Paul Goble
Vienna, November 15 – After more than 70 years of Soviet oppression and various problems they experienced during the first decade after the collapse of the USSR, Russia’s 20 million-plus Muslims find themselves unexpectedly enjoying both sympathy band financial support from the Kremlin.
But that unprecedented situation, the editors of the most influential Muslim website in the Middle Volga say, has left many in the Islamic community in a potentially problematic situation, “dizzy with success,” uncertain about what this shift means, and how they should behave as a result (http://www.muslims-volga.ru/?id=621).
On the one hand, the site’s leadership argues in an unusual editorial article, some of Russia’s Muslims have come to believe that the state’s change of heart is not only permanent but means that they no longer have to work hard in support of the umma because the government will take care of everything.
But on the other hand, some of the faithful are now convinced that the government owes them this because of how Moscow behaved toward Islam in the past and that they have a right to demand ever greater funding from the government and act against it if the regime does not come through.
Both these attitudes are dangerously wrong, the “Muslims of the Volga” editorial board argues, and then it provides an extensive discussion of both the basis for its argument that Russia’s Muslims are in a good position, something many would dispute, and its recommendations on how the Islamic community should behave as a result.
The site’s editors point to the statements of Russian President Putin and the actions of the Foundation for the Support of Islamic Culture, Science and Education that he established more than a year ago as a public organization attached to the Presidential Administration.
Jointly organized by Putin and the leaders of the Muslim community in Russia at the end of 2006 and officially registered on January 31, 2006, that fund, which includes money from the government as well as from other sources within Russia and abroad, has provided funding for numerous Muslim activities over the past year.
Its website, http://www.islamfund.ru, says that this foundation was created to provide money from the government for projects proposed by the “traditional Muslim organizations of Russia,” to “channel” any money that may be coming to them from abroad, and to promote domestic Muslim media and educational activities.
The site also lists the government and religious officials who oversee its operations and the disbursal of funds. Among the former are Yevgeniy Primakov, and senior people from the Presidential Administration, the presidents of Daghestan and Tatarstan, and representatives from foreign ministry.
Among the latter are the rector of the Moscow Islamic University, the deputy head of the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD), the chairman of the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR), and the chairman of the International Islamic Mission in the Russian Federation.
Over the past year, this foundation has provided to Russia’s Muslim educational institutions in particular some 14 million rubles (about 600,000 U.S. dollars). Such an amount seems small only to those unaware of how little money Muslim institutions in that country have had up to now.
Indeed, much of the funding they did receive in the past came from Muslim governments and institutions abroad, something that Putin’s foundation was set up to limit lest this foreign funding open the way to the spread of Islamic ideas at variance with those of what Moscow calls its “traditional” moderate Muslims.
Not surprisingly, many Muslims in the Russian Federation are likely to view this foundation as a threat to the independence they enjoyed from their government because of foreign funds, even if at the same time they are only too pleased to take whatever money the Kremlin offers.
Their concerns about this foundation are likely to find an echo among Muslims outside of Russia, with some of these welcoming Moscow’s support of the faith but probably far more concerned that this Kremlin move represents an effort to once again limit contacts between Russia’s Muslims and the umma outside.
And it thus appears that the real reason the editors of this Muslim site – itself created, its masthead says, to promote “the development of civil society in the Volga Federal District” -- put out this editorial is that some Muslims there believe they can take the Kremlin’s money while continuing to accept it from foreign sources.
That is a delusion, the editorial says. Russia’s Muslims need to recognize that Putin’s foundation is -- together with their own efforts -- the best hope for the future and thus turn away from foreign sources. If they don’t, it strongly implies, not only will Moscow cut off the one form of funding but quite certainly try to end the other as well.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Nearly One-Third of Russian Deaths Linked to Alcohol
Paul Goble
Vienna, November 15 – Russian adults, according to Moscow officials, currently consume some 30 liters of pure alcohol every year, a figure that is more than three times what the World Health Organization says is dangerous and one that is eight times the amount Americans drink.
But because this official figure measures only officially registered distilled spirits and does not include additional liters of pure alcohol from illegally produced samogon (Russian for “moonshine”) or from what Russians call alcohol “surrogates,” the actual among of alcohol consumption among Russian adults may a third or more again higher.
As a result, as members of the Duma were told this week, such high rates of alcohol consumption now play a direct or indirect role in nearly one-third of all Russian deaths and thus constitute a threat not only to popular well being but also to that country’s national security.
During the course of a roundtable earlier this week, members of the Duma not only listened to reports about this general state of affairs but had their attention directed both at its specific features and what they might do to try to correct this situation (http://orthomed.ru/news.php?id=20505; www.gzt.ru/health/2007/11/13/220201.html).
According to the state statistical administration, something over 40,000 Russians die from alcoholism or alcohol poisoning each year, but the real impact of their heavy drinking on the country’s death rate is far larger, if not always understood or acknowledged.
Sustained heavy drinking leads to a variety of illness, murders and suicides, automobile and other accidents, and the disintegration of families, and all those things in turn are behind 550,000 to 700,000 of the 2.2 million deaths recorded in the Russian Federation on average in recent years.
But two additional elements to this story, the Duma deputies were told, make it especially tragic. On the one hand, Russians legally purchase 80 percent more alcohol than the country produces through their purchase of the large volume of alcoholic beverages now flooding into the country.
And on the other, they drink each year “not less than 600 million liters” of samogon, according to the Interior Ministry which is able to seize only about one percent of this amount, as well as unknown amounts of other surrogates like perfume or industrial fluids not intended for human consumption.
In relatively well-off Moscow, Russian experts say, illegally produced samogon and surrogates of one kind or another probably account for only about one-quarter of total amount offered for sale, but in poorer and more isolated regions of the country, that figure may now have reached the far more dangerous level of 40 or even 50 percent.
Although this does not appear to have been mentioned at the Duma meeting, that pattern is behind one slightly more optimistic prediction: As Russians become relatively better off because of higher oil prices, they drink more vodka but less samogon and surrogates, and thus they are less likely to die as a result.
That conclusion was first advanced by Russian demographers in the so-called Izhevsk study last year and reinforced by the subsequent experience of Pskov oblast. For a discussion of these findings, with citations to the original research, as well as of their policy implications, see http://mikhailove.livejournal.com/1819.html#cutid1.
Despite the comment of one participant at the roundtable that “laws do not work” in this sphere in Russia, the parliamentarians discussed what they might do legislatively. Among their ideas: raising the drinking age to 21, banning alcohol advertising, forced treatment of alcoholism, and a state monopoly on alcohol production.
Both individually and collectively these measures would have some impact on the amount of alcohol Russians consume and thus on the health of that nation, but many of the problems Russia faces now as in the past are the result of efforts by individual drinkers to get around just such laws, be they tsarist, Soviet or Russian.
And there is even the danger that such legislation, however attractive its staated purposes may be, could in fact make the situation worse by driving even more Russians away from officially produced and in smaller amounts relatively safe distilled spirits and toward more dangerous samogon and surrogates.
Vienna, November 15 – Russian adults, according to Moscow officials, currently consume some 30 liters of pure alcohol every year, a figure that is more than three times what the World Health Organization says is dangerous and one that is eight times the amount Americans drink.
But because this official figure measures only officially registered distilled spirits and does not include additional liters of pure alcohol from illegally produced samogon (Russian for “moonshine”) or from what Russians call alcohol “surrogates,” the actual among of alcohol consumption among Russian adults may a third or more again higher.
As a result, as members of the Duma were told this week, such high rates of alcohol consumption now play a direct or indirect role in nearly one-third of all Russian deaths and thus constitute a threat not only to popular well being but also to that country’s national security.
During the course of a roundtable earlier this week, members of the Duma not only listened to reports about this general state of affairs but had their attention directed both at its specific features and what they might do to try to correct this situation (http://orthomed.ru/news.php?id=20505; www.gzt.ru/health/2007/11/13/220201.html).
According to the state statistical administration, something over 40,000 Russians die from alcoholism or alcohol poisoning each year, but the real impact of their heavy drinking on the country’s death rate is far larger, if not always understood or acknowledged.
Sustained heavy drinking leads to a variety of illness, murders and suicides, automobile and other accidents, and the disintegration of families, and all those things in turn are behind 550,000 to 700,000 of the 2.2 million deaths recorded in the Russian Federation on average in recent years.
But two additional elements to this story, the Duma deputies were told, make it especially tragic. On the one hand, Russians legally purchase 80 percent more alcohol than the country produces through their purchase of the large volume of alcoholic beverages now flooding into the country.
And on the other, they drink each year “not less than 600 million liters” of samogon, according to the Interior Ministry which is able to seize only about one percent of this amount, as well as unknown amounts of other surrogates like perfume or industrial fluids not intended for human consumption.
In relatively well-off Moscow, Russian experts say, illegally produced samogon and surrogates of one kind or another probably account for only about one-quarter of total amount offered for sale, but in poorer and more isolated regions of the country, that figure may now have reached the far more dangerous level of 40 or even 50 percent.
Although this does not appear to have been mentioned at the Duma meeting, that pattern is behind one slightly more optimistic prediction: As Russians become relatively better off because of higher oil prices, they drink more vodka but less samogon and surrogates, and thus they are less likely to die as a result.
That conclusion was first advanced by Russian demographers in the so-called Izhevsk study last year and reinforced by the subsequent experience of Pskov oblast. For a discussion of these findings, with citations to the original research, as well as of their policy implications, see http://mikhailove.livejournal.com/1819.html#cutid1.
Despite the comment of one participant at the roundtable that “laws do not work” in this sphere in Russia, the parliamentarians discussed what they might do legislatively. Among their ideas: raising the drinking age to 21, banning alcohol advertising, forced treatment of alcoholism, and a state monopoly on alcohol production.
Both individually and collectively these measures would have some impact on the amount of alcohol Russians consume and thus on the health of that nation, but many of the problems Russia faces now as in the past are the result of efforts by individual drinkers to get around just such laws, be they tsarist, Soviet or Russian.
And there is even the danger that such legislation, however attractive its staated purposes may be, could in fact make the situation worse by driving even more Russians away from officially produced and in smaller amounts relatively safe distilled spirits and toward more dangerous samogon and surrogates.
Window on Eurasia: Russia’s Military Decaying Under Putin, New Study Says
Paul Goble
Vienna, November 15 – Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly claimed that his country’s armed services are on the rebound from the disastrous 1990s, but a new study prepared by Russian researchers argues that in fact the Russian army continues to decay and is not able to meet the most important emerging security challenges.
Because the Moscow Institute of National Strategy experts who prepared this report have often been critical of Putin and his approaches to national security in the past, many in Moscow and elsewhere are likely to dismiss its overall conclusions as nothing more than a pre-election attack on the Russian leader.
But even if some of their conclusions are overstated, the specific data they offer in support of them nonetheless provide a disturbing picture of a military in decline and thus merit reporting and the attention of all those concerned about Russia’s national security strategy.
The full text of the report has not yet been posted online, but Russia’s New Region News Agency provided a detailed summary of its contents yesterday (http://www.nr2.ru/moskow/14769.html), and. Moscow’s “Gazeta” newspaper offered an overview (http://www.gzt.ru/politics/2007/11/13/220008.html).
The authors of the report focused on three inter-related topics: the adequacy of Moscow’s military doctrine in the face of rising threats, the adequacy of Russian government funding for materiel both strategic and conventional, and the condition of the military’s human capital, its officers and men.
In each case, they offered a devastating portrait of conditions, one at odds not only with the statements of President Putin but also with the assumptions of many foreign governments who need to be in a position to respond to what the government of the Russian Federation may do.
First, the Institute of National Strategy authors say, Russia’s current military doctrine is too wedded to the past and fails to address what the country needs to counter emerging threats from China or the Islamic south. As a result, Moscow is deploying resources in ways that will not promote national security now and in the future.
Second, despite Russia being “awash in oil money,” the Russian government under Putin has increased spending on the military only 15 percent as of 2006 from the low average of the 1990s. As a result, the report’s authors say, the Russian military is increasingly far beyond in the deployment of new strategic and conventional weaponry.
Since Putin came to power, they note, the Russian military has put into service only 27 new rockets, one-third fewer than his predecessor Boris Yeltsin did, and the armed forces have suffered if anything even more in the conventional area because the government has not replaced equipment lost in the fighting in the North Caucasus.
And third, the Russian military faces a crisis in personnel. In the past, the report suggests, Russian officers and men have often behaved heroically even when they have not had equipment equivalent to what their opponents did. But now, the likelihood they would do so in the future is reduced because of their sad conditions.
Some of the problems in the officer corps they call attention to – the aging of Russian pilots and the departure of top officers for civilian life -- have been widely reported in the past. But others, which may have an even greater impact, have not been the object of as much attention, at least when presented together as in this report.
Draft resistance is increasing, they report, because of the low status and bad conditions soldiers in the ranks face. And consequently, the report notes, the military has been forced to induct people whose health, mental state, or criminal background would have kept them out before.
Problems among contract soldiers were also highlighted this week in a statement by the Coordinating Council of Law Enforcement Organs of the Military in which it was reported that these people alone had committed more than 3500 crimes during the first ten months of this year, 25 percent more than in the same period last year.
Aleksandr Golts, the military observer of Moscow’s Yezhednevniy zhurnal, traced this problem to the failure of the Russian military to produce professional sergeants and said that most of the “professional” soldiers were little more than “mercenaries” (http://www.izbrannoe.ru/19879.html).
As for the officers, who in the Russian military still form its backbone, the report notes, two-thirds of officer training school graduates leave the service as soon as they can, according to the military’s own data, and an even higher percentage – 83.3 percent – of them say they have no intention of making the military a career.
Those who do remain face a bleak life, the report says. Thirty-six percent of the families of those in the Russian military live below the poverty line. More than half – 52 percent – of Russian officers have to take a second job to make ends meet, and almost one in five now relies on his wife for the greater share of total family income.
And for those who do make the military a career, their future as retirees is appalling. According to the report’s authors, someone who retires as a colonel in the army receives a pension that is only a third that of his counterpart in the Interior Ministry and only a quarter of what an FSB colonel would receive.
Not only does that make cooperation among these security services more difficult and guarantee that many officers are the way up will think about leaving the service in order not to face such a future, but it also means that the Russian army is an ever less effective force, the authors of this study conclude.
Indeed, they say, the condition to which Putin has reduced the military likely means that the only enemy the Russian armed services will be able to take on is the people of the Russian Federation. But that, they imply, may be the most dangerous opponent the current Russian president now faces.
UPDATE FOR NOVEMBER 28; The full text of the report is now available as a PDF file at http://www.apn.ru/userdata/files/ins/INS-MR-1.pdf.
Vienna, November 15 – Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly claimed that his country’s armed services are on the rebound from the disastrous 1990s, but a new study prepared by Russian researchers argues that in fact the Russian army continues to decay and is not able to meet the most important emerging security challenges.
Because the Moscow Institute of National Strategy experts who prepared this report have often been critical of Putin and his approaches to national security in the past, many in Moscow and elsewhere are likely to dismiss its overall conclusions as nothing more than a pre-election attack on the Russian leader.
But even if some of their conclusions are overstated, the specific data they offer in support of them nonetheless provide a disturbing picture of a military in decline and thus merit reporting and the attention of all those concerned about Russia’s national security strategy.
The full text of the report has not yet been posted online, but Russia’s New Region News Agency provided a detailed summary of its contents yesterday (http://www.nr2.ru/moskow/14769.html), and. Moscow’s “Gazeta” newspaper offered an overview (http://www.gzt.ru/politics/2007/11/13/220008.html).
The authors of the report focused on three inter-related topics: the adequacy of Moscow’s military doctrine in the face of rising threats, the adequacy of Russian government funding for materiel both strategic and conventional, and the condition of the military’s human capital, its officers and men.
In each case, they offered a devastating portrait of conditions, one at odds not only with the statements of President Putin but also with the assumptions of many foreign governments who need to be in a position to respond to what the government of the Russian Federation may do.
First, the Institute of National Strategy authors say, Russia’s current military doctrine is too wedded to the past and fails to address what the country needs to counter emerging threats from China or the Islamic south. As a result, Moscow is deploying resources in ways that will not promote national security now and in the future.
Second, despite Russia being “awash in oil money,” the Russian government under Putin has increased spending on the military only 15 percent as of 2006 from the low average of the 1990s. As a result, the report’s authors say, the Russian military is increasingly far beyond in the deployment of new strategic and conventional weaponry.
Since Putin came to power, they note, the Russian military has put into service only 27 new rockets, one-third fewer than his predecessor Boris Yeltsin did, and the armed forces have suffered if anything even more in the conventional area because the government has not replaced equipment lost in the fighting in the North Caucasus.
And third, the Russian military faces a crisis in personnel. In the past, the report suggests, Russian officers and men have often behaved heroically even when they have not had equipment equivalent to what their opponents did. But now, the likelihood they would do so in the future is reduced because of their sad conditions.
Some of the problems in the officer corps they call attention to – the aging of Russian pilots and the departure of top officers for civilian life -- have been widely reported in the past. But others, which may have an even greater impact, have not been the object of as much attention, at least when presented together as in this report.
Draft resistance is increasing, they report, because of the low status and bad conditions soldiers in the ranks face. And consequently, the report notes, the military has been forced to induct people whose health, mental state, or criminal background would have kept them out before.
Problems among contract soldiers were also highlighted this week in a statement by the Coordinating Council of Law Enforcement Organs of the Military in which it was reported that these people alone had committed more than 3500 crimes during the first ten months of this year, 25 percent more than in the same period last year.
Aleksandr Golts, the military observer of Moscow’s Yezhednevniy zhurnal, traced this problem to the failure of the Russian military to produce professional sergeants and said that most of the “professional” soldiers were little more than “mercenaries” (http://www.izbrannoe.ru/19879.html).
As for the officers, who in the Russian military still form its backbone, the report notes, two-thirds of officer training school graduates leave the service as soon as they can, according to the military’s own data, and an even higher percentage – 83.3 percent – of them say they have no intention of making the military a career.
Those who do remain face a bleak life, the report says. Thirty-six percent of the families of those in the Russian military live below the poverty line. More than half – 52 percent – of Russian officers have to take a second job to make ends meet, and almost one in five now relies on his wife for the greater share of total family income.
And for those who do make the military a career, their future as retirees is appalling. According to the report’s authors, someone who retires as a colonel in the army receives a pension that is only a third that of his counterpart in the Interior Ministry and only a quarter of what an FSB colonel would receive.
Not only does that make cooperation among these security services more difficult and guarantee that many officers are the way up will think about leaving the service in order not to face such a future, but it also means that the Russian army is an ever less effective force, the authors of this study conclude.
Indeed, they say, the condition to which Putin has reduced the military likely means that the only enemy the Russian armed services will be able to take on is the people of the Russian Federation. But that, they imply, may be the most dangerous opponent the current Russian president now faces.
UPDATE FOR NOVEMBER 28; The full text of the report is now available as a PDF file at http://www.apn.ru/userdata/files/ins/INS-MR-1.pdf.
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