And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Kyiv to be born?
Backstory: The springtime of the oligarchs.
Last week was crazy. Events of this coming week may set the course of western civilization’s continuation over the next few decades, if such a thing can be imagined (sorry to be so melodramatic, but seriously).
NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg is convening a meeting of the NATO heads of state and government on Thursday in Brussels, to discuss Russia’s ongoing obliteration of Ukraine. U.S. President Joe Biden will of course attend, and he’ll also travel to Warsaw to meet Polish president Andrzej Duda to discuss what the White House is now calling the "humanitarian and human rights crisis" set in motion by Putin’s war. I guess you could call it that. A full-metal war of conquest in Europe and more than three million Ukrainians have fled their country. Ukraine is starting to look more like Syria every day.
On to today’s newsletter (and do please subscribe, it’s $50 a year or $5 a month, and paying customers get inside stories that are worth the price of admission).
Anyone who’s been following my work in the National Post, Macleans, the Ottawa Citizen and elsewhere over the years will be aware that I tend to keep an eye on the worldwide rise of the police-state bloc and democracy’s concurrent retreat, its degeneration, and its corruption in the G7 states - most notably in Canada - by what Sinologists call “elite capture.”
My most recent was just a couple of weeks ago in Macleans, on why sanctions aren’t enough to stop Vladimir Putin from destroying Ukraine. Long story short: it’s mostly because of the privileged place Putin’s bankers and multinational corporations in Beijing continue to occupy in the business lounges of the liberal democracies - again, most notably in Canada. I drew deep from the data in the just-released 2021 Freedom House report, which was written in the days before Putin set out to destroy Ukraine. Even then, the evidence clearly showed that democracy’s 16-year worldwide retreat had become a rout.
Under-reported this past week, by the way: A report published by Canadians for Tax Fairness, Transparency International Canada and Publish What You Pay Canada. The report shows that oligarchs and sanctions-evaders suddenly having a tough time of it in places like the United Kingdom are being advised to strike out for the territories in Canada. Unlike Britain, in Canada you’re still not allowed to know who really owns all those mysterious offshore-owned companies with letters for names and listed owners who aren’t really the owners. Here’s the report.
Anyway, in the Ukraine catastrophe, I’ve tried to trace the circuitous but ink-black lines running from Putin’s barbarism in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol back to his starvations sieges and bombardments of Aleppo, Idlib and Yarmouk, five, six and seven years ago. But where was I when the Age of Monsters chronicled by Freedom House kicked off, and what was I doing when Putin’s scorched-earth march began?
I happened to be in a far corner of the Russian Federation, in Ulan Ude, the capital of the Republic of Buryatia. I wrote about my experience there in my very first dispatch for the Ottawa Citizen, 15 years ago (long vanished from the web archives but available in full below). Though vastly reduced in size, the Buryat Republic still exists, although in name only, thanks largely to Vladimir Putin’s tendency to cultural genocide, his tsarist megalomania and the brutal intrigues and nightstick savagery of his FSB, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.
You’ve probably never heard of the Republic of Buryatia. If you want to get your head around the total erasure Putin intends for Ukraine, you’ll want to cast your mind forward, say, 15 years from now, and you’re reading something like this newsletter that refers to Ukraine as a country you’ve probably never heard of.
Pictured above is the historian and human rights activist Nikolai Tsyrempilov and the journalist and university lecturer Radjana Dugarova, in 2007, at the base of the world’s largest Lenin head. It’s cast in bronze, it’s roughly eight metres high, and weighs nearly 40 tonnes. It’s still there, and it’s been there ever since 1970, the centenary of Lenin’s birth. It’s not going anywhere, any time soon.
At the time I was in Ulan Ude, Tsyrempilov was chairman of the Buryatia Young Scholars Union and a research fellow with Buryatia's Institute for Buddhist, Mongolian and Tibetan Studies. Dugarova was a journalist, a university lecturer and the head of the multi-ethnic Buryat Human Rights Movement. They have both long since fled the Russian Federation.
Democracy’s long eclipse did not begin in Buryatia, exactly, but I bring this up now, at the moment when Ukrainians are being slaughtered and their country is being systematically smashed by Russian tanks, cruise missiles, and artillery bombardment, for reasons that should be evident.
It was back then in Ulan Ude, the last stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway before Ulan Bator, Mongolia, that I got a glimpse of what was to come from the fecklessness of the NATO capitals, the moneygrubbing of the G7’s elites, and especially the diplocratic uselessness of the European institutions that would eventually allow Vladimir Putin to bring the world to this apocalyptic juncture in Ukraine.
I’d had an inkling of what was to come a couple of years earlier in the Russian Far East, in Khabarovsk, a strangely lovely city about the size of Vancouver, and at roughly the same latitude, on the Amur River. I’d arrived late at night on an Aeroflot flight from Beijing. Fleets of Mercedes limousines with black-tinted windows growled through the streets. “New capitalists,” they were called then. Now they’re called oligarchs.
In the morning, I woke up in a crackerbox palace of a hotel on Khabarovsk’s Lenin Square to the sound of a deafening rumble in the streets below. From my open window I could scarce believe my eyes. There were columns of Soviet-era tanks and personnel carriers and battalions of soldiers marching in 1940s-era uniforms and tens of thousands of people, thronging in parades. It was May Day, the first day of the week-long vodka binge that ends with Victory Day, the day that commemorates the Red Army’s sacrifices in the Second World War. It was a bacchanalia of nostalgia.
At the time of my visit to Khabarovsk and my journeys up and down the Amur River, Vladimir Putin was the career KGB officer who was just beginning his second term as the president of the Russian Federation. He’d briefly served as Boris Yeltsin’s FSB director and secretary of Russia’s Security Council, and he’d been busy consolidating the network of former KGB consigliere that would go on to serve as his palace guard. When I was in Khabarovsk he was just hitting his stride.
Only a week before my first bleary-eyed morning in overlooking the spectacle in the streets below, Putin had delivered that famous nationally-televised speech, the one that was a harbinger of all that was to come, in which he lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century.
The throngs of that May Day, the marching battalions, the legions of old women lining the streets holding portraits of the mass murderer Josef Stalin above their heads: This was Vladimir Putin’s base.
The same kind of crowd was at that triumph-of-the-will rally in Moscow on Friday. Not everyone in attendance was there because they were government workers instructed to show up and get their attendance cards punched. It’s not just because people don’t know what’s really going on in the world owing to news censorship that is now so insanely harsh that you can go to prison for saying out loud that what’s happening in Ukraine is a war and Putin started it. Putin still has his base.
During the decade between the Soviet empire’s collapse and Putin’s entrenchment at the pinnacle of post-Soviet power, the Communist Party’s industrial nomenklatura and managerial-caste apparatchiks had become a syndicate of gangsters. They’d taken over everything in an Canada-sized expanse between the Ural Mountains and Sakhalin Island in the Pacific. In Khabarovsk, they checked their glocks with the concierges at nightclubs that throbbed with techno-trance catatonics that lasted until dawn.
During the presidency of Vladimir Putin’s drunken benefactor and predecessor, Boris Yelstin, the Russian Far East was a failed-state nightmare of plundered fisheries, thoroughly denuded forests and gangland assassinations. I did my best to paint a portrait of the anarchy I encountered on my travels back then for the Globe and Mail. Even the vast collective-farm reindeer herds had been butchered and liquidated. The collapse was so savage that more than 1,000 naval personnel at Russky Island, off Vladivostok, had to be evacuated owing to severe malnutrition. Four sailors starved to death.
It was the springtime of oligarchs. It ended up a chapter in a book I was writing at the time. Their grinding of the faces of the poor, their humiliation of the woodcutters of the deep forests, the ill-paid, alcoholic factory workers, the hollow-eyed women of the fishing towns - that’s what struck me in my travels up and down the Amur River. So of course the people turned to nostalgia, and to Putin’s messianic visions of restoring Russia to some mythical former glory.
For a proper reading of the madness of Putin’s delusions, here’s the reading you want. It’s from the great chronicler of democratic uprisings and the barbaric repressions that so often follow, Paul Berman, author of A Tale of Two Utopias, Power and the Idealists, and The Flight of the Intellectuals, writing in Foreign Policy:
His nationalism resembles only in a surface way the sundry Romantic nationalisms of Europe in the 19th century and the years leading up to World War I. Those nationalisms, the ones from the past, tended to be versions of universality in which each separate nationalism, in rebelling against the universalism of the Jacobin dictators or the multiethnic empires, claimed a special mission for the whole of humanity.
But Putin’s nationalism claims no such special mission. It is a small nationalism instead of a grandiose one. . . It is, to be sure, an angry voice, but not in the deep and thunderous fashion of the communists. It is a voice of resentment, directed at the victors in the Cold War. It is the voice of a man whose dignity has been offended.
Unknown to the wretched masses in the cities and towns and villages east of the Urals, by 2005 Putin was already cutting his deals with the oligarchs: You get the forestry licences, the mining leases, the hydroelectric contracts, the vast fisheries-management units, and I get my slice. I’ll protect you. Do what you’re told and you’ll get your villas in Tuscany, your obscenely opulent yachts, your cavernous townhouses in London. Do what you’re told, give me my percentage, and you’ll do just fine. The Europeans and the Americans will welcome you with open arms.
During my time on the Amur River, which forms the border with China, where it’s known as the Heilongjiang, the River of the Black Dragon, I had only an inkling of what was to come. It was two years later, in Ulan Ude, at precisely the hour of Buryatia’s greatest need, that Europe’s uselessness against Putinism came into sharp relief.
Radjana Dugarova, the leader of the Buryat Human Rights Movement pictured above at the giant Lenin Head with Nikolai Tsyrempilov of the Buryatia Young Scholars Union, was giving a presentation to a delegation of the Council of Europe from Strasbourg, in its capacity as the European Court of Human Rights. The proceedings were conducted in Buryatia’s presidential palace, just off the Square of the Soviets.
Dugarova presented meticulously researched evidence of the brazen and bloody human rights abuses endured by Buryat’s journalists, autonomists and intellectuals. The shuttering of newspapers, the beatings, the police harrassment, the theatres that refused to show Buryat films. The whole story.
In the end, the gentlemen from Strassbourg told her there wasn’t much they could do. Moscow had ratified the European Convention on Human Rights in 1998, and in the early days there was a spate of judgments against Moscow, for what good they did: Violations of the right to life, to a fair trial, to be free from torture and inhuman treatment, freedom of expression and so on.
There were 41,300 cases filed against Russia by the time Putin came to power. In the five years since Putin had taken over as the Russian Federation’s supreme leader, the Court’s backlog of cases had grown to roughly 90,000 complaints, mostly against Russia.
The month before Dugarova’s testimony, two dozen prominent Russians had sent an open letter to the G8 Summit in Rostock, Germany, begging for Putin to be disciplined in some way for his "de facto liquidation of democracy in Russia." It took another seven years and Putin’s invasion of Donbas and annexation of Crimea in 2014 for Moscow to be expelled, obliging the G8 to revert to its earlier configuration as the G7.
It wasn’t until last Wednesday that Russia was formally expelled from the 47-member Council of Europe and the Court of Human Rights - for having invaded a fellow Council member’s country. That decision followed a vote of the Council’s membership two weeks earlier to expel Putin’s Russia for waging war on Ukraine. The only country to support Moscow’s continued membership was Armenia. As newsletter subscribers will know, that’s where Canada’s Ambassador to Germany and Special Envoy to the European Union, Stephane Dion - the G7’s most adamant opponent of sanctions against Russian oligarchs, going back to 2014 - was hanging out, at the time the Council vote was tallied.
In Ulan Ude back in 2007, the human rights activist Nikolai Tsyrempilov, the young man in the photo with the Lenin head in the background, was still placing his trust in Europe and the “west.” He’d already been arrested for merely waving a Buryat flag, but he and his comrades were not separatists, he explained.
When the Soviet Union fell apart after 1989, 13 of the USSR’s republics seceded. The hope of the Buryats was reform within the Russian Federation, precisely because Russia was a member of the Council of Europe. But even in 2007, that seemed like a vain hope. By then, Putin had already decreed that he enjoyed the privilege of decapitating Buryatia and the other remaining national republics across Eurasia, Siberia and the Russian Far East. If the republics didn’t elect presidents of the oligarchs’ choosing, Putin had reserved to himself the right to fire them and appoint somebody he liked.
"The secret police are very active in Buryatia," Tsyrempilov told me. “I don't think it will be easy for anyone to openly express political views in the coming years."
Anyway, here’s the text of that dispatch from Ulan Ude, the first time my byline ever appeared in the Ottawa Citizen.
The land democracy forgot
Reformers in Russia's oppressed eastern regions are looking to countries such as Canada for help, but they're not getting much
“To say what we think without fear of repercussion, to walk down the streets without fear ... it is our responsibility to spread this freedom all around us, and around the world.” - Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean, Canada Day, 2007.
Terry Glavin, Citizen Special, Thursday, July 12, 2007
Nikolai Tsyrempilov can't say what he thinks without fear of repercussion. He can't walk down the street without fear. He would like Canada, and other western democracies, to do something about it.
I recently met Mr. Tsyrempilov in Ulan Ude, the capital of Buryatia, an impoverished Russian republic of about a million people that shares a border, a language, a Buddhist heritage and a great deal of history with Mongolia.
When we met, in a basement coffee shop across Sakhyanova Street from the Khrushchev-era complex of dank hallways and dingy offices where he works, the 31-year-old chairman of the Buryatia Young Scholars Union lowered his voice and leaned across the table.
"The secret police are very active in Buryatia," he said. "People get together to discuss problems, and there is a resistance movement, but it's limited to the Internet. I don't think it will be easy for anyone to openly express political views in the coming years."
Pro-democracy activists throughout the Russian Federation are looking to countries such as Canada for help. But they're not getting much, and the shadow that hangs over Ulan Ude these days is darkening dozens of cities and towns, from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Tsyrempilov, a research fellow with Buryatia's Institute for Buddhist, Mongolian and Tibetan Studies, was taking a risk just talking about it.
Last summer, Mr. Tsyrempilov was arrested for waving Buryatia's flag at a protest rally. Around the same time, the local Ugai Zam newspaper was shuttered for several weeks after printing pro-autonomy editorials, and its outspoken editor, Vladimir Tsybikdorzhiev, was beaten by thugs.
When I asked Mr. Tsyrempilov if he was sure he wanted me to quote him talking about these things so candidly, he replied: "Yes, yes ... we know the only power that can stop or even soften the oppression here is the West." Although it's hardly a secret that Russian president Vladimir Putin has turned Moscow into a kleptocrat's playground, that's just half the story. The other half involves his trampling of democracy across a Canada-sized swathe of the planet, east of the Urals, that takes in all of Siberia and the Russian Far East.
Mr. Putin has embarked on an authoritarian program of eliminating up to two-thirds of Russia's 90-odd resource-rich provinces and territories. It's a bit like our federal government deciding to eliminate most of Canada's First Nations and setting out to abolish Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Yukon.
Because of Mr. Putin's new electoral laws, which require political parties to have at least 50,000 members and to field candidates in at least half of Russia's constituencies, lawful, parliamentary protest has been put completely beyond the reach of pro-autonomy minorities and indigenous groups.
Last year, Russia's "small nations" and indigenous minorities were cheered when the United Nations' discredited UN Human Rights Commission was replaced by the UN Human Rights Council. One of the new council's first acts was to adopt a long-debated declaration affirming the rights of indigenous people.
Only two of the new council's 47 member states voted against the resolution. One was Russia. The other was Canada.
Buryatia is one of the Russian Federation's 21 republics, and ethnic Buryats, although they make up only a third of Buryatia's citizens, are the largest of Siberia's 31 indigenous minorities. Buryatia's reformers are not ethnic nationalists or separatists, Mr. Tsyrempilov insisted. If the generally pro-Russia Buryats are denied a shot at democracy, he said, then Siberia's other small nations don't stand a chance.
"We want freedom, but inside the Russian federation," Mr. Tsyrempilov said. "This is the best way to protect the rights of minorities, but there are people who want to close once and forever the question of ethnic and national diversity in Russia." That question has persisted from the time of the Bolshevik revolutionaries of 1917, who promised autonomy to the far-flung nations of the old Russian Empire. During the Great Terror of the 1930s, Josef Stalin broke those promises, and he was especially ferocious in Buryatia, where he massacred thousands of shamans, intellectuals and Buddhist priests.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Buryats took heart when Boris Yeltsin invited the former Soviet republics to "take as much sovereignty as you can swallow," but then Mr. Putin took the helm in Moscow. Now, Buryatia's citizens can't even elect their own president, and the Buryat People's Congress has been outlawed.
Although Stalin carved up the old Buryat-Mongol republic into three pieces, the Buryats held fast to the dream of reuniting their old homeland. But Mr. Putin recently crushed those hopes by engineering the demise of the two orphaned Buryat regions, having them swallowed up by the neighbouring territories of Irkutsk and Chita.
Buryat human rights activists say the plebiscites confirming the dissolutions were plagued by government disinformation, harassment of anti-merger activists, press-muzzling, intimidation and ballot-rigging. The shock left Buryatia's autonomists feeling twice betrayed -- first by Stalin, then by Mr. Putin.
Looking to the West for help, two dozen prominent Russian liberals last month sent an open letter to the G8 Summit in Rostock, Germany, pleading for Mr. Putin's fellow G8 leaders to call him to task for his "de facto liquidation of democracy in Russia." Their appeal was barely noticed.
Buryat reformers saw another opening recently when a delegation from the Council of Europe visited Ulan Ude. Because Russia is one of the council's newest members, and a key council function is its Court of Human Rights, it was an opportune moment.
It came and went.
The Strasbourg officials began their proceedings in Ulan Ude's splendid presidential palace, just off the Square of the Soviets. Radjana Dugarova, a soft-spoken 37-year-old journalist and university lecturer who heads the multi-ethnic Buryat Human Rights Movement, presented a litany of human rights abuses: the constant secret-police surveillance of autonomists, the printing shops shut down for printing leaflets that offend Mr. Putin's local sycophants, the theatres that won't allow Buryat film screenings, and so on.
She was shouted down.
The delegation's senior member said he was sympathetic, but there was little he could do. The council's human rights court is hobbled by a backlog of roughly 90,000 human rights complaints, up from about 14,000 when Mr. Putin came to power. Russia is the biggest single source of new cases, and Russia is also blocking multilateral efforts to streamline the court's complaints process.
Ms. Dugarova left the meeting rather less than optimistic.
"If the people protest and complain, the secret police take pictures of their faces," she said. "In the state newspaper, they say we are spies. It is like the 1930s all over again."
Her excellency Michaelle Jean is quite right. Canadians are burdened by a solemn duty to demand for everyone, everywhere, the same hard-won freedoms we ourselves enjoy. And we're uniquely positioned to take up this demand in Russia.
We know about the delicate balances required of a constitutional federation. Like us, Russians are a northern people, in a vast country, immensely rich in cultural diversity. Their democrats and reformers would very much like to hear from us. We should not let them down.
I wonder how Edward Snowden is enjoying life in Putin's Russia at the moment...