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April 18, 2025 13:30-15:02 - CSPAN
01:31:50
Scholars Discuss Russian Society
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marco rubio
admin 00:23
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
So, I mean, it was discussed, but I don't and I don't have to be part of any sort of conversation.
marco rubio ▲ ● ▼
Ukraine, in order for there to be peace, we recognize that Ukraine has to feel like it has the ability to defend itself from a future attack from anyone.
unidentified
Every country in the world has that right.
But I think everyone recognizes that Ukraine's ability to defend itself is going to be a part of its right as a country and will be a part of any agreement.
But we're not working yet on that level of specific.
I think that's something we can fix and solve in a way that's acceptable to everyone.
marco rubio ▲ ● ▼
I think we have bigger challenges that we need to figure out whether it's even possible within the short term.
unidentified
I can tell you this: this war has no military solution to it.
It really doesn't.
marco rubio ▲ ● ▼
It's not going to be decided with neither side has some strategic capability to end this war quickly.
unidentified
And so, what we're talking about here is avoiding thousands and thousands of people from dying over the next year.
We're trying to avoid that.
marco rubio ▲ ● ▼
We saw what happened last weekend with a missile strike in Sunny, where people died on Palm Sunday.
unidentified
We're just going to see more like that.
We have three presentations and four wonderful speakers.
So, when each speaker has up to 12 minutes, we have, since there are only three of you, have a little bit of flexibility, but I will also be showing some signs that the time is up.
So, without any further ado, the first presenter is Vladimir Gelman, University of Helsinki, Russia's Gamble: Why the Kremlin has not achieved its goals in February 2022.
Did it work?
Yeah.
Let me start from my great appreciation of the entire GW team for organizing this excellent conference.
And you guys have done a great job of keeping scholarly discussion on a very high professional level.
I hope that my contribution will add some important notes in this respect.
how to proceed with this.
You have to press the key down, I think.
No.
Okay.
Well, can you do something on this matter?
Yeah, actually, my.
No, it's not me.
Whoever likes to do it.
Yeah, this is me.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
So my presentation addresses to one of the most puzzling questions of our time.
Basically, why Russia not achieved its goals in Ukraine in February 2022.
If we'll go back to numerous predictions and expectations of February 24 of 2022, you'll find out that it was a sort of mantra.
Kiev will be falling in three days or four days.
And many analysts, highly reputable experts, argued that because of military might of Russia, because of overall prevalence in technologies, in manpower, and so on and so forth, the outcome of the Russian special military operation is inevitable.
However, it not happens in three days.
It not happens in three years.
I would say that the fall of Kyiv is a highly unlikely outcome of this special military operation even by now.
So we need to explain why.
Why such an effort not completely come in vain, but certainly not brought desired outcomes.
And I would say that this is a very difficult question to address nowadays, because we have to rely upon very much imperfect and incomplete information.
We have no access to whatever classified materials and very often have to use some journalistic accounts, some memoirs and the like.
But in my view, it's not much specific to the current situation.
And in the past, there were plenty of examples of brilliant analysis made upon very much imperfect and incomplete information.
A classical account of international relations is a study of Cuban missile crisis by Graham Ellison, which is based upon very much imperfect, if not biased, sources.
However, Ellison made great research on foreign policy decision making, and this is why students still use it by now.
And well, when more sources became available, then findings were somehow revised.
In my view, we can address big questions even using imperfect and incomplete information, and this is how we may proceed further.
So there are two basic explanations of why Russia not achieved its goals.
And in my view, both of them are very much imperfect.
One is an excessively shallow approach offered by some military analysts who pointed out that the Russian assault on Ukraine in a way was a replica of 1968 Soviet Operation Danube,
but things went wrong due to poor implementation of this plan, and this is an explanation.
Yet another approach is excessively deep and address issues very much beyond purely technological matters such as combat spirit, morality and the like.
In a way, it's a replica of Tolstoy's argument in War and Peace why the Russian army won over Napoleon.
But for good or for bad, explanations like that not work well in comparative perspective.
And more importantly, that these approaches being very different in many ways address symptoms rather than causes of this mismatch between expectations and reality.
And instead of dealing with purely military affairs, one should follow the footsteps of von Clausevis, who argued that with a continuation of policy with other means, and instead of focusing on policy implementation, we need to address matters of policy adoption.
And this is, in my view, the key for explanation.
So my response addresses two interrelated traps of decision making and these are first the trap of personalist authoritarian regime,
second is a trap of bad governance, the third is a trap of misperceptions about adversaries and about oneself, and finally the trap of previous impunity, how the previous success turned out to be the source of failure.
So let's address these traps one by one.
The key difference between the Soviet regime, which performed very much successfully in Czechoslovakia in nineteen sixty eight, and the Russian regime, which performed not so spectacular in Ukraine in twenty twenty two, is a difference between the nature of these regimes.
The Soviet regime was party-based, highly institutionalized, based upon collective decision-making and the like.
There was an excellent study of Soviet decision-making in Czechoslovakia in 1968 by Mark Ramer, the famous Cold War historian from Harvard, and he analyzed six plenary meetings of Politburo negotiations between Soviet leadership and leadership of Warsaw Pact countries,
and this led to very much efficient preparation of decision and its successful implementation.
Nothing like that was observed in Russia in February twenty twenty two.
At least what we know was far away from whatever collective decision making.
But more specifically, it's a matter of institutionalization.
Highly institutionalized regimes tend to operate probably not so quickly and not so decisively, but much more effectively than personalist regimes.
And the problem with personalist regimes is that they're well known for their decisiveness, but the arbitrariness is other side of the coin.
And actually the rise of personalization of the Russian regime skyrocketed after the twenty twenty constitutional plebiscite,
which immensely increased the time horizon for Russia's leadership, but also tend to undermine some sort of mechanisms of decision making.
So this is important for our understanding of the logic of decision making.
Second is the problem of bad governance.
This is the subject matter of my previous book which was sent to the press just some weeks before the start of military assault.
And following excellent David's presentation, I would say that one of the problems of bad governance in Russia in general and in foreign military and security policy is the lack of technocratic foolproofing.
David mentioned quite important matter that it is a huge difference between civilian and Siloviki sectors of the Russian Government and in this respect the lack of technocratic foolproofing is one of the elements.
Of course there is plenty of episodes of corruption and mismanagement accusations toward former leadership of the Ministry of Defence is very much reasonable,
but I would say that the problem is much more deeper and attempts to circumvent these deficiencies of quality of governance such as making certain pockets of efficiency like a Wagner group is also a double edged sword and not resolve the trap of misperceptions.
We know from classical analysis in international relations that overall misperceptions resulted in overestimation of your adversaries.
Quite the opposite in the case of Russia's approach toward Ukraine, it was a number of underestimations and this means that risks were not taken seriously enough.
Why the Kremlin underestimated adversaries, not only Ukraine but elsewhere, is a matter of special discussion.
And finally, the experience of successful annexation of Crimea in twenty fourteen made the Kremlin a victim of previous success, because it's a sort of scaling up of a relatively minor episode and expectation that well this time will be the same, but much bigger.
And in this respect such an expectation played a very much negative role in policy planning and implementation.
So what went wrong?
To summarize, there are three former students among the presenters in this conference, and all of them know that I requested students to summarise their answers on scholarly questions in one or two sentences.
I summarize my answer in one quotation from Bible.
Whoever exalts himself will be humbled.
But this is the shortest possible answer.
Those who are interested in longer answers, I would strongly suggest to read the book which entitled Russia's Gamble.
It will appear in polity press in two months from now.
So thank you for accepting my selfish self-promotion.
Thank you.
Thank you, Vladimir.
We're even one minute ahead, actually.
Just following a good example, so setting good examples.
So our second speaker is Alexander Golds from the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.
Back to the USSR: How the war in Ukraine is pushing the Russian army towards Soviet Euro organizational models.
Thank you so much.
It's a great honor to address such knowledgeable audience, and it's a really great honor for me.
Ironically, in fact, I plan to continue Vladimir's presentations for obvious reasons.
I can suggest you my explanation of failures and effect of this operation.
Today we are speaking about the level of expertise.
Russian invasion in Ukraine was an overwhelming catastrophe in many, many dimensions.
But it was a total catastrophe in the sense of military expertise.
None.
I'm sure what I am speaking about.
None of these prognosis was realized.
Let me remind you a few facts.
A few weeks before the invasion, Americans trying to stop the invasion, to prevent it, made intelligence leaks in press, publishing possible scenarios of Russian operation.
Bulk of military experts said it's totally nonsense.
When you have 200,000 troops, you cannot invade in seven directions.
Russia invaded in seven directions.
Next, people say, okay, Russian military mind technological superiority will lead us that Kiev will fall in seven days.
And the same people, let me stress, the same people began to write that, okay, now we see the corruption problems, inefficiency of decision-making, blah, blah, blah.
And one of these experts even wrote that Russia lost capability for planning of strategic operations.
Then 2003 came.
Ukrainian advance was not very successful.
And people turned around.
Okay, now we know that Russia has its capabilities.
So I can this list is endless.
What are the reasons for this lack of expertise?
Of course, I agree with political reasons Vladimir mentioned, but my feeling is that people who made such predictions based on common sense and second on traditional patterns making no difference between countries.
Okay, big battalions win.
That is the reason why Russia, this Ukraine will be different.
It's a lack of knowledge of history of Russian military build-up, in my humble opinion.
For 170 years, the basic concept of Russia defense was mass mobilization armed forces.
In a few words, just to explain what I mean.
The idea was that all the country is a military camp, and in case of emergency, military authorities should have capability to call under banners millions and millions of people.
In the Soviet Union, this system reached its peak.
It was an ideal mobilization system and totally idiotic from economic points.
No, no.
What does it mean?
Soviet army was a huge military school.
Five million people.
All privates and sergeants were not professional soldiers.
They were drafteers.
The idea was to train them during one or two years to make them reservists that can be called in emergence.
The second part of this system was industrial mobilization.
All, I'll stress, all Soviet enterprises had so-called mobilization tasks.
Again, from the point of view of economy, it's totally ideal.
You can keep reserve production lines to produce something that you absolutely do not need.
We should add here that Soviet leaders supposed that their possible adversaries have the same way of thinking and they knew for sure that American and European industry are much more effective.
What is the answer?
We should do as much, make as much military equipment as possible and store it for this particular reason.
Soviet Union had 63,000 tanks, three times more than states had and two times more than all other countries in the world.
It's absolutely clear that this system collapsed together with Congress.
And honestly speaking, generals were powerful enough to keep image of this system for next 10 years.
And only in 2008, when Serdiukov became defense minister, he understood the problem and he grew this system.
And Mr. Putin, at the end of the day, received armed forces that can solve some military problem in terms of hours or days.
And the biggest success of the Russian army was February 26, 2014, when more than 40,000 troops were deployed along the Russian-Ukrainian border.
Let me remind you that a few years before, when Chechens intruded Dagestan, it took two full weeks before Russia could start the deployment.
Fortunately or unfortunately, Mr. Putin misunderstood this opportunity.
And the main problem in February 2022 was that troops received orders they cannot fulfill.
You cannot occupy big European countries having 200,000 troops.
It's totally nonsense.
Generals knew all this stuff.
But in the Russian system, they cannot say, Mr. President, we cannot do so.
So they prefer to behave as if they really trusted FSB reports that Ukrainians will meet Russian troops with flour.
What happened then?
After failures of autumn 2022, I suppose, I suppose, Putin asked advice.
And generals can give the only advice they know.
Let's return to mobilization system.
And it happened during the so-called partial mobilization.
Ekatina was absolutely right when she said that it was a total shock for the Russian system and it was a clear red line.
Kremlin understood it cannot conduct compulsory mobilization.
And at that particular point, Putin made a real, real revolution in Russian military thinking.
He began to pay money.
Look, it's never happened in Soviet history.
It happened during post-World War.
All mobilized soldiers, all families of mobilized soldiers received money absolutely unbelievable in Russian village.
And it leads to changes of social structures in traditional Russian village.
Because wife of soldier was nothing in this, but suddenly this woman received huge money.
And there are fantastic letters of these women who said, okay, I want this would be end.
Of course, it's ended with lack of products and inflation and then lack of products.
But Putin took this system and it's very workable.
Now we should understand that the recruiting is rather effective to permit authorities to recruit something like thirty thousand men a month.
It's real mobilization.
I name it volunteer mobilization.
Or you can name it market mobilization.
Because the whole market appears.
Some regions, all regions have quarters for those who will sign contracts.
They pay different money.
And if a guy wants to be recruited, he begins to think what regions okay.
Sorry.
Now the qu the biggest question now, and we can turn to this point in Russia.
What happened then?
I think that in this situation military will suggest, Mr. Putin, that this particular type of conflict will be modeled for future conflicts.
And if it happens, Putin will stand before the very difficult choice.
The deports, Soviet deports of old Soviet tanks are more or less exhausted.
He badly needs to return to Soviet system of military production.
And if you want to have such kind of system, it means that you should return to Soviet economy, which was reason for collapse of Soviet Union.
So it will be a very difficult choice.
But now we have a clear tendency of renaissance of industry.
According to my accounts, approximately two hundred big enterprises were renovated in twenty twenty four.
So we can suppose that Putin is moving to restore Soviet military system.
Thank you so much.
So perfect timing.
And finally we have two presenters, Matthew Blackburn from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Alina Amadinova from the Washington State University, assessing critical patriotism and the imperial nationalist imaginary in wartime Russia.
The floor is yours.
Twelve minutes.
Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Sorry. At least you didn't get out of it.
So this presentation is part of a larger project that involves some other labs that are studying changes in wartime Russia.
Our focus was on nationalism, nationalisms in the plural.
The transformation of Russian nationalism in wartime war and nationalism have historically transformed societies, countries, regions.
So but at the same time, nationalism is multifaceted, multi-directional phenomenon.
No regime or state can ever claim or hope to have it under control forever and in perpetuity.
And particularly, the Putin regime has had an ambiguous and complex relationship with nationalism, as Marlene Larille has written about extensively.
And often the approach is to allow a great deal of venting and a great deal of that to be elaborated and allowed in comparison to perhaps liberal opposition groups.
So just to say about the context that got us moving into this, how we decided to go with the lab in our first article that we tried to write, was this context of the shrinking space for dissent in Russia.
So of course due to the foreign agent laws or the censorship laws, the sense that there is no space for dissent in the old way.
And so then we have the explosion in telegram usage during the war and the sense or the national patriots, as they might call themselves, have stepped in to perform this role.
And how the way they do it is sort of agree with a large amount of the regime's ideological positions while finding spaces to criticise government performance or decision making and so forth.
And we also point out that, well, our starting point in the context is that the systemic opposition during the war has become more loyal.
And there's a paper out from Matthias Dalton that covers that.
And that also we have, of course, the repression of anti-systemic parties and the development movement.
So we have two concepts that are moving around in our paper, and some might say that's too much, and we should read two papers over.
Critical patriotism, which we define on two levels, which is, as I just mentioned, this type of dissent that basically is involving certain groups and mid-level actors who are covering their dissent up in the state spatial language.
The other part of our meaning of critical patriotism is that it's a segment, a value cluster inside the Russian population, which has been identified by quality sociological research such as Feman and PS Lab have also discovered this segment of non-state patriotism, people who call themselves patriots but are very critical of the regime and don't accept the propaganda that is fed to them.
The other major concept we have is imperial nationalism.
Now, many people in this room might think these two concepts, no imperialism and nationalism, are not mutual, they're just exclusive, they can't be combined, but there is a body of scholarship that shows in the 19th century, particularly imperialism and nationalism reinforce each other.
And there's a sense that that's happening in Russia again.
The nationalist imperative for self-determination merges or fuses with a desire for imperial expansion.
But this time it's in the 21st century, and the idea being that maybe this applies to some other countries, like China, India, Turkey, and even America.
Perhaps.
So, those are the sort of conceptual realm, and we are kind of arguing that there is a relationship between critical patriotism and imperial nationalism.
Imperial nationalism for the groups we study is a kind of social imaginary, geopolitical imaginary, and nationalist and populist imaginaries that kind of overlap with each other.
And at the same time, the critical patriotism is a way of a mobilizing frame for communicating with society.
So, the two kind of interlink that way.
Okay, I will now pass over to my co-author who is going to take us into the methods and the data.
So, as you can see, we choose Telegram as a source of our empirical data.
And while in the US, Telegram is mostly perceived as a haven for drug dealers and peanut followers, in Russia, it's one of the most popular websites, with almost 47% of the population using it every single day.
Moreover, Telegram is maybe the last best stone of political freedom in Russia because of its minimal content moderation and relative privacy.
Basically, Telegram facilitates political engagement in two ways.
The first one is one-to-many broadcasting channels where hosts can create their own contact, but also forward messages from other channels.
And these channels can serve as a tool for top-down political mobilization, but also they can perform as an independent media too, because some of them have more than several million subscribers.
And by the way, while trust in TV was declining since the beginning of the war in Russia, trust in Telegram as a source of information increased dramatically.
At the same time, Telegram provides opportunities for more horizontal information tools too, because any user can create private or public chats where members can communicate with each other directly.
And together this creates fertile ground for digital political communities.
And while field work in Russia is especially problematic right now, digital field work telegram can be a good alternative.
But what exactly did we do?
First of all, we selected four so-called seed telegram channels that best reflect our theoretical definition of critical patriotism and imperial nationalism.
And then we added to our sample channels whose messages these seed channels forwarded most frequently.
And then we repeated the same process with these newly added channels too.
And as a result, this exponential snowball sampling gave us the list of 79 telegram channels.
And we collected all messages they posted since the beginning of the war.
And this database is automatically updating even right now.
So today we have over 770,000 messages there.
And we use this data to build a network where every node is a telegram channel and every edge represents the fact that messages go forward between them.
And after that we applied the wine clustering algorithm to identify let's say the most connected group of channels which also can be described as different groups or even types of national imperialists.
And the first cluster is the blue one is white imperial nationalists.
They are visor is ICRISTROCOV and all of them mostly share his nostalgia for Russian Empire and would like to restore its historical order.
The second cluster is the red one is the anti-systemic nationalist and this cluster mostly contains telegram channels of left-wing unregistrated national Bolshevik facie under Russia named by Eduard Limonov and its regional branches.
And the last and the biggest cluster is the green one includes both radical conservative Orthodox patriots for example Alexander Dukin and military bloggers such as Rebai Obi and Korkaton and we have several working hypotheses on why these two subgroups ended up in the same cluster but what is even more important is that more detailed year-by-year network analysis demonstrated that these two subgroups began to drift apart forming two separate clusters by 2024.
And to make sense of this shift we treated them as two different let's say ideological subgroups as the next stage of our analysis and we were also wondering do these critical patriots actually criticize Russian authorities and Russian government.
So we used nature language products and techniques called national learning models classifiers to identify messages where they criticize government and to track how often they appear all the time.
And the two really important points about this graph, the first one is that we see synchronized spikes in criticism in 2022.
The first one was just after the announcement of partial mobilization because it was widely viewed by critical patriots as ineffective and insufficient.
They would like to see full-scale mobilization instead of partial mobilization.
And the next spike followed the first successful drone strikes on Russian military infrastructure deep inside Russian territories.
And the second important point is that the real turning point for them was Pregozhan March for Justice of Bagner Group Rebellion.
It looks like Imperial nationalists saw it as a window of political opportunities for them, but it's also worth to note that when this rebellion was shut down, and for example, Igris Trilkov was arrested too, this criticism dropped.
But this led to the divergence of how this group positions themselves.
For example, anti-regime, sorry, white imperial nationalism, the red line here, became even more radical, while Orthodox Conservative Patriots, the green line, toned down the criticism, possibly to demonstrate loyalty to the regime.
While, for example, military bloggers didn't do so.
So maybe this could be one of the reasons why they formed two different clusters later.
But the core idea here is that they choose different strategies to respond to the increased threat of governmental repressions.
So now we know who are national patriots when they criticize the Russian government.
And the next question was how they criticize the Russian government, at what value they promote.
And we used all this data to select the most critical messages posted by the most influential Telegram channels.
And I can go into more details about that in QA session.
But the core idea here is that we selected 300 messages for qualitative analysis.
And Maxwell spent a lot of time to do that.
Thanks to him.
We identified eight core frames of critical patriotism and imperial nationalism.
And also we created the list of keywords for each frame and used them for quantitative content analysis of all messages posted by all channels.
And this took not so much time as Maxwell spent for qualitative analysis.
But you can see some results on the slide.
It's the distributions of frames across all clusters.
And now I kind of don't want to mess it so he can tell you more about our results.
Yes, Alina spent three days on 700,000 messages and I spent three weeks looking at just eight channels.
So that's how it works to be quantitative and qualitative.
So just to sort of wrap up, some findings that we have based on the coding and the qualitative reading and the quantitative data, that there is much unity in the presentation of these themes of imperial irredentism, the attempt to sort of recapture land and create a larger Russian state, which the Kremlin doesn't articulate in the ways that these groups do, and the common theme of nationalist reunification, all the people that have to come back together and live in the same state.
But also the ethnocentrism and nativism, which we didn't necessarily expect to see also reproduced by the national Bolsheviks, all talking about Russia's need for demographic rebirth of the Ruski and the need to tackle immigration.
So the unity in this, so in the imaginaries and the commonality, there was a lot in common.
There was not so many areas where they were at odds.
There's also unity about the presentation of the war being an existential war and therefore must be fought in the most extreme possible way, which is kind of like a logical conclusion.
If you say it's an existential war, why don't you fight it like it's an existential war?
And that's the point they make repeatedly.
And they put themselves in the position of the party of war who will be able to make these claims with a stab in the back if the peace deal is not to their liking.
So those two points of unity, you could say they're quite banal findings.
We already know that, but at least it's backed up with some strong empirical evidence.
But there's key differences in the stances to the regime and in terms of their mobilizational frames.
And so, as Alina already indicated, there is a sense that the Malefeyv, Dugin kind of cluster and the military bloggers have moved themselves closer to the options for co-option and about getting resources and occupying niches in the ideological ecosystem, as Marlen would put it.
And they have toned down their dissent, whereas Strelkov upped his dissent.
But the key point is that the social populist discourse, which is really key idea of critical patriotism, they very much use a similar discourse like Navalny did.
And as you go back and look at Strelkov and Navalny debating in 2017, you'll find that the imperial nationalist kind of imaginaries utterly divide the two.
But when it comes to their social populism, there is some similarities in how they talk about the elites and the need for fairness.
So the red line that Strelkov crossed was when he decided to actually form an attempt to enter politics.
After they refused to allow him to form a volunteer battalion, he actually announced that the club of angry patriots would try and enter politics and engage people and have an enlivened patriotic civil society.
Final point, that our work definitely underlines there's agency amongst these groups.
They are choosing between doing things that might enrage the authorities, but raise their credibility.
And it is very much possible that Strelkov's credibility has been increased.
His patriotic mythology has been kind of underlined by his bravery and actions, as he would put himself.
Whereas Dugin and Malefev are hoping to reap the benefits of a new Russia after the war, where they've positioned themselves in better place.
Okay, and if only we had more time to talk about future directions, but I will leave it there.
Thank you very much for your attention.
Thank you so much for a very thought-provoking presentation.
Now I'm opening the floor for the questions and comments.
Please.
Don't forget to introduce yourself and wait for the mic, please.
Hello, my name is Dan Setinsky.
I have a question for you about ideologies.
And you laid out these two, these various ideologies.
What role do you think the state ideology, say, as embodied in Karaganov and Symes,
and this notion of a conservative Russian response to Western imperialism that poses Ukraine as a fight of a bigger fight of the opposing Western imperialism in a year and a year?
unity of Russia with the world majority, with China and the global south?
And I don't see this just doesn't appear anywhere, and I understand why it wouldn't, because it's not a dissenting appearance.
But I don't know whether there's any resonance in the population for this ideology that's being created by the people at the higher school of economics.
So let's collect a few more.
Also a question for the final presenters.
Have you looked at how these groups have responded to the most recent peace negotiations?
Question to Alexander.
Could you comment a bit more on how the return to the Soviet way of conducting war may have affected the way in which the Russian military is actually conducting its operations on a day-to-day basis?
Thank you.
So maybe let's collect one more.
was a hand on the back so yes so yeah okay Here is one hand, and also Ilya.
I have two questions.
First one to Matthew and Alina.
So I'm wondering about the killing of Prigorzhin.
So I mean, was it like influential in the silencing of criticism of the state for which of the groups?
And the second one is for Alexander.
So you're saying about that the Russian state is going just to reinstate the Soviet military economic approach.
But you were at the same time were showing that just Russian state was very creative in using market tools to just to avoid the mobilization.
So why you are not just thinking about the opportunity of finding a creative way to use the market to avoid the mobilizational economy as it was in the Soviet times?
Hi, I'm Harry Stevens.
So two quick questions.
One for Professor Goltz.
There's obviously not a great deal of public information about this, but speaking, kind of continuing to talk about the need to rebuild a larger almost Soviet style military industrial base, what are some of the how feasible do you think that is given the especially for certain military products that have not been made in many decades?
What kind of timeline, just to put a general, you don't need a specific number, but what kind of timeline and what kind of resource investment would be needed to recreate that?
And then quickly for Blackburn and Alina, based on kind of what you've seen with the sentiment analysis of the various messages, is there a sense between these groups, which is there a sense of unity amongst them?
Are they kind of thicker, or what is the level of, if not formal cooperation, kind of alignment, or do they kind of break into factionalism?
Thank you.
So there was also, if you don't mind, so let's collect just maybe a final question for this first round and then.
Thank you.
Question for Alexander Goltz.
Thank you.
That's absolutely fascinating.
I would just like to ask, I mean, my conversations with Ukrainian veterans, but also observation of the battlefield, has suggested that these reports of Russian so-called meat attacks or human wave attacks are in fact completely false, that you cannot carry out such attacks at present because of the nature of the weaponry.
But also from what you say, because the Russians, well, A, don't have enough troops for that.
But also, of course, to get soldiers to carry out such attacks with such casualties would also require a degree of either discipline or motivation or terror.
Do you think that Russia today is capable of that kind of well, that kind of strategy, that kind of spiritual military mobilization?
And if so, what are the implications for the future of this war?
Thank you.
So now we're done with the first round.
Thank you.
So let's start with Alexander, please.
Okay.
First question, how this turn To Soviet strategy and military build-up reflects regular activity of Russian troops.
Okay, this return is very complicated.
I can give you a few examples.
For example, Russia now rejected the idea of brigade division to division level.
And it's very in path of mass mobilization.
Also, preparing of reservists.
They took simply Soviet manner.
They organized nine reservist units for each direction, for each front in Ukraine, where they in a few weeks they prepare these reservists.
So it's interesting.
I cannot answer in one minute, but look, one of the failures of military analysis was that this war has nothing to do with libraries of books about future warfare.
Nothing.
The biggest example, the closest example of this warfare is First World War.
Positional warfare.
And from this point of view, there is no, absolutely no sense for this so-called mid-storms.
Because what Russia repeating the strategy of First World War is doing is this Salami strategy.
100 meters, one kilometer, then stop, make defensive, build positions.
So for this reason, they are repeating, of course, we cannot speak that they are repeating Soviet strategy, which was based on strategic throw-up.
But nevertheless, it's totally so, let's say it's totally Soviet approach.
Second question about can in expanding military industry, can Russia use market laws?
My answer is no, for obvious reasons.
Russian industry, military industry, so-called military industry, reached the peak of production and it cannot be profitable afterwards.
Okay, now Russian industry is a driver of Russian economy, but it will not last forever.
But if case Russian leadership will take this conflict as a model and start to prepare Country and army for a long conventional war in Europe, for example.
There is no other way out but to restart an effective Soviet economy, which was ideal from the point of view of constructing weapons.
It was ideal system.
If this system had no goal to receive profits, benefits, the single goal was to build as much tanks as possible.
And if Mr. Putin keeps such a model in his mind, okay, the renaissance will be the single answer I can imagine.
So, he is, again, answering the question about these mid storms and everything.
Okay, as I said, there is no need for such storms, but it doesn't say that Russia has low losses.
The losses are very high, obvious reason.
Russia attacks.
Russia is advancing.
When you advance, you have much more losses.
And again, the goals of this advance are more political than military.
From military point, there was absolutely no sense of this operation in general.
But also it has very few military sense, if any, in this advance.
I hate, honestly speaking, I hate reading of colleagues their tragic stories that today or tomorrow Ukrainian front will be broken.
It was broken several times.
But the basic problem of Russia is of Russian strategies is they have no reserves.
According to Soviet manuals, in order to move to 60 kilometers, honestly speaking, I suppose that Russian generals have the same idea, the same manuals, you need a fresh army group.
So something between 30 to 40,000 men.
This volunteer mobilization gives enough troops to replenish those who were lost.
No more.
Thank you.
Matthew or Alina?
Yes.
Is this working?
The first question about ideology and the kind of sanitized version of Russia's war aims and what they're doing in the struggle with the West with Putin, Lavrov, Karaganov, and Symes, as you mentioned.
I absolutely agree that they paint it very much as if they're the normal ones, they're the pragmatic ones, and the West are the ones who are ideologically possessed.
So it's counter-ideological framing, which is very much designed to go to the global south audiences.
I mean, if you're in HSC and you talk about Russia's aims and you go to a university in India, you're going to talk in these terms.
So how does it compare to the groups we study?
Well, I mean, they have a radical illiberalism which pulls no punches.
And basically, they get right into every single sort of, if we use the term empty signifier, a phrase like traditional values or existential war or civilization state.
Well, these groups that we study fill it with some really powerful meaning.
And they basically make really clear visions of war nationalism and visions of imperialism, articulations of imperialism, which are frankly taboo, I think, in Kremlin discourse to openly advocate imperialism.
No, of course not.
So they do it.
And I hope that answers your question satisfactorily.
But just like the theory of empty signifiers have to be filled with content.
They don't, or they do.
Well, these groups are doing it.
So what does that mean for them in the future?
We'll see.
The second question that I'll take is about the death of Prigozhin.
So it was interesting to look at the difference.
The National Bolsheviks and Strilkov have an elaborate conspiracy theory which says that Prigozhin was in league with the West and they wanted to overthrow the Russian government and free Navalny from prison and create a new liberal.
They're part of the traitors inside the Russian elites, the so-called liberals that they call liberal.
Now, Dugin also believes, uses the language of sixth column, but he stopped talking about it to a significant degree, according to our data.
And of course, the interesting thing, Malafeyev also is silent on this, relatively speaking, the interesting thing is that the military bloggers surely are positioned to know most about this, the best informed.
And we didn't find them talking too much about this.
It's almost as if they decided to be quiet as well.
And of course, the co-option of the military bloggers happened before Prigozhin.
I think there were those meetings towards the end of 2022 in Moscow where the most prominent military bloggers came to the Kremlin and had these meetings and were given this kind of awards ceremony.
Okay.
Third one, before I pass it to Alina, was unity amongst the groups.
So we found that the National Bolsheviks and Strilkovsky refer to each other a lot and they repost a lot of their own material between each other.
They both have a mythology kind of account of their movement for the National Bolsheviks, Islimonov, and for Strilkov.
And this is a big mythology of key events and really just based around these personalities, these powerful personalities, who have always been patriots according to their narrative.
They've always been on the right side of the patriotic camp and they've always led the way and they've always been right.
And so there's a little bit of that kind of big personality focus and leader focused.
But of course the other major cluster of groups that we look at are more diverse.
And Malafeyv and Dugin have certainly cemented their relationship in the war.
They're cooperating much more deeply around the infrastructure of Tsargrad, which has now expanded beyond being just a media channel to also being an institute and a club for academic discussions and so on.
So this produces books, like Malafey has written a book called Ruskai Imperia, it's called Plan Budyshev or something like this.
If nobody really has a lot of free time, they could read it.
I haven't got around to it, but I will, I will.
Promise.
I have to.
I have no choice.
But just to make a final, just make that final point: that the avoiding social populist discourse amongst the military bloggers and Malafe and Dugin, the only area they still talk about is immigration after Crocos and the chaos within immigration and the need to clean that up and bring order to the cities and to end all the immigration chaos that they call it.
But otherwise, they avoid criticising, naming, and criticising people in the authorities or in the elites.
They used to do it more before the war.
During COVID, for example, they were much more vocal.
And in fact, all these groups were working together during COVID, which culminated in protests that were rather understudied.
In November 2021, there were a number of small-scale protests and they repealed the QR code legislation, which they said was a digital concentration camp that the Kremlin wanted to install on Russians as part of a globalist conspiracy.
Well, it was successful.
They repealed the legislation and their resistance was there, was before the war.
So, sorry, I've gone on a bit too long, but I'll pass on to Telina.
I just have one thing to add about similarities and cooperations among different clusters, because it was interestingly enough that white imperialists were much more closer to anti-systemic nationalists, red nationalists, than to Orthodox conservative patriots, especially after the arrest of Igor Strolkov, because this act of governmental repression maybe provoked the sense of solidarity between them,
because Nat Bolo were repressed a lot even before the onset of the Fulsti invasion of Ukraine, and especially after the invasion in Ukraine, because they also tried to protest for more like hawkish foreign policy.
The other important thing is about the question on their attitudes about peace negotiations and peace talks.
They also have a conspiracy theory about that, because from their perspective, all these peace talks, especially peace talks with the West and with Trump, is just a plot of this six column or this hidden pro-West part of political elite, and they just try to fool.
Sometimes they try to fool Putin, sometimes they try to fool the Russian nation in general.
But yeah, they think about peace negotiations negatively, of course.
Okay, great.
Thank you so much for a very detailed question.
So we have also one hand on the back.
And yeah, also there's a gentleman over there.
Thank you.
I just want to continue this debate between Alexander and Ilya Vinyakin.
I also see a contradiction in what you're saying, Alexander, about the capacity of military plants in Russia to produce any more tanks that they actually produce now, which is a very low number, right?
They never replenish what they lose.
And what you're saying is that, in fact, if they now re-nationalize the other plants and produce more, they maybe can succeed.
But it seems that Chemezov and Rostech and this whole group are very ineffective men generally.
So the question is, why bother?
I think this is something that Ilyao also meant when he was asking: why not buy rockets from North Korea and drones from Iran, which they already do, and they have so many other friends among authoritarian regimes that can sell stuff.
And the question here is: are there any markets where heavy tanks and other machines can be bought?
Because we know that with rockets, it worked out, with drones, it worked out, but can it work with anything bigger?
Thank you.
Okay.
Two hands up here.
Yeah.
So, quickly following up on your point about reindustrialization, while there is kind of a push within Russia to renationalize and produce a greater volume of equipment, I think that it's also worth noting that in the lead-up to the war, there was a lot of push within Russia to remodernize its equipment to get it up to standard with what is being used in the West.
And I think that the Ukrainian war has kind of proven that the model of simply just throwing down numbers does not necessarily work.
We see cases where the Russians will fire 200 shells at something to kill it, whereas the Ukrainians only need one.
Considering that inefficiency in production that is currently the case, would you necessarily say that another solution other than nationalization might be to embrace modern technologies like precision-guided munitions and so on and so forth?
Okay.
Kevin Killeen, I just wanted to add to the why bother part.
Jamie Metzel keeps talking about dual-use technology for bioweapons.
And you can make bioweapons for the price of one tank.
And KEI had a talk a couple days ago about economic policy between Korea, Japan, and China.
And all of them make tanks to it probably a lot cheaper.
Okay, so also there were.
No, give it to Anders.
a second the mic is coming Thank you very much.
My name is Anders Oslo.
I wanted to ask Vladimir and Alexander about the other side, the Ukrainian side.
And Charles Teeley taught us that war forms states.
And this is very much what we have seen now in Ukraine.
The Ukrainians have nowhere to go to the grave or to the West.
And therefore, they are fighting bitterly.
And something that is not much noticed is the military budget.
Ukraine's military budget this year and the last two years has each been about $100 billion, half the GDP.
Russia's military budget this year is up to 9% of the GDP, officially $180 billion.
And this is discussed in Russia as a big problem.
In Ukraine, it's not discussed as a problem.
This is something that we have to do, the Ukrainians say.
And therefore, I think that the Ukrainians will win.
And it doesn't really matter what the Russians do.
The question is, when will Russia have had enough?
In the Afghanistan war, it took 10 years, and officially 15,000 dead.
Now, already we are seeing probably 200,000 dead.
Alexander, you're welcome to correct me if I'm saying it wrong, probably 600,000 injured.
This is a message, but it takes time.
And I see on the reports the mood is changing.
So I would really like to pose a different question.
For how long can Russia continue this mad war?
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Very important question.
So, okay, Stefan.
I have a very short question to Alina and Matthew.
Do you see any illiberal thinking coming mostly from this country?
Simmering, I mean, because this country produces very strong illiberal ideological thinking right now that resonates through Europe.
Do you see this entering the Russian discourse?
Do we see, I mean, Russia is often receptive to Western ideological production.
Can we see Californian liberalism, tech liberalism appearing in the discussions in Russia?
Okay, so and this.
Hi, thank you.
I also had a question for Alina and Matthew.
I was curious about how in your data these different rhetorical communities are discussing or not discussing the fact of the multi-ethnic nature of the Russian Federation and also the outsized role that national minorities are playing on the battlefield, you know, fighting for the Russian side in Ukraine as well.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, great.
I don't see any other questions, so now it's back to our presenters.
So probably for referring to the Tillian approach to the role of wars in state building.
In my forthcoming book, there is a paragraph called When War Unmade the State.
And this is exactly about Russia as the last three years greatly increased state cursive capacity for apparent reasons.
However, it not much improved state building because Tillian version addressed the issue of replacement of rulers and elites in the wake of long-standing wars.
And this is quite the opposite to what we observed.
Rather, ongoing military assault is a mechanism of preservation of political status quo.
This is why further extension of this process will probably take place at least as long as the current Russian leadership is in power.
It's hard to predict in numerical terms.
It may be one month or one decade or even further, but I don't see any prospects for changes under the current Russian leadership, and that's it.
Alexander?
Okay.
Speaking about military industry, we should understand the specificity of this conflict.
Again, it has nothing to do with all these scenarios about future highly technology high-tech warfare.
Look, in such conflict, quantity matters much more than quality.
I was shocked reading in Krasnezvizda the article about how good Hawai A one hundred is.
The production of this Hawaii was stopped in the middle of the fifties.
Now T fifty five produced seventy years ago are the main fighting tank on Ukrainian front.
In this reality, let us accept two or three better three.
T fifty five is much better than one Abrams or one Leopard.
What's going on?
As I told Russia Soviet Union fields huge stockpiles of weapons.
And before twenty fourteen, nobody knows it was a huge problem of all Russian governments what to do with these heaps of metal that looked totally useful useless.
Now they found the way how to utilize all this stuff.
And the problem that can be foreseen, that in rather small period of time, these stockpiles will be empty.
To be concrete, let's take tanks.
Royal Bagonzavot is ready to produce three hundred new tanks a year.
Russia loses approximately 1,500 tanks each year.
Eighty percent of and it managed to replenish it with not new tanks, but these T fifty five taken from deposits.
If trust military balance, now Russia has something between two and three thousand old tanks in its deposits.
It means that Russia has no these deposits will be empty in two years.
I'm not speaking that, of course, they took more ready tanks from deposits first, and God knows what is now in these stockpiles.
So it means that, like Putin or not, he badly needs to expand military production.
The level of Russian military industry, as I said, reached its peak.
They need new and not new, but some enterprises where they can start production.
For this reason, I'm speaking about renaissance.
Speaking about free market, such market doesn't exist.
Look, Russia uses something like four million shells a year.
All stock, according to Southern Korean intelligence, all Northern Korea has less than five million shells in its stockpile.
It gave Russia, according some estimation, something like one million shells.
That's all.
The same we can say about Iranian capability to build drones.
It doesn't work for such type of attrition warfare.
We know pretty well that countries which really want to support Ukraine have unbelievable difficulties in military production.
We know about this 800 billion European plan, but for God's sake, nobody knows how soon this production can be started.
So it's a huge problem, not only for Russia, but I suppose that Russia will take these old Soviet models to replenish its military equipment.
The last point: how long, and it coincides with your question.
It's more or less clear that the Russian concept, military planning, has a few bottlenecks.
The biggest one, as I mentioned, is military interest.
Another is the lack of training grounds and reserve divisions.
You have no capability where to train new soldiers.
And it also will be a big problem.
Again, I can presume that Mr. Putin will take this way of military build-up.
But who said that this decision will be successful?
Thank you.
So when we still have 10 minutes for the last speakers.
Yes, to start with the first question about the sort of cross-fertilization of liberal thinking and discourses between Russia and America.
And certainly we obviously know that Tucker Carlson got a lot of attention, and a lot of his clips of his interview with Putin and the Midlavrov were kind of rehashed and spread around our groups.
But there is a kind of sense that there's like a strong anti-Westernism in the audiences of these channels, and we all know what social media is like in terms of being an echo chamber.
So there's not really much sympathy with the idea that we should be getting our intellectual fruits from the Americans.
Instead, there's the idea that there was a kind of a disbelief in Trump in the groups we studied that it said MAGA is not even real and the deep state controls everything and so it's not going to work.
But since Trump has come into office, I think Dugan has certainly changed his outputs.
There's now an AI Dugan that speaks very fluent English.
It's scary.
That's all I'm going to say.
It's scary.
But there's separate media projects running on Telegram that are all about translating this stuff into Russian subtitles and just giving that audience.
But I wouldn't say it's so important.
What's most important is just the kind of picking up, cherry-picking certain articles that come out in German media, French media, UK media, American media, that they debunk or they use as, oh, look, here's a Westerner who says this, which is our version of the reality.
So it's kind of information war debunking and showcasing the contradictions and just information warfare from the military bloggers a lot of the time.
I'll just say a few things about the national minority questions, and I pass it on to Alina.
The same theme continues with the national minorities and the idea that the West has got this propaganda obsession with the national minorities and the West keeps claiming that they're being used as cannon fodder and all and la la la and they try and debunk it and they say that this didn't actually happen and this incident in Dajestan was overplayed and Radio Swaboda said this and it's a lie and all this kind of stuff.
So again, but on the other hand I couldn't find any rich content that tried to do something else, like for example, talk about the unity of Muslims and Christians, said something positive about Kadyrov and Ahmed elite troops and things and that really tried to talk up the supranational multinational Russia.
I didn't find this kind of material in our analysis, but we did of course find that, especially with the trigger of Krokas, like a very kind of xenophobic discourses, that and of course this actually has a twenty twenty one precursor.
This was going on in twenty twenty one before the war.
There was a spike of anti sort of xenophobic activity in the groups, spurred by the state.
The state gave the green light.
They had a couple of things that happened.
So by all accounts, Oroska Abshina has really grown a lot, which is basically like a modern version of the Black Hundreds, I would say.
I'm not the historian, but and of course there is a creator in all of this, a patron in all of this, Alexander Bastrikin, the head of the investigative committee, and so that's because he's taken up more interests as his career has developed, and now he's more interested in the question of ideology.
And he's interested as well about this idea of dealing with illegal immigration, which isn't really the main function of the investigative committee.
I think it's primarily about police corruption and security and other things like that.
But anyway, I'll let you continue, Alina.
I totally agree with Matthew on the matter of the first question about this parallel between Russian and American nationalists, but also what I think is really important that probably they don't even know about the existence of, for example, dark enlightenment movement in the US, just because they have really simplified the image of the United States as liberals who lack traditional values, and for them, the distinction between Republicans and Democrats, or MAGA movement, or I don't know,
Black Lives Matter movements, it's not so clear.
For them, American society looks homogeneous, just like for most Americans, Russian society looks the same.
As for the second question about the multi-ethnic nature of Russian Federation and Russian troops, I would say that sometimes we can find negative sentiments about Khadurov and Chichians as a part of Russian military as a part of Russian military.
But also it's not the biggest part of their agenda.
By the way, maybe it also addresses your question about the vision of the cooperation with Big South, something like that.
The problem is that for imperial nationalists especially, the cooperation with North Korea was really problematic because on the one hand it was the sign that now we are the global power again, we have some people from other countries in our troops, but at the same time it was problematic because it doesn't mean that we're weak or being only Russian in the Russian army is not enough and we need someone else, for example North Korean.
So this plot also took place.
Okay, so we still have a couple of minutes left.
So if there are some burning questions of Gulnas to Valoida, and Valoida, you know how much I love and respect you, but I'm going to disagree with the way you posed the question at the beginning of your presentation.
The premise of that question, right, so you took it as a puzzle that Putin, the Kremlin, did not achieve its goals and you had the goals, demilitarization, denazification, which presumes that there is a puzzle why it hasn't achieved those goals.
I remember my reaction in March 2014.
I remember my reaction in February 2022.
We can rationally say that bigger countries might subdue smaller countries to achieve some goals, but for many, many, many people There was no expectation that the Kremlin is in the position to achieve any of its goals.
And the problem was with those expectations to start with, that those expectations that the Kremlin might conquer Ukraine in three days were there to start with.
Those were problematic.
That was then discussed and considered for so long by the media, by the Ukrainian scholars, by the Russian scholars.
So, when three years into this war, you bring such a question why Kremlin has not achieved its goals, to me, it brings something out of me that's almost like morally, you know, sort of I become almost enraged by the question and by the premise.
And maybe I'm wrong in this, maybe, but it's weird that we live in war.
But you somehow not normalize, but there is something happening with the research question the way you posed it.
And so that's why I wanted to raise that.
Thank you.
And probably the last one.
So is there a money?
Is there a mic?
I'm sure this is going to be the last, last question.
So if there are any other questions left, so feel free to approach how.
This is a question for Alexander.
And in terms of the beginning of the war, I'm a prisoner of the sources of information that I listen to.
So I listened to War on the Rocks, and I have no idea what your opinion of them as a source is, but they did a detailed case study of the initial days of the war, in which they say the plan was to take an airport close to Kiev, fly in special forces, quickly depose the leadership, and in that case,
the plan for 200,000 and that the population would rally to their side are all mistakes, but still they were stymied by a combination of circumstances that the Ukrainians stopped that initial plan to decapitate the leadership and kept them from landing in that airport with those special forces.
And so there was a rationale that changed in the course of the war that they continued to follow for some period until they got those military convoys destroyed on the road because they never thought they would be in that position.
So there was a rationality to it that was different than what they ended up having to fight.
So I don't know if you accept that, and I don't know what you think of that kind of analysis that was done by the War on the Rocks folks.
Okay, we have two minutes left.
I don't know to what extent it's feasible to respond very quickly.
Yeah, my approach to what happens in February 2022 is mostly positive rather than normative.
We all agree about condemning of Kremlin's actions, but addressing the question from my perspective is very much,
well, similar to how, say, sport analysts analyzed how it happens that one strong team.
team not won the game.
And it done irrespectively to our sympathies to whatever sports team.
So this is why, in my view, addressing the question in such a way is quite legitimate.
Well, similarly to how we analyze, say, wars in the distant past.
I don't think there is a contradiction here.
In my mind, the idea to decapitate Ukraine and get rid of its leadership is totally adventuristic.
Look, just from a military point of view, you deploy two paratroop brigades trying to invade two million cities.
To reach Ziliensky, they should pass through the streets.
It's hardly possible.
Simply.
So if to take this plan as a real plan, I'll say that these planners watched two more Hollywood production.
Thank you so much for being brief and so time efficient.
So it's 3 p.m. sharp.
So we did a great job.
Thank you, dear panelists.
Thank you, our audience.
Great questions.
And let's meet in half an hour for those who actually decide to stay with us till the end of this day.
Dear colleague, just some logistical points.
If after the coffee break you want to stay for panel fourth, interpreting Russian society at wartime, you stay in this room, of course.
U.S. Senator Chris Van Holland is on his way back to the United States at this hour.
The Maryland Democrat flew to El Salvador to both meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia and to press for his release.
The senator is due to land at Dulles Airport in Virginia around 4 p.m. Eastern and will speak with the media about his trip.
We'll have live coverage for you when he begins right here on C-SPAN.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral argument in Kennedy v. Braidwood management, a case challenging a part of the Affordable Care Act that requires private insurers to cover certain preventative health care services at no cost to consumers.
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