This thread is about Russia and any events, political or otherwise, that are or might be worth discussing.
Any news, links or posts pertaining to the situation involving Russia, Crimea and Ukraine must be put in the 'Crisis in Ukraine' thread.
Group of deputies wants Gorbachev investigated over Soviet break-up.
Above in the Guardian version.
Putin's war against Russia's last independent TV channel.
No discussion regarding nuclear war. As nuclear weapons are not being used by either side, nuclear war is off-topic.
Edited by MacronNotes on Feb 27th 2022 at 11:26:10 AM
When was this? This is the first I've seen it.
Also, this is glorious. If only Minnie Driver was singing next to him in a cowboy hat...
Looks like someone tried setting 55 Savushkina Street on fire. Any other sources for this?
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiotAnother musical interlude, this time from Robbie Williams
It appears that some Russians aren't happy with the song .note
edited 27th Oct '16 8:45:12 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling OnWall of text incoming
From The Economist's special report.
TL;DR: The Russian deep state is...deep and practically in the hand of Putin through the FSB.
The Economist: Wheels within wheels
How Mr Putin keeps the country under control
MYSTERY, MIRACLE AND authority are three powers alone able to hold the conscience of people captive, explains Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in “The Brothers Karamazov”. Mr Putin has mastered all three. Yet none of these is as important as secrecy, the main tool of a good spy. Nobody really knows what goes on behind the Kremlin’s thick walls, or inside Mr Putin’s head. But several things are becoming clearer. Mr Putin’s rule is turning increasingly personal; a generational shift is taking place within his entourage; and the FSB, the successor organisation to the KGB, is emerging as the main mechanism for exercising power, often at the expense of all other security services, including the police.
Mr Putin had always relied heavily on his former KGB colleagues, but after the annexation of Crimea the expansion of the FSB gained new momentum and greater public legitimacy. It now openly wields political and economic power. Mr Putin has recently appointed three members of his security detail and one former KGB officer as regional governors.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, the KGB was a “combat division” of the Communist Party, tightly controlled by its central committee, which did not want to see a repeat of Stalin’s purges. When the party collapsed in 1991 the KGB lost its lustre, but the new rulers never dismantled it. Though the party could not survive without ideology, the KGB could.
Today the FSB is personally overseen by Mr Putin. “There is no political control over the FSB. It is a self-contained and closed system,” says Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services. Behind the scenes, the FSB controls the Investigative Committee, the Russian equivalent of America’s FBI. The prosecutor’s office, in effect, has no independent oversight of the FSB and the courts take their cue from it.
On September 18th, the day of the parliamentary elections, Kommersant, an authoritative daily newspaper, reported the Kremlin’s plan to fold other parts of the former KGB, including the foreign intelligence services (SVR) and the Federal Protection Service, which is responsible for guarding top Russian officials, into a new megastructure: the Ministry for State Security, or MGB, which is what the KGB was called under Stalin. The date of the report is telling. The parliament has become an appendix of the FSB. As Tatyana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Moscow Centre notes, the FSB drafts most of the repressive laws that are rubber-stamped by the parliament.
The FSB is a notoriously opaque organisation, but one of its most powerful figures appears to be Sergei Korolev, who used to head the internal-security department that can investigate the staff of all security services, including its own. He has recently been promoted to the job of overseeing all financial and business activity in Russia. His team was behind most of the high-profile arrests of governors, mayors and policemen in recent years. These started with two young generals from the interior ministry, Denis Sugrobov, the head of the ministry’s economic-crime and anti-corruption department, and his deputy, Boris Kolesnikov. Both in their mid-30s, they had been installed in their jobs by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s current prime minister and former president, and given carte blanche to go after corrupt senior officials.
Yet soon afterwards they became victims of a sting operation set up by the FSB. In his prison cell Mr Kolesnikov suffered a head injury and six weeks later, during a formal interrogation, he apparently killed himself by jumping out of a sixth-floor window. Mr Sugrobov remains in jail.
The public is regularly treated to footage of governors, policemen and officials being led away in handcuffs, their homes being searched and enormous piles of cash being confiscated. The most spectacular arrest so far has been that of Dmitry Zakharchenko, a police colonel who had hidden $120m in cash in his sister’s flat. A few weeks earlier the FSB had raided a vast mansion belonging to Andrei Belyaninov, the head of the customs service and a former KGB officer, and found $670,000 in cash, a one-kilo gold ingot and assorted old-master paintings. Mr Belyaninov was fired from his job but not charged.
Hardly anyone believes that such raids help the fight against corruption, which remains an organising principle of Russia’s political system, but they go down well with the public. It is said that Mr Putin is using men like Mr Korolev to purge the ranks of the FSB itself and keep its members on their toes and the elites in check. The practice harks back to Stalin, who wielded his power almost exclusively through the NKVD, the KGB’s predecessor, regularly purging the party.
Mr Putin’s rotation of cadres so far has been much softer. None of the senior people in his entourage has yet lost his freedom or his fortune. Mr Belyaninov has said he is hoping to find another government post. Mr Korolev’s rival has been “exiled” to Rosneft, the mammoth oil company. Every important Russian firm and institution has an FSB officer seconded to it, a practice preserved from Soviet days.
But as Mr Putin’s personality cult grows, he is severing his connections with the old comrades who remember him as a lowly young KGB officer and bringing in new people who have known him only as president. Many of those who had started with him have already stepped down, including Sergei Ivanov, a long-serving chief of staff and former KGB general, Viktor Ivanov, the former head of an anti-drugs agency, and Evgeny Murov, the trusted (but ageing) head of the Federal Protection Service. Mr Putin has also got rid of some of the old KGB guard who had headed Russia’s largest state-owned corporations.
Pass it on
They have been replaced by youngish men who owe their careers entirely to Mr Putin. Mr Putin’s new chief of staff, Anton Vaino, aged 44, is the grandson of a Soviet-era Estonian Communist Party leader and a third-generation bureaucrat. But while civilians have been installed to run the Kremlin apparatus, the children of the old siloviki are moving into key positions in state banks and natural-resource companies. The son of Mr Murov is chairman of the management board of the state-owned Federal Grid Company, Russia’s main electricity supplier. Dmitry Patrushev, the son of the Security Council chief, Nikolai Patrushev, heads the Russian Agricultural Bank, a large state-owned bank.
One of the communist regime’s key weaknesses was the impossibility of passing on wealth. When old party bosses died, their families were mostly left with nothing. It was also one of the main reasons why many members of the Soviet nomenklatura supported the revolution in 1991. These days Russia’s elite can pass on its possessions to its children, but its wealth and its physical safety depend on Mr Putin.
Perhaps in an effort at diversification, Mr Putin recently announced the creation of a new security structure, the National Guard. Headed by Viktor Zolotov, who used to be one of Mr Putin’s bodyguards, it has 25,000-40,000 special commandos at its disposal, along with 400,000 troops. These are not part of the regular army of about 930,000 and report directly to Mr Putin.
The creation of the National Guard is meant to head off the threat of another colour revolution (as the series of peaceful uprisings in former Soviet republics became known), explains Alexander Golts, a Russian military analyst. The scenarios used in its training are based on the protests in Ukraine and involve the use of tear gas and water cannon as well as conventional weapons. One of the lessons the Kremlin learned from the failed coup of August 1991 was that in a political crisis a regular army may be reluctant to use force against protesters.
As a former bodyguard, Mr Zolotov is responsible for Mr Putin’s personal safety, but also for providing some balance to the powers of the FSB. In a closed political system, trust is low.
Speaking of the FSB, just what is it's current relationship to the other two descendants of the former KGB — the SVR and the FSO?
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
They used to be at each other throats all the time. Although not to the degree that the narcotics agency (now part of the National Guard) and the FSB had, who arrested each others agents and may have even assassinated them.
Now, they will all (FSB, SVR, FSO+others) be merged into the Ministry for State Security, effectively recreating the KGB. Although the Kremlin denies this, which hardly means anything.
edited 28th Oct '16 2:07:12 PM by TerminusEst
Si Vis Pacem, Para PerkeleThere use to be another North Asian country besides Russia, Tannu Tuva, which was absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1944, but didn't separate from Russia like the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Baltics when the Soviet Union collapsed. I wonder why? Though, only Russia and Mongolia seemed to recognize it when it was independent.
edited 29th Oct '16 1:02:02 AM by Bat178
Like the Baltics, it only achieved sovereignity during the interbellum. Unlike the Baltics, it wasn't located anywhere of interest to the US and Europe to demand its nationhood...the same reason why Chechnya wasn't given much recognition either.
Also, the Tuvans were treated relatively nicely under the Soviet rule and therefore didn't desire independence even remotely as strongly as the Balts. They're like the Dagestanis, the Kazan Tatars and the Baskirs in that regard - they like living in Russia, so why bother with separatism?
Ministry of State Security - I actually welcome this merger. They were Putin's lapdogs already, but now they'll be less inefficient Putin's lapdogs. It's pretty much the situation with the National Guard, where there was no serious opposition to Putin's rule among its predecessor organisations, but plenty of overlapping fields of responsibility and stupid interservice rivalry.
Nox's article - Why does the Economist love overanalysing so much? The real reason why Putin is in power is much simpler and can be expressed in three words: no serious opposition. Half a loaf is always better than none.
edited 1st Nov '16 12:40:05 AM by KnitTie
The lack of serious opposition was a direct result of those policies, when you have several state apparatuses at your disposal to discredit, persecute and marginalize the opposition, only leaving a token opposition made of ineffective and ineligible politicians it becomes easy to achieve political supremacy by the lack of a better option.
The Economist has pretty much Analytical pieces of every single major world player, I've been posting their articles like crazy in the US and China threads over political and economic issues, I wouldn't leave Russia out of it either.
Inter arma enim silent legesYeah but the lack of competent opposition was a thing during Yeltsin's time too. I don't think it has much to do with Putin so much as Russia really doesn't have room for anyone but either a single big tent type that surrounds a man of charisma...or the crazies.
Pretty much. We haven't had much chance to move away from the USSR-style one party political climate as a society, so Putin's control apparatus described above isn't scary, it's silly because it's completely superfluous. If he gave up his paranoia and obsession with cheating and started grinding his opposition into the dust fair and square, he'd be even more sequre in his power and proof against most accusations of dictatorship to boot.
The thing is that even if you only look at what our opposition says without taking into account anything government-affiliated ever, they still come off as a collection of stupid, incompetent and anti-Russian to the point of prejudice elitist snobs that embody the worst liberal stereotypes with gusto.
edited 1st Nov '16 12:39:36 AM by KnitTie
"If he gave up his paranoia and obsession with cheating"
So he's a real life example of Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat? Reminds me of Trump.
Disgusted, but not surprisedHe is Dick Dastardly to a fault, sometimes literally. The man simply can't not cheat.
edited 1st Nov '16 5:06:12 AM by KnitTie
Wasn't there actually one election where they for some reason "embellished" the election result despite Puting having won in a landslide anyway?
Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.One? That's how every election since Putin came to power has worked, compadre.
edited 1st Nov '16 6:33:51 AM by KnitTie
So seeing as how there's an increasing chance Trump may be the next POTUS, any tips on life under a paranoid authoritarian?
edited 1st Nov '16 6:39:38 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedKeep calm and carry on. It's not that bad, really. Although that's mostly because we have very, very low standards about that sort of thing.
Depends. Are you part of the main steam society or a minority, specially if is one disliked in general?
If the former, keep a low profile and carry on if you're the latter...good luck son, you will need it.
Inter arma enim silent legesI'm part of an upper class tax bracket, but I'm also not white...
edited 1st Nov '16 10:41:59 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedUnder Trump you will be fine, it is the Jews, Blacks, Latinos and LGBT+ that will have to worry.
Oh yeah definitely.
edited 1st Nov '16 11:40:10 AM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent legesDon't forget Muslims.
Disgusted, but not surprisededited 1st Nov '16 12:04:02 PM by KnitTie
Hmm, maybe I should be going into the Philippines thread to ask how they are managing under Duterte.
Disgusted, but not surprised
There's something oddly amusing about this... (I know, I know, it's an old video, but still...)
edited 24th Oct '16 4:12:58 PM by Quag15