On the beach: notes from a Finnish Gulf resort
July 15, 2023
NATO’s Summit in Vilnius has come and gone. The Ukrainian counter-offensive is winding down for lack of ammunition and the need to reconfigure the troops following horrendous losses. The Russian offensive has not yet begun. And so we Russia experts find ourselves in the summer lull that you typically expect in July, when the vacation season is in full swing.
How long this pause in news-making events will last no one can say. In the normal course of events, the next big international gathering on the global schedule comes only in the period 22- 24 August, when the BRICS leaders assemble in Johannesburg. Reports from South Africa tell us that Vladimir Putin will attend in person together with his peers.
Under these conditions of lull, I propose to do what I indicated was in my plans before undertaking this trip to Russia: to share with readers my travel impressions of Russians on their summer holidays in the greater St Petersburg region.
I have been spending this first week of my trip close to the city, just 25 kilometers to the northeast along the shores of the Gulf of Finland. The settlement where I am staying is called Repino, in honor of Russia’s most celebrated artist of the late 19th, early 20th centuries, Ilya Repin, whose country house, or dacha, now a state museum, is just a couple of kilometers down the road from my hotel Repinskaya. I will have a word or two to say about him in a moment. But first I want to explain what this hotel means to me by offering some reflections on past visits. Then I will speak about its present day clientele and the whole related question of “family values” in Mr. Putin’s Russia.
*****
My stay in Repino is what I will call the ‘Rip Van Winkle’ experience. I was last here perhaps 25 years ago, when the very hotel where I am now renting was a shabby whore house of sorts: the clientele consisting of truck drivers took rooms by the hour for sexual services. But that was nothing unusual in the Yeltsin years, when the economy was wrecked, when decent people of middle age were out of a job and their sons, at best, worked as body guards or barroom bouncers, when all too many of their daughters were call girls. That was the time of unregulated real estate development, when there was good reason to fear that the whole coast would be divided up among the wealthy, who would build three meter high fences around their beachfront properties and the public would be herded into what remained of open sand.
On the other side of the coastal highway, a short walk up the hill in the direction of the suburban railway line, there was a hold-over institution from Soviet days, the summer House of Cinematographers, where film makers in the LenFilm studios and other high ranking staff and actors could reserve rooms for themselves and family on a full board basis and spend some weeks relaxing by the sea at negligible prices. As a journalist covering St Petersburg’s cultural life, my wife got rooms there for herself and our daughter. I dropped in on weekends. The place was shabby. The big stars dropped off their kids for whom their aged parents served as guardians, while they headed off to more classy vacation destinations.
The House of Cinematographers closed down more than a decade ago. And the Hotel Repinskaya entirely reinvented itself in line with the new values and new economy of the Putin years. The building was gutted and refitted to become the very modern, comfortable and medium priced family hotel that we are living in today. There are many young families here, by which I mean families with one or several infants, toddlers or primary school age kids. There are also some elderly couples who may be taking their young grandchildren in charge. And there are some pairs of elderly ladies who rent self-catering studios in the same hotel. The hotel offers afternoon entertainment for the kids supervised by gals in yellow sweat shirts with “Animation” printed on them. The term is taken unapologetically from the French lexicon of Club Med establishments.
Rooms in the Repinskaya hotel are now priced at the ruble equivalent of 120 euros per night for two including breakfast in what they call their “comfort class” rooms, meaning 30 meter rooms with balconies overlooking the sea. The same surface area is also on offer at nearly the same price divided into two bed rooms that sleep four in what we would call a family suite in American jargon. This configuration surely was well planned to appeal to the hotel’s target audience. The rooms for two have double jacuzzis built into the bathroom, a lavish feature for young couples.
And what is the social status of the clients? Do not pay attention to dress, because there are no starlets here and everyone is quite casual. The key is in the parking lot: not a single simple Lada. The cars appear to be mostly in the 30,000 – 50,000 euro price range. The Mercedes crossovers are now being muscled out by Chinese Heelys and Havals. The owners are, by definition, middle middle class. The truly wealthy Russians have their own dachas or apartments on the coast, or are now in Dubai and have no need for Repino.
Cross references to the European way of life abound. The breakfast coffee in our hotel is provided by automatic machines making espresso, Americano and Cappuccino directly from the coffee beans they grind and the fresh milk that they steam to order. And what is unusual about that, you may comment? What is unusual is that the coffee is of the same quality as we get in the Venice hotel we like best. Coffee like this is devilishly hard to find in Brussels.
A premium quality, premium price “Gastronom” across the road from our hotel offers Italian biscuits and other treats at sky-high prices for a clientele of dacha owners who will pay for the pleasures of Florence while staying at home.
Otherwise, the hotel breakfasts here are very typically Russian: great variety, ranging from the essential pancakes (bliny) with jam and hot oatmeal kasha (cereal), to cocktail hot dogs and Swedish meatballs, to a variety of potato and rice salads, cheese cakes and so on, as well as the fermented milk drink ‘kefir’ with or without fruit, down to the fresh watermelon coming from the deep Russian South. Breakfasts are by tradition the biggest meal of the day. When they are included in the room rate, as is the case here, you have already cut your out of pocket expenses for daily living substantially.
The hotel offers bicycle rental and there are many takers, since there are asphalted bicycle and pedestrian paths running parallel to the highway for dozens of kilometers.
Of course, most vacationers are here for the beach and a word about that is in order. The Repinskaya hotel faces the beach directly and you have just a 200 meter walk through fine sand to reach the water’s edge. On the negative side, this particular beach is very shallow, by which I mean that you have to wade out 100 meters to be in over your knees and 300 meters to be in water over your waste. On a windy day, and the days presently are windy, that is a long way out in the cold when you have finished your swim. The water temperature itself is a bracing 18 degrees Centigrade.
However, just 5 km further down the road away from Petersburg there is a beach at Zelenogorsk which is swimmable almost from the shoreline. We went there today and what I saw along the way there is a necessary complement to my remarks on the Rip Van Winkle nature of this whole experience.
What was clear is that our fears from the distant past that the shore would be privatized and closed to the general public were misplaced. Perhaps the explanation is to be found in the fact that the entire coastal zone is part of the federal St Petersburg region. To my mind this suggests that the opportunities for corrupt real estate dealings against the public interest were reduced dramatically as compared to a situation where low level local authorities open to graft would be making zoning decisions.
Whatever the reason, the situation today is remarkable on a European-wide level. The entire sand shoreline extending for dozens of kilometers is open to the public for free, without any of the private concessions for chaise-longue renters that blight the shore in Belgium or in Italy, for example. Along the coastal road there are numerous parking areas so that tourists can access the beaches wherever they wish. Meanwhile, on the other side of the coastal road there are pine forests which, in the autumn, are the happy hunting grounds for seekers of boletes and other prized mushrooms.
Lest anyone believe that the Petersburg’s coastal strip on the Gulf of Finland is just for summers and autumn outings it bears mention that in full winter these resorts attract cross country skiers. That the beaches might offer good ski trails as the snow accumulates is self-evident. What is not obvious is that the Gulf itself can offer terrific skiing when it freezes solid. The water of the Gulf is only slightly saline, so that the big freeze is all the more likely even in less severe winters. Besides the skiers, there are many ice fishermen who venture out onto the Gulf to spend the day, comforted as they are by flasks of vodka or brandy.
On this coastal strip there are desirable hotels and there also are many very attractive restaurants which have distinctive menus. On a summer weekend like today, every table is taken and you may find that you have to wait in line to get seated since no reservations are accepted.
One example of the themed restaurants is an eatery several kilometers from us which has interconnected ponds in front of it from which the diners catch their own fish for the chef to prepare. Needless to say they are not fishing for catfish but for sturgeon and other prized catches.
Another restaurant just near our hotel operates under the name “Stroganoff” and is a palace for meat-eaters. The central part of the menu lists “strip loin, rib-eye”and other American beef cuts alongside the universally known filet mignon in portions of 300 to 350 grams. Most remarkably, the list of these cuts is in duplicate: one for corn fed beef at around 35 euros and another for grass fed beef at around 24 euros. To my knowledge, carnivores in Belgium are offered no such choice…
*****
Now that I have mentioned Zelenogorsk, I return to souvenirs of the past before adding some comments about the family-oriented present that is very evident in this town.
My first visit to Zelenogorsk was back in 1972 when I and other Fulbright scholars as well as faculty on the US-USSR academic exchange were invited for cocktails by the American Consul to his dacha in Zelenogorsk. We all knew that Zelenogorsk was just within the 30 km limit from Leningrad which was as far as foreigners could travel in the Soviet days. The Consul was a generous host and it was a memorable visit. That was when I learned a bit about the history of Zelenogorsk from its pre-Soviet Finnish name Terijoke.
My last visit to Zelenogorsk was in 2010 when we traveled through it on the way to or from the town of Primorsk, further up the coast and just shy of Vyborg, where my wife and I went to meet realtors and inspect plots of land available for construction or ready built homes for use as summer residences. That whole adventure is described in some detail in Dacha Tales: Life in the Russian Hinterland, Larisa Zalesova (2020).
Zelenogorsk was then still in a dilapidated state. The main promenade-park leading down from the coastal highway to the shoreline passed between broken down amusement park rides.
Today that blighted past is as if it had never been. The statue of Lenin still stands above the coastal road, but is now surrounded by a well-tended lawn. The park promenade is decorated by seasonal floral beds that add a touch of dignity. The rides for children are in perfect operating order and have their little customers on board. There is a very handsome Ferris wheel at the far end. Along the way are stands selling hot corn on the cob, ice cream and hot dogs. The 200 meter wide sand beach is immaculate. There are several unusual bentwood two-seater benches in the sand for use first come, first served. There are new coupled demi-circle wooden changing rooms. The swings and other playground structures are made from bare brown logs. These innovative and aesthetically pleasing natural wood solutions extend to the park benches lining the promenade.
I stress that the accent is on providing free of charge facilities suitable for families with young children. Vladimir Putin and his government speak of “family values.” The park in Zelenogorsk and what I have seen in our Repino hotel show that these values are not just empty words of politicians: they are implemented in ways that have impact on people’s consciousness and daily pleasure.
The democratic nature of these resorts is underlined by their being well served by public transit. The shore line comes within the Petersburg municipal authority and the buses now running every 15 minutes from a major Metro stop in the city to Zelenogorsk are the same latest issue buses that operate in my borough of Pushkin. They are all fitted with credit card readers for payment and have video displays showing and calling out the next bus stops. In addition, these resorts are served by commuter trains.
*****
At the outset, I mentioned that the most famous painter of the reign of Nicholas II, Ilya Repin built a country house here which he named Penaty with reference to Roman mythology and their gods protecting the family hearth. The house was destroyed during WWII but then was reconstructed and today is furnished with art works, furniture and memorabilia going back to the artist’s forty years of residence here from 1890 till his death in 1930.
During that time, Repin experienced what so many people in Central Europe went through at the conclusion of WWII and what Ukrainians may well go through when the present war ends: finding themselves in a new country with new borders though they had not moved one inch from their homes.
Following the October Revolution and the independence of the Principality of Finland from the Russian Empire, the whole swathe of the coast down to what is now Repino was no longer Russian. The artist found himself in Penaty high and dry and penniless in a foreign land, and when he died and was buried on the property, he was still in a foreign land. It became Russian again only in 1940.
A year ago, when we toured the National Museum of Art in Helsinki, they were running a major exhibition of Ilya Repin, whom they designated in large letters as a Finnish artist and in small letters as a Russian. Of course, Repin was no more a Finnish painter than Rakhmaninoff was an American composer, though many New Yorkers would say otherwise.
Repin never took Finnish citizenship, though he donated many of his art works to the State in Finland and received commissions from wealthy locals to do their portraits, which was his special and distinguishing talent.
Repin’s major art works that are world renowned include his tragic portrayal of Ivan the Terrible holding in his arms the body of his son whom he has just murdered. Then there is his monumental painting of the Volga boat haulers. Not to mention his large scale painting of the Zaporozhie Cossacks, which present you with an admirable psychological portrait of the cutthroats described by the Ukrainian-Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol in Taras Bulba. Given where we are in the war, that paining in particular is very timely. All of these paintings can be seen in the Russian Museum in downtown Petersburg.
Ilya Repin lived and worked at the same time that fellow Russian artists like Malevich were laying the foundations for a new, abstract art that would dominate the 20th century. But for his psychological insights into his subjects, who were among the most famous singers, literary figures and statesman of his age, Russian culture owes a great debt to Repin. This suburban museum gives the visitor a homely understanding of the man and what made him tick. I heartily recommend it to anyone venturing this way.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/07/15/ ... lf-resort/
To be sure, Doctorow's point of view is strictly petty bourgeoise, it is nonetheless informative if that is kept in mind. One hundred euros or dollars is a very good price for a room with an ocean view, you'll not get that here in SC. Hell they get that much at middle brow joints like Days Inn on the interstate. OTOH, that sum is probably out of reach for the working class Russian. Sounds like a nice spot, compare and contrast: https://us.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/07/15 ... rig-ll.cnn
Russia today
Re: Russia today
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Russia today
Who will remember the boy from the Nadezhda office today?
July 17, 21:08
Who will remember the boy from the Nadezhda office today?
1. Azelitsky Pavel Pavlov, 30 years old, a peasant in the Pskov province. Opochenetsky u. Voronitsky par. miller in the cannon workshop of the Putilov factory;
2 Alekseev Dmitry Alekseev 33 years old peasant of the Pskov province. Novorzhevsky st. Anolinsky vol., village. Milokhin, a laborer at a chemical plant;
3 Alekseev Terenty 34 years old reserve lower rank from the peasants of the Kostroma province. Gakhichskogo Ryleevskoy vol., village. Kostoma is a worker at the Putilov factory...
This is from the "List of Persons Killed and Died of Wounds in Various Hospitals of St. Petersburg, Received on January 9, 1905."
Why am I? I read in the media: “Celebration (???) events dedicated to the Tsar's Days have started in Yekaterinburg. Events in memory of the Romanov family will last a week and end with a Divine Liturgy and a procession from the Church on the Blood to the monastery in the Ganina Yama tract.
“We will turn to God when we remember the feat of the royal family, their faithful servants and all their contemporaries who somehow got into this cycle of events, and, most importantly, their loyalty to the Fatherland, the Church and our Lord God.”
What unnatural pathos! Yes, 105 years have passed. Somehow I already wrote that purely humanly, from the standpoint of our generation, born in calm and good stagnant years, execution in the basement seems terrible. Yes, this is a personal tragedy of the Romanov family. However, Nicholas the Bloody had a lot of time and opportunities to change something and thereby save himself and his family. He chose Bloody Sunday. And every time I chose this path to the end. And the family was supportive. Who is to blame?
On the occasion of the next anniversary in the monarchical public, they like to post photos of the royal family and put pressure on emotions about the execution of all its members. Monarchists feel good, they have old photographs. Lots of beautiful and touching photos.
But there are simply no photographs of Russian children who died during the execution of a workers' demonstration on Bloody Sunday in 1905. Their exact number is unknown. For example, many eyewitnesses spoke about children killed in the Alexander Garden park. But there is not a single person under the age of 14 on the official list of those killed. Many of the dead and wounded were picked up by acquaintances and taken home in cabs. At the same time, the wounded did not go to hospitals, justifiably fearing reprisals from the authorities.
A quote from the book of memoirs of an officer of the General Staff, Captain Nikolsky E.A. about the events that took place on Palace Square on January 9, 1905:
“I turned along the Moika, but at the very first gate to the left in front of me lay a janitor with a badge on his chest, not far from him was a woman holding a girl by the hand. All three were dead. In a small space of ten or twelve paces, I counted nine corpses. And then I came across dead and wounded. Seeing me, the wounded stretched out their hands and asked for help. I went back to Riemann and told him about the need to immediately call for help. He answered me:
“Go your own way. None of your business".
Today, none of those who call for repentance for the family of citizen Romanov will remember the victims of Bloody Sunday. Modern monarchists do not want to repent for ordinary Russian people:
- Belova Maria, 16 years old, a peasant woman of the Kaluga province. Medynsky st. Kirilinsky Vol. village Volyupin;
- Dmitry Vasiliev, 18 years old, a peasant in St. Petersburg. lips. Gdovsky Tupitsinsky vol. village Rotten;
- Vasiliev Evdokia, 51 years old, a laborer at the Shavin factory;
- Pavel Yezhov, 15 years old, a boy in the Nadezhda office ...
(c) Alexander Stepanov
https://dzen.ru/a/ZLT6ytdktFiM4Aus - zinc
This is not a white bone, they do not deserve attention ...
There are simply profitable boys for propaganda , but there are disadvantageous ones. Therefore, icons are molded from some, and they keep quiet about others. These are different boys, you need to understand.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8498866.html
Google Translator
July 17, 21:08
Who will remember the boy from the Nadezhda office today?
1. Azelitsky Pavel Pavlov, 30 years old, a peasant in the Pskov province. Opochenetsky u. Voronitsky par. miller in the cannon workshop of the Putilov factory;
2 Alekseev Dmitry Alekseev 33 years old peasant of the Pskov province. Novorzhevsky st. Anolinsky vol., village. Milokhin, a laborer at a chemical plant;
3 Alekseev Terenty 34 years old reserve lower rank from the peasants of the Kostroma province. Gakhichskogo Ryleevskoy vol., village. Kostoma is a worker at the Putilov factory...
This is from the "List of Persons Killed and Died of Wounds in Various Hospitals of St. Petersburg, Received on January 9, 1905."
Why am I? I read in the media: “Celebration (???) events dedicated to the Tsar's Days have started in Yekaterinburg. Events in memory of the Romanov family will last a week and end with a Divine Liturgy and a procession from the Church on the Blood to the monastery in the Ganina Yama tract.
“We will turn to God when we remember the feat of the royal family, their faithful servants and all their contemporaries who somehow got into this cycle of events, and, most importantly, their loyalty to the Fatherland, the Church and our Lord God.”
What unnatural pathos! Yes, 105 years have passed. Somehow I already wrote that purely humanly, from the standpoint of our generation, born in calm and good stagnant years, execution in the basement seems terrible. Yes, this is a personal tragedy of the Romanov family. However, Nicholas the Bloody had a lot of time and opportunities to change something and thereby save himself and his family. He chose Bloody Sunday. And every time I chose this path to the end. And the family was supportive. Who is to blame?
On the occasion of the next anniversary in the monarchical public, they like to post photos of the royal family and put pressure on emotions about the execution of all its members. Monarchists feel good, they have old photographs. Lots of beautiful and touching photos.
But there are simply no photographs of Russian children who died during the execution of a workers' demonstration on Bloody Sunday in 1905. Their exact number is unknown. For example, many eyewitnesses spoke about children killed in the Alexander Garden park. But there is not a single person under the age of 14 on the official list of those killed. Many of the dead and wounded were picked up by acquaintances and taken home in cabs. At the same time, the wounded did not go to hospitals, justifiably fearing reprisals from the authorities.
A quote from the book of memoirs of an officer of the General Staff, Captain Nikolsky E.A. about the events that took place on Palace Square on January 9, 1905:
“I turned along the Moika, but at the very first gate to the left in front of me lay a janitor with a badge on his chest, not far from him was a woman holding a girl by the hand. All three were dead. In a small space of ten or twelve paces, I counted nine corpses. And then I came across dead and wounded. Seeing me, the wounded stretched out their hands and asked for help. I went back to Riemann and told him about the need to immediately call for help. He answered me:
“Go your own way. None of your business".
Today, none of those who call for repentance for the family of citizen Romanov will remember the victims of Bloody Sunday. Modern monarchists do not want to repent for ordinary Russian people:
- Belova Maria, 16 years old, a peasant woman of the Kaluga province. Medynsky st. Kirilinsky Vol. village Volyupin;
- Dmitry Vasiliev, 18 years old, a peasant in St. Petersburg. lips. Gdovsky Tupitsinsky vol. village Rotten;
- Vasiliev Evdokia, 51 years old, a laborer at the Shavin factory;
- Pavel Yezhov, 15 years old, a boy in the Nadezhda office ...
(c) Alexander Stepanov
https://dzen.ru/a/ZLT6ytdktFiM4Aus - zinc
This is not a white bone, they do not deserve attention ...
There are simply profitable boys for propaganda , but there are disadvantageous ones. Therefore, icons are molded from some, and they keep quiet about others. These are different boys, you need to understand.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8498866.html
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Russia today
‘The Financial Times,’ Danone, Baltika and how Russia is striking back
I have no doubt that among readers of these pages there are those who wonder why I remain a paying subscriber to the leading mainstream newspaper Financial Times given that so often I hold the paper up as an example of how mainstream distorts news reporting to satisfy the anti-Putin, anti-Russian bias of the editorial board.
The answer to that question lies in something more valuable even than the amusement and distraction value to be found in the Weekend edition, and particularly in the Lunch with the FT column, which is very well written journalism. Amusement used to justify my subscription to The New York Times, but when recipes overran the space formerly given to book reviews or travel reports, I cancelled it; there was no other redeeming virtue to the daily. In the case of Financial Times, that virtue lies in the occasional feature articles on a company or industrial sector. Such was the case in two articles over the past week directing in depth attention where almost no one else is looking. See “Kremlin oligarchs eye Carlsberg assets as Kadyrov ally takes over Danone unit” by Max Seddon, Anastasia Stognei and Adrienne Klasa.
https://www.ft.com/content/d5234953-cdd ... 749843ab5c
The follow-on article was entitled “Trapped or nationalised: walls close in on western businesses in Russia” by Max Seddon and Anastasia Stognei. https://www.ft.com/content/c6108c1a-97d ... 81ab52aaa9
These articles tell us a good deal about the nationalization on 16 July of the major Russian production operations owned by French and Danish mother companies. I take a special interest, because in my earlier careers as country manager or consultant to very large European corporations setting up business in Russia (1994-2000) then as incorporator of a translation company in St Petersburg (2000-2004) I did some work for both of these concerns and enjoyed an insider’s view of their activities.
For Danone, in 1997-1988 I performed business development research to guide their planned entry into a dairy category which was unknown to them (syrniki) but which could serve as a useful platform for nationwide distribution because it went into the daily lunch bag of nearly every child of school age in Russia. My work entailed entering into talks on Danone’s behalf with a half-dozen Russian leading Russian companies in this sector for the sake of co-production under the Danone trade mark.
For Baltika, my company was performing translations into English of all their press releases and of a great deal of marketing and promotional material.
The FT articles I have cited give an anti-Putin spin to everything they describe by withholding information that would have been easily procurable and relevant, or by malicious defamation of key actors. I have found some of the missing information in Wikipedia. Moreover, even without that extra step, I have arrived at different overall conclusions about the significance of the nationalizations by reordering the very points made by the authors that are buried in the text and not brought to the opening or concluding paragraphs. I believe this exercise is important and should be shared with readers, because it demonstrates that often you do not have to access alternative media to understand where the truth lies with respect to the Russia-Ukraine war, but just have to pay attention to contradictions within the reports of mainstream.
*****
To keep this analytical essay within manageable size, I will here devote attention exclusively to Baltika, the company that I knew best and longest as an insider, and the company about which the most information is accessible in public sources (Wikipedia).
Baltika owns the country’s largest brewery, in St Petersburg, and a string of smaller breweries across the whole of the Russian Federation, with a daughter company in Baku, Azerbaijan. For most of the new millennium and up to today, the company’s share of the Russian beer market is over 35%.
The FT article speaks of Baltika as a Carlsberg property but Carlsberg did not found or build Baltika: it had an interest in Baltika from a partial ownership of the holding company Baltic Beverages Holding (BBH) going back to the 1990s. I will not go into the whole story of BBH ownership, but it is necessary to explain that there were companies of three Baltic region countries which participated in its creation in 1991: Hartwall (Finland), Pripps (Sweden) and Ringnes (Norway).
Though there is no mention of this in Wikipedia, to my knowledge from promotional literature that passed through my hands, the Finnish partner Hartwall was at the time the owner of Finland’s (and Russia’s) oldest brewer, Synebrychoff. Judging by that company’s name (in Russian, Синебрюхов or ‘blue belly’), the Russian character of Baltika may be traced back to the 1820s.
The 1990s and early 2000s were a time of consolidation of the global beer industry, and the owners of BBH were all subject to that universal trend. One of the global survivors was Denmark’s Carlsberg which bought out another part owner of BBH (Scottish & Newcastle, Britain) early in the new millennium. Only in 2008 did Carlsberg take full control of Baltika. At that time, Baltika was the fastest growing and most profitable of Carlsberg’s operations worldwide.
The global economic crash of 2008 hit the Russian beer brewing market just as the entire economy suffered a severe recession. Baltika recovered in the ensuing years, but never again would be as profitable as at the time of its acquisition by Carlsberg.
*****
As we all know, the “Putin regime” is run by avaricious thieves who line their pockets at the public’s expense. As we all know, Putin is irrational and his moves are unforeseeable.
These principles guide the opening sentences of the first FT article on the nationalizations:
“Vladimir Putin ordered the seizure of Danone and Carlsberg’s Russian operations after businessmen close to the Kremlin expressed an interest in the assets, according to people close to the decision.”
We also find here the following:
“The Kovalchuk brothers, who are among Putin’s closest confidants, had previously signaled their interest in Baltika, which is based in their native St Petersburg, according to two people familiar with the matter.”
An overview of the nationalizations is set out in the FT’s follow-on article:
“Several months into Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a veteran of Russia’s mass privatisations in the 1990s received a call from an “old-time friend”. ‘This is privatisation 2.0!’ the friend exclaimed enthusiastically, suggesting they join forces ‘like in the good old times’ to get hold of factories owned by western companies that now wanted to pull out of Russia because of Ukraine. The scramble has parallels with Russia’s first great sell-off following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Kremlin-connected oligarchs snatched up prime assets at bargain prices.”
“Now, the assets on offer are all western, and all prospective buyers need are close ties to the Russian president. ‘This is like Venezuela,’ a senior Moscow businessman said. ‘They’re giving the best to their cronies . . . and then everything will go to shit.”’
From the FT texts, we may conclude that Kremlin insiders are driving the seizures of foreign corporate properties and that what confiscations lie ahead are entirely unforeseeable.
And yet, the FT names only two major Western companies that lost their assets in Russia by state order previous to the decrees of 16 July: Germany’s Uniper and Finland’s Fortum. In each case, it is fairly easy to see why Russia acted as it did. The seizure of Uniper was in response to Germany’s confiscation of Rosneft assets in their country. The seizure of Fortum assets may be set against the Finn’s summary cancellation of their multi-billion euro contract with Rosatom to construct a nuclear power plant in Finland. Production of equipment for that plant and other heavy expenses had been borne by the Russian state supplier Rosatom without any likelihood of compensation.
As regards the latest nationalizations, both of the involved countries have given Russia ample cause to act. France has been a major supplier of advanced war materiel to Ukraine, including most recently the shipment of their version of the Storm Shadow long range missiles. Denmark has been the lead country in pressing for delivery of F-16s to Ukraine, including nuclear-capable planes from their own inventory.
And as for the future? The talk show Sixty Minutes recently presented a feature report on Belgium which opened with a smiling photo of Belgian Prime Minister De Croo. The point was that Belgium should be prepared to see nationalization of the multi-billion euro investments of its major corporations like Solvay in chemicals and Glaverbel in plate glass in response to Mr De Croo’s boasting of his country’s holding the largest sum of frozen assets of the Russian Central Bank and of his announcing plans to send to Ukraine as humanitarian aid the tens of millions of euros that these Russian investments are earning in interest and dividends.
*****
Now let us consider the text of the second article in the FT reportage which also tells a very different story from arbitrary and venal considerations driving the latest nationalizations:
“According to one Russian oligarch, the Kremlin is using western assets to buy the loyalty of the country’s business elite, many of whom privately chafe at the war but have decided to stay in the country because of western sanctions. ‘People have lost their capital outside Russia, but they are being compensated domestically. They can make the same money they lost in the UK or wherever again,’ the oligarch said.”
The foregoing is set out in the midst of an article that is meant to be anti-Putin. But these very observations in the middle of the article can and should be read in an entirely different manner, as setting out the logic guiding very reasonable decisions benefiting stability in the country, punishing cruel enemies abroad and rewarding loyalists at home. The valuation we put on the nationalizations then turns on the quality of the new management and owners. From the FT article, one assumes they are the same thieves and con men who became oligarchs in the Yeltsin years at the expense of the federal government and of the broad population. But is this justified? Let us put aside the question of who from among the Putin entourage may become the principal shareholders. Instead let us consider who has been named as the effective manager.
*****[/b]
And so, we ask who is Mr. Bolloev and what are his qualifications for his new position as President of Baltika in its new status since 16 July as a nationalized property of the Russian state.
What does the FT tell us about him?
“Taimuraz Bolloev, a personal friend of Putin’s who has business ties to the president’s most powerful allies, is the new head of Carlsberg’s Baltika brewery.” And further: “…Bolloev, who previously ran Baltika in the 1990s, is reportedly close to billionaires Yuri and Mikhail Kovalchuk.”
The Kovalchuks are identified by the FT as the likely future owners of nationalized Baltika. But I will not be sidelined by that issue, since they will not be running the operation, and the presence of Bolloev at the top is the best assurance that there can be no asset stripping or excess skimming of profits for reasons that should be entirely clear when I explain the past of Bolloev.
Taimuraz Bolloev is not a very Russian name, you may say. And you are right – he is an Ossetian, from North Ossetia, the same homeland in the Caucasus as conductor Valery Gergiev and of the same age. Both came to Petersburg as young men and made spectacular careers in this most Russian of cities.
Let me not mince words: Bolloev is a through and through professional in the beer brewing business. In the 1980s he worked his way up the management hierarchy of the state brewery Stepan Razin, mastering all the production techniques before achieving the position of Chief Brewer.
From 1991-2004 he was the Director, then General Director and finally President of Baltika in St Petersburg. As Wikipedia tells us, in the first 8 years of his tenure, Baltika increased its production capacity 18 times. Under Bolloev, Baltika became the largest beer producer in Russia.
In 2004, when Carlsberg increased its control of Baltika, Bolloev left the company. Neither the FT nor Wikipedia says anything about the terms of his departure, but as I was closely following the company back then, I was surprised to learn that his next move was to enter the clothing industry, where he bought out companies and emerged as a high profile entrepreneur. It was clear to me then that Bolloev had not been a simple hired hand at Baltika but was a substantial share owner when he left.
Bolloev invested heavily in the latest production equipment for his clothing factories, which quickly moved into the sector of “special clothing” and uniforms. Ultimately his companies became key suppliers of uniforms to the Russian army. His uniforms are said to have marked a great improvement in the quality of soldiers’ kit.
After the 2008 Russian-Georgian war, Bolloev became the biggest outside investor in Southern Ossetia. Let us recall that Southern Ossetia was a part of Georgia which had declared its independence from Tbilisi more than a decade earlier and was effectively autonomous till Georgian President Saakashvili decided to retake the province by force in the summer of 2008.
From 2005, Bolloev was engaged in reconstruction of several historically important buildings in St Petersburg through his construction companies. He also was a major contributor to cultural institutions and to the creation of monuments in Ossetia, North and South. He is on the council of the Russian Entrepreneurs’ Association.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that Taimuraz Bolloev is the most experienced and best prepared person in Russia today to take charge of Baltika. Given his long commitment to Baltika, it is most improbable that Bolloev would allow asset stripping or excessive skimming of profits by any shareholders.
With that point, I suggest that the nationalizations are justified and rational and likely to serve the interests of the Russian people and state. ©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/07/22/ ... king-back/
I have no doubt that among readers of these pages there are those who wonder why I remain a paying subscriber to the leading mainstream newspaper Financial Times given that so often I hold the paper up as an example of how mainstream distorts news reporting to satisfy the anti-Putin, anti-Russian bias of the editorial board.
The answer to that question lies in something more valuable even than the amusement and distraction value to be found in the Weekend edition, and particularly in the Lunch with the FT column, which is very well written journalism. Amusement used to justify my subscription to The New York Times, but when recipes overran the space formerly given to book reviews or travel reports, I cancelled it; there was no other redeeming virtue to the daily. In the case of Financial Times, that virtue lies in the occasional feature articles on a company or industrial sector. Such was the case in two articles over the past week directing in depth attention where almost no one else is looking. See “Kremlin oligarchs eye Carlsberg assets as Kadyrov ally takes over Danone unit” by Max Seddon, Anastasia Stognei and Adrienne Klasa.
https://www.ft.com/content/d5234953-cdd ... 749843ab5c
The follow-on article was entitled “Trapped or nationalised: walls close in on western businesses in Russia” by Max Seddon and Anastasia Stognei. https://www.ft.com/content/c6108c1a-97d ... 81ab52aaa9
These articles tell us a good deal about the nationalization on 16 July of the major Russian production operations owned by French and Danish mother companies. I take a special interest, because in my earlier careers as country manager or consultant to very large European corporations setting up business in Russia (1994-2000) then as incorporator of a translation company in St Petersburg (2000-2004) I did some work for both of these concerns and enjoyed an insider’s view of their activities.
For Danone, in 1997-1988 I performed business development research to guide their planned entry into a dairy category which was unknown to them (syrniki) but which could serve as a useful platform for nationwide distribution because it went into the daily lunch bag of nearly every child of school age in Russia. My work entailed entering into talks on Danone’s behalf with a half-dozen Russian leading Russian companies in this sector for the sake of co-production under the Danone trade mark.
For Baltika, my company was performing translations into English of all their press releases and of a great deal of marketing and promotional material.
The FT articles I have cited give an anti-Putin spin to everything they describe by withholding information that would have been easily procurable and relevant, or by malicious defamation of key actors. I have found some of the missing information in Wikipedia. Moreover, even without that extra step, I have arrived at different overall conclusions about the significance of the nationalizations by reordering the very points made by the authors that are buried in the text and not brought to the opening or concluding paragraphs. I believe this exercise is important and should be shared with readers, because it demonstrates that often you do not have to access alternative media to understand where the truth lies with respect to the Russia-Ukraine war, but just have to pay attention to contradictions within the reports of mainstream.
*****
To keep this analytical essay within manageable size, I will here devote attention exclusively to Baltika, the company that I knew best and longest as an insider, and the company about which the most information is accessible in public sources (Wikipedia).
Baltika owns the country’s largest brewery, in St Petersburg, and a string of smaller breweries across the whole of the Russian Federation, with a daughter company in Baku, Azerbaijan. For most of the new millennium and up to today, the company’s share of the Russian beer market is over 35%.
The FT article speaks of Baltika as a Carlsberg property but Carlsberg did not found or build Baltika: it had an interest in Baltika from a partial ownership of the holding company Baltic Beverages Holding (BBH) going back to the 1990s. I will not go into the whole story of BBH ownership, but it is necessary to explain that there were companies of three Baltic region countries which participated in its creation in 1991: Hartwall (Finland), Pripps (Sweden) and Ringnes (Norway).
Though there is no mention of this in Wikipedia, to my knowledge from promotional literature that passed through my hands, the Finnish partner Hartwall was at the time the owner of Finland’s (and Russia’s) oldest brewer, Synebrychoff. Judging by that company’s name (in Russian, Синебрюхов or ‘blue belly’), the Russian character of Baltika may be traced back to the 1820s.
The 1990s and early 2000s were a time of consolidation of the global beer industry, and the owners of BBH were all subject to that universal trend. One of the global survivors was Denmark’s Carlsberg which bought out another part owner of BBH (Scottish & Newcastle, Britain) early in the new millennium. Only in 2008 did Carlsberg take full control of Baltika. At that time, Baltika was the fastest growing and most profitable of Carlsberg’s operations worldwide.
The global economic crash of 2008 hit the Russian beer brewing market just as the entire economy suffered a severe recession. Baltika recovered in the ensuing years, but never again would be as profitable as at the time of its acquisition by Carlsberg.
*****
As we all know, the “Putin regime” is run by avaricious thieves who line their pockets at the public’s expense. As we all know, Putin is irrational and his moves are unforeseeable.
These principles guide the opening sentences of the first FT article on the nationalizations:
“Vladimir Putin ordered the seizure of Danone and Carlsberg’s Russian operations after businessmen close to the Kremlin expressed an interest in the assets, according to people close to the decision.”
We also find here the following:
“The Kovalchuk brothers, who are among Putin’s closest confidants, had previously signaled their interest in Baltika, which is based in their native St Petersburg, according to two people familiar with the matter.”
An overview of the nationalizations is set out in the FT’s follow-on article:
“Several months into Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a veteran of Russia’s mass privatisations in the 1990s received a call from an “old-time friend”. ‘This is privatisation 2.0!’ the friend exclaimed enthusiastically, suggesting they join forces ‘like in the good old times’ to get hold of factories owned by western companies that now wanted to pull out of Russia because of Ukraine. The scramble has parallels with Russia’s first great sell-off following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Kremlin-connected oligarchs snatched up prime assets at bargain prices.”
“Now, the assets on offer are all western, and all prospective buyers need are close ties to the Russian president. ‘This is like Venezuela,’ a senior Moscow businessman said. ‘They’re giving the best to their cronies . . . and then everything will go to shit.”’
From the FT texts, we may conclude that Kremlin insiders are driving the seizures of foreign corporate properties and that what confiscations lie ahead are entirely unforeseeable.
And yet, the FT names only two major Western companies that lost their assets in Russia by state order previous to the decrees of 16 July: Germany’s Uniper and Finland’s Fortum. In each case, it is fairly easy to see why Russia acted as it did. The seizure of Uniper was in response to Germany’s confiscation of Rosneft assets in their country. The seizure of Fortum assets may be set against the Finn’s summary cancellation of their multi-billion euro contract with Rosatom to construct a nuclear power plant in Finland. Production of equipment for that plant and other heavy expenses had been borne by the Russian state supplier Rosatom without any likelihood of compensation.
As regards the latest nationalizations, both of the involved countries have given Russia ample cause to act. France has been a major supplier of advanced war materiel to Ukraine, including most recently the shipment of their version of the Storm Shadow long range missiles. Denmark has been the lead country in pressing for delivery of F-16s to Ukraine, including nuclear-capable planes from their own inventory.
And as for the future? The talk show Sixty Minutes recently presented a feature report on Belgium which opened with a smiling photo of Belgian Prime Minister De Croo. The point was that Belgium should be prepared to see nationalization of the multi-billion euro investments of its major corporations like Solvay in chemicals and Glaverbel in plate glass in response to Mr De Croo’s boasting of his country’s holding the largest sum of frozen assets of the Russian Central Bank and of his announcing plans to send to Ukraine as humanitarian aid the tens of millions of euros that these Russian investments are earning in interest and dividends.
*****
Now let us consider the text of the second article in the FT reportage which also tells a very different story from arbitrary and venal considerations driving the latest nationalizations:
“According to one Russian oligarch, the Kremlin is using western assets to buy the loyalty of the country’s business elite, many of whom privately chafe at the war but have decided to stay in the country because of western sanctions. ‘People have lost their capital outside Russia, but they are being compensated domestically. They can make the same money they lost in the UK or wherever again,’ the oligarch said.”
The foregoing is set out in the midst of an article that is meant to be anti-Putin. But these very observations in the middle of the article can and should be read in an entirely different manner, as setting out the logic guiding very reasonable decisions benefiting stability in the country, punishing cruel enemies abroad and rewarding loyalists at home. The valuation we put on the nationalizations then turns on the quality of the new management and owners. From the FT article, one assumes they are the same thieves and con men who became oligarchs in the Yeltsin years at the expense of the federal government and of the broad population. But is this justified? Let us put aside the question of who from among the Putin entourage may become the principal shareholders. Instead let us consider who has been named as the effective manager.
*****[/b]
And so, we ask who is Mr. Bolloev and what are his qualifications for his new position as President of Baltika in its new status since 16 July as a nationalized property of the Russian state.
What does the FT tell us about him?
“Taimuraz Bolloev, a personal friend of Putin’s who has business ties to the president’s most powerful allies, is the new head of Carlsberg’s Baltika brewery.” And further: “…Bolloev, who previously ran Baltika in the 1990s, is reportedly close to billionaires Yuri and Mikhail Kovalchuk.”
The Kovalchuks are identified by the FT as the likely future owners of nationalized Baltika. But I will not be sidelined by that issue, since they will not be running the operation, and the presence of Bolloev at the top is the best assurance that there can be no asset stripping or excess skimming of profits for reasons that should be entirely clear when I explain the past of Bolloev.
Taimuraz Bolloev is not a very Russian name, you may say. And you are right – he is an Ossetian, from North Ossetia, the same homeland in the Caucasus as conductor Valery Gergiev and of the same age. Both came to Petersburg as young men and made spectacular careers in this most Russian of cities.
Let me not mince words: Bolloev is a through and through professional in the beer brewing business. In the 1980s he worked his way up the management hierarchy of the state brewery Stepan Razin, mastering all the production techniques before achieving the position of Chief Brewer.
From 1991-2004 he was the Director, then General Director and finally President of Baltika in St Petersburg. As Wikipedia tells us, in the first 8 years of his tenure, Baltika increased its production capacity 18 times. Under Bolloev, Baltika became the largest beer producer in Russia.
In 2004, when Carlsberg increased its control of Baltika, Bolloev left the company. Neither the FT nor Wikipedia says anything about the terms of his departure, but as I was closely following the company back then, I was surprised to learn that his next move was to enter the clothing industry, where he bought out companies and emerged as a high profile entrepreneur. It was clear to me then that Bolloev had not been a simple hired hand at Baltika but was a substantial share owner when he left.
Bolloev invested heavily in the latest production equipment for his clothing factories, which quickly moved into the sector of “special clothing” and uniforms. Ultimately his companies became key suppliers of uniforms to the Russian army. His uniforms are said to have marked a great improvement in the quality of soldiers’ kit.
After the 2008 Russian-Georgian war, Bolloev became the biggest outside investor in Southern Ossetia. Let us recall that Southern Ossetia was a part of Georgia which had declared its independence from Tbilisi more than a decade earlier and was effectively autonomous till Georgian President Saakashvili decided to retake the province by force in the summer of 2008.
From 2005, Bolloev was engaged in reconstruction of several historically important buildings in St Petersburg through his construction companies. He also was a major contributor to cultural institutions and to the creation of monuments in Ossetia, North and South. He is on the council of the Russian Entrepreneurs’ Association.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that Taimuraz Bolloev is the most experienced and best prepared person in Russia today to take charge of Baltika. Given his long commitment to Baltika, it is most improbable that Bolloev would allow asset stripping or excessive skimming of profits by any shareholders.
With that point, I suggest that the nationalizations are justified and rational and likely to serve the interests of the Russian people and state. ©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/07/22/ ... king-back/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Russia today
Travels in Russia: Veliky Novgorod and Staraya Russa
July 24, 2023
I am delighted to read from various comments posted on my website and in Contact letters to my email address that many readers enjoy and profit from my travel notes about visits to Petersburg and to the greater Northwest region of the Russian Federation. Some of you have expressed the wish to come and see for yourselves what life is like here ‘on the ground’ among the broad Russian population during the holiday season.
Let me be frank. There is no heaven on earth and travel everywhere in this world comes with irritations and disappointments as well as with positive discoveries and pleasures. So it is here. In my last ten days, I have stayed in one 4-star hotel where everything was terrific except the very spoiled ‘beautiful people’ guests (Park Inn, Radisson in Veliky Novgorod) and in a mineral water spa (Staraya Russa) offering Soviet style health treatment to the masses, where there are the occasional bad apple guests who spoil the barrel. To be sure, my overall impressions are positive and I do hope that my remarks here will prompt many of you to follow in my footsteps, but be forewarned that there are downsides too.
Both holiday destinations which I am about to describe would not have appeared on the package tours that foreign visitors to Russia purchased when there were still big tourist flows from Western Europe and the United States. Both are historic centers on their own merit that have been lovingly restored only in recent years from WWII devastation at the hands of German occupation forces. This country is vast, the wounds of war were omnipresent and restoration was always prioritized for the capitals and best known tourist destinations. These two resorts are today in very presentable condition even as they are a work in progress. That remark pertains especially to Novgorod Veliky, where the most important attraction, a cluster of 11th and 12th century churches on the river bank across from the Kremlin side are now undergoing vast renovation that will be completed only in 2024. When they reopen, visitors will again have the possibility to marvel at frescoes of Feofan the Greek and other masters who brought and developed the art forms which originated in Byzantium. Nonetheless, there are sufficient sites open today in Novgorod to justify a visit. The icon museum in the Kremlin is one of the finest in Russia. As for Staraya Russa, the entire complex of the spa is fully modern and comfortable as is, while the historic monuments nearby are in perfect condition.
In the past, foreign visitors to Russia interested in visiting the historical and religious heritage of the country outside Moscow or Petersburg were necessarily sent to the Golden Triangle of cities in the near vicinity of Moscow and the Volga River which is the backbone of European Russia.
There is nothing wrong with that solution. But then to understand Russia’s past and ‘paths not taken’ it pays to visit Veliky Novgorod, which is approximately half-way between Moscow and Petersburg in the Northwest. Why do I say the ‘road not taken’? Because Novgorod Veliky was the cradle of democracy in Russia, a city which had an Athenian, or shall we say, Venetian style governance consisting of prince at the apex of authority and public assembly (veche) that decided key political issues. The princes were from the same Riurik dynasty as headed other medieval Russian cities. This unique arrangement lasted from the 12th through 15th centuries when Novgorod was conquered by Moscow forces and became just another province in a centralized realm headed by an autocratic tsar.
Novgorod in its heyday was the Russian entity that led the fight of the Rus’ against German crusaders from the West and against the Swedes from the North. Its greatest hero was Alexander Nevsky, a military commander who defeated the Germans in a wintertime battle on the frozen Chudskoye Lake which was part of the Novgorod territories. The German ‘tanks’ of the day were heavily armored knights on horseback, who, like the Leopards of today, were just too heavy for the battlefield and sank to their deaths. The mortal remains of Alexander Nevsky’s brother are believed to be miracle working and his coffin is on display in the Sophia church within the Kremlin.
In the present war context, Novgorod Veliky has a special resonance for Russian visitors to the city. The Saint Sophia cathedral church, by the way, is one of the earliest stone churches in all of Russia. Its interior space may be dimly lit, but the iconostasis is magnificent and in places one can see elements of frescoes dating from its earliest days. This church is smaller but historically as significant and closely dated with the Saint Sophia cathedral in Kiev that is considered the mother of Russian Orthodox churches.
Novgorod Veliky has a population of just over 220,000 and is not merely a tourist town. It has a particularly strong food processing industry. I had my first introduction to that aspect of their economy when I discovered their jars of concentrated traditional Russian soups (solyanka, shchi) and stewed meats on sale in the little grocery in my dacha hamlet Orlino 80 km south of Petersburg. The city also produces high quality hard cheeses and a great variety of artisan-style traditional smoked lake and river fishes. These I see on display in the Staraya Russa spa commercial center and in a nearby small grocery that is filled with the aroma of the smoked fish.
The Park Inn hotel, Novgorod Veliky, which I mentioned above is a magnificent place to stay. True, it is a couple of kilometers from the city center. If you want to live just across the street from the ancient churches that are now being restored, the choice would be an elegant three star hotel called the Rakhmaninoff. However, for pure creature comfort the Park Inn has no peer in this town. The rooms are very well appointed. The room price was the ruble equivalent of 100 euros for a double room with Scandinavian-Russian breakfast.
The chef of the restaurant turns out excellent gourmet quality dishes. The dining area is glass walled and from your seat you can see the shrub lined river banks that are just a couple of hundred meters away. If this all sounds heavenly, there is a problem: as I already noted, the problem is the upper class Russian clients who can be fairly obnoxious. Our dinner was spoiled by their brats, who instead of staying in the kiddy room were running around the tables and shouting. Round and round again. The moms, who were dressed for the Côte d’Azur could not have cared less. Their dads were probably back in Moscow doing some business deals. The hotel staff looked the other way.
On the positive side, the hotel has a heated indoor pool. Here, too, the problem was lack of management supervision, so that the several rowdy swimmers were not called to order.
But again on the positive side, when you walk from the hotel to the river, you find a splendid wooden path that takes you down to a boat landing from which several people were swimming in the river.
*****
When I told my high-living dental surgeon in Petersburg that I would be spending a week of vacation time in Staraya Russa, he said: “So you are going back to the USSR!” It was not meant as a compliment.
Indeed, Staraya Russa is a modern, updated version of the sanitoriums that were widely present in the USSR, especially in the South of Russia and provided the Stakhanovites of the working classes with free of cost vacations under strict medical supervision. The objective was prophylactic medicine that would restore the physical force of those contributing most to national production.
Staraya Russa today is by no means free. But the daily charge of approximately 120 euros in ruble equivalent for a couple pays for a handsome and spacious room of 30 sq.m., for full board and a program of mud treatment, therapeutic massage, special baths and the use of an Aqua Center that features an Olympic sized swimming pool for adults and a large separate pool with water slides and similar amusements for children. Your schedule of treatments is established by a doctor on the day after arrival in accordance with your physical complaints. The establishment’s computer system ensures that your every scheduled treatment is known to the providers before your arrival for an appointment.
The grounds are extensive and you can hike 5 km a day very easily going from your room to the restaurant, to the “water gallery” where you take your cup of hot or cold water from the source before meals, to the several other buildings that offer treatments, and to the Aqua Center. There is also a lake fed by the underground mineral springs, though the water temperature of just 17 degrees C is only for the very hardy.
The Staraya Russa spa can handle up to 1,000 guests at any given time. Because the facilities are spread out over a large terrain, you have no sense of the mass nature of the operation except in one critical place: the restaurant. It has three sessions of 50 minutes each for each meal to spread the pressure on the facility. But nonetheless, the numbers of the diners, their less than aristocratic restraint when offered buffet meals on an ‘all you can eat’ basis, makes meal time stressful and at times simply unpleasant. When you watch someone ahead of you in line for the splendid ripe melons that are the most prized daily desert pile on the slices so high on his plate that some will surely fall off on the way back to his table, while leaving almost nothing for those immediately in front of you, then it is hard not to be muttering curses under your breath. As for the food, some of it is prepared exceedingly well, while meats and fish can be overcooked and dry, which is not the least unusual in catering on this scale anywhere.
Lest my remark about in-your-face gluttony be misunderstood as a rebuke to the Russian lower middle classes who make up a large part of the Staraya Russa clientele or to Russians as a people, I hasten to note that in my vacation stays on the Costa del Sol or the Canaries back in the 1980s, I saw exactly the same rudeness and selfishness displayed by guests from Western Europe, who not only grabbed as much as possible from the buffet line right from under your nose but even dared to take away food to their rooms. To avoid spoiling relations with any given nationality among my readers, I will not name names here. My point is simply that mass tourist operations can only offer buffet service and the end result can be disagreeable for diners seeking a relaxed ambiance.
A visitor’s experience to Staraya Russa should go beyond the spa and take in other attractions that the town has to offer coming down from its pre-Soviet history. The establishment dates back to 1828 when ‘taking the waters’ was a widespread pastime among European royalty and aristocracy. And where they led, others followed. In the case of Staraya Russa, the most famous visitor, then local resident for months at a time over the course of more than four years was the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. This was in the last and most productive period of his life, when he wrote Brothers Karamazov among other master works.
Dostoevsky’s rented apartment in downtown Petersburg, now a museum well worth visiting, is a modest affair. In his lifetime, the neighborhood was lower class, overcrowded and noisy. By contrast, the large wooden house he and his wife purchased in Staraya Russa near a slow moving river and with a large back yard is a perfect writer’s retreat. The rooms are spacious and the family could easily entertain friends in style.
The Dostoevsky house is now a state museum and well worth your time. I was surprised by the preservation of this wooden structure in such a perfect state given all the destruction that WWII brought to the region. A museum guide explained that the building had served as the German officers’ club during the war.
The town authorities have made available an audio guide and there are also organized walking tours of the Dostoevsky district. In the immediate vicinity you find the Church of St. George and one other notable stone church dating from the 14th century which have museum worthy icons on display.
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/07/24/ ... aya-russa/
Very interesting, but I wonder when and if miners from Donbass could enjoy the benefits of Staraya Russa, like in the 'old days'?
July 24, 2023
I am delighted to read from various comments posted on my website and in Contact letters to my email address that many readers enjoy and profit from my travel notes about visits to Petersburg and to the greater Northwest region of the Russian Federation. Some of you have expressed the wish to come and see for yourselves what life is like here ‘on the ground’ among the broad Russian population during the holiday season.
Let me be frank. There is no heaven on earth and travel everywhere in this world comes with irritations and disappointments as well as with positive discoveries and pleasures. So it is here. In my last ten days, I have stayed in one 4-star hotel where everything was terrific except the very spoiled ‘beautiful people’ guests (Park Inn, Radisson in Veliky Novgorod) and in a mineral water spa (Staraya Russa) offering Soviet style health treatment to the masses, where there are the occasional bad apple guests who spoil the barrel. To be sure, my overall impressions are positive and I do hope that my remarks here will prompt many of you to follow in my footsteps, but be forewarned that there are downsides too.
Both holiday destinations which I am about to describe would not have appeared on the package tours that foreign visitors to Russia purchased when there were still big tourist flows from Western Europe and the United States. Both are historic centers on their own merit that have been lovingly restored only in recent years from WWII devastation at the hands of German occupation forces. This country is vast, the wounds of war were omnipresent and restoration was always prioritized for the capitals and best known tourist destinations. These two resorts are today in very presentable condition even as they are a work in progress. That remark pertains especially to Novgorod Veliky, where the most important attraction, a cluster of 11th and 12th century churches on the river bank across from the Kremlin side are now undergoing vast renovation that will be completed only in 2024. When they reopen, visitors will again have the possibility to marvel at frescoes of Feofan the Greek and other masters who brought and developed the art forms which originated in Byzantium. Nonetheless, there are sufficient sites open today in Novgorod to justify a visit. The icon museum in the Kremlin is one of the finest in Russia. As for Staraya Russa, the entire complex of the spa is fully modern and comfortable as is, while the historic monuments nearby are in perfect condition.
In the past, foreign visitors to Russia interested in visiting the historical and religious heritage of the country outside Moscow or Petersburg were necessarily sent to the Golden Triangle of cities in the near vicinity of Moscow and the Volga River which is the backbone of European Russia.
There is nothing wrong with that solution. But then to understand Russia’s past and ‘paths not taken’ it pays to visit Veliky Novgorod, which is approximately half-way between Moscow and Petersburg in the Northwest. Why do I say the ‘road not taken’? Because Novgorod Veliky was the cradle of democracy in Russia, a city which had an Athenian, or shall we say, Venetian style governance consisting of prince at the apex of authority and public assembly (veche) that decided key political issues. The princes were from the same Riurik dynasty as headed other medieval Russian cities. This unique arrangement lasted from the 12th through 15th centuries when Novgorod was conquered by Moscow forces and became just another province in a centralized realm headed by an autocratic tsar.
Novgorod in its heyday was the Russian entity that led the fight of the Rus’ against German crusaders from the West and against the Swedes from the North. Its greatest hero was Alexander Nevsky, a military commander who defeated the Germans in a wintertime battle on the frozen Chudskoye Lake which was part of the Novgorod territories. The German ‘tanks’ of the day were heavily armored knights on horseback, who, like the Leopards of today, were just too heavy for the battlefield and sank to their deaths. The mortal remains of Alexander Nevsky’s brother are believed to be miracle working and his coffin is on display in the Sophia church within the Kremlin.
In the present war context, Novgorod Veliky has a special resonance for Russian visitors to the city. The Saint Sophia cathedral church, by the way, is one of the earliest stone churches in all of Russia. Its interior space may be dimly lit, but the iconostasis is magnificent and in places one can see elements of frescoes dating from its earliest days. This church is smaller but historically as significant and closely dated with the Saint Sophia cathedral in Kiev that is considered the mother of Russian Orthodox churches.
Novgorod Veliky has a population of just over 220,000 and is not merely a tourist town. It has a particularly strong food processing industry. I had my first introduction to that aspect of their economy when I discovered their jars of concentrated traditional Russian soups (solyanka, shchi) and stewed meats on sale in the little grocery in my dacha hamlet Orlino 80 km south of Petersburg. The city also produces high quality hard cheeses and a great variety of artisan-style traditional smoked lake and river fishes. These I see on display in the Staraya Russa spa commercial center and in a nearby small grocery that is filled with the aroma of the smoked fish.
The Park Inn hotel, Novgorod Veliky, which I mentioned above is a magnificent place to stay. True, it is a couple of kilometers from the city center. If you want to live just across the street from the ancient churches that are now being restored, the choice would be an elegant three star hotel called the Rakhmaninoff. However, for pure creature comfort the Park Inn has no peer in this town. The rooms are very well appointed. The room price was the ruble equivalent of 100 euros for a double room with Scandinavian-Russian breakfast.
The chef of the restaurant turns out excellent gourmet quality dishes. The dining area is glass walled and from your seat you can see the shrub lined river banks that are just a couple of hundred meters away. If this all sounds heavenly, there is a problem: as I already noted, the problem is the upper class Russian clients who can be fairly obnoxious. Our dinner was spoiled by their brats, who instead of staying in the kiddy room were running around the tables and shouting. Round and round again. The moms, who were dressed for the Côte d’Azur could not have cared less. Their dads were probably back in Moscow doing some business deals. The hotel staff looked the other way.
On the positive side, the hotel has a heated indoor pool. Here, too, the problem was lack of management supervision, so that the several rowdy swimmers were not called to order.
But again on the positive side, when you walk from the hotel to the river, you find a splendid wooden path that takes you down to a boat landing from which several people were swimming in the river.
*****
When I told my high-living dental surgeon in Petersburg that I would be spending a week of vacation time in Staraya Russa, he said: “So you are going back to the USSR!” It was not meant as a compliment.
Indeed, Staraya Russa is a modern, updated version of the sanitoriums that were widely present in the USSR, especially in the South of Russia and provided the Stakhanovites of the working classes with free of cost vacations under strict medical supervision. The objective was prophylactic medicine that would restore the physical force of those contributing most to national production.
Staraya Russa today is by no means free. But the daily charge of approximately 120 euros in ruble equivalent for a couple pays for a handsome and spacious room of 30 sq.m., for full board and a program of mud treatment, therapeutic massage, special baths and the use of an Aqua Center that features an Olympic sized swimming pool for adults and a large separate pool with water slides and similar amusements for children. Your schedule of treatments is established by a doctor on the day after arrival in accordance with your physical complaints. The establishment’s computer system ensures that your every scheduled treatment is known to the providers before your arrival for an appointment.
The grounds are extensive and you can hike 5 km a day very easily going from your room to the restaurant, to the “water gallery” where you take your cup of hot or cold water from the source before meals, to the several other buildings that offer treatments, and to the Aqua Center. There is also a lake fed by the underground mineral springs, though the water temperature of just 17 degrees C is only for the very hardy.
The Staraya Russa spa can handle up to 1,000 guests at any given time. Because the facilities are spread out over a large terrain, you have no sense of the mass nature of the operation except in one critical place: the restaurant. It has three sessions of 50 minutes each for each meal to spread the pressure on the facility. But nonetheless, the numbers of the diners, their less than aristocratic restraint when offered buffet meals on an ‘all you can eat’ basis, makes meal time stressful and at times simply unpleasant. When you watch someone ahead of you in line for the splendid ripe melons that are the most prized daily desert pile on the slices so high on his plate that some will surely fall off on the way back to his table, while leaving almost nothing for those immediately in front of you, then it is hard not to be muttering curses under your breath. As for the food, some of it is prepared exceedingly well, while meats and fish can be overcooked and dry, which is not the least unusual in catering on this scale anywhere.
Lest my remark about in-your-face gluttony be misunderstood as a rebuke to the Russian lower middle classes who make up a large part of the Staraya Russa clientele or to Russians as a people, I hasten to note that in my vacation stays on the Costa del Sol or the Canaries back in the 1980s, I saw exactly the same rudeness and selfishness displayed by guests from Western Europe, who not only grabbed as much as possible from the buffet line right from under your nose but even dared to take away food to their rooms. To avoid spoiling relations with any given nationality among my readers, I will not name names here. My point is simply that mass tourist operations can only offer buffet service and the end result can be disagreeable for diners seeking a relaxed ambiance.
A visitor’s experience to Staraya Russa should go beyond the spa and take in other attractions that the town has to offer coming down from its pre-Soviet history. The establishment dates back to 1828 when ‘taking the waters’ was a widespread pastime among European royalty and aristocracy. And where they led, others followed. In the case of Staraya Russa, the most famous visitor, then local resident for months at a time over the course of more than four years was the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. This was in the last and most productive period of his life, when he wrote Brothers Karamazov among other master works.
Dostoevsky’s rented apartment in downtown Petersburg, now a museum well worth visiting, is a modest affair. In his lifetime, the neighborhood was lower class, overcrowded and noisy. By contrast, the large wooden house he and his wife purchased in Staraya Russa near a slow moving river and with a large back yard is a perfect writer’s retreat. The rooms are spacious and the family could easily entertain friends in style.
The Dostoevsky house is now a state museum and well worth your time. I was surprised by the preservation of this wooden structure in such a perfect state given all the destruction that WWII brought to the region. A museum guide explained that the building had served as the German officers’ club during the war.
The town authorities have made available an audio guide and there are also organized walking tours of the Dostoevsky district. In the immediate vicinity you find the Church of St. George and one other notable stone church dating from the 14th century which have museum worthy icons on display.
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/07/24/ ... aya-russa/
Very interesting, but I wonder when and if miners from Donbass could enjoy the benefits of Staraya Russa, like in the 'old days'?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Russia today
On justice and the rebellion of the Wagners
No. 7/83.VII.2023
As we know, the so-called Prigozhin rebellion was prepared ahead of time and was accompanied not only by criticism of the leadership of the Ministry of Defense without censorship and the demand for ammunition, but also by a social message, though not formalized into any political program, but fitting in one concept - justice.
During this time, Prigogine said a lot, on the basis of which it is possible to draw up a political portrait of his image. As he himself noted in an interview, "private property is sacred." Therefore, to see in him some kind of fighter for the happiness of the people is absurd. Oligarchs and businessmen not only in Russia, but also in other major capitalist countries have long learned to trade on the aspirations of the proletariat and earn "political points" by exploiting criticism of the vices of capitalism for the benefit of this very capitalism.
The Russian Federation is a bourgeois country, which means that all the same laws of capitalism apply to it, but they are expressed here with certain specifics. The West has been trying for decades to destabilize the regime, using discontent from below, but has not succeeded. At the same time, Prigozhin demonstrated criticism of the authorities from above. But was she independent?
Prior to the events of June 24, Prigozhin's bourgeois political technologists wrote :
“Vladimir Putin personally gave Prigozhin carte blanche to destroy the ossified system, since it will no longer be possible to change and fix a broken machine. That is why the president has repeatedly supported the Wagner PMC, presented awards, and also congratulated the fighters on the capture of Bakhmut. This can be called a landmark event, since the head of state personally focused on who exactly defended the city ... As soon as the Wagner PMC emerged from the shadows, Putin, at the first opportunity, presented Prigozhin with the Hero of Russia in a secret decree for the successful conduct of special operations. On May 22, 2023, a meeting between Putin and Prigozhin took place, at which the president agreed with Prigozhin to increase criticism of the elites. The reaction was not long in coming: the very next day, Prigozhin’s big interview with Konstantin Dolgov was published.”
That is, if this is reliable information, criticism of the “elites” and an appeal to ensure that everything is fair from Prigozhin is nothing more than the same order from above as military services. But the very fact that Prigozhin pointedly refused to submit to Putin during the rebellion showed that he himself became an independent participant in the events. We, of course, do not see the whole picture, but certain circumstances of the events that took place on June 24 do not change the situation as a whole for us, and the issues that were raised do not lose their relevance.
That Prigozhin castigated the so-called Rublev elite so viciously was clearly agreed with Putin himself. A person was needed who would, so to speak, "bite" the Russian bourgeoisie, accustoming them to new conditions of life for reasons of general class discipline. This is democracy with Russian specifics.
The Question of Justice
Putin expressed his attitude towards the June 24 rebellion in a speech aired at 9 am. In general, the text of this was sustained around the central thesis "evolution, not revolution", which can be traced in his other numerous statements. In fact, this is the quintessence of the thought of any political grouping of the bourgeoisie that controls state power in the country.
Of course, Putin would like history to go without a hitch, that is, for Russian capitalists to stop squabbling among themselves and begin to "work in the interests of the people." He himself has long become for the Russian oligarchs someone like a godfather. After all, under him their number increased many times, and therefore he paternally advises them to keep their capital exclusively in the country. As the main guarantee of their immunity. So that Western colleagues do not expropriate.
Of course, the justice of the system, in which there are some who own tens of billions of dollars and rubles, live in their own estates and palaces, and others who are forced to sell their labor daily, is not questioned in state propaganda. And none of the political scientists and political technologists hides this. That is the order of things. Consequently, the Kremlin has one morality for the “elite”, and another for the people. But National Unity Day is one for all. From locksmith Petrov to oligarch Usmanov.
Putin's speech was built on "morality for the people" and showed how much he is being led away from reality into a world of fantasies and illusions about "eternal peace"... Not only outside the class, but also within the class. But if entrepreneurs do not compete and fight with each other in the market or on the battlefield, then it will no longer be capitalism ... Therefore, in moments of crisis, top managers from politics advise the proletariat, first of all, to think not about themselves, but about Russia, about Germany , about the United States, about France, about the “old woman” of Britain, etc. And this always works by virtue of, so to speak, the class “symphony”. And it will work in the future. Exactly as long as the proletariat will be nothing more than a motley abstract, weak-willed fluid mass.
Speaking of analogies. Putin again did what he loved - he recalled the year 1917:
“It was precisely such a blow that was dealt to Russia in 1917, when the country was waging the First World War. But the victory was stolen from her. Intrigues, squabbles, politicking behind the backs of the army and the people turned into the greatest shock, the destruction of the army and the collapse of the state, the loss of vast territories. As a result, the tragedy of the civil war.
There are so many things mixed up in four sentences that you are simply amazed. And mixed about everything and nothing. The message is nevertheless clear. But the processes in 1917 and in June 2023 are as different as they are far from each other in time. Putin deliberately appealed, without clarification, either to February or October, simply for the sake of intimidating the public.
Prigogine described the situation in society in a completely different way. That is why it has gained popularity. But it's not only that. And also in the fact that Prigozhin began to expose the attitude of the "elite" to the NWO. One can recall the moment when, when asked by journalist Konstantin Dolgov about whether the fact that Peskov’s son served in Wagner caused condemnation among the “golden youth”, Prigogine replied that “this step caused contempt among the parents of the golden youth” .
“Because when I come to one of my friends ... they say with horror: “Why are you sweeping this? Why are you talking about children? Don't touch the kids." They all have psychosis... What are you, Lavrov's daughter lives in America, there is someone else somewhere else. Yes bitch, shame on you. You take your youths by the balls... and put them in their place... And what's going on with Shoigu? Shoigu's son-in-law walks around, shaking his “buns”, meaning his buttocks, and his daughter opens the Kronstadt forts. We did not come up with a special operation, but we took it under the hood. And if the village got into a whoredom, if we went to f*ck with the neighbors, we must f*ck to the end. And it turns out that the men are fighting, and someone is rushing from life. Another important thing is that not only the elite have children. And when the children of the elite smear themselves with creams and show it on Instagram, YouTube, etc., while the children of ordinary people come in zinc, torn to pieces, and when a mother cries over her son... And this split, everything can end with. It is, like in 1917, a revolution. When the soldiers stand up first, and then their loved ones stand up. And it is in vain to think that there are hundreds of them. There are now tens of thousands of them ... Surely there will be hundreds of thousands. We are not going anywhere from this. And everything will end with the fact that there will be Bartholomew's night in an instant ... People will take the pitchfork and raise them on the pitchfork ... And therefore I recommend to the elite of the Russian Federation - gather, bitch, your youths, send them to war. And when you go to the funeral, when you start burying them, people will say: now everything is fair.
By the way, it is not much different from what is happening in Ukraine. When the children of the “elite” are taken to safe places abroad, and the rest of the Ukrainians are taken hostage by a gang of crazy clown from the “Kvartal”. For example, the granddaughter of the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Alexei Danilov, travels around Europe and the Americas and shoots music videos about the need to live in a high, which are then played on the big screens of the mall in the very center of Kiev.
Hence the question: is it fair that the children of the Russian “elite” die on the battlefield along with the children of the people? And nothing else? Do people really think so? That they and their children should die for capitalism, which breeds the animal way of life of some and death for this sweet, carefree and well-fed life of others?
This is not to mention the most piquant moment in the figure of Prigogine - that his own daughter is exactly the same.
So what is justice and who determines it? And why does the billionaire voice the idea of justice?
“The key nuance lies in the name that the rebels gave to their action. More precisely, in the word “justice” contained in it. It expresses the most important basic value in Russian society. For centuries, society has been willing to give up certain freedoms in exchange for guarantees of justice. The bearer of the latter in different eras could be the emperor, the CPSU or the president. But the main thing is that he was alone. Justice should be one - being divided and transferred to different hands (especially if these hands are in conflict), it loses its meaning, ” the Octagon writes .
All this, to put it mildly, is not true. Both the emperor, and the general secretary of the CPSU, and the president of the Russian Federation exercised power not in the name of abstract justice, but in the interests of specific classes. In Russia, as elsewhere in the world, there has never been any kind of extra-class power. This is basically impossible. We have already heard what "justice" is in Prigozhin's way. But no "justice at all" has ever existed. As well as “freedoms in general”, “democracy in general”, etc. These words are used by representatives of different classes or social strata, but they put into it their own ideas about how everything should be.
And “for some reason” none of those who tried to reflect on June 24 asked the question why Prigozhin was going to realize his “justice” in the conditions of a bourgeois state that protects the capitals of the oligarchs with all the firepower of his army? And anyone who honestly asks this question will be forced to come to only one conclusion: that all those vices that Prigozhin so castigated are in fact not a manifestation of the qualities of some individual private owners, but are generated by the system itself.
What, in the Russian Empire, whose lovers are now divorced so many, was somehow different? Maybe someone will remember the inscription hanging before the revolution at the Petrograd Zoological Garden "Dogs and lower ranks are not allowed to enter"? By the way, this applies not only to the words of Prigozhin, but also of Putin about the lost country in 1917. But now everyone in the Kremlin will subscribe to Dud's well-known statement "capitalism, happiness, zae ...". They will not forget to shed a tear for the innocent and for nothing persecuted enemies of the people under Soviet rule, who tried to restore capitalism and drive a free person under the yoke of an entrepreneur. But now it turns out that capitalism is about justice… And what kind of justice it is can be observed daily in the news feeds. The bottom line is that while the proletariat in the Russian Federation will continue to be only a reflection of the bourgeoisie, reproducing its ideological attitudes,
As long as the consciousness of the Russian proletariat remains for the most part exactly the way the bourgeoisie instills it, then it will think exactly the same as they do. After all, Prigozhin, urging the Russian “elite” to send their children to the front, thereby offers something like a class deal to deceive the proletariat, which should calm down from the fact that the son of some oligarch or high-ranking official is serving along with his son. Prigogine resolves property issues like an oligarch.
It is strange to expect a representative of big business to see the situation in any other way. That is why Prigozhin scares the “elite” with February 1917, while Putin scares the people themselves with the same 1917. But both of them do not understand the objective causes of the revolution. More precisely, both revolutions. And that the events of those times have nothing to do with what is happening now. Moreover, even if now the Russians start to unscrew the heads of the oligarchs, and raise the officials on the pitchfork, the system will not change from this. It will remain the same, like all the problems it generates.
Therefore, state propaganda broadcasts that the Russian proletariat has no other choice but to unite in the current situation around the figure of the president. But how high is this trust and how does it correspond to the level that the TV broadcasts?
Any level of support can be cheated. Therefore, alternative surveys are conducted among the population and even articles are written about what is happening in reality. But what do they say? Such surveys, again, report only the obvious: that there is a certain mass of the population that does not like the ongoing processes and believes that they need to be corrected. And having taken Prigozhin's "mutiny" at face value, these people saw such an opportunity in the performance of the Wagners. Only and everything. If we talk about polls of different agencies, then they show such different results that it is difficult to say anything concrete based on them.
As a result, the proletariat did not show itself in any way in this story. Because it is not about the people and not about the proletariat at all. As a result, the ruling group in the person of Putin and through the channels of state propaganda brainwashed the proletarians once again on the topic of how it is not good to rebel against the authorities. The organization "Gundyaev and Partners", better known as the Russian Orthodox Church, and individual priests did not stand aside, who did not miss the opportunity to teach the people that it is a sin to raise weapons against the authorities.
Conclusion
The main conclusion is that the Russian bourgeoisie is not so monolithic, and some of its representatives, even in a state of hostilities, put personal ambitions above class discipline. For the regime of the Russian Federation, it is not so much the West and NATO that are dangerous, but the Russian bourgeoisie themselves. This provides certain advantages for the proletariat and communist work within it.
Of course, state propaganda will continue to talk about the "national unity" and the greatness of the "Russian world" invented by the Russian Orthodox Church. At the same time, what kind of unity can we talk about when there is no unity even in power.
The second is the soldier question. The soldiers themselves, with their own eyes, see all the falsity of the prevailing social relations within the army. And the army is a reflection of society. And the main pillar of the state. And the problems in the army are just one of the many damned questions of the existence of capitalist Russia, torn apart by internal contradictions, which are diligently driven "under the carpet."
And now Prigogine has built his rhetoric on the defense of a simple soldier from the arbitrariness of fattening military officials from the Ministry of Defense. But how did it happen that the military personnel of the second army of the world according to various ratings have to buy ammunition, drones and much more at the expense of public fees? You have probably already seen the advertisement of the RF Ministry of Defense for recruitment into contract service. But on Telegram, people familiar with the topic did not miss the opportunity to point out with caustic sarcasm how advertising and reality differ.
The ordinary soldier is faced with the same damned question, which is deliberately confused by state propaganda - the question of the Motherland and the state. The same question gets around the tenth way when discussing the events of 1917, which every time Putin leads. What is our answer? Two classes, two views. Open and read "The State and Revolution" by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Everything is chewed up there. As for the Motherland, these are not the same conditional birches, but endless fields that both the oligarch and the manager working for him from some financial company in St. Petersburg love, and the same soldier. This is a socio-economic system that embodies everything for which a person wants to live. The values of his class. People went to the Great Patriotic War and died not for a certain "Russia", but for a specific system on our common land for all nations - communism.
In the current conditions, each soldier is trying to solve this issue in his own way, realizing that if he does not fulfill his duty now, the country will be destroyed. And we don't have any moral right to tell them what to do. Of course, they defend and die for the bourgeois state, but their mission is now partly progressive - to counteract American fascism, including in the global configuration of the world order.
As Lenin wrote in 1905, the soldiers' barracks, which in those years was a "prison within a prison", turned from a hotbed of reaction into a hotbed of revolution. Soldiers in Russia have always played an important role in fateful events. And now we see how the bourgeoisie is solving the army question in its own way.
Third. The very “unity” that state propaganda talks about with such tenderness and tears in their eyes is nothing more than a beautiful picture. Moreover, according to nationalists from the Kremlin and experts on TV, the people do not have and should not have any subjectivity. Its purpose is to serve as consumables for business and war. And the train of thought should fit into the ready-made formulations of state patriotism. In fact, when the proletariat is formed into a class, sooner or later ministers, presidents and oligarchs lose power over it, it becomes power itself.
Fourth. Despite the existing problems, it is objectively important to keep the political system in Russia in such a state that Marxism could develop as freely as possible. In view of this, it does not matter to us which figure will be in power - Putin, Prigozhin, Naryshkin, Medvedev, Mishustin or someone else.
At present, the growth of Marxist cadres is very low and proceeds rather slowly. But that's ok at this stage. To expect more is to fall into stupid leftism with its race for quantity at the expense of quality. But the further the organization develops - both theoretically and practically - the more supporters it will acquire in all classes and strata of society. The time will come, there will be cadres from the army among us. All sorts of leftists, one way or another, confessing their love for the Kyiv regime and wishing, as they say, to “shake the regime”, do not understand this and, in fact, become enemies of the multinational people of Russia. The same as the numerous scum in the face of liberals and Nazis who fled abroad after the start of the NWO.
K. Kievsky
26/07/2023
https://prorivists.org/83_w2/
Google Translator
No. 7/83.VII.2023
As we know, the so-called Prigozhin rebellion was prepared ahead of time and was accompanied not only by criticism of the leadership of the Ministry of Defense without censorship and the demand for ammunition, but also by a social message, though not formalized into any political program, but fitting in one concept - justice.
During this time, Prigogine said a lot, on the basis of which it is possible to draw up a political portrait of his image. As he himself noted in an interview, "private property is sacred." Therefore, to see in him some kind of fighter for the happiness of the people is absurd. Oligarchs and businessmen not only in Russia, but also in other major capitalist countries have long learned to trade on the aspirations of the proletariat and earn "political points" by exploiting criticism of the vices of capitalism for the benefit of this very capitalism.
The Russian Federation is a bourgeois country, which means that all the same laws of capitalism apply to it, but they are expressed here with certain specifics. The West has been trying for decades to destabilize the regime, using discontent from below, but has not succeeded. At the same time, Prigozhin demonstrated criticism of the authorities from above. But was she independent?
Prior to the events of June 24, Prigozhin's bourgeois political technologists wrote :
“Vladimir Putin personally gave Prigozhin carte blanche to destroy the ossified system, since it will no longer be possible to change and fix a broken machine. That is why the president has repeatedly supported the Wagner PMC, presented awards, and also congratulated the fighters on the capture of Bakhmut. This can be called a landmark event, since the head of state personally focused on who exactly defended the city ... As soon as the Wagner PMC emerged from the shadows, Putin, at the first opportunity, presented Prigozhin with the Hero of Russia in a secret decree for the successful conduct of special operations. On May 22, 2023, a meeting between Putin and Prigozhin took place, at which the president agreed with Prigozhin to increase criticism of the elites. The reaction was not long in coming: the very next day, Prigozhin’s big interview with Konstantin Dolgov was published.”
That is, if this is reliable information, criticism of the “elites” and an appeal to ensure that everything is fair from Prigozhin is nothing more than the same order from above as military services. But the very fact that Prigozhin pointedly refused to submit to Putin during the rebellion showed that he himself became an independent participant in the events. We, of course, do not see the whole picture, but certain circumstances of the events that took place on June 24 do not change the situation as a whole for us, and the issues that were raised do not lose their relevance.
That Prigozhin castigated the so-called Rublev elite so viciously was clearly agreed with Putin himself. A person was needed who would, so to speak, "bite" the Russian bourgeoisie, accustoming them to new conditions of life for reasons of general class discipline. This is democracy with Russian specifics.
The Question of Justice
Putin expressed his attitude towards the June 24 rebellion in a speech aired at 9 am. In general, the text of this was sustained around the central thesis "evolution, not revolution", which can be traced in his other numerous statements. In fact, this is the quintessence of the thought of any political grouping of the bourgeoisie that controls state power in the country.
Of course, Putin would like history to go without a hitch, that is, for Russian capitalists to stop squabbling among themselves and begin to "work in the interests of the people." He himself has long become for the Russian oligarchs someone like a godfather. After all, under him their number increased many times, and therefore he paternally advises them to keep their capital exclusively in the country. As the main guarantee of their immunity. So that Western colleagues do not expropriate.
Of course, the justice of the system, in which there are some who own tens of billions of dollars and rubles, live in their own estates and palaces, and others who are forced to sell their labor daily, is not questioned in state propaganda. And none of the political scientists and political technologists hides this. That is the order of things. Consequently, the Kremlin has one morality for the “elite”, and another for the people. But National Unity Day is one for all. From locksmith Petrov to oligarch Usmanov.
Putin's speech was built on "morality for the people" and showed how much he is being led away from reality into a world of fantasies and illusions about "eternal peace"... Not only outside the class, but also within the class. But if entrepreneurs do not compete and fight with each other in the market or on the battlefield, then it will no longer be capitalism ... Therefore, in moments of crisis, top managers from politics advise the proletariat, first of all, to think not about themselves, but about Russia, about Germany , about the United States, about France, about the “old woman” of Britain, etc. And this always works by virtue of, so to speak, the class “symphony”. And it will work in the future. Exactly as long as the proletariat will be nothing more than a motley abstract, weak-willed fluid mass.
Speaking of analogies. Putin again did what he loved - he recalled the year 1917:
“It was precisely such a blow that was dealt to Russia in 1917, when the country was waging the First World War. But the victory was stolen from her. Intrigues, squabbles, politicking behind the backs of the army and the people turned into the greatest shock, the destruction of the army and the collapse of the state, the loss of vast territories. As a result, the tragedy of the civil war.
There are so many things mixed up in four sentences that you are simply amazed. And mixed about everything and nothing. The message is nevertheless clear. But the processes in 1917 and in June 2023 are as different as they are far from each other in time. Putin deliberately appealed, without clarification, either to February or October, simply for the sake of intimidating the public.
Prigogine described the situation in society in a completely different way. That is why it has gained popularity. But it's not only that. And also in the fact that Prigozhin began to expose the attitude of the "elite" to the NWO. One can recall the moment when, when asked by journalist Konstantin Dolgov about whether the fact that Peskov’s son served in Wagner caused condemnation among the “golden youth”, Prigogine replied that “this step caused contempt among the parents of the golden youth” .
“Because when I come to one of my friends ... they say with horror: “Why are you sweeping this? Why are you talking about children? Don't touch the kids." They all have psychosis... What are you, Lavrov's daughter lives in America, there is someone else somewhere else. Yes bitch, shame on you. You take your youths by the balls... and put them in their place... And what's going on with Shoigu? Shoigu's son-in-law walks around, shaking his “buns”, meaning his buttocks, and his daughter opens the Kronstadt forts. We did not come up with a special operation, but we took it under the hood. And if the village got into a whoredom, if we went to f*ck with the neighbors, we must f*ck to the end. And it turns out that the men are fighting, and someone is rushing from life. Another important thing is that not only the elite have children. And when the children of the elite smear themselves with creams and show it on Instagram, YouTube, etc., while the children of ordinary people come in zinc, torn to pieces, and when a mother cries over her son... And this split, everything can end with. It is, like in 1917, a revolution. When the soldiers stand up first, and then their loved ones stand up. And it is in vain to think that there are hundreds of them. There are now tens of thousands of them ... Surely there will be hundreds of thousands. We are not going anywhere from this. And everything will end with the fact that there will be Bartholomew's night in an instant ... People will take the pitchfork and raise them on the pitchfork ... And therefore I recommend to the elite of the Russian Federation - gather, bitch, your youths, send them to war. And when you go to the funeral, when you start burying them, people will say: now everything is fair.
By the way, it is not much different from what is happening in Ukraine. When the children of the “elite” are taken to safe places abroad, and the rest of the Ukrainians are taken hostage by a gang of crazy clown from the “Kvartal”. For example, the granddaughter of the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Alexei Danilov, travels around Europe and the Americas and shoots music videos about the need to live in a high, which are then played on the big screens of the mall in the very center of Kiev.
Hence the question: is it fair that the children of the Russian “elite” die on the battlefield along with the children of the people? And nothing else? Do people really think so? That they and their children should die for capitalism, which breeds the animal way of life of some and death for this sweet, carefree and well-fed life of others?
This is not to mention the most piquant moment in the figure of Prigogine - that his own daughter is exactly the same.
So what is justice and who determines it? And why does the billionaire voice the idea of justice?
“The key nuance lies in the name that the rebels gave to their action. More precisely, in the word “justice” contained in it. It expresses the most important basic value in Russian society. For centuries, society has been willing to give up certain freedoms in exchange for guarantees of justice. The bearer of the latter in different eras could be the emperor, the CPSU or the president. But the main thing is that he was alone. Justice should be one - being divided and transferred to different hands (especially if these hands are in conflict), it loses its meaning, ” the Octagon writes .
All this, to put it mildly, is not true. Both the emperor, and the general secretary of the CPSU, and the president of the Russian Federation exercised power not in the name of abstract justice, but in the interests of specific classes. In Russia, as elsewhere in the world, there has never been any kind of extra-class power. This is basically impossible. We have already heard what "justice" is in Prigozhin's way. But no "justice at all" has ever existed. As well as “freedoms in general”, “democracy in general”, etc. These words are used by representatives of different classes or social strata, but they put into it their own ideas about how everything should be.
And “for some reason” none of those who tried to reflect on June 24 asked the question why Prigozhin was going to realize his “justice” in the conditions of a bourgeois state that protects the capitals of the oligarchs with all the firepower of his army? And anyone who honestly asks this question will be forced to come to only one conclusion: that all those vices that Prigozhin so castigated are in fact not a manifestation of the qualities of some individual private owners, but are generated by the system itself.
What, in the Russian Empire, whose lovers are now divorced so many, was somehow different? Maybe someone will remember the inscription hanging before the revolution at the Petrograd Zoological Garden "Dogs and lower ranks are not allowed to enter"? By the way, this applies not only to the words of Prigozhin, but also of Putin about the lost country in 1917. But now everyone in the Kremlin will subscribe to Dud's well-known statement "capitalism, happiness, zae ...". They will not forget to shed a tear for the innocent and for nothing persecuted enemies of the people under Soviet rule, who tried to restore capitalism and drive a free person under the yoke of an entrepreneur. But now it turns out that capitalism is about justice… And what kind of justice it is can be observed daily in the news feeds. The bottom line is that while the proletariat in the Russian Federation will continue to be only a reflection of the bourgeoisie, reproducing its ideological attitudes,
As long as the consciousness of the Russian proletariat remains for the most part exactly the way the bourgeoisie instills it, then it will think exactly the same as they do. After all, Prigozhin, urging the Russian “elite” to send their children to the front, thereby offers something like a class deal to deceive the proletariat, which should calm down from the fact that the son of some oligarch or high-ranking official is serving along with his son. Prigogine resolves property issues like an oligarch.
It is strange to expect a representative of big business to see the situation in any other way. That is why Prigozhin scares the “elite” with February 1917, while Putin scares the people themselves with the same 1917. But both of them do not understand the objective causes of the revolution. More precisely, both revolutions. And that the events of those times have nothing to do with what is happening now. Moreover, even if now the Russians start to unscrew the heads of the oligarchs, and raise the officials on the pitchfork, the system will not change from this. It will remain the same, like all the problems it generates.
Therefore, state propaganda broadcasts that the Russian proletariat has no other choice but to unite in the current situation around the figure of the president. But how high is this trust and how does it correspond to the level that the TV broadcasts?
Any level of support can be cheated. Therefore, alternative surveys are conducted among the population and even articles are written about what is happening in reality. But what do they say? Such surveys, again, report only the obvious: that there is a certain mass of the population that does not like the ongoing processes and believes that they need to be corrected. And having taken Prigozhin's "mutiny" at face value, these people saw such an opportunity in the performance of the Wagners. Only and everything. If we talk about polls of different agencies, then they show such different results that it is difficult to say anything concrete based on them.
As a result, the proletariat did not show itself in any way in this story. Because it is not about the people and not about the proletariat at all. As a result, the ruling group in the person of Putin and through the channels of state propaganda brainwashed the proletarians once again on the topic of how it is not good to rebel against the authorities. The organization "Gundyaev and Partners", better known as the Russian Orthodox Church, and individual priests did not stand aside, who did not miss the opportunity to teach the people that it is a sin to raise weapons against the authorities.
Conclusion
The main conclusion is that the Russian bourgeoisie is not so monolithic, and some of its representatives, even in a state of hostilities, put personal ambitions above class discipline. For the regime of the Russian Federation, it is not so much the West and NATO that are dangerous, but the Russian bourgeoisie themselves. This provides certain advantages for the proletariat and communist work within it.
Of course, state propaganda will continue to talk about the "national unity" and the greatness of the "Russian world" invented by the Russian Orthodox Church. At the same time, what kind of unity can we talk about when there is no unity even in power.
The second is the soldier question. The soldiers themselves, with their own eyes, see all the falsity of the prevailing social relations within the army. And the army is a reflection of society. And the main pillar of the state. And the problems in the army are just one of the many damned questions of the existence of capitalist Russia, torn apart by internal contradictions, which are diligently driven "under the carpet."
And now Prigogine has built his rhetoric on the defense of a simple soldier from the arbitrariness of fattening military officials from the Ministry of Defense. But how did it happen that the military personnel of the second army of the world according to various ratings have to buy ammunition, drones and much more at the expense of public fees? You have probably already seen the advertisement of the RF Ministry of Defense for recruitment into contract service. But on Telegram, people familiar with the topic did not miss the opportunity to point out with caustic sarcasm how advertising and reality differ.
The ordinary soldier is faced with the same damned question, which is deliberately confused by state propaganda - the question of the Motherland and the state. The same question gets around the tenth way when discussing the events of 1917, which every time Putin leads. What is our answer? Two classes, two views. Open and read "The State and Revolution" by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Everything is chewed up there. As for the Motherland, these are not the same conditional birches, but endless fields that both the oligarch and the manager working for him from some financial company in St. Petersburg love, and the same soldier. This is a socio-economic system that embodies everything for which a person wants to live. The values of his class. People went to the Great Patriotic War and died not for a certain "Russia", but for a specific system on our common land for all nations - communism.
In the current conditions, each soldier is trying to solve this issue in his own way, realizing that if he does not fulfill his duty now, the country will be destroyed. And we don't have any moral right to tell them what to do. Of course, they defend and die for the bourgeois state, but their mission is now partly progressive - to counteract American fascism, including in the global configuration of the world order.
As Lenin wrote in 1905, the soldiers' barracks, which in those years was a "prison within a prison", turned from a hotbed of reaction into a hotbed of revolution. Soldiers in Russia have always played an important role in fateful events. And now we see how the bourgeoisie is solving the army question in its own way.
Third. The very “unity” that state propaganda talks about with such tenderness and tears in their eyes is nothing more than a beautiful picture. Moreover, according to nationalists from the Kremlin and experts on TV, the people do not have and should not have any subjectivity. Its purpose is to serve as consumables for business and war. And the train of thought should fit into the ready-made formulations of state patriotism. In fact, when the proletariat is formed into a class, sooner or later ministers, presidents and oligarchs lose power over it, it becomes power itself.
Fourth. Despite the existing problems, it is objectively important to keep the political system in Russia in such a state that Marxism could develop as freely as possible. In view of this, it does not matter to us which figure will be in power - Putin, Prigozhin, Naryshkin, Medvedev, Mishustin or someone else.
At present, the growth of Marxist cadres is very low and proceeds rather slowly. But that's ok at this stage. To expect more is to fall into stupid leftism with its race for quantity at the expense of quality. But the further the organization develops - both theoretically and practically - the more supporters it will acquire in all classes and strata of society. The time will come, there will be cadres from the army among us. All sorts of leftists, one way or another, confessing their love for the Kyiv regime and wishing, as they say, to “shake the regime”, do not understand this and, in fact, become enemies of the multinational people of Russia. The same as the numerous scum in the face of liberals and Nazis who fled abroad after the start of the NWO.
K. Kievsky
26/07/2023
https://prorivists.org/83_w2/
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Russia today
Reflections on Russia and Crimea: The Hate Goes One Way
By Rick Sterling and Dan Kovalik - July 27, 2023 6
Scene from beautiful Crimea. [Source: sputnikglobe.com]
[This is the third part of a travelogue series by two CAM writers who recently traveled to Russia and Crimea. Part 1 of the series can be read here; and Part II here.—Editors]
We spent nearly 20 days in Russia, including five days in Crimea. During our journey, we spent around 70 hours on trains riding in close quarters with Russians whom we had never met before but who freely shared food and drink with us. Indeed, throughout our travels, we were invariably treated with kindness, generosity and hospitality.
When people realized that we spoke English and were from the States, they tried very hard to communicate with us and to make sure that we, as visitors in their land, were comfortable and taken care of. In short, it was clear to us that, while many Americans may hate Russia and even Russians themselves, this hatred is not returned in kind.
One anecdote is illustrative of such treatment. About half an hour into our 27-hour train ride from Moscow to Crimea, Rick realized that he had left his money belt, with around $2,000 in cash, back in his Moscow hotel room safe. This hotel had a quaint name in English—the Sunflower Avenue Hotel—and is located around the corner from the biggest mosque in Europe.
Rick called the hotel and informed them of what had happened, and, after some back and forth to make sure that Rick was the true owner of the money, the hotel management said they would give it to anyone we designated to retrieve it.
We were able to contact a friend in Moscow, Yulia, who went to the hotel and took possession of the money belt. And, because our plan was to travel back from Crimea directly to St. Petersburg, and not to return to Moscow, Yulia also arranged for a friend of hers to bring the belt to St. Petersburg—a city located at least four hours by train from Moscow. Within a few hours of our returning there a week later, this friend drove up to the hotel and handed the belt to Rick outside of our hotel. And, not a dollar was missing.
Obviously, this could have turned out much differently given how many times the money belt had to change hands before getting back to Rick and given that all involved knew that if we never saw some or all of the money again there would have been little we could do about it given that we were not returning to Moscow and would soon be leaving for the United States. Our faith in humanity remained intact from the experience.
The other place where we witnessed that the hate goes only one way was in Crimea—a peninsula on the Black Sea, which has changed hands from Russia to the Soviet Union to Ukraine and back to Russia and which has three distinct ethnic groups. These three ethnic groups are Russians, who make up around 65% of the Crimean population, Ukrainians who are 16% of the population and Tatars who are around 13%. Although there are these different ethnic groups, more than 80% of the Crimeans speak Russian on a daily basis.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and Ukraine’s taking control of the peninsula in spite of an earlier (January 1991) referendum in which 94% of Crimeans voted to become an autonomous Republic, Ukraine moved quickly to try to “Ukrainize” Crimea along with the Russian-speaking Donbas region of Ukraine. What this meant in practice was outlawing Russian as a national language and as a language taught in schools, and attempting to eradicate Russian culture and historical monuments.
This process accelerated after the 2014 coup in Kyiv, which brought to power a right-wing government quite hostile to Ukraine’s own Russian population. It was this open hostility, which led Crimeans to hold a referendum to rejoin Russia—a referendum in which, with an 83% voter turnout, 97% of the voters cast their votes for Russian reunification.
For its part, the Ukrainian government moved to punish the Crimean people for their decision to return to Russia. Thus, Ukraine dammed a canal which fed Crimea with fresh water and cut off electricity to Crimea, resulting in Crimeans suffering from a lack of electricity for months.
While Zelensky and the U.S. are escalating their threats that Ukraine will somehow “recapture” Crimea, this type of spiteful mistreatment of Crimea, combined with the periodic drone attacks against civilian targets in Crimea, have guaranteed that Crimea will never willingly go back to Ukraine.
Crimeans honor Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka. [Source: Photo courtesy of Dan Kovalik]
Even after the 2014 referendum, the Crimean law respecting and protecting all three national languages continues to be the law of Crimea. In addition, while Ukraine moved to destroy Russian and Soviet monuments in Crimea, there was no retaliation to do the same to Ukrainian monuments. As just one example, Irina Alexeyeva pointed out to us the statue of famous Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka, which still stands in a prominent spot in Yalta, Crimea, and which had fresh flowers laid at it.
As for the Crimean Tatars, the Russian government moved swiftly to try to make good relations with this group after the 2014 Crimean referendum. As many may know, the Tatars had been persecuted during World War II as suspected collaborators and forcibly removed from Crimea to other Soviet republics.
However, many have moved back to Crimea and, as noted above, make up about 13% of Crimea’s population. One of the first things President Putin did after Crimea returned to Russia in 2014 was to officially “rehabilitate” them from the claims of collaboration made by the Stalin government, give them land they protested for in Crimea, provide them with modest monetary reparations and build a new mosque for them in Crimea. This mosque, once completed, will be one of the biggest in all of Russia.
Planned Tatar mega-mosque. [Source: youtube.com]
Still, readers may fairly ask about Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, and whether this shows antipathy on the part of the Russian government and the Russian people toward Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. What we found in talking to people throughout our journey was that, while nearly everyone believes that the current war, while regrettable, was necessary to defend both Russia and the Russian-speaking population within Ukraine, they nonetheless do not bear ill will toward either Ukraine or the Ukrainian people. Rather, their issue is with the right-wing government in Kyiv, the government’s neo-Nazi allies and, above all, NATO, which they perceive as the puppet master of these forces.
The people with whom we met during our journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow and Crimea made it clear that the Ukrainians are their “brothers and sisters,” and many Russians have friends and family within Ukraine. In addition, Russia has welcomed more Ukrainian refugees (more than five million since February 2022) than any other country. Many refugees have resettled in Crimea.
The Russians we met spoke quite somberly about the war, regretting the huge loss of life on both sides of the conflict, and expressing frustration and concern about how long the war is lasting and how many more will die as a result. In addition, Russians are reasonably fearful that the war may expand into something greater and something more terrible—for example, a world war that might involve nuclear weapons. This fear was magnified when a drone attack, which the U.S. government has now admitted was most likely launched by Ukraine, damaged the Kremlin during our stay.
May 9 Victory Day in Russia was subdued because of terrorist threats but, on the streets, many families still remembered their family members who died in World War II. Having been invaded many times, Russians are much more fearful of war than Americans are. The overwhelming sentiment we heard is they want the Ukraine conflict to end and “peace and friendship” with the U.S.
Families honor their relatives who died in World War II. [Source: Photo courtesy of Rick Sterling]
In the end, whatever one thinks of the war which is taking place in Ukraine and which is now bleeding into Russia as well, we believe that the primary goal of those living in the U.S. must be to do everything we can to prevail upon our government to de-escalate this situation which is at grave risk of spiraling out of control and threatening humanity itself. Instead of fueling the flames of war with more weapons and munitions to Ukraine, our government should encourage, instead of opposing, a negotiated solution to the conflict and the offer to help broker negotiations by countries like China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Israel.
One of the first steps in helping to achieve peace is being willing to look at the world as our adversaries—including Russia—do, and being willing to make concessions to their legitimate security concerns. This is how the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, for example, and this is how the current crisis can be resolved.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... s-one-way/
Um, it is well known that some Tartars did indeed collaborate, there was even a Tartar SS formation. It was war, Dan and sometimes hard decisions are made. You and Putin need to get with it, Stalin is trending.))
******
The Prosecutor General's Office wants to withdraw Volzhsky Orgsintez to the treasury
July 28, 11:01 am
The Prosecutor General's Office wants to confiscate Volzhsky Orgsintez into the treasury
The Prosecutor General's Office continues its attempts to confiscate stakes in various strategic production assets in favor of the state on the grounds that their privatization was carried out with violations. Following the stake in TGK-2 confiscated from ex-senator Leonid Lebedev, the Prosecutor General's Office is demanding the return of shares from the owner of the Volzhsky Orgsintez chemical plant, privatized in 1993-1996, Alexander Sobolevsky. The market believes that other chemical enterprises with the possibility of producing defense products may be next in line.
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6125601 - zinc
Efficient owners have not justified their trust. They do not fit well with the conditions of war. But what about all these stories about effective privatizers ...
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8525704.html
Google Translator
When ya get right down to it all capitalists are socially inefficient.
By Rick Sterling and Dan Kovalik - July 27, 2023 6
Scene from beautiful Crimea. [Source: sputnikglobe.com]
[This is the third part of a travelogue series by two CAM writers who recently traveled to Russia and Crimea. Part 1 of the series can be read here; and Part II here.—Editors]
We spent nearly 20 days in Russia, including five days in Crimea. During our journey, we spent around 70 hours on trains riding in close quarters with Russians whom we had never met before but who freely shared food and drink with us. Indeed, throughout our travels, we were invariably treated with kindness, generosity and hospitality.
When people realized that we spoke English and were from the States, they tried very hard to communicate with us and to make sure that we, as visitors in their land, were comfortable and taken care of. In short, it was clear to us that, while many Americans may hate Russia and even Russians themselves, this hatred is not returned in kind.
One anecdote is illustrative of such treatment. About half an hour into our 27-hour train ride from Moscow to Crimea, Rick realized that he had left his money belt, with around $2,000 in cash, back in his Moscow hotel room safe. This hotel had a quaint name in English—the Sunflower Avenue Hotel—and is located around the corner from the biggest mosque in Europe.
Rick called the hotel and informed them of what had happened, and, after some back and forth to make sure that Rick was the true owner of the money, the hotel management said they would give it to anyone we designated to retrieve it.
We were able to contact a friend in Moscow, Yulia, who went to the hotel and took possession of the money belt. And, because our plan was to travel back from Crimea directly to St. Petersburg, and not to return to Moscow, Yulia also arranged for a friend of hers to bring the belt to St. Petersburg—a city located at least four hours by train from Moscow. Within a few hours of our returning there a week later, this friend drove up to the hotel and handed the belt to Rick outside of our hotel. And, not a dollar was missing.
Obviously, this could have turned out much differently given how many times the money belt had to change hands before getting back to Rick and given that all involved knew that if we never saw some or all of the money again there would have been little we could do about it given that we were not returning to Moscow and would soon be leaving for the United States. Our faith in humanity remained intact from the experience.
The other place where we witnessed that the hate goes only one way was in Crimea—a peninsula on the Black Sea, which has changed hands from Russia to the Soviet Union to Ukraine and back to Russia and which has three distinct ethnic groups. These three ethnic groups are Russians, who make up around 65% of the Crimean population, Ukrainians who are 16% of the population and Tatars who are around 13%. Although there are these different ethnic groups, more than 80% of the Crimeans speak Russian on a daily basis.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and Ukraine’s taking control of the peninsula in spite of an earlier (January 1991) referendum in which 94% of Crimeans voted to become an autonomous Republic, Ukraine moved quickly to try to “Ukrainize” Crimea along with the Russian-speaking Donbas region of Ukraine. What this meant in practice was outlawing Russian as a national language and as a language taught in schools, and attempting to eradicate Russian culture and historical monuments.
This process accelerated after the 2014 coup in Kyiv, which brought to power a right-wing government quite hostile to Ukraine’s own Russian population. It was this open hostility, which led Crimeans to hold a referendum to rejoin Russia—a referendum in which, with an 83% voter turnout, 97% of the voters cast their votes for Russian reunification.
For its part, the Ukrainian government moved to punish the Crimean people for their decision to return to Russia. Thus, Ukraine dammed a canal which fed Crimea with fresh water and cut off electricity to Crimea, resulting in Crimeans suffering from a lack of electricity for months.
While Zelensky and the U.S. are escalating their threats that Ukraine will somehow “recapture” Crimea, this type of spiteful mistreatment of Crimea, combined with the periodic drone attacks against civilian targets in Crimea, have guaranteed that Crimea will never willingly go back to Ukraine.
Crimeans honor Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka. [Source: Photo courtesy of Dan Kovalik]
Even after the 2014 referendum, the Crimean law respecting and protecting all three national languages continues to be the law of Crimea. In addition, while Ukraine moved to destroy Russian and Soviet monuments in Crimea, there was no retaliation to do the same to Ukrainian monuments. As just one example, Irina Alexeyeva pointed out to us the statue of famous Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka, which still stands in a prominent spot in Yalta, Crimea, and which had fresh flowers laid at it.
As for the Crimean Tatars, the Russian government moved swiftly to try to make good relations with this group after the 2014 Crimean referendum. As many may know, the Tatars had been persecuted during World War II as suspected collaborators and forcibly removed from Crimea to other Soviet republics.
However, many have moved back to Crimea and, as noted above, make up about 13% of Crimea’s population. One of the first things President Putin did after Crimea returned to Russia in 2014 was to officially “rehabilitate” them from the claims of collaboration made by the Stalin government, give them land they protested for in Crimea, provide them with modest monetary reparations and build a new mosque for them in Crimea. This mosque, once completed, will be one of the biggest in all of Russia.
Planned Tatar mega-mosque. [Source: youtube.com]
Still, readers may fairly ask about Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, and whether this shows antipathy on the part of the Russian government and the Russian people toward Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. What we found in talking to people throughout our journey was that, while nearly everyone believes that the current war, while regrettable, was necessary to defend both Russia and the Russian-speaking population within Ukraine, they nonetheless do not bear ill will toward either Ukraine or the Ukrainian people. Rather, their issue is with the right-wing government in Kyiv, the government’s neo-Nazi allies and, above all, NATO, which they perceive as the puppet master of these forces.
The people with whom we met during our journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow and Crimea made it clear that the Ukrainians are their “brothers and sisters,” and many Russians have friends and family within Ukraine. In addition, Russia has welcomed more Ukrainian refugees (more than five million since February 2022) than any other country. Many refugees have resettled in Crimea.
The Russians we met spoke quite somberly about the war, regretting the huge loss of life on both sides of the conflict, and expressing frustration and concern about how long the war is lasting and how many more will die as a result. In addition, Russians are reasonably fearful that the war may expand into something greater and something more terrible—for example, a world war that might involve nuclear weapons. This fear was magnified when a drone attack, which the U.S. government has now admitted was most likely launched by Ukraine, damaged the Kremlin during our stay.
May 9 Victory Day in Russia was subdued because of terrorist threats but, on the streets, many families still remembered their family members who died in World War II. Having been invaded many times, Russians are much more fearful of war than Americans are. The overwhelming sentiment we heard is they want the Ukraine conflict to end and “peace and friendship” with the U.S.
Families honor their relatives who died in World War II. [Source: Photo courtesy of Rick Sterling]
In the end, whatever one thinks of the war which is taking place in Ukraine and which is now bleeding into Russia as well, we believe that the primary goal of those living in the U.S. must be to do everything we can to prevail upon our government to de-escalate this situation which is at grave risk of spiraling out of control and threatening humanity itself. Instead of fueling the flames of war with more weapons and munitions to Ukraine, our government should encourage, instead of opposing, a negotiated solution to the conflict and the offer to help broker negotiations by countries like China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Israel.
One of the first steps in helping to achieve peace is being willing to look at the world as our adversaries—including Russia—do, and being willing to make concessions to their legitimate security concerns. This is how the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, for example, and this is how the current crisis can be resolved.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... s-one-way/
Um, it is well known that some Tartars did indeed collaborate, there was even a Tartar SS formation. It was war, Dan and sometimes hard decisions are made. You and Putin need to get with it, Stalin is trending.))
******
The Prosecutor General's Office wants to withdraw Volzhsky Orgsintez to the treasury
July 28, 11:01 am
The Prosecutor General's Office wants to confiscate Volzhsky Orgsintez into the treasury
The Prosecutor General's Office continues its attempts to confiscate stakes in various strategic production assets in favor of the state on the grounds that their privatization was carried out with violations. Following the stake in TGK-2 confiscated from ex-senator Leonid Lebedev, the Prosecutor General's Office is demanding the return of shares from the owner of the Volzhsky Orgsintez chemical plant, privatized in 1993-1996, Alexander Sobolevsky. The market believes that other chemical enterprises with the possibility of producing defense products may be next in line.
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6125601 - zinc
Efficient owners have not justified their trust. They do not fit well with the conditions of war. But what about all these stories about effective privatizers ...
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8525704.html
Google Translator
When ya get right down to it all capitalists are socially inefficient.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Russia today
Communists Propose Russia Leave IMF and World Bank
JULY 30, 2023
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) logo is seen in Washington D.C., United States on April 11, 2023. Photo: Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.
MPs from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation have sponsored a bill that seeks to terminate the country’s participation in major Western-dominated international financial organizations, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. The cabinet, however, opposed the proposal, citing the risks that doing so would entail.
Russia joined the IMF and World Bank Group in 1992. Sponsors of the bill, which was introduced in the lower house of the Russian parliament on Tuesday, July 25, are seeking to repeal that decision.
The lawmakers, including CPRF head Gennady Zyuganov, argued that the country would be better off outside of such organizations. Voting rights in both are organized in a way that gives the US and its allies a dominant position, while Russia barely has any impact on decision-making, the MPs said.
The IMF has failed to oppose economic sanctions on Russia, acting against its stated goals of fostering economic development and international trade, the MPs added. Meanwhile, the World Bank is “directly financing unfriendly states,” they stated, referring to its projects in Ukraine.
The US is preventing Russia from benefiting from IMF membership through assets known as Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), which nations are allocated depending on their quotas in the fund. Hypothetically, Moscow could borrow from another nation using its SDRs as collateral, but Washington has pledged to block any such deal.
While the majority of nations belong to the IMF and World Bank, a handful did not join. Taiwan was expelled in 1980, after Washington switched its diplomatic recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing.
One prominent founding member, Cuba, pulled out of both in the 1960s, following the revolution led by Fidel Castro. The new government nevertheless repaid an IMF loan taken out by the regime of ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista.
There is no agreement in Moscow on whether it should follow Havana’s example. The Russian cabinet said it objected to the proposal due to the “significant negative consequences” such a move would entail.
Some of Moscow’s programs of cooperation with friendly nations, such as the members of BRICS, are tied to its membership in the financial institutions. Leaving the IMF would also jeopardize the repayment of loans that Russia had extended through its mechanisms, the government explained.
https://orinocotribune.com/communists-p ... orld-bank/
******
Putin about the arrest of Kagarlitsky
July 30, 5:07 am
Putin about the arrest of Kagarlitsky
President Vladimir Putin commented on the comparison between 1937 and 2023 in Russia in the context of high-profile arrests. According to him, "a certain attitude" towards those who cause "damage within the country" is necessary.
On July 29, during a meeting between the president and journalists, Kommersant correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov asked him to comment on “the fact that lately, perhaps the only punishment for the doubting part of society is arrest” . “I will name names, for example, Boris Kagarlitsky * one of these days, Yevgeny Berkovich is far from being the other day,” Kolesnikov specified. “People are arrested for spoken or written words. Is it normal? We, thank God, are not in the 37th year now, or are some already thinking - or maybe the 37th?
Vladimir Putin replied that now is 2023, and the country is in an armed conflict with a neighbor. “I think that there should be a certain attitude towards people who harm us inside the country, ” the president said. I can honestly say I don't know who you are talking about. I hear these names for the first time and do not really understand what they did, what they did to them, I'm just telling you about my overall attitude to the problem. In Ukraine, they are shot for this, well, not for this, for people like that ... This does not mean that we should do this. But we must keep in mind that in order for us to achieve success, including in the war zone, we need to follow certain rules for everyone.”
Vladimir Putin admitted that those listed by Kolesnikov might not deserve what was done to them, but he asked to be told more specifically about the situation.
Earlier, the court sent sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky* into custody until September 24 in a criminal case on the public justification of terrorism committed using information and communication networks, including the Internet. Shortly before that, the former DNR Defense Minister Igor Strelkov, who was accused of public calls for extremist activities, was also arrested.
Theater director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright of the play Finist the Clear Sokol Svetlana Petriychuk were arrested at the end of June until September 10. They are accused of justifying terrorism.
https://www.fontanka.ru/2023/07/29/72547274/ - zinc
Taking into account the voiced analogies, it looks like Kagarlitsky will really be imprisoned.
A couple of high-profile cases on this topic should clearly demonstrate to society that excessive chatter in the media field during a war can have dire consequences.
PS. Of course, the death penalty is not planned. So far, the authorities do not show a great desire to return it, despite calls from below and sociological calculations.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8529700.html
Google Translator
*******
Man-in-the-street view of the Russia-Africa Summit
As some of you know, my home base is Brussels. In fact, I live in the city center and so I am well conditioned by the word “summit” to expect road obstructions, police cars with sirens wailing that accompany heads of state and other VIPs to the summit events of European Union institutions, as well as enhanced surveillance, which usually means lots of helicopters hovering overhead to watch our movements.
These past two days of the Russia-Africa Summit I happened by chance to be in St Petersburg, and worse still, to be close to the epicenter of summit events which took place mostly in the RosCongress complex at nearby Shushary. That complex is known to the international community as the venue for the annual St Petersburg International Economic Forum, which took place in June. Such proximity on one side would be bad enough, but it seems that President Putin yesterday spent time in Pavlovsk, a palace town two kilometers on the other side of Pushkin, where I live. And so there was super road congestion in our immediate area all day. The main thoroughfares leading to the city center were closed and the general public, myself included, was sent to the commuter trains if we wanted to get downtown.
This inconvenience was exacerbated by heightened security that included the shutdown of wireless internet for hours at a time and disorientation of GPS systems, meaning that the taxi services were heavily impacted, sending cars on call by App to addresses that in no way matched the location of clients.
That, in a nutshell is what the Russia-Africa Summit meant to the man in the street in St Petersburg.
But what about its meaning to political commentators?
As one could imagine, there has been a lot of air time and print media pages devoted to the Summit. Just on its eve, the prime discussion program on Rossiya 1, The Great Game, hosted by Dmitri Simes, gave the microphone to a great authority on African affairs from Soviet times, still very active professionally notwithstanding his pension age. This expert was overjoyed that his hour had come, that Russia once again is prioritizing relations with Africa in the tradition of the USSR. He insisted that closer relations would bring benefits to both sides. However, his enumeration of the economic and other benefits was very, very modest and the show finally was a bore. Yes, Africa should be of interest to Russia as a potential market for its goods and services, because it has the best demographic trends of any part of the world, that is to say, the highest percentage of young people. The African economy is fast growing, but not nearly as fast growing as China. Yawn…
And then on Thursday morning, during my breakfast catch-up on the news broadcasts of Business FM, I heard a much more dynamic analysis of the prospects for Russian interaction with Africa offered by a journalist who appears regularly on the station, Georgy Bovt. What he said is available in text by following the link https://www.bfm.ru/news/530513 – “How can Russia attract Africa?” [in Russian]
Bovt is not my favorite commentator, but here I take my hat off to him. He did his homework and brought to the discussion some very important comparative information about how Russia matches up with other European and global players active in Africa.
Bovt opens his discourse with enumeration of the significant achievements Russia has made in its business development efforts in Africa. Total trade with the Continent reached 18 billion dollars last year and there have been significant Russian projects underlying this turnover, including those involving bauxite mining (Guinée) and oil and gas extraction. Rosneft, Gazprom Neft, Rusgidro, Alrosa, Lukoil and Rosatom are among the most active Russian concerns in Africa. Egypt’s first nuclear power station which is now being built by Rosatom will supply energy in excess of the output of the Aswan dam, which was the star engineering succes of the USSR in the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser
However, the Russian economic activity in Africa pales by comparison with the European Union, which did 412 billion dollars in turnover last year. The trade volumes with Africa of Italy and France are each in excess of 70 billion dollars. Last year alone the EU trade with Africa grew by 100 billion dollars. China’s two way trade with Africa last year was 212 billion dollars. And U.S. trade was 68 billion.
Russia presently accounts for just1% of direct foreign investment in Africa. China is the current world leader in infrastructure development in Africa. But in terms of cumulative investments, Britain has the lead, with 60 billion dollars. Next come Holland and France, with 54 billion each, followed by the USA and China with 45 and 44 billion dollars respectively. But, comments Bovt, there is still so much to do in Africa to help it catch up with the industrial world, that it is not too late for Russia to increase its presence.
In Russia’s favor, per Bovt, is the current anti-colonial rhetoric coming from the Kremlin, which finds a sympathetic audience in Africa. But, he concludes as follows: “In any case, this is a very long term game. You can be sure there will be no quick pay-back.”
Good as Bovt’s analysis is, he has curiously overlooked a very relevant question, namely the distribution of Russian trade and geopolitical interests across the Continent, which is in fact highly differentiated.
What do I mean? It would be a safe guess that most of Russia’s trade today and in the near future is and will be with North Africa, namely with Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, whereas much of the political advantage in the United Nations and other international institutions that the Kremlin can gain in Africa going forward is in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yes, there are great possibilities for Russia to occupy a greater position in the extractive industries across Africa. But grain sales, the number one talking point at the Summit, are really concentrated in the North African countries.
The poorest African nations that will now receive between 25,000 and 50,000 tons of Russian grain free of charge – Somalia, Zimbabwe, Burkina-Faso and Eritrea – account for a drop in the bucket of Russian total grain exports on a commercial basis, very little of it sought by Black Africa.
Russian commercial involvement in Nigeria and other very large countries in central Africa is especially low, while these countries are heavily dependent on Western financing to keep their economies afloat. That by itself explains why the delegations of these largest countries were not led by a head of state or head of government. They were least willing to face punishment by their Western partners
Now let us take a brief look at the Declaration which attendees of the Summit signed at the conclusion of their gathering. I have found a useful list of the contents here: https://rg.ru/2023/07/28/priniata-itogo ... avnoe.html
Most of the points are in the political domain, namely staking out common positions in the United Nations and other international institutions, opposing imposition of unilateral sanctions and secondary sanctions, peace-keeping on the African continent, strengthening international law and resisting the notion of a ‘rules based order,’ developing cooperation to protect cultural values and to promote use of Russian and African languages in school programs.
The last named point is probably the most concrete and easy to implement immediately. In general, the Russians found support for a Soft Power move on the Continent with a view to shaping the mindset of future leaders. News programs on Russian television have spoken this week of plans to expand the number of Russian Cultural and Scientific Centers in Africa from the present five to many more. For the sake of facilitating cultural exchanges and tourism, Russia will be adding staff to its embassies in Africa.
What this means practically speaking is that Russian diplomats who have been booted out of Paris, for example, will now find themselves moved to French speaking Africa. Such is the fate of career diplomats…
Speaking more seriously, these measures mark a return to the practices of Soviet Russia, when there were a great many teachers of mathematics and other subjects sent to Africa and other parts of the Developing World like Cuba for long periods. And, of course, there will be expansion of the number of places in Russian military schools open to candidates from Africa.
Note that most of the African delegations departed right after the Summit wrapped up on Thursday or early Friday. But as I had anticipated the leaders of at least 5 delegations are staying on to join Vladimir Putin on the reviewing stand of the annual Russian Navy Parade down the Neva River. Who these leaders are will be a good tip-off on Russia’s next export contracts for military hardware.
*****
Before closing, I want to direct attention to another type of man on the street: taxi drivers. The taxi market in St Petersburg, and more generally across Russia has been evolving with amazing speed over the past several years. Consolidation was the overriding principle, with shift from salaried drivers to independent ‘service partners’ who rented their cars from an operating company and who, for a time, were enrolled in the dispatch systems of several operators, responding to calls to present their availability to each new client request. Small taxi companies either went bust, because they could not attract enough drivers to provide dependable service to the clientele or merged with others of similar size. The next step was when a very few large operators gobbled up all the others. And the latest very obvious development over the past year has been the emergence of one company, Yandex Go, as the biggest nationwide taxi operator.
Yandex is the Google of the Russian consumer market. What started as the nation’s most widely used search engine has become an e-commerce giant. My most recent hotel, intercity bus and train reservations for the trip around Northwest Russia that is now coming to an end was largely done online via Yandex travel subsidiaries. They are now the country’s equivalent to booking.com.
Yandex Go’s domination of the taxi market comes from its huge cash flows assured by the various Yandex businesses and also by Yandex being at the forefront of technological innovation. Yandex was among the first to offer taxi dispatching via its proprietary App that used geolocation to identify the address of callers and simplified entry of destination addresses based on its digital records of the given taxi rider.
But the App is at times frustrated by the state interference with GPS that I noted above. And so Yandex has recently moved to upgrade the experience of placing taxi orders by telephone. They have largely replaced human operators with Artificial Intelligence guided robot operators. The bots catch the addresses you give and repeat them back to you impeccably, much better than the humans in some central location far from your town or neighborhood could do.
And so it is no wonder that Yandex Go is now the logo you see on the vast majority of taxis on the city streets in and around Petersburg.
Who are the drivers? Don’t be surprised if there is at times a communication problem with them, because many are ‘guest workers.’ Twice in the past couple of days our driver turned out to be a Kirghiz. Yesterday’s driver was perhaps atypical in that he spoke perfect Russian and knew the city very well without resorting to his GPS ‘navigator’ except to see where there are traffic jams that can be avoided. But then he has lived here for the last 13 years. He flies back to Bishkek periodically. He explained to us that Kirghiz citizens enjoy real privileges in finding work in Russia thanks to state to state relations that are as close or closer than Russian-Belarus relations.
This is a useful reminder that Russia remains one of the biggest importers of foreign labor on the world scale. Their numbers fell sharply during COVID, but it is a safe guess that their presence in the Russian market is reasserting itself. Whether there will be room here for ‘guest workers’ from Africa in the future remains to be seen.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/07/29/ ... ca-summit/
JULY 30, 2023
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) logo is seen in Washington D.C., United States on April 11, 2023. Photo: Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.
MPs from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation have sponsored a bill that seeks to terminate the country’s participation in major Western-dominated international financial organizations, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. The cabinet, however, opposed the proposal, citing the risks that doing so would entail.
Russia joined the IMF and World Bank Group in 1992. Sponsors of the bill, which was introduced in the lower house of the Russian parliament on Tuesday, July 25, are seeking to repeal that decision.
The lawmakers, including CPRF head Gennady Zyuganov, argued that the country would be better off outside of such organizations. Voting rights in both are organized in a way that gives the US and its allies a dominant position, while Russia barely has any impact on decision-making, the MPs said.
The IMF has failed to oppose economic sanctions on Russia, acting against its stated goals of fostering economic development and international trade, the MPs added. Meanwhile, the World Bank is “directly financing unfriendly states,” they stated, referring to its projects in Ukraine.
The US is preventing Russia from benefiting from IMF membership through assets known as Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), which nations are allocated depending on their quotas in the fund. Hypothetically, Moscow could borrow from another nation using its SDRs as collateral, but Washington has pledged to block any such deal.
While the majority of nations belong to the IMF and World Bank, a handful did not join. Taiwan was expelled in 1980, after Washington switched its diplomatic recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing.
One prominent founding member, Cuba, pulled out of both in the 1960s, following the revolution led by Fidel Castro. The new government nevertheless repaid an IMF loan taken out by the regime of ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista.
There is no agreement in Moscow on whether it should follow Havana’s example. The Russian cabinet said it objected to the proposal due to the “significant negative consequences” such a move would entail.
Some of Moscow’s programs of cooperation with friendly nations, such as the members of BRICS, are tied to its membership in the financial institutions. Leaving the IMF would also jeopardize the repayment of loans that Russia had extended through its mechanisms, the government explained.
https://orinocotribune.com/communists-p ... orld-bank/
******
Putin about the arrest of Kagarlitsky
July 30, 5:07 am
Putin about the arrest of Kagarlitsky
President Vladimir Putin commented on the comparison between 1937 and 2023 in Russia in the context of high-profile arrests. According to him, "a certain attitude" towards those who cause "damage within the country" is necessary.
On July 29, during a meeting between the president and journalists, Kommersant correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov asked him to comment on “the fact that lately, perhaps the only punishment for the doubting part of society is arrest” . “I will name names, for example, Boris Kagarlitsky * one of these days, Yevgeny Berkovich is far from being the other day,” Kolesnikov specified. “People are arrested for spoken or written words. Is it normal? We, thank God, are not in the 37th year now, or are some already thinking - or maybe the 37th?
Vladimir Putin replied that now is 2023, and the country is in an armed conflict with a neighbor. “I think that there should be a certain attitude towards people who harm us inside the country, ” the president said. I can honestly say I don't know who you are talking about. I hear these names for the first time and do not really understand what they did, what they did to them, I'm just telling you about my overall attitude to the problem. In Ukraine, they are shot for this, well, not for this, for people like that ... This does not mean that we should do this. But we must keep in mind that in order for us to achieve success, including in the war zone, we need to follow certain rules for everyone.”
Vladimir Putin admitted that those listed by Kolesnikov might not deserve what was done to them, but he asked to be told more specifically about the situation.
Earlier, the court sent sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky* into custody until September 24 in a criminal case on the public justification of terrorism committed using information and communication networks, including the Internet. Shortly before that, the former DNR Defense Minister Igor Strelkov, who was accused of public calls for extremist activities, was also arrested.
Theater director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright of the play Finist the Clear Sokol Svetlana Petriychuk were arrested at the end of June until September 10. They are accused of justifying terrorism.
https://www.fontanka.ru/2023/07/29/72547274/ - zinc
Taking into account the voiced analogies, it looks like Kagarlitsky will really be imprisoned.
A couple of high-profile cases on this topic should clearly demonstrate to society that excessive chatter in the media field during a war can have dire consequences.
PS. Of course, the death penalty is not planned. So far, the authorities do not show a great desire to return it, despite calls from below and sociological calculations.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8529700.html
Google Translator
*******
Man-in-the-street view of the Russia-Africa Summit
As some of you know, my home base is Brussels. In fact, I live in the city center and so I am well conditioned by the word “summit” to expect road obstructions, police cars with sirens wailing that accompany heads of state and other VIPs to the summit events of European Union institutions, as well as enhanced surveillance, which usually means lots of helicopters hovering overhead to watch our movements.
These past two days of the Russia-Africa Summit I happened by chance to be in St Petersburg, and worse still, to be close to the epicenter of summit events which took place mostly in the RosCongress complex at nearby Shushary. That complex is known to the international community as the venue for the annual St Petersburg International Economic Forum, which took place in June. Such proximity on one side would be bad enough, but it seems that President Putin yesterday spent time in Pavlovsk, a palace town two kilometers on the other side of Pushkin, where I live. And so there was super road congestion in our immediate area all day. The main thoroughfares leading to the city center were closed and the general public, myself included, was sent to the commuter trains if we wanted to get downtown.
This inconvenience was exacerbated by heightened security that included the shutdown of wireless internet for hours at a time and disorientation of GPS systems, meaning that the taxi services were heavily impacted, sending cars on call by App to addresses that in no way matched the location of clients.
That, in a nutshell is what the Russia-Africa Summit meant to the man in the street in St Petersburg.
But what about its meaning to political commentators?
As one could imagine, there has been a lot of air time and print media pages devoted to the Summit. Just on its eve, the prime discussion program on Rossiya 1, The Great Game, hosted by Dmitri Simes, gave the microphone to a great authority on African affairs from Soviet times, still very active professionally notwithstanding his pension age. This expert was overjoyed that his hour had come, that Russia once again is prioritizing relations with Africa in the tradition of the USSR. He insisted that closer relations would bring benefits to both sides. However, his enumeration of the economic and other benefits was very, very modest and the show finally was a bore. Yes, Africa should be of interest to Russia as a potential market for its goods and services, because it has the best demographic trends of any part of the world, that is to say, the highest percentage of young people. The African economy is fast growing, but not nearly as fast growing as China. Yawn…
And then on Thursday morning, during my breakfast catch-up on the news broadcasts of Business FM, I heard a much more dynamic analysis of the prospects for Russian interaction with Africa offered by a journalist who appears regularly on the station, Georgy Bovt. What he said is available in text by following the link https://www.bfm.ru/news/530513 – “How can Russia attract Africa?” [in Russian]
Bovt is not my favorite commentator, but here I take my hat off to him. He did his homework and brought to the discussion some very important comparative information about how Russia matches up with other European and global players active in Africa.
Bovt opens his discourse with enumeration of the significant achievements Russia has made in its business development efforts in Africa. Total trade with the Continent reached 18 billion dollars last year and there have been significant Russian projects underlying this turnover, including those involving bauxite mining (Guinée) and oil and gas extraction. Rosneft, Gazprom Neft, Rusgidro, Alrosa, Lukoil and Rosatom are among the most active Russian concerns in Africa. Egypt’s first nuclear power station which is now being built by Rosatom will supply energy in excess of the output of the Aswan dam, which was the star engineering succes of the USSR in the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser
However, the Russian economic activity in Africa pales by comparison with the European Union, which did 412 billion dollars in turnover last year. The trade volumes with Africa of Italy and France are each in excess of 70 billion dollars. Last year alone the EU trade with Africa grew by 100 billion dollars. China’s two way trade with Africa last year was 212 billion dollars. And U.S. trade was 68 billion.
Russia presently accounts for just1% of direct foreign investment in Africa. China is the current world leader in infrastructure development in Africa. But in terms of cumulative investments, Britain has the lead, with 60 billion dollars. Next come Holland and France, with 54 billion each, followed by the USA and China with 45 and 44 billion dollars respectively. But, comments Bovt, there is still so much to do in Africa to help it catch up with the industrial world, that it is not too late for Russia to increase its presence.
In Russia’s favor, per Bovt, is the current anti-colonial rhetoric coming from the Kremlin, which finds a sympathetic audience in Africa. But, he concludes as follows: “In any case, this is a very long term game. You can be sure there will be no quick pay-back.”
Good as Bovt’s analysis is, he has curiously overlooked a very relevant question, namely the distribution of Russian trade and geopolitical interests across the Continent, which is in fact highly differentiated.
What do I mean? It would be a safe guess that most of Russia’s trade today and in the near future is and will be with North Africa, namely with Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, whereas much of the political advantage in the United Nations and other international institutions that the Kremlin can gain in Africa going forward is in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yes, there are great possibilities for Russia to occupy a greater position in the extractive industries across Africa. But grain sales, the number one talking point at the Summit, are really concentrated in the North African countries.
The poorest African nations that will now receive between 25,000 and 50,000 tons of Russian grain free of charge – Somalia, Zimbabwe, Burkina-Faso and Eritrea – account for a drop in the bucket of Russian total grain exports on a commercial basis, very little of it sought by Black Africa.
Russian commercial involvement in Nigeria and other very large countries in central Africa is especially low, while these countries are heavily dependent on Western financing to keep their economies afloat. That by itself explains why the delegations of these largest countries were not led by a head of state or head of government. They were least willing to face punishment by their Western partners
Now let us take a brief look at the Declaration which attendees of the Summit signed at the conclusion of their gathering. I have found a useful list of the contents here: https://rg.ru/2023/07/28/priniata-itogo ... avnoe.html
Most of the points are in the political domain, namely staking out common positions in the United Nations and other international institutions, opposing imposition of unilateral sanctions and secondary sanctions, peace-keeping on the African continent, strengthening international law and resisting the notion of a ‘rules based order,’ developing cooperation to protect cultural values and to promote use of Russian and African languages in school programs.
The last named point is probably the most concrete and easy to implement immediately. In general, the Russians found support for a Soft Power move on the Continent with a view to shaping the mindset of future leaders. News programs on Russian television have spoken this week of plans to expand the number of Russian Cultural and Scientific Centers in Africa from the present five to many more. For the sake of facilitating cultural exchanges and tourism, Russia will be adding staff to its embassies in Africa.
What this means practically speaking is that Russian diplomats who have been booted out of Paris, for example, will now find themselves moved to French speaking Africa. Such is the fate of career diplomats…
Speaking more seriously, these measures mark a return to the practices of Soviet Russia, when there were a great many teachers of mathematics and other subjects sent to Africa and other parts of the Developing World like Cuba for long periods. And, of course, there will be expansion of the number of places in Russian military schools open to candidates from Africa.
Note that most of the African delegations departed right after the Summit wrapped up on Thursday or early Friday. But as I had anticipated the leaders of at least 5 delegations are staying on to join Vladimir Putin on the reviewing stand of the annual Russian Navy Parade down the Neva River. Who these leaders are will be a good tip-off on Russia’s next export contracts for military hardware.
*****
Before closing, I want to direct attention to another type of man on the street: taxi drivers. The taxi market in St Petersburg, and more generally across Russia has been evolving with amazing speed over the past several years. Consolidation was the overriding principle, with shift from salaried drivers to independent ‘service partners’ who rented their cars from an operating company and who, for a time, were enrolled in the dispatch systems of several operators, responding to calls to present their availability to each new client request. Small taxi companies either went bust, because they could not attract enough drivers to provide dependable service to the clientele or merged with others of similar size. The next step was when a very few large operators gobbled up all the others. And the latest very obvious development over the past year has been the emergence of one company, Yandex Go, as the biggest nationwide taxi operator.
Yandex is the Google of the Russian consumer market. What started as the nation’s most widely used search engine has become an e-commerce giant. My most recent hotel, intercity bus and train reservations for the trip around Northwest Russia that is now coming to an end was largely done online via Yandex travel subsidiaries. They are now the country’s equivalent to booking.com.
Yandex Go’s domination of the taxi market comes from its huge cash flows assured by the various Yandex businesses and also by Yandex being at the forefront of technological innovation. Yandex was among the first to offer taxi dispatching via its proprietary App that used geolocation to identify the address of callers and simplified entry of destination addresses based on its digital records of the given taxi rider.
But the App is at times frustrated by the state interference with GPS that I noted above. And so Yandex has recently moved to upgrade the experience of placing taxi orders by telephone. They have largely replaced human operators with Artificial Intelligence guided robot operators. The bots catch the addresses you give and repeat them back to you impeccably, much better than the humans in some central location far from your town or neighborhood could do.
And so it is no wonder that Yandex Go is now the logo you see on the vast majority of taxis on the city streets in and around Petersburg.
Who are the drivers? Don’t be surprised if there is at times a communication problem with them, because many are ‘guest workers.’ Twice in the past couple of days our driver turned out to be a Kirghiz. Yesterday’s driver was perhaps atypical in that he spoke perfect Russian and knew the city very well without resorting to his GPS ‘navigator’ except to see where there are traffic jams that can be avoided. But then he has lived here for the last 13 years. He flies back to Bishkek periodically. He explained to us that Kirghiz citizens enjoy real privileges in finding work in Russia thanks to state to state relations that are as close or closer than Russian-Belarus relations.
This is a useful reminder that Russia remains one of the biggest importers of foreign labor on the world scale. Their numbers fell sharply during COVID, but it is a safe guess that their presence in the Russian market is reasserting itself. Whether there will be room here for ‘guest workers’ from Africa in the future remains to be seen.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/07/29/ ... ca-summit/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Russia today
On the Russian home front do you feel that the country is at war?
July 31, 2023
After three weeks of travel around Northwest Russia, keeping an eye on the people and circumstances of daily life around me, my answer to the question in the title is ‘yes and no.’
On the one hand, the consumer society is going strong. Supermarkets are well stocked. Within Europe, Russia had the lowest rate of inflation in the food products sector during the past month: zero percent. When you read about export bans of one commodity or another, such as the ban on rice exports just imposed today by the Kremlin, the reason is found in the external world, not within Russia itself. The Kremlin was reacting to the ban on rice exports recently announced in India, which drove up global prices and would have led to Russian sales abroad of rice needed at home if the markets were left to their own devices.
Meanwhile we are told that the grain harvest in Russia this season may well show a record surplus, notwithstanding all the climatic abnormalities globally and within the Russian Federation. Russia represents 20% of world grain supplies, Ukraine, just 5%. In this light, Russia can easily meet world needs even if Ukraine does not export one bushel of wheat.
In one very important consumer market sector, automobiles, the reorganization of supply away from Europe and towards China has been almost seamless. The high-end cars from the PRC are more in evidence in St Pete by the week. On the main roads leading into the city, I see new Chinese brand dealerships opening here and there. I have ‘test driven’ these cars in taxi fleets and they are really impressive, not just to me as a passenger but from the remarks of drivers.
To be sure, the ruble is weak and various consumer electronics companies have announced price rises to come on devices imported from the West. This weakness has causes relating to the shift in the hydrocarbons trade from Western Europe to Asia, where contract settlements are not denominated in dollars. Hence there are fewer dollars and euros put up for auction on the Russian domestic bourse and the price of these currencies has followed the bidding.
Otherwise, despite the weak ruble I am each day surprised at how imported sea bass from Turkey or imported French premium quality Burgundy wine is on sale in the Petersburg supermarkets at prices less than half what we pay in Belgium for similar goods.
On the other side of the issue, one would have to be blind not to understand that the country is at war, considering the now omnipresent recruitment advertisements urging men to sign up as ‘contract’ soldiers for the war. I say ‘men,’ because the advertising billboards, posters and television ads are all addressed to males. They tell the reader that “combat is a man’s job.”
The appeal is openly and unapologetically sexist. But it also only accentuates the positive: ‘join your peers,’ etc. Judging by the models in these ads, men signing up would appear to be in their mid to upper 20s, with a second tranche in their 40s and 50s.There is no hint whatsoever that those who do not sign up are shirkers, cowards or pansies.
You see a lot more recruitment advertisements in St Petersburg and environs than you see actual soldiers in uniform. In my outlying borough of Pushkin, we have several military academies and so in the morning you can catch sight of a platoon doing their morning run. But that is nothing new.
The other day when riding a commuter train we were seated just across from a young soldier in his early 20s. Whereas the sartorial image of these guys used to be sad sack maybe a decade ago, I can say that this fellow’s uniform was very smart looking. And he had a self-assured demeanor.
What you do not see is any military bearing arms in civilian milieu.
Notwithstanding the appeal to Alpha males, television news reports also tell us that women are serving in armed forces. We see occasional interviews with women air force pilots. But the overriding theme with respect to women is that they serve as doctors or nurses who may treat wounded soldiers in the field on their way back to hospitals in central Russia. They are saving lives, not taking lives.
Meanwhile, for those who can bear watching war news on television, the narrative has been changing, especially in the past week. Until then, news of the material damage and bodily harm caused by daily Ukrainian bombardment of Donetsk city and other towns in the Donbas took up much of the news bulletins. Now the accent is on the destruction Russian forces are dealing out to the Ukrainians as Kiev directs larger scale attacks and brings into play its strategic reserves, especially in the Zaporozhie region. The new Ukrainian offensive appears to be no more successful than previous probing maneuvers in breaking though the dense Russian defense lines.
Russian military experts on the leading talk shows who showed great reserve about predicting the future course of the conflict lest Russians be overconfident a week ago now appear radiant and ready to confide that the Ukrainians never got the equipment they needed to make their counter-offensive a success.
As I noted in a recent essay, the Russian military command has been biding its time until it is certain that Ukraine was already committing its reserves to battle and would soon run dry. Now that time is approaching. We see that the Russians are opening an offensive in the northeast, in the Kharkov region.
There is good reason to believe that the Russian advance around Kharkov is yielding results. In the past week there was talk of starting reconstruction work in the border region of Belgorod, where the Ukrainians had made armed incursions six weeks ago from Kharkov and had destroyed or damaged a large swathe of residences by artillery strikes. The cry went up in Russia to take Kharkov and put an end to these calamities. Evidently the Russian military is succeeding in silencing the Ukrainian guns.
Against this background of the changes in the correlation of forces in Russia’s favor, I am stunned that U.S. and other observers and commentators are not taking note. A very good example of this blindness or ignorance was an article put out in the past week by owner-publisher of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel and James Carden, who may be said to represent the supposedly enlightened views of Progressive Democrats in the United States. The co-authors called for peace talks based on compromises by both sides to the conflict. In particular, Ukraine would accept neutrality and Russia would pay war reparations. War reparations!
These authors like so many talking heads in the West do not have the necessary linguistic skills to access Russian news sources on their own. They depend wholly on propagandists in the State Department for the raw facts from which they can spin their reasonable compromises. I humbly submit that this war will either end on Russia’s terms or it will escalate thanks to American miscalculations and obstinacy to the point of a nuclear exchange that puts the survival of humankind in peril.
Meanwhile Secretary of State Antony Blinken is telling reporters that the dangers of human extinction from nuclear war are no greater than the dangers humanity faces from climate change. Goebels would be proud of him.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/07/31/ ... is-at-war/
July 31, 2023
After three weeks of travel around Northwest Russia, keeping an eye on the people and circumstances of daily life around me, my answer to the question in the title is ‘yes and no.’
On the one hand, the consumer society is going strong. Supermarkets are well stocked. Within Europe, Russia had the lowest rate of inflation in the food products sector during the past month: zero percent. When you read about export bans of one commodity or another, such as the ban on rice exports just imposed today by the Kremlin, the reason is found in the external world, not within Russia itself. The Kremlin was reacting to the ban on rice exports recently announced in India, which drove up global prices and would have led to Russian sales abroad of rice needed at home if the markets were left to their own devices.
Meanwhile we are told that the grain harvest in Russia this season may well show a record surplus, notwithstanding all the climatic abnormalities globally and within the Russian Federation. Russia represents 20% of world grain supplies, Ukraine, just 5%. In this light, Russia can easily meet world needs even if Ukraine does not export one bushel of wheat.
In one very important consumer market sector, automobiles, the reorganization of supply away from Europe and towards China has been almost seamless. The high-end cars from the PRC are more in evidence in St Pete by the week. On the main roads leading into the city, I see new Chinese brand dealerships opening here and there. I have ‘test driven’ these cars in taxi fleets and they are really impressive, not just to me as a passenger but from the remarks of drivers.
To be sure, the ruble is weak and various consumer electronics companies have announced price rises to come on devices imported from the West. This weakness has causes relating to the shift in the hydrocarbons trade from Western Europe to Asia, where contract settlements are not denominated in dollars. Hence there are fewer dollars and euros put up for auction on the Russian domestic bourse and the price of these currencies has followed the bidding.
Otherwise, despite the weak ruble I am each day surprised at how imported sea bass from Turkey or imported French premium quality Burgundy wine is on sale in the Petersburg supermarkets at prices less than half what we pay in Belgium for similar goods.
On the other side of the issue, one would have to be blind not to understand that the country is at war, considering the now omnipresent recruitment advertisements urging men to sign up as ‘contract’ soldiers for the war. I say ‘men,’ because the advertising billboards, posters and television ads are all addressed to males. They tell the reader that “combat is a man’s job.”
The appeal is openly and unapologetically sexist. But it also only accentuates the positive: ‘join your peers,’ etc. Judging by the models in these ads, men signing up would appear to be in their mid to upper 20s, with a second tranche in their 40s and 50s.There is no hint whatsoever that those who do not sign up are shirkers, cowards or pansies.
You see a lot more recruitment advertisements in St Petersburg and environs than you see actual soldiers in uniform. In my outlying borough of Pushkin, we have several military academies and so in the morning you can catch sight of a platoon doing their morning run. But that is nothing new.
The other day when riding a commuter train we were seated just across from a young soldier in his early 20s. Whereas the sartorial image of these guys used to be sad sack maybe a decade ago, I can say that this fellow’s uniform was very smart looking. And he had a self-assured demeanor.
What you do not see is any military bearing arms in civilian milieu.
Notwithstanding the appeal to Alpha males, television news reports also tell us that women are serving in armed forces. We see occasional interviews with women air force pilots. But the overriding theme with respect to women is that they serve as doctors or nurses who may treat wounded soldiers in the field on their way back to hospitals in central Russia. They are saving lives, not taking lives.
Meanwhile, for those who can bear watching war news on television, the narrative has been changing, especially in the past week. Until then, news of the material damage and bodily harm caused by daily Ukrainian bombardment of Donetsk city and other towns in the Donbas took up much of the news bulletins. Now the accent is on the destruction Russian forces are dealing out to the Ukrainians as Kiev directs larger scale attacks and brings into play its strategic reserves, especially in the Zaporozhie region. The new Ukrainian offensive appears to be no more successful than previous probing maneuvers in breaking though the dense Russian defense lines.
Russian military experts on the leading talk shows who showed great reserve about predicting the future course of the conflict lest Russians be overconfident a week ago now appear radiant and ready to confide that the Ukrainians never got the equipment they needed to make their counter-offensive a success.
As I noted in a recent essay, the Russian military command has been biding its time until it is certain that Ukraine was already committing its reserves to battle and would soon run dry. Now that time is approaching. We see that the Russians are opening an offensive in the northeast, in the Kharkov region.
There is good reason to believe that the Russian advance around Kharkov is yielding results. In the past week there was talk of starting reconstruction work in the border region of Belgorod, where the Ukrainians had made armed incursions six weeks ago from Kharkov and had destroyed or damaged a large swathe of residences by artillery strikes. The cry went up in Russia to take Kharkov and put an end to these calamities. Evidently the Russian military is succeeding in silencing the Ukrainian guns.
Against this background of the changes in the correlation of forces in Russia’s favor, I am stunned that U.S. and other observers and commentators are not taking note. A very good example of this blindness or ignorance was an article put out in the past week by owner-publisher of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel and James Carden, who may be said to represent the supposedly enlightened views of Progressive Democrats in the United States. The co-authors called for peace talks based on compromises by both sides to the conflict. In particular, Ukraine would accept neutrality and Russia would pay war reparations. War reparations!
These authors like so many talking heads in the West do not have the necessary linguistic skills to access Russian news sources on their own. They depend wholly on propagandists in the State Department for the raw facts from which they can spin their reasonable compromises. I humbly submit that this war will either end on Russia’s terms or it will escalate thanks to American miscalculations and obstinacy to the point of a nuclear exchange that puts the survival of humankind in peril.
Meanwhile Secretary of State Antony Blinken is telling reporters that the dangers of human extinction from nuclear war are no greater than the dangers humanity faces from climate change. Goebels would be proud of him.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/07/31/ ... is-at-war/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Russia today
In Russia arrested the property of the oligarch Akhmetov
August 1, 10:40
In Russia arrested the property of the oligarch Akhmetov
A criminal case is being investigated on the financing of Azov and other security officials by Rinat Akhmetov's structures
As it became known to Kommersant, at the request of the ICR, the Russian assets of Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov were arrested. This happened as part of a criminal case on the financing of a Ukrainian army entrepreneur by business structures. According to investigators, the oligarch helped the nationalist detachments in the Donbass, and after the start of the special operation, the money from the account of the Russian company Metinvest Eurasia, which is part of his empire, went to the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, including the Azov unit recognized as a terrorist.
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6136011 - zinc
The news is 9 years late.
All this should have been done in 2014. Instead, Mariupol was sent to Akhmetov as part of an agreement. The deal price for the city became known in 2022.
PS. The wonderful characters who in 2014-2015 spoke about the benefit of Akhmetov for the Donbass have long since disappeared.
Apparently they joined Azov.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8535085.html
Google Translator
The consequences of the retreat of Donbass forces, impelled my Moscow in order to ingratiate itself with it's 'Western partners' were great and terrible. Except for the dead Nazis, that's a plus. Small wonder that Russia is resuscitating the city post-haste.
August 1, 10:40
In Russia arrested the property of the oligarch Akhmetov
A criminal case is being investigated on the financing of Azov and other security officials by Rinat Akhmetov's structures
As it became known to Kommersant, at the request of the ICR, the Russian assets of Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov were arrested. This happened as part of a criminal case on the financing of a Ukrainian army entrepreneur by business structures. According to investigators, the oligarch helped the nationalist detachments in the Donbass, and after the start of the special operation, the money from the account of the Russian company Metinvest Eurasia, which is part of his empire, went to the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, including the Azov unit recognized as a terrorist.
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6136011 - zinc
The news is 9 years late.
All this should have been done in 2014. Instead, Mariupol was sent to Akhmetov as part of an agreement. The deal price for the city became known in 2022.
PS. The wonderful characters who in 2014-2015 spoke about the benefit of Akhmetov for the Donbass have long since disappeared.
Apparently they joined Azov.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8535085.html
Google Translator
The consequences of the retreat of Donbass forces, impelled my Moscow in order to ingratiate itself with it's 'Western partners' were great and terrible. Except for the dead Nazis, that's a plus. Small wonder that Russia is resuscitating the city post-haste.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Russia today
Working view from Naberezhnye Chelny
No. 8/84.VIII.2023
The aftertaste of the "musical" rebellion, as well as the arrests of Strelkov and Kagarlitsky, once again brought the left environment of our city into an unsettling unrest, proceeding with strong emotional excitement. And since the plague of party democracy has its roots in social science ignorance, then nothing but affective pathos, pathos slogans and angry demands into the void, the leftists could not squeeze out of themselves. Deciding to take advantage of the situation, we proposed a meeting with representatives of the motley left of our city in order to spread scientific understanding of what was happening among them. To demonstrate that the fire of inspiration can really ignite someone only when the communists do not limit themselves to indignation at certain phenomena of life, but clearly see their direct connection with the structure of society and show them by personal example,
Representatives of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the RRP at the meeting proposed the creation of a kind of alliance of the left forces of the city for mutual assistance and the fight against marauders, which would be led by a joint committee. To which we reasonably objected: what would be the effectiveness of such a situational alliance of a swan, cancer and pike? Won't this organizational itch turn into yet another squandering of energy, drawing off potential Marxist cadres from the practice of self-education? After all, these unfortunate Marxists, sometimes without realizing it themselves, once again please the bourgeoisie. The fact that not alliances-trade unions-syndicates-coalitions-committees-fronts-movements and unions today need to be created, but the Communist Party! And this does not require democracy, not the "enlightenment" of the workers and not the unification of all with all, but first of all unanimity, high-quality party literature and conscious discipline.
However, at the meeting, the leftists once again proved their blatant revolutionary unsuitability, naively believing that since agitation and propaganda of their thoughtlessness under the guise of Marxism among the so-called. The “working aristocracy” is not doing well with them, which means that it is necessary to pay attention to guest workers. They say that low-paid and low-skilled workers from the CIS are the basis of the future Marxist cadres, which is needed for organizing the party and its connection with the masses. But try to stick your agitation-propaganda to the visiting proletarians from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan, who for the most part live in an isolated world where national and religious delusions flourish! Anyone who understands what we are talking about cannot fail to know that the basis of the Marxist cadres is hired workers who have free time to read and think, who can move on the path of knowledge, and for the most part they are skilled workers, engineers and employees. And it was with them that a tense situation developed in our city, because among our leftists there are no real authorities in Marxism - solid professional mourners who, after the story with the hardened opportunist and anti-Soviet Kagarla, began to throw tantrums about "tightening the screws" in the country. But sober proletarians are like whining in the ear. They have experienced many disappointments, many of their hopes since the 90s turned out to be empty expectations, which is why they look down on the ingenuous leftists. Because they understand that the enthusiastic conversations of homegrown progressives, the play of facial muscles, and not the demonstration of developed brain convolutions, is extremely insufficient to change reality. That all the "beds" are waiting, they want and even demand improvements, but things are still there. From time to time they bawl angrily against all sorts of abuses, cursing someone else's laziness and apathy, but they themselves,Themselves do not take on the real deal - they cannot unite into a clear, knowledgeable, confident organization of the Leninist-Stalinist model! ..
*
Recently in Moscow, at the headquarters of the National Bolsheviks, another gathering was held, where a lecture was given by the so-called. "club of angry patriots" (a funny mixture of Limonovites, Kvachkovites and "left front-line soldiers"). And the young Chelny residents from the RRP were curious: what, in their opinion, would be the form of ownership of the means of production in the country - private or public? and what is the relationship between the Limonovites and Citizen Dugin now? This is exactly the case when ordinary childish-leftism appears through the mask of a Marxist. Well, what results can be expected from this comical political hybrid, which sets the release of citizen Girkin-Strelkov as its immediate task? What awaits them in the future? Only a split, because whatever a person plays, he plays as long as he hopes to win - as long as he hopes to achieve his goals!
*
Yes, comrades, we live in an amazing time - just some kind of carnival: the liberals-bulk have been strangled so that they hiss like snakes; the Trotskyists, who were spoiling the communists during the Soviet era (the same Kagarlitsky), were covered up, the nationalists were taken under the hood, the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation travels with a Chinese colleague to the DPRK with the idea of creating a coalition (“We are in the same trench against American imperialism”), and our left in their limited maximalism, they are dissatisfied with everything, literally with everything, except for themselves!
Leftist citizens, isn't it time for you to grow up? Isn't it time for you to carefully read Lenin's "What is to be done?" and "The Childhood Disease of 'Leftism' in Communism"? Or will you continue to tear your vests in vain for the liberals-Trotskyists-White Guards?!
Yes, it turned out that spreading scientific understanding among stilted Marxists is not an easy task. For the effectiveness of such efforts, the effectiveness of self-education is strictly necessary, when knowledge raises you above the sticky atmosphere of leftist stuffiness, when the thought: “any democracy: bourgeois, proletarian, electronic, etc. gives the floor to those who, in fact, have nothing to say, ”becomes an immutable, clear and obvious truth ...
In conclusion, let us quote the statement of our remarkable comrade and friend of the worker:
“I read and re-read Lenin’s works and am amazed at how clearly and accessible everything is presented. One single time is enough to read, say, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” or “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism” to fully understand that communism is decisively incompatible with any kind of democracy and pluralism, and in the era of the MMC petty-bourgeois illusions do not make any sense and are banal petty-bourgeois stupidity. Each work of V.I. Lenin gives a clear answer to any social science question. And even more so, Leninist thought is a reliable inoculation against Menshevik-Trotskyite delusions. Guys, seriously. If you want to put things in order in your brains, to understand social phenomena - do not be lazy, read at least the main works of Ilyich.
K. Neverov , S. Shamov
4/08/2023
https://prorivists.org/84_lefts/
Google Translator
********
An employee of the Ministry of Natural Resources received 12 years for spying for Ukraine.
August 3, 12:43
An employee of the Ministry of Natural Resources received 12 years for spying for Ukraine.
The Krasnodar Regional Court sentenced a thirty-five-year-old scoundrel named Arthur Katrychko to 12 years in a strict regime colony for high treason in favor of Ukraine.
He worked in the information and technical support department of the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Krasnodar Territory (the mother of the defendant also worked in the regional Ministry of Natural Resources, occupying a not the last position) and, concurrently, worked for a terrorist organization called the Security Service of Ukraine. SBU curators assigned him the pseudonym "Archie".
This is the first sentence handed down in the Krasnodar Territory under Article 275 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
"The verdict of the Krasnodar Regional Court against a citizen of the Russian Federation Artur Gennadyevich Katrychko, born in 1988, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison in a strict regime colony, has entered into force for committing a crime under Article 275 ("high treason") Criminal Code of the Russian Federation As a result of operational-search measures and investigative actions carried out by employees of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, it was established that the Russian established contact with representatives of the Security Service of Ukraine and, on their instructions, received and transmitted abroad for a monetary reward information that became known to him in within the framework of official activities and which could be used against the security of the Russian Federation", reads the message of the FSB Public Relations Center. https://zavtra.ru/events/12_let_kolonii ... minprirodi
- zinc
30s of the XX century, and the first quarter of the XXI century.
PS. The SBU and the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense must be recognized as terrorist organizations. Persons collaborating with them must be imprisoned (since we don’t have the death penalty yet) not only under the articles of treason and espionage, but also under the heading of terrorism.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8540222.html
Google Translator
No. 8/84.VIII.2023
The aftertaste of the "musical" rebellion, as well as the arrests of Strelkov and Kagarlitsky, once again brought the left environment of our city into an unsettling unrest, proceeding with strong emotional excitement. And since the plague of party democracy has its roots in social science ignorance, then nothing but affective pathos, pathos slogans and angry demands into the void, the leftists could not squeeze out of themselves. Deciding to take advantage of the situation, we proposed a meeting with representatives of the motley left of our city in order to spread scientific understanding of what was happening among them. To demonstrate that the fire of inspiration can really ignite someone only when the communists do not limit themselves to indignation at certain phenomena of life, but clearly see their direct connection with the structure of society and show them by personal example,
Representatives of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the RRP at the meeting proposed the creation of a kind of alliance of the left forces of the city for mutual assistance and the fight against marauders, which would be led by a joint committee. To which we reasonably objected: what would be the effectiveness of such a situational alliance of a swan, cancer and pike? Won't this organizational itch turn into yet another squandering of energy, drawing off potential Marxist cadres from the practice of self-education? After all, these unfortunate Marxists, sometimes without realizing it themselves, once again please the bourgeoisie. The fact that not alliances-trade unions-syndicates-coalitions-committees-fronts-movements and unions today need to be created, but the Communist Party! And this does not require democracy, not the "enlightenment" of the workers and not the unification of all with all, but first of all unanimity, high-quality party literature and conscious discipline.
However, at the meeting, the leftists once again proved their blatant revolutionary unsuitability, naively believing that since agitation and propaganda of their thoughtlessness under the guise of Marxism among the so-called. The “working aristocracy” is not doing well with them, which means that it is necessary to pay attention to guest workers. They say that low-paid and low-skilled workers from the CIS are the basis of the future Marxist cadres, which is needed for organizing the party and its connection with the masses. But try to stick your agitation-propaganda to the visiting proletarians from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan, who for the most part live in an isolated world where national and religious delusions flourish! Anyone who understands what we are talking about cannot fail to know that the basis of the Marxist cadres is hired workers who have free time to read and think, who can move on the path of knowledge, and for the most part they are skilled workers, engineers and employees. And it was with them that a tense situation developed in our city, because among our leftists there are no real authorities in Marxism - solid professional mourners who, after the story with the hardened opportunist and anti-Soviet Kagarla, began to throw tantrums about "tightening the screws" in the country. But sober proletarians are like whining in the ear. They have experienced many disappointments, many of their hopes since the 90s turned out to be empty expectations, which is why they look down on the ingenuous leftists. Because they understand that the enthusiastic conversations of homegrown progressives, the play of facial muscles, and not the demonstration of developed brain convolutions, is extremely insufficient to change reality. That all the "beds" are waiting, they want and even demand improvements, but things are still there. From time to time they bawl angrily against all sorts of abuses, cursing someone else's laziness and apathy, but they themselves,Themselves do not take on the real deal - they cannot unite into a clear, knowledgeable, confident organization of the Leninist-Stalinist model! ..
*
Recently in Moscow, at the headquarters of the National Bolsheviks, another gathering was held, where a lecture was given by the so-called. "club of angry patriots" (a funny mixture of Limonovites, Kvachkovites and "left front-line soldiers"). And the young Chelny residents from the RRP were curious: what, in their opinion, would be the form of ownership of the means of production in the country - private or public? and what is the relationship between the Limonovites and Citizen Dugin now? This is exactly the case when ordinary childish-leftism appears through the mask of a Marxist. Well, what results can be expected from this comical political hybrid, which sets the release of citizen Girkin-Strelkov as its immediate task? What awaits them in the future? Only a split, because whatever a person plays, he plays as long as he hopes to win - as long as he hopes to achieve his goals!
*
Yes, comrades, we live in an amazing time - just some kind of carnival: the liberals-bulk have been strangled so that they hiss like snakes; the Trotskyists, who were spoiling the communists during the Soviet era (the same Kagarlitsky), were covered up, the nationalists were taken under the hood, the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation travels with a Chinese colleague to the DPRK with the idea of creating a coalition (“We are in the same trench against American imperialism”), and our left in their limited maximalism, they are dissatisfied with everything, literally with everything, except for themselves!
Leftist citizens, isn't it time for you to grow up? Isn't it time for you to carefully read Lenin's "What is to be done?" and "The Childhood Disease of 'Leftism' in Communism"? Or will you continue to tear your vests in vain for the liberals-Trotskyists-White Guards?!
Yes, it turned out that spreading scientific understanding among stilted Marxists is not an easy task. For the effectiveness of such efforts, the effectiveness of self-education is strictly necessary, when knowledge raises you above the sticky atmosphere of leftist stuffiness, when the thought: “any democracy: bourgeois, proletarian, electronic, etc. gives the floor to those who, in fact, have nothing to say, ”becomes an immutable, clear and obvious truth ...
In conclusion, let us quote the statement of our remarkable comrade and friend of the worker:
“I read and re-read Lenin’s works and am amazed at how clearly and accessible everything is presented. One single time is enough to read, say, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” or “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism” to fully understand that communism is decisively incompatible with any kind of democracy and pluralism, and in the era of the MMC petty-bourgeois illusions do not make any sense and are banal petty-bourgeois stupidity. Each work of V.I. Lenin gives a clear answer to any social science question. And even more so, Leninist thought is a reliable inoculation against Menshevik-Trotskyite delusions. Guys, seriously. If you want to put things in order in your brains, to understand social phenomena - do not be lazy, read at least the main works of Ilyich.
K. Neverov , S. Shamov
4/08/2023
https://prorivists.org/84_lefts/
Google Translator
********
An employee of the Ministry of Natural Resources received 12 years for spying for Ukraine.
August 3, 12:43
An employee of the Ministry of Natural Resources received 12 years for spying for Ukraine.
The Krasnodar Regional Court sentenced a thirty-five-year-old scoundrel named Arthur Katrychko to 12 years in a strict regime colony for high treason in favor of Ukraine.
He worked in the information and technical support department of the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Krasnodar Territory (the mother of the defendant also worked in the regional Ministry of Natural Resources, occupying a not the last position) and, concurrently, worked for a terrorist organization called the Security Service of Ukraine. SBU curators assigned him the pseudonym "Archie".
This is the first sentence handed down in the Krasnodar Territory under Article 275 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
"The verdict of the Krasnodar Regional Court against a citizen of the Russian Federation Artur Gennadyevich Katrychko, born in 1988, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison in a strict regime colony, has entered into force for committing a crime under Article 275 ("high treason") Criminal Code of the Russian Federation As a result of operational-search measures and investigative actions carried out by employees of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, it was established that the Russian established contact with representatives of the Security Service of Ukraine and, on their instructions, received and transmitted abroad for a monetary reward information that became known to him in within the framework of official activities and which could be used against the security of the Russian Federation", reads the message of the FSB Public Relations Center. https://zavtra.ru/events/12_let_kolonii ... minprirodi
- zinc
30s of the XX century, and the first quarter of the XXI century.
PS. The SBU and the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense must be recognized as terrorist organizations. Persons collaborating with them must be imprisoned (since we don’t have the death penalty yet) not only under the articles of treason and espionage, but also under the heading of terrorism.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8540222.html
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."