What the ‘chattering classes’ of Russia are talking about: update

My harvest of impressions from the past 48 hours of monitoring Russian political talk shows and news bulletins of Russian state television is filled to the brim with both highly interesting and at times frightening and off-putting developments. 

The most momentous is perhaps what I just saw 15 minutes ago on the latest edition of Время покажет (Time Will Tell), a talk show I know from the inside having twice been a panelist there in 2016-2017. The program opened with mention of the forthcoming European visit of Joe Biden which has two cities on its itinerary:  Brussels for the next regular G7 and NATO gatherings, and….Warsaw.

Why Warsaw? The presenter notes that this meeting with the Polish leadership might be linked with the planned visit of President Duda to Washington next week. But then she moves on to link it was another announcement made yesterday by the US envoy to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. In the video recording of Thomas-Greenfield projected onto the screen, the envoy tells us that while the United States has no intention of sending any military personnel to Ukraine, any member country of NATO has the right to do so on its own.

This matches up nicely with the latest Polish government thoughts aloud to the effect that it might just move some troops across the Ukrainian border to secure its own eastern flank. In this way, the Poles would be doing no more than the Turks have done in Syria, where they still are parked in the predominantly Kurdish sector of the country in violation of international law.

 Meanwhile, per the talk show presenter, Hungary has already said it will not consider any clash with Russia resulting from forces sent by any NATO member state to Ukraine as justifying action under the famous NATO Alliance clause 5 of “all for one and one for all.” In other words, per the management of Time Will Tell, a little and probably very short lived Russo-Polish war will follow. Complete defeat of Warsaw is foreseen, even if it would take longer than the 2 days projected by the Polish army command itself not long ago; longer because so much Russian armed strength is presently committed to holding down Ukraine. As the presenter joked, this might mean the end of Polish statehood…

A bit earlier today, the latest edition of Большая игра (The Great Game) hosted by Vyacheslav Nikonov also was full of interesting commentary.  Over the past several years, Nikonov proved his talent for leading public discussions of the most serious topics in US-Russian relations with some of the best minds in Russia. His program today was one more demonstration that The Great Game has moved ahead to rank above Vladimir Solovyov’s talk show in terms of intellectual content.  Like the above mentioned Time Will Tell, The Great Game uses video clips of Biden and other U.S. and Western leaders as the starting point for discussions.  I mention this by way of answer to the several readers of my essays who could not imagine that Russian state television disseminates more than the official Kremlin point of view.  In fact, the views of the foreign adversary are given extensive airing before they are demolished by Russian experts.

In today’s show, the American views to be demolished were those of the President and of the Pentagon commenting on Russia’s use this past week of its hypersonic missile Kinzhal to attack a military target in Ukraine.  President Biden was quoted as saying that he saw nothing special about the Kinzhal other than speed, that its warheads were the common variety.  The Pentagon was quoted as saying that the Russians “appear” to have fired their Kinzhal in Ukraine, which would be a wasted effort for the given target.

 Nikonov’s guests pointed out that the target of the first Kinzhal strike was a “nuclear attack hardened” structure 60 meters underground and protected by reinforced concrete dating from Soviet days. Inside this bunker were Ukrainian missiles and other munitions of high value.  In other words, thanks to the incredible energy of mass and speed, the Kinzhal using what they characterized as one of its weaker potential conventional, as opposed to tactical nuclear charges could destroy a target otherwise considered protected against a nuclear armed ICBM.  Nothing special about this weapon system, eh?

Meanwhile, some of the Russian state programming these days is awful in the thesaurus meaning of ‘extremely disturbing or repellant.’  The latest edition of 60 Минут  (Sixty Minutes) with Yevgeny Popov and Olga Skabeyeva took a strong stomach to sit through. To be sure, the repellant material on the screen is coming from Ukrainian state television and includes the following: first, the televised statements of a Ukrainian government representative addressed to the wives and fiancées of Russian airmen, warning them that they will soon be widows, that Ukrainian forces will follow them to the ends of the earth to take revenge for their role in the current war, that they will be killed while vacationing on the beaches of Turkey, etc., and second, the televised address of the head of a Ukrainian medical institution telling the doctors under him to castrate any Russian prisoners of war who come their way, because they are not people but cockroaches.  Add to this the testimony of escapees from Mariupol who describe the methods of torture and disfiguration inflicted on them by the Nazi battalions in the city.  The source material is full of hate, and the airing on Russian state television also is not innocent: it has the clear purpose of inciting hatred for Ukrainians among the television viewers and so to prepare them for the much more cruel conduct of the war that Russia is likely about to implement, given that its human resources are insufficient to further prosecute the war quickly under the gentlemanly rules observed up till now.  To be specific, the Russians may switch over to the “American Way of War” out of necessity, meaning use of carpet bombing to ‘neutralize’ the Ukrainian forces, both regular army and nationalist battalions just to the west of the line of demarcation. 

The objective of a new and vicious though completely ‘legal’ attack on the Ukrainian troop concentrations will be in line with the recommendations of Clausewitz, who obviously enjoys great respect in the Kremlin: namely to win a war by destruction of armies, not by capturing cities.  Thus, it is very likely that Kiev will never be conquered, that the regime will capitulate because it has no more fighters in the field to resist the Russian presence.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Navalny and Sedition

I had not given much thought to the verdict handed down yesterday on Alexei Navalny following his conviction for large scale financial fraud relating to the 2018 presidential elections.  As I understand the case, Navalny was accused of continuing to solicit and receive public contributions to his electoral campaign for President well after his candidacy had been disqualified by the authorities.  Presumably he diverted the incoming funds to his own pocket or reassigned them to his various political activities.

The trial has, of course, been condemned in the West as a sham, as one more high visibility indication of the ongoing domestic repression practiced by the Putin regime, a repression of all opposition figures in the context  of an unpopular war in Ukraine to maintain political stability at all costs.

Let me say up front that I have never found Navalny a worthy cause for freedom fighters. He is an obnoxious character who has in the past espoused racist and ultra-nationalist views which would place him more appropriately among the backers of the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev than in the Russian Federation. At the same time, I see disproportionality between the financial crimes for which he has been tried and the latest sentence of 9 years of further imprisonment under conditions that are more harsh than what he has been serving for defrauding the French manufacturer Yves Rocher. The net effect will be to cut him off from the outside world and ensure he is properly silenced.

The Western press calls the trial and sentencing a sham.  Sham it may be, but that is beside the point. Navalny is paying the price not for the given financial frauds but for the much bigger crime of sedition, for which he was never punished properly going back to the clearest evidence of his call for overthrow of the government during the December 2011 big demonstrations in Moscow over alleged irregularities in the Duma elections.  Specifically he called upon the masses before him to march to the Kremlin and put “the people” in power.

The revolutionary moment passed with the new year 2012 and Navalny pursued his wrecking operation more discretely but always with the same purpose:  to shatter the aura of respectability around the government leadership and to try to prove by real or fake videos and other documentation that Putin and everyone around him were crooks.  The logic of such defamation is always the same: overturning the legitimately elected authorities by mass action, or, if nothing better is available, by voter turnout of irate (if misled) citizens.

The legal treatment or mistreatment of Navalny in his trials for financial fraud are the Russian version of the most widespread procedure in the United States for putting Mafioso behind bars.  They are almost never tried for murder, causing physical harm in shakedowns or similar activities which they, of course, practice with abandon.  Jury trials for such crimes would face enormous obstacles of evidence gathering from the omerta, the sworn silence within and around the criminal world.  Instead, mafia figures are put away for years if not decades on charges of perjury or of tax evasion which are much easier for the federal authorities to document beyond any reasonable doubt.

Navalny’s sentencing comes against the background of an evident government crackdown on the more diffuse sedition that has just been denounced by the President as Fifth Column activities. Yes, part of this crackdown has been the long-awaited closing down of radio station Ekho Moskvy and television (internet) broadcaster Dozhd. These stations had been deeply resented by patriotic Russian elites for their editorial lines discrediting the country and its leadership at every turn. Ekho Moskvy had been financed by a Gazprom subsidiary for the sake of giving the Liberal loudmouths a place to let off steam. But that policy was no longer tenable under conditions of the present life-or-death struggle of Russia versus the U.S.-led Collective West which has the name of the Russia-Ukraine War.   Meanwhile, the opposition print outlet Novaya Gazeta has been issued with a formal warning by the media monitor. Nobel Prize in the pocket of its editor or no, that newspaper may very well be forced to shut down in the weeks ahead.

Does the crackdown on free speech mean that Russia is on the path to Soviet style totalitarianism? Of course, the answer is “no.” The state broadcasters still air divergent views on panel discussions. Nearly all global news providers are accessible throughout Russia via satellite or cable subscriptions. And by general agreement, the internet remains largely open to the world. The exceptions, bans on social networks like Facebook, have been brought down on their heads by the flagrant challenges to Russian sensibilities of their top management by allowing messages calling for the death of Russians to be posted on their platforms.

Navalny was treated with great indulgence back in 2011 when he openly engaged in sedition. That was still a time when Russia tried hard to adhere to rules of Liberal Democracy which states in the West were often disregarding without “consequences.”  Remember that in virtually the same time frame, Occupy Wall Street, a seditious movement in the United States, was brutally crushed by police measures. Demonstrators in New York who were swept up and taken to prison for interrogation were threatened with years of deprivation of liberty for their very minor infractions of civic order. You needed a good lawyer to get out of this trap, as I heard at the time from some relatives living in New York who fell into police hands.

Today is a different day in Russia from 2011, and the limitations placed on the personal liberties of Russians result directly from the enormous pressure being applied on Russia economically, politically and militarily by the U.S.-led West. Personal freedoms everywhere in the world do well in conditions of peace and prosperity; they wilt in conditions of war and belt-tightening. ©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

The New “Russian Season” at the Brussels Opera House: reaffirmation of humanistic values

Three days ago I wrote about the remarkable “Statement- Ukraine” that the world renowned Queen Elisabeth Musical Competition posted on its website recently.  I praised the directors of the Competition for their courage and eloquence in defending humanistic values against the rampant Russophobia that has shown its ugly face at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, at the Munich Symphony Orchestra, to name the two institutions which were among the first to fire Russian artists in a show of self-righteous indignation at Russian foreign policy. Meanwhile, the same mass hypnosis seems to have deprived leaders of the Parisian cultural world of their wits as well.  

With regard to the Queen Elisabeth Competition, I pointed to its royal patronage as a factor in its holding true to its values and resistance to the volatility of mass politics.  For that very reason, the extraordinary decisions taken now on repertoire and the explanation of its choices by the management of the Brussels opera, the 300 year old Théâtre de la Monnaie, merit our very close attention.  After all, the opera house is a federal institution and everything that it rolled out in its press briefing yesterday could not have happened without the tacit or more likely explicit approval of the respective ministry that funds the opera.

The statement read out to journalists yesterday by the Monnaie’s Intendant Peter De Caluwe is a bit over 1,000 words long.  My first thought was to provide excerpts here. But then upon re-reading  the piece, it was clear that it is so logically interwoven that taking separate phrases will not do justice to the logic of the author.

Although the briefing for the “musical press” of Belgium was conducted, as is the custom, in alternating French and Flemish segments, Mr. De Caluwe chose to deliver his statement on the new season’s rationale in English, making it perfectly accessible to the world at large without any intermediary translations.

Readers will note that the speaker denounces several times the Russian military intervention or invasion of Ukraine.  That is not a judgment I share. However, opinions can differ on such matters, and the opera, as a federal institution has to be aligned with the government on that issue, which I would call here a ‘subsidiary issue.’  The overriding issue is the purpose of music and of the arts in our society. This is a subject that was always foremost in the thinking of the Intendant  during his long tenure. Year after year he has gone hat in hand to the government for funding and had to justify the social utility of the institution and not merely declare ‘art for art’s sake.’   In his statement explaining the repertoire choices of the new season, Mr. De Caluwe is exemplary.  I can only wish that his words reach the broadest possible audience across the world. This is a message of sanity in our insane times.

                                                                                ****

                                                      Peter de Caluwe

Two years ago, we presented the BREX-IN season, which emphasized links with British culture. In a similar vein, are now proposing a totally unplanned-for season in which Russian titles feature more prominently than ever. We are aware that this programming might well raise questions and perhaps even trigger discussion or dismay. We have nevertheless decided to run with what was planned, or rather, what has become a cluster of Russian titles to be performed in one and the same season as a result of the COVID pandemic preventing us from performing them according to the original schedule. So while the cluster was not intentional, it provides us with an unexpected opportunity to endorse our intrinsic mission: to unite, federate and build bridges between people.

I consider our house to be an anti-war and pro-peace institution, as borne out by our position in the heart of the capital of Europe, by our purpose, our programming, our leadership style and our way of working. Our model is one of harmony, not conflict. This constitutes our moral base and there is a greater need than ever to defend it. We are therefore taking a clear stand on this matter: strong towards those who are responsible, supportive towards those who are suffering, empathic towards those who are caught in the middle.

WE ARE HERE TO MAKE ART, NOT WAR.

La Monnaie strongly condemns the devastating aggression of Ukraine by the Russian regime and expresses its solidarity with the populations who are suffering the terrible consequences of this unnecessary war: first and foremost, the Ukrainian people and Ukraine’s artists. It is our responsibility as citizens to do everything within our power to help bring about a peaceful future based on the humanist values at the core of our European societies.

We also express our support for those artists who are committed to peace and who oppose, each in their own way and with great courage, this unacceptable aggression. We subscribe to the statement of Opera Europa and its members in that we “believe that there are many artists and institutions within Russia that are experiencing profound concern, disapproval and shame at what is happening, but dare not speak out for fear of savage retaliation…. We endorse the words published by Ukrainian artists and cultural activists: ‘Art has always been at the forefront of humanitarian values. We strongly believe that art cannot be subservient to political propaganda; instead it should be utilized to develop critical thinking and promote dialogue.’”

Though we cannot emphasize enough that we do not understand the motivations of the aggressors, we do believe that Russian culture is part of our shared heritage. European arts, literature, cinema and music will always be connected to Russian culture, which has inspired some of the most eloquent works on our shared continent. We cannot erase history. Indeed, great and immortal artworks confront us with ourselves>bring us face to face with ourselves? and with our own time. With our mistakes, too, and how to avoid them. It is clear to us, therefore, that the Russian repertoire should not be banned and that we must continue to perform it.

So the current conflict has not tempted us to make changes to our programming. Especially as the two composers, whose operatic and symphonic work is at the core of our season, have been victims of previous Russian regimes. We cannot contemplate punishing them again for their opinions, which defended the same values we are trying to protect now.

DURING OUR NEXT SEASON, RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN ARTISTS WILL BE WORKING TOGETHER, ALONGSIDE MANY OTHER NATIONALITIES.

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was often accused of being too Westernized, and therefore not Russian enough. Yet in his two operas we are presenting next season, he provides insight into the poetic Slavic soul which, combined with Pushkin’s libretti, is so reminiscent of our European literature… Dmitri Shostakovich suffered greatly under the Communist regime. He was constantly being told how he should function as an artist. He reacted by closing himself off from the world and wrote music permeated with subtlety and criticism of the system from which he could not escape. Hence his tortured decision later on in his career to join the Community party. Neither composer turned his back on his country but tried to walk the fine line between acknowledging the regime and rejecting it. They were Russians, but they were first and foremost humanists. They themselves suffered enough under the political conditions of their time. Their works should not be banned once more just because a dictator has lost his senses.

Throughout its history, La Monnaie has been a stronghold of encounters and openness through the shared experience of music and theatre. Artists from all backgrounds have been able to meet here in a welcoming and creative atmosphere. I do not believe that banning Russian artists from our theatres will bring us any closer to peace. The aggression against Ukraine by a violent regime should not hinder nor put a stop to our collaboration with an artistic community that is committed to peace and to the shared European values.

Culture and the arts remain some of the best recipes for creating solidarity, understanding and harmony between people, regardless of nationality. Of course, artists and institutions that openly support Vladimir Putin’s actions will not be welcome at La Monnaie. We expect artists performing in our house to defend our shared values. At the same time, we cannot force Russian artists who oppose their culpable leadership to make statements that might endanger their safety and security or that of their families. This would not be an act of solidarity. The answer to war should be cultural cooperation, not cultural exclusion.

Even more importantly, I have always defended opera as the best example of collaborative work: so many male and female artists, technicians, artisans, etc. from every corner of the world working side by side on a production. No fewer than thirty-eight nationalities have permanent jobs at La Monnaie. Add to that the large number of international guest artists and it is clear that we play the card of multinational and multicultural cohabitation and collaboration.

During our next season, Russian and Ukrainian artists will be working alongside many other nationalities. It is the responsibility of our institutions to continue to engage collaborators and artists regardless of nationality so as to show the world just what can be achieved by bringing together people, communities, generations and cultures. Art is and remains the domain of freedom, exchange, understanding and humanism.

We are here to make art, not war.

Peter de Caluwe

https://www.lamonnaiedemunt.be/en/mmm-online/2363-a-russian-season

Media watch: when parallel lines converge, stand clear!

Directly confrontational U.S. and Russian narratives on the threat of weapons of mass destruction being deployed in Ukraine

One of the main issues on the agenda of NATO’s urgent summit yesterday in Brussels called by U.S. President Joe Biden was the threat that Russia will use weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine out of frustration with its stalled assault on the country for lack of manpower and sufficient conventional armaments.

 In his speech, which was partially aired on European television, Biden directed particular attention to the risk of chemical attack in Ukraine, which he said would elicit a response ‘in kind,’ without elaborating. Meanwhile, today’s Financial Times quotes NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg as follows:  the Alliance had now activated its chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense elements.  Per the FT:

“We are taking measures both to support Ukraine and to defend ourselves,” [Stoltenberg] told reporters at the summit in Brussels on Thursday, adding that Nato was concerned by Russia’s rhetoric regarding chemical and nuclear weapons and its history of using chemical agents against its enemies, as well as its support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, where chemical weapons had been used.”

These are very serious allegations and merit a minute or two of semantic and factual parsing before we proceed.

First, there is today no Russian ‘rhetoric’ at all regarding its own planned use of chemical and nuclear weapons in the Ukrainian theater.  They have mentioned chemical weapons only with respect to an expected ‘false flag’ operation which the Ukrainian nationalists may carry out by releasing into the atmosphere toxic chemicals stored in one or another Ukrainian factory so as to blame advancing Russian forces for an “attack.” One such incident was already reported on Russian news in the past week, though the ammonia leaks were quickly repaired and there was no harm to nearby Ukrainian villagers.

With respect to Russia’s supposed “history of using chemical agents against its enemies,” we can well imagine that the author had in mind the Novichok poisoning of the Skripals and of Alexei Navalny or the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko several years ago.  These cases were proven only in the court of public opinion thanks to heavy pressure on the media from the British government.  There is good reason to suppose that they were all MI6 operations intended to discredit the Russian government, not actual Russian attacks. Similarly the supposed chemical attacks on his opponents by al-Assad were very likely ‘false flag’ operations by one or another Jihadi group aided by Western intelligence operatives.

But let us put these contentious issues aside for a moment and ask whether the Russians have any reason whatsoever to resort to weapons that violate all international conventions for the sake of victory in their Ukraine campaign. On the basis of available information about the state of the fighting, rumored losses of personnel and depletion of conventional weapons, there are no reasons for such action by the Russians.  All evidence suggests that the Russian campaign has been conducted so far with a view to reducing civilian deaths to a minimum.  The UN agency responsible for monitoring such things has reported a little over 2,000 deaths in the first month of the Russian military operation. This is absolutely miniscule for a campaign of this magnitude. U.S. forces inflicted hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in their own operations in Iraq in 2003 at this stage in the fighting. Moreover, the recent slowdown in the Russian offensive may be little more than a regrouping for continued assault when fresh reserves and equipment arrive.  The heaviest fighting, in Mariupol, appears to be headed for total Russian victory in a matter of days, despite the city having been held by the fanatical nationalist Azov battalion in addition to substantial regular army units. Chechen forces deployed in Mariupol yesterday claimed to have taken the municipal government buildings and to control a large part of the city. Once Mariupol is secure, the large Russian contingent besieging the city will likely be moved north to facilitate encirclement and destruction of the main Ukrainian military force encamped west of the line of demarcation with Donbas.

One further sign that supposed Russian setbacks of a scale that would give rise to drastic change in their conduct of the war is nothing more than a bare-faced lie was the remark by Biden in answer to a journalist’s question at yesterday’s press conference in NATO headquarters.  Would the United States agree to Ukraine’s making territorial concessions to Russia for the sake of a cease-fire and peace?  Said Biden, that decision is entirely up to the Kiev authorities.  The remark is as good as confirmation that Ukraine is losing the war and will have to sue for peace.

If I am correct and there is no factual or logical basis to assume that the Russians will deploy internationally prohibited weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine, then why all the noise about it? To answer that question, you have to turn to Russian media. 

Yesterday’s Russian television broadcasts give you the answer. Programming was filled with one dominant issue:  the documentary evidence that Russian military investigators have found in their seizure of biological laboratories in Ukraine financed by the Pentagon and curated by Americans.  The Russians are asserting that these labs were being used to conduct internationally prohibited development of biological weapons.  They provide details on the various toxins produced there and on human experiments, including on Ukrainian soldiers, resulting in multiple fatalities and hospitalizations. The documents and other evidence were shown on the screen quickly, but I have no doubt that they will be properly published in the days ahead. 

Perhaps most damaging in the present U.S. – Russian confrontation which has become so personalized on the two presidents is that the Russians are publicizing documents showing that Joe’s son Hunter was directly involved in the work of the criminal biological labs through a company of his that operated in Ukraine during the presidency of Barack Obama.

If true, then the Biden family is up to its neck in criminal activity and yesterday’s Public Relations push against Russia over weapons of mass destruction is just a smoke screen to conceal the real culprits.

By the way, the second featured item on Russian television yesterday was ceremonies in Belgrade to mark the anniversary of the two month NATO aerial bombardment of the Serbian capital that began on this day in 1999 and resulted in over 4,000 civilian deaths, including from use of uranium based bombs, and the destruction of most of the civil infrastructure of the city. Russian television showed a video of Biden, then a U.S. Senator, calling for this massive attack, which the Russians, alongside the Serbs, consider to have been a war crime.

I have in recent weeks spoken of the Russian and Western media reporting on the Ukraine war as ‘parallel worlds.’  Regrettably, I was wrong. They are, in fact, converging lines and when they meet there will be hell to pay.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

An open letter to British PM Boris Johnson: a modest proposal of a prisoner exchange

Dear Sir:

I assume that even in these very eventful days you had the time to remark the prisoner exchange newly agreed between the Ukrainian and Russian authorities.  If these mortal enemies were able to summon up the courage and humane feelings required to do the right thing on behalf of their own and the enemy’s soldiers, what I am about to propose to you will be both less onerous for you and far more rewarding for humanity in general than what is transpiring in the Ukrainian-Russian exchange.

My suggestion to you is to offer to exchange Julian Assange for Alexei Navalny. Such an exchange would support your political views, win you new supporters at home and abroad and add a dollop of humanity to our war crazed world. In Europe, in the Americas you alone have within your grasp a political prisoner of the international renown sufficient to entice the Kremlin to agree to part with Mr. Navalny.

You are by far the leading warrior in Europe against the “Putin regime.”  For years now you have fought by all means fair and foul to achieve regime change and remove Vladimir Putin from power.  I am appealing to your better side to act fairly in pursuit of your political objectives.

By achieving the release of Navalny, you will give hope to those who support his cause inside and outside of Russia.  The simultaneous release of Assange will remove from the U.K. a source of embarrassment and an unnecessary headache.  Let him enjoy his freedom on Red Square and share a cappuccino with Edward Snowde n.

Putting aside for a moment your self-interest in following my recommendation, your noble act will save two tortured souls from serving out years of imprisonment that are vastly disproportionate to their alleged misdeeds.  It is high time to relegate Iron Mask justice to its historic place in the distant past and to show humane mercy that corresponds to our occasionally enlightened age.

Respectfully,

Gilbert Doctorow

P.S. – I urge all readers who share my thinking on this issue to petition Mr. Johnson in their own name directly.

Great Post-Cold War AmericanThinkers on International Relations

Great Post-Cold War American Thinkers on International Relations is the title of my first book of essays. Published in 2010, it has remarkable utility for understanding where we are in relations with Russia today, how and why a New World Order is now forming before our eyes, and where we are headed.

As an historian by education, I had long been unhappy with the way that American political scientists  were prospecting history for “lessons” to support their latest proposals for the country’s foreign policy. This practice was all the more in view during the 1990s in the period immediately following the collapse of Communist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe, reaching finally to the USSR. America’s best known, and also some aspiring less known academics produced works which were intended to inform a confused public, and also to guide policy makers in the highest offices of the land. They provided road maps for the new world which was now no longer split to the core by an ideological fissure and which was no longer bipolar, but instead appeared to be unipolar, with the USA as the sole remaining global superpower and hegemon.

I read some of their works, was scandalized by the shoddy workmanship and decided to take action as an historian calling fellow professionals in a related discipline to order.

Considering the results of my dissection of the 1990s and early new millennium writings of the established names in the field, some readers of my book decided that I was insincere in designating them as “great.” However, my yardstick was not the intrinsic value of their writings but the degree of influence they bore across the profession and in the foreign policy community at large. There was little to quibble over my choices. Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky were all well known to the public for several bookshelves of works that have enduring interest up to present.  The less well known names in my “big ten” were Joseph Nye, Stanley Hoffmann, G. John Ikenberry and Robert Kagan.  They were fillers to give my volume enough bulk. I make no apologies for including them because they were still inescapable in 2010 though their residual value today is often negligible.  With one exception, of course, Kagan. I would be remiss not to mention that he is the husband of Victoria Nuland, with whom he shared a Neoconservative world view that he helped to define.

The stronger of the authors in my list were complex thinkers, and it took all of my efforts to get my mind around them to produce a critical analysis, including where they “borrowed” many of their ideas from, what was wrong with the sources and what remained wrong in their reworks.

The most original of the lot was Francis Fukuyama. His End of History (1992) was seminal in the sense that the other “greats” wrote in response to his challenge, even if they never acknowledged his work by name. Fukuyama’s book set down the principles that were embedded in the Neoconservative movement. He argued that with Communism vanquished, all of humanity was now headed in the same direction towards liberal democracy and free markets.  This was a single set of rails, along which were stretched out all the nations on earth, some ahead by the locomotive, some behind. With the direction of history clearly delineated by Fukuyama it was a small step for the Neocons to urge the U.S. government to accelerate the historical processes by direct intervention.  When this ended in the ill-fated invasion of Iraq, Fukuyama jumped ship and quit the movement.  But he never went very far away, and he is called upon even today as an expert in international affairs to comment on the disaster awaiting Putin from his war on Ukraine. That was the main topic of his interview last week on the BBC’s Hard Talk show. Very clever people like Fukuyama walk away from train wrecks unscathed.

Zbigniew Brezinski is now long dead (2017) but his voice is still heard. In the past several weeks many of our news commentators cite the passage in Brzezinski’s best-selling book, Grand Chessboard (1997), in which he explains the decisive importance of Ukraine in Russia’s retaining or losing its standing as a European empire. Of course, there is a great deal more in that book than the two lines cited today. It encapsulated an entire world view that was deeply anti-Russian just as Brzezinski’s career had been when he moved from his university professorship to become Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor.

Brzezinski was the author of the plan to lure the Soviet Union into an invasion of Afghanistan in December1979 and then to provide U.S. support to the Islamic warriors fighting the USSR, which, in the long run wore down the Soviet state and contributed to its demise.  There are many in Washington who are hoping for similar results from American support to the Ukrainians in their war with Russia, another war which the USA largely engineered.

Brzezinski’s name was not mentioned in the many obituaries for former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who died last week. However, he had been her mentor during her university studies and they remained in close contact when she rose to high office. Brzezinski accepted an assignment from Albright to assist plans to build oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to Europe, skirting the territory of the Russian Federation, with intent to reduce Russian revenues from and control over global hydrocarbons.

It would be no exaggeration to say that Brzezinski’s anti-Russian views were imbibed with his mother’s milk. Though it is considered bad form in American political life to draw attention to birth, ethnicity, and the like, there were at the time of his appointment as National Security Adviser a number of serious professionals who questioned the wisdom of appointing a Polish patriot, son of a Polish diplomat, to participate in high level decision making involving policy towards Russia given the several centuries of bad blood between these countries and peoples.

Henry Kissinger’s writings were surely the most difficult to master.  He graduated from Harvard a summa cum laude and you feel it. When I was writing my analysis of his master work Diplomacy (1994)  I went to the amazon.com page for the book and looked over reader comments, seeking to capture the vox populi. One comment stood out:  “He writes very well for a war criminal.”

Indeed it was a widely held view in the past that Kissinger spent the second half of his life atoning for the sins of the first half. His role in prosecuting the ugly, criminal war in Viet Nam was the main sin of the past. From the 1990s on, it was assumed that Kissinger acted as one of the “sage men” giving perspective and insights to those making foreign policy, including presidents.  And when he is quoted today, it is common to point to his statements after 2008 advising against extending NATO membership to Ukraine.  However, this is to ignore what he did and said in the 1990s.  Kissinger and Brzezinski both testified on Capitol Hill in the 1994-1996 period when America reached a decision on NATO expansion and on relations with the Russian Federation going forward.  Back then Kissinger had been strongly opposed to including Russia in NATO, even opposed to including Russia in the very diluted Partnership for Peace program. NATO had to be sacrosanct. 

In 2008, when the United States and Russia edged towards war over Russia’s incursion into Georgia in August, Kissinger was a leading player in the group of senior statesmen who put together a paper on how to restart relations with Moscow.  The paper was delivered to Barack Obama’s campaign team and was implemented in early 2009 as the “Re-set.”  However, that plan in fact did not question the givens of U.S. global hegemony and only called for improved rhetoric when dealing with the Kremlin.  This scarcely qualifies Kissinger for credits to offset his past sins.

Kissinger has been blessed with longevity.  Next month he will be a featured speaker at a big public event hosted by The Financial Times.  We may expect him to hold forth on the Ukraine crisis.  For readers of my Great Post-Cold War American Thinkers, it will be hard to hold back the jeers.

Finally, I wish to mention here Samuel Huntington, a political scientist who is less remembered today than the first three above, but whose vision of the present and the future set out in his Clash of Civilizations (1996) had a great influence on the thinking about the world in a whole generation of Americans and others around the globe.

Huntington’s book became a best seller after the September 11^th bombing of the World Trade Center. The author appeared to foresee the titanic struggle between the West and Islamic terror, and everyone was keen to read him.  But the book was not limited to the conflict with Islam. Huntington had a full set of “civilizations” that were supposedly jostling for position. Among them, we find Eastern Orthodoxy, of which Russia is the outstanding case. In this regard, the work remains relevant to today.

That said, Clash of Civilizations was a rather shoddy work which owed a great deal to Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History for the overall concept and to Huntington’s young research assistants for the many scenarios that make up the bulk of the book.

I recalled the half-baked ideas of those young researchers who lacked any worldly experience when I exchanged emails this morning with my good friend Ray McGovern and he asked for my thoughts on a recent interview given by MIT professor emeritus Ted Postol. Postol was lambasting the young “punks” who seem to populate the ranks of advisers to Joe Biden.  What Postol missed is that exactly kids like these were always doing the grunt work in political science.  Lots of creativity, zero competence. They were surely the kind of folks who said in 2008 to let Lehman go under, because it would have a salutary effect on risk-taking by speculators. They were ignorant of the disasters that lay ahead then, just as those formulating the sanctions policy against Russia today are ignorant of the blowback to come.

Of course, no nation has a monopoly on stupidity and ignorance of economics. The European Union “leadership” is doing its best to hold up its end in this regard. If three days from now the EU member states follow the stern instructions of Gauleiter vonder Leyen and reject the Russian demand to pay for their gas in rubles purchased on the domestic Russian market, then economic mayhem will follow. That damned fool, a gynecologist by education, is telling the whole EU what to do in a vital area of commerce. Her position amounts to an unbelievable usurpation of powers by a warmonger.

The West is pointed straight down, like that Boeing 737 that crashed in China last week. Straight down and accelerating.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Press TV, Iran:”Spotlight” – Russia gas currency switch

This edition of the Spotlight interviews Gilbert Doctorow, independent international affairs analyst from Brussels, and Daniel Lazare, journalist and author from New York to discuss the impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict on global energy supply. 

 

www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/107036

Is a peace treaty to end the Russia-Ukraine war in sight?

Yesterday, after the Ukrainian and Russian delegations ended their several hours of negotiations in Istanbul under the watchful eye of Turkish president Erdogan, the parties released information on the proposals that Kiev made and which Moscow acknowledged were a possible working document for their eventual peace treaty. Meanwhile, the Russians announced that as a token of good faith to encourage the further rounds of negotiations, they would “drastically cut back” their attack on Kiev.

Immediately, global financial markets took heart and marked gains.  In Russia, the currency market strengthened significantly, reaching exchange rates against the dollar and euro that are within 10-15% of where they were before Russia’s “special military operation” got underway on 24 February.

What do we know about the points on the negotiating table and can they serve as the basis for a definitive peace?

The most important concession which Kiev is offering is to declare “neutral” status, to give up any plans to join military alliances or to allow foreign military to establish bases on its territory. The latest proposal fleshes out the list of guarantors of Ukraine’s security. These could include the UK, China, the USA, Turkey, France, Canada, Italy, Poland and Israel. In return, Russia will not object to Ukraine joining the European Union. 

The talking points remain wide open as regards territory.  The future status of Crimea would be decided by 15 years of consultations.  The two presidents would discuss the future of the Donbas republics.

One thing that Western media have not noticed is the reaction of Russia’s leading talk show panelists and hosts to these draft points for a treaty.  As usual, I take for my point of reference Vyacheslav Nikonov’s Great Game and Vladimir Solovyov’s Evening show. I think the message was clear yesterday: patriotic panelists were disheartened by what they construed to be the too soft line being taken by the Kremlin’s negotiators. A peace treaty is being drafted when none of Russia’s war objectives has been met. No de-Nazification.  No regime change: the same Russophobe government would remain in power. No significant territorial gains consolidated in the terms of the proposed settlement.  However, the hosts were careful to remind the panelists that this was not end game, just a stopping place on the way. 

What do I foresee?

I believe that the Russians will continue to negotiate while using all available firepower to change the situation on the ground in Ukraine dramatically in their favor.  The Kremlin remarked several days ago, before the last round of negotiations, that it was about to concentrate its forces in the Donbas to liberate still occupied territories of the two republics and restore their boundaries from before 2014.

As regards, Lugansk, there is not much to do. Latest information suggests that 93% of the former Lugansk oblast is now in separatist hands.  However, in the Donetsk People’s Republic there is still a great deal to do. The separatists are holding only 50% of what had been the territory of their oblast in 2014. There are reasons for this.  First, the main concentration of the Ukrainian army, perhaps as many as 100,000 troops are still dug into hardened positions directly opposite Donetsk that  they created over the last eight years. They have been firing artillery shells and rockets into Donetsk city and its suburbs on a daily basis, causing multiple deaths and wanton destruction of residential buildings and civil infrastructure.  The Donetsk forces alone are no match for this concentration; moreover, some of the Donetsk troops have been diverted from attacking across the line of demarcation by the assignment given to them by Moscow from the start of the operations: to assist with the taking of Mariupol.  Donetsk units moved south to Mariupol to meet up with Russian troops moving north from Crimea. But the operation has been very difficult and time consuming.  Still now there are a couple of thousand die-hard Azov battalion soldiers holed up in the steel mill and in the port area. Their numbers are falling either to Russian assault teams or by melting into the civilian population and heading out via humanitarian corridors.  As soon as this operation is completed, the Donetsk forces and Russians can head north to attack the main mass of Ukrainians to the west of the Dniepr.

The Russians are running out of time and out of resources to smash the Ukrainian troops west of the Dniepr. It may be that to get the job done, they will finally resort to the “American way of war” and carpet bomb the Ukrainian positions. We will see shortly.

If the Russians succeed in liberating the 50% of Donetsk oblast still held by Kiev, then they will be ready for a cease fire and for definitive peace talks.  By smashing the greatest concentration of Ukrainian forces they will achieve two of their original objectives with one stroke:  de-Nazification and demilitarization.   The question will remain whether Zelenski can sign a peace based on the new realities. It may be in his interest to go to Istanbul for talks with Putin and then to keep on flying to freedom.  His associates in Kiev will surely be ready to lynch him for a bad peace.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

“Cross Talk” on RT, Thursday, 31 March 2022

My colleague Paul Lookman has very kindly embedded in the latest posting on his website the link to a panel discussion on RT devoted to the Ukraine war. 

My fellow panelists on the program were two prominent speakers on the subject who are very much in demand in the States and internationally:  professor Nicolai Petro, a Ukraine expert at the University of Rhode Island, and Scott Ritter, a military intelligence and security expert with much relevant experience from his past government service.

The host, Peter Lavelle, has been the lead personality of Cross Talk since its inception 17 years ago. 

Since the onset of the Great Censorship that Western governments and major media companies put in place in February, all of Cross Talk programs are no longer carried by youtube.com  which is where most of their audience was concentrated.  Live reception of RT is, of course, impossible in Europe and North America due to the prohibition on this channel.  In the meantime, RT production people are preparing to place the shows on a new internationally accessible platform.

 Paul Lookman has done us all a great service by finding the key to the door, and posting the show.

https://geopolitiekincontext.wordpress.com/crosstalk/

The world is flat: Alleged atrocities in the city of Bucha as latest US-UK-Ukrainian “false flag” operation

Several weeks ago, US President Joe Biden warned gravely that Russia would soon be making a chemical weapons attack in Ukraine, thereby violating international conventions and exposing itself to the severest punishment of the world community. Alternatively, the Russians would arrange a radiation leak by attacking one or another of the nuclear power plants in Ukraine.

Happily, neither dastardly act was carried out by the Russians to cover up their supposed losing position in the war being waged against the brave Ukrainians, who enjoy the unstinting support of the NATO alliance.

Instead, a very different kind of war crimes scandal has been promoted in the past two days to achieve the very same objective of universal outrage. The consequence is demands by French President Macron and Chancellor Scholz of Germany for still more draconian measures against the barbarians to the East, namely a full embargo on Russian hydrocarbons, even if it spells suicide for European industry and economies generally. These two birds sang before the microphones almost simultaneously yesterday afternoon denouncing the atrocities supposedly committed by Russian soldiers as they withdrew from their siege of Kiev.

Yes, my commentary introduces a note of sarcasm in speaking about a propaganda operation that is obvious as day to anyone with half a wit and half a memory.  It all takes us back to 2014 and the MH17 catastrophe which was laid at the door of Russia within minutes of its occurrence, without any need for an investigation.

As to the murder of civilians in the city of Bucha, a northern suburb of Kiev, and similar photographic accounts from several other settlements evacuated by Russian troops in the past few days, the vicious propaganda narrative coming from Kiev, but surely scripted in Washington and London, raises no alarm bells in the Western media.  But then again, there is no collective memory in Western media of what happened on the Maidan, when U.S. backed neo-Nazi units employed snipers to murder peaceful street demonstrators and police in support of a totally fabricated story of police violence by the Yanukovich government to justify its illegal ouster in a coup d’etat. Those same cynical murderers have been in control of Ukrainian politics up to the present day.

It has been reported extensively by Russian television crews traveling with the Donbas republic forces how departing Ukrainian troops fired wantonly on the towns they had been occupying for the past eight years but now were forced to give up.  It has been extensively reported by Russian press teams interviewing refugees leaving Mariupol via humanitarian corridors how the Azov battalion and other nationalist radical troops attached to the Ukrainian army were shooting anyone daring to come out of the basements to risk joining the escape routes out of the city.  None of this was picked up by Western media. But it surely was picked up by the Kiev propagandists, who decided to turn it inside out and sell it further.

In summation, there are reasons why wars are fought to the death, why many crucial disputes between nations are not amenable to diplomacy until one of the sides has been utterly destroyed.   We are living through such a moment in history.  And it is most sad, here in Europe, to see elected leaders like Macron, like Scholz play along with the villains to gain favor with the overlord in Washington, D.C.  May their cowardice and betrayal of the interests of their own peoples be recorded here and now for posterity.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

R.I.P. Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky

I met Vladimir Zhirinovsky just once, in the autumn of 2016 when I was a ‘hot property’ on the Russian political talk shows and took part in Evening with Vladimir Solovyov, where Zhirinovsky was one of the ‘regulars.’  My making the rounds of the talk shows was due to the keen interest just then of the production teams, and presumably of their domestic Russian audiences, in views of the Trump candidacy from bona fide Americans. This is all well before Covid and the Zoom era:  panelists on these shows had to be based in Moscow, or no further away than St Petersburg, where I was at the time, and had to be on call for invitations on a moment’s notice. There were very few Russian-speaking Americans with tested on-air political analytical skills who met those criteria. I was one.

In any case, my shared time with Zhirinovsky on a segment of the Solovyov show did not leave a pleasant aftertaste. Zhirinovsky made one of his typically outrageous remarks, which I countered when my microphone was turned on. He then pounced, asking rhetorically: “What is this CIA agent doing on the show.”

That vitriolic statement was classic Zhirinovsky.  It was a sign of why he had so many enemies and…so many devoted supporters.

I had first become aware of Zhirinovsky’s existence back in the fall of 1995, when he was running for the State Duma elections in December and was making waves.  He was then the leading figure in the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) which he founded in the closing years of the Soviet Union and then re-registered as the first non-Communist party in the new, sovereign state of the Russian Federation. 

My favorite English-language newspaper, The Financial Times, called him a fascist in 1995. That designation stuck for a while, though even the FT understood it was a gross misrepresentation, and quickly changed to “far-right” the adjective that it regularly attached to his name.  At the time, it was widely recognized that the LDPR led by Zhirinovsky and the Communist Party led Gennady Zyuganov shared ultra-patriotic views and antipathy to the American-led West that was busily buying up Russia and installing its representatives in Russian ministries. Both parties rallied the general electorate behind an anti-West electoral revolt that claimed many Duma seats in December 1995.  Though it is largely ignored, that tidal wave of nationalism set off alarm bells in Washington, where it now became clear that the pro-Western government of Boris Yeltsin could be replaced by politicians who were not friendly at all.  Thus, the nationalist wave in Russia put wind in the sails of those in the United States who were pressing for NATO expansion to the East.  I discuss this in some detail in my diaries of the period that were published a year ago in Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume II:  Russia in the Roaring 1990s. (see amazon.com and all other online book sellers; available in ebook, hardbound and paperback formats).

When the Soviet Union was disbanded by the Belovezh Accords in December 1991, Zhirinovsky denounced the dissolution.  However, over time he revised his views substantially and in the last decade of his life spoke out repeatedly against any attempt to reconstitute the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe. This is a point that most Western analysts overlook entirely when they speak of supposed Russian nostalgia for its Soviet past especially among the patriotic Right.  Zhirinovsky explained his position in the entirely rational arguments of economic nationalism:  the Soviet republics had been a net drain on its core political entity, Russia. Similarly, the East European countries in the Soviet bloc were also a net drain on Russia. Zhirinovsky spoke in favor of the American practice of extracting financial benefit from foreign policy instead of the Soviet pattern of throwing good money after bad by trying to buy friends abroad.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, or “Volfovich” as he was familiarly called on the talk show that promoted him and his ideas the most, that of Vladimir Solovyov, was during the Putin years a regular contestant in the presidential elections, mostly polling less than 10% but nonetheless a force that was felt around the country, in particular, in the Far East, where LDPR had especially strong local presence. He was intentionally colorful, both in the loud sports jackets he wore on occasion, and in the unspeakable proposals he made regarding the exercise of Russian power abroad. 

It is commonplace in Western journalism to say there are no “opposition parties” in Russia but that is a gross oversimplification.  It is true that Zhirinovsky’s LDPR voted regularly with the Government on nearly all foreign policy issues.  However, in domestic policy the party had its own programs which it consistently defended in legislative initiatives, quite distinct from those of United Russia.

In the new millennium, Zhirinovsky played the fool in his television appearances, but it was all very well calculated to remain in the public eye while not arousing repression from the powers that be.  When his 75^th birthday was celebrated on television, he dropped the clown’s mask and spoke honestly about the challenge of remaining at the top of Russian politics in the face of a very strong and dominant United Russia party.

Otherwise, it bears mention that Zhirinovsky was well educated and a skillful linguist. His Ph.D. in the humanities focused on the Turkish language and culture. He is said to have been fluent in Turkish even to the end and he always was a knowledgeable commentator on political developments in the Middle East and Central Asia, where he was born.

As part of the feature programs on Russian television dedicated to his life that are being put on air now that his demise was announced in the morning, we are shown snippets from his predictions of political events to come year by year.  In the midst of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, we are all reminded that Zhirinovsky foresaw this proxy war between the United States and Russia.  He was a leader among the patriotic Russian elites in being ready to stand up to the United States militarily in the confident expectation that Russia will be victorious.

The leadership position in his LDPR party that Zhirinovsky held for most of three decades cannot be filled by anyone else. But the patriotic Right that he represented will in one form or another remain a major current in Russian politics.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin’s Address to the State Duma, 07 April 2022

By good fortune, I turned on our satellite receiver of Russian state television today just in time to catch key moments from the Prime Minister’s annual report to the State Duma on the work of the Government in the year gone by. Mishustin described in substantial detail the Government’s funding for domestic social and economic needs in 2021, but went on to say how the appropriations are being greatly increased in the current year to counter the negative effects of the “sanctions from hell” which the USA and the EU unleashed after the start of the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine on 24 February.

Mikhail Mishustin is a heavy-set man but radiates energy, mastery of the subject matter of the day and enormous confidence in the ability of his team to manage effectively all of the challenges, challenges which would have already sunk most every other nation on earth save China. Instead, Russia recovered from a brief collapse of the ruble exchange rate, attaining once again in the past few days the level from before the sanctions. Of course, the exchange rate is not the only measure of success in coping with the sanctions, but it is a good initial barometer of business and public confidence in the government’s financial management.

At his appointment by Putin a couple of years ago, Mikhail Mishustin had going for him a reputation as what the Russians call a хозяйственник, meaning a technocratic manager who can keep tight reins on government spending and get things done.  Following the trials of seeing Russia through the Covid crisis, Mishustin has filled out his inventory of skills to be a very impressive manager of men as well as means. He is a good public speaker.  What he is not is a politician: he does not pose a threat to the occupant of the Kremlin; instead he is deferential and mentioned at every turn how this or that initiative of the Government or the legislature is made in response to directives from the Head of State.

He spoke a good deal about support for the people in these trying times, in particular about subsidies for mortgage loans to ensure that housing construction remains at the highest levels of output ever seen in modern Russian history. This is good for employment and good for people’s well being. In farming communities, the mortgage will be held at 3%.

He spoke about the massive funding being realized for infrastructure build-out, in particular for roads having regional importance.  He talked about several industries having national importance which are being given special assistance – ship-building and civil aircraft production. The latter is being given every support to complete import substitution of all critical components, a task which began already several years ago following earlier waves of sanctions against Russia when Russia was denied supplies of the materials for composite wings on its newest passenger airliners.

But the greatest attention appeared to be to assist industry and commerce with subsidized credit for both investment and working capital. This takes on special importance under conditions of the very high prime rate (20%) which the Bank of Russia recently imposed to rein in inflation. The inflation was sparked by the sanctions and pull-out of foreign suppliers and manufacturers from the Russian market.  It also related to the collapse of the ruble in the early days of the ‘special military operation.’

Such high prime rates would normally put a halt to the currency exchange crisis which it did very nicely. However, it would normally also starve the economy of capital and so lead to sharp reduction of supply as well as of demand.  The measures that Mishustin set out, feeding capital at affordable rates directly to enterprises through subsidy arrangements with the banks, provides oxygen where it is needed at this critical moment.  The objective is to keep enterprises afloat, workers employed, and give a breathing space for the enormous challenges of import substitution to be resolved.  It all makes good sense.

In general, despite its statist overarching policies, which include, in present circumstances, naming champions in the target industrial sectors for import substitution, the government’s emphasis remains on encouraging private entrepreneurship at all levels, from small and medium sized enterprises, to the industrial giants, which are also under great stress from the sanctions.  That is to say, Russia remains predisposed to free markets as the best response to foreign pressure.

The statist, interventionist side of the present Government shows itself in the measures Mishustin listed with respect to facilitating closer cooperation between universities and other centers of research on the one side and industry on the other.  Going back to Soviet times, this was always a weak point in the Russian economy.  Now, listening to Mishustin, it appears that there are people in charge who know how to fix the problem just when the Russian economy will be in greatest need of innovation and new technological talents.

My take-away from Mishustin’s speech is that Russia has in place a world class management of the economy and finance.  Those in Washington who thought the country could be crushed misunderstood Russians and underestimated the capabilities, determination and sang froid of their Government.

But then there is nothing to be surprised at in this state of affairs.  Russian studies in the United States have been virtually useless to anyone for at least two decades.  Taking the well known and respected Harriman Institute of Columbia University as a marker, I can say that apart from LGBTQ issues in Russia or Ukrainian films, the monthly program of events for the student body has zero on offer. The lectures and round tables on the Ukraine war today are talk between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee, with all panelists reading from State Department briefings, no different from what the journalists in mainstream media are doing.  Not an original perspective or thought to be found there. The field has been totally politicized into an anti-Putin street party and otherwise trivialized.  There is no way that this esteemed institution could help anyone in Washington planning economic warfare on Russia to understand the resilience of the Russian side and the futility of their mission.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

P.S. – On the issue of the failure of Russian Studies in the United States to produce anything of value, I refer the reader to my 2013 essay in The Moscow Times: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2013/11/18/defunding-russian-studies-may-be-a-blessing-a29668

More on the Bucha atrocities: Iran’s Press TV

“Short and to the point.”  With those words I would characterize the 12 minute news bulletin on Iran’s Press TV yesterday in which I was given the microphone to place the Bucha scandal in the broader context of the ongoing vicious Information War. The United States and the United Kingdom are conducting precisely such a hands-off operation due to  their animal fear of confronting Russia in a kinetic war.  Moreover, it is the only kind of war they have any chance of winning, for all that is worth. The hasty, indecent withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan last August capped a series of disastrous military adventures by the US and NATO forces in Iraq, Syria and Libya over the course of the past two decades that left millions of civilians dead and these given unfortunate countries in ruins economically and politically.

The result of the present Washington policies is a vast discrepancy between the “virtual world” being disseminated by the U.S. led Collective West and a “boots on the ground” reality from the Russians. 

As I note, for reasons of military secrecy, the Russians are divulging very little about their troop concentrations and immediate plans.  Consequently, we will have to wait some time to see the outcome. I anticipate it will be the utter destruction of the bulk of the Ukrainian military parked to the West of the Donbas demarcation line. Such an outcome will obviate the need for a negotiated peace treaty. Facts speak louder than words.

With regard to Press TV:  I draw your attention to the moderate and rather fair handed news management.  This drives home the fact that even in present day massive censorship in the USA and Western Europe and propagandistic manipulation of the media facilitated by a blackout on Russian news sources of all kinds (not just Sputnik and RT), the curious and open-minded public can find the “other side” or sides of issues making the headlines by tapping into the English language broadcasts of major global players like Turkey, Iran, India.

www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/107681

Read all about it: Final days of the battle for Mariupol

The Russian operation to take the port city of Mariupol is drawing to a successful conclusion.  “Success”  has to be understood today in a qualified sense, since large parts of the city now lie in ruins and as many as 4,000 civilians may have been killed in the fighting, largely victims of trigger happy Ukrainian ultra-nationalists. The Azov battalion soldiers and other irregulars holding the city from fortified positions in residential communities of this city of 460,000 shot wantonly at those who tried to escape from the basements of apartment houses to fetch water or who dared attempt to join the humanitarian corridors and exit the city. The civilian population was held hostage and constituted a “human shield.” They protected the Ukrainian forces from the full fury of Russian artillery and precision air strikes, which otherwise would have been deployed.

All of the fighting over Mariupol has gotten very little coverage in the Western media. All that we heard about was the difficulty in establishing humanitarian corridors and interviews with the few terrorized civilians who managed to get out to the West.  To be fair, the situation on the ground in Mariupol has been reported only partially by the Russians because it has been very much a work in progress that they kept under rules of secrecy in line with their entire ‘special military operation.’

Now that the capture of Mariupol is in its final phase, some information of value has been published in alternative Russian media and I propose to present that here to give readers a sense of how this war is being prosecuted and why.  Main source:  https://www.9111.ru/questions/7777777771838727/

In effect, most of the city proper has been taken by the Russian army and Donetsk militias, with significant assistance from a battalion of Chechens headed by their leader Kadyrov.  As the routes out of the city heading east were freed and as the snipers and other Azov forces were pushed back to provide some level of safety in the streets, large numbers of civilians have left the city in the past week. It is estimated that the civilian population remaining in Mariupol at present is about one third what it was at the start of the conflict.

The Azov fighters, other irregulars and Ukrainian army forces numbered about 4,000 at the start and now have been reduced due to casualties. They include among them “foreign mercenaries” as the Russians have said for some time.  Now from intercepted phone conversations of these belligerents, it appears that among the foreigners are NATO instructors. This means that the proxy war between Russia and the USA/NATO begins to approximate a direct confrontation, contradicting the public pronouncements coming from the Biden administration. Should the Russians succeed in taking these NATO instructors alive, which is one of their priority tasks, the next sessions of the UN Security Council could be very tense.

To be sure, the 4,000 enemy forces mentioned above were only those within the city. Ukrainian forces numbering perhaps ten times more were positioned to the west of the city at the start of hostilities. Presumably they have been pushed back to the West.

As we have known for a week or so, the remaining Azov and other Ukrainian forces have retreated from the city proper to two locations on the outskirts of Mariupol:  the port and the Azovstal industrial territory. The Russians have now entirely encircled both.

The port runs for about 3 kilometers along the sea and reaches inland about 300 meters. It is from here that in the past week, the Azov group tried to send out by helicopter a dozen or more of its top officers. The helicopter was shot down by the Russians, killing all aboard.  A relief helicopter also was destroyed by the Russians, but here one Ukrainian survived and he was interrogated about the failed operation.

The port is now being cleared of enemy forces, with the Donbas militia taking the lead.  

The Azovstal industrial complex is a much tougher nut to crack. It consists of two steel works. Their specific feature is underground levels going down as much as six to eight stories, where the enemy has to be flushed out by siege methods not by artillery barrage or bombing.  As many as 3,000 nationalists and Ukrainian army soldiers may be there. The main task for the Russians is to watch all entrances and exits to the underground.

The Russians are not bombing for two reasons:

First, there is no sense in destroying the infrastructure above the ground level if the enemy is holed up below.  Moreover, there are some residential buildings in the vicinity.

Second, if you bomb and bury the nationalists underground, then there will be no witnesses to bring to court to talk about the atrocities which these people have committed in the Donbas. And there may well be in these underground bunkers still more biological laboratories which were till now very carefully kept out of view. The Russians want to get their hands on proof.

Whatever the level of destruction may be, the pending Russian victory over Ukrainian forces in Mariupol is anything but Pyrrhic.  It is a full-blooded victory with great strategic importance insofar as it gives the Russians full control of the Azov Sea littoral. It seals the land bridge connecting the Russian Federation mainland with Crimea. It also is a key piece in ensuring water supplies to Crimea, which had been cut off by Ukraine in order to inflict maximum pain on Russian Crimea. With water now flowing once again from the Dnieper, there is a solid basis for resuming farming on Crimea in its traditional levels and also to support tourist inflows, a key source of income for the region. Add to that the likelihood that with some time and investment, Mariupol will reassume its important economic role as seaport and industrial town.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

The Russian Way of War: Part Two

Sometime in the distant future, when the Russian internal documents relating to the conduct of this war in Ukraine are made public, one of the great conundrums of our time may finally receive a definitive answer:  why Russia has been prosecuting its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine with one hand tied behind its back, always holding back the vast destructive forces at its command, and so drawing out the operation and suffering losses of its soldiers in a way which a more cruel, ‘American style’ campaign would largely have avoided. 

At the very start of the armed conflict, I remarked on the specifics of what I called ‘the Russian Way of War’ now being applied in Ukraine. This approach does not inflict death on huge numbers of civilians, does not count on a ‘shock and awe’ initial attack to demoralize and overrun the enemy.  I said at the time that the overriding considerations on the Russian side were the traditional ‘brotherly’ relations between Ukrainians and Russians, who were extensively intermarried and had relations on both sides of the national frontiers. The intent of Vladimir Putin and his war collegiums was to do minimal damage to the Ukrainian people, to try to separate the ‘healthy’ elements in the Ukrainian military command from the rabid nationalist Azov and similar irregular forces that had become embedded in the army over the past eight years. If the two could be separated, the war could be won with absolute minimum expenditure of materiel and loss of life.

However, in the early weeks of the operation, after it had become manifestly clear that these were illusions, that Russia was facing a unified military force supported by widespread popular civilian backing, still there was no change visible in how Russia was operating on the ground.  The only hint of change to come was the refocusing of available forces on the capture of Mariupol, to secure the whole Azov Sea littoral and the progressive redirection of the ground forces to the encirclement of the major part of the Ukrainian army that was entrenched just to the west of the line of demarcation with Donbas. In compensation, there was the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kiev and Chernigov, in the north.

There has been a lot of supposedly expert analysis of the war from British, American and other retired generals.  Add to that the ignorant but voluble speculations of simple Western journalists, especially ladies, who have never held firearms of any kind let alone drawn up battle plans.  All of these Western commentators begin with assumptions on how an invasion of Ukraine should be fought, assuming the war was unleashed by the USA or Britain.  Any deviation by the Russian forces from the timetable or scope of such a Western style assault aimed, of course, at overthrowing the regime in Kiev and subjugating the entire country, is deemed to be a failure of morale or ability to coordinate air cover, artillery and other elements of the battle. Full stop. The conclusion they reach is that the Russian armed forces are far less ominous than we had feared, and we should not hesitate to expand NATO and push them back.

At the same time, no one, NO ONE, in the West has commented on a few obvious facts that place the Russian ‘military operation’ totally outside the traditions of invasions or other acts of aggression.  The Russians’ choice of words to describe what they were about to do was anything but arbitrary. They had specific objectives of ‘demilitarization’ and ‘denazification,’ to which was added in the past couple of weeks, almost as an afterthought, to secure the Donbas from any further attacks by Ukrainian forces positioned on the other side of the line of demarcation.  The importance of the last-named would not be obvious to Western readers, because the only war pictures put up on Western media are those showing suffering of residents of Mariupol or Khamatorsk.  However, Russian television viewers are shown daily the consequences of Ukrainian missile and artillery barrages on the civilian population of Donetsk and surrounding villages, with a daily death toll and casualties requiring hospitalization. This is only the tail of a story of vicious attacks in violation of the Minsk Accords that goes back eight years and produced more than 14,000 civilian deaths, of which the West has chosen to be oblivious to this very day.

The appointment several days ago of General Dvornikov to head the next phase of the war, the full liberation of the Donbas and liquidation of the main concentration of the Ukrainian ground forces, received immediate comment in the Western media.  Russian media are just beginning to catch up and publish their evaluation of what changes in the conduct of the war may result. 

Dvornikov distinguished himself as commander of Russia’s very successful military operation in Syria. He was known for effective coordination of air and ground forces, something for which the first phase of the war did not seem impressive, whether because of incompetence, as Western analysts insisted, or because of avoidance of collateral damage and loss of civilian life within the constraints of a geography where the enemy troops were intermixed with residential housing, as the Russian narrative insisted.  The new battlefield in Donbas would be far better suited to “technical” solutions of artillery and missile strikes.

However, the appointment of Dvornikov is only one sign that the Russian Way of War is being reconsidered at present in the highest levels of the Russian command.  In part, this is so because of the ever more daring, or shall we say reckless American and NATO promises to supply heavy armaments to Kiev. The alarm bells rang in Moscow yesterday over statements by a Deputy Secretary of Defense in Washington that the next level of support to Kiev would include intermediate range missiles capable of striking at airfields within Russia.

The Russian response to that threat was immediate.  General Konashenkov, the spokesman of the Russian military throughout the campaign, issued a special announcement that any attacks on Russian territory coming from Ukraine would result in Russia’s directing strikes at the decision-making instances in Kiev, which the Russian command had so far chosen not to do.  This obviously means the Ministry of Defense, Zelensky’s presidential administration, perhaps the Rada, as well as their handmaidens including Ukrainian television towers would now be instantly destroyed.  De facto regime change would be the direct consequence.

While the leaders of several European countries have in the last couple of days publicly discussed whether Russian actions in Ukraine constitute “genocide,” as Joe Biden blithely declared, no one seems to remark on the most glaring contradictions to any notion of Russia’s presently staging an all-out war in Ukraine. 

Ursula van der Leyen, Boris Johnson and the prime ministers of Poland and several Baltic States calmly travel to Kiev, stroll down the boulevards of central Kiev together with Zelensky, as if no war existed.  To be sure, they are surrounded by security escorts, but these are only of value should there be some violent passersby on their route.  The possibility of a Russian missile attack seems not to cross anyone’s mind.  In light of Konashenkov’s remarks, all that may change abruptly at any moment.

Finally, I am obliged to mention that not all military professionals in Russia have remained silent over how the ‘military operation’ is being conducted. Last week, reporting live from Mariupol and surveying the scene of utter destruction around him, Yevgeny Poddubny, the most experienced war correspondent of Russian state television, veteran of the Syrian war and other hotspots, quietly muttered, as if spontaneously: “in a military campaign you normally bring in forces six times the numbers of your opponent and here we were nearly matched in numbers.” Surely therer was nothing “offhanded” about that.

The point was repeated in yesterday’s edition of the semi-official newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta in an interview with Lieutenant General Leonid Reshetnikov, a retired officer of the foreign intelligence service. Reshetnikov said:

“When on the attack, military science tells you that you should have a minimum of three times the numbers of the defending side. But on the ground, according to available information, we are artacking from a minority position. We are achieving results that come very rarely in history, in Izyum, in Novaya Kakhovka and in other territories. This shows the mastery of our soldiers and command.” Yes, Reshetnikov has cast his remarks as a compliment, but the hidden criticism is there for anyone who cares to look closely.

                                                                     *****

From the beginning, I have directed attention to what Russian social, academic and political elites have to say about the ‘special military operation.’  One of my key markers has been the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov political talk show and yesterday’s edition provided a lot of food for thought.

First, with regard to sanctions, there was near unanimity among the panelists that it is time for Russia to respond directly and strongly to the full economic and hybrid war that the United States and Europe are now waging against their country.  They call for an immediate cut-off of gas supplies to Europe, to an embargo on export of titanium and other essential raw materials for advanced industrial production in the West.  One alternative to these cruel and devastating moves against Europe would be to try it all out first on Japan, which has been a fervent enforcer of the trade war on Russia and even in the past few days publicly came out in support of the Azov ultranationalists, by removing them from the list of global terrorists.  Russia should impose a total commercial embargo on Japan, beginning with hydrocarbons and extending into all spheres, such as fishing concessions. Moreover, Russia should position tactical nuclear weapons and other significant armaments on the Kurile Islands as a firm reminder of who owns these territories now and forever.

As regards military action, the consensus of the panelists was also in favor of all-out war on Ukraine, to hell with collateral civilian casualties. The war must be ended quickly, decisively and with minimum further Russian casualties. Period.  As several noted, it is highly likely that television viewers are also confused by Russia’s ‘softly, softly’ approach till now.  While they trust the Commander in Chief, they want more decisive action in the air and on the ground.  It is worth mentioning that the panelist who represents Russia’s ‘creative’ classes, director general of the Mosfilm studios, Karen Shakhnazarov, who had been wavering in his support for the war a couple of weeks ago, was now ‘all in’ and doing his best to find solutions to winning the kinetic war at once.

Then there was also the question of war mobilization. The consensus of panelists was that the Russian economy has to be put on a full war footing, with decision making concentrated in the Executive and removed from the hands of entrepreneurs.  This is required not for the ongoing conflict with Ukraine but for continuation of the wider war with the U.S.-led West that constitutes the context for the conflict.  Dispatch of longer range missiles to Kiev would make the USA a cobelligerent and Russia should be prepared to strike at the ‘decision making’ institutions there.

In short, the logic of the discussion on Solovyov’s show was that the Russians should make perfectly plain to Washington that it is courting disaster, that we are not in a video game but in a life and death struggle in which Americans do not enjoy immortality.

How much of this feistiness will influence the next moves from the Kremlin remains to be seen. But American analysts would do well to cast an eye on programs like Solovyov’s lest we all move on to end of the world scenarios out of ignorance and miscalculation.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Unasked, unanswered questions

Questions not being asked about the Mariupol die-hards, about the availability from today of Euro and dollar cash withdrawals at Russian banks, and much more

As I have remarked in earlier diary entries, the Russians are very sparing in the information they release daily on the status of the war effort.  A couple of days ago, we were shown the 1300 or so Ukrainian marines who surrendered in Mariupol. Yesterday, Russian television devoted a lot of time to brief interviews with some of these prisoners of war, all of whom were Russian speakers, by the way.  No surprises there, of course, since the whole region is basically Russian speaking, which is why there is a civil war going on against the extreme nationalist government in Kiev which has sought from the beginning to wipe out the language, the culture and all Russian ethnic identity.

There was another curious news item yesterday on Russian television: a video report on the capture of the latest mobile air defense system produced in Ukraine, which was abandoned by its technical crew in mint condition, with all of the manufacturer’s technical brochures still intact.  Here again, most peculiarly, all of the technical documentation is in Russian!  This would be amusing if the broad context were not tragic, set alongside the number of Ukrainian servicemen whom the Russians have listed as killed in action:  over 23,700.  That is approximately eight times the number Zelensky gave to the press the day before.

Finally, Russian news in the past day recounted how a Ukrainian freight plane loaded with Western military supplies was shot down by Russian forces as it approached Odessa from the sea.

Aside from these feature items in the news, Russian authorities continue to give no overall picture of how the campaign is proceeding.  Strangely, Ukrainian news sources from the field can be more informative.  Among the items today posted on www.news.google.ru  are reports from the Ukrainian controlled administration of what remains of Lugansk under their control.  They speak of Russian artillery attacks, on the damage being done to houses in hamlets, on the evacuation of civilians to the West ahead of Russian advances on the ground. All of this is in anticipation of the full-scale Russian onslaught on Donbas expected imminently.

Western media have been featuring today the “brave” decision of the remaining Ukrainian forces in Mariupol, holed up in the underground fortress of the Azovstal works, to refuse the Russian offer of their lives in exchange for unconditional surrender.  But Western coverage asks no questions whatsoever about the decision and what it tells us about the regime in Kiev that these thousand or so die-hards are serving, seemingly heroically.  Russian talk shows today shine a spotlight on that very question and produce some interesting interpretations.  We are told that Kiev instructed the Azov battalion leaders and those aligned with them in Mariupol to fight to the end and not to negotiate with the Russians over surrender. From within the ranks of the desperate troops underground, whose ammunition, food and water are all depleted, we are told that anyone daring to speak in favor of surrender is being shot on the spot. We are also told that among the 1,000 or so hold-outs are 400 foreign mercenaries including a goodly number of high ranking NATO instructors.  Since from the standpoint of Kiev those instructors are better dead than taken alive, we may assume they are from Member States lower in the pecking order than the British pair of cut-throats taken several days ago who may yet be saved by intervention of Boris Johnson in a prisoner exchange.  Shall we assume that the NATO instructors in the lower tunnels of Azovstal are Polish or Lithuanian?  I think that would be a fair guess. 

So much for easy questions that go unasked, let alone unanswered by Western media, by Russian media or by both.  Now I will raise a different question just to demonstrate how the news and analysis flow on  this ‘special military operation’  or war, if you will, runs in a narrow rut.  The net result is that we have very limited ability to understand what is going on and where we are all headed.

I will just turn attention to the announcement in Russia that as of today the public can make cash withdrawals of dollars and euros in substantial amounts, and also can order foreign currency transfers abroad, up to $5,000 if I understood properly.  This means that poor Mr. Piotr Aven, the billionaire banker and Russian wheeler dealer sitting in London at present with his vast assets frozen under sanction rules, may yet be able to pay his chauffeur by ordering a transfer from his Sberbank account in Moscow. 
Curiously no one is asking how and why Russia has reopened nearly free currency exchange and cash withdrawals after a month of strict clampdown.  Where are the dollar bills and euro notes coming from?  Surely the question is begging to be asked. It is not coming in from tourists to Russia since there are virtually no foreign tourists in Russia at present.  It is not being carried by foreign business visitors for the same reason.  So let us guess.  Could it be that Germany and other select EU Member States are delivering plane loads of cash to Moscow to pay for their gas, oil and coal deliveries? Yes, this would allow them to claim they are defying Putin over payment in rubles while respecting the terms of their long term contracts with Gazprom. But it is a pretty picture that they would not want made public, since the European Parliament would make the life of them all quite unbearable if the word got out.  Perhaps readers can offer better explanations.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

“They must be out of their minds”: how the Collective West is stumbling towards nuclear Armageddon

I have in past weeks focused attention on the political talk show “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov,” calling it the best of its kind on Russian state television and a good indicator of the thinking of  Russia’s political elites.  However, it is time to admit that in terms of overall quality of presentation, level of invited panelists and screening of videos of topical developments in the West to inform the panelist discussion, Solovyov is now being outdone by Vyacheslav Nikonov’s “Great Game” talk show. 

“The Great Game” in the past featured live discussion with its anchor in Washington, director of the National Interest think tank , Dmitry Simes.  Now Simes is a rare guest, and the panel format more closely resembles that of other political talk shows, with the following notable qualification:  the host, Nikonov, is an unusually gifted moderator, who does not impose his views on the panel and brings out the best from his panelists. Nikonov is a leading member of the Russian parliament from the ruling United Russia party, and has broad experience running parliamentary committees.  As the grandson of Bolshevik revolutionary Molotov, he happens also to be a member of the hereditary ruling clans and practices ‘noblesse oblige’ in his public service work.

It bears mention that alongside the Solovyov show and the widely viewed Sixty Minutes talk show of Yevgeny Popov and Olga Skabeyeva, ‘The Great Game’ has evolved from a once or twice weekly event to a virtually daily affair, indeed with a couple of afternoon and evening time slots as justified by fast moving current events.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, Vladimir Solovyov has at least one advantage making it worthwhile to tune in. To my knowledge, he is the only host to go outside the usual circuit of ‘talking heads’ from universities, think tanks and the Duma. Solovyov regularly feature a bona fide top manager in the arts who rubs shoulders daily with the ‘creative classes’ and shares with the audience what he hears from them.  I have in mind Mosfilm general director Karen Shakhnazarov. 

Over the course of the past six weeks, I have several times pointed to the changing mood of Shakhnazarov with respect to the ‘special military operation in Ukraine.’  At first he was buoyant, then he was fearful that the operation was going badly and running out of control, and finally he appeared to be ‘all in,’ looking for ways for Russia to win decisively and quickly.

Last night, we heard from yet another mood swing.  I bring it to the attention of readers, because it has great relevance to the current complete passivity of our general public in the face of some very peculiar policy decisions with respect to Russia being made at the highest levels in the USA and in Europe, with zero public consultation so far.

To be specific, Shakhnazarov expressed amazement and deep worry that Western leaders have literally ‘lost their minds’ by pursuing measures to destabilize Russia in the hope of precipitating the overthrow of Vladimir Putin and maybe even the disintegration of Russia in a way similar to the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991.  Shakhnazarov remarked that total absence of common or any other sense in Joe Biden is to be expected because of his health (read: senility). But his jaw dropped when he heard that the Chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, declared a couple of days ago that “Russia must not be allowed to win this war!”    Where are his brains? Shakhnazarov asked rhetorically.

The point of Shakhnazarov’s reasoning is as follows:   Russia is the world’s leading power in terms of nuclear arms. An overthrow of Putin would lead to chaos, and very likely to genuine radicals assuming power.  Their aggressive inclinations for policy to the West would be underpinned by the vast majority of the Russian population, which, in Shakhnazarov’s view, is now overcome with pure hatred for the West brought on by the sanctions, by the rampant Russophobia that is now public policy in Europe and the USA. If the conflict should escalate to use of tactical nuclear missiles and beyond, then Russia would no longer limit its strikes to military installations but will happily target all capitals and population centers in Europe and, we may assume, in North America.   In a word, Shakhnazarov equates destabilization of Russia with nuclear Armageddon.

I repeat, these are the fears of a highly responsible and publicly visible Russian general manager in the arts.  Is anybody in the West with comparable standing even beginning to imagine the coming catastrophe let alone speak out about it?

Before closing, I redirect attention to a major newsworthy development in Russia yesterday afternoon which even our Western media have reported on this morning:  the test launch of Russia’s new Sarmat ICBM, which sets new records for speed, distance, destructive force of its MIRV warheads and, surely most important, imperviousness to all known and projected anti-missile systems in the West.  Part of the invulnerability of the Sarmat is a function of its range, which extends to every point on planet Earth.  Sarmat’s trajectory can be set as best suits its undetectability. For example, it can hit the USA by approach via the South Pole, thereby evading American tracking systems, which look to attack from the Northwest. The Sarmat’s 7 or 15 nuclear warheads can each also evade ABM systems and head for target at hypersonic speeds.

Starting in September, the Sarmat will be installed in silos till now housing the world’s most powerful ICBM, the Voevoda, which will be gradually retired and redeployed as launchers for commercial satellites.

In his words of congratulations to the designers, project developers, and manufacturers of the Sarmat, President Putin stressed the importance of the new armaments as Russia’s dissuasion directed against those in the West who would threaten the country militarily.   Is anybody listening?

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Russian media today, 25 April 2022

As I have noted previously, there is a firewall between what Western major media are reporting daily about the situation in the Russia-Ukraine War and more generally about Russia versus what one sees on Russian state television and reads in the Russian news agencies.  On the advice of a colleague in Washington, I will now as occasion requires post news developments from Russia that Western audiences otherwise are not receiving despite their importance as indicators of where East-West relations are headed and whether we are all likely to survive the coming weeks.

The top such news item in Russia today is the successful capture by the Russian state intelligence agency FSB of a gang of would-be assassins based in Moscow and acting under orders from Kiev to kill the leading Russian talk show host Vladimir Solovyov, about whom I have written these past few weeks.  And their ‘kill list’ went on to take in other leading personalities on Russian state television:  Dmitry Kiselyov (director of all Russian television news programming), Yevgeny Popov, Olga Skabeyeva and  Margarita Simonian (editor-in-chief of RT).

The gang, which appears to consist of White Power and other neo-Nazi elements, was interrogated before video cameras and the videos have been posted on the Russian internet by TASS and other state news agencies.

As might be expected, Russian media have been properly roiled by this news. I caught the discussion on Vyacheslav Nikonov’s afternoon edition of “The Great Game.”  His panelists saw this ‘terrorism’ as a new phase in Ukraine’s hybrid war that is being stage managed from Washington.  Panelists made the point that the West has been very lucky till now that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has shown great forbearance by not responding in kind to the vicious war being waged by Washington, which always remains one step short of kinetic war in the mistaken belief that these kinds of aggression are water-tight and mutually exclusive. The panelists stressed that at a certain point Putin will indeed respond and the response will be kinetic.  The message was addressed to Messrs. Blinken and Austin, who, following their meeting with Zelensky, said at a press conference at the Polish-Ukrainian border, that the goal of the U.S. in the  whole matter of the Ukraine-Russian war is to so weaken Russia that it will be incapable of similar actions in the future.  In simple English, what they are saying is that the U.S. ambition is to destroy Russia.  The masks have been dropped.

Another item in Russian news yesterday and today has been the screening several times a day of videos taken in the United States during Joe Biden’s latest trips across the country to sell his narrative on the economic travails America is now experiencing.  Two separate speeches end in Biden’s turning from the lectern and seeking to the shake someone’s hand when there is in fact no one around him. Biden then looks lost and makes a sad retreat from the stage. 

Nikonov remarked that these videos have not been aired on major U.S. television, have not been reported on in mainstream print media.  My friend in Washington confirms that this is so.  Meanwhile, the fact of Biden’s blatant disorientation was denounced by Donald Trump a day ago – so at least he has seen the videos which the Russians take as indicative of the mental degeneration of the U.S. President and a token of the degeneration of the entire U.S. political class. Trump commented that Biden’s disorientation is something the country has never seen before and that the Biden administration has put the U.S. on a path to hell.

Where will all this end?   It is not headed in a good direction

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Russian Media Today, 26 April 2022

The number one news item on Russian state television on 26 April was the meeting in Rammstein, Germany of defense officials from the United States and 40 allied countries to set policy on providing military assistance to Ukraine, including the provision for monthly such meetings going forward.

 The U.S. delegation was headed by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and his remarks were parsed by Russia’s ‘talking heads. They also delivered their considerations on the practical value of the deliveries of heavy weaponry that Germany and other European countries pledged during the gathering.

As is now the rule, the very best discussion of these issues was on the political talk show “The Great Game,” which features the most calm and collected analysis of the day’s hot news items. None of the panelists tries to shout down others, which has been the long tradition of such shows. All are warned by the moderator against presuming to give military advice to the nation’s Commander-in-Chief. And yet even here it was clear that the mood of panelists is for more decisive action against Ukraine right now, meaning the bombing of the ‘decision making institutions’ in Kiev, as the Russian Ministry of Defense proposed to do a week ago in response to Ukrainian missile and artillery attacks across the border with Russia. This was made all the more topical by the statements of the British delegation in Rammstein encouraging the Ukrainians to do precisely that, and by the corresponding offer to ship appropriate missiles to Kiev now. The panelists also want the transportation infrastructure of Ukraine to be destroyed without delay in order to prevent the new heavy weaponry being shipped to Kiev from ever reaching the Ukrainian forces at the front.

Surely the bombing of central Kiev will come, effectively removing the Ukrainian regime. But it will come at the moment of choosing of Vladimir Vladimirovich and will signal the Russian decision to break up Ukraine into several states, as the Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev yesterday said might be in the cards if the war drags on due to Western intervention and cheerleading.

With respect to Lloyd Austin’s statement yesterday that the United States’ objective is to greatly weaken Russian armed forces over an extended period of time, the panelists on The Great Game offered an interpretation that is well worth repeating here.  The Russians view this as an admission by Washington that the Ukrainians’ position on the battlefield is hopeless. The Americans now seek to redefine their objectives so as to turn a defeat into an apparent victory.  Whatever happens on the front lines in the coming days and weeks, Washington will be able to say that it forced Russia to dip deeply into its store of missiles and other high tech gear, that it forced Russia to lose a substantial part of its professional soldiers.  The objective is now intentionally vague and stands independently of the possible loss of Ukrainian’s main army forces adjacent to the Donbas in a ‘cauldron’ of confinement where they will be killed like herrings in a barrel.

As regards the newly announced shipment of super tanks from Germany and other high tech gear from other NATO Member States, the Russian panel appeared confident this will be too little, too late and would be mostly destroyed on the ground by Russian missiles and aerial bombing.

The foregoing is all more reassuring about our future survival here in Brussels and in New York than any U.S. declarations yesterday that nuclear war is off the table.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Western media today, 28 April 2022

Compliance with Russian payment demands in rubles for gas deliveries: Western reporting falls on its own sword

It is widely assumed in the general public that all Russian news sources are propaganda, which justifies the banning of these sources from the airwaves, or to put it into simpler English, justifies the unprecedented Western censorship about which none of our human rights activists seems to care a fig. So much for European values!

However, in the The Financial Times reporting today on the unraveling of Europe’s supposed unified stand against payment for Russian gas in rubles we see that censorship is destroying not the Russia media but the Western media which, in the absence of competition and challenge, is printing and disseminating every ignorant and self-contradictory utterance that comes out of the mouths of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Charles Michel and Co. without exercising the slightest logic check.

Let me be specific. The article in question is entitled “EU energy groups prepare to meet Vladimir Putin’s terms for Russian gas. Germany’s Uniper and Austria’s OMV plan rouble accounts while Eni of Italy weighs options”. This piece has been slapped together by Sam Jones in Vienna, Andy Bounds in Brussels, Guy Chazan in Berlin and Marton Dunai in Budapest.  Going through the text and encountering the whoppers I will discuss below, you have to wonder where is the editorial staff of the FT to keep their feature articles at a level worthy of the world’s business elites who are their subscribers.

In line with the overall propaganda line set by the United States in the ongoing vicious Information War, cause and effect are systematically reversed.  Every dastardly intention and act laid at the door of Russia is, upon a moment’s reflection, actually being initiated by the West.  This game starts early on, in paragraph five:  “The preparations [for payment in rubles as demanded by Russia] show the impact of Russian efforts to weaponise gas supplies and challenge the EU’s ability to maintain a united front against Moscow.”

The authors have not gone one step further in their reasoning: they do not suggest that the evil intention of the Kremlin is to sow discord among European states. That is the subject of another feature article in today’s online edition of The Financial Times entitled “‘Divide and rule’: Russia’s rationale for halting gas flows to Poland and Bulgaria.” Apparently the authors Harry Dempsey and Neil Hume have forgotten or never heard the remark attributed to Sigmund Freud that sometimes ‘a cigar is just a cigar,’ meaning that there is no need for exotic explanations of a simple fact.

Wouldn’t it be more logical to say that the unprecedented freezing of Russian Bank dollar and euro assets in the West had the effect of “weaponizing” gas supplies?  If the existing contracts calling for payment in euros were to continue, the effect, as intended by the European policy makers, was to deprive Russia of the proceeds of its sales, all of which would be frozen in turn.

In the next paragraph the FT authors quietly acknowledge that “the EU sanctions against Russia’s central bank” prompted Vladimir Putin to impose the new rules for payment in rubles purchased on the Russian currency market. Of course, no conclusions are drawn from this fact regarding who is acting and who is reacting.

Then the FT cites Ursula von der Leyen’s description of the Russian cutoff of gas to Poland and Bulgaria over their refusal to sign up to the new payment scheme as “being tantamount to blackmail.”   Blackmail?   No deliveries if we get no money is blackmail?  Or is it rather just the application of normal rules of international business?

The FT writer group then opines that compliance with Russia’s new payment procedures “would result in Russia being able to access billions in gas revenues to support its currency and its economy…” But why else does one country sell its wares to another country?  Out of charity? With no cash receipts expected or demanded?

I will not belabor the points made above.  The FT can make its pitch to schoolchildren who have never studied business or economics.  But how they dare to feed this nonsense to the company directors and bank presidents who comprise their readership defies comprehension.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Russian media today, 28 April 2022

In fulfillment of my mission to bring to Western readers news items of particular importance in Russian media about which they otherwise would likely be clueless, I direct attention to information released on the Interfax website and carried by Lenta.ru and other major Russian news portals:   the head of Russian External Intelligence (SVR), Sergei Naryshkin, has spoken out about Poland’s plans to take control of part of the territory of Ukraine.

According to SVR, Poland is coordinating this issue with the United States. The idea is to establish military and political control by Warsaw over the “its historic territories” which today fall within the boundaries of Ukraine. Poland would introduce its troops into the Western regions of the country under cover of a mission to “protect the territory from Russian aggression.”  Eventually this would be expected to lead to a partition of Ukraine. The Poles would install a friendly government in the territory they control, ousting the Ukrainian nationalists.

Of course, the Polish ambitions in Western Ukraine are as well founded historically as are Russia’s with respect to Eastern Ukraine, which was once known as New Russia.  Western followers of the war will now know for certain where the city of Lviv is located – 50 km or less from the Polish border.  It is the city to which American and other foreign diplomats withdrew after Kiev seemed unsafe in the early days of the war. It has been the marshalling point for incoming foreign mercenaries and deliveries of military supplies to Ukraine from the West.

Following the three partitions of Poland in the 18^th century and for the entire period of the 19^th century, Lviv alias Lvov alias Lemberg, was a Polish city within the Austro-Hungarian Empire known for its splendid Central European architecture and philosophical bent: the city was home to mystical religious sects, both Jewish and Christian.

Indeed, if we want to trace back in history the sources of the present conflict in and over Ukraine, we necessarily find ourselves going back even earlier into the 16^th and 17^th centuries, when the Great Powers of the day, Ottoman Turkey, Poland, Sweden and Russia were all engaged in warfare over lands that figure in modern day Ukraine.  For a good initiation into the culture, or perhaps better to say the barbarism of those days, which prefigure what is now going on in places like Bucha, a good place to start is with the novella Taras Bulba by the Ukrainian-Russian author Nikolai Gogol. I just re-read it in Russian and I assure you the novel is a splendid initial guide to understanding the passions of the present day.

However, none of the foregoing takes into account the military powerhouse that Russia is today.  We may take the possibility of a Polish move of its forces into the Western Ukraine as the kind of intervention that Vladimir Putin had in mind when he said yesterday to legislators gathered in St Petersburg that it would provoke a lightning fast counter blow by Russia.  Meanwhile, a similar possible intervention by Romania in swallowing up Moldova and threatening to overrun the Russian separatist territory of Transnistria which is sandwiched between Moldova and Ukraine, could also spark a powerful military response from Moscow. 

The mainspring of history is unwinding spasmodically and destructively.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

“The Eagle Has Landed”: A voyage to St Petersburg via the far side of the moon

I write to you today and for the coming month to six weeks from St Petersburg, Russia. During this stay, I will broaden my reporting from the events and media coverage of the war in Ukraine that have been my staple since 24 February to more mundane but highly relevant issues of how everyday life in Russia is going on notwithstanding the distortions caused by the West’s sanctions.

In today’s installment, I direct attention to how I got here and what I learned along the way, to the peculiarities of the present ruble-euro and ruble-dollar exchange rates and to the bread and butter issues of how the Russian food stores and markets are currently operating, meaning price inflation, changed country-suppliers and the like.

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The Covid 19 pandemic created serious barriers to travel globally, including travel from most anywhere to Russia, where issuance of visas to tourists and business visitors was suspended for 18 months starting in the late spring of 2020.  And when the Russian borders re-opened tentatively to foreigners in the late summer of 2021, that did not progress very far before the onset of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine beginning in February of this year prompted the mutual closing of airspace and cancellation of air travel between Russia and all of Europe.

For these reasons, my intended periodic visit to St Petersburg where my wife and I maintain a pied à terre, was postponed several times as we investigated exotic travel solutions after our March tickets on Finnair were cancelled by the carrier. On the advice of friends, we decided to access Russia via neighboring Estonia.

The Estonian capital is just 368 km by road from Petersburg, and much of the route in both countries is good to very good four-lane highways. The problematic part was always the border crossing. From the Russian side, the town of Ivan Gorod, you go through their passport and customs control building and then proceed over a bridge in your car, bus or on foot, crossing the Narva river to the Estonian border control in the town which shares its name with the river. There another full document check takes place, though you remain in your vehicle while frontier police take your documents for inspection in their offices.

The situation at the borders today is greatly complicated by the large flows of Ukrainian refugees on the move into Estonia that began about three weeks ago when the Russian forces besieging and attacking Mariupol completed their victory over the Azov battalion and other radical Ukrainian nationalists. The Ukrainian forces had held the city in their grip and used the civilian population numbering nearly half a million at the start of hostilities as “human shields,” or hostages in plain English. When the power of the nationalists was broken by Russian forces, humanitarian corridors heading east into Russia were opened. More than 120,000 refugees from the city and its environs were given free choice of where to head after liberation.  Some, like those we encountered at the Estonian border, decided that their safest option would be to head north through Russia to the EU Member States of Estonia and Finland.  The alternative, heading west across Ukraine, simply was deemed to be risky. This became all the more true once the Russians began bombing railway power stations a week ago, crippling the train service across Ukraine.

Be that as it may, the Ukrainian refugee crisis caught up with us Friday night on our bus trip.  An sms message from the bus operator an hour before scheduled departure time warned us that our bus was delayed and that we would be informed later when it would show up in Tallinn.  A chat with the staff of Ecolines at their offices just near the station clarified that problem:  our bus was still waiting for clearance at the Estonian-Russian border.  Meanwhile, back at the bus station we chatted with several Russian-speaking ladies who were there waiting to meet incoming Ukrainians on that very bus now delayed.  They were there to receive a party of four Ukrainian refugees from the Mariupol area. From their experience, the current delays at the border can add three to eight hours to the normal bus trip of seven hours. At the borders, each of the Ukrainian refugees leaving Russia and entering Estonia has to be interviewed to record their case, their intentions. Many are lacking proper identification papers, so their processing simply takes time.

How long this crisis will last, no one can say. But it makes the land route between Scandinavia and Russia a miserable choice.

We were lucky that our bus to Petersburg was only half filled and that among the twenty or so passengers there were only three Ukrainian refugees. They were traveling back to Russia, to the total confusion of the Estonian border police. Their story was that they had been living in the Mariupol region, where they had a farm and livestock. After eight years under the Kiev regime, they had their fill of insecurity and moved across into Russia to travel north to Scandinavia. For reasons unknown, they were denied refugee status in Estonia and now had to return to Russia, from where they probably would try another refugee route into the EU.  Their return into Russia raised more eyebrows there. The Russian border police took them off our bus for longer debriefing and that was the last we saw of them.

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Tallinn is a charming small city of 450,000 with a touristy medieval center. It is also a town where everyone in the hospitality industry and a majority of the folks enjoying the sights are Russian speakers. Most of them are in fact citizens of Estonia.

To be sure, Estonian in the only official language, but the authorities have some common sense and don’t overdo their protection of national identity:  signs in the streets urging people to register for Covid vaccinations carry Russian and English texts as well as Estonian.

Everyone identifies Petersburg with its historic imperial period city center, but that is not what you see when you arrive by bus. The city has a population ten times bigger than Tallinn. Its extensive new industrial-logistical parks and high-rise residential districts on the outskirts are strikingly modern, and you sense at once the pulse of a big lively city that operates 24/4. One hundred per cent of the folks strolling the streets are Russian speakers. These days, foreign visitors are a very rare breed.

Yesterday morning I began enjoying the full spectrum of Russian media which I had been denied in Brussels after the West lowered its Iron Curtain of censorship following the onset of the Ukraine war.  Conversely, some Western channels have been cut here in tit-for-tat measures. For example, www.news.google.ru, to which I referred readers in a recent essay, is not accessible on my computer in Petersburg, surely as a result of the ongoing Google-Russia fight. However, my staple news sources Financial Times and The New York Times are fully accessible. I still have to look into which of the global television news providers have been removed from Russian cable and satellite television and will report on that later.

I began my day listening to the radio station Business FM – Moscow over breakfast. The station offers a potpourri of news with an emphasis on economic and business issues. What caught my attention was a brief feature report on movements in the ruble-dollar and ruble-euro exchange rates.

Several weeks ago I remarked on the decision of the Bank of Russia to relax constraints on currency exchange that were imposed after the start of military action and the immediate collapse of the ruble which for several days was trading at 120 rubles to the euro. The new rules would allow Russian citizens to freely transfer hard currency to accounts abroad within certain monthly limits. They also allowed banks to sell cash, euro and dollar banknotes, to their clientele.

I wondered at the time where these banknotes would come from given that there was no longer any flow of tourists and business people carrying cash into the country. I speculated that perhaps some customers of Russian hydrocarbons in the West were quietly shipping banknotes by the plane-load to Moscow to cover current deliveries of gas and oil. A few days later, I saw reports that in fact the banks had no banknotes to sell their clients. However, at the time there was no follow-up in Russian news and I let go of the issue.

Now, the Business FM report was more detailed.  Indeed, their journalist contacted several banks and was told that they had no currency to offer their depositors. The radio station went one step further and checked to see what the actual exchange rate of the dollar and euro to the ruble might be “on the street” and how it might differ from the officially quoted rate of the Central Bank.  What they found is that the exchange rate for purchase of dollar and euro bank notes is just a few rubles more than the official rate. In other words, there is no true “black market” currency exchange. This discovery raises as many questions as it answers.

It may well be that the non-cash exchange rate of the Central Bank is an accurate measure of the strength or weakness of the ruble since it reflects mainly commercial demand of big business. In the past couple of weeks, the ruble has strengthened significantly against foreign currencies. Its present value as quoted by the Central Bank is 5-10 percent higher than before the Ukrainian crisis. The ten percent change with respect to the euro is partly explained by the collapse this past week of the euro rate to the dollar in the West. But the broader explanation is that Russian exports continue at high levels while imports from the euro and dollar zones have plummeted.

With foreign travel  for Russians to Europe now so very restricted for reasons of problematic visa issuance by the foreign consulates in Russia presently operating with greatly reduced staff, and for reasons of the very limited travel options to get to Europe, it may well be that private demand for physical cash has dried up.

I round out this discussion of the exchange rate with my personal experience yesterday at the Sberbank branch in the Petersburg district of Pushkin.  I exchanged 400 euros and received rubles at the rate of 71.49 to the euro, which is considerably worse than the Central Bank’s cross rate on the 30th of 74.56 rubles to the euro. No sooner was the transaction complete than the cashier called over to colleagues:  “I’ve got some currency!”  Obviously, I made their day.

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Finally, I direct your attention to an area of reporting that I pioneered back in 2014 following the first wave of European and American sanctions: my walking tour of food product retailing in St Petersburg. Yesterday I pursued my customary visits to retailing at three levels:  what they call here “economy class” supermarket chains (in my neighborhood, a chain called “Verny”), an upmarket supermarket chain (Perekryostok), and the city market where vendors specialized in one or another food product occupy stalls or small stores (Pushkin market).

My sweeping generalization about all three categories of retailing is that they are all well stocked. The Russian consumer is spoiled for choice, as I intend to demonstrate. Price is a different matter, and I will make a first attempt at gauging inflation, nothing more than a finger to the wind, but hopefully informative, especially to those readers who only know about the Russian consumer and his/her options from highly prejudicial Western media.

I   begin with the “economy class” Verny supermarket that is just across the street from our apartment complex. This is where I buy most basic foodstuffs, and even wines, given that they have exceptionally smart buyers and sell at very fair prices.  This is the store where the value oriented and restricted budget military families who are a sub-group of our residential district do most of their shopping.

My inspection began with wines and I can report that the Spanish and Italian wines remain strongly represented and at prices unchanged from where they were on my last visit in late October.  I imagine that the warehouses of this chain and their importers have goods on hand to last several months more. These products will eventually be replaced by an enlarged assortment of Chilean, Argentinian, South African and other wines from friendly countries. Moreover, ever more shelf space will be allocated to the growing numbers of quality wines from the South of Russia and Crimea. These Russian products are today very well packaged in high quality bottles and sometimes also have good quality liquid inside.

The same stock conditions are true of detergents and other dry goods supplied by major Western consumer goods manufacturers that recently declared they are leaving Russia.  A better test of how Russia is faring under conditions of severe sanctions and embargos is fresh produce, meats and poultry, fish and the like.

The economy class supermarket still offers the meats and poultry it had before the crisis. These were then as now almost 100% Russia-sourced.  In the past year or two before the crisis, Russian producers of marbleized beefsteaks and high quality cuts of pork in special atmosphere plastic packaging had done a very good job bringing these products to all levels of retailing. Locally grown poultry was long before at a fully Western level in terms of packaging, long storage and other parameters.  The prices yesterday were not noticeably different from what I paid in the past.

As regard fresh produce, nothing much has changed.  Lettuce, small cucumbers, green onions, tomatoes have for several years now been grown in hothouses located regionally and the supply, as well as the prices remain excellent.  Russia’s advantages in gas supply, which is essential to hothouse farming, translate into stable prices even now for these vegetables, whereas in Belgium for example, cherry tomatoes recently doubled in price thanks to the rise in energy costs.

As for fruits, a very large portion of non-seasonal items was always imported.  The sanctions have had not had much of an impact on assortment. Bananas were imported from Ecuador and the fruit on display in Verny still come from there. But some other fruits are obviously coming from new supplier countries.  The kiwis are now smaller, but better than ever. Apples, conference pears (a typical export item of Belgium before 2014) and similar non-exotic fruits are all present in abundance and at seemingly unchanged prices.

The assortment of dairy products at Verny also is virtually unchanged from before the crisis. These had long been completely Russia-sourced from producers of local brands.  How long the Danone yoghurts will bear that logo remains to be seen, but the product will not disappear.

Turning to the upper middle class Perekryostok supermarket in my neighborhood, I will speak about two product categories which drew me there in the past as well:  fresh fish and the manned deli department.

The fish counter remains very attractive.  The perfectly fresh sea bass and dorade royale were and remain supplied by Turkey. They are not cheap at about 8 euros per kilogram, but that is nonetheless half the price you pay in Belgium and freshness like what I paid for yesterday is not assured even in upmarket Belgian supermarkets or at specialty fish mongers.  The usual Murmansk supplied lake trout and flounder are still fully available.  What is missing at Perekryostok now is fresh salmon.  From after 2014, when Norwegian imports were banned, the Faroe Islands (Denmark) became Russia’s main source of this farmed fish. Now they too apparently are no longer invited onto the Russian market.

The deli department at Perekryostok is totally unchanged from before the crisis. All the delicacies so beloved of Russians, in particular, Salade Olivier and other prepared appetizers are available at seemingly unchanged prices.

My remarks on “unchanged prices” will clearly need greater attention as I spend more time in stores. I am obliged to admit that my total purchases in the two aforementioned supermarkets yesterday totaled perhaps 15% more than I spent in the past, but it is difficult to compare based on just two shopping carts full.  Some food products are priced comparably to Western European prices, as was true in the past.  Some others remain well below Western prices. That is true of wines and spirits.  Premium quality Russian vodka costs less than half what the product costs in Belgium, where excise taxes are very high.

It remains for me to say a few words about the Pushkin city market, which occupies a special place in retailing. As was always the case in the distant Soviet past, such markets offer luxury products that are well beyond the pocketbook of most citizens. However, in fairness, ordinary Russians always were and are ready to spend a higher percentage of their disposable income on food and especially on exotic and pricy items for family celebrations. So it is not only plutocrats who frequent the market stalls.

What I found at the market yesterday reconfirms the high level of the products on offer. What has changed is the countries of origin. That said, Turkey remains a big player. There were wonderful fresh strawberries from there yesterday, though competing strawberries also came from Russia’s Krasnodar and from, most remarkably, from Greece, which officially should not be represented here. I might add that strawberries of this quality simply are unavailable in most of Western Europe, which is held in the clutches of a Spanish mafia, who peddle their chemicals laden berries that bring only woe to anyone with an allergic susceptibility. Happily Belgium is an exception to this rule during the early spring when Flemish farms put superior local strawberries on sale in the supermarkets.

One fruit counter in the Pushkin market offered wonderfully scented honeydew melons from South America and perfectly ripe watermelons from Iran.  Other counters featured large and very attractive cultivated blueberries from Morocco.  I can only imagine that these products are arriving air freight, as surely did the fish from Turkey, to assure the evident level of freshness.

A visit to one of the fish stores within the market grounds turned up an unexpected discovery: farmed salmon supplied from Murmansk.  I imagine that the supply from there is still too small to enable them to meet the requirements of the supermarket chains.  This shop also offered the Petersburg seasonal specialty of koryushka, a sardine sized lake fish which traditionally is caught in the Neva River that passes through the city as the fish leave their home in Lake Ladoga after the ice breaks and head for the Gulf of Finland to spawn. 

Koryushka has a distinctive aroma of fresh cucumber. Every self-respecting Petersburg family will buy it from stores, from vendors who for a week or two sell it on the city streets. Rolled in flour, fried in sunflower oil, it graces the table and brings joy even in these trying times.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

America’s ideological blinkers and the Ukraine war

Ideological blinkers prevent a correct U.S. assessment of the Russian successes in the Ukraine war, of the likely outcomes and of what to do now

Yesterday’s edition of the premier Sunday news wrap-up on Russian state television, Vesti nedeli, hosted by Dmitry Kiselyov,  marked a turning point in what the Russians are saying officially about their achievements on the ground in Ukraine. It set me to thinking over why Washington is getting it all wrong and how America’s ideological blinkers may lead to very unfortunate consequences on a global level.

Up until now, Russian news has been very quiet about the country’s military achievements in Ukraine. The daily briefings of Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov have only given summary figures on the planes, tanks and other armored vehicles, command centers in Ukraine that were destroyed by high precision Russian missiles plus the names of towns that were taken, without elaborating on their strategic or other value.  Otherwise, Russian television programming has been showing only the damage inflicted daily by Ukrainian forces on the city of Donetsk and its suburbs from artillery and Tochka U missile strikes. There is a steady toll of destroyed homes, hospitals, schools and loss of civilian lives. The sense of this programming is clear: explaining again and again to the Russian audience why we are there.

Yesterday’s News of the Week devoted more than 45 minutes to Russian military operations on the ground. The message has changed to what we are doing there. Television viewers were led by the Rossiya team of war zone reporters through the wrecked forests and fields of the Kharkov oblast in northeastern Ukraine as well as in newly liberated parts of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Filming from an armored all-terrain vehicle, they showed us kilometers long stretches of burned out Ukrainian tanks and other heavy military gear as well as dozens and dozens of corpses of Ukrainian soldiers “killed in action” and left behind to rot by their fast retreating comrades and deserters. Then came interviews with Ukrainian prisoners of war, whose faces and words tell a very different story from the heroic encomiums raining down from Zelensky and his entourage. Finally, there were interviews with some of the civilians who were let out of the Azovstal underground complex these past couple of days and made their way to freedom via the humanitarian corridor which the Russians set up each afternoon.

I will deal briefly with each of these segments from last night’s News of the Week. But first, allow me to offer two overall generalizations.

First, the Russian ‘special military operation’ is a millstone that grinds slowly but grinds fine. It is working. The Russians are crushing the Ukrainian forces.  It is improbable that any amount of deliveries of foreign equipment to Kiev can make a difference on the outcome of this conflict. Indeed, while critics of the US-led intervention in the conflict claim, correctly, that the deliveries are drawing out the war by encouraging Kiev to fight on, it is also true that the Russians have no problem with that:  the longer it goes on, the more territory they can seize, with a view to controlling and ultimately annexing the entire Black Sea littoral. They would thereby ensure that what survives of the Ukrainian state can never again pose a military threat to Russia, with or without NATO help.

Second, the Ukrainian army indeed has NATO trained officers and skilled professionals who may be admirable fighters, as the Western media insist. But it also has a lot of cannon fodder. By cannon fodder I mean overaged recruits dragooned into the forces and also volunteers who are useless to any modern military and are no longer trainable. Most of the prisoners of war shown on Russian television were in their late 50s and even late 60s; they had no prior military experience. One of the latter, with haggard face and scraggly beard down to his chest was asked why he enlisted to fight. The answer came back: “There was no work. So I signed up just to make some money.” After seeing their mates shot dead, is it any wonder that such soldiers raise their arms to surrender at the first opportunity? 

The question not being asked is where are all the young and able Ukrainian males? How have they evaded the draft?  Given the widely acknowledged corruption in Ukrainian government and society, would it not be strange if some just buy their way out of the war? Are they among the 5 million Ukrainians who have gone abroad since the start of the hostilities? Are they the ones now driving their high priced Mercedes with Ukrainian license plates around the streets of Hamburg? Who in the West records this or really cares about it?

The testimony of the prisoners of war shows that they were misled by their officers. They were told that the Russians would simply slaughter them if they showed the white flag.  The testimony of the several women who walked to freedom from the Azovstal catacombs supports the official Russian version of the situation there: they were intimidated by the nationalist warriors who used them as human shields. They were barely fed and were warned that the way out was mined so that they would die in any attempt at escape.

The advance of the Russians on the ground as they finish preparations of the cauldron or total encirclement of the major part of Ukrainian forces in the Donbas is slow, only a couple of kilometers per day. The reason was clear from the reporting last night: apart from the open fields and forests mentioned above, the Ukrainians are in well-fortified bunkers that they constructed over the past eight years and they are situated in the midst of small towns where they have to be flushed out street by street, house by house. Carpet bombing or unlimited shelling would result in heavy loss of life among the civilian population, many of whom are Russian speakers, precisely the people whom the Russians are seeking to liberate.

The reasoning underlying the Russian Way of War in Ukraine has been wholly overlooked or dismissed out of hand by official Washington. American media and senior politicians speak only of Russia’s supposed logistical problems and poor implementation of its war plans.  This is so is not because Biden’s advisers are lame-brained. It is so because of the ideological blinkers that the whole foreign policy establishment in the United States wears. The ideology may be called (Wilsonian) Idealism. It stands in contrast to Realism, which is espoused by a tiny minority of American academics.

The distinction is not mere words. It is how foreign policy issues are analyzed. It is about the creation in the United States of a post-factual world that might just as well be called a virtual world. 

Idealism in foreign policy rests on the assumption that universal principles shape societies everywhere. It systematically ignores national peculiarities, such as history, language, culture and will. By contrast, Realism is based precisely on knowledge of such specifics, which define national interests and priorities.

Under these conditions, the think tank scholars in the United States can sit at their computers and write up their evaluations of the Russian prosecution of the war in Ukraine solely on what they, the Americans and their allies, would do if they were directing the Russian military effort.  They would fight the American way, meaning a start with “shock and awe” followed by vast destruction of everything in the way of their march on the capital of the enemy state to bring about total capitulation in short order.  The reasoning of the men in the Kremlin holds no interest for them. Hence, the dead wrong conclusion that the Russians are losing the war, that Russia is not the strong military force that we feared, and that Russia can be successfully challenged and beaten down until it submits to American directions and American definitions of its national interest.

The same problem of a “virtual world” approach comes up now in the discussion among American experts of the likelihood that Putin will use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine and how the US-led West should respond.  The possibility that the Russians are winning and have no need for extreme solutions is excluded. The possibility that non-nuclear solutions like carpet bombing might be applied if the Russians genuinely were stymied is excluded.

The latest variation on Russia’s possibly escalating towards WWIII by using tactical nuclear weapons is a reaction to President Putin’s vague threat of a ‘lightning quick’ response to any sign of Western powers becoming co-belligerents by their deeds in support of Ukraine.  Curiously, the threat was deemed to mean precisely tactical nuclear attacks, not the launch of the new Sarmat hypersonic and ABM-evading ICBMs, or the dispatch of the deep-sea drone Poseidon to wash away Washington, D.C. in a nuclear explosion caused tidal wave.  In any case, the assortment of devastating new weapons systems at Russia’s disposal seems to be ignored by our policy experts. They have settled on just one, about which they speculate endlessly.

The virtual world bubble in which the U.S. foreign policy community exists and flourishes is a disaster waiting to happen.  Who will heed the wake-up call of John Mearsheimer and the few policy experts who hold up the Realpolitik standard?

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Lavrov’s ‘anti-Semitic’ remarks

In the past couple of days, there were two major diplomatic scandals at the international level. One concerns the Ukrainian ambassador to Berlin, who grossly insulted the Chancellor.  The other concerns Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov’s offhand remarks in an interview regarding anti-Semitism, which immediately riled the political establishment in Israel. Though both incidents have been featured in news bulletins, neither has been approached from the angle of investigative journalism.

When Ambassador Andrij Melnyk accused Olaf Scholz of behaving like “an offended liver sausage” for refusing to visit Kyiv, that caught the attention of not only German media, but global media. The term “offended liver sausage” may have seemed peculiar to English speakers, but it clearly was not meant as a compliment.

The Daily Beast went further than most of the press in identifying the term as a German colloquialism “commonly employed to describe someone as a prima donna.” They connected this insult to the head of government with a tit-for-tat by the Chancellor:  in the preceding month, Zelensky had refused to receive German head of state Frank-Walter Steinmeier because of his past close ties to Moscow and this motivated Scholz’s decision not to go.

However, the nominally investigative journalists of The Daily Beast looked no further. Neither this paper nor mainstream has asked and then answered persuasively why Kiev would intentionally offend the most powerful country within the EU, upon whom it greatly depends for military and economic assistance. Some put it down to the ambassador’s personal views. Others are simply confounded.  No one has considered that the spat Kiev’s man on the spot has initiated with Scholz might be a calculated intervention in German domestic politics, with a view to pushing the indecisive Scholz out of power.  The Chancellor is known to be under threat from other members of his own party and from coalition partners who would gladly replace him with someone more committed to helping the Ukrainian cause with action and not just words.

The case of Lavrov’s remarks about Jews and anti-Semitism has received even less penetrating analysis.  He is quoted in the press as having said that Hitler also had Jewish blood and that the worst anti-Semites are found among Jews.  These words were instantly denounced by the Israeli government, which called for an apology.

The Western press was equally quick to remark how Lavrov had precipitated what can only be a cooling of relations with Israel. Jerusalem would now surely abandon its claims to be an honest broker and would align itself more closely with Kiev. In Washington and London, editors were gleeful.

However, no one asked the question which begs to be addressed: how, why would Sergei Lavrov, who is surely the most experienced diplomat on the world stage, make remarks that could only do damage to Russian-Israeli relations?

I admit that there is an innocuous explanation. Lavrov intended his words as a counter to Western denial that Kiev is a Nazi-dominated regime on grounds that President Zelensky himself is Jewish. But Lavrov had to be aware how Jerusalem would react to his words, so we should look further.

Let me hazard a guess.  Lavrov knew well what he was doing and probably had discussed this subject with his boss, Vladimir Vladimirovich, before he opened his mouth.

The Russians are very dissatisfied with Israel over its past military cooperation with Ukraine, and Lavrov’s statement was only the opening round. If we go back to the very first days of Russia’s ‘special military operation,’ when they took control of the Zaporozhye nuclear power station and seized there documents relating to Ukraine’s efforts to build a ‘dirty nuclear weapon,’ the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that there were foreign enablers active there.  Then the next day, unexpectedly and in great haste, Israeli Prime Minister Bennett flew to Moscow for unscheduled talks with Putin.  Almost nothing was disclosed about the subject of their talks. But subsequently the foreign enablers were never identified by the Russians.

Though I have been praised by some readers for avoiding ‘speculation,’ I will permit myself just this once to speculate:  it is not inconceivable that the Israelis were among the key advisers to Kiev on its program to build nuclear weapons.  If that is so, we may expect Russian-Israeli relations to get a lot worse in the coming weeks and months.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Déjà-vu all over again:  Western companies exit Russia en masse

In my Memoirs of a Russianist: Volume II, Russia in the Roaring 1990s* published in February 2021, my diary entries from the period 1998-2000 devote a good deal of attention to the exodus of Western businesses from Russia following the default of August 1998.  In the preceding five years, the number of companies setting up business in Russia and their headcounts in country had grown by leaps and bounds, to the point where there were 50,000 expats and their families in Moscow alone. In the year following the default, the expat population fell by more than 50%.

 Most small and medium sized foreign companies that, in fact, lacked the resources to get their arms around the huge and complex Russian market threw in the towel.  Large multinational corporations nearly all stayed on, but they halted all further investments in the country and replaced their expat managers, including those in the key positions of general director and finance director, with local staff.

In fact, the promotion of the Russian employees was for those employees a Pyrrhic victory: the departure of the expats meant that Russia was downgraded in the corporate priorities generally.  Moreover, the organizational change within Russia was often accompanied by a change in the corporations’ global marketing structure. Companies like the one I worked for at the time as general director, United Distillers & Vintners (UDV), known today as Diageo, gave a strong signal to investors that Developed Markets in Western Europe and North America now trumped the formerly hyped Emerging Markets. The latter would no longer report directly to senior management in headquarters as had been the case hitherto but would instead be subordinated to individual Key Markets. This had the advantage of burying losses in places like Russia within the performance reports of large, established and profitable markets.

I have had reason to think over these issues as we all have read in mainstream media about the closures of the Russian operations of most U.S., European and even Japanese and Korean corporations in the weeks following the start of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine in February. 

Whatever the wishes of senior management, today the practicalities of doing business dictated at least a temporary suspension of operations in Russia for the very same reasons as I saw around me in 1998: a collapsed ruble exchange rate followed by great volatility and a compromised banking system. The challenges facing any company running a business entailing importation of finished goods or components from abroad were as great in February 2022 as in September 1998. Thus, at a minimum one had to expect suspension of business activity. 

What has changed is the way the 2022 crisis has been driven by geopolitics at the level of Western governments imposing sanctions on Russia and at the level of society in the West, where the ‘cancel Russia’ movement has been promoted by the media. These are factors that skittish business executives could not ignore. Hence, the widespread decision of very big corporations in 2022 not merely to suspend operations but to close down altogether and exit the country.

Does this make sense in the medium and long term?  When may these companies reconsider their decision and try to reenter the market? What does the temporary or permanent departure of Western companies mean for Russian firms that may be tempted to fill the void?  In what follows, I will try to answer each of these questions.

In conclusion, I will offer a personal observation on the cycles of construction and destruction in business life.

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Does the departure of major corporations from the Russian market now make sense in the medium and long term? 

To be sure, the Russian market lost its appeal for Western business executives long ago following a series of severe shocks. The default of 1998 under President Yeltsin was the first. The second came in 2008 during the global recession triggered by the failure of Lehman brothers in the United States and the toxic assets of mortgage loans that had been securitized and sold worldwide by American banks: the Russian economy, alongside other Emerging Markets experienced a very big setback. Then came 2014 when the first hard sanctions were imposed on Russia by the USA and the European Union following the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s intervention in the Ukrainian civil war. 

For some industries, for example beer brewing, which has been wholly dominated in Russia by AB InBev, Carlson and a very few other global players, the general rush for the exit in February may have given them a pretext to close what had long ceased to be the money spinners they had hoped for. For other multinationals, like Apple, the share of Russia’s contribution to sales and profit may have been no greater than 1%, so the withdrawal from the market falls within the normal accounting margin of error and could be taken without any adverse impact on share values while resulting in good PR. For still other companies like the international banks operating on the Russian market in consumer banking, the pull-out from Russia entails sustaining substantial pain and multibillion dollar losses.

The decisions taken now with so few apparent reservations or second thoughts represent a total write-off of major investments of senior management time and capital over the past 25 years from when all of global business was knocking at Russia’s front door to get in.  As regards consumer goods manufacturers in particular, they also are writing off the possible future rise of the Russian economy and purchasing power in a country of 150 million citizens as it undergoes reindustrialization through government supported import substitution. Vast numbers of good paying high-tech jobs will be created.

When and under what conditions are the companies leaving the market today likely to make a reentry try and what obstacles will they face?  From my experience as someone who reported to top management in London headquarters of multinational corporations, I find it hard to imagine that those leaving today will be ready to reconsider resuming activity in Russia in less than five years.  The decision to leave is taken at the CEO or Chairman level and no Vice President with regional responsibility will dare come back to them with proposals to reverse such decisions any time soon, since it would be the equivalent of denying the correctness of the decision to leave.

Nature abhors a vacuum and in the meantime, one way or another it is highly likely that the place of those departing will be filled by other companies, first and foremost by Russians.  All of which brings us to the question of why the foreign companies have dominated so many sectors of the Russian economy. This is something I witnessed back in the 1990s when the Western businesses were first being set up in Russia. The key lever back then was working capital, which the Western companies had and which existing Russian companies or entrepreneurs did not have. Western industrial and consumer goods may have been better than their Russian equivalents, but that was not the decisive issue.  Western goods were offered to wholesalers and retailers either on consignment or on generous credit terms that the Russian manufacturers could not match.  An additional advantage of the major Western brands was their marketing and advertising skills.

Today, when Western companies leave, there will be many Russian companies of long standing as well as start-ups that will, with government assistance, have the working capital essential to make a go of it. And once they are entrenched in any given industrial sector, it will be hard for any foreign company seeking to reenter the market to gain traction.

Secondarily, the place of many Western manufacturers in the Russian market may be taken by Chinese and other non-Western corporations who have political backing and see business opportunities in Russia that did not exist for them until now, when global competitors have left the field.

                                                                         *****

In a week or two, I will be making an hour-long presentation of my Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s on a St Petersburg radio show called “The History Club.”  Back in November 2021, which is when this should have taken place had there been no new wave of omicron, I had a story to tell about the construction of the Western business presence in Russia which I participated in during the 1990s. This was a story that had its positive and negative sides.  Some of the companies at the time, such as the intermodal shipping and railway logistics company SeaLand, made a very positive contribution to Russia’s infrastructure while also making a handsome profit on their investment. I knew their story from the inside having been the lead candidate to replace their Russian manager.  Other companies were ill-adapted to achieve much in Russia because their internal political wars between the field and the headquarters precluded taking business decisions on the basis of objective profit and loss analysis as opposed to the interests of individual company officers. I knew such companies from having worked in them. Yet, on balance, I think more benefit came from the presence of Western companies in Russia than the damage that the blundering of some caused. A generation of Russian managers was trained in what had been until then alien business concepts and practices.

As I prepare for my radio talk, I find that the subject at hand is truly history, an age gone by. What we built in that decade and in the years since has been largely destroyed in the past few weeks, as Western companies have pulled up stakes. This is sad, but not tragic.  It is a good reminder that nothing is forever, that change is the only constant in our lives.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Delusional interpretations on both sides of the Russia-West divide

In the past few weeks, I have commented several times on the way Western media and politicians either overlook or fail to understand the Russian Way of War as implemented presently during the military operation in Ukraine. They judge the success or failure of the Russians by what the U.S. Armed Forces would do if their objective were to subdue Kiev. With no ‘shock and awe’ opening by the Russians and considering the very slow progress of their move to free the entire Donbas region from Ukrainian control, Western commentators consider the Russian effort a failure.

Perhaps the most extreme analysis and most dangerous conclusions were presented on 6 May by a British journalist who has for decades written about Russia and is widely considered to be an expert, Mary Dejevsky.  Her article in The Independent was given a heading that almost says it all: “By hyping up the Russia threat, the west helped ignite this war. It turns out that Russia had a far more realistic idea of its own strength, or lack of it, than the west allowed.” 

In the body of the article, Dejevsky takes us back to the days of the USSR, which despite its faltering economy in the Gorbachev years was considered in the West to be a military powerhouse. The country’s poor performance in the Afghanistan war and then the total collapse of the Soviet Union forced a revision of the mistaken notion of a military threat from Moscow. 

Now again, she believes the West has overrated Russia’s arms.  She supposes that the arms manufacturers in the West have a vested interest in perpetuating the myth. However, Russia’s poor results against the Ukrainian forces, which have been trained and supplied by the West, compels us to think again.

Unfortunately, Dejevsky goes beyond this observation, which is shared by all too many Western commentators. Her concluding paragraph merits full quotation:

“The west fatally misread a weak state as a strong state, meaning that its attempts to second-guess Russia’s behavior largely misfired. If there is to be any new relationship between the west and Russia – which is unlikely to be very soon – the west must start with this basic reassessment. It must accept that Russia is a weak state, and that the west and Nato are strong.”

Quite amazing that she does not see what is right in front of her nose. About Russian military strength, the fact that Russia now occupies a part of the Ukraine bigger than the United Kingdom thanks to its advances in the ‘special military operation’ somehow does not register. As for economic strength, it is also amazing how blind she is: the market economy of Russia today is vastly more resilient than the command economy of the USSR. Indeed, no other country on earth could have withstood the ‘sanctions from hell’ that the USA has imposed on Russia since 24 February.

But my key point is that if Russia is deemed to be weak, then American and EU pressure will have no limits and will precipitate a reaction from the Kremlin that takes us straight to Armageddon. Vladimir Putin has threatened precisely this and he is, above all, a man of his word.

                                                                        *****

Now I would like to direct attention to delusional thinking on the Russian side that may in its own way head them and us to Judgment Day. The material for my commentary is a front page feature article on today’s online edition of Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a high quality pro-Kremlin newspaper.

Pride of place in the right column is an interview with Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation. His position may be likened to that of Jake Sullivan in the USA. He surely has the ear of Vladimir Vladimirovich and what he says in this interview should worry us all.

Patrushev opens by stressing that the root evil in present world crises as in the past is Washington’s striving to consolidate its global hegemony and to prevent the collapse of the unipolar world.

“The USA does everything to ensure that other centers of the multipolar world do not dare raise their heads. However, our country not only dared but declared for everyone to hear that it will not play according to imposed rules. They have tried to force Russia to renounce its sovereignty, its self-awareness, its culture and its independent foreign and domestic policy. We have no right to agree with this approach.”

So far, so good. I broadly agree with Patrushev on the foregoing.  But the problems begin as he proceeds, in particular his expectations of what the future holds for Europe:

“What awaits Europe is a deep economic and political crisis for the various countries. Growth of inflation and lowering standards of living already are making themselves felt on the pocketbook and in the mood of Europeans. Moreover, large-scale immigration adds to the old threats to security. Almost 5 million Ukrainian migrants already arrived in Europe. In the near future, their numbers will grow to 10 million. The majority of the Ukrainians arriving in Europe expect Europeans to maintain and look after them, but when they are forced to work, they begin to rebel.”

Patrushev goes on to forecast food shortages that will push tens of millions of people in Africa and the Near East to the edge of starvation. To live on, they will try to reach Europe.

He concludes: “I am not certain that Europe will survive this crisis. The political institutions, supranational associations, economy, culture, traditions may all recede into the past. Europe will be gnawing at its knuckles, while America will be rid of its main geopolitical fear – a political alliance between Russia and Europe.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Patrushev is confusing what he would like to see happen with what indeed will probably happen. Intellectually mediocre, conformist and slavish in their pandering to the American overlords as the leaders of the EU Member States and EU central institutions may be, they are unlikely to lose political control at home. Their instinct for survival is not that far gone yet. Moreover, passivity and indifference to the political class are the rule in most of Europe. What the highly unpopular Emanuel Macron just achieved in winning reelection is proof positive of that reality.

Patrushev’s belief in Western weakness is as fraught with danger as the notion among the U.S. and European political establishment that Russia is weak.  These misconceptions easily lead to reckless policies of brinkmanship.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

March of the Immortal Regiment, St Petersburg, 2022: Impressions of a Participant

One of my highest priorities in these writings is to record personal impressions of significant Russia-related events in which I have been a first-hand witness, i.e. to practice active journalism as opposed to sedentary commentary on what others have said or written. Over the course of two years beginning in the spring of 2020, visa and other restrictions imposed by nearly all countries including Russia to combat the Covid epidemic stood in the way.  Then following the onset of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, getting to Russia became still more challenging when air and train networks were shut down. Nonetheless, when there is a will there is a way, and it is a rare pleasure to once again report ‘from the field’ on yesterday’s March of the Immortal Regiment in Russia’s Northern Capital.

This was the first parade celebrating Russia’s victory over fascist Germany in World War II per the Russian calendar after the two-year suspension due to Covid. Lest the skipping of a parade go underappreciated by readers, allow me to remind them that May 9^th is the most important holiday of the year to Russians, trumping personal birthdays, because virtually every family in the country lost loved ones in World War II. Twenty-six million died in defense of the homeland, the greatest wartime loss of life in human history.

The March of the Immortal Regiment was added to the commemoration ceremonies several years ago as a ground-up movement that provides a personal and family oriented counterpoint in the afternoon to the formal military parades on the morning of the 9^th in Moscow and in major cities across the country. Nearly all marchers hold aloft photographs of their fathers, grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers who fought on the front or who served the defense effort at home, both those who died in the conflict or who lived on as veterans.

I have written about the Immortal Regiment four times following my participation year after year, and so I can bring a certain comparative sense to what I am about to say.

Let me begin with numbers.  Surely, the high point was in 2019, when it was estimated that one million people turned out for the March in St Petersburg alone, roughly one quarter of the city’s overall population. Though I have not seen official numbers, my guess is that this year’s edition attracted significantly fewer. 

It would be risky to name any reason for reduced attendance.  The weather was reasonably good:  no rain or snow showers, as have occurred in the past, just a cold breeze recorded as 10 degrees C. 

Perhaps lower attendance may be explained by a popular mood that is depressed by the military action now going on in the Donbas.  It did seem to me that the joyfulness of families, of three generations from grandparents to toddlers participating in the same public event, was less in evidence than in years past. Perhaps there were fewer dating couples in the parade, no flirting policemen and women on the sidelines, though overall young people were very present.

I will not hazard conclusions from these several observations. It is very much to the point that among the thousands of people whom I saw around me only one person was carrying a placard on which was written: “Peace. No to War.”  And that individual carrying a dissonant message was left alone by the good-humored crowd singing Katyusha; no scandal resulted.

After walking down the traditional route starting from the Alexander Nevsky Square by the riverside to the Uprising Square and continuing for several hundred meters along Nevsky Prospekt in the direction of the Palace Square, we left the parade and headed for our traditional May 9^th dinner with friends or relatives.  Same friends, same apartment.

The table was richly set with the appetizers that support vodka toasts so beloved by Russians of a certain age: marinated slivers of salmon, pickled herring with onions in sour cream, salted wild mushrooms and assorted herbs and greens. Only this time there were very few toasts.

Following the tradition of the household, our host read from his poems published in a volume dedicated to May 9^th.  He is a certified blokadnik, who spent his early childhood years living in a downtown apartment with family during the entire Siege of Leningrad.

This time he went off script and left his poems to tell us how he survived:  with one or two other children, he would cross the street from his apartment house and would be given some sweets or table scraps by soldiers in the garrison building on the other side. But he also told us of his macabre experience witnessing partly eaten frozen corpses, the results of cannibalism by which some adult neighbors survived.

The atmosphere of our gathering was altered in other ways. For the first time ever, our camaraderie was interrupted for several minutes by a quarrel over the necessity and sense of the ‘special military operation.’

Our friends, our hostess, are all Russian patriots.  But they are also flesh and blood people with personal and family concerns over how the war affects them and their loved ones. Will there be a general mobilization?  Will men as old as 50 be called up?  These questions weighed on the celebratory mood of May 9^th and begged to be discussed. In this respect yesterday’s Victory Day was unlike any I have witnessed until now.

                                                                           *****

Before closing, I am obliged to remark on the morning’s televised spectacle from Moscow and its grand military parade that the whole country was watching. Perhaps the attention was all the more keen due to expectations, fears that some new escalation in the military operation would be announced from the tribune by President Putin during his brief speech.

As it turned out, Putin’s words were very restrained.  There were no threats of nuclear attack on NATO nations posing an existential threat to Russia. The word “Ukraine” was not mentioned once. All talk was of the Donbas and of the historic Russian lands (meaning the Eastern territories of present day Ukraine) which were threatened by a Ukrainian punitive expedition in the run-up to Russia’s launch of its ‘special military operation.’ The operation, he said, was preemptive in nature from the get-go.

Western commentators found little to sink their teeth into other than the seeming admission that the operation is taking a toll on military personnel: this may be tweaked out of President Putin’s signing a decree providing for additional financial compensation to the families of wounded servicemen or those killed in action.

Meanwhile, Russian observers, such as the political scientist who offered his appreciation of the speech on Business FM radio St Petersburg this morning, explain that by tradition a presidential address during May 9^th celebrations is not the format for announcing decisions with respect to military operations. In this respect, Western observers were simply naïve in their expectations.

As for the military parade itself, the expected symbolism was respected.  The parade was opened by flagbearers carrying aloft the flag which was hoisted atop the Reichstag in Berlin following Germany’s capitulation to the Red Army and other Allied forces. At his entrance to Red Square in his open-top Aurus limousine for a review of the troops, Russia’s Buddhist Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu crossed himself in Orthodox fashion as required  after passing under an icon mounted above the portal.

Otherwise, the parade was noteworthy only for its brevity. There were plenty of tanks and also of the Grad truck mounted multiple rocket launcher that is seeing a lot of action in the Donbas. But there was only one intercontinental missile on display, the Yars which is launched from a mobile carrier and which was deployed by the army more than ten years ago.

Most importantly, the air show or ‘parade’ was cancelled at the last minute due to unfavorable meteorological conditions. This deprived both the domestic audience and foreign observers of a view of the specially configured ‘White Swan’ heavy bomber known as the Judgment Day aircraft since it is intended to take on board the President at the start of a nuclear war.

Nonetheless, the fraught times in which we are living were brought to mind by one aspect of Putin’s appearance on the tribune and of his subsequent walk to the Eternal Flame at the walls of the Kremlin in the Alexander Garden: he was shadowed the whole time by a security guard carrying the briefcase with ‘the button,’ meaning the key to unleashing Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrent.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022 

Who is winning? It is all down to timing

Over the course of the past couple of weeks, Johnson’s Russia List, the daily digest of news and commentary about Russia to which a great many American academics and international affairs professionals subscribe, has been filled with articles by respected experts from think tanks, from the universities all explaining why Russia is losing the war.  Some of these analysts specialize in military affairs: they tell us that the Russians do not have sufficient men and materiel to close the cauldron in the Donbas and achieve their objective of destroying Ukraine’s most effective fighting force. Being just a layman in these matters, I read their arguments with concern.  This concern is amplified by the writings of other American experts published in JRL who explain how Russia’s failure at arms will precipitate regime change or chaos in the Russian Federation.

Against this background, I was amazed to read today’s Morning Briefing from The New York Times, which seemingly out of nowhere is telling a very different story.  It is so remarkable that I copy it uncut below.

Quote

Russia makes gains in eastern Ukraine

More than two months into the war in Ukraine, Russia is making some significant territorial gains, even as its invasion has been marred by poor planning, flawed intelligence, low morale and brutal, indiscriminate violence against civilians. Follow the latest updates from the war.

Russian forces have advanced to the border between Donetsk and Luhansk, according to the Russian defense ministry — provinces where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukraine’s army for eight years. If confirmed, the news makes it more probable that Russia could entirely control the region, known as the Donbas, compared with just a third of it before the invasion.

If Russia can hold on to, or expand, the territory it occupies in the south and east, and maintain its dominion in the Black Sea, it could further undermine Ukraine’s already battered economy, improve Moscow’s leverage in any future negotiated settlement and potentially expand its capacity to stage broader assaults.

Unquote To be sure, Russia’s announcements yesterday of successes in reaching the western and northern territorial boundaries of what had been Lugansk oblast before the civil war that began in the summer of 2014 bear on the NYT’s article. However, by just following the daily maps of territories under the control of the Lugansk People’ Republic the “new” conclusion about the overall state of play could have been reached by any military professional without guidance from the Russian Ministry of Defense. I believe the greater factor in the NYT’s change of tune today about who is winning and who is losing the war was the successful passage yesterday of a new 40 billion aid package by Congress. From the standpoint of Washington, “mission accomplished” and now we can move on. The entire logic of that bill was to provide urgently needed assistance to back Kiev in what has been portrayed as a very successful defense and the start of a counter-offensive against the Russians to recover lost ground. If the Ukrainians are seen to be losing, and losing badly, why bother? In this regard, it is worth considering another item in the news today, this time in the pro-Kremlin Russian daily newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta: Quote A foolish PR stunt by the Kiev regime to seize Zmeiny Island [in the Black Sea, southwest of Odessa] on the eve of Victory Day led to the senseless death of more than 50 Ukrainian fighters and soldiers from elite subdivisions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In addition, the Ukrainian army lost 4 planes, 10 helicopters, 3 cutters and 30 drones. This was reported by the representative of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Major General Igor Konashenkov. In particular, during the attempt to seize the island, the Kiev regime lost in the area around the island three SU-24 bombers and one SU-27 fighter jet. Out of the 10 Ukrainian Air Force helicopters which were destroyed, three Mi-8 were shot down with a landing party on board along with one Mi-24 support helicopter. Additionally, six Mi-7 and Mi-24 helicopters which were detached to the operation were destroyed on ground near the city of Artsiz, Odessa oblast. Konashenkov said that three Ukrainian armored Centaur landing craft cutters were destroyed at sea together with their landing parties on board. “Thus, this military adventure ended in catastrophe for Ukraine.” Unquote

If this is indicative of the way the long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive in Donbas will be managed, it is unlikely the trajectory of the war sketched in today’s New York Times article will be changed in the coming weeks, with or without Mr. Biden’s package of 40 billion dollars of assistance.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

When your taxi driver is a retired Russian Foreign Intelligence officer…

Several months ago, when talking about the way everyone in Russia faced economic hardship immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, President Vladimir Putin spoke for the first time about how it affected him:  for several months he had to take work as a taxi driver just to be able to feed his family and pay bills.

Those days of generalized destitution in the Russian population during the early 1990s are long gone. But formerly well placed officers in the Soviet intelligence community and in other branches of the siloviki still turn to taxi driving to make a supplemental income and to fill their days with interesting conversation. I know this from first-hand experience, such as what I am about to share with you.

I observed long ago that for me taxi drivers have always been a major source of information on how people really live here. That goes for our “regulars,” meaning individual drivers who may work for taxi fleets but become attached to us when we are here for several weeks and take us on our longer trips – into downtown Petersburg or out to the dacha. It is all the more true of the drivers sent to us by automated dispatchers of the big fleets when we are out and about in Petersburg. In the context of complete anonymity, given that we will never meet again, these drivers are often especially chatty and informative.

Yesterday was a case in point.

Our driver from the fleet in ‘green livery,’ Taksovichkoff,  turned out to be a retired officer of the Soviet/Russian Foreign Intelligence (GRU), as he told us towards the end of the ride. He picked us up during rush hour. The downtown traffic was slowed to a crawl by bottlenecks and we spent close to 40 minutes in his car in a conversation that at least initially was intriguing.

He opened by saying he is very worried that nuclear war is now a real threat and could end civilization. But whether that happens will depend on who strikes first.  If the Americans launch first, then truly everything will go to hell globally.  But if the Russians strike first, they believe they can contain the risks and humanity will go on.  He says that advisers to Putin are urging him to consider a first strike but that the President is holding back. “He does not want to go down in history as the one who did it.”  The last point sounds a lot like a line from the conversation in the War Room between Peter Sellars as President of the USA and his senior general in the always relevant film, Dr. Strangelove.

Otherwise, the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine was also a topic in our exchange.  He maintains contact with former pals in the service and so I take his story with a high degree of trust.

Our GRU officer in retirement said that the first five days of the ‘special military operation’ were a disaster, with heavy loss of life on the Russian side.  It was all due, he said, to the incompetence of the major generals in Moscow who were in charge of the invasion. Considering the debacle, he accuses them of treason.  In fact, they were removed from command days later and shunted to one side. But our driver insists the whole lot of them should have been shot.

Why were they incompetent?  Because they owed their jobs to corruption, not to merit. The major generals were armchair experts, whereas the Russian Armed Forces had plenty of simple generals who had proven themselves in the field of action.  Moreover, Intelligence experts were kept out of the operation, which explains its starting out on false premises about the enemy.

I tried to comfort him by noting that incompetence and corruption in the higher ranks of government and military are problems that also exist in many countries, including the USA.  He wasn’t listening: “they should all have been shot,” he repeated.

My question how things are going now was met by silence.

After sharing these observations and opinions, our driver decided that it was time to move on and directed the conversation to a totally different topic, his concerns over global warming, telling us that his expert friends in high places believe that climate change is now irreversible whatever we do. The methane emissions from the oceans are rising and will overwhelm mankind’s best efforts to halt the process.  Then he turned to speculation on divine intervention that has allegedly gotten Russia out of hopeless situations, including on the battlefield, in the past, going back to the Borodino battle during the war with Napoleon. At this point, I turned off my mental tape recorder.

“Loose lips sink ships” as they used to say in the States.  Despite the Terror, in Soviet times Russians blabbed quite a bit.  In the Putin era, this has been largely cut off at the source. The Boss takes all the big decisions alone, so that the possibility of leaks is excluded.

The chitchat of taxi drivers can relate what they hear from friends in high places. These elites are, of course, not in full agreement among themselves. But their views set the limits on what the Boss can do either way.

Before closing, I acknowledge that not every taxi driver is a patriot. The other day, a driver from the same ‘green livery fleet’ said just before dropping me off at a hotel: “I really hope the Americans will win in Ukraine.” Perhaps he thought he would engratiate himself with me, an obvious foreigner. Perhaps that is what he truly believes. But I was perplexed to think how his country’s defeat could serve his own interests, financially or otherwise.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Life in the village

Spending some time in the countryside was one of our objectives on this trip to St Petersburg and now that we are into our third day I have some impressions to share about what has or has not changed out here since the start of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.

My location is 80 km south of Petersburg, in the hamlet of Orlino within the Gatchina district of Leningradskaya Oblast. Population about 300 in season, maybe one third that number year-round.

Ours is the main street that takes you from the nearby intercity highway down to the large lake 200 meters away which is the pride of Orlino and the key attraction for summer visitors.  Our house is lined up with others facing the street; and behind it the property opens onto a long strip of land that traditionally was dedicated to subsistence farming, meaning fruit trees, a vegetable garden and the obligatory patch of potatoes. 

We are separated from the neighbors by picket fences and it is common to chat over the fence about the usual concerns of weather, infestations of Colorado beatles threatening the potato harvest and the like. Right now the key question is whether it is still too cool to plant the potatoes. When the birch trees are blooming, like now, is the right time to plant says one neighbor.  No, the real test is to lower your trousers and plant your butt on the soil; if it feels cold, wait a while. So much for folk wisdom… 

Politics rarely arises and it is not a subject of discussion today, though convictions can be expressed otherwise. One change I note is the appearance of the national flag on houses. Never saw that before. It fits into a broader pattern:  a couple of weeks ago orders were given by Moscow for all schools in the country to raise the flag at the start of each week and for all students to sing the national anthem.  Curiously, in a country that is in a proxy war with the United States, these public shows of patriotism look very much like America in the 1950s.

The quiet discussion of the war which we have had with locals closest to us shows unquestioning confidence that it was necessary to preempt an attack on Donbas and Crimea by Ukrainian forces planned for the first week of March and that it is being properly prosecuted.  Yes, soldiers are dying, but that is in the nature of wars.  Should there be a mobilization?  Absolutely not!  One professional special forces contract soldier is worth 100 recruits says our friend and handyman Sergei.

Though we come and go several times in the year, this is the first time in all ten years of our visits to Orlino that the neighbors took an interest in how we got here.  Was it difficult, they asked? The fact that we come from Belgium, more specifically from Brussels, now registers with them in a way it did not in the past.  I suppose I can thank Frau von der Leyen for that.

Finally, a word about television. Like most everyone in this hamlet, like most everyone living in the hinterland across this vast country, we have satellite television. The installation of the dish and tuner is a one time cost. We pay nothing for what we watch. There are on the decoder a few hundred stations listed, but in practice we only watched a half dozen foreign broadcasters plus the three main Russian state channels. 

I was not surprised to find that French and German broadcasters are no longer available on our satellite tv. However, it was unexpected to see that BBC World News and Bloomberg are still available.  This supports my conclusions about cable television in Petersburg: that the exclusion or retention of given channels seems to be the result of commercial deals between content providers and the Russian distributors.  I imagine that the removal of nearly all foreign stations from our cable service in Petersburg is due to that factor rather than from any government orders. In this way it would be like the withdrawal of Hollywood film companies from the Russian market. “Animal World” is gone. “National Geographic” is still available.

Otherwise little has changed in village life from what we left behind on our last visit in October 2021.  The food shops in Orlino and in the surrounding villages are fully stocked. Prices are unquestionably higher but not shockingly so. Local roads that were dodgy have been fixed and we drove on smooth asphalt. The taxi service has been improved; it now operates 24 hours. Gasification has finally come to Orlino: some residents on a parallel street to ours are now getting their connections after a wait of many years.  Life is good…

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

The impact of Western sanctions on Russian musical life

In Volume II of my Memoirs of a Russianist: Russia in the Roaring 1990s, the diary entries which constitute three quarters of the book describe in considerable detail the musical and literary life of the country that I saw firsthand and in which I participated as sponsor in the name of my employers. Notwithstanding an economic collapse that was deeper than America’s Great Depression of the 1930s, Russia experienced a cultural renaissance, moving in new directions and bringing out great new talent that won over discerning cultural consumers the world over. My conclusion was that High Culture was, is and forever will be a distinguishing feature of Russia come what may in world affairs and in the domestic economy.

In this essay, I propose to examine how Russian culture is faring in the face of the new and dramatic challenges posed by Western sanctions and by the “cancel culture,” “cancel Russia” movements that are being fanned by Western media. They have resulted in the cutting of cultural ties at the intergovernmental level and also at the level of individual artists and individual symphony halls and opera-ballet theaters from both Russia and the Collective West.

Playbills in the West are being censored and revised to remove Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and other Russian staples of the international musical repertoire in a manner similar to the way Wagner was cut from repertoires during and after WWII. The direct consequence is the removal of opportunities to appear on Western stages for the best performers of such works, meaning both troupes and individuals first and foremost from Russia. Artists who regularly crossed what were invisible borders now are confronted with almost insuperable obstacles

I focus attention here on music, meaning opera, concerts and ballet, because, of all the performing arts, it is the most accessible to the broad public at home and abroad given that knowledge of language is not a requirement for full enjoyment.

But before we look at the present, I will go back to the 1990s and direct attention to what some of the same Russian institutions and individuals as figure in the news today at the head of Russian musical culture were doing then.

                                                                      *****

Musical leadership in Russia today is less concentrated geographically and institutionally than it was in the 1990s.  Many new theaters and greatly improved troupes have emerged in places like Kazan in Tatarstan and in Novosibirsk in Siberia. They are well financed by local government, which is flush from income generated by extractive industries, and with their deep purses can attract some of the best talent in the country.  Nonetheless, the one person and the one house of music that stood out in the 1990s and which set the tone for the nation then remains the bellwether today:  Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater of St Petersburg.

Under Gergiev’s guidance, during the 1990s the Mariinsky moved way ahead of its key competitor and long-time ‘ elder brother,’ Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, which was beset by internal discord, political interference and an inability to respond appropriately to the economic challenges of the market economy then being established. It was precisely Gergiev’s genius at selling his ‘product’ abroad via recording contracts, joint productions, foreign tours and the development of opera and ballet festivals that drew in leading artists from the world over as well as a wealthy audience of foreign and domestic visitors.  Meanwhile, “Friends of the Mariinsky” fund-raising associations were cultivated in major musical centers. Besides financial contributions, they helped with the rebranding of what had been known as the “Kirov” company in Soviet times, to the new “Mariinsky” label. 

As musical director, Valery Gergiev had a clear agenda which he implemented with great consistency and success. Keen to turn his house orchestras into quality performers of symphonic music, he downgraded the ballet repertoire, for which the Kirov was best known abroad, to second place and brought forward the opera troupe with new, more demanding repertoire. This entailed promotion of Wagner, and of the Ring Cycle in particular. It entailed the promotion of compositions by long ignored geniuses of Soviet Russia, meaning Sergei Prokofiev in particular.

Gergiev invited leading stage directors from Europe to update the visual presentation of scenery, lighting and costumes from the static Soviet past, and, most importantly, to bring up to world standards the delivery methods of the singers themselves. From “stand up and sing,” they became actors and actresses on stage. The introduction of titles in English and Russian was a finishing touch to engage the audience in the dramatic flow of the opera.

Annual tours abroad to London and New York, among other global opera centers, consolidated the Mariinsky’s worldwide reputation and provided financial assistance to the orchestra members and singers who otherwise received miserly paychecks at home. 

All of these priority initiatives came together in 1991, three years into Gergiev’s tenure as Music Director, when the Mariinsky launched a sensational, unforgettable co-production of Prokofiev’s Fiery Angel with London’s Covent Garden. The presentation of this opera had been held up for many years by the inability to find a suitable female lead singer for the role of Renata. With the casting for this role of the young and rising star, Mariinsky soprano Galina Gorchakova, this gap was filled. Following the presentation of this show in London, Gorchakova was named opera singer of the year in the United Kingdom. She went on to make an important international career, during which she noisily denounced Gergiev as a “dictator” because of his tight control over the private lives of his protégés. Sometimes Valery Gergiev does not hold a grudge and today Gorchakova works at the Mariinsky as a voice coach, her singing career having ended some time ago.

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In the new millennium, the hyper-active musical director and chief conductor of the Mariinsky Theater, Valery Gergiev, oversaw the creation of a musical empire.  A spectacular new opera house, dubbed Mariinsky II, was built adjacent to the historic 19^th century theater, which underwent much-needed renovation.  Five minutes walking distance away, a third venue was added, the Concert Hall, where concert performances of operas also are presented on a daily basis.  Moreover, in a manner which paralleled the Russian art museum world, where satellites or affiliates of the Hermitage were being set up in other Russian cities, the Mariinsky went beyond domestic touring to establish several permanent operational bases in the country. 

One was in the city of Vladikavkaz, the capital of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, the area where Gergiev was born and spent his childhood. Western readers will know this part of the Caucasus best from its connection to South Ossetia, which was once territorially part of Georgia and was the land over which the Russian-Georgian War of 2008 was fought. The Gergiev family has maintained close relations with Ossetia. Valery’s sister Larisa, who otherwise is engaged as director of the professional vocal school attached to the theater in St Petersburg, holds administrative and production oversight positions in Vladikavkaz.  Lest one think that this remote territory is a musical backwater, I note that the conductor of last Friday’s splendid production of Rossini’s Barbiere di Seviglia in Mariinsky II, Zaurbek Gugkaev, bears the title of ‘honored artist of the Republic of North Ossetia.’ His conducting was world class.

Another key achievement of the Mariinsky’s extension of its domestic and international reach was the opening of its ‘Maritime Region Stage’ in Vladivostok in 2013. Housed in a new and architecturally exciting building, this opera and ballet company operates a full season of productions. The logic of its creation was not merely to raise the attractiveness of living in the Russian Far East by adding a center of European high culture there to complement the university center developed on Ostrov Russky in the Vladivostok harbor, but to serve as a beacon to opera and dance aficionados in neighboring Korea, Japan and China, where potential demand was huge. The logic of this investment seemed impeccable….until February 2022.

When the “iron curtain” fell on Russia once again following the start of the ‘special military operation’ on 24 February, among the first news reports in Western mainstream media were about the scandalous dismissal of Valery Gergiev from his position as principal conductor by the Munich symphony and of his status as persona non grata at the Met in New York, where he had once been very welcome together with the entire troupe for Russian seasons. Soon afterwards, the world renowned soprano who began her career at the Mariinsky, Anna Netrebko was also kicked out of the Met, while European performances in La Scala and elsewhere were cancelled on the phony pretext of health problems.

Gergiev did nothing to challenge the disgraceful and cowardly actions of his Western partners. He had seen this circus before, when he was given the boot by his hosts in Europe and America over his patriotic stance in support of the Kremlin during the 2008 war with Georgia. After a few years, they all came back to him to beg for renewal of ties.

However, Anna Netrebko’s career as singer is by definition not going to be as long-lived as Gergiev’s conducting career. Moreover, her tax residence is in Austria and that is where her home is, meaning that it would be personally quite painful to pull up stakes. Thus, she made the decision to meet the demands of the Met and openly denounced Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine. In doing so, she enraged fans in Russia and a planned performance in Novosibirsk was immediately cancelled there by her hosts. Still she failed to sway the stubborn Met General Manager Peter Gelb to rescind his blacklisting her.

Gelb’s pre-Met career was in marketing at a leading recording company. As marketer he always pitched to the bleachers and continues to do so, without regard for ethical or cultural values. 

Netrebko’s public turn away from the Kremlin did win her some concessions in Europe. Her first success was at the Opera of Monte Carlo. Other appearances followed.  Now, as the White Nights Festival gets underway in St Petersburg, there are rumors that Gergiev has invited her to perform in one or another opera.

Follow-up Western mainstream coverage of the ‘cancel Russia’ movement affecting Russian cultural icons told us about the departure of a Resident Conductor at the Mariinsky, the American Gavriel Heine. Since joining the company in 2007, Heine had taken over nearly the entire historic ballet repertoire, conducting the orchestra both at home and on tour abroad. His loss to the Mariinsky will be felt, although as I explained above, the theater places primary emphasis on opera, where interpretation by the maestro at the podium plays a substantially bigger role. I also note that Gergiev has had a succession of Western conductor protégés over the years.  A select few like Gianandrea Noseda, went on to make international careers of the first order.  Others remained relatively obscure. 

The Bolshoi company in Moscow took a much bigger hit when its Russian music director and principal conductor Tugan Sokhiev resigned, saying he had been under pressure to take a stand on the military operation in Ukraine. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Sokhiev also resigned from his decades long position as head of the Orchestre nationale du Capitole in Toulouse, France, for the same reason. This case illustrates perfectly the dilemma of performers who have not only great talent and skills, like Netrebko, but also brains and self-respect, like Sokhiev.

Turning from the fate of individuals to that of the institutions which shape national culture, we note that the descent of the new Iron Curtain instantly stripped away all of the foreign sources of income and performance opportunities of the Mariinsky company as a whole.

Now that the traditional White Nights Festival which runs from 24 May to 17 July is about to open, I have taken a look at their program to consider what changes the sanctions have made.

Firstly, you note the nearly total absence of foreign performers. This may well explain the unusual fact that a good number of performances on the playbill are still listed with casts “to be announced.” Nonetheless no shows have been cancelled, and as in the past each of the three Mariinsky venues in St Petersburg that I cited above offers one or more performances during each day of the Festival.

It is still too early to say what effect the loss of foreign visitors will have on ticket sales to the Festival events. One side effect of the difficulty Russians have had traveling abroad since the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic was that domestic tourism shot up and St Petersburg is a top tourist destination. That trend has of course been given further powerful encouragement by the shutdown of air transport links with Europe and America, and the complication of getting visas for travel abroad resulting from the shutdown of foreign consulates and expulsion of embassy staff dating from the beginning of the military operation.

Of course, the foregoing will not be of much assistance to the Mariinsky’s Vladivostok stage. The city is nearly twelve hours flying time from Moscow and is not a significant tourist destination among Russians. It is now cut off from the neighboring countries. China remains under lockdown, and both Korea and Japan have joined the sanctions parade.  Relief to Vladivostok will come only when China reopens. In the meantime the house will surely incur serious operating losses.

Besides out-of-town Russians, another boost to sales in the St Petersburg venues has been the implementation of a previously introduced scheme of federally financed allowances enabling students to buy tickets to museums, concert and opera houses for tiny out of pocket cost. At our evening in the Mariinsky last Friday, there were large numbers of young people present, despite the posted ticket prices that would normally be out of their reach.

In a way, market laws have long determined pricing of tickets at the Mariinsky. As a rule, starting prices for ballets are double the price of operas. Ballets are less demanding intellectually and they are considered by loving parents to be a perfect way of introducing their children to high culture.  All seats are sold out whatever the price.

At performances of the best loved ballets, Swan Lake and Nutcracker, there will always be lots of kids aged six and up sitting with their parents in the most expensive front rows of the stalls (“orchestra seats” in American parlance). By expensive, I mean on the order of 150 euros. The same seats will sell for half that to see a popular opera, one quarter of that for an opera that is either not beloved by Russians (as, for example, Hector Berlioz’ Les Troyennes in the current Festival) or is simply a poor show with dull staging and weak cast. Needless to say, there are very few of the last named category in the coming weeks.

In the program of this year’s White Nights Festival, there are several shows which will be in great demand and which are priced at levels that may cover direct costs of the theater. I have in mind Swan Lake in several star-studded casts and a revival of Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace staged by the Russian film director Andrei Konchalovsky.  I was present when this opera production premiered on 11 March 2000. Also present at the opening was British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who spent the day in St Petersburg as the first Western leader to meet with the newly installed President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. He was seated with his wife in the royal box, next to Vladimir Vladimirovich. The whole Russian government was in attendance and security was extraordinary. The opera’s revival is particularly timely today:  while the first half, Peace, is lyrical and romantic, the second half, War, is very patriotic, aggressively anti-French and more generally anti-West. It should do especially well with the audience now.

Other shows in this year’s Festival may also do very well in drawing audiences and keeping the box office busy on the strength of a single star performer.  I have in mind the June performances of Macbeth, Don Carlos and even the less loved Troyennes in which the soprano Ekaterina Semenchuk sings. She might just as easily have taken the easy way out and stayed in Paris or Salzburg, where she is most welcome, but Semenchuk has opted to sing in this year’s Festival, which will warm the hearts of Russian opera lovers.

The White Nights Festival has in the past featured performances by world renowned instrumentalists. Looking over the program, one might conclude that this aspect of the Festival has suffered the most from the ‘cancel Russia’ movement.  However, there will be a concert by the Russia-born pianist Nikolai Lugansky that is sure to be successful. Given his solid standing in the West, Lugansky’s boldness in coming to St Petersburg merits recognition.

One special feature of this year’s Festival is the attention given to works by the ‘house composer’ of the Mariinsky, Rodion Shchedrin, who will be celebrating his ninetieth birthday in December of this year. Shchedrin is best known in the West not for his ballet and opera compositions but as the husband, now widower, of one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated ballerinas, Maya Plisetskaya.

Schedrin has composed in many different genres including instrumental music ranging from chamber music to concertos and other orchestral pieces. His pieces for the stage have been shown in various European and American theaters, but have not entered into repertoire and are unfamiliar to the general public, except for one – his Carmen Suite.

The four pieces by Shchedrin to be performed in this Festival are the ballet Little Hump-backed Horse and the operas Adventures of an Ape, Boyarina Morozova and The Enchanted Wanderer. In light of the patriotic feelings sparked by the military operation in Ukraine, Gergiev may well now regret that he did not have the foresight to bring back to the stage Shchedrin’s opera The Left-Hander, which premiered in 2013 and was dedicated by the composer to Gergiev’s sixtieth birthday that year. I can say, from my personal impressions, that the production which premiered in the Mariinsky as staged by Aleksei Stepaniuk was brilliant.

The opera The Left-Hander is based on a novel by the 19^th century Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, as are several other operas by Shchedrin. The Left-Hander is set in the first quarter of the 19^th century, in the rein of Alexander I, the conqueror of Napoleon in 1812, who later made a royal visit to the United Kingdom, which is depicted here. The opera highlights the civilizational divide between Russia with its sobornost (collective solidarity) and England, with its individualism. Very timely!

Finally, it bears mention that in keeping with the house rules Gergiev established at the very start of his directorship at the Mariinsky, the Festival program includes a couple of Wagner operas, Lohengrin and Tristan and Isolde. Let it be noted that these productions, as well as the other featured operas that I mentioned above all require enormous theatrical resources which very few opera theaters in the world can summon in the best of times.  The Mariinsky is proceeding full speed ahead in these, the worst of times.

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I have spoken of how the Mariinsky may fill most seats and cover some of its Festival related expenses from the box office.  But the loss of its revenues from foreign tours, recording contracts, live broadcast contracts (Mezzo and national broadcasters) present an enormous challenge to management.  In this context, none other than the country’s President has stepped in to help. It is widely rumored that Putin proposed to merge the management of the Bolshoi theater in Moscow with that of the Mariinsky theater, all under the musical direction of Valery Gergiev.  The vacancy in the Bolshoi created by the departure of Tugan Sokhiev makes this decision not only possible but necessary for the sake of both companies. 

Of course, taking control of the Bolshoi has been a long time ambition of Valery Gergiev.  It will be opposed by many in the Moscow musical establishment, but no one will dare go up against The Boss. The benefit for the Mariinsky in the new, pending arrangement is that it will be able to tap into some of the generous federal funding that the Bolshoi has enjoyed since the 1990s, when it failed to enjoy the success in the global marketplace that Gergiev had assured for his theater. Most everyone in the Russian musical world will be watching closely to see how this proposed merger develops.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Radio St Petersburg: an appearance on “The History Club”

Last week one of my “to do” tasks for this trip to Russia was successfully completed: I spent an hour in a recording studio of Radio St Petersburg’s Chanel Five speaking to Professor Andrei Leonidovich Bassoevich about the edition of my Russia in the Roaring 1990s published here in November 2021 and more generally about the cycles of friendship-enmity in Russia’s relations with the United States and Europe over the past half century. 

Bassoevich has been the presenter of this show for the past twenty years. He has a distinctive way of interviewing and of lightening the style of the broadcast by insertions of music and other sound tracks relevant to the subject at hand.

Our conversation was conducted in Russian.

https://cloud.mail.ru/stock/3rBxnMfcQCPak5pn9PR3dDTU

How the war will end…

It has been my rule not to join the vast majority of my fellow political commentators at the scrimmage line in sterile debates of the one subject of the day, week, month that has attracted their full attention. Their debates are sterile because they ignore all but a few parameters of reality in Russia, in Ukraine. For them, ignorance is bliss. They do not stir from their armchairs nor do they switch channels to get information from the other side of the barricades, meaning from Russia.

I will violate this overriding rule and just this once join the debate over how Russia’s ‘special military operation’ will end.   Nearly all of my peers in Western media and academia give you read-outs based on their shared certainty over Russia’s military and political ambition from the start of the ‘operation,’ how Russia failed by underestimating Ukrainian resilience and professionalism, how Putin must now save face by capturing and holding some part of Ukraine. The subject of disagreement is whether at the end of the campaign the borders will revert to the status quo before 24 February in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality or whether the Russians will have to entirely give up claims on Donbas and possibly even on Crimea.

As for commentators in the European Union, there is exaggerated outrage over alleged Russian aggression, over any possible revision of European borders as enshrined in the Helsinki Act of 1975 and subsequent recommitments by all parties to territorial inviolability of the signatory States. There is the stench of hypocrisy from this crowd as they overlook what they wrought in the deconstruction of Yugoslavia and, in particular, the hiving off of Kosovo from the state of Serbia.

I mention all of the foregoing as background to what I see now going on in Russian political life, namely open and lively discussion of whether the country should annex the territories of Ukraine newly ‘liberated’ by forces of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics with decisive assistance of the Russian military. By admission of President Zelensky yesterday, these territories now amount to 20% of the Ukrainian state as it was configured in 2014.

In the past several weeks, when Russia concentrated its men and materiel on the Donbas and began to score decisive victories, most notably following the taking of Mariupol and capitulation of the nationalist fighters in the Azovstal complex, leading public officials in the DPR, the LPR and the Kherson oblast have called for quick accession of their lands to the Russian Federation with or without referendums. In Moscow, politicians, including Duma members, have called for the same, claiming that a fait accompli could be achieved already in July.

However, as I see and hear on political talk shows and even in simple political reportage on mainstream Russian radio like Business FM, a counter argument has raised its head.  Those on this side ask whether the populations of the potential new constituent parts of the RF are likely to be loyal to Russia. They ask if there is truly a pro-Russian majority in the population should a referendum be organized.

This is all very interesting. It surely is a continuation of the internal debate in Moscow back in 2014 when the decision was taken to grant Crimea immediate entry into the RF while denying the requests for similar treatment from the political leaders of the Donbas oblasts.

However, there surely are other considerations weighing in on the Kremlin that I have not seen aired so far. They may be likened to the considerations of France following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when the possible reunification of Germany was the talk of the day.  Sharp witted observers said at the time that President Mitterand liked Germany so much that he wanted to continue to see two of them.  Today Vladimir Putin may like Ukraine and its brethren Slavs so much that he wants to see three or four of them.

To be specific, from the very beginning the number one issue for Moscow as it entered upon its military adventure in Ukraine was geopolitical:  to ensure that Ukraine will never again be used as a platform to threaten Russian state security, that  Ukraine will never become a NATO member. We may safely assume that internationally guaranteed and supervised neutrality of Ukraine will be part of any peace settlement. It would be nicely supported by a new reality on the ground: namely by carving out several Russia-friendly and Russia-dependent mini-states on the former territory of East and South Ukraine. At the same time this solution removes from the international political agenda many of the accusations that have been made against Russia which support the vicious sanctions now being applied to the RF at great cost to Europe and to the world at large: there will be no territorial acquisitions.

If Kiev is compelled to acknowledge the independence of these two, three or more former oblasts as demanded by their populations, that is a situation fully compatible with the United Nations Charter.  In a word, a decision by the Kremlin not to annex parts of Ukraine beyond the Crimea, which has long been quietly accepted by many in Europe, would prepare the way for a gradual return of civilized relations within Europe and even, eventually, with the United States

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Russia today at ground level: further observations

Tomorrow, Wednesday, 8 June, I will be leaving Petersburg, leaving Russia. My return home will follow in reverse order the same path as my arrival a little over five weeks ago, taking a bus to Tallinn, Estonia and thence two days later onward by plane to Brussels.  The bus company assures me that the delays at the border due to processing of Ukrainian refugees heading for the EU are now less severe, which is a comfort to us.

I use this time to piece together the many observations on everyday life in Russia’s second largest city that could not be accommodated so far in my essays focused on musical life, on life in the countryside, on the food markets.

We have passed the hundred day mark of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and the effects or lack of effect of the sanctions are that much clearer with the passage of time. This will be a leitmotiv of the observations presented here.

 I am emboldened to present both big and petty observations because ever since 24 February there are very few Western observers on the ground to report on the real as opposed to imagined daily life of Russians.  Mainstream journalists left the country not long after the start of hostilities.  Others simply never came here, because no business or tourist visas were being issued. So I ask the reader to bear with me if my remarks on a host of topics exhaust your patience with any one of them.  I am all you’ve got for the moment.

Food

In my essay about my visits to Petersburg and provincial food stores, I offered a brief survey of economy class, mid-range and high class supermarket chains, with some further words on vendor stalls in the city markets.  Now I wish to direct attention to the top of the top, a food emporium that rivals Harrod’s in London or the best gourmet food shops in Paris, the world’s capital of gastronomy.  I am talking about the branch of Azbuka Vkusa [The Alphabet of Taste, or perhaps better rendered as A to Z of Taste] located in the -1 Level of the Stockman building on Nevsky Prospekt.  This is not the only branch of the given chain in the city. Nor is Petersburg its home base – that is Moscow.  But it is surely the most exciting location and most representative of what Russia’s wealthy class can buy, sanctions or no sanctions.

The Azbuka Vkusa moved into its Nevsky Prospekt premises when they were vacated by Stockman’s own food supermarket in 2014 shortly after the first round of sanctions on Russia were imposed. The departure was surely motivated by supply problems for what was, after all, just one of two outposts in Russia of Finland’s biggest department store, the other location being Moscow.  The departure was something of a shock, because Stockman’s had created the first gourmet food supermarket in the city in the early ‘90s and remained, until 2014, the nec plus ultra.  The discovery of delicacies in Stockman’s St Petersburg prompted locals to travel across the border to Lappeenranta periodically to stock up on quality food products that otherwise were not available at home. 

When Stockman’s shut the doors of their food hall in 2014, we feared food shopping would lose its glamor.  We were mistaken. Azbuka Vkusa has many outlets in Russia and with greater heft comes greater ability to manage the logistics and finance needed to stock the store with exquisite food products from all over the world, many of which are simply not available in Europe for political reasons (Iran) or restraints on free trade to protect domestic interests of Spain, Italy or Greece and other producers, for example.

This store chain puts the previous tenant to shame. The sheer variety and luxury of the present offering in fresh produce, cheeses, meats, fish, tinned conserves of all varieties is stunning. The fresh fish section offers swordfish from Sri Lanka, wild salmon from the Faroe Islands (presumably Russian caught), some unidentified white sea fish from Egypt, and dorade from Turkey. In a tank, there is a two kilogram live Kamchatka King Crab waiting for a buyer at 200 euros.  Live oysters in another tank are brought from both Crimea (large) and from the Far East (very large).  Farmed mussels are brought in from Crimea.

In the produce section a couple of weeks ago I purchased for 6 euros a 500g packet of green asparagus which, according to a vendor, were grown in the Moscow region!  On a later visit I found more asparagus, though less robust; it had been flown in from Peru. Just imagine: twenty years ago Russians did not know what an asparagus looked like; it was only an entry in some 19^th century encyclopedias. 

The produce sourcing is global – kiwis from Chile, oranges from Egypt.  Beef steaks in vacuum packs fill a large refrigerator display with labels describing them as Ribeye, New York style, filet mignon, strip loin dry aged. The marbleized beef comes mainly from Voronezh, which in the past five years has become a national center.   Additionally there is an open butcher shop just adjacent to the refrigerators which displays cuts of veal, beef, pork that merit all due respect.

The cakes section and chocolates rival the best one can find in specialty stores in Brussels.  Breads, cheeses are all exciting.  Needless to say, there is a prestigious selection of wines and spirits. A great many wines from the most sought after French, Italian and other famous estates cost several hundred euros a bottle. But the shop also promotes excellent quality Crimean wines from as low as 7 euros a bottle.

In my first walking tour of St Petersburg food shops, I mentioned the upmarket Perekryostok chain. Allow me to add a few details here, particularly as regards the fresh fish counter, which has surprised me now that I have shopped there for several weeks. Their offer of fresh dorade and sea bass from Turkey deserves special mention.  Freshness and quality like this cannot be matched in the top of the line Belgian supermarket chain Delhaize (‘The Lion’ in its US subsidiary).  I can only imagine that the fish are flown in daily from Turkey to ensure this freshness, which bests what the Belgians offer coming from Greek fish farms. Notwithstanding high transportation costs, the prices here are a good 30% below Belgium.

I close out discussion of fish with a couple of words about salmon, which was widely sold before the sanctions regime took effect and was priced at roughly a 35% discount to prices in Belgium.  With sanctions, the farmed salmon from Norway disappeared. Farmed salmon from the Faroe Islands continued to be sold until the more rigorous sanctions post February 2022 came into force.  Implicit in my bracketed remark on Azbuka Vkusa salmon, the fish are probably wild, caught by Russian boats under a treaty that the Faroes are loathe to cancel. Then, from nowhere, farmed salmon from Murmansk came onto the market, but at what I would describe as a 25% premium to supermarket prices in Belgium. And now, in the city market, I found that there is a multiplicity of farmed and wild salmon from the Baltic on sale.  Clearly there will be a market shake-out before there is a new normal established.

Throughout the food chain, whether Economy, Middle Class or Premium, I note that new supplier countries are emerging.  Iceberg lettuce and celery are among the new entries from Iran. Iranian canteloupes in even the Economy chain Verny would be fair competitors to the prized Cavaillon melons from France and Morocco that appear in Belgian stores.

Cosmetics

For this entry I am reliant on my wife’s shopping experience.  Whereas both staples and luxury food products are fully stocked in St Petersburg supermarkets, the same cannot be said of foreign branded mass market cosmetics. Russian ladies have surely been out hoarding because many well known brands are already out of stock or remain in very limited ranges.  However, certain elite products buck the trend.  My wife found that a shop specialized in very pricey world beating Korean and Japanese skin creams have no trouble maintaining stock. Middlemen have already moved in to assure supplies via workarounds, i.e. ‘parallel trading.’ This, of course, adds to price but is affordable to the traditional clientele.

Similarly, when my wife went shopping for luxury Italian fabrics including silks, she found that the stores are receiving daily shipments, presumably also via middlemen and roundabout logistics.

Finally, I offer a comment on the shuttered street level shops and mall tenants that have been gleefully reported by Western journalists:   yes, major Western branded stores have closed down, not all, but a great many.  Their loss is felt on the most prestigious shopping streets and malls, where they bought market share for their products by lavish spending on promotion, including prestige premises.  However, outside these limited addresses, one does not see gaps in the street level stores in Petersburg.  I see more empty store fronts in shopping streets in Brussels than here.

Musical life:

“Ognenenny Angel” [Fiery Angel] at the Mariinsky

This revival of a legacy opera production dating from the early days of Valery Gergiev’s management of the Mariinsky and launched jointly with Covent Garden was an important musical event, very suitable to the first week of the White Nights Festival. The cast was excellent and Gergiev conducted, which speaks for itself. However, this first class event, did not have an audience to match. 

We were sitting in 3^rd row orchestra seats (stalls in British parlance) which were sold to us by the Mariinsky online ticket office at a 40% discount. However, looking at those seated around us, I understood that we had overpaid: they surely got their tickets gratis. The Mariinsky has done this from time to time to fill seats and avoid an embarrassing void just in front of the performers.

This audience listened attentively, applauded where necessary, but was remarkable for being very poorly dressed. Although the Mariinsky stopped setting a dress code many years ago when Western visitors showed up in jeans and sweaters, I had never before seen hefty men wearing singlets take front row seats. Out of 1500 in the audience overall, maybe a dozen men wore suits or sports jackets.  Women were proper but in cheap apparel. For a premiere performance, this sartorial descent of the audience does not augur well for the financial health of the theater going forward.

We also saw another legacy production in the historic Mariinsky-1 building – ‘Eugene Onegin’ as staged by Yuri Temirkanov in the early 1980s. Temirkanov was Gergiev’s immediate predecessor as music director of the Kirov/Mariinsky. He famously also was stage director of two operas, of which Onegin is one. He moved from the Mariinsky to the Philharmonic, where he remained for the rest of his career, combined with principal conductor positions in the USA.

The Temirkanov production of Onegin is visually a delight. Yes, it is retro in the same sense as Zeffirelli’s various productions of Verdi operas were retro when they were kept in repertoire by Met intendant Joseph Volpe for decades.  But Onegin is about a certain place and a certain age. Its ‘updating’ by contemporary stage directors in the West to impress on the audience the universality of the composer’s message by abstract decoration and costumes only creates contradictions between what we see on stage and the words we hear or read overhead, all to the detriment of the work. In the Mariinsky production, when Tatyana tells the Nurse to ‘open the window,’ there is a window to open.

The evening of Onegin was a good demonstration of what Gergiev has made the leitmotiv of this season’s White Nights Festival when foreign performers are largely absent for obvious reasons – to feature young performers who have received their advanced training within the theater but are still unknown to the audience.  Good voices and musicality were in evidence on stage even if the casting was uneven.  However, in all fairness, without big name guest performers from abroad, a ‘buzz’ is missing, and that is what drew in the wealthy Russians in the past.

In St Petersburg, even before the sanctions, wealthy society tended to favor the smaller Mikhailovsky opera house over the Mariinsky on most evenings. Seat prices were high and no seats were discounted for pensioners, none were given out for free at the Mikhailovsky.  The wealthy could feel comfortable with their privilege.  Perhaps the Mariinsky will have to move in this direction to navigate the new age.

Until June, the Mariinsky theaters announced at the start of each show that the audience was obliged to wear masks during the performance for their own safety and that of the staff. In fact, no one wore masks in the theaters, just as no one was wearing masks when shopping, dining in restaurants or in other public spaces, including the metro and buses. Only store personnel and public service workers were wearing masks.  That all ended on 1 June. However, at the theater a temperature check is now being made on everyone just ahead of the passage through metal detectors.

The abandonment of Covid precautions is in fact justified at this time by the very low rate of infection in Russia, including in St Petersburg. About 4,000 new cases are declared daily nationwide, about 400 daily in St Petersburg.  At this rate, the chance of contracting an infection is 50 times less than in the USA at present.

I cannot close this discussion of my evenings at the opera without mentioning our pre-theater dining experience. 

It was a shock to discover on our first evening out that our favorite venue, the French cuisine gourmet restaurant Vincent, just opposite the old theater, closed for good just days before our arrival. It had barely survived the shutdowns during the pandemic, but the latest stress arising from the disappearance of foreign visitors obviously was too much for the owners.  During our visit to another gourmet restaurant, just a few minutes’ walk down the same street, the staff explained that they have been hard hit by a fall-off in clientele.  Indeed, my wife and I were the only diners at 6pm.

For sure, the folks in the audience in the front rows of the Mariinsky during the Fiery Angel performance don’t have the spare cash to frequent pricey restaurants.  However, this restaurant, Repa [the Turnip] has the support of maestro Gergiev for his entertainment of guests and colleagues in a private dining room after shows. It also is aiming for a Michelin Guide star, which, if we speak only of the quality of the fare put out by the imaginative chef, and not about the numbers of diners, they have good reason to expect.

Of course, it is difficult to foresee how the Mariinsky and its commercial neighborhood will weather the storm created by the Western sanctions and disappearance of well-heeled foreign visitors.   A couple of days ago, the morning news on radio Business FM carried relevant information that is promising. The news item was the announcement by Marriott that they will be leaving the Russian market.  The commentators noted that the departure of major hotel brands will change very little in the Russian hospitality industry since all of the hotels are owned by Russian investors. They also remarked that four and five star Moscow hotels are fully booked for the coming two months. The prices for rooms begin at 15,000 rubles per night (220 euros). And whereas in the past their clients were mostly foreign visitors, today the overwhelming share of hotel guests is Russians. 

Tour Groups visiting cultural venues

As the calendar moved on to June, there was a visible uptick in tourists in the district where we have our apartment, the ‘borough’ of Pushkin, just opposite the park and Catherine palaces that have long been a major tourist attraction. To be sure, today there are no Chinese, who swarmed here before the pandemic. Nor are there any other foreign tourist groups at all.  Russian groups are just beginning to show up, but they are still too few to be a nuisance to individual tourists like ourselves or a major financial support to the museums.

A week ago, we visited the Hermitage Museum and it was a delight to be able to stroll around without crossing the currents of groups.  We could approach the best known and loved paintings, inspect them at close distance without being shooed away by tour guides or members of their groups keen to take photos. This is a moment to savor, even if it is depleting the ticket revenues of the management. Absent foreigners, they have had to triple the entry ticket price for Russian pensioners.

As property owners, we follow with interest news about the local real estate market.  I have not seen figures for St Petersburg, but the news from Moscow is that their prices are rising by 30% this year. The average price for apartments in the capital is now over 400,000 rubles per square meter, meaning 6,000 euros.  This is half the price of Paris, but double the price of Brussels. The explanation is price inflation in construction materials and labor. Russians are perplexed, because nearly all construction materials are now produced in country, not imported.  The prices appear to be resisting decreased demand that results from the still high interest rates on new mortgages outside of special government programs.

Life in the countryside

In my essay on impressions from our visit to our dacha in Orlino published a couple of weeks ago, I said that the situation there was stable, with small improvements such as improved roads this past year.  I should have added that over the years we have witnessed fashions that sweep through the town.  Maybe six or seven years ago everyone acquired a Chinese ‘trimmer,’ usually gas powered to cut the ‘grass’, meaning the green undergrowth, mostly weeds that passes for a lawn in many yards including our own. Only a very few have true seeded lawns. 

The next fashion wave was siding.  Siding was being applied to new houses built from cement blocks or from pressed sawdust panels to provide an aesthetically pleasing exterior. Often the colors selected were shocking – pastel pinks more suited to the Caribbean than to the Russian North.

Siding was being applied to century old and decrepit hewn log houses to give them a wholly updated look with clean lines. What lies inside is nobody’s business.  The next fashion wave to hit our countryside was greenhouses.  Every landowner in our area was putting them in.  And if your neighbor had one, you tried to move ahead and put in two. Even neighbors who were seldom seen in our town and could hardly look after the greenhouse plantings had their own greenhouses installed. 

This year, ‘special military operation’ or no, yet another wave of investment and home improvement has rolled over the countryside:  new roofs.  Houses which otherwise have not been altered for 80 years or more now are acquiring roofs based on a new product that looks like ceramic tiles but is laid down in panels, so that the installation is a matter of just a couple of days, and the cost is substantially less than traditional tiles.

On the war:  Que sera, sera

As I remarked in a previous essay, Petersburgers do not talk much about the war.  This is not because of state repression, as many Western media would have us believe. No, it is simply because opinions are divided. People know where their friends, relations, acquaintances stand and they avoid raising issues that would only unleash acrimony. However, when there is anonymity, as for example among taxi drivers or hair dressers, talk flows more freely.

What I hear with regard to the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine falls into the long Russian folk tradition of авось. This philosophy encapsulated in one word corresponds to what the 10 or 15% of the population who profess Islam would express as Inshallah. However, given that Russians are now celebrating the 350^th anniversary of the birth of Peter the Great, who opened his Window on Europe by founding this city on the Neva, it is more appropriate to make reference to European folk thinking from the popular Italian song Que sera, sera:  “what will be will be, the future is not ours to see…”

Along with this sense of resignation before historical forces greater than our abilities, I hear the comment that “every hundred years the Europeans get it into their heads to destroy Russia.” If Europeans see Russia as the aggressor by its move into Ukraine, here the causality is taken back one step to the NATO installations and instructors active in Ukraine over the past 8 years leading to the preparation of an army of 150,000 nationalists prepared to pounce on the Donbas in March 2022.

As for the periodicity of European madness, most adults here think back at once to Napoleon’s Grande Armée of 1812 which attracted adventurers from all of Europe keen to glean spoils of war in Moscow. Then, of course, came World War I and the German assault which drove deep into the territory of the Russian Empire.

Today the hostile position of Chancellor Scholz has touched off neuralgic reactions in the population. His pronouncements on arms shipments to Ukraine, on Germany casting off the pacifism which dominated its policies for the past fifty years to create ‘Europe’s largest army’ set off alarm bells in Russia. These are the policies of the weak leader of a coalition dependent on the Russophobic Greens to stay in power. But the Russians are focused on the results, not the causes of policy.  What they hear brings up memories of German violence and barbarism seventy years ago, all the more so here in Petersburg, where the German Siege cost more than a million civilian lives.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Postscript, 11 June:

Several readers sent in comments to my report on “Russia today at ground level,” demonstrating that they understood fully well my subversive intent.  The point of a detailed and unbiased description of shopping experiences, cultural events and the like was to show that the ongoing war and the fierce sanctions imposed on Russia by the Collective West have not deprived Russians of their pleasures and normal life.

One or two readers sent in spoiler remarks, asking how Russians are coping with spare parts for the autos now that manufacturers have cut ties with the country, whether white goods such as refrigerators and washing machines have exploded in price for the same reason, and much more.  But such attempts to denigrate what I reported for failing to be fully comprehensive, beyond the capacity of any one observer, are just a variation on the theme that one fool can ask a hundred questions more than a wise man can answer.

Without claiming to be that ‘wise man’ I answered the questions by showing how in a couple of product categories that I or my wife saw on sale, parallel trading was already ensuring the supply on the Russian market of goods that their manufacturers no longer market directly in Russia.  Nearly everything that Western firms have withdrawn from Russia is purely civil in application, has no dual use and is not itself prohibited for sale to Russia. Therefore it may be taken for granted that most everything will continue to be available to Russian consumers if at a moderately higher price. Or the market niche will be filled at lower prices by enterprising Russian manufacturers.

As regards software, including apps, I do not doubt the ingenuity of Russian programmers and the appearance of replacement services that are Russian designed and brought to market.  After all Yandex, not Google, was the largest Search Engine in Russia before 24 February, and V Kontakte, not LinkedIn or Facebook, was the largest social network.

Peace Plan

I take pleasure in announcing the publication earlier today in The National Interest, Washington, D.C. of a Peace Plan prepared jointly with my friend Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/building-lasting-settlement-ukraine-202920

Postscript:

Not surprising, but disappointing nonetheless: I have received some poisonous comments on the PeacePlan following my posting of the National Interest link.  It just goes to prove that too many readers of non-mainstream analysis are not looking for new insights, just looking for pro-Russian, anti-Western soulmates and penpals.

When you seek Veritas, be prepared to wear a barrel and carry a candle.

Estonia and the Russian World

As noted in my essay a couple of days ago,  I returned home to Brussels from St Petersburg, in two steps:  by bus to Tallinn, followed by a forty-eight hour stay there before resuming my trip by plane.  For reasons unknown, the only bus service to Tallinn departs Petersburg at an ungodly 6.30 am and the only direct flight from Tallinn to Brussels departs at the same ungodly hour.  Hence, we decided to break the trip and allow for some recovery in between. This also provided an excellent opportunity to explore further the questions that arose on our brief stop in Tallinn on our way East:  namely how to reconcile the country’s Russophobic notoriety at the national government level with the omnipresent Russian speakers on the streets of the Old Town and among all the personnel of the hospitality industry whom we encountered.

The New York Times regularly features Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas’ anti-Putin pronouncements as she vies with her colleagues in Latvia and Lithuania for leadership in the sanctions crusade.  For its part, Russian state television airs footage of Estonians removing Soviet war memorials as proof of the hostile intentions of their neighbors.

The reality of relations between Estonia and the Russian World is more complex, as my little two days of exploration showed.  But then again, as I knew well before this, though all three Baltic States are lumped together by Western media as a bloc in the EU that is and has long been pressing for anti-Russian policies, their domestic treatment of their Russian speakers differs greatly. 

In what follows, note that I use the term “Russian speakers” rather than “ethnic Russians” because the population in question largely settled in the Baltics during the post-WWII Soviet period and included many from Ukraine and Belarus who shared the language with their ethnic Russian fellow settlers.

The most egregious violator of the human rights of their Russian speaking residents is Latvia, where the percentage of Russians holding Latvian passports at the time of national independence in 1991 was 40% or more. Latvia then stripped of citizenship all those who had settled in their country after 1939, effectively making 300,000 Russian speakers stateless. They also subjected these Russian speakers to restrictions on their property rights and on employment possibilities, including the levels to which they could rise. Effectively Latvia installed an Apartheid regime which they maintain to this day, whatever mouth honor is given to “European values.” Moreover, Latvia also tolerates fascist parades honoring Nazi collaborators from WWII, similar to the Bandera movement in Ukraine. And it has closed down public and church schools that conduct classes in Russian. Given the country’s shortage of teachers generally, this means that many students learn their lessons in the broken Latvian of their native Russian speaker educators.

The least friction with its Russian-speaking minority is in Lithuania, where Russians never counted more than 15% of the population and where another significant minority, Polish speakers, also had to be tolerated.

Finally, there is Estonia, which has 320,000 Russian speakers among a total population of 1.3 million. And those Russian speakers are concentrated in the national capital, Tallinn, where they constitute a substantial majority of the 426,000 population there. Inescapably, the city government in Tallinn is not aligned with the anti-Russian policies of the national government.

So much for statistics.  How did my experience of two days in Tallinn reflect or contradict these generalities?

Without further ado, I say that I found two parallel worlds – ethnic Estonians and Russian speakers. They each seem comfortable with themselves, with no obvious complexes and rather little intercourse.

Our hotel the first night was the famous and unique Hotel Viru, just a couple of minutes walk from the Old Town. This 23 story building towers over the city. In Soviet times it was the best hotel in the city and I stayed there when passing through on business in 1990. Today it is owned by the leading Finnish hospitality company Sokos. It has been renovated to high international standards, though one typically Socialist feature of architecture has remained, namely the main dining room where breakfasts are served in the morning and where a cabaret show is offered on some evenings. The seating capacity must be several hundred, so that it is not the place for a romantic dinner. But it serves tourist groups very efficiently, which is fine for those stopping in Tallinn on their way to the cruise ships putting in at the nearby port.

The Viru was doing good business during our stay. At breakfast nearly all places were taken.  Not a Russian to be seen or heard.  The hotel receptionist confirmed my hunch: 90% or more of the guests are Finns, who take the two hour ferries from Helsinki to enjoy a low-cost vacation trip; the remainder are ethnic Estonians. My point is that Tallinn is receiving a good share of its tourist visitors from outside Russia, but they travel their own separate route from the Russian groups and individual tourists.

The Viru is also just a five minutes’ walk from Estonia’s cultural holy sites, the Concert Hall and the Opera-Ballet House.  I call them holy sites, because they were built the year following the end of WWI in what was unmistakably a political statement of the newly independent Estonia, that it owned its high culture.

By good luck, the opera house was performing Tosca on our first night in the city. The hall was only two-thirds sold and we easily got fifth row orchestra (stalls) seats at the very democratic price of 32 euros each. The production was good, both vocalists and the orchestra. Happily the stage décor and costumes were simple and non-intrusive. But our attention was on the audience:  100% ethnic Estonians judging by the chatter we heard in the café – buffet, which was heavily frequented.

 The food and drink on offer in the opera café was very traditional: high quality smoked salmon sandwiches and little cakes, while sparkling wine was the best selling beverage.  Most of the audience was provincial in dress. They could just as easily have been opera-goers in stodgy Ghent or Antwerp. The opera house, which seats perhaps 600, is in impeccable condition, perfectly maintained and with all essential conveniences such as elevators for the mobility impaired and 21^st century toilets.

In the adjacent building, a very Estonian event was planned for the evening of the 9^th, which we sadly would have to miss: a special concert celebrating the upcoming 85^th birthday of the Estonian-American conductor Neeme Järvi, who has had an outstanding career at home and abroad in both Europe and the USA, where he presently resides. His family constitutes a musical dynasty in the country, which punches above its weight in musical culture.

My argument for parallel worlds of ethnic Russians and Estonians is borne out by our visits to two of the most important tourist sites in and around Tallinn, both former palaces dating back to the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when what we now call Estonia was part of the Russian Empire: the Kaila Joa Schloss Fall museum-hotel and the Kadriorg Palace Art Museum.

The Russian essence of these attractions is not something overlooked or distorted by official Estonia. Even today Russian “occupation” of Estonia describes only the post-WWII period.  Even today, these magnificent cultural monuments from tsarist Russia are substantially supported by the Estonian national government in the frank recognition that Estlandiya (as the territory was known following its conquest from Sweden in the Northern War) was a jewel of the Empire. In the mid-18^th century, Revel (present day Tallinn) was the largest seaport in the Empire. The mineral water spas of the city and its environs attracted emperors and empresses including Elizabeth and Catherine II, extending into the first half of the 19^th century during the reign of Nicholas I. In this regard, today’s “cancel Russia” movement has had zero impact on Estonian domestic policies pertaining to culture and the arts.

This reasonableness or common sense behavior of Estonians matches what I discovered on an earlier day visit to Tallinn five years ago during a port stop on a Baltic Sea cruise. We visited the city history museum and found in the entrance hall the disarming statement that in the past 2,000  years prior to the post-Soviet independence in 1991, the lands comprising modern Estonia had known political sovereignty only for the twenty year interwar period ending in 1939. The summary history for visitors went on to say that the native peoples of this land, the ethnic Estonians, had been farmers primarily, and they had lived under a succession of foreign overlords: German, Swedish and for the last two hundred years, Russian.  This sobering truth necessarily is an antidote to any nationalist fever which might otherwise spoil the interethnic relations today.

The Schloss Fall museum-hotel situated at Keila Joa, about 32 km along the coast southwest of Tallinn is unique in more than the dimension of Russian-Estonian consciousness. I was persuaded to go there by my wife, who is a full-blooded representative of the Russian intelligentsia as well as a card carrying member of Petersburg’s Union of Journalists. Keila Joa resonates among her peers because the “castle”  there symbolizes the intertwined relations between Fighters for Liberty and Defenders of Autocracy, between the Decembrists and their persecutors in the first half of the 19^th century and beyond. The story of the castle is the story of two fabled families, the Benckendorffs and the Volkonsky’s.

The builder of the castle, Count Alexander Benckendorff, was a bemedaled officer in the Napoleonic wars. Benckendorff was born in Revel (Tallinn) as a member of the Baltic Germans who were long in the service of the Russian throne.  His place of birth explains his decision to build a family residence at a very picturesque point one kilometer from the Estonian coast, overlooking the fast moving Keila river and a dramatic six meter high waterfall. The 20 hectare property is today open to visitors, who can enjoy trails in the forest.

Count Benckendorff was a close associate of Alexander I whom he served as aide-de-camp. When, following the death of Alexander in December 1825,  a contingent of officers revolted, seeking to replace autocracy with constitutional rule, Benckendorff was the officer in charge of putting down the insurrection. . He subsequently had responsibility for trying and sentencing the “Decembrists.” Several were executed while most were sent into domestic exile in Siberia, where they remained for decades and were known for spreading education and Enlightenment to their remote part of the Empire. Among them was Major General Sergei Volkonsky.

In the new reign of Nicholas I, Benckendorff became his close advisor and was appointed head of the political police, or Third Department of His Majesty’s Chancellery, a post he retained for life.  However, in the years following his death, under guidance of his widow, the family intermarried with the Volkonsky’s and ultimately the property passed into their hands, where it remained until the Revolution. A scion of the family is well known in Estonia today as a singer and stage performer.

Be that as it may, the buildings on the site were gutted after the Revolution and remained in a dilapidated state until 2010 when the Estonian government approved a formula by which the complex would be totally restored by private investors for dual use as a commercial hotel and also a state museum. The result is extraordinary:  visitors to the castle are treated to the home-like comfort of being able to touch everything. You can seat yourself in the well upholstered divans and armchairs of the ground floor rooms to quietly contemplate the interior design and reproduction paintings of Russian officers who fought in the Napoleonic Wars and other imperial statesmen. These are reproductions of originals in the State Hermitage Museum of St Petersburg, as is plainly noted.  Some of the furniture is antique.

The castle building was designed in the Gothic Revival style by the young architect Andrei Stackenschneider, who was then serving as an assistant to the chief architect of the St Isaac’s Cathedral in Petersburg, the Frenchman Auguste de Montferrand. Later in his career, he became in his own right a well known architect of important palaces and townhouses in central Petersburg. 

The completion of the castle in 1833 was marked by a visit from the emperor Nicholas I himself. During his stay, the guests were treated to the performance of what was immediately approved as Russia’s national anthem, God Save the Tsar, written by another multi-functional young courtier, Alexei Lvov.

As a further commentary on Estonia’s relations with its Russian World past and present, I note that the private investors in the reconstruction of the castle complex were three:  two Russians and one Estonian. The Russians sold out their shares three years ago, and the complex now is owned fully by the Estonian partner, who is an interior decorator by profession and the owner of the Luxor furniture stores that you see in Tallinn and elsewhere in the country.

For all of the above reasons, given the rich history of the site, it is well worth considering not only a day visit but placing a reservation to spend the night. Accommodations in the 21-room Keila Joa hotel can be reserved on booking.com, on tripadvisor.com and from the Schloss Fall website.

The Kadriorg Palace has occupied an outstanding place in Estonian history both under the tsars and during the country’s period of independence, when it served alternately as the residence of the President and as an art museum. Construction was begun in 1718, a decade after the military victory over Sweden that transferred these lands to Russia.  The palace, which was intended as a gift to the Empress Catherine (hence the name in Estonian) was completed in 1725, the year of Peter the Great’s death.  As Wikipedia informs us, between 1741 and 1917, the palace housed the civilian governor of the Governorate of Estonia.  After WWII, the palace definitively became an art museum, though the buildings were neglected and were in bad need of renovation at the time of Estonia’s independence in 1991. 

The renovation work was supported by the government of Sweden, which was at the time heavily involved in the Estonian economy and particularly in the banking system. The palace reopened to the public in 2000 as the home of a specific part of the Estonian national art collection. The ground floor displays the extensive and high quality paintings of European art, in particular Dutch canvases of the 17^th century which were widely acquired by royalty and connoisseurs throughout Europe in the 18^th century and beyond. The second floor displays the much smaller collection of Russian art, though I emphasize that the works are of high quality and very representative of important art movements in Russia during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. There are serious paintings here by Korovin, Aivazovsky, Kustodiev, Petrov-Vodkin, among others.  None has been taken down or turned to the wall.

I close out this sharing of impressions from our stay in Tallinn with a couple of remarks on my visit to one of the largest shopping centers in the city, thye Ulemiste Centre, near the airport. It is just across the road from the hotel where we spent the second and last night of our stay in view of our early flight departure the next morning.

Well designed, handsomely executed, this shopping center seems to be doing well. The large parking area was nearly full and there was a good crowd of shoppers circulating inside. Every one of them speaking Russian. Well dressed, relaxed. If you want a picture of successful integration of a minority population into national llife, this was it.

Oh, yes, one more thing: television. We found in our hotel room that Estonian state television also broadcasts in Russian. That channel provided us with good, entertaining films in the original sound tracks, whether English or Russian. It was a pleasure to watch a Russian channel that is not weighed down with war reporting.

If Kiev treated its Russian speaking minority in any way like what the Estonians have done, there would be no war today and the world would be pulled back from the abyss of Armageddon that presently drains the joy from our lives.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Belarus Radio – Television

I am pleased to share the link to my half hour interview yesterday with Belarus Radio Television.  I have appeared on their broadcasts several times before.  The video was a good opportunity to discuss the effect of sanctions on Russian society and economy, and also to consider what the end game in Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine is likely to be.

To this I can add one other interview, two days later, with a separate Belarus broadcaster, the television channel ONT, this time conducted in Russian.

Analysis of the French legislative election on Iran’s Press TV

It was a delight to participate yesterday evening in a featured news program on Press TV just as the results of the voting were coming in.  It is quite remarkable that the news room and their correspondent in Paris took a line of commentary that would fit perfectly within the reportage of the French mainstream news Establishment, Figaro or Le Monde. Their top question was whether Macron’s movement, which now had lost its absolute majority, could regain control of Parliament by forming a coalition with the traditional centrist party, the Republicans. Their top concern was whether this would enable Macron to proceed with his neo-Liberal domestic reform policies, such as raising the legal retirement age from 62 to 65.

It was my pleasure to throw a spanner in the works and redirect attention to Macron’s foreign policy, namely his support for Ukraine in the ongoing military conflict with Russia, a policy which the nominally Leftist Opposition coalition of Mélenchon shares fully. Indeed, judging by foreign policy issues, there was only one true Opposition in this election, Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement national, which seeks good relations with Russia and distances itself from NATO. Note that Le Pen’s party did better in yesterday’s elections than ever before and will capture as many as 10 times the number of seats it held before the elections.

As I argued in yesterday’s mini-debate, continuation of the war thanks to French and other European and American military and financial assistance to Kiev, and the continued imposition of draconian sanctions on Russia particularly in the energy sphere, are feeding an inflationary cycle that will overwhelm political and economic life in France in the coming months, especially when the home heating season begins.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/06/19/684204/France-Parliamentary-Vote

Right between the eyes: Putin to the West at the St Petersburg Economic forum

I have taken my time preparing a commentary on Putin’s speech to the Plenary Session of the St Petersburg Economic Forum last Friday, and I am well satisfied that this was the right decision.  Others have written about the content and delivery of the speech. Still others have written about the Forum itself in its twenty-fifth anniversary, with a particular emphasis placed on the absence of foreign government leaders and of high level contingents of Western businessmen.

 What I intend to do here is to go beyond these narrow constraints and to put the event in the broader context of several other important international developments that have occurred in the past few days, many of which are interrelated. They have barely received the attention they deserve in global media and I intend to make amends here.

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The slogan of this year’s Forum was “A New World. New Possibilities.”  Put another way, in terms well familiar to the Western business community, the logic here is not to let a good crisis go to waste but to react in a constructive manner that takes the economy and standard of living to new heights previously unattainable through import substitution, which is just another name for reindustrialization.

 Both in the specialized sessions which were broadcast live and in the plenary session to which Putin spoke, the challenges posed by current, draconian Western sanctions on Russia were spelled out in great detail without any self-deception or gloss. The same was true of businessmen speaking truth to Power when commenting on the Government’s proposed programs to help the economy during the transition period to new logistical solutions, new trade flows and new local manufacturing:  “don’t do the usual thing and build a bridge to the middle of the river; go all the way with radical new solutions and in particular with a very cheap credit policy to provide working capital to where it is needed most.”  This kind of talk which I heard in the session chaired by Sberbank general director Gref, is both responsible and bold.

 Indeed, the most relevant adjective to describe the proceedings would be “frank.”  Political correctness was no longer being practiced.  Interlocutors in the West were no longer called “partners.”  In his speech, Putin led the way, criticizing the American administration and the European bureaucratic elites setting policy in Brussels for economic illiteracy.

For his part, the most honored international guest at the Forum, Kazakhstan’s president Kasym-Zhomart Tokaev, did not mince words either when answering a question put to him by the moderator, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan during Q&A following the keynote speech:  whether he recognizes the Donbas republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states?  “No,” he said, without hesitation though he was seated on stage just a couple of meters from Vladimir Putin.

Tokaev explained that the United Nations Charter contains two contradictory principles:  the territorial integrity of Member States and the right of populations within any State to self-determination, meaning declaration of their independence without asking or receiving the permission of the Government of the Member State. In this context, Tokaev added, if the right of secession were to take the upper hand, the present membership of the UN at 200 or so countries would balloon out to over 500 and this would create chaos. Accordingly, Kazakhstan does not recognize the independence of Kosovo, which Russia has used as a precedent for its own actions with respect to various ‘frozen conflicts’ in Former Soviet Republics, such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  This being said, it was also clear by his presence at the Forum that Tokaev supports Russia economically and politically in its ongoing proxy war with the United States on Ukrainian territory.

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Vladimir Putin’s speech to the Forum lasted an hour. The most interesting remarks were in the first 15 minutes, when he argued the case that the present grave challenges to the global economic, financial and political systems have their source in wrong-headed policies of the Collective West.

The West’s abuse of the printing presses to keep state institutions and business afloat during the Covid pandemic through emissions of currency not covered by ongoing supply of goods and services started an inflationary process that long preceded the conflict in Ukraine. It drove up energy and food costs dramatically, and the inflation was then further aggravated by the “thoughtless” sanctions imposed on Russian hydrocarbons, fertilizer and agricultural products as from 24 February. 

To be specific, Putin remarked that in the past two years, the money supply in the United States had expanded by 38%, an amount that normally would take decades.  In Europe, the money supply was increased over this period by 20%.  Then Putin matched these facts with the trade figures for the United States. Before the excess emissions, import into the United States had been running at 250 billion dollars a month.  By February 2022, monthly imports were at 350 billion. That is to say, they tracked precisely the increases in the amount of money in circulation. 

From this Putin made the concluding argument that the United States and Europe were now practicing an updated version of colonialism. Like a ‘vacuum cleaner’ they are buying up goods and services from the rest of the world in exchange for their own currency which is depreciating in value with uncovered emissions. This, he said, explains the near doubling in the price of food products globally over the past year.

There were other points in Putin’s economics lesson, but these give a good idea of the contempt in which he holds Western politicians and elites, who, in his view, have not absorbed the lessons handed down in elementary school and are now trying, in the global Information War, to put the blame on Russia for “Putin’s inflation.”

                                                                  *****

Traditionally there has been a Master of Ceremonies or moderator to oversee the Q&A that follows the presidential address to the Plenary Session of the Forum. Traditionally this role was given to celebrities from Western mainstream media – presenters from CNN, MSNBC and the like. Generally they were given their lines by their employers and would ask once, twice and repeatedly the same offensive questions while ignoring completely the detailed answers given by Vladimir Vladimirovich.  This show of collegiality and jollity by the Russians is something I never quite understood, but then I never understood why so many of the American academics that the Kremlin invited year after year to the annual Valdai gatherings were incorrigible Putin and Russia haters.

Under present circumstances, the Forum organizers had to fall back on domestic candidates for the role of MC and the assignment was given to RT’s Margarita Simonyan. 

In the past I have been critical of Simonyan’s stewardship at RT, which presented all too many shows run by failed or overaged journalists from Western mainstream, by people with no knowledge of or feel for Russia.  In what I saw of Simonyan’s performance last Friday, I will freely admit that whatever her competence as a news station manager, she is an outstanding journalist.

This very point was highlighted at the outset of Sunday evening’s premier talk show with Vladimir Solovyov.  His opening remarks were to the effect that Simonyan had been given the rare assignment to moderate for the country’s President and had performed this journalistic task at the level of Olympian gold. Having tossed to her this bouquet of roses, he asked her to comment on her experience of working hand in glove with Putin for nearly two hours of Q&A.

Simonyan’s remarks are worth repeating here. She expressed her surprise that Putin showed up in such a good mood, fully confident that he had been making the right decisions with respect to the start and the prosecution of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.  And she shared her impression of his being in excellent physical and mental form. Not only did he perform on stage with her for three hours, but later in the evening she saw him at one gathering, in which he maintained the same high energy level. And still later, after leaving her group, she knew that he went on to yet other meetings. Her conclusion was that all talk of his suffering from some illness is belied by this evident vigor.

Simonyan noted that she saw it as her obligation not only to ask the questions that are the talk of Russia’s expert community but also the number one question being asked by ‘simple people,’ as those experts would condescendingly call the mass of the population. That question was: why has Russia not responded to the daily rocket and artillery attacks on the civilian population in Donetsk, to the attacks across the border on towns within the Russian Federation, by doing what Putin had threatened weeks ago, namely to bomb the ‘decision making centers’ of Ukraine, starting with the Ministry of Defense. 

She said that Putin offered a comprehensive answer to the question. First, an all-out assault on the Ukrainian positions from which the artillery and rocket firings were hitting the DNR would lead to a great number of civilian casualties since the Ukrainian forces intentionally positioned themselves in residential areas so as to invite ‘indiscriminate’ shelling by Russian return fire. Moreover, the Russian objective was to keep civilian casualties to a minimum since these were their future citizens. Secondly, a blitzkrieg assault would be very costly in casualties among Russian military and had to be avoided whenever possible. Therefore the preferred method was encirclement of the Ukrainian positions and a calm wait for them to run out of provisions and surrender. When asked what were Russia’s red lines that would trigger a more forceful response, Putin refused to be drawn.

                                                                       *****

There are indications that not only friends of Russia but also its most fierce enemies were paying close attention to the proceedings of the Petersburg Economic Forum.

Today the Ukrainian armed forces struck and did great damage to an offshore Crimean oil drilling platform in the Black Sea on which more than a hundred workers were stationed. More than 90 were evacuated but at least seven are unaccounted for.  This dramatic and  highly provocative attack by Ukrainian fighter planes and vessels is said to be Zelensky’s response to a Russian missile strike a day earlier that destroyed the main refinery supplying fuel to the Ukrainian military. It is also a clear attempt to test Putin’s red lines and continued restraint in pursuing the military operation.

But this is not all. Among the various governors of Russia’s constituent federal units attending the Forum, state television journalists broadcast an interview on Friday morning with the governor of Kaliningrad, Anton Alikhanov, a vigorous 37 year old who spoke fluently and confidently about the situation of his oblast.  When asked about relations with the neighboring Baltic States, he commented that all mutual obligations were being respected and that transportation of freight to and from the rest of the RF via the corridor passing through Lithuania was operating normally.

However, on Friday evening Lithuania announced a partial blockade on rail traffic to Kaliningrad. Specifically, all goods subject to EU sanctions would no longer be allowed to transit their country. This would amount to about half of all railway freight, and would present Kaliningrad with a host of problems to resolve if alternate, sea transportation has to be put in place.

By Saturday morning, Russian news channels were discussing the counter-leverage Russia may exert in response to the Lithuanian move. They claim that the free transit of goods between the Russian Federation and its outpost, Kaliningrad, was a precondition agreed by all parties at the start of the 1990s when Russia accepted the line of its international border with Lithuania. If free transit was now being withheld, Russia might cancel its acceptance of the borders. As regards leverage of a non-legal variety, threats were being made to cut the supply of Russian electricity to Lithuania, which is a major element in the country’s energy balance.

This spat over borders comes in the context of tensions between Russia and Finland. As Minister of Foreign Affairs Lavrov mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Finland’s possibly joining NATO would compel Russia to reopen an old issue of property rights over an important canal in Finnish Karelia. This could pose a serious security risk for Finland.

In short, the whole question of Russia’s relations with its Baltic neighbors is heating up.  In this context, it is necessary to recall Vladimir Putin’s public remarks in the past week or so that Russia has no ambition of territorial expansion but will only reabsorb and consolidate what has been Russia’s in the past. This statement immediately set off alarm bells in Helsinki. After all, Finland had for a hundred years until WWI been a constituent if separately administered and privileged part of the Russian Empire.

What we are witnessing is a potential vector of escalation in America’s proxy war with Russia on Ukrainian territory.  While many commentators in Washington speculate on the possibility of Russia resorting to nuclear weapons if it should fear that it is losing the fight in Ukraine, I believe that is a phony issue, given that Russia is very unlikely to fail in its Ukrainian campaign and given that it has barely begun to implement the conventional weapons systems at its disposal and to destroy the infrastructure and major cities of Ukraine as it can and may yet do. However, Russia’s success in withstanding the full weight of NATO in Ukraine is probably changing its calculus on how to deal with the Baltics now that they are using their exaggerated sense of security from NATO’s Article 5 provisions to bait and provoke Russia. A more muscular if still reactive Russian posture is clearly emerging.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

An Iron Curtain descends on Europe and the USA

In recent weeks, I have received a number of complimentary emails from readers of my essays who took note of what they consider my even-handed approach to the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian military conflict which is at variance with the fired-up Russophile and Russophobe positions that we find daily in alternative and mainstream media respectively. Some have gone on to say that they have profited from my reporting on the content and changing views aired on Russian political talk shows these past few months, all of which is rarely featured in mainstream Western news and analysis. My intent in such reporting was to ensure that at least some people here understand what Ukraine and its Western backers are up against, so as to better understand the course of the fighting on the ground and who may be winning.

In this context, I announce with sadness that the job of even-handed reporting has just become much more difficult as a result of Eutelsat’s implementation yesterday of a policy decision announced just over a month ago, but which went unnoticed by most everyone, myself included.

I quote from Google Search:

“Eutelsat to remove banned Russian channels. Eutelsat ready to immediately stop the rebroadcasting of the Russian channels RTR Planeta and Rossiya 24 on its satellites on June 25.  13 May 2022”

Indeed, the main state news channels of the Russian Federation can now no longer be received via satellite antennas here in Belgium or elsewhere on the Continent. They are partially and sporadically accessible on the internet via www.smotrim.ru but the level of interference from Western censors makes such viewing a dismal exercise. “Freezing” of frames seems to be most common with respect to the talk shows “Sixty Minutes” and “Evening with Solovyov,” two programs which I had been following and reporting on most regularly. However, it also is applied against Russian shows which might be characterized as being simply entertainment, such as the currently running historical serial about the life and times of the 18^th century tsarina Elizabeth. I dare anyone to get more than a minute or two into the broadcast before the curtain comes down, so to speak.

The curtain in question is an updated Iron Curtain, which this time has been dropped on our heads by the powers that be in Washington.  After all, it is Washington that pressured the French controlled Eutelsat rebroadcaster of television channels that dominates the European and other global markets to throw out the Russians.

The argument behind that demand was to exclude “Russian propaganda” from the airwaves. 

In the spirit of fairmindedness with which I opened this essay, I agree that Russian state television is practicing propagandistic methods insofar as it withholds certain information from viewers while promoting other information favorable to its paymasters.  For example, on Russian state television news you will not find a word about the civilian casualties and damage to residential buildings of Russian artillery and rocket attacks on Kharkov. You are shown only the civilian casualties and damage to residential buildings in Donetsk and towns of the Donbas caused by Ukrainian artillery and rocket strikes. 

On the other hand, however, European and U.S. newscasts feature the damage caused by Russian strikes on Ukrainian towns while saying not a word about the sufferings of the Donbas population from military assaults by Ukrainian forces.  Just as they have been entirely silent about such suffering and death among the Donbas population that Kiev has inflicted on them for the past eight years, since the outbreak of the civil war in 2014.

Each side in the Ukrainian conflict accuses the other side of using cluster bombs and other internationally prohibited weapons against civilian populations.  These accusations are put on air by Russian and Western news programs only as they are set out by their favored respective side.

My point is very simple: by silencing the so-called Russian propagandists, Western propagandists have the field to themselves here in Belgium, in the broader European Union and in North America. The possibilities for the public to form an independent view of what is going on are choked off, and with that there is no basis for informed policy discussion in the expert community. As The Washington Post so nicely puts it: democracy dies in darkness.

And what about the Russian side? Are they also cut off and ignorant as my remarks on coverage of casualties above might suggest?  I commented on this question in my travel report on my six week stay in Petersburg that began in May:  Western news channels have been removed from the cable television distributors in the city. For this I blame not Russian government prohibitions but the commercial decisions of Western content providers who terminated their contracts with Russian distributors just as did the Hollywood studios. Meanwhile, Western stations remain accessible on the internet without interference and they remain accessible on satellite television.

At my dacha, I had no difficulty receiving the BBC and Bloomberg for free courtesy of my parabolic antenna. How long this will be the case given the tit-for-tat nature of the relationship between the West and Russia generally I cannot say. But if someone does pull the plug on Western ‘propaganda’ in Russia, it will be in response to the West’s dropping the Iron Curtain on Russia, not the other way around.

It is sad that Western leaders are destroying with their own hands the underpinnings of democracy at home through this censorship.  The only likely result will be total shock and surprise throughout the Western world when the Russians complete their liberation of Donbas, take the Ukrainian Black Sea coast including Odessa and declare victory over what will by then be an utterly destroyed Ukrainian army.

In the meantime, under greatly constrained conditions, I will try my best to follow the Russian side of the story on talk shows, on news reports of Russian war correspondents embedded with their forces on the front lines, and to share with readers what appears to be afoot on the other side of the barricades.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Just half a functioning brain will suffice to see through propaganda

The elites of the European Union who are running the show seem to have a contemptuous view of their fellow citizens.  Russian media must be banned from the air waves lest the poor simpletons who call themselves Europeans be led astray by the Kremlin!

I submit that the people could not care less about the entire fuss over Ukraine at the ideological level of democracy versus autocracy, or civilization over barbarism.  They care about their fuel bills, about rising costs at the supermarket check-out. Full stop.

This indifference to the military and economic warfare being led from Brussels is sad, though it may yet be reversed and shift towards street protests in the coming months. Not because of Russian propaganda, which is surely now nipped in the bud, but because the pain being inflicted on the population by the economic kamikaze political leadership through sanctions on Russia becomes unbearable here.

Meanwhile, I offer some further thoughts bearing on my essay of two days ago about the New Iron Curtain.

First, to anyone with half a brain and a bit of mental concentration, the contradictions in Kiev-Collective West news (read propaganda) are glaring and self-defeating without an adversary in the ring. 

I noted more than a month ago such contradictions in a BBC report from Kharkov on supposedly savage Russian artillery fire against residential buildings  A well-coiffed and dressed female reporter in the foreground pointed to a partially burned out high rise building a hundred meters or so behind her, saying:  ‘just imagine, four people died here under Russian artillery fire!’  Four people died in the destruction of a multistory apartment building?  A better interpretation is that the building was empty except for Ukrainian military supplies or sheltered heavy weapons, as the Russians said at the time.

Over this past weekend, a similar bit of nonsense was reported by Euronews and other Western media with respect to a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in downtown Kiev.  Four of the nine stories were destroyed, but only one or two casualties were reported by the Ukrainians.  Was this not a building from which the civilian residents had been chased out and a weapons production line had been installed, as the Russians claimed?

Now today’s featured headline report on the morning edition of Euronews speaks of a Russian air launched rocket attack on a shopping center in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, Poltava oblast.  The smoldering remains, the twisted iron frame are shown on our screens. Zelensky claims that more than a thousand civilians had been sheltering there.  Yet the reported deaths were a dozen or so.  Does this make any sense if you put your mind to it?  The simple answer is ‘no.’  That is to say, you see through the propaganda without even hearing the Russian explanation of what happened: namely that just 90 meters away was a factory renovating Ukrainian tanks and other military vehicles that was also being used to store newly arrived Western armaments; it was the primary target of the Russian bombs. Secondary explosions there set off fires in what was an abandoned shopping mall.

In closing, I am obliged to correct my remarks about the accessibility of the Russian point of view on www.smotrim.ru:  I have now discovered that the live broadcasts , as opposed to the shows already aired and stored on the site, can be viewed without difficulty. This means there is no need to find exotic hi-tech solutions that some readers have proposed in the Comments section.

 I also note that the Russians are seeking and finding alternative ways of presenting their point of view on youtube, from which the official Russian channels have been banned.  Yesterday I received a link to a Russian language news program in which I appeared in vignette interviews. The production company is called “Mir” and is an offshoot of the Community of Independent States ( CIS), the organization of a dozen or so former Soviet republics.  Formally, legally it is not a Russian entity and so it slips past the youtube censors. I assume that the cat and mouse game of the Information War will continue to evolve.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

More Press TV from Iran

I am pleased to share the link to yesterday’s live broadcast of Press TV dedicated to the ongoing NATO meeting in Madrid and to the new NATO doctrine identifying Russia as the main strategic threat to the Alliance.

Regrettably some technical problems with Skype interfered with the recording at times and cut short my concluding answer to the question about the prospects for world peace which I had hoped would end the program on an upbeat note. My point was that that if the United States never came close to attacking North Korea under Trump, fearing its couple of nuclear armed missiles, it is most unlikely that the US and NATO will enter into direct military action against Russia, with its several thousand latest generation missiles and nuclear triad. In the announcement of the 300,000 troops to be kept on high alert, NATO leaders are just engaging in more posturing and self-congratulations that someone, meaning taxpayers, will have to pay for.

I call attention to the calm and highly professional direction of the panel discussion by the Press TV team. In other dimensions, the country’s leadership is presently heavily engaged in diplomacy directed at raising Iran’s international profile.  Iran’s president Raisi is now in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, participating in a Caspian Summit with other regional leaders including Vladimir Putin. And Iran, alongside Argentina, has just publicly announced its application to join the BRICS group.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/112012

Post Script, 30 June 2022:  My misjudgment of the likelihood of Sweden and Finland overcoming Turkish objections to their accession to NATO may be forgiven in light of the apparent concessions made to Erdogan at the Summit that were unthinkable till now. Latest reports suggest that the Swedes have agreed to turn over to Turkey 73 Kurdish ‘terrorists’ now living in Sweden. Previously it was said that such an about face on the longstanding Swedish policy of welcoming Kurdish refugees would bring down the government. Moreover, the United States did its part with respect to carrots:  Biden has promised to remove all obstacles to Ankara’s purchase of F16s.  Meanwhile, Russian talk show experts are saying that the horse trading with Erdogan may not be over, and that he may yet extract further concessions as the ratification process of the new candidate members proceeds to the parliaments of the Member States. In the Turkish parliament new objections to the deal may emerge which must be overcome by further actions of the Scandinavians.

Russian television celebrates full ‘liberation’ of the Lugansk oblast (LNR)

To my good fortune, here in Belgium internet reception of www.smotrim.ru  now works perfectly with respect to live broadcasts. I am thus able to share with readers impressions from the programs I follow most closely: Sixty Minutes, Evening with Vladimir Solovyov and News of the Week hosted by Dmitri Kiselyov.

The past week provided Russian state television with a cornucopia of important events foreign and domestic.  These included, in the West, the gathering of the G7 leaders in Schloss Elmau, Bavaria and the NATO Summit in Madrid. At both events, Russia, its president Vladimir Putin, and the ongoing war in Ukraine were central to the talks and therefore of special interest to RF audiences. 

Russian television coverage was partly provided by Vesti correspondents permanently based in the EU,  like Anastasya Popova, partly by reporting from major Western television channels and print media. It bears mention that some of the segments from foreign television were quite extensive, giving a full airing to the anti-Russian rants. The Russian programmers obviously had no doubt that the absurdities and plain ignorance exposed in the speeches and comments to journalists of one after another EU or NATO worthy ensured that no one in their own audience would be misled and that a great many would be amused.

The overriding nature of the Russian television presentations was mockery of the European leaders for their servility to Uncle Sam and persistence in ratcheting up sanctions against Russia that are destructive of their own economies as proven by separate footage on consumer reactions to the rampant inflation and threatening shortages of gas and heating oil in coming weeks.  

On the subject of servility, no video was more damaging to its central personality than that of Emmanuel Macron interrupting  Biden’s conversation with Jake Sullivan during a walk from one venue to another in Madrid to tell the Boss confidentially that France was doing its utmost to cut import of Russian hydrocarbons but could not see any solutions since his own telephone conversation with a counterpart in the Gulf made it clear no significant increase in oil production there could be expected. Macron had not counted on a French journalist intercepting and later publishing this revelation.  The clip was shown repeatedly on Russian television over the weekend.

At both the G7 and at the NATO Summit, Boris Johnson stood out as the most determined advocate for further military and financial assistance to Ukraine and as the most determined opponent of any peace negotiations. This made him especially vulnerable to malicious Russian commentary, which he invited by his comportment in all venues as the lead jokester or clown among the European leaders.

Johnson made the absurd proposal at a NATO Summit lunch that they all throw off their shirts to show Putin that they also had great pectorals.  This indirect tribute to Putin for his widely disseminated macho photos taken on vacation in the past was picked up with alacrity by Russian television, which also quoted Vladimir Vladimirovich asking whether the NATO leaders proposed to strip only above the waist or further down and noting that in any event it would be a hideous sight. 

Dmitry Kiselyov on Sunday night took this attack on the British Prime Minister one step further, putting up photos of Boris in his sweat shirt, with his heavy chest in need of a bra, per Kiselyov.  This aspersion regarding Johnson’s sexual identity was a biting response to Johnson’s offhand remarks to journalists that the war with Ukraine would never have been unleashed had Putin been a woman. Russian audiences were treated as well to other photos of Boris in his jogging shorts, looking very much like the neighborhood fat boy, with his weighty thighs bare for all to see.

As for Joe Biden, Russian state television picked up and re-broadcast all of his flubbed lines and signs of physical deterioration (the fall from his bicycle) that came their way from U.S. television channels. This perfectly served their editorial line about the degradation of Western political elites.

Closer to home, Russian media could feast on the countdown to the capture of the last major city in Lugansk still held by the Ukrainian forces, Lisichansk. On Sunday, Russian Minister of Defense Shoigu duly reported to President Putin on the fall of Lisichansk and the surrounding territory of more than 150 square kilometers to Russian troops. Even major Western media acknowledged that this was a key event which indicated clearly how Russia was winning the war on the ground thanks to superior firepower.  Everyone understood that the ‘special military operation’ will now direct its full forces against the Ukrainian military in Kramatorsk and other strategic cities in Donetsk oblast with a view to a similar cleansing of that second Donbas region of what the Russians call the neo-Nazi, extreme nationalist fighters . 

However, a more piquant vision of what the future holds was offered on Monday morning’s edition of Sixty Minutes by the commander of the “Akhmat” battalion of special forces Chechen soldiers fighting in the Lugansk region, Apti Alaudinov.  As deputy to the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, Alaudinov has been interviewed on Sixty Minutes every day in past weeks as the battles headed towards their culmination.  This privileged position on Russian airwaves is justified by the major contribution the Chechen battalion has made to the very challenging fight for control of the regional cities.  The artillery battles in the suburbs and fields of Donbas are the job assigned to Russian soldiers, as we see from the interviews conducted on the front lines. These Russians either man the artillery pieces out in the open or sit in consoles of highly sophisticated rocket launchers.  The Chechens are doing the very risky work of urban warfare, flushing out Ukrainian fighters from the basements of residential buildings and civil infrastructure, fighting street by street.

Alaudinov’s remarks on Monday about the way forward will surely be closely studied by Western intelligence operatives in Washington and Brussels for days to come before they percolate up into speeches of EU and US politicians.  He said that following the liberation of all of Lugansk, Russian forces would continue their move South and West, or perhaps might on the way take Kiev.  Then they could turn on the Baltic States, where, in his words, the armed forces of a country like Estonia were negligible. Until ordered to halt by the Commander-in-Chief, they might next take Poland.

Would a direct fight with NATO be intimidating, the program co-host Olga Skabeyeva asked.

With a broad smile on his face, Alaudinov said ‘no,’ the ‘LGBTQ’ led armies of NATO were no match for the forces of the Russian Federation.  “Power to Russia,” he exclaimed in conclusion.

Yes, Russian television can be very entertaining!

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Reaching the Greater New York audience with common sense on Ukraine

When I received an invitation from Elliot Resnick, former editor-in-chief of the Brooklyn, New York-based Jewish Press to record a podcast devoted to the Ukraine-Russia war, I was delighted to have an opportunity to address an audience that, until his untimely death eighteen months ago, my comrade-in-arms and fellow expert on Russia professor Stephen Cohen had been talking to in his weekly radio broadcasts. Of course, Cohen’s radio programs were listened to by a far wider audience than the core Orthodox community reached by The Jewish Press: they numbered in the millions.  But getting a foothold in New York was desirable for me since most alternative media outlets in the U.S. reposting my essays seem to be on the West Coast.

Here is the link to the newly released podcast by Resnick:

Live interviews like this are always a challenge. Inevitably you do not get across every argument you prepared in advance.  In my mental review of our chat, I have one regret. Though I had requested to be asked about how the Kiev regime can be fascist when its president, Zelensky, is a Jew, I did not give the most relevant answer to that question when we spoke: namely the celebration of the SS-collaborator Bandera by the ultra-nationalists running the show through Zelensky as their front man.

Bandera’s name is being given to streets throughout Ukraine and statues are raised to him.  Tattoos bearing Bandera’s image were found to be worn by the Azovstal defenders when they surrendered to Russian forces.

The whole issue of Bandera and the present day heirs to Ukraine’s collaborationists during WWII was highlighted last week by the scandal over remarks to a German journalist made by the Ukrainian ambassador to Berlin, Andriy Melnyk:  he denied that Bandera was anti-Semitic or was in any way responsible for the slaughter of Jews in Ukraine by his followers. Those remarks elicited a storm of criticism from the Israeli government who called it willful disinformation about the Holocaust. Official Poland also entered the fray and with good reason: Poles were slaughtered by Bandera’s warriors as well. From within Scholz’s government, Germans were incensed. Yesterday Melnyk was removed as ambassador and returned to Kiev, where he likely will be promoted to the position of deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. This whole ugly affair is a good demonstration of the fascist nature of a government nominally headed by Zelensky.

©Gilbert Doctorow

RT’s “Cross Talk” is back on youtube.com

Thanks to the efforts of sympathetic account holders with youtube.com, some RT shows are accessible on the platform, notwithtanding the closure of RT’s own account in the days following the start of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.

Accordingly, I invite you to view yesterday’s Cross Talk show entitled “The Russia-West Split” in which I had the pleasure of participating with a couple of outstanding panelists under the guidance of the show’s moderator and host, Peter Lavelle.0:5 / 24:57

I also note that the following previously aired RT program fits nicely back to back with the show of yesterday.  “Russia and Europe: The Closing Window”.  That was taped just as Russia was celebrating the 350^th anniversary of the birth of Peter the Great.

Sergei Leshchenko: In Memoriam

On 3 July, we lost one of our closest friends in Brussels, Sergei Leshchenko, who died at age 73, ‘following a long illness,’ as they say. We were present at the onset of that illness, about seven years ago, when we drove him to an out of town hospital for prostate cancer surgery. We heard about the delivery of his death sentence 18 months ago, when he was diagnosed with stage four cancer. The cancer had come back unexpectedly and metastasized. And this past Monday we took part in his funeral at the main Russian Orthodox church in Brussels, St. Job, situated a few hundred meters from the Russian embassy, where his passport had been renewed periodically over the years.

Yes, Sergei was Russian. Very Russian in his zest for life, extravagant risk taking and monomania for his chosen profession, music, the piano to be specific.  Indeed, music was his true nationality whatever other passports he held.  Music had taken him to Cuba in the Soviet days, when for several years he held an appointment as music teacher at the Soviet embassy. He fell in love with the tropics and late colonial life, had the Latin mistresses that so many Russian males dreamed of in the distressed 1990s.  It led him to his third and final wife, a Brazilian, and to travels in the Amazon, where he swam in rivers infested with poisonous fish and life-threatening reptiles without a care in the world.

In terms of professional achievement, Sergei retired several years ago from a career of teaching at the Conservatory of Brussels. He prepared more than one generation of students of the piano, both at the Conservatory and in private lessons. Some became candidates in international competitions. He gave annual master classes in northern Italy and Germany.  He helped his own daughter, Polina, to develop an international career as soloist. She performs across the globe under her maiden name and she has numerous recordings.

In his own family, Sergei embodied the multinational, multiethnic Russia that Vladimir Putin speaks so often about. His family name was, of course, Ukrainian, though I know nothing about that distant past. Sergei’s immediate family came from Moscow, where his father was a leading ophthalmologist, practicing his specialty there into his early 90s in the new millennium.

During the Second World War, like many Muscovites, the Leshchenko family was evacuated to Central Asia for safety reasons and in 1948 Sergei was born in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where he grew up.

Sergei’s first two wives were Jewish. The first remained in Petersburg after their divorce. The second lived with him abroad, settling ultimately in Belgium after a stay of several years in Israel.

After music, Sergei’s greatest passion and indulgence was forest mushrooms. Year after year, we joined him on mushroom hunting expeditions, mostly in the Flemish lands around the industrial town of Genk, best known to the general public for its Ford factory. We knew it better for its fields of cêpes and other prized funghi.   Sergei went through the forest like a vacuum cleaner, picking up varieties we would never touch.  He alone knew how to disarm their toxins and enjoy the flesh, whether sautéed or, more commonly, in rich soups to which he treated his dinner guests.

A Dieu, Sergei.  Till we meet again, as I know we shall.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Iran TV panel discussion on inflation in Europe and the sanctions policy

My three weeks of vacation in the Russian countryside south of St Petersburg come to an end tomorrow and by Thursday I expect to publish my day by day notes for this period.  In the meantime, I offer the link to a panel discussion on Iran’s Press TV in which I participated a couple of days ago. The subject was the ECB’s latest decision to raise interest rates to combat rampant inflation throughout the Eurozone. The inflation is in large part due to the anti-Russian sanctions which Europe imposed on energy exports from Russia, and so that policy also featured in the program.

 You will note that my hosts assumed I was speaking to them from Brussels when in fact I was in my Petersburg apartment at the time. Thanks to 5G capable fiber optic cable now installed in our apartment complex the broadcast quality is indistinguishable from what it would have been speaking from Brussels.

http://www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/114094

Report on a three-week visit to St Petersburg, July 2022

Without meaning to offend fellow dachniki, I affirm that the farming life is not conducive to intellectual pursuits. During most of my time in Russia during July, I was busy from morning to night putting order in the chaos we found when we arrived at our country residence 80 km south of Petersburg.  Waist high grasses and aggressive vines covered nearly all of the 1400 square meters of our property.

My electric ‘trimmer,’ supported by 200 meters of linked-up extension cords, was a great help in clearing the land. However, a lot of hand work was inescapable when freeing the vegetable patch, the flower beds and the many berry bushes. Suffice it to say that by evening my optimistic plans for writing about current international events succumbed to generalized exhaustion and I barely managed to set down a few lines about one or another issue of the day that captured my imagination.

In what follows below, I set out these longer and shorter diary entries which are systematic only in chronological order, not themes.  If I have to identify a couple of overarching themes from international developments during this period, they would be the unstoppable advance of Russian forces through the Donbas and southern reaches of Ukraine, accompanied by the changing Russian war aims, which now suggest plans to annex the entire Black Sea littoral. The logic of this change in objectives has been clearly stated by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a couple of weeks ago:  the ongoing deliveries of long range artillery-missile systems (HIMARS) by the United States and its allies represent a serious escalation in the war that imposes on Russia the need to push back the borders with Ukraine to the point where the new weapons no longer threaten the Donbas, not to mention civilian populations in adjacent territories of the Russian Federation. Continued Western military assistance to Ukraine, which now clearly includes dispatch of military technicians to man and direct the advanced materiel, will result in the full conquest of Ukraine by Russian forces and a dictated peace with whatever regime replaces the Zelensky junta.

Under these changed circumstances, my proposal of six weeks ago for a peace in which Russia would leave in place the independent and sovereign self-declared people’s republics of the Donbas in exchange for Western lifting of sanctions no longer is relevant. 

Day by day, Russian actions on the ground in the ‘occupied territories’ as Kiev calls them, show the clear intent to incorporate all of them into the Russian Federation. I have in mind the issuance of Russian passports to all comers in these territories, the preparations for a new school year based on the standard Russian curriculum, the pay-out of pensions and state salaries from the Russian budget, the ongoing construction of new housing and schools to accommodate those who have lost their lodgings in Mariupol and elsewhere. These actions complement and underscore the words delivered by Sergei Lavrov.  What we are witnessing will add perhaps 10 million citizens to the country’s population as well as vast new economic potential from what was since 1922 the industrial heartland of Ukraine.

At the level of daily life of Russians both in the city and in the countryside, little has changed since my visit ending a month earlier. Not only food stores, but those selling consumer goods of all kinds seem to be well stocked. Prices are higher than before the ‘special military operation,’ but not more so than in Western Europe.  A couple of our city friends left for their annual vacation of several months duration on their tiny property in Crimea near Feodosia. The trains to the South function normally even if air traffic has been shut down for safety reasons. Other friends grouse about the now much more expensive package tours to Turkey due to higher airfares and they look further afield to places like Kazakhstan where beaches on the Caspian are in lesser demand.  Still others who would normally vacation in Europe at one or another spa now instead are driving south to Krasnodar, making many stops in historic towns along the way. One friend just came back from Kostroma, where she was delighted to discover a local cheese producer whose wares rival what we see around us in Belgium; in short, a pre-Revolutionary tradition has been successfully revived.

In the countryside, our neighbors are busy tending their greenhouses and harvesting daily their wonderful Bio quality tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and the like.  The mood is of greater solidarity and sociality than we have seen before in our ten years on the land.  We were given buckets of vegetables by neighbors on both sides, which was a surprise and a pleasure.

Crossing the border into Russia from Finland, 14 July 2022

Departure of our bus from Vantaa airport, Helsinki was on time,  and our arrival in St Petersburg was 45 minutes ahead of schedule, for a total travel time of 7 hours, of which 1.5 hours was spent crossing at customs and passport control on both sides of  the frontier.

Every seat in the bus was taken. Of the 50 passengers, I was the only foreigner. This became clear when the driver asked foreigners to step forward to be presented to a Russian border official – for the purpose of checking on the mandatory PCR test result.  

The time going through Finnish control, meaning presenting our passports inside their administrative building, was less than half an hour. The building itself is state of the art, much superior to the Estonian border facility we passed through on our last trip.  But then at this Finnish border the Russian administration is also a modern and spacious building, However, on the Russian side the checking is redundant and aggressive. Once we are processed, including x-ray inspection of all our luggage, we were then checked again to see that the date stamp was properly entered in our passports, and this was repeated twice more before our bus was allowed to move on.  Meanwhile while we were waiting, we watched the inspection of the bus itself, which included the requirement that the engine compartment be opened for checking. Were they looking for stowaways going into Russia? More likely they are trying to break narcotics smuggling. That would fit the other ‘show’ to which we passengers were treated:  a couple of German shepherds were put through their attack paces just outside our waiting room.  The bureaucracy is working overtime to put in controls. It begins to look like the Soviet Union all over again.

Otherwise, the bus trip here from Helsinki allowed me to see firsthand the enormous engineering and construction project now proceeding at full speed from the Finnish border down to the city of Vyborg, about an hour’s drive to the southeast. The scale of the project is stunning and includes putting in electricity lines and construction of side roads going off into the forest.   Our bus driver told me it is an extension of the “Scandinavia” highway, the first fully modern, international standard throughway in northwest Russia, built 20 years ago from the outskirts of St Petersburg up to Vyborg.   Completion is scheduled for 2024.

Considering the rupture in relations with Finland over the past several months, considering that there are today virtually no semi-trailers at the border on either side, you have to ask why the Russians are continuing the construction at this level of intensity and cost. 

I see two possible answers.  1. They believe the rupture will be short-lived and normal commercial exchange will resume before the completion date of the highway or  2.  They are preparing for war with Finland/NATO and this new highway will greatly simplify logistics for heavy Russian equipment going up to the 1,000 km shared border.

I mention in passing that the original Scandinavia highway has also been modernized in its full original length, meaning state of the art lighting and the addition of sound buffer screens where it passes through settlements. Moreover, it has been extended south into the city proper and connected with the arterial roads and bridges that the city built in preparation for the FIFA games three years ago. Thus you now pass over the southern tip of Vasilievsky Island and the roadway descends to ground level only when it overpasses the Port with its shipbuilding wharves and views of the broader harbor. The roadway is spectacular and fitting for the country’s second most populous municipality.

Friday, 15 July, St Petersburg

Local media report that more than 5,000 people crossed the border into Finland today, the first day that the Russians dropped the travel restrictions they imposed shortly after the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic in March 2020.

The balance of traffic was 60% from Russia to Finland and 40% going the other way.  The border service noted that most Russians were traveling to Finland for tourism or shopping, some to check on their property in Finland. Finns were crossing into Russia to fill up with cheap gasoline.

Separately, the Finnish embassy in Moscow announced that from the moment when the Corona virus restrictions were lifted by the Russians they received around 59,000 visa applications.  In all of 2021 they received a total of 46,000 applications.

A surprise awaited us as we entered our apartment house in the southern St Petersburg borough of Pushkin:  a notice on the door informed us that the annual shutdown of the central hot water boiler serving our neighborhood has come and there will be no hot water from the 14^th through 27^th July.  Here was proof positive that you don’t have to be German in this period to limit your showers to four strategic parts of the body.  This annual timing may also explain why so many of our neighbors in the building have chosen to leave town for their dachas or for other vacation destinations right now.

Sunday, 17 July, Orlino

The online  “Morning Briefing”  of today’s New York Times carries the news of Zelensky’s firing his prosecutor general and intelligence chief, calling it the most important shake-up in the government since the start of the Russian invasion.

The newspaper repeats Zelensky’s allegation that he took the decision due to “a large number of treason investigations that were opened into employees of law enforcement agencies.” The changes are said to have the approval of American officials, who now expect the Ukrainian president to put more experienced personnel in charge of key security positions. As The Times article further explains, “the firing of Ivan Bakanov, the leader of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency and a childhood friend of the president’s, was not because of any mishandling of intelligence or any major penetration of Ukraine’s intelligence services by Russia.”

Quite separately, NYT also reports today on a Russian missile attack on Vinnitsa, where it says 23 people died including a 4 year old child with Down’s syndrome. Meanwhile, http://www.yandex.ru tells me that the Russian military command on Sunday reported that their missile strike in Vinnitsa was directed at the Officers’ Club, where it killed senior military officers of the Ukrainian air command together with high level NATO personnel who had come to a meeting to discuss Western shipments of aircraft to Ukraine. I juxtapose these accounts to highlight the propagandistic editorial manipulation of news by The New York Times. Yes, separate facts are reported, but their causal relationship is utterly ignored for running counter to the official Washington narrative. Linking the stories leads without fail to the conclusion that the shake-up of the intelligence services in Kiev was directed from Washington, which was licking its wounds over the death of high ranking personnel due to intelligence leaks which Kiev could not thwart. By the way, here at the dacha our no-fee satellite tv receiver still provides the Bloomberg and BBC News channels in English.  However, contrary to common sense logic, the Russian state television channels which the pan-European satellite operator Eutelsat dropped on 15 June no longer are accessible here on my receiver.  This is very disappointing.  So here in the Russian countryside I do as in Brussels and watch Russian news on www.smotrim.ru.  However, I am assured that Russia’s largest satellite television operator, Trikolor TV, which has more than 12 million subscribers across the country, continues to offer its paying clientele all Russian channels, though foreign broadcasters like National Geographic, Discovery Channel, the Disney Channel as well as the BBC and other international stations are no longer available.   Wednesday, 20 July, Orlino The Financial Times and other Western media discuss Sergei Lavrov’s interview with RT and indications that Russia is preparing the territory it occupies for annexation. Plans to hold referendums make this very clear.  So was I wrong to propose a month ago that Russia would not annex the newly liberated territories if in exchange the West lifted sanctions?    The latter question was answered by Scholz in the past few days when he said that a peace with Ukraine on Russian terms would not lead to lifting of sanctions.    Moreover, Russian objectives have been changing in keeping with the changing level of US and Western equipment being supplied to Ukraine. The delivery of the HIMARS multiple rocket launchers with 80 km range has been a game changer, but not in the sense meant in Washington.

Monday, 25 July, St Petersburg

Last night’s “Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov” was enlightening.  The mood was optimistic that Russian military superiority will prove itself on the Ukrainian battlefield.  Let the Americans send in their F16s (they dare not send in more recent fighter jets) and we will just shoot them down, given the edge of our latest generation fighters.  What we need now is to concentrate on those NATO members which are supplying the preponderant majority of arms to Ukraine:  the USA and the UK.  See the need to destroy satellites in Musk’s system, which are relaying real time positioning of Russian forces to the Ukrainians. The United States will begin to worry only when we threaten their territory, and their weakest link is Alaska. 

The Russian war aims are ratcheted up with each escalation of the heavy equipment the US is dispatching to Ukraine. HIMARS was a turning point.  The Russian logic is:  as the Ukrainians are given increasingly long range missile systems, we have to push the borders back to the West so they cannot threaten our civilians as they are doing now.    

The Russians are now issuing passports in Kharkiv!  The city, the second largest in Ukraine, will surely fall to Russian forces.  They are moving on Odessa.  Transdnistria is appealing to Russia for annexation.    It is a foregone conclusion that in several months the Russians will reach end game and take the entire Black Sea coast, making Ukraine a landlocked and mainly agricultural country.  They will also dictate terms on completion of demilitarization and denazification.  The demilitarization is already proceeding at a fast place.  The missile attacks on local command cetnters across Ukraine is liquidating the officer class and most experienced soldiers. What is left will be rabble.

The Solovyov show made a big issue of the visit to Moscow this past week by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Hungary, who came begging for increased deliveries of Russian gas to Hungary, saying that realism shows there is no alternative today to Russian energy resources. His arrival speech and his speech at the closing press conference were shown on the screen.  Pleading, begging.  Lavrov responded by saying we will consider this request with the utmost speed. 

The panelists asked whether Orban will survive some US led attack on him for this betrayal. Maybe there will be a political attack, maybe physical liquidation.

The panelists also note Hungary’s contempt for Kiev over its Ukrainization policies with respect to the Hungarian ethnic minority in their western borderlands. There we see exactly the same criminalization of the use of Hungarian language as is applied to Russian speakers.  The Kiev nationalists are suicidal madmen. In this respect, indeed they are true to the Hitler cult.

 Friday, 22 July, Orlino

Sergei Brillyov, host to the “News on Saturday” weekly program and member of the board of Russian state television news reporting, who has been on leave since shortly after the start of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, and is now doing spot reporting from South America, announced he is quitting the Russian news service and will take up special documentary film projects as an independent.  Brillyov has a British passport; his family is long established in Britain.  Here is one more leading case of a prominent personality finding it impossible to sit on two chairs any longer. To put it starkly, as George Bush said during the Iraq war,’you are either with us or you are against us.’

Saturday, 23 July, Orlino

A Russian missile attack on Odessa is denounced by Western media as showing contempt for the just concluded Ukraine-Russia-Turkey agreement on resumption of grain exports brokered by the United Nations.

Sunday, 24 July, Orlino

One news item of the day catches my attention:  Russia and Israel are in open dispute over the Kremlin’s recent announcement of plans to close down the Sokhnut agency which is charged with recruiting Russian Jews for ‘repatriation.’

The issue seems not to have been picked up by Western mainstream media.  It is a landmine, and yet I feel compelled to take a position on it based on what I perceive are the underlying factors that have influenced the Kremlin’s decision.

The question is not Israel per se but Zionism and how it contradicts the Kremlin’s definition of what the Russian Federation is all about.  Vladimir Putin has in recent months repeatedly stressed the multinational, multi-creed, multi-ethnic nature of Russia. This has been particularly underlined in the reports on heroism of RF soldiers in the field in Ukraine, many of them coming from minority peoples and coincidentally from  Russia’s Muslim population. 

The question of closing Sokhnut will be decided by the Basmanny Court in Moscow.  Though the government has not divulged its reasons for seeking the closure, it is rumored that the case against the agency includes its comments on war crimes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine and violation of Russian laws governing personal information about citizens.

Other news today concerns official Russian military denials that the missile strike in Odessa yesterday was directed against civilian infrastructure or against the grain loading facilities. They struck a Ukrainian naval vessel and a storehouse of U.S. Harpoon missiles. Such attacks do not violate the terms of the signed agreement over grain shipping from Ukraine, say the Russians.

Monday, 25 July, Orlino

The warming in relations with neighbors on both sides of our property continues.  Yesterday I had a lengthy chat with one over taming nature on our farms, the lives of trees and so forth. Later they invited Larisa to join them for some watermelon.   Then today as I walked by the fence on the other side, I was summoned by the wife of the second in command to the owner, her mother in law.  “Hey, neighbor. Come here.  Take this bucket of cucumbers!  This morning we went through our vegetable garden and found that we have four buckets of them.  We can’t possibly eat them all.  My mother in law said – take them to the market to sell. But that is not for us.  So please accept this.”  I did and she waited for me to return with the empty bucket.

Thursday, 28 July  St Petersburg

We go into Petersburg for a number of tasks and find ourselves stuck in traffic as the Full Repetition for the Naval Parade on the Neva takes place and shuts access to Nevsky Prospekt for several hours till 2 pm. On the brighter side, this gives us more time to chat with our regular driver, Andrei, who has just returned from his 10 day unpaid summer vacation which he spent at his mother’s country house to the south of Petersburg, past our own village.  In that time, he went fishing daily and caught a total of 150 fish which he immediately cleaned and salted, and is now hanging out to dry in the back yard of his house. The result will be what the Russians call vobly, an essential accompaniment to a stein of beer.

Andrei explains to us that a lot of VIPs from Moscow will come for the naval parade. Of course, Putin will be there,  but it is also very likely Medvedev will make the trip. After all, he very discretely keeps a house in the St Petersburg area. Moreover, there may well be a visit of the Patriarch to our borough of Pushkin, where from time to time he appears at the Federovsky Sobor, a church constructed in 1909-12 at the orders of Emperor Nicholas II in honor of his cavalry regiment. It bears mention that the nearby Federovsky Gorodok is being restored as a patriarchal residence. The Gorodok was initially built to house those serving the Sobor.  What liturgical obligations the Patriarch may perform in Petersburg on Navy Day have not yet been announced.

Friday, 29 July, Pushkin

We made a trip into Petersburg for talks at the Palace of Grand Prince Vladimir Aleksandrovich, which for many years in the Soviet period served as the House of Scholars. We completed our reservation of their ground floor dining rooms facing the Neva at the level of the Peter and Paul Fortress for 19 September. The views are wonderful and the building itself is a remarkable architectural monument to the imperial age, which justifiably takes visitors on paid tours of the premises on several floors.

I had first visited this palace when I was courting my Russian bride and her father’s membership was our entry ticket. It is wonderful to return now as the venue for our banquet celebrating fifty years of matrimony.   This will be the follow-on to a second taking of vows in the very same Wedding Palace on the English Embankment where in September 1972 we were married.  The American consul had then been the witness signatory and we had our little party in his apartment.  The forthcoming event hopefully will be witnessed by assorted friends from all walks of life, meaning a stage director and a soloist from the Mariinsky Theater, some childhood friends of my wife, our trusted guardian and repairman of our Orlino dacha, our publishers in Petersburg and others.  The opportunity to rent these historic premises to host 15 guests at a price that is not ruinous is typical of what has been and remains so endearing to us about this city and country. Indeed, if we were a simple Russian-Russian couple, nearly all the costs of the celebration would be compensated by a grant from the city authorities.

Sunday, 31 July,  Orlino

We watch the television broadcast of the Navy Day parade on the Neva which Putin oversees. It does not rain on Russian parades!  Beautiful clear skies are the order of the day. The display of ships is very interesting – many of the latest surface and submarine craft are on the Neva river and harbor; others are in the Kronstadt harbor.  Nearly all are relatively small but packed with weaponry and electronic gear. Most of them have cruise missiles – vertical launch Kalibri. The corvette Admiral Gorshkov has the new hypersonic missile Zircon, which has 8 Mach speed and a range of 1,000 km. Stationing off the US coast would give it five minute flying time to Washington, D.C.

Putin makes a short speech from the reviewing stand.  It focuses on the history of the fleet and the valor, bravery of the crews and their commanders. It is a dignified speech. There is no reference to international affairs, no threats to anyone.  Simply the fleet is there to safeguard Russia’s sovereignty and interests. He speaks of Petersburg as “the naval capital of Russia.”  

Note that among the places where Russia is staging naval parades today are Vladivostok, Sevastopol, a Caspian Sea port, and there is also Tartus in Syria!

Before the start of the naval parade, in the Peter and Paul fortress Putin signs a new Naval Doctrine which takes into consideration the challenges of the new sanctions against Russia and global geopolitics. It places priority on the Arctic. It emphasizes that Russia operates in all the world’s oceans.  It states that Russia will be increasing its shipbuilding capabilities, in Vladivostok and elsewhere.  And it mentions that Russia will build an aircraft carrier.

Otherwise, I took my final swim in Orlino lake this visit.  Folk wisdom holds that autumn begins on 1 August and from that day you do not go swimming since the water temperature drops steadily. Already today I feel that the lake temperature has dropped a degree or two, down to the barely acceptable level of 19 degrees.

Monday, 1 August,  Orlino – St Petersburg

The news continues to feature calls for an investigation into the bombing of a prisoner of war installation in Donbas where several hundred Ukrainian fighters who surrendered at the end of the Azovstal siege were being held for interrogation.  A missile struck the facility in the middle of the night killing 53 detainees outright and injuring another 90 or so out of the 200 kept in the dormitory that was struck.  Among the victims were Azov Battalion members. 

Zelensky claims the Russians did this and calls for an international investigation into the war crime.  This was picked up and rebroadcast by mainstream Western media. The complete illogic of such claims has gone past nearly all journalists. One need only consider who had an interest in preventing these POWs from talking about their crimes.

Also today Algeria announced its interest in joining BRICS.  This joins numerous other announcements of candidacy for both BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.  Taken all together, it spells the end of US-European global domination.  And to whom do we owe this very promising reordering of the global landscape?  To Putin and the ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Happy days are here again…

It is good to be back home in Brussels, and the popular song Happy Days from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s pitching optimism to a depressive populace in the 1930s runs on a circular tape through my mind.

However, it seems less good when I switch on the television and watch the BBC news or browse Le Soir and other local mainstream media to complement the Financial Times and New York Times which come to my inbox wherever I am. The barrage of propaganda coming from Zelensky’s narcotics-distorted face on my screen brings to mind very unkind thoughts about what his tragic final scene should be in the ‘nearest future,’ as the Russians say..

Today’s dose of venom from the Ukrainian president, presented as God’s honest truth by the editorial team at Euronews, concerns the latest attacks on the Zaporozhie nuclear power station, which, of course, he lays at the door of the Kremlin, notwithstanding the nonsensical nature of such allegations given that the Russians would be interested in the uninterrupted supply of electricity to the territories they now occupy whereas the Ukrainian command would be interested in its disruption or even in some leakage of radiation that would threaten the nearby population that is now once and forever outside their control.

All of these Ukrainian allegations following one or another atrocity that they themselves have committed  with an eye to false flag propaganda become very tiresome. I think of the atrocities in Bucha, in which the victims were one and all persons suspected by pro-Ukrainian neighbors of having collaborated with the Russian occupation forces. I think of last week’s shouting by Kiev that the missile attack on a POW camp which killed and wounded large numbers of Azovstal defenders in captivity was done by the Russians.  This impudent, bare-faced lie which does not stand up to any test of logic, sailed past the editorial teams of our major electronic and print media.

However, there are some signs that enough is enough. Yesterday the FT carried an article about what they call the war weariness of the European public, which, they say, endangers further economic and military aid to Kiev. The public, they say, has stopped being interested in news dispatches from the front. The numbers of published articles on the Ukraine war seem to be down 80% from where they were in March.  Is it that the European public is unable to concentrate on any one issue for long, as the FT would have us believe, or is it that the farcical accounts of what is going on in Ukraine have brought about sullen rejection from the broad majority of readers who just turn the page to get to sports news?

The only bright spot on the news front is the release last week by Amnesty International of its report on the Ukrainian army’s systematically putting civilians at risk by intermingling its weapons and men in residential blocks, hospitals and schools, all in violation of international law. The word “war crimes” has now been used in conjunction with the Zelensky regimes.   Some media in the United States are now challenging Zelensky’s credentials as a democrat and champion of human rights.

And yet, it is clear that whatever European leaders know or do not know about Zelensky and the murderous gang presently holding the Ukrainian nation captive, they are not about to reverse course and say ‘sorry’ to Russia.  Only a clean sweep of Europe’s “leaders” and their replacement by new persons who may or may not be smarter but who will have no reason to double down on dead wrong policies out of empty vanity can bring some reason and common sense back to European politics.  Johnson is gone.  Draghi is gone.  Time for Scholz, Macron and a host of other buffoons wearing presidential hats to leave the scene.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

The German Greens and Unprincipled Lust for Power

Over the course of the past few months I have alluded both in writing and in various televised interviews to the ‘ship of fools’ composition of the German coalition government under Chancellor Scholz. This falls in line with my repeated emphasis over the years on the undemocratic results of seemingly progressive political processes across the European Continent guided by proportional representation as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon rule of ‘first past the post.’  I say undemocratic, because as is now commonly the case, no single party in such elections favoring minority groupings enjoys a majority in parliament and governments are cobbled together behind closed doors whereby the public has no say in the outcome. Ministerial portfolios are allocated following political haggling among party bosses and most often competence or prior experience with the given dossier of responsibilities plays no role.

In the German case today, though the Chancellor himself often seems clueless about international affairs, he is brilliant when compared to two of the ministers from the Greens Party whom he installed in his cabinet in positions which weigh heavily today on the most critical issue facing Germany and Europe generally, the sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. The ministers in question are responsible for Foreign Affairs (Annalena Baerbock) and The Economy and Environmental Affairs (Robert Habeck).

These two former co-leaders of the German Greens are now featured almost daily on European print and electronic media and so we can more easily reach conclusions about their personalities and suitability for office than is the case with other ministers in the coalition. That conclusion is shock over the incompetence, unprofessionalism and inconsistent logic they project from day to day.

Though most everyone associates the German Greens with environmentally friendly policies, that is not the priority of these two ministers. Instead their priority is punishing Putin in any and every conceivable way, with cavalier disregard for the economic consequences in Germany. Coal power stations can be restarted. The working lives of nuclear power stations formerly scheduled for decommissioning can be extended. These formerly key electoral issues of the Greens now go by the boards to maintain energy supplies to the public and to industry if and when the Russians respond to the sanctions by cutting completely gas deliveries via Nord Stream 1.

From the very start, we heard the trivial proposal from Ms. Baerbock on how Germany could give Putin the finger by cutting back on personal hygiene and reducing daily hot showers to washing the four strategic parts of their bodies. It was hard to believe that a federal minister in the very serious country of Germany could stand before the cameras and utter such rubbish. That was when a Russian push-back was strictly hypothetical. Now that the flow of gas through Nord Stream I has been reduced to 20% of capacity, the complete shutdown is entirely possible and the impact on the German economy will be severe pain, meaning a likely recession on the order of 6%. That implies the loss of hundreds of thousands if not millions of jobs.

I can well imagine that the chosen priorities of the Greens’ ministers may be dismissed by some as being idiosyncrasies of the given individuals.  However, that is not the case. From the time of its founding more than 30 years ago by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer, the German Greens party took anti-Russian policy positions. In the new millennium, it was precisely the German Greens who came out time and again in the European Parliament with calls to sanction Russia for alleged abridgements of human rights such as over the falsified claims of the U.S.-U.K. investor William Browder in what Washington knows as the Magnitsky affair.

The Greens movement across Europe has various faces locally. Here in Belgium the Party, both in its  Flemish and Walloon (Francophone) versions, is perceived as a single issue party, as the spokesmen and women for environmentally friendly policies.  They have enjoyed variable success at the polls, but have nonetheless been an influential force in Brussels for realization of a variety of Luddite policies.

The Brussels city fathers in the 1960s and 1970s were excessively enamored of the automobile. The downtown was ripped up to make way for highways which were initially elevated. The long drawn-out construction and the resulting ‘Chinese walls’ killed off small shops along the way, to no one’s apparent concern in the ministerial offices. From the ‘90s on, the pendulum swung the other way, with the Greens leading the charge.  Arterial roads connecting the city to its residential suburbs have been constricted to make bus and tram lanes which carry a fraction of the traffic of the autos they have displaced. Commuting time has gone up dramatically at all times of the day. Consequently, the economy of Brussels has suffered substantially.  Slogans of car-free days have been symptomatic of a government policy that cares little about economic consequences and cares a great deal about populist ideology.

In a related domain, our Belgian Greens have had a great influence on management of park lands. Their slogan has been biodiversity. On this basis, they have promoted the cutting of what was for a couple hundred years through the 1980s Europe’s largest and most beautiful beech forest, the Forêt de Soignes. Their idea was to return this forest to its ‘native state’ before human intervention created a nearly single variety forest.  And so we have nearly lost the cathedral of lofty beeches which was the glory of this city. 

The forest of the past was home to chipmunks, squirrels, foxes and other small creatures. I recall very well how careful we cavaliers had to be on our weekend horse rides lest our mount shy at a chipmunk crossing our path.  That challenge no longer exists. For one reason or another, the forest floor outside Brussels today is devoid of animal life.  The mismanagement of our forest heritage by the Greens-influenced authorities today means that obligations of private cutters to clean up after themselves and to remove dead and fallen trees are not observed. Our forest floor is covered with dead branches and rotting tree trunks. It is only the good fortune of a wet climate that spares us devastating forest fires given the amount of kindling waiting to go up in smoke.  So much for Green policies in practice.

My point in the foregoing is very simple:  the Greens Party in Germany, in Belgium and I assume elsewhere in Europe is nothing more than a vehicle for incompetent, unprofessional sloganeers to seize power and to implement radical social policies of which the public has no inkling. If it were only economic hardship for the population that resulted from their policies, that would be bad enough. But by foolishly and ignorantly baiting the Russian bear and trying to inflict maximum damage on the Russian economy, which is a policy that has “Greens” written all over it, the party and its leadership are pointing Europe to what may yet become a pan-European conflagration that spins out of control.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022