Dear Readers:
This is a very short, but still rather informative piece. The reporter is Olga Invanovna. The young man in the photo (with a rather square-shaped head) is named Vitaly Khotsenko, and he is the new “Chairman of the Government of the Donetsk Peoples Republic”.
Not sure what this equivalates to, but I’m thinking that’s something like Speaker of the Parliament (?), or possibly even Prime Minister (?) Here is the wording of the announcement from the DPR Parliament:
“Today, 8 June, at an extraordinary [not in the meaning of wow! but in the meaning of extra, not previously pre-scheduled] plenary meeting of the Spring 2022 Session of the People’s Soviet of the Donetsk Peoples Republic, of the II Convocation, a resolution was adopted: On conferring the right upon the Head of the DPR [that would be Denis Pushilin] to appoint Vitaly Pavlovich Khotsenko to the post of Chairman of the Government.”
The appointment goes into effect immediately. This follows right after Pushilin had dissolved the previous government and fired Khotsenko’s predecessor, Alexander Ananchenko.
A Now And Future Leader
Next follows a brief biography of Khotsenko, in which we learn that the Russian government has been grooming this guy since 2018 for a post of Governor of some region. He even won a contest for “Future Leaders of Russia 2018-2019.” It is not specified whether or not there was a swimsuit component of the competition, or if it was all just talent portion. Okay, enough joking around, I looked it up. This competition is sponsored by an organization called “Russia — nation of Possibilities”. Which is curated by the President of the Russian Federation, and receives its funding from the government. So, not an NGO.
The competition consists of 4 phases: (1) online registration and a video interview; (2) an online oral exam which includes verbal and mathematical skills; (3) the semi-finals (still online); and (4) the finals, in which the candidates must prove their management and leadership skills. The winner gets on a fast-track to service in the Russian government, with the hope of rising to the very top someday; or at least as high as Governor of some Oblast.
Vitaly was born in 1986 in Dnepropetrovsk (in the Ukraine, USSR, which the Ukrainains renamed to Dnipro becaue the –petrovsk part of the name alluded to Russian Tsar Peter). Vitaly’s birthplace is, seriously, his sole connection with the Ukraine. He graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in Sociology. Then moved to Sinapore, where he got his degree in Business Management, with a minor in Jurisprudence. Then back to Moscow State University for his Masters Degree in “Government and Municipal Management”. After which, for several years he worked for the government of the Yamal-Nenets autonomous region of the Russian Federation.
In 2013 he was transferred to the Stavropol Krai to head the Ministry of Energy. In 2019 he had risen to a post in the Russian Federal government, under the Ministry of Industry. This was around he time he won the competition to be a future Governor himself.
And now he is going to head the government of the Donetsk Peoples Republic. Which shows, I reckon, that the Russian government is serious about staffing these new Oblasts of Future Novorossiya with their most promising cadres.
Awful Avalanche 
Dunno about this move, the optics look bad…is there not one of the resistance that learned leadership through the hardship of the monstrous years since Obama’s 2014 coup?
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It’s the Russian way… [sigh]…
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The choice is:
Appoint or elect a war hero (various African and Asian nations, Cuba).
Nominate a bureaucrate / technocrate (China, Russia)
Appoint an accomplished member of the ruling party (various nations all over the world).
Elect a populist or a telegenic actor (the European model).
Accept or simply not reject a fraudster and hustler (USA, Latin America)
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Definitely NOT an actor or comedian, nothing good can come of that!
My emotions say to go with the war hero, but my logical mind says to go with a technocrat.
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Reading the Wikipedia entry on the real Head Cheese Pushilin is a bit hair-raising. Okay, knock off 50% for CIA exaggeration, and still, they seem to paint him to be a bit of a lad. And now he appoints a new Chairman for an elected legislative body, which is like making a rear-engine front-wheel drive car to me — odd — as in, because I am an abject Westerner used to things being done a certain way, this kind of thing seems all wrong. Like appointing a Russian dictator, who’s never been elected. Am I too hidebound? Or is this indeed a perfectly logical Russian version of democracy??
Enquiring minds need to know.
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Well, it’s Russian practice to appoint Oblast-level Governors, for example. (Not elect.)
I think at at one point (if I am not mistaken), they were electing Governors in Russia. But that turned out badly, because it resulted in Western-oriented oligarchs (with tons of money and a war chest) getting elected. So then, Russia reverted to the old practice of Vertical Management style. This was one of Putin’s innovations, while at the same time converting himself into a quasi-Napoleon type figure at the head of the Russian state. I think he does it for sincere reasons, though, believing this is the only way to get Russia through this dangerous period. And there isn’t exactly any alternative, since the Russian Left is so weak. Who you gonna believe, the Communist Party? They long ago betrayed everything they were supposed to stand for!
Don’t worry though, there is still some democracy, when it comes to electing Parliament Deputies and lower-level officials like Mayors, etc.
Personally, I don’t like the Putin-era Parliamentary system because there is an Upper House. Which is just too reminiscent of the English House of Lords.
I wonder if there will be some friction with absorbing Donbass, because many Donbass people literally believe in the Soviet model. So when they start voting in Federal elections…
🙂
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Yalensis – most of the Oblast governors in Russia ARE elected! Most of the ethnic republics have Governors appointed by the President – but that’s understandable
and a whole different ball game because you can’t expect the same from Chechnya and Dagestan, as you would with Moscow or Sverdlovsk.
The Ukraine is actually the country which never had elected Oblast governors ( except for Kiev city)! That’s a country where democracy is abnormal and authorianism is natural.
There are 7 governors from opposition parties in power in Russia. Most of them via elections
It’s all fairly straightforward, as it should be in a democracy (which Russia is) – in the regions that are not doing so well economically, and don’t have ethnic republic status……United Russia does not fare so well , and so the Communists, LDPR and Just Russia come into play.
Any elections in LDNR, or Kherson and Zaporizhye are just too dangerous to have know due to the vindictiveness of the Kiev regime, who will happily strike areas where locals are voting- so I welcome this type of appointment.from Donetsk.
PS – On the subject of Dnepropetrovsk, I read somewhere like kp.ru that while there has been much renaming of things as part of decommunisation and derussification in Ukraine – towns called Pavlograd in Ukraine have been untouched. Why is this? Because Paul or Pavel the 1st of Russia was mostly German and not Russian! Thats good enough for the Ukrop officialdom
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Hey, Eric, thanks for that clarification about the Russian Oblast governors. Clearly I don’t follow Russian politics or “civics” as closely as I should. I think my mind was thinking back to the days of yore, with Kirov Gov Nikita Belykh, I was under the impression that Putin had appointed him to the Oblast to appease the Liberals. Look how that turned out.
Anyhow, that is a very interesting point about Pavlograd. So they spared Tsar Paul because he was German? That doesn’t make sense though, because his mom Catherine was also German, but they renamed her towns anyhow. Maybe they only go after the more powerful Russian Tsars, like Catherine, Peter, but they don’t care about a loser like Paul? .
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Yes, it looks like that is the reasoning behind it Yalensis.It’s baffling because any decommunisation or derussifying just leads to some massive contradiction or dead-end.
My guess would be that most of the towns named after Catherine were renamed already by the Communists, and after 1991 they kept the Soviet name. It looks like Catherine spared herself the humiliation of some of the renaming because of all the places she founded in the South of Ukraine that she gave the greek names to!
But yes Paul gets to keep his towns, just like Wladimir Klitschko gets to keep his german-friendly first name as we discussed in a previous blog entry.
BTW , fantastic 7 part series about Ukrainian language Yalensis. I will comment on that some time in the near future.
One more thing I want to mention ( and apologies in advance if the subject matter is too tedious for you), but we have here Pavlograd, and other places like Petrograd or variations named after Pavel and Pyotr. Ukrainian variations of the same names are Pavlo and Petro, but the Russian place names of course have the “Pavlo” and “Petro” variant. So my question is why this is?
Were Ukrainian parents naming their children Pavlo, Petro & Dymtro, phonectically sounding like Pavlo,Petro and Dmytro – or is this just modern svidomy gone mad, because the same people in Kiev, Kharkov or wherever were calling themselves Pavel, Pyotr and Dmitry!
I had never even heard of “Dmytro” until after 2010, not even the uber-nazi trashbucket Chrystia Freedland when she was working as a “journalist” wrote Dmytro as far as I can remember.
All confusing. Just to recap, the gist of my question is why was Petrograd not named Pyotrgrad?
Galina going to Halina, Alexandr becoming Olexandr – all that I can understand fine, but the stuff mentioned above – not so much
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Hey, Eric, thanks so much for reading my post on the Ukrainian language, I really appreciate that! It was truly a labor of love, penned in the heat of battle against Stupid Otto! 🙂
To answer your question why Petrograd and not Pyotrgrad, it’s because of the stress, in Russian this 3-syllable word has stress on the final syllable: Петрогра́д = Petr-o-GRAD. In standard Russian (the Moscow dialect), an unstressed /o/ loses its flavor, especially when it’s 2 syllables away from the stressed syllable. In this position, following a soft consonant, it would wash out to an [i] or [e] type sound.
The original name of the city was Sankt-Peterburg (=Saint Petersburg), but then the Russians themselves de-Germanized it to Petrograd as a show of contempt for the Germans during WWI (replacing the German -burg with the Slavic -grad).
But the name “Peter” itself in Russian has the stress on the first syllable, so Russians (this dates back to very early sound changes in the East Slavic dialects) will tend to pronounce a stressed -e- sound following a soft consonant as the /o/ sound. Hence /P’Otr/ (basically a one-syllable word).
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P.S. – I almost forgot, the -o- itself in Petr-o-grad is just the connector between two morphemes, forming a compound substantive. This is a very common construction in many Indo-European languages, you’ll even see it in English, for example, swap-o-rama (just for a silly example).
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I have to think the reason why they (the combined DPR+RF) chose this route (summarily appointing someone from the ‘Future Leaders of Russia’ competition) is because those contestants graduated from Charles Heberle’s civic education program — described here:
The break-away republics have done really well in terms of holding out against the depredations of the ‘Revolution of Dignity'(TM); but, they now need to seize the future. At this point in time, it would not serve them well to simply revert to patterns inherited and vaguely remembered from Soviet days (overlaid with patterns inherited and vividly remembered from the post-1990s Rule of the Oligarchs); and, they don’t have the luxury of time for a leisurely, organic process of political development. They’ve got to get it right, straight out of the gate.
People may say this move “doesn’t look good”, but it’s too late in the game to worry about what people say or how something ‘looks’. Results are what matters.
The republics are either going to stand on their own as independent entities on the world stage, or they will vote to be quickly folded into the RF as federal units. Either way, they gonna need a working familiarity with the “attitudes, understandings, and skills” which are essential to successfully run a government “of, by, and for the people.”
On a side note (off-topic), I have to say I’m starting to like this guy, Arestovich. He’s a one-man wrecking crew ! : https://t.me/NewResistance/9656
On another side note, yalensis, it seems a long time since you did one of your ‘How’m I Doin’, Hey, Hey’ reports. Don’t know how others feel, but I’d be interested to see your latest stats. I have the impression your blog has been drawing traffic since the SMO started.
Anyway, I loves what you do on this blog. Read it every day, though I hardly ever post a comment.
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“Transforming Subjects into Citizens…” [gag!]
It still nauseates me to recall how absolutely pro-American all these people were — Putin and his inner circle, Simonyan, Medvedev, the whole lot. They were absolutely deluded about what exactly America was. They loved Ronald Reagan and literally saw America as the “shining city on the hill” — blech..
Well, I think they have come around since then. Medvedev has surprised me the most (pleasantly surprised). In his Soviet youth he proudly wore blue jeans and sang with rock bands [nothing wrong with blue jeans or pop bands per se, but in the Soviet context it was sort of a virtue-signalling that they were pro-Westie] — but look at him now! He is absolutely on fire with contempt for the West and its Fifth Column within Russia.
Shows that people can change, but sometimes it takes a push…
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P.S. – hey, seven, thanks for being a loyal reader! I forget why I stopped doing those “How’m I doin”, it wasn’t because my numbers were any lower (or higher) than they ever were; and that was never my concern anyhow. It was just a way of cultivating my readership and keeping myself honest. I think one month I just didn’t have time to do it, because there was too much news, and then I never bothered to go back to it.
Maybe I’ll do it again when this war is over and I have more time. I haven’t checked my numbers recently, but when I sign on WordPress flatters me by telling me I’m “on a streak”, whatever that means. Given that I am a niche blog, it may not mean all that much, LOL!
Re. Arestovich, yeah, that guys is just too funny. I don’t always have time, but some nights I try to watch at least part of his nightly podcast with that toad, Feigin. It wasn’t last night but the night before, I watched him for about half an hour, I could swear that Alexei was drunk, or at least tipsy, he was sipping at some dark-looking drink, got slightly flushed, and giggling at inappropriate moments (like when they were talking about Ukrainian defeats at Svyatogorsk). Fortunately, Arestovich is NOT a disgusting drunk, nor a mean drunk, the man is obviously a happy drunk, so one has to give him credit for that.
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This is off-topic, but I couldn’t resist — ignore this comment, if it’s inappropriate.
One should not be unforgiving or self-righteous. The Atlanticists, the liberals, the St. Petersburg intelligentsia fell victims to the biggest propaganda (or reeducation) campaign the world has ever seen. With all the luxury, affluence, and ease of life displayed in US film and TV, who couldn’t be tempted to see the USA as a role model.
The pillars of the propaganda campaign:
A social fabric based on delusion, fantasy (rags to riches), ignorance, indoctrination, mind control. “A shining city upon a hill,” or “a beacon of hope,” or “leader of the free world.”
Every salesman, expert, pundit, politician is a con (confidence) man. The high art of creating illusions, of deceiving, misleading, and lying. Edward Bernays Public Relations. Relentless advertising of products nobody really needs.
The soft power of USA’s “dream machine” (Hollywood, TV), 24/7 propaganda by news channels and “newspapers of record”.
The highjacking of global pop culture by US corporations. It didn’t help that Hitler banned “entartete Kunst,” forcing all creative minds to flee and bolster US culture (Weill, Holländer), which was already highly energetic due to African American music.
George Carlin:
“The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
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So true! By the way, your comment was lost for a while, apologies for the inconvenience. I found it floating in the spam filter and fished it out. Have no idea why it went to spam, since it didn’t contain links, but wordpress does that sometimes, seemingly for no reason!
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yalensis,
Yeah, go ahead and gag if you want to. Maybe you and I have different understandings of what it means to be a subject, and what it means to be a citizen. I’m pretty ignorant where it comes to Russian history; but, from what I’ve read, it (Russia) never really developed a fully-fledged European style feudalism, though they emulated it to a certain degree.
To me, being a subject equates with being owned by a sovereign ruler, as in a feudal construct. To be a citizen implies a member of a sovereign entity which is not an individual who owns everything in the realm, but the collective itself, the population as a whole. Each member of that collective, each citizen, assumes a share of the responsibilities and benefits of running and maintaining that sovereign collective.
Which is why, when the Petersburg group approached Heberle, they specified an interest in the “attitudes, understandings, and skills learned by the American colonists from 1620 to 1775 that made the American Revolution successful where others failed.”
Problem is, while the American Revolution was successful in the short term, over the long term, it failed. The Fabians and knaves of the Roundtable eventually retook by stealth what had been lost on the battlefield. Then, after WWI, all across ‘the West’, citizens became consumers, who devolved further in the Information Age to become ‘users’.
But that doesn’t mean that training in citizenship is inherently suspect or useless. I, personally, think such training will stand your ancestral homeland in good stead. ’Cause, I was observing what I could of the contestants who threw their hats into the ring in the last Presidential election over there, and I gotta tell you, it was sad! It was embarrassing. I was thinking: this does not bode well for post-Putin Russia. They’d wanna pull some kind of rabbit out of the hat by 2024.
Which is not to say the electoral candidates in ‘the West’ have been any better. They have been just as sad and embarrassing, though more polished in presenting themselves. They’ve perfected the salesmanship. To tell you the truth, I wish someone in my own ancestral homeland (the USA) would institute Heberle’s training program nationwide (remind people what it means to be citizens). I wish we’d run something like that here in Canada, where people are still, at core, loyal subjects of the British Crown.
Nice chatting with you.
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Thanks, seven, I enjoy chatting with you as well. The American and French revolutions (particularly the French) did indeed create the concept of “citizen” (citoyen) which sounds pretty good on paper. That would be the progressive bourgeoisie of that era, and their concept was certainly a cut above being a feudal subject, I grant you that. It’s just that, by the time the Soviet Union was on its last legs, only somebody deluded would still see the U.S. as a shining exemplar of that concept; I mean, by that time, even decades earlier, America had completely degenerated and decayed. I think people like Putin and Medvedev can see it now, but they couldn’t see it then, just how degenerate and corrupt America was, and how its so-called “ideals” were just pure hypocrisy. I mean, I could see that myself, even when I was just a silly dumb child. So why couldn’t smart men like them have seen it at the time?
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This is good; it’s both interesting and important. ’Cause what we’re talking about is how to craft a non-exploitative and non-suffocating relationship between the individual and the collective in any given polity. (The polities in question, at the moment, being the new-born twins: DPR and LPR. But, we also have an eye on USA, Canada, etc., etc.)
You’re dismissive of the bourgeois concept of citizen/citoyen, which sounds good on paper but fails in practice. I’m tempted to ask: why does it fail? And, does it fail catastrophically, or merely in the sense of not being able to live up to a set of lofty ideals? Also, why single out the French as being the exemplar of the concept of citizen when the French Revolution so swiftly devoured its children (its own citizens) in an orgy of bloodletting unmatched by the American Revolution, which tended to project its violence outward onto non-citizens at its frontier?
The concept of ‘new soviet man’ (person), also seemed good in concept, but then it, too, failed. Why? Why did it have such a short lifespan? And, did it fail catastrophically or merely spectacularly?
You say by the time the Soviet Union was “on its last legs”, even you as a kid were sensitive to the stinkin’ hypocrisy of the American system. Kids have pretty good noses for BS. Nevertheless, while you were holding your nose in that direction, the ground under your feet was already dissolving. We can fault the predators all we want; but, there had to have been a fatal weakness in the system for it to have succumbed so easily.
You criticize Putin and his inner circle, Medvedev et al. for certain attitudes, for being deluded, pro-Westie, etc.; but, me, being a Westie m’self, older than you, and viewing it all from the distance as an uninvolved observer, I can tell you the damage was done long before that crew took command of the ship of state. By that time, the ship was already floundering on the reef. Breaking up. We all thought she was a goner. Watching that crew come in and slowly, methodically patch it back together (without attracting much attention), then lift it up, steer it away from the rocks, and hoist its sails was like witnessing some kind of miracle happen before our very eyes.
Over the decades (two, now) little miracles keep happening. They keep accumulating. The latest one has been how Russia as an organism responded to the neutron bomb of financial thefts and sanctions – what was intended to be the definitive knock-out blow. She just shrugged it off! I mean, she obviously took a punch and had to pause for a moment. But, around the world, everyone’s looking with large eyes and open mouths, thinking: Holy! moly! How’d she do that!? And it energizes them to stand up on their own hind legs and grow a backbone. The system itself is resilient now. It’s not brittle. That’s impressive.
We’re currently in a node of spacetime where/when nothing is solid. Everything’s dissolving like a caterpillar inside its cocoon, reshaping, metamorphosing. Everyone’s fumbling toward something they don’t know the shape of yet … something that’s going to work better, serve us all better than what we’ve known in the past. Nobody really has the answer yet.
But, the DPR has this new Chairman of the Government who came through a process of leadership development in Russia and was catapulted into his present assignment all of the sudden. Let’s hope he produces another little miracle for the people Donbass who, caught in the political brambles for so long, have suffered so much heartache.
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Thanks for this essay, seven, this is very good, and deep, stuff. You are a natural philosopher, and I think you should write a book. (If you haven’t already.)
You raise a lot of interesting philosophical points. It brings up very interesting sociological questions about, to what degree does a society act like a single organism, and what does it take for a diseased organism to become healthy again? I am rather pessimistic when it comes to America, because I don’t see a good off-ramp for the fascist oligarchy which currently rules that country. Anything short of a bloody French-type revolution. Which I personally do not wish for because I abhor violence, and I would probably die in it too, but maybe it’s inevitable. Given the American mentality, I think this would be almost a copy of the French Revolution, there would be a Marat and a Robespierre, etc.
I agree with you that the Russian people (in which I include all citizens of Russia, not just ethnic Slavs, obviously) have come together in this time probably more unified than at any point in recent history. It wasn’t just the sanctions and the dawning of the realization that the West really wanted them all dead; it was all the other slights too, the humiliating banning of Russian athletes and musicians; all those slings and arrows showing just how genocidal was this wave of hatred coming from a place (=Europe and America) that many of them had always looked upon benignly. I mean, wasn’t it somebody in the German government (I forget who) who literally said she couldn’t stand to live in a world that had Russia in it?
As to these new governors for DPR/LPR, I have a new post on that coming up, maybe even later today, so please stay tuned!
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