Window on Eurasia: Moscow’s New Agglomeration Plan Threatens Non-Russian Republics

Paul Goble

Vienna, November 17 – Officials in the Kremlin and the Russian government are preparing to seek the transformation of the map of Russia, creating 20 giant super-regions centered on major urban agglomerations on top or or in place of the 83 existing federal subjects, in response to demographic and economic problems and to promote modernization.
But the grandiose nature of the plan, which some experts have already dismissed as a campaign stunt by President Dmitry Medvedev intended to show that the country is not moving toward a new period of stagnation, is certain to provoke a political firestorm if the powers that be at the center try to introduce it quickly.
On the one hand, this project would cost many officials their jobs, challenge the territorial arrangements of Russian life, and introduce disorder into both economic relationships and political ties. And on the other, it could eliminate the non-Russian component of Russian federalism by folding in all non-Russian units into larger and predominantly Russian ones.
Yesterday, “Vedomosti” reported that senior officials have prepared a new map of Russia, one based on 20 agglomerations rather than the 83 existing federal subjects. While spokespersons were not prepared to confirm that this plan is about to be announced, they did not deny it either, the paper said (www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/article/249680/peredel_rossi).
Unlike previous regional amalgamation efforts which focused on the existing federal units and sought to combine them, the new plan reportedly focuses on cities and on the need to develop them beyond often stagnating company towns to places where modernization and development can take place more freely and effectively.
But the plan calls not for the development of existing cities but rather for “the reation of general conditions for the accelerated migration of the population from single profile cities into larger ones,” a potential death sentence for 90 percent of Russia’s cities, although the plan’s authors deny that.
Given that the country’s population is projected to continue to fall, by 2025-2030, “only six major cities can count on [even] a small growth of population” under the existing system: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, and Samara. Omsk, Kazan, Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Rostov and Perm will all become smaller.
Instead of trying to preserve what the document calls “the provincial urban system” of Russia, which in recent years has lost “more than 20,000 population points,” the plan calls for the formation of 20 major agglomerations with a population of more than one million people each.
Because of their size and complexity, these new agglomerations will be able to offer more to their residents, but this will be achieved not by “the mechanical combination of population points” but rather by “the coordination of plans of territorial and infrastructure development and the provision of a free migration regime.”
The new three-million-person strong agglomerations will provide “a critical mass of intellectual resources” and thus form “an infrastructure of knowledge” and promote “a new model of urban administration and the conception of a creative city.” These places will have city managers, high tech infrastructure, and numerous public services.
Were such places to develop “spontaneously,” the plan says, “there could arise serious risks for the state” including the creation of “imbalances in territorial development.” And consequently, the central powers that be must take control of the situation in order to ensure order.
Many Russian commentators are already expressing extreme skepticism. Andrey Buniich, the president of the Union of Entrepreneurs, said that the whole plan smacked of Khrushchevian overreaching and the time of the creation of the sovnarkhoz system, something that further undermined the Soviet economy (svpressa.ru/politic/article/33929/).
And he suggested that “our government [which] cannot deal with much less complicated tasks suddenly is taking up the rearrangement of the entire countries, building 20 super cities” and so on. Given the improbability of the realization of these ideas, Bunich said, it appears that this is an effort to distract attention of people from real problems.
“It is understood that the task is beyond our capacity, but it is possible to talk about it, to open unending discussions … in a word, instead of improving the economy and dealing with real economic reforms, today’s powers that be are occupying themselves with administrative creativity,” something that will do no one any good, including them.
Meanwhile, Mikhail Delyagin, director of the Moscow Institute of the Problems of Globalization, said that the plan recalls “the history of the Byzantine Empire,” which died when its rulers pulled back to the single city of Constantinople and the rest of the empire fell away and the whole enterprise passed into history.
But Elena Minchenko, director of the Institute of International Expertise, disagreed with the notion that the plan would be a disaster, even though she suggested that it was probably being offered less as a road map for the future than as part of Medvedev’s electoral campaign, and she argued that many have misunderstood something they haven’t read.
“Among many people,” she told “Svobodnaya pressa,” the mistaken impression has formed that the currently existing structure of the regional division of Russia will change. Naturally, this isn’t so. The agglomerations will be created in the already existing borders of the subjects of the federation.”
Their task, she continued, will be to create “centers of attraction and development around which will be grouped smaller cities and company towns.” But if she is right, the new plan, even more than the eight federal districts, will introduce new confusion and chaos into the Russian state and economy, with the agglomerations competing with everyone else.

Window on Eurasia: Russians’ Opposition to Mosques Reflects ‘Subconscious Fears of a Muslim Russia,’ SMR Head Says

Paul Goble

Vienna, November 17 – Ravil Gainutdin, the head of the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR), says that opposition to the construction of mosques in Moscow shows that “in the subconsciousness of the contemporary urban residents of the titular nation, the Russians, there is a fear that on one fine day, they will wake up in a Muslim country.”
Such people, the Muslim leader said on the occasion of Kurban Bayram, are “seeking to frighten believing Muslims, to sow fear in the Muslim mmilieu, to spread doubts about the sincerity of the respect and attention to Muslims from the side of the power structures of the government by defining the question as is it necessary to build a mosque in Moscow?”
That is a dangerous step, he continued, because it could generate support for radical nationalists among Russians and for Islamist fundamentalists among Muslims, all the more so since “Moscow is not only the capital of the Russian state, not only an enormous megapolis … but also a mirror whose actions serve as a model for other regions of Russia.”
Indeed, Gainutdin said, “the real basis for extremism and terrorism is created by cultural and religion illiteracy, including on questions about the cultural heritage of other peoples and ethnic groups,” especially when those groups are not arrivals from somewhere far away but indigenous citizens (www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=news&div=38242).
The SMR leader’s remarks reflect the growing anger of many Muslims in the Russian Federation to the way in which they are being treated not only directly by the powers that be but also by extremist anti-Islamic groups that the regime is doing relatively little to restrain and that have been encouraged by recent anti-Muslim statements by European leaders.
Moreover, the anger Gainutdin expressed would undoubtedly have been even greater had it come after two developments reported today. On the one hand, Vladimir Zorov, prefect of the South East District of Moscow, announced that “no construction of a mosque [in Tekstilshchiki] is going on or being planned (www.blagovest-info.ru/index.php?ss=2&s=3&id=37816).
And on the other hand, the New Region news agency is reporting that some Russian nationalists are now saying that “there is only one means of forcing Muslims to take us into consideration and that is called deportation,” the kind of language that will only further enflame the situation (www.nr2.ru/moskow/309334.html).
Aleksandr Belov, the former leader of the openly xenophobic Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), told the news agency that Russian officials must “carefully study the results of the celebration of Kurban-Bayram [in Russian cities] and drawn corresponding conclusions for the future.”
“Thank Allah,” Belov continued, “that there is such a holiday. In one place and at one time all the illegals have assembled. “It only remains for the militia to detain them and rapidly deport them according to the existing legal order. The holiday is a beautiful moment for the identification of all migrants.”
For Belov, the distinction between illegal migrants and Muslims in this case is less hard and fast than it may be for other. Muslims, he said, “love to say that in Moscow there live 1.5 million of the faithful. But this is not so. … In the best case, there are 100,000 Muslims in all of Moscow. There is no Muslim community of a million here and never was one.”
“The basic mass of these uneducated people [who took part in the slaughter of animals for Kurban-Bayram] are not local Muslims, not Tatars, but rather arrivals from Central Asia and the Trans-Caucasus who interfere with the local Muslims who conduct their religious holiday in a normal way.”
But Belov then made a broader point: “I do not know a single country where Islam peacefully coexists with other religions. And that includes not only countries which have a predominantly non-Muslim population, but even in lands with a Muslim population such as Pakistan for example there are constant terrorist acts.”
“Among Muslims,” the nationalist continued, the phenomena of fanaticism and radicalism are very widely spread and if something isn’t just so, then let’s blow up a mosque. Therefore all this is a functional danger, a threat for the entire society. Consequently, the fewer of them, the more peaceful” for everyone else.
Another radical Russian nationalist, Dmitry Demushkin, the head of the banned Slavic Union, advocates equally harsh measures against not only immigrants but Muslims as such. “Why must we think about the national feelings of Muslims. They are in our country as guests, is it not true? They must observe our laws, our traditions, and our way of doing business.”
If they want to do otherwise, he continued, then let them do it in turkmenistan, Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. “We won’t go into their monastery with our rules.” But while they are in our country, Demushkin said, they need to follow “our rules.” If they don’t, “deportation” is the answer, lest windows be broken and sheep sacrificed in public.
The Moscow militia, if it had been doing its job, the Slavic Union leader says, would have been able to send “two thirds” of those taking part in Kurban-Bayram celebrations in Moscow “immediately” out of Russia and back to their homeland where they could do as they please.

Window on Eurasia: Russians View Spy Scandals as Proof Their Country is Still a Superpower, Soldatov Says

Paul Goble

Vienna, November 17 – Because Moscow has in the best traditions of Soviet times played up the notion that all recent failures in Russia’s espionage activities are the result of traitors, the powers that be have reinforced the notion among most Russians that their country is still a superpower which can compete as equals with the United States, Soldatov Says.
Andrey Soldatov, the editor of Agentura.ru and one of Moscow’s leading independent specialists on intelligence operations suggests that the case of the two intelligence officers, Shcherbakov and Poteyev, that has attracted so much attention provides a key insight into how Russians view espionage and how Moscow plays on that view.
In an article in today’s “Yezhednevny zhurnal” entitled “Heroes and Traitors for Internal Use,” Soldatov argues that the recent story has “from the very beginning been constructured according to the laws of the Soviet spy mythology” in which the hero spy is confronted by the traitor and then is defeated by yet a third (ej.ru/?a=note&id=10560).
As Soldatov points out, “in the mythology of Soviet intelligence, treason always occupied a particular place.” Traitors were responsible for all failures, and consequently one had no reason to look for “shortcomings in the world of the special services themselves,” a view that former SVR spokesman Yury Kobaladze expressed last weekend on Moscow television.
As the case of the scandal about the Russian illegals in the United States showed, Soldatov argues, Russian society was split into “two unequal parts,” a small group of liberals who viewed this as a reflection of “the degradation of the intelligence service,” and “the enormous majority who viewed this story” very differently.
For the latter, the spy scandal was “testimony that Russia is still a super power which can on an equal basis compete with the special services of the United States,” an idea that is identical to the one that Soviet officials liked to promote during the Cold War. President Dmitry Medvedev “perfectly well” understands this and hence his playing up of these spies.
It is worth noting, Soldatov continues, that “the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is the only special service of Russia which was never reformed. In the early 1990s, the First Chief Directorate of the USSR KGB was simply separated from the KGB, and with that, the reform of this structure concluded.”
As a result, the Agentura.ru editor says, “the traditions of Soviet intelligence were not critically reviewed” and “the methods inherited by the Russian intelligence serve were those which had been developed in the first half of the 20th century,” traditions which continued by “inertia” even as they gradually decayed over the last 40 years of Soviet power.
The period of “the very greatest successes of Soviet intelligence” was the 1930s and 1940s, Soldatov writes, but “these successes were the result not of Soviet intelligence but of the Communist International” which linked together “convinced fanatics of the communist idea throughout the entire world.”
After Stalin disbanded the Comintern, “everything that happened with Soviet intelligence was an attempt to repeat its success.” And the way the Soviet intelligence service sought to do that was to “train its own citizens to pose as residents of the West,” the kind of illegals who were just exposed in the United States.
That led to the formation of two intelligence schools, one by the GRU and a second by the SVR to train such people often for years while the training course of intelligence officers in the US and Great Britain typically lasted only “several months” because they were not going to be used in the same way.
As was the case with many other Soviet institutions, corruption and nepotism contributed to the degradation of Soviet espionage operations abroad because “children of highly placed party leaders used the agent networks in the US and Western Europe as a great place to begin a career and a comfortable place to live.”
Recruitment of people like Hansen and Ames, Soldatov says, was “more the exception than the rule” and by the early 1990s, Soviet intelligence was “in such a deep crisis that party functionaries from the KGB fled to the West carrying with them lists of all the members of the party organization of the students at the [Soviet] intelligence academy.”
Over the last 20 years, Soldatov suggests, drawing on the testimony of a defector, the SVR has not changed from its focus on active measures such as disinformation and the dispatch of illegals as a substitute for the ideological loyalists it has not been able to count on since the end of the Comintern.
Moreover, he continues, “the declarations that traitors were responsible for the failure of the illegals reflect the traditional approach of the Russian special services, for whom the special services can only be guilty of an insufficiency of vigilance” against enemies internal and external.
As a result of this and the internal use of this case for the Russian leadership, the Kremlin not only did not raise the question as to whether illegals are a useful tool at the present but did not take advantage of this opportunity to “reform the SVR.” But another result of this case may matter even more: the FSB has gained the chance to expand its control over the SVR.