After three weeks of travel around Northwest Russia, keeping an eye on the people and circumstances of daily life around me, my answer to the question in the title is ‘yes and no.’
On the one hand, the consumer society is going strong. Supermarkets are well stocked. Within Europe, Russia had the lowest rate of inflation in the food products sector during the past month: zero percent. When you read about export bans of one commodity or another, such as the ban on rice exports just imposed today by the Kremlin, the reason is found in the external world, not within Russia itself. The Kremlin was reacting to the ban on rice exports recently announced in India, which drove up global prices and would have led to Russian sales abroad of rice needed at home if the markets were left to their own devices.
Meanwhile we are told that the grain harvest in Russia this season may well show a record surplus, notwithstanding all the climatic abnormalities globally and within the Russian Federation. Russia represents 20% of world grain supplies, Ukraine, just 5%. In this light, Russia can easily meet world needs even if Ukraine does not export one bushel of wheat.
In one very important consumer market sector, automobiles, the reorganization of supply away from Europe and towards China has been almost seamless. The high-end cars from the PRC are more in evidence in St Pete by the week. On the main roads leading into the city, I see new Chinese brand dealerships opening here and there. I have ‘test driven’ these cars in taxi fleets and they are really impressive, not just to me as a passenger but from the remarks of drivers.
To be sure, the ruble is weak and various consumer electronics companies have announced price rises to come on devices imported from the West. This weakness has causes relating to the shift in the hydrocarbons trade from Western Europe to Asia, where contract settlements are not denominated in dollars. Hence there are fewer dollars and euros put up for auction on the Russian domestic bourse and the price of these currencies has followed the bidding.
Otherwise, despite the weak ruble I am each day surprised at how imported sea bass from Turkey or imported French premium quality Burgundy wine is on sale in the Petersburg supermarkets at prices less than half what we pay in Belgium for similar goods.
On the other side of the issue, one would have to be blind not to understand that the country is at war, considering the now omnipresent recruitment advertisements urging men to sign up as ‘contract’ soldiers for the war. I say ‘men,’ because the advertising billboards, posters and television ads are all addressed to males. They tell the reader that “combat is a man’s job.”
The appeal is openly and unapologetically sexist. But it also only accentuates the positive: ‘join your peers,’ etc. Judging by the models in these ads, men signing up would appear to be in their mid to upper 20s, with a second tranche in their 40s and 50s.There is no hint whatsoever that those who do not sign up are shirkers, cowards or pansies.
You see a lot more recruitment advertisements in St Petersburg and environs than you see actual soldiers in uniform. In my outlying borough of Pushkin, we have several military academies and so in the morning you can catch sight of a platoon doing their morning run. But that is nothing new.
The other day when riding a commuter train we were seated just across from a young soldier in his early 20s. Whereas the sartorial image of these guys used to be sad sack maybe a decade ago, I can say that this fellow’s uniform was very smart looking. And he had a self-assured demeanor.
What you do not see is any military bearing arms in civilian milieu.
Notwithstanding the appeal to Alpha males, television news reports also tell us that women are serving in armed forces. We see occasional interviews with women air force pilots. But the overriding theme with respect to women is that they serve as doctors or nurses who may treat wounded soldiers in the field on their way back to hospitals in central Russia. They are saving lives, not taking lives.
Meanwhile, for those who can bear watching war news on television, the narrative has been changing, especially in the past week. Until then, news of the material damage and bodily harm caused by daily Ukrainian bombardment of Donetsk city and other towns in the Donbas took up much of the news bulletins. Now the accent is on the destruction Russian forces are dealing out to the Ukrainians as Kiev directs larger scale attacks and brings into play its strategic reserves, especially in the Zaporozhie region. The new Ukrainian offensive appears to be no more successful than previous probing maneuvers in breaking though the dense Russian defense lines.
Russian military experts on the leading talk shows who showed great reserve about predicting the future course of the conflict lest Russians be overconfident a week ago now appear radiant and ready to confide that the Ukrainians never got the equipment they needed to make their counter-offensive a success.
As I noted in a recent essay, the Russian military command has been biding its time until it is certain that Ukraine was already committing its reserves to battle and would soon run dry. Now that time is approaching. We see that the Russians are opening an offensive in the northeast, in the Kharkov region.
There is good reason to believe that the Russian advance around Kharkov is yielding results. In the past week there was talk of starting reconstruction work in the border region of Belgorod, where the Ukrainians had made armed incursions six weeks ago from Kharkov and had destroyed or damaged a large swathe of residences by artillery strikes. The cry went up in Russia to take Kharkov and put an end to these calamities. Evidently the Russian military is succeeding in silencing the Ukrainian guns.
Against this background of the changes in the correlation of forces in Russia’s favor, I am stunned that U.S. and other observers and commentators are not taking note. A very good example of this blindness or ignorance was an article put out in the past week by owner-publisher of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel and James Carden, who may be said to represent the supposedly enlightened views of Progressive Democrats in the United States. The co-authors called for peace talks based on compromises by both sides to the conflict. In particular, Ukraine would accept neutrality and Russia would pay war reparations. War reparations!
These authors like so many talking heads in the West do not have the necessary linguistic skills to access Russian news sources on their own. They depend wholly on propagandists in the State Department for the raw facts from which they can spin their reasonable compromises. I humbly submit that this war will either end on Russia’s terms or it will escalate thanks to American miscalculations and obstinacy to the point of a nuclear exchange that puts the survival of humankind in peril.
Meanwhile Secretary of State Antony Blinken is telling reporters that the dangers of human extinction from nuclear war are no greater than the dangers humanity faces from climate change. Goebels would be proud of him.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
Gilbert Doctorow 
I enjoy receiving your on-the-ground perspective.
Note that there’s little Western mention of the $23bn debt relief Putin gave Africa, nor the St Petersburg Declaration. Big news in Russia?
Hoping you will write an article about how Russia is moving its grain.
Believing in Blinken would be a reason for personal armageddon.
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Thank you for that helpful summary and update. One difference in my experience here in Luga is that I am seeing a LOT more soldiers around town and “out and about” here. Significant increase. The last time I took a train to St. Petersburg one car was completely full of soldiers. I have a friend who is a psychologist at the base here, and he give the psychological tests to new recruits. He is working 6 days a week. The military base here is primarily an artillery base. I hear less firing of the tanks, etc., but we have heard (and felt) some huge explosions recently. Not sure what is up with that.
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The appeal is openly and unapologetically sexist
Good to know there’s sanity left in the European continent.
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My feeling exactly. It is not sexist to distinguish between men and women.
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I saw Carden and Heuvel’s article–and almost spit out my drink when I read “war reparations”! I note that Western discussion of any diplomatic peace talks process inevitably leaves Russia out of the process! It’s a bizarre hubris the West has: that they will dictate peace to Russia, not discuss it with her. They act as if they are victors declaring terms. It’s truly bizarre; they believe their own propaganda.
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I have to correct you on one assumption at the end of your essay. Katrina vanden Heuvel is a fluent Russian speaker and is capable of reading Russian. She has spent lots of time in Russia over decades with her late husband Stephen F. Cohen. That is not the reason for her views. She simply is more sympathetic to the pro-Western Russian liberal viewpoint. Both her and Cohen acknowledged – and it was very evident in a speaking engagement they were both at that I attended a couple of years before Cohen’s death – that they had disagreements in their views of contemporary Russia.
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thank you for this remark about vanden Heuvel. Proximity breeds contempt. In what I am about to say I will try to avoid that pitfall while setting the record straight on Cohen from my perspective as a close collaborator of his, or, as I am tempted to say, as an alter-ego of his, during several critical years starting in 2014 and ending at his death. Cohen was the most intellectually alive and perspicacious historian of our day. His identification of the death of Russian studies in the 1980s since all questions had been answered was simply brilliant and brave. However he was less brave in dealing with US-Russian relations in his writings of the new millennium until his last book, War with Russia? in which he spoke his mind with great courage and without compromises to avoid prosecution or other phantom fears. This is the Cohen that his great many followers today surely have in mind. By the way, it was that Cohen who counselled John Mearsheimer on Russia when John was still underinformed on the subject. At the same time, there is no denying that Cohen was, like vanden Heuvel, very sympathetic to the Liberal Russians, who are today rightly identified as a Fifth Column, due to their disdain for their own country, its people and its past and for their adoration of England and Western Europe. Cohen’s daily reading was Novaya Gazeta, which says it all. That and Izvestiya. He made his fame on Bukharin and his sympathies lay there to the end, not to the market-based modern Russia of Vladimir Putin. On the question of who is to blame for the Ukraine war: I have no doubt that Cohen would not today be a fence sitter, would not try to fabricate a false compromise between Russian and Ukrainian interests as his widow has done.
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well then she’s out of sync with the vast majority of Russia’s population and has no business making inane suggestions, whatever her personal liberal views are. A pragmatic solution to the war, based on reality is what is needed not the wishful thinking of a particular politicl bent. I was rather taken aback when she recently suggested that France and Germany should take a leading role in peace negotiations after Russia’s experience with those two countries in connection with the Minsk accords..
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Zero percent inflation. “Russia had the lowest rate of inflation in the food products sector during the past month: zero percent.”
Imagine living in a country where you aren’t paying 10-percent to “the big guy.”
“. . . one would have to be blind not to understand that the country is at war . . . .” All you need is one country who keeps its people on an endless war footing, with endless wars and threats of endless wars for the whole world to be at war. The result is the same.
People cannot live like this. Keeping the people on an endless war footing with endless wars and threats of endless war has only one result — the people go insane. The world goes insane.
Nuclear War is a whole planet backed into a corner by a relentless regime saying: “I can’t live like this. I won’t.” World Wars used to take care of these episodes where the whole world went insane. But that was when conventional warfare was the only outlet for the expression of mass insanity. Now you have the power of the atom, and a regime that believes nuclear wars are both winnable and survivable.
Conscription and the draft are good examples of what endless wars do to a people. During the Vietnam War it was common practice for the average soldier to toss a live hand grenade in the general direction of an unpopular officer. They called this practice “fragging.”
If that wasn’t an obvious expression of a country fed up with the endless wars and endless warmongering, then I just don’t know. Just not potent enough an expression, I guess. “Fragging” helped end the draft. Having too many young men refusing to be drafted, dodging the draft, to possibly prosecute (at least publicly) helped too. So did a real two-party system of government. It wasn’t like our institutions or our whole way of life had failed. That would come later. But back then all the people wanted was for the system to get itself straight with the people. This system said it would. The system lied.
We fall for this all the time. Just ask the Russians. They will tell you. We can’t be trusted. We can’t be negotiated with. We always lie.
In the end, the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) just doubled-down. It always does. Power always prevails. It was back to business as usual. It is business as usual. Don’t like the draft. They will try something else. Don’t like the ROTC and military uniforms on campus. No problem. They will arrive in civies to take advanced courses in government, finance, and business. Of course, business.
This is what is going to destroy us. The fallout will do the rest. Just because we have survived the nuclear experiment so far — with two nuclear bombs being dropped already, and all that fallout from all that nuclear testing, and all those accidents like Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl, and Fukushima, and now the dumping of millions of gallons of nuclear contaminated was into the ocean. Somebody has been watching too many of those Japanese monster movies. Or not enough. I wouldn’t go getting all that smug about how our future on this planet is certain. What could possibly go wrong?
“Still here. Sorry.”
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