TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup
19 November 2023: Ends of the line, plus texts and tunes
After much hemming and hawing in the virtual pages of this newsletter, I finally got my act together and published something real about the need for the White House to pivot to a national-security framing of the war in Ukraine — after, of course, President Biden actually made that pivot in his 19 October Oval Office address. The key point, I think, is this:
The question for the Biden administration, and for Ukraine’s supporters in both parties, then, is how to shift that logic and get Republicans and even more independents on board. The answer is national security.
An October 17 Quinnipiac University poll points the way: 65% of respondents said that supporting Ukraine was in America’s national interest, including 87% of Democrats, 63% of independents, and, remarkably, 49% of Republicans (versus 44% of Republicans who disagreed). Note that these responses were collected before President Biden made his Oval Office address linking Ukraine and Israel, and laying out the national-security case for supporting both.
I’ll add one more question for the White House, though: Will they stick with it?
What I’m thinking about
If you really want to be depressed — and be honest, why else would you be reading this newsletter? — dive into Ekaterina Aliabyeva’s interview in Bumaga on Wednesday with the 76-year-old woman whose complaint to the police led to the arrest, trial and imprisonment for seven years of Sasha Skochilenko, whose crime was replacing price tags in a supermarket with anti-war messages.
It’s hard to know where to start with this one. Maybe with the fact that, despite feeling that a seven-year jail sentence is a bit much — “they should have just whipped her and let her go,” the unnamed woman said — she doesn’t feel sorry for Skochilenko. Why? Because Skochilenko’s arrest led to a minor social media campaign against the woman who filed the complaint.
Or maybe what matters most is that the woman is incapable of believing that Skochilenko could have posted the anti-war messages because she believed in them. “I don’t believe she was upset,” she told Aliabyeva. “And what about the fact that Ukraine never existed, and that three quarters of the territory of that Ukraine are Russian, it’s Novorossia and not some kind of Ukraine — I don’t suppose she thought about that, that Sasha?”
Or maybe it’s that the woman — who up in Baku and claims that “my cousins are half-Ukrainian” and one lives outside Kyiv (although she uses a derogatory term) — says she ignores state television and watches YouTube instead. Why?
“I watch Tsargrad, Delyagin. And Satanovsky,” she said — naming a nationalist TV channel associated with the Russian Orthodox Church and two nationalist commentators, neither of whom happens to be ethnically Russian (and one of whom is a former president of the Russian Jewish Congress, but hey ho). “Those guys are great. What do I like? I remember from my childhood experiences in Baku what we always used to say: Russians are the worst. All nations support their own, except Russians.”
And when you’re done with that, take a look at Elizaveta Osetinskaya’s interview with the sociologist Alexei Levinson, a founder of the Levada Center and one of the keenest analysts of Russian social reality. The whole interview is worth your time, butI was struck in particular by the following passage:
Osetinskaya: What happens if Putin loses the war?
Levinson: It would be very bad. Rather, it’s impossible. Because Putin is Russia. People don’t think in the categories that Putin lost, but Russia didn’t lose. So at the moment, that simply cannot be. After some time, maybe a kind of differentiation is possible, and then maybe people will say to Putin, ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, tremendous thanks, but we’ll carry on without you.’ But for that to happen, something major would have to change. For now, what Volodin and others say — those formulas [TL;DRussia: Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin is famous for saying that without Putin there is no Russia, among other things], whatever I might think of them, it’s not that they’re correct but they’re accepted by a huge number of people. Russia cannot lose, because if it loses to Ukraine, it loses to America. I mean, losing to Ukraine is nonsense [for most people]: how can that even happen, what are we talking about? But if you lose to America and the West, then the conversation shifts to Russia being back on its knees. ‘And that would be horrible’, Russians say. What would happen to Putin if Russia loses? I think he thinks that it would be the end of his career.
Osetinskaya: So it would be the end for him?
Levinson: Yes.
On one level, this is a common conjecture: Putin can’t allow himself to lose the war without losing the legitimacy on which his power rests. But Levinson’s point, I think, is deeper than that, and more complex. (And I do highly suggest reading or watching the rest of the interview.) And when read in the context of Aliabyeva’s interview with the woman who put Skochilenko in jail it gets deeper still.
As Levinson goes on to remind us, human beings are social animals.
And in order to be social, they need to come together. People come together in the worst of circumstances, even in gas chambers. They come together at resorts. They come together in hospitals. Everywhere. Because they are social creatures. And they need a symbol around which they can come together.
As I’ve argued elsewhere (including in this little presentation at the Nemtsov Forum recently in Berlin), that sociality is particularly important in Russia, where formal institutions don’t work terribly well, and the ability to come together is more or less the only source of security and prosperity most Russians have ever known. It’s even more important in times of uncertainty like these. So what happens if — when — Russia loses the war?
I’m not at all convinced that it’s the end of the road for Putin or his project. As Levinson makes clear (and I agree), the habit in Russian life has been to come together particularly strongly not when things are good, but when they are bad — because it’s when they’re bad that you really need that sense of community. The woman who got Skochilenko in trouble littered her interview with the second-person plural: “we”, “us”, “our”. She was angry not that Skochilenko was accusing Russian troops of war crimes, but that she was accusing “our boys” of war crimes (though the ethno-national identification is also there and hard to ignore).
Deepening crisis, then, will heighten the need for a symbol, not reduce it. And there’s nothing at all to suggest that the symbol around which people come together needs to be a positive one: Russians can be just as easily motivated by ressentiment and irredentism as by victory. I suspect Putin knows that, which is why I suspect he may not be as concerned about his future as Alexei suggests. Putin doesn’t need to win the war to win at Russian politics. He just needs to fight it.
One more thing I’m thinking: Maybe it’s good that I sometimes miss a week? I mean, do you really want to read this kind of stuff week-in and week-out? Do I really want to write it?
What I’m reading
One more for the depressing social reality file: Verstka had a long-long read on 1 November (missed it last time around, sorry) on the return of Wagner mercenaries to the fight. Those — evidently relatively few — who have chosen to stay with Wagner itself (now decapitated, of course) are finding their way to Africa and other fronts, but not to Ukraine. Those who chose to go back to Ukraine, evidently a significant number, are signing up with the Army, with the state paramilitary force Rosgvardia (which reportedly got a lot of Wagner’s kit), and with Redut, a pseudo-private mercenary force associated, like Wagner before it, with the GRU. Mostly, though, they’re returning home, biding their time, and beating up their wives and girlfriends. (Some are also returning to prison, but that’s another story.)
In other news, Kommersant reports usefully on the state of the Russian budget, which is back in the black, thanks to a 28.7% year-on-year jump in hydrocarbon income. That, in turn, should be read in tandem with the report in the Financial Times on Tuesday that “almost none” of Russia’s oil is actually being sold under the G7’s price cap. Also depressing, I suppose.
If I might be allowed to toot my own horn in this session, I’d highlight a conversation I had with NYU’s Joshua Tucker and Stanford’s Kathryn Stoner back on 6 November about the impact of the Israel/Hamas war on Russia’s regional and global policy objectives and the line that the US and Europe are trying to hold in Ukraine. Kathryn isn’t as pessimistic as I am. (Josh was asking the questions for Good Authority, the successor to the Monkey Cage, which some readers may remember fondly.)
To pivot to things somewhat less depressing, Carnegie’s Eugene Rumer and Andrew Weiss had a good piece in the Wall Street Journal Thursday, suggesting that however the war in Ukraine ends, it is unlikely to lay the groundwork for a lasting improvement in Russia’s geo-strategic behavior — and thus the West ought to be preparing for a strategy of containment. Containment is not my favorite word, but I agree in principle, and I’m going to take it as good news that people are beginning to think seriously about Russia — and non-magically (as their headline implores) — beyond the next few months.
And finally, the best news of the week comes from Europe, where the reality of American political dysfunction is finally hitting home, and EU and member-state governments are gearing up at least partially to cover the gap in funding that Washington is likely to leave, according to a report in Saturday’s New York Times.
What I’m listening to
With apologies to those who don’t listen to music in Russian, there’s really only one song for this week’s newsletter — Yury Shevchuk’s immortal ditty about getting plastered with an FSB officer. It was never really meant to be funny. And that’s the point.
Depressing or not, your weekend columns are welcomed. How else can we understand the day-to-day madness if we don't read/hear thoughtful insights and analysis from those in the know?
I don't know whether to laugh or to cry. The author of a depressing Substack on depressing topics that only masochists are inclined to read becomes himself so hopeless that he questions why anyone wants to read what he writes and furthermore why/whether he wants to write it.
Maybe the operative word here is "wants." Speaking for myself, no, I do not WANT to read depressing articles, and I understand why you do not WANT to write them. Nonetheless, I NEED to understand these matters, as depressing as the current state of them is, and I hope that you NEED to communicate that depressing state to anyone who NEEDs to understand it.
We too often turn a blind eye to the abyss, increasing the likelihood that we will fall into it. Better to acknowledge and to understand that we are edging toward the precipice, while we can perhaps correct course, than to be dumb-founded as we plunge into 'unforeseen' catastrophe. Many catastrophes are foreseeable: the financial crisis, Russia's invasion of Ukraine (good god! Putin had been telegraphing that one for over a decade!), the devastating effects of climate change (over a half-century of warnings about that one), even Hamas' assault on Israel (I mean, really, they publicly posted videos of training exercises!). Ignorance is bliss only until the moment it bites you in the ass.
A spoonful of sugar may help the medicine go down, but we've become a people who WANT all sugar all the time. Failing to take our medicine insures that we will eventually embrace the sugar-high of our ignorance so thoroughly that we'll succumb to whatever "rough beast slouches toward" Washington to be reborn (Thinking of you, DJT!).