radiofree.asia

Category: Russia

  • USSR to Russia

    In the early 1960s, the intensifying Cold War confrontation between the U.S. and the USSR was not only a terrifying nuclear-arms race, but also a struggle for prestige and influence vis-a-vis non-aligned Third World nations.  The “Soviet” Union — founded on the promise of a dictatorship of proletarian councils — had long since become a highly centralized and corrupt, Party-run system, in which massive worker uprisings could only prove embarrassing in the “court of world opinion” (and dangerously disillusioning to the well-indoctrinated populace).  Thus, the efficient cover-up of this 1962 massacre of striking workers at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Plant — which is realistically depicted, with some fictional elements, by director Konchalovsky (Siberiade, Runaway Train).

    Lest American viewers come away feeling overly complacent about their “democracy,” the rarely acknowledged 1894 massacre of Pullman strikers by 12,000 U.S. Army troops bears some startling resemblance to the events depicted.  Even so, in more recent decades, U.S. administrations have preferred to “export” their initiated and/or heavily backed massacres (Indonesia, East Timor, e.g.; cf. also documentaries The Panama Deception and RAI’s Fallujah, the Hidden Massacre).

    The fact that the making of this film was heavily funded by Russia’s Ministry of Culture should also alert us to its possible use as favorable propaganda for President Putin.  Young Russians, many of whom remember little about the Soviet Union, may come away with the impression that living under Putin’s government must be “much better” than under Krushchev’s Communist regime.  (Under Putin, brutal suppression of rebellion has been more likely to occur, from time to time, in remote regions like Chechnya.)  I particularly found the movie’s ending suspect: in the aftermath of the killings, having feared that her daughter was among the dead, stalwart Communist official Lyudmila expresses nostalgia for the days of Stalin (who “reduced food prices”) — and also comes to appreciate her KGB acquaintance as basically a helpful, nice guy.  Former KGB operative Putin, who reportedly plans to oversee Russia for a longer period than Stalin’s reign, would most likely appreciate the character Lyudmila’s outlook.

    The script could also have provided more explanation for the causes of the events depicted.  Why the increase in food prices in the first place — which first ignited the workers’ rage?  Bad harvest, hoarding (price-fixing), and/or diversion of budget into “defense”?  Why did plant managers cut wages precisely at this time (talk about bad timing)?  And why didn’t the higher-ups immediately reverse this terribly ill-timed measure — thereby quelling the massive spread of the labor protests?  The film does seem to depict realistically an incompetent, decision-evading process, whereby officials preferred a brutal “quick fix” to patiently resolving the crisis (and possibly being blamed for ineffectiveness).  In sum, this viewer is left with many unanswered questions.  Of course, the ultimate irony, historically, is that Poland’s Solidarity labor movement, begun in 1980 among Gdansk dockworkers, was the beginning of the end for the bureaucratic Communist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe.                          

    This article was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2021 at 9:09pm and is filed under Cold War, Film Review, Russia, The Soviet Union.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • America’s National Humiliation by Eurasia: Uncle Sam is ‘Sick Man’ of the West

    As American economic power continues to decline, a division has emerged within the U.S. political establishment as to which of its designated adversaries is to blame for the country’s woes — Russia, or China. The dispute came to a head during each of the last two presidential elections, with the Democratic Party first blaming Moscow for Hillary Clinton’s shocking defeat in 2016 over unproven “election meddling” by the Kremlin. After Joe Biden’s equally controversial victory over Donald Trump this past November, the GOP has retaliated by portraying the 46th president as “soft on China” just as their counterparts drew critical attention to Trump’s alleged ties to Russia — even though both men have taken tough stances toward each respective country. As a result of this neo-McCarthyist political atmosphere, détente has been criminalized. In order to understand what is driving this interwar between factions of the Anglo-American elite amid the rise of China and Russia on the world stage, a revisiting of the history of relations between the three nations is necessary.

    From the first millennia until the 19th century, China was one of the world’s foremost economic powers. Today, the People’s Republic has largely recaptured that position and by the end of the decade is expected to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, a gain that may be expedited by the post-pandemic U.S. recession compared with China’s rapid recovery. Unfortunately, the Western attitude toward China remains stuck in the ‘century of humiliation’ where from the mid-19th century until the Chinese Revolution in 1949, it was successively raped and plundered by the Western, Japanese, and Russian imperial powers. The reason the English-speaking world clings to this backwards view is because apart from that centennial period, the West has always been second place to China as the world’s most distinguished country providing the global standard in infrastructure, technology, governance, agriculture, and economic development. Even at the peak of the Roman Empire, the Han dynasty where the ancient Silk Road began was vastly larger in territory and population.

    For two consecutive years in the early 1930s, the best-selling fiction book in the U.S. was Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth which depicted the extreme poverty and famine of rural peasant life in pre-revolutionary China. In many respects, the picture of China in the Western mind remains a composite impression from Buck’s Nobel Prize-winning novel. The former Chinese Empire underwent its ‘hundred years of humiliation’ after suffering a series of military defeats in the Opium Wars which funded Western industrialization, where the ceding of territories and war reparations in unequal treaties left China subjugated as the “sick man of Asia.” Like Russia which lagged behind Europe after the Industrial Revolution until the Soviet centralized plans of the 1930s, China was able to transform its primarily agricultural economy into an industrial giant after its communist revolution in 1949. However, it was only a short time until the Sino-Soviet split in 1961 when China began to forge its own path in one of the most widely misunderstood geopolitical developments of the Cold War.

    In 1956, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave what is commonly known as his “Secret Speech” to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a report entitled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”, where the Ukrainian-born politician denounced the excesses of his deceased predecessor, Joseph Stalin. The news of the shocking address to the Politburo did not just further polarize an international communist movement already divided between Trotskyists and the Comintern but had geopolitical consequences beyond its intended purpose of accommodating Washington to deescalate the arms race. At first, China took a relatively neutral stance toward the Soviet reforms during its Hundred Flowers Campaign, even as Mao encouraged the USSR to put down the 1956 counter-revolution in Hungary.

    The real turning point in Sino-Soviet relations came when the bureaucratic placation of the Khrushchev Thaw began to discourage movements in the developing world living under Western-backed dictatorships from taking up arms in revolutionary struggle. With the support of Enver Hoxha and Albania, China began to fiercely criticize de-Stalinization and accused the Soviet Union of “revisionism” for prioritizing world peace and preventing a nuclear war over support for national liberation movements, becoming the de facto leader of ‘Third Worldism’ against Western imperialism. Moscow reciprocated by freezing aid to China which greatly damaged its economy and relations soured between the world’s two biggest socialist countries, transforming the the Cold War into a tri-polar conflict already multifaceted with the Non-Aligned Movement led by Yugoslavia after Josep Broz Tito’s falling out with Stalin.

    As the PRC continued to break from what Mao viewed as the USSR’s deviation from Marxism-Leninism, China went down the primrose path of the Cultural Revolution during the 1960s amid the rise of the Gang of Four faction who took the anti-Soviet policies a step further by condemning the USSR as “social imperialist” and an even greater threat than the West. This led to several huge missteps in foreign policy and a complete betrayal of internationalism, as China aligned with the U.S. in support of UNITA against the MPLA in the Angolan civil war, the CIA-backed Khmer Rouge genocidaires in Cambodia against Vietnam, and the fascist Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile. After years of international isolation, U.S. President Richard Nixon and his war criminal Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were received as guests in 1972. Despite the initial reasons for the Sino-Soviet split, it was ironically the Soviet Union which ended up carrying the mantle of national liberation as the USSR backed numerous socialist revolutions in the global south while China sided with imperialism.

    In hindsight, the Cold War’s conclusion with the demise of the USSR was arguably an inevitable result of the Sino-Soviet split. Ultimately, mistakes were made by both sides that are recognized by the two countries today, as can be seen in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation’s negative historical view of Khrushchev and the denunciation of the Cultural Revolution and Gang of Four by the CPC (not “CCP”). In fact, China has since even apologized to Angola for its support of Jonas Savimbi. Nevertheless, the break in political relations with Moscow also set the process in motion for China to develop its own interpretation of Marxism-Leninism that diverged from the Soviet model and eventually allowed a level of private enterprise which never occurred under the USSR, including during the short-lived New Economic Policy of the 1920s. If truth be told, this may have been the very thing which prevented China from meeting the same fate.

    Starting in 1978, China began opening its economy to domestic private enterprise and even foreign capital, but with the ruling party and government retaining final authority over both the private and public sectors. The result of implementing market-oriented reforms while maintaining mostly state ownership of industry was the economic marvel we see today, where China has since become the ‘world’s factory’ and global manufacturing powerhouse. For four decades, China’s real gross domestic product growth has averaged nearly ten percent every year and almost a billion people have been lifted out of poverty, but with capital never rising above the political authority of the CPC. Unfortunately, the success of Deng Xiaoping’s reform of the Chinese socialist system was not replicated by perestroika (“restructuring”) in the USSR under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev who completely failed to revive the Soviet economy and eventually oversaw its dissolution in 1991.

    During the 1990s, Russia underwent total collapse as its formerly planned enterprises were dismantled by the same neoliberal policies to which Margaret Thatcher once phrased “there is no alternative” (TINA). The restoration of capitalism sharply increased poverty and unemployment while mortality fell by an entire decade under IMF-imposed ‘shock therapy’ which created an obscenely wealthy new class of Russian “oligarchs” overnight. So much so, the fortunes of the Semibankarschina (“seven bankers”) were compared to the boyars of tsarist nobility in previous centuries. This comprador elite also controlled most of the country’s media while funding the election campaigns of pro-Western President Boris Yeltsin who transformed the previously centralized economy into a free market system. That was until his notorious successor assumed power and brought the energy sector back under control of the Russian state which restored wages, reduced poverty, and expelled corrupt foreign investors like Bill Browder. Needless to say, the U.S. was not pleased by Vladimir Putin’s successful revival of the Russian economy because the U.S. already faced a geopolitical contender in China.

    As China has been the world’s ascending economic superpower through its unique mixture of private and state-owned enterprises, the U.S. economy has shrunk as trade liberalization and globalization de-industrialized the Rust Belt. Simultaneously, the expense of the military budget has grown so gargantuan that it can’t be audited while rash imperialist wars in the Middle East following 9/11 marked the beginning of the end for American hegemony. In 2016, Donald Trump rose to power railing against the political establishment over its “endless wars” and anti-worker free trade deals, abandoning the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on his first day in office and imposing protectionist tariffs which kickstarted a U.S.-China trade war. Unfortunately, any efforts to return U.S. productive power outsourced to China by multinationals and scale back American empire-building were destined to fail.

    Trump was also politically persecuted by the Democrats and the intelligence community for daring to embrace détente with Moscow as a candidate and spent his entire administration trying to appease the deep state in Washington with little result. Oddly enough, it was reportedly none other than Henry Kissinger who encouraged Trump to ease the strained relations with Russia as a strategy to contain China, the traditional enemy he once convinced Richard Nixon to make steps toward peace with. The GOP, representing the interests of the military-industrial complex, has reciprocated the anti-Russia hysteria by accusing incumbent Joe Biden of being weak on China, even though the previous Obama-Biden administration presided over an unprecedented military buildup in the Pacific as part of the U.S. “pivot to Asia.” The views of constituents from both parties also seem to fall on partisan lines, as indicated in a recent Gallup poll where only 16% of Democrats held a positive view of Russia and a mere 10% of Republicans regard China favorably.

    The rise of Russia and China on the global stage presents such a threat to Washington’s full spectrum dominance that the head of U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, recently warned of the very real possibility of a nuclear war in the future with both countries. Under the administration of Xi Jinping, China has reshaped the geopolitical order with its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure project, also known as the New Silk Road. At the same time, Russia has reintegrated several of the former Soviet republics with the formation of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). Conceivably, the return of Russia to world politics has the potential to transform the sphere of competition between the U.S. and China into a multipolar plane where the balance of power can shift toward a more stable geopolitical landscape in the long run. Nevertheless, the challenge made by the Xi-Putin partnership to the dominion of Western capital is the basis for the bellicosity toward Eurasia by the U.S., as is their joining forces to repair the Sino-Russian political relations broken decades ago.

    When the Soviet Union dissolved, the tentative US–China alliance effectively ended and Sino-Russian rapprochement began. But what prevented the PRC from going the same route as the Eastern Bloc? Why did Deng succeed and Gorbachev fail? After all, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were concurrent with the numerous ‘Color Revolutions’ behind the Iron Curtain, even though the Western narrative about the June Fourth Incident omits that among the “pro-democracy” demonstrators were many Maoists who considered Deng’s market reforms a betrayal of Chinese socialism. As it happens, Xi Jinping himself correctly identified one of the main reasons why the USSR dissolved in a 2013 speech:

    Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party fall from power? An important reason was that the struggle in the field of ideology was extremely intense, completely negating the history of the Soviet Union, negating the history of the Soviet Communist Party, negating Lenin, negating Stalin, creating historical nihilism and confused thinking. Party organs at all levels had lost their functions, the military was no longer under Party leadership. In the end, the Soviet Communist Party, a great party, was scattered, the Soviet Union, a great socialist country, disintegrated. This is a cautionary tale!

    Xi is correct in that China, unlike the Soviet Union, never made the crucial error of playing into the hands of the West through the condemnation of its own history as Khrushchev did in his “Secret Speech.” Despite the fact that the report by the Soviet leader contained demonstrable falsehoods such as the absurd claim that Stalin, one of Russia’s most formidable bank robbers as a revolutionary, was a coward deathly afraid of the Nazi invasion as it neared Moscow during WWII, the self-serving speech split the international communist movement and laid the internal groundwork for the USSR’s eventual downfall. As for the economic reasons for the different outcomes, the late Marxist historian Domenico Losurdo explained:

    If we analyse the first 15 years of Soviet Russia, we see three social experiments. The first experiment, based on the equal distribution of poverty, suggests the “universal asceticism” and “rough egalitarianism” criticised by the Communist Manifesto. We can now understand the decision to move to Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which was often interpreted as a return to capitalism. The increasing threat of war pushed Stalin into sweeping economic collectivisation. The third experiment produced a very advanced welfare state but ended in failure: in the last years of the Soviet Union, it was characterised by mass absenteeism and disengagement in the workplace; this stalled productivity, and it became hard to find any application of the principle that Marx said should preside over socialism — remuneration according to the quantity and quality of work delivered. The history of China is different: Mao believed that, unlike “political capital,” the economic capital of the bourgeoisie should not be subject to total expropriation, at least until it can serve the development of the national economy. After the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, it took Deng Xiaoping to emphasise that socialism implies the development of the productive forces. Chinese market socialism has achieved extraordinary success.

    Since China’s economic upswing has been simultaneous with the downturn of American capitalism, it has left the U.S. with only one option but to equate the PRC with its own crumbling system. Sadly, in most instances it is the Eurocentric pseudo-left which has parroted the propaganda of Western think tanks that China is “state capitalist” and even “imperialist.” This also means that its unparalleled economic gains must therefore be a result of capitalism, not state planning, which is another fabrication. Has there ever been a clearer case of neocolonial projection than the baseless accusation of “dept-trap diplomacy” hurled at China’s BRI by the West? It is true that China seeks to profit in the global south, but based on terms of mutual benefit for developing nations previously plundered by Western financial institutions which actually impose debt slavery on low income countries. In reality, Beijing is only guilty of offering a preferable win-win alternative to states exploited under the yoke of imperialism. Once upon a time, the U.S. itself envisioned a peaceful world of mutual cooperation and trade under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, a forgotten legacy that Xi’s BRI is fulfilling.

    None of this is to say China is undeserving of any criticism. To the contrary, its paradoxes are as deep as its achievements and it would be naive to think that Chinese capital, if left unchecked, doesn’t have the potential to be as predatory as the Western variety. Free enterprise is so inherently unstable that its destructive nature will be impossible to contain forever even by a party like the CPC and must be disassembled eventually. Without the retention of a large state sector maintaining vital infrastructure and public services, the market relations in China would wreak havoc as it did in post-Soviet Russia. Not to mention, the biggest progress made by the PRC was in the years prior to the pro-market reforms and ultimately served as the foundation upon which “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is able to thrive. The lesson of the fall of the USSR is that even a society capable of the most incredible human advancements is not invincible to a market environment. The Soviet Union withstood an invasion by more than a dozen Allied nations during the Russian Civil War and an onslaught by the Nazi war machine in WWII, but succumbed to perestroika. While Russia may be under the free market, both nations are a threat to Western capital because they represent a new win-win cooperative model in international relations and an end to American unipolarity.

    The post America’s National Humiliation by Eurasia: Uncle Sam is ‘Sick Man’ of the West first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • America’s National Humiliation by Eurasia: Uncle Sam is ‘Sick Man’ of the West

    As American economic power continues to decline, a division has emerged within the U.S. political establishment as to which of its designated adversaries is to blame for the country’s woes — Russia, or China. The dispute came to a head during each of the last two presidential elections, with the Democratic Party first blaming Moscow for Hillary Clinton’s shocking defeat in 2016 over unproven “election meddling” by the Kremlin. After Joe Biden’s equally controversial victory over Donald Trump this past November, the GOP has retaliated by portraying the 46th president as “soft on China” just as their counterparts drew critical attention to Trump’s alleged ties to Russia — even though both men have taken tough stances toward each respective country. As a result of this neo-McCarthyist political atmosphere, détente has been criminalized. In order to understand what is driving this interwar between factions of the Anglo-American elite amid the rise of China and Russia on the world stage, a revisiting of the history of relations between the three nations is necessary.

    From the first millennia until the 19th century, China was one of the world’s foremost economic powers. Today, the People’s Republic has largely recaptured that position and by the end of the decade is expected to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, a gain that may be expedited by the post-pandemic U.S. recession compared with China’s rapid recovery. Unfortunately, the Western attitude toward China remains stuck in the ‘century of humiliation’ where from the mid-19th century until the Chinese Revolution in 1949, it was successively raped and plundered by the Western, Japanese, and Russian imperial powers. The reason the English-speaking world clings to this backwards view is because apart from that centennial period, the West has always been second place to China as the world’s most distinguished country providing the global standard in infrastructure, technology, governance, agriculture, and economic development. Even at the peak of the Roman Empire, the Han dynasty where the ancient Silk Road began was vastly larger in territory and population.

    For two consecutive years in the early 1930s, the best-selling fiction book in the U.S. was Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth which depicted the extreme poverty and famine of rural peasant life in pre-revolutionary China. In many respects, the picture of China in the Western mind remains a composite impression from Buck’s Nobel Prize-winning novel. The former Chinese Empire underwent its ‘hundred years of humiliation’ after suffering a series of military defeats in the Opium Wars which funded Western industrialization, where the ceding of territories and war reparations in unequal treaties left China subjugated as the “sick man of Asia.” Like Russia which lagged behind Europe after the Industrial Revolution until the Soviet centralized plans of the 1930s, China was able to transform its primarily agricultural economy into an industrial giant after its communist revolution in 1949. However, it was only a short time until the Sino-Soviet split in 1961 when China began to forge its own path in one of the most widely misunderstood geopolitical developments of the Cold War.

    In 1956, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave what is commonly known as his “Secret Speech” to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a report entitled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”, where the Ukrainian-born politician denounced the excesses of his deceased predecessor, Joseph Stalin. The news of the shocking address to the Politburo did not just further polarize an international communist movement already divided between Trotskyists and the Comintern but had geopolitical consequences beyond its intended purpose of accommodating Washington to deescalate the arms race. At first, China took a relatively neutral stance toward the Soviet reforms during its Hundred Flowers Campaign, even as Mao encouraged the USSR to put down the 1956 counter-revolution in Hungary.

    The real turning point in Sino-Soviet relations came when the bureaucratic placation of the Khrushchev Thaw began to discourage movements in the developing world living under Western-backed dictatorships from taking up arms in revolutionary struggle. With the support of Enver Hoxha and Albania, China began to fiercely criticize de-Stalinization and accused the Soviet Union of “revisionism” for prioritizing world peace and preventing a nuclear war over support for national liberation movements, becoming the de facto leader of ‘Third Worldism’ against Western imperialism. Moscow reciprocated by freezing aid to China which greatly damaged its economy and relations soured between the world’s two biggest socialist countries, transforming the the Cold War into a tri-polar conflict already multifaceted with the Non-Aligned Movement led by Yugoslavia after Josep Broz Tito’s falling out with Stalin.

    As the PRC continued to break from what Mao viewed as the USSR’s deviation from Marxism-Leninism, China went down the primrose path of the Cultural Revolution during the 1960s amid the rise of the Gang of Four faction who took the anti-Soviet policies a step further by condemning the USSR as “social imperialist” and an even greater threat than the West. This led to several huge missteps in foreign policy and a complete betrayal of internationalism, as China aligned with the U.S. in support of UNITA against the MPLA in the Angolan civil war, the CIA-backed Khmer Rouge genocidaires in Cambodia against Vietnam, and the fascist Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile. After years of international isolation, U.S. President Richard Nixon and his war criminal Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were received as guests in 1972. Despite the initial reasons for the Sino-Soviet split, it was ironically the Soviet Union which ended up carrying the mantle of national liberation as the USSR backed numerous socialist revolutions in the global south while China sided with imperialism.

    In hindsight, the Cold War’s conclusion with the demise of the USSR was arguably an inevitable result of the Sino-Soviet split. Ultimately, mistakes were made by both sides that are recognized by the two countries today, as can be seen in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation’s negative historical view of Khrushchev and the denunciation of the Cultural Revolution and Gang of Four by the CPC (not “CCP”). In fact, China has since even apologized to Angola for its support of Jonas Savimbi. Nevertheless, the break in political relations with Moscow also set the process in motion for China to develop its own interpretation of Marxism-Leninism that diverged from the Soviet model and eventually allowed a level of private enterprise which never occurred under the USSR, including during the short-lived New Economic Policy of the 1920s. If truth be told, this may have been the very thing which prevented China from meeting the same fate.

    Starting in 1978, China began opening its economy to domestic private enterprise and even foreign capital, but with the ruling party and government retaining final authority over both the private and public sectors. The result of implementing market-oriented reforms while maintaining mostly state ownership of industry was the economic marvel we see today, where China has since become the ‘world’s factory’ and global manufacturing powerhouse. For four decades, China’s real gross domestic product growth has averaged nearly ten percent every year and almost a billion people have been lifted out of poverty, but with capital never rising above the political authority of the CPC. Unfortunately, the success of Deng Xiaoping’s reform of the Chinese socialist system was not replicated by perestroika (“restructuring”) in the USSR under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev who completely failed to revive the Soviet economy and eventually oversaw its dissolution in 1991.

    During the 1990s, Russia underwent total collapse as its formerly planned enterprises were dismantled by the same neoliberal policies to which Margaret Thatcher once phrased “there is no alternative” (TINA). The restoration of capitalism sharply increased poverty and unemployment while mortality fell by an entire decade under IMF-imposed ‘shock therapy’ which created an obscenely wealthy new class of Russian “oligarchs” overnight. So much so, the fortunes of the Semibankarschina (“seven bankers”) were compared to the boyars of tsarist nobility in previous centuries. This comprador elite also controlled most of the country’s media while funding the election campaigns of pro-Western President Boris Yeltsin who transformed the previously centralized economy into a free market system. That was until his notorious successor assumed power and brought the energy sector back under control of the Russian state which restored wages, reduced poverty, and expelled corrupt foreign investors like Bill Browder. Needless to say, the U.S. was not pleased by Vladimir Putin’s successful revival of the Russian economy because the U.S. already faced a geopolitical contender in China.

    As China has been the world’s ascending economic superpower through its unique mixture of private and state-owned enterprises, the U.S. economy has shrunk as trade liberalization and globalization de-industrialized the Rust Belt. Simultaneously, the expense of the military budget has grown so gargantuan that it can’t be audited while rash imperialist wars in the Middle East following 9/11 marked the beginning of the end for American hegemony. In 2016, Donald Trump rose to power railing against the political establishment over its “endless wars” and anti-worker free trade deals, abandoning the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on his first day in office and imposing protectionist tariffs which kickstarted a U.S.-China trade war. Unfortunately, any efforts to return U.S. productive power outsourced to China by multinationals and scale back American empire-building were destined to fail.

    Trump was also politically persecuted by the Democrats and the intelligence community for daring to embrace détente with Moscow as a candidate and spent his entire administration trying to appease the deep state in Washington with little result. Oddly enough, it was reportedly none other than Henry Kissinger who encouraged Trump to ease the strained relations with Russia as a strategy to contain China, the traditional enemy he once convinced Richard Nixon to make steps toward peace with. The GOP, representing the interests of the military-industrial complex, has reciprocated the anti-Russia hysteria by accusing incumbent Joe Biden of being weak on China, even though the previous Obama-Biden administration presided over an unprecedented military buildup in the Pacific as part of the U.S. “pivot to Asia.” The views of constituents from both parties also seem to fall on partisan lines, as indicated in a recent Gallup poll where only 16% of Democrats held a positive view of Russia and a mere 10% of Republicans regard China favorably.

    The rise of Russia and China on the global stage presents such a threat to Washington’s full spectrum dominance that the head of U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, recently warned of the very real possibility of a nuclear war in the future with both countries. Under the administration of Xi Jinping, China has reshaped the geopolitical order with its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure project, also known as the New Silk Road. At the same time, Russia has reintegrated several of the former Soviet republics with the formation of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). Conceivably, the return of Russia to world politics has the potential to transform the sphere of competition between the U.S. and China into a multipolar plane where the balance of power can shift toward a more stable geopolitical landscape in the long run. Nevertheless, the challenge made by the Xi-Putin partnership to the dominion of Western capital is the basis for the bellicosity toward Eurasia by the U.S., as is their joining forces to repair the Sino-Russian political relations broken decades ago.

    When the Soviet Union dissolved, the tentative US–China alliance effectively ended and Sino-Russian rapprochement began. But what prevented the PRC from going the same route as the Eastern Bloc? Why did Deng succeed and Gorbachev fail? After all, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were concurrent with the numerous ‘Color Revolutions’ behind the Iron Curtain, even though the Western narrative about the June Fourth Incident omits that among the “pro-democracy” demonstrators were many Maoists who considered Deng’s market reforms a betrayal of Chinese socialism. As it happens, Xi Jinping himself correctly identified one of the main reasons why the USSR dissolved in a 2013 speech:

    Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party fall from power? An important reason was that the struggle in the field of ideology was extremely intense, completely negating the history of the Soviet Union, negating the history of the Soviet Communist Party, negating Lenin, negating Stalin, creating historical nihilism and confused thinking. Party organs at all levels had lost their functions, the military was no longer under Party leadership. In the end, the Soviet Communist Party, a great party, was scattered, the Soviet Union, a great socialist country, disintegrated. This is a cautionary tale!

    Xi is correct in that China, unlike the Soviet Union, never made the crucial error of playing into the hands of the West through the condemnation of its own history as Khrushchev did in his “Secret Speech.” Despite the fact that the report by the Soviet leader contained demonstrable falsehoods such as the absurd claim that Stalin, one of Russia’s most formidable bank robbers as a revolutionary, was a coward deathly afraid of the Nazi invasion as it neared Moscow during WWII, the self-serving speech split the international communist movement and laid the internal groundwork for the USSR’s eventual downfall. As for the economic reasons for the different outcomes, the late Marxist historian Domenico Losurdo explained:

    If we analyse the first 15 years of Soviet Russia, we see three social experiments. The first experiment, based on the equal distribution of poverty, suggests the “universal asceticism” and “rough egalitarianism” criticised by the Communist Manifesto. We can now understand the decision to move to Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which was often interpreted as a return to capitalism. The increasing threat of war pushed Stalin into sweeping economic collectivisation. The third experiment produced a very advanced welfare state but ended in failure: in the last years of the Soviet Union, it was characterised by mass absenteeism and disengagement in the workplace; this stalled productivity, and it became hard to find any application of the principle that Marx said should preside over socialism — remuneration according to the quantity and quality of work delivered. The history of China is different: Mao believed that, unlike “political capital,” the economic capital of the bourgeoisie should not be subject to total expropriation, at least until it can serve the development of the national economy. After the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, it took Deng Xiaoping to emphasise that socialism implies the development of the productive forces. Chinese market socialism has achieved extraordinary success.

    Since China’s economic upswing has been simultaneous with the downturn of American capitalism, it has left the U.S. with only one option but to equate the PRC with its own crumbling system. Sadly, in most instances it is the Eurocentric pseudo-left which has parroted the propaganda of Western think tanks that China is “state capitalist” and even “imperialist.” This also means that its unparalleled economic gains must therefore be a result of capitalism, not state planning, which is another fabrication. Has there ever been a clearer case of neocolonial projection than the baseless accusation of “dept-trap diplomacy” hurled at China’s BRI by the West? It is true that China seeks to profit in the global south, but based on terms of mutual benefit for developing nations previously plundered by Western financial institutions which actually impose debt slavery on low income countries. In reality, Beijing is only guilty of offering a preferable win-win alternative to states exploited under the yoke of imperialism. Once upon a time, the U.S. itself envisioned a peaceful world of mutual cooperation and trade under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, a forgotten legacy that Xi’s BRI is fulfilling.

    None of this is to say China is undeserving of any criticism. To the contrary, its paradoxes are as deep as its achievements and it would be naive to think that Chinese capital, if left unchecked, doesn’t have the potential to be as predatory as the Western variety. Free enterprise is so inherently unstable that its destructive nature will be impossible to contain forever even by a party like the CPC and must be disassembled eventually. Without the retention of a large state sector maintaining vital infrastructure and public services, the market relations in China would wreak havoc as it did in post-Soviet Russia. Not to mention, the biggest progress made by the PRC was in the years prior to the pro-market reforms and ultimately served as the foundation upon which “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is able to thrive. The lesson of the fall of the USSR is that even a society capable of the most incredible human advancements is not invincible to a market environment. The Soviet Union withstood an invasion by more than a dozen Allied nations during the Russian Civil War and an onslaught by the Nazi war machine in WWII, but succumbed to perestroika. While Russia may be under the free market, both nations are a threat to Western capital because they represent a new win-win cooperative model in international relations and an end to American unipolarity.

    This article was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2021 at 7:17pm and is filed under China, History, Russia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Afghan peace summit includes just one female delegate

    Activist and politician Habiba Sarabi tells Moscow talks ‘51% of people should not be ignored’

    A three-day conference aimed at breathing life into Afghanistan’s stalled peace process has been launched in Moscow, but Afghan human rights activists have raised the alarm that the delegates included just one woman.

    Habiba Sarabi, an activist and politician, was the only female delegate on the 12-member team representing the Afghan government and political leaders at Thursday’s summit in Moscow. The 10-member delegation sent by the Islamist Taliban had none.

    Related: ‘The Taliban took years of my life’: the Afghan women living in the shadow of war

    Related: Afghan TV station ‘can’t hire women’ over security fears after four killed

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • U.S. Warns Entities Involved In Nord Stream 2 They Face More Sanctions

    The United States has called for “any entity involved” in the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project between Russia and Germany to disengage “immediately” or face U.S. sanctions.

    U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged those entities to pull out of construction on the German-Russian gas project, saying on March 18 that President Joe Biden’s administration was “committed to complying” with the law passed in 2019 and extended in 2020 by the U.S. Congress that provides for sanctions.

    “Nord Stream 2 is a bad deal — for Germany, for Ukraine, and for our Central and Eastern European allies and partners,” Blinken said in a statement, reiterating Washington’s long-standing opposition to the $11 billion gas pipeline running under the Baltic Sea.

    U.S. officials argue that the pipeline, which is supposed to transport 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia to Germany once a year, will make Europe too dependent on Russian energy supplies.

    Blinken denounced it as a “Russian geopolitical project intended to divide Europe and weaken European energy security.”

    The State Department “is tracking efforts to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and is evaluating information regarding entities that appear to be involved,” he added.

    So far, Washington has only imposed sanctions on the Russian company KVT-RUS, which operates the pipe-laying vessel Fortuna. These measures were announced by the administration of U.S. president Donald Trump shortly before the end of its term in January.

    Supporters of the gas pipeline have long accused the US of undermining the project in order to increase sales of their liquid gas in Europe.

    With reporting by AP and dpa

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • U.S., EU Tell OSCE That Russian Media Curbs Are Aimed At Independent Press, RFE/RL

    The United States and European Union have reiterated their condemnation of Russia’s increasing repression of independent media, including RFE/RL.

    Courtney Austrian, the U.S. charge d’ affaires to the Permanent Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said in a March 18 statement that Russia’s new requirements for outlets branded “foreign media agents” were in some cases technically impossible and were being “used against entities and individuals associated, sometimes only tangentially, with U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, funded programming in Russia.”

    The assault on USAGM outlets, including RFE/RL, “reflects a broader crackdown on independent voices and civil society,” Austrian wrote in the statement on behalf of both the United States and Canada.

    “The new regulations are aimed at impeding RFE/RL’s media operations in Russia and reducing its growing audience share.”
    Austrian added that, while USAGM outlets were the first foreign media to be targeted by Russia, media from any OSCE state could be next.

    The new regulations include requirements that entities and individuals designated by Moscow as “media foreign agents” must note the designation in material published in Russia with a prominent, state-mandated, disclaimer.

    In some cases, such as tweets, the requirement was technically impossible because the disclaimer had more characters than allowed by Twitter, Austrian noted.

    Austrian noted that Russia’s media regulatory body, Roskomnadzor, has opened 260 cases against RFE/RL for violations of the regulations, with potential fines of $980,000, since January 14.

    “We reiterate our call on the Russian government to end its repression of independent journalists and outlets, including RFE/RL and its affiliates,” Austrian wrote. “The people of Russia deserve access to a wide range of information and opinion and a government that respects freedom of expression in keeping with Russia’s international obligations and OSCE commitments.”

    False Equivalence

    In a later “right of reply” statement delivered to the Permanent Council in Vienna, Austrian said that the Russian delegation to the intergovernmental organization “has repeatedly tried to create a false equivalence between the draconian measures taken against RFE/RL in Russia and the legal framework within which RT and Sputnik operate in the United States.”

    Those Russian outlets are required to register with the U.S. Justice Ministry as “foreign agents” under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

    However, Austrian said, “we will repeat what we have stated before: there is no equivalence between U.S. FARA legislation and Russia’s ‘foreign agent’ law.”

    Austrian noted that while the U.S. law does not impose restrictions on how foreign outlets print and broadcast their stories and opinions, “Russia uses its ‘foreign agent’ law to restrict, intimidate, prosecute, and shut down civil society organizations and independent media.”

    The European Union on March 18 also issued a statement to the OSCE Permanent Council expressing “our serious concern about the worsening situation of media freedom in Russia.”

    In its two-page statement, the 27-member bloc said that Russia’s adoption in December of stricter measures under its “foreign agents” and other legislation had “enabled the authorities to exercise online censorship.”

    “The EU reiterates its longstanding position that the so-called ‘foreign agent’ law contributes to a systematic infringement of basic freedoms, and restricts civil society, independent media, and the rights of political opposition in Russia,” the statement read. “It goes against Russia’s international obligations and human rights commitments.”

    The EU statement also described the opening of cases against RFE/RL regarding alleged violations of the labeling requirement as “systematic targeting” and “a blatant attempt to silence independent media and to eventually cease RFE/RL’s activities in Russia.”

    ‘Orders To Intimidate’

    Russia’s so-called “foreign agent” legislation was adopted in 2012 and has been modified repeatedly. It requires nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign assistance and that the government deems to be engaged in political activity to be registered, to identify themselves as “foreign agents,” and to submit to audits.

    Later modifications targeted foreign-funded media.

    In 2017, the Russian government placed RFE/RL’s Russian Service on the list, along with six other RFE/RL Russian-language news services, and Current Time, a network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.

    At the end of 2020, the legislation was modified to allow the Russian government to add individuals, including foreign journalists, to its “foreign agent” list and to impose restrictions on them.

    In December 2020, authorities added five individuals to its “foreign agent” list, including three contributors to RFE/RL’s Russian Service. All five are appealing their inclusion on the list.

    Roskomnadzor last year adopted rules requiring listed media to mark all written materials with a lengthy notice in large text, all radio materials with an audio statement, and all video materials with a 15-second text declaration.

    RFE/RL President Jamie Fly has called the regulations “orders to deface our content platforms and intimidate our audiences” and says RFE/RL will continue “to object, protest, and appeal these requirements.”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • GOP Clinging to Their January 6th Lie

    The events of January 6 left several people, including three police officers, dead, and more than 100 law enforcement officers wounded. Hundreds of people have been charged with crimes. Continue reading

    The post GOP Clinging to Their January 6th Lie appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • U.S. Denounces Repression In Russia-Controlled Crimea After Journalist Arrested On Spying Charge

    The United States has called the arrest of a journalist in Russia-annexed Crimea for allegedly spying on behalf of Kyiv “another attempt to repress those who speak the truth about Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.”

    “Russia continues to prosecute Ukrainian activists and target independent voices on the peninsula,” State Department spokesman Ned Price tweeted late on March 17.

    The tweet came one day after Vladislav Yesypenko, who holds dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship and is a freelance contributor to RFE/RL’s Crimea.Realities, a regional news outlet of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, was arrested on suspicion of collecting information for Ukrainian intelligence.

    The Ukrainian Foreign Intelligence Service has described the move as “propaganda” ahead of the seventh anniversary of Moscow’s forcible annexation of the region on March 18.

    According to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), an object “looking like an explosive device” was found in Yesypenko’s vehicle during his arrest. The FSB also claimed he had confessed to collecting data for the Ukrainian Security Service.

    Yesypenko, along with a resident of the Crimean city of Alushta, Yelizaveta Pavlenko, was detained on March 10 after the two took part in an event marking the 207th anniversary of the birth of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko a day earlier in Crimea.

    Pavlenko was later released.

    RFE/RL President Jamie Fly has called Yesypenko’s detention “deeply troubling,” noting that it comes at a time “when the Kremlin is employing harassment and intimidation against any possible alternative voice in Russia-annexed Crimea.”

    Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by at least 100 countries after Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted amid a wave of public protests.

    Rights groups say that, since then, Russia has moved aggressively to prosecute Ukrainian activists and anyone who questions the annexation.

    Moscow also backs separatists in a war against Ukrainian government forces that has killed more than 13,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Russia Set To Host Conference To Revive Afghan Peace Process

    Russia will host a conference on March 18 to advance the peace process in Afghanistan featuring high-level delegations representing the Taliban and Afghan government as well the United States, Pakistan, and China.

    The meeting comes a day after U.S. President Joe Biden warned that it could be difficult for the United States to meet a deadline set out in a U.S.-Taliban deal to withdraw all U.S. troops by May 1.

    “I’m in the process of making that decision now as to when they’ll leave,” Biden said in an interview with U.S. broadcaster ABC.

    “The fact is that that was not a very solidly negotiated deal that the president — the former president — worked out. And so we’re in consultation with our allies as well as the government, and that decision’s going to be — it’s in process now,” Biden said.

    The deal was signed in 2020 during the last year of former President Donald Trump’s administration. Trump later cut the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 2,500 in his final days in office. They are part of a NATO mission that has just under 10,000 troops helping to train and advise Afghan security forces.

    The Taliban has said the May 1 date for the U.S. withdrawal is inflexible. In response to Biden’s comments, a Taliban spokesman told AFP there would be “consequences” if the United States did not stick to the agreed timetable.

    Peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government resumed last month in Qatar after a delay of more than a month amid escalating violence in the country. But the talks, which convened in September, have made little progress.

    The United States is shifting focus to meetings among key regional countries aimed at pushing Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, Taliban insurgents, and other Afghan political leaders to form an interim government.

    The Taliban’s 10-member delegation to the Moscow talks will be led by Mullah Baradar, the group’s deputy leader and chief negotiator at the talks in Qatar. The Afghan government side will be headed by former chief executive Abdullah Abdullah.

    Pakistan will be represented by veteran diplomat Mohammed Sadiq, while the United States has sent longtime Afghan envoy Zalmay Khalilzad.

    The Moscow gathering will be followed by a meeting of regional players next month in Turkey and a summit that Khalilzad has asked the United Nations to organize.

    The Afghan government has said it would take part in the conference in Turkey, but the Taliban has not yet confirmed whether it would attend.

    The United Nations, which is not participating in the Moscow talks, announced on March 17 that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has nominated a new personal envoy, Jean Arnault of France, to work for peace in Afghanistan.

    Arnault will work with Deborah Lyons, who is the world body’s special envoy to Afghanistan. The Canadian is also the head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

    With reporting by AP, AFP, and Radio Free Afghanistan

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Journalist Arrested On Espionage Charge In Russian-Controlled Crimea

    SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — The authorities in Crimea have arrested a man for allegedly spying on behalf of Ukraine, a move Kyiv characterized as propaganda ahead of the seventh anniversary of Moscow’s illegitimate annexation of the region.

    Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on March 16 that Vladislav Yesypenko, who holds dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship and is a freelance contributor to Crimea.Realities, was arrested on suspicion of collecting information for Ukrainian intelligence.

    According to the FSB, an object “looking like an explosive device” was found in Yesypenko’s automobile during his apprehension. It also said he confessed to collecting data for the Ukrainian Security Service.

    Yesypenko, along with a resident of the Crimean city of Alushta, Yelizaveta Pavlenko, was detained on March 10 after the two took part in an event marking the 207th anniversary of the Ukrainian poet and thinker Taras Shevchenko the day before in Crimea.

    Pavlenko was later released.

    Yesypenko’s lawyer, Emil Kuberdinov, said on March 15 that he had not been allowed to meet with his client since his arrest.

    “At a time when the Kremlin is employing harassment and intimidation against any possible alternative voice in Russia-annexed Crimea, the recent detention of Vladislav Yesypenko, a freelancer for RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, is deeply troubling. Yesypenko should be released immediately, so that he can be reunited with his family,” RFE/RL President Jamie Fly said in a statement.

    Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by at least 100 countries after Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted amid a wave of public protests.

    Rights groups say that since then, Russia has moved aggressively to prosecute Ukrainian activists and anyone who questions the annexation.

    The Ukrainian Foreign Intelligence Service said in a post on Facebook that with the arrest, the FSB was trying create the atmosphere the Kremlin needs to “celebrate the anniversary of the occupation of Crimea.”

    “Such propaganda on the eve of the anniversary is a convenient attempt to distract the attention of the population away from the numerous internal problems of the peninsula,” it said.

    “Russia is deliberately inflating the situation, trying to shift responsibility for the settlement process in eastern Ukraine to Ukraine.”

    Moscow also backs separatists in a war against Ukrainian government forces that has killed more than 13,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.

    On March 15, the Russian-imposed authorities in the Black Sea peninsula temporarily lifted coronavirus pandemic restrictions to mark the seventh anniversary of the region’s annexation with a variety of events organized by the pro-Kremlin Night Wolves bikers club, as well as patriotic events at schools and military schools on March 18.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • U.S. Intelligence Says Iran, Russia Carried Out Influence Operations During 2020 Election

    Russia and Iran both conducted misinformation operations to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, according to a U.S. intelligence report.

    The unclassified 15-page report, published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on March 16, said there were no indications foreign actors attempted to influence technical aspects of the U.S. election, such as meddling with ballots or voter tabulation.

    But it assessed that Russian President Vladimir Putin “authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the United States.”

    Unlike during Russian meddling in the 2016 election, U.S. intelligence did not observe Russian cyber-action to gain access to election infrastructure. Instead, the report said the Russian state and its proxies tried to impact U.S. public perceptions.

    Moscow’s strategy primarily revolved around using “proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives” to U.S. media, officials, and prominent individuals, “including some close to former President Trump and his administration,” the report said.

    Meanwhile, Iran also carried out “a multi-pronged covert influence campaign” to damage Trump’s reelection campaign, but did not actively promote Biden.

    The goal of Iran’s actions was to undermine confidence in the U.S. election and institutions and foster divisions within society, the report said.

    Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “authorized the campaign and Iran’s military and intelligence services implemented it using overt and covert messaging and cyber-operations,” the report said.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Global Arms Transfers Leveled Off From 2016 To 2020, Swedish Institute Says

    International deliveries of arms were flat from 2016 through 2020 compared with the previous five-year period, but they were still close to the highest level since the end of the Cold War, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said in a report released on March 15.

    Three of the top five arms exporters – the United States, France, and Germany – increased deliveries from 2016-20, but a decline in exports from Russian and China offset the rise, SIPRI said in its latest review of global arms transfers.

    It was the first time since the 2001–05 period that the volume of deliveries of major arms between countries did not increase from the previous five years, SIPRI said.

    The United States remained the top exporter, accounting for 37 percent of global arms transfers during the period, SIPRI said. Half of U.S. transfers were made to the Middle East.

    Russia, the world’s second-largest exporter, accounted for one-fifth of global arms deliveries, but its sales declined by 22 per cent compared to the 2011-15 period, mainly due to a sizeable drop in imports by India, SIPRI said.

    SIPRI senior researcher Pieter Wezeman said it was too early to tell whether the slowdown in arms deliveries would continue.

    “The economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic could see some countries reassessing their arms imports in the coming years,” Wezeman said. “However, at the same time, even at the height of the pandemic in 2020, several countries signed large contracts for major arms.”

    The United Arab Emirates, for example, recently signed an agreement with the United States to purchase 50 F-35 jets and up to 18 armed drones as part of a $23 billion package.

    Middle Eastern countries accounted for the biggest increase in arms imports, up 25 percent in 2016–20 from 2011–15.

    Saudi Arabia was the world’s largest arms importer, accounting for 11 per cent of global imports during the period. Other top importers were India, Egypt, Australia, and China.

    Asia and Oceania were the largest importing regions for major arms, receiving 42 percent of global arms transfers in 2016–20. India, Australia, China, South Korea, and Pakistan were the biggest importers in the region.

    France, the third largest exporter, with 8 percent, recorded several large deals, most notably with India, Egypt, and Qatar, the institute said.

    Germany and China completed the list of top five exporters.

    The SIPRI arms transfers database does not include small arms and is based on public sources, including newspapers, specialized international journals, and government and industry reports.

    With reporting by Reuters and dpa

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Global Arms Transfers Leveled Off From 2016 To 2020, Swedish Institute Says

    International deliveries of arms were flat from 2016 through 2020 compared with the previous five-year period, but they were still close to the highest level since the end of the Cold War, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said in a report released on March 15.

    Three of the top five arms exporters — the United States, France, and Germany — increased deliveries from 2016 to 2020, but a decline in exports from Russia and China offset the rise, SIPRI said in its latest review of global arms transfers.

    It was the first time since the 2001-05 period that the volume of deliveries of major arms between countries did not increase from the previous five years, SIPRI said.

    The United States remained the top exporter, accounting for 37 percent of global arms transfers during the period, SIPRI said. Half of U.S. transfers were made to the Middle East.

    Russia, the world’s second-largest exporter, accounted for one-fifth of global arms deliveries, but its sales declined by 22 per cent compared to the 2011-15 period, mainly due to a sizeable drop in imports by India, SIPRI said.

    SIPRI senior researcher Pieter Wezeman said it was too early to tell whether the slowdown in arms deliveries would continue.

    Impact Of Pandemic

    “The economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic could see some countries reassessing their arms imports in the coming years,” Wezeman said. “However, at the same time, even at the height of the pandemic in 2020, several countries signed large contracts for major arms.”

    The United Arab Emirates, for example, recently signed an agreement with the United States to purchase 50 F-35 jets and up to 18 armed drones as part of a $23 billion package.

    Middle Eastern countries accounted for the biggest increase in arms imports, up 25 percent in 2016–20 from 2011–15.

    Saudi Arabia was the world’s largest arms importer, accounting for 11 per cent of global imports during the period. Other top importers were India, Egypt, Australia, and China.

    Asia and Oceania were the largest importing regions for major arms, receiving 42 percent of global arms transfers in 2016–20. India, Australia, China, South Korea, and Pakistan were the biggest importers in the region.

    France, the third largest exporter, with 8 percent, recorded several large deals, most notably with India, Egypt, and Qatar, the institute said.

    Germany and China completed the list of top five exporters.

    The SIPRI arms transfers database does not include small arms and is based on public sources, including newspapers, specialized international journals, and government and industry reports.

    With reporting by Reuters and dpa

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • China Prepares New Era Of ‘Belt And Road’ Amid Pandemic Pressures

    After declaring victories over extreme poverty and the coronavirus, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has laid out a new path for China’s economic rise at home and abroad that could force Beijing to adapt to new difficulties caused by the pandemic.

    The future direction came as the Chinese Communist Party’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, convened in Beijing on March 5 for a more-than-week-long gathering to unveil a new economic blueprint — known as the country’s 14th five-year plan — and chart a broad course for China to claim its place as a modern nation and true global power.

    The annual summit of Chinese lawmakers laid out broad guidelines that would shape the country’s growth model over the next 15 years.

    Preoccupied with growing China’s tech industry amid a deepening rivalry with the United States, it also provided a platform for Xi to tout the merits of his autocratic style and tightening grip on power at home.

    While the stagecraft of the conclave focused on China’s domestic goals, they remain deeply intertwined with Beijing’s global ambitions, particularly the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — a blanket term for the multibillion-dollar centerpiece of Xi’s foreign policy that builds influence through infrastructure, investment, and closer political ties.

    “The message is a continuation and doubling-down of what we’ve been seeing for years, which is that China is growing stronger and it feels confident to elbow its way in even more around the world,” Raffaello Pantucci, a senior associate fellow at London’s Royal United Services Institute, told RFE/RL.

    A giant screen shows Chinese President Xi Jinping attending the closing session of the National People's Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 11.

    A giant screen shows Chinese President Xi Jinping attending the closing session of the National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 11.

    Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi echoed this during an expansive March 8 press conference on the sidelines of the congress in Beijing, where he said there would be no pause for BRI and that it had and would continue to evolve amid the constraints and opportunities caused by the pandemic.

    “[BRI] isn’t so much a specific project as it is a broad vision,” Pantucci said, “and visions can be reshaped as needed, which is what we’re seeing now.”

    An Evolving Vision

    Despite the display of strength and unity coming out of Beijing over the country’s success in curbing the spread of COVID-19 and keeping its economy growing amid the pressures of the pandemic, Beijing finds itself facing new global pressure.

    The BRI has suffered setbacks recently due to concerns in host countries over mounting debts, with many governments — from Africa to Central Asia — asking China for debt forgiveness and restructuring. Beijing is also looking to rebuild its credibility, which was hurt over its early handling of COVID-19 in the central city of Wuhan, and navigate growing pressure from Western countries that have begun to push back against Chinese tech and political policies.

    In the face of this, Beijing has looked for new opportunities to demonstrate global leadership, providing vaccines and medical equipment to countries across the globe and raising climate-change concerns.

    This has also applied to the BRI.

    During his press conference, Wang focused on the initiative’s traditional infrastructure emphasis, but also pointed towards new horizons for the policy, such as medical diplomacy as well as a shifting focus on tech and foreign aid. China is the world’s largest emerging donor and a new white paper released in January by the Chinese government outlined its plans to play an ambitious leading role in the international aid system.

    Many experts also say Beijing will look to build off its growing “vaccine diplomacy” campaign and use China’s recent success in fighting poverty to find new ways to build ties and deepen cooperation around the world.

    “Fighting poverty and medical coordination linked to the pandemic and its aftermath will be a major focus of Chinese diplomacy moving forward,” Zhang Xin, a research fellow at Shanghai’s East China Normal University, told RFE/RL. “[BRI] is an umbrella initiative that can include everything and this will be one of the new fronts under that umbrella.”

    Realities On The Ground

    Despite the growing opportunities, China’s flagship project is also facing plenty of challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic on the ground.

    In addition to debt concerns, closed or partially open borders with China’s neighbors in South and Central Asia due to China’s strict COVID restrictions remain a point of tension, and have led to massive lines, trade bottlenecks, and ballooning transportation costs.

    China’s overseas energy lending has likewise dropped to its lowest level since 2008, after the pandemic severely hampered deal-making in developing states, according to Boston University’s Global Energy Finance Database, which saw financing for foreign energy projects fall by 43 percent to $4.6 billion in 2020.

    And while the pandemic provided an all-time high for freight-train traffic to Europe from China, it has slowed trade from Central Asia to China. Only limited traffic is allowed to pass through China’s border post with Kyrgyzstan, something the new government in Bishkek is trying to change as it deals with the economic blows of the pandemic.

    Kyrgyz Prime Minister Ulukbek Maripov met with Du Dewen, China’s ambassador to Bishkek, on March 3 to discuss speeding up border crossings and increasing trade, but progress remains uncertain as long as China stays wary of the spread of COVID-19 in Central Asia.

    Similarly, traders in Tajikistan are still grappling with border closures as they remain cut off from their main export destination. Many of the merchants complain they are being squeezed out by Chinese competitors.

    Preliminary Chinese trade data for 2020 shows that imports to China from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan fell by more than 45 percent compared to 2019.

    Tensions also continue to flare in Pakistan, where the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), China’s flagship BRI project, is progressing slowly amid multiple setbacks and delays. While problems with the initiative are not new, Beijing has aired its frustrations and supported the Pakistani military taking greater control over CPEC, which it views as a more reliable partner than the country’s political class.

    Global Headwinds

    Trade and relations with neighboring Russia, however, appear to still be a bright spot for Beijing. Russian customs figures show that China continues to make up a growing share of its trade as Moscow increasingly finds itself sanctioned and cut off from the West.

    Political ties between Beijing and Moscow are also deepening. Wang spoke at length at his press conference about how the two governments were working closer together in a variety of fields, from plans to build a lunar space station to joint efforts in vaccine production.

    Wang also said that the two countries were working to combat “color revolutions” and to fight against a “political virus,” hinting at their shared animosity towards the United States.

    “The overall tone is quite clear, the partnership between China and Russia is being heavily valued,” Zhang said. “The Chinese state is emphasizing this relationship and how they can act together [with Russia] to face shared challenges around the world.”

    Chief among those challenges for Beijing is continuing to grow its economy at home and navigate its rivalry with the United States.

    U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national-security adviser Jake Sullivan will meet with their Chinese counterparts in Alaska on March 18 for the first meeting between Beijing and the administration of President Joe Biden.

    China is also looking to take successful policies at home and build upon them abroad under the banner of the BRI. China was the only major world economy to expand last year and many of its neighbors across Eurasia are hoping Chinese economic growth can help them with a post-pandemic recovery.

    But China’s own recovery remains fragile in some areas, including in consumer spending, and regulators are growing more worried about real-estate prices rising to unsustainable levels. The Chinese stock market began to recover on March 11 after a large rout that saw officials censor the word “stock market” from social media searches in the country, showcasing the sensitivity to anything that can derail Beijing’s ambitions at home or abroad.

    “There are many challenges ahead for the Chinese leadership to navigate and maintaining economic growth is the biggest one,” Ho-Fung Hung, a professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University, told RFE/RL. “Xi cares about political power and boosting economic growth is the best way to hold on to political power.”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Opposition, NGO Event Broken Up In Moscow, Dozens Detained

    Russian police have stormed a gathering of independent local deputies in the capital and detained dozens of people, reportedly accusing them of taking part in an event organized by an “undesirable” group. A correspondent for RFE/RL’s Russian Service said officers arrived at the “Municipal Russia” event about 40 minutes after it began at Moscow’s Izmailovo Hotel early on March 13 and started taking people away. The event was organized by the United Democrats project, which is not among the entities on the list of “undesirable” organizations kept by prosecutors. Russia’s “undesirable organization” law was adopted in 2015 amid a number of legislative, executive, and other restrictive efforts to curb dissent in the country.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Moscow Police Break Up ‘Municipal Russia’ Event, Detain Independent NGO, Political Leaders

    Russian police have stormed a gathering of independent local deputies in the capital and detained dozens of people, reportedly accusing them of taking part in an event organized by an “undesirable” group.

    A correspondent for RFE/RL’s Russian Service said officers arrived at the “Municipal Russia” event about 40 minutes after it began at Moscow’s Izmailovo Hotel early on March 13 and started taking people away.

    The list of detainees numbers at least 100, according to one of the groups involved, and is a “who’s who” among politicians and NGOs critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    The event was organized by the United Democrats project, which is not among the entities on the list of “undesirable” organizations kept by prosecutors.

    The detainees include senior Open Russia leaders Andrey Pivovarov and Anastasia Burakova, former Yekaterinburg Mayor Yevgeny Roizman, city deputies Ilya Yashin and Yuliya Galyamina, and opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza.

    A number of journalists from independent media were also detained.

    There were said to be around 150 attendees at the forum.

    Reports from the scene suggested detainees were being taken away to a number of different police stations and Interior Ministry facilities in some of the more than 12 police minibuses parked outside the hotel.

    Russia’s “undesirable organization” law was adopted in May 2015 amid a flurry of legislative, executive, and other restrictive efforts to further curb dissent in the country.

    One of the effects has been to squeeze many nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations that receive funding from foreign sources and provide grounds to persecute their members.

    Open Russia has been on the “undesirable” list since 2017, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said Open Russia and other groups have come under increasing pressure.

    Its coordinator, Tatyana Usmanova, told local Dozhd TV that she didn’t know why police would have started targeting the United Democrats project too.

    Fresh elections, which routinely include bans and disqualifications of opposition and independent candidates critical of the government, are due in the fall.

    A bipartisan group of U.S. senators on March 12 called on Putin to halt what they called a “state-sponsored assault on media freedom” through the targeting of RFE/RL under a controversial “foreign agent” law.

    A long list of other organizations are also targeted under that legislation.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • U.S. Senators Condemn Russia’s ‘Assault’ On RFE/RL

    A bipartisan group of top U.S. senators has called on President Vladimir Putin to halt Russia’s “state-sponsored assault on media freedom” through the targeting of RFE/RL.

    In a March 12 statement, Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took aim at the deteriorating media environment in Russia and a clampdown on U.S.-funded RFE/RL under a controversial “foreign agent” law.

    Russia’s state media-monitoring agency Roskomnadzor has opened 260 cases against RFE/RL Russian-language news services for failing to mark written and broadcast materials in accordance with onerous regulations. A Moscow court has already levied fines totaling some $1 million in 142 cases.

    “Long employed to weaken Russian civil society, the Kremlin is now using onerous ‘foreign agent’ laws as a pretext to silence RFE/RL in Russia, pursuing court cases and fines,” Senators Chris Coons (Democrat-Delaware), Mitt Romney (Republican-Utah), Marco Rubio (Republican-Florida), and Bob Menendez (Democrat-New Jersey), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a joint statement.

    The senators accused Putin of consolidating control over the media and passing laws to punish critics, while threatening the safety of members of the press.

    “In this harsh media environment, RFE/RL has performed an invaluable service to the Russian people, providing them uncensored local news that aims to meet the highest standards of objective journalism,” the senators said.

    The string of cases against RFE/RL means that pending appeals, it must pay the fines and come into compliance with regulations or face the potential closure of its operations inside Russia.

    Earlier this month the U.S. State Department expressed “deep concern” about what it called Russian government efforts “to clamp down on the exercise of freedom of expression.”

    The statement came the same day that a Moscow judge rejected five appeals by RFE/RL against fines imposed on the company under the “foreign agent” law.

    Russia’s so-called “foreign agent” legislation was adopted in 2012 and has been modified repeatedly. It requires nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign assistance and that the government deems to be engaged in political activity to be registered, to identify themselves as “foreign agents,” and to submit to audits.

    Later modifications targeted foreign-funded media.

    In 2017, the Russian government placed RFE/RL’s Russian Service on the list, along with six other RFE/RL Russian-language news services, and Current Time, a network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.

    At the end of 2020, the legislation was modified to allow the Russian government to include individuals, including foreign journalists, on its “foreign agent” list and to impose restrictions on them.

    In December 2020, authorities added five individuals to its “foreign agent” list, including three contributors to RFE/RL’s Russian Service. All five are appealing their inclusion on the list.

    Roskomnadzor last year adopted rules requiring listed media to mark all written materials with a lengthy notice in large text, all radio materials with an audio statement, and all video materials with a 15-second text declaration.

    RFE/RL President Jamie Fly has called the regulations “orders to deface our content platforms and intimidate our audiences.” He added that RFE/RL will continue “to object, protest, and appeal these requirements.”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • China unveils homegrown HQ-17AE short range air defence system

    State-owned defence prime China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) has unveiled a new variant of the in-service Hong Qi-17A (HQ-17A) self-propelled short-range air-defence (SHORAD) system known as the HQ-17AE, state broadcaster CCTV revealed on 7 March. The HQ-17AE is the latest variant within the “Flying Mongoose” family of SHORAD vehicles developed by CASIC’s Second […]

    The post China unveils homegrown HQ-17AE short range air defence system appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Blinken Assures Congress Of Biden’s Opposition To Nord Stream 2

    U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has assured members of Congress that the Biden administration opposes the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and said the administration continues to review further sanctions.

    Blinken told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that President Joe Biden thinks the nearly completed pipeline was a “bad idea” and had “been clear on this for some time.”

    He added that the United States, which has already placed sanctions on companies involved in building the pipeline, was “making clear that we stand against its completion…and we continue to review other possibilities for sanctions going forward.”

    Nord Stream 2 is designed to reroute Russian natural-gas exports to Europe under the Baltic Sea, circumventing Ukraine.

    Congress opposes the pipeline on the grounds that it strengthens the Kremlin’s hold on Europe’s energy industry and hurts Ukraine, which stands to lose billions of dollars in annual transit fees.

    Senate Republicans have been pressuring the Biden administration to impose sanctions on more companies involved in the project.

    At the same time it has called the pipeline a “bad idea,” the Biden administration is also reportedly concerned about the impact additional sanctions would have on U.S. relations with Germany, which has defended the pipeline as a commercial project.

    Legislation passed by Congress in 2019 placing sanctions on vessels laying the pipeline halted the project for more than a year, but Russia resumed construction with its own ships.

    That pushed Congress to pass new legislation last year widening the sanctions to include companies engaging generally in Nord Stream 2 activities, including those that insure and certify the project.

    The legislation required the administration to update Congress on the status of the project and impose sanctions on any companies in violation. In its update last month the Biden administration identified only one vessel and its owner, which were already under sanction. Meanwhile, some media reports have identified at least a dozen companies involved in the construction.

    In a letter to Biden last week, 40 Senate Republicans called the update “completely inadequate” and demanded the administration place sanctions on the additional companies “without delay.”

    Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee also asked Blinken about Moscow’s involvement in Venezuela and Cuba. He said the United States had seen a resurgence of Russian presence and activity in the two countries, and “we’re very attentive to that across the board.”

    With reporting by Reuters

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Has NYT Heard of China’s or Russia’s Covid Vaccines?

     

    I guess it is hard to get news at the world’s leading newspapers, but this lengthy New York Times podcast (The Daily, 3/3/21) on Bill Gates and his efforts to make vaccines available to the developing world never once mentioned the vaccines developed by China or Russia. This is more than a bit incredible, because at this point, far more of the Russian and Chinese vaccines are going to developing countries than the vaccines supplied by Western countries through COVAX, the international consortium set up the World Health Organization and supported by the Gates Foundation.

    Are New York Times reporters prohibited from talking about the Chinese and Russian vaccines?

    This piece is also incredible in that it explicitly says that because Gates doesn’t want the government-granted patent monopoly system of financing from being challenged, there is no alternative. That could well be true, but it speaks to the incredible corruption of our politics and our economy that because one incredibly rich person is opposed to having a corrupt, inefficient and antiquated system reformed, it will not be reformed.

    A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (3/4/21).

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • EU Report Says Germany Is Leading Target Of Russian Disinformation

    Russia has targeted Germany more than any other country in the European Union in its disinformation efforts, a new report by the 27-member bloc shows.

    “No other EU member state is being attacked more violently than Germany,” says the report published on March 9 by the EU diplomatic service in Brussels.

    The report says “systematic campaigns” have been launched at the political level and through media close to the Kremlin.

    The report comes as the United States has accused Russia of a coordinated disinformation campaign designed to undermine faith in U.S.- and Western-developed coronavirus vaccines.

    Russia denies it is involved in disinformation campaigns.

    The EU says that since late 2015, more than 700 cases have been collected on Germany in the EUvsDisinfo database.

    France was the target more than 300 times, with Italy around 170 times, it adds.

    “The Kremlin creates an intellectual image of Germany in which there are a few sensible voices in a chorus of irrational ‘Russophobia’” the report says.

    Based on reporting by dpa

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • U.S. Condemns Russia For Vaccine ‘Disinformation,’ Vows To Fight Back

    The United States publicly blasted what it called a Russian disinformation campaign designed to undermine confidence in U.S.-made COVID-19 vaccines and vowed to fight back “with every tool we have.”

    “It is very clear that Russia is up to its old tricks, and in doing so is potentially putting people at risk by spreading disinformation about vaccines that we know to be saving lives every day,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters on March 8.

    The comments came after The Wall Street Journal on March 7 reported on findings of the Global Engagement Center — an arm of the State Department – that said Russian intelligence was behind four online platforms involved in a coordinated campaign.

    The WSJ said the websites played up risks of the U.S.-made Pfizer vaccine in an apparent bid to boost Russia’s homegrown Sputnik V vaccine.

    The websites accentuate actual international news reports that cast a negative view of the vaccines without providing contradictory information about their safety and efficacy, the WSJ reported.

    Price said the sites have “included disinformation about two of the vaccines that have now been approved” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

    White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a news briefing that “we will fight [the disinformation] with every tool we have.”

    Western vaccines were approved after stringent trials that demonstrated efficacy of more than 90 percent with two of the most used vaccines. The Western vaccines compete with Sputnik V, which also recently showed efficacy of greater than 90 percent in a mass trial.

    The websites identified by the Global Engagement Center include New Eastern Outlook and Oriental Review, which it says are controlled by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and News Front, which it claims is run by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). News Front is based in Russian-occupied Crimea.

    Pfizer’s vaccine has been the main target of the Russian campaign, according to a report on March 8 by the Alliance for Security Democracy, a nonpartisan initiative that studies disinformation by autocratic governments.

    “The emphasis on denigrating Pfizer is likely due in part to its status as the first vaccine besides Sputnik V to see mass use, resulting in a greater potential threat to Sputnik’s market dominance,” the Alliance’s report says.

    AFP reported that in an assessment provided to it last year, the Global Engagement Center said that thousands of Russian-linked social media accounts have run a coordinated campaign to undermine official narratives on COVID-19.

    Following the WSJ report, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that Russian intelligence agencies were spreading disinformation about Western vaccines and said the United States was trying to blame Russia for the resulting international debate on coronavirus remedies.

    The State Department center found that China made a similar effort for a short time but ultimately decided it was more beneficial to highlight its own vaccine efforts rather than to disparage other versions.

    With reporting by AFP, USA Today, and WSJ

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Tajik-Born Singer Manizha To Represent Russia In Eurovision Song Contest

    Tajik-born singer and UNHCR goodwill ambassador Manizha has been chosen to represent Russia at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.

    Program host Yana Churikova said during a selection competition broadcast on March 8 that the 29-year-old Manizha was chosen through a nationwide popular vote to represent Russia in the annual song contest watched by millions throughout the world.

    Churikova said the singer, whose full name is Manizha Sangin, will perform the song Russia Woman in the finals competition.

    The singer-songwriter has become a public figure through her work as a musician, music video director, and as a goodwill ambassador for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) in 2020.

    She was born in Tajikistan in 1991. Her family moved to Russia during the Central Asian country’s 1992-97 civil war.

    The 65th Eurovision contest is to be held in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam on May 18-22 after last year’s edition was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The site of the 2022 contest will be based on the winner of this year’s competition.

    With reporting by TASS

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Bishkek Ballet Dancers Boycott Performance With Russians Over Pay

    BISHKEK — A ballet performance in Kyrgyzstan with the participation of two prominent Russian ballet dancers, Sergei Manuilov and Yekaterina Pervushina, was canceled after local dancers refused to take part.

    The Swan Lake performance was due to take place in Bishkek over the weekend, but a group of dancers from the Abdylas Maldybaev National Opera and Ballet Theater refused to perform at the last moment.

    A member of the Kyrgyz ballet troupe, Dosmat Sadyrkulov, told RFE/RL on March 8 that the dancers refused to participate because they hadn’t been paid.

    Sagida Jumabekova of the Rainbow Foundation, the organizer of the event, said that it had been agreed that the foundation would pay the Russian dancers while the local artists would receive money from the Bishkek ballet theater.

    “The local [dancers] started asking for money from us. We agreed to do so, although [we were not legally bound to do so], just to try to save the performance. But even when we brought the cash to pay them, they still refused to perform,” Jumabekova told RFE/RL.

    Sadyrkulov explained that the March 6 scheduled performance was “a commercial project with commercial ticket prices.”

    Ticket prices ranged from 1,000 to 2,000 soms (between $12 and $24) — a significant sum of money in the former Soviet republic.

    “The prices are very high for Bishkek, but our dancers do not receive anything for their performance. This is a long-standing issue. Our performers have asked both the theater’s administration and the Culture Ministry to solve the problem,” Sadyrkulov said.

    According to him, the theater received a double rental fee for the one-day Swan Lake performance, but refused to pay the Kyrgyz dancers, arguing that they already receive monthly salaries.

    “When [the Kyrgyz dancers] refused to put on the costumes 30 minutes before the performance, they started promising money…and then they threatened to fire them or sue them,” Sadyrkulov said.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Detained Russian Protester Uses Current Time Video To Win Legal Battle

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • U.S. Accuses Russia Of Spreading Disinformation About Western COVID Vaccines

    The United States has accused Russian intelligence agencies of spreading disinformation about Western vaccines against the coronavirus in an attempt to undermine global confidence in their safety, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

    The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which monitors foreign disinformation efforts, told the newspaper that four websites it claims are associated with Russian intelligence have been publishing articles questioning the efficacy of the vaccines and raising questions about their side effects.

    The websites accentuate actual international news reports that cast a negative view of the vaccines without providing contradictory information about their safety and efficacy, the newspaper reported.

    Western vaccines were approved after stringent trials that demonstrated more than 60 percent efficacy, and in two of the three cases, more than 90 percent. The Western vaccines compete with Russia’s Sputnik V, which also recently showed efficacy of greater than 90 percent in a mass trial.

    The websites identified by the Global Engagement Center include New Eastern Outlook and Oriental Review, which it says are Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and News Front, which it claims is run by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). News Front is based in Russian-occupied Crimea.

    The fourth website, Rebel Inside, is controlled by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, according to the Global Engagement Center. However, it did not provide specific evidence linking the publications to Russian intelligence.

    The websites are niche, without a large following. New Eastern Outlook and Oriental Review focus on an audience based in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Rebel Inside appears to be dormant, the center said.

    U.S. social-media companies have removed the accounts affiliated with the four websites, though some non-English-language accounts remained active earlier this year.

    Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that Russian intelligence agencies were spreading disinformation about Western vaccines and said the United States was trying to blame Russia for the resulting international debate on coronavirus remedies.

    The United States has long accused Russia of spreading disinformation on medical issues, going back to Soviet times, experts told The Wall Street Journal.

    A Soviet KGB campaign claimed that U.S. military biological labs unleashed the AIDS epidemic.

    With reporting by The Wall Street Journal

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • U.S. Senator Holds Up CIA Nomination To Force Biden To Stop Nord Stream 2

    U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (Republican-Texas) says he is holding up the confirmation of the next Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief in order to pressure President Joe Biden to stop Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

    “I’ll release my hold when the Biden admin meets its legal obligation to report and sanction the ships and companies building [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s pipeline,” Cruz said in a tweet on March 6 as he confirmed an earlier Bloomberg story.

    Biden in January picked William Burns, a career Foreign Service officer who served as ambassador to Russia in the 2000s, to be the next head of the CIA.

    The 64-year-old was approved by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on March 2 following a confirmation hearing last month.

    Senate Republicans have been pressuring the Biden administration to impose sanctions on more companies reportedly involved in the construction of Nord Stream 2.

    The pipeline, which is more than 90 percent complete, is designed to reroute Russian natural gas to Europe under the Baltic Sea, circumventing Ukraine.

    Congress opposes the pipeline on the grounds that it strengthens the Kremlin hold on Europe’s energy industry and hurts Ukraine, which stands to lose billions of dollars in annual transit fees.

    Legislation passed in 2019 to place sanctions on vessels laying the pipeline halted the project for more than a year.

    However, Russia has resumed completion of the project with its own ships, pushing Congress late last year to pass new legislation widening the sanctions beyond vessels to include companies engaging generally in Nord Stream 2 activities, including insuring and certifying the project.

    The legislation required the administration to update Congress in February on the status of the project and impose sanctions on any companies in violation. The Biden administration identified one vessel and its owner, which were already put under sanctions.

    However, some media reports have identified at least a dozen companies involved in the construction.

    In a March 3 letter addressed to Biden, 40 Senate Republicans, including Cruz, called the February update “completely inadequate” and demanded the Biden administration impose sanctions on the additional companies “without delay.”

    While Biden has called the pipeline a “bad deal for Europe,” his administration is reportedly concerned about the impact additional sanctions would have on its relationship with Germany.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘We Are Coming For You’: Russian Feminists Face Intimidation Campaign Online

    MOSCOW — On February 14, a small group of women in the Russian capital marked Valentine’s Day by holding a demonstration in support of jailed women they consider political prisoners. They also wanted to encourage Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of imprisoned opposition politician Aleksei Navalny.

    “I admire those who know that they could face more than just fines but who come to protests anyway,” said a retiree who asked to be identified only as Marina and who regularly attends opposition demonstrations. “When you know what those people are risking, you are ashamed to sit at home and complain in your kitchen.”

    But some of those involved in the protest risked more than fines or even jail. A woman who asked to be identified only as Ksenia, who is a member of the SotsFem Alternativa community, told RFE/RL that the leader of a growing online community called Male State (Muzhskoye gosudarstvo) posted personal information on social media on February 13, telling her not to participate in the protest the next day and stressing ominously that this was her “first warning.”

    “His followers began sending me all sorts of insults, some even saying it would be good if I died,” Ksenia told RFE/RL.

    Other SotsFem Alternativa activists also had their contact information posted on closed Male State forums.

    “We got a lot of indecipherable threats…using anonymous accounts,” Ksenia recalled. “It was very unpleasant.”

    Feminist artist and activist Darya Serenko was an organizer of the February 14 protest, and her personal data and the physical address of some of her relatives were posted by Male State leader Vladislav Pozdnyakov on his Telegram channel. She received nearly 600 insulting or threatening messages.

    Serenko said many of the messages she received from Male State acolytes contained direct threats.

    “There were threats like: ‘We will find out your address,’” she said in an interview with the website Mediazona. “‘We are coming for you.’ ‘Look around you.’ ‘We will sit you down on a bottle.’ ‘We are coming to rape you.’ ‘We know where your husband lives.’ ‘We will kill your pets.’”

    On February 14, she wrote on Twitter that the intimidation campaign against her had moved to the real world.

    “I was followed from early this morning,” she wrote. “I’m talking about a real threat to my life and health. I will file a complaint.”

    Women have been threatened for taking part in protests.

    Women have been threatened for taking part in protests.

    Pozdnyakov, 30, refused to speak to RFE/RL for this article, insisting that he would only do so if RFE/RL deleted an earlier article about the origins of Male State. Pozdnyakov created the online community on the VK social-media site in 2016. Its members were openly racist and misogynist, advocating extreme right-wing views, and even calling for morality police.

    Members celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday and railed against Russian women they felt were destroying the Russian nation through immoral behavior such as homosexuality or consorting with foreigners. Pozdnyakov called the community’s ideology “national-patriarchy.”

    Incel Community

    Filmmaker Yelena Khazanova has spent two years studying the “incel” phenomenon, beginning her work after a self-professed incel drove a truck onto a sidewalk in Toronto, Canada, and killed 10 people. Incels — the term is a portmanteau of “involuntary celibates” — have been listed as a hate group by the U.S.-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which describes them as “part of the online male supremacist ecosystem.”

    “We studied both Russian and English-language sources,” Khazanova told RFE/RL in an interview in July 2020. “For two years we were only working on this topic. Two years ago, when we started, no one in Russia had heard the term ‘incel.’ But during the time that we have been working, the situation has changed a lot.”

    Khazanova said the Male State phenomenon is ideologically and psychologically akin to the larger incel phenomenon.

    “These are typical conservative convictions that have been given new life by our digital reality,” she said. “Incels believe that women have taken their place in the world, that in reality men should be dominant and that women must obey them. Their worst enemies are feminists, whom they even refuse to acknowledge as women.”

    Some social-media accounts of Male State leader Vladislav Pozdnyakov have been blocked.

    Some social-media accounts of Male State leader Vladislav Pozdnyakov have been blocked.

    “Feminists and LGBT are biogarbage,” Pozdnyakov wrote on Telegram after the February 14 protest. “Absolute deformities and degenerates. They are psychologically sick people who have no place among normal people.”

    The Male State community gained notoriety for various campaigns purporting to “out” women who supposedly appeared in pornographic clips in the past, threatening to tell their husbands and children and sometimes trying to extort money. Some victims of these campaigns, who asked not to be identified, told RFE/RL they were wrongly targeted for superficial similarities to the women in the videos.

    One woman, who works now as a teacher, shared with RFE/RL an audio direct message from one of Postnyakov’s personal social-media accounts in which a voice threatens to send pornographic videos to her students and to post screenshots around her school if she didn’t quit. Her minor son also received Male State messages.

    Male State campaigns have also targeted women who posted photographs of themselves with black men or who have mixed-race children. One woman, who was only 16 and who asked that her name not be used, was targeted for such a photograph.

    “My goodness,” she told RFE/RL, “I only kissed him once.”

    One 28-year-old from Mordovia who asked to be identified only as Anna is married to a man from Ghana and has a 2-year-old daughter.

    One woman, who is married to a man from Ghana, received abuse online.

    One woman, who is married to a man from Ghana, received abuse online.

    “A lot of the messages contained threats to my life,” she said. “‘We will find you.’ ‘You can’t hide.’ ‘We will cut you up.’ I never thought anyone would actually come and kill me, but the stress affected my health.”

    “They wrote that I was a slut and that I am sleeping with a ‘monkey,’” the woman added. “They wished illness and death not only on me but on my child as well.”

    Male State memes celebrate “Domestic Violence Day” and attract comments glorifying violence against women.

    In July 2020, VK blocked the Male State community, which at the time had about 170,000 members, for calls for violence. Pozdnyakov’s TikTok account was blocked in April 2020. The community, however, continues to exist in various closed forums and Telegram channels.

    Several Male State followers spoke with RFE/RL and defended the threats against feminist activists over the Valentine’s Day demonstration.

    “The leftists in Russia are always saying we have to have freedom of speech,” said Viktor Volkov, who found out about the campaign against Serenko via Telegram. “Everyone must be free to express their opinions. Well, people expressed their opinions about Darya and her activity.”

    Another follower of Pozdnyakov’s, who asked not to be identified, claimed that he knew about and supports the campaign targeting Serenko but did not participate in it.

    “There have to be alternative voices in society,” he said. “The leftists have used these tactics for a long time, and it isn’t surprising that opinion-makers like Pozdnyakov have adopted such effective means of fighting.”

    “Feminism debases and bestializes women,” the man added. “And the rightist fight against feminism is a fight for a decent future for our women and children.”

    Feminist activist Darya Chaban has been in Male State’s sights for several years. She received a torrent of threats when she spoke out in support of the three Khachaturyan sisters, who are being prosecuted for killing their father in 2018 after enduring what they describe as years of sexual and physical abuse. Male State has featured prominently in a coalition of so-called defenders of traditional values — including the Russian Orthodox Church — who have rejected the sisters’ argument of self-defense.

    The online abuse grew much worse when Chaban wrote on social media that she did not want to have children. After that post, she received messages saying she “wasn’t worthy of living” or regretting that “there are no concentration camps where they could destroy people like you together with gays and other unworthies.”

    “There were threats of death, rape, and beating,” she recounted. “Someone wrote that he would denounce me to the police and that I would be imprisoned for distributing pornography. That’s how they claim to be defending the interests of children and teenagers who might come to my social-media page and find my body-positive images.”

    SotsFem Alternativa activist Ksenia stressed that despite the Male State intimidation campaign, the February 14 rally was a success.

    “I think that 250 women who stood up in the center of Moscow in a solidarity chain although they knew that they might be beaten with billy clubs is a successful protest,” she told RFE/RL. “They definitely didn’t manage to cancel it.”

    She added that activists in Russia are used to being threatened and that feminist events regularly attract ultrarightists who use various means to disrupt the proceedings.

    “But that is definitely no reason to stay home,” Ksenia said, “or to stop insisting on the rights of women or to stop fighting for a just world.”

    Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting by RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Karina Merkuryeva. RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Sergei Khazov-Cassia contributed to this report.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • His Great-Grandfather Was Executed By Stalin’s Secret Police. Now He’s Being Sued.

    MOSCOW — Denis Karagodin has spent almost a decade compiling a meticulous record of evidence about the murder of his great-grandfather by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s secret police, running a website that lists, by name, every individual he deems complicit.

    The Siberia-based designer has been tipped for prestigious human rights prizes, and leading Western publications have spotlighted his work and the website he runs.

    The people he ties to the killing of Stepan Karagodin, a peasant swept up in Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, have passed away. But their relatives are now making sure Karagodin’s accusations don’t go unchallenged.

    Karagodin was interrogated this week by police in Tomsk, the city where he lives and where his great-grandfather’s murder took place on January 21, 1938. “Buckle your seatbelts, dear friends!” he wrote on Facebook after his questioning. “They’ve filed a police complaint against me.”

    Sergei Mityushov, the son of a deceased local employee of the NKVD secret police force that dispatched millions of Soviet citizens to frigid labor camps and the firing squad, confirmed that he had pressed charges against the amateur researcher for publishing what he says is inaccurate and defamatory information about his father, Aleksei Alekseyevich Mityushov.

    Karagodin published a document citing the execution and bearing Mityushov’s signature. But his son told the independent Belarusian news site Belsat that he had visited historical archives, retrieved documents relating to his father, and concluded that “half the facts on [Karagodin’s] website are plucked out of the air.” He didn’t deny his father’s complicity, but said “I don’t like it when people pry into my life without permission.”

    It’s unclear what specific charges Karagodin faces, but his work has courted controversy from the outset. The 38-year-old began the research in 2012, publishing on his website each document and every shred of evidence he could find about the case. The result is a detailed account of the fate of his great-grandfather, a Cossack farmer and father of nine who was executed on the trumped-up accusation that he was a Japanese spy.

    Stepan Karagodin was killed on January 21, 1938.

    Stepan Karagodin was killed on January 21, 1938.

    Karagodin achieved a breakthrough in November 2016, when he received an envelope in the mail from the archives of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the NKVD and KGB. Inside was an original document in which his great-grandfather’s executioners reported to a Soviet court that its verdict “has been carried out.” The typewritten, stamped document featured the names and signatures of three NKVD agents.

    Armed with the evidence, Karagodin announced his investigation complete. He claimed to have established a direct chain of responsibility that included the three executioners, members of the tribunal that rubber-stamped the verdict, local officials in Siberia including Aleksei Mityushov, secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov, and Stalin himself. He even identified the men who allegedly drove the black vans that shuttled the condemned around the city.

    After Stalin’s death in 1953, Russia never organized its own version of the Nuremberg trials, the military tribunals in postwar Germany that convicted almost two dozen senior Nazi officers. But Karagodin said he planned to prosecute “the entire criminal conspiracy” that led to his great-grandfather’s death.

    “We found out what several generations of my family have wanted to know: the names of the murderers,” Karagodin told RFE/RL at the time. “I began in 2012, and it ended on November 12, 2016.”

    Eight days later, he was stunned by a letter of gratitude from the granddaughter of one of the three secret police agents who executed Stepan Karagodin. “Thank you for the enormous work you have done for the sake of these difficult truths,” the woman wrote. “It gives us hope that society will finally come to its senses thanks to people like you.”

    But in a country where digging up dark pages of the past is a fraught activity — and where Stalin, who oversaw show trials of his opponents and jailed or executed hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, is officially neither vilified nor excused — not everyone is happy with Karagodin’s work.

    In a December 2019 interview on the radio station Ekho Moskvy, Karagodin said many relatives of people named in his investigation have contacted him to complain. He was defiant.

    “What can they criticize me for? That I published official documents from the FSB saying their relatives took part in mass murders?” he said. “How am I guilty?”

    He is also a controversial figure among professional historians and long-time researchers of Stalin-era repressions, some of whom say he lacks the training to draw accurate conclusions from the archival documents that come into his possession.

    A section on Karagodin’s website titled “Executioners” lists more than 150 names of people he says were tied to his great-grandfather’s murder. A hyperlink with Aleksei Mityushov’s name redirects to a page showing a signed statement listing the date of Stepan Karagodin’s death sentence and the date his execution took place.

    Yan Rachinsky of human rights NGO Memorial, which was founded in 1989 to document Soviet-era crimes, says written statements of this sort — known in Russian as vypiski — were often produced years after the crime and offer no proof that those who signed them took part in it.

    “Such vypiski were folded into case files two years after the Great Terror, in 1939, when they were simply getting documents in order. And that process was carried out by people who had nothing to do with the executions,” Rachinsky told RFE/RL. “These are standard pieces of paper. I’ve seen hundreds of them.”

    Aleksei Mityushov, the man accused of murdering Stepan Karagodin in 1938

    Aleksei Mityushov, the man accused of murdering Stepan Karagodin in 1938

    “I can’t unequivocally say this person did not take part,” Rachinsky said of Aleksei Mityushov. “But it’s wrong to claim on the basis of this document that he did.” He added that Mityushov, who joined the NKVD in 1932 and would have been 25 years old at the time of Karagodin’s death, was most likely an ordinary clerk doing simple administrative work.

    Sergei Mityushov said the “final straw” — the development that prompted him to file charges — was a phone call he alleges was from Karagodin or one of his associates, announcing that researchers had found his father’s grave and posted video and images of it online. (Karagodin, who declined to be interviewed for this article, told RFE/RL he has never communicated with Mityushov.)

    In the Belsat interview, Mityushov voiced general criticism about efforts to dig into Russia’s past, citing the Defense Ministry’s TV channel Zvezda, which often broadcasts propagandistic reports about wartime events and the country’s armed forces, as a useful guide for learning about Russian history.

    “We must acknowledge that we fell into this historical current,” he said of the Stalin-era repressions, which some Russians justify as a necessary evil. “We need a great deal of time to find out what really happened.”

    But Karagodin, Mityushov said, “is staging his own private Nuremberg.”

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Biden Administration Proving to Be More of the Same Old Discredited Policies as its Predecessor

    There were a number of political commentators who urged us to give newly elected United States president Joe Biden a chance to show that he would offer a new approach to the multiple problems facing the United States alliance. Well, he had an opportunity to do so. But the speech that Biden gave on 19th of February of this year that “an attack on one is an attack on all” tells a different story. This “attack” was going to be made by either Russia or China, whom he declared to be the greatest enemy of both the United States and Europe.

    What Biden hoped to achieve, beyond gratifying the exorbitant United States military budget, in attacking Russia and China as the United States’ main threats is unclear. Certainly, any kind of military attack on those two nations, or either of them, is a fantasy invoked by more than a few of the United States strategic planners. This fantasy has not stopped the United States from using its military to continue to threaten both Russia and China.

    Three days after his speech, the United States deployed four B1 heavy bombers to Norway. According to the CNN commentary on the move, the objective of this particular exercise was to send “a clear message” to Russia that the United States intended to operate in the strategically important Arctic region. The move was also apparently to send a message that the United States will defend allies in the Arctic area against “any Russian aggression.”

    That the United States is unable to point to a single instance of this alleged “Russian aggression” is apparently immaterial. That the placing of United States military assets within reach of Russia’s borders could reasonably be perceived as an American threat to Russia is a concept that appears beyond American minds to grasp.

    That the United States military deployment to threaten Russia and China is contrary to international law is apparently an idea that fails to trouble United States planners. Their double standard in this regard was exemplified in the United States’ response to a speech by China’s foreign minister Wang on 22nd of February indicating a continued Chinese willingness to communicate on problems that may exist.

    The conciliatory approach by the Chinese was rudely rebuffed by United States State Department spokesman Ned Price, who instead of welcoming the offer of constructive dialogue preferred to characterise it as reflecting the alleged continuing pattern of China’s tendency to “avert blame for its predatory economic practices, it’s lack of transparency, its failure to honour international agreements, and its repression of universal human rights.” This is a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black, because each and every one of Mr Price’s allegations could be applied to United States behaviour over the past 70+ years.

    Further convincing evidence that NATO (and Biden) are still singing from a long-discredited song sheet is found in the recently published document NATO 2030, prepared by a group of so-called “wise persons.” It contains 138 specific proposals that does nothing to modify French president Macron’s description of NATO as “brain dead.”

    In comments made just prior to the documents publication, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared that “China posed important challenges to our security.” At a press conference given to broadcast his views, Stoltenberg claimed that China did not share “our values” and tries to “intimidate other countries.”

    Unfortunately, Stoltenberg is locked in the same outdated time frame as Biden. China is now the largest trading partner for the European Union, replacing the United States in that role last year. A total of 18 of the European Union nations have now signed a Memorandum of Understanding regarding China’s Belt and Road Initiative. According to independent economic data the European Union member States that have signed up to the BRI are now experiencing faster economic growth rates than those who have not signed on.

    This development is a classic illustration of what Chinese president Xi refers to as a “win win situation”. Critics of the Chinese moves have claimed that it is all part of some undefined “Chinese plot” to take over the economies of Western Europe. The economic logic behind such a claim is manifestly lacking.

    NATO and the Biden administration are happy to promote this anti-China rhetoric, regardless of its detachment from reality, but also manifestly at odds with the experience of countries that have embraced the Chinese initiative.

    Similarly, on 20th February Biden repeated tired US claims that Russia had violated international law with its purported annexation of Crimea. This is a claim endlessly repeated in the western media. Such claims show a casual disregard for Crimea’s history. Alarmed at the manifestly illegal coup that replaced the legitimate Ukrainian government in early 2014, the Crimean parliament voted to re-join the Russian Federation.  I say “re-join” because Crimea had been part of Russia for centuries before being gifted to Ukraine in 1953 by then Russian President Khrushchev.

    The issue was then put to a referendum on whether or not the people wanted to re-join Russia. It is the “re-join” component that is notably lacking from western commentary. The people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly (>90%) in favour of reunification and the Russian parliament in turn voted to allow them to re-join. All of this relevant history is missing from western discussion of what happened. Instead, there is a constant misrepresentation of events that also ignores the right, guaranteed by the United Nations Charter, for such self-determination votes to occur.

    That Kosovo was similarly separated from Serbia in 2008 is a fact that the critics of Crimean separation from Ukraine carefully avoid, not least because the Kosovo government has become a major United States asset with an enormous military presence.  It also serves as a major conduit to Europe of heroin from Afghanistan. That the United States had similar visions for its navy in Crimea, replacing the Russians, is another part of the equation carefully avoided in western analysis.

    For the United States, what happened in Crimea is yet another stick with which to beat the Russians. That Biden, who had his own particular role in the Ukrainian revolution, is unlikely to have a change of heart on this topic is yet further proof that there will be no substantive changes in United States foreign policy under the new administration.

    Fortunately, the world has changed since he last held power. The sooner the United States recognises that fact and adjusts its foreign policy accordingly, the safer we are all likely to be.

    The post The Biden Administration Proving to Be More of the Same Old Discredited Policies as its Predecessor first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.