Paul Goble
Staunton, April 11 – The privatization of the state into the hands of the elite and the failure of both to meet even minimal social demands has become unsustainable as a result of the economic crisis, sparking not only anger but demands that the state be de-privatized and restored to something like its ostensible purpose, according to a Moscow analyst.
This process, Aleksey Kuzmin, head of the National Prospects Foundation, says, is taking place in many countries now, but it is particularly intense in Russia because the privatization of state power went so far and because, until the recent economic crisis, the population itself was happy enough to be left alone by the state (www.russ.ru/pole/Zadacha-vossozdat-gosudarstvo).
“The split between the society and the elite in Russia was formed in the middle 1990s, but at the start of the 2000s, it became impassable,” Kuzmin points out, adding that “in the Near East and Central Asia,” this division occurred at “approximately the same time” and in much the same way because “the causes are universal.”
“Economic liberalization in the form it took after the 1970s,” Kuzmin continues, spread to Russia and the other post-Soviet states in the 1990s. “It meant the following: the elite and the state threw off from themselves the function of ‘the servant to society,’” an idea that had always involved a certain amount of hypocrisy but now became blatant.
As a result, this “mimicking” “disappeared and the state began to be concerned about economic effectiveness, sometimes proudly call this its ability to compete.” But such an approach benefited only the top of the social pyramid, and everyone else “moderately or immoderately” was thrown to the winds of their own devices.
Everywhere, including in Russia, “the elite privatized the state; that is, the interests of the state began to strictly correspond with the interests of the elite and ceased in any way to correspond to the interests of the entire rest of the population, of that which could be called society.”
In this way and on one and the same territory existed simultaneously “a state together with the elite” and everyone else. “Normal communication between them” ceased to exist. “Vertical mobility” declined to almost nothing. “And the social elevator began to carry [most people] only downward.”
For a time in Russia and so other countries, the population nonetheless displayed a kind of “negative loyalty,” either because its members were being bought off in one way or another or because the institutions of the state no longer interfered in the life of the population and allowed its members to act independently of it.
In this situation, Kuzmin continues, “a very strange social contract is arising: the elite, of course, does not fulfill its basic social obligations but the masses in general relate to this very peacefully. Because each is out for himself with one God for all.” And such an arrangement at least a decade ago seemed stable and sustainable.
However, with the onset of the economic crisis in 2008, it “became obvious” to everyone” that the elite was no longer in a position to “fulfill even those minimal obligations” which it had promised, the Moscow analyst says. And as a result, anger and tensions between the population and the elites have begun to grow.
A particular feature of this situation is the role played by the media. “The television plays a role of mediator in communications [between the elite and the population], one which forms in a unilateral way that picture which the elite needs. But people see not that which is shown on television.
This does not mean that “the importance of the Internet as a space for communication” should be overrated. There are many “real social networks” independent of the Internet which today “operate with a high degree of trust,” much higher in fact than the Internet enjoys, Kuzmin argues.
As a result and in a way many do not yet recognize, he says, while “television is a substitute for communications of the powers that be and the people,” “the Internet is a remarkable substitute for communication among various pieces of society,” a reflection of the atomization of society that liberalization has produced.
But as conditions deteriorate, there will be a demand for “solidarity,” something that will emerge, Kuzmin suggests, first in nominally apolitical institutions and then become political as was the case with Russian trade unions, although just where these clusters will be in the future is uncertain.
.
“To the extent that all elites are completely delegitimized,” Kuzmin continues, “the so-called political opposition is located in exactly the same position as the powers that be.” It “does not have social support or if it does, it does not have the corresponding social and political skills” to make use of it. But then neither does the state, he adds.
“Today,” the Moscow analyst says, “we are at the point either of the continuing collapse of statehood or at the early stage of social and state genesis.” In many countries, people “are creating from scratch the society and the state,” even in countries like the United States as the Tea Party movement shows.
Up to now, “the basic function of the state is the monopoly on force,” Kuzmin points out, but today on the territory of any state are arious forms of force, including structural force” which almost anyone can gain access to. “The state looks on this situation and gives the impression that nothing is happening.”
But a lot is, and the future in Russia and elsewhere is likely to reflect the working out of the complex processes of “de-privatizing” and thus rebuilding the state and reforming society on the basis of broader and deeper forms of trust.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Window on Eurasia: Latifundias Threaten Moscow, the Third Rome, Just as They Did the First, Expert Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, April 11 – The emergence of enormous agricultural holding companies in the Russian Federation is not only destroying much of the social infrastructure of the rural portions of that country but also threatening Russian society as a whole, according to a leading Moscow specialist on rural economics.
In an interview to “Svobodnaya pressa,” Aleksandr Nikulin, the director of the Center of Agrarian Research of the Russian Academy of Economics and State Service, explains how this situation has come about and why it threatens the Third Rome just as Pliny the Elder warned that it threatened the First (svpressa.ru/society/article/41718/).
As Nikulin’s interviewer Kirill Zubkov says, the recent tragic events in Kushchevskaya, “where a local criminal community created ‘a state within a state,’” highlight some of the most obvious dangers of the emergence in Russia of “an analogue of Latin American latifundia with the total lack of rights of the peasants and the death squadrons.”
But the Moscow expert provides a less sensationalist but far more disturbing picture of what is going on, one that positions what is taking place in rural Russia today not just in terms of the Russian and Soviet pasts but also relative to certain international trends in agricultural economics and organization.
Nikulin notes that there are “two basic types of agrarian production:” the amily farm and the agrarian enterprise where “production is achieved through the use of a hired workforce.” Latifundias are “a special case” of the latter and represent a kind of “super-large agrarian enterprise.”
At the end of the Soviet period, there wer approximately 25,000 kokhozes and sovkhozes, and reformers wanted “entirely” correctly Nikulin says to create a more diverse agriculture that would include family farms as well as larger agrarian enterprises as part of a plan to overcome “the multitutde of problems” of rural people.
Two decades later, there are now “approximately 260,000 farmers” in the Russian Federation. And their appearance led many “ideologues of liberal reforms” to believe that “after a few years” there would be a Stolypin-style rural population at the center of which would be strong individual family farms.
That has not happened, Nikulin says, and such farmers “produce only about seven percent of the total of agrarian production.” Worse, many new social problems in rural areas have emerged, and “tens of thousands” of supposed farmers do not engage in agricultural activities at all.
Indeed, the Moscow expert continues, “only about 20,000 farmers (of 260,000) are farmer-entrepreneurs in the Western sense,” while “more than 100,000” of these people are involved in subsistence agriculture rather than production for sale. Consequently, one must look elsewhere for the major producers.
Part of the reason for the failure of these reforms lay in the difficulties of the 1990s, the lack of the kind of institutions and assistance the transformation the reformers wanted required, Nikulin says. And part of it lies with the fact that collective forms of agriculture “displayed a surprising vitality” over this period.
Not only were these institutions larger and thus capable of using mechanization more effectively, but they “were not agrarian enterprises. Instead, they were means of organization of rural communities” which provided “all the social infrastructure – schools, roads, water supplies, and hospitals.”
Until 1998, Russian capitalists showed little interest in rural areas because agriculture did not appear to be a profit center. But the default changed that by making Russian farm products more attractive to the domestic market and even to the international one. As a result and because almost everything else had been privatized by then, investors moved into the rural aras.
Beginning at that time, however, investors began forming large agro-holdings of as much as 400,000 hectares, holdings that dwarf all other forms of agriculture. There are now “more than 700” of these, and as in many other countries, these “farms” are setting the weather for all the others, including family farms.
Until the economic crisis hit in 2008, investors around the world engaged in a speculative race to buy enormous amounts of rural land, sometimes in their own countries but often in others. Thus, The Chinese have bought land in Africa and the Russian Far East, European and US concerns in South America, and European and American firms in Ukraine
As a result of these various trends, Nikulin says, “over the last decade, a land and property redivision has taken place in rural Russia, one analogous to that which took place in the 1990s in the industrial and raw materials sectors.” And as in both of them, “colossal, vertically integrated” corporations have emerged as the dominant players.
But in agriculture, these entities have proved much less successful because they have ignored the local conditions and the specific requirements of farming. As a result, the Russian landscape is littered with a cemetary of these ‘agro-dinosaurs,’” institutions that existed a few years and then declared bankruptcy.
The latifundia which remain, however, are having serious “social and political consequences,” Nikulin says. The big firms have little interest in maintaining the collateral institutions like schools and hospitals on which rural life depends. As those institutions perish because of a lack of support, so too will the rural portion of the country.
The short-term, profit-driven approach of the agro-holdings means that their managers consider those who work for them not individual farmers but “a faceless wage work force.” To keep such people in line, these firms use “private security companies” and are lobbying for various means to hold workers to the land much as under serfdom.
“Historical experience shows,” he continues, “that there were rural places completely fall under the control of latifundia owner oligarchs, the entire society tends toward decline and emptying out.” That is what Pliny the Elder warned about in Rome, and unless Russia adopts “a tough social and economic policy” for its rural areas, the same could happen to it.
Staunton, April 11 – The emergence of enormous agricultural holding companies in the Russian Federation is not only destroying much of the social infrastructure of the rural portions of that country but also threatening Russian society as a whole, according to a leading Moscow specialist on rural economics.
In an interview to “Svobodnaya pressa,” Aleksandr Nikulin, the director of the Center of Agrarian Research of the Russian Academy of Economics and State Service, explains how this situation has come about and why it threatens the Third Rome just as Pliny the Elder warned that it threatened the First (svpressa.ru/society/article/41718/).
As Nikulin’s interviewer Kirill Zubkov says, the recent tragic events in Kushchevskaya, “where a local criminal community created ‘a state within a state,’” highlight some of the most obvious dangers of the emergence in Russia of “an analogue of Latin American latifundia with the total lack of rights of the peasants and the death squadrons.”
But the Moscow expert provides a less sensationalist but far more disturbing picture of what is going on, one that positions what is taking place in rural Russia today not just in terms of the Russian and Soviet pasts but also relative to certain international trends in agricultural economics and organization.
Nikulin notes that there are “two basic types of agrarian production:” the amily farm and the agrarian enterprise where “production is achieved through the use of a hired workforce.” Latifundias are “a special case” of the latter and represent a kind of “super-large agrarian enterprise.”
At the end of the Soviet period, there wer approximately 25,000 kokhozes and sovkhozes, and reformers wanted “entirely” correctly Nikulin says to create a more diverse agriculture that would include family farms as well as larger agrarian enterprises as part of a plan to overcome “the multitutde of problems” of rural people.
Two decades later, there are now “approximately 260,000 farmers” in the Russian Federation. And their appearance led many “ideologues of liberal reforms” to believe that “after a few years” there would be a Stolypin-style rural population at the center of which would be strong individual family farms.
That has not happened, Nikulin says, and such farmers “produce only about seven percent of the total of agrarian production.” Worse, many new social problems in rural areas have emerged, and “tens of thousands” of supposed farmers do not engage in agricultural activities at all.
Indeed, the Moscow expert continues, “only about 20,000 farmers (of 260,000) are farmer-entrepreneurs in the Western sense,” while “more than 100,000” of these people are involved in subsistence agriculture rather than production for sale. Consequently, one must look elsewhere for the major producers.
Part of the reason for the failure of these reforms lay in the difficulties of the 1990s, the lack of the kind of institutions and assistance the transformation the reformers wanted required, Nikulin says. And part of it lies with the fact that collective forms of agriculture “displayed a surprising vitality” over this period.
Not only were these institutions larger and thus capable of using mechanization more effectively, but they “were not agrarian enterprises. Instead, they were means of organization of rural communities” which provided “all the social infrastructure – schools, roads, water supplies, and hospitals.”
Until 1998, Russian capitalists showed little interest in rural areas because agriculture did not appear to be a profit center. But the default changed that by making Russian farm products more attractive to the domestic market and even to the international one. As a result and because almost everything else had been privatized by then, investors moved into the rural aras.
Beginning at that time, however, investors began forming large agro-holdings of as much as 400,000 hectares, holdings that dwarf all other forms of agriculture. There are now “more than 700” of these, and as in many other countries, these “farms” are setting the weather for all the others, including family farms.
Until the economic crisis hit in 2008, investors around the world engaged in a speculative race to buy enormous amounts of rural land, sometimes in their own countries but often in others. Thus, The Chinese have bought land in Africa and the Russian Far East, European and US concerns in South America, and European and American firms in Ukraine
As a result of these various trends, Nikulin says, “over the last decade, a land and property redivision has taken place in rural Russia, one analogous to that which took place in the 1990s in the industrial and raw materials sectors.” And as in both of them, “colossal, vertically integrated” corporations have emerged as the dominant players.
But in agriculture, these entities have proved much less successful because they have ignored the local conditions and the specific requirements of farming. As a result, the Russian landscape is littered with a cemetary of these ‘agro-dinosaurs,’” institutions that existed a few years and then declared bankruptcy.
The latifundia which remain, however, are having serious “social and political consequences,” Nikulin says. The big firms have little interest in maintaining the collateral institutions like schools and hospitals on which rural life depends. As those institutions perish because of a lack of support, so too will the rural portion of the country.
The short-term, profit-driven approach of the agro-holdings means that their managers consider those who work for them not individual farmers but “a faceless wage work force.” To keep such people in line, these firms use “private security companies” and are lobbying for various means to hold workers to the land much as under serfdom.
“Historical experience shows,” he continues, “that there were rural places completely fall under the control of latifundia owner oligarchs, the entire society tends toward decline and emptying out.” That is what Pliny the Elder warned about in Rome, and unless Russia adopts “a tough social and economic policy” for its rural areas, the same could happen to it.
Window on Eurasia: One in Three East of the Urals Now Identifies as a Siberian, Irkutsk Priest Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, April 11 – Approximately one in every three residents of the Russian Federation east of the Urals now identifies as a Siberian, an identification that will intensify into fullblown nationhood unless Moscow arranges to dispatch more ethnic Russians from European portions of the country there, according to a Russian Orthodox churchman in Irkutsk.
In a comment on the debate over whether Siberians constitute a nation, a sub-ethnos or only a regional identity, Archpriest Vyacheslav Pushkarev says that “Sibiryaks” now form 30 to 35 percent of the population east of the Urals, making them the second largest ethnos in that region (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2011/04/06/sibiryaki_eto_subetnicheskaya_obwnost/).
According to Pushkarev, the situation regarding identity in Siberia and the Far East is far more complicated than most of the participants in the debate over whether Siberians are a nationality or not suspect, the result of both the complex history of the settlement of that region and recent changes.
“In Siberia and the Far East,” he writes, “a situation evolved in which in reality live side by side two major ethnoses and a mass of small ones.” The first “and still the dominant one” are the Great Russians, people “who as a rule are children of recent resettlers who came or were sent to [the region] in the 1950s to the 1970s.”
“These people spent all their childhood and each summer as guests of their grandmothers in Central Russia and the South of the country” and viewed “life in Siberia” as “atemporary phenomenon … constantly dreaming and now dreaming of returning to the historic Motherland of their fathers and mothers.”
And it is this group of people who make up the 100,000 who annually leave Siberia and the Far East every year, departures that mean that those who “call themselves [ethnic] Russian people and are proud of their origins.” They now form roughly half of the population of the region, but their share is constantly declining.
“The second major ethnos,” the archpriest says, “is a mass of people who now call themselves and for a long time have felt themselves to be Sibirians.” This is “already an accomplished fact.” They are “justbegining to understand themselves as a single community, but this process is developing very quickly.”
These “Siberians” represent now approximately 30-35 percent of the total population.[They] are descendents of voluntary settlers whocame to Siberia from the 17th to the end of the 19th century and of course as well the children of numerous mixed marriages [with indigenous nationalities] in various generations.”
They “did not have a childhood in the South,” and “they do not connect their future with the Core Russia because no one is waiting for them there and all that they have was given to them by Siberia. Why do they call themselves Siberians? Because by blood they are already far from Russians and are distinguished even by their anthropological type.”
“In addition,” Pushkarev writes, as the authority of the Great Russian nation has fallen, those who are the products of mixed marriages but who do not want to identify as Buryats, Yakuts or Udygeys are interested in an identity that reflects their unique character as a people in between.
“The people in these districts are now not very religious, and religion does not unify them,” Pushkarev says. “Geography does.” That feeling is intensified by the sense that many of them feel that “for Moscow,” the residents of this enormous land are only servants of the interests of the center.
“To call themselves Siberians,” the archpriest says, “is just as natural and comfortable as it is for Anglo-Saxons to call themselves Canadians, Australians or Americans.” And that is all the more so “under conditions when the [ethnic] Russian people does not have special rights and even its own territory,”while small non-Russian peoples do.
In this way as in many others, the Siberians resemble the small peoples of Siberia with whom they are interrelated. “For the Siberians, the small peoples of Siberia are part of their blood and their history and therefore they are closer to them than to the Great Russians and only they can be seriously concerned about the rapid dying out of communities of local people.”
Pushkarev says that “Siberians now are becoming the leading force in Siberia since they intend to live in it in the future and therefore their self-determination and self-advancement will continue, and no political science commentaries or ethnographic definitions are going to help” change that.
The only thing that would help, the Russian Orthodox priest says, would be “the flooding of Siberia and the Far East with Great Russians”—“a minimum of 100 million “would be needed,” he says – and the shifting of the political capital of the country “closer to the center of the entire Russian Federation so that each will feel that it near and common” to all.
Unless these things happen – and they aren’t, Pushkarev observes – “then the phenomenon of the Siberians as a nationality will become an anthropological and political fact with all the snuring centrifugal consequences up to the loss by the Russian Federation of the territories of Siberia and the Far East.”
“This is where the truth is,” the archipriest concludes, “and not in assertions that the Siberians supposedly do not exist. One must not close one’s eyes to an accomplished fact,” as some Moscow commentators are doing, people who are “far from an understanding of the essence of the problem” beyond the Urals.
Staunton, April 11 – Approximately one in every three residents of the Russian Federation east of the Urals now identifies as a Siberian, an identification that will intensify into fullblown nationhood unless Moscow arranges to dispatch more ethnic Russians from European portions of the country there, according to a Russian Orthodox churchman in Irkutsk.
In a comment on the debate over whether Siberians constitute a nation, a sub-ethnos or only a regional identity, Archpriest Vyacheslav Pushkarev says that “Sibiryaks” now form 30 to 35 percent of the population east of the Urals, making them the second largest ethnos in that region (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2011/04/06/sibiryaki_eto_subetnicheskaya_obwnost/).
According to Pushkarev, the situation regarding identity in Siberia and the Far East is far more complicated than most of the participants in the debate over whether Siberians are a nationality or not suspect, the result of both the complex history of the settlement of that region and recent changes.
“In Siberia and the Far East,” he writes, “a situation evolved in which in reality live side by side two major ethnoses and a mass of small ones.” The first “and still the dominant one” are the Great Russians, people “who as a rule are children of recent resettlers who came or were sent to [the region] in the 1950s to the 1970s.”
“These people spent all their childhood and each summer as guests of their grandmothers in Central Russia and the South of the country” and viewed “life in Siberia” as “atemporary phenomenon … constantly dreaming and now dreaming of returning to the historic Motherland of their fathers and mothers.”
And it is this group of people who make up the 100,000 who annually leave Siberia and the Far East every year, departures that mean that those who “call themselves [ethnic] Russian people and are proud of their origins.” They now form roughly half of the population of the region, but their share is constantly declining.
“The second major ethnos,” the archpriest says, “is a mass of people who now call themselves and for a long time have felt themselves to be Sibirians.” This is “already an accomplished fact.” They are “justbegining to understand themselves as a single community, but this process is developing very quickly.”
These “Siberians” represent now approximately 30-35 percent of the total population.[They] are descendents of voluntary settlers whocame to Siberia from the 17th to the end of the 19th century and of course as well the children of numerous mixed marriages [with indigenous nationalities] in various generations.”
They “did not have a childhood in the South,” and “they do not connect their future with the Core Russia because no one is waiting for them there and all that they have was given to them by Siberia. Why do they call themselves Siberians? Because by blood they are already far from Russians and are distinguished even by their anthropological type.”
“In addition,” Pushkarev writes, as the authority of the Great Russian nation has fallen, those who are the products of mixed marriages but who do not want to identify as Buryats, Yakuts or Udygeys are interested in an identity that reflects their unique character as a people in between.
“The people in these districts are now not very religious, and religion does not unify them,” Pushkarev says. “Geography does.” That feeling is intensified by the sense that many of them feel that “for Moscow,” the residents of this enormous land are only servants of the interests of the center.
“To call themselves Siberians,” the archpriest says, “is just as natural and comfortable as it is for Anglo-Saxons to call themselves Canadians, Australians or Americans.” And that is all the more so “under conditions when the [ethnic] Russian people does not have special rights and even its own territory,”while small non-Russian peoples do.
In this way as in many others, the Siberians resemble the small peoples of Siberia with whom they are interrelated. “For the Siberians, the small peoples of Siberia are part of their blood and their history and therefore they are closer to them than to the Great Russians and only they can be seriously concerned about the rapid dying out of communities of local people.”
Pushkarev says that “Siberians now are becoming the leading force in Siberia since they intend to live in it in the future and therefore their self-determination and self-advancement will continue, and no political science commentaries or ethnographic definitions are going to help” change that.
The only thing that would help, the Russian Orthodox priest says, would be “the flooding of Siberia and the Far East with Great Russians”—“a minimum of 100 million “would be needed,” he says – and the shifting of the political capital of the country “closer to the center of the entire Russian Federation so that each will feel that it near and common” to all.
Unless these things happen – and they aren’t, Pushkarev observes – “then the phenomenon of the Siberians as a nationality will become an anthropological and political fact with all the snuring centrifugal consequences up to the loss by the Russian Federation of the territories of Siberia and the Far East.”
“This is where the truth is,” the archipriest concludes, “and not in assertions that the Siberians supposedly do not exist. One must not close one’s eyes to an accomplished fact,” as some Moscow commentators are doing, people who are “far from an understanding of the essence of the problem” beyond the Urals.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
