Paul Goble
Staunton, November 2 – The relative quiet in which most Daghestani municipal elections last month took place was less the result of improved work by election officials than by the absence of competition in many constituencies, an absence that United Russia officials and other incumbents worked hard to ensure, according to a Makhachkala observer.
Musa Musayev says in an article posted on a Moscow State University site today that Daghestanis “did not want to vote for the current bureaucrats” but had little choice in many places because officials had used their influence to dissuade people from running against them or even refused to register those who tried (www.ia-centr.ru/expert/9254/).
In those places where “real competition continued to exist,” he continues, “the voting passed with the traditional collection of violations of the law, including murders.” This time, Musayev says, the incumbent head of the village of Khadzhalmakhi Abudmuslim Nurmagormedov was killed and six others there wounded in an election clash.
Last year, competition in the elections in that village led the backers of one candidate to block a major road, forcing officials to delay a vote altogether. When it finally occurred, ther was another tragedy: People there found out about massive fraud, with more than 4,000 ballots disappearing and the closure of two of the precinct voting places on that election day itself.
But the most serious violence a year ago was in Derbent, where there were “mass disorders and the closing of many voting places.” To prevent that, Vladimir Churov, the head of the Russian Central Election Commission, came to Daghestan. This year, the vote in that southern Daghestani city was peaceful – because, Musayev says, “there was no competition.”
There were violations of election law almost everywhere there were multiple candidates for any position, with officials using “administrative” measures and open fraud including destroying ballots and ballot box stuffing to ensure that the “correct” candidate won, a trend that the Makhachkala observer says is quit dangerous.
Those steps may have bought peace now, he writes, but only at the price of highlighting the criminal behavior of many officials, something that along with “other de-stabilizing factors” in that republic have added to the potential for conflicts in what is now perhaps the most violent place in the Russian Federation.
Another Daghestani observer, Albert Esedov of the Nogay District of Daghestan concurs with Musayev’s observations, saying that official malfeasance in the electoral process is so widespread that the population doesn’t have any faith in the results and is continuing to challenge them with “massive and armed” protests (http://gazeta-nv.ru/content/view/5052/109/).
In his view, only an engaged citizenry and the presence of journalists prevented officials in his area from committing even more violations. Indeed, he said, in Daghestan now, it is possible to “rephrase Comrade Stalin’s observation” and say that “it is not important who votes in what way, it is important WHO counts those votes.”
If citizen observers or journalists are present, officials naturally find it more difficult to falsify the results, Esedov says. But he makes that observation without the self-confident optimism that one might expect. Instead, the Daghestani journalist suggests, officials there have “still not learned” how to falsify things if someone is watching, but they may soon learn how to.
Such a level of cynicism means that the victories in which United Russia and its leadership put so much stock do not mean all that much or more precisely they do not mean what the members of that party hope for. Instead, the extreme manipulation of elections has deprived the outcomes of legitimacy.
And that in turn has cost the officials there and in Moscow their legitimacy in the eyes of Daghestanis, a development that makes it more rather than less likely that the residents of that republic will listen to militants who argue that they and not the current powers that be are the real representatives of the population.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Window on Eurasia: Moscow’s Attack on Federalism Pushing Northwest along ‘Baltic Path,’ Ingermanland Activist Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, November 2 – By its systematic attack on federalism within the Russian Federation and its effort to isolate European-oriented people in St. Petersburg and Northwestern Russia from their Baltic neighbors, Moscow is pushing that region onto “the Baltic path,” one that may ultimately lead to the same outcome, according to an Ingermanland activist.
In a 7300-word article on the Ingria.info portal today, Andrey Pugovkin argues that what is currently the Russian northwest has been “part of the cultural and political space of Northern Europe,” despite Moscow’s efforts to subordinate the region to itself and break those ties to the West (www.ingria.info/?biblio&news_action=show_news&news_id=5131).
Moscow’s conquest of European Novgorod and Staraya Ladoga, he points out, was for the residents of this highly literate and diverse population “an historic catastrophe,” the first of several Pugovkin argues the Muscovites with their links to the political system of the Mongol Horde have visited on them.
Prior to 1917, however, Petersburgers succeeded in creating “the type of ‘the Russian European,’ educated in the traditions of Orthodox culture but with an orientation toward the ethnical values and external attributes of the Western way of life.” And precisely because of that, many Russians from elsewhere had such a negative attitude toward that city.
The causes of this “irrational lack of acceptance of Petersburg by people with a paternalistic consciousness and a lumpen psychology” played and continue to play “a fatal role for the city” up to this day that is manifested in everything from vandalism of the city’s monuments to Moscow’s blocking of links between the city and Europe.
A major reason for the unique Europeanness of the city was that at the end of the imperial period, “not less than a fifth of the permanent residents of St. Petersburg consisted of religious and ethnic minorities” and by the presence of “approximately 200,000 foreign citizens,” almost all of whom contributed to a cosmopolitan and tolerant society.
Indeed, Pugovkin notes, except for the actions of small marginal groups and for those supported more or less openly by the representatives of the Moscow powers that be, St. Petersburg “did not know over the course of its entire history up to the 2000s any open inter-religious or inter-national conflicts.”
But that characteristic of the city along with so many others, he writes, was changed by “the events of 1917 and all that followed,” events that were “a catastrophe equivalent in history to that which Rome experienced during the barbarian invastions or Novgorod in the course of the Muscovite conquest.”
The destruction or expulsion of so many historical Petersburgers and their replacement by a lumpen class of people from elsewhere has meant, Pugovkin insists, that “the historical multi-national population of Petersburg and all Ingria can with full justification be considered a repressed ethno-cultural group.”
Despite that, he argues, as the Soviet system softened after the death of Stalin, Leningraders re-asserted themselves as a cultural center and, what is especially important, expanded their historical ties with intellectuals in neighboring nations including the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Finns.
“For residents of Soviet Leningrad,” he writes,, “Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in those times stood for Western Europe, a place in practice inaccessible because of ‘the iron curtain.’” And in 1964, an easing of visa arrangements allowed dramatically more short-term visits between the city and Finland.
In part because of those links and experiences, it was “in Leningrad more than anywhere else where already in the 1970s, the lack of prospects” for the Soviet system “became evident.” And consequently, “it is not surprising thatprecisely here, practically at the same time as in the Baltic region, there appeared the first challenges to the communist regime.
Moreover, Pugovkin continues, it was also precisely in these two places where the regime responded by “openly turning for help to the neo-nazis.”
“The consolidation of democratic forces of the Northern capital took place in close interconnection with the national-liberation movements of the Baltic republics,” with the latter often publishing things for the city that could not be published there and then sending them eastward.
When Soviet forces attacked the Lithuanians in January 1991, “tens of thousands of Leningraders” went into the street to show their solidarity with Lithuanian. And during the same period, “on the barricades in the center of Riga it was possible to see the Russian tri-color that had been raised by a delegation of the Leningrad Peoples Front.”
Representatives of the city allied themselves with the delegates of the peoples fronts of the Baltic republics at congresses of the peoples deputies of the USSR, and when asked in march 1991 if they favored the preservation of the USSR, the city’s voters by more than two to one said that they did not.
These experiences, he suggests, “created the conditions for the search for a regional identity,” one that would be a way out from “provincial complexes and Soviet traditions.” But Moscow was opposed to all steps in that direction, splitting the city and oblast apart and denying the two the possibility of forming a single free economic zone.
Thanks to the leadership of Anatoly Sobchak, the city continued during the 1990s many of the traditions it had recovered along with the Baltic peoples at the end of Soviet times, but “the change of priorities of Russian foreign and domestic policy in the 2000s turned out to be extraordinarily unfavorable for the entire North-West region of Russia.”
And that was true even though after 2000, a large number of Petersburgers took top jobs in Moscow. Having arrived in the Russian capital, they turned on the city, reducing its status through the formation of the North-West Federal District and cutting the resources its people have had for the improvement of their own lives.
At the same time, Moscow’s foreing policy shifts regarding the Baltic countries and other European neighbors had a negative impact on the city. The Russian government “renewed its short-sighted and harmful policy, in the first instance for the Russian-speaking population,” against the Baltic countries, preferring to talk about “russophobia” than to cooperate.
As a result of Russian policies, the Baltic countries “have guaranteed their military security by joining NATO and their economic well-being by becoming members of the European Union.” Instead of adapting, Moscow has re-erected a kind of “iron curtain” against them and transformed “’the window on Europe’ into a [oil] pipeline.”
Moreover, the central Russian powers that be have sought to reduce the ability of the federal subjects to conduct an independent foreign policy, treating that as “’separatism’ and ‘a threat to the integrity of the state,’” a counter-productive approach in a country as large and diverse as the Russian Federation.
In the 1990s, federalism prevented a civil war in Russia, but in the last decade, Moscow has made the struggle against it “almost its main domestic political goal,” forgetting, Pugovkin points out, that “an excess of centralization [is] one of the main threats to the integrity of any federal state.”
And he concludes by warning that if Moscow continues on this “deadend” path, then “sooner or later” because of its historical “conditioning,” the people of Ingermanland and St. Petersburg will be driven to move along another road, “the Baltic path” which has consequences Moscow very much does not want to see.
Staunton, November 2 – By its systematic attack on federalism within the Russian Federation and its effort to isolate European-oriented people in St. Petersburg and Northwestern Russia from their Baltic neighbors, Moscow is pushing that region onto “the Baltic path,” one that may ultimately lead to the same outcome, according to an Ingermanland activist.
In a 7300-word article on the Ingria.info portal today, Andrey Pugovkin argues that what is currently the Russian northwest has been “part of the cultural and political space of Northern Europe,” despite Moscow’s efforts to subordinate the region to itself and break those ties to the West (www.ingria.info/?biblio&news_action=show_news&news_id=5131).
Moscow’s conquest of European Novgorod and Staraya Ladoga, he points out, was for the residents of this highly literate and diverse population “an historic catastrophe,” the first of several Pugovkin argues the Muscovites with their links to the political system of the Mongol Horde have visited on them.
Prior to 1917, however, Petersburgers succeeded in creating “the type of ‘the Russian European,’ educated in the traditions of Orthodox culture but with an orientation toward the ethnical values and external attributes of the Western way of life.” And precisely because of that, many Russians from elsewhere had such a negative attitude toward that city.
The causes of this “irrational lack of acceptance of Petersburg by people with a paternalistic consciousness and a lumpen psychology” played and continue to play “a fatal role for the city” up to this day that is manifested in everything from vandalism of the city’s monuments to Moscow’s blocking of links between the city and Europe.
A major reason for the unique Europeanness of the city was that at the end of the imperial period, “not less than a fifth of the permanent residents of St. Petersburg consisted of religious and ethnic minorities” and by the presence of “approximately 200,000 foreign citizens,” almost all of whom contributed to a cosmopolitan and tolerant society.
Indeed, Pugovkin notes, except for the actions of small marginal groups and for those supported more or less openly by the representatives of the Moscow powers that be, St. Petersburg “did not know over the course of its entire history up to the 2000s any open inter-religious or inter-national conflicts.”
But that characteristic of the city along with so many others, he writes, was changed by “the events of 1917 and all that followed,” events that were “a catastrophe equivalent in history to that which Rome experienced during the barbarian invastions or Novgorod in the course of the Muscovite conquest.”
The destruction or expulsion of so many historical Petersburgers and their replacement by a lumpen class of people from elsewhere has meant, Pugovkin insists, that “the historical multi-national population of Petersburg and all Ingria can with full justification be considered a repressed ethno-cultural group.”
Despite that, he argues, as the Soviet system softened after the death of Stalin, Leningraders re-asserted themselves as a cultural center and, what is especially important, expanded their historical ties with intellectuals in neighboring nations including the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Finns.
“For residents of Soviet Leningrad,” he writes,, “Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in those times stood for Western Europe, a place in practice inaccessible because of ‘the iron curtain.’” And in 1964, an easing of visa arrangements allowed dramatically more short-term visits between the city and Finland.
In part because of those links and experiences, it was “in Leningrad more than anywhere else where already in the 1970s, the lack of prospects” for the Soviet system “became evident.” And consequently, “it is not surprising thatprecisely here, practically at the same time as in the Baltic region, there appeared the first challenges to the communist regime.
Moreover, Pugovkin continues, it was also precisely in these two places where the regime responded by “openly turning for help to the neo-nazis.”
“The consolidation of democratic forces of the Northern capital took place in close interconnection with the national-liberation movements of the Baltic republics,” with the latter often publishing things for the city that could not be published there and then sending them eastward.
When Soviet forces attacked the Lithuanians in January 1991, “tens of thousands of Leningraders” went into the street to show their solidarity with Lithuanian. And during the same period, “on the barricades in the center of Riga it was possible to see the Russian tri-color that had been raised by a delegation of the Leningrad Peoples Front.”
Representatives of the city allied themselves with the delegates of the peoples fronts of the Baltic republics at congresses of the peoples deputies of the USSR, and when asked in march 1991 if they favored the preservation of the USSR, the city’s voters by more than two to one said that they did not.
These experiences, he suggests, “created the conditions for the search for a regional identity,” one that would be a way out from “provincial complexes and Soviet traditions.” But Moscow was opposed to all steps in that direction, splitting the city and oblast apart and denying the two the possibility of forming a single free economic zone.
Thanks to the leadership of Anatoly Sobchak, the city continued during the 1990s many of the traditions it had recovered along with the Baltic peoples at the end of Soviet times, but “the change of priorities of Russian foreign and domestic policy in the 2000s turned out to be extraordinarily unfavorable for the entire North-West region of Russia.”
And that was true even though after 2000, a large number of Petersburgers took top jobs in Moscow. Having arrived in the Russian capital, they turned on the city, reducing its status through the formation of the North-West Federal District and cutting the resources its people have had for the improvement of their own lives.
At the same time, Moscow’s foreing policy shifts regarding the Baltic countries and other European neighbors had a negative impact on the city. The Russian government “renewed its short-sighted and harmful policy, in the first instance for the Russian-speaking population,” against the Baltic countries, preferring to talk about “russophobia” than to cooperate.
As a result of Russian policies, the Baltic countries “have guaranteed their military security by joining NATO and their economic well-being by becoming members of the European Union.” Instead of adapting, Moscow has re-erected a kind of “iron curtain” against them and transformed “’the window on Europe’ into a [oil] pipeline.”
Moreover, the central Russian powers that be have sought to reduce the ability of the federal subjects to conduct an independent foreign policy, treating that as “’separatism’ and ‘a threat to the integrity of the state,’” a counter-productive approach in a country as large and diverse as the Russian Federation.
In the 1990s, federalism prevented a civil war in Russia, but in the last decade, Moscow has made the struggle against it “almost its main domestic political goal,” forgetting, Pugovkin points out, that “an excess of centralization [is] one of the main threats to the integrity of any federal state.”
And he concludes by warning that if Moscow continues on this “deadend” path, then “sooner or later” because of its historical “conditioning,” the people of Ingermanland and St. Petersburg will be driven to move along another road, “the Baltic path” which has consequences Moscow very much does not want to see.
Window on Eurasia: Daghestanis Lead the North Caucasus Blogosphere, Survey Finds
Paul Goble
Staunton, November 2 – Daghestanis are responsible for 185 of the 528 blogs being conducted either by people living in the North Caucasus or by North Caucasians living elsewhere, according to a survey conducted by an Ingushetia blogger who goes by the screen name timag82.
According to information posted on his blog (timag82.livejournal.com/36092.html and timag82.livejournal.com/35772.html) and summarized in an article today on Kavkaz-uzel.ru (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/176392/), the Daghestanis are followed by 151 Ossetians, 106 Ingushetians, 63 Chechens, 31 Circassians and six Balkars.
Of the total, some 358 are active, the Ingushetia blogger says, and the average age of bloggers across the region is “about 30.” A Daghestani blogger who works as a sports journalist, converciano, is “the absolute leader” among the bloggers. Another Daghestani, TV journalist Nariman Gadzhiyev, whose screen name is pcnariman, has the largest number of friends (1920).
But the leader by number of commentaries is a Circassian blogger, eva-vitli, who has 56,239. Among the most popular subjects of these bloggers is in descending order “the Caucasus, music, film, politics, literature, history, Islam, Ingusheetia, books, Chechnya, Daghestan, journalism, photography, Ossetia, psychology, football, the mountains,” and so on.
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of timag82’s effort is the complete list of North Caucasus bloggers that he provides on his site, one that includes statistics of various kinds about each of the 528 blogs and that he indicates he plans to update on a regular basis as more bloggers emerge (timag82.narod.ru/caucasus/jj/).
Commenting on timag82’s effort, Nariman Gadzhiyev said that “Timur is a good man and he thought this up and carried it out on his own, [although] we helped hima little.” And the Daghestani blogger said that the numbers in his republic was undoubtedly a reflection of “the greater level of freedom in connection with the neighbors” and better Internet access.
Another reason for the Daghestani lead, Kavkaz-uzel.ru points out in its report, is that “in Daghestan, at the initiative of the republic ministry for youth affairs was earlier created a Blogger School,” something through which many of those active in the blogosphere from that republic have passed or taken as their model.
Meanwhile, there were two other intriguing reports on the Internet in the Russian Federation this week: a content analysis of President Dmitry Medvedev’s first 300 tweets (slon.ru/articles/486648/) and a discussion of the ways in which the Internet may require an updating of the list of basic human rights (forum-msk.org/material/society/4553244.html).
The Slon.ru study reports that Medvedev now has “more than 100,000 followers,” that foreign policy and catastrophic events are the most frequent subjects of his tweets, that the number of his tweets has fallen off since he began his micro-blog this summer, that he tweets mostly during the week and in the evenings, and that he hasn’t yet mentioned Putin.
The other article prepared by Igor Eidman, the author of a widely-noted 2007 book on the sociology of the internet revolution, argues that the rise of the Internet in all its forms not only requires a redefinition of basic human rights but also a rethinking of the nature of the political system and the state as such (forum-msk.org/material/society/4553244.html).
The current conceptions of rights and freedoms and of the state are based on ones that arose “at the end of the 18th century,” he argues, and given technological possibilities, they require fundamental revision. To that end, Eidman proposes that “the information society gives human beings a new fundamental right, the right to freely decide how to devote his time.”
The futurologist outlines six rights that flow from that, but his most interesting comments concern the way in which the Internet by detaching people from the restrictions of geography may lead to the transformation or even the end of the state as we know it at present into a more multi-layered and overlapping set of institutions.
He acknowledges that this won’t come about quickly or easily – there are too many opposing sets of interests – but Eidman argues that technology is likely to drive such a change in the more distant future just as he insists earlier technological revolutions promoted the rise of earlier political arrangements.
Staunton, November 2 – Daghestanis are responsible for 185 of the 528 blogs being conducted either by people living in the North Caucasus or by North Caucasians living elsewhere, according to a survey conducted by an Ingushetia blogger who goes by the screen name timag82.
According to information posted on his blog (timag82.livejournal.com/36092.html and timag82.livejournal.com/35772.html) and summarized in an article today on Kavkaz-uzel.ru (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/176392/), the Daghestanis are followed by 151 Ossetians, 106 Ingushetians, 63 Chechens, 31 Circassians and six Balkars.
Of the total, some 358 are active, the Ingushetia blogger says, and the average age of bloggers across the region is “about 30.” A Daghestani blogger who works as a sports journalist, converciano, is “the absolute leader” among the bloggers. Another Daghestani, TV journalist Nariman Gadzhiyev, whose screen name is pcnariman, has the largest number of friends (1920).
But the leader by number of commentaries is a Circassian blogger, eva-vitli, who has 56,239. Among the most popular subjects of these bloggers is in descending order “the Caucasus, music, film, politics, literature, history, Islam, Ingusheetia, books, Chechnya, Daghestan, journalism, photography, Ossetia, psychology, football, the mountains,” and so on.
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of timag82’s effort is the complete list of North Caucasus bloggers that he provides on his site, one that includes statistics of various kinds about each of the 528 blogs and that he indicates he plans to update on a regular basis as more bloggers emerge (timag82.narod.ru/caucasus/jj/).
Commenting on timag82’s effort, Nariman Gadzhiyev said that “Timur is a good man and he thought this up and carried it out on his own, [although] we helped hima little.” And the Daghestani blogger said that the numbers in his republic was undoubtedly a reflection of “the greater level of freedom in connection with the neighbors” and better Internet access.
Another reason for the Daghestani lead, Kavkaz-uzel.ru points out in its report, is that “in Daghestan, at the initiative of the republic ministry for youth affairs was earlier created a Blogger School,” something through which many of those active in the blogosphere from that republic have passed or taken as their model.
Meanwhile, there were two other intriguing reports on the Internet in the Russian Federation this week: a content analysis of President Dmitry Medvedev’s first 300 tweets (slon.ru/articles/486648/) and a discussion of the ways in which the Internet may require an updating of the list of basic human rights (forum-msk.org/material/society/4553244.html).
The Slon.ru study reports that Medvedev now has “more than 100,000 followers,” that foreign policy and catastrophic events are the most frequent subjects of his tweets, that the number of his tweets has fallen off since he began his micro-blog this summer, that he tweets mostly during the week and in the evenings, and that he hasn’t yet mentioned Putin.
The other article prepared by Igor Eidman, the author of a widely-noted 2007 book on the sociology of the internet revolution, argues that the rise of the Internet in all its forms not only requires a redefinition of basic human rights but also a rethinking of the nature of the political system and the state as such (forum-msk.org/material/society/4553244.html).
The current conceptions of rights and freedoms and of the state are based on ones that arose “at the end of the 18th century,” he argues, and given technological possibilities, they require fundamental revision. To that end, Eidman proposes that “the information society gives human beings a new fundamental right, the right to freely decide how to devote his time.”
The futurologist outlines six rights that flow from that, but his most interesting comments concern the way in which the Internet by detaching people from the restrictions of geography may lead to the transformation or even the end of the state as we know it at present into a more multi-layered and overlapping set of institutions.
He acknowledges that this won’t come about quickly or easily – there are too many opposing sets of interests – but Eidman argues that technology is likely to drive such a change in the more distant future just as he insists earlier technological revolutions promoted the rise of earlier political arrangements.
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