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blindpig
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 25, 2023 3:29 pm

(Pt 4 Continued from previous post.)

5.3. On what basis does the author propose to negotiate
In order to be able to agree on something, it is necessary first of all to solve the problem of bringing the worldviews of different groups of society together. For this I refer to Appendix 1 . If it is not possible to agree on this issue, then further dialogue will not work out in any way.

5.4. Analysis of the Slavophile position
As we found out above, in the worldview of a Slavophile-patriot there are some eternal values ​​that must be followed - and everything will be fine. Such values ​​are professed by Russian civilization.

5.4.1. Progressiveness in the position of a Slavophile
It should be recognized that the Slavophil sincerely cares for the Motherland, sincerely desires justice, sincerely fights against enemies and even, at this stage, correctly understands the destructive role of the West and the authorities of the Russian Federation. The only problem is that the attitudes of the Slavophile, under the influence of religion and the civilizational approach, have too general, non-specific definitions of values, justice and progressiveness. This vagueness does not make it possible to find a way out of the current crisis situation.

5.4.2. Metaphysics and eternal values
The eternal values ​​defined in religious postulates contradict dialectical logic, that is, the principle that everything is in motion and development. Not only are they descended from an unknowable "top", they are also maximally vague and inapplicable to the current situation. They are examples of so-called categorical imperatives.

On this issue, the contradiction between Marxism and Slavophilism is revealed as follows.

Within the framework of dialectical materialism, the principles of the movement of society are fully studied in a scientific way, its contradictions are understood, and a way to overcome them is indicated. Instead, the Slavophile offers some moral principles that everyone must follow in order for society to achieve harmony. Any religion and any nationalism also offers some of its principles to achieve the same goal. And even the famous Immanuel Kant also proposed his categorical imperative - again with the same goal. My favorite example of a Slavophile patriot is Eduard Birov. All values ​​and imperatives are carefully spelled out in him. Based on them, he makes such an analysis of current events and invents such an “image of the future” that it is simply impossible to read them without tears.

Thus, for a Slavophil, like for any other carrier of an idealistic doctrine, say a believer or a nationalist, it turns out that society develops progressively or regressively only due to how “correct” and “benevolent” the filling of the head of each individual person. But where is the reason for this development? Where is the reason for the filling of heads in each specific historical period? Why are some people good and others bad? How is this development taking place? Without an accurate, scientifically verifiable understanding of these issues, it is impossible to find an answer to the question of how to make sure that there are no wars. The answer cannot be found in an idealistic worldview, so all such ideologies assume the presence of absolute evil as opposed to good. They are all fabulous.

Let's say that there is the most enlightened person with humanistic ideals who spreads his teachings. How many such, without sarcasm, ascetics have been throughout history, with all sorts of moral imperatives? There is no number. How long did they fight each other? And what is the result? The result is a ticking clock to nuclear conflict. And the answers are not found just because the moral imperatives are proposed “by themselves”, without being connected with the material causes of the generation of wars.

Not a single most humanistic categorical imperative (that is, a statement about how everything should happen), whether it is derived through teaching or simply postulated by a good person, is capable of shifting the course of history, as it will come into conflict with no less humanistic principles put forward by another person. or teaching. Because none of these teachings recognizes itself as less true and less just.

Examples:

- an example with different branches of Christianity: Catholics against Orthodox, Catholics against Protestants, Old Believers against modern Orthodox;

- an example with different branches of religions: Muslims against Christians, Jews against Christians;

- national examples: the Arab-Israeli conflict (whose land is it after all), the Armenian-Azerbaijani one (I tried to trace this chain “you started it first, you didn’t”) and, in general, any neighboring countries;

- an example of the First World War, when "no one wanted war, war was inevitable";

- an example of civil wars;

- an example of a sudden “change of vector”, when peoples lived peacefully, and then they cut each other out, as after the collapse of the USSR;

- an example of the US war with Afghanistan, a war, in fact, the ideology of democracy with a primitive, but a system of values ​​of the entire Pashtun people.

Let me summarize the contradiction between Marxism and Slavophilism in the most simplified form.

- In the issue of global good-evil, both movements are “for peace against war”.

“We have to fight wars.”

- To fight, you need to understand this phenomenon.

“Merely postulating the moral imperatives “stop fighting” does not help the struggle, as evidenced by the entire history of mankind.

- We still need to return to the issue of scientific understanding of the causes of wars, and hence the causes of the development of society.

- The latter is impossible if there is no clear materialistic base and the understood logic of its cognition.

Slavophilism cannot scientifically answer points 3 and 5.

Conclusion : Slavophilism relies on violations of logic and on idealism, which generally closes the possibility of achieving the set goals, just as ignorance of electricity threatens with certain consequences a person who conducts electricity to a house.

5.4.3. Metaphysics and Russian civilization
For now, I’ll just say that all sorts of geopolitics, civilizational theories, and so on. and so on. do not withstand scientific scrutiny. An example is the civilizational approach. The concept of civilization comes from the word "city", from the emergence of urban culture. Society builds a city out of a wild state, allocates city power, organizes the division of labor and agricultural communities, supplying them with handicraft products. In the process of studying history, scientists have discovered that it also happens that there are states, but no cities: for example, there are complex nomadic societies without cities. Then a theory appeared that civilization is a feature of specific people living in a specific territory. For example, each ethnic society is unique - Russian, Chinese, European, American civilizations. I repeat. Scientists such as Jean Batisto Vico, Godfried Herbert, Simon Balanche, François Guizot, Charles Renovier, Joseph Arthur Gobineau, Nikolai Danilevsky, Oswald Spengler, tried to find signs of civilizations; Arnold Toynbee singled out as many as 30 civilizations, and Lev Gumilyov tried to substantiate the foundation of the emergence and disappearance of civilizations - passionarity. This approach is the brainchild of the colonial policy of the 18th-19th centuries, which the Europeans tried to describe and legitimize. Of course, the CPU was crushed by practice, since German fascism became its extreme form. However, the CPU is still often used by strong countries to justify their dominance, and by weak countries as a defense mechanism against takeovers. The weakness of the CPU is in its idealism. There are no criteria by which civilizations can be convincingly singled out. For example: cultural-religious (what about a mixture of religions), cultural (what about one culture - different languages ​​or one language and different cultures), based on mentality (which is generally a form of objective idealism, when ways of behavior and ways of thinking are arbitrarily attributed to the strata of people). Yu. I. Semyonov studied all civilizers and singled out 22 definitions of civilization that contradict each other. So, for example, inside a large people, country, ethnic society, trying to define its civilization, there are always smaller communities, cultures, peoples that do not fall under this definition. Expansion of the definition will only lead to the fact that other civilizations will also fall under it.

The rottenness and anti-science of the civilizational approach lies in the fact that each representative of such an approach measures social phenomena from the point of view of "one's own shirt is closer to the body." These are prominent representatives of the so-called Hottentot morality: "If a neighbor stole a cow from me, it's bad, if I stole a cow from him, it's good." In fact, this is the philosophy of the eternal war of mankind.

Thus, the concept of Slavophilism is built contrary to logic and violates the dialectical principle of universal interconnections and that the general is higher than the particular. This violation occurs with the help of an antilogical selection of a certain group of people from the whole society on anti-scientific, invented signs like "the gene of our, Russian justice."

Conclusion : And in this matter, Slavophilism again has reliance on violations of logic and on anti-scientific idealism, which again closes the possibility of achieving its goals.

5.4.4. What is really hidden behind Slavophilism
A nation is a historically established community of people based on a common territory, economic structure, system of political ties, language, culture and mental makeup, which is manifested, among other things, in the general civic consciousness and self-awareness. These communities, like everything else, must be studied in development, within the framework of the formational, and therefore class, approach. Modern bourgeois nations are built around capital, are used by it and, within the framework of bourgeois relations, are competitors for each other. In the war of capitals, there is nothing that would not be used - including technology and national cultures. The nation objectively exists and has existed since the formation of the capitalist way of life, but at the same time, everything national is built on parochialism, myths and delusions, that is, subjectively.

It is scientifically impossible to detect any gene of Russianness and a gene of justice in a Russian. Russians go through exactly the same historical formational development as other nations, adjusted for historical and geographical features. And no gene of justice can prevent the Russian nation, like any other, from becoming fascist. You can get and read the philosopher Ilyin on this topic.

In essence, modern Slavophilism is ordinary idealistic nationalism. Political nations arose in the course of the formation of capitalism, and they are only as competitive as the capital with which they stand in solidarity. All nations feel disadvantaged and take revenge on their neighbors. The Arab-Israeli and Armenian-Azerbaijani situations, as vivid examples, are on everyone's lips. Poland and Ukraine are burning no less brightly. The democratic hegemon has been waging a holy war with non-democratic "foreigners" for decades. The concept of the most just "world" in the world - "Russian world", "democratic world", "Poland from sea to sea", "great turan" or "great Finland" - is in every ambitious nation, and all these "worlds" are not able to get along with each other on the same planet.

Of course, this does not negate the historical paths of certain nations. Europeans are colonizers, rapists and oppressors. This is how they developed as a nation, which had a certain influence on their mental make-up. The Russians have always had a lot of lands, but they tolerated Germanized and Frenchized tsarism and aristocracy over themselves, therefore they have a mental warehouse that is significantly different from the European one. But it is impossible to explain anything by the difference of mentalities, since it is not decisive. The determining factor is the material life of society, the economic system, and mentality is a derivative of the conditions of this being.

Thus, Slavophilism is, first of all, bourgeois nationalism, and the national color already plays a tenth meaning and is not essential. I recommend considering a similar Belarusian obscurantism - NGO "Belaya Rus": as soon as it comes to worldview foundations, all of them turn out to be grandiloquent categorical imperatives, sucked out of a well-known place, but having a good purpose.

And like any bourgeois nationalism, Slavophilism, in the first place, does not allow itself to touch the sacred right of private property relations. The principle of "do not steal" applies only to stealing from the rich.

If we discard empty wishes, in fact, as all history shows, Slavophilism, together with all its clergy, is nothing more than a tool for serving the ruling class. Its purpose is to support exploitation and competition with other nations.

This service to the ruling class can be illustrated with historical examples.

First. The fact that the God-given authorities, including the entire clergy as a collective feudal lord, 90% of the population was exploited both tail and mane for centuries, until it reached frenzy, did not bother any of the bearers of Slavophile ideas. As now, none of them cares that the existing capitalist system is built on the principle of making a profit based on the consumption of labor, that is, outright theft. I recommend to think and give scientific answers to the following questions. Why did 90% of the country's population live beyond poverty for centuries before the revolution (the so-called key issues: unresolved land, labor and national issues)? Why did a series of bourgeois revolutions and feudal counter-revolutions take place in 1917, and why was the bourgeoisie unable to resolve key issues and was overthrown? Why during the civil war did the bulk of the people not support the whites (essentially the bourgeoisie) and the 14 interventionist countries? How exactly did a small handful of Bolsheviks manage to get the support of the overwhelming majority of the population? What was the "evil" motivation of the Bolsheviks, who solved these key issues by eliminating, first of all, the relations of private property, that is, the opportunity to enrich themselves, including themselves?

Second. On the territory of the USSR (all republics), from the 1950s to the 1990s, violence had homeopathic doses, and now, after the overthrow of the hated CPSU and the establishment of freedom, equality and fraternity, the population is dying out, people are dying both in peacetime and already in wartime. How to explain? Then no Slavophilism and religions were encouraged, but now - with might and main.

Third. Russia waged feudal wars in exactly the same way as all the other surrounding countries. The same applies to the bourgeois Republic of Ingushetia and its participation in the division of China and the Ottoman Empire and in the First World War.

What kind of Slavophile idea and justice can be discussed here is decidedly unclear.

5.4.5. How do you really need to compare the positions of the Slavophiles-Westerners-liberals-whites-reds
In the unscientific and antilogical concept of Slavophilism, such a system of coordinates emerges, where there is a lover of a certain classless Motherland and there are idiots who either do not like it and try to sell it, or for unclear reasons cannot unite against the enemy. The Slavophil in this coordinate system does not see division along the line of private property relations, does not see the devouring of the majority of his compatriots by a small number of parasites of the same nationality, does not understand that in the event of the victory of the Slavophil movement, nothing will change for the majority and the stratification will only grow.

Let's digress to the concept of "homeland". The concept of "homeland" arose simultaneously with the concepts of "nation" and "state". That is, when human societies entered the era of capitalist relations. Before capitalism, there was loyalty only to one's clan, tribe, or later - to the feudal lord (feudal loyalty). An omnivorous patriot will not even understand how the local equivalent of “Sieg Heil” will yell at someone’s personal address, explaining his behavior by loyalty to the Motherland, which anyone must love. Homeland is not just love for your birches, sunflowers, pines or palm trees, it is not just an uncritical attitude to the place where you were born, where your childhood and youth passed. The motherland is the organization of the life of society, it is what class the power in the country belongs to, it is the standard of living and social guarantees for the entire (!) People, taking into account the level of development of the productive forces. The motherland is, first of all, the people among whom you live, with their specific material interests, entering into certain production and economic relations with each other - on which their and your fate, the future of them and your children, the quality of the society in which you live and with whom you are in contact every day. Where yours is not the one who speaks the same language with you, lives in the same house or “honors the ancestors,” such were the Vlasovites with the white bandits. One who denies the principle of “devour your neighbor for the sake of personal profit”, who hates the parasitism of some people on others, respects work, and not appropriation of the results of someone else’s work. Those who consciously or unconsciously try to reduce everything to abstract birches, poplars, pines, the memory of their ancestors - that is, reducing the choice to idealism and mere emotions, but ignoring materialism, ignoring the socio-economic relations between people, and therefore the materialistic future of him, his family, children, his people, the society in which he and his descendants will live, sooner or later he will be on the side of capital, on the side of punishers or WILL NOT LEAVE OTHERS OF ANOTHER CHOICE, except to be in the form of Kappel regiments, in the form of brown attack aircraft of some Einsatz team, in the form of a speculator-dealer who profits from the difficulties of others, or in the form of a "defender" of the Fatherland, thrashing at his own civilians from guns or hiding behind them, like a shield. Total. Homeland is a class concept. Whoever tries, voluntarily or involuntarily, to make it a universal concept that allegedly stands above society, outside society, in isolation from society, and therefore above socio-economic relations,

Let us return to the considered social movements. Which of them really denies the principle of "devour thy neighbor for personal profit"? That is, ready to fight the class of exploiters and abolish private property relations?

Liberals? Funny. Their value is the religion of democracy with subordination to the Western bourgeoisie.

Westerners? Absolutely not. Their value is the religion of democracy in cooperation with the Western bourgeoisie.

White? Absolutely not. They do not exist as an integral group, but their value is the religion of democracy, capitalism, either independent or pro-Western.

Slavophiles? Unscientific and anti-logical dismantled above. In essence, solidarity with the bourgeoisie against the proletariat under beautiful slogans. What will the conditional Maxim Kalashnikov do, organizing horizontal ties and unexpectedly coming to power during a time of troubles? Our prominent futurist has no ideas other than to introduce the best Slavophile wishes through education. At best, it will make socialism in Lukashenka's style, seasoned with nationalism. But at this time, the objective economy, in which the whole country is involved, will work on the principles of private property. And sooner or later, according to the scientific laws of the movement of society, there will be such a degree of monopolization, in which the whole honest, but idealistic bunch of Slavophiles (even if noble people like Vershinin act under the leadership of Kalashnikov, Strelkov, Grubnik and others) will blow you to hell, because it is impossible to fight with general ideas against objective production relations that cover the whole country. Successful struggle, and we are talking about class struggle, requires not just self-sacrifice, but a scientific basis and maximum specificity.

(I’ll note in brackets: here we need very specific answers like “do one, two, three” for each specific circumstances of a specific period of time, which are absent from the Slavophile-patriot, with the justification that they really lead to the goal. If they are not there, then even criticize the most recent Hitler does not make sense, because a simple statement that he acts anti-humanistically is helpless without saying how your humanistic worldview proposes to eradicate this anti-humanism. Also, I cannot help but note that dialectical materialism gives such answers with deadly accuracy, predicting the course of things over the centuries, showing the causes of wars, their inevitability and ways to overcome them.He also tells everyone what to do at this particular moment.Simply for the reasonthat the diamatic approach requires the study of objective reality even more scrupulously and more precisely than physics studies the current).

Only the Marxists remain, the so hated "Red Tsar-bearers", suddenly of all groups the only ones who stand on a scientific basis and fight not only with foreign bourgeoisie, but also with their own, as well as with unscientific-minded cadres in their ranks. If this is not done, the progressive life of the whole society cannot be achieved.

5.4.6. The opposite method
Suppose Marxism is a set of sectarian dogmas. Then the Slavophile offers to rally - for what? For the sake of survival, protection from the enemy who is going to dismember the country - and it's hard not to accept. Suppose we rallied and won. But Marxists also offer to fight the enemy, and not only them. Suppose the weak bourgeois state of the Russian Federation cannot cope and the Slavophiles begin to build their "horizontal ties". Why is it necessary to rally around them?

Around the heresy about justice, which is refuted historically?

Around good wishes that do not exclude fascism in any way (white-Slavophiles with their slogans and the philosopher Ilyin)?

Around duplicity about the commandment "do not steal"?

It turns out, I will fight, and then they will rob me again?

It is necessary to separate well-wishes from essence. It is the essence that does not allow the Slavophiles to develop an image of the future. How she did not allow this to be done by the feudal church hierarchs. If you serve the ruling class, robbing the people, you have, in essence, nothing to offer.

Or do the Slavophiles have scientifically developed methods for holding back capital? None found. And if they are not there, then how will the conditional Slavophil differ from the conditional “stoned whites and reds”, from the aforementioned African tribes, as well as from Westerners in their dogmas and axioms? Only by the fact that their dogmas seem more just?

The image of the future and our Marxist path are discussed above in the main text of the article.

5.5.1. Where are you communists, why aren't you there?
First, let's not forget the nearly one and a half billion people living in emerging communist societies.

Secondly, the defeat of communism in the USSR is quite understandable for the historical process of the struggle of opposites: capitalism also advanced over the centuries through numerous revolutions and counter-revolutions. A change of formations is inevitable because of the development of the productive forces, which is increasingly in conflict with the miserable relations of production. Since the collapse of the USSR, a small core of communists (not those ignoramuses who destroyed the USSR) have been developing a theory without which it is impossible to react at the right time. And the moment will come, because the strength of the capitalist crisis is growing, the war is blazing more and more, and the existing forces still cannot offer anything. They have almost 10 years of war, zero understanding of the causes of the crisis and zero vision for the future. There were also few Bolsheviks by the time the February revolution began, but there was a theory and there was a party. By October, the masses had accepted the only working red idea and by the time of the Great Patriotic War they had turned the backward Republic of Ingushetia into a state of a completely different quality - economically strong, but most importantly - with people of a new quality. Now, if everything does not burn in a nuclear fire, it will be the same, because the relations of exploitation at the present level of development have outlived their usefulness and it remains only to forge that subjective factor - a party that will put this into practice and will be able to overcome the scientifically studied mistakes of the past - an unscientific approach to organization that caused disaster.

5.5.2. Conclusion
The main thing in the current moment is preparation for the upcoming battles. The Party will unite around itself people who conscientiously improve the quality of their scientific knowledge through self-education. In order to understand the next steps, you need to know a lot, study, verify the acquired scientific knowledge and help a group of Marxists develop a theory and become a party. These are the objective requirements of the current moment. The bourgeoisie of the Russian Federation is already discrediting itself, and it has little chance of coping with the much stronger Western capital. Tomorrow - when the population goes berserk, when it wakes up from the petty-bourgeois dope of endless consumption, in which it has lived for the past 30 years, and when conditions are created for an open struggle for Soviet power in the context of the fight against external intervention. By that time there should be a working party, and tens of thousands of competent communists under her leadership, to replenish the army as a cementing force already in the form of the Red Army. Communism was able to win in the civil, during the "peaceful" 20-30s and during the Second World War thanks toSCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATION . (And this, let me remind you, is the main thing at the moment of moving away from private property relations - organization and a planned economy). Not by abstract courage, not by abstract love - since both courage and love for the Motherland were in abundance on the opposite sides, from the White Guard to the Nazis - namely, thanks to the SYSTEM OF THE DICTATORY OF THE WORKING CLASS !

Only UNDER SUCH CONDITION, the people with their "courage" and "love for the Motherland" can win, and nothing else.

Appendix 1. Problems of bringing worldviews of different groups of society together
I think not a single person will object that conflicts can stop when the public outlook is unified, at least in a number of basic questions about justice and the progress of society. Let's call it the general coordinate system.

The problem of reducing different worldviews to one is the key problem at this stage. Now all participants in absolutely all conflicts consider themselves fair and progressive within the framework of their worldview. The problem is in the subjective interpretation of what is justice. "This is different" is the slogan of our time, the slogan of Hottentot morality.

Simplifying to the extreme, we need to understand how to know that someone's point of view is correct. Why, for example, a Slavophile or any other national patriot is right, but Westerners, liberals, hataskrainiki, whites, greens and reds are not?

In order to come to unanimity, one must first of all realize that a certain complexity is inherent in the system of views (worldview) of any individual, even if he has the most philistine kitchen. Such complexity stems from the fact that the content of this system is an infinite world moving in time, in all its diversity, and the ability of individual thinking to reflect it is very limited. “Inventing” from scratch a system of cognition of the infinite is an occupation beyond the control of one person, and therefore, often without realizing it, he relies on one or another social theory, philosophy, the quality of which directly depends on the methods of thinking on the basis of which it is constructed.

In order to reach unanimity, it is necessary secondarily to agree on a number of issues, and simple "common sense" will not help here: it is different for everyone according to education and is often very superficial.

Clause 1.1. Knowability
The first and most difficult is the question of knowability. The universe must be fundamentally knowable and accessible for rational, that is, scientific, explanation. The question of unanimity ends where "unknowable" places begin. Because each person invents them himself, he believes in them, they cannot be understood rationally, which means that it is impossible to convince another that your "unknowable" is more correct than someone else's.

If something cannot be known, then it must be taken on faith as a dogma. There are an infinite number of such dogmas in the world. Supporters of different dogmas cannot agree with each other even within the same current, a striking example of which is the history of Christianity (one dispute about the Filioque is worth something).

When applied to the whole of society (and this is what we are interested in, and not the individual manifestations of the teachings), any unknowable dogma means that it is impossible to agree on two most important questions:

• what is good and evil on the scale of society?

• what drives the development of society?

Lack of unanimity on these issues means eternal conflict.

For example, if I am a solipsist, then the whole world is created by my consciousness. It is impossible to convince me that it is impossible to burn people in another country, because they exist only in my mind; in the same way yoga, Christianity, Buddhism, the sect of witnesses of Darth Vader - I invented them all, for fun. Some teachings even justify this conflict (claiming that "this is the way"). Other modern philosophical concepts even try to explain this state of affairs, arguing that the truth of a particular doctrine is determined by the number of its bearers (for example, "whoever is stronger is right"). But this does not bring peace to the world, as we see, but for many this is not the goal.

Therefore, for our case, it is necessary to set aside any unknowable dogma, in particular any religion, from further discussion, otherwise we will remain on the positions of the dispute “God exists” - “God does not exist”, which will not lead us to a common understanding of the “image of the future”.

I would like to clarify: no one forbids anyone to believe in anything. We have a common recognition of the ultimate goal, at this stage simply understood as “building a conflict-free society where the life of every person is important”, and we need to come to some kind of rational common foundation that will help us reach this goal together with the whole society.

If a religious person persists precisely on his dogmatics, then we will never reach the goal, because we will run into no less stubborn carriers of other dogmatists. If he decides that it is enough to build a just society in a limited area of ​​influence of his religion, then further dialogue can be stopped, because then how will the bearer of some dogmas differ from the bearers of other dogmas? How, for example, will the conditional Slavophile differ from the conditional “stoned whites and reds”, from the Westerners in their dogmas? Only by the fact that their dogmas seem more just?

Clause 1.2. Scientific
If we agree on knowability, we automatically arrive at the concept of scientificity. It is important. Scientific understanding means that we can cognize objective reality in such a way that, firstly, it is verifiable by each person, and secondly, it is confirmed in practice.

In our case, we are talking about scientific social science.

Next, we will give some definitions of scientificity, the logic of thinking, we will reveal some social science truths and indicate the sources on which such an understanding is built. It is very important in the dialogue that anyone who does not agree with the following can provide their scientifically cognizable sources that can be discussed. If unknowable dogmas are opposed, then - as mentioned above - we will run into dogmatism, which blocks any opportunity to build an “image of the future” and achieve the goal that we discussed above.

So, science.

In science, the truth is always one for every question, and it is knowable and verifiable.

The criterion of truth is the entire socio-historical practice of mankind, including industry, scientific achievements and the consistent development of society itself.

Scientific knowledge proceeds from general questions to particular ones, and not vice versa, as is done in the modern positivist so-called. "science", where a random texture is wound on a set of hypotheses.

The living and non-living world moves according to objective laws, and these laws are fully cognizable. The task of a person is to reflect them as accurately as possible so that individual practice does not conflict with these laws and is progressive in accordance with these laws.

Thus:

- The world exists objectively and moves according to laws that are completely and completely amenable to knowledge.

Man and mankind are part of the world, and they are fully cognizable, like the whole world. Man is endowed with the ability to reflect in consciousness and thereby cognize the surrounding material world.

Remarque about science. The repetition of the word "scientific" does not make the approach scientific. To think scientifically is to think in terms of concepts whose content is adequate to objective reality. The highest type of concepts is the category. The philosophical category is, firstly, an extremely general and extremely specific scientific abstraction, the richness of the content of which guarantees the systematization and coordinated inclusion of any particular fact or series of facts. Secondly, this is the concept of a phenomenon that does not allow arbitrary interpretation. Thirdly, it is a concept that reflects the objective laws, forms or aspects of objective material reality, the key points of knowledge. The philosophical category always presupposes its full compliance with the entire socio-historical practice of mankind. Thus, you can’t just pull on textures without understanding the essence of the phenomenon and declare it a science. Science must explain all known texture - this principle is known as "practice is the criterion of truth."

If we agree on this, then it means that there is a single truly reflected picture of the world (it is not static and not perfect - these are incorrect characteristics, there is no static; it is precisely true), and all the rest are untrue.

Clause 1.3. Logic of thinking
As stated above, "common sense" is a subjective phenomenon. What is logic? Any worldview can be reached only as a result of some work of thought, which, in turn, is based on certain methods of thinking. It is the mistakes in the latter that lead to the emergence of philosophies of varying degrees of inferiority, the application of which leads to the same quality practice, the results of which we clearly observe outside the window. It is easy to illustrate the method of thinking and the consequences of errors in it with the example of a causal relationship. In children, this is just being formed, which leads to funny situations when the child, closing his eyes with his hands, believes that it has become dark for his parents. The fact that he can’t hide like that makes him sincerely surprised. But cause and effect is only a small part of the logic.

Who determines the correctness of a certain method of thinking and who determines the correctness of the philosophy that arises on the basis of this method of thinking (after all, hypothetically, there may be several of them on the same basis)? Here it is necessary to turn to the historically accumulated wisdom of mankind and realize that people have been dealing with the issue of the structure of the world in general and the mechanisms of its knowledge in particular since the beginning of time. And the smartest scientists of their time built entire philosophical systems, arguing with each other through the centuries. Step by step, Zeno, Parmenides, Leucippus, Democritus and their followers deduced the concepts of being, continuity, inexhaustibility, and many others. Thus, on the basis of comprehension of practice, an apparatus with verified categories was formed, which makes it possible to describe the principle of the existence and movement of everything that surrounds us, including the very work of thought. By the way, this is why philosophical kitchen talks are so viscous: in a few hours, their participants are trying to form the basis on which entire human lives were laid. The pinnacle of pre-scientific philosophical thought was the “Science of Logic” by G.V.F. Hegel, with which humanity acquired a more or less developed dialectical method. With the advent of the “Science of Logic”, any philosophy based on a metaphysical method of thinking, that is, containing unknowable entities, considering particulars without a general picture, exploring any “separateness” without their general connection, can be considered irrevocably outdated. Unless, of course, we discard the idealistic scholasticism of Hegel himself.

This is how we can see the limitation of formal logic and rely on the principles of logic: the need to see everything in development, in interconnection; the need to understand the principles of development of any phenomenon in the identity and struggle of its constituent opposites, in the spasmodic changes. One of the consequences of such a system is the principle of "the general over the particular." It is important to remember this moment.

This is scientific logic, dialectics, and it needs to be studied. If it is neglected, there will be the same consequences as from the neglect of cause-and-effect relationships. Its opposite is metaphysics, which loses the relationship between phenomena and their development. It is important to remember this moment too.

Clause 1.4. Scientific social science
Let's apply the above principles to social science.

Human. The first thing that will have to be recognized within the framework of scientific logic is that a person is shaped by society. The mental properties of a person are formed in the course of activity. A person's abilities are manifested, formed and developed in one or another social activity; it is the relationship with society in the process of its implementation that develops the personality, and it is as a result of the activity of the individual with the most diverse properties that they unite into social groups. It is worth recalling that Mowgli children never became people if they were placed in society after a certain age. So we come to the need in further research to consider a social person, that is, an individual as a manifestation of society. Moreover, society cannot be regarded as a collection of individuals, if only because there can be no individual without society. So the individual personality is a manifestation of society, its singular expression. Each unique person is the way he is, only because he has been formed socially, within society.

Society. For a long time, scientists tried to answer questions like: how to explain wars, states, religion, philosophy, morality, etc.? But such a formulation of the question has no answer because of its vagueness and far-fetchedness, openness to an infinite number of idealistic concepts. Instead, as a foundation for discovering regularities, let us put the question: what are the conditions for the existence of a society of any type? That is, what do all human societies throughout history have in common? The answer is unequivocal: the unification of people for the production of material means of life is a way of obtaining the means of life necessary for the existence of people, a way of producing material goods (food, clothing, footwear, housing, fuel, tools of production, etc.) necessary for so that society can reproduce, live and develop. The individual person accepts the rules of the game of social relations if he wants to live. Animals also adapt themselves to the environment, but only man does this by constantly complicating the means of influencing the surrounding matter, transforming it collectively.

History as a science then becomes a study of the course of social development, a science of studying the laws of development of society for practical application to building the future. And it is possible to study the course of social development only on the basis of this very interaction with nature regarding the acquisition of means of subsistence for subsistence.

The above definition of society leads to the fact that society moves according to the dialectic of the development of the means of production, productive forces and production relations. Such an objective development of society is given in the theory of formations. On the scale of humanity, we will see that social ideas, thoughts, views, theories and social institutions must correspond to production relations and, therefore, that most (but not all) modern ideas correspond to the prevailing (but there are others) production relations.

Dialectics requires finding the source of society's movement in the identity and unity of opposites. What? Productive forces and production relations. Such an objectively existing source of the development of society is described in class theory, since only through the class struggle can the contradiction that has arisen be eliminated. K. Marx's "Capital" is a scientific work that reveals the essence of bourgeois economics. K. Marx explores the principle of operation of commodity relations, derives the law of value, the causes and principles of the functioning of money and capital, and also discovers the source of exploitation, the source of profit from human labor. He wrote primarily about people (the development of commodity relations, money, capital), and not about resources and property. This can be studied and verified

It is Marxism that gives a complete picture of what fascism is as an extreme expression of competitive relations of unlimited profit in relations of private property. It also becomes clear that no group of society, no modern nation can escape fascism within the framework of capitalist relations.

As a source, all volumes of F. Engels, K. Marx, V. I. Lenin and I. Stalin are attached, which exhaustively explore these issues on the basis of dialectics.

Clause 1.5. Outcome
The diamatic understanding of the laws of history, the formational approach, the laws of capitalist society, the class approach, and much more - this is a scientific theory that reveals the objective laws of the development of society, fully confirmed by practice. This basis is revealed in powerful scientific works, which again are the result of the development of the entire science of mankind, rely on it.

Ya. Dubov
24/04/2023

https://prorivists.org/80_nationalism/

Google Translator

It is clear that these folks do not ascribe to the 'civilizational' clap-trap promoted by some Russians. Good for them.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 26, 2023 1:55 pm

IN THE SEEDS WAR WHO IS BURYING WHOM?

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By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

The war and US war sanctions have reversed the destruction of the Russian farm economy forced during the 1990s by the US “reformers” in the Yeltsin administration led by the recently exiled Anatoly Chubais.

Now, however, under government orders for self-sufficiency in food production, protection from US biochemical warfare against the Russian food chain, and revival of Soviet seed breeding centres, the American, German, French and Dutch agro-industry exporters which have profited in Russia for thirty years are being locked out.

Not only in Russia and in the Ukraine – the Axis faces long-term competition in Europe, Asia and Africa in the future.

“We are defeating the Americans and Germans on the battlefield,” observes a veteran farm industry source in Moscow. “We are going to do the same on the farm field. Do you remember what Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev] said a long time ago – ‘we will bury you’. And you have been saying that’s what you are going to do to us.”

This week Russian grain and berry producers went public with a warning that new regulations proposed by the federal Ministry of Agriculture to implement new legislation on seed production, due to come into effect in September, will lessen competition in the domestic market, raise seed and farm product prices, reduce crop yields, and lower production volumes.

“The draft regulation, On the approval of the rules for the localization of the production of seeds of agricultural plants on the territory of the Russian Federation — allows foreign companies to do business on the territory of our country only if they work jointly with Russia’s scientific institutes. The share of the latter in joint ventures must be at least 51%, otherwise the foreign seed producers will not be able to work on the Russian market and supply products.”

This statement was authored by the Russian Grain Union and the Berry Union, and leaked to Vedomosti, a Moscow business newspaper. With imported seeds accounting for 97% of commercial beet plantings, 72% for sunflowers, 69% for potatoes, 56% for corn, and between 75% and 100% for berries, forcing the exit of foreign companies from the Russian market will cause scarcity, price inflation, and consumer protest.

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Source: https://news.agropages.com/

In 2018 Bayer took over Monsanto in a $63 billion transaction subsequently reported by US business media to have been “one of the most worst corporate deals”.

The newspaper asked Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, and Limagrain for comment; they refused.

The domestication or localization regulation, as the Russians are calling it, is due to be finalized in a month, following the domestic comment period, the deputy agriculture minister in charge, Oksana Lut, has announced.

The new rule is backed by the grain producers. They told the Moscow press the situation is already that the foreign companies can leave at any time they choose, or their governments decide for them, and they have been threatening this for a year now. “The moment may be chosen that will cause maximum damage to the Russian agro-industry,” said a spokesman for the Grain Union. “The new rules will not restrict the rights of bona fide foreign seed growers, but will give them the economic incentive for their continuing presence and development in the Russian market.”

“The fact is that our seed production in Russia was destroyed back in the 90s,” tomato breeder Tatiana Tereshkova told an industry publication a year ago. “Once we had specialized farms with special equipment and people. But since they completely switched to import, the farms were overturne, and the specialists went to other areas. Now all this needs to be revived from scratch. If the state considers that this is really necessary, then everything can be resuscitated. There are the people; there is also the will. The main thing is that there should be no indulgence towards foreign manufacturers. It seems to me that in two to three years we will cope if necessary.”

After President Yeltsin and his US proxies, acting prime minister Yegor Gaidar and Kremlin chief of staff Anatoly Chubais had destroyed the Soviet seed research and development centres, Russian agriculture lagged far behind other countries. The commercial incentives were also transformed in favour of imports of foreign seeds, plant stock, and insecticides and herbicides. According to Vitaly Barakhtenko, founder of the Museum of Seeds and Plant Protection Products in St. Petersburg, “across the world seeds are usually harvested from the equatorial zone, because there are the most favourable conditions on the planet: constant sun, stable temperature. Imagine, in winter and summer about 28 degrees! Under these conditions, the seeds develop much better. Plus, you can grow three to four crops. No greenhouse in Russia will give such a result. But you can approach it.”

“Today we are buying seeds abroad, because during Yeltsin’s time all the seed banks were destroyed, and the seed breeding stations were closed,” Arkady Dudov, a Leningrad region farmer told an agro-industry website. “It takes decades to revive all this. Here in Leningrad we kept the seed bank for the country safely underground . Above, during the Great Patriotic War, the city population under the blockade were dying of hunger, but they did not eat the seeds. And then Yeltsin blew it all. As a result, all the seeds we have now are Dutch and American. They sell us the hybrids that we grow. But we cannot immediately cultivate a clean line from these fruits, it takes five years to do this. I took care of this problem for myself seven years ago, got the first seeds, the first results. But at the local level, this is not supported in any way; on the contrary, they are strangling the farmers by all sorts of checks.”

In 2017 the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) took note of the shift in Kremlin priority, reporting on the new government programme for stimulating seed production and food self-sufficiency. The official papers were issued in Moscow in August 2017 entitled the “Federal Scientific and Technical Program for Agricultural Development in 2017-2025”. The plan calls for financing from the federal budget of Rb26.1 billion ($438 million) until 2025. Another Rb25 billion ($419 million) is to be provided by provincial budgets and non-budget, commercial sources. The efficacity of the plan is to be measured by annual performance against target indicators for investment in agriculture, growing production of new domestic seed varieties, livestock genetics, feeds and feed additives.

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Source: https://apps.fas.usda.gov/

The USDA report was skeptical of the Russian capability to achieve the plan’s objectives. “If one of Russia’s biggest agricultural exhibitions, Golden Autumn, is any indication, business has been conspicuous by its absence at the key events of the forum’s agenda devoted to the Program.” That was late 2017.

The USDA data show Russia started introducing field crop seeds from the US in 1994 with $13.2 million worth of imports. The total annual value peaked at $37 million in 2018 when Russia was one of the top-10 markets in the world for US seed exporters. It then dropped to $22.7 million in 2020; it is zero now. As the latest tabulation from the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) shows, Russia is no longer in the top-10.

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As a direct response to US economic warfare and sanctions, Russia’s Food Security Doctrine of 2010 was revised. On January 21, 2020, the Kremlin issued new targets for self-sufficiency, and also for combatting the new risks of US and German (Monsanto and Bayer) warfare using genetically modified crop seeds and related products to poison Russia’s food chain.

A translation into English has been published by the Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) of the USDA here. Note the date – the Covid-19 virus pandemic had not yet been recognized, and Russian Defense Ministry reporting of US biochemical warfare plans against Russia had yet to be made public.

According to the USDA report, “the new section of the January 2020 strategy devoted to national interests related to food security aims to prevent the import and distribution of genetically modified organisms for planting, and prohibits raising and breeding animals whose genetic code has been engineered or that carry genetic material of artificial origin as key provisions. The only exception to the ban is the import and sowing of genetically modified organisms for examination and research purposes, as well as the growing of such plants and breeding of such animals for examination and research purposes, according to the Doctrine. Additionally, the new doctrine expanded the list of self-sufficiency indicators to include vegetables, melons and gourds with a value of 90 percent, fruit and berries at 60 percent, and seeds at 75 percent.”

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Source: https://apps.fas.usda.gov/

The practical and financial effect of the war sanctions subsequently imposed by Washington in 2022 on US corporations operating in Russia has been to cancel the Yeltsin, Gaidar and Chubais “reform” once and for all. This has hit the Corteva corporation, one of the world’s largest seed and herbicide producers, with losses on its income, earnings and profit lines, as well as in its share price on the New York Stock Exchange.

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Source: https://www.corteva.com/

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Source: https://markets.ft.com/

In the years ending 2021 and 2022, Corteva, whose global sales revenue exceeded $17 billion, reported that seed sales to Europe amounted to between 18% and 20% of the group’s worldwide seed sale revenues. Corteva’s financial reports indicate that corn seed is the principal one worldwide, followed by soybean; sunflower seeds (under the Pioneer brand) have been the biggest seller to Russia, and also the Ukraine. Herbicides and other crop protection chemicals are the second largest source of Corteva’s revenues.

In the company’s financial reports and investor briefings, sales to Russia (and Ukraine) of Corteva seeds have been aggregated in a single Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) total. The market wasn’t misled. After Corteva’s announcement a year ago of its war sanction exit from Russia, the company’s share price dropped 13% on the New York Stock Exchange, but it has recovered most of the loss. Payroll cuts, job and other losses were recorded at the company’s California unit. The losses which Corteva recorded for 2022 in income and profit in its European (EMEA) operations have been more significant than the media have noticed.

Bayer, the leading seed producer and exporter in the global table, and also in the Russian import market, initially threatened to close down and withdraw from Russia last March, but it didn’t follow through. Instead, at the beginning of this month, the German management announced Bayer’s increased support for the Ukraine, plus a stop to “all spending in Russia and Belarus that is not related to supplying essential products in health and agriculture”, adding “we will continue to monitor developments and evolve or adjust our response as necessary.” Bayer’s seed sales have continued; the company refuses to answer questions from Russian reporters.

The Germans are afraid — Moscow sources report off the record — that if Bayer stops selling seeds to Russia, it will be locked out of the Russian market forever; make next to no gain from the partitioned Ukraine; and in the longer term face competition globally from Russian seed exporters.

Because of the war conditions, and the damage the US, German and French governments are aiming to inflict on Russian agriculture, Russian seed industry sources are reluctant to speak to or be quoted by non-Russian reporters. Instead, the sources discuss openly government and commercial policy-making and their debates with government officials in the Russian agro-industry media and the Moscow business press.

Alexander Olson, who directs the Dutch Rijk Zwaan company’s operations in eastern Europe and CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), has told Kommersant that over the past fifty years, Russia has accumulated great experience in seed selection. This, he says, is reflected in that the country is home to one of the world’s largest and most unique seed collections located at the Vavilov Institute, also in St. Petersburg. Vavilov remains the world’s most important repository of seed genetic material, according to Olson. ‘Despite the existence of such a centre, most seed selection programs in Russia closed after the collapse of the USSR,’ Olson explains. “Seed selection is a long and complicated process. ‘For example, a commercially successful white cabbage hybrid requires about 20 years to create.’ To restore this sector of agriculture in Russia, Olson says large investments and state support are needed.”

Without the sanctions war, this Russian restoration would not have occurred.

“Viktor Yakushev, who serves as director of the Agrophysical Research Institute within the Russian Academy of Sciences, told SeedWorld.com in 2019 that seed material for most of Russia’s agricultural crops are primarily purchased abroad. “In the case of oil-bearing and some industrial crops, the volume of imports of seed material is currently estimated at 50 percent to 70 percent of the market,” Yakushev says. “At the same time, in the case of potatoes, vegetables and greens, these figures are lower … in the range of 40 percent to 50 percent. “It is important to provide the Russian seed market with varieties and hybrids of domestic selection that are not inferior to … the best imported analogues. For these purposes, it’s necessary to radically change the methodology of [the] entire selection process and create a large-scale center to specialize in these activities.”

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Source: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5493536

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Source: https://www.zol.ru/n/386fc

The Russian seed producers, both the state funded centres and the commercial enterprises, have joined the lobbying of deputy minister Lut with a call for more comprehensive import substitution, especially for sugar beet and potatoes. According to Academician Salis Karakotov, chief executive of Schelkovo Agrochem, “ it is remarkable that we, the world’s leader in grain, have set ourselves the task of import substitution of grain crops, spring and winter wheat. Is it worth keeping them out of the market? I think we have practically no equal in varietal crops in the world, and therefore spring and winter wheat had to be protected by some special actions for the purpose of preventing them from entering our market.” At present Karakotov estimates that Russia’s dependence on imported spring wheat seeds is 23%.

“We cannot continue with the appearance of foreign varieties in our registers. It would be best to do it [substitution] where we most need it. [For example] the government’s plan for potatoes and sugar beets is weak.”

Schelkovo’s principal line of business is the production of pesticide and other crop control agents. It is also leading the domestic commercial race to produce beet seeds to end the foreign imports from Germany and France. With investment from Rusagro, the land bank and beet producer owned by Vadim Moshkovich, Schelkovo is working to develop beet seed supplies to overcome the reasons for the serious deficit in that crop. Disease resistance, yield and cost effectiveness have been the chief reasons Russian beet growers have preferred imports.

“Since 2017,” Schelkovo’s website reports, “Rusagro in cooperation with Shchelkovo AGROCHEM has been participating in the development of increased yields for sugar beet. The SoyuzSemSvekla breeding and genetic center was opened in the Voronezh Region in 2019. Key objectives: the creation of new highly productive and disease-resistant sugar beet hybrid with uniformity of biological and morphological characteristics. The first hybrids were registered in 2019. As of the end of 2020, 21 self-breeding sugar beet hybrids were registered in the State Register of Breeding Achievements approved for use in the Russian Federation. The Company is going to sell about 40 thousand seeding units in 2021. The work of the selection and genetic center SoyuzSemSvekla [Union of Beet Seeds] is carried out within the Federal Scientific and Technical Program for the Development of Agriculture for 2017-2025, the subprogram ‘Development of selection and seed production of sugar beet in the Russian Federation’, according to the developed complex scientific and technical project ‘Creation of highly competitive hybrids of sugar beets and the organization of their seed production system’. In 2019, the project was selected by the commission of the Ministry of Agriculture of Russia to receive state support. It was supported with state in 2020.”

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Source: https://eng.betaren.ru/about/

According to Karakotov, seed breeding is accelerating in Russia. “By itself Schelkovo Agrochem is already offering for sale 16 varieties of wheat, 11 varieties of soybeans, 27 sugar beet hybrids, 13 sunflower hybrids, and 10 corn hybrids with competitive yield indicators. Karakotov noted that dependence on imported seed material for soybeans is high, but Russian institutes and businesses are actively developing in this direction and already have varieties on the market with yield indicators of 23-28 quintals per hectare, and protein — 41.0–44.4%. For soybeans, I think we need to implement a more active plan, said the head of the company, commenting on the government decree of December 23, 2022 on plans for self—sufficiency with seeds of major crops in the Russian Federation.

“Referring to sunflower, Karakotov noted there are already domestic hybrids on the market that have shown yields from 21 to 32.7 quintals per hectare. According to him, by 2030 Schelkovo will be ready to produce 1 million sunflower seeds on hybridization plots of 14,500 hectares, which will make up 25% of the demand. Speaking about sugar beet, Karakotov noted that together with the Sugar Beet Institute, the company is ready to supply 120,000 sowing units in 2023 (13% of the demand), and by 2027 to close 75% of the market needs by supplying 675,000 seeds.”

The Russian problem is that although it leads the world in volume of the sugar beet harvest, it manages to do so on double the area sown – 1.1 million hectares — with a 48 kilogram yield per hectare that is half that of France (85.1 kg/ha) and almost that of Germany (77.2 kg/ha). By going to war against Russia, they will have lost their productivity advantage within five to ten years. The Russian advantage in land and other cost of production factors will then drive the French and Germans out of the global market.

WORLD’S TOP-5 PRODUCERS OF SUGAR BEET
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In the policy debate this month in Moscow, some government officials are opposed to the state mobilization approach. The Ministry of Economic Development, for example, a surviving redoubt of US “liberalism”, is arguing the old Chubais line against “provisions introducing excessive duties, prohibitions and restrictions for individuals and legal entities in the field of entrepreneurial and other economic activities or contributing to their introduction, as well as provisions leading to unreasonable expenses of individuals and legal entities in the field of entrepreneurial and other economic activities.”

Another relic of US corporate and government intervention and the old oligarch incentive schemes remains the Higher School of Economics (HSE). HSE academics advocate “privatization” and oppose state planning on the ground that the import ban “would dramatically weaken the competitiveness of the Russian agro-industrial complex and stop the further development of seed production. An alternative is an approach to the problem of import dependence from a business point of view. The demand for seeds should be created by the agricultural producer, the customer for whom the breeders will work. Such a scheme will reduce the dependence of breeding on government subsidies. Farmers will be able to pay for the seed material, and the funds will be directed to the development of domestic seed production.”

The oligarchs who once used Chubais to promote this line to advantage their businesses have been forced by the war to switch, like Moshkovich at Rusagro. How much money the state is contributing to Schelkovo and how much Moshkovich, and what share of the profits they are drawing, is not disclosed by either Schelkovo or Rusagro. Schelkovo is not currently listed on the top-10 table of Russian seed producers.

CURRENT RATING OF TOP RUSSIAN SEED PRODUCERS BY LOCATION, MAIN CROPS, NUMBER OF SEED VARIETIES
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The rating includes the top-15 Russian producers and the top-10 foreign companies in the Russian market. Click on source for the complete listings: Source: https://vestnikapk.ru/

There is a risk that the “non-competitive” seed producers, that is the state seed research institutes, will win out in the lobbying for the final Kremlin decision. According to Natalia Shagaida, head of the RANiGS Agri-Food Policy Center, a commercial consultant, “many Soviet varieties remain uncompetitive. It is necessary to take into account the long-term underfunding of breeders. Many Russian breeders do not know how (or they do not have the strength and means) to promote their products among agricultural producers in the way that foreign giant companies have done. We have practically no breeding business. There is no breeding as a business for making money. You can give public money, but it is scarely appropriate to give to those structures which cannot function as a business – they are not aimed at development. There they can bring out a variety and make a hybrid, enter it into the register, but go no further. As for imports, they will limit themselves when the Russian growers see there is a competitive Russian product.”

Deputy Agriculture Minister Lut pointed out in parliament last month, “we are not against working with foreign companies. But we want foreign companies to be normally localized in our country. We want everything from germplasm to be in the country simultaneously, so that they will transfer technologies to us, train our people. Our market is a good one; it is interesting to work with us. If they want to work, then we will ask them to do so. Otherwise, they will not work in our market.”

During the transition period required to reach the new 2030 targets — 50% for beets and potatoes, 75% for sunflowers, 77% for corn – the government and its supporters propose to introduce import quotas. According to Igor Lobach, chairman of the National Seed Alliance, “It was necessary to quota the import of seeds five to seven years ago. We must protect our market. Now it is necessary to introduce them for each crop separately, first of all, for sunflower seeds, corn and sugar beet, and to reduce the quotas in stages, as the volume of domestic seeds increases.” Lobach said at a conference on seed production in Krasnodar.

“The quotas should be introduced based on calculations of the capabilities of domestic producers to replace the vacant niche. At the same time, the quota size should be adjusted downward annually. We have experience in introducing quotas and it is positive. You will remember about poultry meat — we imported it at 1.2 million tonnes per year, and now we have reached full security (after the introduction of an import quota). It is necessary to go this way in seed production. At the same time, Lobach says it is not necessary to completely abandon the services of foreign companies. Foreign companies are needed for two reasons: firstly, it is difficult to expect a significant breakthrough in breeding if genetic material is not exchanged; and secondly, it is necessary to maintain competition in the Russian market, ensuring the level of our breeding is not lower than that of advanced seed-growing countries. At the same time, the presence of foreign companies in the Russian market should not exceed the share determined by the country’s food security doctrine, and they should work on it according to the rules that take into account the interests of the state.”

Lut’s ministry is proposing to introduce quotas for the import of seeds of nine crops in 2024. These are seeds of potatoes, wheat, rye, barley, corn, soybeans, rapeseed, sunflower, and sugar beet. The quota period will run from January 1 to December 31, 2024 inclusive. The size of quotas will gradually decrease. In addition, the ministry plan calls for reserving the seed import quotas only to those foreign companies which have committed to localizing their operations in Russia with a plan submitted to and approved by the government.

Through the Russian think tanks, the foreign lobby is fighting the quota plan. “Restrictive administrative measures over the long term show, as a rule, a negative result, and they should not be abused, according to Alexei Ivanov of the Higher School of Economics (HSE) where he runs the International Centre for Competition Law and Policy of the BRICS. He reminds us that we have already had unsuccessful examples of using the quota tool, for example, in the automotive industry – this did not lead to an improvement in Russian cars. If we are trying to help Russian farmers use Russian seeds more, we need to introduce measures to support, not to close or restrict the market. And now we want to avoid stress for the market by creating stress artificially. To remedy the situation, it is necessary to create a fully-fledged private breeding in the country…Commercialization has already proved its effectiveness in the agro-industrial complex itself – this has led to a significant increase in labour productivity, and Russia has turned from a net importer country into a net exporter of agricultural products. And in order for private breeding in Russia to work, it is necessary to provide companies with a return on investment and receive royalties for their intellectual property.”

Since the US and European Union have intensified economic warfare, and Moscow has reacted by making illegal donations, subsidies, and other forms of foreign financial sponsorship, HSE has attempted to create new ties with the friendly states – India, Vietnam, Brazil and the BRICS organization.

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Top: left, Vitaly Barakhtenko, founder of the Museum of Seeds and Plant Protection Products of St. Petersburg; right, Leningrad region farmer Arkady Dudov. Bottom: First Deputy Agriculture Minister Oksana Lut; Academician Salis Karakotov, chief executive of Schelkovo Agrochem; National Seed Alliance chairman Igor Lobach.

President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin have yet to make public their decision between the state and privatization options of the seed plan.

None of the sources identified in this story and then contacted for direct comment and answers to questions would agree to speak to the foreign press on the telephone; all requested emails of the questions and then refused to answer.

NOTE: the left lead image is one of two posters created by James Montgomery Flagg to stimulate domestic food production in the US during World War I. The poster was commissioned by a US government agency, the National War Garden Commission, in 1917. The right image is a cartoon of April 1920 by John McCutcheon, published in the Chicago Tribune, mocking the members of the League of Nations for sowing the seeds of war instead of promoting the League of Nations mandate for world peace. The US is shown behind the Monroe Doctrine, its self-proclaimed protectorate of the Americas. As the contrasting examples of Corteva and Bayer reveal since February 2022, the new fence erected by the US and its NATO allies has attempted to extended the protectorate eastwards until the war began. The fence now permanently excludes the US from Europe’s largest agro-industry market.

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(The Paul Robeson Tomato, a product of Soviet agriculture. I grow these)))

https://johnhelmer.net/in-the-seeds-war ... more-87890

J. M. BARRIE, PETER PAN, AND THE DEFENCE OF RUSSIAN CULTURE

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By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

Once upon a time, one of the leading literary figures in the UK defended Russian culture by staging a play in a London theatre in 1920 and again in 1926. J.M. (James) Barrie, famous then and now as the creator of Peter Pan, was the playwright; the play he wrote was called “The Truth about Russian Dancers”.

Not one Englishman or Scotsman (for that was Barrie’s race) dares to do such a thing today.

Barrie’s play followed after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the attempts by the British government in military operations, economic sanctions, and propaganda to attack the new Kremlin regime, kill Vladimir Lenin, and replace the Red government. These military operations didn’t end until the British army withdrew from Russia in September 1920, five months after Barrie’s play had concluded its popular stage run.

According to his script, the fantasy and beauty Barrie characterised as the Russianness of Karissima, the heroine of the play, and her company of dancers is pitted against the unimaginativeness and rigid conformity of the British. And so it is today – that is, if you believe in Barrie, Peter Pan, and their lost boys.

Very well known in Russia as a prima ballerina in her time, Tamara Karsavina, played Karissima, the lead in Barrie’s play “The Truth about Russian Dancers”, but the play itself was not noticed in Russia at the time; it was subsequently forgotten in England. It was rediscovered in English by Olga Soboleva in an academic publication in 2015. This was picked up in Russian in 2019.

Peter Pan first appeared in Russian translation in 1918, after Lenin had begun to consolidate his power and the tsar had been executed. It was fifty years before a second translation was published by a Soviet house in 1968; a third followed in 1981. Since the end of the Soviet Union, there have been twelve fresh translations. The 1981 translation by Irina Tokmakova can still be purchased here.

A lengthy history of Russian as well as Soviet interpretations of Barrie’s creation of Peter Pan and its meaning appeared in 2017. It was written by Alexandra Borisenko, a professor of philology and specialist in English literature at Moscow State University. She understood that Barrie was writing autobiographically; that the Peter Pan story was much more than a fantasy; and that the character had appeared many times in Barrie’s work before Peter Pan was named and became famous. “He experienced many losses and tragedies, and this wound permeates almost all of Barrie’s texts, including the tale of Peter Pan.”

Mistaken as a fairy tale for children, Barrie had written his story for adults about children; that’s to say, the loss of children. “Barrie was thinking about childhood all his life,” Borisenko concluded, “and constantly returned to this topic in his work: the eternal childhood of those who died before they could grow up; the eternal childhood of those who cannot grow up; eternal childhood as a refuge and as a trap.”

“Ridiculous Barrie-ness”, wrote the book critic at The Times in praise of an earlier version of this theme published in 1902. “Utterly impossible, yet absolutely real, a fairy tower built on the eternal truth… Mr Barrie has given us the best of himself, and we can think of no higher praise.”

“Peter Pan,” Borisenko wrote, “came to Soviet children’s literature relatively late, in the 1960s. For quite a long time the fairy tale in the Soviet Union remained under suspicion — it was believed that unbridled fantasies were harmful to children. Peter Pan was discovered for the Soviet reader almost simultaneously (and independently of each other) by two of the best translators of English children’s classics, Boris Zahoder and Nina Demurova. Boris Zahoder translated the play — at first his translation was staged by MTYUZ [Moscow Young Viewers’ Theatre], then in 1971 he came out with Barrie’s book. As always, Zahoder translated quite freely, with great passion and sensitivity to the text.”

“In the preface, he explains the freedom of handling the text with the interests of the addressee –the child: the translator tried to be as close to the original as possible, more precisely: to be as faithful to him as possible. And where he allowed himself small ‘liberties’ — these were liberties caused by the desire to be faithful to the author and be understandable to today’s young! — to the viewer. The first translation of the story ‘Peter Pan and Wendy’ had to lie in the desk drawer for ten years. Nina Demurova saw the English ‘Peter Pan’ in the early sixties in India, where she worked as a translator. She liked the illustrations by Mabel Lucy Atwell, so she bought a book and sat down to translate it. It was her first translation experience, and naively she sent it to Detgiz [Detskaya literatura, ‘Children’s Literature’] publishing house. To no avail, of course. But ten years later, when Demurova became a famous translator thanks to her translation of Alice in Wonderland, she received a call and was offered to publish ‘Peter’.”

“Detgiz was going to severely censor the text. Actually, this should have been expected: it is difficult to imagine a work more distant from the Soviet concept of childhood (joyful, cheerful, creative and devoid of ‘tearful sentimentality’). Children’s literature was censored no less than adult literature, and for the most part the rules of the game were known to everyone in advance. The translator himself cleaned up and smoothed out in advance what would surely ‘not be missed’.”

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Left: the 1968 Russian translation by Nina Demurova of Peter Pan and Wendy. Right, Andrew Birkin’s biography, with additional material and photographs from the Yale University Press edition of 1986-2005: In Russia two other publications about Barrie, his life, his stories and Peter Pan’s interpretation are Nina Demurova, Peter Pan in Russia.; and Chris Routh and Nina Demurova, In the Neverland: Two Flights over the Territory, 1995.

Almost no Russian knows of Barrie’s play about Russians; the same for the English biographers of Barrie and of the Peter Pan story. Andrew Birkin, the most sensitive of Barrie’s biographers and the maker of a BBC film about his life, failed to mention Karsavina or Lidia Lopokova, another Bolshoi Theatre ballerina whom Barrie knew well; his play was originally written for Lopokova. The J.M.Barrie website’s database also ignores the Russians.

Birkin’s biography of Barrie is the story of how the man turned everything he suffered of loss into the love that everyone – almost everyone except George Bernard Shaw – recognizes in the original play, Barrie’s books on Peter, and in the film about Barrie. In a first draft of his personal dedication of the play to the five boys of the Llewellyn Davies family who had inspired it, Barrie wrote: “this dedication is no more than giving you back yourselves.” What has happened is that in a way no one can anticipate in advance, what Barrie has done is to give us all back ourselves.

The moment this was recognized by the opening-night audience at the Duke of York’s Theatre, on St. Martin’s Lane, London, came when Peter Pan, addressing the audience over the footlights, asked them to signal if they believed in fairies by clapping their hands. The response was tumultuous then, December 27, 1904, one hundred and nineteen years ago. It still is, if you can read or imagine the original play – and not the Disney and other bowdlerizations which have tried to make money by replacing and puerilizing it.

When Mark Twain saw it in a Broadway theatre in Manhattan, he wrote privately to the actress who played the lead: “Peter Pan is a great and refining and uplifting benefaction to this sordid and money-mad age.”

The suffering of ordinary lives was concentrated beyond extraordinary in the case of Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies boys – mortal accidents skating and crossing the road; terminal cancer of their father and mother; one death in war; suicides by drowning and by train, etc. If none of this misfortune is familiar to you, stop reading at this point and count yourself to have been so lucky, so far.

“The whimsicality that so many people have found intolerable in J.M.B’s work,” Peter Llewelyn Davies wrote in 1950, “and which was no doubt of the essence of his genius and primarily responsible for his achievements and success, was something almost beyond his control as soon as he had a pen or pencil in his hand. His conversation was often on a much higher plane, and doubtless rose to its highest in his talks with the dying Arthur [Llewelyn Davies, Peter’s father].”

The script, stage set and costume designs, director’s records, and photographs which the Victoria and Albert Museum keeps in London of “The Truth about the Russian Dancers” – filed in the archives, not on public display — is summarized in the museum’s published note. The play shows “how Russian dancers love, how they marry, how they are made, with how they die and live happy ever afterwards… the Russian dancers are not like ordinary humans. They are called into being by a master spirit and can only express themselves through their own medium: they find it so much jollier to talk with their toes. Russian dancers are not ordinary mortals; they are made by their maestro, and when they give birth to a child – also a Russian dancer – it costs them their life. In this case, however, the Maestro seems to have had a generous heart, or to have repented of early wrong doings, for he brings Karissima back to life, and lies on the bier in her place.”

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Left: Tamara Karsavina in the death dance from the play, March 13, 1920. Right: Karsavina takes a bow, a photograph in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The play ran for an initial five weeks, and was revived in July 1926. In the present circumstances it could not be revived because no Russian dancer or musician would be allowed by the British government into the UK. The Bolshoi Theatre has recently complained that foreign-made ballet shoes, pointes, have been sanctioned, and that Russia’s ballet dancers must dance on without them. And that’s not all. Leading Russian ballet directors and choreographers working abroad have been forced out of their jobs.

In a few days’ time in May, it will be the 102nd anniversary of the death in 1921 by drowning of Michael Llewelyn Davies, one of the lost boys from whose combination Barrie had created the story of Peter Pan; Michael was the one dearest to Barrie’s heart after George, his brother, had been killed on the Ypres front on March 15, 1915. “Such have been there will be such again,” he wrote later, “but not for us”. Michael was “the lad that will never be old.”

Barrie was the greatest writer there ever was of the love known to the Greeks as Pothos, the god of longing for what is lost.

There have many poets of the same in short bursts. But none for as many times, for as long and as sad as Barrie. Because of that, Barrie was tolerant and civilized as nobody writing English in the UK against Russia in this war can approach, or even comprehend. Not one Englishman left (or Scotsman).

NOTE: The lead image is a Russian forest with two bird-men, a stage set by Mikhail Larionov for Anatoly Lyadov’s ballet titled Russian Fairy Tales. Lyadov tried composing his ballet between 1916 and 1918, but didn’t finish. The bird-men never appeared on stage.

https://johnhelmer.net/j-m-barrie-peter ... more-87879
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 30, 2023 10:47 pm

Inequality in Russia in the mirror of statistics
April 30, 20:41

Image

Income inequality in Russia fell to its lowest level in 25 years

But it remains one of the highest among developed countries and is 3 times higher than under the

USSR when the coefficient of funds was 13.6 times, although many times higher than the level of Soviet Russia. Then the difference was many times smaller - only 4.6 times in 1990.

The average income after taxes in 2022 was 38,530 rubles. For 10% of the rich, it amounted to 115,000 rubles, and for the rest - 30,030 rubles. 10% of the poor received only 8,300 rubles, Ravenstvo calculated according to Rosstat data published on Friday.

Among 161 countries of the world, the Russian Federation has shifted from 124th to 111th place, overtaking Haiti, Rwanda, as well as Israel and the United States.

The income of the richest 10% to the income of the poorest 10%, times

1. Belarus - 4.7
2. Slovenia - 4.9
3. UAE - 5.0
42. France - 7.9
46. Germany - 8.1
50. Britain - 8.3
88. China - 10, 5
107. Spain - 13.2
111. Russia - 13.8
121. USA - 14.8
157. Brazil - 42
159. Zambia - 44
160. Namibia - 47
161. South Africa - 56

= Full rating =
( https: / /docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f5w4MfvKg2ReKmdG1GDj7VMXA9XO_xB3jUhnQU1WwJg/edit?usp=sharing )

Among regions ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... xB3jUhnQU1 WwJg /edit#gid=703471921) of the Russian Federation, the most stratification is in the YaNAO (19.1), the Nenets Autonomous Okrug (16.3) and Moscow (15.5), and the lowest is in the Jewish Autonomous Okrug (7.4), Kalmykia and Ingushetia (7.7).

In 2021, the coefficient of funds was 15.2 times and for almost 20 years did not fall below 15. The main reason for the reduction in stratification in 2022 was payments to NWO participants, among which there are disproportionately more poor citizens than rich ones. There are frequent cases when an additional incentive to join the ranks of the defenders of the Fatherland was the difficult economic conditions of citizens - debts, low wages, unemployment.

Since the problem of inequality is not being systematically addressed, as the NWO ends, income stratification may again win back upwards. Moreover, the long-term appropriation by the rich of the main streams of income has led to a colossal stratification of the already accumulated property: the 1% of the rich account for 59% (https://t.me/ravenstvomedia/106 ) state of households in the Russian Federation.

https://t.me/ravenstvomedia/189 - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8326565.html

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Mon May 01, 2023 3:29 pm

Law student about education
No. 4/80.IV.2023

I am a law student. He became interested in Marxism at the beginning of his student's path, as he studied the works of the classics, he came to the "Breakthrough".

The choice of the profession of a lawyer was influenced by the fact that back in my school years I noticed what my parents faced at work: the authorities absolutely do not value employees, they additionally load them, often in violation of the law, and the remuneration was a real mockery compared to the remuneration of "labor "all sorts of social parasites (then I understood them as all sorts of bureaucrats, oligarchs and other" effective managers "). In short, I observed the typical market reality, which is familiar to most of the world's population. In my eyes, this state of affairs seemed wild, because the professions of my parents are a resuscitator and a teacher, that is, those whose concern is the life and health of adults and the spiritual development of the younger generation. “Is a society that strives for development, and not for destruction, is not obliged to allocate maximum funds and forces for the maintenance of medicine and education?” I thought at school.

I saw the solution to this problem in the struggle for the rights of workers, declared by the laws of the bourgeois state. Therefore, the profession of a lawyer seemed noble to me, and since my favorite subjects at school were history and social studies, having passed the exam well in them, I entered the budget department of my current university.

Initially, my studies went well: and the realization that my future work will be connected with the service not only to myself, but also to society as a whole, the feeling of the usefulness of what I will do after my studies, motivated me to study much more than scholarships and the fear of failing exams. However, the more I immersed myself in academic disciplines, the more questions appeared in my head that I could not find answers to either from teachers or in textbooks.

I was also alerted by relations in the student environment. After the relatively “herbivorous” school, student competition simply struck me: students fight each other for points, raise their hands, often without even knowing the answer, just to say something, “light up” in front of the teacher and get such a necessary score from him in statement. There is simply no friendly atmosphere: students perceive each other precisely as competitors for nominal scholarships, prizes at “scientific” conferences and, as I have already mentioned, for the attention of teachers.

Having studied the courses of philosophy, logic and other introductory disciplines taught in the first year, I got the impression that these disciplines are not very useful directly in the work of a lawyer. Philosophy was not the study of the most general laws of nature, human thinking, but the study of different points of view on this subject by representatives of different philosophical schools. Logic also brought me little closer to the goal of protecting the working people, because we were told at the first lesson that formal logic is not equal to common sense and that anything can be proved with the help of such logic. The only and most useful course seemed to me to be TGP (theory of state and law). This was partly because the course program included a study of Engels' work "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", and the textbook on this discipline was clearly a “reflashing” of the old Soviet textbook, where, although the material was presented in the usual manner of freedom of opinion and pluralism, there were still references to the class division of society, social formations, and in some places Marx’s quotes with Engels (naturally, with an "unobtrusive" reminder that the state is "general social" and law is "the art of goodness and justice"). For my classmates, the mention of everything connected with the Soviet past acts like a red rag on a bull: “It's all outdated! This is all Soviet heritage! Now we have freedom of opinion!” However, the response of the teachers was quite remarkable: “Yes, this is a legacy of the Soviet era, but nothing better has yet been invented ...”

“... And they won’t come up with it,” I can add, having studied, in addition to the above-mentioned work of Engels, other works of the great revolutionary scientists of the past. For “better” in science means closer to objective reality. Theoretical provisions are either scientific or not, there is no middle ground. The Marxist method is the scientific method, and therefore the information obtained by the scientific method will be scientific knowledge, and present-day bourgeois science, refusing the diamatic method, is incapable of producing anything scientific. It remains to continue to reanimate the corpse of the social contract theory, the truth of which is refuted by the very fact of the existence of a capitalist society, state, power apparatus and other attributes of the pre-communist era.

Around that moment, I began to be interested in Marxism: at first I watched videos on YouTube of “red bloggers”, read articles on all sorts of Internet resources such as Herald of the Storm and Politshturm, which then seemed to me the development and actualization of Marxism. Philosophical illiteracy did not allow at that time to understand where development ended and where the revision, revision of Marxism began.

But university studies continued, and from the second year branch disciplines began (criminal, civil, etc. law), but they seemed so divorced from the same first-year program that I began to lose confidence in the material being presented. Cramming the laws began to seem pointless: firstly, in practice, if necessary, I will look into the reference legal system to clarify this or that point, and secondly, what is the point in my further studies if, as I found out, there is law only the will of the ruling class elevated to law? What is the point of trying to change the outcome of individual cases without changing the very structure of society, which encourages absolutely inhuman and bestial behavior? The futility and stupidity of my studies and profession still haunts me: I study by inertia, simply because it is necessary,

I have already mentioned teachers who speak neutrally or positively about Marxism and the Soviet past. However, there is also an opposite example. Our university has a department of international law. Its distinguishing feature is that teachers were recruited there, apparently on the basis of the liberalism of the brain. I’ll make a reservation right away that these teachers didn’t do anything bad to me personally, this has nothing to do with personal insults. My indignation is caused by the nonsense that they cram into students at their lectures and seminars. I saw such intensity of anti-communism and liberal schizophrenia only on the Internet, in the comments.

Recently there was a wonderful lecture, during which a teacher from this department stated that the oppression of a person begins with the fact that someone on behalf of society determines the boundaries of good and evil, right and wrong. In other words, freedom is permissiveness, the ability to do anything, and morality in reality should not be determined by society, but by each individual individually.

The denial of the existence of public morality, i.e. the denial of objective reality, and the liberal interpretation of freedom as permissiveness, and not as “a conscious necessity,” betray in the bearer of such views a terry idealist, and an idealist immersed in extreme subjectivism.

As an argument for his position, the teacher said the following: “The European colonialists were guided by the ideals of humanism, which gave an idea of ​​the ideal person (“Vitruvian Man” is the ideal of a person according to humanists), and therefore, considering themselves civilized peoples, they decided that it was necessary to “civilize” natives, robbing them and taking their lives." Another idealistic nonsense: that is, the colonialists cut, burned and poisoned the indigenous population of the new lands, not because of a banal animal desire to rob and get rich, but because they wanted to “bring civilization”. That is, at first glance, a pacifist liberal, guided by "universal" values, condemns violence and colonialism, but if you look closely, it becomes obvious that, recognizing the monstrous deeds of lovers of private property,

Such a philosophy is very easily assimilated and accepted with a bang by politicized students, because the liberal ideology is firmly entrenched in the minds of the majority of the younger generation. Apolitical students, of course, do not listen to the "impractical" chatter of a young teacher, but still the anti-communist tales are put aside in their heads.

Jurisprudence as a science is now most susceptible to idealistic misconceptions and distortions due to the fact that this science is humanitarian, aimed at studying society. The study of truly scientific knowledge and its dissemination among the intelligentsia is harmful and dangerous for the position of the ruling class of capitalists, therefore, anti-scientific theoretical positions are actively introduced into the humanities, formalism and careerism are encouraged in the conduct of scientific work: from the student bench, thanks to participation in various competitions, conferences and forums, the idea that the main thing when writing a paper is not the content, not the scientific component, but compliance with formal criteria and the number of written papers.

The only way out of the situation now seems to be work on the creation of a party of scientific centralism, the seizure of power and the transfer of the educational and research process from anti-scientific market democratic rails to scientific communist ones.

N. Kharitonov
30/04/2023

https://prorivists.org/80_education/

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Tue May 02, 2023 11:22 am

In Conversation with Sergey Glazyev
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 1, 2023
Radhika Desai and Alan Freeman

Image
Sergey Glazyev Russian politician and economist. Photo credit: A. Savin (Wikimedia Commons).

St. Petersburg, 1 April, 2023

We met Sergey Glazyev at the St Petersburg Economic Forum where, having long been a lone voice demanding a turn away from neoliberalism and toward the path to planning, industrial policy, redistribution and integration with the economies of Asia, he was now among the majority of plenary speakers who agreed with him. The war has turned Russia on its axis.

Glazyev agreed to meet us one afternoon soon after and we started off by asking him what he thought of President Putin’s conduct of the economy. Glazyev replied by saying, simply, that Putin appeared to have no strategy. The conversation then turned to sanctions on Europe and we discussed Angela Merkel’s statement, widely reported as saying that the Europeans had never engaged in the Minsk II peace process in good faith, only to buy Ukraine time to arm itself, though an actual reading of the interview might suggest she was much more ambiguous.

But hadn’t Hollande said something similar, interjected Glazyev. Indeed, he had, though that posture revealed Europeans acting against their own interests. Glazyev agreed, ‘Why are they so stupid?’ he asked, wondering whether this meant that ‘European business is not so influential, they couldn’t influence political decisions’. There is a crisis of political leadership, we suggested.

Glazyev then turned the conversation to the UK. ‘Why the UK is so aggressive? All the prime ministers which we had over the last two years, they have related to Russia very aggressively’, he said. ‘In fact, they are even more aggressive than the Americans. What is the reason?’ We recalled that ‘no European leader has ever broken with America except Hitler’, making Glazyev laugh. The fact was that the US had practically built postwar Europe, imposing the dollar, destroying Britain, taking a big hand in the reconstruction of Germany and tolerating fascism for its own reasons. So, Europe had long been a US asset.

Glazyev returned to the question of the UK. ‘I mean the American strategy is quite clear; they want to destroy Russia because they want to keep hegemony and isolate China, they say this openly. Why is England so involved in this conflict? In fact, they train Ukrainian soldiers, they are involved very deeply even in the front. And they push Zelensky all the time…’

This was, we felt, part of a longer history going back to Britain’s historic decision in favour of the liberal US against the productively focussed regionalism of Germany, a choice for which the US punished it after the Second World War, playing a major role in the diminution of British power. Since then, the British elite has been ruled by the silly notion that they have a ‘special relationship’ with the US and Britain has played the role of a junior, and ideologically more zealous, partner of the US in its quest for world domination.

‘So, they do not have their own strategy? Glazyev asked. No, they don’t. The subordination of Britain had required an early capitulation by the Labour Party left, which opposed nuclear weapons for half a decade after 1945 until its revered leader, Nye Bevan, reversed his opposition in 1951. The US interest in the UK also focusses on the string of naval bases it has, particularly in the Southern hemisphere, which was why the Falklands were so important.

Now Glazyev got to the nub of his concern with the UK’s belligerence:

I’m asking, because it was not clear after the decision, you know, the International Criminal Court, decided to arrest our President. I analyzed the members of this [court], who are they, who made the decision? Their prosecutor, is English, and his brother is sitting in jail, the brother of the prosecutor. Because he was homosexual and because of violence of some kids, or something like that. So, he was not only homosexual he was paedophile. And just before the prosecutor of this International Criminal Court sent the order, his brother, the time that he was sitting in the jail was reduced, three times. So, it was quite clear that this International Court is manipulated by English. Not by Americans, I think. But this decision was very important, it has symbolic character, because I think till this decision, there was some understanding between our elite and Americans that somehow we should stop the war. But after the decision was made, no negotiations.’

This, of course, was consonant with how Boris Johnson’s visit to Kiev called off promising peace negotiations in March 2022. At the same time, we reminded him that the US did not always speak with one voice. There were factions in favour of the war and others against. The UK seemed to be allied with those factions who want to pull in the direction of war. And then, there is the matter of the crisis of political leadership in Europe and the West more generally that gets the likes of Trump, Johnson and even Truss, taking leading positions. Moreover, the US in particular is fighting to hold on to what remains of its declining world position. It has never been able to come to terms with the development, however modest, of the rest of the world and certainly not with their assertion.

Another reason for the war mania in the West was, of course, the business opportunities it offered. ‘Opportunity in the production of weapons?’, Glazyev asked. Well, that, and also the interest of capital in the West in buying up Ukrainian productive facilities, land, etc, particularly in a context where Zelensky has banned the opposition, he’s ramming through legislation that is even more economically liberal, anti-labour, and so on. So, if there is anything like Ukraine left after the war, it will be a paradise for these sorts of people, we suggested. ‘So, they want to go to Ukraine to make business, to do business?’ Glazyev queried. Yes, we thought.

And there was the question of Russia, which the West has always wanted to break up. Glazyev knew this well: ‘ One thing to understand about American strategy, do they follow Mackinder’s theory?’ This was the early twentieth century theory that the power that controlled the ‘heartland’ of Eurasia, precisely the territory that is Russia today, controls the world. We discussed how this was a far-from-antiquated theory and takes modern form, for instance, in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s work. Anglo-American hostility towards Russia was not just that it was communist: it was not just about ideology. It was also about the fact that the entire communist world, and all the parts of the third world that were supported by the communist world, were trying to run their economies in ways that did not subordinate themselves adequately to Western interests. Communism is only the sharpest edge of the resistance to imperialism.

Now Glazyev took the conversation in an interesting direction:

Now I ask you this question: if the American elite, business elite, especially, wants to control the Russian market, the Russian economy, they don’t have any motivation to do what they do now in Russia. Because in fact, old style Russian business is in their control, Western participation is very high. Aluminum industry, even the oil industry, they all had a lot of Western directors. In fact, the trade of oil was controlled mainly not by Russian managers, but almost all oil companies had either Americans or European managers who held top positions. If you look at monetary policy, it is totally in line with IMF recommendations. Russia is the largest national donor of the Anglo-American financial system. They didn’t have any reason to fear and to fight with Putin, because our economic policy was exactly the policy which was good for the West.

A most interesting set of points, we thought and wondered if what the West really feared was the potential that a strong government of an intact Russia, the government of a very large country, could at some point assert itself in ways that were not amenable to the West, and, in any case, they found even the minimum of assertion of Russia’s interests under Putin, after the abject submission of Yeltsin, threatening.

That, Glazyev said, was the reason for his interest in the Mackinder theory:

because I think if they’re following Mackinder ideas it is quite understandable. But if you want to control the Russian economy, it is a crazy policy, because now [after the commencement of hostilities last year] they don’t control anything.
However, even now, Russian aluminium is controlled by the American treasury. Rusal was under sanctions, and they got a deal. They got a deal, according to which the American Treasury, not business partners, but the Treasury, got the right to control the director of Rusal. So, all the direct managers of Rusal, they are members of the directorate, appointed, or agreed by the American Treasury.

Was this still the case? ‘‘Even now. I think it is formally, though it does not work in reality. But I just give this example to understand that Americans could do everything in Russia, what they want, they want this company, that company, European companies controlled all the automobile manufacturing industry.’


After some discussion of the US election, the conversation turned to the world situation and its potentials. For Glazyev, the situation was

quite clear. That China and India will lead the world economically, over the next, years to the end of the century. And if you look at the 5-year plans of China, they can fulfill their 5-year plans. And now, in the present 5-year plan, their main goal is technological sovereignty. And if you look at Research and Development expenditures in China, the number of scientists is larger now than the United States. And they continue to finance Research and Development; they’re leading in 5G, and I’m sure they will take technological leadership in the next ten years. They will then produce and export more high-tech goods than the United States. This is in this part of the world. I have been in Indonesia in January. Jakarta is developing fantastically. So, all this region is growing up.

And for this part of the world, it is quite clear that according to Arrighi’s forecast, the world is moving to the Asia cycle for capital accumulation. And in all those countries you have socialist ideology. In China that is quite clear, but in India I guess, the Indian constitution is rather socialist.


We discussed the difficulty of understanding the Indian position, given the government’s divisive politics, its disastrous economic performance deliberately hidden by very problematic statistical measures and the potential of pro-Western forces still gaining the upper hand. Nevertheless,

India is of course, very important. Because if India keeps a neutral position, the world will be stable. If the Americans and the English interfere into Indian politics, they will try to organize war between India and China, which would be a nightmare. But for them it would be the good chance to win. So too much depends on India, because I was sure that, in fact, I don’t know in detail, but I’m looking only for official statistics, that India had a number one growth rate, number one population, huge opportunities, to go up. The connection with Russia and our region, is also developing very fast. Trade with India increased three times last year. And India can produce everything, which can help in Europe. So, it will take maybe one or two years that trade with India will increase maybe five times. You see, in the Soviet period, trade was ten times more than now, because almost all our resources were going to the West. So, if India could be quiet, and remain stable, I think the Western countries have no chance. Because in Europe, you have catastrophe. In the United States, you say that chaos is going up.

With the 2024 US elections already getting into gear, things could heat up quite problematically, we thought and Glazyev agreed: there could be ‘civil war’, he offered. Even so, he felt that despite the political mayhem in the US,

the Americans [had won] the first phase of this war, and all the goals that in this first stage they had in mind, they achieved. They control Europe, this was the goal for the first stage of the war. Europe is structurally under their control. This was the first stage. The second stage was to destroy Russia. And here I think they will not succeed. So, in spite of all problems, I’m sure that this war, in fact, will be economically harmful to Russia. But the political situation if we do not finish this war, Putin’s position becomes strong. Maybe one or two million people left Russia.. The problem is that this is mainly young people, highly educated. And of course, this is a huge damage for our economy. But nevertheless, I’m sure that we survive and America will not achieve the goals of the second stage. We need only one year, because according to our forecasts, which we made about 15 years ago, the next year will be the crucial. You know long waves?

The long waves, the Arrighi cycles, every 100 years,. We will have a turning point around the year 2024. And we are coming to this turning point. And this turning point, it’s happening with the presidential elections. When we made this forecast 15 years ago, we didn’t think about the elections; now it becomes clear how it could happen. A turning point in the major cycles… the world order which started to change after the collapse of the Soviet Union is now coming to the transition period, its coming to them with the collapse of Pax America.

So, Pax America is collapsing, because in spite of the fact that they control Europe now, they lost their monopoly to print world money. Just yesterday we had information that even France has decided to trade with China in yuan.

Brazil has started to trade in national currencies. The Indian government declared that it will take rupees for their exports. So, the dollar lost its position. And this was very stupid for them, to arrest Russian reserves. And of course, according to their short term thinking they should be in a very good position. They control Europe, they don’t spend their money for the war; of all the credits which they give to Ukraine 80% is spent in procurement of American weapons. And they are guaranteed by the Russian reserves. So, they haven’t spent any dollars on this war. And achieved all the goals. But in long term, they lost the monopoly for the world currency. And together with the banking crisis, their financial position becomes worse and worse. And as far as they do not have a well-run economy, …you see the production chains are destroyed, so they rely only on printing money, and it is finished.


The tendency of the US financial system to create asset bubbles that then inevitably burst, we suggested, is finally testing the limits of the world’s tolerance; Glazyev agreed: ‘yes, and now nobody buys American Treasuries.’

Finally, we turned to Eurasian integration, which the war had decidedly accelerated.
‘We had agreements with India, Iran, and Russia, from the year 2000, about the North-South transportation corridors’, Glazyev recalled:

for twenty years, we did nothing. Nothing was done at all. Now, after these Western sanctions, President Putin made the decision and government now is investing a lot of money in this corridor. And I am sure, maybe in two years, it will help make a good transportation route from Russia to India through Iran; trade will go up, and cooperation will go up. So Russian resources will be there allocated to India, and this very good for Russia because we need to compete with China. Because the Chinese are very tough negotiators: they want to control the price. And maybe it will help India to develop.

And it would certainly create the right incentives for Indian governments to abandon their pro-Western inclinations, we thought. Glazyev then turned to Brazil:

Another interesting and uncertain point is Brazil. I don’t know whether now the Americans control Brazilian government or not, at least they control the central bank, until now, I’m sure. Because the Brazilian central bank is doing awful policy, like the Russian. Totally IMF recommendations.

Restrictive monetary policy had quite serious repercussions, Glazyev felt: ‘No credits, no capital controls. And for this reason, I think that Madame Dilma Rousseff lost power, because of the Brazilian central bank policy’:

To finalize the world affairs, this discussion, I think about the future. I think too much depends on India, and on Brazil. Because, the United States situation is quite clear: their only chance to maintain at least part of their leadership and hegemony in the world is to organize more and more wars, war between India and China, But, I think they will not succeed. Because the Indians and the Chinese are not so stupid as to start the war between themselves. Of course, they can maybe organize some kind of Muslim revolution in India, but I think this will not succeed…

So, I think American Pax Americana is collapsing. The dollar system is collapsing. What we are thinking now …It is very funny. I told, when I was the minister for foreign trade in Russia, it was the year 1993, and I told President Yeltsin that we have to export oil and gas for rubles, not for dollars. And for all these thirty years, I advocated that we have to trade in rubles because of the huge capital flight. It’s going on, very simply, because of huge corruption. We will supply oil and gas to Europe in one price, and the retail price is five times higher. The difference is about two, three times. And all this money is going to the pockets of corrupted managers, of oil and gas companies, and going into offshores. If you trade with rubles, this couldn’t happen. They told me all this time, it is impossible, we couldn’t move to rubles, because we have agreements we need a lot of time to change, we shall lose money. But when the war started, we immediately, in one week we switched to the rubles.


However, pressures to revert to neoliberalism were not entirely absent:

You see, when the central bank was isolated from the currency market because it lost all the currency reserves, the ruble was going up. It happened because of the huge surplus in trade. Now, after the shock, Putin made a decision for 80% obligatory surrender of export revenues. So, 80% of export revenues should be sold on the Moscow Exchange. And for this reason the ruble was going up, not because of some policy of the central bank. So the central bank was isolated, and rubles appreciated. Then after the first shock, Nabiullina, three months after, started to liberalize export regulation again. And now they totally reject this obligatory sale of export revenues.

So, they liberalized the regulation again and told the exporters that they could keep export revenues abroad. To my mind it was an awful decision because first of all, you’re not going to guarantee the security of this money.
Second, if they keep money in rupees, in renminbi, or other currencies there is still an exchange rate risk. Nevertheless, last year, we had capital flight of $240 billion. It is much more than any year, we had capital flight above $100 billion every year, but now it is $240 billion. This money didn’t come back because of the central bank policy. You see, the problem is, there have been no decisions about the mobilization of industry, only about the mobilization of people. But as for industry, economic policy, no such thing. The production facilities have only about 60% of [capacity utilization], In some industries like machine tools for instance, only 25% capacity is being used. So, economic policy is still pro liberal.

[Putin] thinks that Europe is collapsing, and that they will not be able to continue this war, and he’s waiting for the presidential election in the United States. And at the same time, internally, he thinks that everything is good, you know, because a year ago it was forecast from the IMF and the World Bank that the Russian economy will go down 12%. Our central bank immediately re-translated to him that we are in a very bad situation, we are struggling with the whole West, this was your decision, we have to pay, the economy will go down about 10%. It was forecast by the central bank. I insisted in my papers that we can go up 10% because we have a huge market now which is free from European products. About 25% of consumption was European imports. So, we can increase production [to meet this demand]. We can produce at least half of the things we imported from Europe by ourselves. So, from the demand side, we have 25% opportunity for growth. As for the supply side, we have 60% of capacity, so we can increase production 40%. Why not to have 10% growth? And Putin said we have to accelerate import substitution. He said this, but the central bank increased interest rates. And there are no credits, so now there is huge capital flight, and the investments are not growing.


We discussed why Putin does not change the central bank governor. Was it to please the oligarchs? Glazyev thought not: ‘you see the oligarchs now are not so influential because they are very angry at the situation because they lost a lot of money.’ And their houses and yachts! So, what was the reason Putin didn’t put somebody else in charge of the central bank?

you see the main problem is that of course there is a strong government that is now more or less efficient. So, they organized the total monitoring of all government expenditures, they introduce digital technologies in monitoring of what government is doing, they pursue clearly the goals which they declared, national projects, and so forth, but they couldn’t do it without credit. And last year, the government was very good because with the high prices of oil and export of raw materials, you have a huge surplus in trade. And so also, in spite of the fact that volume of trade decreased, the money increased. Because of prices. And they got a lot of money for the budget. Now, the situation becomes much worse. Prices are going down…

Will they keep going down? we asked.

Well we don’t control this. The import now cost more expensive, and is going up, so the trade surplus is not too high, not as high as the previous year, so the conditions, the external conditions for Russia’s economy becomes worse. At the same time, we hit about -minus 2% last year, of GDP. And he [Putin] thinks that it was success, because it was not -minus 12%. And so it could be much worse. So, we survived. This is the major goal for the last year – just to survive. And now they have forecast that perhaps now we shall have growth 2%.

We ended wondering how long the war would last: Glazyev felt that ‘If it continues into next year, I think the social opinion will be very negative. Because in fact, everybody thinks we could do this in one week.’

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... y-glazyev/

**************

St Petersburg Travel Notes – Part One

Trying to sanction the Russian economy is like trying to sweep back the incoming tide

It is just over a week since my arrival in St Petersburg from Belgium and I will now begin to deliver what I proposed in my announcement of publication plans before setting out on this trip, namely to share my impressions of daily life in Russia’s “northern capital” in wartime.

Today’s essay is the first of what will be several installments. Readers will find that I offer a very detailed and personal form of journalism. I write about what I see and hear around me. I seek to address the information hole about Russia today in Western media. The reading public gets only overarching generalizations in mainstream print and electronic media without the underlying facts. That those overarching generalizations tend to be vile propaganda is a separate issue.

Here I will provide the facts, big and small, and leave it to readers to draw their own overarching generalizations. My personal conclusion is set out in the subtitle above: “trying to sanction the Russian economy is like trying to sweep back the incoming tide.”

To those who prefer less detail, I say just skim until you find what interests you most.

Several curious readers have asked me to report on how I traveled here, since they are thinking of making a visit to Russia. Accordingly I will open this essay with information about my trip from Brussels. I covered this question a year ago in my essays entitled “feet on the ground.” But travel conditions have been changing all the time since, and it is appropriate to convey what options there are now for travel to Russia and what are the respective pluses and minuses of these solutions.

I will then explain what “here” means, i.e., where I live in Petersburg, who are my neighbors and sources of information in socio-economic terms. And I will close out today’s installment with information about one area of consumer interest which I believe I pioneered three years ago: what is on sale in Russia’s supermarkets and city farmers’ markets. In future installments, I intend to talk about other consumer goods, Then there will be words about entertainment in the performing arts as well as other aspects of high culture for which this city is rightly famous.. Everything has been affected by the Western sanctions and I believe that readers will be interested to see how Russia has adapted to the changed circumstances in so many different domains.

*****

How did I get here?

I came into Russia this time and plan to leave exactly the same way as in my last trip, back in November-December 2022, by flight from Brussels to Helsinki and by bus onward to Petersburg the next day. Leaving, I plan to follow the same route in reverse.

This is a rather inexpensive solution. Flights to Helsinki from Brussels take just two and a half hours. This as close as you can get to Russia by airplane from Western Europe given the cancellation of all flights ever since the start of the Special Military Operation.

Last year I also used the alternative solution of flying to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia and proceeding by bus to Petersburg from there. But the Estonian officials are really quite nasty at the border crossings in both directions, so that ceased to be an acceptable solution.

By contrast, the Finns are business like and passing their frontier is not stressful. Indeed, the greater nuisance is at the Russian border crossing which is motivated not by any ill humor but by mindless bureaucratic procedures that cost you precious time. Going east, only the Russians require travelers to take their luggage out of the bus and pass it through X-ray machines. Only Russia does a full search of each bus, supposedly to thwart drug traffickers, though they have sniffer dogs and could in theory pass the bus in 10 minutes rather than an hour.

Only Russia has two further inspections of your passport when leaving the passport control building: to see that the entry stamp has been properly applied! And then at the Russian border crossing there is the question of who is among your fellow travelers. If you are unlucky, one or more will be Ukrainians returning to Russia, possibly for transit to their home country. That can delay the crossing for more than an hour by itself until the Russian border guards decide either to release or, more likely, to detain the unfortunate Ukrainian(s) for an in depth security investigation that will require that the spend the night there.

The buses themselves, operated by two different Russian registered companies, are modern, well staffed and comfortable as comfortable can be given that the trip will take on average 7 – 8 hours. The on-board entertainment systems work, so that you can pass the time watching one or two recent or classic movies.

Up to present, the Russians were issuing visas only to family members of RF citizens and the Finns, like other EU states have been admitting into Finland only Russians who had similar reasons for traveling abroad, not tourism. Accordingly, nearly all passengers on these buses have been dual nationals carrying both EU and Russian passports. For this limited number of travelers, the six daily buses in each direction appear to have been sufficient. However, now that visa issuance by Russia to tourists is opening up, there may be more pressure on the available bus transport.

Of course, for visitors to Russia from overseas, who already face lengthy flights, it is far preferable to arrive directly by plane. The most widely used solutions are to fly in to Moscow via Istanbul, Qatar, Dubai and other United Arab Emirates transit airports. For travelers from Europe, the solutions via the Middle East roughly double the cost of travel compared to the Helsinki solution described above.

I close these remarks on travel to Russia with the reminder that no Western payment cards work here, nor can you easily pay in advance for accommodation before arrival due to the cut-off of Russia from the global financial system. This means that you have to carry sufficient cash in dollars or euros to cover the costs of your stay. These currencies are freely exchanged for rubles in all banks and the exchange rate presently is very favorable to foreign visitors.

****

Now, I should say a word about my home base in an outlying borough of Petersburg, which, together with day visits to the city center, provides the basis for my observations of ‘life on the ground.’

“Pushkin” is the post-Revolutionary name of what was Tsarskoye Selo (Tsar’s Village), the principal summer residence of Russia’s rulers from the time of Peter the Great’s daughter Empress Elizabeth Petrovna up to Nicholas II. From the last quarter of the 19th century, their secondary summer residence was in the Crimea.

We live in a middle class residential complex of about 200 apartments. The buildings are all no higher than 5 stories and there is plenty of green space around them where staff cares for flower beds and decorative shrubs. More to the point, we are located just across the road from the Catherine Palace, which is not only one of St Petersburg’s prime tourist attractions, but also has an extensive park of 300 hectares where you can jog in splendid isolation early in the morning and where local ladies walk their baby prams later in the day. From 7am to 9am, entrance to the park is free.

In a later installment, I will explain what draws Russian and foreign visitors to this Palace, built in the middle of the 18th century in the Baroque style by Empress Elizabeth and her favored architect, the Italian Francesco Rastrelli. I have to admit, somewhat sheepishly, that in the eight years we have lived opposite that Palace, I only took the tour of its interiors yesterday. But that is a story for another day.

Our apartment block was built to the latest European standards 10 years ago by a Turkish construction firm and remains very comfortable and well maintained. Most of the tenants are young families and they know why they are here. Excellent schools are within 10 minutes walking distance, as are hospitals and clinics. For those with cars, and that is the majority of tenants, the underground parking below the residential buildings is a rare benefit in this town.

Though our complex is a ‘gated community’ in the strict sense of the word, residents are middle income, not plutocrats and there are no impoverished neighbors to keep out. The average purchase price of housing in this complex is about 2500 euros per square meter at current exchange rates. Since the ruble is now valued well below its true worth, it would be better to say that the long-term price is 3500 euros per meter, which is exactly in line with similar quality housing in Brussels.

A lot of the surrounding apartment buildings are occupied by the families of military officers. There are military schools here, which is nothing new: in tsarist times the prestigious Cadet Corps studied here. Indeed, one street nearby is named “Kadetskaya.” This is not to say that times do not change: a fair number of black and oriental students from the Global South also study here and shop in the same supermarkets as we do.

In other parts of Pushkin, especially at the periphery, there are self-standing single family homes. Though Pushkin is overall a low density town, the visual feel is urban, not suburban. We have a well developed network of surface public transport. Indeed, one change since my last visit was the replacement of the entire local bus fleet by new, smart looking Volga-branded buses. In keeping with the move to cashless commerce, the drivers no longer sell tickets and trips are paid for only by bank cards using the contactless terminals on board.

Urban as the infrastructure may be, people here are more sociable than in the Petersburg city center. Most everyone in our complex will greet you on the street with ‘good morning’ or ‘good day.’ People are orderly. We have no litter, nor is there a hint of graffiti anywhere.

I mention who our neighbors are not because they are a direct source of my information about the public mood. Beyond the simple politesse of greetings, we do not enter into discussions. But there are intermediaries who serve my purposes: the taxi drivers, the hair dressers – they all chat with my neighbors and they all chat with me. Otherwise my sources of information are our friends, who all live in downtown Petersburg. They are mostly people attached to the music world, meaning they went through formal training in music, have relatives performing in the Mariinsky Theater or otherwise on stage, or are themselves stage directors of opera. Then there is also the long time friend who at age 80 remains at the helm of one of the leading children’s music schools in the city. A few other friends or close acquaintances are authors or publishers. I think it is worth mentioning this closeness to people in the arts because here in Russia as most everywhere else, such people are not knee-jerk patriots, so I particularly value their inputs for gauging the popular mood.

*****

I can say without hesitation that in Pushkin, just as in the Petersburg city center, it is a great pleasure to go shopping for food. We have three different supermarket chains present within 5 minutes walk from our apartment, all in the Economy to Medium Price categories, and a fourth supermarket 10 minutes walk away, “Perekyostok,” which is in premium class. They each have their own suppliers as regards fresh produce, dairy, meats and fish, so that the products on offer vary and we are spoiled for choice. From time to time I visit the city market 3 kilometers away and find there still more delicacies for a fatter wallet.

Compared to what I saw on my last visit in December 2022, the product assortment of domestically prepared foodstuffs has expanded considerably, with many new entries on the market representing traditional Russian food items that go back to the 19th century and have not been seen on Russian store shelves since then. I think, for example, of tinned chunks of exotically named river fish from Siberia. Or jars of preserves of lingonberries or other red berries that have been mainstays of country life. Most everyone here remembers them from visits to grandma’s dacha. Then there are jars of mixed wild mushrooms from European Russia in light vinegar and herbal marinade, Like the berries, they make a splendid side dish to meat and poultry main dishes. On the other hand, cloudberry preserves have disappeared from the market. These berries are treasured in Finland, where local producers relied on raw fruit imported from the marshes of (since WWII) Russian Karelia. The finished preserves were reintroduced as a luxury product category in Russia by Ikea. But with Ikea’s pull-out from the Russian market last year, the cloudberry preserves disappeared with them. Perhaps some enterprising Russians will step in and fill that gap.

For more extravagant traditional Russian culinary treats, namely big game from the North, foodies can visit the city’s finest food emporium, Azbuka Vkusa (Alphabet of Taste) in the shopping center opposite the Moscow railway station. There you will find tins of elk, bear and other rare trophy animals. I assume that the target audience for such treats was visiting or resident foreigners, though there are surely enough super wealthy Petersburgers to justify keeping these goods in stock. Those same wealthy folk visiting Azbuka Vkusa can find at the fish counter other curiosities that will make a party for the most demanding and pampered guests.

Azbuka Vkusa are still offering the exceptional seafood that I saw here a year ago. These include enormous oysters from the Russian Far East and from Crimea and also a tank displaying a live 2 or 3 kg King Crab from the Far East that will probably cost a couple of hundred euros. But what I found when I stopped by the store last week was new: a tank with live sterlets. The starlet (стерлядь in Russian) is a small member of the sturgeon family that was found in most European and UK rivers until the Industrial Age pollution mostly killed them off. However, back in the 1980s they were still caught wild in the Danube. I recall that on my frequent visits to Belgrade in those years I would on occasion buy a small open tin packet of black sterlet caviar. It was being sold at a fancy price to the diplomatic community. Taking it back to Belgium gave us reason for calling in friends to a dinner party. By the way, 50 gram jars of pasteurized sterlet caviar have just now appeared in Russian premium range supermarkets priced at 3,000 rubles (35 euros). This is not to be confused with the beluga sturgeon raised in France, in Italy and elsewhere that is promoted in Belgium ahead of New Years and, from my experience, was tasteless.

Still on the subject of live sterlets, the price in Azbuka Vkusa last week was 1450 rubles per kilogram, meaning about18 euros. That is the same price as in the Petersburg city markets two years ago and it is the same price as ordinary salmon steaks when they are offered on discount in Belgium, reduced from the normal 28 euros or more. The sterlet can be the centerpiece of any dinner party. You stuff it with purple basilica and other herbs from the Caucasus mountains, you roll it in flat bread and bake it to perfection. These fish are farmed in the Lower Volga River not far from the Caspian Sea.

Coming back down to earth from those heights of gastronomy just described, I note that some new foodstuffs in local supermarkets replace and consciously make reference to products that were supplied from abroad but are now locally produced by Russian start-ups. In the latter regard I think of the 100 gram jars of what is called pâté à la française (in Latin letters) made from duck or other poultry, A further note on the label identifies the product as “ риет ,“ which is the transliteration of the French “rillettes” which differ from other spreads in that they have very low fat content and consist mainly of filet meat not liver. The presence of such products in Economy class food stores here tells you something about the sophistication of Russian culinary tastes and what folks picked up from travel abroad beginning in the mid 1990s.

I have tried these rillettes and they are excellent. However, not all attempts at local substitution are so successful. Cheeses are still a work in progress. Beware of Russian produced “camembert” and blue cheese. For those with deep pockets, the French originals remain available in the supermarkets here but the prices are painful. Meanwhile, less prestigious cheeses like Maasdam, sliced and portion packed or Greek Feta in little Tetrapak containers are widely sold and are no more expensive than they were before the Special Military Operation.

In fresh produce, the Russian greenhouses are bringing to market ever more prepackaged green salads that duplicate the varieties we see in Belgium: young green leaves and beet shoots, sprouts, crunchy leaf lettuce, rucola and the like. This, in a country which until the 1990s understood salad to mean one thing: a variation on potato salad. Then in the 1990s and into the new century Russians who traveled abroad were buying and consuming green salads that were 100% imported. Now there is an abundance coming from local green houses. In our times of sanctions, this means that the producers have solved the critical challenge of sourcing seeds, probably relying on Russian providers.

The sourcing of fruits on sale in supermarkets out of season, as at present, take you on a tour of the world. But whereas in Belgium this means Chile, Mexico or South Africa, here in Pushkin the supplying countries are entirely different. Today I discovered splendid seedless yellow grapes from India, an entirely new supplier. Then I bought a packet of 4 “Pink Lady” labeled apples. We have the same in Belgium coming from France. Here the source was Serbia.

Notwithstanding the principle of free internal market, in Belgium nearly all supermarket strawberries are sourced in Spain, where we all know there is overuse of chemicals in the farming. The exception is the premium quality local berries branded “Hoogstraat” that are worth their weight in gold and are priced accordingly. Here in Petersburg a week ago stalls in the city market were all selling fantastic strawberries said to come from Greece and priced at about the level of the much poorer quality Spanish fruit in Belgium. A few days later, Turkey was the source for premium quality strawberries. In a week or two, the same finest berries will be arriving from the Crimea. War and sanctions have in no way affected flows of some produce.

Returning to the issue of new product entries, all the supermarkets in Pushkin are now offering self-serve bins of pistachios, roasted almonds in shell and dried apricots. In the past, only the apricots were on offer, and they mostly were the consistency of shoe leather. Not now. All the named products are fresh, priced attractively and worth purchasing for the family. These are medium quality products coming from…Iran. Till now these food items were worth considering only at high priced kiosks in city markets where they were sold by Uzbeks and were sourced from Samarkand or other Central Asian centers. The products in the market were worthy of pashas and were so priced. Now, thanks to swaps with Iran, the market is democratized.

At times, I am genuinely surprised by the imagination and knowledge of supermarket procurement people. The Economy Class supermarket across from our apartment complex always was impressive for their wines. Before sanctions, they would offer Reserve editions of Spanish Riojas aged ten years or more for eight or nine euros. Now I am struck by their especially big selection of beers. Perhaps the presence of military families is a factor in their weighting of beverages. But I can buy here what is difficult if not impossible to find in a top supermarket in Belgium – not only Hoegaarden wheat beer, but also its nearest French competitor in the category by Kronenbourg,. Palm, a premium dark blond beer from Ghent that you simply cannot find in Brussels, is right here in my Pushkin supermarket. InBev may have left Russia, but their products and the products of other leading European producers are easy to find on the shelves.

In soft drinks, our supermarkets are stocked with 1 liter and 1.5 liter bottles of PEPSI produced in Belarus! So Cola fans do not have to go down market to no-name brands.

If I may take a step back to fish, I would like to say a word about the fish counter at our premium supermarket Perekryostok in Pushkin. The selection on any given day is really not bad, no less in terms of variety than at my local Delhaize the Lion in Belgium. And nothing has changed in the assortment over the past year. We have small flounders from Murmansk at 4 euros per kilogram; superb salmon trout big enough to feed four, coming from nearby Lake Ladoga and priced at 8 euros per kilogram; salmon steaks, possibly Russian grown, at 18 euros per kilogram; Turkish origin farmed sea bass at 9 euros per kilogram; plus several types of Black Sea fish at less than 5 euros per kilogram. Since we are in mid spring, this is the season of the local hero of the fish markets, the sardine sized Koryushka, which makes its way down from Lake Ladoga to the Finnish Gulf to spawn once the ice breaks on the Neva River. The Koryushka has the aroma of fresh cucumber when you buy it and when fried lightly coated in flour yields a platter of food to rival the best of any friture de poisson on Lake Geneva. The fish are priced between 3.50 and 5.00 euros per kilogram depending on size.

Trends in meat retailing in Russia have followed the same trajectory as in France or Belgium: finest cuts and aged steaks are available vacuum packed in convenient portions in the chilled section of the supermarkets. This is so even in the more modest Economy chains. And the number of different cuts has only increased with time over the past year.

The local innovator who brought top quality butchered meats to the attention of Russian consumers is Miratorg. They and several competitors have developed beef farming in the Voronezh region of Central Russia and enjoy national distribution.

Now I see that a similar trend is coming to poultry. For several years now chicken parts, meaning breasts, legs, wings have been sold in Russian supermarkets fresh chilled. They have a three or four day shelf life. Now the latest innovation which I discovered on this trip is vacuum packed duckling filets marinated in sour cherry sauce with 10 day shelf life. You bake them at home. The quality is excellent and the price is surprisingly low, about six euros for 500 grams of tender and flavorful duck meat. These, too, come from the Voronezh region. See the product offering of this remarkable farm group: https://utinayaferma.ru/products/

In passing, I mentioned above that Russia is moving aggressively to cashless commerce. In food retailing this is being promoted to consumers via television ads for bank debit cards that give you “cash back,” meaning discounts of 5, 10 even 20% at the cash register when you pay by card. In fact “cash back” is so widely used in advertising that it has become a new Russian verb, the reflexive, intransitive verb кэшбзкиться. Russian language purists may cringe, but that is what is going on today.

As for supermarket prices, in general staple foods are priced here at three or four times below the prices in Western Europe for goods of similar quality. Let me give one example. I purchased a broiler chicken this morning. It weighed 1.2 kg and cost 1.60 euros, roughly one third the price in Brussels

To be sure, when I put the prices into euros I am using the present exchange rate in which the ruble is sharply underappreciated, as I noted earlier. It is presently around 90 rubles per euro, whereas purchasing price parity would suggest a rate of 60 rubles. However, this in no way explains a price 3 – 4 times less than Belgian prices. The Russian prices bespeak the fact of big grain surpluses in this country. Simply put, the wheat to feed poultry and livestock is very cheap.

Nonetheless, not everything in the supermarkets is similarly cheap compared to Western prices. Some of the delicacies I mentioned above are priced in line with what I see in Belgium, meaning they are quite expensive for the average Russian wage earner. However, cultural factors weigh in here. Russians today, just as Russians as I have seen them over the past fifty years, place great emphasis on generous hospitality. Therefore, products which may be ignored when buying groceries for the family, will be added to the shopping basket when preparing to entertain friends at home.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/05/01/ ... -part-one/
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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Thu May 04, 2023 2:28 pm

What is wrong with Russian state television news reporting on the Ukraine war
gilbertdoctorow Uncategorized May 2, 2023 24 Minutes

In Western mainstream media and in Western expert journals, we find the nearly universal characterization of Russian news reporting on the Ukraine war as “disinformation.”

The reader will not be surprised when I say this is all rubbish: what they are saying in the West is state sponsored propaganda and nothing more.

When these same Western journalists and experts speak about specific Russian television hosts and programs, they frequently attack the talk show host Vladimir Solovyov and the presenter of News on Sunday, Dmitry Kiselyov. Both present the most watched news programs in the country, and Western observers uniformly condemn them for supporting Vladimir Putin and his “war of aggression” in Ukraine. These condemnations cost Solovyov his villa in Italy, where authorities have sanctioned him and suspended his property rights. It is hard to think of any other case globally where a mere journalist in another country has been punished so severely for practicing freedom of speech and freedom of the press at home.

In what follows, I provide a different perspective on these opinion leaders in Russia and on the programs they produce. This is not to say that I give them and Russian state television news reporting on the war a clean bill of health. Not at all! But my line of criticism is entirely different from what my peers in the West are saying.

Attentive readers will have noted my sharp criticism of the President of Russia’s Union of Journalists for the way he conducts his political talk show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov. Solovyov is rude, he is boorish, he is overbearing in his treatment of the expert panelists who regularly appear on his show. This trait has become all the worse ever since the Ministry of Defense has over the course of several weekends taken him down to the front lines in Donbas and allowed him to travel in tanks and armored personnel cars, to spend time chatting with both ordinary soldiers and officers. Each time he comes back still more puffed up with his self-importance and behaves still more obnoxiously with the academics and even with Duma members who appear as panelists. He interrupts them, he hectors them.

Yes, Solovyov deserves commendation for going to the front lines. But how is he any better or worthy of respect than Yevgeny Poddubny or the other Russian war correspondents who report from there every day of the year?

What is more to the point, Solovyov is only superficially a cheerleader for Vladimir Putin. His political beliefs going back more than a decade were always more stridently nationalistic than those of the Kremlin. The most favored guest on his show was always Vladimir Zhirinovsky, founder and leader for life of the Liberal Democrats, a party that never shared the enthusiasm for partnership with the West that characterized the ruling party, United Russia. And today Solovyov allows himself on air to make the kind of outrageous and inflammatory remarks about driving Russian tanks to Berlin and Paris that one could have heard from Zhirinovsky in the past.

My issue with Dmitry Kiselyov is only professional, not personal. He is a gentleman, a diplomat in everything he says and does on air. At the same time, I will agree with his Western critics that Kiselyov is a staunch supporter of Vladimir Putin and of the way the war is being conducted. The problem I have with Kiselyov is that the way he organizes the presentation of news on his show works against these very policies, not for them. And this is important, because Kiselyov is not just the presenter of a Sunday news wrap-up; he is the director of all news programming on Russian state television and the priorities of his own show are adopted by the regular Vesti news broadcasts 24 hours a day.

On this past Sunday, Kiselyov opened his show with what must have been a half hour of video coverage of the artillery and rocket attacks on Donetsk and nearby towns by Ukrainian forces. We saw the minibus which was struck by a missile, killing immediately the 7 riders, including a young girl. We saw the owners of apartments and small wooden houses beside their destroyed homes where some lost wives or other close relatives. And we saw the Investigative Unit soldiers photographing the destruction, making records of the bomb debris and size of artillery craters for Russia’s ongoing compilation of war crimes committed by the “Ukrainian Nazis.”

Yes, these events occurred and find no reflection whatsoever in Western news reporting on the war. Yes, the attacks were directed against the civilian population, not against any military targets which are absent from the neighborhoods that were attacked. However, the message of these reports to the broad Russian public is wrong-headed. Anyone with interest in following logic has to ask how it is possible that the Ukrainians are still inflicting such massive destruction on civilians in what is now part of the Russian Federation more than a year after the start of the Special Military Operation. Considering that Russians by nature very often indulge in conspiracy theories, these facts provide fertile ground for supposing that there is treason in high places to explain the failure to stop the Ukrainian attackers.

Then this very coverage contrasts sharply with the next news items which show Vladimir Putin speaking to legislators on how all social services and worthy employment must be ensured to citizens in the new RF regions, how they must be brought up to the level of living standards in the rest of Russia. What kind of equality can there be when elemental security from artillery and rocket attack is not being provided?

And the opening coverage is in direct contradiction with the further reporting from the front lines, where Russian soldiers manning artillery and rapid fire rocket launchers are interviewed and from where we are shown the massive firing of munitions against Ukrainian positions 20 or 30 kilometers away.

It all does not add up, and it is patently clear that Kiselyov and his team have not given sufficient thought to the consistency of their messaging to the broad Russian public.

There are some bright spots on the Russian state television scene. One of them also regularly comes in for harsh and unjustified criticism by Western commentators. I have in mind the Sixty Minutes news and analysis show hosted by Yevgeny Popov and Olga Skabeyeva.

Allow me to state my personal biases with respect to these two. I have a debt of gratitude to Popov, since he was the journalist who first put me on live Russian domestic television seven years ago in a news show (From our own correspondent) that preceded the creation of Sixty Minutes. We had met in an auditorium of the European Parliament building where we were awaiting the screening of a film by the then Opposition film-maker Andrei Nekrasov about the scam Magnitsky case that was placed before Congress by Bill Browder. We found each other simpatico and I got on his show in Moscow. The nature of Russian television being what it is, that appearance led to invitations to appear on talk shows of other channels. I tip my hat to Popov, who is now not only a talk show co-host but also a member of the State Duma from the ruling party.

As regards, Olga Skabeyeva, my feelings are less warm. Somehow we did not hit it off and on a later show she cut off my microphone and sent me home. Nonetheless, I freely acknowledge that she and her husband, Popov, host a very well produced program, which provides to Russian audiences extensive video coverage of leading events of the day as shown on CNN, Fox News and a number of European state broadcasters. They treat their panelists with due respect, and the panelists themselves are circumspect professionals who help explain to the lay public what is going on in the Ukraine campaign. My only criticism is that they offset their coverage of the war with what is probably meant to be light entertainment – coverage of gender identity issues in the West, the scandals over drag shows for children there, and the like. Yes, the transgender campaigners in the USA are sufficiently mad to be self-parody. But it would be a serious mistake to judge American military might by how many queers there are in uniform.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/05/02/ ... raine-war/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Fri May 05, 2023 1:51 pm

The commissioners spoke only the truth!
May 5, 8:53 am

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Meanwhile, at the federal TF they talk about the benefits of the communist commissars, who spoke only the truth and seriously increased the combat effectiveness of the troops.

(Video at link. )

Yes, communist commissars rule. But where are they now to find in such a quantity. They were not taken out of thin air, but were the product of the activities of the Bolshevik Party, both in civilian and in the Great Patriotic War.
Well, otherwise, one can agree with Gurulev's thesis - it is necessary to strengthen the role of political workers, who must be trained. But there is a serious problem - the Soviet commissars and political workers relied on the communist ideology, which was brought through them to the masses of soldiers and officers. In Russia, ideology is officially banned. You can rename the current political officers as commissars and even dress them in retro commissar uniforms, giving everyone a Mauser. But this will be a copy of the form, not the content - the main thing is what and how exactly these new commissars will bring to the personnel. And here we return to the old problem of the absence of a state ideology. Well, renaming political officers into commissars is not difficult.

Well, of course, it’s a little smiling to watch how on federal TV, where commissars were usually vilified, after the start of the SVO, it became possible to hear about cool communist commissars. No matter what they say, but the country is really changing, although the mausoleum is still hidden behind a cardboard box. All the same, the war seriously cleanses some of the clogged pores of the state body.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8335133.html

Landmark
May 3, 6:04 p.m

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1. The head of the Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, called for the re-creation of SMERSH.
2. The head of the State Duma Committee on Defense, Andrei Kartapolov, called for the return of commissars to the army.
3. State Duma deputy Andrei Ivanov called for the abolition of the moratorium on the death penalty for terrorists.

Looking for order and organization?
Well, where did that lead you? Back to me.

PS. And they noticed how, after the opening of various problems after the start of the SVO, no one calls for a return to the organizational practices of Nicholas II. This is not for you to carry icons on the Immortal Shelf, order is needed here. And Comrade Stalin was responsible for order in the 20th century, hence all these references to the Stalin era and Stalin's managerial and organizational decisions. It was in peacetime that one could break a comedy about Nicholas II who won the Second World War. And in wartime, the landmark is too obvious.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8332535.html

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Mon May 08, 2023 3:15 pm

“The National Interest” has moved to Moscow
gilbertdoctorow Uncategorized May 5, 2023 15 Minutes

Late last night, I turned on the television for the best talk shows that begin close to midnight. For the second day running I found that Dmitry Simes is now the anchor or master of ceremonies for “The Great Game,” a very serious discussion program that was long run on this end by Vyacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Molotov.

Nikonov is a leading figure in the Kremlin establishment. For many years he served as a member of the ruling United Russia party in the Duma and is now a committee chairman in the Federation Council, the upper house. Nikonov also was the long-serving director of ‘Russky Mir’ (Russian World), the government subsidized NGO promoting Russian culture among the worldwide diaspora. This post gave him wide visibility outside the legislative branch.

I met Nikonov in Moscow back in 2016. I saw him again in Brussels in 2017 when he was the most prominent guest and keynote speaker at the annual Russian Forum held in the European Parliament building which his NGO helped to finance.These personal encounters strengthened my conviction that he is a diplomatic, suave and intellectually forceful politician, who had every talent needed to host one of the nation’s best on air discussion clubs.

From its creation ‘The Great Game’ was produced in ‘television bridge’ format, with a counterpart anchor in Washington. That man was Dmitry Simes, who well matched Nikonov in his insider’s knowledge of his adopted country, the USA.

Simes was a foreign policy adviser to Richard Nixon who traveled with him on his Russian trips after he left the presidency. Following Nixon’s death, Simes ran The Nixon Center think tank, which later changed its name to the less controversial and more patriotic sounding Center for the National Interest. In this capacity, Simes was also publisher of the homonymous magazine.

There were rumors a couple of years ago that Simes was having trouble in Washington. He was said to be a cameleon, a fellow who spoke out of both sides of his mouth, saying one thing to the Russians and another to his American colleagues. This duplicity had caught up with him.

Whatever the reason, Simes left his position at the helm of The National Interest, Center and magazine, in 2022.

From what I saw these past two days, Simes’ identity conflict is over. He jumped ship and is fully installed in Moscow. This was evident beyond a shadow of doubt from the way he conducted his discussion with two of his interviewees. I caught the tail end of his talk with Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov.

Ryabkov is the no-nonsense guy who was talking tough about the United States back in the late fall of 2021, before the Ukraine war. He was driving hard for negotiations over the Russian plan to reform the European security architecture by pushing NATO back to its pre-1997 borders. Ryabkov was as hard and direct as Lavrov is soft and, shall we say, mealy mouthed.

And here I saw Simes end his chat with Ryabkov on what you might call collegial terms. Great friends, to all appearances!

Then his next guest was Konstantin Kosachev, with whom he seemed also to have established a special rapport. Kosachev served in the State Duma then moved to the upper house, where he assumed direction of the Committee on Foreign Relations. He is now a Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council and a person well qualified to talk about the fraught present relationship with the United States, which was characterized on this program as being “an opponent or the enemy.”

I followed Kosachev’s career from a distance but then met him at the reception in downtown Moscow for the 10th anniversary of the creation of RT back in 2015. At that time he sounded somewhat naïve and hopeful relations with the USA would be restored. No one would call him naïve today. His little speech to Simes last night left no doubt that he understands all too well the danger Washington poses for Russia’s continued existence as a great power. His key message to Simes and to the television audience is that present times are even more dangerous than back in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, because American elites have hoodwinked themselves into thinking that nuclear weapons no longer count in measuring strategic strength of nations, in thinking that they cannot be used. This illusion of invulnerability has been compounded by America’s impunity and failure to be called to account for its wars of aggression over the past 30 years. In Serbia, in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, in Afghanistan. However, beware, said Kosachev: a nuclear superpower like Russia cannot suffer a strategic defeat such as the deluded American elites intend to impose on it; a nuclear superpower will in fact use all weapons at its disposal, including strategic nuclear arms, if it has reason to believe it is facing a military disaster.

For this message, which surely was directed more to listeners in the American intelligence community than for the Russian home audience, we can thank Mr. Dmitry Simes, Russian patriot that he has become.

Times are a changing…

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/05/05/ ... to-moscow/

Prevaricators, fence-sitters and ‘low life’

In my recent article The National Interest has moved to Moscow, I discussed the dramatic repatriation to Russia in both the physical and moral sense of one of America’s best known Russia experts, Dmitry Simes. This occurred against a background of sharp deterioration in American-Russian relations and open hostility in the States to anyone presenting a middle ground on issues separating the two sides. This has made it very difficult for fence-sitters.

One other notable case of a fence sitter who abandoned the pose of neutrality and has become an open and unapologetic Russian patriot is Dmitry Trenin. Unlike Simes, Trenin did not have to move house, only to move office, since he was and is established in Moscow. From 2008 to 2022, Trenin headed the Carnegie Center, Moscow.

Let us not mince words, the Carnegie Center, Moscow like other NGOs bearing the “Carnegie” name combined with words like “Peace,” have been for decades projections of American Soft Power and defenders of its global hegemony. Given Trenin’s background in the Soviet-Russian military (1973-1993) and also in key defense related foreign relations activities (member of the Soviet delegation to negotiations with the USA over nuclear weapons 1985-91), I assume that he saw his job at the Carnegie Center as trying to promote mutual understanding between these adversarial countries. That was a worthy objective, no doubt. However, objectively speaking, his presence in the Carnegie Center, Moscow gave respectability to an organization that should have been shut down long ago because of its publications and activities directed against the existing order in Russia.

With the start of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine, Dmitry Trenin left the Carnegie Center and changed course 180 degrees. Already in May 2022 he spoke publicly in favor of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. He called upon Russia to be pursue its “war with the West” to successful conclusion. The West is the enemy, he said. Per Trenin, all Russians should back the government in this vital mission. These quotations and the respective sources are set out in Trenin’s Russian language entry in Wikipedia.

*****

Simes and Trenin are high professionals with doctorates in fields relevant to their daily activities. They have now realigned their activities with the changed times that leave little or no room for fence sitters.

Now I wish to direct attention to another high professional in the field of Russian – American relations, also the holder of a relevant doctoral degree in political science (Cambridge): Anatol Lieven. Unlike the two experts cited above, Lieven has remained a fence sitter and has, strange to say, gotten away with it and done very well for himself. Week after week he publishes articles that are arguably propaganda for the Ukrainian war cause and appear in the most prestigious journals and websites in the United States and the United Kingdom. Yet he still is listed as a contributor to the Valdai Discussion Club.

Please note, it is not my intention or my interest to go after one man for his inconsistencies and his lies in public space. I have bigger game in mind: those who employ Lieven, those who publish and promote Lieven as if he were an objective and serious contributor to discussion of policy issues. This big game includes the Quincy Institute, the American Committee for US-Russia Accord, where he is a member of the Board of Directors, and The Nation, which features his articles and pitches them to its subscriber base of Progressive Democrats.

Lieven’s professional career is an open book that you can read in his Wikipedia entry. Suffice it to say that he began his career as a war correspondent and served his time in some difficult locations including Pakistan, Afghanistan and Chechnya. He then rounded out his academic credentials and spent further years as a professor with Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service at its campus in Qatar. After leaving that post, he was appointed to the prestigious position of Director of the Eurasia Program at the Washington-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Now we see his name week after week as the author of articles dealing with Ukraine and the war with Russia.

Lieven is prolific and I will not take the reader’s time to look at his entire opus. Let us just consider three of his articles here. I provide the links below so that everyone can see the source and decide for himself/herself about the fairness of my remarks.

Just three weeks into the Special Military Operation, Lieven published an article declaring that “Ukraine already won the war.” His claims were quite outrageous and largely repeated the stories coming out of Kiev as regards Russian incompetence and the rally-round-the-flag phenomenon in Ukraine. Lieven gave no consideration to the issue of total subjugation of opposition voices within Ukraine during the consolidation of Zelensky’s dictatorship.

A year later we find Lieven pursuing the same subject of how the war has hardened Ukrainian national identity. Here in what looks like a bit of real journalism he tells us that the Ukrainians are now maybe going too far in their disparagement of Russians, that in fact he has seen and heard ethnic slurs against Russians that border on racism. Regrettably, Lieven then disculpates the Ukrainians, lets them off the hook by suggesting that the Russians are doing the same. We read the following in his 17 April article in The Nation:

Once again, every day on Russian TV you can see hate-filled ethnic insults directed at Ukrainians (for example, portraying them as descended from miscegenated Polish serfs)

To this I say to Mr. Lieven that I watch a good deal of Russian state television and have never heard an ethnic insult of any kind directed against Ukrainians. To be sure, derogatory words do exist in the Russian language. However, Russians on television only speak of Ukrainians as “adversaries” (противники) or “neo-Nazis” and that is almost exclusively used by combatants in the field. My conclusion is that Lieven is lying through his teeth.

Finally, I point to Lieven’s 23 April article written from his hospital bed in Ukraine. This again tells the story of Russian military incompetence and Ukrainian valor as related by the Kiev regime. If we are to believe Lieven, the Russian air and missile strikes are ineffective and inaccurate, killing and maiming innocent civilians. Lieven passes along what he hears from his Ukrainian interlocutors without filter or logic test. He is doing no more or less in this regard than the BBC or Euronews, which are both propaganda disseminators these days, not objective news agencies.

I am aghast that not only the Quincy Institute but also the American Committee for US-Russia Accord have seen fit to present to their online readers the text of Lieven’s hospital bed report, which otherwise was published by the Sunday Times of London. Lieven is enjoying both prestigious backers and wide circulation at a time when what the United States and European publics badly need is sober reporting of the risks we face by continuing on our merry way towards the abyss through support for the Zelensky regime.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/05/07/5769/

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Russian Oil Floods Global Markets via Major Asian Intermediaries
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 5, 2023
F.M. Shakil

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Despite western sanctions, there is more Russian fuel being exported around the world than before the Ukraine crisis. It’s just coming via Saudi Arabia, India, China, and other trading states – with steep commissions.

Despite western sanctions imposed on Russia over the Ukraine conflict, some Asian and specifically West Asian economies are importing significant amounts of Russian gasoline at discounted prices, and reselling it with windfall profits to the EU under their brand names.

Western sanctions have forced Moscow to actively diversify its energy exports – oil and gas exports accounted for 45 percent of the Russian government’s 2022 budget – and it has rapidly filled the gap left by its diminished oil exports to Europe with new customers in China, India, and the Persian Gulf nations.

Despite the EU’s prohibition on seaborne exports, during the initial quarter of the current year, Russian seaborne crude oil exports amounted to 3.5 million barrels per day (bpd), surpassing the 3.35 million bpd recorded at the onset of the Ukrainian conflict a year ago.

According to industry analysts and oil executives, this has transpired despite western sanctions that led to the severance of several active trading partnerships for Russian oil in the EU markets.

Finding ways around sanctions

Dubai-based oil tycoon Hakam Valliani tells The Cradle that, in general, sanctions did not significantly impact the Russian gasoline supply line as new buyers filled the gap left by the EU market. Washington, he says, had enforced these limitations to force the EU to buy expensive US gasoline rather than cheaper Russian oil.

When compared to Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG), the price of US LNG is nearly $1,000 per ton more expensive, so “the European Union is paying a disproportionately huge amount for the US stuff,” Valliani explains.

“Sanctions or no sanctions, individuals will find a way around by devising cunning strategies to bypass restrictions,” he says, adding:

“This is scary to see that the entire American-based price benchmark and the SWIFT system are collapsing, and a new benchmark will be needed within the next five years. Russia now accepts a variety of currencies when transacting fuel sales, including Indian rupees, Chinese renminbi, and other regional currencies.”

Valliani predicts that with the expansion of BRICS ( to BRICS+), there will be a decline in the value of the dollar and the collapse of the International Monetary Fund (IMF): “The world’s future source of gold and oil will come from BRICS+.”

This has allowed countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, China, India, and Iran to import the majority of Russian oil, not for domestic consumption, but to transport it to third parties in energy-deficient markets in Europe and Asia.

Saudi import of Russian crude

According to Reuters, Saudi Arabia has been importing unprecedented quantities of Russian fuel to circumvent US sanctions. Traders have also taken advantage of lower prices to build up fuel reserves at the Fujairah hub, located in the UAE.

Today, West Asia is playing an increasingly important role as a supplier of industrial fuel to Europe and Africa, with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Russia contributing to the fuel reserves in Asia.

As the largest producer within OPEC and the top global oil exporter, Saudi Arabia has had to step up its global energy supply – while keeping its own production down, per OPEC+ decisions – due to US-imposed restrictions on direct imports of Russian crude oil and oil products.

In March and early April of this year, Saudi Arabia imported a record high 261,000 metric tons of Russian diesel. Three of the containers were unloaded in Jeddah, while one was delivered to Ras Tanura. The free-on-board price range for Russian diesel cargoes scheduled to load in March ranged from $60 to $70 per barrel.

This price is nearly $20 per barrel lower than the “Middle East benchmark,” which falls below the price ceiling of $100 per barrel set by the G7 consortium, thereby allowing traders to utilize western vessels and insurance services to transport Russian fuel.

West Asia wins

Recent findings from the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University have alerted the European Commission that oil-exporting nations in West Asia have largely benefited from the conflict in Ukraine.

The study examines the implications of increased imports of Russian petroleum by West Asian countries, which has manifested itself predominantly through price increases and created an opportunity for the refining, storage, and distribution of Russian petroleum.

According to analysts, the primary exporters from the Persian Gulf region, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, will become “balancers-in-chief in Europe,” providing a supply of petroleum to the continent.

Perturbed by Saudi Arabia’s imports of Russian diesel and its subsequent re-export to Europe, the EU parliament has been compelled to start a discussion about the new phenomenon and investigate “what evidence the Commission has to support its claim that diesel fuel imported from Saudi Arabia to the European Union is not simply rebranded Russian crude oil?”

The group is also investigating the price gap between Saudi Arabia’s discounted petroleum imports from Russia and the EU’s imports of petroleum from the kingdom. It aims to determine whether Saudi Arabia and other market influencers are currently playing a significant role in meeting Europe’s import needs and preventing market contraction due to the ban on Russian oil.

Hakam Valliani believes that oil from Russia is a necessity for both Europe and the US, and while everyone is aware that this is a sanctioned product, they do end up purchasing this item. He says that nearly 40 percent of US oil imports come from Russia, and that traders in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkiye, and the rest of West Asia rebrand Russian gasoline in their respective countries.

Valliani claims that even the banks are aware of these transactions but choose to disregard them, adding that:

“There may not be a lot of Russian aviation gasoline available, but the profit margin on it is 25 percent higher than that of US-produced fuel. The profit margin on Euro 5 diesel is far bigger than that of diesel produced in the Middle East or the United States. The margin on diesel per metric ton is about $100.”

China and India’s impact

Recent reports also suggest that China and India are playing a crucial role in Russia’s ability to avoid western sanctions and increase its oil shipments to pre-Ukraine war levels.

India, in particular, has emerged as a significant player in the global oil markets by importing cheap Russian crude and converting it into fuel for Europe and the US. In the fiscal year 2022–2023, India imported a large quantity of crude oil from Russia, which allowed it to increase shipments of diesel and jet fuel to Europe.

In January, India imported a record amount of Russian oil, tripling in quantity from the previous year. After Moscow lowered its oil prices for India – following the onset of the Ukraine war – Russia became India’s primary oil supplier, surpassing both Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Russia’s market share in India’s energy imports increased to 1.62 million barrels per day in February, rising from a less than 1 percent share before the 2022 Ukraine war to a whopping 35 percent stake today.

More than a quarter of the 4.5-4.6 million bpd of Russian oil imported in 2022-2023 went to Indian refineries, and a long-term agreement between the largest oil producer in Russia, Rosneft, and the largest Indian refiner, Indian Oil Corp, can greatly increase and diversify the types of oil transported to India.

Russia-Iran fuel trade

It was recently reported that Russia has begun exporting gasoline and diesel to Iran by rail earlier this year, with Moscow allowing Tehran to access up to 30,000 tons of gasoline and diesel in February and March.

Although Russian officials announced in 2017 that oil products would be traded with Iran, it appears that actual shipments did not start until 2023. The oil consignments were transported to Iran by rail from Russia, via Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.

While Iran needs natural gas and diesel to run its power plants and refineries, a top oil refiner based in Saudi Arabia who asked to remain anonymous tells The Cradle that there is a possibility that Iran may use the Russian consignment for export to other countries.

The source claims that Pakistan – in addition to Afghanistan – is a multi-billion dollar informal market for Iranian oil, and the evidence of some gasoline shipments from Iran being transported by truck to neighboring countries such as Iraq supports the notion that Tehran is making money from gasoline trades.

Once again, western sanctions have demonstrated their tendency to backfire. Russian oil sales are booming, and Asia is reaping the economic benefits by reselling cheaper Russian fuel at marked up prices to Europe – which is clearly the biggest loser in this proxy conflict with Russia.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... mediaries/

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The index of the external debt of the Russian Federation fell to the minimum values
May 8, 13:35

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And more on the topic of the benefits of sanctions

The indicator of Russia's external debt fell to its minimum

At the end of 2022, the level of Russia's external debt in relation to gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 10 percentage points, to 16.6 percent. The indicator became the lowest in the history of statistics.

Among the largest economies in the world, the lowest level was recorded in China - 13.7 percent. India's external debt is 19.1 percent of GDP.

At the same time, the highest external debt burden is observed in European countries. In the Netherlands, the figure reaches 380.5 percent of GDP, in the UK - 287 percent, and in Switzerland - 280.5 percent. Over the year, the level of external debt of these states decreased by almost 15 percentage points. In France, the same indicator in 2022 reached 249 percent of GDP, in Belgium - 242 percent.

> The top ten countries with the highest external debt burden also included Spain (179 percent), Sweden (170 percent), Germany (159 percent), Norway (132 percent) and Italy (131 percent).

You need to quickly run to YouTube, study a new pack of videos with titles like "CHINESE ECONOMY COLLAPSE BEGINS, DEBT BUBBLE BURST, DOMINOS BEGIN TO FALL, BEIJING IN A PANIC, COLLAPSE HELL DARK SEA SEVEN EGYPTIAN EXECUTIONS". With references to successful Western best practices, of course

(c) "Chinese connection"

https://t.me/zov_snb/14405 - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8342652.html

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Tue May 09, 2023 2:43 pm

By May 9
No. 5/81.V.2023

By the next bright day of the Victory of communism over the most aggressive and inhuman manifestation of capitalism - Nazism - the Russian Federation came up with a clip of discouraging news. Among them are a drone attack on the Kremlin, a scandal between the Moscow Region and PMCs, an attempt on the life of the bourgeois patriot Prilepin and other market misunderstandings of the extremely protracted era of “getting up from your knees”. But such a selyavuha has already firmly entered the life of the Russian layman and does not raise any special questions. In fact, the triumph of market banditry is based on the oppression of the masses, on their humility, patience, understanding and reconciliation with extinction. And it is guaranteed by the power of their own petty-bourgeois illusions, when a typical hired worker, in the conditions of an epidemic of class blindness, wants to get a job as a kind of “liver fluke” in the body of society, and then God forbid you claws, if only not to tear us.

“We are standing on a historic frontier. Ahead is the most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time important decade since the end of World War II. The West is not able to single-handedly manage humanity, but is desperately trying to do so. And most of the peoples of the world no longer want to put up with it. This is the main contradiction of the new era. In the words of a classic, the situation is, to a certain extent, revolutionary: the upper classes cannot, and the lower classes no longer want to live like this,” V.V. Putin.

The President in his own style: standard concern, typical indignation, routine phrases. Only the chatter about "the main contradiction of the new era" was added. In reality, the main contradiction is the contradiction between labor and capital, and the inevitable contradictions between the imperialists are a natural consequence of the main contradiction.

When, during the counter-revolution of 1991, the new rich came to power on 1/6 of the land, they immediately began to destroy and break the national economy, humiliate and exterminate the population, vilify and slander the Soviet government and Stalin, under whose leadership the USSR became a superpower. What did they think then: that the imperialist predator on the other side of the ocean would cease to be a predator? They probably didn't think about anything. In their minds, one triumphant "today" reigned. And now, after the apologists of democracy launched a natural genocide in the post-Soviet space, having practically fulfilled all of Hitler's precepts, the student of Sobchak vaguely and streamlinedly compared liberals and fascists:

“In their time, the Nazis reached the burning of books, and now the fathers of liberalism and progress have reached the ban on Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky.”

Putin, of course, did not say a word about the fact that liberal fascism, like fascism, is “soft”, “civilized”, carried out with the help of “honest and transparent” privatization, the unrestrained export of capital over the hill, the division of the Soviet people into “communal apartments” and pitting the "tenants" among themselves for the benefit of the oligarchs, mass unemployment, prostitution, alcoholism, drug addiction and youth corruption, disregard for pensioners, the incessant rise in prices and tariffs, naturally differs from kondo fascism, but only in form. The content varies slightly. And here and there gentlemen, and here and there: "You are poor because you do not work well."

Naturally, the Victory of the Soviet Union over a united fascist Europe still causes phantom pain to the heirs of the organizers of the Cold War, which was the same war of world capital against the USSR, only in a “soft”, “civilized” form. Moreover, this “softness” was dictated by real Soviet power. Real technical achievements of the USSR, both space and "terrestrial". Isn’t that why today anti-Stalinists, and therefore anti-Soviet and Russophobes, are trying with all their might to slander the Generalissimo of Victory, filming artistic and documentary libels about him, erecting absolutely false “gulag museums”, promoting anti-Stalinism both officially and under the guise of culture, art, entertainment shows?

Fascism as a product of nationalism is by far the most categorical form of anti-communism . At the same time, nationalism is a purely bourgeois product. In the days of slavery and feudalism, people did not really care what people this or that person belongs to. It was important what faith he was and what prosperity. From the moment when religion began to lose its authority among the masses, since it was unable to answer the real questions of life, it was replaced by nationalism.

As an atavism and a relic of the exploitative formation, nationalism also existed in the USSR. However, "healthy" nationalists in the context of the annual reduction in prices FOR EVERYONE, regardless of skin color, skull size and eye shape, were vanishingly few. Vanishingly little because ordinary workers had nothing to share. Not because they had nothing, but because of the growth of not only the material, but the intellectual baggage of citizens. Because even today, in the conditions of total bourgeois propaganda of false patriotism, they say, the owner and his hired worker are one team, the layman, albeit in hindsight, but understands that their national oligarchy is playing off the Armenians and Azerbaijanis, that the massacre in Ukraine is beneficial to certain individuals and has specific beneficiaries, that Tajiks and Uzbeks do not slaughter each other easily, but for property that will go to those in power ...

Therefore, to all thinking people, to everyone who understands that the meaning of life is not in money and not even in its quantity, but in progress, in the self-growth of a person, in more exciting work and leisure, in free time and in free labor, it is clear that the market the economy is a veiled, "soft", "civilized" fascism. Moreover, even Putin, who shamefully mumbled something about “Soviet galoshes”, is probably aware that only the Soviet government can stop the thirty-year civil war on the territory of the former USSR.

The noteworthy sycophants of capital will immediately begin to refute the reality that is inconvenient for them: they allegedly threw corpses, and won, of course, in spite of Stalin, and the reset Putin is no better than Hitler ... Let them squeal anything, but it was the USSR that defeated Nazi Germany and everyone its satellites, it was the USSR, led by Stalin, who achieved the implementation of the atomic project, due to which all these Svanidzes, Goizmans, Latinins, Nevzorovs, Kashins, Makarevichs, Akhedzhakovs, Yavlinskys, Chubais, Gaidars, Kikabidzes, Dudi, Roizmans, Okudzhavs, Troitsky, Shenderovichs , Kiselyovs and similar Albats are generally alive. If it weren’t for Stalin and the fight against the internal and external enemy organized under his leadership, world capital, represented by its NATO gendarme, without any regret, would have sent several Hiroshima / Nagosaka on their heads and wiped them off the face of the earth just like the Japanese cities.

However, one must be quite naive to hope that the 70-year-old Putin is able to admit that the best way to secure the country and the world from another world war is to take the experience of the Stalinist USSR and start with the destruction of private property and the establishment of the dictatorship of the working class throughout the post-Soviet space. To believe that the anti-communist Putin wants justice for the people does not make sense even for full-time guards. Yes, they do not believe, as well as all those who did not understand the pension reform of 2018.

Hence, for everyone who sees our country as prosperous, free and truly progressive, it is important not only to monitor and study the manifestations of Ukrainian Nazism, to respond to the growth of fascist hysteria in the Baltics, but also to prepare for the fight against fascist adherents of the market throughout the former USSR. And to prepare without having a party of the Leninist-Stalinist model, based on a conscious, iron discipline , on the actualization of Marxism and a scientific approach to social organization, means to bring the peoples to another defeat. Since only organized communists can really resist market fascism, which is proved by the recent history of our country, which on May 9, 1945 turned the neck of the most terrible and vile enemy of mankind.

Happy Victory Day!

Southerner
09/05/2023

https://prorivists.org/81_9may/

Google Translator

*************

Victory Day!
May 9, 4:00

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Happy Victory Day to all readers!
Our ancestors at one time dealt with Nazism.
Now it has been revived and today it is the turn of our generations not to disgrace our great ancestors.

Happy holiday!

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8344086.html

Victory parade
May 9, 8:51 am

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Unusual angle.

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https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8344659.html

(As can be seen in the second photo, to the right, Lenin is still'in a cardboard box'. One day... And then, after a time, he will be laid to rest by a socialist government.)

Impressions of the Victory Parade 2023
May 9, 12:57 p.m

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After the parade.

1. Was the first time. Impressions of course somewhat different than on TV. I have long been accustomed to the local Sevastopol parades - land and sea - and they have not been surprising for a long time. And here is something new, although it seems to be familiar for a long time. At the Moscow parades in our family, only my grandfather was before. On November 7, 1941, just from Red Square, he went to the front to defend Moscow.

2. Security was taken very seriously - the passport was checked 4 times, personal belongings 2 times. Already at the finish line in front of the stands, the FSO officer found fault with a slightly torn page of the passport, but the senior clarified that it was necessary to take pictures and take control if the page was torn by about half. On the rooftops, snipers and drone hunters could be observed. Also, men with drone strikers were noted on the way to the square. And in general, there were a lot of guards, starting from the Lubyanka on the rise to Red Square. Something was deliberately and defiantly in plain sight, something hidden from the eyes of passers-by. By the way, to the question of the notorious bandage "Shaman". Exactly the same bandage on the square went to the employees of the FSO, who were engaged in directing the flow of people and checking documents according to some kind of their program. Apparently. and "Shaman" bandage

3. There were no traces of the arrival of the drone on the dome of the Senate Palace - everything has already been replaced.
Of course, after that, drone flights were also banned and the tactical air defense of the capital was strengthened. How effective we will see during the next terrorist attacks. Our special services are certainly preparing for such attempts.

4. Of the complaints, as usual, two old questions - the Mausoleum hidden behind cardboard boxes (absurd historical hide and seek continues) and the procedure for taking out the flag of the Russian Federation and the Banner of Victory. Otherwise, everything is at a high organizational level. However, Lenin was present at the parade, about 12 flags with Lenin carried parade boxes.

5. 7 leaders of the CIS countries came to the parade. The very ones that Boris Filatov aka. "we will hang later" called "faggots". However, the tantrums of the Ukrainian Nazis were expected, especially since yesterday they flew in Dnepropetrovsk and Filatov's fart was on fire since yesterday.
The picture of foreign policy isolation of the Russian Federation did not work out. And in general, there were many foreigners from Asia, Africa, South America. The Americans were not invited, but, nevertheless, in the speech, Putin noted the contribution of the soldiers of the anti-Hitler coalition from the United States and Britain to the defeat of Nazism.

6. Putin's key message is that the war is not against Ukraine, but against the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and we act as liberators of Ukraine from Nazism. Still, it would be great not to negotiate with him on grain and ammonia. Otherwise, the emphasis was placed on the need to achieve victory in the NMD and that it is there that the future of Russia is being decided, therefore the military is now of paramount importance for the fate of the country. You can't argue with that. It is also worth noting that, unlike in other years, this time it is about the "victims of the Gulag" and so on. didn't even remember. Such are the times. On the contrary, the ghost of SMERSH roams the country.

7. Shoigu and Salyukov taxied in the parade. Shoigu traditionally crossed himself before leaving for the front boxes. The parade scheme itself was standard. The parade was held according to a somewhat abbreviated scheme without an air parade and a small mechanized column without tanks at all. Tanks are now needed at the front. So this parade could hardly cause serious damage to the NMD in the format in which it was held. However, it is quite clear that the task was to hold the parade without excessive pathos and it was successfully solved. The main parade of the main holiday of the country is an axiomatic thing. "Yars" close up is of course a powerful thing. Well, looking at the 3 finishing Boomerangs, I would like 300 at the front as well.

8. 530 participants of the NWO participated in the parade. Of the familiar faces, I saw Abkhaz and several Chechen officers (I don’t remember their names), whom I saw from the video from the LPR. Plus, from familiar faces, I saw Admin with Akim Apachev. On the way back from Red Square, I also met Solovyov. Well, Konashenkova on the square.

9. Already after the parade, next to the podium where he was sitting, Putin passed, gathered around him the generals and officers who headed the parade boxes and talked to them about something there. Then he waved his hand and went to the rest of the presidents of the CIS, who were going to lay flowers at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. From the podium they shouted "Thank you."

10. In general, quite interesting impressions. Apparently because the first. In fact, from a serious negative, only the Mausoleum covered with cardboard, but this old story and under Putin, apparently nothing will change in this matter. Comrade Periscope correctly noticed this a couple of years ago. Otherwise, it is a rather bright event underlying one of the few real ideological bonds in the country. We are waiting for another Victory Parade after the victory in the NWO. So that not only past victories can be remembered and can be seen in the front boxes of modern front-line soldiers with captured Nazi banners.

On the title photo Konashenkov. He already knows what will be in the daily summary.
There are more photos in Telegram https://t.me/boris_rozhin
A little later I’ll take a photo from my phone and make a selection here.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8344973.html

We arrived for the holiday
May 8, 9:49 p.m

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Suddenly.

In Moscow, at the celebration of Victory Day will be;

1, Lukashenko (Belarus)
2. Tokaev (Kazakhstan)
3. Japarov (Kyrgyzstan)
4. Rakhmonov (Tajikistan)
5. Mirziyoev (Uzbekistan)
6. Pashinyan (Armenia)
7. Berdimuhamedov (Turkmenistan)

Until recently, it was only about the visit Zhaparov, but in recent days the list has expanded.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8343354.html

Google Translator

**********

Our antifascist past must be our future, declare Zagreb’s citizens on 78th anniversary of liberation
Thousands of people gathered on the banks of the Sava river in Zagreb to mark the 78th anniversary of the city’s liberation from the fascist Ustaša regime and Nazi occupiers

May 08, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch

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Residents of Zagreb gather to celebrate the 78th anniversary of the city's liberation from fascism. The banner reads “Partisans, thank you!” Photo: Ana Vračar

Zagreb’s anti-fascist legacy remains alive and strong in the face of revisionist attacks from the right. In 2015, the Network of Anti-fascist Women of Zagreb (MAZ) reignited the tradition of marking Liberation Day by lighting bonfires at the place where partisan units entered the city in 1945. Since then, increasing numbers of people have shown up at the event to pay tribute to the many women and men members of the National Liberation Army and local resistance movement who freed the city from the fascist Ustaša regime and Nazi occupiers.

MAZ reminded the thousands of participants at the central event on Saturday, May 6, that the bonfires remain a symbol of the city’s collective victory at a time when the legacy of the anti-fascist struggle is under attack. “With the symbolic act of lighting the bonfires, we show that we will not forget our anti-fascist past, that we are fighting, and will fight, for its future,” the organizers said.

This year, in addition to the central mobilization, Liberation Day in the city included other events, such as tours of the lesser known, ‘unconquered Zagreb,’ consisting of the locations which played a key role in building the resistance movement.

The bonfires are organized in spite of opposition and pressure from right-wing groups. A handful of right-wing party members scheduled a press conference at the spot where this year’s central event was taking place. They were soon driven away amid the booing of the crowd and drum rolls of the musical collectives present there.

On the other hand, Zagreb’s Liberation Day has been embraced by political parties closer to the left. Since last year, the city’s mayor Tomislav Tomašević (Možemo!) has formally supported and attended the event. This year, both he and the president of the local council where the bonfires are lit, Dubravka Canjko, gave speeches in which they made clear that the anti-fascist struggle represents a part of Zagreb’s history of which its citizens should be proud.

The fact that the people of Zagreb liberated the city, just as people in other parts of Yugoslavia strove to do the same in their own towns and villages, should indeed represent a reason for pride, noted the organizers. “Let us not forget our Yugoslav past, in which the ideas of universal equality and solidarity were dominant. Let’s not forget anti-fascism and anti-fascist ideas despite and precisely because there is a systematic attempt to erase them from history textbooks. Let’s not forget our anti-fascist past because it must be our future,” said the organizers as the bonfires lit up.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/05/08/ ... iberation/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Fri May 12, 2023 2:22 pm

Why am I a supporter of Breakthrough?
No. 5/81.V.2023

I became interested in politics in adolescence, and therefore, at the first stages of the formation of my worldview, I was inevitably accompanied by militant ignorance, youthful maximalism and ostentatious radicalism. After learning a number of political terms, I, filled with ultra-right philistinism, declared myself a nationalist. But time passed, I tried to study the history of my native country, and my attempts were largely unsuccessful due to the fact that, having become interested in history, I, with the dishonesty inherent in any layman, ran to study the lectures of bourgeois historians of a “left-patriotic” orientation. And although under their influence I for a long time believed in the vile lie - the product of bourgeois historiography - nevertheless, a certain interest in Marxism woke up in me. This interest took the form of typical leftism: without bothering to conscientiously study the legacy of the classics, I, due to laziness of mind, preferred to the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin that hodgepodge of ideas that the left propagandists so obligingly offered (and still offer). My nationalist bias has not gone away either, making me for a long time a nationalist deviationist, trying to speculatively "adjust" Marxism to fit his own dogma that fetishizes the national question, the unfaithfulness of which is nevertheless recognized somewhere in the depths of the soul, but is not openly recognized due to all that or dishonesty.

And yet I had some rudiments of conscience, and therefore I tried to figure out how the society in which I happened to live actually works. And although my path was full of fluctuations from one vile opportunism to another, I nevertheless embarked on the right path, which I am following to this day, studying Marxism and struggling with the remnants of philistinism that still have a place in my personality. The proposed text will be devoted, firstly, to my disappointment in left-wing propaganda, and secondly, to the reason why the theoretical positions of the Proryv magazine were regarded by me as the only true ones among the diverse palette of opinions of people who claim the right to call themselves communists.

I. Bourgeois historiography and the struggle against it

It is no secret that many leftists in our country came to their professed ideas through their interest in the Soviet period in the history of their native country. This was my path: being a nationalist, taking into account at least the fact of the victory of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War, I gradually switched to more and more pro-Soviet positions, turning first from a right-wing nationalist into a nationalist with a bias to the left, and then a leftist with a bias towards nationalism . Obviously, when studying the history of the USSR, one cannot ignore the study of Marxism, but in my case this process took place in a manner characteristic of any leftist - without due conscientiousness, which at first caused monstrous fluctuations from one opportunism to another. Nevertheless, even such a wretched approach to mastering Marxism brought some results: firstly,

The general prevails over the particular - this truth, without which it is impossible to imagine a truly scientific worldview, is recognized by a certain number of ordinary people, at least formally. And it was the recognition of this truth that was the foundation on which my doubts about the views of leftists on history stood. I think that the majority of the rank-and-file left, even if they do not know Marxism to the proper extent, it is obvious that not a single anti-communist theorist has ever been able to give any credible critique of the fundamental provisions of Marxism, that is, the provisions designed to resolve the most general questions. I, even being an illiterate leftist, clearly saw all that weakness and intellectual impotence, which alone can characterize the numerous attempts of bourgeois sing-alongs to refute true science. That is why anti-communism in most cases comes down to the absolutization of particulars, to only bare “facts”, regardless of the essence of the entire historical process as a whole, which opens up unprecedented opportunities for the bourgeoisie to speculate on questions of history and falsify the so-called “facts”. None of the left "historians" bothered to ask themselves questions that seemed obvious in such a situation: why, for example, Lenin and Stalin, who were absolutely right in their answers to the most general questions, suddenly turned out to be profane in the distorted mirror of bourgeois historiography, unable to effectively resolve private issues? Perhaps this profanation is only the work of enemy "historians", and therefore there is no point in forever justifying the "facts" of the crimes of the Leninist-Stalinist CPSU (b) so pedaled in the capitalist ideology? May be,

To my disappointment, none of the numerous defenders of the USSR was ready to ask such tricky and equally inevitable questions. I, due to my then illiteracy, in trying to find an answer, did not reach the clearly realized need for an uncompromising struggle against the bourgeois party spirit in matters of history - I preferred the approach of an ostrich with its head in the sand to such a truly Marxist approach: my doubts remained doubts until then. the moment I discovered the Breakthrough materials.

It was the work of Fedotov, a member of the editorial board of the Proryv magazine, that made me feel ashamed for my dishonesty and for my fear of being branded as a conspiracy theorist in leftist circles. It was in Fedotov's "The Anti-Scientific Methodology of Liberalism" that I first saw the clear and uncompromising position of a Marxist, who defends true science in the fight against bourgeois party spirit, which today is completely unfairly considered scientific by the layman (including the left layman), in the fight against Trotskyism, which represents from itself the most that neither is "leftist" anti-communism.

II. "Mistakes" of the classics, dogmatism and revisionism

Having caught the inconsistencies of the leftist historiography, but without bringing my doubts to the end, I moved on. I must say that my next doubt remained just a doubt until my acquaintance with Breakthrough - the reason for this was a frivolous attitude to studying the works of the classics: then I read them only diagonally.

The leaders of the Russian left movement said a lot about the inadmissibility of dogmatism and revisionism, about the need to approach the development of theory creatively. These conversations, being nothing more than a set of vulgarities and good wishes, as is usually the case with leftists, did not lead to anything, and, unfortunately, with a high degree of probability they will not lead to anything in the future either. Observing the theoretical (if they can be called as such) research of Semin, Sadonin, Rudy, Yulin, the Vector group and others, it struck me that most of them look at the legacy of Marx, Engels and Lenin as a simple sum quotes: in my memory, few people were interested in the very course of thought of the classics, few were interested in the whole set of methods, evidence, reasoning and positions developed by communist theorists. I'm silent about that many on the left did not recognize Stalin's status as a classic of Marxism. For clarity, I will give a couple of examples that most firmly fixed my doubts.

Example one. Sadonin makes his statements, famous in narrow circles, about the uselessness and uselessness of dialectics. In his opinion, dialectics is "a philosophical concept, but not a scientific method." Then the question immediately arose in me: if this is so, then how can one leave without explanation at least the fact that Lenin, an authority recognized in left circles, insisted in his book “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” that materialist dialectics is the method of Marxism how science? Why didn't Sadonin analyze Lenin's train of thought, why didn't he reveal the essence of Lenin's "mistake"? It turned out that this blogger simply offered to believe in the "fallacy" of the judgments of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin about dialectics. He did not care that, by recognizing dialectics as unscientific, we automatically undermine the very foundation of Marxism - dialectics is unscientific,

Second example. When Boris Yulin was asked what a young Marxist should study, it suddenly became clear that Mr. Yulin considers it unnecessary to study Capital, because this book can at most help to understand why the text of the Communist Manifesto in the 19th century turned out to be exactly like this, and not otherwise. Regardless of the fact that such a position is simply wrong, one could safely ask the question: is it not important for us? Is it not important for a Marxist to understand the train of thought of his teachers? For Yulin, apparently, the answer to this question was negative.

Example three. It is generally accepted today that Lysenko was wrong, and Stalin, who supported him, was wrong after him. This is what I thought when I was a leftist, but I was interested in explaining why Stalin, an expert on communist theory, suddenly made a mistake on a question directly related to the philosophy of science, and therefore to dialectical materialism. None of the leftists could provide an explanation, the essence of Stalin's "delusions" was not revealed - Stalin was wrong and that's it!

Many more such examples could be cited, but I will only say that now there are more and more new examples of such a philistine approach to the study of theory: recently, for example, a little-known native of Vector, Boris Morozov, agreed that the first phase of communism in Russia beginning of the 20th century it was impossible to build. What then will Morozov do with the legacy of Lenin, who claimed exactly the opposite? Will Morozov publicly renounce Leninism?

So, the leftists, then and now, instead of self-criticism, instead of analyzing the defeats of the Russian left movement that has not won a single victory in recent years, have been engaged in an endless critical rethinking of the theory and practice of the Marxists of the past. If we look at the teachings of Marx as a collection of quotations taken out of context, either dogmatism is inevitable as a blind adherence to these quotations, or revisionism, which, in essence, is still the same dogmatism, but went a little further: first, the revisionists vulgarize the theory, reducing it to set of dogmas, and then "heroically" refute these vulgar dogmas. Finally, from such a view of the teachings of Marxism follows that vague position, examples of which have been described above: this position actually amounts to a blanket denial of those positions that they did not understand.

Thus, I was no longer confident in any of the leftist propagandists and theorists, I doubted the correctness of their approaches to the study and development of theory. I did not try to work out the right approaches on my own - at that time the level of my conscientiousness was still extremely low and the degree of laziness of the mind was extremely high. Later, many months later, when I got acquainted with the works of Valery Podguzov, I learned about the operation of the law of negation of negation in relation to the development of theory: the provisions developed by Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin are truths, but truths of a lower order in relation to those truths that should to be discovered by the Marxists of the present and what lies ahead for the Marxists of the future. The development of Marxism is not a refutation of the classics, but a deepening and completion of their teaching. To develop Marxism means to actualize it.

III. Special military operation and patriotic bias

Time passed; I, having doubts about the ideas expressed by the leftist propagandists, engaged in casual reading of the works of the classics, continued to follow the discussions that took place in the left segment of the Russian-speaking Internet, and watched with great interest the activities of those who supported the SVO on February 24, 2022.

A special military operation split Russian leftism into two parts. Having an idea of ​​the fascist nature of the Ukrainian regime, I sympathized with Maxim Bendus and other humanitarian workers, the Plan B group, as well as left-wing bloggers who supported Russia's actions. The tantrums of Semin and Sadonin, Meisner's inappropriate snickering and Zhukov's vague, abstractly humanistic position did their job, shaping my sharply negative attitude towards the gentlemen listed.

From the very beginning of the SVO, I was aware that the truly communist position in current events does not at all consist in supporting the domestic bourgeoisie, but in using the current situation in the interests of fighting precisely for communism. Those who really want to be a communist must first of all be engaged not in humanitarian trips, not in “agitation at the fronts”, not in “going to the people”, but in the development of theoretical work, in the formation of a party capable of becoming the vanguard of the working class. None of the leftists who supported the SVO wanted to engage in such work, preferring a kind of “theory of small deeds” to it.

Why did I sympathize with this “small deeds theory” at first? Because the vestiges of nationalist metaphysics have not been outlived in my mind: for a long time I vacillated in the direction of a pronounced national-patriotic bias.

Gradually, the understanding came to me that to put my nationalistic “wants” above objective truth is the highest measure of shamelessness. And along with this understanding came the inability to put up with the refusal of the leftists who supported the NWO to fight for communism. I began to look for people who put the struggle for the formation of a truly communist party in the first place.

IV. Why Proryv?

In the course of my searches, I came across materials from the Proryv magazine and the Proryvist newspaper. The quality of these materials made a strong impression on me: for example, it was after reading Podguzov’s articles on scientific centralism, especially after reading those passages that spoke about the role of conscience, that I firmly decided that I would no longer put up with my own illiteracy and laziness. It was the high demands on the supporter of communism set out in the breakthrough materials that prompted me to seriously sit down at the collected works of the classics of Marxism and abandon their superficial reading in favor of thoughtful study.

Only in newspaper and magazine articles could I find examples of the actualization of Marxism, the development and deepening of its provisions. Everything that I came across before I got acquainted with Proryv from Russian-language left-wing journalism could be attributed either to dogmatism or revisionism. The breakthrough activist rebuffs both skepticism and positivism, as well as attempts to absolutize individual quotes of the classics taken out of context.

Only newspaper and magazine articles contain an unflattering analysis of the defeats of the Russian left, uncompromising criticism of economism, Trotskyism and democracy, which replaces the struggle for communism with the struggle for democracy, as well as other currents of opportunism.

Only in newspaper and magazine articles did I manage to find a view of Marxism as a whole and open to development scientific worldview that does not allow for pluralism and has a foundation in the form of a methodology that excludes any metaphysical dogma, and therefore surpasses any of the existing and existing ideologies.

Through reading newspapers and magazines, I was able to embark on the path of being reforged from a person who believes in communism, into a person who aspires to learn communism and gain confidence in it, based on the possession of Marxism. I am still only at the beginning of the path, I am still very far from that ideological, to that scientific conscientiousness that the classics of Marxism had, but I firmly know that I will not deviate from this path.

Thanks to the staff of the Proryv magazine and the Proryvist newspaper for setting me on the true path!

E. Krovin
11/05/2023

https://prorivists.org/81_proriv/

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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