We all know that President Vladimir Putin’s referendum on amendments to the Russian Constitution held on July 1^st gave him an overwhelming victory.  That is what the Russia’s Central Electoral Commission officially announced on Friday and it has been picked up by all media in Russia and in the West even well before, just after the voting booths were shut on Wednesday night based on exit poll data.

So far, critics of the Referendum in the West have directed their attention to two issues only.  One of these, advanced by the long-established and authoritative Chatham House think tank in Britain tells us that the Referendum was illegal, illegitimate from the get-go, that it violated the procedures set down in the existing Constitution of 1993 and that it was superfluous since the amendments had already been approved by both chambers of the legislature.

The other critics, meaning the vast majority of our mainstream media, have kicked the tires, saying there was surely ballot stuffing and other hanky-panky which render the Referendum results fraudulent. To be sure, this is speculation unsupported by any facts and merely spreading the malicious anti-Putin gossip of opposition politicians within Russia. Moreover, the likelihood of illegal abuses at the local level such as famously occurred in the 2011 Duma elections was very low given all the technical investments in security at voting booths made in the time since.  These same advances include not merely live broadcast of cameras in the voting stations onto the internet for public access but also widespread use of sophisticated autonomous ballot boxes that read each vote before sending them into plexiglass boxes for storage in case a manual recount is demanded; and that technology incidentally makes it possible to have an instantaneous read-out of the results as soon as the polling station shuts.

However, it is striking that no one has asked: where are the numbers?  Elections are all about numbers and the results published by the Russian authorities this time break entirely with the practices of a couple of decades of national elections in the country.  In past nationwide elections, the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta carried on the next day a full breakdown of voting results for each “subject of the Russian Federation,” meaning cities and regions (the Russian equivalent of states).

Now you may ask, why bother with such a breakdown when the given vote on July 1^st was essentially a plebiscite.  But the same could be said of Russia’s presidential elections, and yet the region by region numbers were always released. Surely this transparency in the past was intended to validate the credibility of the results and to provide political scientists with a future crop of dissertations and food for thought.

This time the officials have given us only three summary numbers. These are 67.97% participation in the Referendum by eligible voters; 77.92% votes in favor of the amendments; and 21.27% votes against. Doing the arithmetic, this tells us that 52.9% of the eligible voters approved the amendments and Mr. Putin has the support of the absolute majority that he sought. Victory!

In response, I say:  not so fast.  There are fragmentary electoral results for the regions that have been sprinkled in the Russian print and online media and which suggest that voting results differed significantly across all three parameters. These discrepancies raise questions about how the absolute majority was reached.  It is worth mentioning here that even the results by region have kept apart the release of results of voter turnout and results of yes-no on the amendments.  Only when you put these together can you understand whether a majority of eligible voters approved the amendments in any given region.  This does not change the overall conclusion that in every region except one (the Nenets autonomous region in the Far North), the voters who participated in the election approved the amendment by a majority. But it does raise the question of shortfall in the President’s objective of getting an absolute majority of the polity on board for the amendments.

Sixty-eight percent participation may be very high by European and world voting patterns, but it is still far from 100% and one can wonder why 32% stayed at home. Were they ‘no’ voters who were afraid to come out of the closet?  Were they abstainers? This is the meat of political science and we have been put on a diet by the Russian authorities.

First off, from the fragmentary published numbers on voter turnout by region, we see that some of the ‘usual suspects’ have outperformed on delivering the vote. These tend to be places like Dagestan or the Caucasus republics and the Crimea (81% turnout) which are especially beholden to Moscow for their welfare and prosperity. In other regions, particularly the remote Far Eastern regions, where loyalty to Moscow has at times been questionable in past elections, we see particularly low turnout:  Magadan (44%), Khabarovsk (44%). Almost the same comes up in Siberia: Novosibirsk (Russia’s third largest city, 47%), Tomsk (44%). This information came courtesy of the RBK news agency. As for major cities of European Russia, Leningrad Oblast (which abuts the city of St Petersburg) had voter turnout of 78%, ten points above the national average; but then it is the home to many military training bases and specialized schools turning out officers. And by definition military men are easiest to send off to voting booths, even easier than civilian employees of the government.

Turning to the “no” votes, on the day after the election yandex.ru told us that in Magadan they numbered 36% of voters, in Irkutsk – 34.84%, in Kamchatka – 37.16% and in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk – 29.55.

In many of the regions mentioned above it is obvious that the goal of 50% plus of eligible voters supporting the amendments was never achieved.

But what about the capital, Moscow?  Here, information on electoral results has been very peculiarly reported.  The Rossiiskaya Gazeta did tell us that the electronic balloting in Moscow, which was one of only two cities in the country allowed to experiment with such voting, produced 62.33%  of ballots in favor of the amendments, 37.67% against. Meanwhile, in the traditional voting booths the result in Moscow was 65.26% in favor and 30.84% against. Information on voter turnout was not provided but if it corresponded to the national average that would yield a net vote of 44% of eligible voters supporting Mr. Putin’s Referendum.

And what about Russians living abroad?  As we know the Russian passport-carrying diaspora numbers several million. The only information about their voting that I have seen was provided by the news portal Lenta.ru.  They said that the balloting of Russian at their consulates in New York, in Berlin and in Vienna all produced majorities of No votes. No further information was provided. This is significant, because unlike those living in Russia, these expats were likely uninterested in the social benefits enshrined in the amendments but were moved by the one amendment allowing Putin to stay in power after his present mandate expires in 2024. We may construe their vote to be based on more abstract principles of governance than personal welfare.

And now I direct attention elsewhere, to the 21% of participating voters who voted against the reform nationwide.  Who were they?  None of our media has given a thought to that question.  I will hazard a guess, that they were heeding the advice of the one Opposition party in the Duma that called for a No vote:  the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

The 20% corresponds roughly to the electoral strength of the CPRF over the past decade or so, as the second largest party in the country after United Russia. About two weeks before the elections got under way, Party leader Gennady Zyuganov was asked by a journalist of Russian state television what he would be advising his followers to do.  Without hesitation, Zyuganov said to vote against the amendments. And he went on to say that if the Referendum passed, then Putin would enjoy powers greater than the pharaohs! Given the vast promotional campaign going on in favor of the Referendum, including television spots by tv celebrities, musicians, artists and scientists, this open rejection of the Referendum by Zyuganov was very courageous.  Not that it won him any plaudits from our media for defending democracy.

I close this essay with the observation that Vladimir Putin’s victory in the Referendum is in any case illusory. It attests to his inability over 20 years in power to provide a secure succession when he passes from the scene.

His first presentation of the project to amend the Russian Constitution back on January 15 was based on the notion of rebalancing the share of responsibility and power between the three branches of government, Executive, Judiciary and Legislature. His words were pointed in the direction of a cabinet responsible to the legislature, not to the head of state. By cutting back on presidential powers, he would have made it easier to find a worthy successor to fill shoes smaller than he had worn.  This all was subsequently jettisoned before the reform was presented to the Russian electorate for approval.

Yes, in principle Mr. Putin can now stand for re-election in 2024 and in 2030. However, as the old folk saying has it:  Man proposes and God disposes.  There are no assurances that Mr. Putin will stay in good health and good mental acuity into his seventies and eighties. And if he should leave the scene abruptly, for one reason or another, there is presently after these Constitutional amendments no clear path of succession that would give the country the stability that Mr. Putin places above all in his value system

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the “View Inside” tab on the book’s webpages to browse.]

President Putin’s grand referendum on several hundred proposed amendments to the Russian Constitution officially takes place on July 1^st, although de facto through ‘early voting’ it will have been running for a week when polls open tomorrow.

If you live in the United States or in Western Europe, you would hardly know anything about it, nor is there any reason for you to know, in the estimation of our mainstream media, because the vote is a fraud and the outcome is known in advance as “proven” by copies of the new revised Constitution that went on sale in Moscow a couple of days ago. Moreover, given all the time and attention shown to the new outbreaks of Covid19 in the USA there is hardly a column inch to spare for the Russians, other than to remark on their place as number three worldwide in Covid infections and the shabby state of their medical infrastructure in the hinterland. Putin is denounced, yet again, for putting his own political objectives ahead of public health by holding this election in the midst of the pandemic.

If, however, you live in the Russian Federation or for some reason watch Russian state television broadcasts by satellite as I do, you are not merely aware of the referendum, you are saturated with news coverage about its every facet. This includes details of social distancing, hand sanitizers and the like to ensure hygiene and public safety of those coming to cast their votes. It includes interviews with volunteers who have been going out to visit the old and the infirm who cannot travel to polling stations and collect the ballots at their homes.  It includes ‘human interest story’ interviews with newlyweds who went straight from the civil office registering their marriage to the polling booths to be sure to have their votes counted and to protect the future of their progeny by signing up to the amendments, which enshrine in the Basic Law a huge list of social welfare benefits.  It includes almost daily addresses by President Putin to the nation regarding new allocations of monthly allowances to the parents of babes, of adolescents and to other socially fragile groups of the population in the spirit of the revised Constitution. This is not vote rigging but it is good old fashioned vote buying and it is being carried out shamelessly on state television.

In between these two extremes of non-coverage and over-exposure to the referendum, there is a third media position on the referendum which we may call the position of “alternative” Western media, meaning the relatively few websites that are either subtly or more commonly blatantly pro-Putin.  They are all pro-referendum because of one amendment in particular which we may call the “Tereshkova amendment” after the octogenarian Duma member, first Soviet woman in space, who at the closing of hearings on the amendments in the lower house introduced an additional paragraph resetting to zero President Putin’s time in office and thereby allowing him to run again for President in 2024 and in 2030. Our alternative media see this as an unmixed blessing, assuring Russia of firm (anti-Western) leadership to the end of our days.  This same media is mostly blissfully ignorant of Russian realities, mostly have never set foot in the country. For them, Russia is just a stick with which to beat the American hegemon and its European running dogs.

For those of us who do care about Russia and have some depth of experience of the country, this referendum is a sad page in Russia’s move backwards towards autocracy instead of forwards towards greater parliamentary democracy.  To be sure, some of the promoters of the revisions on Russian television, such as the anchorman on the “News on Saturday” program Sergey Brillyov, speak of more power sharing with parliament coming with the revised Basic Law.  But that is unsupported by the language of the amendments, which is opaque and subject to the interpretation of whoever runs the Executive in future. Meanwhile, as regards relations between the Executive and the Judiciary, there is nothing to discuss: the revised Constitution will give new powers to the Executive to remove judges who are unwilling to bend to the times.

Instead, the real pluses of the amended Constitution, such as they are, may be found in the provisions regarding protection of pensions through indexation, financial assistance to support families and the like. For Russians with a conservative bent, and Russian society, just like East Central European society in general, is deeply conservative in its social and ethical values, there are the definition of marriage solely as the bond between a man and a woman, the reminder that ‘in God they trust’, the vow never to give up an inch of national territory and many other provisions setting in concrete the values of the Putin years.

Having called out the reasons why Russians may vote ‘pro’ in the referendum, I must quickly add that not everyone has been bought off by the goodies so as to overlook the bone in the throat of a perpetual president.  In fact polls last week suggested that 43% of the Russian population opposes the revised Constitution.

So where are the Russian Opposition parties on this?  If you look at our mainstream press there are no Opposition parties in Russia.  There are Opposition personalities, the most prominent of which is the blogger Alexei Navalny. Navalny has wisely decided to hold his fire, to avoid new time in jail and to save his strength and his popularity for the 2021 legislative elections.

However, the Western mainstream press willfully overlooks the Duma parties, which they conveniently describe as sham, tolerated by United Russia to give an appearance of democracy.  Again, reality is very different.  From the beginning of democratic Russia in the early 1990s, the Communist Party has been the largest and most effective counter force first to the Neoliberal centrists of Yeltsin and then to the centrists who gathered around Vladimir Putin to form eventually United Russia.  A couple of weeks ago their leader Gennady Zyuganov spoke to the press and denounced the referendum. He said the revised Constitution would give Putin powers greater than those enjoyed by the Egyptian pharaohs. A colorful turn of phrase, it showed enormous civic courage. Needless to say, Zyuganov has not been given a microphone since.

The other less numerous parties, namely Fair Russia led by Sergei Mironov and the LDPR of firebrand nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky have been less honorable. Mironov has simply shut up.  Zhirinovsky was more royalist than the king and declared a few weeks ago that the referendum is not needed because the Duma has already approved the revised Constitution.

It will be very interesting to see what the actual numbers are in this referendum.  Given all the safeguards to protect abuses at the polling stations, it is very unlikely there will be hanky panky.  But calls for a boycott of the vote by the many thinking Russians who reject the perpetual presidency of Putin could dope the outcome.  We shall see shortly.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the “View Inside” tab on the book’s webpages to browse.]

Fond memories of a visit to Soviet Georgia in September 1979 together with a “delegation” from one of Americas’s leading global producers and marketers of tropical fruit and vegetables, organized under the aegis of the USSR Ministry of Agriculture

Following our Georgian hosts’ description of their activities, we present a 90 minute slide and tape show which they reluctantly and none too happily sit through. Then leave for a tour of their farm.

Виноградно-плодоводческий совхоз ВАРКЕТЕЛИ-   3000 hectares, founded in 1957 on arid land – brought under cultivation with irrigation from an earthen dam upriver. Grow main table varieties of grapes – have 500 tons storage capacity of grapes. During labor peaks use student help – 40 days. Pay students 20% below regular sovkhoz wages.  Use sprinklers for irrigation – chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Japanese equipment.

“During the ride I am given information on the ‘subsistence farming’ (подсобное хозяйство) which Brezhnev has been pushing this season: quite apart from land directly around one’s house, this generally means 1000 square meters here, as against the national norm of 2000 square meters. The norm for the subsistence farming in a Kolkhoz, however, is 5000 square meters = 1 acre.

The ‘tour’ of farmland is really no more than 10 minutes look from one hilltop at vineyards and orchards. Even this is sufficient for our boys, however – they take note of the extremely wasteful irrigation system, which is poorly maintained – right before our eyes one sprinkler is malfunctioning, pouring gallons of water per minute into a hole.

At about 5 pm we are taken to the house of a wine-making foreman for a feast – the six of us and an equal number of locals sit around an overladen table – with smoked suckling pigs and chicken, local cheeses and breads, grapes, pears, peaches, sauces – and homemade fresh wine. Here for the next 5 hours we feast in the Georgian tradition. Under etiquette of the feast, Jan is made the toastmaster or Tamada, with obligation to turn the floor over to each for toasting in turn.  Ceremony of Bacchus is a page out of Svetlana Allilueva’s descriptions of life with father. To my surprise, the Soviets go very easy on Cayton, who refuses to drink on grounds of religion (Mormon). Several of the toasts are outstanding. Cayton raises glass for the tillers of the earth, who work for the good of the people. The farm chief toasts our families, because if a man doesn’t love and honor his own family, then he cannot love and respect others.  Dick goes mushy, raises a glass to Russian-American friendship and begins to slobber over WWII days as an aviator – We are joined by our host’s 78 year old father, who also saw action during the World War and this brings Dick into a bawling state,  he weeps as exchanges embraces with the representative of the generation which saved us all! At this stage, the bottoms up procedure has taken its toll. Jan discovers that cannot make his way back to the house unaided on visit to the outhouse.  Selby looks poorly and Dick has begun to get sick. We beat a retreat – packed inside two cars. While Jan and Selby make a quick return, I and Dave have our hands full with Dick, who pukes miserably and requires that we stop a number of times en route. Halfway back to the hotel he has to stop and pulls a prank: climbs over a high fence intending to wretch away from public view. However, it takes two of the Georgians to retrieve him.  Back at the hotel, I have difficulty getting rid of the Sovkhoz chief, who offers insistently to set me up with girls – he sits down at my desk and starts phoning. I distract him by offering to go down to the dollar bar, where, I say, Jan and Gillis are surely hanging out. The fact is that Jan, Selby and Dick and Kotelnikov are all out cold in their respective beds.  With assistance of maids we enter their locked rooms to find them sprawled out like so many wooden planks. Bored and tired, the Georgians leave me in peace. But it is not much peace for me as I spend the next few hours suffering in my room from intoxication – to my credit and perhaps misfortune, I hold this dose down.  Note –a final macho gesture at the feast came when the sovkhoz director saw my long look at the suckling pig head on the table. He proceeded to split the skull, open the cranium and then thin slice with his knife portions of the pate like smoked pig brain, which he then slipped into my mouth, along with Jan’s, Selby’s. To their relief, neither of the latter remembered this episode the next day.

Overall I cannot especially fault the Georgians – though they set us up for a fall, they were rather considerate when disaster struck.

A city tour of Tbilisi, September 1979

We take an auto tour, which is brief and uninformative. The Old Town is shown to us from afar, atop an outlook across the river. We hear the set narrative: Tbilisi is so friendly a town, 97 nationalities live here in harmony, a testimony to the fact that people who settled here found it hospitable and stayed. Where else on earth can you find in such proximity a working synagogue, Armenian Gregorian Church, Georgian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox churches… Of course, they do not bring us anywhere close to these miracles of harmony. Instead we are shown the sterile new sections of town – the university, medical institute.  Some curiosities:  the driver points to the Набережная имени Сталина and seeing my expression says “I suppose you’re surprised by this?  I’d be surprised if you weren’t.”  It’s so obvious the Stalin cult is a kind of revenge, a way of keeping out the Brezhnev cult.

The driver tells us the story of the Georgian land: “Once upon a time, God was dividing up the Earth among the peoples. At that very time, the Georgians, being Georgians, were out in a forest meadow drinking and carousing. When a stranger appeared at the edge of the wood, the Georgians extended their usual hospitality and invited him to join them and drink a cup to their health.  He agreed and it turned out the stranger was God. God said that he was pleased to be among such a lively people, but asked why he had not seen them when he was dividing up the Earth. They explain that such is their nature and they had been drinking.  God says he had given away all the land except a small parcel which he had saved for himself – now this will be theirs.  The Georgians rejoice and prepare a basket of fruit and wine for God, to see him off on his trip back to Heaven. But God is a bit tipsy and as he ascends, He drops the basket – so that to this day Georgia is the land of fruit and wine.”

* * * * *

Notes on agricultural sector in Moldavia, 1979, as reported by local Agricultural Institute, by farms directors, by taxi drivers and other authoritative sources during the September 1979 visit

With 0.15% of the land mass, Moldavia produces 40% of Soviet canned fruits and vegetables.  Moldavia produces 360,000 tons of meat and 500,000 tons of milk annually.  Moldavia still has industrial sugar beet cultivation. Table and wine grapes is a major industry – for land on slopes.

We visited the largest orchard in the USSR at Tiraspol with 6000 hectares planting in progress, half of which has already been completed. Main varieties from the US: Golden Delicious, Richard, Starker, Jonathan, Wagner. During peak of season they use supplemental labor – detachment of 1000 university students.

The 6,000 hectare farm represents an investment by surrounding Kolkhozes. Thus far have poured 27 million rubles into the venture and 20 million have been recovered in 4 harvests. One half of the production is held for long term storage. Out of 30,000 tons apples now produced, 12,800 tons are stored – they use chilled air methods. Ship out by rail.            23 orchards in Moldavia will have an average of 2500 hectares each for overall tree planting of 50,000 hectares by 1985

In the Tiraspol region we also visited a Vegetable Farm where a pilot project is run by the American equipment manufacturer FMC under a master agreement with the USSR Ministry of Agriculture.  The project is built on a 600 hectare tomato farm. FMC has supplied all field equipment, seeds, sorting equipment.   These are late variety tomatoes going into tomato juice and paste. Contract calls for output of 50 metric tons per hectare.  In fact 36 were achieved last year and this year the figure will be 40.  Reason is that US varieties are susceptible to local fungus.  Another reason – locally poor assortment of herbicides. FMC provided the equipment for new furrow methods. This FMC equipment is very satisfactory, especially the tillers. The cannery has 80 ton per hour capacity.

We watch a combine pass through the fields pulling up tomato plants and spitting out roots and stems. The area in general has 3-crop rotation: peas, tomatoes and milo wheat. There are 2 harvests per season. From FMC’s 600 hectares they look to production of 30,000 tons, out of which 4,000 will be sold fresh and 26,000 will be canned.

Our boys are less than overwhelmed by the success of this integrated farming operation. They note that the 60% survival rate of tomato seedlings is very poor, meaning great waste of fertilizer and water resources on the way.

FMC will do potato farming and processing next. Note – we are told that FMC specialists are paid by contract – $250 and 20 rubles per calendar day per year = $100,000 total. And in a new contract to go into effect soon the figure rises to $350.

FMC has been in Moldavia for a total of 4 years. For the first 2 years they worked with the local Institute in the planning phase; the past 2 years have been in the field. Their personnel is here on a permanent basis.

Looking at fruits – 450 kolkhozes in Moldavia, with 100,000 hectares under cultivation, of which 25,000 are post-1970 specialized agriculture.

Vegetables:  Formerly vegetables were a losing proposition – but not any longer. Collective farms are now producing 800,000 tons annually, out of which 750,000 tons are sold to the state. Mainly tomatoes, cabbage, onion, cucumber, eggplant, potato, watermelon.  State farms grow all the herbs and spices: rhubarb, parsnips, parsley, dill, celery, fennel, cauliflower, lettuce.

Climatic regions:   North, potato   Southeast – vegetables, irrigated   South: onion, early potatoes

Now set 35% return on investment annually in vegetable farming

In all of Moldavia, there are 450 collective farms, each of which does some vegetable farming. However, 67 Sovkhozes are specialized in vegetable production and they produce 70% of what is sold to the State.  Use fertilizers, mechanized harvesting, irrigation.

Spices and herbs – these are grown only on state farms – sovkhozes – because they are processed directly by the state.  Very little lettuce is grown here because ‘there is little demand.’ It’ a matter of what is traditional.  Also no cauliflower.  (All very curious, given that in neighboring Romania these greens, especially leaf lettuce, are very traditional).  As regards the “little demand” explaining failure to grow lettuce, when we then mentioned this to the Ministry in Moscow we were reassured that they would give marching orders to Moldavia.

Fruit production in Moldavia: North – pears and apples.  South- apricots and peaches    Center – plums

The Institute:  plans crops for each region, develop technology, maps, equipment, guide book for administrators. Also provides practical help in planting orchards. Check on proper implementation of their directives. Develop anti-erosion methods.   400 members in the Institute – including specialists on soil, land reclamation, agronomists, economists, geologists, water resource specialists.

[2020 observation:  presently Moldova is reportedly the poorest state in Europe. From the foregoing it should be self-evident that this poverty is entirely the consequence of geopolitical factors outside the control of its population and exists notwithstanding the fertility and productivity of the land in the recent past. Wedged between Ukraine and Romania, Moldova is cut off from its traditional markets in Russia and from its natural waterway, the Dniester, leading south into the Black Sea 170 km away at the Ukrainian port of Odessa. Its substantial Russian-speaking (largely Byelorussian) population resists tooth and nail the notion of takeover by its neighbors. This unnecessary poverty is likely to continue indefinitely]

Memo to the files: impressions from our visit to the Soviet fruit and vegetable cornucopia:  Georgia and Moldavia, September 1979 under the auspices of the USSR Ministry of Agriculture

One of the most striking impressions is the apparent leveling of once sharp distinctions between what supplies were available in cities and those in the favored countryside areas.  Less than a decade ago it was possible to say that even highly rewarded agricultural regions in the Soviet Union were poorly stocked in consumer goods and were the poor country cousins of even second and third rank cities, let alone the metropolis of Moscow.  Today these distinctions are fess less apparent; other distinctions have taken their place, and these are generated by the degree of successful or unsuccessful integration of a given region into the political hierarchy. For this purpose, comparison of Georgia and Moldavia can be highly illustrative.

The Georgian countryside, which, with the exception of some tropical coastal areas, is mediocre to poor farmland, has been won from mountainous terrain at great cost in labor. It was formerly known to be outstanding within the Russian context. After several years of political repression, little remains of this former affluence. Shops in Georgia have little to boast by comparison with highly prosperous Moldavia.  Political alienation in Georgia seems to have further expression in a revival and stubborn advancement of the Stalin cult.  If this is indeed the source of Stalin adoration elsewhere in the USSR, then Western analysts have been probably far off base in their understanding of the cult’s reappearance. For what is in evidence today in Georgia through restoration of portraits of the former leader and through prominent bigger-than-life gilded statues of him in public buildings, though memorial plaques, and through entreaties to tourists to visit his birthplace in Gory, is little more than an affirmation of the Georgians’ national existence and rejection of rule from Moscow. The Stalin cult is not so much an affront to Western sensibilities as a challenge to the Brezhnev regime.

Comparison between Moldavia and other favored agricultural regions than Georgia is all the more striking when this development is borne in mind. As the political power base of Leonid Brezhnev, the post to which he was assigned Party Leader after World War II, Moldavia to this day enjoys a special position vis-à-vis Brezhnev’s leadership. This is manifest in the model agricultural enterprises which are encouraged in the rea, in the innovative and self-assured behavior of local Party and State officials who make a virtue out of being in step with Moscow’s latest directives.  It is seen in the richness of Kishinev’s stores, in the well-dressed pedestrians, the orderly orchards and vineyards, and the prosperous new peasant houses along small towns.

Speaking with officials both in Georgia and Moldavia, one learns that the mandated increases in agricultural incomes have been realized. Collective farm workers in Moldavia, by way of example, now receive over the course of a year remuneration at the same level as industrial workers in Moscow. As an addition, they may enjoy the fruits of their labors on private plots which, depending on the nature of the farm enterprise, range between one-quarter and one acre of arable irrigated land.

With reference to official figures, it is obvious from even a glance inside stores that consumer goods which are in scarcity in major Russian cities are available without lines in these smaller, particularly Moldavian, towns.

All of this tends to support a hypothesis about the nature of Russia’s difficulties in the consumer sector which seems to me has been overlooked by Soviet analysts in the USA who have not visited and seen first-hand what is happening in that country. This hypothesis is that shortages of consumer goods and of processed foods arise today not because of declining production but because of rising disposable income and more equitable distribution of national wealth among the Soviet population. In a situation of largely fixed-price-production that rises only modestly from year to year and broadened demand, the necessary and logical result is the one which the astute observer will find today: widespread shortages. In this respect, the Soviet Union today appears to be traveling down the same road as Poland 5 years ago. It remains to be seen whether the implications for political stability will be the same in the USSR as they have been for Poland.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[Memoirs of Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up in now in print and available on all national websites of Amazon.com, as well as from other leading online retailers including Barnes & Noble, and http://www.bol.com

]

The article referenced in the heading appeared a couple of days ago in a leading American think tank publication which traces its ancestry back to the Richard Nixon pro-détente circles of the nation’s capital. Indeed, the personality at its apex, Dmitry Simes, was Nixon’s Sherpa for dealings with the Soviet Union during his final years.

This article is being promoted by Russian diplomacy as the country’s official word on the significance of World War II for the present generation of Russians and of people everywhere during this year of celebration of the 75^th anniversary of the war’s end.  In this connection, I was invited to offer my comments to the Russian online journal Sputnik, which came out with an article of commentary today:

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/202006191079667491-putin-is-showing-restraint-why-russian-president-could-have-written-wwii-article-in-harsher-tone/

My analysis, which is generously cited by Sputnik, was set out in full in the following:

In his article, Vladimir Putin has adopted a statesmanlike rather than argumentative tone. He has avoided naming directly the points in the historical revisionism being practiced in the West with respect to causes of World War II. This revisionism first developed in its present malignant form in the Baltic States and Poland going back twenty-five years when they loudly denounced Soviet responsibility in the start of the war arising from the deal with Hitler at their expense known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In these countries it served the purposes of nation-building.   The revisionism has in recent years been given further amplification in the United State where fits of Russophobia have suited the cause of   NATO expansion and propped up American hegemony on the Old Continent. In the United States, it is not so much blame for the start of World War II as the air brushing of the Soviet Union out of the fight against Hitler so that the liberation of Europe appears to have been purely the result of the heroic Allied landings in Normandy and the drive across France and the Low Countries towards Berlin.

Vladimir Putin has chosen to focus more attention on the Munich Betrayal, which shows up Western complicity in the Nazis overrunning Europe, starting from the Sudetenland.  This is understandable, because the notion of Appeasement as symbolized by Chamberlain’s return to the UK from his shameful deal with Hitler claiming ‘peace in our time’, is precisely how most of the Western populations view the run-up to WWII.    And then there is the one finger he points at Poland reminding everyone that the Poles were actively conspiring with Berlin to dismember Czechoslovakia. He makes a veiled hint that the aristocracy in certain Western countries were quite happy to deal with Hitler and did not heed the warnings of Moscow and its bid to create a united resistance to German aggression from the mid-1930s when it may have till been possible to stop the Germans in their tracks.

In fact, the hand of Mr Putin is much stronger than he has cared to set out in this article.  He is showing great restraint, and I would argue perhaps too much restraint given the fierce level of Information Wars against Russia that have been going on in the past decade.

It bears mention that Appeasement was a Western policy that proceeded almost from the signing of the Versailles Treaty. This argument was made very persuasively by Henry Kissinger in his master work “Diplomacy” in 1994. It was appeasement in allowing the Germans not to pay the crushing reparations that the Treaty required, by allowing them gradually to recreate their army and reoccupy their lands militarily in violation of the Treaty way before Mr. Chamberlain came on the scene. Munich was merely the culmination of a long process wherein the different interests of France and England in particular during the interwar years as regards their defense against Germany.  And let us dot the ‘I’s which Mr Putin has left blank: it was specifically the pro-fascist sympathies of English royalty and aristocracy that prevented collective action.  There was a strong streak in European political classes hoping to see the Hitlerites send their forces to the East and destroy Bolshevism.

Of course, had President Putin gone into these specifics, there would be bellowing from London, from Washington against the Kremlin.  Instead, he has spoken obliquely.  It is hard to say what effect his mild words will have.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the “View Inside” tab on the book’s webpages to browse.]

 In my previous archival installments I mentioned that I am now preparing a book of memoirs dedicated to my experiences as an expatriate senior manager in Moscow during the 1990s when the foreign community there numbered some 100,000 families. To my knowledge there has been no narrative published on our Russia ‘from the ground up’ whereas books have been written by those who occupied the halls of power in Washington, in particular Strobe Talbott’s “Russia Hand” looking down on us all from the Olympian heights. The small gems I presented in this space so far were intended as teasers for that forthcoming book.

However, during my work in parallel transcribing into MS Word files my extensive archive of diaries, business and personal correspondence going back into the mid-1970s, I have reached the conclusion that the scope of the book should be expanded to embrace two focal periods in my business career that merit simultaneous examination because of the very similarities and the contrasts in the Russia I visited so intensively in the earlier period and lived in during the later period. Indeed even the words ‘traveled to’ and ‘lived in’ have very qualified meaning when you consider that my visits to the USSR in the 1970s from my New York base were monthly and my residing in Moscow in the 1990s was punctuated by monthly trips back to corporate headquarters in London with time off at my family base in Brussels. Moreover, eternal Russia and….eternal America come up in both periods in ways that demand such comparison.  For business and intergovernmental relations, each period began with hoopla, great expectations, and each ended in recriminations and aggressive U.S. measures to isolate Russia and treat it as a pariah.  But I leave the big picture for the writing of the book.  Here and now I wish to present one more ‘teaser’ drawn from my time in the USSR in the 1970s.

To understand what I was doing in the midst of the august company at the event,I must explain first that I had an inverted business career. I started out and made my way into high business circles as a consultant, reaching the very top of American executive circles as witnessed by the account I present here below at age 33. I eventually moved on, with some assistance from then President Carter and his security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who closed down my business area by imposing crippling trade sanctions on the USSR following their invasion of Afghanistan.  In my reconfigured career, I took employment with the world’s largest conglomerate at the time, with an office based in Brussels and took business responsibility for the safer pastures of Poland and Yugoslavia.  Several jobs later, I found myself the head of representation of major German, Canadian and finally UK corporations in Moscow.  A top boss locally, and an upper middle level manager corporate-wide.  This is precisely the opposite of normal business careers where consultancy marks the end of a long career not the start.

As a young man in his early 30s I was the co-founder and sole professional in a marketing company selling consultancy services at the Board level to major US corporations in food processing and consumer goods having the ambition to achieve big sales in the USSR by way of industrial projects. In this capacity I joined the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council and established close working relations with the major force for foreign investment, turnkey factory construction and technology transfer at the time, the State Committee for Science and Technology, which was headed by Prime Minister Kosygin’s son-in-law, Dzherman Gvishiani.  In a sense, this period was as close as I ever came to being a ‘Kremlin stooge’ as our anti-Russian claque of academics and media generalists would call it today.  In fact, if I was a ‘useful tool’ of the Kremlin by bringing into negotiation for technology transfer companies that otherwise would never have set foot in Russia, all of my interlocutors on the Soviet side were to the same degree ‘dupes of Washington’.  Our careers on both sides were hostage to good and improving US-Soviet political and commercial relations.  There was nothing sentimental or self-deceptive about this either way.

The Moscow event described below took place in the context of the annual meeting of the Trade Council, which was held in alternate years in Russia and in the USA.  Out of the 267 U.S. companies then members of the Council, perhaps half came to Moscow with one or more members, including a large number of CEOs of the most important American businesses. The US government was represented by Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal and Secretary of Commerce Juanita Krebs. A number of iconic American statesmen and businessmen, including Averell Harriman, Armand Hammer and David Rockefeller were in attendance.

All participants were aware of the likelihood that Communist Party Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev would hold a reception in the Kremlin for a limited number of Council members on Wednesday evening, December 6^th, which, as many understood, was Brezhnev’s birthday. Various companies were enlisted to help mark the event with gifts related to their businesses.  One of my corporate clients obliged by sending in airfreight 1,000 pounds of their dog food as a gift for the Chairman’s kennel.  That went without mention from the dais, though other dog-related presents are noted in my diary entry below.

In any case, the printed invitations to the event were distributed at our hotel just a couple of hours in advance and only two busloads of us received them.  My inclusion may be explained on the technicality that I was a ‘corporate president’ which was a prerequisite, but more generally attested to the appreciation of the powers that be for the companies I was bringing to the negotiating table.

At the hotel another pleasant surprise awaited me: George von Streeruwitz came over in a friendly manner and invited me to a reception in the apartment of the head of the Chase representative office, David Buckman, in honor of their chairman the next day at 8.30. It is entirely illustrative of the political atmosphere in Moscow at this time that when I went through the Customs line at Sheremetyevo airport on my departure several days later, the inspector stopped me upon finding the maps showing how to reach Buckman’s house, assuming by his ‘suspicious’ name that he must be a Jewish dissident. That was quickly clarified and I proceeded on my way

‘

The diary entry for 6 December 1978 set out below has been lightly edited. At the end I provide a key to the identity of speakers and fellow participants in the event who may not be widely known today.

 Evening Reception at the Kremlin, Грановитая Палата 7.15pm – 10.00pm

Anxious anticipation in the whole group – two bus loads, all men with two exceptions.

(curious: whereas Marshall Goldman has an invitation, Harold Berman is not among us – must be fuming)

Wives sent packing to the opera at this executive only event.  Only FMC’s McClellan has made arrangements for his spouse.

On entering through the Верховный Совет main doors, we ascend a glittering marble staircase into a series of rooms, opening onto the enormous ball-room sized St George’s hall, which has exquisite parquet floors, elegant marble walls with gilded regimental histories in-set. We all gather in a reception area part of George’s Hall to the left and down a set of steps.

My dear Chris goes off in a corner – very poor mixer, especially in large crowd where he knows very few people. Doesn’t like all those high-powered egos around. I take him by the arm to meet Minister Lein of the Food Ministry, who is just then exchanging small talk with Kendall through a Ministry of Foreign Trade official acting as interpreter. While Kendall takes a deep breath I interrupt with “Господин Министр!” and introduce Chris and then say how his chairman will be here on Monday. It is a very rushed delivery, because he is anxious to get back to Kendall, but we do invite him to the signing ceremony and say a written invitation will be available next; on this basis we can say to the Food Ministry that Lein has already been personally invited.

Brezhnev enters – broad lion’s head, conspicuously wearing a hearing aid, large yet bloated and frail looking. Next to him his slick interpreter Viktor. He enters with Blumenthal and with Krebs on one arm, takes her up to see the St George Hall. Shakes hands with Rockefeller, Hammer, Harriman. Holds back a moment and Kendall looks alarmed that Brezhnev won’t shake his hand, but Brezhnev moves forward and does. Then Brezhnev moves to the doors which open and beckons us to follow him to dinner.  We pass through a low vaulted entry with heavy gilding into a magnificent high chamber with central columns painted wall surfaces throughout in 18^th century Classical iconographic style, Old Church Slavonic script. Obviously much restoration work since it is in splendid condition. Long banquet tables are set rather simply with standard quality Russian porcelain and glass, stainless steel cutlery; it is a 6 glass dinner, however, with water glass, champagne, vodka, two wines and cognac.  Service is quiet and efficient, moving in quickly as we sit down from each toast to lay on the next course. The total number of us, including Soviets and officials at the head table, perhaps 300. The uncertainty surrounding the event itself and over the guest list, which lasted till 5pm today has raised anticipation and the great satisfaction of each attendee at having been selected for these great heights. Floral decoration is simple and restrained: separate modest bouquets of carnations and pink roses. All liquor is served by waiters – no bottles clutter the table, which is really quite formal though plain.

The round of toasts is begun by Brezhnev, who makes a 10 minute speech that goes over many of the same points we have heard repeatedly in the past few days. He remains statesmanlike and accommodating, high minded. Main single argument:  trade should not be turned on and off like a tap since it requires great mutual trust; we don’t have to love one another to respect each other and to establish normal, even good relations; we shall continue to trade with you even if no steps are taken by the US side to end discrimination against us, but such trade will not have a real basis and cannot expand.

Note that Brezhnev’s diction is seriously slurred, really as if he has had a stroke. However, no other obvious physical impairment; does wear a hearing aid prominently though. Very large head and wide frame on which clothes hang a bit loosely. Nonetheless, seems to be in firm control of himself and of the audience.  Blumenthal makes the first return toast and a 10 minute speech. Looking this speech over in written form, all seems quite unremarkable, moderate in tone; however, his delivery is very aggressive, in particular, as he underlines the phrase ‘we have given each other good advice in the past few days; let us now, each of us, try to follow that advice.’ Once again there is tension, sharpness in his voice, slightly smug sound. This type of presentation is reckoning more on the Americans present, to show Carter’s strength, than it is on Soviet hosts. Whereas Blumenthal sounded two years ago like a businessman in government, he now sounds like an Administration spokesman in business guise. It is slightly unpleasant to hear him presumptuously speak for all Americans present and continue to press the hard line on the Russians. Fails to recognize that this is a business gathering, that essentially we are the sellers and that as such we don’t make demands. Blumenthal offers a gift – a painting of a Newfoundland retriever.

“Krebs delivers a long toast as prologue to her prepared speech: it is to present the hunting dog puppy that she has named ‘Decoy’ together with a collar bearing a silly inscription “I belong to Leonid Brezhnev. If lost please return to the Kremlin.’  Then a long-drawn out and overly cute song and dance about the significance of the name ‘decoy’, to the effect that trade is not our real goal, it is a decoy that will bring us to the real target, which is better relations for world peace. This is belabored still more in her official toast, which is not for the success of the Council though that is important, not for the sake of trade though it is important, not for several other causes, but rather for the benefit and wellbeing of mankind.  A typical liberal; one feels she doesn’t give a damn about this session, and therefore invokes the meaningless cause of mankind. Her tone is irritation, seems to enjoy modulation of her own voice too much. There is something treacherous about Krebs. She sounds insincere. Amazing gaffe: appears to say ‘Hope you enjoy Decoy in the little time left to you’ – obviously meaning free time but that’s not what comes out. Even the interpreter Viktor is puzzled. Verity and Forrestal make short toasts.

The meal service itself is sensible – portions are delicate and well complementary.

In the midst of the evening, it is remarked that December 19^th [December 6^th Old Style] is Brezhnev’s birthday and so all 300 of us stand with glasses in hand and lustily sing “Happy Birthday to You.”  Incongruous!  A gathering of America’s top executives singing on cue to Mr. B.

My neighbors at the table: to one side, a partner in the New York law firm Lackenbach, Lilling and Siegel, patent and trademark lawyer who is here representing the US Chamber of Commerce; short, peppery man in his mid-50s; throws back his vodka with relish, talks loudly and merrily. Says Wella is among his clients and offers to pass my name along to them for areas outside hair spray, e.g., for dyes and tints.  When Brezhnev finally makes his departure, he jumps up to join the line and shake Brezhnev’s hand; returns to his seat overjoyed. Says, “I went to the White House and they didn’t even give me a cookie, whereas look at this reception.”  How easily we are bought off by flattery and attention.

Nearly opposite me is Gregorian, stout and sturdy Armenian who runs a California trading company. To the right, an Englishman working for the engineers and construction company Badger Inc., compares his experiences here with what he has seen in Peking; super-sophisticated, with snobbish tinge. At the end of the table, four or five seats down and across sits a Brigadier General, Brezhnev’s personal body guard from the days of WWII; genial looking old chap with close-shaven, pinkish cheeks and well pressed tunic; like his boss, he is in mid-70s. Next to him a rotund protocol chief.  Opposite me across the table is a Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs rep in his late 30s who has just returned from a tour of duty in Canada.

At 10.00 Brezhnev announces that he must leave, because early tomorrow he has to officiate at a diplomatic event. Bids us to stay on with his associates. He makes his way around our side of the room, shaking hands, then leaves. Within minutes, the reception closes and we leave on foot back to the hotel.

The talk around me is about Brezhnev’s tremendous stage presence and continuing mental acuity despite physical frailty. However, one fellow mentions having heard from medical authorities here that Brezhnev has kidney dialysis and regular blood transfusions because of some blood deficiency associated with the bone marrow.

Others curse Krebs, saying ‘that damned woman, just like Margaret Thatcher in England, just doesn’t know when to stop talking.’ Say she should have stayed at home. As continuation one says the real warfare in the coming 25 years will be between men and women, that we will find ourselves in the trenches.  To which another adds that he doesn’t mind so long as he can share a trench.

Although I had wondered why Brezhnev exposed himself to scrutiny of outsiders and their possibly vicious evaluation of his health, it is clear that most have been favorably impressed. Moreover, for him to live in full seclusion would only give rise to still more damaging speculation over the real state of his health.

Note: at the close of the evening, when Brezhnev filed by to shake hands, he reached Marshall Goldman, seated about 8 seats from me across the table. Goldman had a big smile as he pumped Brezhnev’s hand.

Names

Armand Hammer – chairman of Occidental Petroleum, one of the first Western businessmen to have done deals with the new Soviet state after the Revolution

Averell Harriman –  Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to Moscow in WWII, former governor of the State of New York, patrician statesman

Donald Kendall – chairman of Pepsico, recently stepped down as co-chair of the Trade Council, active pro-détente campaigner, had at this point a monopoly position on Soviet vodka and hard liquor exports

Viktor Sukhodrev –  Brezhnev’s very savvy long time interpreter who gave sense to the Secretary General’s speeches in his failing years

Marshall Goldman – expert on the Soviet economy, deputy director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center

Harold Berman – law professor at Harvard, leading American scholar on Soviet law at the time

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[Memoirs of Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up in now in print and available on all national websites of Amazon.com, as well as from other leading online retailers including Barnes & Noble, and http://www.bol.com]

For a number of weeks in a row as coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths spiraled upwards exponentially, the broad population in Belgium and many other European countries came out at specified times in the evening to collectively celebrate the heroism of their medical cadres on the front lines of the pandemic.  For a while I joined in, but then as it became clear that Belgium has the world’s highest number of deaths per capita in the world, and that the explanations for this given by the authorities are utterly unconvincing, my feelings towards our medical profession changed from admiration to pity for their risking their lives only to produce miserable results. Clearly the foot soldiers had been let down by their generals.

As of today, more than 9,500 patients have died in this country of 11.5 million, half in hospital and half in old age and care homes. To put this in proper perspective, in the United States, where the chaotic response of the federal government under President Trump has been exposed to scathing ridicule both domestically and by observers abroad, today was marked with solemnity as the country crossed the threshold of 100,000 Covid -19 deaths.  If the official Belgian mortality rate per million were to be projected onto the United States, which is 28 times more populous, we should be marking 270,000 deaths there today.  Of course, given the unruly de-confinement now going in many U.S. states with the active encouragement of the White House, the numbers there may reach and exceed that level in the coming weeks. But they also may not.

If we use another yardstick which has been promoted by the Financial Times, namely the total excess deaths in a given country in 2020 during the months of the pandemic compared to the normal mortality in the same country in the same period over the past several years, Belgium once again comes out at the top of the list of shame, just behind the UK and Italy.

Most of the Covid-19 deaths in Belgium could have been spared had the right decisions been taken at the outset. And I do not mean earlier imposition of confinement. I will explain myself below. Many other unnecessary deaths have continued even up to the present day because of critical errors that are not being corrected due to pure incompetence, aided and abetted by a dysfunctional political system of power sharing, placing political ideology above pragmatism, and being penny wise and pound foolish in the spending to combat the epidemic. In this regard, it is relevant to note that the daily death toll in Belgium this past week has persistently exceeded that in neighboring France, a country with 5 times the population.

In this brief essay, I will ask some of the tough questions that our lame print media seem unable or unwilling to do during the thrice weekly press conferences held by officials of the federal health ministry.

As recently as a few days ago I hesitated to come out with accusations since I am not a health professional and can base my doubts only on the inconsistencies I have remarked between how the epidemic has been handled in other countries including South Korea and Russia where deaths per million are vastly lower, and what is being done and said from high offices in Belgium. However, the very sharp criticism reported on 26 May in the middle-of-the-road French language newspaper La Libre Belgique directed against the Sciensano institute at the center of the Government’s Covid 19 management has brought starkly into the open some of the weaknesses we in lay society had observed among ourselves in kitchen talk. A breach in the Government’s defenses of its policies has opened up and it is high time to march through.

* * * *

La Libre Belgique assigned to the article mentioned above a title sure to attract the attention it merits: “Coronavirus: the Royal Academies castigate the ‘opaque decisions of Sciensano’ which ‘put our country in danger.’”   The Royal Academy of Medicine and the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts denounce in particular the monopoly of power exercised by the Scientific Institute of Public Health (Sciensano) with respect to management of the health crisis and the way their own advice has not been taken into account. They call for ‘rethinking the strategy for developing the Belgian medical plan.’ They note that the oncoming pandemic provoked panic in the country. Decisions were taken precipitously and without any well thought out plan despite the fact that the viral outbreak had occurred in China already in December. They insist that Belgium must learn from its errors if it is to face up to the likely second wave of viral infections ahead.

The one specific charge the Royal Academies raise is over the flip-flop on public policy with respect to wearing masks. We are told that “They point their finger at the ‘denial of the interest in the population wearing masks to cover up the shortage [of masks] and a lack of foresight, as well as the ‘restrictions on use of diagnostic tests’ for the asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic cases of persons having been in contact with a contaminated person.’”

The net result of the démarche is the following: “The two Academies ask Sciensano to collaborate with them in order to ensure transparency, independence and coherence of the decisions taken. They emphasize that they are composed of ‘internationally recognized experts in numerous disciplines concerned by the problem at hand.’”

Finally we are told that the two Academies point to the mistrust which the population is showing with regard to the management of the health crisis, saying ‘’It is urgent that we reestablish confidence and credibility between the decision-making authorities and civil society.”

* * * *

For little Belgium, the open conflict among elites that we see in the article I have summarized above is quite remarkable. We read that the public has lost trust in the authorities, and we read that internationally recognized experts have been sidelined.

Neither phenomenon is particularly unusual in this country where the flip side of the advanced democratic solutions for holding the kingdom together, given the rivalries of the French-speaking and Dutch-speaking regions, is power sharing. This power sharing broadly equates to institutionalized corruption and incompetence. Ministers receive their portfolios by back-room deals among the parties forming the governing coalition of the day. The coronavirus is the sharp end that has driven these abuses out into the open for public scrutiny, particularly as regards the reviled minister of public health Maggie de Bock.

The remarks about government lies about the usefulness of masks when there were none for the hospitals let alone for the general public hit at the most talked about and grating abuses of the Minister of Health. Moreover, she had a year earlier overseen the destruction of millions of masks purchased for the feared ‘bird flu’ H5N1 ten years ago, thereby leaving the country totally exposed in case of some new viral epidemic. On these grounds alone, the Belgian doctors’ association had called for her to be stripped of her license to practice medicine. That may not seem more than a tap on the wrist, but the notion of hauling her into court for dereliction of duty was too improbable of success to be contemplated.

In the meantime, two months into the pandemic, Belgium has stocked up on masks and latex gloves. In my own commune of Ixelles, one of the boroughs in central Brussels, we received a knock on the door a couple of weeks ago, from a communal official delivering for me and my wife individually packaged double layer cloth masks. A very nice gesture, if somewhat late. In Brussels, it is now mandatory to wear masks on public transit and in stores.  However, the damage to public trust from the prevarication of the minister was substantial.

What we see in the allegations of the two Academies is that the rot goes much further than one incompetent minister. The Institute advising the ministry, Sciensano, is itself a concoction of political interests rather than a serious center of expertise. It serves two very different administrations: Public Health and Agriculture. Wikipedia tells us that “its core business is scientific research in the fields of public health, animal health and food safety.” The same source spells out the ideology which Sciensanto promotes: “that the areas of human health, animal health and the environment are inherently connected with each other.” Given this ‘green agenda,’ is it any wonder that early on in the pandemic we heard that the high levels of infection and mortality in Belgium might be explained by the high levels of industrial pollution in its cities. I would suggest that this irrelevancy blinded officials to the mortal threat posed by a vicious and uniquely contagious viral infection, full stop.

* * * *

There is no question but that lockdown everywhere has been effective in “flattening the curve” and bringing the daily admissions into hospital, and more particularly into Intensive Care Units, down to manageable levels and so avoiding the kind of pandemonium that we all saw to our horror hit Lombardy in early March.

It is also beyond dispute that imposition of draconian lockdown rules in democratic societies could come only after the existential threat to society was made plain by the kind of disaster that hit Italy.  During an interview with the BBC, Italian Prime Minister Conte said as much to justify his foot-dragging in the early days of the epidemic: “Had I imposed lockdown then, all the political classes would have said I was crazy.”

In this respect, we have to give credit to the government of Belgium, and to its Acting Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès for its breaking the political logjam and imposing lockdown in time to avoid the tragedy of Northern Italy. However, it also has to be said that this very rich country did not do what could have changed the game in favor of both saving lives and saving the economy:  it did not reach into its wallet to do what China had done so impressively, namely to urgently construct one or more large scale dedicated hospitals to isolate and treat Covid 19 patients. Removing the flow of patients from the normal hospital infrastructure could have maintained essential services to the public., so important to dialysis patients, oncology patients undergoing chemotherapy, those suffering from cardio-vascular events, and the like. Equally importantly, the concentration of fire power in a very few facilities would have helped to ensure proper training and availability of proper protective equipment for those dealing with the Covid-19 patients.  Instead, Belgium chose the cheap and dirty solution, distributing the daily influx of Covid-19 patients among more than 100 hospitals around the country, most of which were very poorly prepared for the daunting challenges ahead.

The second, very important strategic failure of the Belgian health profession was to advise all those who were reporting Covid-19 symptoms to remain at home as long as possible and merely consult with their ‘family physicians’ (which a great many people do not have) by remote.  The net result of this practice is that Belgian patients came to hospital by ambulance in advanced and often untreatable condition. Yes, they may have been placed on respirators in ICU’s. Indeed, Belgium never fell short of respirators.  We can have no doubt that failure by the health authorities to inform us about the fatality rate of those placed on respirators is simply that the figures are too shocking.

So what do other countries that have been more successful both in patient outcomes and in damage to the economy show us?  First, that those exhibiting or complaining of Covid-19 symptoms should be isolated by the authorities, not by self-quarantine, and that they should be observed closely and given drugs now known to inhibit the reproduction of the virus, among which we find the Gilead substance remdesivir.  This is what is being done with great effect in South Korea.  It is what is being done in Russia, where another virus-inhibitor discovered in China during the Wuhan treatments is now undergoing massive production in Moscow for widespread distribution to treat the virus. Russian authorities claim that the Chinese pills shorten the Covid-19 recovery time and lessen the damage from the infection by a factor of two compared to remdesivir.

As we all know, Western media have focused on the high incidence of Covid-19 infections in Russia, said to be third in the world after the United States and China, and the very low mortality, with death toll less than 4,000 at last count. The first fact results directly from the massive testing going on in Russia, far greater than in any other country now experiencing this plague.

The reasons for the relative benign outcomes in Russia are simple if you make an effort to understand what is being done. First, the Russians have copied directly the Chinese approach to urgent construction of dedicated Covid-19 field and permanent hospitals.  These are state of the art facilities with $60,000 allocated for each bed. Second, the Russians followed the draconian lockdown on the most vulnerable populations, namely those over age 65.  In Russia, seniors are directed, not merely advised to stay at home. No walking the dog, no visits to pharmacies or food stores. As regards the urban population, volunteers bring food and other essentials directly to the apartments of the seniors. This is precisely what the Chinese were doing in Wuhan for the entire population.

Unfortunately, in Belgium as in most of Western Europe and in the USA, China is today viewed only as the source of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yes, they are paid suppliers of our masks and other protective gear.  But we do not see in them solutions to medical management that are proving very effective in Russia and which have parallel, home developed solutions elsewhere in Asia.

Despite all the talk of globalization, the reality here in Belgium with respect to handling the Covid-19 pandemic has been insular and, quite plainly, ignorant.  Let us hope that now, when the first wave of the pandemic is receding, we will stop rallying around the interim government and start exercising our minds by challenging the authorities on the points above and many further points which I am sure our medical experts in the Academies are aware of.

Postscript, Friday, 29 May 2020

©Gilbert Doctorow,  2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the “View Inside” tab on the book’s webpages to browse.]

The Tolstoy tradition of broad canvas novels dealing with epic events presented from the perspective of a given family has not died out, whatever else happens in literature of our day. The recently published Mosaic of My Life in English and its counterpart in Russian, Мозаика моей жизни belongs to precisely this genre.

The back cover sets out a concise argument for the book’s intrigue:

“The Mosaic of My Life is the author’s second novel. The original Russian language edition was published in 2019. The novel has been nominated for three national literary awards in Russia which will be adjudicated in the autumn of 2020.

The Mosaic of My Life covers a broad swathe of Russian history from the still ‘normal’ living conditions at the turn of the 20th century through World War I and the 1917 Revolution, the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War, to the New Economic Policy and semi-return to a market economy followed by the Great Terror, World War II and the immediate post war years. The story is based on reminiscences of people who lived through this complex historical period and, in their own words, explain their various decisions to stay or emigrate. The narrative takes the reader through several social strata from workers to high bourgeoisie, from inside the director’s box at the Bolshoi Theater to inside solitary confinement cells of political prisoners awaiting interrogation and likely execution.”

The Look Inside function on the amazon.com web page of the English edition allows for browsing, to sample the narrative style.

The novel is a fine demonstration of how and why some of our best histories are written by non-historians.  I know well. The author, Larisa Zalesova, happens to be my wife.

https://www.amazon.com/Mosaic-My-Life-Larisa-Zalesova/dp/1728361001/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=larisa+zalesova&qid=1590330912&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Mosaic-My-Life-Russian/dp/1728361028/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=larisa+zalesova&qid=1590331553&sr=8-2

The books in print format are also in stock from the Amazon global websites, from Barnes and Noble, as well as all other bookstores everywhere upon order.  An e-book version of the Russian edition can be purchased online from the publisher at www.authorhouse.com  (Bookstore: Лариса Залесова). An English e-book will be released shortly.

In the ‘fake news’ exchanges between China and the USA, the question of whose biological warfare lab may have developed and lost control over the coronavirus has figured prominently, although most intelligence agencies seem to agree that the virus had natural causes and was not manufactured by humans anywhere.

At the same time, it seems to me that no one is talking about how nations having cutting edge experience in biological warfare can apply that knowledge to combatting the virus.  In Western media there is one tiny exception that is not properly drawn out and explained: namely the mention that the US Army is contributing to efforts of private pharmaceutical concerns to develop a vaccine.

Meanwhile, the fact that the Russian military is being brought into action on the Covid19 front hardly figures in Western coverage, except as related to the Russian mercy mission to Lombardy, when giant Russian freight aircraft brought in equipment and military medics to assist the vastly overwhelmed Italian medical establishment to cope with the tide of infected, ailing and dying. At that point there were some snide comments to the effect that the Russians were in Italy on an intelligence gathering mission, not truly humanitarian in motivation.

It escaped mention in the media, though surely did not escape notice in our intelligence services that the Russian mission to Italy was a powerful demonstration of what Russia’s military has learned in the domain of biological warfare. Italian journalists expressed their amazement at the specialized motorized equipment that the Russians brought to disinfect the towns, from streets to building by building, often using for interior work not chemicals but oxygen as the sanitizing agent.

If Britain, for example, has any similar insights in combatting biological agents at its Porton Down facility (so well publicized by the Skripal case), then we have heard nothing about these capabilities being harnessed for combatting the ongoing pandemic.

I make the foregoing remarks about Russia’s very special knowledge in the realm of biologicals because it is a possible additional reason why the country so far has an astonishingly low mortality rate compared to most countries in Western Europe and the USA.  Perhaps from the same pool of knowledge, it would appear that the Russians are getting much better results with their use of ventilators to treat the worst affected cases of Covid19.

We have heard a lot about ventilators in the past two months everywhere in Europe and the USA.  They were said to be in grave shortage in New York as the epidemic approached its peak there.  What no one has talked much about is how capable our medical practitioners have been to achieve life-saving results with these devices. If I am not mistaken, there was mention several weeks ago that 88% of those put on ventilators in New York died.  Here in Belgium it appears to be more than 50% die.

Does it have to be that way, or is it the lack of know-how in using these sophisticated devices to treat Covid19 that explains these shocking results?  A very interesting program on Russian television several weeks ago indicated that they have been experimenting with the gas mixtures used in ventilators, in particular with the volume of helium versus oxygen to find the right balance whereby the oxygen is not blocked by the virus but in turn purges the virus from the lungs and allows the oxygen levels in the blood to return to levels sustaining life.  We do not hear a peep about these issues in the Belgian media, for example.

If I may sum up, when the crisis passes and our journalists and civic activists begin their assessment of what has gone wrong in Western Europe to allow the levels of mortality to reach the shocking levels we have seen, let us hope attention will be given to the questions I have raised here, as well as to the issue I discussed  yesterday:  why our national governments did not open their checkbooks and order the urgent construction of dedicated state of the art hospitals to treat coronavirus patients well apart from the normal hospital establishments which were overtaken by the virus and ceased to perform their essential services for the non-infected population in oncology, in cardio-vascular medicine and the like. The Russians and the Chinese have done precisely that.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the “View Inside” tab on the book’s webpages to browse.]

This week started with a major presentation by President Putin of Russia’s plans for gradually lessening the strictures of lockdown, restarting the economy and restoring normal life as the epidemic in the country passes stabilization, which was just reached, and enters the ebb phase of contagion, hospitalization and death. The setting was a virtual conference with major players in the government responsible for managing the health crisis. However, since Putin’s lengthy speech which came to 17 typed pages was televised live by all Russian state channels, it could just as easily be called an address to the nation.  The main focus was on the economy and assistance to citizens and to business.

That speech has received little attention in the West and I will come back to it in a follow-up tomorrow, because it tells us a great deal about the guiding principles of Russian governance and its ‘social economy.’

In this essay I deal with the second major appearance by Putin this week dedicated to the coronavirus which took place this afternoon, Friday, 15 May. It also was carried live by all state television channels. It also was nominally remarks made within a virtual intragovernmental conference. And it also was a major policy statement that merits our greatest attention, not only for what it says about Russia, but more importantly for what is says about us, in the West, and how we are badly handling the challenges of the pandemic because of our stubborn and proud disparagement of China.

I listened closely to two of the reports to Putin from the ‘regions’, meaning territories outside Moscow on what is being done right now to handle the growing case load of coronavirus sufferers, and Putin’s comments which may be characterized as ‘programmatic’ insofar as they seek to use the ongoing experience in combatting the coronavirus to deliver, at long last, a substantial rebuilding of medical infrastructure across the country with the help of the military.

The regions reporting were St Petersburg, which is still relatively healthy compared to Moscow but has seen a growing number of infections and hospitalizations in the past few weeks, and Voronezh, which more typically represents the Russian provinces and till now has had a very low level of infection, but is preparing for the worst. In each case the governor read a report of what is being done to build dedicated hospitals for treatment of coronavirus cases both by the local administration and with the help of the Ministry of Defense, represented by the senior officer standing at their side who is overseeing construction of modular hospitals by military personnel and staffed by military doctors.

In Petersburg, which is Russia’s second largest city with a population of approximately 5 million, there are specialized hospitals for light cases with 1,000 beds being completed and specialized hospitals with Intensive Care Units in the size of 200 to 600 beds also reaching completion.  A similar approach is being implemented in Voronezh.

The involvement of the Armed Forces in building some of these hospitals is very significant, because they have developed modular solutions that can be applied uniformly across the vast continent that is Russia.

In a way, these projects are similar to what Moscow did as first mover when it opened the state of the art hospital at the city’s periphery in a district called Kommunarka.  The logic is to remove the coronavirus patients from the general hospital system. This leaves the general hospitals free to continue to serve their traditional ‘clientele,’ the community of those with other ailments. It focuses training, equipment, medicines in locations where maximum attention can be given to ensuring sanitary conditions that protect medical staff and encourage application of well-rehearsed solutions to the challenges of each patient.

Now where would the Russians have gotten this idea from?  It is not hard to imagine.  We need only think back at the response of the Chinese authorities following the recognition that the outbreak in Wuhan posed existential questions for the local population, indeed for the nation as a whole if it were not contained and wiped out. We all were stunned at the construction of the first specialized facility to deal with the epidemic in one week!

The Russians are less “Stakhanovite” these days, and the hospital projects mentioned above are being executed on a 6 week schedule.  But they are being implemented at the highest technical level. Putin gave the figure 5 million rubles as the cost of one hospital bed in the new units; that comes to $60,000 and in Russia’s price equivalency to the dollar probably represents a US cost double or triple the nominal ruble cost. So they are not skimping, not planning to put the incoming patients on matrasses on the floor as happened in Bergamo, Italy.

We also know from the day’s press, that the Russians are now entering into mass production of the few medicines which the Chinese told them proved to be effective in treating their coronavirus patients. Which ones Putin did not say.

And now I must ask, how does Russia’s borrowing from the Chinese playbook compare to what we see around us in Western Europe and the United States?  Here China comes up in the coronavirus story only as a punching bag, the people who ‘kept us in the dark’ about the dangers of this plague, not as providers of solutions and advice from their own first and successful experience snuffing it out.

The question I must pose is this:  are the Russians being especially clever, or are we being especially stupid?

The segregation of coronavirus patients from the general flows of the ailing contrasts dramatically with what has been going on in Belgium, for example.  Here about 100 hospitals around the country have been sharing the aggravated cases of coronavirus requiring hospitalization. This population reached about 5,000 at its peak with nearly one third in Intensive Care, of which to two thirds required ventilators. At the peak a couple of weeks ago, the number of patients in the last category came close to the national inventory of ventilators, a bit more than 1,000.  Thankfully, the numbers in the past ten days have come down sharply and there are now half the number of hospital beds taken by virus sufferers.

However, at the peak all of Belgium’s hospitals resembled war zones with ‘extraterrestrial’ suited medics at the entrances. Normal patients did not have to think twice to shun them. Accordingly, even non-elective surgery was being cancelled; chemotherapy patients were staying at home, etc.  This is one element of the mortality brought on by the coronavirus that no one has been recording.  Moreover, one has to ask about the quality of medical attention when 100 hospitals, mostly without any experience in epidemics, in virology, were being used to treat Covid19 patients. This had to be a contributor to the body bag count that went into official statistics.

Finally, in closing ,a word about body counts.

In the past several days there have been news reports in Western media accusing Russia of under-reporting deaths in the country due to the coronavirus epidemic.  In particular, I can point to articles in The New York Times and in the Financial Times.

With respect to the New York Times the piquant title given to one respective article pointing to a “Coronavirus Mystery” – is fully in line with the daily dose of anti-Russian propaganda that this most widely read American newspaper has been carrying on for years now.  A couple of weeks ago the same paper carried an article by one of its veteran science journalists accusing President Putin of using the coronavirus to undermine American science, and medicine in particular. That article was totally baseless, a collection of slanderous fake news.

With respect to the accusation of intentional underreporting of mortality figures in Russia, the New York Times was actually borrowing from the Financial Times, which stated that Russian deaths from the virus may be 70 per cent higher than the official numbers.  In both cases, even if the underreporting were true, and this is very debatable, it obscures the fact that both official and unofficial numbers are miniscule compared to the devastation wrought by the virus elsewhere in Europe (Italy, Spain and the UK) or in the USA, where the numbers continue to spike.  Russia has either a couple of thousand deaths or something closer to three thousand. Compare that to the official deaths ten times greater in the worst hit European countries having overall populations less than half or a third of Russia’s.  So the accusation of 72% underreporting in Russia is a debating point that can easily be shown to be deceptive if not irrelevant.

However, there is a missing element here: context.  The whole issue of underreporting Covid19 deaths has been reported on by the Financial Times for a good number of countries, not just Russia. Indeed, their first concern has been to show that the official numbers posted by the UK government, now in the range of 30,000 are a fraction of the actual deaths in the UK (more than 50,000) if one uses not the death certificates case by case but the overall excess of deaths in a given month in 2020 compared to the norm in the given country over the 3 preceding years.  The New York Times in its typical cherry picking approach to find what is worst to say about Russia ignores this background of FT reporting.

Why is there underreporting?  There are many possible reasons, the chief one is the varying methodology used by the various countries to allocate a given death to the virus.

By curious coincidence this very issue was addressed in today’s press conference on the pandemic by the Belgian Ministry of Public Health. As is widely reported, Belgium has one of the world’s highest rates of mortality from Covid19, very close to the figures in Spain and Italy. This has been reported in the local press and the Ministry today chose to respond.  As they noted, Belgium is one of the few countries to report ALL Covid-19 deaths, meaning both those in hospital and those in care homes (mostly old age homes). In Belgium, as in France, deaths have been equally split between these two sets of institutions. Almost no deaths have occurred at home or, as they say, ‘in the community.’ Moreover, deaths are attributed to Covid-19 if the symptoms were there even if no proper test was carried out to confirm this.

In total, Belgium death count today stands close to 9,000 for a general population of 11.8 million.  High, but still substantially lower than the mortality in New York, for example, whichever way you count.  And, to put the picture into a less dire context, it is reported that each winter Belgium experiences about 5,000 deaths attributable to the seasonal flu.  Of course, the flu does not lay waste to the medical establishment, and there you have the difference that makes the ongoing Russian approach to Covid19 so relevant.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the “View Inside” tab on the book’s webpages to browse.]

In the days since publication of my essay entitled “Kremlinology 2.0” on 28 March, I have received fairly wide exposure in the alternative media as a ‘formerly’ reasonable observer of the Russian scene who has gone rogue.  I am said to have joined the Anglo-Saxon propagandists who are working nonstop to discredit President Putin and Russia more generally.

The signal for this stampede of the herd of Russia’s would-be defenders to trample my objectivity and credibility was given by The Saker originally in its English language portal, but then broadcast by its multifarious network in French, in Russian, in Greek and other languages. But whereas the couple of words directed at me by Andrei Raevsky were a hint rather than a full-blown denunciation of apostasy, the Comments sections of his blog and associated portals, were overrun by the usual claque of no-nothings keen to spill blood.

The same flood of ignorant commentary bordering on the obscene occurred on portals like www.anti-empire.com which merely re-posted (without permission, as usual) my 28 March essay. I responded there to a couple of the defamers and let it drop.  Here in this essay, I take up the gauntlet in a more public way because the issue is too important to go unremarked.

And what is that issue?  It is that, regrettably, the vicious and mindless propaganda of Russia-bashers who dominate mainstream and “own” America’s newspapers of record, The Washington Post and The New York Times (witness the utterly scandalous publication there on 13 April of a concocted and factually baseless article by William Broad entitled “Putin’s Long War Against American Science”) is matched in equal measure of vicious and mendacious propaganda among the more fervent defenders of the ‘Putin regime’ in the West.

I hasten to add that far too many of these defenders know absolutely nothing about Russia and care still less about the facts. Russia and Putin are of interest to them solely as a bludgeon against the American world order that they despise.  Indeed, they are entitled to their loathing for the USA, for capitalism, and the rest. They are not entitled to invent a Russia and a Kremlin leadership as a foil and to pick and choose factoids in support of their theses.

Both sides in the Info Wars are adept at smear techniques, using guilt by association and ad hominem argumentation to avoid entirely responding to the reasoning of those they are pillorying.  It is not what you are saying and proving factually that counts, but who publishes you and how what you are saying can be used by one’s enemies that matters. A supporting technique is to take separate phrases one might use out of context in order to misrepresent the target’s ideas as the inversion of what they are in context, and to ignore irony so as to construe it as the opposite, meaning the author’s avowal of what he is lampooning. I called out these abuses in my response to Comments on www.anti-empire.com.

Then there is the pure invention of a Curriculum Vitae for the purposes of discrediting today’s object of attack. In my case, as one example, a reader of my “Kremlinology 2.0” commented that I had a long record of “working for” anti-Russian propaganda publications, in particular for the Finnish-owned  Moscow Times.  In its obliviousness to the truth this allegation from would be Kremlin defenders matches perfectly the denunciations I received a couple of years ago from our overzealous Progressives and Liberals over my “working for” the anti-Semitic, pro-Kremlin news portal Russia Insider.

I state here flatly that I have never “worked for” or “written for” anyone.  My life as a political commentator specializing in Russia-related news began in 2010 as a post-business career avocation, acting as a “public intellectual” who neither expects nor receives compensation from anyone. All of my writings appear first on my own blog site and are copyrighted. They are reposted with or more usually without my permission because other portals appreciate their value to their reader communities. Period.

And specifically with respect to The Moscow Times, which published a total of a half-dozen of my analytical articles at the start of my re-invention of myself as political analyst, these articles got through the anti-Russian filter of the responsible editor for the Op-Ed page, the nominal journalist Michael Bohm, who made cuts and assigned titles at odds with my intent.  I put up with this mangling because theirs was the only game in town at the time when they still had a paper edition. But all of that is history. Bohm went on to become a highly paid talk show guest on all Russian state and commercial channels where his keen knowledge of Russian in all of its folk wisdom and his invariable regurgitation of CIA propaganda were a useful foil to the patriotic experts deployed by the shows’ hosts.  I went on to publishing online in my own blog site attached to a middle of the road Belgian newspaper, La Libre Belgique.

* * * *

So much for current Info Wars. Now I direct attention to the main contention of my article of 28 March, namely that ever since the roll-out of his planned constitutional reform during a state of the nation address on 15 January 2020, Putin seemed to have lost control of the political agenda. To be very specific, what Putin had suggested would be a re-balancing of powers at the federal level between Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, moving gently in the direction of parliamentarism, eventually, in the bill passed by both the State Duma and the Federation Council, turned out to be nothing more than a consecration in the Fundamental Law of the values of the Putin era, namely a social economy, protection of living standards for the broad population, patriotic defense of the Motherland and of its historical record, bouquets to motherhood and the family, etc. That and the incredible point reversing to zero the time Putin has served in the presidency so that under the two-term limit he will again be eligible to run when his present mandate expires in 2024.

All of these changes in what will be put to the electorate for ratification in a referendum indicated to me that the course of Russian politics was now being dictated not by Vladimir Putin, the key figure as arbitrator among Kremlin factions that he has been for the past 20 years, but by one of these factions which has overruled his preferences. Given the virtual disappearance of Duma opposition party spokesmen from Russian state television since the end of January,  it seemed to me that all of the opposition has been sidelined, made irrelevant and that United Russia has seized control of the political agenda in the hopes of retaining majority control of the legislature in the upcoming 2021 elections.

In my article, I also pointed out that Russia’s response to the oncoming coronavirus crisis revealed the same kind of infighting among elites that we have seen in virtually every one of the major countries in Western Europe and the United States.  There were too many contradictions in policy at that moment, not least of which was a promotional airfare being offered by Aeroflot to boost domestic traffic at the very moment when the government should have curtailed or ended such traffic to avoid spread of the infection.

Putin was obviously caught in the cross-fire between defenders of the economy and defenders of public health. And in the meantime, there was ongoing clan fighting over the just initiated oil and price war with Saudi Arabia.

Looking at these contests going on behind the scenes in the Kremlin, I made the simple argument that it was and is high time to resume Kremlinology, to look beyond the lynchpin of Russian politics, Mr. Putin, and to sketch out in detail what the interest groups are doing as they jockey for and perhaps seize control of Russian politics in one domain or another.  I stand by that reading today, undeterred by the slings and arrows that have come my way.

In the meantime, for the moment some consistency has been restored to Russian domestic policy as regards the coronavirus with a temporary victory of the defenders of public health and imposition of ever tighter shutdown in the hearth of the epidemic, Greater Moscow.

Moreover, the second shoe is about to drop.  At the start of anti-coronavirus measures, the Kremlin announced the cancellation of this year’s regular St Petersburg International Economic Forum scheduled for the first week in June. However, not a word was said about the fate of the still earlier May 9^th Victory Day celebrations marking the 75^th anniversary that would, if held normally, with mass public participation numbering in the millions, provide a splendid platform for propagation of the virus throughout the population and across the country.  It is only now that we hear that Veterans’ Organizations are petitioning the Kremlin to postpone the celebration.

What we see here is that just as Russia is following the multi-nation curve of infection rates to a peak and plateau, so Russia is following the near-universal laws on the political risks of taking on the corona virus by quarantine and other draconian measures.

This question was very aptly put in a recent Euronews interview with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. The journalist probed and probed again whether the Prime Minister felt any guilt for the government’s slow response to the oncoming pandemic which cost so many thousands of Italian lives.  In a carefully worded answer that was fully in line with his professional background as a law professor and intellectual, Conte said that he was ‘not so arrogant’ as to claim that no mistakes were made.  At the same time, he noted that had he introduced quarantine and lockdown at the outset he would have been universally condemned in Italian political circles as being ‘mad.’

Indeed this is the predicament facing political leaders in all countries today and name-calling  or guilt-attribution by the public in the midst of the crisis does not help.  It is also the predicament facing the Russian leadership which is divided the same way as in most countries.  These political realities merit investigation and discussion, not politically motivated silence.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the “View Inside” tab on the book’s webpages to browse.]