Tag "Window on Eurasia"
By Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia Most people in the West continue to make two “fatal” mistakes about the media in Putin’s Russia, Igor Yakovenko says. They assume that Russians who call themselves journalists are in fact journalists and that Russian propaganda is propaganda in the normal sense. “Few in the West understand,” the Russian commentator writes, “what the world is dealing with in the form of the Putin regime…
By Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia Given that 90 percent of Russian society is “apolitical,” Moscow commentator Boris Kagarlitsky says, “it is impossible” to say how much support Vladimir Putin or anyone else has. Indeed, asking that question under Russian conditions now is completely inappropriate. This comment from the director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements came in response to a question posed by Kazan’s Business Gazeta to a number…
By Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia At the everyday level, Vladimir Pastukhov says, it is unlikely that Russians lie more than people in other countries do; but in the public sphere, the lie is not criticized but rather encouraged,” making it “almost the norm of public politics not only in the eyes of the authorities but in those of the population as well. There are many reasons for the official…
By Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia The Kremlin’s effort to affect the outcome of the 2016 US presidential elections has provoked one consequence Moscow has long wanted – the demoralization of the American elite – but it is having other less welcome ones on both that elite and the Russian one, something only becoming clear, Liliya Shevtsova says. The American investigation into Russia’s involvement is rapidly spreading from a focus…
By Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia In Russia today, monuments more than memoranda have become the most favored way of expressing political views at least in part because, however controversial many of them inevitably become, statues allow for multiple interpretations or alternatively for none at all. This weekend brought two examples. In the first, Vladimir Putin dedicated a statue in Russian-occupied Crimea to Emperor Aleksandr III, the embodiment for many…
Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia A major reason that Moscow has to struggle to find symmetrical responses to anything other countries do is because it lacks many of the institutions that they have but that Russia does not, ranging from media environments open to almost anyone to schools in the languages of many minorities. Consequently, the Kremlin is forced to identify “asymmetrical” replies that often put it even more at…
By Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia The failure of Vladimir Putin to get a sit down with Donald Trump represents “the agony of [the Kremlin’s] ‘Putin is Ours’ special operation” and is leading some in Putin’s entourage to think about some kind of “hybrid capitulation” that both the US and the Russian people will accept, according to Andrey Piontkovsky. Ever more people in the Russian capital, the commentator says, recognize…
By Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia The conclusion of the Tatarstan procuracy that Russian language study is compulsory but non-Russian language study must be voluntary not only for Russian speakers but for non-Russians as well shows that Vladimir Putin’s plans to Russianize and Russify his country are far more radical than they first appeared. The Kazan prosecutors’ conclusions based on on the Russian constitution. They beyond any doubt reflect Moscow’s…
By Paul Goble, for Window on Eurasia It is long past time calling “the content of Russia media propaganda,” Igor Yakovenko says. Propaganda is about promoting and spreading an ideology, “a system of ideas concerning the future and ways of achieving them.” But there is no Putinist ideology, and there isn’t going to be any. In an article in Yezhednevny zhurnal, the Russian commentator says that the immediate goal of…
By Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia Most commentaries on Belarus and Ukraine suggest that the relatively large Russian-speaking populations in these two countries are a threat to their survival because they make it easier for Moscow to manipulate the domestic situation of the two and that the growth of Belarusian and Ukrainian speakers thus benefits these countries and harms Russia. While those may be reasonable conclusions for Belarusians and Ukrainians…
