Probably unintentionally, but still.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwqIY80nEdw
The video, subtly titled “Hitler 1945/Navalny 2018,” basically argues that if you oppose Medvedev’s corruption and the importation of infinity Moslems into Russia then you are Hitler.
Its current Dislikes to Likes ratio is at around 10.
According to Navalny himself, the man behind the video is Sergey Kiriyenko, the First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration.
The kremlin connection is probably true.
First, it obviously has a high production value, and has many of the stylistic features of the My Duck’s Vision studio, known for its goofy hyperbolic rhetoric and CGI overkill, which nobody really uses nowadays apart from the kremlins.
Second, the video has been shown to [edit 4/20: as has just been brought to my attention by Alexey Kovalev, they were actually shown another video, about Navalny’s involvement in the Kirovles affair (an alleged corruption scandal for which Navalny had been convicted), not the one about how he is Hitler; in his post on the matter, Navalny had implied otherwise, which serves as a good reminder that what Navalny says should be fact checked as well] students of Vladimir State University, some of whom had allegedly been forced to go there as punishment for participating in the protests against corruption on March 26.
After the video, the head of the regional law school’s department for counter extremism outreach amongst youth, one vibrantly named Alla Byba lectures the disgruntled students for their temerity in asking her that she also show some of Navalny’s videos – for example, on how Dmitry Peskov wears watches worth three times his annual salary – in the interests of academic neutrality.
“You all know there that is an information war against the Russian Federation,” she informs the students, “No wonder that terrorist organizations are intensively recruiting across the Internet.”
So the basic takeaway is that as we well know actual terrorists have no religion or nationality, discussing Medvedev’s corruption and opposing infinity Moslems in Moscow makes you an extremist, a supporter of Adolf Hitler, and a member of the sixth-column ala Dugin.
You can hardly find a better way to inflate Navalny’s otherwise very modest approval ratings and smother away his real failings, such as a lack of knowledge about policy.
Indeed, as Egor Prosvirnin argues, calling Navalny a Russian fascist is perhaps the one thing that can save him – because it is evidently false to just about everyone who is not in the over 50, no Internet connection, sub-90 IQ demographic. But by attacking him on the basis of his supposed nationalism, the kremlins may well actually end up forcing Navalny to (re)adopt Russian nationalism. In the current climate, that could well increase Navalny’s popularity by a factor of of two or three, making him a real political threat to the kremlins.
All of which begs Milyukov’s classic question: Is this treason, or stupidity?
Well, judge for yourselves.
Some biographic data on Kiriyenko from the English Wikipedia (no mention of this in the Russian version, incidentally):
Sergei Kiriyenko’s grandfather, Yakov Israitel, made his name as a devoted communist and member of the Cheka, and Vladimir Lenin awarded him with an inscribed pistol for his good service to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Sergei Kiriyenko, son of a Jewish father, was born in Sukhumi, the capital of the Abkhazian ASSR, and grew up in Sochi, in southern Russia. He adopted Ukrainian surname of his mother.
He was also one of the Gaidar’s “young reformers” responsible for the theft-ridden privatizations of the 1990s, and was Prime Minister during the 1998 default. After that, he spent the next seven years in inconsequential posts, until Putin plucked him out of obscurity to head Rosatom, the state nuclear power behemoth.
There have also been rumors in the press (which he denied) that he attended Scientology seminars in his hometown of Nizhny Novgorod.
Speaking of weird quasi-Masonic associations… Kirienko’s direct boss now is Anton Vaino, a descendant of Estonian communists. On becoming head of the Presidential Administration, the Internet quickly discovered his dissertation about the “nooscope,” a theoretical device that tracks “the collective conscience of mankind” thought a system of “spatial scanners” that monitor “changes in the biosphere.”
Many Russians expressed the hope that Vaino had paid someone to write it, because having an academic fraud in a position of power is par for the course in Russia, and far preferable to him being the deranged madman who wrote many dozens of pages about this pseudoscientific nonsense.
Apart from “treason” and “stupidity,” I suppose there is also a 666D chess explanation, a “mnogokhodovka” so to speak. If the kremlins could get nationalists to hop back aboard the Navalny bandwagon – meme Navalny into becoming a Russian Richard Spencer, as one Twitter user just suggested to me – then perhaps the kremlins could use the opportunity to shut down Russian nationalists along with Navalny himself in a future crackdown (for instance, if it coincides with the surrender of Donbass).
However, I don’t think that’s true, because I don’t think the kremlins are any smarter than Trump.
Is the Kremlin finally restoring Russia’s democracy?
This is the second pro-Navalny video that is backed by Russian authorities (first was Dimon video).
This made me look up Peskov’s watch:
https://navalny.com/p/4378/
It’s horrible. I don’t want that for free. Putin wears some pretty good watches though.
How competent is the PRC and Japan compared to other world governments, because it seems european countries are run by idealist idiots comparatively.
Anatoly,
To me this reference to the “nooscope” harkens back to the “noosphere” introduced in 1921 by Teilhard de Chardin.
de Chardin was regarded as a theologian by scientists and as a scientist by theologians. Both were wrong! The nooscope continues in this grand tradition of egregious nonsense.
The trouble with living in Moscow is that you get this fraudulent nonentity on the brain.
Yea. Kiriyenko.
Kremlin Hitler Navalniy Nooscope. This is what you now doing? Realy?
Well yes, there’s a connection, but the difference is that whereas it was not scientific, De Chardin’s ideas about the noosphere constitued a nice, elegant theory of universal history with real intellectual value, in my opinion more so than historical materialism at any rate which some people take quite seriously, whereas Vaino’s purported dissertation is what you get if you mash Kurzweil’s scribblings and brochures from a pharmaceuticals pyramid scheme into a machine learning program.
Reductio ad Hitlerum. Always a bad sign and invariably a vote loser for the side using it.
If Kiriyenko is behind it, shouldn’t Putin banish him to Siberia ( for a few months ). But he is famously loyal to friends and minions, so he’ll probably promote him.
Navalny is a political threat to exactly nobody, and he never will be. He’s a politician like I’m a ballerina; about as much charisma as a bag of rocks. He’s good looking, so is appealing to yuppie women and cucked Russian men. No, his real value is as a provocateur, something he does well and the kremlins are now harnessing to their advantage.
This whole things is just trolling for Russian liberals and nationalists, i.e. people who take their own opinions too seriously, but represent no threat to those in power. The confusion is rife. What to do, when you’re a Russian liberal and want to Westernize the country but aren’t a good white? Or, if you’re a Russian nationalist and despise Western liberals, yet have this common thread with the liberals in your own country? Russian liberals want Moscow without Russia (and Central Asians/Caucasians), while Russian nationalists want Russia without Moscow (and Central Asians/Caucasians).
I stopped following S&P a long time ago, to me Prosvirnin is emblematic of this political bi-polar syndrome. Obviously very smart, often perceptive and quite witty, his screed will still sound like full blast liberasty one day, then hardcore 88s the next. There are other Russian nationalists with their feet planted a bit more firmly on the ground.
Probably Stas Belkovsky had the best idea for Navalny’s future, which was for him to eventually replace Zhirik as head of LDPR. Because, you know, it’s simultaneously called “liberal democratic” and yet pushes the “Russia for Russians” line. But, in reality, it adheres to neither ideology.
It’s interesting that in Russia the hard right and the liberal opposition to Putin can occasionally converge. Which reminds me how in Hungary the so-called “far right” Jobbik party just made common cause with the leftist/liberal opposition, in support of… George Soros’s university. (On the other hand, the Trump administration just sent a senior diplomat of the Chinese persuasion to threaten Hungary not to enforce the new law against said university.) You couldn’t make this up.
Why is Jobbik pro-Soros?
I agree about Prosvirnin. Incredibly smart, but the different parts of his ideology war with each other. There are very good reasons why nationalists throughout the world are protectionists and social conservatives. He doesn’t seem to understand those reasons.
In short, if you love your country, you’d want it to be economically independent. And if you love your people, you’d want them to have strong families and a heathy, wholesome outlook on life. He can’t bring himself to believe in God? That’s not a reason to spoil life for everybody else. And actually there was an example of secular social conservatism in his own country not that long ago, but for some reason he hates that even more than religion.
So it is like a Rupert Sheldrake morphogenetic field.
I remember that stuff from before the GWOT, there used to be some device that you could connect to your PC to sample the field or something, helping predict the extremely important event of the death of Princess Diana for example.
Also seen in Jacques Vallée’s books on UFO events as a way to get rid of the “extraterrestrial” explanations which does not fit, and in “Serial Experiments: LAIN”.
Anyone who follows good advice from NYT Krugman to go the way of the Death of Money into the Cavern of Unpayable Govnmt Debt and who follows the US into the Pivot to China is raving bonkers.
China has enough internal anger to go its own way. But what the future brings is uncertain. Economic crash, population crash, ecological crash, war with US, cultural revolution II or a really-mean-it union with New Russia / New Turkey? Get your “Future Shock” SciFi pens ready.
Same boss — the CIA. The NWO doesn’t care if you’re hard-right, soft-left, purple-up or spotted-down, they want specific results checkmarked and they don’t care which ideology checkmarks them.
‘Political scoundrels’: Medvedev blasts corruption claims against him
https://www.rt.com/news/385300-medvedev-navalny-corruption-usmanov/
Russia is complicated!
How is he related to Vladislav Surkov (at 02:36:40):
https://youtu.be/f9m2yReECak?t=8229
The problem of Jobbik was that the ruling Fidesz party of Orbán stole much of the nationalist voters from them, they just couldn’t out-nationalist him convincingly, as the majority of the population doesn’t want to leave the EU or to become best buddies with Iran. Jobbik was friendly with Russia but Orbán stole that from them too now he is maybe the best friend of Putin within the EU, made a deal with Russia about building a new nuclear power plant etc.
So Jobbik decided to swing to the left and take over the former voters of the Socialist Party (already many former Socialist voters supported Jobbik in the countryside), and they are now supported by an oligarch who was basically Orbán’s Rotenberg (even more, he was the financier the party for two decades in exchange of kickbacks), but fell out with Orbán a few years ago and is now his arch enemy. Also neither the left-liberal parties, neither Jobbik can hope to defeat Fidesz in the election next year, only if they make a deal. So I think Jobbik will make a deal with MSZP likely. It will not be easy to sell to the voters of neither, but they are moving in that direction definitely.
Thanks for the explanation.
OK, for today I’m more indignant against (some) kremlins than anyone. A stupid cunt who should have lived out her life working in the Zhitomir mayor’s office, and some Armenian asshole from MGU, are horrified that someone dared speak plainly to an Anglo. What is worse, Lavrov apparently didn’t tell her to go fuck herself. This whole Moscow tusovka needs to be dealt with. Forget “suitcase – station – Kiev”, what’s needed is “basement – Makarov – Kärcher”.
https://russian.rt.com/russia/news/380831-matvienko-ne-odobrila-vystuplenie-safronkova
It’s basic politics-they have nothing to gain by tagging along as the little brother of FIDESZ. I’m sure they’re saying that they’re doing it for some high principle.
I am confused by this talk of Kremlins. Is there more than one? Are you referring to organizations or people?
Anatoly,
For us American non-slavic Russophiles, in your reports could you please make the internal politics a little simpler to us by disentangling the Slavic names. It gets a bit confusing for those Americans not immersed in Rusian politics.
BTW, what is your take on Prof Emeritus Steve Cohen? He appears to be the only one on the MSM (when invited) that appears to present the Russian side. His only regular outlet seems to be his weekly appearance on the John Batchelor Radio Show in NYC. Personally Cohen seems to me to be a decent person, but I am suspicious of his relationship to Katarina vanden Heuvel (by marriage) and the fact that she bankrolls The Nation Magazine.
I don’t think this is a game changer or has any real importance.
HOWEVER. Why dismiss the possibility that they are trying to drive people towards Navalny? The Kremlin has worked to prop him up as a useful opposition leader before. Remember how they let him run for mayor? They really did not have to do that. Well, someone has to take Nemtsov’s place, after all. And there is still zero risk of Navalny becoming President without the elite electing him themselves. (Personally I think they might be grooming the next Zhirinovsky instead, for when the current one expires.)
There actually are many kremlins in Russia. In the middle ages “kremlin” was just a generic Russian word for “fortress”. A few dozen of them remain, besides the famous Moscow one.
However, that’s not what Anatoly means by that word at all. When he says “kremlins”, he means the people who work in the presidential administration, and the central political apparatus in general. It’s likely a play on the English word “gremlins”, a jokey way to refer to the powers that be, the top of Russian officialdom.
Yes, Glossy is correct. There is also a term called “kremlyad” for them, but it has very negative connotations and is used exclusively by shitlibs (or “liberasts”), whereas “kremlins” has not so much an oppositional as a cynical/disdainful connotation.
.
So, I guess that both you and Jim Kovpak (whose latest piece over at his blog also reviews this exact same video about Navalny) come to similar conclusions?…
That would explain the CIA’s support of Binladen in the 1980s and their support of Jundallah today.
Yeah the similarities are quite striking, down to “elderly people in provincial Russia.”
Jobbik is very popular among the 15-35 age group (they get something like 53% support against 25% for Orban and 17% for the Socialist Party) so arguably they just have to wait. They are hard-right by their own self description (down to, well, the name of the party), but they’re actually pushing quite a left wing agenda as far as economics goes right now, complete with expanding health care, nationalizing industries, redistribution and so forth.
If there’s ever a disputed election between Orban and Jobbik, the response of western liberals would be….interesting to watch. Between a semi-authoritarian arch-conservative and an actual neofascist party, who knows which way they would go?
That meme needs to die. Most polls in Hungary don’t break down the numbers by age group (to be more precise, they don’t put it out to the public domain), but once one pollster did it, and precisely because of this finding, which, as they themselves wrote, could’ve been just a quirk in that particular poll (with relatively small sample). Their later polls didn’t confirm those findings, nor did those of other pollsters. Jobbik for a while made much of this particular poll (from I think 2013), but since then even they have stopped it. The young are still probably more supportive of them than other age groups, unfortunately it’s also true of most leftist opposition parties.
One more point: the youth are not very active politically. The majority of them don’t support any party. So it might be an artifact of more mainstream inclined young people just not being very much into politics, but as they get older they’ll probably vote for more mainstream parties.
I think it was also mentioned in the original (now several years old) poll, on which the whole “Jobbik is popular with the youth” meme is based on.
Navalny is not a HItler; he is a new Ahmed Chalabi, ready to sell his country and his people to the United States.
Anatoly, Smoothie or Glossy, do/would any of you bother to vote in the Russian elections?
The one thing I really like about Navalny is he wants to discard the North Caucasus, eject it from the rest of the RF. Outside of Milan you don’t ever find any national political figure with a vision of a nation based on “stronger without them”. If he can gain power and go through with that plan it will be a great example for China. We can then follow the Russian example and get rid of the burden of Kashgaria.
That’s retarded, simply because the chinese can swamp xinjiang with chinese and harvest valuable minerals with authoritarian PRC policy.
Kashgaria is the southwest part of Xinjiang.
Unless you address some of these practical difficulties and have an actual sense of the rewards for China in ruling over Kashgaria then any ideas you have are dumb and shoot from the hip.
That is a bad idea and it is a good thing that it is only supported by a minority.
If Russia were to get rid of the North Caucasian Federal District:
Benefits
1. Almost 10 million Muslims who don’t get along well with Russians are taken out of the country and their descendants
2. Annual transfer of wealth to keep things quiet in the North Caucasus is diverted back to spending on Russian needs
3. Exposure to terrorism from ruling over those people is gone
Negatives
1. Literally 1% of landmass gone
So why would it be a bad idea?
There are millions of Muslim Russian citizens outside of the NCFD.
Your message is that they are not welcome too. Do you want to lose Tatarstan too?
There are millions of non-Muslims in the NCFD.
Do you want that they end up like the millions of ethnic Russians in the former SSRs?
Most regions in Russia receive more than they transfer to other regions.
Do you want to get rid of Tuva and Kamchatka as well?
There will be more exposure, not less.
There is no buffer between Russia and the Northern Caucasus, but millions of people whose lives would get worse.
You want the FSB to do something against them? Too bad, FSB can no longer operate there, but Wahhabis can.
One of the most populous landmass of Russia right next to one of Russia’s prosperous regions is gone.
Favoring separatism from the Caucasus republics would eventually spur separatism from other regions of Russia and lead to the end of the country. Probably even Russian-populated regions would invent some ‘oppressed’ ethnic past to justify their separatism, as well as Umberto Bossi’s supporters claiming to be ‘Celts’.
That said, the separatist movement of Bossi is complete absurdity. Its “Padania” would lose the markets of the rest of Italy, with serious damages to its economy.The Slovenes also thought they would have a glorious future as Germany’s backyard, and they bitterly discovered how their economy depended on that ‘burden’ that was the old Yugoslavia.
One of the consequences could be to open the door to further separatism but not by regions populated by Russians. I can’t see how it will be the end of Russia to become more homogeneous, ridding itself of the burden of marginal Muslim groups. Only Muslim groups that don’t like the majority will want separatism. And why shouldn’t they be free to go? Do they make the union stronger with their presence?
For some Muslim groups that are secular and do get along reasonably well with the majority the ejection of poorly behaved Muslim groups will spur them to try even harder to get along better because they will understand union with the rest of Russia is a gift and not something they are begged to take.
You can’t advance without having to pay some cost or bear some pain. Is it going to be worth it? I think to relieve Russian forever of the burden of 10 million Muslims who can’t get along with other Russians is valuable and outweighs the costs. My criteria for expulsion of certain territories from any much larger union, whether China or Russia, is 2-part: 1) is the group that dominates the territory a burden to feed? and 2) are they patriotic/get along with the majority? If a certain group is a long term failure in both parts of the criteria then I believe the case for expulsion (and freedom for those subject people) from the union is sealed.