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NY Times Acknowledges U.S. Failure In Russia – Adds More To What Caused It
The U.S. finally acknowledges the utter defeat of its major manipulation strategy in Russia.
The news comes in form of a New York Times analysis of Russia's recent Duma election.
The core sentence:
Dismal results for the opposition in an election last weekend that was not free or fair only drove home a mood of defeat. The election underscored the grim reality that Russia’s pro-Western and pro-democratic opposition, a focus of American and other Western countries’ policy toward Russia for years now, has no visible strategy to regain relevance.
All the millions of dollars invested and thousands of CIA framed 'news' reports about Russia's opposition launched in 'western' outlets like the NY Times have been in vain.
One would think that the above insight would lead to some reflection about how or why the strategy has failed.
- Was it probably wrong to support 'liberal' clowns like Navalny who are actually too fascist to be acceptable to more than 2% of the Russian electorate?
- Was there a way to achieve a different outcome by looking at the real problems Russians have with Putin's neo-liberal economic policies?
- Was is false to pay no attention to the real opposition in Russia, the one that gets real votes?
Unfortunately the rest of the piece shows that the NY Times author is unable to discuss or to even ask such questions. He instead continues with false claims about Russia's democratic system:
The Central Election Commission reported — as usual after Russian elections — a landslide for parties and politicians loyal to President Vladimir V. Putin. The vote in parliamentary elections cleared a seemingly easy path for Mr. Putin to seek a fifth term as president in 2024.
There was no such landslide for parties and politicians loyal to Putin.
In fact Putin's party, United Russia, only got 49% of the votes, a loss of 5 percentage points from the 2016 election. It also lost 19 of its seats in the parliament. The Communist Party was the winner in this election. It gained 6 percentage points from 13% in 2016 to 19% in 2021 and 15 new parliament seats. That significant move is not mentioned at all in the NYT writeup:
The pro-government party, United Russia, won just short of 50 percent of the national vote, and 198 out of 225 seats allocated in district-level elections. The Communist Party of Russia, which runs in elections as an opposition party but votes with United Russia once in Parliament, came in second place, with 19 percent. Three other parties, all seen as loyal to Mr. Putin, also won seats. No candidates in open opposition to Mr. Putin entered Parliament.
The claim that the Communist Party is voting with United Russia is outright false. It may have done so on some issues of national importance, like the return of Crimea to Russia, but surly votes against most other laws and the budget resolutions United Russia supports.
The other three parties are likewise opposed to Putin and most of his policies. They, like the Communists, would vote him out if they had the majority needed to do that.
It didn’t help that Google and Apple, under pressure from the Kremlin, removed an app promoting candidates Mr. Navalny had endorsed just before the vote.
A depper analysis of the fate of the candidates Navalny's 'smart voting' promoted would be of interest. But to go there the NY Times would have to tell you this:
I discuss Alexei Navalny’s ’smart voting’ scheme in the light of the list of preferred candidates for this week’s Russian parliamentary elections just issued by Navalny’s team. There are 225 single member constituencies up for grab. Team Navalny recommends one candidate per constituency and suggests voters cast their ballot for thar person, as the candidate most likely to beat the ruling United Russia party.
So who does Navalny recommend?
Communists mostly (61% of the total), plus some from the left nationalist Just Russia, and the occasional person from other parties. But only a handful of liberals.
In short, voting smart means voting Communist.
Now tell me, please, what’s so smart about that? As I argue in my article, precious little.
The NY Times author can not acknowledge those facts because he hates the communists even more than he hates United Russia:
With Russia’s pro-democracy groups now crushed, the center of gravity of the Russian political opposition may shift in other, unappealing directions, wrote Tatyana Stanovaya, a nonresident scholar at the Moscow Carnegie Center. The Communist Party, for example, has shifted toward open confrontation with the Kremlin with an ideology of Soviet revival more extreme even than Mr. Putin’s.
Weren't we just told above that the Communist Party 'votes with United Russia once in Parliament'? Now it suddenly is in 'open confrontation with the Kremlin'? How can both claims, just a few paragraphs apart, be true? Hint, the aren't.
And the claim that the Communists have 'an ideology of Soviet revival more extreme even than Mr. Putin’s' is just blatant nonsense.
Putin hates the Soviet ideology and openly rejects it. What he works on is a national revival of Russia by means of a neo-liberal economic policies. The Communist are opposed to that. They reject the neo-liberal economic system. They want to re-nationalize big companies and re-introduce an income distribution system that favors the working class over capital owners. Acknowledging those difference would actually help the NY Times reader to make sense of this paragraph:
But the disillusionment is economic. Most street protests in Russia in recent years have been provincial labor actions that gained little national notice, said Yekaterina Schulmann, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a trend the Communist Party is well positioned to exploit.
Those labor actions also gained no international notice. The NYT's Moscow bureau might by a reason why that is the case.
If the NY Times had reported on those labor actions, instead of the clownery around Navalny, it probably could have made a difference. If U.S. support over the last two decades would had gone to some nationalist minded social-democratic party in Russia, instead of the fake 'liberals', the election outcome this year would probably have been different.
But that would have required factual reporting from Russia and a non-ideological analysis of Russia's political and economical system. Neither of which is available at the upper levels of the U.S. of A.
@ Posted by: Piotr Berman | Sep 25 2021 11:06 utc | 92
Poland was a special case. It had a very complicated history pre-WWII, and was the main geopolitical enemy of the USSR. It is absurd to extrapolate what happened to Poland to the entire Soviet sphere.
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@ Posted by: Gordog | Sep 25 2021 9:49 utc | 85
Tsarist Russia was, by far, the poorest of the imperialist powers. If you read the epoch writings (19th Century) from Western Europe, you can clearly see the Russians were essentially considered to be the monkeys of Europe, the proverbial ugly, disabled cousin. It was Europe’s Deep South. It was still feudal by the time WWI was waged – and that’s the main reason it simply evaporated in it: the feudal mode of production simply wasn’t prepared to wage such modern type of war.
Stalin wasn’t “beloved” by the Russian people. We don’t have evidence for that. But he certainly represented the will of the vast majority of the VKP(B). The interesting question for the historian is why he came to be the figurehead of such vast majority.
To me, this question seems to be clear enough: the Soviet system was created all of a sudden, in the direst and most chaotic of the situations. It was only Lenin’s leadership and genius, alongside the absolute authority of the VKP(B) politburo, that kept the whole thing together during the critical years of the Civil War and in its aftermath (1923-1924) – that’s the only explanation for the fact that Russia itself didn’t disintegrate after the collapse of the feudal land tenure system.
Since the system was completely new and without any precedent, even the members of the politburo didn’t know where true power really lied. While Lenin was alive, this wasn’t an issue. But, after he died, it simply became clear that true power lied in the General Secretariat, that is, true power in the new system lied in the institution that approved new members of the Party and distributed State offices by nomination. By chance, it was Stalin who was the General Secretary. And he was also the head of the Orgburo – the boring, but crucial institution of the new system. Lenin knew that, hence, in his “testament”, he said Stalin had accumulated a huge amount of power – but the other members didn’t know that.
The fact Stalin was at the right place, the right time, when Lenin died, make some people speculate that, if Sverdlov hadn’t died tragically, he would be the most powerful man of the USSR instead of Stalin. Like I said, those were chaotic times, nobody really knew what would happen and which were the forces in action. The debates in the Party seem to be ideological, but they were not – it was a never seen before system, an unprecedented feat, a sail to unknown waters.
There’s absolutely no evidence (in fact, there’s plenty of evidence of the opposite) Stalin represented the crude and uncultured, but pure, Russian nationalist peasant against the evil and conspirator clique of Jewish intellectuals. The debates in the VKP(B) never took this turn. When anti-semitic attacks happened against Trotsky, Stalin, Bukharin and the others were the first to defend him against such type of argumentation. Trotsky was never accused by anyone for being a “know-it-all”, or “too intellectual”. The debate was purely political and intellectual, both sides presenting their arguments. That Stalin had a style of mostly using people below him in the chain of power to make the argumentation doesn’t change the fact that he also knew what he was talking about at the political-theoretical level. He was as Bolshevik as anyone else.
Nationalism was never an issue in the Bolshevik Party. The Russian people never accused the Bolsheviks of being anti-Russian internationalists. This is revisionism. After all, modern Russians continue to speak Russian, the Orthodox Church and cathedrals are still there, Russian culture is still there, Cyrillic alphabet continues to be there. The key here is to understand the international conjecture of the early 1920s: the Second International decided that every social-democratic party should topple their own government and install proletarian governments in case of a world war; only the Bolsheviks did it.
When they did it they found out the Western social-democratic parties had betrayed the Second International and supported the war efforts (plus the German Revolution, which was crushed). Suddenly, in the space of less than one year, the Bolsheviks found themselves completely isolated and vulnerable. The only weapon of counter-attack they had was propaganda warfare in order to incite communist revolutions in the Western powers. That they did, in a process that culminated with the creation of the Third International (Comintern) in 1919. But the important issue here is that the Russian people completely understand that: they knew that, in order to protect Russia, they needed to act internationally. There wasn’t any distinction between a nationalist and an internationalist policy: both were part of the whole. It is insulting to the Russian people to say it isn’t capable of discerning complex abstractions such as nationalism and internationalism.
It is easy for Putin to accuse the Bolsheviks of being anti-Russian internationalists behind all of those nuclear missiles and S-500s – but those didn’t exist in 1917-1923.
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@ Posted by: Jezabeel | Sep 25 2021 9:31 utc | 84
There’s a very famous story known by historians of culture about post-WWII France.
Right after WWII ended in France, the first allied people who landed on it from outside was a team of OSS personnel and some other French notables – Rothschild among them. The very first place they visited in just liberated France was Rothschild’s mansion in Paris. They entered it, opened the wine case/wardrobe that existed there in his room and celebrated the victory.
Rothschild’s mansion was kept untouched by the Nazis. With the furniture, with the wines, with everything.
And people still claim the Nazis were “men of the people” (and I’m not even delving on the fact Hitler gifted himself with a castle and other mansions in the German countryside).
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@ Posted by: NemesisCalling | Sep 25 2021 6:16 utc | 81
Stalin didn’t create the term “Stalinism”. He created the term “Marxism-Leninism”.
“Stalinism” was a pejorative term created by his political enemies.
He didn’t differentiate himself from Lenin at all. On the contrary, he made every effort to reassure the Soviet people he was the direct, most literal possible, continuation of Lenin.
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@ Posted by: m | Sep 25 2021 5:50 utc | 80
From what I’ve heard, the KPRF was some kind of “nationalist party” during Gorbachev, and only adopted the term “communist” during the Yeltsin era. They’re more like the Slavophile party than the communist party.
Although, if you read Zyuganov’s interviews and the texts in the KPRF’s website, you can clearly see they know at least the essentials of Marxism.
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@ Posted by: Rob | Sep 25 2021 4:17 utc | 75
That’s exactly what my earlier comments were all about. Stalin is one of the best documented persons in History, there’s absolutely no need to idealize/demonize him.
The first decade of the Revolution is one of the best documented periods of History. Lenin has his complete works published, Trotsky also has his complete works, Stalin has his complete works. Even some other more obscure leading Bolsheviks had their complete works or at least collections of works published. Plus, we have the published deliberations of the VKP(B) and Comintern, and the Soviet archives with all the decrees etc. etc.
Long story short, the era that we need to idealize the least is the early Soviet era. I don’t understand why some many people still go to such enormous lengths to falsify and mystify this era and its personae.
Posted by: vk | Sep 25 2021 14:29 utc | 104
Re Gordog #148: It’s really above my pay grade; but for what little it’s worth, the Soviet Politburo seem to have taken the Tukhachevsky conspiracy seriously (see below) as an existential threat to Soviet existence, where conspirators admitted they would open the front against Germany in event of war, and award Germany the Ukraine and Japan Primorski Krai in exchange for German and Japanese support (see below). A month later the Soviets began a purge of everyone connected to the conspirators Yezhov admitted in his interrogation of Apr. 26, 1939, seemingly without coercion, that he was involved in the conspiracy, used the purge to cover his tracks and overthrow Stalin, and planned to assassinate Stalin and the Soviet leadership at the Nov. 7, 1938 Revolution Day parade.
In 2018 the Russian Government published the transcript of the Tukhachevsky trial, 172 typewritten pages, after sequestering it 80 years.
— Here’s a link the cover page. You can click on the URL within it to pull up the PDF file, which takes a while to upload. http://istmat.info/node/59108 .
— Here’s a link to the PDF file of the transcript itself, which might upload quicker. http://istmat.info/files/uploads/59108/rgaspi_17.171.392_process_tuhachevskogo.pdf .
In it, the defendants confess to most of the accusations, blame others, name names and argue with one another and the judges. It is so long and diverse, that it seems unlikely to have been scripted.
An English translation of the transcript has been published as an appendix to Glover Furr’s most recent tome, “Trotsky and the Military Conspiracy.” As with Furr’s other books, it’s a farrago of academic quarreling, rather than a straight-forward presentation of facts. (The one exception is his book about the Katyn massacre, treated as a whodunit.) Buried within Furr, however are nine accounts related to the Tukhachevsky conspiracy from outside the Soviet Union, which could not have been fabricated (including ones from a Himmler speech, a Goebbels diary entry, and a diary entry of Joseph Davies, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union).
The most damning account in Furr, however, IMHO, is a handwritten Japanese telegram of Apr. 12, 1937, from Arao, aide to the Japanese military attache in Poland (photographed by the NKVD from a Japanese diplomatic pouch passing through the Soviet Union, and translated by a Japanese linguist for the NKVD, who had previously read a series of document written by Aroa, so knew his handwriting). The telegram states that the Japanese Military Attache in Poland had successfully established contact with a secret emissary of Marshal of the Red Army Tukhachevsky. The telegram was dismissed under Khrushchev as a Japanese provocation (without evidence), then not published until after the fall of the Soviet Union. The date of the telegram, shortly before the arrest of Tukhachevsky and his colleagues, suggests it was likely a smoking gun, perhaps the smoking gun, leading to his arrest.
Posted by: Seward | Sep 26 2021 23:37 utc | 159
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