Polina Sinovets, Odessa National University
Last year was significant for Russia. From the excellent organization of the Olympic Games, Moscow moved on to the annexation of Crimea, and then to direct intervention in the East of Ukraine. Suddenly, the friendly Olympic bear turned into a wild grizzly bear.
Despite sanctions and falling oil prices, Russia continues to actively aggravate the conflict in Ukraine. It seems that Russian motivation is based on several main reasons - ideological, geopolitical, as well as military-political. It is they who make the Kremlin fight so fiercely for Ukraine.
Ukraine as a mirror and source of political processes
In terms of most cultural, political and ideological characteristics, Russia and Ukraine are very close. Such proximity makes everything that happens in Ukraine very dangerous for Moscow, increasing the risk of a repeat of the situation on Russian soil. That is why a pro-Western democratic Ukraine poses a clear threat to the Kremlin.
Of course, the problem is not so clear cut. In Russia, to this day, there is a fairly common position regarding the kinship of both peoples, separated solely due to erroneous political processes, such as, for example, the proclamation of the independence of Ukraine. From time immemorial, the formation of the Russian state took place through the "gathering of lands", i.e. the conquest of neighboring territories, the unity of which was then ensured by a strong central government. Over time, this strategy turned the small Principality of Moscow into the Russian Empire, which became a full-fledged active participant in the European balance of power system. The Soviet period only increased the power of Russia.
To a large extent, we can say that the creation of the Russian Empire was preceded by the inclusion of Ukraine as Little Russia. The agreements of 1654-1668, in fact, made Ukraine completely dependent on the Muscovite kingdom, forming the basis for the formation of a strong Russian empire in the 1700s.
Thus, the concept of the “Russian world” is based on the idea of the existence of a “single nation” living on the territory of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. At the same time, the drift of Ukraine to the West not only undermines the basis of Russian imperial ambitions, but also threatens the transition of “originally Russian” lands to a geopolitical enemy.
Geopolitical aspect
Russian strategic culture is based on two dominant characteristics: a deep sense of vulnerability and, at the same time, imperial pretensions. Ukraine occupies an important place in understanding both.
Despite the vast expanses of Russian lands, their European part is not so large. Throughout history, Russian lands have been repeatedly attacked and captured by various enemies (Tatars, Poles, French, Germans), a significant part of which is associated with the West. Accordingly, it has always been important for Russia to have buffer states along the perimeter of its borders, especially borders with NATO. Today, one of the main military dangers identified by Russia is the expansion of NATO to the East, while one of the main fears has become the deployment of NATO armed forces or a European missile defense system on the territory of Ukraine. The reason is that these moves exacerbate Moscow's age-old fears of shrinking the strategic depth of Russian territory.
Accordingly, the Kremlin portrays the events in Ukraine not as a national movement within a sovereign state, but as a battle between East and West: the United States against Russia, the custodian of traditional values and the UN-based international system. What is happening in Ukraine is also presented to the general public as part of the struggle of the Third Rome with the metaphysical Antichrist, represented by the West with its “moral decline” and refusal to respect traditional “spheres of influence”. Russian official and media rhetoric identifies the "liberal West" with "Ukrainian neo-Nazis" who are represented by American puppets. Sergei Glazyev, an adviser to the President of Russia, claims that in a few years the United States will begin to openly threaten Russia. Accordingly, Moscow must be ready to repel aggression militarily, politically, economically, and socially by forming an international conservative coalition around itself.
Technology and strategic weapons
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian military industry lost its main source of production of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), since the main missile enterprises of the USSR were based in Ukrainian Dnepropetrovsk, Pavlograd and Kharkov.
Russia had to restore its own rocket industry (on the basis of the Votkinsk Machine-Building Plant), which required significant financial and technological efforts from Moscow, moreover, this is a long-term process. Today, about 50% of Russian ground-based ICBMs (which account for 80% of all deployed Russian strategic nuclear forces) are still to some extent associated with Ukrainian enterprises (on the basis of which SS-18 "Satan," SS-19 "Stiletto" navigation systems were produced). , and even Topol-M missile targeting systems).
The modern conflict between Russia and Ukraine has suspended cooperation based on the maintenance of Russian missiles by Ukrainian enterprises. According to official data, Moscow intends to transfer the maintenance of all ICBMs to its own enterprises, which may be associated, at a minimum, with the risk of reducing the effectiveness of ICBMs, and, in the worst case, with difficulties in the field of nuclear safety. In addition, the fears of Russians are largely related to the risk that Ukrainian enterprises will transfer the technological secrets of ICBMs to the West.
Thus, for Russia, Ukraine plays a special role due to ideological, geopolitical, and technological reasons. Ukraine is the most important area Russian interests outside its own national territory, a sphere that Moscow is ready to defend with weapons in its hands and at the cost of considerable losses.
Andrey Makarychev, University of Tartu, Estonia
On March 3, the head of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs (and a key figure in Kremlin propaganda) A.K. . What is surprising, however, is not the content of these options, but the fact that Alexei Pushkov introduced them into Russian political discourse.
Alexey Pushkov's statement is extremely important. Instead of ridiculing and denying the possibility of an orange revolution in Russia, Pushkov accepted it as possible variant developments and perhaps more and more likely. The Kremlin-sponsored Anti-Maidan movement is paradoxically moving in the same direction. By elevating anti-Maidan rhetoric to the highest political level, the Kremlin is effectively recognizing as real what the movement is targeting.
This crucial point because so far Kremlin propaganda has taken a different approach, denying the existence of any serious alternative to the Kremlin's policies and worldview. This was especially evident in Russian politics in relation to Ukraine, which was based on the denial of any possibility of Ukraine's development outside of Russian influence. Now the boundaries of reality, as outlined in Putin's discourse, have expanded to include unpleasant options, and this could have serious consequences.
Whether the shift in rhetoric outlined by Pushkov is accidental or deliberate, it could hit the Kremlin itself. It is easier for opponents of the regime to give their own meanings to an accepted reality than to convince people that it is something that might one day happen.
Of course, according to Pushkov, the coming to power of Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Mikhail Kasyanov is unacceptable, but he himself paradoxically legitimized this option as a hypothetical possibility. All the opposition needs to do is change the format of the discourse and fill it with positive content. Now there is no need to prove that such a variant is possible under certain specific circumstances, since Pushkov has already done it for them.
The same applies to the scenario of mass protests against the regime. The irony is that even many dissidents are skeptical about the possibility of a new wave of anti-Putin demonstrations. However, Pushkov himself said that such a possibility is not ruled out. Again, all the opposition has to do is change the direction of this narrative and publicly defend the argument that people should be free to voice their demands without fear of reprisals.
By making the object of its existential fears - a popular uprising - the subject of public discussion, the Kremlin only increases the chances that many Russians may take the possibility quite seriously. By redesigning the imaginary threat, Putin's propagandists only increase the possibility of its implementation.
Andrey Makarychev, University of Tartu
How has the crisis in Russian-Ukrainian relations affected the Baltic Sea Region (BSR), which for two decades has been considered one of the few success stories among regional integration projects in Europe? The crisis in and around Ukraine has posed a serious challenge to regional institutions and practices, in which the Baltic countries have invested a lot of resources and efforts. In this regard, two questions arise. First, given the deep conflict between Russia and the EU, can regional institutions contribute to shaping a Europe without dividing lines? Second, to what extent is Russia capable and interested in integrating into the regional political environment?
Two Facets of Baltic Regionalism
From the very beginning, Baltic Regionalism has been a project with two strategic goals. The first was to create a framework for regional cooperation among partners who share compatible normative principles and are willing to pool resources to build an institutionally coherent regional (com)society. The main engines in this process were the EU and the Nordic countries, thanks to the efforts of which the three post-Soviet Baltic countries were able to successfully integrate into European and Euro-Atlantic structures, as well as to adapt the regulatory and institutional standards of the European Union.
The second priority was to involve Russia in the process of regional development through numerous institutional "bridges", including sister cities, cross-border euroregions, and the Northern Dimension program. The idea was to come to the creation of a common space in which it would be comfortable for regional actors to interact with each other and which would eliminate the ground for splits along the West-East line. A model example of such a policy can, for example, be considered a series of German-Polish-Russian meetings under the general name of "trialogue", which began with a decision to ease the visa regime on the Kaliningrad-Polish section of the border, but then spread to discussing other issues of trilateral cooperation.
However, instead of promoting network forms of regional interaction and using their capabilities, Moscow, in fact, transferred to the regional level the practices that took place in the format of Russian-European communications, from requirements to ease the visa regime in relations between the Russian Federation and the EU to the “fight against extremism” in the Baltic region. seas. This approach has not led to a closer level of cooperation between the Russian Federation and its Baltic neighbors, and has rendered Russia's chairmanship of the Council of the Baltic Sea States ineffective.
Moreover, the priorities of most of the BSR countries are contrary to the interests of Russia in the form in which they are understood by the Kremlin. This concerns the diversification of the supply of energy resources, programs to enhance energy efficiency and reduce energy consumption. One can also refer to the different understanding of the role of the Internet and new social media: if in Estonia, according to its Prime Minister, freedom of information is one of the foundations of human rights, in Russia the Internet becomes the subject of administrative regulation, supervision and manipulation. All this raises the question of the extent to which Russia is willing and able to associate itself with the BSR region economically, politically and in terms of security.
Is Russia embedding?
Russia's significant lag behind most of the BSR countries becomes apparent when analyzing a number of important indicators. In particular, this was discussed at the meetings of the Baltic Development Forum in Turku in June 2014, in the materials of which it was noted, in particular, that in most respects Russia is an outsider against the background of more successfully developing neighbors in the region:
In the Social Progress Index (the level of well-being and satisfaction of basic needs, the availability of opportunities for self-realization, etc.), Russia is below all other BSR countries;
Russia's positions in the indexes of social infrastructure and political institutions, which include parameters related to the rule of law and human development, are also below all BSR countries. The same applies to the corruption perception index, the level of development of logistics and education;
According to the innovation index, which records the quality of academic and research institutions, the level of interaction between universities and business, the number of patents, etc., only Poland looks worse from the BSR countries;
In terms of the cost of doing business and the level of administrative regulation, Russia's position is lower than all the BSR countries;
The same way the situation with the index of ingenuity of companies;
Russia is the first country in the BSR in terms of the level of labor mobilization and the last in terms of the efficiency of the use of labor resources;
The overall level of Russia in the global competitiveness index (112) is much lower than the weakest country in this regard, the BSR (Poland, 48th). The same applies to indices of labor markets, diversity of consumption and secondary industries.
The policy of the Russian Federation regarding the crisis in Ukraine further alienated Russia from the Baltic regional (com)community. One obvious manifestation of this trend was the cancellation of the Council of the Baltic Sea States summit in Turku in June 2014. Another consequence of Russia's policy has been the growing concern in the BSR countries about their military security. This circumstance is leading to a remilitarization of the region, which is radically different from the scenarios of its development that prevailed in the early 1990s under the academic influence of various schools of regionalism and peace studies and under the political impact of the end of the Cold War. After the annexation of Crimea and Russia's support for the armed insurgency in eastern Ukraine, the debate about joining NATO in Sweden and Finland intensified. In parallel, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are turning to the US and NATO for more substantial guarantees of military protection against an expansionist Russia.
Russia's political strategy
Against the background of the growing conflict with the EU, Russia is intensifying the political tone of its policy towards the BSR countries. First, it seeks to distinguish between "pragmatic" and "cooperative" Finland, on the one hand, and "unfriendly" Baltic states, on the other. The latter are portrayed by Kremlin propaganda as being under US protection and living on EU money, which casts doubt on their independent status and ability to make independent decisions.
Secondly, Moscow is using pro-Russian sentiment among businesses in many of the Baltic countries to weaken the positions of groups advocating sanctions against the Russian Federation. At the same time, Russia actively refers to the ideas of interdependence, which are so popular in Europe as a tool for integration with neighbors, as an argument for obtaining immunity from external pressure and disciplinary measures.
Thirdly, Russia casts a negative light on the experience of the transformation of the Baltic states after their accession to the EU in 2004, emphasizing that they are subsidized from the EU budget and face problems with the outflow of workers to other countries. A key element of the Russian Eurosceptic discourse was the failure of the original plans laid down in the concept of the Eastern Partnership (a program designed by two BSR countries - Poland and Sweden), since Armenia and Ukraine (under President V. Yanukovych) refused to follow the path of European integration.
Russian economic policy
In the economic sphere, Russia, firstly, gives priority to the depoliticization of relations with the BSR countries by focusing on joint energy, transport, tourism and investment projects. In essence, through this model of depoliticized relations, Russia offers its Baltic neighbors material benefits in exchange for loyalty and cooperation.
Secondly, Moscow is trying, by means available to it, to challenge the well-known argument that the experience of the Baltic countries in Europeanization can be useful for Ukraine and other Eastern Partnership states. The Russian discourse contains a critical assessment of the economic consequences of the entry of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia into the EU in terms of negative migration and industrial dynamics, as well as the state of financial markets. Accordingly, the economic argument smoothly flows into a political one, arguing that the most effective way to overcome the current problems for all three countries is their reorientation to the Russian market.
Thirdly, as a measure of economic punishment for "unfriendly" countries, Russia uses their exclusion from transport routes associated with the supply of various goods to European markets. However, this only proves that Russia's economic policy is highly dependent on the political component, which reduces the reliability of the Russian Federation as a trading partner.
Fourth, Russia seeks to challenge the EU's monopoly on the development of regional strategies. Thus, as an alternative to the EU strategy in the BSR, the concept of the development of the Russian North-West is sometimes mentioned. However, it must be kept in mind that this Russian concept is an adaptation of the European concepts of cross-border cooperation and urban planning, and, moreover, has a geographically limited focus.
New elements in security strategy
In the sphere of security, Russia pursues several objectives. The first is to present NATO's increased activity in the BSR as a factor allegedly provoking the authorities in Kyiv to take a more aggressive stance against illegal armed groups in eastern Ukraine.
Secondly, Russian plans include the securitization of the Kaliningrad enclave. Instead of developing this region as a pilot project within the framework of Russian-European interactions, the federal center considers Kaliningrad mainly from a military point of view as a point of Russian presence in the Baltic.
Thirdly, many reports indicate that the Russian Federation is intensifying intelligence activities in the BSR. According to Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, “In recent years alone, Estonia has discovered four Russian agents. This means one of two things: either only we have such problems, or other EU countries are doing nothing in this regard.”
Fourthly, Moscow artificially "warms up" discussions around Russian-speaking population groups in order to use them - as an integral part of the widely promoted concept of the "Russian world" - as a tool for returning the three Baltic countries to the sphere of influence of the Russian Federation. Some Moscow-backed voices speak openly about this. Thus, Yuri Zhuravlev, head of the Association of Russians in Estonia, believes that a revision of Estonian ownership of "some territories" with a predominance of the Russian-speaking population is quite possible if there is "political will". Andrey Neronsky, director of the Center for Russian Culture in Latvia, goes further, arguing provocatively that only 500 armed men are needed to overthrow the independent state of Latvia: “the Latvian army is weak and will not resist.”
It is clear that these threatening statements increase the feeling of insecurity in the Baltic countries, which, in turn, provokes a debate between the "old" and "new" EU members regarding a common defense and security policy. Former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Defense of Latvia Artis Pabriks recently noted that up to 60% of Germans do not consider it necessary to contribute to strengthening the defense capabilities of the Baltic countries. Many in Western Europe perceive the conflict between Russia and Ukraine only in terms of its financial consequences for European economies, since "no one can imagine Putin marching with Russian troops through the Brandenburg Gate." But for the Baltic States, the threats posed by Russia are existential in nature, highlighting the significant difference in perceptions of security among EU and NATO members.
Dilemmas for the EU
Germany is at the center of much of the debate within the EU. As a key player in the BSR, Germany de facto patronizes some regional platforms - for example, the Baltic Development Forum and the German-Baltic-Nordic Forum, which are a kind of laboratory for the development of innovations in the region and the exchange of experience. At the same time, for a long time, German diplomacy adhered to a foreign policy that many in Europe consider pro-Russian.
This situation leads to the existence of two approaches towards Russia. The first is an attempt to involve Russia in the existing mechanisms of the Baltic regional cooperation, despite the understanding of the crisis in communication with Moscow. To a large extent, it is exacerbated by the lack of independent specialists from Russia who could build interaction with European audiences without looking back at the Kremlin.
The second approach centers around the growing demand from the Baltic states for help to contain Russia, which many rightly accuse of fomenting an anti-government uprising in eastern Ukraine and suspect of possible attempts to transfer this experience to other neighboring countries with significant Russian-speaking populations. This political line is not consistent with the diplomatic efforts of Germany and a number of other EU countries to resume normal relations with the Russian Federation, which can be interpreted in Moscow as a de facto recognition of the legitimacy of its claims to an exclusive sphere of influence.
These frictions over Russia illustrate the challenges faced by attempts to formulate a common EU policy towards the Russian Federation. As the EU Presidency, in 2015 Latvia will try to contribute to this process. The signing of the Association Agreements with Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova leave chances for the continuation of the strategic line that underlay the Eastern Partnership, but the key element here will be detailed monitoring of the implementation of these documents. There is reason to believe that the EU will maintain its favored strategy of "constructive ambiguity" while these three post-Soviet countries seek a higher level of institutional engagement with the EU. At the same time, all parties need to be ready for retaliatory measures from Russia as a reaction to the signed Association Agreements.
Conclusion
Recent developments in the BSR show that the ability of regional institutions to reduce the level of conflict caused by normative and political divisions should not be exaggerated. It is likely that the institutional forms of Baltic regionalism in the coming years will be strongly influenced by the conflict between Russia and the EU over key issues of pan-European significance. In this regard, there is a high possibility that the BSR countries in these conditions will implement individual rather than regionally agreed political lines towards Russia.
This situation suits Russia because it allows it to block unwanted forms of solidarity among its Western neighbors. However, conceptually, Russian politics looks very vulnerable. For example, attempts to divide countries into "friendly" and "unfriendly" are untenable due to the fact that even in those countries that Russia set as an example to others (for example, in Poland), there are strong anti-Russian reactions as a response to Russia's role in the events in Ukraine. It is unlikely that Moscow will be convincing in its attempts to present the apparently increased critical attitude among the Baltic countries as their dependence on the United States: Russian propaganda is unlikely to find among its neighbors an understanding that security policy in the BSR reflects the interests of Washington, and not the populations of these countries themselves.
Finally, a close look at the political trajectories of the BSR countries may cast doubt on Moscow's thesis that EU enlargement was the key trigger for the current conflict. Finland's membership in the EU has not led to a deterioration in relations between Moscow and Helsinki - on the contrary, these relations are highly valued in the Russian Federation. Russian business is active in the three Baltic countries (as well as in the countries of Central Europe) even after their accession to the EU. Seen in this light, Russia's efforts to prevent a closer rapprochement with the EU of Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia hardly seem rational. If not for the counter-productive and confrontational line of Russian diplomacy, the experience of the BSR countries in erasing borders and building a Europe without dividing lines could well be useful for Russia itself.
Sergey Kudelya, professor at Baylor University, USA
There is a widespread perception in Western political circles and mainstream Western media that the armed conflict in Donbas was the result of covert Russian military aggression against Ukraine, and that forces opposed to the Ukrainian government do not enjoy widespread support among the local population of the region. US Permanent Representative to the UN Samantha Power on April 13 drew a parallel between the events in the Donbass and the Russian intervention in Crimea. She stated in particular that "there are no signs of widespread support [for the rebel movement] among the local population." In a joint article published in late April, three former US ambassadors to Ukraine accused the Kremlin of "organizing and directing the insurgency in eastern Ukraine." They also expressed the opinion that the rebels would lay down their arms if they received the appropriate order from the Kremlin. Since then, Western media reports and analyzes have paid increasing attention to evidence of links between Russia and the insurgency. Speaking about the role of Russia in the conflict, however, one should not forget that the armed separatist movement emerged as a direct response to the violent regime change that took place in Kyiv. At first, the participants in this movement were mainly local residents, and at least a quarter or even a third of the population of Donbass supported it. (During a survey conducted by KIIS from June 26 to July 2, 2014, 34.8% of respondents in the Donetsk region said they trust the leadership of the DPR, and 26.2% of respondents in the Luhansk region said they trust the leadership of the LPR. Sergey Pashinsky, deputy head of the administration of the acting president of Ukraine, described the insurgency as consisting mainly of the local population.)
In this policy brief, the insurgency in the Donbass is viewed as a phenomenon predominantly of domestic Ukrainian origin. It argues that political factors—state fragmentation, forced regime change, and loss of control over the instruments of coercion—combined with region-specific emotions—namely, feelings of outrage and fear—played a key role in the emergence of the armed separatist movement in Donbass. local population.
Structural possibilities
At a structural level, before the emergence of the insurgency in Ukraine, there were clearly two variables that are associated with a high likelihood of civil war: political instability in the capital and the weakening of state capacity. As researchers James FERON and David Laytin have noted, the presence of a fragile hybrid regime, combined with volatility among political groups or within the ruling coalition, significantly increases the likelihood of a war “due to the weakness of law enforcement officers on the ground and the lack of professionalism or corruption of structures designed to deal with armed resistance.” The change of the Ukrainian regime at the end of February 2014 was preceded by a gradual loss of control by the central government over almost half of the territory of the state as protesters seized the buildings of regional state administrations. There was also an increase in the use of violence by both law enforcement and protesters, especially after 19 January. The unrest quickly spread from Kyiv to other regions of Ukraine. The first clashes between supporters and opponents of Euromaidan in Donbas took place on the central square of Donetsk on January 21. These clashes became even more violent after the expulsion of Viktor Yanukovych. During them, on March 13, one of the demonstrators was killed in Donetsk for the first time, who turned out to be a member of the nationalist Svoboda party.
Three political variables significantly increased the likelihood of a war in the Donbas:
1) Fragmentation of the state. Regional self-governing enclaves that emerged in the west and center of Ukraine at the end of January 2014 did not obey orders from Kyiv. This created a sense of fragmentation of the state and further accelerated the onset of the final phase of the Euromaidan. The inability of the government to stop the violent seizures of administrative buildings and regain control over half of the country's territory indicated the beginning of the actual collapse of the state. The government's continued control of eastern and southern Ukraine was made possible largely by the political dominance of the Party of Regions (PR) and limited Euromaidan support in these areas. As soon as the regime collapsed and former opposition leaders seized power, the PR began to fall apart, and powerful centrifugal forces spread in the east of the country. This was accompanied by the separatists copying the tactics of resistance that were previously used by Euromaidan activists.
2) Low legitimacy central government. Many residents of the southeastern regions of Ukraine considered the new leaders of the state, who came to power after the Euromaidan, illegitimate. However, among the population of Donbass, such sentiments were especially strong. In early April, approximately half of the respondents in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions were confident in the illegitimacy of the acting president and the new government. In the rest of the south-eastern regions of Ukraine, up to one third of the respondents expressed this opinion. Such a sharp rejection of the new authorities was probably due to the negative opinion about the Euromaidan, which was held by the vast majority of the population of Donbass. About 70% of respondents in the Donetsk region and 61% in the Luhansk region considered the Euromaidan protests to be an armed coup sponsored by the West. (KIIS survey, April 8-16, 2014) The average figure for other south-eastern regions of Ukraine was almost two times lower (37%). The new governors of Donetsk and Luhansk regions appointed by Kiev had dubious legitimacy – but the Party of Regions, which controlled the majority of votes in local councils, also lost its authority. Only 4% of respondents in both regions wanted to see representatives of the PR in the new government. As a result, a power vacuum arose, which was exploited by the political marginals. It was they who declared their claims to the people's mandate and led the fight both against Kyiv and against the old local elites.
3) Loss of means of coercion. The ability of the new government to use the means of coercion in the Donbass from the very beginning turned out to be extremely limited. This was partly due to the fact that loyal Yanukovych supporters dominated among local law enforcement officers, but a sense of disrespect for law enforcement from former opposition leaders was also an important factor. During the very first anti-Kiev demonstrations, police chiefs in various cities of Donbass promised to be “on the side of the people.” Members of the special police unit Berkut, who returned from the Maidan, were greeted as heroes and given the floor during demonstrations. Although the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) managed to arrest several separatist leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk in March, those arrests did not stop the wave of protests. When protesters began to take over government buildings across the region, the police either fled or sided with the protesters. One of these defectors was Oleksandr Khodakovsky, who previously headed the special forces unit of the SBU in Donetsk. Now he is the commander of the Vostok battalion, fighting on the side of the rebels. In addition, the peaceful withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from Crimea after its annexation by the Russian Federation became a signal that the Ukrainian authorities are not ready to fight to preserve the integrity of the state. The failure to use coercive means became even more evident when, in mid-April, Ukrainian armored vehicles appeared in the Donbas during a government-led “anti-terrorist operation.” Several cases were reported in which Ukrainian APCs were surrounded and blocked by hostile locals. As a result, Ukrainian soldiers abandoned their vehicles and retreated back to their bases. During this first contact between government forces and the newly organized rebel forces, it turned out that the support of the local population could shift the balance of power in favor of the latter, despite Kyiv's then-preserved superiority in numbers of soldiers and weapons.
group emotions
Structural theories highlight the variables that create opportunities for armed resistance to arise. However, they do not say anything about the specific mechanisms that make people take up arms. As political scientist Roger Pietersen notes, “structural change produces information that is processed into beliefs, which in turn create emotions and action tendencies.” Pietersen identifies three key emotions—fear, resentment, and hatred—that help explain the nature of ethnic conflict. Hatred requires a history of conflict and long-standing animosity between ethnic groups. In Ukraine, these two factors were not expressed. But indignation and fear are directly related to the conflict in Donbass.
Resentment arises when one of the groups considers itself unfairly placed in a subordinate position, and believes that only the use of force will allow it to do away with political infringements. In Donbass, such emotions were associated with the region's self-perception as an industrial base that "feeds" the rest of Ukraine, as well as with its predominantly Russian-speaking culture. This identity of the Donbass is rooted in its historical status as a "borderland", which traditionally has always resisted domination attempts by imperial forces in both Moscow and Kyiv. This self-perception of Donbass has been further strengthened during the years of Ukraine's independence, and 69.5% of the population of Donetsk identified themselves primarily with Donbass, and not with Ukraine. The economic weight of Donbass compared to other regions of Ukraine created a sense of natural right for its inhabitants to play a leading political role in the country, or at least to have a say in Ukrainian politics. The Russian-speaking worldview and the large proportion of ethnic Russians among its population made Donbass, along with Crimea, particularly susceptible to emotional pro-Russian appeals. (According to the results of the 2001 census, approximately 38% of the population of Donbass identified themselves as ethnic Russians. According to a survey in July 2012, 82% identified Russian as their mother tongue, and 23% said that they had difficulty understanding documents in Ukrainian. These figures were higher than in any other region of Ukraine.) Almost a decade of rule in the Donbas by Yanukovych and his Party of Regions gave the inhabitants of the region a sense of their own political influence and protection from discrimination on cultural or ethnic grounds. The sudden end of this rule, accompanied by the collapse of the PR and the criminal prosecution of some of its members, was also an abrupt end to the politically privileged status of the region. At the same time, parliament's repeal of the law giving Russian the status of a regional language, coupled with threats to turn off Russian-language media, marked a new risk of cultural discrimination. On top of that, the use of derogatory terms against pro-Russian activists has become more common. Against this background, separation from Ukraine was perceived in the Donbass as a way to protect not only their own status, but also their own human dignity.
The feeling of indignation among the population of Donbass was also reinforced by a growing sense of fear. Fear arises in a situation of state collapse, when the institutions and rules that protect a certain group cease to function. The resulting violence is perceived in such a situation as a form of self-defense. In the Donbas, fear was a direct reaction to the growing role of paramilitary nationalist groups like Praviy Sektor*, which were at the forefront of clashes with police and seized administrative buildings. During World War II, Ukrainian nationalists in the Donbass were widely regarded as "fascists" and are still viewed with great antipathy by the people of the region. (According to a poll in 2004, 42.7% of respondents in Donetsk named "Ukrainian nationalists" as the group they have the most negative opinion about and with which they have the least in common. Only 2.2% of respondents in Donbas hold positive views about Stepan Bandera, while in the rest of Ukraine this figure is 21.6%.) The first “self-defense” groups designed to protect Donbass from “neo-Nazis” appeared even before the expulsion of Yanukovych, and after his escape, their number began to grow rapidly. Fear of Ukrainian nationalist groups has often been voiced by participants in pro-Russian protests across the Donbas. Such emotions were probably fueled by reports of lawlessness in western Ukraine, where Right Sector activists persecuted government officials. In early April, 46% of respondents in the Donetsk region and 33% in the Lugansk region believed that the main step in maintaining the unity of the country should be the disarmament of illegal radical groups. Instead, Ukrainian authorities allowed such groups to transform into half-state, half-private militia battalions sent to fight separatists in the east. Among the population of Donbass, this increased the desire to somehow protect themselves and pushed local residents to support their own militias, or even join their ranks. ( See replica exchange between the self-proclaimed mayor of Slovyansk, Vyacheslav Ponomarev, and local residents over the threat of an invasion of the city by nationalists.)
Elite strategies
Theories of civil conflicts caused by elites point to the decisive role of political leaders in the following areas: 1) shaping the discursive logic of the conflict; 2) providing financial and organizational resources; 3) coordinating initial power actions in order to mobilize new supporters. However, the role of the leaders in the emergence of the separatist insurgency in Donbas remains far from clear.
At the beginning of the protests, the pro-Russian demonstrators in the region had no clear leader or clear organizational structure. Both self-proclaimed "people's governors", Pavel Gubarev in Donetsk region and Alexander Kharitonov in Luhansk region, had previously been involved in local politics, but were not widely known at the level of their regions. By mid-March, both of them were already under arrest by the SBU, and subsequently did not play a role in the transformation of political protest into an armed separatist movement. The first leader of this movement, who had military experience, was Valery Bolotov. He took the stage in early April and announced his claims to power after the seizure of the SBU building in Luhansk. However, he did not play a significant role in the demonstrations that preceded the seizure of administrative buildings, and did not contribute to the mobilization of the public, but rather simply took advantage of it in his own interests.
The main ideas and messages that sounded at the anti-Kyiv demonstrations were old and well known. Yanukovych and his Party of Regions began portraying their political opponents as "fascists" during the 2004 presidential election. The PR campaign also used military symbols, incl. George Ribbon, which became the hallmark of the rebels and was intended to highlight the difference between the anti-fascist Donbass and the nationalists of western Ukraine. As for the calls for federalization and state status for the Russian language, they have not stopped since the 1990s. The first regional referendum on the federal structure of Ukraine was held in Donbas in March 1994. At that time, a significant majority of the population of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions supported federalization and giving the Russian language the status of a second state language. Another attempt to hold a referendum on the same issues was made during the Orange Revolution. The corresponding decision was made by the Donetsk Regional Council, but later the council canceled it. Thus, the pro-Russian demonstrations used scripts, symbols and slogans that had been in circulation for at least 10 years.
A relatively obscure symbol that came to the fore during the protests was the black, blue and red flag. Such a flag was used during the only historical experiment with the statehood of Donbass in 1918. However, he has also long been popular in local pro-Russian circles. He, in particular, was a symbol of the non-governmental organization "Donetsk Republic", which was created in 2005 and later banned for calling for separatism. One of its founders, Andrei Purgin, actively participated in organizing the first Anti-Maidan in February, but did not play a leading role in the development of the protest movement.
None of the groups that took part in organizing the demonstrations (Russian Block, Donetsk Civil uprising, Luhansk Guard, etc.) did not have sufficient organizational or financial resources to finance the protest movement. There is also no conclusive evidence that this movement was financed by Yanukovych, Rinat Akhmetov, or other wealthy representatives of the PR. Moreover, calls to lay down arms and stop attempts to secede from Ukraine, voiced by some of the most authoritative representatives of the region (including Akhmetov, Boris Kolesnikov and Alexander Lukyanchenko), had no effect. (Gubarev claims that Akhmetov even tried to bribe some activists to curb the secession movement from Ukraine, but failed.) Akhmetov-funded Donbass, a regional TV channel, portrayed the insurgency in a negative light and campaigned for Ukraine's unity. More importantly, almost the entire regional political elite, incl. members of regional and city councils, refused to support the separatist movement, despite attempts by the protesters to enlist such support. As a result, the new self-proclaimed councils included mostly random people from among the demonstrators.
Finally, the wave of forcible seizures of administrative buildings that swept through the cities of Donbass in April was sporadic and decentralized. The self-proclaimed "people's mayors" of the region's cities were local political opportunists who took advantage of the collapse of state structures. They were not representatives of some secret organization coordinated from a single center. The commanders of the various paramilitaries who supported them often clashed over spheres of influence. In addition, the separatists of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and the Lugansk People's Republic (LPR) followed different hastily adopted strategies. The DPR quickly declared independence back in early April, while the LPR only decided to declare secession from Ukraine after a referendum. A more centralized coordination of armed resistance in Donetsk Oblast only emerged at the end of May, when Oleksandr Borodai's group and the Vostok Battalion firmly took control of Donetsk's scattered separatist groups.
The main internal causes of the conflict
The armed conflict in Donbas was the result of a complex interaction of variables at two levels - structural and individual-group. Monocausal explanations that point to Russia as the sole culprit of the conflict ignore these all-important internal causes of the insurgency in Donbas. These reasons include structural variables related to the dynamics of the state and regime, as well as mass emotional background based on resentment and fear. In the absence of internal conditions conducive to the emergence of armed separatism, external incentives could not lead to the emergence of a viable and large-scale insurgency. Those who led this movement simply took advantage of the population's fear of growing anarchy in Kyiv and resorted to long-established ideas and slogans to keep it moving. This does not remove responsibility for the subsequent horrors of the war from either the rebels or the authorities of Ukraine and Russia. However, attempts to suppress the insurgency solely by force, without eliminating deep internal causes of this movement, will not be able to make the Donbass less of a conflict and explosive region of Ukraine.
* - the activity of the organization is prohibited on the territory of the Russian Federation
Irina Kobrinskaya, Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO)
The crisis in Ukraine is transforming the global geopolitical order. It reveals new and highlights old contradictions. It also contributes to building up efforts to accelerate integration processes both in the East and in the West. The United States is working with its partners in Europe and the Pacific with fresh enthusiasm. Meanwhile, Russia is trying to strengthen its traditional partnerships in Eurasia and Asia, but the European vector remains the main one for Russia, because its key economic and security interests have not changed.
In this new emerging geopolitical context, however, the eastern and western vectors of Russian foreign policy acquire different meanings and require new approaches. New strategic challenges put forward new existential problems for Russia. How can it maintain parity in its deepening partnership with China? How could it remain the leader of Eurasian integration? How can Russia avoid further deterioration of relations with the European Union and the United States? What new formats of partnership can Russia strive for in order to avoid isolation in the light of the sanctions that the West has recently imposed on it?
New world order
Very few political scientists, even Zbigniew Brzezinski, could have foreseen the pivotal role that Ukraine would play in the process of reformatting the post-Cold War world order. The Ukraine crisis ended a long period of "innuendo" when the former Cold War-era rivals rarely spoke directly to each other (as Vladimir Putin did in his Munich speech) and never truly reached a level of real understanding and trust. Mutual suspicions reached their peak in 2014, when relations between Russia and the West are characterized by many observers as a "new cold war". This definition can be justified by the scale and level of hostility. However, at least four elements make Russian-American relations different from those that took place during the "classic" Cold War.
First, due to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the apparent ineffectiveness of the non-proliferation regime, and the lack of transparency and treaty-limitation of China's nuclear arsenal, nuclear deterrence, a fundamental principle of the Cold War system of relations, no longer works. This does not mean that the new period of tension in relations between Russia and the West does not affect the military sphere. On the contrary, he gives new meaning and justification to the Russian military construction of recent years (which many experts consider detrimental to the development of the economy and social sphere of the Russian Federation).
Second, deep interdependence in the global economic system keeps both Russia and the West from acting too hard and irreversibly. This circumstance is well illustrated by how sanctions were imposed against Russia and how different were the positions of Western countries in relation to them.
Third, numerous global security issues - stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iran and North Korea, conflicts in the Middle East, drug trafficking, WMD proliferation and terrorism - cannot be resolved without the active participation of Russia, or at least without its consent.
Finally, due to the rise of new emerging economies, primarily China, the new international system is no longer bipolar, as it was during the Cold War.
Integration into the new world order
The crisis in Ukraine, which directly caused the deterioration of relations between Russia and the West, is only a small part of a larger international transformation. The development of events in Ukraine and their perception in Russia and the West could have been different if these events had not followed a string of conflicts and revolutions that have engulfed the post-Soviet (and post-socialist) states and Eastern Europe over the past few years, as well as following the Arab Spring . In a sense, the crisis in Ukraine has taken on such serious significance, being highest point the cumulative effect of complex relations between Russia and the West in the last quarter of a century.
One of the elements of the new “Great Game” now underway is the struggle for maximum independence (which is especially emphasized in Russian and Chinese political documents) and maintaining status in the emerging global balance of power. Another element is the strengthening of their own position through the creation of coalitions, which makes the leading powers turn to integration projects with new zeal.
It is this competitive fight integration projects, namely between the EU's Eastern Partnership and Russia's Eurasian integration initiatives, triggered the Ukrainian crisis in November 2013.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has made efforts to deepen and expand Eurasian integration, in particular through the establishment of the Customs Union, the Eurasian Economic Union (scheduled to begin in January 2015) and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). With the withdrawal of the International Security Assistance Force contingent from Afghanistan, a more active role of the CSTO, as well as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in maintaining stability in Afghanistan and Central Asia, cannot be ruled out. However, within the framework of the SCO, Russia seeks to prevent Chinese dominance and tries to maintain its equal status. This became an obstacle to the development of the SCO, especially in the financial and economic sphere.
The Ukrainian crisis created serious problems for the Russian project of Eurasian integration. The extent to which Russia will lose Ukraine as an economic and security partner has yet to be reliably assessed, which largely depends on the outcome of the crisis. However, there are already political losses. Russia's partners in the Customs Union, Belarus and Kazakhstan, expressed their concerns, especially regarding the annexation of Crimea to the Russian Federation. It will be difficult to convince them of the need for further integration, including the transfer of any degree of national powers to the Eurasian National Commission.
In the past few years, Russia has begun to restore and strengthen cooperation with countries outside of Eurasia. Western sanctions have provided a reason to pay even more attention to potential partners in Central and South America, East Asia and the Pacific. While Russia used to emphasize efforts to develop bilateral relations, it is now paying more attention to multilateral institutions, as exemplified by Russia's efforts to increase the content of the BRICS group.
The logic of the Kremlin's approach is to enter into (and strengthen) such associations that could create a counterbalance to Western (especially US-initiated) integration projects, whether transatlantic or transpacific (Russian political scientist Sergei Rogov called the US "the lord of the two rings") . Such projects do not always lead to the isolation of Russia, but they leave it in limbo. At the same time, in those integration formats in which Russia participates (such as the SCO), it has to achieve an equal status with China. Therefore, seeking to create a counterbalance to Beijing, Moscow is strengthening its relations with other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, especially with India, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan.
The specific nature of these new international relations will depend on the outcome of the Ukrainian crisis.
What are the real interests of Russia?
The key goals of Russia remain the same: modernization of the economy and ensuring the stability of the external environment, which should be favorable for internal socio-economic development. Along with structural reforms, modernization involves the reindustrialization of the country at a new technological level, which, in turn, requires new technologies and investments. Ensuring external stability means resolving conflicts in neighboring states and countering drug trafficking, illegal immigration, terrorism and Islamic extremism.
In achieving the first goal - the modernization of the economy - Europe is a key partner, as the current structure of Russia's economic relations shows. In the structure of Russian trade and investment ties, Europe clearly occupies a priority position, and this situation cannot change overnight. In 2013, the volume of trade between Russia and the EU was 417.5 billion dollars, which accounted for 49.4% of the total Russian foreign trade turnover, while the volume of trade between Russia and China was almost five times less, amounting to 88.8 billion dollars (10.5% of the Russian foreign trade turnover). For comparison, the volume of Russian trade with the United States was 27.7 billion dollars (3.3%). During the first five months of 2014, the statistical distribution did not change: the share of the EU in the Russian foreign trade turnover was 49.6%, China - 11%, and the USA - 3.6%.
Foreign direct investment is of particular importance for Russia. In 2013, the EU provided 75.9% (60.2 billion dollars) of the total volume of such investments, while China provided only 0.9% (683 million dollars), which was even less than the volume of investments received from Hungary. The US share was $459 million (0.6%). Russian FDI in the EU in 2013 amounted to $21.9 billion (23%), to China $14 billion and to the US only $763 million (0.8%).
After the West imposes its own sanctions, the current balance will not change quickly, even with regard to the arms trade. The volume of Russian arms trade is $15.2 billion, of which about half is in the BRIC countries. Imports of weapons (excluding the contract for the supply of Mistral helicopter carriers) were at the level of 100-150 million dollars, including electronic equipment for aircraft and tanks from France, as well as drones and electronic equipment from Israel. Russia also had contracts in this area with Italy, Germany, Sweden and the United States (for the supply of helicopters to Afghanistan).
The real problem for Russia arising from the sanctions lies in the financial sphere and especially in the sphere of dual-use technologies. If the current trends do not change in the medium term, the sanctions could have a devastating effect on the course of the country's economic development. China cannot replace Europe as a source of technology, and overdependence on Beijing's loans is highly undesirable.
As V. Putin's recent addresses and speeches show, Moscow is aware of this dilemma. While taking steps towards the East, the Russian President is still looking to the West.
For the foreseeable future, the current trends in relations between Russia and the West are likely to continue. Stirring up hostility has become the game of those politicians who are trying to rally public opinion. However, responsible realists on both sides will continue to call for keeping the doors open for dialogue, if not at the official level, then at least through other means.
Sergey Minasyan, Caucasus Institute (Yerevan)
April 2015 will mark the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Empire. Armenians and Turks intend to pay special attention to the centenary of this tragedy, which can become a convenient occasion for changes in Armenian-Turkish relations. However, it remains to be seen whether these changes will lead to reconciliation or to a new increase in tension.
Armenia overcomes the psychological barrier
The centenary of the genocide is likely to have a strong psychological impact on Armenian society. Overcoming the centennial milestone of this tragedy can reduce the emotional heaviness and sense of victimization that exists in Armenia and within the Armenian diaspora.
Many are confident that this anniversary will attract greater international attention and move more countries towards official recognition of the genocide. Some express the hope that even Turkey will come to recognize and repent for the crimes committed by its predecessor. For Armenia, recognition of the genocide is important not only as a form of moral compensation and recovery from historical victimization. Recognition is also seen by Armenians as a means of enhancing their sense of security.
The centenary of the genocide, at least, has the potential to become an incentive to intensify efforts to normalize Armenian-Turkish relations. A previous attempt at reconciliation, the 2009 "football diplomacy", stalled a year later due to internal opposition in Turkey and Azerbaijan's jealous but successful efforts to derail the process.
The Turkish-Armenian protocols, signed in October 2009 but never ratified since, continue to be the key to reconciliation. Ankara's refusal to ratify the protocols without preconditions, the ongoing blockade of Armenia and open support of Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict lead to harsh criticism from Armenians. Some opposition and diaspora circles are directly calling for the rejection of the protocols, insisting that keeping them only blocks efforts to recognize the genocide. However, official Yerevan insists that the logic of the protocols remains the basis of any future progress in Armenian-Turkish relations, as they are the result of a difficult and painful compromise reached in bilateral relations.
In early June 2014, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan unexpectedly invited the future President of Turkey to visit Armenia in April 2015 to pay tribute to the victims of the genocide. The invitation was partly made in response to the unprecedented condolences of the then Prime Minister (now President) of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Armenia and the Armenian diaspora on the occasion of the 99th anniversary of the genocide. Obviously, if Erdogan accepts the invitation, it will be a convenient opportunity to revive the Armenian-Turkish normalization process.
Turkey: uncertain new steps or old imitation?
Erdogan's official condolence in April 2014 was an important step, as it was the first time a Turkish official had expressed official condolences to Armenia and the Armenian diaspora. True, many Armenians perceived this as nothing more than an updated and more flexible form of denial of the genocide, an expression of moral sympathy without recognizing historical responsibility. However, some Turkish and foreign observers took Erdogan's statement as a real step towards recognition and repentance, even without using the politically sensitive term "genocide". After that, Turkish officials can supposedly even follow the example of US President Barack Obama, who, in order to avoid the term "genocide" in his official speeches, ritually uses the Armenian language expression "Medts Yegerh" ("Great Catastrophe").
The domestic political perception of the problem in Turkey is also important, as it can influence Ankara's position. Discussion of the genocide is no longer taboo within Turkish society, thanks in part to attempts at reconciliation in 2008-2010. Perhaps Erdogan and his political team would like to get rid of Turkey's Kemalist heritage, integral part which are genocide and its denial; theoretically, they could even be considered in company with those Turkish intellectuals and representatives of Turkish society who support the recognition of the genocide. However, such a move would be a gift for the opposition, the Kemalist Republican People's Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Moreover, there are signs that the government is trying to avoid this problem on the domestic political field, for example, by organizing pompous events in April 2015 on the occasion of the centenary of the Battle of the Dardanelles.
In fairness, it should be noted that Ankara will have to admit that progress in the issue of normalization of relations with Armenia will not mean the end of the efforts of Armenians to achieve full international recognition of the genocide. This struggle is not connected with symbolic dates or the dynamics of the Armenian-Turkish relations. The genocide and its international recognition are key elements of the political identity of the Armenian diaspora scattered around the world mainly as a result of this tragic event. The efforts of the diaspora to gain recognition from Turkey (and receive possible compensation) will continue, even if Armenia and Turkey achieve significant results in normalizing relations and opening borders.
Finally, it is extremely difficult for anyone who seeks to normalize Armenian-Turkish relations to find out whether Ankara's efforts are sincere or false. More precisely, whether Ankara's approaches to the normalization process are based on pure imitation or are attempts at small but sincere steps towards. Contradictory statements regarding the Armenian-Turkish normalization process by Turkish officials only increase this uncertainty. Unfortunately, sometimes it seems that even Ankara itself does not know where imitation ends and realpolitik begins. The Turkish authorities have serious external and internal restrictions in advancing the normalization process with Armenia. However, Turkey's delay in the process requires serious resources and exacerbates foreign policy costs. According to one account, "approximately 70 percent of the time of the Turkish embassy in Washington is spent trying to persuade influential Americans to support the Turkish position on the Armenian question" (Osman Bengur, "Turkey's Image and the Armenian Question,” Turkish Policy Quarterly (Spring, 2009), 45).
Regional context and external actors
Recent developments in the Middle East have changed Turkey's position in the region, increasing Ankara's geopolitical importance to Washington and Brussels. Accordingly, Turkey has become less vulnerable to the West, especially the EU. Turkey's vanished hopes for EU membership in the near future and the EU's preoccupation with its own internal problems and geopolitical challenges on its periphery have weakened Ankara's willingness to listen to the EU. There is also the undisguised ambition of the Turkish elites for a more independent political and economic international role, partly based on a decade of self-sufficient economic development and Turkish penetration into European markets (compared to a permanent economic crisis and serious institutional problems in the EU). Moreover, from a geopolitical point of view, Turkey's importance for the EU has grown with the Arab Spring, the Syrian and Iraqi crises, as well as international negotiations with Iran. Ankara's decades-long efforts to become an alternative energy transit hub for Europe have also heightened Turkey's importance.
However, Turkey's political priorities are still linked to the West, and the political perception of Turkish political and economic elites continues to be "Western-centric". Thus, the positions of the EU and the US on the Armenian-Turkish process are still important. It should be especially taken into account that the position of the United States and a number of key European countries in relation to Turkey is formed partly under the influence of the Armenian, Greek and even pro-Israeli lobby. These lobbying structures often use the dark pages of Turkey's past, such as the Armenian Genocide and its continued denial by the Turkish authorities, as a resource for influencing the legislative and executive authorities in their own countries. Washington, Paris and Brussels, and in Lately- Even Tel Aviv uses this fact at various levels when problems arise in their relations with Ankara. For example, as the former Turkish prime minister tightened his rhetoric on political elites Israel, the readiness for the official recognition of the Armenian genocide, from which Tel Aviv had previously abstained for various reasons, became more noticeable on the part of the latter. Thus, Turkish policy towards Armenia is partly a continuation of Turkey's relations with the West.
The Ukrainian crisis and Armenia's decision in September 2013 not to sign the Associated Agreement with the EU and instead join the Russian-led Customs Union have also affected the situation in the South Caucasus. At the same time, the further political and economic isolation of Russia from the West may stimulate Moscow's overtures towards Turkey, reminiscent of the situation in the early 1920s, when Bolshevik Russia and Kemalist Turkey found common interests.
However, if the West seeks to revive the policy of containment of Russia, it may turn to Turkey's help to weaken Russia's influence in the South Caucasus. One of the elements of such a strategy could be the resumption of the Armenian-Turkish normalization process, since The Turkish blockade of Armenia and Ankara's support for Azerbaijan reinforce the perception of insecurity in Armenia and cement Russia's military and political presence there. Support for this renewed Western effort may come from Ankara's own long-term interests. Although Turkey and Russia are large-scale trade and economic partners, even sometimes showing common tactical interaction (as, for example, during the Russian-Georgian war of 2008), they remain “rival allies” in a strategic perspective in a common border area.
Conclusion
Lack of diplomatic relations and the presence of closed borders for two non-belligerents neighboring countries is an abnormal situation. The centenary of the Armenian Genocide provides an opportunity to renew efforts to normalize relations between Turkey and Armenia. Despite the complexity of the historical past, Armenia demonstrates its readiness to normalize relations with Turkey without preconditions.
Continued neglect of initiatives supported by the international community will remain costly for Ankara. Ankara can choose one of several options: accept an invitation to visit Yerevan in April 2015, which could start a new political process, open borders with Armenia, establish diplomatic relations, and/or ratify protocols. Unfortunately, the new Turkish government may also take a different path. It may simply create the illusion of a new process, which will only further increase the distrust of the Armenians.
Alexey Garan, University "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy"
Back in 2005, Petro Poroshenko, then Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, seemed to have collapsed politically as a result of his rivalry with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. However, during the 2014 presidential election, Poroshenko defeated Tymoshenko and other contenders in the first round. Indeed, Euromaidan changed the entire political dynamic in Ukraine. Why did the political crown end up in the hands of Poroshenko? Will he be able to comply with Euromaidan demands, given that presidential power is now limited as a result of the return to the 2004 constitutional amendments? How will he cope with the internal and external challenges facing Ukraine?
Elections: the situation after Euromaidan and Poroshenko's strategy
Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine's fifth president, is the first president since Leonid Kravchuk (elected in December 1991) to win with an absolute majority in the first round. Poroshenko was elected on a wave of huge popular discontent with his criminally corrupt predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych. In addition, as in 1991, Ukrainians wanted to distance themselves from threats from the Kremlin.
Poroshenko's success was based on the new alignment of forces in Ukraine that emerged after Euromaidan, which transformed the perceptions of voters about political leadership and major players. Prior to these revolutionary events, political leaders used either charisma or populism to influence their constituents. However, the events of December 2013-February 2014 showed that the leaders of the Euromaidan, including Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Vitali Klitschko, Oleg Tyagnybok, often found themselves one step behind popular demands. Although opposition leaders behaved responsibly in many critical situations, they often failed to convey the motives and goals behind their decisions.
Under these conditions, Poroshenko managed to distance himself from these decisions and even partially act as a civil activist. On December 1, 2013, he was the only leading politician who tried to keep the protesters from storming the presidential administration. In January 2014, Poroshenko won the sympathy of protesters by actively participating in the rescue of Automaidan leader Dmitry Bulatov, who was kidnapped and tortured. Poroshenko also avoided approval of an unpopular deal to overcome the crisis between President Yanukovych and opposition leaders.
Another factor that helped Poroshenko's rebranding as a "new politician" was his distancing himself from the distribution of power positions among the winners. Although Poroshenko took an active part in the creation of a new transitional coalition, he decided not to use his influence in parliament to fight Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna party for the posts of parliamentary speaker or prime minister.
As a result, it was Batkivshchyna that received key positions in parliament and government. Oleksandr Turchinov, Tymoshenko's right-hand man, was elected parliamentary speaker and, accordingly, interim president of the country. Arseniy Yatsenyuk was appointed prime minister, and Batkivshchyna received six more ministerial posts. Thus, Tymoshenko began to be seen as a central player influencing the executive power through her associates. She also did not rule out her participation in the presidential race. All this aroused suspicion in the eyes of Ukrainian voters, who had just got rid of an abusive president. They feared Tymoshenko and her businesslike approach to decision making. Tymoshenko's opponents have also cited her former collaboration with Russian President Vladimir Putin as one of the reasons for Ukraine's weak response to the annexation of Crimea. Deputies loyal to Poroshenko and Klitschko believed that the gas contract, concluded as a result of agreements between Putin and Tymoshenko in 2009, now made Ukraine vulnerable to Russian pressure.
Poroshenko was also known as quite a compromise politician. He often collaborated with the most powerful player, including former presidents Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych. In 2001, together with Yanukovych, he was even one of the founders of the Party of Regions. In 2005, he used his power as secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, taking part in the oligarchic wars for the redistribution of privatized state property and television channels. In 2009, he supported Tymoshenko in her presidential campaign in exchange for the post of foreign minister. In 2012, under Yanukovych, Poroshenko was in charge of developing ties with the European Union and was minister of economic development and trade for half a year.
As for his relationship with Russia, in 2005 Poroshenko lobbied for close ties between the "orange team" and Putin's inner circle. In May 2005, Poroshenko and Russian Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov even signed a memorandum of cooperation between Viktor Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party and the ruling United Russia party. Positioning himself as a pro-European politician and emphasizing that a “deep and comprehensive free trade area” (deep and comprehensive free trade area) with the EU is incompatible with membership in the Russian-led Customs Union, Poroshenko at the same time recognized that Ukraine must take into account Russian interests and concerns.
Poroshenko's actions during the crisis in Crimea significantly changed public opinion in his favor. His visit to occupied Simferopol, his call to invalidate the controversial repeal of Ukraine's language law, and his demand for the crackdown on armed pro-Russian groups led to him being viewed by voters as a strong yet pragmatic leader. He also managed to attract deputies and regional leaders known in the east and south of Ukraine (such as Inna Bogoslovskaya from Kharkiv, Oleksiy Goncharenko from Odessa and Andriy Derkach from Sumy) and get his message across to former supporters of the Party of Regions. Judging by the results of the elections, this strategy worked. Poroshenko won in every constituency in eastern and southern Ukraine, with the exception of separatist-controlled areas where elections were disrupted and one constituency in the Kharkiv region.
The agreement with Klitschko practically ensured Poroshenko's victory in the elections. At the beginning of the campaign, Klitschko withdrew his candidacy and called on his supporters to support Poroshenko. Uncomfortable in a coalition with Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna and nationalist Svoboda, and having little interest in transitional power, Klitschko entered into a marriage of convenience with Poroshenko and concentrated his efforts on winning local elections in Kyiv. Meanwhile, Poroshenko distanced himself from the divisions among the former opposition, which became the winner as a result of the Euromaidan. He did not react in any way to Tymoshenko's accusations that he was a "puppet of the oligarchs." Instead, Poroshenko focused on plans for the reconstruction of the Ukrainian economy and the implementation of an association agreement with the EU.
In April 2014, an armed conflict began to unfold in the Donbass. Poroshenko stressed that sustainable peace could only be achieved if the president was confidently elected in the first round. While both Tymoshenko and Party of Regions members Sergei Tigipko and Mikhail Dobkin declared reconciliation with the armed men who occupied administrative buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk, Poroshenko consistently rejected the possibility of negotiations with "terrorists" and called for the use of force against them. However, in contrast to nationalists and populists (such as Oleg Lyashko), Poroshenko claimed that he would give more power to the locals and would respect the rights of the Russian-speaking population.
Poroshenko did not rule out the possibility of cooperation with all political parties that defend the sovereignty of Ukraine. Therefore, his victory was recognized by the majority of applicants, with the exception of the pro-Russian communists and Oleg Tsarev, who supported the separatists. The second and third winners of the race, Tymoshenko and Lyashko, pledged to support the new president in his efforts to restore the country's unity.
Challenges for Poroshenko: conflict in Donbass and early parliamentary elections
During his first two months in office, Poroshenko tried to maintain a balance between force and compromise to root out pro-Russian separatists and freeze the conflict to a minimum of violence. However, the hostility of the leaders of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” (“DPR” and “LPR”) during the unilateral ten-day truce and the failure of the OSCE to arrange negotiations led to the new president ordering an offensive against the Kremlin-backed separatists.
The tragedy of the downed flight number 17 of Malaysian Airlines confirmed the correctness of the position of the president, who rejected negotiations with the militants of the "DPR" and "LPR" and addressed directly to the residents of Donetsk and Lugansk. Poroshenko ordered to immediately restore social security and public services, organize free distribution of food in areas liberated from the separatists. The actions of the Ukrainian army, volunteer battalions and civil activists were widely covered on television and on the Internet. This combination of military, humanitarian and media activities in the anti-terrorist operation led to the restoration of the legitimacy of the central government in the Donbass and the disruption of the separatist project of Novorossiya.
One of the biggest challenges for Poroshenko in Donbas was to prevent the conflict with various groups of pro-Russian militants from escalating into a full-scale war with Russia or into civil war. Severe damage, destruction of basic infrastructure, economic devastation alienate the inhabitants of Donbass and bring some of them into the ranks of the separatists of the "DNR" and "LNR". After the end of military operations, Poroshenko will have to look for large investments in the region and provide social guarantees to the disillusioned local population.
At the national level, Poroshenko faces the dilemma of a president elected with high expectations but limited constitutional power. He promised to dissolve the discredited parliament and launch the necessary political and economic reforms. However, by mid-summer, Poroshenko was faced with the problems of influencing the government and the need to take into account both the requirements of the International Monetary Fund and oligarchic interests.
Early parliamentary elections on October 26, 2014, gave Poroshenko a chance to form a loyal coalition and, accordingly, a government with the participation of non-partisan technocrats who are ready to make unpopular decisions. The problem, however, is that Poroshenko will only be able to form an absolute majority in parliament in a coalition with other parties.
The upcoming parliamentary elections will also test the president's ability to curb the influence of Ukrainian oligarchs. All of Poroshenko's predecessors failed to limit the intervention of "big money" in public policy. So far, Poroshenko (himself a "chocolate tycoon") has appointed a number of wealthy businessmen to high positions in his administration, including former media tycoon Boris Lozhkin and poultry farm owner Yuri Kosiuk. They are tasked with raising the efficiency of the state bureaucracy. It is possible that Poroshenko will try to persuade the oligarchs to support his party during the parliamentary elections and to contribute to the restoration of Ukraine and its integration into Europe.
Conclusion
By distancing himself from the mistakes of the opposition leaders during the Euromaidan and from the transitional government, Poroshenko was able to win the trust of Ukrainian voters. Although Poroshenko came from the same political and business environment, he was able, unlike his rivals, to convince voters that he would provide a new quality of governance. Having convincingly won the elections, he, nevertheless, is forced to work with former rivals. New challenges have also emerged that could lead to a repetition of the mistakes and political patterns of the past.
From the very beginning, Poroshenko has invested his political capital and diplomatic skills in restoring order in the Donbass and the military campaign against the Russian-backed separatists. This made him dependent on further results. In addition, the new president of Ukraine must weaken the influence of the oligarchs and at the same time ensure their support for his "new course" and the restoration of the country. By announcing early parliamentary elections, Poroshenko seeks to achieve these goals by increasing his influence on the government and parliament, while not going beyond his constitutional powers.
Kelly McMahon, Case Western Reserve University, USA
Over the past decade and a half, scientists and politicians have been taken by surprise by the overthrow of numerous heads of state and massive street protests in the capitals of countries in Eurasia and the Middle East. The outcome of political battles is always difficult to predict, however, considering the events in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 and 2010. and in Ukraine in 2004 and 2013, it can be seen that the events in the provinces can serve as a barometer for political forecasters. It is there that new leaders or manifestations of a resurgent civil society are emerging, and these developments open up new opportunities for the expansion of democracy. Local and foreign activists and politicians, learning to predict these kinds of events, would be able to reap the benefits that these changes will bring.
Events unfolding outside the capitals can become harbingers and catalysts for the coming political changes throughout the country. They can also be forerunners in the sense that they contribute to subsequent national upheavals. Local manifestations that could be precursors to coming change could include early local protests, demands, defectors from the local elite camp, and local election rigging. Other developments at the provincial level, such as simultaneous local protests, protest recruitment, and protest movements, are catalysts for new political opportunities on a national scale. These events at the local level do not precede the emergency events in the capitals, but coincide with them in time and feed them. Tracking coincidental phenomena on the ground can help predict when actions unfolding in capitals will translate into political change on a national scale.
Harbingers of political change on a national scale
When it comes to precursors, protests on the ground are particularly important, as they can trigger massive demonstrations in capitals. The combination of provincial and national protests could revitalize civil society and possibly lead to the overthrow of the nation's leaders.
Take, for example, Kyrgyzstan in 2010. Before demonstrations in the capital led to the ouster of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, there were local protests. In February, two months before he was overthrown, some 1,500 protesters filled the streets of the small eastern town of Naryn, demanding that the government's decision to raise prices and cancel plans to privatize energy companies be overturned. In March, when the protests resumed, the number of demonstrators rose to three thousand. A month later, protests erupted in the north, in the Talas region, where demonstrators seized the building of the regional administration. The wave of demonstrations grew, protesters seized the buildings of district and regional administrations in the Chui, Jalal-Abad and Issyk-Kul regions. Then the protests spread to the capital Bishkek and Bakiyev fled.
These demonstrations in remote areas gave form to the political demands of the public, and from this one can draw conclusions about what may happen in the streets of the capitals in the future. As the scale and number of protests on the ground grow, the calls escalate from specific economic grievances to demands for full-blown political change. In addition to economic demands, the protesters insisted that the president's son, Maxim Bakiyev, who many believed personally benefited from his father's presidency, be expelled from Kyrgyzstan. In the end, the protesters began to seek the resignation of the president. Before the metropolitan opposition had time to come to their senses, the protesters in the provinces had already determined the trajectory of events.
The actions of the provincial elite also became a precursor to political change on a national scale. A particularly ominous omen for the ruling regime is the appearance of defectors among the local elite, as happened in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution of 2004 and in Kyrgyzstan during the Tulip Revolution of 2005. In Ukraine, the city administration of Kyiv and some cities in the west of the country refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was prime minister at the time, by expressing his loyalty to opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko. The fact that most of western Ukraine would not recognize the new government if Yanukovych came to power may have contributed to the authorities negotiating a second round of elections rather than trying to go against the demands of the protesters. Crowded protests - 300,000 in Kyiv, 200,000 in Lviv, 30,000 in Kharkiv and 60,000 in Ivano-Frankivsk became an additional incentive: the regime made it possible for Viktor Yushchenko to win the election and become president.
The desertion of local elites also preceded the removal of Askar Akayev in 2005. The defectors were centrists and pro-government candidates in the parliamentary elections, whose actions were provoked by the refusal of the court to register their candidacies. Based on questionable evidence, the courts ruled that these candidates engaged in vote-buying and barred them from running for parliament. The real reason, however, was that their rivals were allies or favorites of Akaev, among whom, for example, was his wife's sister. Candidates withdrew from the race contested the decision and called for protest demonstrations. The protests took a spectacular form in the city of Kochkor, where demonstrators blocked the main highway leading to China, forcing the local governor to flee by jumping over a fence. The defectors' tactics of blocking roads and toppling local leadership inspired larger protests that began after the election. During protests against the defeat of popular candidates, demonstrators used already tried methods
Another elite move that could be a precursor to change on a national scale is electoral fraud at the local level. Before applying this technology on a national scale, the authorities tried to test it in local elections. According to political scientist Nathaniel Copsey, Ukrainian opposition leaders viewed the manipulation of the results of the 2004 local elections as a rehearsal for rigging the upcoming presidential elections. The answer to the question of whether local electoral fraud can provoke democratic change on a national scale depends on the reaction of the masses and the organized opposition.
Catalyst for change on a national scale
Events on the ground can be not only a precursor to change on a national scale, but also a catalyst for that change. Even when local protests coincide with, rather than precede, national protests, developments outside the city limits of the capital can expand the resurgence of civil society across the country. The spread of the protests also sends a signal to the country's leaders that the crisis they are facing has spilled out of the capital, spread across the country, and is getting more serious. Take, for example, the events in Ukraine, which in February 2014 forced Yanukovych to flee the country. After the government passed a law banning protests, demonstrations have escalated in Kyiv itself, but even more so in the provinces. Between 24 and 26 January, protesters took control of regional administration buildings in 11 regions. When the crowd began to storm the next building, the police quickly retreated. This offensive tactic quickly spread from opposition strongholds in western Ukraine to the east of the country. Where power fell, the opposition formed executive committees that challenged Yanukovych's rule.
Peripheral areas can also influence events throughout the country by sending demonstrators to the capital. During the events of 2004 in Ukraine, the influx of protesters from the provinces to Kyiv seemed to help the success of the demonstrations in the capital. In Kyiv, the number of protesters reached almost a million people, while hundreds of thousands came from other cities and villages. The number of demonstrators grew to such an extent that the authorities lost all desire to use force to disperse them, since this was fraught with great bloodshed. Similarly, in 2013, thousands of people from most parts of the country joined protests in Kyiv on November 24, which began after the government reconsidered its decision to sign an integration agreement with the European Union. According to the results of a survey of 1,037 demonstrators conducted by the Ukrainian NGO, Ilko Kucheriv's Democratic Initiatives Foundation, after the punitive actions of Berkut on November 30, about half of the protesters were newcomers. On the posters they held in their hands were the names of the settlements from which they came, which testified to the geographical diversity of their composition.
Active mobilization of demonstrators from the provinces can increase their impact. This was especially evident in Kyrgyzstan in 2005. As political scientist Scott Radnitz described, wealthy people who lost in the first round of elections provided transportation so that their supporters from the villages could go to the regional centers to protest against the loss. Members of their electoral committees were sent to mobilize the demonstrators. The villagers readily supported the initiative, since many of the losing candidates were their patrons, who promised them their support if they won. After seizing several buildings of regional administrations, the losing candidates began to organize protests in Bishkek. They provided their supporters with buses to protest in the capital, and ultimately these protests, combined with events in the regions, led to Akaev's ouster. The failure of earlier attempts by the leading opposition coalitions to mobilize the people in Bishkek only highlighted the importance of the mobilization resources of regional patrons. Ultimately, national opposition leaders led protests in Bishkek that led to the overthrow of the regime, but by this time power had lost control of the south and the regime was close to collapse. Moreover, the national opposition leaders could not take credit for much of the mobilization effort that secured victory.
They recognized the importance of local mobilization in the 2005 revolution and took this factor into account when they planned the protest campaign against the Bakiyev regime in 2010. According to political scientist Caitlin Collins, national opposition leaders turned to regional elites to organize protests in the regions. However, this initiative was intercepted by protests on the ground, namely by spontaneous demonstrations in Naryn, which took place a month before the planned protests.
The mobilization of protesters in the provinces also played an important role in Ukraine, although it was not as significant. According to rough estimates obtained as a result of a survey by the Ilko Kucheriv Foundation, during the events of 2013, 92% of the demonstrators arrived in Kyiv by own initiative, and were not mobilized by any political party or organization. Nationwide organizations played an important role in mobilizing protesters from the provinces during the events of 2004, but they did not appeal to regional elites like their Kyrgyz counterparts.
To solve this problem, these groups acted through their own organizational structures. This was especially evident in the case of the Ukrainian youth organization Pora, whose leading activists were from Galicia, and which had cells in all regions, with the exception of the East and South of the country. According to political scientist Taras Kuzio, the goal of these organizations was to mobilize at least 100,000 people from every western region, as well as a large number of volunteers from the Sumy region, where Yushchenko is from. Lviv served as the main transshipment base for sending protesters to Kyiv. Demonstrators from the provinces, either recruited or showing up of their own free will, helped fan the wave of protests in the capital.
In order to better understand the situation and be ready for major changes on a national scale, both local and foreign activists and politicians should follow the developments in the provinces. This will enable them to prepare well in advance in order to effectively assist in bringing about democratic change. What signs can be seen on the periphery that would indicate that a change of power is not far off? Observers would do well to monitor the demands made by the protesters on the ground, as well as the shift in emphasis in these demands, as well as the existence of infrastructure and networks to mobilize citizens from the provinces to participate in the capital's protests, and the change in the loyalty of local elites. The outcome of political events is difficult to predict, but monitoring events on the ground could help activists and politicians better prepare for upcoming democratic initiatives.
Tomila Lankina, London School of Economics
Russian protests of December 2011-March 2012, unprecedented in their scale. came as a surprise even to the most astute experts on Russian politics. Were these protests just a blip on the "usually calm surface of Russian political life" or part of a long-term trajectory of the political maturation of Russian society? Do they reflect the growing ability of Russian citizens to engage in non-institutionalized forms of political participation, given that the ability to influence power through the ballot is steadily shrinking? When and under what conditions can we expect a new surge of protests?
The array of protest data I have collected helps answer these questions. In 2007, with the assistance of Garry Kasparov (a liberal-minded representative of the political opposition), the website namarsh.ru was created, the very name of which sounded like a call to protest. This site receives information from a network of regional correspondents who post and relay news about protests throughout Russia. Although, given the political orientation of the creators of the site, this resource may, to a certain extent, be biased towards coverage of actions of a liberal orientation, its messages cover protests with various demands and carried out by various political groups. Such protest actions range from purely civil activism in nature (for example, cases when residents of the area take to the streets expressing their dissatisfaction with garbage dumps) to protests organized by activists of the Communist Party (KPRF) and other opposition parties and groups. In total, between April 2007 (when the first protest was reported) and December 2013, approximately 5,100 protests were posted on the site.
These data demonstrate temporal variations in the categories of causes that bring people together, which are correlated with the socio-economic, institutional and political changes taking place over time in Russia. Protest actions with a pronounced economic component reached their peak in 2008-2009, which corresponded to the shock wave of the global economic crisis. Following the economic recovery of the post-crisis period, the number of protest actions with economic agendas and demands has decreased. Those protests that were classified as public - that is, protests caused by environmental, cultural or legal issues - had a more stable and flatter temporal trajectory. (Protest actions caused by legal problems are directed against unpopular legislative norms and their implementation (this concerned, for example, a number of norms of labor, criminal and administrative codes). This category also includes protest actions against illegal actions of state bodies and private companies (illegal eviction, construction in unauthorized places) Environmental protests include those against hazardous working conditions, waste disposal, and the destruction of forests, parks, and protected forest areas.Cultural protests include street rallies against the destruction monuments of historical value to buildings and other landmarks, as well as changes in the names of cities or other places.) In addition, in support of the conclusions made by political scientist Graham Robertson, who studied the data of the opposition website of the Institute for Collective Action with a left bias, pr protest actions of a civil nature accounted for a significant share of the protest activism in general. This data also shows a steady increase in the number of protests with a clear political agenda in the years and months leading up to the December 2011 protests, as well as a decline in political activism since the election of Vladimir Putin to a third presidential term in March 2012. Despite the subsequent Because of the restrictions imposed by the Russian authorities and the resulting decrease in the number of protest actions, the number of such actions and people taking to the streets increased again in the second half of 2013. Such data may be explained by the temporary liberalization of the political space before the Sochi Winter Olympics, which was preceded by the prison of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and members of the Pussy Riot group. The most interesting trend emerging from these data is the apparent transformation of civic protest into political activism during the winter of 2011-2012. Then, after March 2012, the trend quickly reversed. The decrease in the share of political protest actions in the total protest activity seems to correspond to the re-spread of this type of activism, which is determined not by the political agenda, but by various issues on the public agenda. In particular, in 2013, the share of protest actions of a political nature, compared to other types of protest actions, acquired a more balanced character in the spectrum of protest activity, within which civil protest actions are only slightly behind political protests.
These trends suggest a latent base of support for the protest movement, which, for the most part, remains hidden from public scrutiny and is not covered by the mainstream media as long as it engages in "safe" forms of activism during times of political repression and/or political secrecy, but again manifests itself when the right conditions are in place in terms of what social movement theorists call "political opportunity structures." It is well known that the rise in political discontent coincided with a liberal window of opportunity during Dmitry Medvedev's interim presidency of 2008-2012. Putin's election to a third presidential term in March 2012 was followed by an unprecedented crackdown on protests and political opposition. Associated by some experts with the Stalinist show trials, the trial of the defendants in the Bolotnaya case, whose name is associated with the square in Moscow, which became the center of protests and unrest against the regime on May 6, 2012, became the embodiment of this suppression. The swamp lawsuits were initiated allegedly over protesters' violence against police officers and have already resulted in nine prison sentences, arrests of an additional twelve activists, surveillance and travel restrictions on at least four more human. The repression and crackdown on street protests that followed Putin's re-election was systematically accounted for in my dataset. After March 2012, a significantly higher proportion of protest activity compared to earlier time periods was the target of repressive actions in the form of arrests of protesters, attempts to disrupt events with the help of pro-Kremlin groups (for example, with the help of the Nashi youth group), police violence and other actions aimed at disrupting the protests.
By emphasizing how repression of a protest movement can induce protesters to change the demands they express during the actions, I do not mean that these demands are completely divorced from the specific grounds for grievance that Russians have. Indeed, as noted above, in times of economic hardship, it is likely that more people tend to rally around such pressing issues as layoffs, unpaid or delayed wages. Most ordinary citizens at all times are naturally inclined to perceive the problems of their locality or region as having the most relevant and tangible impact on their lives. However, the trends expressed by our data also suggest that during periods when political repression intensifies, there may be an increased tendency to rethink or (re)formulate demands in a more localized manner and to shift blame from the level of national leaders to the level of their own. local subordinates and other even less significant officials on the periphery: corrupt municipal officials enriching themselves on illegal construction projects in beautiful protected areas; private companies that deceive people by collecting money for housing that will never be built and go unpunished due to the complicity or inaction of municipal or regional officials; irresponsible drivers of government-owned luxury cars with flashing lights endangering pedestrians or other vehicles. (Despite the surge in Putin’s popularity following the annexation of Crimea, public opinion polls show a steady and even rising level of frustration with corruption, lawlessness, and lack of accountability at all levels of government. For the latest Levada Center research on Russians’ satisfaction with government performance, see Who disapproves of the president's activities?")
Why pay attention to the observed volatility of the agenda of the protest movement, as well as the question of who the protesters blame for the problems that cause them discontent? Assessing the sustainability of the momentum set by the protests that took place between December 2011 and March 2012, the American political scientist Mark Kramer emphasizes the importance of forming "waiting structures". These structures unite the protesters into a more or less cohesive community, allowing for continuity between phases of mobilization of discontent, which can be separated by months or even years. Our data may not reflect the formation of some clear set of structures, ideologies, leaders that unite the protesters; however, they indicate the presence of supporters of the protest movement (albeit fragmented) who continue to accumulate what Robertson calls human capital or a set of protest skills in the periods between the peaks of discontent. The existence of such constituencies can be seen as an important constant, even if the issues addressed by these people and the goals they advocate are changeable and adaptive to the institutional and political environment in which such people operate. Sociologist Georgy Derlugyan, in his book Adept Bourdieu in the Caucasus: Sketches for a Biography from a World System Perspective, also emphasizes the importance of this phenomenon by tracing the life histories of the most typical Soviet and post-Soviet activists in the Caucasus: an activist of the Brezhnev era engaged in more or less safe in terms of political leadership problems (such as the environment and youth health), becomes a democrat in the perestroika era and a participant in nationalist demonstrations in post-Soviet times. These models illustrate the adaptive ability of citizens to change the way they express their discontent in an authoritarian regime and their potential to unite in large-scale protest when circumstances change.
Under what conditions, then, should we expect the transformation of non-political forms of protest into an anti-regime mass political manifestation of discontent, similar to what was observed on the Russian streets from December 2011 to March 2012? Previous studies of protests in other settings and analyzes of the December movement in Russia highlight the importance of splitting the elite to create windows of opportunity for protest: rival factions of the elite can not only help rally protesters around a particular political issue, but also ensure their relative safety, such as , in cases where they are supported by such influential political figures as former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who joined the protests in 2011.
The sanctions imposed on Russia following the annexation of Crimea and accusations of supporting separatist forces in eastern Ukraine may have already provoked discontent among the elites that rages behind the façade of a patriotic and nationalist consensus. Evidence of the Kremlin's sensitivity to potential disaffection among the bureaucratic elite, and therefore a sense of the fragility of its loyalty to Putin, is the relatively mild campaign to limit foreign property ownership by officials and deputies. (For example, instead of a ban on owning property abroad, Putin allowed officials and deputies to own real estate abroad if that property was declared.)
As increasingly harsh international sanctions are imposed on Russia and affect a wider range of government officials, the patriotic consensus may well be eroded, given the loss of opportunities to spend holidays abroad or use foreign bank accounts. Sanctions could also affect the well-being of ordinary citizens as foreign investment in the Russian economy declines. The social and economic difficulties of ordinary citizens could increase street activism about pressing issues. A combination of political windows of opportunity, if and when they arise, and mounting socio-economic hardships could help transform non-political forms of protest (which, as my data shows, already occur regularly in Russian cities and regions) into more open forms political discontent.
The national question in the USSR (60-80s) From the moment of its existence, the USSR was a federation, the state administrative management of which had a rigid centralized and unified character.
National politics
According to the census data, in the 1960s the Soviet state included more than 50 national-territorial formations and there were 102 ethnic groups. The factor uniting them into a single cultural and state entity was the Communist Party.
The positions of chairmen of the party committees of the republics were held by national officials. The existence of a national nomenklatura significantly influenced the disintegration process in the state, but it was extremely necessary for the top party leadership as a tool for strengthening centralization.
During this period, in the wake of Khrushchev's "thaw", the union republics were granted a number of national freedoms, national cultural institutions were formed, the educational process was conducted in the national language, and territorial autonomy was guaranteed.
The top leadership actually removed the problem of the national question from the agenda, since there were no sharp contradictions between the peoples of the USSR at that time. Russians made up more than 50% of the Soviet people, but they did not have visible advantages over other peoples and ethnic groups.
Nevertheless, in the second half of the 70s, on this basis, the first, after a very long break, national conflicts arose. There was no independent republican party in the RSFSR, the direct control of the republic was carried out by the Central Committee of the CPSU.
This led to the fact that many peoples of the Union republics began to perceive the Russians as the dominant nation in the state. It was during this period that the speech turnover "younger and older brother" entered the life of the Soviet people.
Some ethnic groups of the republics of Transcaucasia during this period were discriminated against by representatives of the titular nations. This caused a number of interethnic conflicts that began in the mid-1970s. It was then that the first confrontations between Chechnya and Dagestan, Ingushetia and North Ossetia began, which continue to this day.
National movements
The "thaw" did not pass without a trace for the Soviet people. In the mid-60s, national movements actively began to form in the USSR, the purpose of which was to protest against the centralization of the state. The weakening of the iron curtain with the West in the early 1970s also contributed to the growth in the number of national organizations.
The most radical national movement was dissidence, which included the intelligentsia, believers and representatives of the opposition forces.
Dissidents organized large-scale political protests, defended the cultural rights of the peoples of the Union republics, and sought the publication of illegal books by authors who interrupted in forced emigration.
The dissident movement became a real threat to the communist ideology, as its activists openly declared the need to eliminate the USSR and promoted national freedom.
The Fifth Branch of the KGB fought against this current; the intelligentsia was most often sent abroad or to Siberia. It was the people who were in the ranks of the dissidents who became the main driving force behind the adoption of independence in the Soviet republics in the early 90s.
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In the context of the growth of national movements, the authorities adjusted the national policy. Repressions were applied only to participants in open speeches. National cadres began to be massively awarded orders, medals and honorary titles. representatives of the indigenous nationality stood at the head of the republics, and the Russians, occupying the posts of the 2nd secretary, turned out to be "observers" In the context of the growth of national movements, the authorities adjusted the national policy. - dug speeches. National cadres began to be massively awarded orders, medals and honorary titles. The “indigenization” of the local leadership began. acted as "observers"
With the adoption in 1961 of the new Program of the CPSU, the beginning of a new stage in the development of national relations in the country was associated. Its features were seen in the further rapprochement and achievement of "complete unity" of nations. national policy to regulate national relations at a new stage, the party pledged to conduct "on the basis of the Leninist national policy", not allowing "neither ignoring nor inflating national characteristics."
The most important goal of the policy was seen "as before" - to ensure the actual equality of nations, nationalities "with full consideration of their interests, paying special attention to those areas of the country that need faster development." Growing in the process of communist construction, the benefits were promised to be "fairly distributed among all nations and nationalities."
However, the "extensive construction of communism" in the country did not last long. In November 1967, L. I. Brezhnev announced that a developed socialist society had been built in the USSR, and that it was to be improved in the future. The new authorities also abandoned other methodological innovations of the Khrushchev period. At the same time, the provision on a new historical community was preserved and further developed with a clarification of the idea of it as a multinational people.
The statement about a new historical community that was supposedly fully formed in the USSR was contained in the speeches of the General Secretary at the XXIV (1971) and XXV (1976) Party Congresses. To develop this position, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU prepared and published in two editions the book "Leninism and the national question in modern conditions" (1972, 1974), which gave an official interpretation of the phenomenon. The book explained: “The Soviet people is not some kind of new nation, but is a historical community of people, wider than the nation, of a new type, embracing all the peoples of the USSR. The concept of "Soviet people" appeared as a reflection of fundamental changes in the essence and appearance of the Soviet nations, as an expression of their all-round rapprochement, the growth of their international features. But even with the close interweaving of the international and the national in the socialist nations, the latter form the Soviet people, remaining at the same time its national components. The strengthening of a new historical community seemed to be the most important goal of the state national policy.
During the 70-80s. a myriad of books and articles were published in the country on the rise and rapprochement of the Soviet nations, on the relationship between the national and the international, on the triumph of "Lenin's national policy." However, the works were sinful of declarativeness and scholasticism, practically did not contribute to narrowing the gap between science, politics and life. The rapidly reviving national consciousness was treated as a manifestation of nationalism. Real contradictions national life and interethnic relations were stubbornly ignored. "Natsiology" in the conditions of "developed socialism" noticeably intensified on holidays - in connection with the anniversaries of the October Revolution and the formation of the USSR. This could not but leave an imprint of "healthiness" on a significant part of the works devoted to national problems.
Of course, the new historical community of people in the USSR was not only a created myth, but also a reality. In the current media, the recognition that there were indeed Soviet people, is often identified by liberals only with a kind of inferiority (hence the contemptuous “scoop”). However, this does not negate the fact that at the level of public reflection there was a sense of "Soviet people". Football fans of different nationalities in major international matches were rooting for Dynamo Kiev and Tbilisi, Ararat Yerevan, our cosmonauts, regardless of their nationality. In other words, there definitely existed a certain substantive space not with an ethnic, but with a civil basis.
"According to all modern ideas about the state and the nation, the Soviet people were a normal multi-ethnic nation, no less real than the American, Brazilian or Indian,” S. G. Kara-Murza rightly asserts these days. Of course, the degree of "Sovietness" was different for different groups of the population, but a single economy, a single school and a single army made the Soviet people much more united than the above-mentioned multi-ethnic nations. A convincing argument in favor of the existence of such a community is the growth in the number of ethnically mixed marriages. The population census of 1959 recorded 50.3 million families in the country, of which 10.3% were ethnically mixed. By 1970, mixed families accounted for 13.5%, in 1979 - 14.9, and in 1989 - 17.5 (12.8 million out of 77.1 million families). Behind each of the spouses there were usually groups of relatives, which greatly increased the number of related people of different nationalities.
The formation of a new community was also evidenced by the data on a significant number of non-Russians who recognized the Russian language as the language of interethnic communication, their "native" language. According to the 1926 census, 6.4 million of them were recorded, in 1959 - 10.2, in 1979 - 13; in 1989 - already 18.7 million. If the process of switching to the Russian language was not sufficiently natural and voluntary, then the vast majority of non-Russians would not call it “native”, limiting themselves to indicating “fluency” in it. Population censuses also showed a constant increase in the number of those who freely use the Russian language along with their native national language. In 1970, 241.7 million people lived in the USSR (of which 53.4% were Russians). By 1989, their number increased to 286.7 million, among them there were 145.2 million (50.6%) Russians by nationality. At the same time, the Russian language was considered native and fluent in it by 81.4% of the population of the USSR and 88% of the population of Russia.
The Constitution adopted in 1977 characterized the “developed socialist society” built in the USSR as a society “in which, on the basis of the convergence of all social strata, the legal and de facto equality of all nations and nationalities, a new historical community of people arose - the Soviet people.” The people were proclaimed the main subject of power and lawmaking in the country. The equality of citizens was declared regardless of race and nationality; it was argued that "the country's economy constitutes a single national economic complex"; the country has one system public education". At the same time, the Basic Law stated that “each union republic retains the right to freely secede from the USSR”, each union and autonomous republic has its own Constitution, taking into account their “features”, the territory of the republics “cannot be changed” without their consent, “ the sovereign rights of the union republics are protected by the USSR.” Thus, the “Soviet people” in the Constitution appeared in words as one, but actually cut into various “sovereign” and “special” parts. The latter also corresponded to the spirit of the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which was not canceled by anyone, proclaiming at the dawn of Soviet power (November 2, 1917) not only “equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia”, but also their right “to free self-determination up to secession and the formation of an independent state ".
Researchers singled out in a single new historical community clearly differing in the possibilities of exercising their sovereignty nations, nationalities, ethnic and national groups. A common opinion about their relationship in the Soviet era was never formed. The “titular” and “non-titular” peoples, national majorities and minorities, had different opportunities for the realization of vital interests.
The territorial principle of the national-state structure of the USSR over time revealed an increasing contradiction with the growing internationalization of the composition of the population of "national" entities. A good example was the Russian Federation, where in 1989 51.5% of the population of the USSR lived. The total number of Russian peoples was most often indicated by an indefinite expression: "more than a hundred." The republic had a complex hierarchical system of national-state and administrative structure. In such a situation, among different peoples naturally there were movements for leveling and raising their “state” status or acquiring it, which was quite sensitive and manifested itself in the 60s and 70s.
The peoples of the USSR differed significantly in the rate of population growth. For example, from 1959 to 1989, the number of Estonians and Latvians increased by 3.8 and 4.2%, respectively, Ukrainians and Belarusians - by 19 and 27%, Russians and Lithuanians - by 27 and 31%, Georgians, Moldovans and Armenians - by 48, 51 and 66%, Kazakhs and Azerbaijanis - by 125 and 130%, Kyrgyz and Turkmens - by 161 and 172%, and Uzbeks and Tajiks - by 178 and 202%. All this created a natural concern of individual peoples with the demographic situation, which was aggravated by unregulated migration of the population.
Contradictions in the national sphere, created at different stages of history, years and decades later came to the surface of public life. The movements of Soviet Germans and Crimean Tatars for the restoration of the autonomies lost during the war still made themselves felt. Other repressed peoples demanded permission to return to their former places of residence (Meskhetian Turks, Greeks, etc.). Dissatisfaction with the conditions of life in the USSR generated among a number of peoples (Jews, Germans, Greeks) movements for the right to emigrate to their “historical homeland”. Protest movements, excesses and other acts of dissatisfaction with national politics also arose for other reasons. A number of them can be noted in accordance with the chronology of events.
Thus, on April 24, 1965, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey, the 100,000th mourning procession took place in Yerevan. Students and workers and employees of many organizations who joined them marched to the city center with the slogan “Resolve the Armenian issue fairly!”. The demonstrators were dispersed using fire trucks.
On October 8, 1966, on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the formation of the Crimean ASSR, rallies of Crimean Tatars were held in the Uzbek cities of Andijan and Bekabad, on October 18 - in Fergana, Kuvasay, Tashkent, Chirchik, Samarkand, Kokand, Yangikurgan, Uchkuduk. Many rallies were dispersed. At the same time, only in Angren and Bekabad, 17 protesters were convicted for participating in "mass riots."
In March 1967, the “Abkhaz events” continued for two weeks, the participants of which demanded the legalization of the Abkhaz toponymy in the republic, the granting of privileges to representatives of the Abkhaz nationality in employment and admission to higher educational institutions, the study of the Abkhaz language in all non-Abkhaz schools of the republic, and even the separation of Abkhazia from Georgia with the status of a union republic within the USSR. In September 1967, a group of cultural figures of Abkhazia arrived in Moscow with a demand to withdraw from circulation a book published in Tbilisi, the author of which tried to prove that the Abkhaz nationality does not exist, the Abkhaz are Georgians who once converted to Islam. As a result, the secretary of the regional committee and the chairman of the government of Abkhazia were relieved of their posts and Abkhazians were recommended in their place. Georgian names and signboards in Georgian have been replaced by Abkhaz ones. Departments of the Abkhaz language and literature were opened at Tbilisi University.
On May 22, 1967, during a traditional meeting and laying flowers at the monument to Taras Shevchenko in Kyiv, several people were detained for participating in an unauthorized event. Outraged people surrounded the police and chanted: "Shame!" Later, 200-300 participants in the meeting went to the building of the Central Committee to protest and obtain the release of those arrested. The authorities tried to stop the movement of the column with water from fire trucks. The Minister of Public Order of the Republic was forced to release the detainees.
On September 2, 1967, the police broke up in Tashkent a demonstration of many thousands of Crimean Tatars protesting against the dispersal on August 27 of a two-thousandth meeting-meeting with representatives of the Crimean Tatar people who returned from Moscow after receiving them on June 21 by Yu. V. Andropov, N. A. Shchelokov, M. P. Georgadze, Secretary of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Council, and R. A. Rudenko, Prosecutor General. At the same time, 160 people were detained, 10 of them were convicted. However, on September 5, 1967, a decree of the Presidium of the Armed Forces was issued, removing the accusation of betrayal from the Crimean Tatars. They got their civil rights back. Tatar youth received the right to study at the universities of Moscow and Leningrad, but Tatar families could not come and settle in the Crimea. The partisans of the Crimea objected to their return, but the main reason was that the Crimea by that time had been “donated” by N. S. Khrushchev to Ukraine.
It took a long time to overcome the consequences of the clash between Uzbek and Russian youth that occurred in Tashkent during and after the football match between the Pakhtakor (Tashkent) and Krylya Sovetov (Kuibyshev) teams on September 27, 1969 at more than a hundred thousand stadium. The hostility of the local population to the Russians was caused by negative traits (drunkenness, hooliganism, theft, prostitution), allegedly brought to the republic in the 20s. predominantly from the Volga region. The contemptuous nickname "Samara" has since taken root among Uzbeks and has been carried over to all Russians. The conflict arose in the middle of the match, when the referee did not count the goal scored by Pakhtakor. Clashes continued after the match. As a result, more than a thousand people were arrested. The leaders of the republic tried to minimize information about the scale of excess. Realizing the ugliness of the case, especially against the backdrop of huge assistance to Tashkent from the RSFSR and other union republics after the devastating earthquake of 1965, they did not want the incident to be regarded as Uzbek nationalism.
Period 60-80s. characterized by a significant increase in Zionist sentiment among Soviet Jews. The consequence of the “awakening of the Jewish consciousness among the youth” was the growth of emigration urges. In order to refute the accusations that the USSR was allegedly pursuing a policy of state anti-Semitism, an official brochure Soviet Jews: Myths and Reality (1972) was published. It noted that Jews, who accounted for less than 1% of the total population of the country, accounted for 11.4% of Lenin Prize winners, 55 people received the highest title of Hero of Socialist Labor, 4 were awarded this title twice, 3 representatives of this nationality were awarded this title three times. With a policy of state anti-Semitism, this would have been impossible.
In 1972, when there was a change in the post of First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Republic of Georgia, an opportunity arose to revise the attitude of its leadership towards the national problem of the Meskhetian Turks. V.P. Mzhavanadze, when he was the 1st Secretary of the Central Committee (1953-1972), considered their return impossible. “Firstly,” he said, “the lands of the Meskhetians are already occupied by others, and secondly, the border is nearby, while the Meskhi are engaged in smuggling, and therefore the border guards object to their return.” Attempts by the leaders of the KGB and the border troops to show that this is incorrect information had no effect. E. A. Shevardnadze, when he became the 1st secretary of the Central Committee, continued to adhere to the version of his predecessor. As a result, only Meskhetians were able to return to Georgia, who decided to change their nationality and become Georgians by passport.
On March 30, 1972, in the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU, when discussing the book of one of its members, P. E. Shelest, “Our Soviet Ukraine” (1971), it was said: “This book glorifies the Cossacks, promotes archaism”, “in Ukraine there are many signs and announcements on Ukrainian. How is it different from Russian? Only a distortion of the latter. So why do it?" Objections were raised against the establishment of coats of arms of cities, excursions and tourism in ancient cities and memorable places. A. N. Kosygin said: “The creation of economic councils at one time was also a manifestation of nationalism ... It is not clear why in Ukraine schools should study the Ukrainian language? .. Sevastopol has been a Russian city for centuries. Why and why are there signs and shop windows in Ukrainian?” It can be assumed that each of the speakers in the depths of his soul considered Ukrainians, or at least their ancestors, to be Russians. As a result, the journal "Communist of Ukraine" (1973, No. 4) published an editorial article "On the serious shortcomings of one book", an instruction was given to discuss the article and Shelest's book at all city and regional assets. The book has been withdrawn from sale. In April 1973, by decision of the plenum of the Central Committee, its author "went on vacation for health reasons."
In 1972, the funeral of R. Kalanta, an 18-year-old youth from Kaunas, who committed self-immolation on May 18 in protest against the "Soviet occupation of Lithuania", caused a great resonance. They grew into a large-scale demonstration of national protest. About 400 demonstrators were detained, and 8 of them were convicted.
In 1973, the situation around the Prigorodny region of North Ossetia escalated. On January 16-19, thousands of Ingush gathered in Grozny, demanding that the authorities solve this problem. The statement handed over to the authorities listed the facts of discrimination against the Ingush population in Ossetia, mainly in the course of employment. The Ingush asked to provide them with equal rights with the Ossetians on the territory of the disputed region. Demonstrations and rallies continued for several days and were eventually dispersed by water from fire hoses and police batons.
In January 1977, it came to terror on ethnic grounds. Three Armenians, who were members of the underground "National United Party", came from Yerevan to Moscow, detonated three bombs on January 8 - in a subway car and two food stores. 37 people died and were injured. After a failed attempt to blow up three charges at the Kursk railway station on the eve of the November holidays, the criminals were detained. It is characteristic that in this case, in order not to “compromise the Armenian people”, at the direction of the leadership of the Communist Party of Armenia, not a single newspaper published in Armenian published a report on the terrorist act. A documentary film about the trial of terrorists was also banned from showing. When A. D. Sakharov, who protested against the allegedly illegal arrest of Armenians (he refused to believe that terrorists could come to Moscow to commit murders), appeared in Izvestia, K. S. Demirchyan was indignant: “How dare Sakharov divulge the names of the criminals who gave permission to the editors to print this material!”
Football fans in Vilnius were among the first to respond to the adopted new Constitution of the USSR. On October 7, 1977, after the victory of Zalgiris over the Vitebsk Dvina, and three days later over the Smolensk Iskra, several hundred spectators of the first football match and more than 10 thousand after the second moved through the streets of the city, shouting: “Down with the constitution invaders!”, “Freedom to Lithuania!”, “Russians, get out!”. Lithuanian youth tore down posters for the 60th anniversary of October, smashed shop windows with visual agitation. The incidents ended in the first case with the detention of 17, and in the second - 44 participants in these peculiar demonstrations.
Contradictions in the national sphere emerged when new republican constitutions were adopted in 1978 on the basis of the Constitution of the USSR. To reflect the process of "rapprochement" of nations, articles on the state language were excluded from the draft constitutions of the Transcaucasian union republics at the suggestion of the Center. This "innovation" caused a wave of open protest on the part of the students and the intelligentsia. The articles had to be retained, despite the fact that they were not in the constitutions of the other union republics, nor in the union constitution.
In the spring of 1978, rallies of the Abkhaz population took place in various settlements of the autonomous republic with demands for giving the state status to the Abkhaz language, stopping the migration of Georgians to the republic, secession from Georgia and joining the RSFSR. A concession to the demands of the Abkhazians was the inclusion in the constitution of the autonomous republic of a provision on the introduction of three state languages in it: Abkhazian, Russian and Georgian.
In December 1978, a demonstration of German “refuseniks” took place in Dushanbe demanding that they be allowed to leave the country. The first secretary of the city committee spoke to the audience and promised to increase the number of exit permits. The promise was kept.
In 1979, an opportunity arose to solve the problem of Soviet Germans evicted from their places of residence during the war years. In the book “KGB and Power” (1995), F. D. Bobkov wrote about this: “It was difficult to explain why their rights were not restored after the war... Centers appeared in Germany that supported the emigration moods of Soviet Germans... We they carried on an ostrich policy, pretending that the problem did not exist at all. The matter reached the point of absurdity. For example, about a million Germans lived in Kazakhstan, expelled from their inhabited land in the Volga region, and they tried to hide this fact from the Soviet and world community. In the encyclopedia of Kazakhstan, the Germans were not even mentioned as a nationality in the composition of the population of the republic ... But now German Chancellor Adenauer was going to visit Moscow. The Central Committee of the CPSU began to fuss, realizing that the Soviet Germans would certainly appeal to him. And then a truly Solomonic decision was made: out of the many thousands who wanted to leave for the FRG, about three hundred families received permission to leave. The same was done later, when visiting the USSR by other high-ranking officials from both German states.
The KGB department headed by Bobkov entered the Central Committee with a proposal to create a German autonomous region on the territory of Kazakhstan. The proposal was accepted, the Politburo issued a corresponding decision. The leaders of the republic promised to resolve the issue. The territory of the future autonomy was determined, its capital (the city of Ermentau in the east of the Tselinograd region) was named, the building of the regional committee was chosen, and its composition was outlined. It only remained to proclaim the formation of an autonomous region, scheduled for June 15th. However, on the morning of that day, a demonstration of Kazakh students took place in Tselinograd against the decision of the authorities in Moscow and Alma-Ata to create autonomy. It was held under the slogans: "Kazakhstan is indivisible!", "No German autonomy!". I had to ask the activists of the autonomist movement to "wait" with the proclamation of their national-territorial formation.
The autumn of 1980 was the time of youth riots in Estonia. On September 22, after the cancellation of a performance by the youth pop band Propeller at the Tallinn stadium after a football match, about a thousand Estonian schoolchildren took to the streets to protest against this decision. The concert was canceled due to the discovery of "nationalistic motives" in the lyrics. The demonstration was dispersed by the police, several high school students were expelled from schools. And on October 1 and 3, the police had to disperse more than a thousand people protesting against these exclusions. The demonstrators waved the flags of independent Estonia, shouted the slogans "Freedom for Estonia!", "Russians - get out of Estonia!". On 7 and 8 October, more protest demonstrations followed in Tallinn (several hundred participants), and on 10 October, youth demonstrations in Tartu and Pärnu. As a result, about 100 students were expelled from schools, several people were convicted for "hooliganism."
The year 1981 characterizes the intensification of the authorities' offensive against the Russian patriotic forces. On March 28, Yu. V. Andropov sent a note to the Politburo, in which he noted the creation of the “Russianists” movement among the intelligentsia. Rusism in the note was presented as “demagoguery about the need to fight for the preservation of Russian culture, ancient monuments, for the “salvation of the Russian nation”, which “outright enemies of the Soviet system cover up their subversive activities.” Under the slogans of defending Russian national traditions, the Russists, the head of the KGB informed, “are essentially engaged in active anti-Soviet activities.” Andropov raised the question of the speedy elimination of this movement, which, in his opinion, threatened the communist foundations more than the so-called dissidents.
The result of the offensive against the "Russianists" was the dismissal of S. N. Semanov in April from the post of editor-in-chief of the magazine "Man and Law". In August, the publicist A. M. Ivanov, the author of articles known in patriotic circles in the journal Veche, the works The Logic of a Nightmare and The Knight of an Obscure Image, depicting the history of the Communist Party as a chain of conspiracies, coups, and brutal violence, conceived and carried out by people, were arrested. who dreamed only of maintaining their personal power. At the end of 1981, the editorial office of Our Contemporary was smashed for publishing materials by V. Kozhinov, A. Lanshchikov, S. Semanov, V. Krupin. The authors were publicly condemned, the editor of the journal, S. V. Vikulov, after a corresponding suggestion, was left at his post, but both of his deputies were fired. At meetings in the Central Committee, such brilliant books by Russian writers as Lad by V. Belov and Memory by V. Chivilikhin were criticized.
In 1982, the Saratov magazine Volga was destroyed. The reason was M. Lobanov's article "Liberation", written about M. Alekseev's novel "Brawlers", which told the truth about the famine of 1933 in the Volga region. For the first time in journalism, the article comprehended the scale and causes of the national tragedy of depeasantization. The publication was condemned by a special decision of the Secretariat of the Central Committee. The editor-in-chief N. E. Palkin was fired. The magazine is dead. In the autumn of 1983, in Literaturnaya Gazeta and Voprosy Literatury, attacks began on scientists studying the work of Russian philosophers V. S. Solovyov, N. F. Fedorov, and P. A. Florensky. The publishers of the book by the outstanding Russian philosopher A.F. Losev received severe penalties. During the persecution of the “Russianists”, the authorities pardoned (April 1983) the dissident “Eurocommunists” arrested a year earlier (A. Fadin, P. Kudyukin, Yu. Khavkin, etc.) from the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, which was headed by the liberal academician N N. Inozemtsev, and in 1983-1985. - A. N. Yakovlev.
In the autumn of 1981 there were major riots in the capital of North Ossetia. The unrest began on October 24, during the funeral in Ordzhonikidze of an Ossetian taxi driver who was killed by two Ingush men who were released three days after the murder for a ransom of one million rubles. Members of the funeral procession organized a rally and seized the regional committee building. By evening, order on the square was restored by the cadets of the local military school. The next day, clashes between protesters (more than 10 thousand people) and law enforcement forces spread throughout the city. Over 800 people were detained during the three days of riots, 40 of them were convicted. The 1st secretary of the regional committee of the CPSU, B. E. Kabaloev, was removed from his post.
Towards the end of the period under review, after several fairly quiet years, there was a major ethnic unrest in the capital of Tajikistan, Dushanbe.
In the spring of 1985, long-forgotten riots were again recorded in military echelons with conscripts to the Soviet army. For two days, Muslim conscripts heated up by alcohol sorted things out with non-Muslims. This event opened a series of excesses with nationalistic overtones in the coming "epoch of perestroika". The events in the North Caucasus received special consideration at a meeting of the Secretariat of the Central Committee. The reason for the trouble in the national sphere was seen, as before, in the flaws of moral and international education, the pernicious influence of religion. The Central Committee also habitually called for education to be built in such a way that the Soviet person felt first of all a citizen of the USSR, and only then a representative of one or another nation.
By the second half of the 1980s, dissidence was largely suppressed. However, as subsequent events showed, the victory was ephemeral. Gorbachev's "perestroika" fully revealed its significance. It turned out that the open struggle of several hundred dissidents, with the moral and material support of the West, against the vices of the existing regime of power aroused the sympathy of an immeasurably wider circle of fellow citizens. The confrontation testified to significant contradictions in society. The ideas of the dissidents were widely popularized by the world media. Sakharov alone in 1972-1979. held 150 press conferences, prepared 1200 broadcasts for foreign radio. Dissidence in the Soviet Union was actively promoted by the American CIA. It is known, for example, that by 1975 it participated in the publication in Russian of more than 1,500 books by Russian and Soviet authors. All this greatly increased the strength of the dissident component itself. According to Yu. V. Andropov, in the Soviet Union there were hundreds of thousands of people who either act or are ready (under suitable circumstances) to act against the Soviet regime. There were those in the party-state elite of Soviet society.
The lowering of the national flag of the USSR from the flagpole over the domes of the Kremlin in 1991, if you look at this event through the prism of anti-Soviet dissidence, means that the main forces of the former party and state leadership essentially moved to the positions of the movement. They became the driving force behind the nomenklatura revolution of 1991-1993, which instantly (by historical standards) undermined the foundations of "developed socialism." The phenomenon of intra-party liberal dissent and its method are well described in the article by A. N. Yakovlev “Bolshevism is a social disease of the 20th century” (1999). It claims that in the days of “developed socialism”, a group of “true reformers” unleashed a new round of exposing the “Stalin personality cult” “with a clear implication: not only Stalin is a criminal, but the system itself is criminal.” Party dissidents proceeded from the conviction that "the Soviet totalitarian regime could be destroyed only through glasnost and totalitarian discipline of the party, while hiding behind the interests of improving socialism."
The policy of glasnost and other perestroika processes changed the attitude of the Soviet authorities towards dissidents. With the freedom to emigrate, many of them left the country, samizdat publications (by the end of 1988 there were 64 of them) began to operate in parallel with the state ones. In the second half of the 1980s, the last dissidents who were serving sentences were released in the USSR. In December 1986, A. D. Sakharov was returned from exile. In 1989, the Gulag Archipelago was allowed to be published, and in August 1990 Soviet citizenship was returned to AI Solzhenitsyn, Yu. F. Orlov and other dissidents. Dissidence as a movement ceased to exist. Since 1986, dissident groups have been replaced by political clubs, and then popular fronts. At the same time, the process of establishing a multi-party system began. Until it completes the function political parties carried out by "informal" public organizations. At the same time, in 1990, 238 political prisoners continued to serve their sentences in the USSR.
In 1994, the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation published the book "The Tale of Sakharov", which includes materials from a conference dedicated to the outstanding scientist's birthday. The book contains a speech by S. A. Filatov, who fully identified the current government with the participants in the branch of dissidence headed by A. D. Sakharov and those of his students, “who took upon themselves the heavy duty to realize much of what Andrei Dmitrievich dreamed of ... May Sakharov's experience, Sakharov's thoughts, Sakharov's ideas and Sakharov's feelings help us fulfill this difficult mission! These words contain an official assessment of the historical role of one of the currents of dissidence. As for the movement as a whole, its participants, with a few exceptions (L. M. Alekseeva, L. I. Borodin, S. A. Kovalev, R. A. Medvedev, V. N. Osipov, V. I. Novodvorskaya , G. O. Pavlovsky, A. I. Solzhenitsyn and others) did not retain a noticeable influence on the post-Soviet political and social life of the country.
§ 4. National politics and national movements
With the adoption in 1961 of the new Program of the CPSU, the beginning of a new stage in the development of national relations in the country was associated. Its features were seen in the further rapprochement and achievement of "complete unity" of nations. The national policy, designed to regulate national relations at a new stage, the party pledged to pursue "on the basis of Lenin's national policy", allowing "neither ignoring nor inflating national characteristics." The most important goal of the policy was seen "as before" in ensuring the actual equality of nations, nationalities "with full consideration of their interests, paying special attention to those areas of the country that need faster development." Growing in the process of communist construction, the benefits were promised to be "fairly distributed among all nations and nationalities."
However, the "extensive construction of communism" in the country did not last long. In November 1967, L. I. Brezhnev announced that a developed socialist society had been built in the USSR, and that it was to be improved in the future. The new authorities also abandoned other methodological innovations of the Khrushchev period. At the same time, the provision on a new historical community was preserved and further developed with a clarification of the idea of it as a multinational people.
The statement about a new historical community that was supposedly fully formed in the USSR was contained in the speeches of the General Secretary at the XXIV (1971) and XXV (1976) Party Congresses. To develop this position, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU prepared and published in two editions the book "Leninism and the national question in modern conditions" (1972, 1974), which gave an official interpretation of the phenomenon. The book explained: “The Soviet people is not some kind of new nation, but is a historical community of people, wider than the nation, of a new type, embracing all the peoples of the USSR. The concept of "Soviet people" appeared as a reflection of fundamental changes in the essence and appearance of the Soviet nations, as an expression of their all-round rapprochement, the growth of their international features. But even with the close interweaving of the international and the national in the socialist nations, the latter form the Soviet people, remaining at the same time its national components. Strengthening the "new historical community" seemed to be the most important goal of the state national policy.
During the 1970s and 1980s, a myriad of books and articles were published in the country about the rise and rapprochement of the Soviet nations, about the relationship between the national and the international, about the triumph of "Lenin's national policy." However, the works were sinful of declarativeness and scholasticism, practically did not contribute to narrowing the gap between science, politics and life. The rapidly reviving national consciousness was treated as a manifestation of nationalism. The real contradictions of national life and interethnic relations were stubbornly ignored. "Natsiology" in the conditions of "developed socialism" noticeably intensified on holidays in connection with the anniversaries of the October Revolution and the formation of the USSR. This could not but leave an imprint of "healthiness" on a significant part of the works devoted to national problems.
Of course, the new historical community of people in the USSR was not only a created myth, but also a reality. In the current media, the recognition that there were really Soviet people is often identified by liberals with only a kind of inferiority (hence the contemptuous "scoop"). However, this does not negate the fact that at the level of public reflection there was a sense of "Soviet people". Football fans of different nationalities in major international matches were sick as their for Kiev and Tbilisi "Dynamo", Yerevan "Ararat", for our astronauts, regardless of their nationality. In other words, there definitely existed a certain substantive space not with an ethnic, but with a civil basis.