‘Russia’s Orbit: Repression, Homicide, Battle’, Osteuropa’s second consecutive subject dedicated to the scenario in Russia since its assault on Ukraine simply over two years in the past, paperwork the escalatory logic driving the regime of Vladimir Putin towards ever-greater excesses of violence each domestically and in its prosecution of the battle.
Of their editorial, Manfred Sapper and Volker Weichsel describe the ‘obvious paradox’ of latter-day Putinism: ‘the supposedly omnipotent regime is in truth powerless. Solely by rising the degrees of violence can it maintain itself alive.’
Colonialism
The Ukrainian novelist, poet and essayist Yuri Andrukhovych argues that Russia’s relationship to Ukraine since Peter the Nice has been one in every of colonizer to colonized. He laments ‘how sophisticated it’s to steer the western educational group of the thesis that Ukraine was a Russian colony’. In accordance with the tenets of decolonial principle, not solely should the colony be geographically distant from the seat of colonial energy, however the subjugated folks should even be, if not nonwhite, then at the very least non-European.
Andrukhovych factors to the Holodomor, the mass hunger of the Ukrainian peasantry in 1932–33, calling it ‘the epitome of predatory colonialism’ in its ruthlessly extractive financial exploitation, deliberate genocide, and mass resettlement of the depopulated area by representatives of the colonial energy.
Although Russia might at all times have been a colonial empire, Andrukhovych notes that in a single key side it’s untypical: ‘Russia is the one former empire that has tried to be reborn by reconquering its colonies’. Nor has it ever reckoned with the manifold crimes of its imperialist previous: ‘Even right now it’s firmly persuaded of its proper to overcome and subjugate’.
Navalny
In one in every of 4 articles within the subject on the life and demise of Alexei Navalny, cultural historian Wolfgang Stephan Kissel examines the cultural politics of the opposition chief’s funeral on 1 March 2024.
The occasions of March 1 have been unprecedented within the historical past of post-Soviet Russia, writes Kissel: ‘Within the thirty years because the collapse of the Soviet Union, there had been no giant, high-profile funeral that captured the general public’s creativeness’.
Although the regime, by way of its surrogates within the Russian Orthodox Church, tried to stress Navalny’s household into forgoing a correct Orthodox funeral service, it stopped wanting an outright ban. Provided that Navalny was a member of the Church who incessantly cited scripture in his speeches, doing so would have risked angering the overwhelmingly Orthodox inhabitants.
Though the authorities succeeded in shortening the service and stopping a mass inflow of the general public into the church, they have been unable to cease the following procession from changing into a spontaneous anti-government demonstration, despite the heavy presence of state safety forces.
In his capsule historical past of Russian public-mourning rituals, Kissel factors out that it was the funerals of ‘cultural heroes’ – Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Mayakovsky and Sakharov, amongst others – and never of politicians that previously proved essentially the most socially disruptive, unleashing subversive energies. Right here too the sample held: ‘After this ceremony, Navalny was now not simply an anti-corruption fighter, politician and road activist … however the first Russian cultural hero of the twenty first century’.
Georgia
An interview with the literary scholar Zaal Andronikashvili particulars the fragile scenario in Georgia within the run-up to parliamentary elections this October. Due to current electoral reforms which have made it more durable for the incumbent celebration to cement its grip on energy, the Georgian Dream celebration, which has dominated the nation since 2012, now runs the very actual threat of being voted out.
The elections will happen within the supercharged environment created by the huge road protests in Tbilisi in 2023–4 in response to the federal government’s Legislation on Transparency of Overseas Affect, which might pressure most NGOs to register as ‘organizations carrying the pursuits of a international energy’. By passing such a measure – a digital carbon copy of Russia’s infamous foreign-agent regulation – the federal government ‘desires to destroy [Georgia’s] unbiased civil society’.
The unseen hand behind such maneuvers is Bidzina Ivanishvili: billionaire, former prime minister, founding father of Georgian Dream and all-around éminence grise of Georgian politics, who on the finish of final yr was elected honorary chairman of Georgian Dream as a method of not directly reasserting his authority.
Since rejoining the political fray Ivanishvili has charted an more and more authoritarian, populist, pro-Russian course for Georgian Dream, railing conspiratorially towards the ‘world celebration of battle’ looking for to pull Georgia into the Ukraine battle and denouncing the opposition as rootless foreign-educated elites.
Although parliament lately handed the transparency regulation, the favored motion animating the discontent, which is in favor of EU membership and against Russian vassalage, reveals no indicators of abating, setting the stage for a showdown in October. ‘Euromaidan, Belarus or a withdrawal of the regulation – the end result remains to be open’, concludes Andronikashvili.
Assessment by Nick Sywak
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