Window On Eurasia: Moscow’s Program For The Repatriation Of Compatriots Collapses
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posted by eagle on June, 2009 as ANALYSIS / OPINION
Paul Goble
Vienna, June 11 – After three years of effort, Moscow has succeeded in attracting the return of only 8800 of the more than 300,000 “compatriots” abroad whose resettlement in Russia it had counted on, an outcome that should not have surprised anyone familiar with Russian conditions or with poll results showing that many Russians would like to live abroad.
In an interview published today in “Argumenty nedeli,” however, Lidiya Frafova, who heads the umbrella Russian Forum of Resettlement Organizations, suggests that the causes for the failure of this Russian government program are in fact both deeper and broader than that (www.argumenti.ru/publications/9788).
On the one hand, she says, despite what appeared to be generous funding at the launch of this program in 2007 – 17 billion rubles (500 million US dollars) over three years – Moscow in fact did not create the conditions necessary for its success, in large measure because it had not ...
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Window on Eurasia: Consumer Spending Decline to Intensify Russian Economic Problems
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posted by eagle on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
Paul Goble
Vienna, June 11 – Russia’s already troubled economy is likely to take another hit later this fall when consumers exhaust most of their reserves and significantly cut back their spending, according to Vladimir Milov, the president of the Moscow Institute of Energy Policy and a member of the opposition Solidarity Movement.
The current economic downtown, he points out, is universally recognized to be the result of declining energy prices and problems in the economies of Russia’s trading partners, but it would now be worse if Russian consumers were not continuing to spend at nearly the levels they were earlier (www.nr2.ru/ekb/235931.html).
Russian consumers have done so at the urging of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin who has argued that the current crisis will be relatively short by drawing down their savings, but those reserves will be largely gone by this fall, Milov says. And as a result, a decline in consumer spending will deliver a ...
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Window On Eurasia: 2010 Census ‘Under Threat,’ May Repeat Shortcomings Of 2002 Count
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posted by eagle on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
Paul Goble
Charlottesville, June 9 – The next Russian census, announced for 2010, may be delayed, less because of the financial problems Moscow officials have cited up to now but because of political concerns that any accurate count would show that Vladimir Putin’s social policies have not been nearly as successful as he and his government have claimed.
And even if it is not put off until the situation in the country improves, Pavel Sedakov argues in this week’s “Russian Newsweek,” there is an increasing risk that its results will be distorted for many of the same reasons and in many of the same ways that the ones reported after the 2002 enumeration were (www.runewsweek.ru/country/28698/?r1=rss&r2=full).
For the last several months, officials at Rosstat, the State Statistical Committee, have complained about cutbacks in the resources they have to carry out the census, reductions that will mean they will be able to ask fewer questions ...
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Window On Eurasia: Putin’s ‘Vulgar Eurasianism’ Has Chekist Roots
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posted by eagle on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
Paul Goble
Vienna, June 8 – Vladimir Putin’s comments during his recent visit to the graves of Denikin, Ilin, and Shmelyov at Moscow’s Donskoy Monastery Cemetery represent a kind of “extremely vulgar Eurasianism,” one whose full dimensions and shortcomings, a Moscow commentator suggests, the Russian prime minister does not comprehend.
In an article in today’s “Yezhednevny zhurnal,” Mark Feygin gives a brief outline of Eurasian doctrine as it emerged in the first Russian emigration in the 1920s and 1930s and explains both how it was exploited by the Soviet government and why its teachings, at least in any detail, have no future (www.ej.ru/?a=note&id=9152).
Beginning in the early 1920s, various émigré writes, including Prince Trubetskoy, Petr Savitsky, and a number of others elaborated in various writings a doctrine whose basic features, Feygin, suggests, include the following: First and foremost, “Russia is not Europe and it is not Asia; it is a special unique land, Eurasia,” hence the name ...
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Window On Eurasia: Moscow’s Policies Seen Unwittingly Promoting Islamist Explosions
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posted by eagle on as ANALYSIS / OPINION
Paul Goble
Vienna, June 8 – Despite its pledges to fight Islamist movements and its expanded “anti-extremism” measures, the Russian government has adopted policies that make the rise of Islamist extremism in the center of the country increasingly likely, a situation that has led one analyst to conclude that the authorities are “losing control” over Moscow and other major Russian cities.
And this situation is especially dangerous because with regard to three major policy initiatives, the Russian authorities appear to believe that what they are doing will have exactly the opposite effect, an attitude that makes it less likely that the powers that be will change course before the situation gets out of hand.
First, under pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian nationalists of almost all stripes, the authorities have generally refused to allow more mosques to open in Russian cities (as opposed to rural areas where many have) even though the number of ...
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