Russia Reform Monitor: No. 1659

January 3:

Russia’s unfolding demographic crisis increasingly is playing out in a new arena: education. In a radio interview with Ekho Moskvy, subsequently reprinted by the newsmagazine Vzglyad, Russian Education and Science Minister Andrei Fursenko has outlined what amounts to a catastrophic emptying of the country’s schools in the years ahead. According to Fursenko, by the year 2012, the number of students who graduate from Russian educational institutions will drop by half, to just 700,000 annually. The dramatic drop in graduates, moreover, portends ill for Russia’s industrial and economic sectors. “Today, the situation is that we are not so much selecting [candidates] as searching for them,” Fursenko details.


January 7:

After a decade of policy assertiveness, write Samuel Greene and Dmitri Trenin in a new Policy Brief for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the economic turbulence that has buffeted Moscow over the past year-and-a-half has injected doubt into the Kremlin’s strategic calculus and outlined “the limitations of the Kremlin’s domestic and foreign policies.” The result has been a renewed emphasis on engagement with foreign nations – including the United States – and a willingness to countenance limited domestic dissent in certain sectors. These represent positive steps, Greene and Trenin suggest, but “[t]ruly reopening the policy space for dialogue and debate” at home “will require rebuilding trust and goodwill among public officials and nongovernmental experts, as well as re-instilling the habits of transparency and peer review that have been forgotten over the preceding decade.” And therein lies the challenge for Washington, which previously relied too heavily upon personal politics in its dealings with the Kremlin: “If Obama’s ‘resetting’ of the relationship is to succeed, it will be because the relationship ceased to be personal and instead became institutional, based on treaties, membership in international organizations, and cooperation in global initiatives.”


January 12:

Despite mounting casualties and difficulties in securing the southwest Asian state, NATO needs to stay the course in Afghanistan, two leading Russian policymakers have urged. “A rapid slide into chaos awaits Afghanistan and its neighbors if NATO pulls out, pretending to have achieved its goals,” Moscow region governor Boris Gromov and Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin write in the International Herald Tribune. The consequences for the region, the pair outline, would be devastating: “A pullout would give a tremendous boost to Islamic militants, destabilize the Central Asian republics and set off flows of refugees, including many thousands to Europe and Russia. It would also give a huge boost to the illegal drug trade. Opium production in Afghanistan in 2008 came to 7,700 tons, more than 40 times that of 2001, when international forces arrived. If even the ISAF presence could not prevent the explosive growth of Taliban drug dealing, than it is not difficult to understand what a NATO pull-out would lead to.”


January 18:

Russia’s plan for a natural gas pipeline through the Balkans to southern Europe is making major progress. The EU News Network reports that Russian officials now foresee concluding exploratory work on the notional energy route, and the commencement of construction, during the current year. "By September-October, exploratory work will be completed, and all the documentation may be ready to allow us to begin work on South Stream by the autumn," RIA Novosti has cited Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov as saying. As part of preparations for the project, Russia’s state natural gas giant, Gazprom, recently established a dedicated department to oversee progress on South Stream. But lingering hurdles must still be overcome in order for the energy route to become a reality, among them a decision on the part of the Serbian government over what geographic route the 280-kilometer leg of South Stream that Belgrade will host should take.


January 25:

Russia’s military is now experiencing a widespread crisis of desertion, a noted Russia and Eurasia expert has detailed. “Some 20,000 soldiers, divided almost equally between draftees and those on contract, are currently being sought by the Russian military and militia for desertion,” writes Paul Goble in his blog Window on Eurasia. That statistic, Goble outlines, is “an especially disturbing figure both because it highlights the continued existence of dedovshchina [hazing] in Russian forces and because many of those now AWOL have taken their weapons with them.” Moreover, that figure is most likely understated. Goble cites the conclusion of Russian specialist Alexandr Stepanov in saying that “because the provisions of Russian military law and the desire of commanders not to harm their own reputations both allow the Russian powers that be to understate the numbers of both deserters and those taking arms with them.”