Drinking killing Russian soldiers as in Crimean war, 150 years ago, while Chekists use heightened power and banning would be draftees from leaving
In a word, Putin's Russia is a hell hole
quote
There’s almost a 20-year difference between them — the Russian teenager dumped in an orphanage because she and her father publicly criticized the war on Ukraine, and the Wall Street Journal reporter held in Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo Prison.
Twenty years is also roughly the time it’s taken Russian President Vladimir Putin and his fellow chekists to turn the clock back to an era in which accredited Western journalists are arrested on bogus espionage charges, and children can be deemed enemies of the state and separated from their families.
end of quote
Way to go PUTIN, Strike one
Also
quote
In what can only be described as a genocidal screed, Medvedev resorted to the typical Russian language with regard to Ukraine and Ukrainians, describing that country and people as “Nazi” as well as “unterukraine” and “blood-sucking parasites”. He went on to describe Ukraine as an artificially cut territory” on which “millions of our [Russian” compatriots” live and those people have allegedly been harassed for years by the “Nazi Kiev [sic] regime”. He concludes by saying “nobody on this planet needs such a Ukraine. That’s why it will disappear.” Medvedev is openly advocating for genocide, and echoing the language of Hitler
Way to go MEDVEDEV, Strike two
Also
quote
According to The New York Times, ?Russia's state Duma has passed a measure which bans those who have been drafted to the military from leaving the country, imposing electronic draft summons and other measures.
The measures are currently before Russia's upper parliament. They will likely be sent to President Vladimir Putin's desk for a signature ahead of an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Russia announced a "partial mobilization" of troops in September, and the new measures expected to be passed in Russia would open the way for a spring draft.
Way to go , DUMA, Strike three
While this is going on, as noted in the history dump as to the romance of Drinking and Russian military defeat
quote
Almost exactly 150 years ago, in a battle against the Ottoman Empire, Russia suffered a catastrophic defeat in the Crimean War — in part due to the drinking habits taken up by the military during the fighting.?
Mark Lawrence Schrad, director of Russian Area Studies at Villanova University and author of?Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State ,?wrote in 2014 that drunkenness plagued the Russian army under Tsar Nicholas I, from the lowly rank and file soldiers to the high command military leaders, as they stumbled their way through battles, only to lose 100,000 soldiers and the war itself.?
Schrad,?in the book,?details instances of befuddled Russian armies left to fight ?without commanders, hospitals drenched in the scent of vodka, and soldiers complaining after being deprived of their vodka rations.
The Crimean War would become another example of the county's war drinking problem cataloged in the annals of Russian history. Another?example Schrad writes about ?includes the Russo-Japanese War, which Japan won despite being heavily outnumbered. Schrad cites a St. Petersburg newspaper writing, "the Japanese found several thousand Russian soldiers so dead drunk that they were able to bayonet them like so many pigs."
Although not the sole reason that these wars were lost, Schrad argues that vodka played a significant part in Russia's failures.?
end of quote
All back to the future. Its all going to plan. Just make damn certain it is not Ukraine, the EU and America's future too
quote
Putin’s chekists are at the height of their power
Twenty years is the time it’s taken for the Russian leader to turn the clock back to an era in which accredited Western journalists are arrested and children of the ‘enemies of the state’ thrown into state orphanages.
APRIL 6, 2023?4:00 AM CET
Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.?
There’s almost a 20-year difference between them — the Russian teenager dumped in an orphanage because she and her father publicly criticized the war on Ukraine, and the Wall Street Journal reporter held in Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo Prison.
Twenty years is also roughly the time it’s taken Russian President Vladimir Putin and his fellow chekists to turn the clock back to an era in which accredited Western journalists are arrested on bogus espionage charges, and children can be deemed enemies of the state and separated from their families.
The?detention of 13-year-old Masha Moskalyov , the imprisonment of her father Alexey,?and the arrest ?of 32-year-old Evan Gershkovich are all of a piece. They are all victims of Russia’s return to the dark past — and they’re unlikely to be the last.
Today’s echoes of Soviet times are haunting, and with his resurrection of the police state, Putin has demonstrated that while history may never exactly repeat itself, it can come awfully close.
The ideology now may not be underpinned by Bolshevism — it’s instead been replaced with grudge-filled ideas about imperial revanchism, ultra-nationalism and quirky religious traditionalism — in every other regard, however, the Russia Putin has built is a state in thrall to the security men whose sole job is to protect the regime.
That was Russia’s destiny the moment Putin took power. Even before his first election, when he was still acting head of state, Putin briskly filled the ranks of the presidential administration with former hard-line KGB officers, mainly from his hometown of St. Petersburg. The appointments even included an officer who opened the last file on a dissident in the waning days of the Soviet Union, but was ordered to stop by then President Mikhail Gorbachev.
Among his first acts as former President Boris Yeltsin’s successor, Putin signed decrees expanding the power and reach of the security agencies, and he has only strengthened them since, making them more aggressive?and more answerable to him.
Putin himself once quipped in a speech that the group of undercover spies dispatched to infiltrate the post-Soviet government is “successfully fulfilling its task.” And while Putin and his chekists pressed on, incrementally capturing Russia’s politics, government and economy, for too long the West ignored the warnings from his opponents like?Vladimir Kara-Murza . A politician and human rights activist currently languishing in jail, Kara-Murza is facing a possible 24-year sentence on a trumped-up charge of high treason.
end of quote
also
quote
Former President Proves Russia is Pursuing Modern-Day Fascism
11 April 2023
New to?Byline Times??Find out more about us
SUBSCRIBE TO THE PRINT EDITION
A new type of newspaper – independent, fearless, outside the system. Fund a better media.
Don’t miss a story! Sign up to our newsletter (and get a free edition posted to you)
Our leading investigations include:?empire & the culture war ,?Brexit ,?crony contracts ,?Russian interference ,?the Coronavirus pandemic ,?democracy in danger , and?the crisis in British journalism . We also introduce new voices of colour in?Our Lives Matter .
The claims of Dmitry Medvedev denying the existence of Ukraine remove all doubt about the Kremlin’s genocidal thinking. But what of its totalitarian methods?
On 8 April the one-time place holder president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev,?published a rant ?on his verified Twitter account where he has 1.1 million followers, a rant entitled “Why will Ukraine disappear? Because nobody needs it”.
In what can only be described as a genocidal screed, Medvedev resorted to the typical Russian language with regard to Ukraine and Ukrainians, describing that country and people as “Nazi” as well as “unterukraine” and “blood-sucking parasites”. He went on to describe Ukraine as an artificially cut territory” on which “millions of our [Russian” compatriots” live and those people have allegedly been harassed for years by the “Nazi Kiev [sic] regime”. He concludes by saying “nobody on this planet needs such a Ukraine. That’s why it will disappear.” Medvedev is openly advocating for genocide, and echoing the language of Hitler.
It is widely believed that Medvedev suffers from an alcohol problem, however it would be unwise to dismiss this as yet another drunken outburst, because the problem is that what Medvedev is voicing is not just his own (possibly vodka-induced) deluded musings, he is expressing the thoughts of not only Putin, who is directing this outrageous illegal war against Ukraine, but these opinions are also shared by the millions of ordinary men and women of Russia who both support and fight in this war.
With such evil being stated by a former head of state, regardless of the fact that he held the role in name only as Putin of course still occupied the real seat of power, and with that vile view being one that a vast majority of Russians side with, it is time to state that the inescapable conclusion. Russia, today, is has descended into a fascist state.
Fascism,?as defined by Wikipedia , is described as follows. “Fascism?is a?far-right ,?authoritarian ,?ultranationalist ?political ideology and movement,?characterized by a?dictatorial ?leader, centralized?autocracy ,?militarism , forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural?social hierarchy , subordination of?individual interests ?for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy” and any rational analysis of modern-day Russia shows that all of these criteria are met.
Exporting Fascism
Not only is Russia itself guided by a “far-right, authoritarian and ultranationalist” government, they clearly align with similarly far-right, authoritarian and ultranationalist movements and governments?the world over . They are, therefore, not only a fascist state but at the same time they are active exporters of fascism elsewhere.
The dictatorial leader part, well that’s self-evident. Vladimir Putin has gradually eroded the guard rails of any normal society, by closing down all dissenting media, assassinating or imprisoning any political opposition, and outlawing any criticism of his government or their policies. That last point in particular with regard to any domestic criticism of the war criminals that make up his army as they lay waste to swathes of territory across Ukraine.
This erosion of the societal norms commonplace in normal countries was actually, and remarkably, achieved with the buy-in of the Russian people. The social contract that existed was that (mainly buoyed by high global oil prices rather than any economic genius from Putin) if living standards rose, the people turned a blind eye to the journalists that would have informed them of the perilous path their country was on being murdered.
Militarism has been covered by me in a previous article for?Byline Times?on Russia’s War Addiction .
Forcible suppression of the opposition. Vladimir Kara-Murza, one of the leading voices of political sanity in Russia is languishing in prison awaiting sentencing on charges of treason, the?prosecutors are demanding a 25 year sentence for him . It is believed that the Kremlin has twice tried to kill Kara-Murza by poisoning. A leading anti-corruption campaigner, Alexey Navalny, (himself not immune to the chauvinism towards Ukraine that is common among Russians) also occupies a jail cell in Siberia. These are just the two most high—profile cases. Dissent is not allowed in any shape or form, and that applies on a national scale.
The social hierarchy in Russia is best demonstrated by Putin’s positioning of himself as a modern-day Tsar. The strata that is below him and that are entitled to extract untold wealth from the resources of the country are best described by journalist Catherine Belton in her book?Putin’s People , in which she painstakingly details the rise of the cabal of former KGB and FSB operatives that have been a part of the Putin journey and his corrupt rule throughout his career.
The people are mere serfs, the indifference to the quality of their lives with rotten hospitals and squalid schools shows that Putin cares nothing for them. As does his willingness to send them to die in their tens of thousands in Ukraine.
领英推荐
Subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and the race is exemplified by the common, and quite untrue, justification for the war in Ukraine that is pervasive in today’s propaganda. They are fighting, they are told, for the motherland. The sacrifices (which are vastly downplayed, Russians only know of the scale of their war dead through seeing their own local cemeteries filling up, they do not know that by now 180,000 of their countryfolk have been killed for invading their peaceful neighbour) are worth it, because it is for the motherland. Of course, this is illogical, because how can one be fighting for their motherland when they’re in another country?
Totalitarian Control
The strong regimentation of Russian society and the economy is the last factor and this, again, is hardly a secret. In his close to a quarter of a century in power, a milestone he is unlikely to actually see, Putin has focused control of all key aspects of the state’s economy in the hands of the Kremlin and associated cronies. True, this is done not for some perceived ideological reason like the centrally planned economy of the communist era, but this is done to allow for those who can to loot at will. Nevertheless. This box too is ticked.
The regimentation of society itself can be boiled down to power. Those who have it, the police, judges, bosses of all kinds, they abuse it. Those who have no power are the unlucky ones who must make the best of their lot, like the saps being mobilised into the military to be dispatched, untrained and ill-equipped, to be thrown into waves of suicidal frontal attacks against the Ukrainian army.
Russia, from the words of Medvedev to the delusions of Putin and through the airwaves of poisonous propaganda, has descended into fascism. The Wikipedia article quoted earlier carries a phot of two men, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. The history books will photoshop Vladimir Putin in alongside them.
end of quote'
also
quote
Russia is set to pass a measure that bans people who have been drafted to the military from leaving the country
Azmi Haroun ?Apr 11, 2023, 9:41 PM
Russia's parliament is close to passing a series of measures aimed at making it harder for citizens to dodge future drafts as Putin seeks battlefield reinforcements.
According to The New York Times, ?Russia's state Duma has passed a measure which bans those who have been drafted to the military from leaving the country, imposing electronic draft summons and other measures.
The measures are currently before Russia's upper parliament. They will likely be sent to President Vladimir Putin's desk for a signature ahead of an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Russia announced a "partial mobilization" of troops in September, and the new measures expected to be passed in Russia would open the way for a spring draft.
According to the Times, the draft law means that as soon as a draft summons arrives in a recipient's inbox on a widely-used government services website, it would count as officially received — even if the recipient has not independently registered for the site, or the summons is not opened.
Previously, a paper system meant that defense officials had to track down draftees, and punishments for avoiding a summons included a suspended driver's license, or bans on real estate or loans, per the report.
The September mobilization proved to be a chaotic venture for the Kremlin, as Putin promised that 300,000 reservists with combat experience would join the war, but reports emerged that many untrained fighters?were sent to battle instead.
In Ukraine, the army is also?trying to recruit more manpower ?amid heavy casualties sustained in the ongoing battle with Russia in eastern Bakhmut. In March, US Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the battle in Bakhmut a?"slaughter-fest" ?for Russian forces, claiming that tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have died there so far.
Leaked US intelligence documents last week?helped paint a more vivid picture ?of the catastrophic death toll for both parties in the war. One document suggested that Russia has suffered up to 223,000 casualties and another suggested that Ukraine has lost up to 131,000 casualties.
Experts have cautioned amid the leak that some of the genuine documents?may have been altered ?to either lower the Russian death toll or overstate Ukraine's death toll for propaganda reasons.
So far, Ukraine's recruitment in the war has largely relied on volunteers, but as a new counteroffensive nears, draft rules could also tighten there.
At the outset of the war, Ukrainian imposed martial law, banning men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country in case they're needed for a draft. The country also instituted mobilization rules which make that same pool of men eligible to be drafted on a whim.
Today, we are seeing the chekists at the height of their power, using the full KGB playbook to intimidate, imprison, silence and repress — including the cynical exploitation of children to exert pressure on those who oppose the Kremlin or protest.
Take Masha, for example. Her father Alexey first attracted the authorities’ attention early last year, after her school reported her to police for an anti-war drawing she painted in art class. Alexey was also fined for an anti-war social media post of his own, but then, months later, their home was raided, and he was once again charged for more online posts criticizing Russia’s war on Ukraine and sentenced to two years.
Subsequently, authorities took Masha and put her in a children’s home. A relative is now trying to secure guardianship for ger, but the signs are not promising.
It was common practice in the Communist era to haul off the children of dissident parents and others deemed enemies of the people, and to then deposit them in overcrowded state-run orphanages. The number ranged from 5,000 to 10,000 children each year during the 1930s, and starvation, malnutrition, abuse and negligence were routine — as later documented in Deborah Hoffman’s book “The Littlest Enemies .” The philosophy was the apple never falls far from the tree.
That same philosophy has now been embraced by Putin chekists, and it was being used against opponents on the left and right even before Ukraine’s invasion. In February 2011, welfare agencies tried to take the two small children of?Evgenia Chirikova ?— the leader of an environmental movement to protect Khimki Forest. They claimed she was neglectful based on bogus statements from neighbors, saying the “children are always hungry, they are given no food, and they are dirty.” An active campaign in support of Chirikova finally persuaded the authorities to stop.
In 2019, it was then?Dmitry Pashkov and Olga Prokazova’s turn . Having attended a protest march with their one-year-old, Moscow prosecutors said the parents had put the baby’s life at risk. It led to the opening of criminal investigations against the parents, with an eye toward stripping them of their parental rights both for the baby and a second child, aged seven.?
Such threats of placing kids in state orphanages have sparked sharp public anger in the past, but since the war on Ukraine, Russians are mostly silent. According to OVD-Info, an independent human rights group, since February last year, nearly 20,000 anti-war protesters have been arrested, but most were in the early weeks and months of the war. And anti-war demonstrations have now fallen off.
At this point, more than half of the demonstrations have just been single person protests — brave souls deciding silence is complicity. “Do dictators and dictatorships breed slave populations or do slave populations breed dictators?”?queries Russian novelist ?Mikhail Shishkin. No one seems to know the answer to that question.
end of quote
also
quote
Drinking is killing Russian troops, according to UK intel. Widespread alcoholism during the first Crimean War 150 years ago resulted in Russia's defeat.
Hannah Getahun ?Apr 11, 2023, 10:55 PM
Almost exactly 150 years ago, in a battle against the Ottoman Empire, Russia suffered a catastrophic defeat in the Crimean War — in part due to the drinking habits taken up by the military during the fighting.?
Mark Lawrence Schrad, director of Russian Area Studies at Villanova University and author of?Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State ,?wrote in 2014 that drunkenness plagued the Russian army under Tsar Nicholas I, from the lowly rank and file soldiers to the high command military leaders, as they stumbled their way through battles, only to lose 100,000 soldiers and the war itself.?
Schrad,?in the book,?details instances of befuddled Russian armies left to fight ?without commanders, hospitals drenched in the scent of vodka, and soldiers complaining after being deprived of their vodka rations.
The Crimean War would become another example of the county's war drinking problem cataloged in the annals of Russian history. Another?example Schrad writes about ?includes the Russo-Japanese War, which Japan won despite being heavily outnumbered. Schrad cites a St. Petersburg newspaper writing, "the Japanese found several thousand Russian soldiers so dead drunk that they were able to bayonet them like so many pigs."
Although not the sole reason that these wars were lost, Schrad argues that vodka played a significant part in Russia's failures.?
During World War I, the Tsar instituted Prohibition that lasted until Joseph Stalin took power, but Schrad writes of riots over conscription and looting of liquor stores, warehouses, and distilleries.
Drinking and?military history ?have?always been entwined ?— the practice fueled by myths that drinking would grant soldiers courage — but Schrad argues that Russia has a particularly unique history with drinking that follows many through lines, particularly the country's history dominating the vodka trade, and the Russian conscription system, a relic of the 17th-century ruler Peter the Great.
Why does it matter now? A recent UK defense ministry?intelligence update ?reported that many Russian troops are dying in Ukraine due to non-combat issues such as alcohol consumption, among other things. The death toll among Russian troops is now two times that of their opponents,?estimates from leaked US intelligence documents reveal .
Schrad told Insider that he doesn't want to make "direct analogies with stuff that happened 150 years ago," but the parallels are there.
"The alcohol angles are interesting. I don't think it's nearly as important nowadays, as it was during the Russo-Japanese War or World War One, but it's significant, right?" Schrad told Insider. "It's not something that you can just kind of brush aside either, right? You've got a demoralized Russian army and they're going up against a very enthusiastic Ukrainian fighting force that's there to defend their homeland defend their turf."
In an interview with Insider, Schrad expanded on the history of Russian drinking during wartime.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
I read one of your articles from last year and you had basically — I don't know if I want to say called it — but you used historical precedent to predict that alcohol would play a role in the war. I want to hear from you why you felt that this was going to be an issue coming into the Ukrainian war.
A lot of it is the consequence of my research topic, which has been alcohol and Russian history. It's been my bread and butter for ages. And a lot of it kind of revolved around my book "Vodka Politics." The thesis of the book was "Why do Russians drink so much?" Yes, there are cultural stereotypes. But the explanation I came up with was that it wasn't so much some sort of cultural or genetic trait, as much as it was the consequence of generations of autocratic decision-making that put the interest of the Russian state ahead of the health and well-being of the Russian people.?
Historically, the thing that was most profitable to the Russian state was vodka. The monopolization of alcohol and tavern trade in Russia, going back to the czars, constituted 1/3 of all the income of the Russian state under the czars, and then even into the Soviet era, one-quarter of all revenue came from selling vodka to their own people. I think a lot of where it comes from. The book traced this thread of alcohol through all sorts of different things, including war-fighting, and you find that every time that Russia goes to war, there is this alcohol calamity. The Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, in particular, were all drunken fiascos.?
And so as that gets into sort of the current scenario with Russia and Ukraine. Ukrainians inherited a lot of that legacy as well — I suppose, a kind of societal alcoholism — but has also moved in a lot of ways towards more European systems, not only when it comes to alcohol use, but also regulation.
When the war started, on the Ukrainian side, they instituted kind of a blanket prohibition during the first months of the war. The idea was that alcohol wasn't necessary to maintain discipline and morale in a time of crisis.
Obviously, on the Russian side, you had just the opposite. You had people stumbling into the war, completely drunk. You have a lot of these reports coming out of Ukraine from survivors of Russians committing mass atrocities, oftentimes while drunk, which is another consistent theme of history.?
When Russia started later on in 2022, with mass conscription, it was the same thing as what we saw in 1904-1905 or 1914 with World War I — that people would show up half drunk and get into fights with the draft officers and continued the drinking straight through till they get on the battlefield.?
One thing that in history we've seen is there have been a lot of cultures that drink during wartime. What circumstances make Russia's current drinking problem unique?
What's fascinating is that Russia becomes the first Prohibition country after World War I because it learned its lesson after the Russo-Japanese war, and that kind of became the cult of military sobriety. All countries that got involved in World War I were restricting availability to alcohol because all these militaries around the world learned their lesson, like Russia did, that whether you have a good fighting force or a drunken fighting force can really make the difference between victory and defeat. So I would say since World War I there has been more of an international consensus towards limiting alcohol in the ranks, especially when it comes to warfighting.?
I think when it comes to especially more modern forces, Russia is still very much stuck in the past of having that pervasiveness of alcohol whereas a more modern army might not have that. Russia's armies in a lot of ways are kind of a relic of the past. It's still pretty much a conscript army. It's not a modern volunteer army. And so you've got a lot of those holdovers from the past, and I think that that might be part of it as well. But the fact is that you're getting people in wartime positions, who really didn't sign up for this, as opposed to American soldiers or British soldiers who choose this lifestyle right for one reason or another.
You know, the last time that we had a draft in the United States, during Vietnam, there was a lot of drug abuse and alcoholism that came with that as well. That could be part of the dynamic, too.
It seems like Russia is aware of this. Why does Russia continue to hold on to this conscription system despite evidence that it could lead to drinking issues among servicemen?
I think it's been hard to reform for one. But then, more importantly, Russia has also, in more recent years, been undergoing something of a demographic crisis. When the Soviet Union falls apart in the early 1990s, there was just, economic decay, disorder, and depression. In Russia, they had sort of a baby bust from the '90s through the mid-2000s. That's the generation now that would be coming up for military service, and there are just not enough people there.
When it comes to this demographic crisis that's plagued Russia for a long time the military has been sort of the most astute at this. They've been sort of raising alarm bells for the last 20 years, in terms of wanting to reform and make a more modern army, but also recognizing that they needed to sort of maintain conscription just because if they were to give it up, they wouldn't have enough warm bodies to man all the turrets and field all the positions that they need.
end of quote
Andrew Beckwith, PhD