This essay draws upon my personal acquaintance with Alexander Gaponenko, the victim of ongoing cruel and unusual judicial procedures in Riga, Latvia which violate fundamentally the much-touted “values” of the European Union. However, this is not about the misfortune of one person, fallen afoul of local authorities. The Gaponenko case fits into a broad context of vicious discrimination by the Latvian state of its minority of Russian speakers who constitute more than thirty percent of the general population of the country.  I will begin with an overview and proceed to the particulars.

My objective is to raise public awareness in Western Europe of the Apartheid regime that has been running Latvia since its independence in 1991 with the connivance of the USA and EU. It is high time for protests to be lodged with Latvian embassies so as to force a solution to what is eminently amenable to political remedy.

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These days we hear a lot about the wayward EU Member States of Central Europe, which are allegedly reverting to authoritarian habits of their Communist past and are trampling on democratic principles and rule of law.  Foremost in these countries selected for stigmatization are Viktor Orban’s Hungary and Poland under its Law and Justice Party of the Kaczynskis.

How grave the recidivism of these two nations may be remains to be determined, and so far the possible sanctions against them are only a talking point.  The contest with Brussels will be difficult.  While the Polish government is on the defensive, insisting that its judicial reforms do not violate EU law, the Hungarian government is on the offensive. In the past week Prime Minister Orban asserted flatly that Western Europe is no longer democratic.  If by that he means that it is no longer open to free discussion of basic issues, is intolerant of other views of governance than those prescribed by Liberal Internationalism, then he is entirely correct.

In any case, these disputes are over abstractions that are entirely internal to the European Union.  There is at the same time flagrant violation of EU law on human rights and judicial procedure that goes on with hardly a murmur in Brussels, though its risks to the Union concern not so much internal housekeeping as relations with the big neighbor to the East, thereby impinging on European and global peace. I have in mind the egregious denial of civil rights to Russian-speakers in Latvia.

This history goes back to the early days of Latvian independence from the Soviet Union when a 1992 law on nationality effectively stripped more half the population of Russian-speaking Latvians of their citizenship. That loss was compounded by economic restrictions on employment that barred the new non-citizens from certain professions like law and banking, set ceilings on how high they could rise in other domains and barred them from land ownership.  At the time, those deprived of their rights numbered 400,000.  Since then by natural attrition of mortality and by emigration, that number has dropped to 300,000 but still amounts to 15% of the current population of the country.

The objective was plainly to ensure that the core Latvian population enjoyed full political and economic control within national borders. That may sound innocent and excusable given the woeful tale of past hardships imposed on Latvians during the preceding fifty years of domination from Moscow, including the large-scale settlement on their land of non-Latvians serving in Soviet naval and army bases and in Soviet-built factories.   But as with ethnic cleansing anywhere, the measures to rectify past injuries inflicted enormous harm on the newly targeted population, created resentments and set the stage for ever worsening inter-ethnic relations. Latvian nationalists running the state have exploited an imaginary potential for ‘fifth column’ resistance to their rule in order to progressively tighten the repression and injustice directed against the Russian speakers.

More to the point, the guilty consciences of Latvian ruling elites induced them to direct an information war against the Russian Federation to cover up their incivility against Latvian born Russian speakers, all to avoid dealing with the problems in their own house. Hence the leading role of the Republic of Latvia in the EU’s confrontation with Russia and its insistent calls upon NATO for ever more protections on the ground to deter a possible Russian military strike or the launch of hybrid warfare instrumentalizing the Russian-speaking minority in Latvia.

One of the ironies of the past quarter century is that the ethnic cleansing intent of Latvia’s discriminatory legislation utterly failed to achieve its objectives. The hardships imposed on them induced some of the Russian-speaking minority to emigrate, but not nearly on the same scale as ethnic Latvians who could use their EU passports to freely leave in search of employment and a better life in Western Europe, with right of return at any time.  The numbers of the Latvian emigration are in line with similar departures of economic emigrants from other Baltic states and from former Communist countries of Eastern Europe, on the order of 25% of the population.

In Latvia, as in the other two Baltic States, the outward flow of its best and most energetic citizens was a largely self-inflicted wound, since the limited job opportunities at home resulted directly from the worsening relations with Russia, with which they had had extensive mutually advantageous commercial relations before they launched their information war on their neighbor for purposes of their nation-building.

The flagrant violation of human rights inherent in the citizenship law was known to the EU when Latvia’s accession application was under review.  But for reasons of expediency, to hasten the implementation of security provisions for the whole region, and in diplomatic horse-trading among the Member States to assure all candidate countries sponsored by one or another of them got a pass, Latvia joined the EU in 2004 with no consequential constraints on its practices towards the Russian speakers in its midst.

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In March 2014, I spent several days in Riga, my first time in the city since independence twenty-three years earlier.  I came as a guest of the city authorities who were generously welcoming visitors to experience “Riga, Cultural Capital of Europe,” for the coming half-year.

At the time, I published my impressions¹ which duly described the cultural attractions of the city but mostly dealt with the political atmosphere, which as a privileged guest I was able to observe not only at street level but in the company of the ruling elite, including, to be quite precise about it, the mayor’s direct assistant for public relations, who guided the festival and spoke to me at some length during one of the cocktail receptions.  My focus of interest was treatment of the Russian minority, and I learned to my considerable surprise, that this robust nationalist who ran the festival admitted it had been a terrible mistake to strip the Russia-speakers of their citizenship. She had seen how Russian neighbors fully supported Latvia’s liberation from the Soviet Union with their votes and…at the barricades when there was a military showdown.  It was only stubbornness and the conviction that they could not be seen to back down before Putin’s Russia that maintained this injustice.

Also on this visit, I spent some hours with a certain Alexander Gaponenko, who was one of the co-founders of the Congress of Latvian Non-Citizens, a body set up in 2012 and whose members were elected by the 300,000 stateless Latvians to represent their interests before the powers-that-be.  I had made Gaponenko’s acquaintance by chance the week before when I heard him address the Brussels Press Club together with Congress co-founder Elizabeta Krivcova in a talk urging West Europeans to use their right to vote, to rise from indifference by considering how others in the EU were struggling to regain their citizenship and, with it, the franchise.

Eager to hear more, I had agreed with Alexander to meet during my visit to the cultural festival.  That meeting was in fact delayed by his detention for six hours of police interrogation just after my arrival. This was part of the cat and mouse game the authorities were playing with him over his attempts to arrange an evening of Russian songs.  Just songs, not protests or politics. The concert was eventually prohibited. This fit a pattern of harassment that he had become accustomed to.

Following his release, Alexander very kindly took me on a walking tour of downtown Riga during which he explained the psychology of people like himself who had refused to attempt the naturalization process, which they considered demeaning.  In fact, at the time, only about 2,000 Russian speakers a year were passing the process and regaining their citizenship.  It was patently clear that the 300,000 non-citizens would never be assimilated.

From speaking to others and in particular from a visit with one of the priests in the Russian Orthodox cathedral of Riga, I understood that the number one issue facing the Russian-speaking community now was the assault on their cultural identity by the authorities in the form of restrictions on use of the Russian language in public school instruction.

The fears of the Russian-speaking community were realized this year when the legislature passed and the prime minister signed on 2 April a language law completely forbidding Russian-language instruction in the public school system. The complete ban takes effect in the 2020-21 academic year, but it will be introduced in stages beginning already in the coming year.

Like the citizenship law of 1992 and the rupture of commercial ties with Russia that began later in that decade, the prohibition on use of Russian is not only a slap in the face of the 40% of the population of Riga that speaks Russian as its maternal language.  It is a measure that will be destructive of the entire educational system for years to come, because there simply are insufficient numbers of competent Latvian speaking teachers available in the country.  The result will be, for example, math lessons given in broken Latvian by teachers who are basically Russian-speakers.

However, the nationalists who call the shots in Latvia are not interested in practical outcomes.  Their concern is to exercise and maintain their monopoly on power at whatever cost.

The expected passage of the new language law outraged many Latvians months in advance and gave rise to a protest movement that has included street demonstrations.  Given his long-established activism, it comes as no surprise that Alexander Gaponenko was one of the leaders of this movement.

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My third and most recent meeting with Alexander Gaponenko was quite accidental, as we found one another in the small party of 40 international election observers sent to the Crimea by various NGOs to report on the 18 March 2018 presidential election.  An accidental and yet surely also inescapable meeting..

On the evening of the 17^th, Alexander and I were seated at the same dinner table of a small hotel on the outskirts of Yalta where our group was spending the night. Early the next morning we would head out to polling stations in Yalta, then to several small villages along the main coastal road leading up to the regional capital of Simferopol where we would conclude our inspections.  However, the evening of the 17^th was free. We ordered several bottles of the best Crimean wine I have ever sampled, a white that would rival any fine French Chablis and priced accordingly.  We chatted.

Alexander spoke of his various film and publishing projects. Everything seemed normal.

Therefore I was deeply shocked when just over a month later I learned of his arrest and incarceration in Riga on 21 April over unspecified charges.

The violent manner of Alexander’s arrest itself was unnerving. He was beaten. He was handcuffed for more than 11 hours and he was not given food.  However, that was only the start of his ordeal.  Under Latvian law, the authorities have the right to impose preliminary arrest for a period of two months. In fact, when that term expired on 21 June, his arrest was extended for another two months.

Since charges have not been brought, one may speculate on what prompted this arrest.

Some say the current accusation is related to his recent film “The Latvia we lost-2” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZWTxQ-Pu11) about Soviet Latvia, a one-sided film generally positive about Soviet history.

Others believe the case is related to Gaponenko’s having spoken at a parents’ conference for the defense of Russian-language schools on 31 March. That was the opinion of Vladimir Vuzajevs, Latvian Human Rights Committee co-Chairman in a letter dated 20 May to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

In fact, Alexander Gaponenko was not the only defender of Russian language usage in the Latvian public schools to face proceedings. As of 9 May, at least five participants of the parents’ conference in Riga protesting the coming language prohibition were called to the Security Police for questioning, partly as suspects, partly as witnesses, among them Tatjana Zdanoka, co-chair of the Latvian Russian Union political party and until her resignation in March 2018, a three term Member of the European Parliament.

On 8 May, one of the keynote speakers of the conference, Mr. Vladimirs Lindermans was arrested in Riga by masked people without uniform. Later the Security Police clarified that they were its officers acting in criminal proceedings initiated on April 18.  On 21 May, by decision of the regional court of the city of Riga, he was released from prison but numerous restrictions were placed on his liberty.

In addition to the Parliamentary Assembly, the Latvian Human Rights Committee wrote to the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression and the UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues, asking that they “remind the Latvian authorities about the need to enter into frank dialogue with national minorities, and to have their meaningful participation in decision-making on their education, instead of political intimidation.”

Up to present, the Council of Europe and the OSCE have responded to the letter of the Latvian Human Rights Committee that they are following developments in Latvia with respect to the problems raised. The UN rapporteurs, for their part, sent a stern letter to the Latvian authorities at the start of the year criticizing the planned elimination of education in Russian, but have taken no action on the recent cases of police harassment.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2018

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¹Republished as chapter 33 “Latvia’s failed U.S.-inspired policies towards Russia and Russians” in G. Doctorow, Does Russia Have a Future?

When the month-long football World Cup tournament in Russia ended on Sunday, 15 July, it was entirely overshadowed in the news and global commentary by coverage of preparations for the summit meeting of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Helsinki the next day. In turn, the summit was immediately followed by a firestorm of criticism of Trump that precluded any further thoughts being given to the World Cup in US and Western media.

However, in Russia the FIFA tournament most decidedly has not disappeared from ongoing news cycles in the two weeks that have passed since the closing ceremony.  On several occasions  Vladimir Putin has used public appearances to draw a line under the month of football matches, to congratulate all those who participated in making the World Cup what FIFA President Gianni Infantino declared to have been “the best World Cup ever.”   The culmination was a televised reception in the Kremlin a couple of days ago to which the national team players, their wives and trainers were invited.  The most valuable  defense players and strikers in the matches were especially honored, and the head trainer Stanislav Cherchesov was warmly praised by Putin for his leadership qualities as well as excellent tactical guidance in the matches.

As many observers have noted, by its performance on the field, by perseverance in giving their all in contests against the world’s best proven teams…and winning, the Russian team surprised a skeptical Russian public and stoked national pride. For the first time since Soviet days, a Russian team had made it to the quarter finals. They left the tournament with heads held high following a penalty goal loss to Croatia in what was otherwise a very well-played game which could have gone either way.

In the commentary of sports professionals, politicians and journalists during the World Cup and at its conclusion, there were three dimensions to the unquestioned success of the tournament in Russia.  One was the valor of the home team. The second was the warm reception and openness of the Russian people: their volunteers manning the fan zones in each city, the staff in hotel receptions, in eateries, in taxis, in public transport, wherever the visitors came into contact with them.  This hospitality constituted highly effective “public diplomacy” that proceeded independently from the government authorities, even if it was encouraged from on high.

The third dimension was the organizational skills the hosts demonstrated during the month long tournament. This was precisely what Vladimir Putin identified as the likely distinguishing element of this World Cup before the games opened, when the prospects of the home team could in no way justify the effort and expense that had been invested in the World Cup.

Precisely this managerial competence is essential to any reading  of Putin’s Russia and in particular of its claims to a seat at the world’s board of governors, quite apart from the country’s nuclear arsenal or inherited status as Permanent Member of the UN Security Council.  This dimension is well outside the scope of interest of our political scientists, who, to a man, are focused on gross GDP and demography when drawing up their tables of national power and so systematically overlook Russia as a global leader by merit. And yet, in the domain of business, in the running the national economy, in military potential and Hard Power the organizational skills Russia so effectively put to work during the World Cup over eight years of gestation are decisive.

It is worth noting the remarks made by International Olympics Committee president Thomas Bach at the closing of the World Cup on Sunday, 15 July.  After leading the charge against Russia for its alleged doping programs and abuses at the Sochi Olympics, after avoiding any meeting with Putin since 2014, Bach, who was the guest of FIFA President Infantino for the final France-Croatia play-off in Moscow,  now had only complimentary words for the Russian people, whom he called “kind and hospitable hosts.” This, he said, had “changed perceptions” of Russia in many countries.  Moreover, in line with my thesis in this essay, Bach added: “Russia has really proved once again that the country can create such large-scale events due to exceptional organizing skills.”  That these were not empty words of flattery, we can see from the specific recommendations they led to.

According to a release by the International Olympics Committee, in his chat with Vladimir Putin at the stadium, Bach and the Russian President agreed “that in the interests of Russian athletes, now was the time to re-enter into a dialogue to look to the future and to bring Russian sport fully back in the international sports community.”

In the last part of this essay we will return to this issue of organization.  But first I direct the reader’s attention to how the US-led global media covered the World Cup from start to finish, because it was very different from what one might have anticipated.

In fact, I begin my survey in the period preceding the start, since what would come was already clear then.

Heading into the tournament, there was remarkably little negative reporting on Russia and its preparations as host such as had poisoned the atmosphere in the run-up to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.  This is not because US and Western media have become kinder towards Russia over the past four years. Indeed, quite the opposite is true: a widespread campaign of vilification of Putin’s Russia has grown ever more malignant year by year following the reunification with Crimea in March 2014 and Russian intervention in the Ukraine’s Donbass insurgency that summer.

The fairly neutral US reporting on the World Cup ahead of its opening may be explained in relation to the US bid to host the same World Cup in 2026. That bid was to be adjudicated by the gathering of all FIFA associations in Moscow on the day before the opening of the football tournament. Any malicious attacks on Russia would necessarily put in jeopardy if not sideline entirely the US chances. Moreover, though football (soccer) is the world’s favorite sport, it is still a minor sport in the USA and the prestige it carries in the USA cannot be compared to the Summer or Winter Olympic Games.

Once the matches got under way, US reporting moved from neutral to enthusiastic as regards the hospitality and the new or massively reconstructed stadiums of the 10 cities across European Russia in a 2500 km swathe from Kaliningrad in the northwest to Sochi in the southeast where the matches were held. Warnings about the likelihood of hooliganism, racist outbursts and rough treatment of visitors from the LGBT community sprinkled the reporting of some US media initially, but only briefly. The reality of the welcoming hosts and vast numbers of foreign fans cheering in gratitude for the festive atmosphere that the Russian organizers invited and supported took the preponderant share in US reporting.

Meanwhile the European press, having received no guidelines from Washington, took to the sporting event in non-ideological manner, offering their readers scoops about the cities where the respective country matches would be held, gossip on the condition of their national teams, and the like.

I call attention in particular to coverage by the two US newspapers of record which also happen to be leading the anti-Russian hysteria ever since 2014, if not earlier:  The Washington Post and The New York Times. In quoting their positive statements, I do not mean to say that these newspapers and their journalists stopped Russia-bashing entirely during the football World Cup. However, in relation to the football tournament they published texts favorable to Russia in a way that has been unthinkable for years.

Let us consider, for example, the 26 June submission of Washington Post Moscow correspondent Amie Ferris-Rotman etitled “For the World Cup, the Russian people are all in, win or lose.”  The opening paragraph sets up the largely positive account that follows:

“Russia is on a winning streak at the World Cup, and it has little to do with its team on the field. Since the tournament kicked off nearly two weeks ago, chants for one country have dominated the stadiums, rising above the din or supporters from around the globe: ‘Ros-si-ya!’ Even when the host nation is not playing, those three syllables are noisily spouted morning and night by energetic fans of all ages.”

“Finally, a Loss for Russia. But only on the Field,” an article by New York Times reporter Rory Smith the same day has similar upbeat remarks, pointing to certain characteristics of the team on the field: “style, panache and joy – traits not exactly associated with the country’s soccer traditions, and, to some extent, not attributed to the country as a whole.”

Speaking of the stadium in provincial Samara, Smith tells us: “Inside, the stadium was faultless. Everything had turned out O.K., and much the same can be said for the team and the country….[Russia] has staged the carnival, to use the cliché, that the World Cup is supposed to be.”  He observes that Russians appear to be enjoying the party as much as the guests.

A little more than a week later, on 5 July, in their article “How Russia Gave Itself a Facelift for the World Cup” for The Wall Street Journal, another newspaper which has done its fair share of denigrating Russia, Anatoly Kurmanaev and Andrew Beaton summarize what they have seen on the ground as follows: “This World Cup has shaken the Russian stereotypes for the masses of foreign visitors, who encountered first-world infrastructure, impeccable planning and friendly people. “

These impressions of foreign journalists are supported by statistics published by Russian authorities, by wire services, by NGOs. To be sure, during and even after the World Cup there have been unexplained contradictions or inconsistencies on the numbers of visitors or expenses. But I will set down here some of these data even if they are not perfect, because they give scale to what are otherwise anecdotal reports.

Russia opened its doors and the world came in. There were between one and two million foreign visitors holding tickets to the matches. More than two million foreign visitors were registered in the cities hosting the games. In Moscow alone, there were a total of 4 million visitors during the month of the World Cup, which is the equivalent of the normal visitor count in a whole year. Of that number, one half were foreigners.

Moving back from quantitative to qualitative measurement of the impact of the World Cup on Russia’s supposed “international isolation” due to post-Crimea Western sanctions, more than twenty heads of state or government came to Moscow for the opening. And the list of dignitaries who came thereafter as the national teams moved into the final competition included Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres, French President Emmanuel Macron, Belgian King Philippe and Foreign Minister Reynders.  The only country whose football team was not supported by government officials arriving for matches was Britain, which declared a boycott of the Games and braved the indignation of many British fans over its politicization of sport.

The various logistical challenges which the Russian government faced and mastered as it prepared for the World Cup’s month-long festival of football strains the imagination.  Host cities stretched from one end of European Russia to another. Some of the host cities were well off traditional tourist itineraries and were in need of considerable upgrading of transport facilities, hotels and training for staff. Fan zones were created in all the host cities and elsewhere across the country. Transportation had to be arranged from city to city, meaning upgrading rail facilities and in selected cities, building new airports. Additional flights were put on where necessary and flight tickets were issued gratis or against nominal payment.

Russia has visa free travel arrangements with much of Latin America and Asia.  But none exist with North America and Western Europe, from which many of the inbound football fans would be coming. The solution was creation of a World Cup “passport,” a cutting-edge technological platform providing the holders of tickets to the matches with a document that served as multiple-entry visa, seat ticket in stadiums, entitlement to local transportation and train or plane connections from Moscow to the remote locations.

Surely when the World Cup closed, the Russian leadership could breathe a collective sigh of relief that it had passed without incidents of hooliganism, not to mention terrorist attacks. To ensure security under conditions of unparalleled transparency and openness, Russia mobilized some 100,000 policemen in the host cities and deployed 10,000 military servicemen equipped with state of the art intelligence techniques.  Potential trouble-makers from abroad were denied entry into the country. Every World Cup venue had airport type security screening.

And yet, as all journalists remarked, the security arrangements were not heavy-handed. Police, in particular, were trained to be tolerant of extravagant behavior, public consumption of alcohol that is normally prohibited in Russia and other signs of high spirits of the visitors from across the globe. That this actually was implemented, not only under the noses of the authorities in Moscow but in all the provincial venues of the matches is a testament to effective managerial controls.

After the World Cup ended, The Financial Times published a kick-the-tires article that raised questions other Western media had brought up earlier in the tournament:  what will become of the new stadiums, will they not be white elephants as has happened to infrastructure built for so many international sports events worldwide?

In fact, the estimated $6 billion in investments in stadiums and an equal amount in new airports and other transport infrastructure is in total just one-fifth of the cost of the 2014 Sochi Olympics, and there is reason to believe that even that huge investment will pay off over time, given that Sochi has now become the number one  year-round resort destination in the Russian Federation, with top quality alpine skiing facilities and world class hotels and beaches. In addition, Sochi is now a major convention center for national and international events.

In the case of the FIFA Cup facilities, several of the locations, in particular Saransk and Kaliningrad, would ordinarily not justify great expectations given the small size of local populations and hitherto rather limited attendance at local football matches.  However, in a speech delivered on 20 July, Vladimir Putin committed the federal government to support the running costs of all the football stadiums participating in the FIFA Cup for a period of five years. During that time, private owners will be lined up to operate the facilities at a profit for multi-purpose use.

The construction of the stadiums has been done to the highest standards of safety, functionality and aesthetics, with due thought given to their integration into their urban surroundings. I was persuaded of this a couple of weeks ago when I viewed the new St Petersburg football stadium from a river cruise ship in the Neva.  It is absolutely magnificent by itself and it is served by the new highways that otherwise direct traffic from the city center (Vasilievsky Island) either east or west along the Gulf of Finland.  The double suspension bridge across the Neva associated with this route is a spectacular piece of engineering.

Then again, the investment in FIFA infrastructure has to be seen in the context of ongoing massive Russian infrastructure investments in general. The most widely publicized success in this domain earlier this year was the opening of the Crimea  bridge connecting the peninsula to the Russian mainland across the Kerch Strait.  That was another feat of engineering and management, with completion six months ahead of schedule so as to serve the 2018 tourist influx in Crimea.

As was expected in late 2017, the next spectacular transportation link that the President has tentatively approved during this past week is a bridge linking the island of Sakhalin with the Russian mainland.  The bridge will serve as a major integrating force in the Russian Far East and will prepare the way for eventual connection with the Japanese island of Hokkaido when Prime Minister Abe or one of his successors finally is ready to sit down with the Russians and sign a peace treaty.

But apart from these extraordinary inventions of engineering, the more general federal highway program has been producing tangible changes to long-haul road traffic, both for private cars and trucking.  It is now quite normal for Russians to consider driving the 2500 km from St Petersburg to Sochi or the Crimea for their summer vacations, just as transcontinental automobile travel became an everyday phenomenon after President Eisenhower’s National Interstate and Defense Highways Act got underway. Moreover, in his policy directives to the cabinet in the month following his election to another six-year term, Vladimir Putin called for manifold increase in spending on roads.

To summarize, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been busy doing what governments should do in the view of liberal economists:  creating infrastructure that will improve the lives of people and the efficiency of business.  Of course, some of the most visible investments have a special geopolitical rationale. But none are white elephants, all are completed and function as intended.  Seen from this angle, the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia was just one more proof of the high competence of the Russian Government, with world-beating organizational skills.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2018

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Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book, Does the United States Have a Future? was published on 12 October 2017. Both paperback and e-book versions are available for purchase on http://www.amazon.com and all affiliated Amazon websites worldwide. See the recent professional review  http://theduran.com/does-the-united-states-have-a-future-a-new-book-by-gilbert-doctorow-review/    For a video of the book presentation made at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. on 7 December 2017 see  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciW4yod8upg

Back in April 2017, when the United States sent cruise missiles against the Sheyrat air base in Syria in response to  alleged use of chemical weapons by Bashar Assad’s armed forces on his civilian population and also dropped the “mother of all bombs” on ISIS caves in Afghanistan a week later to no apparent purpose, I believed that Donald Trump was being guided by Henry Kissinger, then still in the President’s inner circle, to use the tactic of appearing unhinged as a way of establishing his power presence on the world stage and also to fend off domestic enemies who were plotting  his impeachment. In a word, it seemed that Trump was taking a page out of the Richard Nixon playbook from the Christmas Eve bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor in 1972.

In the fourteen months since then straight up to Trump’s scandalous behavior at the G7 summit in Canada in June when he refused to sign the collective declaration of participants and through to his back of the hand treatment of allies at the NATO summit in Brussels last week, I have come to appreciate that Trump had nothing to learn from Kissinger.  Being unpredictable, being personally aggressive and impolite, being mendacious and contradictory to those he does not respect are clearly his long held business principles.

I salute him for this, because those he does not respect are precisely the liberal Atlantic community establishments in Washington, D.C., in Brussels who, since the USA achieved its unipolar moment with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, have waged war incessantly on piddling countries in Southern Europe, in the Middle East, spreading havoc and destruction, killing innumerable civilians while proclaiming the spread of human rights and democracy as their guiding principle.

In case the gentle reader sees this condemnation as unduly severe, even radical, I direct him or her to the article by Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School Graham Allison:  “The Myth of the Liberal Order” in the July-August issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. In 10 pages, Allison says very much the same thing as I have summarized in the preceding paragraph.

The leading personalities in the establishment are conformists for whom strength comes only from unity and a forced consensus that stifles all free thinking.  By their political correctness, they crush dissent and make a mockery of freedom of expression.

Donald Trump has instinctively understood they are his ideological enemies and has dropped all pretense at courtesy, which leaves them collectively huffing and puffing, as we saw on the margins of the NATO gathering last week.

Ever since he moved into the White House, mainstream media in the US have resisted the temptation to call Trump a madman, but they continually insinuate that he is volatile, whimsical and generally speaking, in his changeability, frequent policy reversals, and seemingly quixotic for tilting at the windmills of establishment thinking on foreign policy, in particular.

This sort of commentary personalizes and so depreciates the political war that Trump is waging on the establishment. Trump campaigned against NATO in 2016, and despite his nodding as President to its continued existence, it is perfectly clear that he intends to pull the US out of NATO.  He has taken up the grievances of the two past US administrations over the unwillingness of our European allies to properly fund the common defense. And he has used this as a bludgeon, doubling the target contributions to 4% of GDP, a target utterly unachievable for lack of political will on the Old Continent.

The confrontation with NATO allies over funding is really about the illogic of NATO’s existence, which is justified only by its creating the conditions for war.  Trump in effect has been saying: if you, Europe, are beating the drum over a Russian threat to the Baltics, to European-American control of the Middle East, then pay the bill, don’t expect the US to continue to pay 75% of the tab.  And this blunt threat shakes out the reality:  that the Russian threat is invented to serve the interests of NATO’s continuity as an institution, nothing more.

Of course, Trump does not say this.  Firstly, .he does not have a way with words.  Secondly, this is unspeakable heresy.

Trump campaigned in 2016 for normalization of relations with Russia.  From the time of the forced resignation of his then National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in February 2017. Trump has had to retreat from that campaign pledge, and indeed, he has gone along with every proposal for ratcheting up sanctions on Russia that Congress has pitched to him and with every measure to show contempt for Moscow that the malicious functionaries at the State Department could serve up, such as confiscation of Russian consular properties.

However, when he gained traction against the Mueller investigation earlier this spring, when he fully absorbed the meaning of Vladimir Putin’s claims to full nuclear parity with the United States through roll-out of new and awesome weapons systems in his annual address to the Federal Assembly on 1 March 2018, Trump knew that a meeting to start to repair relations with the Kremlin could be postponed no longer. That was clear from his telephone call to Putin on 20 March to congratulate him on his electoral victory during which he said a meeting would have to be arranged “in the near future.” The summit with North Korean leader Kim in Singapore was not a self-standing event:  it was an essential first step towards the meeting with Vladimir Putin taking place in Helsinki today.

In conclusion, in the person of Donald Trump we see remarkable continuity of thought and strategic vision notwithstanding all of the noise and contradictions used to disarm and confuse his opponents.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2018

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Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book, Does the United States Have a Future? was published on 12 October 2017. Both paperback and e-book versions are available for purchase on http://www.amazon.com and all affiliated Amazon websites worldwide. See the recent professional review  http://theduran.com/does-the-united-states-have-a-future-a-new-book-by-gilbert-doctorow-review/    For a video of the book presentation made at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. on 7 December 2017 see  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciW4yod8upg

Each summer I spend several weeks of vacation at a country house 80 km south of St Petersburg, in the hamlet of Orlino, which has about 400 registered residents, two-thirds of them seasonal, “summer people,” as they are called with a certain condescension by the true grit locals.

We have high-speed internet and satellite television, so that business as usual is possible if I so wished. Moreover, there have been the broadcasts of the World Cup games to keep us connected to what the global community is excited about each day. Indeed, the England-Belgium match kept my wife on edge before her computer yesterday afternoon   Yet, overall this is a place to slow down, sniff the flowers and mingle with diverse people who are quite removed from my social circles in St Petersburg or Brussels. At the end of my stay, I share my observations on the state of one-story Russia in this once yearly letter from Orlino.

Many things change in daily life here from year to year, and I will talk about them at length below.  Other things are immutable: namely the predisposition of weather in these northern climes to disappoint, particularly spring and summer.  Given the rare beauty of White Nights from mid-May to mid-July when dusk passes imperceptibly into dawn in ethereal light, it is more than a pity when the sky is hidden by unbroken cloud cover or when you have weeks on end of cold rain, as occurred in 2017.

I got a reminder of just how constant meteorological fragility has been over not just one or two years but over centuries when taking in an evening of opera at the Mariinsky Theater before leaving for our dacha.  I was struck by the dialogues in the opening scene of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, when ladies of high society who gathered in the Summer Garden near the Neva remarked on the splendid May sunshine.  “We haven’t had a spring day like this for years,” said one.  “And the climate has become so unpredictable, not like in the past when the seasons were reliable.” says another. These lines were written by the librettist, the composer’s brother in 1889, and the piece, based on a novel in verse by Pushkin, was set in the 1790’s.

Two thousand eighteen has been the exception that proves the rule. May in the Russian Northwest where Orlino is situated was unusually warm and sunny day after day. June was also exceptionally bright. Of course, the weather here spoiled upon our arrival on 29 June but there are signs that summer warmth will prevail in the second half of this month and beyond.

Notwithstanding the difficult climatic conditions for agriculture in the Russian Northwest, during Soviet times there was large-scale farming activity here, employing a substantial part of the rural population. The nearby settlement of Lampovo was home to a dairy farming complex that had a herd of 5,000 cows. This state farm employed hundreds of workers, who, in typical Soviet fashion, were housed in a block of purpose-built 5-story apartment buildings set back amidst fields just a hundred meters from the district road.  That farm produced, among other things, a vast amount of butter that was entirely exported to Czechoslovakia, so that people in the region never tasted a pat. But they all had jobs.

The bigger issue is that the farm is long gone and with it the source of employment for all these families in the cheaply built and poorly maintained housing estate that has deteriorated into slum-like shabbiness and appears to be all the more anomalous alongside open and now fallow fields. I am told that some of the luckier residents have found work in the district city of Gatchina, more than one hour away by train. Others commute to jobs in St Petersburg and spend up to six hours a day getting to work and back.

I learned these details from our neighbors in Orlino, who told me as well about other industrial scale farms in the area producing potatoes, producing strawberries, producing even wheat that have all disappeared since 1991, leaving behind empty fields which are here and there being slowly developed into dacha-land.  Some of these new residences are splendid brick structures set behind high fences. Generally they are owned by absentee landlords who contribute little to the economy or social life of the area. They are not oligarchs, just moderately wealthy city folk.

My sources for this local lore are neighbors. First among them is Sergei, whom I introduced in one of my first Letters. Sergei is a master builder who drilled our artesian well, installed our plumbing system eight years ago, and has looked after our property when we are away ever since. Then there is the village librarian.  Surprisingly, the hamlet of Orlino has a library that operates in the afternoon five days a week. Kids are drawn there by the cookies and candies the librarian sets out for them in what is a center of social life in parallel with the Orthodox church a couple of hundred meters further down the Central  Street where we live in the direction of the lake.  A third source of both local history and current events is the general store, three hundred meters away in the opposite direction on Central Street heading towards the district road.  The store is owned by a tough-minded lady who has held some petty administrative positions here over time, including receiving annual fees for the garbage collection. Larisa knows everyone. And, of course, I gather tidbits of information every time I take a taxi from our hamlet to the nearest commercial and administrative center, Siversk, 10 km away.  The taxis may have progressed from broken down Volgas to comfortable and well maintained Hondas, VWs and the like over the past eight years of our patronage here, but the drivers remain talkative and informative.

From the perspective of these locals, Russian agriculture would appear to be in crisis. Of course, this view flies in the face of the objective facts, where we find that precisely agriculture is one of the drivers of Russia’s economic recovery these past eighteen years of the Putin era. Year-on-year growth of 3% is recorded regularly now. Russia has become the world’s biggest grain exporter, and, particularly in the period since 2014 when Western food products were placed on embargo in response to sanctions over Crimea’s reunification with the Russian Federation, the country has become self-sufficient in ever more sectors of the food market.

The point is that Russian agriculture is growing in response to rational economic incentives which favor efficiency and the climatic advantages of the South of Russia.  The Kuban region just northeast of the Black Sea has been a magnet for investment in high-tech and capital-intensive farming. Its administrative and financial center, Krasnodar, is now one of the richest urban areas in the country. Meanwhile, climatically disadvantaged areas like the Northwest, have been left to die on the vine. What is clearly missing is a government program to assist the transition of such areas to the new economy and generation of non-farming employment in the given localities.

In one respect, though, industrial-scale farming has survived in the Northwest:  year-round production of tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers and other highly appreciated vegetables in newly constructed and rapidly expanding greenhouses.  Greater St Petersburg is no different from other major metropolitan areas across the country in developing these sources of fresh produce close to the consumer market.  But industrial-scale greenhouse agriculture is absent in our area.

This is not to say that Orlino and adjoining communities have been left unaffected by Russia’s new love for greenhouses.  Indeed, as I stroll down the quiet lanes of Orlino it is hard to find a good-looking house that does not have a brand-new polycarbonate inverted U greenhouse to one side or out back.

Such greenhouses are the latest fad.  Going back five years or so, we have seen here, as elsewhere in rural Russia, successive waves of must-have upgrades to any self-respecting Russian’s property.  One such fad was siding.  Siding gives new concrete-block houses designer facades. Siding turns granny’s weathered hundred year old gray log cabin into a neat modern dwelling, at least on the outside.

Another fad in this period has been grass trimmers.  The Russian countryside has very few golf-course style lawns. The grounds tend to be left uneven and covered predominantly with weeds that can grow waist high if the owner is away for a month or more. The weeds come in successive waves: dandelions, plantains and other pests which my botanical knowledge is too weak to identify. The ubiquitous answer to this challenge has been gasoline or electric powered hand-held trimmers. They are made almost    China, whether sold as no- name or marketed under German and other European brands.  On any weekend, the quiet mornings or late afternoons are punctuated by the high-pitched whirring of these trimmers as neighbors tackle their weed patches and bring temporary order to their property.

The polycarbonate greenhouses usually measure 3 meters by eight and may be more than two meters high in the middle, so that they can be entered and serviced in comfort. They have louvers to control the air temperature. Additional features may include self-feeding drip irrigation from cisterns and even heaters to extend the growing season well into early winter.

Every second Russian city dweller has a country property. The happy owners praise the clean air, clean water and generally healthful surroundings. In addition, for the middle classes Russia country residences are synonymous with weekend barbecues and socializing in the bathhouse. For the lower classes, dachas have always been a valued source of nutrition.

It is not for nothing that the zoning of all land parcels in Orlino is for “subsistence farming.” If properly managed, the standard 700 square meter plot of land can provide staples for a family of four for the year. Much of the land is given over to potatoes and cabbage. Then you absolutely must have several apple, sour cherry and plum trees. Add to that berry bushes: raspberries, gooseberries, black currant are  de rigueur.  The fruits are preserved in a variety of ways – as jam or juice or liqueur, to name but a few.

In the past, those with a green thumb would add to their yard flower beds and….a vegetable garden. This meant firstly root vegetables like beets and carrots, or green onions.

But we live in modern times, and Russians have acquired sophisticated tastes which extend to a variety of salads and other greens.  They also have become fastidious about what goes into their food and skeptical about what they find in the supermarkets or even farmers’ markets.

For these health food enthusiasts, their home gardening has become a vector for self-expression and family pride. That is what I see around me on the properties of our neighbors.

The polycarbonate home greenhouses did not come from Mars and did not land in a desert.  They represent the latest and most productive form of protected vegetable farming that has been going on here for decades.  What fifty years ago was glass-covered beds for seedlings became twenty years ago plastic film covered beds. The glass panes or plastic were removed as and when the air temperature and precipitation levels allowed the plants to continue on their own in free air.

The new greenhouses go several steps further.  They are suitable to take the seedlings straight through to final production of vegetables, and fruits like strawberries, safe from insects, birds and other threats to the crop. This also means no weeding and no pesticides.

Besides being certifiably organic, this protected farming allows my neighbors to experiment with non-standard plant varieties and, once they have identified what pleases them, to prepare their own seeds for planting from the last harvest.

What all of this leads to was made crystal clear to us this past week when Sergei and his wife accepted our invitation to “high tea” on our veranda.  They came with a wicker basket of vegetables from their greenhouse:  tomatoes, cucumbers in various sizes and yellow peppers. These products were exquisite: you will not find them in stores or markets. Additionally they are growing in the hothouse summer squash, pumpkins, and some raspberries.

They start with seedlings in March and go through three harvests to the end of October.  I asked what they buy in supermarkets these days, and the answer was short:  bread.

What I see in Sergei and his wife is a modern day pioneer spirit of self-providing, living off the land and taking pleasure in the uniqueness and wholesomeness of what they produce.

I do not insert politics into the chats with our neighbors, but inevitably it intrudes in one way or another. I know full well that this is Putin country, and yet there are changes in mood from year to year that are worth noting.

In the period before 2014, I heard a lot of grousing in Orlino about corruption.  It was not as vicious as what our intelligentsia friends in Petersburg were hearing daily from Ekho Moskvy radio station and retelling with malicious pleasure to me and to anyone else within earshot, but it was undeniably questioning the fairness of the regime from the federal level on down to local officials believed to be on the take. The reunification with Crimea in the spring of 2014, followed by the imposition of Western sanctions on Russian oligarchs accused of aiding and abetting the President in his aggressive policies abroad, changed all that.  The government and its officers now were seen by my interlocutors in Orlino as defending the nation, even at the expense of their own personal interests.

Four years of belt-tightening from the post-Crimea recession have finally corroded the patriotic euphoria here in Orlino as elsewhere in Russia.  One catalyst of change today is the highly controversial pension reform bill.

To be sure, here in Orlino there is no controversy:  the idea of raising the pension age is seen as an encroachment on financial security.  No one is interested in the argument that the reform would merely align Russia with the rest of the industrial world, even with the other former republics of the USSR all of whom have raised their pension age.  Everyone is skeptical of the government’s ability to improve health care and so extend life expectancy.

And yet there is no reversion to the “we versus them” mentality that prevailed before 2014. In this regard the issue of roads is telling.

Here in our district, the local roads are deplorable.  In places, filled potholes take up more of the road surface than the original asphalt.  As one clever Lada owner posted on his back window: “I pay my taxes. Where are the roads?” In Russian that rhymes nicely:   “я плачу налоги. где дороги?”

Since these roads are plied by municipal bus services which complain loudly about the cost of maintaining their vehicles given the deformations in the roads, finally we do get some “capital” repairs, meaning stripping the surface and putting down stretches of new asphalt. Not every year, not in every place, but at some locations and from time to time.

One such case of resurfacing took place here a week ago on the heavily traveled road connecting us to Siversk.  And yet the strip and resurface process was localized.  Where some part of the road was deemed serviceable despite its filled potholes, it was left in place.  I took special notice of the comment of our taxi driver:  “they are economizing on us.”

That was a fair-minded evaluation of what had happened.  He did not say that the road budget had been embezzled, diverted to someone’s pocket, as he would likely have said four years ago.  Instead, “they are economizing on us” – a politically directed observation that is not subversive in any way and potentially is constructive.

One other change this year worth remarking is the surprising cleanliness of our streets and beaches in Orlino.  We now have a local official tasked with keeping the public areas trash-free, and to all appearances, the public is responding positively. As I said in the beginning we have had excellent weather since early May and this brings large numbers of day visitors from nearby settlements to our Orlino lakeside for boating or swimming or making barbecues. They were in years gone by hopeless litterers.  That seems to have stopped entirely, for which we “locals” can be very thankful.  If I may generalize, it seems that Russians are becoming environmentally aware in ever greater numbers and across all classes. This season in this place manifestly demonstrates that.

Finally, what is special about this summer in Orlino is the World Cup effect. The pride of the nation in hosting this month-long sporting event reaches even into the depths of the countryside where there are no “fan zones.”  People who would never have watched a football match in their lives, have these past several weeks kept an eye on the FIFA broadcasts on Russia One.  The unexpected rise of the scorned Russian national team from its Group into the Quarter Finals caught the national imagination. And even after the knock-out of the Russian team, interest in the World Cup has continued unabated here in Orlino. Yesterday afternoon, when the match in St Petersburg for third place in the tournament was won by the Red Devils, we got a phone call from Sergey congratulating us on the Belgian victory.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2018

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Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book, Does the United States Have a Future? was published on 12 October 2017. Both paperback and e-book versions are available for purchase on http://www.amazon.com and all affiliated Amazon websites worldwide. See the recent professional review  http://theduran.com/does-the-united-states-have-a-future-a-new-book-by-gilbert-doctorow-review/    For a video of the book presentation made at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. on 7 December 2017 see  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciW4yod8upg

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton