approach is, even if it is directed at new neighbors and not just old ones.
First of all, he notes, many officials, especially those raised in Soviet times, are comfortable with the idea that they are living surrounded by enemies. That justifies both a certain prickliness in dealing with the outside world and also greater powers for the Russian state in dealing with its own population.
Moreover, Kolesnichenko notes, some are openly contemptuous of the idea that Moscow should try to be friendly with its neighbors. Konstantin Zatulin, director of the Moscow Institute of CIS Countries, for example, told the journalist that Moscow should view these countries as prizes to be captured rather than friends to be made.
Russian officials are beginning to understand that reality, Zatulin added, and they have begun to reorient Moscow’s policies in this enormous region in order to advance the national interests of the Russian Federation rather than permitting these countries to do whatever they want.
And finally, the “Novyye izvestiya” writer cites the comment of Moscow political scientist Dmitriy Oreshkin to the effect that “the current Russian ideology is an attempt to achieve a kind of revenge [for the dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991] and to reestablish [the Russian Federation] as a great power.”
The third item in the Russian media today may seem the most minor, but it too highlights the tensions between continuity and change in today’s Russia. It concerns a new emerge to bureaucratize religion, to transform what should be an independent form of social life into a branch of the state.
In Bashkortostan today, officials of “The Foundation for Support of the Peace-Making Programs of the President of the Russian Federation” came out with a proposal to amend the Russian constitution and make the four “traditional religions” of Russia “state religions” (http://www.regions.ru/news2075319/).
The Foundation’s president, Kh. Sharafutdinov said that the country’s constitution should recognize the special role of these four faiths -- Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism -- in this way because a basic law “ought to serve the All-Highest, the people and the state.”
Over the last decade, the Russian Orthodox Church and especially Metropolitan Kirill, who heads the External Affairs Department of the Patriarchate and is currently the odds-on favorite to succeed Patriarch Aleksii II, has pushed the idea of four traditional faiths as a way of solidifying their role.
But that push has not had a legal, let alone constitutional basis. Shafutdinov’s proposal could give it one, something that would threaten the secular basis of the state but intriguingly combine some aspects of Russia that have changed – the return of faith – and others that have not – the regime’s effort to subordinate public life to the state.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Tishkov Admits 2002 Census Was Distorted, Outlines Plans for 2010 Count
Paul Goble
Vienna, May 15 – The 2002 Russian census, the first such count Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union, suffered from significant “technical” and “political” distortions, according to a leading Moscow academic who played a key role in its design and conduct.
But Valeriy Tishkov insists that the enumeration of the population in 2010 will be more accurate and comprehensive and will likely include several new questions, including about religious affiliation, and allow a wider range of permissible answers, such as declarations of mixed ethnicity (http://www.globalrus.ru/opinions/783908/).
In a speech to the Government Club on April 25, a transcript of which was posted online this week, Tishkov, who doubles as director of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology and chairman of the Social Chamber’s Committee on Tolerance, provides the most authoritative declaration yet about shortcomings in the 2002 census.
“In our view,” he said, “five to seven percent of the population was not counted, including certain residents of major megalopolises, migrants from the former USSR, and residents of isolated districts.” At the same time, “in a number of large and small cities,” officials added to the number of favored groups.
“Certain ethnic groups in the census had their numbers distorted,” Tishkov acknowledges, and “the reasons were various, not only technical but also political.” The count, he adds, understated the number of indigenous peoples of Daghestan, Meskhetian Turks, and “through political manipulation,” the Tatars in Bashkortostan.
But having made those admissions, Tishkov is at pains to argue that even though the total number of Russians in the population declined by three percent between 1989 and 2002, the result largely of the aging of that nationality, “the share of Russians in the population of the country even increased over the same period.”
He explains these paradoxical and by no means indisputable conclusions by pointing a radical shift in identity among Ukrainians living in the Russian Federation. Between 1989 and 2002, he continues, some two million of these people “disappeared” from the census, even though only about 500,000 moved to Ukraine.
Tishkov, who played major role in organizing the 2002 census, then provides some clues about the changes Moscow officials are thinking about for the next enumeration in 2010 – or at least, about what he, a still-influential former nationalities minister under President Boris Yeltsin, is advocating at the present time.
“Questions about language and nationality ought to be improved,” Tishkov says, and a question about religious affiliation ought to be added.” With regard to the first, he suggests that Russian citizens should have the option to declare themselves of mixed nationality, something they have not been able to do in earlier censuses.
While allowing such an answer will both reflect the reality of ethnically mixed marriages, it is certain to be controversial both among those who are likely to view it as a threat to their own ethnic power positions in various regions and as a half-way house to assimilation into the ethnic Russian community.
And with regard to questions about religion, there will be even more disputes. Many in the Russian Federation are likely to view a religious count as a threat to secularism, and still more are certain to fear that the numbers of believers shown by such a census will be far lower for some faiths than they now claim.
Such concerns on both points are even more likely given three other observations Tishkov makes in his recent speech. First, he says that “we must de-ethnicise politics and depoliticise ethnicity,” and thus return all questions of identity “to the internal world” of each individual.
That view, one he has long espoused, will certainly be viewed as threatening by groups like the Kazan Tatars against whom Tishkov earlier worked by seeking to set the Kryashens against the Kazan Tatars. Kazan views them as only Orthodox Christian Tatars, but Tishkov has insisted they are a separate nationality.
Second, Tishkov argues that the country must move from the principle of “friendship of the peoples to a friendly [and single] people.” Again, that will be viewed as undermining the status of minority ethnic groups and of elites who base their power on territorialized ethnicity.
And third, the former nationalities minister says, he is “against a too rapid Islamization of the population, including as a result of immigrants,” adding that “if [he is] speaking honestly, then [he] is in general against all our society becoming increasingly made up of believers.”
His remarks about Muslims may please most non-Muslims in Russia. Indeed, they put in polite language the fears many Russians have about demographic changes in that country. But Tishkov’s comments about increasing religiosity more generally will offend the increasingly influential Russian Orthodox Church.
And consequently, Tishkov’s academic speech at the end of the month is likely to be the opening shot in a new round of controversy not only about how to conduct a more accurate census in 2010 than the one in 2002 but also about what the population of the Russian Federation in fact should look like, whatever either enumeration shows.
Vienna, May 15 – The 2002 Russian census, the first such count Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union, suffered from significant “technical” and “political” distortions, according to a leading Moscow academic who played a key role in its design and conduct.
But Valeriy Tishkov insists that the enumeration of the population in 2010 will be more accurate and comprehensive and will likely include several new questions, including about religious affiliation, and allow a wider range of permissible answers, such as declarations of mixed ethnicity (http://www.globalrus.ru/opinions/783908/).
In a speech to the Government Club on April 25, a transcript of which was posted online this week, Tishkov, who doubles as director of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology and chairman of the Social Chamber’s Committee on Tolerance, provides the most authoritative declaration yet about shortcomings in the 2002 census.
“In our view,” he said, “five to seven percent of the population was not counted, including certain residents of major megalopolises, migrants from the former USSR, and residents of isolated districts.” At the same time, “in a number of large and small cities,” officials added to the number of favored groups.
“Certain ethnic groups in the census had their numbers distorted,” Tishkov acknowledges, and “the reasons were various, not only technical but also political.” The count, he adds, understated the number of indigenous peoples of Daghestan, Meskhetian Turks, and “through political manipulation,” the Tatars in Bashkortostan.
But having made those admissions, Tishkov is at pains to argue that even though the total number of Russians in the population declined by three percent between 1989 and 2002, the result largely of the aging of that nationality, “the share of Russians in the population of the country even increased over the same period.”
He explains these paradoxical and by no means indisputable conclusions by pointing a radical shift in identity among Ukrainians living in the Russian Federation. Between 1989 and 2002, he continues, some two million of these people “disappeared” from the census, even though only about 500,000 moved to Ukraine.
Tishkov, who played major role in organizing the 2002 census, then provides some clues about the changes Moscow officials are thinking about for the next enumeration in 2010 – or at least, about what he, a still-influential former nationalities minister under President Boris Yeltsin, is advocating at the present time.
“Questions about language and nationality ought to be improved,” Tishkov says, and a question about religious affiliation ought to be added.” With regard to the first, he suggests that Russian citizens should have the option to declare themselves of mixed nationality, something they have not been able to do in earlier censuses.
While allowing such an answer will both reflect the reality of ethnically mixed marriages, it is certain to be controversial both among those who are likely to view it as a threat to their own ethnic power positions in various regions and as a half-way house to assimilation into the ethnic Russian community.
And with regard to questions about religion, there will be even more disputes. Many in the Russian Federation are likely to view a religious count as a threat to secularism, and still more are certain to fear that the numbers of believers shown by such a census will be far lower for some faiths than they now claim.
Such concerns on both points are even more likely given three other observations Tishkov makes in his recent speech. First, he says that “we must de-ethnicise politics and depoliticise ethnicity,” and thus return all questions of identity “to the internal world” of each individual.
That view, one he has long espoused, will certainly be viewed as threatening by groups like the Kazan Tatars against whom Tishkov earlier worked by seeking to set the Kryashens against the Kazan Tatars. Kazan views them as only Orthodox Christian Tatars, but Tishkov has insisted they are a separate nationality.
Second, Tishkov argues that the country must move from the principle of “friendship of the peoples to a friendly [and single] people.” Again, that will be viewed as undermining the status of minority ethnic groups and of elites who base their power on territorialized ethnicity.
And third, the former nationalities minister says, he is “against a too rapid Islamization of the population, including as a result of immigrants,” adding that “if [he is] speaking honestly, then [he] is in general against all our society becoming increasingly made up of believers.”
His remarks about Muslims may please most non-Muslims in Russia. Indeed, they put in polite language the fears many Russians have about demographic changes in that country. But Tishkov’s comments about increasing religiosity more generally will offend the increasingly influential Russian Orthodox Church.
And consequently, Tishkov’s academic speech at the end of the month is likely to be the opening shot in a new round of controversy not only about how to conduct a more accurate census in 2010 than the one in 2002 but also about what the population of the Russian Federation in fact should look like, whatever either enumeration shows.
Window on Eurasia: Why Russia Has Such Bad Roads – And Why They’re Unlikely to Improve
Paul Goble
Vienna, May 15 – Every Russian is familiar with Nikolai Gogol’s bitter observation that Russia suffers from two misfortunes, fools and bad roads. And anyone who lives in or even visits the Russian Federation knows that that country’s roads are in almost all cases in a truly deplorable state.
Given its size, Russia has a very small network of roads. But even where roads do exist, their state is truly appalling: The average speed of travel on them is only half that found in developed countries. Cars and trucks use 50 percent more fuel. And both the costs of maintaining vehicles and the rate of replacements required are higher as well.
Often Russians blame this situation on their harsh climate, but Canada and Finland have good highways despite being equally northern. And sometimes they blame it on a kind of Russian mysticism. But according to an analysis posted online this week, the real reasons lie elsewhere (http://www.razgovor.org/projects/article43/).
First of all, Russia has some of the worst soils in the world for the construction of roadbeds. Most of the country’s soil is mixed with clay or loam, materials that readily absorb water but do not allow the water to flow out equally quickly. As a result, the thawing and freezing of the water in the soil leads to the breakup of highway surface.
Second, Russian officials have failed to impose higher compacting standards and to import or develop the technology to do so. Indeed, Russia has not changed its compacting standards since 1939. Were it to increase them by only five percent, as the U.S. did in 1946, Russian roads would more than twice as long as they do.
At present, Russia produces much smaller pneumatic compactors than do Western countries and has been reluctant to important more powerful models from abroad. But at the same time, Russian officials have refused to back an innovative domestic machine, including one that relies on vibration rather than pressure to compact the soil.
The article includes the full texts of four different letters to senior officials about these possibilities but notes that unfortunately despite the fact that everyone involved knows what needs to be done and even says he or she is in favor of it, nothing has happened over the last generation.
Indeed, the inventor of the new compaction-by-vibration technology became so frustrated with such hypocrisy and indifference that he finally decided the only way out of his situation was to emigrate from Russia and move to a country where his ideas might be taken seriously.
And third, the firms which build Russian roads know that there is far more money in repairing existing roads even if they will soon need to be repaired again than in building new and better highways that will carry traffic more rapidly and last longer. Moreover, these firms regularly pressure the government to maintain the existing system.
The amount of money involved every year with Russia’s highways is truly enormous, even given the sad state of the network and the even sadder state of the highways themselves. And that in turn means that the politics surrounding the use of these funds are intense.
In 2002, for example, Moscow allotted 54 billion rubles – some two billion U.S. dollars -- for road construction and repair, the study notes. But unfortunately, it allocated two-thirds of this money for repairs and only one-third for the construction of new roads. That means Russian roads will not get better anytime soon but instead quickly fall apart.
Until that changes, until the Russian government honestly addresses the nature of the problem rather than providing funds to those who make the highest contributions to politicians and officials, Gogol’s observation about Russia’s twin misfortunes will remain at least half right if not indeed completely true.
Vienna, May 15 – Every Russian is familiar with Nikolai Gogol’s bitter observation that Russia suffers from two misfortunes, fools and bad roads. And anyone who lives in or even visits the Russian Federation knows that that country’s roads are in almost all cases in a truly deplorable state.
Given its size, Russia has a very small network of roads. But even where roads do exist, their state is truly appalling: The average speed of travel on them is only half that found in developed countries. Cars and trucks use 50 percent more fuel. And both the costs of maintaining vehicles and the rate of replacements required are higher as well.
Often Russians blame this situation on their harsh climate, but Canada and Finland have good highways despite being equally northern. And sometimes they blame it on a kind of Russian mysticism. But according to an analysis posted online this week, the real reasons lie elsewhere (http://www.razgovor.org/projects/article43/).
First of all, Russia has some of the worst soils in the world for the construction of roadbeds. Most of the country’s soil is mixed with clay or loam, materials that readily absorb water but do not allow the water to flow out equally quickly. As a result, the thawing and freezing of the water in the soil leads to the breakup of highway surface.
Second, Russian officials have failed to impose higher compacting standards and to import or develop the technology to do so. Indeed, Russia has not changed its compacting standards since 1939. Were it to increase them by only five percent, as the U.S. did in 1946, Russian roads would more than twice as long as they do.
At present, Russia produces much smaller pneumatic compactors than do Western countries and has been reluctant to important more powerful models from abroad. But at the same time, Russian officials have refused to back an innovative domestic machine, including one that relies on vibration rather than pressure to compact the soil.
The article includes the full texts of four different letters to senior officials about these possibilities but notes that unfortunately despite the fact that everyone involved knows what needs to be done and even says he or she is in favor of it, nothing has happened over the last generation.
Indeed, the inventor of the new compaction-by-vibration technology became so frustrated with such hypocrisy and indifference that he finally decided the only way out of his situation was to emigrate from Russia and move to a country where his ideas might be taken seriously.
And third, the firms which build Russian roads know that there is far more money in repairing existing roads even if they will soon need to be repaired again than in building new and better highways that will carry traffic more rapidly and last longer. Moreover, these firms regularly pressure the government to maintain the existing system.
The amount of money involved every year with Russia’s highways is truly enormous, even given the sad state of the network and the even sadder state of the highways themselves. And that in turn means that the politics surrounding the use of these funds are intense.
In 2002, for example, Moscow allotted 54 billion rubles – some two billion U.S. dollars -- for road construction and repair, the study notes. But unfortunately, it allocated two-thirds of this money for repairs and only one-third for the construction of new roads. That means Russian roads will not get better anytime soon but instead quickly fall apart.
Until that changes, until the Russian government honestly addresses the nature of the problem rather than providing funds to those who make the highest contributions to politicians and officials, Gogol’s observation about Russia’s twin misfortunes will remain at least half right if not indeed completely true.
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