Russia is Descending into Authoritarianism--again
In less than one more month, we are going to commemorate the first anniversary of the Russian war aggression against Ukraine, and much has happened since then. As we currently observe a stalemate in terms of conquests and losses of territory in Eastern Ukraine, even though the Wagner Group claims to have vanquished villages around Bakhmut[1], Ukraine was able to regain territory that was occupied by Russia before the initiation of the war[2]. In the meantime, Putin solemnly signed declarations manifesting the annexation of the occupied territories of Луганск & Донецьк[3]. Even before this annexation, there were valid claims stating that those so-called 'separatists' were actually Russian invaders who conquered the land with the plan to incorporate the two territories into the Russian Federation. Recently, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) underscored those claims by mentioning that those territories had been in the hands of the Russian government since 2014, when the first 'separatists' invaded them[4]. Under normal circumstances, separatists have been citizens of the country they want to separate from, anything different therefrom would constitute a régime change wherein infiltrators function as proxy agitators.
However, there is also something different to focus on which has hitherto gained less attention on behalf of the Western population that has been following this war since it was set off by Russia: The gradual descent of Russia as a whole into authoritarianism. Alas, there was little left to a full-fledged autocracy in Russia, given that there is almost no opposition possible due to frequent obstruction of opposition parties and instantaneous arrests upon the slightest sign of critique against the incumbent government[5][6].Eventually Putin declared any president of Russia capable of ruling indefinitely, even though he himself was rumoured to plan his retirement from politics.[7] Something that has also been declared in Mainland China a couple of years thereafter[8].
Another factor that has also existed before the war was the so-called 'foreign agents law' that marked journalists arbitrarily as 'foreign agents' when they received funding from abroad or were registered abroad, the latter of what would make sense as a lone reason. But since many journalists feared prosecution (more appropriately termed as persecution) or closure of their offices or web domain, they chose to register abroad, such as in Lativa or Lithuania, in order to keep some wiggle space. One of those journalistic organisations is 'Meduza', and it has recently been banned in Russia while previously having been declared a 'foreign agent'[9]. Other organisations, particularly of the 'Radio Free Europe' group--an organisation that was founded by the CIA during the Cold-War era as a radio group to make it possible for people in the Soviet régime to receive independent news from their own country as well as from abroad--, have since found ways to encrypt their websites to make it possible for citizens of Russia or Belarus to access them and read their news without fear of repercussions, even without VPN[10]]. Still, the pressure remains, as a couple of years ago, Belarusian police officers raided a Radio Free Europe (Радыë Слабодна Европа) office in Minsk, the allegations were apparently dubious[11]. But not only in Belarus, journalists are being harassed for their work, although some of the most recent examples derive from there[12]. Before them, Russian journalists have been arrested and sentenced on dubious charges too in like kangaroo courts[13]. One could not even blame those men and women for having worked in the open, as distribution of their work requires some degree of visibility, so that the job remains risky also because of vigilante patriots who would look for them in order to expose them to the law enforcement. Another, more hybrid example would be the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who has been in prison, more precisely in penal colonies, for years now, but whose team has been continuing their investigative work pointing out corruption within Putin's régime still, reaching one-time fame for an investigation into a lavish, village-sized villa of Putin's, documented in a YouTube documentary[14].More cases of corruption and cronyism have been exposed thereafter via his «Проект», which bore the question whether the advent of the war was only a symptom of pathological megalomania in Putin, as the consequences thereof were imaginable even to those who had less interest in politics etc. The international response included the confiscation of assets by affiliates of him, mostly oligarchs. Yachts, mansions and financial amassments in offshore bank accounts have been freezed, some are planned to be ransacked by the nations that froze them to provide financial relief and reparations respectively to Ukrainian refugees and the Ukrainian nation already beginning to reconstruct cities that have been shattered by regular Russian missile attacks[15][16].
Many hardcore Socialists, so-called 'tankies', have claimed that there was nothing wrong with Russia's war against Ukraine and that it certainly were not imperialistic because Ukraine were not a real state but artificially created by the first Soviet dictator, Lenin; and that Ukrainians were not an own nationality but only outcast Russians. Secondly, Russia only protected its own people living in the occupied territories (who they apparently recognise as own nations, as 'People's Republics', as the 'separatists' declared them) who had been bombed since 2014, according to them. Similar claims--on Ukraine's alleged history, as well as the argument upon which the invasion was founded, could also be heard by Putin[17][18]. Altogether, the whole Russian Federation, as the name implies, was founded upon the conquest of independent peoples from the Ural mountains to the Pacific Ocean who now live on as semi-autonomous republics, while many of their people were the first to be drafted in the salvos of mobilisations for the war[19][20][21]. A nation based on imperialist warfare can only function as an antidote thereto when it confessed to its earlier mistakes and pledges to do better on the one hand and also does so on the other hand. At the moment, Russia is nothing different from the US: They have expanded their reach under the Monroe Doctrine and the Western Expansion, and later fought régime changes in Latin America while also having conquered Hawai'i in the early 20th century. Too often it is forgotten that after Spain, the US claimed the Philippines as their colony, to which the first president of the independent Philippines said that he'd prefer 'a government run like hell by Filipinos to a government run like heaven by Americans'. (Not verbatim by Manuel Quezon[22]). We don't need to repeat the many laughable attempts to justify the war that were given by the Kremlin during the operation of the alleged 'three-day-war that has now extended to several months. But it may be needless to say that Ukrainians would surely prefer a government run by a corrupt, nepotist 'Jewish, Satanic, Nazi' government of Ukrainian oligarchs than by an autocratic, mass-murdering, foreign dictator. Whether this is true or not is not for a foreigner to state: The Ukrainians need to decide. It's their country, not anyone else's.
Penultimately, one should observe the most recent developments on the political level in the occupied territories. (Which will henceforth be abbreviated as LNR for Luhansk and DNR for Donetsk) We have addressed them beforehand, but it was not appropriate to mention already what the Russian proxy rulers have legislated in the past few weeks. Two developments stick out of the crowd as being derived directly from the authoritarian's playbook. First, in the LNR, Ukrainian 'patriotic books' were prohibited as they could spark revolts against the 'People's Republic'[23]. It does not take an erudite professor of political sciences to understand what this means, given that this is a rather broad definition of books that needed to be removed from the face of the public. And the removal of information from the public is one of the most obvious ways of rulers intending to numb down their people in order to make it easier for them to rule them, although in this particular case, the objective is different from this more common prospectus: As the Russian government doesn't recognise Ukrainians as an independent nationality, they are consequentially interested in eradicating every remnant of it, ranging from culture to the identity of its people. This is also one of the reason why many Ukrainian children have already been deported to the eastmost outback of Siberia to displace them as far from their homeland and their parents as possible, leaving them for adoption by Russian adults who'd--either inadvertently or deliberately--partake in their 'national overwriting'[24].Concerning the prohibition of information to manipulate the public mind, we have seen similar tactics in Russia as well: Only recently, Aleksandr Solzhenizyn's literary classic 'Gulag Archipelago' (Архипелаг ГУЛАГ) has been removed from the schools' schedules for dubious reasons, namely that the author had made up what he wrote, even though it is known that he was incarcerated in a gulag too[25]. One could only imagine the reasons as to why Putin wished to see this book banned from schools. (Or how children were supposed to read all five volumes within a school year) The most pessimistic outlook would be that he wished to remove this book in order to make it easier to reinstate the same measurements in the already existing penal colonies in Siberia. Patriotic education[26] has already become a thing, contrarily, teaching children 'the values of the Russian society', whatever those are supposed to be, as long as the government enriches itself on the public's expense. Perhaps they are taught to stoically persevere all gruelties and lies presented to them by the rulers, and to subordinate to authorities and duly follow orders without asking twice.
Speaking of penal colonies, in the DNR, legislators presented plans to erect more than a dozen of such on their territory to incarcerate rebelling Ukrainians[27]. (They have been mentioned explicitly, already showing what they are up to) And those are erected only now, after we have seen multiple reports from inside the filtration camps that were erected to identify captured Ukrainians and to separate them by men, women and children, and what there thoughts were on Russia etc.[28]. Those also preceded the later deportation to Russia to assimilate the civilian-prisoners of war by force into a foreign culture.
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| Screenshot from news segment „Wiadomości” of Polish TV broadcaster „TVP” from 03. October 2022. |
Finally, there is only one word suitable to describe what is happening in Ukraine: Those are war crimes[29], intent to eradicate a people, a culture, a nation. Of course the final word will be left to the International Crimes Court in Den Haag, but as I am not a legal scholar, nor practise anything remotely similar to jurisprudence, I can share nothing but my two cents as a dilettante. Russian TV, on the other hand, can possibly understate the Russian government's intent to perform such war crimes, as language in the panel shows has become more aggressive in this direction throughout the progress of the war, and as Russian losses started piling up to a degree that it could no longer be denied by the propaganda machinery trying to cover up the actual performance of the army[30]. Dehumanisation of the 'enemy' has become the law, and while it may appear exaggerated, one could refer to Hannah Arendt's singular work on totalitarian rulership to understand just how fatal this aspect in language can become in terms of the cruelty of the acts that follow thereafter. To quote from her book:
"Denaturalisierung und Entzug der Staatsbürgerschaft gehören zu den wirksamsten Waffen in der internationalen Politik totalitärer Regierungen, weil sie hierdurch dem Ausland, das innerhalb seiner eigenen Verfassung unfähig war, den Verfolgten die elementarsten Grundrechte zu sichern, ihre eigenen Maßstäbe aufzwingen konnten."[31]
This quote does not outline the practice of dehumanisation, I must confess. But it shows the topicality of not only Ms. Arendt's book but also the practices she describes. We have seen the same twice in the past, nigh of a decade: First, during the refugee crisis of 2015, with the Turkish authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has blackmailed Germany into cooperation as he would have otherwise unleashed the row of refugees he held back in his country[32]. The second time was during the "Stan Wyjątkowy" at the Polish-Belarusian border, when Belarusian dictator Александр Лукашенко released a row of refugees towards Poland, which led Poland to start building a fence at the shared border[33]. The Straż Granica began patrolling the border on horseback. (Possibly had already been even beforehand, but it only came to my attention thenceforth)
The uprooting of refugees from any statehood makes the vagabonds and refugees; fugitives when they have fled from their land because they were dissidents, outcast intellectuals fallen from grace with their former government because they criticised it, which was not well received. (The fate of many Russian dissidents both during the USSR and thereafter) The hesitancy of the EU to shape a humanitarian union and the instance to instead strengthen the Frontex border security not to release the refugees from their suicidal adventures to cross the Mediterranean Ocean by dinghy or a trawler without a captain, stubbornly sailing in one direction, but to push them back to where they came from, shows that Ms. Arendt was right even now[34]. Once it counts, all words about humanitarianism coming from either individual nations or alliances like the EU are hollow inside like a rotten walnut, the authoritarians and dictators victor ultimately.
Another example could follow from German scholar of Romanic languages and literature Victor Klemperer, himself a persecuted Jew in the Third Reich who nevertheless stayed in Germany until the end and miraculously has managed to survive as other Jews in his closer environment had been deported, has observed the degradation of language under Hitler and wrote a book about that. He termed it the "LTI", the "Lingua Tertii Imperii", the Language of the Third Reich. Therein he wrote inter alia:
"'Jüdlein' und 'schwarzer Tod', Ausdruck des verächtlichen Hohns und Ausdruck des Entsetzens, der panischen Angst: es sind die beiden Stilformen, die man bei Hitler immer antreffen wird, so oft er vor den Juden spricht, und also i njeder seiner Reden und Ansprachen. Über die zugleich kindliche und infantile Anfangshaltung des Judentum gegenüber ist er nie hinweggekommen. In ihr liegt ein wesentlicher Teil seiner Stärke, denn sie verbindet ihn mit der dumpfsten Volksmasse, die im Maschinenzeitalter niciht etwa aus dem industriellen Proletariat, als nur zum Teil aus Landbevölkerung, vielmehr aus der Menge des zusammengedrängten Kleinbürgertums besteht. Für sie ist der anders Gekleidete, der anders Sprechende nicht der andere Mensch, sondern das andere Tier aus dem anderen STall, mit dem es kein Einvernehmen geben kann, das man hassen und wegbeißen muß."[35]
It didn't need a linguist to draw the obvious relations to what we see in Russia today. And it should therefore raise our awareness that only under one core premise, peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine were possible: That (1) the Russian Federation made the first step; (2) that concessions are made by the Russian Federation in accordance with Ukrainian demands; and (3) that Russian troops withdraw from Ukrainian soil. To recycle an oft-cited example from history, the Allied Forces didn't concede to Hitler during World War II after, and we have likewise seen that Appeasement policies in shape of concessions of land to Hitler didn't work either, just as Stalin had to learn that the Molotov-Ribbentrop-Pact didn't work for him and the Soviet Union. The lessons to be learnt from this have to be that conceding to authoritarian war aggressors never work because they usually cross their fingers behind their back while admitting to fidelity to pacts on the foreground. Someone who doesn't comply with internaitonal law, which he may have even ratified earlier, cannot be expected to follow wartime agreements either. We could mention the ceasefire over the Epiphany, but this could never be taken serious to begin with as Russia advanced it to leave a chance for Russian Orthodox Christians to celebrate Christmas. It was unilaterally advanced and Ukrainians were expected to follow suit.
In the end, there can only be peace under the above-mentioned given conditions. Otherwise, the war will continue until Russia is roundly defeated. Putin has set off an 'old-school' war, a style of war that should have been interred by World War I but was repeated in World War II. Geographical borders are rigged in place, only twice have they been changed again: In 1990, when Soviet satellite republics declared independence, and around 2006 or so, when South Sudan declared independence from the North. But otherwise, there is nothing to be gained from such wars anymore, except for personal economic devastation, a descent into international disrepute, and perhaps a fall from grace with the own people. Neither of those effects can be perceived as preferrable. International trade partnerships should be pursued instead, trying to boost economic growth and consequential welfare of one's people. This can only be achieved through a globalised network of supply chains and attractive conditions for expats to move to them to amortise shortcomings in professions amongst one's own people. There is little that can be done for those who clinge to obsolete models of 'patriotism' in a blood-and-soil fashion; they need to realise that it is up for everyone individually what lifestyle they pursue, and that they can live theirs within their own living space. They need to understand that they cannot impose their preferences onto others, just as Russia needs to understand that Ukrainians don't want to become part of the Russian Federation but instead live independently. As Russia chose to not understand that, it will have to be pushed behind its borders again. And it will happen--with united forces against this evil. END
FOOTNOTES:
Disclaimer: Please note that some of the sources mentioned in those footnotes--namely the second source of footnote no. 13; furthermore those in footnotes no. 3, 17, 18 and 25--are either state websites, state-governed or state-affiliated websites and therefore need to be read with a good portion of suspicion. They were applied only in order to verify the existence or the utterance of either an incident, facility or statement. Had there been good reason to doubt either of those cases, a more reasonable and independent source would have been chosen, but at least when it came to Putin's essay or his annexation de jure of the occupied territories, it was preferable to use his own propaganda organ, likewise was it preferable to use a state-affiliated organ--Gazeta dot ru--for his declaration of war which he never called like this.
In case there were a sense of discomfort with reading them, it is advised to use something different. The author of this text can be contacted via Telegram or via the contact options laid down on his blog. Feedback is welcome via the comment section of the source where you found this text, or by the same aforementioned contact options. Thanks a lot!
1.
The PMC Wagner claims to hold Bakhmut and even conquer further villages, although such news always need to be read with a good portion of suspicion. You can read about such information hereunder: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-january-28-20232.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2022/11/25/nine-months-of-war-in-ukraine-in-one-map-how-much-territory-did-russia-invade-and-then-cede_6005655_8.html3.
http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/694654.
For some unfathomable reason, the verdict was provided only in Ukrainian. Not that there weren't any context that would justify it, but due to public interest beyond Ukrainian borders, it would've made sense to also provide an English translation.https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng-press#%7B%22sort%22:[%22kpdate%20Descending%22],%22itemid%22:[%22003-7550173-10372796%22]%7D
5.
Citation: Vladimir Gel'man (2020) The Politics of Fear: How the Russian Regime Confronts Its Opponents, Russian Social Science Review, 61:6, 467-482, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10611428.2020.18520336.
https://www.vgoroden.ru/novosti/socseti-devushku-s-chistym-listom-bumagi-zaderzhal-v-nizhnem-novgorode-id3527967.
To be clear, he didn't change the Constitution in such a way as that he could rule perpetually, but he and his successors are able to rule for far longer than previously possible: https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-signs-law-to-rule-until-2036/31187934.html8.
https://thediplomat.com/2023/01/how-xi-jinping-used-the-ccp-constitution-to-cement-his-power/9.
https://meduza.io/en/cards/life-after-undesirability10.
https://www.wired.com/story/russia-internet-censorship-samizdat-online/11.
https://pressroom.rferl.org/a/rferl-condemns-belarus-bureau-raid-detention-of-journalists/31362831.html12.
https://spring96.org/be/news/110331But they were by far not the only ones who have been prosecuted for their work: https://www.rferl.org/a/belarus-trial-journalits-tutby-chekina-zolatava/32215597.html
13.
Just to list two articles about such arrests:Иван Сафронов: https://meduza.io/feature/2022/09/05/eto-uzhe-kak-v-1937-m-ili-esche-nado-podozhdat
Илья Яшин: https://www.interfax.ru/russia/851782
14.
They have published their documentary / investigative report on YouTube, where it can be watched for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipAnwilMncI&t=5sBut in case you prefer reading about it, they have also written a lengthy investigative piece online, where one can also access it without VPN: https://palace.navalny.com/
15.
A couple of news concerning the confiscation of assets by Russian oligarchs can be found in this post under point no. 3: https://t.me/PoliticsAndEconomicsOllyffer/2878516.
Plans to do something like this has been planned, inter alia, by Esotnia, as you can read in the news under point no. 5. of this post, but also in the article that has been cited thereunder: https://t.me/PoliticsAndEconomicsOllyffer/2836217.
http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/6618118.
https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/news/2022/02/24/17336791.shtml19.
You will find one newspaper essay and a couple of studies on that subject in these two posts on my news channel: https://t.me/PoliticsAndEconomicsOllyffer/24079 | https://t.me/PoliticsAndEconomicsOllyffer/2408020.
https://www.currenttime.tv/a/rasskazyvayut-rodstvennitsy-mobilizovannyh-i-vyzvannyh-voenkomaty-v-buryatii-i-yakutii/32046865.html21.
Dov Lynch, Separatist states and post-Soviet conflicts, International Affairs, Volume 78, Issue 4, October 2002, Pages 831–848, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.0028222.
https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1939/12/09/speech-of-president-quezon-on-civil-liberties-december-9-1939/23.
https://imi.org.ua/news/na-luganshhyni-okupanty-stvoryly-spysok-zaboronenoyi-literatury-i5032624.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/world/europe/ukraine-children-russia-adoptions.htmlFor those to whom a newspaper investigation / essay is insufficient, there is also a report by human-rights organisation "Human Rights Watch" (HRW) that has dived deeper into the subject, with individual case reports: https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/09/01/we-had-no-choice/filtration-and-crime-forcibly-transferring-ukrainian-civilians
25.
https://www.rbc.ru/society/22/01/2023/63ccbefd9a7947052b30630e26.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/04/19/russia-announces-compulsory-patriotic-history-education-for-7-year-olds-a7740627.
https://meduza.io/news/2023/01/24/pravitelstvo-rf-poruchilo-sozdat-bolshe-20-ispravitelnyh-koloniy-v-anneksirovannyh-regionah-ukrainy28.
General Information on what it is like inside those camps:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/inside-russias-filtration-camps-in-eastern-ukraine
Not only in terms of constituting whether those camps are war crimes, those camps need to be investigated:
https://reliefweb.int/report/ukraine/reports-russian-federation-forces-putting-ukrainian-civilians-filtration-camps-must-be-investigated-senior-officials-tell-security-council
29.
A Preliminary Assessment of War Crimes committed by Russians in Ukraine:https://reliefweb.int/report/ukraine/update-chair-independent-international-commission-inquiry-ukraine-51st-session-human-rights-council-23-september-2022-enruuk
30.
https://www.onet.pl/informacje/onetwiadomosci/rosyjska-propaganda-szykuje-grunt-pod-ludobojstwo-analiza/yn0jvde,79cfc27831.
Arendt, Hannah (2001 [1951]). Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft. Antisemitismus, Imperialismus, totale Herrschaft. München: Piper Verlag GmbH. Seite 563.
32.
Altogether, Mr. Erdoğan has blackmailed the EU into his deal with the refugees and leniency towards his participation in the war in Syria, as well as his deterioration of Democracy in Turkey: https://www.politico.eu/article/beyond-blackmail-at-the-greek-turkish-border-european-commission-josep-borrell-asylum-seekers-recep-tayyip-erdogan/33.
https://oko.press/moja-zbrodnia-to-moj-paszport-reporter-oko-press-na-szlaku-uchodzcow/As of recently, new information have been unearthed, showing that there may be few differences between the detention camps for refugees in Poland and in the US under President Donald J. Trump. You can read about the Polish camps in the following report: https://balkaninsight.com/2023/02/01/held-without-rhyme-or-reason-polands-detention-system-for-migrants-labeled-a-farce/
34.
Frontex has been exposed to deliberately push back refugees at the EU's outer border: https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/why-der-spiegel-is-publishing-the-eu-investigative-report-on-pushbacks-a-5218398a-5c1e-414e-a477-b26515353fceBut this does not only happen at sea but also on land, particularly in Bulgaria and Greece: https://www.lighthousereports.nl/investigation/we-were-slaves/
35.
Klemperer, Victor (2018). LTI. Ditzingen: Philipp Reclam jun. GmbH & Co. KG. Seite 196-197.
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