New News

I have been tagged by the proliferating educator meme. I will respond to this soon.

But, first, something briefer. Getting regular and relevant news is one of the challenges of studying the contemporary social/cultural/political phenomena of a country other than your own. Of course the intertubes have helped everyone become an instant (surface level) expert on all manner of arcane stuff. Access to news has, perhaps, never been greater -- even if much of it is just re-written press releases and unreflective reportage, there is a glimmer of news in there. But this all comes to naught if your area of interest speaks a different language; Google translator only gets you so far. Getting news from Russia, Germany and other places East is a continuing quest.

The English version of Der Spiegel is useful, their regular email newsletters keep pumping information down my intertube pipe daily. There was the much more old school (pure text! webpage frames!) German News translations via email, although this has recently shut down.

Russia has presented more difficulties. The Cold War winds are still blowing in much reporting of Russian politics and society. A certain judgement of 'backwardness' is still there in the arched eyebrows of many Western journalists. (And, to be sure, peniscopters aren't a regular occurrence in many other countries' politics, but that's arguably to everyone else's detriment.) In which case getting some less coloured material becomes an important task.

Window on Eurasia is a blog run by Paul Goble. He provides a set of three comprehensive articles each day. Often these are drawing from reports translated for the first time, which is invaluable. He (re-)reports regularly on new statistics and analysis about the population in post-communist Russia and elsewhere. Goble may have his own political pursuits -- "promoting Baltic independence and the withdrawal of Russian forces from those formerly occupied lands" -- but the reports don't seem unfairly tilted by this interest. He's currently working at Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, but has worked as an academic in Estonia and in the US public service. This included a stint in the CIA and Radio Free Europe (America's radio service into Soviet territory), which obviously needs to be borne in mind. (In related news, Radio Free Europe's research department is to close. A sign of political convergence? The propaganda for free markets and 'liberty' now too orthodox to be worth budgeting for?)

A scan over Goble's pieces in recent days yields some interesting material: "Kremlin’s Ties with Religions Said to be Strengthening ‘Archaic’ Elements in Each," "Russia’s Poor – Fewer in Number but Further Behind the Wealthy," "The Red Army Did Not Liberate East Europeans or the Russians Either, Moscow Commentator Says".

The latter, referring to the removal of the Soviet memorial in Estonia (see image above), presents the intriguing thesis of Igor Dzhordan:

Dzhordan’s core argument is as follows: The Soviet political system was based on “an institutionalized civil war. The USSR was the geographical-political form of the state of the civil war.” And consequently, when the CPSU was overthrown and the USSR dissolved, these were “the most important steps toward the end” of that civil conflict.

Consequently, after 1991, there was the promise of “civil peace” in which “force would no longer be the foundation of social life. But then Vladimir Putin created “a post-modernist cocktail,” in which thre was “(almost) the tsarist coat of arms and (almost) the Soviet hymn and in which the MVD traced its roots to Benckendorf and the FSB to Derzhinsky.”

Such a compound state needed some things from the tsarist system and some from the Soviet one, Dzhordan says, and one of the things it needed from the Soviet was “the myth of liberation,” the idea that the Soviet Red Army “liberated” Eastern Europe and thus justified the use of force at home and the Communist mission abroad.

Such a myth, of course, would have been “impossible” to insist upon “if it was not based on something real, on the genuine experience of a grandiose people’s war, which ended with a victory over Hitlerite Germany.” But the “integral” quality of this myth represents “its weak side.” One cannot allow any part of it to be challenged, or the entire myth disintegrates.

While one can no doubt argue against this analysis, it's an argument that wouldn't be possible without access to sources of news and debate inside Russia and its former satellites.