Compared to His Soviet Predecessors, Putin Relies on Fear-Driven Self-Censorship than on Formal Controls, Golosov Says

Compared to His Soviet Predecessors, Putin Relies on Fear-Driven Self-Censorship than on Formal Controls, Golosov Says

             Staunton, Mar. 12 – Censorship in the Russian Federation now is very different from that in the last decades of Soviet power, Grigory Golosov says. Then, the authorities relied on a ramified system of censors and censorship agencies to ensure control. Now, the Kremlin relies more on self-censorship and thus takes action to make fear the primary motivating factor. 

             “The Soviet model was quite repressive,” the St. Petersburg political scientist says; “but it did not expect people to censor themselves to the extent that doing so is what is now expected in contemporary Russia” (polit.ru/articles/konspekty/grigoriy-golosov-o-samotsenzure-v-sssr-i-seychas/).

             On the one hand, that means that those who write or speak publicly must interpret what the authorities want, sometimes not controlling their words as much as the powers that be would like but sometimes controlling them even more than the denizens of the Kremlin in fact are ready to demand.

             And it also means that anyone who does violate what the authorities want is at risk of losing his or her job, since almost all positions are either government or government-influenced, or facing criminal sanctions, including being sent to the camps, dangers far greater than most who did offend the censors faced in Soviet times.

For First Time Ever,’ a Kremlin Leader has Announced a Policy Explicitly Focused on Demographic Collapse of the Ethnic Russian Core of the Country, Baburin Says

            Staunton, Mar. 12 – In his address to the Federal Assembly, Vladimir Putin did something remarkable that is only beginning to be noticed, Vyacheslav Baburin says. He announced a policy to invest in the revival of birthrates in the ethnic Russian core of the country that has been on the brink of dying out.

            This is “the first time” a Kremlin leader has done that, the Moscow State University geographer says. In the past, apparently fearful of looking overly pro-Russian, Kremlin leaders, including Putin, have put forward demographic policies that at least in principle were universal in their pretensions (kp.ru/daily/27578/4902687/).

But in his remarks, Putin declared that he will invest 75 billion rubles (750 million US dollars) in the coming years to boost the birthrate in regions where birthrates are now the lowest. These regions, Baburin points out, are precisely the predominantly ethnic Russian oblasts of central and northwestern Russia. 

There are many reasons why these predominantly ethnic Russian regions are in trouble demographically: greater urbanization and the death of villages, war losses and their echo, and a history of government policy of taking money from these regions to finance projects on the periphery of the country and abroad.

Whether Putin’s proposed policy can work, given the inertia of demographic developments, and even whether it will be fully funded, given his spending on the war in Ukraine, are very much open questions. But what he has done is nonetheless remarkable, the geographer continues.

Putin has shown that the problem of the demographic collapse of the ethnic Russian center of the country is now so severe that he is prepared to address it as an issue in and of itself, something ethnic Russians are likely to celebrate and non-Russians are likely to view as yet more evidence of the Kremlin leader’s hostility toward them.

Both of those views will have an impact on Russian politics in the coming years, possibly a greater impact than any of the other issues that are now attracting far more attention.