Posted by Daveg on Thu, 02 Feb 2006 02:44 | #

The problem with these nationalistic movements is not that the can’t work - they can and do work quite well in the short term - it is the “soft landing.”

The society goes from being down and out to thinking it is all powerful and making reckless choices, (like declaring war on the US).

It would be nice to sese Russia pull out of its current state tho.

Posted by Daveg on Thu, 02 Feb 2006 03:36 | #

For example, if financial rape is the explanation for the attack on the Oligarchs, one would hardly predict a new line of attack against the human rights industry in Russia.  But if nationalism, anti-decay and anti-liberalism are moving government, preventive measures against the hr organisations are wholly predictable, given what we know of hr’s effects in the West.

...
NGO’s, which include The Soros Foundation and the Open
Society Foundation, have accused the FSB of running a smear campaign.  They are no doubt right.  The real intention is surely to cover a very Russian nationalist agenda with a more or less credible security blanket.

Don’t you think there is credibility to the claim that NGO are instruments of foreign governments and/or foreign interests, at least some of the time?

If so, than Russia’s response is not a strong indicator of the nature of the movement, is it?

Posted by Tournament of Champions on Thu, 02 Feb 2006 06:29 | #

The platforms of the Russian political parties, with the exception of the foreign funded ones, are exactly what one should expect in a real democracy: each one more nationalistic than the next, and often headed by open racialists.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 02 Feb 2006 08:35 | #

Daveg,

Take some time to check the funding of NGO’s in, say, Britain.  American sources such as the Ford Foundation are a commonplace.

It’s somewhat absurd from a British perspective to see in Putin’s politics a battle for the future of the Russian homeland with MI6 and the CIA.  But as organs of external state power they have their place in the scheme of things, given the well-known analysis of the war of the Land against the Sea.  In the event that Putin sought to target them, however, he only needed to make foreign funding illegal.

What he has actually done goes much further.  He is harrassing the NGO’s administratively out of business.  That leads me to conclude that, actually, his target is International Jewry - which, of course, works through not only the NGO’s and minority movements but the mega-rich, the media owners and, intellectually, the liberal-left.

It is necessary to bear in mind that the partricular stripe of nationalism which Dugin philosophised is non-racial, because Russia itself is not racially homogenous.  It is revanchist and draws its power from the deep attachment to Russia’s soil of all its people.  The attachment to soil is always the great counterweight to rootless cosmopolitanism, and events in Russia should primarily be understood in that light, IMHO.

Posted by Alexei on Thu, 02 Feb 2006 10:20 | #

Ferguson got one thing right—the humiliation that lots of Russians, especially ethnic Russians in Russia and the “near abroad” have suffered since 1991. Other than that, he doesn’t see past the surface. First, Putin is not a nationalist; he only plays to the nationalist instinct of the average Russian. A Russian nationalist would focus on the long-term well-being of Russia’s native peoples. Russia is obviously suffering from a human capital crisis (people getting sicker and dumber) but Putin has not made health care, education or housing a priority. Not that these sectors are not being reformed—they are, but in a way that is not benefitting most Russians. Plus, Putin’s government is strongly pro-immigration.

Second, Germany had a sophisticated economy and a healthy, growing population in 1933. Russia has an economy that is becoming less and less sophisticated technologically, and an ailing population. Third, Putin, being no nationalist, is no Hitler; nor would he let a Hitler win an election; but Putin may need a Hitler to compete with in 2008. He needs radical ethnonationalists—strawman nationalists—in Russia to suppress them and emerge a protector of minorities’ rights and other European values. Fourth, Putin is no threat to anybody but the Russians because in foreign affairs, he’s a loser: he talks tough, then backs down. I can’t name a single foreign policy success creditable to Putin. Sometimes he just makes a fool of himself. Take this “space technology stone”—the whole Russia seems to be laughing at Putin’s counterintelligence. Fifth, Putin has no functional army. Sixth, most Russians can’t even imagine Russia invading Ukraine. And so on…

The NGO law that Putin signed is not as draconian as Ferguson would have us believe: its first draft was but an uproar in Russia and international criticism forced the government to amend the bill before the Duma voted it into law.

Berezovsky has never been PM of Russia.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 02 Feb 2006 11:34 | #

Alexei,

Putin may well not be a Russian nationalist himself, even in the very particular sense that I have tried to communicate.  Nevertheless, daily politics, presidential or otherwise, do not proceed in an ideological vaccuum.  Philosophy engulfs everything.  Even if you favour the power/financial rape explanation of Putin still he operates within a general philosophical context.

That context (or milieu or zeitgeist) is not left-to-right liberal, like ours.  Neither is it Conservative in the sense that we (sometimes) mean it.  It is something else, in at least partial explication of which I have referred to the vehement Russian nationalist, philosopher and geopoliticist Aleksandr Dugin. 

Here is part of what Wikipedia says of this man and his new political party:-

The Eurasia Party, founded by Dugin on the eve of George W. Bush’s visit to Russia at the end of May 2002, is said by some observers to enjoy financial and organizational support from Vladimir Putin’s presidential office. The Eurasia Party also is supported by some military circles and by the leaders of the Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Buddhist, and Jewish faiths in Russia, and the party hopes to play a key role in attempts to resolve the Chechen problem, with the objective of setting the stage for Dugin’s dream of a Russian strategic alliance with European and Middle Eastern states, primarily Iran.

The last winter he has criticized the “Euro-Atlantic” involvement in the Ukrainian presidential election as a scheme to create a “cordon sanitaire” around Russia, much like the British attempted after the first world war. He has also criticized Putin for the “loss” of Ukraine, and accused his Eurasianism of being “empty”. Now he has a transnational NGO called International Eurasianist Movement.

Posted by Alexei on Thu, 02 Feb 2006 13:52 | #

Guessedworker, I don’t know whether Putin and/or his ruling clique and/or a politically important segment of the Russian voters, are thinking and operating within a “Eurasianist” context, even broadly defined. It might be that Dugin’s Eurasianism is an expression of a worldview many Russians share, if subconsciously. On the other hand, Putin might sense that and pretend to be operating within this context while pursuing his very personal goals.

I would warn against taking Dugin the man and his party too seriously—he does not seem an original thinker.  Dugin’s writings apparently owe much not only to early Russian Eurasianists of the 1920s and to Lev N. Gumilev, but also to Spengler, Guenon, Junger (and even Pat Buchanan), so his intellectual roots are not so exotically Russian.

Posted by Karlmagnus on Thu, 02 Feb 2006 14:26 | #

Putin’s a Commie.  Always has been, always will be.  He wants state control of everything, with reliable henchmen running the big ticket items like Gazprom and the powerful ones like the FSB.  he deeply regrets the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and aims to recreate it, preferably bigger and economically more efficient—a bit like the old 1970s joke about Hitler returning from South America, his motto is “No More Mister Nice Guy.” He wants immigration and doesn’t care what color the immigrants are, so long as they obey orders. He wants the NGOs out of Russia because while in Soros’ case they are generally helpful, they may find out stuff he doesn’t want publicised—they reduce his control.

Apart from jailing the local Soros Foundation, which one can approve of, there is nothing in Putin’s agenda for the West to rejoice at.  By sloppy short-termist policy, Clinton and Bush have thrown away Reagan and Thatcher;s great Cold War victory.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 02 Feb 2006 14:56 | #

Alexei, my impression - admittedly very sketchy - is that Dugin’s current party political activity is an expression of the failing traction of his philosophical contribution.  I do think that, probably, he had a rather remarkable impact on Russian political ideology at the time the shine went off Yeltsin’s criminal beanfeast.  Essentially, he got lucky, and was probably punching above his weight.  But time and the nature of power may have found him out, and today he has nothing new or interesting to add that might regain the attention of the executive.  Hence the more overtly political current activity.

However, that does not detract from the fact that Russian politics operate in a context which, by hook or by crook, is substantially Duganist: pro-nationalist, non-racist, anti-liberal.  Whether he was genuinely creative in this regard, in the manner of the great philosophical thinkers, or just got lucky through striking the right note at the right time is a bit immaterial now (I suspect the latter, anyway).

For all that, he and modern Russia remain interesting but essentially valueless from our own standpoint.  We can’t use his ideas.  They don’t cross the Channel or the Atlantic.

Posted by Alexei on Thu, 02 Feb 2006 16:47 | #

I am more on Karlmagnus’ side here—Putin is a Commie of sorts, not the Lenin type of course but more of a Brezhnev-Andropov-lite thing with a Latin American flair: “For our friends, everything; for our enemies, the law!” On the other hand, there are good reasons to deplore the fact that the Soviet Union simply fell apart overnight instead of going forward as a non-Soviet, post-Communist Union, dissolving if need be over the course of years. That way, millions of Russian speakers wouldn’t have been left to the mercy of Asian mobs and dictators.

As for Dugin’s ideas, their anti-liberalism makes them indeed unacceptable in the Anglosphere.

Posted by daveg on Thu, 02 Feb 2006 17:09 | #

I really don’t see why the Soros and Ford foundations are accorded such respect by you?  I don’t see who the few individuals who run these organizations should be accorded such influence over a countries internal affiars, included the US’ internal affairs.

Posted by Karlmagnus on Thu, 02 Feb 2006 17:29 | #

Soros has been one of the major obstacles to progress towards free market oriented, reponsibly nationalist policies in Eastern Europe and the FSU—those pepole never saw a corrupt incompetent Socialist they didn’t like.

The late great Franjo Tudjman closed down the Soros office and jailed his local representatives; he was right.

Posted by Alexei on Fri, 03 Feb 2006 08:32 | #

Søren, I don’t think “liberalism” makes much sense outside of the English-speaking world, perhaps with Western Europe added, so I wouldn’t call myself a liberal. Besides, I do not believe the European populations of Britain, North America or Australia can ever abandon their liberal instincts. And why should they try?

I point out Dugin’s European roots to suggest that Continental Europeans might be better positioned to understand his ideas than people across the channel and the pond, who often think in totally different terms. I do object to his notion of Tradition, which goes back to Guenon, whose anti-Christianity I find unacceptable.

Posted by Alexei on Fri, 03 Feb 2006 17:58 | #

One of these Russians explained that in that country two different words are used in the Russian language to designate a Russian person:  “a Russian,” meaning a person of the traditional Russian race, and “a man of Russia,” meaning a citizen of the political entity called Russia, who can be of any race.

Let me try to explain this. In modern usage, Rossiya is Russian for “Russia,” and rossiyskiy is the corresponding attribute, i.e., related to Russia as a country or state. Russkiy commonly means “ethnically Russian” although it is often used in a more general sense. I believe 80% of Russia’s population are ethnic Russians. The remaining 20% represent over a hundred ethnic groups, the largest being the Tatars (5%+), then the Ukrainians (2%+)—most of them native to Russia.

Now the 80% that are ethnic Russians are not pure Slavs by blood, of course. The Russian (formerly Greater Russian, as opposed to Minor Russian or Ukrainian) ethnicity emerged after Slavs of Kievan Rus (and perhaps of Novgorod) started settling in the forests of the Upper Volga, possibly as early as the 11th century. As they were colonizing the land, they must have encountered its earlier inhabitants, mostly Finno-Ugric speakers. We have to assume that the Slavs mixed up with the Ugro-Finns and/or Slavicized them. It is hard to say how those Ugro-Finns looked like; I would assume they were of the so-called Uralic race.

The Mongol invasion of the 13th century could have left a genetic impact, too, adding not so much Mongol as Turkic genes to the pool. The extent of that among the peasantry is much disputed but the nobility of North-Eastern Rus’ (of Slavic, Scandinavian, Baltic descent) did intermarry with that of the Mongol Hordes for centuries. After the Golden Horde fell apart and Moscow came to dominate the emerging Russia, the nation started expanding again, colonizing new lands all the way to the Urals and beyond. As before, common Russians did not mind marrying natives, converting them to Christianity in the process. Not everybody was “sucked in” but, in general, Russians were not averse to intermarriage. For centuries, the Russian identity was primarily religious and linguistic.

Thus, the Russian “race” is an alloy, so to say, but its composition has not changed very much in the past 200 years (so it seems, except for the exodus of the aristocracy after 1917). My feeling is that many, perhaps most Russians think of themselves as basically Slavs with an assortment of admixtures. Russians are not very happy about the recent stream of immigrants from the Caucasus and guestworkers from Central Asia into Russia, but whether this aversion is mostly cultural or racial, I cannot judge. I would only say this pattern—of people from outside Russia+Ukraine+Belarus flowing into the heartland of Russia—is unprecedented.

By the way, if anybody is interested in the subraces of Russia, I suggest visiting http://dodona.proboards35.com/ for pictures and discussions.