Regime change?

The big picture political analysis suggested by the above title will be the subject of part two of today’s essay. But first I wish to share impressions of life on the ground in Russia, what I see around me, which is generally quite agreeable. People I meet in my ongoing business affairs try hard to be nice. Period.

My life in Petersburg on this visit has been very different from what I reported in my Travel Notes on these pages over the past several years.

Though I happen to be here during the time of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, in fact I will not be attending that event for the pleasure of parting with 10.000 euros in partipation fees, just as I did not opt to attend a couple of years ago when the organizers kindly offered to admit me for free. Unless you are a speaker or have business meetings on behalf of the corporation you represent, it is senseless to go to the Forum. It is much more efficient and more informative simply to watch the nonstop coverage of main Forum events on state television while sitting in the comfort of your own home.

What makes this visit to ‘Piter’ (as the city is affectionately known to locals) is that my wife and I are moving house, from the outlying borough of Pushkin, 18 km from the city, to a rental apartment in the very center, close to where we owned an apartment that we bought at the end of the 90s and sold in 2012.

In 2022 we downsized our residence in Brussels from a large, circa 1895 townhouse that had too many staircases which we no longer enjoyed climbing, to a one-floor apartment in a building completed in 1967 located a few kilometers away that had all the amenities we wish for, quiet views on the gardens to the rear and balconies on three sides to catch the sun. That move entailed satisfying a great many useless, tedious and costly regulations for our sale - to establish the energy efficiency of our house, to prove that the fuel oil tank for heating does not leak, etc. All of it was time consuming. All of it was imposed on us by European Parliament legislation that only succeeds in raising the cost of housing and slowing or stopping new construction. Then when we moved into our new apartment we had to have a comprehensive examination of the electric wiring that very few companies can perform, but without which our fire insurance would be invalidated.

Here in Russia, the parliamentarians are equally diligent in ‘serving the people’ and enacting measures intended to prevent fraud during sales. It would be so much better if they just sat and drank vodka at their seats in the Duma. No, they seem driven to legislate. And the bureaucrats, for their part, are also working full time to make life difficult through excess regulation issued by decree. Our disposal of our apartment in Pushkin has required fulfillment of much senseless paperwork including the de-registration of my wife from the apartment with the Ministry of Internal Affairs. This type of registration has been a factor in Russian social history since the early tsarist times. The peasants in particular were nailed to the ground by such registration. By good fortune, one of the best regulatory decisions of the Putin government in the past couple of months has been to stop requiring registration of residence, which was traditionally entered into your domestic passport. Finally a Russian can have no registered address and still not be considered a vagrant and locked up.

One of the more touching efforts of Russian legislators to save people from themselves and from victimization by the мошенники – predators – who seem to be everywhere, is to require that anyone intending to sell their home must first get an expertise from a psychiatrist certifying that the seller is not a loon. This is required now not only of the old and marginally senile but of sellers as young as their 30s.

I will not list more of the hurdles we have had to jump through. I think my point is clear.

Now it is more or less all behind us. This afternoon we visit the downtown apartment we expect to move into and then my focus can return to high politics. By the way, the particular charm of the apartment we hope to move into is that it is just a few minutes walk from the Tauride Palace built for Prince Potemkin (of Potemkin village fame) the favorite of Catherine the Great who conquered Crimea for her. That palace happened to be the home of Russia’s first State Duma as from 1906. For me this is an intellectual home coming since the introduction of parliamentary institutions in Russia during the First Revolution of 1905-06 was the subject of my doctoral dissertation.

*****

As I explained in an essay yesterday, it appears that President Putin has stepped back from his threats to blow up central Kiev where the decision-making centers of Ukraine are situated. Indeed, the Ukraine almost disappeared from the weekly news program hosted by Dmitry Kiselyov last night. There was seemingly endless discussion on his program of the spat with the prime minister of Armenia over his plans to join the European Union and so align his country against Russia. A parliamentary election is coming soon in Yerevan which will be essentially a referendum on Prime Minister Pashinyan’s plans for reorientation of the country. Russia is doing what it can to make the Armenian people see how the move to the EU will destroy their economy, given Russia’s revoking the very privileged price of the 2 billion cubic meters of gas it sells to Yerevan each year which powers the country’s electricity grid. Moreover, Russia has just revoked import rights for Armenian flowers, vegetables and fruits and mineral water, all of which were 95 percent exported to Russia till now and will find no buyers in the EU. By the time Kiselyov allotted to Armenia with its 3 million population, you would think Russia had nothing else on its plate to consider.

There was hardly a word on News of the Week about Ukraine, just mention of some utterly insignificant hamlet that Russian forces captured in the past several days.

Meanwhile on the Evening with Solovyov talk show and on other state news programs, Russian military experts have been saying openly that the Ukrainian drones are becoming a serious security threat which will get all the worse towards the end of the year when Kiev has serial production of medium range drones carrying heavy explosive charges which can attack the Crimean bridge and other major Russian infrastructure. Russian news today also reported that sales of gasoline in Crimea have been put on a voucher basis, another word for rationing. This is terrible news for the region since so much travel of the incoming tourists from mainland Russia in the coming weeks is by car and they will be very frustrated by limited access to fuel. I wait for news of other regions that will be doing the same. And we all know the reason for the rationing - it is the destruction of Russian refineries by Ukrainian drones.

Meanwhile every day President Putin is behaving more and more like Gorbachev towards the end of his reign: endless speeches, a lot of travel abroad and seeming indifference to the growing problems for the population arising from the president’s actions, or in this case inaction to respond to the security threat from Ukraine.

As we know, from fine days and blue skies, one fine day Gorbachev was placed under house arrest in a palace coup. This is no longer unthinkable for the present incumbent of the Kremlin. And those who refuse to see that fact are playing the ostrich.

Yesterday’s essay entitled “Putin the Paper Tiger?” attracted a lot of attention and one comment on my Substack platform that is worth repeating here.

Please note that I do not engage in personal attacks on those who have different interpretations of what is going on in this country and what may come next. It is the same reason I do not plan to debate the odious individuals who show no restraint and who throw mud or worse in my direction. But readers understand what is going on, and the comment below proves it.

Outsider

1h

Mr. Doctorow, you didn’t name any of the “Putin cheerleaders in the Alt Media,” but those of us who follow YouTube closely know who they are. Out of all of Putin’s Fanboys, Scott Ritter is probably the worst. Since the war started, he’s been saying that “Russia/Putin doesn’t bluff.” But hasn’t Putin been bluffing since the shooting started, the latest being his promised decapitation of the corrupt Zelensky Regime as well as wiping out little barking dogs like Latvia? Hysterical Ritter led his audience to believe that the attack on Kiev was imminent, but the longer he waits a US-style Shock and Awe campaign seems less and less likely. Ritter is starting to remind me of Trump’s braindead MAGA cult. Nothing will shake him from his adoration of Putin.