“Moscow.future” by Konstantin Bratishko http://konstantinbratishko.deviantart.com/art/Moscow-future-445605195

The PS21 Project for the Study of the 21st Century has an interesting little series of thought experiments, short fictionalised narratives imagining aspects of the world in 2030.

I jotted down a quick account of a trip on the new high-speed Trans-Siberian to Moscow, via Zabaikalsk, Novisibirsk and Kazan, for their latest, complete with some general thoughts about Russia’s political evolution (as I’ve speculated before, Putin to kleptocrat to reformer), its economic place in the world, and the rise of the ‘novy gipster’…. It is a rather different Moscow from that in the picture on the left I should add:

The Trans-Siberian Express isn’t just a train, it’s a metaphor. Once, a metaphor for the Tsarist empire’s determination to claim Siberia and the Russian Far East. And now? The double-headed eagle proudly glitters on the bullet-nose of the new, high-speed trains, and the conductors on the Moskovskaya strelka, the ‘Moscow Arrow,’ wear uniforms derived from those of their imperial forebears. But the CRH-49 locomotives are a Chinese design, built in the now Chinese-owned Uralvagonzavod works with a loan from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, running along a new track built by a Russo-Chinese consortium, and largely by Uighur labourers.

That said, the proud and pricklish days when Moscow thought it could pivot east yet remain the ‘elder brother’ are long gone. When Putin’s stroke delivered power into the laps of kleptocrats who had never had any real enthusiasm for his imperial project, they eagerly looked to rebuild relations in Asia and the West alike. This was just the last hurrah of Russian ‘wild capitalism’—lenders were too canny, opportunities elsewhere were more appealing, and the oligarchs and bureaucrat-entrepreneurs behind President Shuvalov’s figurehead government soon fell to feuding amongst themselves.

Read there rest here.

I’m a great believer in this kind of practical daydreaming; we absolutely may not — probably won’t — get it right, especially not in detail. But it provides us a way of considering the might-bes, the black swans, the surely-nots and the wonder-ifs. Given how unpredictable the future is, either we throw up our hands and stick to reading the newspaper, or else we might as well embrace the fact that we are really in the business of creating the most plausible science fictions we can…

‘Putin Will Be Forced to Choose Between Oligarchs and Public,’ Wikistrat, 1 January 2016

‘Talking Policy: Mark Galeotti on Russia,’ interview in World Policy Blog, 1 January 2016

‘Russia’s New National Security Strategy: familiar themes, gaudy rhetoric,’ War On The Rocks, 4 January 2016

‘Yuri Andropov Would Drop Assad Like a Hot Kartoshka,’ Foreign Policy, 7 January 2016

‘Fix Russia’s ****ing Prison System,’ Russia! magazine, 18 January 2016

‘STOLYPIN: Russia needs its Brains,’ IntelliNews Business New Europe, 18 January 2016

‘We Don’t Know What To Call Russian Military Intelligence and That May Be A Problem,’ War On The Rocks, 19 January 2016

‘Who Needs Assassins When You’ve Got Hackers?’, New York Times, 22 January 2016

‘Mark Galeotti: in Russia corrupted elite often interact with organized crime‘, interview with Dozhd-TV, 27 January 2016 [video, in English; here dubbed into Russian]

‘The Litvinenko Affair: An Anglo-Russian Exercise in Futility,’ Moscow Times, 28 January 2016

Here’s the usual summary, of a pretty sparse month; as ever, ignore if you’re not interested, follow the links is you are.

Moscow Must Avoid Shadow War With Ankara, Moscow Times, 3 December 2015

CGI Asks: Will Turkey-Russia Tensions Spill Over Into the Caucasus?, CGI, 18 December 2015

‘Russia’s Middle Eastern adventure evolves,’ IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review, 21 December 2015 (with Samir Naser)

The Kremlin’s Theatre of Tyranny, Russia! magazine 26 December 2015

Cruising Towards Cooperation?, conversation with Oxana Boyko on RT’s World Apart programme, 27 December 2015

I was also delighted to see that my April article ‘“Hybrid War” and “Little Green Men”: How It Works, and How It Doesn’t,’ was the excellent e-IR online journal’s most viewed article in 2015.

Hero of Russia, Lt. Gen. Alexei Dyumin

The former relationship of Lt. Gen. Alexei Dyumin to the GRU, mentioned in my last blog, is still unclear. As of 24 December 2015, he is a Deputy Defence Minister, although of still unclear portfolio. However, accounts of his promotion say that he was before then head of the Special Operations Forces (SSO: Sily spetsial’nykh operatsii) — and the Spetsnaz are a GRU asset, so this might have been a position giving an equivalence to a deputy headship of the GRU — and even before than, Ground Forces Chief of Staff. That’s a pretty solid pedigree, but given that even back in May 2015 he was being name-checked as still being in the Presidential Security Service (SBP), that suggests a pretty meteoric rise.

Let’s assume there aren’t two Alexei Gennad’evich Dyumins within the Russian security elite. Let’s further assume that these various accounts are correct. That means that in the space of at most seven months, Colonel Dyumin (as he was then), one of the deputy heads of the SBP, moved across to the Defence Ministry, took a senior operational role in the Ground Forces (despite not having been a career soldier), then a crucial command position in GRU special forces, and then a hop up to to deputy ministerial rank. In the process, he also went from colonel to major general to (two-star) lt. general. Pretty impressive.

But not wholly unprecedented — let’s not forget the infamous Viktor Zolotov, close Putin associate and judo sparring partner, who went at flank speed from head of the SBP to commander of the Interior Ministry’s Interior Troops, to First Deputy Interior Minister and potential minister-in-waiting.

It’s all conjecture, but the rapid promotion of close Putin clients from the SBP, people he knows, people he plays judo and ice hockey with, people who are his neighbours, may suggest a degree of insecurity. If he feels he cannot trust the elite as a whole (and I suspect he may be right), the temptation to colonise the key security structures with those you feel on whom you can rely, if push comes to shove, is logical. And interesting.

Wordpress have delivered their usual summary of a year in statistics. I’m not going to post the whole thing, but I was delighted and honoured to read that I had some 240,000 views across the year, with one day — 24th November — getting almost 11,000 views. Now, sadly much of this is because of the mayhem, murder and misery attached to Russia in 2015, given the nature of my beat, so pleasure must be balanced with a little reflective sadness. Still, I would like to say thank you to all those who do subscribe or just stop by, and especially express my pleasure that while the USA and the UK account for the most hits, Russia comes third. I hope you find this useful and even sometimes entertaining, and now have a target to exceed for 2016. S novym godom! 

As part of Wikistrat’s Predictions for 2016 report, I contributed a potentially upbeat one, reproduced here with permission, that speculated about the way the likely opening pressures between the interests of the public and the kleptocratic oligarchs of Russia (or maybe the “three Russias” I write about here) may force Putin to choose between them. It is possible — and this may be wishful thinking — that he would choose some form of economic reform and limited anti-corruption campaign. Of course, he could just as easily decide to go full late-Brezhnev and cushion the elite regardless of the impact on the public and state legitimacy, in which case he is truly dooming his state-building project.