UKR-TAZ

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.”

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

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:

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.

The University of Toronto Munk School’s Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES) held a conference on June 20 on the topic “After Ecocide: Grappling With the Ecological and Socioeconomic Consequences of the Destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant in Southern Ukraine.” A recording of the conference can be viewed here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xgB4coV8Ws

Conference organizers have kindly allowed me to share the following set of resources on the topic of the impacts of the dam’s June 6 destruction by Russian explosives. The list includes organizations that are collecting donations to help the victims of the disaster.

After about 24 hours of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s 24-hour abortive mutiny (judging by the major media, we haven’t even figured out what to call it yet), I posted the following list of uncertainties, intended to answer the common question “WTF is going on in Russia?”, on social media:

• 1) If this was an attempted coup, it didn’t end convincingly.
• 2) If this was an egomaniacal outburst within a long simmering battle of wills, it was bizarrely theatrical and not very smart.
• 3) If this was a spectacular false-flag operation, it didn’t go according to plan (and it’s not very evident who was in the know and who wasn’t, except that most or all of the Russian media was not).
• 4) If this was simply another day in the workings of an authoritarian kleptocratic-mafia state, it was a spectacularly entertaining one.
• 5) If this was the beginning of the implosion of Putinist Russia, all bets are off on what that implosion will look like. (But, honestly, I can’t wait to see.)
• 6) If this was a dress rehearsal, the real performance will be wild.

Since then, a consensus seems to be emerging among Russia observers (in the West) that, if we don’t know what exactly to call it yet (“armed rebellion,” “march on Moscow,” “abortive coup,” et al.), we know it was not a good thing for the Putin regime.

It revealed, and proclaimed, military weakness, as well as genuine brittleness at the top, challenged longstanding narratives of the “special military operation,” and showed the inability of state media to do much of anything when they aren’t given precise instructions. Its ending was anti-climactic — as the Columbia Journalism Review put it, “Putin, a man who punishes journalists and peaceful domestic opponents as if they were traitors, had apparently agreed to give an actual traitor no punishment at all. If only for now.” But it left wide open the possibility that this was no ending, just a temporary stopping point. As CJR puts it, “most observers seem to agree that the last shoe has yet to drop in this story.”

Outside of some circuitous (and rather touch-and-go) Twitter threads, the most useful analyses I’ve seen include the Institute for the Study of War‘s June 24 and June 25 assessments, and Timothy Snyder’s Substack piece “Prigozhin’s march on Moscow: Ten lessons from a mutiny.” Snyder summarizes the background beautifully:

Both the Russian state itself and Prigozhin’s mercenary firm Wagner are extractive regimes with large public relations and military arms. 

The Putin regime exists, and the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are relatively wealthy, thanks to the colonial exploitation of hydrocarbon resources in Siberia.  The wealth is held by a very few people, and the Russian population is treated to a regular spectacle of otherwise pointless war — Ukraine, Syria, Ukraine again — to distract attention from this basic state of affairs, and to convince them that there is some kind of external enemy that justifies it (hint: there really isn’t). 

Wagner functioned as a kind of intensification of the Russian state, doing the dirtiest work beyond Russia, not only in Syria and Ukraine but also in Africa.  It was subsidized by the Russian state, but made its real money by extracting mineral resources on its own, especially in Africa.  Unlike most of its other ventures, Wagner’s war in Ukraine was a losing proposition.  Prigozhin leveraged the desperation of Russia’s propaganda for a victory by taking credit for victory at Bakhmut.  That minor city was completely destroyed and abandoned by the time Wagner took it, at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian lives. 

But because it was the only gain in Russia’s horrifyingly costly but strategically senseless 2023 offensive, Bakhmut had to be portrayed by Putin’s media as some kind of Stalingrad or Berlin.  Prigozhin took advantage of this. He was able to direct the false glory to himself even as he then withdrew Wagner from Ukraine.  Meanwhile he criticized the military commanders of the Russian Federation in increasingly vulgar terms, thereby preventing the Russian state (and Putin) from gaining much from the bloody spectacle of invaded Ukraine.  In sum: Wagner was able to make the Putin regime work for it.

Snyder disputes the “realist” explanations for Russia’s war on Ukraine in ways that add to what’s already been said on this blog (e.g., here), and offers another kind of realism — one that sees Russia as a protection racket:

You can think of the Russian state as a protection racket.  No one is really safe, but everyone has to accept “protection” in the knowledge that this is less risky than rebellion.  A protection racket is always vulnerable to another protection racket.  In marching from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, Prigozhin was breaking one protection racket and proposing another.  On this logic, we can imagine Prigozhin’s proposal to Putin as follows: I am deploying the greater force, and I am now demanding protection money from you.  If you want to continue your own protection racket, pay me off before I reach Moscow.

Read the whole thing here.

To update my last post about the Vienna “peace summit,” I recommend Fabian Sommavilla’s account of the day-long conference. Here’s some more context on the cancelation of the event.

I also recommend University of Salzburg economic geographer Christian Zeller‘s excellent analysis of the summit, shared at Emancipation, Journal of Ecosocialist Strategy; see “Somewhere between anti-imperialism, conspiracy theory, and the need to speak honestly.” Written on Friday, Zeller’s account describes organizers’ efforts to give the summit a “quasi-diplomatic status.” He notes:

The organisers did not conceive their “summit for peace” at all as a gathering of pacifist grassroots movements fighting dictatorships, occupying powers and war – everywhere and always  – but as an event that only apparently pursues alternative geopolitics against the hegemony of the “West”. This orientation towards multipolarity, which also respects dictatorships, is far from an emancipatory perspective, as the Indian communist and feminist Kavita Krishnan has clearly pointed out.

Zeller concluded:

The organisers of the “peace summit” have brought their fiasco upon themselves. The process of personal and political erosion in the run-up to the event shows that the strategists of the only seemingly alternative geopolitics, who are completely anchored in reactionary concepts of geopolitical camps (“campism”), are not succeeding in gaining hegemony on the broader left. This is a welcome outcome.

In response to the summit, Zeller proposed

that we organise — together with trade unions and groups in solidarity with the social resistance in Ukraine against the Russian occupation — an international conference to support the Ukrainian trade unions and civil society, both in their resistance against occupation and for a socially just and ecologically compatible reconstruction of Ukraine.

This ended up becoming Saturday’s alternative “solidarity summit,” which also took place in Vienna (but about which I have not yet seen any news).