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And what's the deal with Russia?
Glyph
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Can someone tell me where Russia stands in relation to other nations? I really can't figure it out, I look at it and I feel like I’m staring at a black hole.
Sometimes I hear Putin is a really popular prime minister and could maybe be president again soon but then on the other hand I hear about journalists getting beaten up and killed. Sometimes they seem to have a corrupt and very ineffective military other times they're just going ahead and invading Chechnya or Georgia.
Someone explain it to me, how powerful are they? What do they specialize in? What's the state of their economy? What's their agenda, short- and long-term? Rogue state or industrialized partner to the EU? I really don't get it.
And how do you suppose this conversation usually goes?
Sometimes I hear Putin is a really popular prime minister and could maybe be president again soon but then on the other hand I hear about journalists getting beaten up and killed. Sometimes they seem to have a corrupt and very ineffective military other times they're just going ahead and invading Chechnya or Georgia.
Someone explain it to me, how powerful are they? What do they specialize in? What's the state of their economy? What's their agenda, short- and long-term? Rogue state or industrialized partner to the EU? I really don't get it.
And how do you suppose this conversation usually goes?
Glyph on
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Yes.
The Russian public is keen on authoritarian leaders who are seen as 'strong', mainly because the only time they didn't have leaders like that (immediately after the dissolution of the USSR) everything went to shit. In addition under Putin the economy has seen recovery (mainly due to oil wealth and technological modernisation that might have happened anyway). A few beaten up Journalists isn't a worry to the average Russian, especially since their character is smeared as well by the numerous pro-United Russia news organisations (if you thought Fox News was right wing...)
Russia spends the second most on its military of the whole planet, it has structural problems but is probably still the second most powerful military machine in existence. It doesn't have logistical reach of the US, but Georgia is right on the Russia border and Chechnya is inside Russia (and Russians get very pissed over other countries poking their nose in an 'internal' matter). The Georgian operation was conducted pretty efficiently.
Their exports are based on mineral and energy commodities, weapons sales (2nd behind the US), and other technology and software products. Russia is a big place, with areas that are developed modern post-industrial cities and areas that are barely out of the 60s.
Their agenda is power, respect, and security in their local region (baring in mind that all of Eurasia is local for Russia), doing what they like at home, and economic growth.
They have vast soft power over the European nations that purchase gas from them (Germany and everything east of it), but aren't a military threat. Summarising the relationship of each individual EU state with Russia would take a loooong time. the EU accounts for over half Russia's markets and 3/4ths of the investment in Russia, and the trend recently has been in cooperation, though Russia constantly gets annoyed over any indication it might be a junior partner.
Entrenched organized crime and institutionalized corruption are severe problems; broadly, the dynamic you are seeing is the familiar authoritarian system of a strongman wielding considerable informal powers, reinforced with a network of cronies throughout the formal power structure - this is popular all over the developing world. It is not contradictory with being rich or industrialized (or not), however. Note that Russia has significant oil, coal, and timber exports, which imply a degree of wealth regardless of how dysfunctional their domestic industry is.
Having journalists killed and being popular are not necessarily contradictory, either, especially if said entrenched crime, institutionalized corruption, and so on distance one's administration from said killings. The great success of the Putin presidential administration was to re-assert the effective rule of law, anyway, relative to the Yeltsin government.
Yeah, there is that. I've heard some horror stories (which I think are true, given that I know the people involved) about racial profiling in Moscow (don't be Brown), but on the other hand, having spek a few days in Moscow, the ethnic diversity is rather pronounced. Sure, it is like any other European city where most people are white, but there are huge numbers of Central Asians, people from the Caucasus, East Asia and to a lesser extent, African. Apparently about 20% of the population is Muslim too. Now St Petersburg, that is a much more European town from first impressions anyway.
Feels necessary here. I can't think of Russia without thinking of Putin's cold, dead stare. I'm convinced he can kill you with polonium exposure by staring into your soul
Sounds harsh, but the country is really pretty messed up - and after a few bad run-ins with the police over documents, I'm rather inclined to say what little good there is is massively outweighed by the general shitness.
If it is Putin we're talking about
Russia doesn't seem to be evil or imperialist or anything, they just seem to be interested in consolidating their economic and militaristic power.
Not that much, it's Russian Gas that is the primary money maker/instrument of soft power. They have a whole 25% of the worlds stock, and the running out is a problem for the 2070s, by which point everything will have changed a good deal.
The combination of Authoritarianism and a modern economy and technological tools is something pretty new (much like China since the 80s) it's hard to predict how things will end up.
Very. Massive territory and resources. Very industrialized. Large army, mostly well equiped. Centuries of military and political experience, a lot of which has been really tough on them. They make some of the most advanced weapons in the world. And, of course, they have thousands of nuclear weapons, which can strike anywhere in the world. I call Russia one of the "Great Powers" up there with the US, China and parts of Europe. Less powerful than the US though, of course. Similar to China and Europe.
What do they specialize in?
Fuel. Russia has access to some of the largest reserves of oil and especially natural gas in the world, either through their own territory or via friendly states like Khazakstan. They export most of this to Europe, which contributes greatly to their power; since they can (and have) simply turned off the gas to countries that they disagree with. In an Eastern European winter, this is a powerful thing to do. But like most countries they don't really specialize in anything, an economy that large has to be very diverse.
What's the state of their economy?
Its ok. Most nations in the world have economic problems at this point, so it shouldn't be surprising that Russia does to. Only last week did they bail out one of their largest banks for the largest sum in their history (which I forget, but it was worth billions). Their stock market took a massive thrashing during the housing crisis and afterwords. I don't know a lot more than this, but with huge stocks of natural resources their in a fundamentally fairly good position, depending on how they manage it. Their free market capitalist now, with a select few "oligarchs" running enormous companies with close links to the government, a lot like the US really. Government is highly friendly with massive Russian companies, giving them all sorts of special treatment and encouraging them to explad elsewhere (again, this applies especially with the fuel industry).
What's their agenda, short- and long-term?
I'd say they're still recovering from the fall of the Soviet Union. They're making sure states around them (in their "sphere of influence") are friendly to them. This can mean invasion for those that are not, like Chechnya and Georgia. Its trying to keep its influence in Central Asia especially (where there is a lot of untapped oil) and trying to keep the US from gaining too much of a foot hold their. They're also dealing with China, somehow. Their displaying more muscle towards Eastern Europe as well, especially towards the Ukraine. They want a big piece of the Arctic pie, and are taking steps to see that they get it.
Rogue state or industrialized partner to the EU?
I think rogue state is a ridiculous term, it basically means "doesn't like the US". They are what they are, which is massive country thats been a major power for 200 odd years or more. They're certainly not going anywhere. They want to keep their place in the world, which means limiting the power of the US, mostly. Just like old times.
The next big news in Russia will again be in the Caucuses I think. Aside from Georgia, the whole region is very messy. There are lots of islamic insurgets in Chechnya, Ingushetia and especially Dagestan, which is a province on the Caspian sea and right next to those other provinces. Russia has limited control over the region, and that control is often very harsh. Suicide bombings, shooting police and general lawlessness are common to the region, and there are numerous foreign fighters from the region too. There will be another war there in the next 10 years or so, guaranteed.
Oh, they also have troops in Tajikistan, on the border with Afghanistan. Trying to prevent mujihadeen going coming in, trying to keep the country stable. Russia views this as basically the extent of their southern borders (ie where it was when the USSR was still around). That area is extremely unstable, and going to be moreso. So if Russian troops started to get involved in something serious then it would stirs some shit up there too.
In Soviet Russia, crooks arrest you
I don't care, it was hilarious as hell
Put in the most general terms, I think Russia, and many of the CIS countries, aren't turning out the way the think tanks in the United States (primarily) hoped they would have, and it really pisses a lot of people off. After all, Russians are still contending with problems of widespread corruption on federal and local levels, though in actuality, these problems aren't at the point where they were in the period immediately following the 1993 Constitutional Crisis, when they were literally crippling the country politically, militarily, and internationally.
And yet, here in the west, people seemed much more willing to overlook that then the present state of affairs. The current government in Moscow handwaving away the beating up (and worse) of journalists and critics by their own numerous enemies? Yes, that's bad. Of course it is. "Hey, this is not a reasonable state of affairs," isn't an invalid position.
But where were we (I say that in a general sense) when literally thousands of people were getting beaten up (or blown up) when the government in Moscow was shooting at its own parliament with tanks? Somehow, this was okay? That was the discourse in western Europe and North America. If you happened to say "Hey, this is not a reasonable state of affairs," you were literally labeled a communist.
We (in the west) were much happier with Russia so long as the neo-liberal political heads thought they were getting some sort of longstanding victory, and we seemed to be happy to give them a pass in this case. But when those neo-liberal policies turned out to be incredibly unpopular in the country in question, and politicians quickly responded accordingly, we became a lot less willing to handwave away corruption, criminal behavior, and the like.
That's whats up with Russia, sort of. That, and that Moscow is willing to honor official and unofficial promises made to the governments of neighbors we couldn't care less about--for example, South Ossetia or Dagestan. That was a rude awakening too. That goes hand in hand with a Russian willingness to work much more closely with China, having resolved contentious issues such as its patronage of India and Mongolia. And you know how we feel about China....
There's a sort of story for this, with some variations: "Who is Mikhail Gorbachev (or Boris Yeltsin)?" "Well, he is (or was) a respected Russian elder statesman," is the non-Russian answer.
EDIT: Also.
Courtesy of the Russian Communist Party.
Well I guess the obvious point being that what went down in at least the first half of the 1990s was still relatively unknown territory for everyone, whether that be the ex Soviet citizens (soldiers, party-men, businessmen, criminals, every day people) or the various Westerners who gave a crap. Whereas today, we are 20 or so years on from what was one of the strangest, unexpected happenings of the late 20th century. Russia today is just one of many countries in varying states of disrepair, whereas 20 years ago it was a superpower that was trying to rebuild itself after an overnight collapse. So it is hardly surprising or unconscionable that external or internal observers see things differently now than they did then, or are less willing to let things slide now than then.
The Moscow of today looks just like anyone of a dozen European capital cities (St Petersburg moreso) and it would be incredibly hard for one to know the local or recent history was any different from Paris, Vienna or Rome, as a tourist. Yet, while I thought that, sitting in a park, looking at a giant Mango (EU women's clothing chain store) under construction, I was still conscious that on the other side of the park was the ex KGB central HQ where tens of thousands of people had been tortured and killed in the basement. Then in a previous era, that same HQ had been a prosperous insurance company HQ.
(Warning: long, drawn-out, and with a link to you know what.)
Though on the other hand, Russia, and the CIS, were not really "unknown territory" for Americans--especially Americans who were shaping the discourse concerning the country--in the 1990s any more than they are now. In fact, there's a wide arguement that American political leadership and academia understood Russia better in the 1990s then they did now, tied to the idea of a closed society (versus the decade or two before the 1990s) and the anxiousness of the Kremlin to cooperate with the United States following the Constitutional Crisis. Especially in terms of military and economic capabilities (social considerations have always involved a lot of guessing, and people refrain from trying to predict those the same way they do political economies). It had a lot more to do with expectations and optimism, which was far stronger in the 1990s, due to the worsening position of Russia versus the powers of NATO. Then again, everyone has an agenda--just look at Russia's furious response to the Balkan Intervention compared to their willingness to intervene in South Ossetia after Georgia began the shelling, in the same convenient time frame.
On the specific matter of Lubyanka Square, that's actually a fairly common response, I think. By many estimations, hundreds of people died in the 1993 Crisis, and yet, Russian newlyweds flocked to get their pictures taken front of the bombed out White House. And despite the highly romaniticized (that's actually the word for this sort of thing) reputation of the building in the West, the A. V. Ivanov building in Lubyanka Square was never really any sort of permanent prison (though there were cases of people being held there, primarily from Moscow itself, they're a very tiny portion of the actual people arrested in the famous Purges). It was built as an office building for an insurance firm in Tsarist Russia, it became an office building for the intelligence/security organs of the Interior Ministry, not their central prison. The NKVD also controlled the border patrol, forestry service, firefighting and disaster response, and the militsyia for the largest country in the world--their entire interrogation apparatus wasn't housed in one moderately-sized building in downtown Moscow, contrary to urban legends and hilarious episodes of Archer. I think it has something to do with the same tendency in western media, not limited to the US, to confuse the St. Basil's Cathedral and the Kremlin Palace.
I took my late grandfather to the Pentagon, because he was in Washginton, in May of 2001. I was acutely aware that, back when he was a young man, the Pentagon housed the War Department that made the decision to obliterate 90% of the country he was born in (we're both Taiwanese nationals), and that the technical college he attended was actually destroyed by US Air Raids, since it was built by the Japanese. He didn't mind personally because, in his own words, it happened some time ago, among other things, but I could understand why he might not have been comfortable. We weren't able to go inside (should have done my research first on tour groups), which is a bit of a shame.
[/tangent]
Double post!
Actually, this isn't the case anymore (if the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which is wikipedia's source is to be believed anyway).
In actuality, all these numbers are likely underreported (particularly the United States and China), but they're still a good guide--I think a lot of people would be shocked to realize that both France and the UK are either tying with Russia, or surpassing it, in terms of raw money spent (of course, as a portion of GDP, it could be a different story). Of course, you could just as easily argue, "Who the fuck gives a shit about France or Britain? It's not like French tanks are going to roll all over Manhattan." This is true about Russia as well, but you get the point.
If you had to worry about something about Russia's military capabilities, personally, I'd look at their once-every-two years (whatever you call it) joint exercises with China, Peace Mission. While it's pretty good in terms of forging a trust between two economic competitors who are otherwise willing to work with one another, it is still an indirect challenge to the United States as the lone superpower. Which is not to say that their combined front is a match for the nation spending almost half of the world's military expenditures, but from a purely pro-American standpoint, a lot more distrust (not complete antagaonism though) would be far more desirable. Russia may still be the superior military power, certainly, particularly in terms of quality of military academies, doctrine, technology and industrial capability specifically for military hardware, but they aren't close to the #2 spender.
Hope this helps you out a bit, Glyph.
I think you miss my point slightly. It was not so much that the Soviet Union was unknown territory (I know it wasn't) for Americans or otherwise (Soviet Studies, however one labeled it, was big in nearly every pols/IR studies department in the West, including my own), it is more that the collapse was so sudden, that a paradigm needed replacing overnight.
Then, in the aftermath of the collapse, the scale of the problem/issue/potential etc was so great that really no one, expert, on the site expat, local politician etc could really quite get a handle on what was happening. Essentially, every country or complex society is a black box of kinds, where one can guess or develop certain rules that sort of work, but when radical/fast change occurs, one realises that the sheer complexity quickly becomes apparent and a sense of cautious optimism and helplessness often ensues, alongside the over-confidence of experts. Reading contemporary news-sites like the Exile (amongst others) gave a window into the chaos
Re the Square. Yes, I do understand that it was just one of many sites that the various security services had in central Moscow, let alone the outer ring and the rest of the country. So far as I can remember though (I don't have any citations to hand though), it is still accepted that there were widescale torture and death in that particular building and the various over-flow sites next to it, or the basements under it. The sheer scale of Moscow is something else though, from the parks through to any public building you can think of, much of which will be far outside of the usual tourist inner city circuit that tourists or expats visit.
The sheer industrial scale of the Eastern Bloc security services takes some effort to comprehend, I remember when I was wandering around the Stasi HQ in Berlin looking for the museum, we got rather lost for about 15 minutes, then later, when in the museum, it became clear we had been wandering through the old campus for the entire time, which was made up of dozens of low rise towers.
Huh, seems I've been out of date since 2005-7 :oops:. I would note that Russia also spends significantly on Interior Troops and Civil Defence Troops that don't fall under the Defence budget in ways the UK and France do not, and routinely funnels more up 150% of what it says it spends in the budget to the military. A googled "Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Economics and Security" put its 2006 actual expenditure at $72bil over $46bil reported.
And even if you don't like Putin, you have to admit he's an absolutely brilliant leader. Intelligent, charismatic, dependable. This is a man that has made Russia the superstate it is today.
When it comes to Russian politics I don't think they want to set the world on fire, but they're certainly asserting themselves, and are particularly asserting a diplomacy that makes it clear that, although they are willing to talk and indeed be friendly with the US - they won't bow down to American rule. Their policies within the UN have so far been rather solid, acting along with China as a neutral group, which is fair enough.
Either way, Russia is fun. They're a modernising nation looking to recover from the Soviet Union.
Fair point--it was a very sudden event that people did not necessarily see coming (the widespread approval of the New Union Treaty referendum in the republics that participated kind of underlined the surprise), and even if the United States had an unprecedented view of their counterparts in Moscow, the mindsets still needed to be updated (and in many respects, still need to be updated).
In the end, the west really liked Yeltsin, and let him get away with certain things for that. It wouldn't be the first time (I was about to make a comparison with Shah Pahlavi, but I caught myself--bad analogy). A similar thing happened with Gorbachev, though for slightly different reasons: Gorbachev is widely celebrated in the west among everyone but the extreme left and right, while he somewhat controversial and widely faulted, Nixon-style, in Russia and many of the CIS countries. It's not just the assumption of blame for the demise of the superpower--in the west, Gorbachev is the sole beneficiary of his reform movement, while in Russia, people were naturally familiar with leaders besides Gorbachev (and thus, he is not creditted with everyone good, but sometimes disproportionately blamed for many of the bad things).
I see where you're coming from...it's different for me, having been born towards the end of the longest modern period of martial law in history (1948 to 1987 or 1992, depending on who you ask), so for me, it's not that foreign or surprising. Until my most recent visit, I could still remember seeing television broadcasts of huge police crackdowns--I'm probably a little desensitized.
And that was just Taiwan. In South Korea, the head of the intelligence service actually killed the president. Personally. Now that's crazy stuff.
I've no doubt that Russia also underreports it's expenditures, but at the same time, it's been declining in the last decade--since 2005-2007, the Military District system has been ended, and many of the high readiness divisions--not to mention low readiness--have been disbanded, their battalions either dismissed or folded into other units. I don't disagree that the Interior Ministry spends more, and in a manner more closely resembling the armed forces, than in the UK or France, but I'd be reluctant to count Civil Defense too, since that falls largely into areas of firefighting, disaster response, as well as military endeavors--France has very high rising civil defense spending too, if I remember correctly, they have more than 20 air refueling tankers for their civil defense forces alone! Then again, the USSR historically took Civil Defense to an unprecedented level following the Second World War, so there's going to be a lot of money involved. Military wise, I think the expensive catch-up game has slowed down a lot since the early-2000s, in part because Russia seems to be closing in on their prospective goals, alongside the huge restructing efforts. I don't think that puts them into a really competitive area with the United States, but I don't think that was their final objective either.
The United States has a huge problem of underreporting military expenses as well (for the most famous example, consider how much of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were reported to congress), from what I remeber. The SIPRI reports try to compensate for these things in Russia and America, of course.
Well, for all Putin's positive parts, the word on the street is he has amassed about a portfolio worth about 30B USD, under his personal control. This does not seem so unbelievable when you see the wealth that the ex Mayor of Moscow and his family amassed, see current banking crisis. When I was in Russia last year, a lot of the final stages of the moves to depose him were apparently moving into place, of which I saw a small fraction, by way of the tame/controlled English language media. Some of the free newspapers in Moscow went with one particular line, the ones in St Petersburg quite a different one, which was mildly amusing. You can see this kind of thing if you watch Russia Today (the 24h English news channel)
Got me chuckling, well done. I like your comedy.
Edit: Russia is a country that managed to successfully translate ex-intelligence service into organized crime and from there into current political power. It's a country being exploited by its own current ruling "class" for personal benefit and has reduced investing in its own progress to a bare minimum.
I do try :P
Pretty ironic
They're one in the same, practically. Before and after Russia privatized.
Yes and no. You don't have the same thing as the Federal government working for the Italian Mob as a way to get to Musolini and potentially save lives, and the mob riding that for decades--or rather, you would have, if the Soviet Government hadn't made the uniform decision to take those gangsters they made promises to in 1941 and promptly send them all back to prison in 1944, along with a little note that read "Tough Shit." That grievance, among others, won them more sympathy in 1990s, when they could claim to have been persecuted despite their "charity".
On the other hand, Andropov went rather swiftly from director of the KGB (it was that at the time), to General Secretary, a lot faster than G. H. W. Bush did the same thing. As with money, you need power to get more power. Of course, that was almost 30 years ago, and while the adage is still true, the players have change to some degree.