The Sayano Chernobyl
Vitaly Portnikov
August 21, 2009
Grani.ru

I remember the first days after the Chernobyl disaster well. I wasn’t living in Kiev then, but wanted to visit my relatives for the May 1st holidays. The accident had already taken place, but it was absolutely impossible to understand what was happening: the official reports were patchy, Western radio voices were strenuously suppressed, and even they at first had trouble getting a sense of what happened.

The May 1st demonstration resolved everything. It was hard to suspect that it could be conducted in a city that should, to be safe, have been evacuated. That was how I ended up in the post-Chernobyl Kiev. And after several days took ill with a heavy cold. Panic was already wandering the city streets, everyone was picking up [Radio] Svoboda and Voice of America, buying up red wine by the case. The doctors who visited me only shrugged their shoulders: what do you want, radiation, people are dying now like flies… They started washing the tram stops with soapy foam, parents tried to send away their children to relatives in other cities, even under threat of expulsion from the Party and dismissal from work.

And so, in its throes, sneering over its subjects and scornful of them, the empire of lies, whose leadership would declare glasnost just a few months after the Chernobyl nightmare, was on the verge of death. And it seemed that all this would end forever. At least they wouldn’t hide catastrophes from the people. At least in the critical moments, the government would think not about a pretty picture on the television, but about human lives.

It turned out that everything was just starting. The accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station, and the willingness of authorities to crush the single(!) journalist who disputed the official version of events, presses this home with complete clarity.

In recent years, many in Russia were sincerely perplexed, [wondering] why the crazy dissenters went to their marches, and independent journalists, instead of describing the color of Kseniya Sobchak’s underwear or the eyebrow movements of yet another high-ranking bureaucrat, tried to make sense of the authorities’ true intentions. As if these people didn’t live in the Soviet epoch and don’t understand what stupefying silence leads to. As if they don’t remember how one could only find out about plane crashes if they happened in the West, how those who tried to relate the execution of workers in Novocherkassk were arrested, how they suppressed the truth about natural disasters, hunger, emergencies.

Ultimately, Chernobyl was the end and not the beginning to the lies. In that same Ukraine in the 30s, newspapers merrily recounted the successes of agriculture to their dying readers in the epoch of the Holodomor. Then, already after the war, an entire section of Kiev went underwater when the authorities tried to backfill Babi Yar, with its hated memory of murdered Jews, and erect a dance floor in its place – and again, to speak about this was anti-Soviet agitation.

They have found just about the same clause for journalist Mikhail Afanasyev. I’m not one to judge the truth or exactness of his information about the possible victims of the accident. I won’t even say that this person is saving the honor of the journalist profession. At least because the workers of the official Russian media and those close to them, who lie to the people daily about what happens in their own country and the world around it, aren’t journalists at all: they are ordinary grey bureaucrats, working for their ration in prescribed conditions.

Were there a different society, then journalists would appear. But in order for this to happen, Russia’s citizens must themselves feel the necessity for honest journalism, which thinks about them, and not the authorities. Not for the sake of abstract freedom and democracy, but for the sake of ordinary safety. So they’ll remember about you, your wife, your son, your mother, when you end up the victim of nature, an accident, terrorism – and not just cast them aside, like soulless debris, for the sake of a pretty television report.

translation by theotherrussia.org

A Strategy With No Dangers
Vitaly Portnikov
May 15, 2009
Grani.ru

Having signed the National security strategy for Russia until 2020, President Dmitri Medvedev gave the chance for Western – you almost want to say “Sovietologists” – to talk once more about Russian foreign policy.  Perhaps this is a signal for Barack Obama, the new American president?  Perhaps the new Russian president in such a way demonstrates confidence in his own strengths and a continuity of policy?  Since it is absolutely indispensable for the American President, who plans to come to Moscow, to understand that the Russian leadership will continue to regard siting elements of US missile defense in Europe as all but the most important problem of their country’s security.

Any sensible Russian could tell her president about the major threats to the country’s national security.  In the natural resource dependence of the economy, which would turn Russia into a third-world country the next day after a fall in oil prices.  In the corruption suffocating the country.  In the catastrophic population loss, which calls into question the physical capability, not even of the development, but simply of populating Russia’s expanses.  But who among the Russian political elite cares about these trifles?

In the minds of the people who have by some accident ended up in Moscow’s corridors of power at the start of the new millennium, present-day Russia is a sort-of clone of the Soviet Union, rising from some imagined knees.  Naturally, the threats to this clone, which lives its life in a virtual Kremlin-televised space, are completely different.  Its major opponent is those same United States, who dream of beating Russia down and hindering its renewal.  Its major betrayer is the former Soviet satellite states, who dared to regard the happy years of sitting in the shade of their “big brother” as not quite the best times in their history, and are now entering into cooperation with the overseas adversary.  Its major ally is China, whose leadership hardly dreams about joint battle with the adversary, as it economically – and the crisis has clearly proven – depends on its well-being.

Remarkably, all the threats thought to be serious at the start of the century have practically disappeared from the new strategy.  The current authorities aren’t worried about the growing divisions in society, terrorism and separatism, despite the anything-but-simple situation in the Caucasus, the crisis of social welfare and public health, and the criminalization of social relations.  Is there actually none of this left?  One would really like for it not to be there – and so issues actually critical to Russia’s future are simply culled from the strategy.  Even allowing that this is an ordinary, bureaucratic document, at least it used to give evidence that the authorities understood what country they lived in.

But now, the strategy approved by its president has no relation to the problems of actual Russia.  From the document, we can learn everything we need about the fanciful day-dreams* of Russian officialdom.   About how every clerk, landing a job at the Security Council or in the head of state’s administration, thinks of themselves as a Napoleon, and what image of Russia takes shape in his mind on the road to Rublyevka**.  But we won’t learn anything about Russia itself, just as we won’t understand at all, what kind of country it will be in 2020.  One thing is evident – if the documents passed by the highest leadership of the country continue to be so far removed from the actual situation in Russia and the world, ten years down the line, Dmitri Medvedev’s successor won’t be concerned with disseminating strategy any longer.

*trans. note.  Portnikov references Manilov, a character from Gogol’s “Dead Souls” who has a lofty imagination.

**an unofficial name of a prestigious residential area West of Moscow, Russia.

translation by theotherrussia.org

A De-Facto Confession

Vitaly Portnikov
Grani.Ru
11/21/08

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin became yet another high-ranking Russian civil servant to admit that an economic crisis exists in the country. He did this loudly and solemnly at a congress of the party of power. And having promised that there would not be a repeat of the 1998 collapse, he took personal responsibility for the social impact of the crisis, which even such a mighty national leader doesn’t have the power to prevent.

Unlike President Dmitri Medvedev’s statement, which confessed that 2009 would be a hard year for Russians, or the interview with Minister of Economic Development Elvira Nabiullina, which acknowledged the breakdown of the Russian economic model from Putin’s time [in office], Putin’s performance was liberally replayed on national television. Russians will remember precisely two of his excerpts, that a crisis exists, and that there won’t be any social impact. They will be remembered when the numbers at currency exchanges start to traitorously turn to favor the bourgeois and vanishing dollar. They will astonish yet another laid-off employee, when he cannot find a new job, and discovers that the government which promised to help him can do nothing for its citizen. Precisely these words will be quoted, when yet another strategic enterprise, or more importantly, a city’s major employer ceases operations, sending its workers overboard…

One can list such possibilities to remember Vladimir Putin’s words endlessly. Something else is more important: from the simple, popular point of view, these were the most important words of his political career. The public remembers well that Boris Yeltsin promised to lie down across the rails if prices grew, and then didn’t lie down. He promised that there would be no default, and then there was a default. But before these unkept promises, Yeltsin had a large and turbulent political biography under his belt: the anticipation of changes, that amazing air of freedom which today is already difficult to feel in Russia’s twilight (incidentally, the air becomes so thin during crisis years, that it sometimes seems fresh). And for Putin -years of assurances of stability, ending in admitting a crisis. That is why the Russian national memory won’t put President Putin together with stability, the fight with America and a glamorized Rublevka. There will only be Prime Minister Putin, who didn’t protect the country and her residents from a fiasco.

But could he have kept silent about all this? Probably, since no one was making him or his speech-writers speak up. In general, that’s how a public official differs from a televised underling. He tells the people the truth, which is sometimes bitter. Especially since Vladimir Putin doesn’t need to be elected anywhere, anytime soon. Or am I mistaken? But having been created by television, these people only believe their receivers. They believe that if you say that there’s no crisis, it won’t happen. They believe that if you say a crisis exists, but there won’t be an impact, then there won’t be.

Today’s elite, which had its hand held as it was brought into power, which never had to fight with anyone for it, which confused the government with a corporation and is incapable of a simple analysis of the situation six months ahead, much less of making strategic decisions, believes in an a remarkable manner in the power of the word, not of the action. Of the televised word. Appearing before a carefully arranged audience, that’s precisely why Vladimir Putin delivered what may end up being the most important and sole remembered speech of his future biography.

translation by theotherrussia.org

For further background on the subject, read coverage from The New York Times and Bloomberg.

Update (August 9): Read up-to-date coverage from CNN, the Kommersant newspaper, The New York Times, and the BBC (with video).

Update 2 (August 10): Georgia Pulls out troops, calls for cease-fire (AP and BBC). Two journalists die in S. Ossetia (AP). Russia brushes aside calls for cease-fire (The Guardian).

Update 3 (August 11): Russian troops invade Georgia, take Gori (The Times).
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A Mirror For Heroes
Grani.ru
Vitaly Portnikov

Russian television channels, having forgotten the Olympics, are broadcasting reports from the shelled [South Ossetian capital] of Tskhinvali. Russia’s representative in the UN Security Council, Vitaly Churkin, is talking about a loss of faith in the Georgian leadership. The head of the international committee of the State Duma, Konstantin Kosachev, is calling for Georgia’s isolation.

There’s no point in being astonished at such words and emotions: there is a real war in the region, houses are crumbling, people are perishing. But if Russia’s leadership listened closely to the statements of their Georgian colleagues, they would recognize themselves –only during the period of their own war in the Caucasus.

After all, what did they speak about in Moscow during the epoch of carpet bombings in Grozny, street fighting in the Chechen mountains, “clean-up operations” (this word [zachistka] has become so widespread in the Russian language, that it is now used for any reason – both when a business needs to be taken away and when a parking space needs to be found)? They spoke of restoring Constitutional order. And were absolutely certain –not just the authorities, by the way, but a large part of society –that the best method for this restoration was precisely war, and not a tiresome negotiation process. That shooting enemies was much wiser than finding allies.

And has the the opinion of what happened really changed now? Doesn’t the modern Russian leadership pride itself in the restoration of Constitutional order in Chechnya – even against the background of a deteriorating situation not only in that Republic, but in the neighboring regions of the Northern Caucasus?

The Georgians also talk about restoring Constitutional order. It was precisely this kind of restoration that Mikhail Saakashvili was preparing for since his first day of coming to power – because he desperately wants to resemble Vladimir Putin. And if anyone can blame the Georgian president for this, it’s his Western friends. But we of the former Soviet Union know: the society here adores the victor with his bloody saber bared. Experienced diplomats, devoting their lives to the negotiation process are out of favor here.

And if for Mikhail Saakashvili it became a point of honor and point of life to hold power in Georgia, then the he could not come up with anything better, than a new war in the Russian model. The whole scenario was written long before Saakashvili became Georgia’s president: talk about commitment to the world, nurture the image of the enemy among the public with the help of controlled media, wait for an occasion and strike. And already the Georgian Putin is leading the brave forces against the enemy with a sure hand…

In this situation, incidentally, Russia had one clear advantage –in the period of the Caucasus war, she did not have an unfriendly country of such size and such capabilities near by. For precisely this reason, restoring the Constitutional order in South Ossetia is a risky operation for Saakashvili.

Provided we’re not dealing with a banal exchange, agreed upon by Tbilisi and Moscow: you take Ossetia, we –Abkhazia, which is too hard for you to crack anyway. You’re the victor, we’re the peacekeepers. And everyone’s happy. And the dead –these are already trivial matters. The death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic, as said [Joseph Stalin], the last commander equally close to the Russian and Georgian rulers.

But if the matter at hand isn’t about an exchange, but about an uncoordinated operation to return the territory of South Ossetia into Georgia, then we will have to live through a full-blown war. After all, even the capture of the near-border Tskhinvali doesn’t signify the end of the conflict. And it isn’t likely that Moscow can elect not to intervene –not so much from the point of view of their relations with Saakashvili, but thinking of their positions on the North Caucasus. To “surrender” South Ossetia– is to demonstrate to the people of the region once again that the authority in Moscow is just as foreign and indifferent as the authority in Tbilisi. Simply put, “surrendering” South Ossetia today, one can lose North [Ossetia] tomorrow. And if one looks at what’s taking place through the eyes of Dmitri Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, and not Mikhail Saakashvili –then one cannot help but ask the question: Is Georgian nationhood worth such sacrifices?

translated by theotherrussia.org