Chechnya And War Veterans
Russia 2011-2021: Life After Death
A fundamental difference between developments in Russia 20 years ago and in Central Europe and the Baltic countries is that Russia has never had a democratic revolution.
The driving force of change was the ruling nomenklatura, which conceived and implemented a plan to convert its absolute collective political power into huge financial power for its individual members.
All the golden dreams of the Communist Party and KGB nomenklatura, which launched perestroika in the mid-1980s, have come true by now. What have they achieved as a result of this 20-year period? The total concentration of political power, just as before, but with huge personal fortunes they could not even have imagined and a completely different lifestyle (in Moscow’s exclusive Rublyovka neighborhood, Courchevel, or Sardinia).
Most importantly, the rulers no longer have any social and historical responsibility. Now they do not need to howl in unison: "The purpose of our life is ordinary people’s happiness." They were sick of that hypocrisy. Now they repeat matter-of-factly that the purpose of their lives is "the continuation of market reforms" and "getting Russia off its knees," though none of them believes that or even knows what it means. The regime has promised the people to take "unpopular but necessary measures" for 20 (!) consecutive years of reform as it was implementing measures very popular among a handful of people and aimed at their personal enrichment.
The history of authoritarian regimes succeeding one another in Russia reveals a pattern – they do not die from external blows of fate or attacks by their opponents. They tend to die suddenly of a strange sort of internal disease – the irresistible existential disgust for themselves, their own exhaustion and what Sartre described as the nausea ( la nausée ) of existence.
Today we are witnessing the Putin regime, which paved the political space with asphalt, waste away from the same chronic disease. The simulacrum of a big ideological style, it could hardly avoid such a fate. In its short biography of one decade it went through all the classic stages of Soviet history only to become a vulgar parody of each of them.
The ruling corporation has no people or ideas, or even desires. For them Francis Fukuyama’s end of history came a long time ago. Time stands still in the viscous eternity and our original Eurasian pride – the vertically structured government – is about to collapse to form yet another black hole of Russian history for the third time in less than a century.
Chechnya And War Veterans - News
North Caucasian republics, starting with Chechnya, will finally break away from ailing Russia after they stop receiving tribute. The government will not dare to use force to retain them for fear of terrorist attacks by Islamists.
Interview of Tanya Lokshina, President of the Demos center ...
) Of the law-enforcement system and the second - which interests you (entitled “Veterans of Chechnya: Drawing Public Attention to the Chechen Conflict through the Prism of Issues Associated with Social Adaptation and Professional Activities of Veterans” 3 ) - deals with the situation of Police veterans. The second study was a logical continuation of the first. In our first study, some respondents referred to postings in Chechnya and spoke of the problems encountered by policemen. They said that the fact that a lot of police officers go to Chechnya has an impact on how the Ministry of the Interior works. This study is also rooted in the larger framework of our work in Chechnya and the North Caucasus. I have visited Chechnya regularly for the last four years as I carry out standard human rights monitoring there, I interview victims of human rights violations. Both my colleagues and I have heard a lot of victims’ stories, we know their point of view, how they feel, the problems they have with the armed forces, the special services, and the police and how they perceive Russian soldiers and police officers. So it seemed quite important and necessary for us to look into the other side of the coin – to investigate police officers’ perceptions of the situation: whether they feel dislike or hatred against the local population, whether they want to go to Chechnya, why they go there in the first place, what it means to them and how it influences their life and career. As a field researcher in Chechnya, I have spoken with hundreds of people to whom our policemen have done terrifying things that I would not want to describe at the moment. I got used to seeing the situation from the point of view of the local population and I have the strongest empathy for innumerable civilians victimized by the conflict, including those who were tormented and humiliated by Russian police servicemen. But having now looked at the same situation from another angle, I also cannot but feel empathy for police officers who are sent to Chechnya without proper training and get no effective rehabilitation upon return.
In any case, within the framework of our first major research effort, we were working on the broader problem of the arbitrariness in the law-enforcement system but we to see not only how society perceives the police, but also how the police perceive society. In the second study, we also tried to do something along those lines, though our topic is narrower and in many respects more complicated. Unfortunately, Chechnya has become almost a taboo subject in Russia of late and a lot of police officers who served in Chechnya refuse to speak about their respective experiences in the conflict zone, even with anonymity warranted.Chechnya And War Veterans - Bookshelf
Chechnya - Russia's 'war on terror'
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Post-War Situations / Chechnya Veterans
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Calenda - Le rôle politique et social des vétérans en Russie
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First Tbilisi International Conference on Veterans and ...
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Russia: Court Challenges Unprecedented Compensation Award For ...
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Chechnya War Impact - Johnson's Russia List 6-21-03
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