Russia Moves Away from Legacy of Soviet Union

Factors such as the Sochi Winter Olympics, political success throughout the Middle East, the blockage of Ukraine and Moldova's respective moves toward the European Union and the presence of a powerful and charismatic president at the helm of business have all helped keep the Russian Federation in the middle of the global agenda.
 
Will Russia be able to bring about some of the successes it has seen in foreign policy in its domestic arena, though?
 
Many new and powerful lobbies have formed in Russia of late. If we were to list them according to their strength, it is certainly the Jewish lobby that is the most powerful in terms of both the economy and foreign policy. Following this come the church, Rosneft, Gazprom, the oligarchs, the exportation lobby, the Armenian lobby and the Greek lobby. In the meantime, while purely intellectual circles used to have great influence within the sphere of the Soviet Union, they now see their own influential capabilities at zero.
 
This past Oct. 17, the Russian state television station RTR-Planeta broadcast a program about the solitude and poverty that hit actress Alexsandra Strijenova, who was from a once-great Russian acting family. Both Alexandra's father (Olex Strijenov) and grandfather had been famous actors. Her paternal grandmother, Marianna Strijenova, had been a well-known cinema and theater actress, though the last film in which she had played a role was in 1988. Following this film, she had been able to find work in neither cinema nor theater. Not able to find a job, she spent the rest of her life sweeping theaters and working in cloak-rooms. When Marianna Strijenova died, her granddaughter Alexandra, who had not been educated, was left without anyone.
 
More dramas about the quickly declining state of the intellectual class in Russia were featured on a Nov. 27 program on the state television station Russia 1. One portrait in particular, that of the once-famous actor Yuri Orlov -- who now lies old and impoverished in a psychiatric clinic in Russia -- was particularly striking.
 
And so, it is that the intellectual classes, who were once so privileged under the Soviet Union, who have now been crushed in this most recent period of the Russian Federation. Now, it is the money that lies in the hands of the mafia and the political powers of the country that is winning. At the same time, though, societal conscience in Russia does not wish to accept this injustice.
 
The further the Russian Federation moves away from the Soviet era, the greater the problems grow, because the essential underpinnings that were eliminated have simply not been replaced by new ones.
 
The percentage of actual Russians within Russia has never been as great as it is now. But at the same time, the Russians are neither working nor having children. The Russian population is ageing thus. The science, education and health sectors are on the verge of depleting what they have maintained from the Soviet Union. In the hands of the oligarchs, the industry of the Soviet Union is not being renewed. Meanwhile, violence against the new enemies created by globalism -- Muslims -- is on the rise in Russia as well. Salafism is being supported, while Sufi Islam is oppressed.
 
But the monsters created in laboratories sometimes get out of control. For this reason, there are occasional forays to hunt down the “jihadists” in the mountains. And while the struggle against Islam is kept at the fore of the agenda in Russia, it means the very real and right demands being made by Russian factory workers, clerks, farmers, etc., as well as by intellectuals, are being hindered.
 
Within this context, Russia 1 aired a program on Oct. 25 that claimed young Russian women were being raped by Dagestani youth, and that brainwashed Dagestani female jihadists were throwing Molotov cocktails at municipality buses in Volgograd.