Dear Readers:
Today’s post is a continuation on the theme of the Brand New Governors sent from Moscow to manage these unruly [just joking, don’t throw tomatoes] new provinces in Donetsk and Luhansk. Three reporters contributed to this piece: Darya Volkova, Rafael Fakhrutdinov, and Artur Priymak.
A couple of days ago we met Donetsk’s new Governor (well, technically, Prime Minister) Vitaly Khotsenko. Today we will also meet his Luhansk counterpart, Vladislav Kuznetsov. Both men were appointed by the Kremlin (yes, the actual building complex) and sent into the Donbass, with great hopes and expectations upon their shoulders. Both men were finalists in the “Future Governors Of Russia” Beauty Pageant Competitions of past years, as we discussed before. The cynic in me can’t help but wonder, though: When these very talented guys were working so hard and studying until all hours to pass this test; and building up their careers over the years and decades –, maybe they were hoping for a rewarding but peaceful job in some nice Okrug working with friendly reindeer herders; and then boom! they are both in the middle of ruined cities, being shelled 24/7 and subject to possible Ukrainian terrorist attacks and assassination attempts at any moment. It isn’t even a place you would want to bring your wife, until things calm down some.
On the other hand, this is the Russian way of doing things, and always has been, dating back to the very beginning of the Rurik Dynasty. The Russian world is a place where Generals are expected to be out on the front lines with their troops, not sitting in some armchair in their office thousands of miles away; which is the reason why a significant number of Russian Generals have been killed in this war. This is a world where service to the state may entail accepting a dangerous job instead of a cushy one. In other words, you go where you are needed.
Brief Bio Of Kuznetsov
Vladislav Garievich Kuznetsov was born in 1969, in Moscow. Still in Soviet times, he graduated from a business-management school named after Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Starting in 1992 he managed many businesses, both state-owned and private. He is an accomplished economist and manager. Most of his positions have been in Moscow, except for a stint in Tver. In 2013 he entered government service, as a deputy of the Bashkortostan parliament, representing the United Russia political party. In 2019 he was appointed Deputy-Governor of the Kurgan Oblast, which is a Federal-level subject of the Russian Federation, located in the Ural Mountains. Towards the end of 2021 Kuznetsov resigned from his Kurgan post, left Kurgan and also quit the United Russia party. It was one of those resignations where his boss abolished the entire position after the employee left; which is cold. However, on a positive note, Kuznetsov won the “Future Governors” competition, and now here he is, in Luhansk! His official title is “First Deputy Chairman of the Government of the Luhansk Peoples Republic”, but guess what, there is another guy with the same title, goes by the name of Yury Nikolaevich Gotvin. So, Vladislav and Yury will have to become best friends and work together very closely, to get Luhansk back on its feet.
Kuznetsov is married, his wife Ulyana graduated from Strassburg University in France, and is an accomplished economist in her own right, holding many important positions in government. The couple have a daughter and two sons.
Why Vikings?
Next a quick note about the title of this piece I am reviewing, which is “Why did they bring Variags from Russia to rule the Donbass?” Which I translated for comic effect as “The Vikings Are Coming!”
Well, technically, a Variag is not exactly the same animal as a Viking, but it’s close enough for government work, as they say in America. The Russian word var’ag (Cyrillic spelling варяг) is beloved by scholars of Slavonic Historical Linguistics, as it illustrates several different types of phonological changes, all in one word. The original word, borrowed into Slavic from Germanic-Scandinavian languages, was something like *váringr, væringr, from which “Varingian”. (Not sure, but this might be somehow related to the Proto-Germanic *werz-a-, whence English “war” and “warrior”.) Then, in the course of time, the nasal syllable /in/ morphs into the Common Slavic nasal vowel *ę [pronounced nasally sort of like the -ain in French pain, “bread”]. In Old Church Slavonic texts this word was spelled as варѧгъ, and later evolving into its current Russian form. In the 9th-11th centuries of the medieval era, these Scandinavian warriors and ex-officials of the Byzantine government (Varingians), arrived in Kievan Rus, where they established the first (Rurik) dynasty of Russian Princes and later Tsars (from “Caesar”, “Emperor”). The Rurik dynasty lasted for many centuries, from 862 to 1598, ending only with the death of Fyodor Ivanovich, son of Ivan the Awesome.
There is often confusion between Varingians and Vikings, which is why many people still repeat the meme that Vikings came to rule over Russians; and, in fact, there may be a lot of truth to this confusion, according to some historians. Both groups were Scandinavian soldiers who came to Russia and contributed in many ways to the building of the Russian state. But the meme of violent uncouth Vikings like Hagar the Horrible invading Russia, is not correct. Historical chronicles record 862 as the year in which the peoples of ancient Rus allegedly called upon Scandinavian experts to help them build a government and army. The Varingians in particular had a lot of state-building experience, having served in the Byzantine armed forces and at the court (5th – 8th centuries). But yeah, there may have been some Vikings involved, as well. Maybe they provided the muscle.
All of this is a long way to explaining the Russian meme of Varingians arriving to restore law and order; with a semantic connotation of “Being so helpful, I have arrived to govern you, because you are not capable of governing yourselves.” In American English, a possible translation is “carpetbagger”, except that the latter word is much more negative than Variag, which does not connote corruption or exploitation.
Important Tasks
A couple of days ago, this past Thursday, Variag Vitaly Khotsenko named his most important tasks upon arriving at his new post in Donetsk. First, legal integration with Russia: “Synchronization of our legal systems, to the point where they are virtually identical,” Khotsenko told reporters from the Rossia-24 TV channel. Next on the list: restoration of the civilian infrastructure, social institutions, schools and other educational institutions; getting businesses and enterprises back on their feet. “All of Russia will help, all the regions. We have many sources of funding, for example there is the Federal budget, the DPR budget, state corporations, our own regions, businesses.” Khotsenko is right: The Russian Federation is literally rolling in oil money now, so funding these new regions should not be a problem.
Khotsenko will be reporting to Denis Pushilin and taking the position of Alexander Ananchenko; the latter is moved to a different role, where he will be engaged in the state sector.
Two other important cadres have been moved in from mainland Russia: Evgeny Solntsev and Alexander Kostomarov. Solntsev previously worked in the railroad sector in Russia, and will report directly to Khotsenko. Kostomarov, who has served previously as Deputy-Governor of the Ulyanovsk Oblast and also the Lipetsk Oblast, will report directly to Pushilin and manage his administration. People close to the corridors of power say that Kostomarov will be entrusted with coming up with the appropriate scenario for integrating the two Donbass Republics into the Russian Federation. One should recall, in this respect, that President Putin himself is a lawyer by training, and that, in his world, everything must be done by the book. The legal foundation absolutely comes first. These things must be done delicately, like the Green Lady says.
In conclusion: A lot of management and personnel changes! It all sounds good, but I hope these guys realize that Ukrainian terrorists are going to be trying to blow them up every minute of every day.
Meanwhile, similar cadre shuffles are taking place in Luhansk….
[to be continued]
Awful Avalanche 
Given the fact that idiocy that has been DC’s foreign policy since Clinton, [excusing Trump, who wasn’t allowed to govern* during his term], it appears that Russia’s preference to be surrounded by neutral, as in not enemy, countries has given way to the recognition that the USA is, at least in the near term, governed by sociopaths.
These deluded DC’s-sociopaths believe in a “master-plan” of Russia dismemberment. One of the authors of that plan was Zbigniew Brzezinski, a guy who has had a hand in helping The USA lose in the Vietnam, AF-PAK/911, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. All in all, quite a track record, apparently, once one displays homicidal tendencies, the sky is the limit in DC.
Given that this “ethos” is shared by all who come to DC to rule my great country; Russia has decided it can not have neutral, independent, countries surrounding it’s territory. This is because it is the stated policy of DC’s-sociopaths to turn those countries into Russia’s enemies and then attack Russia with said countries in the manner of a modern day suicide bomber. Do the denizens DC politely clap at the spectacle of these countries self-immolations when they are not sipping Champaign accompanied by caviar? Only the sociopaths of DC could make the Roman’s doings at the coliseum appear civilized.
I have opposed DC’s criminally insane foreign policy for over 3 decades…as such, I do sympathize with Russia’s conundrum. It’s hard to play nice with a murderous group of sociopaths or, as my father once said; there are some men in this world who can only understand one thing…a well placed shot. It appears, that for Russia, tolerance of DC’s efforts to dissect Russia for the past 30 years has come to an end. Russia will divide Ukraine when and where it sees fit and DC’s-sociopaths will arrive to sign the surrender papers only when the revelation of it’s widespread lies starts to become too obvious to obscure with the usual smoke and mirrors.
At this point, Odessa to the east bank of Dniester River have yet to be secured, until then Russia has little interest in entering serious negotiation, Russia has learned that sociopaths that rule the roost in DC can only understand a well placed shot, he might as well finish the job. And so it goes.
*Indeed, the Cheney/Obama wing of congress has as it’s #1 priority, the excoriation and banishment of Trump and in particular, Trump’s expressed, but not carried out Foriegn-Policy.
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Well said. My only quibble being that the “idiots” and “sociopaths” who rule Washington D.C. have been there a lot longer before the Clinton administration!
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Fair enough…
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My apologies for inconvenience, I just logged on this morning and fished your comment out of the spam filter. I don’t know why WordPress does this sometimes, still trying to figure it out. Anybody who doesn’t notice their comment for a while, please be patient, I’ll find it and rescue it, eventually!
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I thought Russian caviar (the best stuff) had been sanctioned.
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Washington DC bureaucrats are so uncouth, they probably don’t even know good from mediocre caviar! Probably would be easy to fool them with the cheap stuff. Champagne as well. Just tell ’em it’s expensive, and they’ll pretend to like it.
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I found this article here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/48577839?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A8f0ba541422c60835e1590e342773584&seq=1 you cn register for 100 free article per months through your google account.
It states that the Vikings and Russians (adventurers on the road to Constantinople) followed the Varangian road named after them (from the North, Norsemen) and some Vikings settled in the western part among the Slavs, united by an Oleg, and they were called Rus. So the Rus, which from what I remember means red, from the color of the hair of some Vikings, were actually the original Rus-sians and they gave the name to the state they founded.
So Varangians was the name given to the adventurers and mercenaries from the north on their way south, they being of Viking origin.
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Fascinating! Before the arrival of these nation-building Varangians and Vikings, the local Slavic tribes lived their mundane lives, in harmony with the local Finno-Ugric tribes. There was much inter-marrying and hanky-panky going on, that’s also the Russian way.
Every passing tribe who came along contributed something to the general mix. Sometimes there was war, sometimes there was peace, always there was some hanky-panky.
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No doubt there will be a certain amount of patronage involved in the careers of these “fast stream” administrators, but it seems to be a much more rational method of identifying candidates worthy of consideration for further promotion to place them in challenging situations than finding “soft spots” for buddies close to the centre of power. If they do well, they have the chance to become more “papabile”; before his current position as Defence Minister, Shoigu was handed the poisoned chalice of the equivalent of FEMA and obviously did such a great job that he was elevated.
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I agree. But I still want to see a swimsuit competition! (preferably with some lady candidates, as well…)
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I thank you for the previous answer to my question of this parachuting of these civil servants in as heads of government by the Kremlin as titular PMs of independent countries. But I confess your answer and those of other commenters in follow-up make little sense to me.
If the Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics are indeed recognized as independent entities, as occurred this past Feb 21 by the RF, then by what reasoning does the RF have the right to send in a couple of blokes (who won contests to be bureaucratic administrators in the RF) to run these two places which are supposed to be independent countries? On top of that, they both report to Pushilin on some org chart, but he was actually elected in Donetsk in 2018 as Head Cheese.
I mean, unless I am terminally stupid, this appears to be the takeover of two nominally independent states by a foreign power. Non? And three guesses how the legislatures will vote on joining the RF after their legal systems are fully aligned with Russia’s — you report above that Kuznetzov is keen on getting on with that. I mean, they have been de facto taken over by the RF already to all outward appearances. Was there nobody local to turn to for these appointments?
Frankly, it looks like a put-up job from my viewpoint, with the two “republics” taken as the spoils of war with administrators appointed to run the show to the Kremlin’s satisfaction.
I’m afraid merely saying “that’s the way the Russians do it” does not cut the mustard with me. It’s a logically preposterous scenario on the face of it. And if the West/US/Nato/EU Inc decide to dwell on the matter, it’ll be easy propaganda meat for them.
Here I am today, perhaps more anti-American imperial adventurism than pro-Russian now that I see the fix is apparently in already on the Donbas. Not all of it is ethnically Russian by any means, with the rurals being more likely to be Ukrainian, from what I read. So does the citizenry itself decide to join the RF by plebescite, as Putin constantly says sovereign nations should be sovereign and “must decide for themselves how to govern themselves”, or is that mere double-talk?
Do you see my quandary? Scratches head. It all seems most irregular to me, with a hefty helping of the old “nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean” about it.
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Yeah. I totally get what you’re saying, Beluga, and I see your point. I don’t really have an answer for you. I’m not a Kremlin bot by any stretch of the imagination; but I can also sort of appreciate the technocratic brilliance of the scheme.
I mean, unless one was naive or deluded, it was sort of obvious from the beginning, that the Donbass Peoples Republics were either going to be wiped out by the Ukrainian Nazis; or were going to be absorbed by Russia.
It’s not even a question of “when” or “if” any more, just a question of “how”.
Frankly, I am as surprised as you are, that the Westie propagandists have not picked up on this “outrageous situation” yet, either they are a couple of days behind the loop, or they are just in a state of shock – LOL!
Like you said, the fix is in. And yet everything has to be done by the book. Which is what I was hinting at when I posted that image of the Wicked Witch of the West intoning, “These things must be done very delicately!”
What can I say? Realpolitik?
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Your focus on Varangians/Vikings in the 800s AD inspired me to some tripped-out thinking, Yalensis. Not about the latest play-by-play in the Ukraine war, but about ancient deities, amber and longboats on the Black Sea.
I just finished reading “Gods of America,” which has an undercurrent of Vikingry, plus lots of far-north gods as characters in the book. One named “Czernobog the Slavic killer” has a big role. He seems like an entity dreamt up on the steppes. I’m also re-reading “The World Without Us” (fascinating science-based book on what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared — what are the biological processes that would make houses and skyscrapers fall apart? How would trees and animals grow back to reclaim the areas we humans have paved over?) There are good sections in that book about an ancient forest in Poland/Belarus that’s been preserved as it was in the primordial times, with other bits about the mastodons that proto-Ukrainians hunted into extinction.
Your post got me contemplating “What did the land-form look like when those Varangians were rowing boats up the Dnieper and other rivers? What were the sounds and smells of an area that wasn’t thick with humans, but where people had still been living for thousands of years, so long that their origins had been forgotten? What gods did they worship — because men always make up gods — when this new Jesus character would have barely trickled up from the warm South, Allah was not even a rumour there, and the supernatural stories from Greco-Roman times were like ‘so 500 years ago’?” This was before the Mongols and the Golden Horde stampeded the steppes, but after the Huns. So no doubt that the Varangians had spear-fought against invading outsiders like the czars and commissars would do a millennium later. When Varangian story-tellers recited their sagas around bonfires — the old version of the Internet — what did they say?
To be a Varangian would have meant traipsing the endless forests looking for amber, because that was one of the few things that those sophisticated people at the other end of the Black Sea valued from their primitive land. Perhaps wheat too, because the Greeks had been using those regions as a breadbasket when Jason and the Argonauts were an actual template for life. Were Varangians finding mammoth tusks buried 10,000 years deep in bogs and sending them to Constantinople for the ivory trade? Did they still have folk myths about the beasts that created these things? Their mental focus would have been SO oriented to the cities many months downstream. They’d be thinking about where unimaginable numbers of people lived in BIG stone buildings, who could make those amazing things with metal. So much metal for weapons and tools, when all we have in our crappy village is wood and clay…
That’s what I like about the Internet — random things like your blog post can lead my mind into unexpected ways of imagining the world. It’s not like I spent hours and hours in a reverie about hairy guys wearing fur cloaks, but it did spark up some creative thinking.
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It’s so fascinating to imagine those days of yore. There was a time in my youth I became obsessed with the Nibelungenlied, which I still consider probably the best and most sophisticated epic ever written. It tells the story of Siegfried and the Burgundians, Siegfried’s widow Krimhilde and how she married Atila the Hun to get even with her brothers.
Speaking of Vikings, though, just yesterday when I came home from work I was looking at some of the usual youtube channels that I follow to keep up with the war. You know how youtube reads your mind and puts videos it thinks you might be interested in, so I saw this one on the side out of the corner of my eye, it was some English Linguistics professor talking about Norse (Viking) borrowings into English. I couldn’t resist, so I watched, it was very interesting; and then he discussed the theory which some scholars have, that the English language should actually be placed in the Scandinavian branch of the language family rather than the West German branch, as it traditionally is. The reason they cite: they say it is easier for Norwegians to learn English as a second language than German; because of certain syntactic structures which are common to English and Norwegian, for example, putting prepositions at the end of a sentence, for example, “That’s exactly what I was thinking about.” In German they would say, “about which I was thinking…”
These scholars believe that syntax shows more kindship, you can never rely on vocabulary, of course, because words are borrowed like crazy from language to language. But speaking of vocabulary, English has a lot of word pairs, same word, different pronunciation (and slightly different meaning), with one word of the pair being the German (Anglo-Saxon) form, and the other being Norse (Viking).
For example: shin/skin, shirt/skirt, etc.
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