TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

29 October 2023: Back at it, plus texts and tunes

“Golden Autumn”, Isaac Levitan (1895)

Um… sorry.

I didn’t mean to disappear quite like that, but a week off (travel and stuff) turned into two (deadlines), three (more travel) and four (travel, deadlines and a virus). But, I mean, it’s not like anything important happened while I was gone, right?

What I’m thinking about

Truth be told, I had planned versions of this particular edition of the newsletter at least twice before: Once when the US House of Representatives deposed Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and again when it looked like he would be replaced by Jim Jordan. After Jordan couldn’t clear the bar, I put my head in my hands and had a drink (not, mind you, out of sympathy for Jordan).

That said, what happened on Capitol Hill in the last few weeks has been so remarkable that it’s still almost the only thing I can think about. (The Middle East is also taking up a big chunk of my headspace, but I’ll refrain from comment on that, at least for a while.)

My first thought about Congress is this: even the bad parts of American politics aren’t working they way they’re supposed to.

Let me explain. There are two reasons why I care about who is Speaker of the House. One reason — and the least pertinent one here — is that I’m a citizen, and so while no Republican speaker is ever like to be to my liking, I’d rather see one who, in my estimation, would do less damage, rather than more. The more important reason, however, is that I happen to believe that the US needs to continue providing significant amounts of military and economic aid to Ukraine, and the likelihood of that happening depends in no small measure on who is speaker. McCarthy, for all his faults, was politically committed to supporting Ukraine. Jordan, to add to his, was (and remains) politically committed to ending support for Ukraine. (I’ll get to Mike Johnson later.)

In thinking about how a Congressional coalition in support of Ukraine might be bolstered, a colleague suggested looking up where major American defense contractors have their factories, and who represents those districts. That same colleague — likely already knowing what I did not — suggested that I start with the factory that makes Abrams tanks, which are now being delivered to Ukraine, with new ones being purchased by the Pentagon.

So here’s the thing: Abrams tanks are manufactured entirely at the Lima Army Tank Plant (also known as the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center) in Lima, Ohio. Lima, Ohio, is located entirely in Ohio’s Fourth Congressional District. And Ohio’s Fourth Congressional District is represented by … Jim Jordan.

Now, I’m all in favor of members of Congress having positions of principle and even ideology that are at odds with the material interests of their districts and even their electoral interests as politicians. Still, we have come to expect that members of Congress vote in the economic interests of their districts more often than not, and when they habitually vote against the interests of their district, their constituents tend to vote them out.

The problem, of course, is that Jordan doesn’t need to worry about that. His district has been represented by a Republican for 96 of the last 100 years. The Lima Army Tank Plant could go bankrupt and lay off all of its employees, and Jordan would still have no difficulty winning reelection. (And it’s not like there’s a surplus of other good-paying jobs for people to take in the neighborhood: Lima’s median household income is about $38,000, compared to $62,000 for Ohio as a whole, and $74,500 nationwide.)

So that was my first thought: America is so broken that we can’t even do pork-barrel politics right.

Later, as Jordan failed to claw his way to the speakership, I was struck by the discrepancy between how Republican members of the House voted openly on the floor and how they voted secretly in conference. To recap:

• On 11 October in conference, 113 Republicans voted for Steve Scalise, 99 for Jordan, eight for other candidates, three voted “present”, and one member was absent;

• On 13 October, after Scalise failed to bring his nomination to the floor of the House, Republicans went back to conference, where 124 votes for Jordan, 81 for Austin Scott, seven for other candidates, one voted “present”, and 11 were absent;

• On 17-20 October, Jordan failed to clear the bar on the floor of the House, getting votes from 200 Republicans on first ballot, 199 on second, and 194 on third, before finally withdrawing.

Now, there are somethings we know. We know, for one thing, that Republicans in competitive seats — and particularly those in districts that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 — were reluctant to see Jordan as speaker, fearing that it would make their races harder to win in 2024. We also know that Jordan and Donald Trump put a lot of pressure, including inciting threats of violence, on Republican members to vote for Jordan on the floor. Those two countervailing forces go a long way to explaining why so many Republicans voted against Jordan in conference but for him on the floor.

But they don’t go all the way. Presumably, if people could do the math and see that Jordan was going to lose on the floor, they would be more likely to come out and vote against him, in order to burnish their moderate credentials for voters back home. In fact, that’s probably why Jordan lost votes on the successive ballots. Yet the vast majority of Republicans who voted against Jordan in conference continued to vote for him on the floor, suggesting that they were more afraid of the signal they would send to Trump, than of the signal they would send to their constituents.

Looking at all of this dysfunction in the round — members of Congress consistently voting and pursuing policies that are out of step with their own political interests and the material interests of their constituents — a second thought occurred: I’ve seen this before. In Russia.

Specifically, I was reminded of the success that Putin had in the earliest years of his presidency in getting Russia’s fractious political and economic elite of the 1990s and early 2000s to abandon the constituencies that gave them power and autonomy — local and regional constituencies, ethnic and ideological constituencies, commercial and even criminal constituencies — in the service of Putin himself.

Putin’s success — and the resulting demise of the Russian elite — was underpinned by Putin’s effective monopolization of two things. The first was patronage. One of the first things Putin did after coming to power was to begin to concentrate control over the country’s financial flows, while giving himself the power to redistribute access to those flows as both a carrot and a stick. As a result, the only route to obtaining and maintaining wealth, power and privilege lay through your relationship, directly or indirectly, with Putin.

The second object of Putin’s monopoly was expectations. Most people in the Russian system were perfectly well aware of what Putin was doing and the deleterious effect it would have on them — and likely on Russia as a whole. To challenge the system, however, would only make sense if you could be sure that others would challenge it, too. Otherwise, acting out of principle would achieve nothing but one’s own impoverishment, or worse. As the George Washington University political scientist Henry Hale wrote, describing this “patronal” system:

Given that everyone expects everyone else to behave this way, it makes no sense for an individual to behave differently since she would only wind up hurting herself and possibly those who depend on her, possibly severely. Such people may all … prefer a system where rules are impartially enforced. But so long as they do not expect everyone else to change his behavior at the same time, they are caught in a dilemma that is captured nicely by the title of Rasma Karklins’s book, The System Made Me Do It. And by “doing it,” they can make a case that they are in fact morally right under the circumstances. And so their predicament endures.

What I’m thinking, then, is that Trump’s hold over the Republican party increasingly resembles Putin’s hold over the Russian elite. Many of the people affected (maybe even most) may recognize that what they are being asked to do and to endure, and what they are being asked to perpetrate on others, is disadvantageous to them themselves, and perhaps even wrong on principle. But because Trump has effectively monopolized both the flow of the resources critical to Republican politicians — namely, the dynamics of GOP base politics and primaries, as well as the right-wing media ecosystem — and the structure of expectations, it doesn’t fundamentally matter.

As long as Trump retains these monopolies, Republicans of all stripes will compete for a place int he MAGA hierarchy. They will support him even when he undercuts them on issues, like abortion and foreign policy, that have been central to their politics for decades. They will switch their positions to ensure that they are keeping up not with the expectations of their constituents, but with the expectations of their peers and their patron.

If this is true, then we will not get any of these people — whether Russian elites or Republican politicians — to behave differently by appealing to their ideologies or sensibilities. The only effective strategy will be to attack the monopolies of resources and patronage held by their patrons. Breaking the monopoly over resources, I think, is more difficult, but it will become easier as and when the monopoly of expectations is broken. Republicans and Russian elites will rediscover, as they say where I grew up, the “fear of G-d” only when it becomes clear that Trump and Putin can no longer deliver on their promises or their threats.

That, I suppose, is one more reason why Putin needs to be defeated. And Trump, too.

What I’m reading

It’s been a month since I did one of these, so I’m afraid this is going to be a bit of a list. Back to the bullet points, in other words. Apologies.

• Among the biggest pieces of news out of Russia recently was the arrest of the bulk of Alexei Navalny’s legal defense team on charges of extremism. Pavel Kanygin had an excellent report — focusing on a profile of Alexei Liptser, one of Navalny’s lawyers — in Meduza on 17 October. A week earlier, Advokatskaia ulitsa (which translates to Lawyers’ street) published a massive investigation into how the Russian legal system has methodically circumscribed the legal profession’s autonomy — and then promptly closed its doors. The publication’s work has been consistently excellent, and they will be sorely missed. Its demise, however, is wholly reflective of the demise of the Russian judiciary.

• While we’re on the subject of repression, Kommersant had a report on 23 October reviewing law enforcement statistics on enforcement of the draconian censorship and ideological control laws put into place since February 2022. The key takeaway: police and prosecutors are increasingly focusing on felony cases, carrying jail sentences, instead of misdemeanors, which are punishable by fines.

• Switching from repression to ideological and political control:

  • Andrei Vinokurov reported in Kommersant on 20 October on a conference held in Moscow by the Expert Institute of Social Research, one of the Kremlin’s in-house think tanks, on the subject of “family values and the value of the family.” As Institute director Firdus Aliev explained, “we see our country as a unique civilization. And the traditional Russian family is the foundation of our civilization.” Indeed.

  • Historical memory, by contrast, is evidently not the foundation of Russia’s ostensibly unique civilization. On 26 October, Meduza published a list — which will continue to be updated on a regular basis — of monuments to the victims of Soviet repression that have been demolished or severely defaced. The list is so long, Meduza writes, that it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that this is a coordinated campaign designed to revise Soviet history.

• Earlier in the month, Meduza’s Andrei Pertsev had an interesting report on growing unease among United Russia politicians about what they fear is the Kremlin’s diminishing capacity to manage protest in some of the country’s farther flung regions and to ensure the party’s electoral dominance in certain parts of the periphery. The Kremlin’s willingness to allow the loyal Communist Party to retain power in Khakassia evidently has some in the party worried — probably correctly — that the Kremlin values its own success over and above that of the ruling party.

• The Bell’s Valeria Pozychanyuk and Irina Pankratova published a fascinating investigation into Stepan Kovalchuk, the new head of video at the Russian social network VKontakte, whose job it is to turn the network into a video platform so large that Russia will finally be able to block YouTube without depriving Russians of their favorite cute cats. Stepan is, of course, the third generation of Kovalchuks to have become obscenely wealthy and powerful since Putin came to power 23 years ago. His father, Kirill Kovalchuk, is head of the National Media Group; his uncle, Boris Kovalchuk, runs Inter RAO; his grandfather Mikhail Kovalchuk, is president of the Kurchatov Institute, Russia’s largest nuclear research facility; and his great uncle, Yury Kovalchuk, owns the bank Rossiia. But that’s only a fraction of the problem. Other figures in the story include Stepan Kovalchuk’s boss at VKontakte, Vladimir Kirienko, the son of Sergei Kirienko, Deputy Head of Russia’s Presidential Administration, and Boris Dobrodeev, who until recently ran Mail.ru, another Russian tech giant, and is the son of Oleg Dobrodeev, the head of one of Russia’s largest television stations. I guess Sting can sleep soundly: Clearly, Russia’s elite, at least, love their children, too.

• On 16 October, Meduza published a curious — and curiously disturbing — profile of a 60-year-old Ukrainian woman from Kharkiv, who moved to Russia to live with her daughter after the invasion began and supports Russia and Putin, but who found herself homeless and abandoned not long after arriving in Russia and is aghast at how Russia treats its citizens.

• Equally depression-inducing was a 25 October report by Courtney Weaver in the Financial Times on the Russian émigrés who are planning to return home — most of whom left for reasons of convenience, rather than principle.

• Readers interested in the news from the South Caucasus — where Azerbaijan overran and effectively reconquered Nagorno-Karabakh, leading to the mass exodus of Armenians and the repression of those who remain — may be interested in an essay in the New York Times by the NYU Abu Dhabi sociologist (and my old professor at Northwestern), Geori Derlugian. It is not happy reading, but it is important reading.

• Finally, regular readers will know that I have been complaining for some time about Biden’s apparent unwillingness to lay out for the American public the national security case for supporting Ukraine. Well, the President began to do just that in an Oval Office address on 19 October. If my thoughts (see above) are correct, however, laying out this case — as important as it still seems to me — this kind of speechifying may usefully have an impact on American citizens and on those Republican policymakers who are still on the fence. It is unlikely, however, to have much of an impact on Republican politicians themselves. Indeed, as the New York Times reported earlier in the month, cutting aid for Ukraine has become something of a litmus test for the new American right, akin to abortion.

What I’m listening to

Just in case my comments above gave anyone the impression that I have no time for the sons of famous fathers, I seek atonement. I discovered, while traveling, the Sam Grisman Project, fronted by the son of the legendary American folk musician and Jerry Garcia collaborator David ‘Dawg’ Grisman. This is nepotism I can get behind.