Racism in modern-day Russia

Is racism a problem in modern day Russia? I doubt that “problem” is a word they would use, but what we here in the U.S. we can’t avoid seeing that what we call Racism does exist there. Consider the following from a Wikipedia article:

“In May 2006, Amnesty International reported that racist killings in Russia were "out of control" and that at least 28 people were killed in 2005. In 2006 Amnesty International registered 252 victims of racist crimes, of which 21 died. In February 2007, President Vladimir Putin asked the Federal Security Service to combat racism, but hate crimes still increased. From January 1 to July 31, 2007, Amnesty International registered 310 victims of neo-Nazi and racist crimes in Russia; 37 of those victims died as a result of attacks. Amnesty International criticize Russian police for not doing enough to combat racist crimes, and for often ignoring reports from civilians about threats and crimes. According to the Moscow Human Rights Bureau, from January to March, 2008, 49 people were killed in assaults by radical nationalists, 28 of them in the greater Moscow area.

“The number of Russian neo-Nazis is estimated at 50,000 to 70,000, "half of the world's total.". The director of the Human Rights Bureau, Alexander Brod, stated that surveys show xenophobia and other racist expressions affect 50 percent of Russians.”

And Paul Goble’s just posted an article about attempts to bridge the gap between ethnic Russians (racists by US definition) and civic Russians. http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/04/window-on-eurasia-russian-citizens-try.html

COMMENT:

In reading about these matters, I recalled that a number of times Michael Kuznetsov referred to himself as 100% White Russian. Such an expression couldn’t be used with impunity here in the United States. One would instantly be classified as a racist. Racism is among the most serious of crimes here in the US, but apparently not in Russia, and that strikes me as especially interesting at the present time because I have just been wading through the horrors of the Red Army’s occupation of Berlin in 1945. Rape was considered an acceptable thing to do – gang rape was especially popular and it didn’t make any difference whether the victim was 12 or 62.

Apparently the Soviets referred to what the Red Army did as a “noble fury.” One of the effects was to trigger “the largest panic migration in history. Between 12 January and mid-February 1945, almost 8.5 million Germans fled their homes in the eastern provinces of the Reich.” [Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945, pp. 36-37]

“’They all lifted their skirts for us and lay on the bed,’ said the Komsomol leader in a tank company. He even went on to boast that ‘2 million of our children were born’ in Germany.” [ibid. P. 31]

If this is true; if the mass rape of countless German Women by Red Army soldiers produced 2 million Russian/German babies, then the prospect of another Racist Hitler rising up to speak of the purity of the German “race” would be problematic. But perhaps that is not nearly the same problem for modern day Russians. It is almost as though the Racist Germans have handed off their racist baton to the Racist Russians. For Hitler, the Slavic people were untermensch, but what about now? Are the 100% White Russians the new ubermensch? Are those in Russia who aren’t 100% White Russian untermensch? And how about the rest of the world? Are we all untermensch?

If one were to search my blog, one would find that I have sided with ethnic Europeans against the inroads being made by ethnic Muslims, but what I had in mind was the Oriana Fallaci – Bat Ye’or concern, of Muslins who move into the Netherlands or France but refuse to integrate. They remain in enclaves which as time goes on increase in power and number. Alarmist see the Muslin ethnicity drowning out the European; which I would consider a bad thing.

I compared the difficulties Europeans have in integrating their immigrants with the ease with which that occurs in the US. To integrate immigrants is good, I assume. But if a nation can’t integrate them or if the immigrants won’t integrate, then that is bad – I have argued this in the past, but what I am reading about in Russia now is a different matter. The “Civic Russians” want to integrate – in fact they think they already have – but the “Ethnic Russians” won’t accept them.

I live in Southern California, the melting-pot of the US. We do integration better here than any place else in the US and the US does it better than any place elsewhere in the world; so are we thereby better than other nations? Or are we merely as Hitler described us, a nation of mongrels. The answer would depend on whether one accepts current thinking on genetics and anthropology or prefers obsolete and discredited racial theories.

Of this I am sure: genetically there is very little difference between any of us. Only in the realm of culture are their differences. We here in the US have cultivated a culture which encourages all the cultures coming here, immigrating here, to consider themselves and their beliefs as equal, but at the same time to accept America as a working-melting pot. But in other parts of the world ethnicity is more important. One can’t move to Japan or Saudi Arabia or, apparently, Russia, and expect to fit in. In fact there are probably more places where an immigrant wouldn’t fit in than places where he would.

Which, regrettably, brings me back to the political philosophy of Samuel Huntington who argued that for the foreseeable future, there will be military clashes between “Civilizations” along their “fault lines.” If I declare myself to be 100% White Russian, I may add that I don’t think I am superior to anyone, but it should go without saying that I don’t think anyone is superior to me. Also, how can I walk around with this declaration hanging around my neck without having it nailed down by a chip on each shoulder?

“Can’t we all just get along?” is a line Jack Nicholson used portraying the American President in Mars Attacks. The short answer was an unspoken, “no.”

Katyn: Death in the Forest

I’ve begun Death in the Forest, The Story of the Katyn Forest Massacre by J. K. Zawodny, 1962. This seems to be the “classic” of Katyn scholarship. Zawodny is succinct and meticulous. His scholarship holds up from what I have read about this book.

The search for 15,000 missing Polish Officers began sometime after June 21, 1941 when General Wladyslaw Anders was released from Soviet imprisonment. A deal was struck between the Polish Government and the USSR such that a Polish Army was to be created within Russia to aid in fighting the Germans. General Anders was to lead that army.

Anders began assembling his army sometime after June 21, 1941, as released Polish soldiers showed up to be part of that army. But very few Polish officers arrived – not enough for the army to be effective. He was able to learn a few things about the missing officers. As Polish men were released from prison and showed up, he questioned them about the missing officers. His search was well known and Anders received thousands of letters from the families of the missing officers. “The men from the three camps [where the 15,000 Polish officers had been held] stopped writing home in the middle of April 1940.” This is significant because the Germans didn’t overrun the Katyn part of Poland until July of 1941. And in 1943, the forensic teams examining the Katyn remains determined that April 1940 was the likely time of their death.

Three teams made independent examinations of the remains at Katyn, and though one of the teams was German, its findings didn’t disagree with those of the other two teams, one of which was an “international” team, and the third made up of members of the Polish Red Cross. The Poles by this time, 1943, seem to have hated the Germans worse than the Russians and suspected a German trick, but they couldn’t find one.

Page 20: “Microscopic analysis of the rope [used to tie up the Polish Officers] – made by a German scientist on the spot – showed it to be Soviet-made. The same kind of knots was found on the bodies of several men and women dressed in the remnants of garments of Soviet origin, who also were found in a separate common grave in Katyn Forest. Close examination of these cadavers established that the persons had been killed in the same manner between five and ten years earlier – many years before the Germans had come to this area.”

The bodies of several of the Polish Officers showed that they had been bayoneted, presumably because they wouldn’t hold still so that they could be shot in the head “The wounds and holes in the material were made by four cornered bayonets. It was observed that this type of bayonet was used by the Soviet Army at the time.”

The matter of the bullets is of interest. The bullets used to shoot the Polish officers were manufactured in Germany “by a factory belonging to Gustav Genschow in Durlach. German Ordnance speedily established that this type of ammunition [Geco caliber 7.56 and 6.35] was produced by the Genschow Company and was exported from Germany to Poland, the Baltic states, and the Soviet Union prior to 1939.”

COMMENT:

I am familiar with the Mosin Nagent bolt action rifles used by the USSR in WWII. I got mine out to look at the bayonet. Mine was manufactured in 1951, but the description of the bayonet above matches what I see before me. It resembles a very long strong, reinforced four cornered ice-pick except that the point forms a very narrow flat screw-driver-shape less than ¼ inches wide. At its widest, it is about ½ inch. From base to point is slightly more than 12 inches. This is a very different sort of bayonet than the one on a K98, the German Rifle used in both world wars; which has a blade-shape.

The fact that the Polish Officers quit writing home all at the same time, about the time the forensic teams determined they had been in their graves, seems telling.

The Germans swept through Smolensk, (Katyn is just outside of that city), in July of 1941. If the Katyn massacre was some sort of elaborate trick, why wait until February 1943 to discover the grave? And why use ammo that is of German manufacture? The Germans had captured thousands of Soviet prisoners by this time and would have been swimming in unfired Russian ammo. Why not use that if this was a German hoax?

Today's FSB Very much like the NKVD

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/04/window-on-eurasia-todays-fsb-very-much.html

The above article was posted to his web site on April 2 by Paul Goble and entitled, “Today’s FSB ‘Very Much Like’ Stalin’s Secret Police, Russian Activists Say”

I am trying to understand Russia’s continuing love for Stalin and for Russian authoritarianism. Kuznetsov’s image of “ants” was helpful. Ants are happy because everything is under control. Not under their control, to be sure, but under the control of their authoritarian Ant Queen. There are worker ants, soldier ants, and everyone is happy doing the job he has to do. Well, not quite everyone as I read in this article. Lyudmila Alekseyeva doesn’t seem very happy.

Alekseyeva is the “dean of human rights activists” in Russia. She says that “the Russian FSB resembles Stalin’s secret police in that it is “absolutely outside the law” and its officers “do what they want” without even the fear of legal persecution that the late Soviet dictator sometimes visited upon his officers. . . “

A “roundtable” was held on the subject of whether “The FSB in Contemporary Russia is Special Services or a Punitive Organ.” The head of the Moscow Helsinki Group acknowledged that . . .“there is now no Stalinist mass terror,” but . . . the ability of the FSB to ignore the law opens the way to new horrors (www.grani.ru/Politics/Russia/FSB/m.149432.html ). . .”

Alekseyeva says the “situation under Vladimir Putin is far more frightening in some respects than it was under Leonid Brezhnev. ‘In Brezhnev’s times,’ . . she was called to the Lubyanka “more than 30 times, where she was subject to many kinds of intimidation but never physical violence. At that time, she said, “there was an order from above: one could scare people, but one must not apply physical force. But now this law does not operate, and thus the FSB has gained access to all available criminal methods,” as can be seen in the recent series of attacks on opponents of the regime.”

“. . . Mikhail Kasyanov, the leader of the Russian Popular Democratic Union, said that . . . the FSB today . . . has access not only to political power but also to financial flows, which is no less terrible,” and its officers “really think that they are the real saviors of Russia,” having on the basis of their action “rescued” the country after it had gone through the turmoil of the 1990s. The willingness and ability of the FSB and its representatives in the political establishment to ignore the law in pursuit and defense of power was not so obvious when times were good, Kasyanov said, but now that the country is in economic difficulties, this tendency “has become more than obvious” and the actions of the organs ever more violent. . . .”

“If violent actions not surprisingly attract the most attention, they are far from the only way in which Russia’s security services are restoring noxious aspects of the Stalinist past. Life.ru this week, for example, reports on the return of the system under which ordinary citizens either volunteer or are compelled to serve as confidential informants of the regime. . . .”

COMMENT:

Well, I must admit I am impressed. Kuznetsov’s analogy of the ant is being born out. Russia really needs an organization like the NKVD to keep everything running smoothly. The Russian ant colony tried to get by without it for awhile, but things were becoming much too disorganized, much too like a nation of Lady bugs, so back comes the NKVD with the name changed to the FSB – a kinder gentler NKVD to be sure what with all the cell phones that can take pictures and the internet that can post them, but still having the power to keep all those ants, some of whom seem to have a desire to be lady bugs, under control.

Ward Churchill to get his job back

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/04/03/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry4916473.shtml

The above is an article posted by Andrew Cohen on the CBS News Political Hotsheet entitled “Analysis: Ward Churchill and the Tension of Tenure.”

If I understand what was written here, the Judge decided (well, the Jury with the help of the Judge’s advice) that there was a cause and effect relationship between Churchill calling the victims of the 9-11 bombings “Little Eichmanns” and his firing, and since that was so, the reason the University gave, plagiarism, was bogus.

Cohen is right in blaming the University. But I disagree with him when he said that professors may have to be vetted like a Presidential candidate. I only needed to listen to Churchill once to decide he was incompetent. He is an anti-American nutcase. No, the University administrators, many of them I suspect, probably liked Churchill. They agreed with his anti-Americanism, and it was only when he thumbed his incompetence in the face of America at large that the administrators decided he went too far. Yes, his peers said he was incompetent, but were they asked before Churchill was hired? Were they asked before he was given tenure?

What if the University had charged ”incompetence” instead of plagiarism? Here are the signs of his incompetence: He plagiarizes, he doesn’t know his subjects (per peer review), and he is a sociopath as evidence by his calling the victims of 9/11 Little Eichmanns – something along those lines. Then it wouldn’t matter that his “Little Eichmann” slur had drawn the attention of the Colorado Governor.

I believe and have said elsewhere, there is never a single reason for taking an action like this. I may have said it first in relation to the 2003 Iraq invasion. WMDs were not the only reason. A whole long list of reasons existed. One could read them as I did, before the Iraq invasion in Pollack’s The Threatening Storm, the Case for Invading Iraq.” No doubt there were other places that one could read a list of reasons for invading Iraq, but Pollack was a good place. Why then were WMDs mentioned so prominently, as plagiarism was in the Churchill case? There is a strong belief in this country that the average person is stupid, doesn’t read, doesn’t know anything and you are going to have to make things really really simple for him if you want him to understand. Well, I agree with the first part, but the making things simple for him was a mistake, at least in these two cases. Because the reasons picked weren’t too simple for the lawyers and political pundits that come afterward, after you had picked the wrong “simple reasons.”

Chechnya: a base for International Terrorism?

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/03/window-on-eurasia-chechnya-never-base.html

The above article was posted by Paul Goble on 3-31-09 and entitled “Chechnya, Never a Base for International Terrorism in the Past, Could Now Become one, Moscow Expert says”

In my last note, I asked whether Russophilia trumped Islamism. And then I thought that the answer must surely be some place in Paul Goble’s archives. I didn’t have far to look – not that the answer is precisely what I expected, nor does Goble in this article discuss all the Islamic nations on Russia’s borders, but it is a discussion of the nation that has been the biggest Islamic (not Islamist so far) thorn in Russia’s side:

“Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov’s statement that Moscow will soon end the counter-terrorist operation in his republic and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s directive to the National Anti-Terrorist Committee to make plans to do so have sparked a new discussion on the nature of the conflict there and whether it is really over.

“One of the most thoughtful of these has been provided by Andrey Soldatov, the editor of the Agentura.ru portal, in an article in today’s “Yezhednevny zhurnal” in which he suggests that to understand “just what in the opinion of the Kremlin and Kadyrov is now ending,” it is useful to recall what Russian forces were dealing at the start (www.ej.ru/?a=note&id=8931 ). . . Chechnya in 1999 . . . did not become a base for international terrorism.”

“. . . Instead of coming to Chechnya after the fall of Kabul in 1992, as some expected, most of the Arabs who formed the core of Al-Qaeda went to Bosnia.. . . Those who came from abroad . . . came from Saudi Arabia and Jordan, but most of them went not to Chechnya but to Ingushetia or other republics there and “after the start of the war in Iraq, what Arabs there were in Chechnya almost completely left.”

“. . . ‘Chechnya at least from 2006 . . . has not been a zone for the carrying out of terrorist acts, that is, for attacks on the civilian population.” . . . this shift in Chechen tactics to a version of the IRA’s “long war” occurred simultaneously with something else: After 2005, “after the creation of the so-called ‘Caucasus Front of the Armed Forces of the Chechen Republic-Ichkeria,’ there has not been a separate and distinct Chechen separatist movement.” And that submersion of the Chechen cause under the broader regional Islamist challenge was confirmed by the declaration in October 2007 of the creation of the Caucasus Emirate, an event that was accompanied by terrorist actions in a number of places outside Chechnya but not in that republic itself.”

“. . . According to some North Caucasus militants, ‘the mountainous regions of [Chechnya] have been converted into zones beyond the control of Kadyrov where the militants can live not just in the forests but even in the villages,’ a claim that if true not only means that the conflict is far from over but also lays the ground for a new explosion in the future. . . .”

COMMENT:

What I found most interesting was Soldatov’s view that there was no Islamist-type terrorism in Chechnya earlier because Islamist “evangelists” had not come to Chechnya. So instead of terrorism in a form favored by Islamists, targeting civilians, Chechens used the form favored by the IRA, targeting the military.

Also, Soldatov tells us there were no Islamists in Chechnya because they had gone to Iraq to fight with Al Qaeda against the US. Now, we must assume, they have come to Chechnya. They must have since Chechnya is now at risk for becoming a center for “International Terrorism.” Al Qaeda representatives must now be available to go to Chechnya? Why is that? Has Al Qaeda given up on Iraq? Has Al Qaeda conceded that their efforts in Iraq have failed? If so, then certainly they would want to focus their efforts elsewhere. If Iraq is too difficult for them, then perhaps things can be stirred up on Russia’s border. After all, Al Qaeda mythology has it, they defeated the USSR in Afghanistan; so surely they could defeat them again someplace else.

Iran's Khomeini Was a Russophile

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/04/window-on-eurasia-irans-khomeini-was.html

The above was posted by Paul Goble on his blog April 1st. It is entitled, “Iran’s Khomeini Was a Russophile, KGB Resident in Tehran Says.”

“Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian revolution whose regime was formally inaugurated 30 years ago today, was a committed Russophile, according to the retired KGB officer who served as that organization’s resident in Tehran before and during that time.”

” Leonid Shebarshin, who retired from the Soviet intelligence service as a much-decorated lieutenant general and who now heads his own company, talks about his years of service in Iran, 1979-1983 (www.vpk-news.ru/article.asp?pr_sign=archive.2009.278.articles.conception_01 ).”

“In May 1979, just before he departed for Tehran, Shebarshin says that he was told by KGB chief and future CPSU leader Yury Andropov that ‘left progressive forces [in Iran] had no chance of coming to power and that many years would be required for Iranians to become disappointed in the theocracy.’

“. . . Shebarshin describes what he says were the “intelligent and pragmatic” qualities of the Iranian leaders who maintained their economic relations with the Soviet Union and did not force out most Soviet workers in the country, although Tehran did force all Americans and most Europeans to do so. . . .”

“At the end of December 1979, after Moscow had sent its forces into Afghanistan, the Soviet ambassador in Tehran travelled to Khomeini’s residence in Qum to explain why Moscow had taken the decision to intervene and to discuss the possible consequences of that action for Soviet-Iranian relations. ‘The imam attentively listened to [the Soviet diplomat] and then said: “You are making a big error!” And in general, [the Iranian leader] turned out to be right,’ Shebarshin acknowledges. But then the former KGB officer makes the following declaration: ‘Imam Khomeini was a Russophile, however strange this may seem’ to those who do not know the history of Iran.

“’Of course, the ayatollah was “an opponent of godless socialism, but [he was also] a man who had great respect for northern neighbor and belonged to an [Iranian] Russophile family. “At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century,” Shebarshin explains, “Iranian society was approximately equally divided between Anglophiles and Russophiles.”

“And it turned out that “already his upbringing in childhood and youth led Ruholla al-Musavi al-Khomini to relate to Russia with respect,” a background Moscow and its KGB clearly recognized, valued, and exploited but one that many people elsewhere not only did not know but considered absolutely impossible.’”

COMMENT:

It was possible to know something of what Shebarshin knew about Khomeini based on a different line of reasoning. Khomeini loved Stalinist tactics. The same thing can be said about Sayyid Qutb who was the Islamist philosopher of the Sunnis. They both loved the way Stalin operated. We know that during the Second world war, there was a lot of fondness for the Nazis because of their hatred of the Jews and Sayyid Qutb, at least, seemed to take from both the Nazis and the Stalinists in formulating his Islamist ideology.

Knowing that the Islamists owed a great deal to Soviet tactics, both domestic and foreign, did I take the next step and assume that meant that Khomeini liked Russians? No, I didn’t know that. I knew more about Sayyid Qutb than I did Khomeini and Sayyid Qutb’s liking of Soviet tactics while sitting in an Egyptian jail was a disembodied sort of thing. He never had a chance to put his ideas into practice or to show a preference for a non-Islamic people. And yet he and his followers did have a great respect for the Soviets. That is without doubt. Osama bin Laden believed he was fighting against the greatest enemy of Islam when he fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan; such that when the Soviets left in defeat he thought that nothing could stop the relentless role of Islam as it conquered the rest of the world. He thought the US would be easier to defeat than the USSR. He defeated (according to him) the USSR in Afghanistan and expected to defeat the US in Iraq.

Now I wonder about something else. If much of Iranian society was Russophile, what of the many Islamic nations on both sides of present-day-Russia’s borders? Looking at a map I would think Russia had great cause to be worried about Islamism, but perhaps the nations that seem ripe for Islamist picking are also Russophile. But if so, we must ask, does Russophilia trump Islamism?

Afghanistan's President has signed a law which "legalizes" rape

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/134219

This article is interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is, why the surprise? Is there anyone still so Neoconish that they think Iraq and Afghanistan are going to be turned into Liberal Democracies any time soon? Perhaps Fukuyama’s historical necessity will turn them into Liberal Democracies eventually, but my guess would be 100 years at the soonest, and that guess is contingent upon our not having any more economic crashes.

If we had gone into Afghanistan and Iraq with reasonable expectations of what to expect afterwards, we probably should have expected no more than something less authoritarian than most of the Middle East – some sort of Democracy, but certainly not a Liberal one, that could sustain itself.

The “rape” being legalized is of a woman by her husband and that sort of treatment is consistent with “traditional” Islam and not just Islamism. Hey, all you Leftists who wanted to leave Afghanistan and Iraq alone, poor treatment of women is part of what you wanted to leave alone. Traditional Islam, if it is practiced in a legalistic manner, is brutal by today’s standards, and there is a lot of inertia in the Islamic World resisting change. Moderate Muslims, as usually, are fairly quiet.

But notice also that Karzai is very much aware of public opinion and knows that the Liberal Democracies that pay his bills are outraged; so there will be an effect. Maybe the law can be changed, but don’t expect anything more after that than a “don’t ask, don’t tell” sort of situation. Wife beating and abuse will go on as usual.