As Russia's military commissariats begin rounding up reservists for the front, we're seeing fairly clear -- if inevitably anecdotal -- evidence that the call-up is falling hardest on the communities already hardest hit by the war, particularly ethnic minorities.
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As has been the case since the beginning, that means Buryats...
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https://twitter.com/BaikalPeople/status/1572893834174140417
... and inevitably many others, including ethnically Slavic rust-belt towns.
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https://twitter.com/holodmedia/status/1572954659299667970
Racism and classism are absolutely part of this process. Wars are almost always fought by the disenfranchised, marginalized and the poor on behalf of the powerful -- and Russia is no exception in that regard.
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But there is also a more mundane -- and, for Putin, a more problematic -- reason behind this: Bureaucratic inertia.
Tasked with mobilizing as many men as possible as quickly as possible, the military is going for the easiest targets.
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Tasked with mobilizing as many men as possible as quickly as possible, the military is going for the easiest targets.
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Inefficient bureaucracies -- whether the police, the tax authorities or the military -- will often try to hit their targets by fishing over and over again from the same ponds. It's easier than seeking new fishing holes, even if it brings diminishing returns.
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The diminishing returns from such behavior, meanwhile, accrue to others: to the communities being decimated by this war, and to the front-line commanders, who will have to fight with poorly trained and weakly motivated troops.
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I've been noting for months that the burden is falling inequitably on particular communities, creating pockets of deprivation and injustice -- and warning that the Kremlin lacks the administrative capacity to smooth things out.
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tldrussia.substack.com/p/pyrrhic-vict…
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tldrussia.substack.com/p/pyrrhic-vict…
What we're seeing now bears that analysis out: Rather than correcting the mistakes of the earlier phases of this war, the Russian administrative machinery is deepening them. The scenes we're seeing from Dagestan are evidence of the potential consequences of that.
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The Kremlin's coercive apparatus will now have to pick up the tab for this administrative dysfunction, seeing off protests and rounding up reluctant recruits. If they're mostly facing down big-city liberals, they'll probably make it through.
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But if the Kremlin needs to suppress the communities from which the military is trying to recruit troops, it may struggle. It's not just that blue-collar workers might fight harder on the streets, though it's that, too.
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If the Kremlin tries to repress ethnic minorities, they will sharpen identities, imbue those identities with a sense of injustice, and swing horizontal social institutions into the fight -- institutions that can be much more legitimate in these communities than Putin is.
/END
/END
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