President Dmitry Medvedev reviews CSTO exercises. Photo by Presidential Press and Information Service, Sept. 27, 2011. Russia is looking ahead to a greater role in Central Asia after the withdrawal of US troops.
It's long been my sense that EurasiaNet tilts too far towards the Kremlin in its coverage of Russia.
This tilt is a problem in Soros programs in general all across the board, and is a function of the felt need to push the "progressive" agenda without debate, which I've criticized. But EurasiaNet, as the top Soros-funded news service, has a particular case of this bias and I think it needs open debate -- something it never gets in the pages of EurasiaNet itself, where real criticism of Russia as a threat is almost never heard. (In fact, when I once put in a quote from a Western diplomat regarding the increased Russian threat in a story published on EurasiaNet about diplomatic rapid response, it was removed.)
Washington Post neo-conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin once did a column on this problem of pro-Russian bias at EurasiaNet, specifically in a blog by Joshua Kucera, which evoked a lot of indignation from EurasiaNet fanboyz. They felt it self-discredited because she was one of the identifiable ideological foes of the Soros-funded crowd. Unfortunately, she didn't really pursue the theme by examining other stories, even though she did do a second column on the tendentious rendering of a quote from Condoleeza Rice.
At one point she exclaimed, "Eurasianet? What is that?" which about summed up how much influence it had in her foreign and domestic policy circles -- it's main fan base is among the Foreign Policy and Atlantic editors and Central Asian scholars and think tank senior fellows -- it's a beat decidedly overshadowed by the Middle East and North Africa and the Arab Spring now.
In the comments to Rubin's piece, Ariel Cohen said that yes, many of the commentators (well, really almost all, Ariel!) are "leftist and progressive". I was the only "liberal, not progressive" writer for years until February 2012 when I left. As proof of the alleged pluralism of EurasiaNet, he cites the fact that he himself published on it. To be sure, he has had dozens of pieces on EurasiaNet, but it is in past years; it hasn't been so much in recent years.
One article seems to have been removed by some glitch. It looks like it was one of those articles that in fact cast Russia as a diminishing power -- and that may have been how it "fit" and was welcome. EurasiaNet has grown decidedly more pro-Russian in the last two years, mainly in Kucera's blog The Bug Pit; he likes to brag that he has been recruited by both the CIA and FSB (and let us know that he finds the concept of the US eavesdropping on a journalist worse than a Russian spy trying to buy a journalist) and styles himself as independent, but he nearly always snarks about Georgia and sticks up for Russia and minimizes its dangers -- which is the litmus test for this position.
An article by Molly Corso is generally just covering the various news accounts and perspectives on the Russian-Georgian conflict, but does include some bashing of Georgia, quoting from the Russian press. Then she quotes Ariel Cohen, and in fact he does what EurasiaNet usually needs to have done on Georgia -- call it to an account as if it is a miscreant:
Ariel Cohen, a senior research fellow at the Washington, DC-based Heritage Foundation, agreed with Tbilisi that Russia is using “the full tool box of state power against Georgia.” But Russia’s alleged actions do not relieve Georgian leaders of an obligation to meet high standards of proof in cases involving espionage or terrorism, Cohen added.
'PUTIN WILL NO LONGER BE IN POWER'
Back in 2002, Cohen set the tone himself for the "dwindling power" approach to covering Russia in Central Asia. It was Russia's failure to reform (and not, say, overriding American intererest following 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan!) that "let" American forces come into Central Asia, he says. He does the usual tour through the poor Russian conscripts with their low pay and their rag-wrapped feet, but then tells us Russian military procurements increased 25 percent in a year. So how to square this booming military might with this theory of the diminished Russia with its crappy army? Oh, by saying that Russia "lacks a vision".
(BTW, this 2002 article includes this humorous -- in hindsight -- paragraph:
Boris Nemtsov, a reformist leader of the Union of Right Forces, a center-right party, who participated in consultations with Putin on the future of the military, says that the Russian generals deceived the president. "They peddled a scheme that will not be finalized until the year 2004, and not be implemented in full until the year 2010, a year when Putin will no longer be in power," Nemtsov says.)
MINIMIZING THE RUSSIAN THREAT
The pro-Kremlin slant takes a sophisticated form and isn't always easy to see and then articulate. In the world of Internet polemics and Twitter parsings, I'm well aware that this position simply will be rejected by EurasiaNet, Registan and all their circles because they are absolutely steeped in it. But I hope by steady explication that eventually it will be clear and others will step up to debate the Soros establishment.
Counterintuitively, the form that the pro-Russian blogging takes is actually in minimizing the Russian threat, downgrading Russia as a power in the region and the world, and dismissing it as unserious, bumbling, corrupt, inept, etc. It's always about the lumbering bear, now greatly diminished in power. This is a kind of backward argument, looking over the shoulder at imaginary neo-cons or hawks in Washington who exaggerate Russia's power -- although in fact, in the Obama era, they're nowhere to be found. Libertarians, conservatives, and progressive alike all downgrade the Russian threat and view Russia as a second-class power that we should be nicer to and sell more to and not criticize for its human rights wrongs.
But that's a mistake, as Russia is in fact still the opposite superpower to the US, and in fact America's greatest enemy -- precisely because the Kremlin has itself designated the US as an enemy and acted accordingly, and because Russia allies with Sudan, Iran, Syria and other conflict-ridden countries. More to the point, it still causes an enormous amount of harm to its own people, especially minorities, and to the near abroad. Most people in the region still have fates largely determined by how cold the wind blows from the Kremlin, as the Czech colleague of Dubcek and one-time room mate of Gorbachev, Zdenek Mlynarz once described it.
RUSSIAN THREAT TO NATO GETS BURIED, IGNORED
Today, the chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces threatens a strike against NATO if it installs anti-missile defense in Europe -- and EurasiaNet's The Bug Pit or any other blog just has nothing to say.Nothing. "Not a story." "It's just bluff," says Peter Sadovnik on Twitter, a Russian expert, who exemplifies this sort of view. Don't take it seriously, or you are merely engaging in Cold War escalation.
Cananada's cbc.ca ran the threat against NATO as a front-page story. Canada, which has many emigres from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and forces in Afghanistan, has an instinctive sense when they see this kind of bluster that it does go on the front page nonetheless.
The Times buries it in the back section WAY under the fold. You had to be really persistent even to find it.
So EurasiaNet ignores it, and instead, there's a story about Georgia's preparation for the NATO summit.
GEORGIA'S ASPIRATIONS TO NATO MOCKED
I myself don't advocate NATO enlargement because I think it's needless provocation for no demonstrable purpose and we can't back up our mouths on this because we have no intention of really having a firefight with Russia over one of their smaller neighbours. As NATO has become involved in the Libya and Afghanistan wars, it becomes even more dubious a proposition to expect it to be a stabilizer and not an inciter of instability in the region.
I suppose the NATO Partnership for Peace and doing things like cleaning up radioactive stuff in Turkmenistan are all good, and maybe there should be more of that. I don't think it makes sense to have an "aspirants' group". Even so, Georgia is entitled to aspire, and some politicians are entitled to encourage them in that and I don't think it means they are "Russophobes" -- a label I completely reject, not only for its connotations around the infamous debate with Alexander Solzhenitsyn but for its overbroad application to people who just rightly want to criticize Russia -- and who rightly want to protect Georgia from obvious Russian provocations.
In the end of this piece, as there often is, there's a swipe at Georgia -- "But now there is at least a relatively concrete standard by which to judge Georgia's reward, whatever it will be, at the summit." And that followed the gloating from this blog post taking delight in Georgia not really being on the list for NATO membership after all, according to the State Department. As I said, I don't think NATO expansion is warranted. But what's wrong with making Georgia an ally, working closely with it, and "offering an award for "compromising with the Kremlin on Russia's bid for the World Trade Organization"? I'm not getting this. It did compromise, and it should get something. That's how politics work. And...the State Department may not decide everything about this.
But it's the snark here -- and the nastiness and clear pro-Kremlin posturing -- that really bites. Says Kucera in a previous linked piece:
There are of course still many other problems with Georgia's membership aspirations -- mainly that it has shown a proclivity for picking fights with nuclear powers -- but it's interesting that Georgia has made that move. We'll see if it gets them anything in Chicago.
Picking fights?! Good Lord, Joshua. Are you completely unaware of how Russia provoked and harried and harassed Georgia for years?! Handing out Russian passports provocatively (and unlawfully) to people in Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia, despite constant warnings from the UN and the OSCE about what this would lead to? Most importantly, there's Russia's refusal to accept the UN and OSCE observers, observers they were obliged to take. The EU report on this conflict in fact doesn't blame Georgia alone, as some like to claim, but apportions blame fairly equally.
It's a little known fact that Georgia came to the UN Security Council when Russia was buzzing airplanes over Georgian territory and provoking days before the Georgian invasion of Southern Ossetia. Elected UNSC members tried to raise the Georgian case as well and failed. The UNSC refused to put Georgia on the agenda due to Russia's objection (the region is basically off limits due to the Russian veto). The Georgians begged the UN to do something. They refused. Then it was left to the EU and notably France to deal with the crisis after the invasion.
Georgia likely imagines that if it were a member of NATO, Russia wouldn't dare to pull the kind of shit it has pulled on it, with constant provocations and its faux "peace-keepers". But that is not to be.
And...Nuclear powers plural. What other nuclear powers has Georgia provoked? Um...the US? Really? How?
Georgia says it will leave Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia's "independence" issue off the table in terms of joining NATO, but what they should do is try to put more pressure not on NATO to join, but on the EU and OSCE to settle the conflict. But of course, they've done such a good job settling Nagorno-Karabakh, Trans-Dniester and other frozen conflicts that are largely a function of Russian meddling and failing to be the peace-keepers they claim. Even so, the US is right to make non-negotiable the idea that Russia has to accept the observers in Georgia that it pledged to allow in with the last peace agreement, which it never has done.
KREMLIN'S SOFT POWER?
So what other story do we see on EurasiaNet on the day that the chief of staff has threatened a strike on NATO (!)? This one, Can the Kremlin Develop a Warm & Fuzzy Side? by Igor Torbakov is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden. Of course, this story had to have been conceived and submitted some time ago. But it's a perfect exemplar of my point about the pro-Russian pieces that tilt to the Kremlin precisely by minimizing it and thereby making it seems like it's not really a problem at all and therefore we should never overreact or even react.
Russia is portrayed as absolutely failing at the "soft power" or the "smart power" game as it's just not attractive enough. Torbakov, who doesn't live in the United States, and therefore just doesn't get it at all about the in fact very slick RT agitprop machine, claims, "For example, an English-language Kremlin mouthpiece, the Russia Today channel, is widely perceived as Pravda 2.0, offering the same old jargon with a hipper design."
Oh, no Igor. Naoborot. Russia Today has greater penetration in the US market than Al Jazeera and is hugely popular among a very fiercely loyal core of progressives who keep giving it street cred on Twitter, and then their literally millions of followers in the aggregate. Numerous people mindlessly absorb and believe and retweet RT and many don't even understand that it is owned and operated by the Kremlin. It keeps up a steady, well-funded sophisticated barrage of propaganda, in fact, by getting on its talkshows people that are already notable "thought leaders" in the US. RT purchased Julian Assange's "product" of a series of talk shows precisely because they knew it would be widely watched by anti-American types all over the world with great relish. And of course, Assange found his soul mate in RT...
Torbakov cites capital flight and the Londongrad phenomenon as a sign of Russia somehow failing. But in fact that means it is thriving -- it can afford to export its wealthiest class, who are highly mobile. Except for a few like Boris Berezovsky, these oligarchs and their children and associates don't criticize the Kremlin; they're its most loyal subjects because that's how they get and stay rich.
As for the realization supposedly dawning on the Russians now as they talk "soft power" that blogs are a threat to authoritarian power, they long since owned all the domains, put in the software with all the back doors for the FSB, and long since infiltrated all the blogosphere, if not with outright pro-Kremlin writers then with pro-Kremlin commenters, trolls, and sock-puppets. And they have help. Kevin Rothrock, a notable pro-Kremlin blogger who heckled me all summer for criticizing Russia on my blog, is now the editor of the supposedly independent Global Voices Runet section, funded by Soros -- a very troubling development but not surprising, as all of Global Voices tilts left.
I can't think of a single person criticizing Russia in the entire Soros-funded universe. I don't work there anymore. And yes, that means even Human Rights Watch, which has pulled its punches considerably as it struggles to keep an office open in Moscow.
Navalny, the most popular anti-corruption blogger, is no Western liberal with free market notions ideas for restraint of the Russian state like Boris Nemtsov. He is a nationalist for a powerful Russia, not a diminishing and defeated power. Liberals don't even have seats in the controlled parliament because they can't even get their parties registered.
As for the threat of a "colour revolution" in Russia, Putin has already handily dealt with all the "banderlogi," as he called dissidents, using a pejorative term out of Kipling's Mowgli tales which basically means "monkey-people." The cunning snake Ka is eating the revolution's children as we speak.
FAILURE OF EURASIAN UNION ISN'T FAILURE OF RUSSIA
As for "an initiative to intellectually beef up the State Duma’s Committee on the CIS Affairs" -- am I the only one that sees that as an oxymoron? Beef it up all you like, but that is not how Russia runs its relations with the near abroad, that's silly. Not only are they run by Gazprom or Russia, Inc., the Foreign Ministry and of course the armed forces and military intelligence have a lot more to say. The Eurasian Union is pretty much a non-starter, but if it just as Belarus, Kazakhstan, and probably Kyrgyzstan, that's enough to make trouble.
CHINA IN THE BULL'S SHOP
To be sure, China is in the wings with more money and resources and managerial capacity than Russia seems to have available to throw at Central Asia. But Russia accomplishes what it needs to accomplish every single time, and the need of the Central Asian tyrants to cosy up to the US or China to offset age-old Russian hegemony in fact is yet another pernicious effect of Russian dominance in the region, not some ameliorative. We've seen how Russia succeeded in forcing the US out of Manas by offering aid to its corrupt crony Bakiyev, the now-deposed ruler of Kyrgyzstan. Russia then incited the crisis by sharply hiking energy prices which forced Bishkek to reduce services and caused the population hardship and incited demonstrations, eventually leading to Bakiyev's toppling. Those bazookas in the hands of rebels didn't grow out of the tulip beds and the commandos hiding behind trees and shooting at the government palace sure looked like seasoned fighters, not angry consumers.
Russia is poised to continue to make trouble again over Manas by pressuring Atambayev, the current leader, and there have been repeated statements about how the US would have to leave by 2014, although Atambayev has talked about some kind of commercial freight use of the base for the US that doesn't sound workable.
RUSSIA ABANDONED UZBEKS IN POGROMS BECAUSE IT CAN
Russia dominates the Collective Treaty Security Organization (CSTO), and makes trouble through this and pressures the members and to be sure, Uzbekistan avoids it and pushes back and refuses to cow to Moscow's pressure.
But the most-cited fact for "diminishing power" status of Russia is that it didn't come to the aid of Kyrgyzstan when Moscow-educated and pro-Russian interrim Kyrgyz leader Roza Otumbayeva asked Russian troops to help stop the widespread pogroms in the South against ethnic Uzbeks, through the CSTO in June 2010.
It isn't a sign of weakness that Russia didn't do this; it's a sign that Russia brutally lets nature take its course on occasions like that because it is fiercely strong. Ethnic Uzbeks are guest workers, second-class people to Russians. They saw no need to come help them when Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan himself, did not want the CSTO used for this purpose. Russia shrewdly calculated that its need not to piss off Karimov, with whom they already had difficult relations, was greater than its humanitarian obligations under international law to protect civilians. That's not about weakness; it's about the kind of German RealPolitik that Jacob Heilbrunn admires in Obama in not coming robustly to the aid of the human rights activist Chen Guangchang.
Karimov preferred to temporarily open his borders and let in refugees rather than have CSTO or even OSCE peace-keepers. That's a factor often overlooked when discussing this "Russia is weak because it didn't stop the pogroms" theory. No, Russia is strong and didn't stop the pogroms because it didn't have to, and didn't see that it was necessary. Drug dealers were settling scores -- whatever -- let the UN take care of it.
Alexander Malashenko of Carnegie in Moscow is typical of this "diminishing- power-so-don't-worry" position, and naturally this perspective found a home in EurasiaNet with this piece, Russian Influence Overestimated--Expert by Richard Weitz of the Hudson Institute (himself author of many of the pro-Russian pieces at EurasiaNet):
A leading Russian political scientist asserts that the Kremlin’s influence in Central Asia is exaggerated and Moscow’s regional impact is likely to “become less and less,” despite President-elect Vladimir Putin’s desire to expand Russia’s role in Eurasia.
Alexey Malashenko, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Center in Moscow, offered an iconoclastic analysis of Russia’s position in Central Asia. He spoke at the inaugural March 8 seminar of the new Central Asia Program at George Washington University in the American capital.
It's actually not iconoclastic at all, as its the Soros-funded establishment position everywhere. Malashenko went ahead and cited the failure of Russia to get involved in the pogroms as an argument of its weakness, although it really is just the opposite: it can coldly just not bother to help people in need because it prefers to keep a RealPolitik balance in the region.
TWO COUNTRIES WITH $2 BILLION
Malashenko seems to feel he clinches his argument by noting the huge trade between China and Kyrgyzstan:
“When I hear about the huge impact of Russia in Kyrgyzstan, I remember that the trade between China and Kyrgyzstan is equal to $2 billion.”
“Does the Kremlin understand this?” Malashenko rhetorically asked. “I do not know.”
Surely Malashenko knows that they do, and surely he knows that Russia is still Kyrgyzstan's largest trading partner. Russia loaned Kyrgyzstan $2 billion to build the Kambarata hydropower station, and has many ties with Kyrgyzstan and Bishkek does remain economically dependent on Russia. If China is threatening to eat Russia's lunch, it's not a lunch that necessarily Bishkek wants to hand to the Chinese.
All the Central Asian powers are wary of Chinese dominance as well. For Berdymukhamedov, the EU-backed Trans Caspian Pipeline and the Turkmenistan Afghanistan Pakistan India (TAPI) pipeline are ways to get out from Chinese dominance as the leading importer of Turkmen gas now, for which China has ponied up $8 billion in soft loans.
DON'T WORRY YOUR PRETTY LITTLE HEAD ABOUT RUSSIA
It's really a deft sort of thing, that EurasiaNet does, conditioning the reader in post after post. "Don't worry your pretty little head, Russia's not a danger." "The Russian language is losing attraction and nobody speaks it anymore." "Russia is losing out to China and fuming" (a typical claim about pipeline politics which I would then have to try to refute with the real facts of the situation about China -- which is that China was only too happy to sink the Trans-Caspian Pipeline due to the pricing competition and competition for the same gas, and Russia was only too happy to see them do that for their own reasons.)
This article is a rare signed piece by managing editor Justin Burke, sort of out of the blue, Burke claims that Russia's economy is failing and not passing the innovation test, and that he can prove this by showing the figures from machine manufacturing. Huh?
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s once-and-future president, has built his political reputation on a perceived ability to enforce order and revive the country’s economy. But a review of official Russian government economic data, in particular import and export figures, suggests that Russia has moved backwards under Putin, at least in terms of the country’s efforts to develop an advanced, high-tech economy.
He goes on to cite in dense detail statistics to show that "equipment and machinery, for example, fell from 10.9 percent of all exports in 1999 to 4.5 percent in 2011" and "exports of chemical products declined from 8.5 percent of overall exports in 1999 to 6 percent in 2011". So what? It was during a global recession when lots of other countries did worse. Russia concentrated on exporting oil at a high price during that period; that's why Putin remained in power.
Does Justin realize what innovation means these days? It means smart phones and aps and web sites and APIs. That in part explains the huge jump in the import of finished manufactured goods -- i-phones and i-pads. That sort of innovation is burgeoning in Russia despite the obvious problems of top-down Silicon Valley clones I'm the first to criticize -- but there are some very wealthy people involved in the platforms like Yandex, Vkontakte, etc. Does Justin understand that Yuri Milner, one of the oligarchs of Russia, owns something like a quarter of Facebook's stock and is about to become even more wealthier as it IPOs?
There is a huge ferment in Russian Internet growth, blogging and mobile aps and shopping sites and such -- the spy Anna Chapman was already spying on Russian transplants in Silicon Valley and US technology even though she was portrayed as some sort of sexpot sleeper-mole waiting instructions for the future.
Innovation of the Internet and mobile sort isn't going to show itself as hardware in the same way that large or medium machine building did in the old Soviet era, especially if the smart phones are made in China.
Russia's economy may have contracted in some places, but it sure keeps its thriving arms industry going, selling $1 billion in weapons to Syria. Russia's economy can be dented without it ceasing to be a big, nasty aggravation in world affairs -- which is exactly what it has been in Syria, and with regard to Iran, and regarding missiles in Europe, drugs in Afghanistan and many other issues around the world. And who says that Putin is going to keep his campaign promises, as Burke indicates he will do now after the elections?! The whole reason that an affluent latte-drinking carbonera-eating Facebooking and Live Journal-blogging Twittering middle-class mass could appear on the squares before and after the elections is in fact because of Putin's oil boom years.
Yet so hard does this notion of "big, failing, dysfunctioning not-so-super power" Russia grip the minds of EurasiaNet, Open Society Institute and their various funded think-tanks like Center for American Progress that they just don't see how biased this thinking is. There's no debate. There's no review of the preconceptions and deep grooves of reiterated thinking.
RUSSIA LIKELY TO HAVE MORE, NOT LESS INFLUENCE IN CENTRAL ASIA
Look, the point isn't to say that Russia is the overwhelmingly dominant power in Central Asia. It does have competition. Obviously, China has a huge impact, India is increasingly important as is South Korea, and of course the US has a role, particularly with the war in Afghanistan and the Northern Distribution Network.
But to imply that Russia is pushed into the background by China, the US or any other power is absurd. It overlooks the harshness of Russia's real actions in the real world in the last decades, and overlooks centuries of ties and the immediate last century of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet relations. Maybe Russia's power is exercised only in the negative, by threats of the great amount of damage it can do -- and does do (it cut off purchases of gas from 50 bcm to 10 bcm in a year for Turkmenistan). But it is indeed the force to be conjured with in Eurasia; it is the spoiler as well as the enabler of big projects, and it has the alliance of all these countries in all mulilateral bodies -- not only at the UN or OSCE but lesser known bodies like FATF, which monitors terrorism financing and money-laudering.
To be sure, these Central Asian despots are feisty -- Turkmenistan's leader cut off Russia's MTS cell phone company, serving half the Turkmen population, overnight just because it felt like it, and there wasn't a thing Moscow could do to rescue its customer lists, stores, and even towers on Turkmen territory, and it is now in litigation.
But even with these drastic alterations in some business relations, Russia still sells Turkmenistan tanks, armaments, and tractors, and still supplies a lot of the education for the Turkmen cadres in the oil and gas industry and other industries. No other power has the inroads into this region that Russia has, with its language and culture and shared Soviet past, and it really is wishful thinking to expect otherwise. In fact, there is so much effort in so many quarters, not only EurasiaNet and its network of Soros-funded think-tanks and NGOs, but much of academia in this field -- that it almost seems as if this is Russia's actual strategic posture: to get the world thinking it is diminishing and eroded and in disarray so that the coiled Ka can strike.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN US TROOPS LEAVE AFGHANISTAN?
There is a power vacuum coming soon to a theater near you, after 2014 when American troops leave Afghanistan. The first vacuum that Nature abhors and will be filled will be along the Tajikistan border where Russia has been spoiling for more troop presence to be restored. We're likely to see those bases in Kyrgyzstan that EurasiaNet keeps writing are nothing and not significant in fact to get a workout. There's this notion that the Americans will hang around, even with a lot less troops, and help build this prosperous Silk Road along the same lines as the NDN. That's not likely, because the US can't afford it and the public doesn't have the attention for it.
We've seen today what the US is preoccupied with on the day The New York Times can't run the story of a threat from a Russian general on the front page: China. Whatever its historic antipathy, China has proved it can gang up with Russia against the West handily again and again -- that's why there aren't solutions to the crises in Sudan, Iran, North Korea, and Syria.
Russia doesn't have to succeed with soft or hard power or the Eurasian Union -- it already has economic and military ties that these countries rely on and plenty of leverage of both the good and bad kind. Russia's day is coming again in Central Asia, and Putin is intensely preparing for it. One of the ways is by putting out stories to deflect from this reality.
