Trump on Putin’s “dream”

29 06 2024

For all that can be said about Thursday’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump — including about the former’s dismal performance and about the boundless creativity of Trump’s fabrications on almost every topic under the sun — Trump’s curious note about Putin’s “dream” stood out to me:

“Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my — this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”

While nothing Trump says should be taken at face value, Heather Cox Richardson’s analysis of that note is worth reading. Political historian Richardson, who remains one of the most perceptive daily commentators on U.S. news, connects Trump’s version of “Putin’s dream” to Trump (and previously Yanukovich) advisor Paul Manafort’s so-called “Mariupol Plan,” cooked up with Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnick — a “‘peace’ plan” Putin purportedly proposed in 2016 to carve off much of Ukraine. The plan is, of course, not so different from Putin’s recently proposed “peace plan” that involves Ukraine giving up what it controls of the four provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, which with Crimea amount to between a fifth and a quarter of the country’s land area.

Trump’s mention of Putin’s “dream” suggested he would happily indulge Putin in enabling its realization.

Richardson’s full piece can be read here.





Dzyuba: new edition of “Internationalism or Russification?”

3 06 2024

Ivan Dzyuba (Dziuba) passed away earlier this year. The dissident theorist’s role in developing what could have been Ukraine’s version of “socialism with a human face” (the movement that emerged under Czechoslovak Communist party leader Alexander Dubček before Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to quash it in 1968) was an important one. Arrested and jailed in 1972, Dzyuba was silenced by the Soviet authorities until re-emerging as a literary critic in the 1980s and a political activist during the Perestroika years. He served as Ukraine’s Minister of Culture in 1992-94.

Dzyuba’s Internationalism or Russification? (1965) was a powerful, Marxist-based critique of Soviet nationalities policy as a continuation of the colonialism of the tsarist Russian empire. A new edition of the book has just been jointly published by the ecosocialist International Institute for Research and Education and anti-capitalist publishing house Resistance Books. It includes a new introduction by John-Paul Himka. Bohdan Krawchenko’s introduction to the book’s original English (1968) edition can be read at Ukrainian Solidarity Campaign’s tribute page to Dziuba. The earlier edition is also available at the Internet Archive and at Diasporiana (but please support the publishers of the new edition if you can).

Tributes to Dzyuba can be found in leftist (e.g., The Militant) as well as human-rights media (e.g., Euromaidan Press).





Kharkiv’s legacy: Slovo House

28 05 2024

As Russian attacks get ever closer to Kharkiv, striking publishing houses alongside megastores, it’s helpful to remind ourselves how important this Ukrainian “second city” is in the country’s history.

Taras Tomenko’s 2017 documentary Slovo House (Budynok Slovo) is a powerful and moving tribute to Ukraine’s Executed Renaissance — the generation of Ukrainian writers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and visual and theatrical artists that flourished for a decade or so in the 1920s before being silenced, many of them brutally executed, by Stalinist persecution in the 1930s. It focuses on the the Slovo (Word) artist’s residence in Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine, which housed dozens of the most creative minds in the country with their families.

A film like this can only be a first stab at documenting its subject matter. Its first half perhaps overfocuses on many of the artists’ bohemian lifestyles at the expense of detailing the ideals that drove them and with which they, in varying measure, hoped to build a new Ukraine. I wish it provided a bit more insight into what historian Mayhill Fowler, in her excellent Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (U. of Toronto Press, 2017), calls the “unique connection between the arts and the state in the Soviet Union,” “a place where dictators called writers at home and personally involved themselves in the aesthetics of their work” (p. 3).

But by the time we get to the Holodomor of 1932-33 and the first arrests that began the years of purges, it becomes clear where the story is heading. The climax, to my mind, is the brilliant writer and theoretician Mykola Khvylovy’s 1933 suicide, by which he performatively accepted the blame for “the murder of an entire generation” for the crime of being “the most sincere Communists.” Ukrainian culture never truly recovered until the 1960s, and even then all too haltingly. Today’s arts scenes in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and elsewhere echo the brilliance of what seemed possible for a brief period a century ago. They also go far beyond it. (That will be a topic in my conversation with author Larissa Babij tonight, viewable online at 6 pm Eastern Daylight Time.)

While Slovo House suffers a bit from an underattribution of quoted materials, its formal elegance and rigorous research make it an important document. The film can be viewed in its complete form here: https://youtu.be/VrAlxSL0aCU?si=jpUq_y-WJRN_HyEt





Zygar & Gladstone on Tucker’s Putin

14 02 2024

WNYC’s (NPR’s) On the Media has created a wonderful 17-minute segment examining the historical claims reiterated by Vladimir Putin in his recent interview (/monologue) with Tucker Carlson. The conversation between host Brooke Gladstone and Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar is well worth listening to. (I should probably specify “dissident journalist,” since “Russia” and “journalism” does not make for a persuasive combo these days. Zygar was the founding editor-in-chief of now banned Russian news channel TV Rain/Dozhd, which continues to broadcast from abroad.)

The conversation covers only a few of the 14 “tales” or “myths” related to the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine that Zygar describes in his recent book War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine. Zygar’s book is one of the first serious efforts by a Russian journalist or historian to begin the process of decolonizing Russian history. (And perhaps the first time U.S. public radio has compared Taras Shevchenko to African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, but it’s an apt comparison.)

The full radio segment can be listened to here.





Snyder on Carlson’s Putin interview

11 02 2024

Timothy Snyder’s Substack post dissecting Vladimir Putin’s rabidly (and genocidally) imperialist view of history, as revealed (again) in his interview with Tucker Carlson, is brilliant. It packs in a lot of what Snyder covers in his 23-part online course The History of Modern Ukraine, and includes a handy bibliography.

The whole post, “Putin’s Genocidal Myth,” found here, is well worth reading.





Putin’s prison-military complex

4 12 2023

Vladimir Putin’s two main advances on Stalinism are (1) the digitization of propaganda and its spread into social-media systems, making for a much more sophisticated penetration of contemporary global information systems, and (2) the mobilization of Russia’s vast prison system — the “Gulag archipelago” made famous by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — into a war machine, a prison-military-industrial complex.

The New York Times’ analysis of the latter, published this morning, presents it in its broad contours:

“In some ways, Mr. Putin’s war has turned the country’s entire criminal justice system into a military recruitment tool, experts say. Russia’s extremely high conviction rates — 99.6 percent — its long prison terms, and inhumane conditions inside jails create strong incentives to risk death to obtain freedom.

“Wagner said that about 50,000 inmates served in their ranks in Ukraine, and that one in five of them died.” [. . .]

“But one of three recruits was serving time for murder. This rate is more than 30 times higher than the overall percentage of murder convicts in the Russian prison system, underscoring the attraction of military service to men with long sentences.” [. . .]

“[Mr. Mokin’s] experience appears typical of inmates who struggle to fit into the brutal caste system of many Russian jails. Enforced by underworld leaders known as bratva, the system ostracizes and humiliates inmates deemed to have violated complex social rules that govern Russian criminal life.

“Inmates in the bottom rungs are forced to act as servants, carry out demeaning tasks such as cleaning toilets, and can be subjected to sexual abuse. Drug dealers like Mr. Mokin are traditionally assigned low social status.

“’All you need to make sure that people keep enlisting is to create bad conditions’ in prison, said Anna Karetnikova, a former senior prison official in the Moscow region, who left Russia in protest of the war. ‘This is not patriotism. It’s survival.'”

For the entire article, see “A Prison at War: The Convicts Sustaining Putin’s Invasion.”





Commons: The struggle for a social Ukraine

11 11 2023

Leading Ukrainian left-wing journal Spil’ne/Спільне/Commons: Journal of Social Criticism has published an all-English-language issue entitled “The Russian Invasion and the Ukrainian Left: The Struggle for a Social Ukraine.”

The issue includes a collective interview with editors that outlines the history of the Spil’ne project, alongside a selection of texts published earlier or reflections on the war. In the editors’ words, these include “texts that are our intervention in the Western left’s discussion on Ukraine,” others “devoted to the experiences of war — primarily occupation and refugeeism, but also the experience of solidarity and mutual support,” and articles that “criticize neoliberal solutions to the country’s economic problems, calling for a just and socially oriented post-war reconstruction.”

The full issue can be read here:

https://commons.com.ua/en/russian-invasion-and-ukrainian-left-struggle/

or downloaded here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QwQwaKvIM5FgTJ6a86QfmcBat5MNB7Se/view





Epstein: on Russia’s “anti-world”

13 10 2023

Scanning the Israeli press (for reasons unrelated to Ukraine), I came across an interview that came out earlier this year with Mikhail Epstein, who is one of the most prolific (he has reportedly published 37 books and some 700 articles), creative, and (to my mind) enjoyable of Russian expat philosophers and intellectuals. Epstein’s books on Russian philosophy, spirituality, literature, and culture include After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), A Philosophy of the Possible: Modalities of Thought and Culture (Brill, 2019), The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period, 1953-1991 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), the weirdly brilliant quasi-fiction Cries in the New Wilderness: From the Files of the Moscow Institute of Atheism (Paul Dry Books, 2002), and most recently, in Russian, Русский антимир: Политика на грани апокалипсиса (The Russian Anti-world: Politics at the Edge of Apocalypse, 2023).

The interview, entitled “Russia Became an Abyss and We Might All Fall Into It,” was carried out by Israel Hayom‘s David Baron. Its themes echo an article Epstein published last year in Studies in East European Thought entitled “Schizophrenic Fascism: On Russia’s War on Ukraine.” In that piece, Epstein traces the roots of Russia’s “schizophrenic fascism,” or “schizofascism,” which he describes as “fascism under the guise of the fight against fascism.” Schizofascism, he writes, is a “serious, dangerous, and aggressive caricature” of fascism, which “embraces the contradiction between archaic myths, chauvinism, and xenophobia, on the one hand, and corruption and cynicism, on the other.”

Part of the “schizo” nature of this fascism is the simultaneous dependence on and opposition to the West, a “love-hate relationship” that manifests as overt demonization of all things Western — “a hysterical hatred of freedom, democracy, everything foreign, and people of a different identity,” he writes in the article — even as the Russian elite has driven incessantly to purchase assets in the West. This results in “a culture of jealousy and competition that finds its purpose in challenging other cultures and marginalizing them based on the accomplishments that were adopted from them.” Putin has become the world’s Dostoyevskian “underground man,” who is “incapable of suggesting anything to the world but rather only annoys it and tries to pinch it.”

Among other things, the interview traces the “Russian world” (Russkii mir) ideology — “the primary guiding concept of today’s Russia” — to Putin advisor Vladislav Surkov. Compared to previous ruling mythologies — such as “Orthodox Kingdom,” “Third Rome,” and Center of World Revolution — the current one is curiously vacuous, based mostly on a territorial vastness accompanied by a feeling of historical loss.

When asked about how to prevent Russia from “galloping toward its history’s depths,” Epstein replies:

“If Russia’s central government were to be taken apart, different ‘Russias’ could be created – Ural’s Russia, Siberia’s Russia, etc. – that together can create something like the European Union. Maybe this union will be even more organic because of the language all the new Russias share. This is the only way this territory will not threaten the world. We speak about the fear of what will happen to nuclear weapons if Russia falls apart. Let’s start with the fact that it is most difficult to supervise nuclear weapons in the hands of an imperialistic superpower like Russia in our times. If Russia falls apart, we can negotiate how to destroy its threatening nuclear arsenal.”

The full interview can be read here.





Letter to some anti-Ukraine solidarity activists

3 10 2023

Here’s what I just sent to Bread & Puppet Theatre, which is preparing to appear alongside a group of others protesting U.S. military support for Ukraine, in Burlington, Vermont, tomorrow. The group organizing this event is small and not very consequential, but Bread & Puppet’s participation, or at least that of some of their members, is troubling. While I agree with their views in favor of negotiation and diplomacy to end the war, I disagree that it’s the U.S. that needs to be pressured into negotiation and diplomacy. It is Russia that needs far more pressure to end its invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine, as the victim, needs support. (Note that the list of links is taken from the right-hand sidebar of this blog. I welcome your suggestions for other links to be added there.)

Dear Bread & Puppeteers:

Read the rest of this entry »




Zaporizhzhia NPP warnings

5 07 2023

Here’s my read of what’s going on with all the recent warnings surrounding the fate of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP).

All signs point to a Russian plan to do something with or at the plant — something that could potentially contaminate a large portion of Ukrainian territory and decommission at least part of the ZNPP (so that Ukrainians wouldn’t be able to use it or the land around it) — and that would have enough ambiguity around it as to allow Russian “deniability.”

The ZNPP is the largest such plant in Europe, and is currently, though barely, on the Russian controlled side of Ukrainian territory. As Ukrainian forces advance, Russia does not expect to hold onto it. As with the Kakhovka dam explosion, Russia will continue to blame Ukraine. Their propaganda players have been ratcheting up the “Ukrainian false flag” narratives for days (have a look at responses to Zelenskyi’s recent Twitter post warning of a potential Russian explosion at the ZNPP to see what that looks like).

The reality-check question here is: who would benefit from any ZNPP disaster and who would lose out? It is Ukrainian land, which Ukrainians expect to gain back and Russians expect (at this point) to lose. Furthermore, it has been historically significant Ukrainian land going back to the 17th century Cossack state, which Ukrainians consider an early progenitor of Ukrainian democracy. (As I and many have been arguing, culture and history are important in this neocolonial/anti-colonial struggle.)

Just as Russia hardly cares for its own conscripts, it doesn’t give a damn about Ukrainian land. Quite the contrary: Putin’s goal all along has been to either take over Ukraine, denying it the right to exist as an independent state (except perhaps as a minimal rump state in western-central Ukraine), or to take some of it “back” and prevent the rest from posing any challenge to his rule. An economically successful democracy at his doorstep, that would demonstrate to Russians that they need not accept his rule, would be the kind of “challenge” he has in mind.

Russia’s unstated precondition for “returning” militarily conquered land is that it will destroy its value for Ukrainians, with the message being “You want this back? Here, have it, it’s yours and it’s useless.” (This is what I recently described as Russia’s “colonial vengeance” for Ukraine’s decolonial trajectory.)

How likely is it that something serious will occur? Before February 24, 2022, hardly anyone thought it was likely that Russia will launch a full-scale invasion, but they did. So I would say that all bets are off. We hope it doesn’t happen, but if it does, it won’t be unexpected.

How do we prevent it? The only way I can think of is through making clear why this is consistent with Russian strategies, and through putting international pressure on Russia not to do it.

May be an image of oil refinery







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