‘Russia’s Orbit: Repression, Homicide, Warfare’, Osteuropa’s second consecutive situation dedicated to the state of affairs in Russia since its assault on Ukraine simply over two years in the past, paperwork the escalatory logic driving the regime of Vladimir Putin towards ever-greater excesses of violence each domestically and in its prosecution of the warfare.
Of their editorial, Manfred Sapper and Volker Weichsel describe the ‘apparent paradox’ of latter-day Putinism: ‘the supposedly all-powerful regime is in fact powerless. Only by increasing the levels of violence can it keep itself alive.’
Colonialism
The Ukrainian novelist, poet and essayist Yuri Andrukhovych argues that Russia’s relationship to Ukraine since Peter the Nice has been one in all colonizer to colonized. He laments ‘how complicated it is to persuade the western academic community of the thesis that Ukraine was a Russian colony’. In line with the tenets of decolonial principle, not solely should the colony be geographically distant from the seat of colonial energy, however the subjugated folks should even be, if not nonwhite, then at the very least non-European.
Andrukhovych factors to the Holodomor, the mass hunger of the Ukrainian peasantry in 1932–33, calling it ‘the epitome of predatory colonialism’ in its ruthlessly extractive financial exploitation, deliberate genocide, and mass resettlement of the depopulated area by representatives of the colonial energy.
Although Russia could at all times have been a colonial empire, Andrukhovych notes that in a single key side it’s untypical: ‘Russia is the only former empire that has attempted to be reborn by reconquering its colonies’. Nor has it ever reckoned with the manifold crimes of its imperialist previous: ‘Even today it is firmly persuaded of its right to conquer and subjugate’.
Navalny
In one in all 4 articles within the situation on the life and dying of Alexei Navalny, cultural historian Wolfgang Stephan Kissel examines the cultural politics of the opposition chief’s funeral on 1 March 2024.
The occasions of March 1 have been unprecedented within the historical past of post-Soviet Russia, writes Kissel: ‘In the thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there had been no large, high-profile funeral that captured the public’s creativeness’.
Although the regime, by way of its surrogates within the Russian Orthodox Church, tried to stress Navalny’s household into forgoing a correct Orthodox funeral service, it stopped in need of an outright ban. Provided that Navalny was a member of the Church who steadily cited scripture in his speeches, doing so would have risked angering the overwhelmingly Orthodox inhabitants.
Though the authorities succeeded in shortening the service and stopping a mass inflow of the general public into the church, they have been unable to cease the next procession from changing into a spontaneous anti-government demonstration, despite the heavy presence of state safety forces.
In his capsule historical past of Russian public-mourning rituals, Kissel factors out that it was the funerals of ‘cultural heroes’ – Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Mayakovsky and Sakharov, amongst others – and never of politicians that previously proved probably the most socially disruptive, unleashing subversive energies. Right here too the sample held: ‘After this ceremony, Navalny was no longer just an anti-corruption fighter, politician and street activist … but the first Russian cultural hero of the 21st century’.
Georgia
An interview with the literary scholar Zaal Andronikashvili particulars the fragile state of affairs in Georgia within the run-up to parliamentary elections this October. Because of latest electoral reforms which have made it tougher for the incumbent celebration to cement its grip on energy, the Georgian Dream celebration, which has dominated the nation since 2012, now runs the very actual danger of being voted out.
The elections will happen within the supercharged ambiance created by the large road protests in Tbilisi in 2023–4 in response to the federal government’s Regulation on Transparency of Overseas Affect, which might pressure most NGOs to register as ‘organizations carrying the interests of a foreign power’. By passing such a measure – a digital carbon copy of Russia’s infamous foreign-agent legislation – the federal government ‘wants to destroy [Georgia’s] impartial civil society’.
The unseen hand behind such maneuvers is Bidzina Ivanishvili: billionaire, former prime minister, founding father of Georgian Dream and all-around éminence grise of Georgian politics, who on the finish of final yr was elected honorary chairman of Georgian Dream as a method of not directly reasserting his authority.
Since rejoining the political fray Ivanishvili has charted an more and more authoritarian, populist, pro-Russian course for Georgian Dream, railing conspiratorially in opposition to the ‘global party of war’ searching for to pull Georgia into the Ukraine battle and denouncing the opposition as rootless foreign-educated elites.
Although parliament lately handed the transparency legislation, the favored motion animating the discontent, which is in favor of EU membership and against Russian vassalage, reveals no indicators of abating, setting the stage for a showdown in October. ‘Euromaidan, Belarus or a withdrawal of the law – the outcome is still open’, concludes Andronikashvili.
Assessment by Nick Sywak
