The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming: ‘One day you’ll barter bread for our DVDs’ | Movies | The Guardian
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In Russia, Mafiaism Is the New Communism
28 Mar 2024 Leave a comment
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In Russia, Mafiaism Is the New Communism
‘Das Kapital’ is out. ‘The Godfather’ is in.
Brian Whitmore
Mar 28, 2024
43
(Photo by Gavriil Grigorov / Sputnik / AFP via Getty Images)
ALEKSEI NAVALNY AND YEVGENY PRIGOZHIN had little in common. Except for the fact that they both got whacked on the orders of the same crime boss.
The extrajudicial execution of Navalny in an Arctic prison colony on February 16 had all the hallmarks of a mob hit carried out to send a message. An anti-corruption crusader whose groundbreaking work helped expose the kleptocratic nature of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin regime was eliminated—it’s as if Al Capone had somehow managed to knock off Eliot Ness.
Similarly, the events leading to Prigozhin’s assassination on August 23 looked like an internal mob dispute, what Russians call a vnutrennyaya razborka (criminal slang for ‘settling of scores’). When the longtime Putin crony, oligarch, and mercenary leader staged a mutiny with his aborted march on Moscow in June, he clearly had to go. As the unforgettable character Omar Little put it in the acclaimed television series The Wire, “you come at the king, you best not miss.” Prigozhin missed. And his fate thus resembled that of countless underbosses who got too ambitious.
“Putin is not a politician, he’s a gangster,” Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, wrote in the Washington Post on March 13. But the issue is not just that Putin is a gangster. It is not just that his Kremlin behaves like an organized crime syndicate. The problem is much deeper than that.
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The system of governance that Putin and his cronies have developed over the past quarter century, a system with deep roots in Russian political culture, can best be described as mafiaism. Like Communism before it, mafiaism is an unaccountable, nontransparent, autocratic, and arbitrary system of governance. Mafiaism, like Communism, seeks to expand its influence and conquer its neighbors—with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine being just the latest and most dramatic example. And like Communism, mafiaism poses a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States and its allies.
To be clear, mafiaism as a system of governance does not necessarily refer to Russian organized crime groups per se, although the Kremlin does often use such groups as instruments of statecraft. It also does not suggest that Russia is a “mafia state,” traditionally defined as a state that has been captured by organized crime groups.
Instead, the Russian state has become, in essence, an organized criminal enterprise, at least insofar as its internal logic, processes, incentive structure, and behavior resemble those of a criminal syndicate.
The key tenets of mafiaism, as it has developed in post-Soviet Russia, are:
Governance by a small cabal of elites that relies on a web of patronage networks to enrich itself and maintain and exercise power outside formal, legal, and constitutional institutions;
A ruling elite that is willing and able to use extrajudicial force, including lethal force, to protect its interests and eliminate threats real and imagined, at home and abroad, and can do so without accountability or fear of reprisal;
A state structure characterized by weak institutions, officially sanctioned kleptocracy, the preponderance of unwritten and informal rules, roles, and codes, what Russians call ponyatiya (understandings), and an absence of the rule of law;
An impulse to expand and control markets and territory, and a convinction that such expansion is essential for its survival because the existence of the rule of law near its borders threatens its survival;
The use of corruption as an instrument of statecraft with the aim of co-opting, controlling, bribing, and blackmailing allies and adversaries both at home and abroad;
The use of geopolitical extortion in an international protection racket by stoking instability in neighboring countries as a pretext for intervening to (re)establish order.
Official rhetoric that cloaks and justifies its predatory goals with appeals to tradition, values, religion, and history.
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MAFIAISM AS IT HAS DEVELOPED under Putin has deep roots in Russian history and political culture. In her 2013 book Can Russia Modernize? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance, the scholar Alena Ledeneva described Russian politics as historically characterized by weak institutions, an intricate web of informal patronage networks, unwritten codes, and complex clan structures. In this sense, some form of mafiaism has always existed in Russia, albeit by other names.
But throughout his years in power, Putin has shaped the current system in a manner consistent with his particular background and experience. Early in his public life, Putin raised eyebrows when, speaking to reporters about Chechen separatists in September 1999, he vowed to “rub them out in the outhouse.” In the Russian language, the phrase he used, “mochit v sortire,” has a long history in gangster slang. (The verb mochit, which literally means “to wet” or “to soak,” is used by Russian gangsters in the same way Sicilian-American gangsters use “whack.”)
Although it shocked (and delighted) the public at the time, Putin’s use of gangster slang in a nationally televised press conference should not have been surprising. As deputy mayor of St. Petersburg from 1991 to 1996, he spent a lot of time with mobsters, colluding with the organized crime groups that dominated that city. Although Putin’s formal job was to oversee foreign investment, his real role was to act as a liaison between the city government and organized crime, which was so powerful at the time that the city’s most powerful gangster, Vladimir Kumarin, was known as the “night governor.” Putin collaborated closely with the city’s two main crime syndicates, the Tambovskaya and Malyshevskaya groups, and assisted them in gaining control of St. Petersburg’s gambling industry, seaport, and fuel distribution network.
According to veteran Kremlin-watcher James Sherr, “In genealogical terms, Putin is the product of the KGB. But in sociological terms, he is the product of the new class that emerged in the Darwinian conditions of the 1990s: business-minded, ambitious, nationalistic, and coldly utilitarian about norms and rules.” In other words, just like a mafia boss.
It is thus not surprising that the regime Putin built is structured more like a crime family than a ruling political party or governing coalition. It is run by a tight cabal of “made men” in Putin’s inner circle who oversee their own crews of underbosses and capos. These made men are led by a godfather-like figure whose main function is to settle disputes among them. Play by the syndicate’s (sometimes changing) rules and make yourself useful, and you’ll be rewarded handsomely. Step out of line and pay the price, as Prigozhin learned.
Putin’s syndicate also has its codes and its rituals. Just as La Cosa Nostra adorned itself in age-old Sicilian traditions and the venerable rites of Roman Catholicism (recall the chilling baptism scene from The Godfather), the Putin syndicate likewise cloaks itself in Russian nationalism and Orthodox Christianity. It also has a team of respectable consiglieres, who, like good mafia lawyers and accountants, attempt to give it a facade of respectability. In this sense, Tom Hagen, the Corleone family lawyer from the Godfather films, has nothing on Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
THE PUTIN SYNDICATE’S GOALS ARE SIMPLE: self-perpetuation, self-enrichment, and expansion. And this has clear security implications for the United States and its allies.
First, because it’s the tradition of patronage networks is deeply embedded in Russian political culture, Russian mafiaism will be highly resistant to change, even in the event of regime change. Communism did not die following the death of Stalin. Instead, the system Stalin built was bureaucratized and became entrenched. Western policymakers should, therefore, be highly skeptical of any apparent change in the nature of the Russian system when Putin inevitably passes from the scene. Regardless of who replaces Putin, the essence of Russian governance is likely to remain resilient.
Most importantly, by the nature of its internal logic and structure, Russian mafiaism needs to expand in order to survive. Imagine a crime syndicate that controls a city district. If the adjacent district is governed by the rule of law, with good cops, law-abiding citizens, and honest prosecutors, the crime syndicate will likely seek to corrupt and co-opt them all. And if this fails, they will probably muscle in with force.
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This is what happened with Ukraine. It is worth nothing that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014 (not 2022), was sparked by Ukraine’s desire to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union, a vital step toward eventual membership. Such a development would establish more transparent and accountable governance in a neighborhood the Putin syndicate believes it needs to control. The same logic applies to other former Soviet states such as Georgia and Moldova.
The Putin syndicate will seek to expand until it meets immovable resistance in the form of solid and stable democracies, governed by the rule of law and embedded in Western institutions.
A decisive victory for Ukraine over Putin’s invading army is a necessary but not sufficient condition to address the security threat posed by Russian mafiaism. Constricting the Kremlin mafia will also require establishing strong and resilient democracies, embedded in the European Union and protected by NATO security guarantees, on Russia’s borders. It’s the only way to make the neighborhood safe from the Putin crime syndicate.
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Brian Whitmore
A blog and podcast about Russian and post-Soviet politics by Atlantic Council Senior Fellow and UTA Assistant Professor Brian Whitmore.
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Putin may be the biggest dupe of his fake election landslide – POLITICO
18 Mar 2024 Leave a comment
Coming on the back of queues for anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin and more recently for Alexei Navalny’s funeral, the flashmob underscored that despite unprecedented repression, Russians’ ability to offer resistance has not completely atrophied.
Finally, many Russians chose to invalidate their ballot by ticking several boxes and adding their own anti-war messages or writing down the names of opposition politicians, such as Navalny.
The messages won’t be read by Putin, but they will go through the hands of thousands of election officials — and higher.
Bernard-Henri Levy articles in Tablet
13 Mar 2024 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: gaza, israel, navalny, russia
The murdered Russian opposition leader who became larger than life
FEBRUARY 21, 2024
Everything about the death of Alexei Navalny is strange. The circumstances. The fable of an accident while walking, when we know that there was no walking in the Polar Wolf penal colony in Kharp. The laughing and luminous eye that, even if perhaps it was, upon reflection, a shade too blue the night before his death, was still that of a grand vivant. The body hidden, reappearing, stolen again, invisible still as I write.
The hypotheses, galloping apace, are contradictory and never quite convincing: Poison, like in 2020? Slow-burning or immediate? An unknown assassin who infiltrated the prison? A professional, with a dagger, or a strangling without a trace? Were the bruises from an attack or an attempted resuscitation? Were the CCTV cameras turned off by FSB visitors in the hours before his death? How did a distant prison have a professional press release ready to go only several minutes after the purported time of his demise?
And of course, the crazy conspiratorial conjectures: not dead … or, at least, not necessarily … a purer Prigozhin, buried in the snow, water, and ashes of the Arctic Circle, which have become now in our imaginations a last frozen circle of Dante’s hell …
And then there’s the decision to kill Navalny. No one doubts that Putin, if he didn’t do it himself, at least allowed his most formidable opponent to be killed. Nor is there any doubt that this public execution is a message to those who, in the West and no less in the Russian Federation, might be tempted to defy his power, which remains, at heart, so vulnerable. But, if so, why?
Or, more exactly, why there, as opposed to somewhere else, why today and not yesterday? Why did Putin kill Navalny now, at this moment in history, when he had his opponent at his mercy for the last three years? Something to do with Ukraine? On the day that Zelensky spectacularly reestablishes his European diplomatic ties? Or as a bloody codicil to the madness emerging from a Moscow agitating, for the first time, for a terrifying war in space? I, Vladimir Putin, am speaking …
Or, rather, I say nothing. I kill and unleash terror on the world … The death, then, of one of the great opposition figures comes as a fiery salvo, a storm, a tornado, a tempest … Unless it is even simpler than that: the coming elections where, like all those who have pulled off a coup d’état in the style of Curzio Malaparte, the former KGB agent holds all the cards—and the “Vote at Noon” movement against Putin, which Navalny and some others called for, encouraging Russians to arrive to the polls all at once, on March 17, to vote for an ass, a horse, a straw man, anyone but him …
But the biggest enigma remains Navalny himself. Let us set aside his dark side, his ambiguities before the war against Ukraine. I do not tire, since the announcement of his death, of reading and rereading everything being said about his last moments, the last days of his short life. I imagine the cell. The solitary hole. The plank on the floor. The endless nights. The buzzing that one hears after a week of isolation. The blackness like a shroud. The cold like a coffin. The taste of poison hidden in bad soup, the potato gruel, the hardboiled egg bought for 19 rubles, crumbled into badly cooked rice. Putin’s speeches, playing loudly, a form of torture, morning and night, within the four walls of the disciplinary wing. Closing his eyes during body cavity searches. Opening them to find the expressionless face of the guard, who is also serving a life sentence.
And then again, the still more mysterious question asked ever since his voluntary return to Moscow, three years ago, barely recovered from his first poisoning with the neurotoxin Novichok: Why? How? What could he have been thinking when, instead of taking care of himself in Berlin, and then running the opposition from New York or Paris, he decided to throw himself back into the wolf’s den and return to Russia like a dead man walking?
There are cases like this in Dostoyevsky. There is the engineer Kirilov and his superior suicide, the proof of supreme liberty, who made such a mark on Gide and Alexandre Kojève. There are characters like this, half-saint half-demon, who, like Christ to whom they said: “if you are the Son of God, save yourself,” answer: “if I save my life, I will lose yours; it’s to save your life that I sacrifice my own.”
There is Plutarch. There is du Guesclin, the Spartans of Leonidas, Jean Moulin. There are the Plyushches, the Sharanskys, the Danylo Shumuks, survivors of the Gulag who, in the 1980s, showed me that nothing, not even death, is worse than becoming a martyr without testifying. And there are today’s Ukrainian heroes who also showed me that dying is nothing, no more than a cigarette puff, a blood stain slightly more black that grows, the sky the color of smoke—and then you become an example, an imperishable memory, a figure more alive dead than living.
Navalny was of that stripe. He was one of these man-mountains, who, without exaltation, with wisdom, rise up and become much more than their selves. The Acropolis, said our Plutarch, André Malraux, is it the only place in the world haunted both by spirit and courage?
Well, no. There is also, from now on, Kharp.
Translated from the French by Matthew Fishbane.
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A great ode to baseball
11 Mar 2024 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: baseball, baseball-history, boston-red-sox, mlb, sports
| From A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti by A. Bartlett Giamatti, et al”The Green Fields of the Mind “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.Somehow, the summer seemed to slip by faster this time. Maybe it wasn’t this summer, but all the summers that, in this my fortieth summer, slipped by so fast. There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game’s deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight. I wrote a few things this last summer, this summer that did not last, nothing grand but some things, and yet that work was just camouflage. The real activity was done with the radio–not the all-seeing, all-falsifying television–and was the playing of the game in the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind. There, in that warm, bright place, what the old poet called Mutability does not so quickly come.But out here, on Sunday, October 2, where it rains all day, Dame Mutability never loses. She was in the crowd at Fenway yesterday, a gray day full of bluster and contradiction, when the Red Sox came up in the last of the ninth trailing Baltimore 8-5, while the Yankees, rain-delayed against Detroit, only needing to win one or have Boston lose one to win it all, sat in New York washing down cold cuts with beer and watching the Boston game. Boston had won two, the Yankees had lost two, and suddenly it seemed as if the whole season might go to the last day, or beyond, except here was Boston losing 8-5, while New York sat in its family room and put its feet up. Lynn, both ankles hurting now as they had in July, hits a single down the right-field line. The crowd stirs. It is on its feet. Hobson, third baseman, former Bear Bryant quarterback, strong, quiet, over 100 RBIs, goes for three breaking balls and is out. The goddess smiles and encourages her agent, a canny journeyman named Nelson Briles.Now comes a pinch hitter, Bernie Carbo, onetime Rookie of the Year, erratic, quick, a shade too handsome, so laid-back he is always, in his soul, stretched out in the tall grass, one arm under his head, watching the clouds and laughing; now he looks over some low stuff unworthy of him and then, uncoiling, sends one out, straight on a rising line, over the center-field wall, no cheap Fenway shot, but all of it, the physics as elegant as the arc the ball describes.New England is on its feet, roaring. The summer will not pass. Roaring, they recall the evening, late and cold, in 1975, the sixth game of the World Series, perhaps the greatest baseball game played in the last fifty years, when Carbo, loose and easy, had uncoiled to tie the game that Fisk would win. It is 8-7, one out, and school will never start, rain will never come, sun will warm the back of your neck forever. Now Bailey, picked up from the National League recently, big arms, heavy gut, experienced, new to the league and the club; he fouls off two and then, checking, tentative, a big man off balance, he pops a soft liner to the first baseman. It is suddenly darker and later, and the announcer doing the game coast to coast, a New Yorker who works for a New York television station, sounds relieved. His little world, well-lit, hot-combed, split-second-timed, had no capacity to absorb this much gritty, grainy, contrary reality.Cox swings a bat, stretches his long arms, bends his back, the rookie from Pawtucket who broke in two weeks earlier with a record six straight hits, the kid drafted ahead of Fred Lynn, rangy, smooth, cool. The count runs two and two, Briles is cagey, nothing too good, and Cox swings, the ball beginning toward the mound and then, in a jaunty, wayward dance, skipping past Briles, feinting to the right, skimming the last of the grass, finding the dirt, moving now like some small, purposeful marine creature negotiating the green deep, easily avoiding the jagged rock of second base, traveling steady and straight now out into the dark, silent recesses of center field.The aisles are jammed, the place is on its feet, the wrappers, the programs, the Coke cups and peanut shells, the doctrines of an afternoon; the anxieties, the things that have to be done tomorrow, the regrets about yesterday, the accumulation of a summer: all forgotten, while hope, the anchor, bites and takes hold where a moment before it seemed we would be swept out with the tide. Rice is up. Rice whom Aaron had said was the only one he’d seen with the ability to break his records. Rice the best clutch hitter on the club, with the best slugging percentage in the league. Rice, so quick and strong he once checked his swing halfway through and snapped the bat in two. Rice the Hammer of God sent to scourge the Yankees, the sound was overwhelming, fathers pounded their sons on the back, cars pulled off the road, households froze, New England exulted in its blessedness, and roared its thanks for all good things, for Rice and for a summer stretching halfway through October. Briles threw, Rice swung, and it was over. One pitch, a fly to center, and it stopped. Summer died in New England and like rain sliding off a roof, the crowd slipped out of Fenway, quickly, with only a steady murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining of the roar. Mutability had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again. And, once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to bring change on.That is why it breaks my heart, that game–not because in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.From A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti, © 1998 by A. Bartlett Giamatti. |
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