Russia in the 21st Century [Superthread]

[Kirkhill]

The big problem is we are playing Russian Roulette with a Russian armed with a rusty revolver and corroded nuclear tipped bullets.... and the Russian is fully aware that he has a limited amount of time.

 

[a_majoor]

Knowing the past is usually a good way of predicting the future. (I was quite surprised when studying translations of Vladimir Putin's speeches and pronouncements his references to Russian philosophers from the 19th century, but once I started looking at what these philosophers were saying, some of Putins actions fit that world view). Robert Conquest was a  historian of the Soviet Union, and (much like Edward suggests that modern China has recreated the forms of the old dynastic system) the autocratic system of Tzarist Russia was recreated in Communist Russia and again under Putin:

https://reason.com/archives/2015/10/18/stalins-prosecutor

Stalin's Prosecutor
RIP Robert Conquest, the historian who held the Soviets accountable
Glenn Garvin from the November 2015 issue - view article in the Digital Edition

To understand the moral and literary power with which Robert Conquest wrote, consider the second sentence in his book Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, a study of the 14.5 million deaths that resulted from Joseph Stalin's murderous takeover of his nation's agricultural sector: "We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book."

As Conquest's friend, the British novelist Martin Amis, would later observe with a palpable shudder, "The sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 411 pages long." The math is too terrible to contemplate.

Conquest, who died of pneumonia on August 3 at the age of 98, was many things: a highly regarded anti-modernist poet, a military intelligence officer, a diplomat, a scholar, a ribald prankster, a serial non-monogamist (four wives punctuated with countless entanglements), even a dystopian science fiction novelist.

But most of all he was Stalin's personal prosecutor, over and over placing him in the dock of history to answer for his monstrous crimes. Conquest wrote more than a score of books on Soviet history and politics, two of them—Harvest of Sorrow and 1968's groundbreaking The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the Thirties—considered the definitive texts on the pure wickedness of the events they describe. "I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy," Stalin once said. Fortunately, Conquest was there to stack it right back up.

The British-born son of an American father and an English mother, Conquest was educated at Oxford, where he joined the Communist Party and visited the Soviet Union in 1937. That started a process of disillusionment that gained speed when Conquest served as a British military intelligence liaison to Russian-commanded Bulgarian resistance forces and hit critical mass when he stayed on in Bulgaria as a diplomat after the war and witnessed Stalin's brutal Sovietization of the country. By 1948 he was back in London, writing an increasingly hostile series of Foreign Office research papers on Soviet activities in Eastern Europe that would eventually morph into his books.

The first of those, Common Sense About Russia, appeared in 1961. But it wasn't until 1968, with the publication of The Great Terror, that Conquest truly hit his stride. Drawn from emigre memoirs, dissident samizdat documents, and sworn statements by hundreds of Soviet exiles and defectors who testified in a 1948 libel trial against a French Communist newspaper, The Great Terror was the first systematic compilation of the atrocities committed during Stalin's massive purges of 1936 through 1938.

The purges themselves were hardly news, but the world had mostly fixated on the manifest injustice of the Moscow show trials of a relatively small group of disgraced top officials charged with spying and sabotage. Conquest forced attention to the massive body count—a million or more—among ordinary citizens, who were shot in prison basements or sent to starve to death in Arctic work camps.

But The Great Terror was much more than a morgue census. Conquest's compelling eye for detail, coupled with a stark, understated prose style, combined to produce the greatest horror story of the 20th century.

He wrote of a town in Byelorussia where a group of peasants stumbled into what may have been the perpetually depressed Soviet economy's single growth industry: professional informing. They routinely partied after trials with the 15 rubles a head they were paid to denounce neighbors as spies, hoarders, and "wreckers," as saboteurs were known. They even wrote an epic ballad about some of their most successful denunciations.

He wrote of the urkas, the labor-camp gangs of common criminals so violent and depraved that even the guards feared them and refused to make them work. The hideously tattooed members, sporting names like Hitler or The Louse, instead spent their days plotting mass rapes of female inmates and gambling for the clothing of newly arrived political prisoners; the losers had to strip it from the victims and deliver it to the winners.

He wrote of Stalin's workdays, which usually began by leafing through hundreds of secret-police-recommended death sentences left in his morning inbox, perhaps with the help of his sycophantic adviser Vyacheslav Molotov. December 12, 1937, was a typical day, Conquest reported: "Stalin and Molotov sanctioned 3,167 death sentences, and then went to the cinema."

Not that being a bloodthirsty dictator was all work and no play. Conquest described Stalin laughing until he cried as an executioner acted out the final, sobbing moments of his former crony Grigory Zinoviev. "Stalin was overcome with merriment and had to sign to [the performer] to stop," Conquest wrote.

"The Great Terror is an extraordinary book, and even more extraordinary is that he extracted it from a totally closed society," says the Emery historian Harvey Klehr, who has written extensively on Soviet espionage in the United States. "The information was out there, but nobody had thought of collecting it using those sources."

As skeptics of the Cold War gained the upper hand in American academia, Conquest's work was dismissed as reactionary fantasy and criminal libel. But in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Moscow's archives began dribbling out to the public, his reporting was confirmed and judged by some even a bit too mild.

Conquest was, of course, gratified. Martin Amis reported that, when a publisher asked for a new title for a revised edition of The Great Terror, Conquest suggested: "How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?" The historian later said, not altogether convincingly, that the quote was the jocose fabrication of a friend. But there is little doubt that he considered most of his critics fools, and fools who needn't be taken seriously.

In 1988, The Village Voice published a shrill attack on Harvest of Sorrow that accused Conquest of, among many other things, "red-baiting" Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent in Moscow whose Panglossian reporting on Stalin won him a now-discredited Pulitzer Prize. Among other things, Duranty's stories repeatedly denied any famine in the Soviet Union during 1932–33, though we now know somewhere between 6 million and 8 million peasants starved to death at the time. Pshaw, sniffed Conquest. "Duranty wasn't a red at all, just a self-serving liar," he wrote the Voice. "I think liars should be baited. Dupes, too, perhaps less harshly."

Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin is the author of Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras and (with Ana Rodriguez) Diary of a Survivor: Nineteen Years in a Cuban Women's Prison. He writes about television for the Miami Herald.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Calm down everyone. PM Trudeau is going to give him a stern talking to and make him play nice.

 

[RocketRichard]

Or he could challenge Putin to a fist fight and beat the scheit out of him.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Or he could challenge Putin to a fist fight and beat the scheit out of him.

^^^ :rofl:

He'd be squashed like a grape.

 

[RocketRichard]

Absolutely not. Whatever 'rofl' means...

 

[RocketRichard]

Just asked a teenager and they told me.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Absolutely not. Whatever 'rofl' means...

You can't seriously think that JT would beat Putin in a fist fight :

 

[CougarKing]

Wasn't there some kind of boxing match between Justin Trudeau and former Senator Parick Brazeau a few years ago?  ???

That Trudeau won, incredibly? (Perhaps he paid Brazeau to take a fall)  ;D

 

[a_majoor]

The Young Dauphin can't even face Sun Media reporters. If Vladimir Putin walks into the same room as the Young Dauphin, Putin's manliness will simply eclipse the Dauphin until Putin exits the building.

 

[Kirkhill]

file:///C:/Users/Kirkhill/Downloads/NewArmy_sm.pdf

Just a refresher in light of ERC's post on Vlad's Potemkin village. I strongly recommend its reading.  It is five years old but change isn't happening that fast.

Vlad has reorganized the pieces he has available on the board and is conducting a good offence.  But his situation is poor.

In chess terms I might suggest that he has castled up and is letting his knights rove.

 

[dapaterson]

Vlad's situation is examined more in depth in the Telegraph here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11937348/Russia-retreats-to-autarky-as-poverty-looms.html

Russia is running out of money. President Vladimir Putin is taking a strategic gamble, depleting the Kremlin's last reserve funds to cover the budget and to pay for an escalating war in Syria at the same time.
...
The Kremlin is launching a radical plan to slash imports across twenty key sectors within five years, ranging from heavy machinery to electrical engineering, photonics, cars, tractors, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and food.

The targets are drastic. Reliance on foreign farm and forestry machinery is to be cut by 56pc, food processing by 53pc, and engineering equipment by 34pc. State procurement contracts will be steered to companies that produce in the country, whether or not they compete on quality.

But the switch-over costs money that the government does not have. Viktor Semenov from the Belaya Dacha Group said his agro-conglomerate is raking in big subsidies to grow lettuces in the Siberian heartland of Novosibirsk, relying on heated greenhouses to fight temperatures of minus 20 degrees.

"We're building 250 hectares of hothouses a year on my farms," he said. Whether it makes sense is anybody's guess. The same vegetables could be imported more cheaply from Turkey.

Trade experts are already shaking their heads. Such a reflex usually means a country is going badly off the rails, though Germany pulled it off with macabre success in the 1930s. “In most of the cases I have known import substitution policies have failed. They degrade the economy," said Pascal Lamy, former head of the World Trade Organisation.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Vlad's situation is examined more in depth in the Telegraph here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11937348/Russia-retreats-to-autarky-as-poverty-looms.html

Oh, good ... of all the stupid policy examples available in the world, and the supply seems endless, Vlad looks to the Buy America Act which guarantees spending too much for too little.

 

[a_majoor]

Autarky is a very old and well oiled response to deteriorating economic situations, although there are almost no examples of success that I can point to. Fans of Autarky should rest easy knowing that it was, until recently, one of the key planks of the NDP platofrm (and may be again if Mr Mulcair is turfted as leader).

 

[a_majoor]

An interesting propaganda piece about the development and deployment of hypersonic weapons from a Russian POV. (Of course the Russians are working very hard to perfect these sorts of weapons themselves):

http://www.globalresearch.ca/hypersonic-deterrence-how-to-maintain-strategic-balance-the-geopolitics-of-long-range-hypersonic-high-precision-weapons/5484962

Hypersonic Deterrence: How to Maintain Strategic Balance. The Geopolitics of Long-Range Hypersonic High-Precision Weapons

By Vladimir Kozin
Global Research, October 28, 2015
Oriental Reivew 27 October 2015
Region: Russia and FSU, USA
Theme: Militarization and WMD

It is unlikely that nuclear weapons, which the US created in the mid-twentieth century and used only once – to bomb Japanese cities – will ever be activated in a global conflict. We can assume that the leaders of the official Western nuclear powers (the UK, US, and France) as well as the other states that actually possess such weapons (India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan) will continue to base the conceptual foundation of their military strategy on this incontestable truism: “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Russia’s current military and political leaders agree with this self-evident observation. In his Oct. 22 speech in Sochi before the Valdai Club, an international discussion group, President Vladimir Putin echoed these sentiments: “The development of nuclear weapons has made it clear that there can be no winners in a global conflict.”

Unlike nuclear weapons, which are “tools of extreme impact,” Long-Range Hypersonic High-Precision Weapons (or Advanced Hypersonic Weapons – AHW in US terminology) are ready for use in any scenario, including as part of counter-terror operations. AHW do not cause unnecessary civilian casualties and do not inflict significant material damage to civil transportation systems, power plants, or other infrastructure beyond the small affected area.

Russia has been developing its own promising prototypes of AHW in the numbers deemed necessary to bolster its own security, in response to both America’s functional rollout of Prompt Global Strike, an ambitious program to deploy a global, layered missile-defense system, as well as the Pentagon’s modernization of its strategic and tactical nuclear weapons.

There have already been calls for an international moratorium on R&D and testing of AHW. Despite the fact that this idea appears somewhat utopian, it is quite feasible that at some future date quantitative limits could be introduced on types of AHW and the regions where they could be positioned, but only if the following six key preconditions are met:

1) Any future AHW agreement must be grounded in the principle of equality and equivalent security for all signatory states and must ensure the creation of a system of multilateral, strategic-deterrence treaties.

2) Signatories to such an agreement must agree to respect the mutual commitment not to use AHW against each other under any circumstances.

3) Before such a treaty goes into effect, all nuclear powers must agree to respect the reciprocalobligation to either refrain from inflicting a nuclear first strike against each other or not to use such weapons at all, and also to renounce the use of weapons of any kind against manned or unmanned spacecraft, and these promises would be formalized through legally binding, international covenants.

4) All states possessing nuclear weapons, whether officially or factually, must commit themselves to move toward the use of defensive strategies and unconditional nuclear deterrence that threatens no one.

5) States deploying missile-defense systems and tactical nuclear weapons within the borders of other states, must dismantle the installations of this type currently being designed or constructed, before reaching an agreement on limiting AHW, and America must also pull all of its tactical nuclear weapons out of Europe and the Asia Pacific region, deploying them only within the borders of the continental US.

6) This agreement must be formalized through a legally binding international treaty that is both versatile and inclusive – in the sense that it includes provisions allowing any other state to join it – and its validity should be of indefinite duration.

Unfortunately, any type of Agreement on Quantitative and Territorial Constraints on the Deployment of AHW would hardly be reached shortly, given the context of America’s updated National Security Strategy (February 2015), which six times refers to Russia an “aggressor,” as well as the identification of Russia and China (here, here, and here) as her first and second, respectively, biggest potential adversaries in the American playbook for the use of strategic nuclear weapons. The Pentagon still adheres to a doctrine that calls for inflicting initial “preemptive and preventative” nuclear strikes against an enemy, and it keeps a longer list of potential targets for an initial nuclear strike than any other state. Another important point to consider is the multifold increase in NATO’s military activitynear Russia’s borders during last two years.

In other words, without a radical change by Washington and its NATO allies in their negative and even hostile stance toward Russia and China, the idea that any sort of mutually acceptable agreement could be reached to limit or control AHWs is simply unrealistic and should be put off until a “better time.”

Vladimir Kozin is Head of Advisers’ Group at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and Professor of the Academy of Military Sciences of the Russian Federation.

The original source of this article is Oriental Reivew
Copyright © Vladimir Kozin, Oriental Reivew, 2015

 

[Cloud Cover]

Russia lays down first of two new Arctic support ships:

http://www.janes.com/article/55630/russia-lays-down-first-of-two-new-arctic-support-ships?utm_campaign=PC6110_E15%20DF%20NL%20Naval%2011_03_15&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Eloqua


Russia's Vostochnaya Verf shipyard in Vladivostok laid down the first of two new arctic multi-purpose support vessels for the Russian Navy on 27 October.

The Project 03182 vessels are designed to act as small tankers, replenishment and support vessels for Russian warships working in the arctic region. They're also intended to be able to take on patrol functions, tow other vessels, conduct search and rescue (SAR) operations, fisheries monitoring and to support civilian shipping and oil and gas operations.

With arctic operations in mind, the vessels have been built to the Russian Arc 4 ice class standard, the second highest level and equivalent to the Finnish-Swedish IA class. The vessels are understood to be a derivative of the Project 23310 design from the Zelenodolsk Design Bureau (ZPKDB).

The first vessel will be called Mikhail Barskov , the Russian Ministry of Defence announced, and will have a displacement of 3,500 tonnes, a crew of 24, a length of 80 m and a range of 1,500 n miles. It will be powered by three diesel-electric engines, and equipped with two auxiliary power units and a bow thruster. A helicopter pad at the rear of the vessel can accommodate a helicopter such as the Kamov Ka-27 'Helix', and the vessel is fitted with a 20 tonne crane amidships. They are not believed to be armed.

Both of the two vessels will enter service with the Russian Navy's Pacific Fleet, with Russian media reporting that Mikhail Barskov will be delivered in November 2017, with the second following at the end of 2019.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We could maybe learn a lesson here: it seems to me that an Arctic replenishment ship for the AOPS Fleet is a good idea.

 

[Cloud Cover]

You can't seriously think that JT would beat Putin in a fist fight :

Putin is some sort of martial arts student/expert. So the old guy is ready for a scrap with Mr. Silverspoon. ..

 

[a_majoor]

So the question is really how long can Russia continue to draw on its reserves, especially if Russia is ramping up expenditures without a similar increase in income?

http://www.ibtimes.com/russian-economic-crisis-2015-international-reserves-slump-54b-amid-sanctions-ongoing-2171565

Russian Economic Crisis 2015: International Reserves Slump $5.4B Amid Sanctions, Ongoing Recession
By Jess McHugh @McHughJess j.mchugh@ibtimes.com on November 05 2015 2:15 PM EST

Russia's international reserve reportedly saw a major dip in October as the country continued to struggle through a recession. Pictured: Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke during an economic summit in October. AFP/Getty Images
Russia's international reserves, liquid foreign assets managed by the Central Bank of Russia, fell by $5.4 billion to $369.2 billion in the week of Oct. 23-30, Tass, a state-owned news agency, reported Thursday. News of the dip came as Russia struggled to recover from a continuing economic downturn while bracing for more losses in 2016.

Russia's economy has been in a downslide since 2014, in part because of crippling sanctions from both the United States and the European Union. Both the U.S. and EU imposed sanctions following Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula and alleged backing of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine in March 2014. The nation was formerly a large importer and exporter to the EU in particular.

Worldwide drops in oil prices have also contributed to the national economic slump. Russia is one of the largest producers of oil in the world, and in September, its output was around 10.74 million barrels a day, according to state data as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Demand for oil has continued to decrease throughout the year, however, as emerging markets did not buy as much oil as had been predicted. The imbalance in supply and demand has continued to push the price per barrel down.

Is the #Russian economy about to be hit by a new drop in #oil prices? https://t.co/uTYNgaH0gf pic.twitter.com/u9GeclNEMf

— RBTH UK (@rbthUK) October 30, 2015

Alongside the drop in international reserves, other indicators of Russia's slump included a 10 percent reduction in retail sales while inflation hovered around 16 percent, the Wall Street Journal reported in October. Experts said the slump might soon bottom out, however. “Overall, we interpret these indicators to imply that the economy is near the bottom of its cycle and that the recession will not deepen much further,” Barclays Capital said in a research note, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Authorities in Russia said they were fearful of shortages when it came to basic food supplies, such as meat and cheese. The country could see a shortage of meat and dairy in 2016, according to a report released by Russian news agency Ria Novosti Wednesday, as a result of ongoing sanctions.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Poking into Donbas to distract from taking Belarus?!?

For Vladimir Putin, Viktor Kaspruk argues, “Ukraine is the key to a future Russia or more precisely a future Russian Empire,” and consequently, even if he has lowered the temperature in the Donbass in recent weeks, the Kremlin leader is likely to renew his attacks on Ukraine next year having first moved to annex Belarus.

In a commentary for Radio Liberty’s Belarusian Service*, Kaspruk argues that “if Putin begins thinking about opening a second front for an attack on Ukraine, then it would not be possible for him to find a better place d’armes for that than a Belarus occupied by Russia.”

Such a move, the Ukrainian political analyst says, would be extremely popular in Russia. “On a wave of hurrah patriotism, euphoria from ‘getting up from its knees,’ and the PR bombing in Syria, the consciousness of Russians has completely atrophied. Therefore it would support with joy the next political adventure of Putin – the return of Belarus ‘home’ to Russia.”

There are already signs that the Kremlin leader is preparing for just such a move. Kaspruk points to the attacks on Lukashenka that have appeared in Kremlin-controlled media and the dispatch already of “’little green men’ to Belarus under the guise of protecting Russian military objects on its territory.”

Such units could quickly link up with pro-Moscow officials and people in Belarus and then “take under their control state institutions and strategic objects in Mensk and key industrial cities.” After which time, a new government would declare that it wants to realize the ideas of the “union state” between Russia and Belarus by being absorbed by the Russian Federation.

Lending support to this argument is that over the last month, Russian embassies in Lithuania, Poland, and Latvia have organized conferences on the “union state” between the Russian Federation and Belarus ....

* - links to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty UKR Service article in Ukrainian.

 

[a_majoor]

Seems a bit silly, since Belarus is the most compliant and pro Russian of the former states of the USSR and already a reliable Russian ally. Indeed, the ZAPAD war-games were joint operations with Russia to flex military muscle and paralyze NATO decision making by assembling up to 70,000 troops in Belarus where they could theoretically jump off into the Baltic States, Poland, Eastern Europe or Ukraine.

What do you gain by invading your friends and allies?