Вся власть поэтом! All Power to the Poets!

Shevchuk rocks.

For most anyone from the former Soviet Union, Yuri Yulianovich Shevchuk needs no introduction. He is the lead singer, songwriter and soul of the band DDT - one of the longest lasting and most influential Russian rock bands of all time. Raised in the industrial city of Ufa in the western Ural mountains, he emerged in the early 1980's as a rebellious voice in the underground rock scene. Relocating to St. Petersburg in 1987, DDT performed with other legendary Soviet bands associated with the Leningrad Rock-Club (such as Kino, Akvarium, Television and Alica). His songs draw on the tradition of the Russian bards, Pushkin's poetry, and the absurdity & tragedy of Soviet and post-Soviet life. By 1989, DDT had achieved widespread fame throughout the former USSR. The 1992 hit "What is Autumn" (Что такое осень) is probably one of the best known rock songs in the Russian language.

The title for today's post comes from a a black flag waved by a fan at a DDT concert in 1996. I saw the show as it was broadcast on Russia's main TV channel (ORT) from the four story apartment building in Mary, Turkmenistan where I was then residing. The phrase is a play on an old slogan from the early days of the USSR - "Вся власть советам!" -- All Power to the Soviets." Before there was the Soviet Union, there were "soviets" - workers councils that emerged during the first revolutionary uprisings in 1905. By 1996, there was nothing particularly subversive about bastardizing a piece of Soviet propaganda, but there is nevertheless something profound and deeply Russian about the pun. In Russia, poetry may be king, but poetry has no political power.

Performing in St. Petersburg, Yuri worked the crowd with the enthusiasm and spirit of Bruce Springsteen - and the people responded in kind. I remember thinking that rock and roll isn't dead, that it lives on in a spirit of resistance to conformity and commercialization back in the USSR.

But Yuri doesn't just rock - he talks. It is worth listening to what he has to say. Last week, he gave an interview on the independent talk radio station, Echo of Moscow:



The entire interview is available on the Echo Moscow - Эхо Мосвкы website. He consistently returns to the same theme - urging his fellow citizens to think critically, to not just absorb government propaganda unquestioningly:

You will not meet any nation in history - at least I personally don't know of an example - where all the people, the grandparents, young people, etc., petition their government to go launch a war on their neighbors, and the government answers, 'well, if that's what you demand, let's do it.' What does this tell us? Politicians start wars. That our politicians have been involved in Tskhinvali [capital of South Ossetia] for 15 years...they failed us. What do we have to be happy about? 150 million people defeated 4 million Georgians. Why would we celebrate that?
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Let's recall those 15 years, when our high society politicians could have done something as politicians. We feed our politicians - they don't work in the coal mines. And for what reason do Russians need politicians? In order to avoid wars, in order to solve by political means the terrible legacy left by Stalin.

Yuri immediately places the conflict in Ossetia in the broader historical context, lamenting twenty years of ethnic conflicts that have occurred in the former Soviet Union. Fighting between Armenians and Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh began in 1988, followed by conflicts in Tajikistan, Georgia, Chechnya and more, right down to the present day. Politicians have failed the people in the newly independent states of the old Soviet Union. Let's hope Ukraine isn't next.

The new round of militarism in Russia, Shevchuk believes, is a deliberate attempt to distract people from internal problems that persist in post-Soviet Russia. He sees parallels between the current manufactured brand of state-sanctioned patriotism under Putin's United Russia party and the Brezhnev era slogans excessively lauding the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:

здравствует КПСС или «Единая Россия», опять эти парады, парады. В головах, в мозгах, в речах… Это невероятно, мы опять куда-то катимся. Опять ложь постоянная, информационные войны, нет объективной информации.

Again these parades, parades. In our heads, in our minds, in our speech...It is inconceivable that we that we are rolling down this path again. Again there are constant lies, information wars, there is no objective information.

Yuri Shevchuk is talking about an aspect of what is really happening inside Russia and how it effects the people living in Russia. Not that American or European politicians are superior, in his estimation. He suggests solving future conflicts by creating a new reality show, where generals, nationalist politicians and those Americans who think they should rule the world are given weapons - only not nuclear weapons - and left on an island to fight it out on camera.

It is no surprise that he can speak freely on Echo of Moscow. Coincidently, the station itself was recently featured in an article by David Remnick in the the New Yorker. Remnick reviews the development of the radio as the primary tool of Soviet propaganda and its evolution under Glasnost, when Echo Moskvy got its start. What is remarkable about Echo is that it continues to provide a platform for more or less independent, critical voices in a landscape otherwise dominated by a mass media that is functionally controlled by the Kremlin.

But, as Remnick notes, freedom of speech is threatened even at Echo. Aleksei Venediktov - the station's editor in chief - was recently called to the carpet by Putin himself in a meeting between the Prime Minister and journalists. Putin thought that Echo had gone too far in airing criticism of Moscow's actions in Georgia. In front of the assembled journalists in Sochi, Putin told Venediktov that "you will have to answer for this!"

In the Echo interview, Yuri also alludes to a piece he wrote for Novaya Gazeta. That's the paper where the journalist Anna Politkovskaya worked before she was mysteriously slain. At least 260 journalists have been murdered since the fall of the Soviet Union. That kind of physical intimidation, on top of overt government control over the main broadcast television stations and implicit limits on other forms of media, puts a real limit on what many news outlets will broadcast. But so far, it does not appear to have slowed down Shevhcuk as a citizen rocker. For example, he participated in the Dissenters March earlier this year:

Hello my dear friends. There are bearers of culture, and there are peddlers of culture. Yesterday we saw peddlers of culture on television in red square....But I want to tell you for us, rock musicians in St. Petersburg, rock music is not just Chuck Berry or Little Richard, it is soul and freedom -- freedom before of all things. It is that freedom that brought me here to be with you.

Yuri notes in the Echo interview that DDT is not regularly featured on radio or television, but that it is still easy to perform live shows. In response both to the recent war in the Caucus mountains and to the militaristic brand of nationalism that is on the rise in his homeland - Shevchuk recently organized two concerts in Moscow called "Ne Stryelyai." The concert is named after an early DDT song, which simply means "don't shoot" - (see DDT perform Не Стреляй - Ne Stryelyai in 2003), written when the first Soviet soldiers began coming home in coffins from Afghanistan. The concerts featured musicians from Georgia, Ukraine, and Ossetia and sent a powerful message of peace and understanding. But will the state dominated media in Russia allow the message to spread beyond clips on RuTube?



As I have reflected on the Russia-Georgia conflict on this blog, it has been easy to loose site of the basic truths expressed by Yuri. He is right to first recall the young, poor boys from the countryside who are sent off to fight in wars like this one, while the sons of the policians live lives of decadence and ease. He is right to think first of the tragic disruption in everyday life brought on by this fighting. My goal has been to offer context and perspective to a situation that is too often described in the United States from an outdated Cold War perspective. Shevchuk reminds us that Russia's military action in Georgia is partly designed for domestic consumption. He uses the great Russian phrase that literally translates to "hanging noodles on your ears" - a version of "pulling your leg" - when describing the Kremlin's chest beating about Russia's strength. If Russia would focus on using its wealth to build its economy, its infrustructure - to humanize, then Ukraine and other neighbors would come to close relations with Russia on their own.

Everything he says goes double for us back in the U.S. If instead of reckless adventures in Iraq, we had a responsible defense budget...if we focused less on showing off our military hardware on the world's stage and instead focused more on building our infrastructure, maintaining oversight over our financial markets, and educating our people, think of how much further we could have come in the last several years. Think of all the wasted opportunities.

U.S. politicians and pundits criticize Russia, but in many ways, politicians there are emulating U.S. policy more than we might like to recognize.

There is much to love about Shevchuk - the way he rolls his "r's," his dramatic facial expressions, his poetic writing, and his sense of humor:


When the Oil Runs Out (Когда Закончится Нефть) (performed in 2007)

When the oil runs out....
You will be with me again
When the gas runs out
You'll come back to me in the Spring

We'll plant forests and
Build paradise under canopy of branches
When everything runs out
There'll be a fullness in our souls

As if the entire premise of the song is not provocative enough, in other performances of the song, Shevchuk adds the line: "when we run out of oil, our president will die!" Here's to hoping that regardless of whether the oil runs out anytime soon, Russian politicians don't take down the whole country with them on their demise.

I leave you one of the all time great DDT songs, "Дождь" ("Rain"):

Georgia's Unsettled Borders & America's Unsettled Choices....

Despite U.S. instance on honoring Georgia's borders as they existed when the Soviet Union collapsed, those borders were contested before Georgia itself obtained independence in 1991.

Though the recent fighting in Georgia was triggered by events in South Ossetia, Abkhazia is another region where tensions had been brewing between the two former members of the Soviet Union.

Georgian spy-drone aircraft after being shot down over Abkhazia in May of 2008

Initially, the Abkhaz Autonomous SSR experienced very little autonomy in the 1920's and 1930's. Georgian was made the official lanaguage and Soviet authorities allowed large in-migration of Georgians, Russians, and Armenians.

After Stalin's death, Abkhazians began to receive more autonomy over internal affairs in the region, as did many of the so-called Autonomous regions in the USSR. Even though the Abkhaz people did not make up a majority of the Abkhaz autonomous region, Moscow granted special privileges to the Abkhaz people within the province. These advantages included placing Abkhaz nationals in privileged party and administrative positions and promoting the Abkhaz language and culture. More importantly, Abkhazia received an out-sized budget allocation from the central government. These favors from Moscow weakened Georgian authority within the Georgian SSR. Over the years, it also led to an Abkhaz dependence on Moscow, so that when the Soviet Union unraveled, the Abkhaz feared losing their status under an independent Georgia and had every incentive to stay close to Mother Russia.

Predictably, it also led to Georgian resentment. After Khrushev's economic reforms allowed for greater local control at the Union Republic level, Georgian authorities made efforts to reduce the influence of ethnic minorities. As Georgian nationalism rose, calls for greater and greater autonomy - and eventually, independence - from Moscow grew. Predictably, Georgia's growing nationalism ran into direct conflict with aspirations of the Abkhazians, who wanted to retain close relations with central Soviet authority. Abkhazian officials threatened to secede from Georgia as early as 1978. Edvard Shevardnadze, then running Soviet Georgia, staved off further moves towards Abkhazian independence from Georgia by granting further privileges to the Abkhaz people in the autonomous region.

Beautiful Abkhazia - Potential Tourist Paradise

As the USSR was in its final days, Georgians in the Georgian SSR voted to secede from the Soviet Union, while an overwhelming majority in Abkhazia voted to stay with the Union. Armed conflict resulted and by 1993, the Georgian military and nearly all Georgian civilians had been pushed out of the province. Russia encouraged and supported the Abkhaz separatists even as it put the hammer down on Chechen separatists in Russian territory. Georgia - as an independent state - never really exerted firm control over Abkhazia.

Fighting in South Ossetia also broke out between Georgians and Ossetians before the August Putsch in 1991 that heralded the end of the USSR. The Washington Post recently reposted Michael Dobbs's reporting on the first round of fighting between South Ossetia and Georgia in 1991:

But this is also a war in which notions of right and wrong, oppressors and oppressed, have become impossibly tangled with centuries-old ethnic disputes. There seems little doubt that the Kremlin has been using minority grievances as a means of bringing pressure to bear on rebellious Soviet republics, such as Georgia. At the same time, Georgia's own treatment of its ethnic minorities has drawn sharp criticism from Western human-rights activists. During a three-week occupation of Tskhinvali in January, Georgian militia units ransacked the Ossetian national theater. The plaster statue of Ossetia's national poet, Kosta Khetagurov, was decapitated. Monuments to Ossetians who fought with Soviet troops in World War II were smashed to pieces and thrown into the river.

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Georgian mistrust of the Ossetians is deeply rooted. For [Georgian nationalist leader] Gamsakhurdia, along with most of his compatriots, the present conflict is a replay of what happened in 1920-22, when a fledgling Georgian state was crushed by the Red Army. The Ossetians sided with the Bolsheviks against the Menshevik government in Tbilisi during the Soviet civil war. In return, the Georgians say, the Ossetians were rewarded with an "autonomous region" within Georgia in addition to the autonomous republic of North Ossetia in Russia.

The New York Times today published an account of the difficulties endured by South Ossetians at Georgia's hands beginning in the late 1980's.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia were not unique. The decision to place the Armenian dominated Nagorno-Karabakh under the jurisdiction of Azerbaijan had a similar effect -- and similarly, led to armed conflict when the Soviet Union ceased to exert central authority. With the stroke of a pen, Stalin could redraw the lines of the internal borders of the Soviet Union. For example, according to a recent article in Izvestiya, Stalin almost used his line-drawing power in 1925 to place North Ossetia - currently part of Russia - into the Georgian Republic. Similarly, Khruschev gave Crimea - likely the site of coming conflict - to Ukraine in 1954.

In short, the borders that McCain - at least by his bellicose rhetoric - would have the U.S. military fight to protect are borders that are an artifact of an intentional policy, originated by Stalin, to help Moscow keep control over its vast empire.

Where do you draw the line on the use of force?

Georgia and its allies in the U.S. - including McCain with his Yosemite-Sam-bluster - have repeatedly thrown around "territorial integrity" and "disproportionate force" in making the case against Russia's actions in Georgia.

Wrapping Russia's knuckles with these phrases has not caused the Russians to flinch. Whether it is a fair analogy or not, Russian officials point to the west's decision to wrest Kosovo from Serbia as precedent for ignoring territorial integrity when an ethnic minority enclave wants to secede from its erstwhile state. And when it comes to disproportionate force, the United States led NATO military action to "liberate" Kosovo resulted in 38,000 sorties, many aimed directly at Serbia's civilian infrastructure (including the Zastava Automobile plant, -pictured below - source of the once beloved Yugo), doing far more extensive damage in Serbia than did the Russian military in Georgia.


I recognize that Russia's claims of "genocide" by Georgians in South Ossetia are most probably bogus; the Kosovar Albanians received more despicable treatment from Slobodan Milošević's Serb army than anything the South Ossetians got from Georgia. Christopher Hitchens has explained many reasons why Russia's attempt to rely on Kosovo as precedent for recognizing South Ossetian or Abkhazian independence is not justified. But these recent, European ethnic conflicts are not as simple as they seem -- Hitchens, for example, fails to recognize that the worst atrocities in Kosovo did not begin until the NATO bombing campaign commenced and that the KLA had themselves committed a number of atrocities against Serb civilians living in the province. I am not suggesting that responsible policy makers in Europe or the U.S. should simply shrug off confronting such ethnic conflicts -- but it is hard to take sides without collaborating with very bad actors on one side or the other.

The former British ambassador to Yugoslavia, Sir Ivor Roberts, states the problem we have created for ourselves: "when the United States and Britain backed the independence of Kosovo without UN approval, they paved the way for Russia's 'defense' of South Ossetia, and for the current Western humiliation.

"What is sauce for the Kosovo goose is sauce for the South Ossetian gander."

I suspect that Russia goaded Georgia to launch its ill fated attack in South Ossetia, thus providing pretext for its military intervention. It is fair to label Russia's military actions in Georgia as disproportionate when compared to the Georgian incursion into South Ossetia. But for the United States to preach this sermon sounds to me like Hugh Hefner lecturing on the virtues of celibacy.

Where do you draw the line on hyperbole?

Putin has said that the disbanding of the Soviet Union was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century." Considering the vast human suffering caused by Soviet authorities, one might be more inclined to think that the formation of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of the last century. Putin went on to explain that the "catastrophe" became a "tragedy" for ethnic Russians who ended outside of Russia after the final break-up. Which brings us back to nationalism in the former Soviet Union.

Russian nationalism is on the rise. And with it, hope of Russia establishing an open society dwindles.

Putin has skillfully exploited Russians' resentment at losing so much in such a short amount of time. Putin's emergent imperial nationalism follows Boris Yeltsin's brand of nationalism, which was premised on Russia withdrawing from the Soviet Union in order to focus on reconstructing itself. Despite the cultural and linguistic dominance of Russian in the Soviet Union, Russia did not reap economic benefit from its membership in the USSR; under the centrally planned economy, wealth flowed out of Russia and into development projects in the far corners of the Soviet Union. Though Russia has a long way to go to build its own, modern infrastructure, Putin's brand of nationalism includes using Russia's military muscle to exert its influence in its so-called "near abroad." There has yet to be a coherent United States response to this shift.

What I do not understand is why the U.S. is assisting Putin, why America is fueling the flames of this resurgent nationalism. What vital U.S. interests are served by having Georgia or Ukraine join NATO? Why did the U.S. continue George Kennan's policy of containment against Russia even after the wall came down and Russia made efforts to adopt a western, capitalist system? The U.S. appears to be pursuing a dizzying array of shifting priorities in the region: securing nuclear weapons material; promoting democracy; ignoring democracy - by engaging with despotic and/or undemocratic regimes like those in Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan to negotiate gas or oil pipelines bypassing Russia and Iran; and relying on Russia's assistance to negotiate with Iran or North Korea. What will be next?

The U.S. will probably have little role in redrawing the map of Georgia, but it should put some thought into whether it is helping or hurting the cause of promoting civil society in Russia. Nader Mousavizadeh, former special assistant to the UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan, has written a thoughtful summary of the choices the U.S. faces in the Times of London:

Which brings us to the real lesson of the Georgian debacle: Tbilisi's freedom to challenge Russia had already been traded away by its Western allies - whether they realised it or not. When Kosovo declared independence in February, a senior European official remarked that the West would pay a price for its decision to offer recognition in the face of fierce Russian opposition.

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The lesson is not that the West was wrong to recognise Kosovo or that Nato was right to delay Georgia's membership. Rather, it is to suggest that we increasingly live in a world of choices. We may be able to enjoy the satisfaction of supporting the Kosovans or encouraging the Georgians, but we may not be able to do so without paying a price in another arena.

Instead, the U.S. government continues to draw rhetorical lines in the sand with regard to "acceptable" Russian actions -- apparently oblivious to the reality that America cannot have it all. As Putin and Medvedev understand, we lack the resources, will and stomach to put our money or military where our mouth is when Russia crosses those lines. Though the U.S. does not want to concede that Russia is playing in its neighborhood sandbox, calling Russia a bully from a balcony down the street is not likely going to make any difference to other kids on Russia's block.