Window on Eurasia: Putin Speaks the Language of ‘a Tatar Khan,’ Michnik Says

Paul Goble

Staunton, September 10 – Adam Michnik, the editor in chief of Warsaw’s “Gazeta Wyborcza,” says that many Russians he has encountered in his recent visit to Russia for the Valdai Club and Yaroslavl Political Forum are clearly 21st century people, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is out of step with them and “speaks the language of a Tatar khan.”

That was just one of the observations Michnik, who has long described himself as “an anti-Soviet Russophile,” made in the course of an interview published today in Moscow’s “Novaya gazeta” about both the current political situation in Russia and the ways in which the West is reacting to it (www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010/100/05.html).

Michnik said his coming to the two events was opposed not by his Polish friends but by his Muscovite ones, who feared that his appearance along with other Western commentators and experts would “legitimate” Putin’s regime, given that the Valdai Club is “a circus organized in order to improve” Moscow’s image in the West.

Indeed, the Polish editor said, such views reflect the notion among some that anyone who comes is playing the role of Leon Feuchtwanger who visited the USSR in 1937 and wrote an approving book about it. But that analogy is wrong. Feuchtwanger “lied about the Moscow trials,” and comparing today’s Russia with that of 1937 is “nonsense,” Michnik argued.

“My task,” the longtime Polish dissident continued, “was never to legitimate any regime, only to listen and express my opinion,” given that “except under extraordinary conditions, one should not completely refuse from taking part in a dialogue with the powers that be.” But that is not to endorse those who attend such meetings and then praise their hosts to the skies.

Michnik said that he had been most impressed by many Russians he met prior to Putin’s appearance, by the way in which they discussed openly their problems in a way that would be the envy of any country, including his own. But when Putin spoke, it became clear that there is not “one” Russia but “two” very different Russias.

The former is very much part of the 21st century, he said, but meetings first with St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matvienko and then Putin made him feel that he had “returned to the times of 25 years ago” and was seeing “the classic style of the Polish apparatchik[s] of socialist times.”

Citing President Dmitry Medvedev’s observation about “legal nihilism” in Russia, Michnik said he asked two questions, one about the popular protests over the Khimki forests and the other about whether Mikhail Khodorkovsky might be released as an indication that Russia was “overcoming” this plague.

Michnik said he was “shocked” by the change in Putin’s visage when he heard the second question: “With passion, [Putin] began to say: ‘the chief of his guards killed people! How could he not know about this? He has blood on his hands.’” Up to that point, Putin was a cool professional, but in this case, he “displayed deep emotions,” suggesting a “personal” tie.

The reason he asked about Khodorkovsky, Michnik said, was because “here is the very important issue of trust.” “When did trust in Gorbachev appear? When he telephoned [Andrey] Sakharov in Gorky.” At that moment, “it became understandable that all this was serious and not simple a playing with words about perestroika.”

“I think,” Michnik said, “that today trust in the Russian powers that be [with their announced intention to modernization] depends on the fate of Khodorkovsky.”

After he had asked his questions, Michnik said, Piotr Smolar of “Le Monde” followed up with questions about the Russian Constitution and the rights it provides. On the one hand, he said, the Russian basic law clearly does not run in Chechnya where shariat plays a bigger role. And on the other, he asked Putin about the handling of public demonstrations.

Putin responded to the second the way a Polish communist official would have 30 or more years ago, the Warsaw editor said. “What are we talking about?” Putin asked. “People have take part in unsanctioned demonstration? They have. They’ve provoked the militia? They have done so. Well, they’ll get it in the head. What would be different in London or Paris?”

“I was shocked,” Michnik continued, “that none of his advisors had explained to him that one must not speak in such terms, that this is the language of a Tatar khan and not of a politician of the 20th century.”
(The Polish commentator noted that “the last question” was an easy one, asked by Natalya Narochnitskaya, who is notorious for her attacks on any Western criticism of Russia. She asked Putin where he found “the strength” to go on. Putin responded that this “is a serious philosophical question” and said that “one must believe in Russia.”)

Asked what had “most surprised him,” Michnik suggested that this was that Putin “had subjected to doubt the bases of a functioning democracy while suggesting that he is not doing that. Under Brezhnev, it was said that we and the West had different systems of values. … But Putin says that in Russia everything is as it is in the West and vice versa.”

Not only did Russian prime minister suggest that in his comments about demonstrators, but he repeated it when asked when Lenin might be removed from the mausoleum on Red Square. Having learned that the individual who asked that was from Britain, Putin asked in turn “But don’t you in London still have a monument to Cromwell?”

Posted by Paul Goble at 10:44 AM

Window on Eurasia: ‘Ethnic Journalism’ Must Compensate for Decline in Shared Experiences among Nationalities in Post-Soviet Russia, Specialist Says

Paul Goble

Staunton, September 4 – Journalists specializing on ethnic issues must compensate for declines since 1991 in the number and quality of interactions among people of different nationalities in post-Soviet Russia, and because there are few such journalists in Moscow, that places an enormous responsibility on journalists in the non-Russian republics.

That is the message Margarita Lyange, the head of the Russian Federation’s Guild of Inter-Ethnic Journalism and advisor to the editor of Radio Russia, delivered in the course of an extensive interview published in the new issue of “Finnougria,” a magazine directed at the Finno-Ugric nations in Russia (www.finnougoria.ru/periodika/20810/).

And this is the task that such journalists, the vast majority of whom are women because of the lower pay and lower status of such positions now, must undertake in order to promote sympathy and empathy among these groups rather than contribute to a further decline in the ties among them and to the exacerbation of inter-ethnic tensions and even violence.

Often these journalists are forced to work not in the traditional print or electronic media but on the Internet, a place that can be extraordinarily useful when the sites involved produce regular news feeds rather than simply commentaries and reactions. Indeed, Lyange said, “the presence of regular news is already an indicator of quality” of journalism.

The Guild, which was created in 2003, not only seeks to unite those working in ethnic journalism across the Russian Federation, its president said, but it tries to increase the professionalism of such journalists, helping them to get grants and organizing seminars on how to cover ethnic issues.
As such, Lyange continued, her organization is combating what she described as the trend toward a demand only for “the universal journalist,” capable of covering anything. An ethnic journalist must simultaneously be a universal journalist and “also a fundraiser,” thus working “twice as much” as his colleagues.

Asked what Finno-Ugric ethnic journalists should do to overcome the difficulties many find in locating news about their groups, Lyange said that the current situation reflects “the problem of growth because national movements in recent years, unfortunately, have been inclined to focus only inward.”

“In our country,” she said, one of the problems is the inability to interact, to cooperate, to establish creative coalitions, to join unions and to exchange something with each other,” all skills which people had to a greater decree in Soviet times but lost after 1991 when people were forced to focus on survival rather than have “the luxury” of worrying about broader linkages.

Before the end of the Soviet system, people of various ethnic groups were more often thrown together in universities, the military and the workplace, and that contributed to “the habit of friendship, tolerance and normal interaction. But now, there remain very few of these places where various ethnic groups can intersect.”

That means ethnic journalists must fill in the gap, covering both individual groups and their interactions in ways that promote understanding rather than heighten isolation and tensions. Doing so requires sensitivity and skill, but promoting such common understanding and hence the basis for common identities above and beyond ethnic ones is “the task of ethnic journalism.”

See original here:
Putin is one of us, says Russia’s radical right

Vienna, June 26 – Despite reports about the expansion of Internet use in Russia, more than half of that country’s urban residents over age 12 have never gone online, and more than a third have never used a computer, global figures which set Russia apart from Western countries but ones that conceal deep divisions within the Russian Federation in the electronic world.

Those are just some of the findings offered in a 144-page report released this week that was prepared by the Public Opinion Foundation on the basis of interviews with 34,000 people in 1920 cities and towns of the Russian Federation. The report itself is available at bd.fom.ru/pdf/int0309.pdf; for a summary, see lenta.ru/articles/2009/06/25/report/.

The Lenta.ru commentary suggested that when variations among various educational and regional groups in Western countries are reported, the Western press speaks “digital divides.” But these divides are so much deeper in Russia, the news agency says, that it is better to refer to them as a digital “gulf” or “abyss.”

Not only have 54 percent of Russia’s urban residents over 12 never gone online, but ten percent of this group say they have never heard of the Internet. Moreover, of those who are not going online now, a third of the population says that it has “neither the desire, nor the possibility” to do so. And only eight percent of those not online say they plan to be this year.

Equally striking are two other general findings: Thirty-six percent of the sample said they had never used a computer, but in contrast to the situation only a few years ago, those who do go online are more likely to do it at home rather than at work, something that reflects greater connectivity and probably affects how Russians use this medium.

While the survey found Internet use to be relatively high in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in the other parts of the country, the Public Opinion Foundation study found that penetration of this technology was relatively low, averaging only 11 percent or significantly less, although in this area too there were some interesting divides as well.

Perhaps the most intriguing is that more than a quarter – 28 percent – of those who go online in the Southern Federal District – which includes the North Caucasus — do so via their mobile telephones, a reflection of the shortage of landlines in that region but a pattern that makes the Internet potentially more important as a means of connecting people opposed to the regime.

Moreover, this finding is a classical example of the way in which those who participate in this and other technical worlds may skip a stage, going directly from snail mail to cell phones rather than through all the stages that the countries which pioneered the current communications revolution have gone through.

Another intriguing example of such a leap from one level of communications technology to a much more advanced one came this week with the announcement of a launch of an Internet TV service for the Finno-Ugric peoples, groups historically poorly served by native language television in the past. (www.raipon.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=131:-lr&catid=1:2009-03-11-15-49-27).

Half – 46 to 53 percent – of those who do use the Internet use it for e-mail and social networking, but what struck the researchers at the Public Opinion Foundation as important is that 53 percent of those going online said they did not express their own opinions, and 52 percent did they did not listen to the opinions of others expressed in Internet forums.

And in a finding that also divides Russians from many other peoples around the world, only 25 percent of Russians said that their lives would be significantly changed if they no longer had access to the World Wide Web, and nearly as large a share said that their lives would not be affected at all if they could no longer go online.

Such experiences and attitudes suggest that Russians are not as passionately affected by or committed to the Internet as many have assumed on the basis of uncritical extrapolations from American or West European experience where the Internet has been integrated into and plays a far larger role in the life and work of a larger part of the population.

And these Russian patterns also suggest both that Moscow would face far less opposition if they move, as the parliament of Kazakhstan did this week, to seriously restrict access to the web and that outsiders should not view the Internet as being as important a transforming force or influential player as all too many now do.

Galina Kozhevnikova, the deputy director of the SOVA Human Rights Center, said that after receiving this threat, which appears to have been timed to coincide with her organization’s release yesterday of a report on radical nationalism in Russia, she had turned to law enforcement officials and asked them to investigate. More in Dr. Paul Goble’s Window on Eurasia