UnHerd: Would you move to Mother Russia? Putin is wooing the West’s workers
November 15, 2024 natyliesb
By Malcom Kyeune, UnHerd, 10/24/24
Last year, Tucker Carlson scandalised America by travelling to Russia and interviewing Vladimir Putin. As US viewers denounced the idea that one ought to speak to an enemy such as Putin, Tucker strolled around Moscow, filming himself taking the subway, buying a burger from the new Russian McDonalds, and going grocery shopping in a Moscow supermarket. Behaving, in fact, like he was in the West.
Back home, Tucker had some good things to say about Putin, as well as some bad things. But it was the streets and shops of Moscow that really “radicalised” him. The West likes to paint Russia as poor, miserable and oppressed, but Tucker described a perfectly ordinary modern society. The discrepancy between what Tucker had been taught to expect and what he actually saw in Russia didn’t just unnerve him — it made him angry.
Of course, one might point out that Moscow and St Petersburg are Potemkin villages of sorts, covering up the reality of deep poverty in much of the rest of the country. But none of this is ultimately a matter of facts. The conflict between the West and Russia today is now seen as ideological and existential, just as the conflict between communism and capitalism once was. To say something nice about the Russian enemy is to take his side; to say something nice about him that also happens to be true is seen as even more treasonous. Communist Russia was rife with stories about American workers being treated like dirt, toiling under truly awful living standards. After all, America was capitalist, and a capitalist society could never be a good place for a worker to live.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the epic tension that had built up over the decades between the US and Russia fell apart rapidly. Russians queued up to eat at McDonald’s or to buy blue jeans, and they also emigrated to America in droves. Some of them wanted a more stable place to raise their children than the dystopian nightmare that was Nineties Russia, others saw in America a more agreeable form of culture and ideology, and others still just wanted to make money. In 1980, the number of foreign-born Russian speakers in the US numbered less than 200,000. In 2011, that number had hit 900,000.
Since then, however, things have changed a great deal. The US is no longer the Mecca of foreign talent it once was, as it dives deeper into a geopolitical showdown with Russia, China, and the Brics more generally. The West is faltering both militarily and economically; the US empire is overstretched, practically insolvent, and facing growing exhaustion and disillusionment at home. To complicate this, the West’s own ideological tenets about freedom of speech and respect for human rights ring increasingly hollow. Even Westerners are losing faith in the American project.
While Tucker Carlson’s trip to Russia was a one-off, there has been a small but growing trickle of news stories in Western media featuring Americans deciding to brave the Iron Curtain in the other direction. The reasons they give are eerily similar to the ones heard from dissidents in the past: the political system in the West is broken and the politicians have lost the plot; the ruling ideology is out of touch with ordinary people; the standard of living is falling and the cost of living too high. Mostly, the reasons given today have to do with politics rather than economics: in this telling the West is just too “woke”, too materialist, and too sclerotic. Russia, for its part, seems eager to offer “political asylum” to any Westerner with a big enough bone to pick with their home country.
It’s easy to dismiss what’s going on here as an irrelevant fringe phenomenon, but that might turn out to be a very grave mistake in the decade ahead. The ideological angle to these stories — that Russia is engaged in some fanciful or vain project of sheltering the “unwoke” out of some kind of humanitarian concern — is nothing but a fable. It is a velvet glove, hiding a far more calculating economic fist.
The truth of the matter is that Russia — like many other Brics countries now preparing their collective challenge to the West — has been struggling with the question of immigration for quite a long time now. After slowly recovering from the runaway brain-drain that hit it in the Nineties, the Russian state has cautiously moved to reform and rationalise its immigration system, particularly with an eye towards streamlining new channels for highly-skilled migrants. In other words, just the kind of migrants who tend to be in short supply and high demand worldwide. The fact that the Russians are entering into this competition decades late is certainly not lost upon them. During the unipolar moment, the West monopolised the pool of skilled migrants available, while also retaining all the high-value labour created at home. In the dawning multipolar world, however, the West appears not just as a competitor to be bested, but also as a potential goldmine from which an increasing number of migrants can be sourced.
It is only when one understands that the West could potentially become a victim, rather than a beneficiary of future brain drain that recent policy changes within Russia can begin to make sense. To wit, Russia recently announced that anyone living in a Western country “opposed to Russia” shall have access to a special, expedited visa process, exempt from all ordinary immigration requirements. There are no quotas for this kind of immigration, no tests on language skills or knowledge of Russian law, and all the other aspects of this visa process are tailored to be as generous as possible. Applicants only have to demonstrate that they wish to move to Russia due to a disagreement with their home country’s policies that contradict “traditional” Western or Russian values. Even if you’re not interested in Russia, Russia is now interested in you.
“Even if you’re not interested in Russia, Russia is now interested in you.”
Law and consultancy firms that offer help to clients looking to move to Russia aren’t exactly new, and there are a decent number to choose from. This new push toward “Shared Values Visas” from the Russian state, however, is notable in that it coincides with far more sleek and ideologically savvy new ventures into the market. A good example of this trend is “ArkVostok”, the company behind the website movetorussia.com. With the founders having mostly Western educational backgrounds as well as experience working inside Western consultancy firms, the pitch offered here is clearly tailored to appeal precisely to the sort of feelings that Tucker Carlson has recently given voice to. Tired of culture war and DEI? Worried about national debt and unsustainable pension funds? Paranoid about bugs in your burger and GMO-food slowly poisoning your body? Whatever you’re in the market to buy, Russia is in the market to sell.
It is tempting to dismiss this out of hand. What kind of traitor would ever contemplate leaving our glorious Free World ™ to shack up with the enemy, all for the worldly promise of a flat 13% tax rate? Unfortunately, the answer to that question, as history has borne out time and time again, is almost always “more people than you’d think”. While ideology and righteousness are always comforting things to have, consider this quote from Tucker Carlson himself on his experience inside that Moscow supermarket: “Everybody [in the film crew] is from the United States … and we didn’t pay any attention to cost, we just put in the cart what we would actually eat over a week. We all [guessed] around $400 bucks. It was $104 U.S. here. And that’s when you start to realise that ideology doesn’t matter as much as you thought.”
One can say that you can’t put a price on freedom, or morality; that the privilege of living in a free society cannot be measured in something so vulgar as dollars and cents. That’s a nice sentiment, but the reality of the human condition is that these things do have a price. Moreover, this price is often much lower than most of us would like to admit. Communists in the USSR, lest we forget, used to think that no human being would ever abandon socialism just for a pair of blue jeans. If we in the West want to ignore recent history and instead cling to the hope that nobody will ever switch sides just because someone floats an offer of better schools, safer streets, cheaper apartments, and lower taxes, we do so at our own peril.
Besides, to try to minimise the danger presented here by criticising Russia or attacking Putin is to catastrophically miss the point. Though the Shared Values Visa programme tries to present itself as a fairly niche culture war phenomenon, its true nature is not cultural or ideological. It is driven by a ruthless economic logic that is much bigger than Russia itself. Even if Russia’s various attempts at wooing Westerners end up being unsuccessful, it is merely the first vulture to start circling overhead. Many more scavengers are likely to appear before long, each one with a bewitching song of higher real wages, cheaper groceries, and lower taxes.
There are at least two big economic reasons that force this development. First, skilled immigration is simply a good deal. If you can poach a highly educated person of prime working age without paying for his education, you have secured a very expensive and limited resource without having to pay any of the costs involved in training, childcare, and healthcare. This is the main reason that brain drain as a phenomenon has been consistently popular inside the West, even as it has long been hated everywhere else: one side pays all the costs, the other side reaps all the benefits.
The economic logic behind the Shared Values Visa is more ominous, however. It’s often said that Russia has terrible demographics, and in many ways, this is true. Russia’s total fertility rate is around 1.4 children per woman, which is far lower than the replacement rate. Unfortunately, this is actually a completely normal fertility rate in 2024. Very few countries in the EU have fertility rates that are much better than this, and a good number of them are significantly worse. This is not an unknown problem in the West, and the hoped-for solution has long been immigration, preferably of the more highly-skilled kind. Without sufficient immigration, European social welfare systems risk collapsing under the weight of too many old people dependent on taxes levied onto too few young workers.
All this means that Europe is highly vulnerable to the poaching of workers. And indeed, because of how our welfare systems are set up, any outmigration cannot help but trigger a very destructive chain reaction: as people migrate due to high taxes, there’s less workers, meaning taxes will get higher, meaning the push factors to emigrate become even stronger. In this environment of stagnation, an extremely vicious game of musical chairs is likely to dominate, as all countries face the pressure to steal workers from somewhere else, in order to ease the tax burden on the workers that already have citizenship. With an extremely low public debt of around $300 billion and an income tax rate that tops out at 15%, Russia is far better prepared for this kind of competition than most people seem willing to admit. For comparison, America pays three times that amount in annual interest on its whopping $35 trillion debt.
This threat is real, and it is much closer than many think. In fact, the UK in particular is already in a slow-rolling brain-drain crisis. Education is getting increasingly expensive, the population is ageing, and real wages are no longer keeping up with inflation. For now, the main actors trying to poach talent are other countries inside the Western bloc, with America as the principal looter-in-chief. That order of affairs might not last for much longer, however, and America might find itself vulnerable to the same kind of asset-stripping before long. It’s hard to see how brain drain can possibly work out as a net benefit to the West in the years and decades ahead: the great majority of Western countries are now stuck in the same sort of malaise as the UK, with economies entering what now looks like a phase of almost permanent stagnation due to the energy crisis. There is no light at the end of the tunnel: opinion polls instead show an increasingly catastrophic loss of faith among the public in their parties and political institutions.
Brain drain often has ruinous effects on the countries that fall victim to it, even in cases where there’s not a looming demographic crisis threatening to upturn all welfare systems. Russia might be using honeyed words as it tempts people with family values and GMO-free burgers, but those Westerners who now glibly mock the velvet glove might end up bitterly regretting not taking the iron gauntlet hidden underneath more seriously. All of this is strictly business: it is the groundwork being laid in order to loot the West of talent the moment a crisis or moment of weakness strikes, leaving hollowed-out economies and dying communities in its wake. After all, the Russians probably figure, it’s only fair: we did the exact same thing to them.
https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/11/unh ... s-workers/
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Moscow continues to warn the West about the risk of nuclear escalation
Lucas Leiroz
November 16, 2024
Maria Zakharova’s recent statement makes it clear that Russia, even while prioritizing diplomacy, will not give up on “devastating” measures if these are necessary to respond to Western aggression.
Tensions over the issue of “deep” strikes continue to escalate. Kiev continues to demand permission to strike targets in the Russian Federation’s demilitarized zone, while Moscow continues to make it clear that it will interpret such maneuvers as a declaration of war by NATO. In a recent statement, Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, emphasized how Ukrainians and their partners are “playing with fire” with such threats, promising an “immediate and devastating” response in the event of a long-range strike.
The Russian government has repeatedly stated that the long-range weapons systems supplied by the West to Ukraine cannot be operated without the presence of NATO specialists, who would provide the necessary training and logistical support to the Ukrainians. This is because such weapons are not compatible with the Ukrainian military infrastructure, which depends on continuous intelligence support and strategic guidance provided by the Atlantic alliance. Moscow’s position is clear: authorizing the use of these missiles for strikes outside the official conflict zone, in addition to representing an expansion of Western involvement, would constitute direct NATO intervention in the conflict. Russia would regard any use of these weapons in such circumstances as a direct aggression against its sovereignty by the Western countries themselves, which would require an “immediate and devastating” retaliation.
The discussion about the deployment of Storm Shadow missiles and other advanced weapons systems in “deep” Russian territory is a clear demonstration of the dangerous game the West is playing, ignoring all the limits imposed by Russia. NATO’s role in the war in Ukraine has been a sensitive issue since the beginning of the conflict. Although Western powers insist on their position of supporting Ukraine as a legitimate right to defend it against what they call a Russian “invasion”, many analysts and officials point out that the interventions of the powers of the Atlantic alliance, both in terms of weapons and intelligence, have led to an unnecessary prolongation of the conflict, dragging Ukraine into a proxy war that puts the world on the brink of a nuclear confrontation.
By offering more powerful and sophisticated weapons, the West is not only strengthening Kiev’s military capabilities – which seem to have little strategic relevance at the moment – but also risks turning the local conflict into a war of global proportions. Moscow’s concern is legitimate, considering that the absence of limits on Western involvement in Ukraine could lead to a situation of unrestricted aggression against the Russian people, including even demilitarized cities far from the zone disputed by Kiev.
Indeed, the eventual authorization of the use of long-range missiles against targets deep inside Russia would place Moscow and NATO facing the near inevitability of a nuclear confrontation. As spokeswoman Zakharova has made clear, Russia is on high alert for the use of advanced missiles against its territory. Moscow has repeatedly stated that if such attacks occur, Russia’s response will be strong and decisive. This would not only imply a military escalation, but also a redefinition of relations between Russia and the West, with the possibility of unpredictable consequences for international stability.
The recent changes in Russia’s nuclear doctrine, allowing a nuclear response to deep strikes by non-nuclear powers supported by nuclear states (just like in the Ukraine-NATO case), were a clear attempt by Moscow to de-escalate the current situation through rhetoric and indirect deterrence. At first, the measure seemed sufficient to calm public pressure from some NATO figures for the authorization of the strikes. However, it is difficult to predict what the Democratic “administration” plans to do in its final days in power, and it is possible that Biden and his team will go into “suicide mode” and put the entire global security architecture at risk, despite Russian warnings.
In the end, Western powers need to reconsider their actions before it is too late. The escalation of the conflict and the lack of dialogue only increase the risk of a global catastrophe. Russia, for its part, continues to prepare to defend its people and its sovereignty, knowing that diplomacy, despite difficult, remains the only viable alternative to avoid a total collapse of the international order. However, once diplomatic means have been exhausted, the Russians will take whatever measures are necessary to respond appropriately to the violation of its red lines.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... scalation/
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St Petersburg Travel Notes, installment five: Russia’s kontraktniki and Blood Money
(Gilbert is such a petty bourgeois pig...but there's a good bit of information here despite his disdain for 'lower class people'.)
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Tomorrow I expect to cross the border into Estonia on my way home to Brussels. Accordingly this fifth installment of my travel notes is the last of the series and will cover a variety of topics as I wind up my stay here.
I begin with the issue flagged in the title above, the Blood Money being offered to Russian men of all ages who sign up to join the fight on the battlefield of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine.
In medieval German and Anglo-Saxon Wergeld money was paid by those responsible for someone’s death in compensation to put an end to enmity. You could also say it was an approximation of the monetary value of a person’s life.
This concept came to mind as I looked over some of the many recruitment posters that you find at bus stops, on public transport and elsewhere here in the Greater Petersburg area. I put that together with information on radio and television these past few days about the new, higher levels of compensation that the government will be paying to those who have experienced contusions, amputations and other life-changing events while serving in the SMO. These pay-outs vary with specific categories of injury and loss. But the amount to be paid out in case of death was named: it is now 3 million rubles, approximately 30,000 euros, which is 50 per cent more than the sum paid till now.
Meanwhile the sign-up payment by the federal government to new recruits (kontraktniki) shown on the posters is several hundred percent above what it was a year ago. The new rate is 2 million rubles at sign-up and 200,000 (2,000 euros) per month for each month spent in the war zone, which I believe lasts 6 months. It is understood that a much lower monthly pay is issued during the training period preceding dispatch to the front.
I also note that this sign-up payment probably represents a leveling up from the schedule of payments put in place in the early months of the SMO. Back then the fairly modest lump sum from the federal budget was complemented by a lump sum from the regional government which varied widely according to the prosperity of the region. Given that the financial incentive is more important in the poorer regions of Russia from which a disproportionately higher share of recruits can be expected to come, the leveling up, if that is what it is, makes good sense.
All in all, if you add the death pay-out to the sign-up pay-out, we may conclude that the Wehrgeld or average value of a working age male in Russia is presently 50,000 euros.
In a minute, I will put that number in the context of general salaries here for lower class people, who are the main body of the population that goes off to war. But first I must explain that the crass financial considerations approach is only one vector of the poster campaign for recruitment. I believe it is directed at middle aged Russian males who make up a large percentage of the soldiers and officers on the ground in this war, as you can see from television coverage. My advice to armchair analysts in the United States, including some very highly considered professors whom you see weekly on youtube, is that they should take a look at Russian war reporting before they open their mouths to mourn the loss of young men sent to war by old men in power. I have heard acquaintances who intended to enlist reason along the following lines: ‘I married, I have had kids, I have fulfilled my biological mission and am ready to take my chances in the army.’
Another vector of the recruitment campaign is clearly directed at young men. It carries the message: ‘Join your own,’ meaning join your coevals, young and patriotic men like yourself. Since this variety of poster is at least as widely disseminated as the ruble and kopeks poster, I assume that it works and brings in lots of recruits.
Now, returning to the question of what males actually earn in wages here in Russia. I make reference to an article in the Financial Times which I cited on these pages several months ago. Their reporter said the Rosstat figures showed that average wages doubled in the last year, and the results were most striking in the depressed regions, many of them in the Urals, which had one-factory towns that never recovered from the shutdown of those factories in the 1990s economic crisis. Now they are enjoying full employment thanks especially to defense industry orders. Due to labor shortages, wages have gone up from 30,000 rubles per month to 60,000 or more (600 euros). In this case the total death benefits of a recruit killed in action equals 7 times his annual earnings at present conditions at the bottom of the pecking order.
Of course, not all ships rise with the incoming tide. There are always losers as well as winners. I present as examples what I heard from two taxi drivers these past few days. One was the driver of a new Chinese crossover in the livery of Yandex Go that he had bought for the equivalent of 30,000 euros, presumably paid in cash given the rest of his story. He wanted me to know that he has an engineering degree and had been working as the head of an engineering unit with 20 men under him before the SMO. He had been living very well, earning a monthly salary of 500,000 rubles plus housing allowance and other generous benefits. Back then he assumed everyone else was doing well and did not pay attention to the poverty in Russian society. However, the war put an end to his easy life. His unit was a subsidiary of an Austrian company that halted operations and left the Russian market after the war began. He then looked around to find another job in engineering but discovered that salaries were too low to meet his life style requirements. And so he opted to become a taxi driver and now takes home 160,000 rubles (1600 euros) a month.
Another taxi driver in Pushkin who shared his personal experience with me works for a local taxi company and presumably has a harder time getting customers who order a ride to the city (15 euros), having to settle for point to point fares in the immediate vicinity (2.50 euros a ride). He also has a new Chinese car, but in a lower price range. He purchased it with a bank loan set at 16 percent annual interest. Friends say he did well, but the accumulating interest is formidable and he is doing his best to pay off the loan ahead of schedule by tightening his belt on home expenses. Nonetheless, he is upbeat and coping with the financial stress well. I did not ask his monthly take home pay.
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I have spoken briefly in earlier Travel Notes about my visits to the neighborhood supermarkets in various price categories from Economy to Premium. I reconfirm here that they are all very well stocked including with exotic fruits that you would imagine are sold only in the most exclusive. In our Economy standard Verny supermarket, they offer not just the sharon fruit (rock hard as usual) but also the fragile, shall we say voluptuous genuine persimmons that presumably are imported from Iran, along with the salted pistachios that are ubiquitous here and some very good stalk celery and iceberg lettuce.
I will go one step further: these Russian supermarkets seem to have better stock control than our leading Delhaize (the Lion) chain in Belgium (now Dutch owned) which frequently runs out of this or that in what I assume is an effort to cut working capital requirements and spoilage.
Meanwhile, I wish to say something about municipal investments in vehicles and infrastructure both in downtown Petersburg and here in Pushkin, which is an outlying city borough.
In Pushkin, I note that all city buses seem to be newly acquired. In the city center, most of the trams are also new and more stylish than what they have replaced. For their part, the electric trolleybuses now operate from batteries when they are not attached to overhead electrical feed. This means that they are not stuck in the middle of traffic when the connection above detaches as used to be the case to the annoyance of all. Such hybrid trolleys exist in Western Europe, where I have seen them in France. But they are new to Russia and they are making their appearance now during wartime when you would expect the government to have other concerns on its mind.
It is also worth mentioning that at long last Russian Railways seems to be upgrading the commuter trains to the suburbs. The other day I took what looked unchanged from the outside but on the inside was a train with comfortable seats and amenities like a big luggage rack in the center of the car. They had replaced the old wooden bench configuration that was no treat for travelers. Looking out the window to gauge our speed and then at my watch upon arrival at destination, I was persuaded that the time in travel has been cut substantially.
Speaking of transportation, I was pleased to see that the Financial Times yesterday put some nationwide figures to the changes in the automobile market that I have been reporting based on what I see on the streets in Petersburg and as a rider in the taxi fleets here.
To be precise, the share of the new car sales in Russia held by European, Korean and Japanese manufactures fell from 69 percent in February 2022 to just 8.5 percent in October 2024, while the share held by Chinese manufacturers in this period rose from 9 percent to 57 percent.
I can attest to the comfort and innovation of the Chinese brands. It seems that crossovers predominate and it is so much easier to get in and out of them than with the European, Korean and Japanese sedans that they replace. The Chinese models all are loaded with electronic gadgets for driver satisfaction.
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Finally, I close out these Travel Notes by some observations drawn from my experience of high culture in Petersburg this past week.
On Monday, we had tickets to the performance of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman at the Mariinsky II theater. Christian Knapp, an American born and trained conductor who has been working at the theater since 2011 and has a vast repertoire under his belt led the orchestra this evening, taking us all far out to stormy seas in the overture and setting the mood for an unforgettable evening. The singers were all Russian, led by the veteran soloist Nikitin as the Captain of the phantom vessel. For those watching their wallet, our tickets in fifth row center cost 4,000 rubles each. As I have mentioned earlier, seats farther back in parterre or in the balconies would cost half or less. All seats have direct vision of the stage and enjoy good acoustics.
On Thursday, we went to the Russian Museum to see the month-long exhibition of paintings by Karl Bryullov to celebrate the 225th anniversary of his death. It is drawing large crowds and we had a wait at the ticket desk even at 3 pm on a workday. The show is interesting for the very important paintings of historical events such as the 1581 siege of Pskov or the Last Day of Pompei that won artistic prizes for the artist in Paris and elsewhere. These measure 5 x 6 meters or more and are rarely put on display. Then there were the still more astonishing and less known ‘cartoons’ by Bryullov, i.e. 1:1 drafts for transfer in paint onto the interior walls of the St Isaacs Cathedral in central Petersburg during the 1840s. Seeing these masterpieces leaves no doubt why Bryullov earned universal respect not only in Russia, where he was awarded a gold ring by Emperor Nicholas I for one of his paintings but also in the West, where he spent a good part of his life, starting from his 3 years in Rome on a stipend from the Russian Academy of Art when he graduated to his final years leading to his death. Bryullov is in fact buried in the Cemetery for non-Catholics in Rome.
I understand that anniversaries have their own schedule independent of current global events. But I do read significance into the presentation right now when relations with the West are so fraught. After all, Bryullov was so integrated into European high society as he was at home in Russia. His mistress, a lady in the highest circles of Russian nobility, kept a residence just near the Spanish Steps in Rome and that is where he passed his time. A couple of his magnificent portraits of her are shown in this exhibition.
In this vein it is also noteworthy that the exhibition’s general sponsor is VTB Bank, the former Foreign Trade Bank of the USSR which has recently greatly expanded its retail branch network and is giving Sberbank a run for its money. Mr. Gref, head of the latter bank, should watch out!
The Chairman and CEO of VTB just happens to be Andrei Kostin, who is close to Vladimir Putin. A year ago, Putin entrusted to VTB and his management the country’s most important ship-building complexes. Kostin also just happens to keep his personal yacht tied up in the Seychelles, where he may on occasion meet with the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, who built a palatial complex overlooking the harbor of Victoria on a site formerly occupied by a US radar and intelligence gathering base.
When you follow the dots, life becomes quite interesting. Is the VTB’s sponsorship of the Bryullov exhibition just a coincidence or is it a straw in the wind with regard to Russia’s eventual reintegration into civilized relations with Europe?
My last entry in the culture category relates to the presentation at TASS headquarters in Petersburg of the forthcoming Schnittke Festival. The Festival will celebrate the 90th anniversary of the composer’s birth.
Schnittke died in 1998 at age 63 in Hamburg, a city to which he had long time bonds. In the spirit of Moscow’s collecting its sons, he is buried in Moscow and his memory is given all honors as the Festival will demonstrate through concerts, lectures and master classes in composition.
The forty-five minute presentation was delivered by the organizer from the Petersburg Union of Composers, by the conductor of the first concert performing Schnittke’s music on traditional Russian folk instruments, by a music professor and composer who will deliver a lecture and master class. But the most important contribution was by Iosif Raiskin, musicologist and music critic, aged 89, who was a close friend of Schnittke for decades and introduced personal touches.
The subtitle of this Festival is Schnittke’s ‘Eclectica’. Though the term is used in various arts with a pejorative tonality, in the case of Schnittke it is used to highlight his presence in different ends of the music world, in different genres. In the 1960s and 1970s, Schnittke’s avant garde symphonic compositions, which included ventures into electronic music, were scorned by the official composer’s union and by Party bosses. And so in parallel with his composing large tableau works, some of which were performed abroad, he made a living writing musical scores for the Russian film industry. The Festival will focus on how he reconciled these two very different sides of his creative work. I have no doubt that the Festival, which is called ‘international’ will attract some professionals from abroad, and the planned concerts should be of interest to anyone passing through Petersburg in late November.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/11/16/ ... ood-money/
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YULIA SKRIPAL REVEALS THE BIGGEST SECRET OF ALL AT NOVICHOK SHOW TRIAL – THE ATTACK WAS A BRITISH OPERATION, NOT A RUSSIAN ONE
by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
Yulia Skripal communicated from her bedside at Salisbury District Hospital on March 8, 2018, four days after she and her father Sergei Skripal collapsed from a poison attack, that the attacker used a spray; and that the attack took place when she and her father were eating at a restaurant just minutes before their collapse on a bench outside.
The implication of the Skripal evidence, revealed for the first time on Thursday, is that the attack on the Skripals was not perpetrated by Russian military agents who were photographed elsewhere in Salisbury town at the time; that the attacker or attackers were British agents; and that if their weapon was a nerve agent called Novichok, it came, not from Moscow, but from the UK Ministry of Defence chemical warfare laboratory at Porton Down.
Porton Down’s subsequent evidence of Novichok contamination in blood samples, clothing, car, and home of the Skripals may therefore be interpreted as British in source, not Russian.
This evidence was revealed by a police witness testifying at the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry in London on November 14. The police officer, retired Detective Inspector Keith Asman was in 2018, and he remains today the chief of forensics for the Counter Terrorism Policing (CTPSE) group which combines the Metropolitan and regional police forces with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5).
According to Asman’s new disclosure, Yulia Skripal had woken from a coma and confirmed to the doctor at her bedside that she remembered the circumstances of the attack on March 4. What she remembered, she signalled, was not (repeat not) the official British Government narrative that Russian agents had tried to kill them by poisoning the front door-handle of the family home.
The new evidence was immediately dismissed by the Sturgess Inquiry lawyer assisting Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley), the judge directing the Inquiry. “We see there,” the lawyer put to Asman as a leading question, “the suggestion, which we now know not to be right, of course”. — page 72.
Hughes then interrupted to tell the witness to disregard what Skripal had communicated. “If the record that you were given there is right, someone suggested to her ‘Had you been sprayed’. She didn’t come up with it herself.” — page 73. Hughes continued to direct the forensics chief to disregard the hearsay of Skripal. “Anyway the suggestion that she had been sprayed in the restaurant didn’t fit with your investigations? A. [Asman] No, sir. LORD HUGHES: Thank you.”
So far in in the Inquiry which began public sessions on October 14, this is the first direct sign of suppression of evidence by Hughes.
Hearsay, he indicates, should be disregarded if it comes from the target of attack, Yulia Skripal. However, hearsay from British Government officials, policemen, and chemical warfare agents at Porton Down must be accepted instead. Hughes has also banned Yulia and Sergei Skripal from testifying at the Inquiry.
The lawyer appointed and paid by the Government to represent the Skripals in the inquiry hearings said nothing to acknowledge the new disclosure nor to challenge Hughes’s efforts to suppress it.
Asman described his career and credentials in his witness statement to the Inquiry, dated October 23, 2024. His rank when he retired from the regular police forces in 2009 was detective inspector. He was then promoted to higher ranking posts at the operations coordinating group known as Counter Terrorism Policing for the Southeast Region (CTPSE). By 2018 Asman says he was “head of the National Counter Terrorism Forensics Working Group since 2012, and was the UK Counter Terrorism Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) forensic lead.” In June 2015 Asman was awarded the Order of the British Empire (MBE) “for services to Policing.”
At page 19 of his recent witness statement, this is what Asman has recorded for the evening of March 8, 2018:

Source:
https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazon ... ession.pdf -- page 19.
Asman’s went on to claim in this statement: “At this point Yulia Skripal was described as being emotional and fell unconscious. I made notes of my conversation with DI [Detective Inspector] VN104 in one of my notebooks, and in addition this information was confirmed to me in writing the next morning. The information she provided about being sprayed at the restaurant [Zizzi] was seemingly inconsistent with the presence of novichok at the Mill public house and 47 Christie Miller Road. On hearing this, I personally wondered whether Yulia Skripal knew more about it than she had alluded to and therefore whilst being fully cognisant of the SIO’s [Senior Investigative Officer] hypothesis and the need to be open-minded continued to prioritise her property.”
THE SCENE OF THE NOVICHOK CRIME
The Skripals reportedly spent 45 minutes at lunch in Zizzi’s restaurant. Witnesses described Sergei Skripal as upset when he left with Yulia to walk to the bench. Source:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/
THE EVIDENCE THE CRIME WAS BRITISH

Left: Yulia Skripal in May 2018, the scar of forced intubation still visible; read more here. Centre; Dr Stephen Cockroft who recorded the exchange with Skripal at her bedside on March 8, 2018; that was followed, Cockroft has also testified, by forced sedation and tracheostomy – read more. Right: read the only book on the case evidence.
Open-minded was not what the judge and his lawyers wanted from Asman when he appeared in public for the first time on Thursday, November 14. Referring precisely to the excerpt of Skripal’s hospital evidence, Francesca Whitelaw KC for the Inquiry asked Asman: “ We can take that [witness statement excerpt] down, but this information as well, was it consistent or inconsistent with what you had found out in terms of forensic about the presence of Novichok at The Mill and 47 Christie Miller Road? A. [Asman] It, I would say, was inconsistent on the basis that she said she was sprayed in the restaurant.” — page 73.
Asman was then asked by Whitelaw to comment on Yulia Skripal’s exchange with Cockroft. “My question for you is: how, if at all, this impacted on your investigations? A. It only very slightly impacted on it…It was information to have but not necessarily going to change my approach on anything.” — page 73.

Left, Francesca Whitelaw KC, counsel assisting Hughes, asked Asman about Yulia Skripal’s hospital evidence – click to watch from Minute 2:01:27. Right: Hughes interrupting the witness to dismiss Skripal’s evidence from Min 2:03:23. On Hughes’s order, Asman’s face was not transmitted during his testimony, and the audio record was delayed by ten minutes before broadcast.
In the Inquiry record of hearings and exhibits since the commencement of the open sessions on October 14, there have been eleven separate exhibits of documents purporting to record what Yulia and Sergei Skripal have said; they include interviews with police and witness statements for the Inquiry; they are dated from April 2018 through October 2024. Most of them have been heavily redacted. None of them is signed by either Skripal.
Neither Yulia nor Sergei Skripal has been asked by the police, by the Inquiry lawyers, or by Hughes to confirm or deny whether Yulia’s recollection of March 8, 2018, of the spray attack in Zizzi’s Restaurant is still their evidence of what happened to them.
https://johnhelmer.net/yulia-skripal-re ... more-90621