Paul Goble Wednesday, June 19, 2024
Staunton, – One of the most serious weaknesses of the Russian opposition, Gasan Guseynov says, is a lack of a vocabulary which could allow it to overcome its paralyzing fear “before the choice between a centralized Russian state and a multiplicity of new states which could arise on the territory of the present-day Russian Federation.”
The Paris-based Russian philologist says that the words leaders of the opposition use not only prevent them from seeing just how far Russia has moved to becoming a Russian nation state but also prevent them from being able to navigate between centralizers now in power and those who advocate disintegration as the only way forward (rfi.fr/ru/россия/20240616-с-чего-начинается-освобождение-языка).
The word “disintegration” frightens them to the point that they cannot respond adequately when it is mentioned. As a result, they don’t recognize how small that threat is now that Russia is becoming a nation state and thus find themselves in an alliance with the centralizing imperialists and thus make the possibility of disintegration far greater.
Is it really better for Russian people today living in the vastness of Eurasia to have a single aggressive and unjust state rather than several additional compact and peace-loving states named for example after large Russian cities or regions?” the philologist asks rhetorically. But the vocabulary the Russian opposition uses prevents this from even being discussed.
Instead, Guseynov says, those in the opposition who dream of “a beautiful Russia of the future … forbid representatives of the Russian minorities from even mentioning the possibility of ‘the collapse of Russia.” And still worse, they tell the latter to “’know their place’” lest in saying anything about changing relations between center and periphery they frighten people.
The others are government officials, Duma members and business leaders, a pattern that holds for the other 90 Muslims on the list, and clear testimony to the fact that Muslims now have multiple ways of rising to the top of Russian society and are not nearly as ghettoized as some would like and many more continue to believe is the case.
Staunton, June 19 – Kazan’s Business Online has offered its list of the 100 most influential Muslims in the Russian Federation. The most striking thing about the list is that these influentials are now in the Russian establishment government or business rather than at the top of the Muslim Spiritual Directorates (MSDs) which oversee the umma in that country.
Among the top 10 of these influential Muslims, only three are leaders of the Muslim community as usually understood: Ravil Gainutdin, head of the MSD of Russia, Talgat Tajuddin, head of the Central MSD in Ufa, and Albir Krganov, head of the Spiritual Assembly of Russia
3:11 am, June 19, 2024
Source: Meduza
A Moscow court has fined Meduza co-founder Galina Timchenko 14,000 rubles ($168) for participating in an “undesirable organization,” Mediazona reported on Wednesday.
The basis for the charges was a special episode of Meduza’s daily Russian-language news podcast “What Happened” from January 2024 in which Timchenko spoke about the latest developments at Meduza and responded to letters from readers.
Since the start of 2024, the Russian authorities have been aggressively prosecuting employees and readers of independent media outlets on the government’s “undesirable” registry, with the highest number of cases involving Meduza specifically. In addition to Timchenko, misdemeanor charges have been filed against Meduza journalists Svetlana Reiter and Dmitry Kuznetsov, film critic Anton Dolin, and reporters Anastasia Zhvik and Asya Zolnikova, who worked with Meduza as freelancers.
The Russian authorities outlawed Meduza as an “undesirable organization” in January 2023.
Navalny Team’s ‘Traitors’ Affecting Russian Opposition Much as Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech Affected Communists, Zharkov Says
Staunton, – The new film, Traitors, prepared by Navalny’s Foundation for the Struggle with Corruption, is having an impact on the Russian opposition comparable to that which Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956 had on communists both in the USSR and around the world, according to Vasily Zharkov.
In both cases, the Russian activist who is now at the European University of the Humanities in Vilnius says, they attacked an earlier leader, Yeltsin in the film and Stalin in the speech, for betraying the principles in which he supposedly acted and opened the way for the recovery of those principles (moscowtimes.ru/2024/06/14/dvadtsatii-sezd-v-emigratsii-a134023).
Just as Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin gave “the children of the 20th congress” the opportunity to seek to restore Leninism so now the film is giving “a new generation of Russian politicians, the generation of the children of Aleksey Navalny” the opportunity to propose “their version of a democratic future and a path to a more just, equal and free society.”
“In the eyes of most Russians, the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘liberalism’ were seriously discredited by the policy of Yeltsin and his team.” If they are to be revived, they must be freed of that burden, something that requires “an analysis of the mistakes of previous political generations” and a rejection of their discredited approaches.
Comparing the new film with the 1956 congress is “of course, a metaphor.” There are many differences, but these two events are “turning points for the history of ideologies and the political history of Russia.” The 20th congress began “the long process of revising ideas of socialism;” the new film, the ideology of liberalism and democracy.
“In criticizing Stalin, Khrushchev called for returning to ‘Leninist principles’ but not to tsarist times.” In criticizing Yeltsin, the new film is doing something similar, not calling for a return to Soviet times but to fulfilling the promises of democracy and freedom that Yeltsin failed to keep.
That demolishes what had been a long-standing consensus in the liberal opposition: say nothing about Yeltsin or speak only good about him.” Now what the first Russian president did to subvert democracy and freedom can be openly discussed by a new generation of opposition figures without any suggestion that the alternative is a return to Sovietism a la Putin.
For the opposition, criticism of Yeltsin has been “finally legalized,” and that has triggered a fight between the older generation of opposition figures who backed his “good tsar” approach to introducing the ideology but not the substance of freedom and democracy and those who want those values in forms that allow them to be pursued.
What happened under Yeltsin was the establishment of “freedom exclusively in a negative sense, freedom from government oversight but not freedom for participation in the affairs of the state and society. The state and the people for a time turned out to be free from one another, but a decade later, the state retook what it had lost,” Zharkov says.
Most of the earlier opposition leaders have fled abroad but there they lost social capital and “committed a fatal mistake,” he continues. That mistake, which consists of “a fear of the people alongside the absolutization of the role of the market,” remains for them what it was for Russian liberal dogmatists of the 1990s, the only way forward.
Their attitude can be summed up in the following way: In addressing the people, they say “you are rabble so you don’t deserve anything good in your life. You will never have democracy but must instead recognize our privileges and power over you in Russia because we are your intellectual elite.”
“Such a message,” Zharkov points out, “does not make democratic ideas more popular across society.” Instead, by taking that position, “Russian liberals have driven themselves into a ghetto from they can escape only by returning to empathy for their fellow citizens,” something a younger generation of the opposition is willing to do.
“Unlike the heirs of the old Soviet pop nobility who flourished in the 1990s,” the commentator says, “these people do not consider themselves ‘an elite’ and are much closer to understanding the needs and aspirations of the mass population.” They don’t view their fellow countrymen “as a rabble but rather as people worthy of living in an equal and free society.”
The new film will speed this process as it is “high time” for “the Russian opposition to leave the pseudo-elite ghetto” it has been in and instead “learn to speak with the people in a respectful way and in clearly understandable language,” Zharkov concludes.
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