Tehran wants to Expand Its Influence in Central Asia and Use Tajikistan to Help It Do So, Tomsk Scholar Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 3 – Over the last two years, Tehran has sought to increase its influence in Central Asia, convinced that changes in the region and more broadly make that an important goal; and it views Tajikistan, a country with which it shares some but far from all cultural characteristics, as a key player who can help it to do so, Yevgeny Troitsky says.

            According to the senior scholar at the Center for Eurasian Research at Tomsk State University, Tehran has six reasons for expanding its attention to Central Asia and compelling ones to believe that Dushanbe can be an important ally in pursuit of that goal (ia-centr.ru/experts/ia-centr-ru/politika-irana-v-tsentralnoy-azii-v-novykh-usloviyakh/).

            The six reasons behind Iran’s expanded focus on Central Asia are as follows:

·       First, Tehran is worried about the weakening of the position of Russia in that region because of Moscow’s concentration on Ukraine.

·       Second, it is also disturbed by the increasing influence of Turkey on the region especially via Azerbaijan but also in Turkmenistan.

·       Third, it is worried that destabilization in Afghanistan will lead to destabilization in Central Asia more generally and that could lead to clashes on the Iranian border and the flood of refugees into Iran.

·       Fourth, it is concerned about the increasingly pro-Western stance of the Pakistan government.

·       Fifth, Tehran believes that having joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, it is now in a better position to reach out to Central Asian countries.

·       And sixth, Tehran has concluded that having normalized relations with Saudi Arabia, it will be able to refocus attention from the south to the north and thus be better able to influence Central Asian countries.

While the Iranian government in the first instance wants to ensure that Central Asian countries do not become allies of Turkey but instead remain neutral and is prepared to expand trade relations with all the countries in the region, it is devoting particular attention to work with Tajikistan, Troitsky says.

The Tomsk scholar points out that “among all the countries of Central Asia, Tajikistan is closer to Iran in a cultural sense,” with a closely related language but with two important differences: Tajiks are primarily Sunni Muslims rather than Shiite, and they were far more secularized by the Soviet authorities than Iran has been for more than a generation.

But despite those limiting factors, Troitsky continues, “over the last several years, the two countries have been developing political, economic and even military-technical cooperation,” including the opening of an Iranian drone factory in Tajikistan and the announcement of plans to agree to a radical expansion in relations over the course of this decade.

Among the steps Tehran and Dushanbe have agreed to already are the renewal of direct flights between the two countries, the formation of a joint investment council, and a dramatic expansion in Iranian investment in Tajikistan, first and foremost in the petroleum sector but also for infrastructure projects like the completion of the Andzob tunnel.

No Real Evidence for Notion that a KGB Conspiracy Brought Putin to Power, Mitrokhin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 3 – The idea that some kind of KGB conspiracy was behind Vladimir Putin’s rise to power is almost two decades old and has gained new followers in recent times, Nikolay Mitrokhin says; “but in reality, we have no evidence for the existence of such a conspiracy” – beyond the insistence that the fact that we don’t shows that it does.

            Moreover, the Russian scholar at Bremen University says, those who promote this idea can’s explain why their supposedly grand conspiracy advanced to the presidency “an insignificant representative of one of its regional departments rather than ‘a heavyweight’ like [Yevgeny] Primakov (t.me/NMitrokhinPublicTalk/3392).

            “In fact,” Mitrokhin continues, “Putin at the time of the rapid advancement of his career represented not ‘the clan of the Leningrad KGB’ but first of all and no matter how trite it may seem, Sobchak and his team as well as his own mafia clan, represented by ‘the Ozero cooperative,’ one of the numerous such groups in the Russian political elite of that time.”

            According to the Russian scholar, “were it not for Yeltsin’s naïve belief … that his ‘successor’ should be ‘young,’ then the leader of Russia’s largest and richest clan, the gas clan, Chernomyrdin, would have become president – or the mayor of Moscow and leader of his own clan, the Luzhkov clan, or the real political head of the special services community, Primakov.”

Two Senior Armenian Cartographers Say 1991 Soviet Borders Were Illegitimate

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 2 – Two Armenian ethnographers say the 1991 administrative borders of the former union republics of the USSR which the successor states and the international community agreed would be the basis for international borders are illegitimate because Moscow drew them without the participation or agreement of the republics involved.

            Their challenge, if it were to be accepted and that is unlikely because the position they take is opposed by both Yerevan and Baku, would make the delimitation of borders in the region far more difficult than it now is and could trigger more conflicts within and between them   (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/399647).

            But their comments are important because Rouben Galichian, a senior Armenian scholar now living in the United Kingdom, and Hranish Kharutian, a former deputy mayor of Yerevan, provide new details on the way in which the Soviet government drew and redrew the borders of the union republics without giving all the republics most immediately involved a say.

            Galichian, who has written numerous books about cartography in the South Caucasus, focuses on the eight villages along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border that are now subject to dispute (jamestown.org/program/armenian-protests-over-return-of-four-villages-to-azerbaijan-threaten-peace-process/).

            He says that Moscow transferred these villages from Armenian to Azerbaijani control between 1936 and 1939 without the involvement of Yerevan and that “Azerbaijan cannot offer a single document about the transfer of these territories to it” as “neither in Armenia nor in Azerbaijan are there any archival documents confirming the transfer.”

            “In those years,” he continues, the USSR General Staff on its military maps marked these territories and designated them as exclaves so as to “put Armenian roads” under the control of the Kremlin rather than for any other purpose.

            Khartyan, for her part, notes that “border issues which were discovered during the period of the Trans-Caucasian Federation up to 1936, according to archival materials of stenographic records of meetings, featured arguments that nomadic herdsmen needed a legal basis for crossing administrative borders.”

            “When nomads drove cattle to pastures in Armenian villages, conflicts arose,” she says. “The issue seemed to be an economic one, but the conflict over land and pasture issues turned into an interethnic one. Enclaves were created so that nomads had the opportunity to move to territories belonging to other republics. This was Soviet policy."

            Kharatyan has a copy of one such decision dated February 18, 1929. At that time, the Trans-Caucasus Federation executive committee voted for changing borders at Armenia’s expense, something it was able to do only by taking a decision when the Armenian representative was no longer present.

            At the present time, the Yerevan ethnographer says, the relevant documents aren’t in Yerevan or Baku or Moscow but only in Georgia. Unfortunately, however, Georgian officials now are denying Armenian scholars like herself access to these materials, something that further complicates the situation and a precise compilation of the historical record.

            (For a broader discussion of just how frequently Moscow changed union republic borders in Soviet times, see my article, “Can Republic Borders be Changed?” RFE/RL Report on the USSR, September 28, 1990, pp. 20-21, at windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/05/borders-in-post-soviet-space-were.html.)

Moscow Now Set to Selectively Enlarge Municipalities, Experts Predict

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 3 – Specialists on urban and regional policy tell Stavropol’s Center for the Support of Social and Civic Initiatives that after Putin’s inauguration, Moscow will selectively support the enlargement of municipalities to help governors boost their control over major cities and to improve economic figures if not reality by combining poorer areas with wealthier ones.

            According to journalist Anton Chablin, the experts in what was an anonymous poll say that the first cities to be subject to this policy change will be in the Yamalo-Nenets AD and in Yaroslavl, Vladimir, Pskov and Novosibirsk oblasts. Others will be spared lest any change undermine rather than strengthen governors (akcent.site/eksklyuziv/31315).

            Proposals to expand urban centers administratively has been controversial for the last decade, with Putin rejecting it in 2017 apparently because he did not come up with the idea himself (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/04/putin-rejects-agglomerations-as-focus.html). But talk about such amalgamation continues, and some Moscow officials still back it (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/04/deputy-prime-minister-wants-to-replace.html).

            It is unclear whether the Stavropol survey marks a resolution of this debate or whether it is simply part of that debate and that the fate of settlements near large cities and possibly of republics as well remains open (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/08/agglomerations-not-step-toward-regional.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/09/agglomerations-not-rest-of-russia-to.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/06/moscow-counting-on-growth-of-urban.html).

Dugin Not ‘Conservative Russian Traditionalist’ He and Others Insist He Is, Pushchayev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 2 – Aleksandr Dugin is not the Russian traditionalist many believe but someone who denies there is a Russian philosophical tradition worth saving and approaches the task of creating one by importing from the West not Marxism as Trotsky did but the ideas of Martin Heidegger and European right of the 1920s and 1930s, Yury Pushchayev says.

            The Moscow State University instructor in philosophy says that “many talk about Aleksandr Dugin but few read him and thus mistakenly accept the way journalists and commentators characterize him as accurate (politconservatism.ru/articles/yavlyaetsya-li-dugin-russkim-traditsionalistom).

            If one does read Dugin’s books, Pushchayev says, one sees that the sources of his ideas are to be found in “the European conservative revolution” of a century ago and that they have “practically no relationship to Russian history.” Indeed, he continues, many of these ideas are in open conflict with that history.

            Not only that but Dugin himself is openly hostile to most Russian philosophers, arguing that there is as yet no such thing as “Russian philosophy” and that after what people call that is “swept away as trash,” it is up to him and his young acolytes to finally form one based on these imports and to do so in a revolutionary rather than evolutionary way.

            In his article, Pushchayev cites numerous examples of Dugin’s reliance on the European right and his open contempt for Russian philosophers and ideologues including the Eurasianists with whom he is incorrectly associated. And he stresses that Dugin’s nihilism with regard to Russian ideas and especially the traditional Russian focus on justice will be his downfall.

Moscow’s ‘Chaotic’ Response to Migration Crisis Fragmenting Russian Political System, Rodin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 3 – Moscow has been “pursuing a chaotic migration policy,” seeking on the one hand to reassure Russians that it will take a harder line on regulating immigration and on the other to reassure businesses that it will continue to allow enough migrants to come into the country to overcome demographic decline, Ivan Rodin says.

            But the result of this approach, the political editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta says, is a fragmentation of the political system, with regions increasingly going their own way and even the systemic parties taking different positions, a development with real risks for both foreign and domestic policies (ng.ru/politics/2024-05-03/100_03052024_migrants.html).

            More than 30 of the country’s federal subjects have adopted restrictions of various kinds on immigration, and pressure to do so is such, Rodin says, that the number will soon be greater than half of Russia’s more than 80 republics, krays and oblasts. And the systemic parties, not to speak of nationalists, are also splitting on this issue.

            Domestically, that means that the Kremlin is less in control of the situation than it would like; and various components of the system are feeling increasingly empowered to go their own way, developments that call into question Putin’s much-ballyhooed “power vertical” and that could spread to other issues as well.

            And in terms of foreign policy, what Moscow’s various political centers do with regard to immigration from various Central Asian countries is already having an impact on governments there, with many of them ready to protest vigorously about what Russia is doing and likely to conclude that they can no longer count on Moscow to maintain the order of the past.

            If Moscow further mistreats migrants and leads ever more of them to return home, that could certainly destabilize some of the countries in Central Asia. But that will have not only foreign policy consequences for Russia but domestic ones as well as some regions try to work out their own deals and others suffer the consequences of intensified worker shortages.

Putin Homogenizing Even Hymns of Russia’s Federal Subjects, ‘NeMoskva’ Reports

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 2 – Vladimir Putin is homogenizing Russia in large ways and small, including imposing ever tighter controls on the content and messages contained in hymns prepared or at least approved by the governments of Russia’s more than 80 federal subjects, according to NeMoskva.

            The portal, which focuses on developments beyond the ring road, collected and analyzed official hymns written and adopted over the last 30 years and reports that there have been major changes in the style and content of such songs particularly in the course of Vladimir Putin’s rule (nemoskva.net/gimny/page46706469.html).

            Few of the regional and republic hymns approved in the 1990s made any reference to the unity of the region with the Russian Federation as a whole, NeMoskva says; but in the texts of those approved after 2000 when Putin came to power, “almost all of them” include such references.

            “Among the 17 hymns written or approved in the 1990s, specify that a region was certainly united with Russia apparently wasn’t necessary,” the portal says. Only three republics specified that at the time – Adygeya, Kabardino-Balkaria and Mordvinia -- but all the others spoke only about the region or republic.

            However, in the first decade of Putin’s reign, the share making such references rose to 79 percent; and in the second decade, it rose still higher to 84 percent, NeMoskva reports. And that trend has continued: three of the four hymns approved since 2020 specify that the region or republic is “part of a great land;” and the fourth may follow once it is finally approved.