What is going on in Russia? I'm fairly certain that no one has any idea. When the wall came down and the USSR collapsed upon itself like a neutron star 17 years ago, Russia was supposed to evolve into a modern, industrial nation, a model of European democracy with strong ties to America and all of the freedoms and spoils that come with it. Unfortunately, things haven't quite worked out that way, as Russia remains as shady as ever. Beyond the large-scale geopolitical issues in which Russia has flexed its increasingly bizarre and powerful muscle (Chechnya, Georgia), the nation's enduring crookedness can be aptly embodied by a series of hilarious (and often tragic) anecdotes. They're still kickin' around...

After the New England Patriots' last Super Bowl victory, in 2005, team owner Robert Kraft traveled to Russia, where he met with president Vladamir Putin, and showed off his Super Bowl ring. Putin famously told Kraft that "Is very nice ring," before pocketing the ring and walking away without saying anything. Kraft was left unsure of what to make of the whole episode, with at least one US official telling him that he should not ask for the ring back. The ring was never returned, and predictably, Kraft issued a statement saying that he had intended to offer the 124-diamond encrusted ring to Putin as a gift all along.

More recently, the New York Rangers (an organization that engages in a sporting event called "hockey") drafted a Russian player named Alexei Cherepanov in the first round of the 2007 NHL draft. Cherepanov had one year left on a contract to play for a Russian hockey team, the Avangard Omsk, and was expected to report to New York to join the Rangers the following season. Unfortunately, Cherepanov never made it out of Omsk, dying of "unknown causes" in the middle of a game. Take a second to soak that in - the dude just dropped dead in the middle of a hockey game and no one had any idea why. Does that sound like something that happens anywhere in the western hemisphere? Granted, there is way less hockey going on on this side of the world, but still, if players were occasionally just dropping dead in front of large crowds of people, someone would probably look into it.

Earlier this week, a church in central Russia that had been standing since 1809 disappeared. Thieves had dismantled the church, brick-by-brick, in order to sells the parts -- apparently there is a market in Russia for random pieces of old church. Again, does this sound like something that goes on in America, or Canada, or England, or anywhere else in the world where people live that can be considered "modern?" All of these crazy things happening, in conjunction with Putin retaining a firm grip on the government's power as prime minister after serving two terms as president, make it pretty clear that Russia is indeed the sketchiest place on Earth. As hypothesized by The Simpsons in 1998's Simpson Tide, we have probably not seen the last of Russia as the world's premiere villain.

A roundup of matters of mild importance... 

1,000 people turned out for the funeral of Seattle's famed "Tuba Man."

Google is preparing to release voice-recognition software for its iPhone application.

Michael Jackson has abdicated his molestation palace.

A resort in Queensland, Australia will be hosting a month-long "Anything Goes" nudity party in March. Resort owner Tony Fox: "Tough economic times call for stiff measures".

Archaeologists in Syria have uncovered the ruins of a Christian church that dates back 1,500 years.

Topps plans to release a series of Barack Obama trading cards.

Fidel Castro is still alive.

Nigeria's adorable little attempt at aerospace engineering didn't work out. A+ for effort though; maybe all they need is some encouragement and they will be able to tackle their various pressing terrestrial matters. 

In what seems to be becoming a weekly occurance, the U.S. military went into Pakistan and killed a bunch of people.

The oft-discussed $100 laptops will be made available in Europe on Monday.

Thieves in Russia have stolen a 200-year-old church, brick-by-brick.

Canadian officials have relieved a convicted felon of a five-year prison sentence because he was literally too fat to fit into the various prison accomodations. Must be all that poutine.

Kanye West was arrested and subsequently cleared of wrongdoing in England.

The new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, opens today.

As the price of crude oil has plummeted, the Russian stock market has entered a truly terrifying state of freefall. Since reaching a historic high six months ago, it has lost 75% of its value, the same type of loss that characterized the Dow Jones slide that presaged the Great Depression. It has lost 20% of its value in the last few days alone. The Kremlin has repeatedly shut down the market in an attempt to stave off even greater slides, and used the national currency reserves to create artificial demand for shares, all to no avail.

The impact on the wider economy has been devastating. Inflation was expected to reach a whopping 13% this year even before the Kremlin decided it could no longer afford to prop up the value of the Russian ruble, and the stock market, by spending its rapidly depleting oil windfall reserves. As the ruble depreciates, the cost of the imported goods on which Russia's anemic manufacturing economy depends will soar even higher. As the Kremlin's massive tariffs on oil, its main source of revenue, squeeze oil company profits due to the falling market price, exports are falling and investment in development is dropping away, seriously imperiling Russia's economic future.

But none of these setbacks have cowed in the least the aggressive efforts of Russia's ruler Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy who has imposed draconian restrictions on civil society (including a disturbing chain of murders) that leave him in virtually unchallenged authoritarian control, to revive the cold war. Most recently, Putin announced that Russia would install offensive short-range nuclear missiles in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which borders Poland (but not Russia) and was seized by the Red Army during World War II.

The threat came in response to Poland's acceptance of a U.S. missile defense system on its territory. Poland had originally been reluctant to do so, but when Russia invaded Georgia with army tanks in the north and naval destroyers on the southern sea coast, Poland suddenly saw the light. On top of that, Russia has been relentlessly buzzing U.S. and British targets with nuclear bomber flybys, sending vast quantities of armaments to Venezuela, nuclear technology to Iran, and all kinds of support to anti-U.S. regimes in Syria and Palestine.

Then on Wednesday, Russia formally rejected a set of U.S proposals for inspection and video monitoring that had been designed to alleviate Russia's concerns about the missile defense plan, openly claiming that it thought it might get a better deal from the incoming Obama administration than George Bush was offering, and refusing to even make a counter-proposal. And indeed, Barack Obama has said he intends to review the technical performance of the proposed defensive systems before ratifying Bush's decision to install them; Obama has also chosen to remain silent about the Kaliningrad threat, from which Russia has appeared to retreat somewhat in recent days as some Russian experts have declared the practical obstacles to such a move very daunting. He did, however, snub the Kremlin by excluding it from a round of telephone calls to world leaders following his election, and he has surrounded himself with a group of tough critics of the Putin regime as advisors on Russia.

 

A cynic might suggest that Putin is acting not despite his economic problems, but because of them. A cold war furor over missiles, harkening back to the days of Cuba and Kennedy, is a convenient distraction from the financial nightmare Russia is confronting (as well as from outbreaks of violence in the Caucasus region as various Russian republics, inspired by the Kremlin's support of separatists in Georgia, agitate for independence). Putin has worked feverishly to suppress reporting about the stock market collapse in the Russian media, but the effects are increasingly being felt at street level in the form of higher prices and widespread layoffs.

Putin appears to have a fallback position if the current approach doesn't do the trick. Forced to stand down from the presidency earlier this year under a term-limit provision, Putin is now ruling the country de facto from his cloistered position in the prime ministry. But the current president, Dmitry Medvedev, recently announced he will ask the Duma to increase the presidential term to six years, and Russian law does not prohibit Putin from returning to office for additional terms after stepping down at the end of two. Experts believe this is laying the groundwork for Medvedev to resign, allowing Putin to serve out the remainder of Medvedev's term and then be reelected to another pair of, now, six-year terms. This would mean Putin formally ruling the country for roughly 23 of the 24 years between 2000 and 2024.

Medvedev recently announced his government would deal forcefully with any civil unrest growing out of the economic downturn. He didn't give specifics, but he may well mean the return of Putin as something like a unfettered "president for life," followed by a whole new round of domestic crackdowns covered by the distraction of alleged foreign threats. That will present President Oama with the most serious foreign policy challenge since the collapse of the USSR.

All the news that's fit to reprint.

• President-Elect Obama has asked the old guard to help out America's failing car companies.
• Jews and Mormons are at each others throats over the latters' practice of posthumously baptizing the formers' dead relatives. Good use of time and energy on both parts here.
• "The Little Rascals: The Complete Collection" is finally available on DVD. (Hey, if the NY Times thinks it was important enough to run on the front page of their website, who are we not to?
• The EU is willing to hear Russia's case for membership.
• The Japanese, who agreed to refrain from taking part in wars at the end of WWII, kind of want to get back into the game.
• Israel is holding hundreds of local elections today; we picked a black guy in our country, no big deal.
• Starbucks' fourth-quarter profits are way down.
• Barack Obama's daughters have been invited to appear on Hannah Montana.

•  The U.S. sortie into Syria shows we're escalating the war against Al Qaeda, using methods straight out of The Untouchables.

•  Richard Dawkins is writing a book about being against non-scientific fantasy books for kids. 

•  Racist rednecks are voting for Obama to provoke a race war. 

•  Pretty much everyone at Slate is voting for Obama.

•  Russia's Monroe Doctrine. 

 

Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired's blog on national security, and in my mind one of the best reporters on that beat, has a great post on how Israel's military connection to Georgia is fueling increasing discord between Israel and Russia:

The Russian military blasted Israel today for supplying weapons and training to its adversaries in Georgia.

"Israel armed the Georgian army," Russian Deputy Chief of General Staff Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn told a Moscow press conference. Jerusalem provided Tblisi with "eight types of military vehicles, explosives, landmines and special explosives for the clearing minefields [sic]. "

"In 2007, Israeli experts trained Georgian commandos," he added. Georgia's Deputy Defense Minister Batu Kutelia previously said that "Georgian corporals and sergeants train with Germans, alpine units and the navy work with French instructors, and special operations and urban warfare troops are taught by Israelis."

Tensions between Georgia and Russia ratcheted up the spring, after Russia and her allies in the breakaway region of Abkhazia shot down a number of Georgian spy drones. Those unmanned Hermes 450 reconnaissance planes were made by Israel's Elbit Systems.

The two countries have been doing military hardware deals for almost seven years, "following an initiative by Georgian citizens who immigrated to Israel and became businesspeople," Ynetnews notes. "The fact that Georgia's defense minister, Davit Kezerashvili, is a former Israeli who is fluent in Hebrew contributed to this cooperation."

 Continue reading "How Israel Trained. . " 

And if you've got the Shachtman bug, check out his still very relevant Wired feature (published in November, '07), How Technology Almost Lost the War. One of the better pieces of analytical reporting on the war-planner's miscalculations, providing what amounts to a fascinating primer on the evolution of military strategy. 

A bizarre six-month standoff came to an end on Friday when the last few members of a Russian doomsday cult that had holed themselves up in a cave awaiting the end of the world finally gave themselves up. The cultists had threatened to blow themselves up using gas canisters if the authorities tried to remove them, but during the siege two women had died and the resulting stench eventually drove the remaining holdouts from their lair. The cult leader himself, Pyotr Kuznetsov, chose to direct operations from the rather more comfortable environment of a nearby house, before being hospitalized last month after attempting suicide by bashing his head repeatedly against a log. He is currently in a local mental hospital, his condition described as "stable."

Vissarion, Messiah of the Steppes: "To keep things simple, yes, I am Jesus Christ." There are plentiful examples of colorful cults from around the world, many of which are harmless (my own favorite hails from the tiny island of Tanna in the South Pacific, whose inhabitants worship our very own Prince Philip as a deity), but in the European media, talks of "cults" normally centers on infamous American examples, from Jonestown through the Branch Davidians to the recent scandal surrounding the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas. Yet there is little doubt that, when it comes to fringe beliefs, Russia is the market leader.

Depending on whom you ask, there are anywhere between 600,000 and a million.Russians in the thousands of sects or cults that have sprung up in the country over the last decade in particular. Most of these, like Pyotr Kuznetsov's True Russian Orthodox Church, have obvious roots in the established state religion. Others are more esoteric, from the Georgian mystic in Lithuania, Lena Lolisvili, who prays to God to energize toilet paper that she then wraps around her patients to "heal" them, to Grigory Grabovoi's "DRUGG" ["friend"] Party, which claimed to be able to resurrect the children killed in the Beslan massacre - for a fee, naturally.

Grabovoi's audacious tilt at the Russian presidency had to be shelved, sadly, when he was imprisoned for fraud, which was a shame; his first act upon assuming the reins of power would have been to "immediately issue a law prohibiting to die," which I would have liked to see. But the overlap between charlatanism and politics remains; a small group in Novgorod who style themselves the "Rus' Resurrecting" sect worship an icon of Vladimir Putin. "We didn't choose Putin," Mother Fontinya told Moskovsky Komsomolets. "It was when Yeltsin was naming him as his successor [during a live New Year's Eve TV broadcast in 1999]. My soul exploded with joy! 'An ubermensch! God himself has chosen him!'" I cried. "Yeltsin was the destroyer, and God replaced him with his creation". Well, I guess he got her vote.

Perhaps the most famous of Russia's many current Messiahs is Sergei Torop, a.k.a. "Vissarion", a former traffic cop who experienced a spiritual awakening in 1990 and promptly set up a self-sustaining community on a remote mountain in the Siberian wilderness. Now known as - what else? - the "Jesus of Siberia," Vissarion's network of communes is thousands strong, and the holy one claims up to 100,000 followers worldwide. His "gospel" is at once wildly idiosyncratic yet pretty typical of Russian sects; a fusion of classical Orthodox doctrine and Eastern mysticism, with a hefty sprinkling of environmentalism and New Age nonsense thrown in for good measure. And the man himself is modest but firm when asked whether he is indeed the second coming of, you know, the big guy himself: "It's all very complicated," he told a Guardian reporter who went to interview him, "but to keep things simple, yes, I am Jesus Christ."

Vissarion is slightly unusual, in that he does not seem to be fleecing his adherents for every ruble he can get. Salvation, in Russia as elsewhere, rarely comes cheap; many cults demand hefty tithes of their adherents' incomes, and some are patently nothing more than scams. But that's not to say there's nothing in it for the Jesus of Siberia:

"[My wife] was the one woman who would open the whole world of women to me," he says. "Through her, I knew I could understand all women; what women's weaknesses are. There are now lots of women in love with me... For me, all people are equally close and I carry large responsibility for them all. So it is, I need to be free. My wife is now learning how correctly to see and regard me, to understand she's not the only woman in my life. There are a thousand others!"

He may be the Messiah, then, but he's also a very naughty boy.

Russia's Vissarions only thrive, though, because there is a burgeoning market for the snake oil he offers. The fall of the Iron Curtain saw Russians assailed by change from all sides; the drab homogeneity of the country's streets and media quickly became a riot of advertising and information overload, a whirlwind of new products and services competing for the citizens' attention, and their money. In those chaotic Yeltsin years, kooky sects hardly stuck out as they might do in a more settled society; combined with a general rise in religious observance, it is perhaps unsurprising that not all the spiritual answers on offer in the new Russia are entirely sane. And, predictably, a lot of the blame falls on foreign influences. As the chairman of the Russian Union of Writers puts it, "Russia is cloning the cells of immorality that it grasped from Western culture".

For a long time, Russian authorities have adopted a relaxed attitude towards these groups. Their main response, in typical Russian fashion, has been a bureaucratic one; all religions are required to register with the Ministry of Justice, but sanctions for failing to do so are unevenly enforced. The principal opposition to this explosion in religious diversity, predictably enough, is the Russian Orthodox Church, who fire off angry press releases attacking Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientologists and help to organize seminars with catchy titles like "Totalitarian Sects as Weapons of Mass Destruction".

It's easy to mock the self-interested nature of the Church's warnings, and charismatic loons like Vissarion always make good copy. But one does not have to be a student of doomsday cults to grasp the problem these sects pose, and the scale on which vulnerable people are - potentially - being abused, not just financially but psychologically and, probably, sexually. As the recently discovered letters of Jim Jones follower Phyllis Alexander to her parents demonstrate with chilling clarity, the complete physical and mental submission that comes with cult membership often bears a heavy price. It will come as no surprise if the next Jonestown takes place in the icy wastes of Siberia.

Remember in the eighties when it was really trendy in the Jewish community to be deeply invested in the fate of Soviet Jews? There were all those rallies about letting them out, plus that awesome song, “We are leaving mother Russia” with the best chorus of all time: “When they come for us, we’ll be gone.” Take that, Communists!
They Do Good Work: trust me
But then communism fell and we all decided to be obsessed with Israel and intermarriage and people pretty much stopped talking about Jews in Russia because it seemed like we brought them all here. But we didn’t, actually, and the ones still in Russia are pretty cash strapped and have very limited resources. Pretty much the only people still doing work there is Chabad, which is all well and good, but I, for one, am not comfortable with Chabad being the only kind of Jewish experience available to an enormous community, which is why I love the Yad L’Yad program. Yad L'Yad is a partnership program, which pairs synagogues and Jewish schools in the United States with Jewish communities throughout the Former Soviet Union. Participating synagogues and schools on both sides of the world benifit from the caring and personal Jewish relationships that grow through these partnerships. Here’s a blurb from their website:

U.S. partners provide humanitarian, cultural, spritual, educational, and financial support. What they get in return is impossible to measure. It includes gaining perspective a chance to perform mitzvot (commandments), to enrich their own lives through a sense of unity and to document and advocate against antisemitic incidents throughout the FSU on a personal level.

For those in the former Soviet Union these partneships give much needed food, medicine and a chance to reclaim Jewish heritage and identity. Yad L'Yad provides food and medicine to the Jewish elderly, and supports Jewish education, religious life, and Jewish communal development. As an additional way for monitoring and advocacy efforts in regions far from UCSJ's existing human rights bureaus in Russia, Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Baltics, and Central Asia, these partnerships provide something else. They provide a chance to have a friend who can and will help. They provide a chance to speak and a chance to be heard. Through Yad L'Yad many are given a voice.

It sounds corny and everything, but I know a couple of minyanim (including my own) that have taken on a Yad L’Yad partnership and had a really awesome experience. Check out this website to see how it worked out for my parents’ minyan.

Anyway, I encourage you or whatever group you’re a part of to get involved with Yad L’Yad, but if you don’t want to or can’t set up your own partnership, you can still donate to them. There’s a list of items on their website that you can contribute if you happen to have any lying around or have access to, or you can just give them some cash, which is always needed.

So, after a few weeks of speculation, we know who Vladimir Putin would like to see succeed him as President of the Russian Federation – and even by the debased ethical standards of the Putinocracy, the level of brazenness on show in the Russian capital over the last 24 hours has been quite breathtaking.

 

On Monday, Vlad announced that his favoured successor would be Dmitry Medvedev, his former chief of staff, who currently combines the role of chairman of Gazprom with being deputy PM. It was something of a surprise ‘appointment’, but Kremlinologists were generally positive; Medvedev is viewed as the most liberal of the candidates for the job both in terms of his approach to economic policy and, crucially, politically as well. And, at 42, he is a young and dynamic figure, which gave some hope to those who were worried that Putin would simply try to install a stooge in order to control things himself.

 

Unfortunately, those hopes are looking a little tarnished this morning, as up popped Medvedev on TV to share his thoughts on who he’d like to be his Prime Minister if elected, and – well, I wonder if you can guess? 

 

“I appeal to [President Putin] with a request to give his agreement in principle to head the Russian government after the election of the new president of our country," Mr Medvedev said on Russian television on Tuesday. 

 

"It's one thing to elect a president - it's no less important to maintain the efficiency of the team," he said.

I don’t know what the Russian is for “reacharound”, but that’s pretty much what we’re watching. And the same factor that analysts had identified as a hopeful sign yesterday – Medvedev’s lack of any links with the state security apparatus, including the FSB – may in fact be one of the attractions for Putin in picking him.

 

It’s widely expected that Putin will continue to exert strong influence over the security services and the military, and he’s been quite open about his intention to remain as a back seat driver even once he steps down. Moreover, his cronies occupy most of the central positions in Russian political and economic life, from oil companies through TV stations to regional governorships. Without a strong power base, and with no political experience to speak of, Medvedev may well prove to be the puppet that conventional wisdom suggests is his fate, even if he does win next March – as now seems overwhelmingly likely.

 

Still, it’s not all bad news. Medvedev recently gave an interview to a Russian magazine in which he revealed that as a feckless youth he rebelled against Soviet oppression in pretty much the only way a Russian schoolboy could:

 

"Endlessly making copies of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple." All these groups were on state-issued blacklists during Medvedev's Soviet-era schooldays. 

 

"The quality was awful, but my interest colossal," he said. 

 

Medvedev went on to boast of his collection of Deep Purple LPs, saying that he had searched for the albums for many years. "Not reissues, but the original albums," he added, concluding that, "If you set yourself a goal you can achieve it."

I guess someone who likes the Zeppelin - and on vinyl, mind you - can’t be all bad. Can they?

Touring Moscow ten years ago, my friend and I found ourselves having to stifle a nearly indefensible laughing fit. We’d both come to realize that our guide wrapped up every historical anecdote about every structure she showed us with, “and then everyone was killed. Next we move on to . . .” Of course this wouldn’t have been funny without her accent, and it wouldn’t have been funny if she’d said it once or twice, but it mostly wouldn’t have been funny without the unceremonious segue into the next sight’s morbid summary.

Would it be fair to call this routine hop from horror to horror a Russian segue?

Sunday, after Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party won enough Parliamentary seats to change the constitution, Putin said:

Russians will never allow for the development of the country along a destructive path, the way it happened in some countries in the post-Soviet space . . . and this sense of responsibility of citizens for their own country is, in my view, the most important index of the fact that our country is strengthening not only economically, not only socially, but also in terms of its domestic politics.

The word choice is arresting: “Russians will never allow for the development of the country . . .” While the elections were almost certainly crooked, one looks at the state of Russia, of Russian identity, and wonders if the not-so-former KGB man is right. Is Russia hopelessly defined by deadly extremes (enormity, cold, submission, starvation, revolution, extermination)? And is the progress of Russian history doomed to be a chain of horrors?

Novelist Martin Amis would have us believe it is so. Twelve pages into his fierce novel House of Meetings, the book’s protagonist-narrator casually remembers to head-off a potential semantic misunderstanding:

Oh, and just to get this out of the way. It’s not the USSR I don’t like. What I don’t like is the northern Eurasian Plain. I don’t like the ‘directed democracy’, and I don’t like Soviet power, and I don’t like the tsars, and I don’t like the Mongol overlords, and I don’t like the theocratic dynasts of old Moscow and old Kiev. I don’t like the multi-ethnic, twelve-time-zone land empire. I don’t like the northern Eurasian Plain.

House of Meetings is written as a last testament from a crusty Russian émigré to the U.S. and addressed to his American stepdaughter. His indictment of a collective geography and an entire history establishes one of the narrator’s main themes. The Russian experience is total—stretching back in time, straddling a continent, and saturating a mass-psychology. “I worship generalizations,” he says. “And the more sweeping the better. I am ready to kill for sweeping generalizations.” One only need look at the recent headlines about Amis and his criticism of Islamism to realize that narrator and author are, in this case, of like mind.

Amis’ narrator repeatedly cites Russia’s alarming demographic trends. Particularly, the fact that the rising death rate has overtaken the plunging birth rate. He calls this telling X the “Russian cross,” and says:

Yes, so far as the individual is concerned, Venus [his stepdaughter], it may very well be true that character is destiny. And the other way round. But on the larger scale character means nothing. On the larger scale, destiny is demographics; and demographics is a monster. When you look into it, when you look into the Russian case, you feel the stirrings of a massive force, a force not only blind but altogether insentient, like an earthquake or a tidal wave. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

It’s Russia in a death spiral. But Amis doesn’t quite believe “character means nothing.” House of Meetings' narrator is planning his suicide and proclaims, “Call me a literalist, but I am only doing what Russia is doing." In other words, the “Russian Cross” is the fulfillment of a long-held national death wish. If Putin has his way with Russia’s constitution, it may be a response to Russians’ constitution.

Garry Kasparov, jailed for protesting this last election, wrote of his lock-up experience recently in The Wall Street Journal: “My other concern was food, since it was out of the question to consume anything provided by the staff. (Nor do I fly Aeroflot. "Paranoia" long ago became an obsolete concept among those in opposition to the Putin regime.)”

What’s the flip-side of this atrophied paranoia? If you’ve ceased to doubt that you can be watched, intruded upon and violated at every turn might you not just as easily, depending on your disposition, lose your skepticism about an omnipotent savior? This is the at the heart of all religious belief, and I think the case can be made that thrall to Russian leadership has always been a religious matter.

It was no less a figure than Mr. Glasnost himself, Mikhail Gorbachev, who came out in support for Putin’s party before Sunday’s election. Gorbachev said, “It is a fact that within Russia Putin is supported by up to 80 per cent of the population. For me that is a more persuasive argument as I live in Russia.”

It is a persuasive argument, indeed. Next we move on to . . .

 

I had to laugh over the weekend when the BBC website started reporting, under its dramatic "Breaking News" logo, "Putin party leads in Russian elections". (Never underestimate the power of 24-hour news media to wring every possible drop of drama even out of statements of the fucking obvious.) The aforementioned election campaign lacked just about every one of the components of a real democratic process; in the absence of any discussion of policies or clash of ideologies, with opposition politicians being arrested simply for holding meetings and the media abandoning any pretence of impartiality, it may occasionally have looked like an election - even, from time to time, sounded like an election - but Russia's parliamentary polls were irredeemably phoney, a pale shadow of the real thing. It was rather like watching Gus Van Sant's pointless remake of Psycho; we knew we were supposed to be in suspense, and yet we felt all empty inside because we had, in every sense, seen this movie before.

It's hard to get across just how surreal these elections were. Never mind your hanging chads and Supreme Court cliffhangers; when these people rig an election, they do it with panache. Only four parties made it into the Duma, and three of them are Putin's creatures; as well as his United Russia party, the Kremlin also controls A Fair Russia and the mordantly-named far-right Liberal Democrats, led by one-time Western bogeyman Vladimir Zhirinovsky. (The only independents in the new parliament, ironically enough, are the Communists.)

The media gave only fleeting, and largely negative, coverage to opposition parties. Regional governors, appointed by Putin, stood at the top of United Russia lists across the country, competing to deliver the most votes for the ruling party. Public sector workers were forced to go out and vote, and warned that they would lose their jobs unless they reported to their managers by midday to confirm that they had voted for United Russia. It seemed to work; in Chechnya, not hitherto noted as a hotbed of pro-Moscow loyalism, early results showed that United Russia had won 99% of the vote on a 99% turnout.

 

Perhaps most egregious of all, the [alleged] murderer of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi, whom Moscow has refused to extradite to Britain to face criminal charges, was elected to the Duma and now enjoys immunity from prosecution as a direct result. He joins Vladimir Putin himself, who will continue to wield power behind the scenes when his Presidential term ends next year. The OSCE, who were forced to send only a token force of election observers to monitor the polls after Russian authorities played silly buggers with election visas and restrictions on movement, have confirmed that the elections were in no way free or fair.

 

Contrast this sorry state of affairs with - and I never thought I'd say this - the results from Venezuela yesterday. Hugo Chavez narrowly failed to win approval for his raft of constitutional amendments which would, among other things, have weakened judicial due process and strengthened the executive powers of the presidency during a state of emergency, removed term limits on the presidency, thus allowing him to carry on in power until his stated retirement date of 2050. I must confess that I thought this vote was every bit as much of a gimme as the Russian polls, and I was wrong. A newly emboldened opposition, led by a brave student movement, saw the danger in allowing Chavez to strengthen a hand that's already stacked in his favour, and the electorate reaffirmed their commitment to democracy in the face of strong pressure to vote yes to Chavez's "reforms".

As Gene says over at Harry's Place, a bit of perspective is no bad thing. Hugo Chavez is by no means uniquely evil among world leaders; far from it. He's a petty thug and a blowhard, not a fanatic or a mass-murderer; a sub-Peronist pantomime villain, little more. And if the choice is between using your country's oil money to bribe the poor, as Chavez does, or sustain a hyper-rich feudal monarchy, as in Saudi Arabia, I certainly prefer the former. But it's a source of constant amazement to me that the mere mention of his name is enough to get a certain section of the international Left purring in admiration.

Prior to the vote, a number of the leading lights of this movement in Britain - Harold Pinter, Ken Livingstone, Ken Loach, you know the cast - wrote a letter to the Guardian (where else?) urging the international community to respect the results of a referendum which they fully expected their hero to win. (How I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when Mrs Pinter read him the results in the paper this morning. I'll bet there was a Pinteresque pause after that.)

It's worth repeating for emphasis; not only are these people impervious to criticism that their pin-ups are, at best, authoritarian bullies, and at worst mass murderers (let's not forget that Pinter remains a leading light in the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević) - but they actively endorse, and lobby for, the removal of checks and balances on their idols' powers. The anti-democratic left's arguments are as discredited as those of any movement in modern political history, their criteria for beatification no more sophisticated than gauging whose anti-Bush rhetoric gives them the hardest erection; and yet they are garlanded far and wide.

Ultimately, though, it's been a mixed weekend for democracy. Venezuela has had a lucky escape, its democratic processes proving robust enough to withstand the best efforts of its loudmouth president to subvert them. Russia gives much more cause for concern. Unless you're a Venezuelan citizen, Chavez doesn't matter; but Putin matters to us all, and his influence in international affairs is almost entirely malevolent. As Oliver Kamm rightly noted earlier today;

The fiasco raises yet again the question why Western governments ever saw Putin as a prospective ally. He is in truth more like the late Slobodan Milosevic - in election fraud if not genocidal aggression. I noted a few months the strong circumstantial evidence of his campaign of assassination against political enemies, as well as obstructionism and anti-democratic instincts in foreign policy. To this list we may add his authoritarian meddling in Ukrainian presidential election, encouragement of Iran's nuclear deceptions, and sabotage of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations by his unilateral opening to Hamas. There is a new Cold War; and Vladimir Putin is its instigator. 

I fear that Vladimir Putin will continue to be a force in world affairs long after Chavez, and for that matter Harold Pinter, have been relegated to the status of punchlines.

• Now He Can Really Herd Cats.

• Intifadah with a French Twist

• Iran Puts the World to Work

• Avigdor the Soothsayer…

• De Palma’s Heaven’s Gate Moment

• Tin Man Needs Adjustment

• Shake hands With Jews –No Way, We’re Here to Be Serious

• Blood Libel’s are still so In

• 40 Lashes from Muhammed the Bear
  

• To Save Us Money, You Must Die

• Next Year In Jerusalem…

• Scotch and Water: The Life and Times of Teddy Kennedy

• No Solidarity for Mahmoud Salehi

• Gulags For Some, Tiny Pictures of Putin for Others…

This is almost a parody of cold war posturing (and I love the distaff stooge from the fascist, Kremlin-financed Nashi party getting the vapors for Volodya):

With Soviet-era songs blaring, the mostly young crowd of around 5,000 waved flags and chanted support for the 55-year-old leader, a former KGB spy who is by far Russia's most popular politician after eight years of strong economic growth.

Some young women had the president's name etched across their faces. "Victory for Putin is victory for Russia!" read a huge poster at the cavernous sports arena.

'COMPLETE RENEWAL'

"I really love Vladimir Putin," Irina Bleshchova, a 20-year-old journalism student and activist of the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth movement, told Reuters.

Calling him "the ideal man," she said: "I would like my future husband to be like Vladimir Putin." Before Putin spoke, a band played a racy song about how appealing Putin was.

 

“Russia is the only country that is helping Iran to realize its nuclear program in a peaceful way.” So spoke our bearded friend in the perpetual gray suit today after an historic visit by Vladimir Putin to Tehran--the first by a Russian head of state since Stalin in 1943.

Putin been building, albeit at a willfully sluggish pace, the Bushehr nuclear power plant for the mullahs, and he's clearly impelled to lock arms with Ahmadinejad in order to buck U.S. military expansion in the Caspian (we have a base in Kyrgyzstan and have financed the upgrade of a Soviet airfield in Azerbaijan). Time's Tony Karon explains the significance of the visit:

Russia agrees that Iran has, in some of its activities, failed to meet the transparency requirements of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is the basis for the Security Council demand that it suspend enrichment until it can clear up questions raised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and restore confidence in its intentions. But the IAEA and Tehran have agreed to a "work plan" and timetable for Iran to resolve the outstanding questions, which is why further U.N. action has been tabled pending the outcome of that process.

And should that process falter or fail, another process will of course be initiated buying Tehran yet more time to do what everyone, including Vladimir Putin, knows it's trying to do with enriched uranium.

I doubt very much that Ahmadinejad is as pleased with his Kremlin counterpart as he makes out to the media. For one thing, this landmark visit could have happened years ago. (How many trips have Hugo Chavez and some grizzled apparatchik from Cuba made to Tehran since the war in Iraq began?) For another, Iran has learned the hard way that being used as a buffer in a game of Great Power intimidation rarely benefits Iran because everything is contingent on external factors such as who our next president will be, whether or not the Caspian states will get their oil pipelines built, breaking Moscow's energy monopoly, etc. Putin knows that he wields more power as a threat to the United States before the mullahs have got the bomb than he will after they've got it.

It seems to me that a major strategic blunder is being made by Washington and Paris (notwithstanding the fact that Bernard Kouchner is easily the best foreign minister France has had since Charles Gravier). Iran's biggest historic rival in the region is now its handmaid for Shiite dominance. Another frequent guest of Ahmadinejad is our own permanent ally Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president, who spent some time in Iran when his party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, was at war with Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party. There is no chance now that Iraq will ever have nuclear weapons, leaving Iranian deterrence all about one fear: regime change at home.

The U.S., by reactivating diplomacy with the Islamic Republic, could easily assure that regime change is not, nor will it be, in the offing. A deal similar to the one just struck with North Korea could be struck with the mullahs without necessarily sacrificing our commitment to funding opposition groups and NGOs inside Iran. (How's this for neocon realism: plausible deniability. It worked for the Congress for Cultural Freedom for a spell, didn't it?)

At the very least, a willingness on our part to negotiate will deprive Iran of its facile sensationalism and its attempt to depict itself as an "anti-imperialist" stalwart in the Middle East. We might make it a condition of such negotiations that Ahmadinejad call it quits on the grandstanding, his threats to Israel, and his creepy talk about the Holocaust, which does more damage in the Arab polities than it does in the Persian one. (If nothing else, it'll make my blog reading easier to see the New Left types sputter and grumble about "hegemony" and counterrevolution.)

But what do you suppose means more to Ayatollah Khamenei right now: Photo ops with Chavez, or getting Condoleeza Rice's undivided attention? Wouldn't it be worth the price of admission just to see the first American head of state touch down in Tehran since the era of the Shah, and to see it broadcast on Venezuelan, Cuban, Bolivian, Chinese, Russian televisions? What then, Al Jazeera?

 

Here's the definition of bad diplomacy: One country tells another country to defer a national security question until the election in a third country has taken place.

"We say it will be a big mistake by the Czech government to put this radar site on Czech territory," said Yuri Baluyevsky, the Russian military chief of staff, after meeting the Czech deputy defense minister, Martin Bartak.

He said the Czech Republic should hold off making a decision until after the U.S. presidential election, scheduled to take place in late 2008. Incumbent George W. Bush will not be running.

I recently wrote a short history of the Estonian cyberwar for Reason; the rhetoric from Moscow leading up to that tank-less invasion was the same. Time to upgrade those firewalls in Prague.

Isn't it encouraging when great nations act like twelve year olds on the schoolyard?  (Couldn't Putin have ordered 5 diplomats out? That's the Chicago way.)

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia said Thursday it was expelling four British diplomats in retaliation for a similar move by Britain, as a confrontation mounted between Moscow and London over the murder of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.

French FM Bernard Kouchner gets a taste back of the Balkans this week as the Russians, apparently intent on reviving the Cold War, are also blocking the latest UN effort on Kosovo. But it’s in the Middle East that he finds out another Balkans, as his efforts at renewing dialogue in Lebanon “did not fail but did not yet succeed.”

Although he admits that “faced with a crisis, one has to talk to all protagonists” when asked whether France will bring Iran and Syria to the negotiating table, his pragmatism doesn’t obscure his opinions overall when he corrects his Italian counterpart by refusing the self-loathing appreciation that Hamas’s involvement with Al-Qaeda is the West’s own fault.

Russia has failed to extradite the man accused of poisoning Alexander Litvinenko, and so now the British are expelling 4 Russian diplomats: 

"The Russian government has failed to register either how seriously we treat this case or the seriousness of the issues involved, despite lobbying at the highest level and clear explanations of our need for a satisfactory response,'' Miliband told lawmakers at the House of Commons.

Note the absence of Vladimir Putin stag hunting with the Queen in Balmoral, or the weak throat-clearing about "allies in peace," etc. This the way Moscow should be talked to when it covers up for gangsters, bullies and assassins -- especially its own. 

I will hand it to those loyalists to Vladimir Putin who will at least cop to his being a strongman in the Great Russian Chauvinist tradition. When George W. Bush declared, after a visit with the ex-KGB premier in 2001, that he managed to glimpse Putin's "heart and soul", fans of "managed democracy" in Moscow couldn't stifle their laughter. That Volodya took to wearing a crucifix on his state visit to Texas was a very fine touch indeed. Worthy of Gogol.

But now Putin is coming to Bush the Elder's domain in Kennebunkport, Maine, raising a number of interesting questions about what else besides lobster and imported Caspian caviar will grace the menu of this odd holiday gathering. It seems like only yesterday the cold war was in revival. The BBC states the matter as coyly as possible:

"This really can be considered to be the Bush family's inner sanctum," one former senior official told the BBC News website.

Putin is the first world leader to be invited by George W to the family home during his presidency, he says, and this in itself can be seen as a "symbolic gesture."

In other words, let's do away for a spell with the neo-Brezhnev bluster and the Scoop Jackson homilies about spreading democracy. The murder of journalists and exiles, the elimination of regional elections, the imprisonment of politically antagonistic oil tycoons and sundry other measures of a consolidated autocracy are small beans in comparison to a mutually administered missile shield in Europe. (Given that our enemies are Russia's friends, I'd pay real money to sit in on the war games this installation gets up to.)

The Bush administration has not lacked for tragic historical ironies of its own making. The most tragic, however, may turn out to be that its hard-nosed brand of neoconservatism has finally given way to the more tender-headed variety of dictatorships and double standards. Only this time it's the fascists in the Middle East we're rightfully opposed to, while toward the bigger and more powerful Stalinoid regime in Russia, we're all smiles.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Any Kennebunkport in a storm

means to be shot or arrested on false charges. Jamey Gambrell in the New York Review of Books on Putin's latest assaults on press freedoms:

One of the most recent victims of the Putin bureaucracy has been an NGO called the Educated Media Foundation (EMF), formerly known as Internews Russia. Over the past decade, this nonprofit organization has trained more than 15,000 Russian broadcast journalists, mostly from the provinces, in the best practices of journalism. It has, for example, conducted seminars, workshops, and classes for news writers, editors, managers, advertising directors, and program producers that have helped them to establish independent television and radio stations. It has given awards for documentaries of high quality, and worked out arrangements for sharing originally produced material among regional radio and television stations, thus encouraging the regions to report on themselves while achieving financial independence. The only "ideological" aspect of their work has been to explain and encourage internationally recognized ethical standards for fair reporting.

Russia's one of the four members of the "Quartet" tasked with monitoring the Arab-Israeli conflict, and by most accounts it's been just as tendentious toward Israel as the other three (the U.S., E.U. and Great Britain).  And yet, and yet...
 

The MiG-31, considered one of the best fighters in the world, can carry guided missiles with a range of more than 200 kilometres (125 miles) and is capable of striking 24 different targets simultaneously, Yediot Aharonot said.

[...] 

A Russian newspaper reported on Tuesday that Russia has begun delivering five MiG-31E interceptors to Syria as part of an agreement reached this year, and that Moscow also plans to sell Damascus its MiG-29M/M2 dual role fighters.

Fred Kaplan says no:

Formal alliances faltered; shifting coalitions became the rule. Americans weren't accustomed to this disconnect between their dictates and the rest of the world's actions. When France refused to go along with the invasion of Iraq, the reaction was manically fierce—the renaming of French fries, the boycotts of Bordeaux wine. But what this panic reflected was sheer bewilderment. France was hardly America's enemy, but that's how many Americans suddenly treated it. Habituated to the Cold War mentality, they found it hard to view a nation that contested America's interests and blocked America's policies as anything other than a foe.

The next sentence in the following paragraph is "Russia is not France," a nice tautology that might have eliminated the need for all of the preceding.

The problem with Kaplan's analysis is that, as much as he accuses the anti-Putinists of a "cold war mentality," he himself succumbs to the hoary vices of detente "realists." Can the United States criticize the Kremlin for its blood-brutal war in Chechnya, its highly suspect attitude to the assassinations of Anna Politkovskaya and Sasha Litvinenko, its undermining of democratic reforms in Ukraine and Georgia, its suborning of the Estonian cyberwar, etc.? Of course not, argues Kaplan, because, well, we're responsible for warrantless wiretaps and Abu Ghraib, much to our everlasting shame.

I doubt Putin needs such instruction in the fine art of moral equivalence given his rhetoric of late, which compares the United States to the Third Reich. (Russians think they can get away with the "fascist" slur after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and here come cartloads of forgetful Western pundits telling them they can.)

Kaplan's thesis is scarcely different from the Hamilton-Baker commission's recommendation for courting that other anti-ally Syria, at the allowable expense of letting justice for Rafiq Hariri and Pierre Gemayel's murders melt away in the warm comity of nations.

One needn't argue for a return to 1963 to be on guard against Putin's dictatorship. Some of us with strong opposition to the new Russian bear still think an American missile shield a profligate folly. Nor do we advocate the unveiling of a new Iron Curtain.

But consider the consequences of turning a deaf ear to those victims of the Off-White Tsar. What happens when their historical turn comes and we seek to make them our allies? Will they agree that our support at this crucial time could not have been forthcoming given our dirty hands in the Middle East and our desire to maintain a post-Soviet state of equilibrium? Or will they rightly see us as overly selective participants in the struggle for human rights and civil liberties?

Anyone who claims to care about Guantanamo Bay or the politically self-serving termination of federal prosecutors has got no business cherrying picking moral issues if Gary Kasparov's Other Russia isn't even a bud on the tree.

UPDATE: The Other Russia's website just posted the following today:

President Bush’s ambitious second inaugural speech was also full of promises of standing up for democracy around the world: 

All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you. Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country.

The rulers of outlaw regimes can know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it.” The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to trust them. Start on this journey of progress and justice, and America will walk at your side.

Since that day, January 20, 2005, Mr. Bush’s strongest statement about the destruction of democracy and civil rights in Putin’s Russia was that one sentence on June 5 in Prague. We are not so proud as to not count ourselves as “democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile.” Stand up for your words, Mr. Bush, and stand up to your friend Vladimir. He’s not your friend any more than he is ours.

"My message will be Vladimir - I call him Vladimir - that you shouldn't fear a missile defense system. As a matter of fact, why don't you cooperate with us on a missile defense system. Why don't you participate with the United States."

George Bush telling reporters in Prague how he'll handle Vladimir Putin's threat to focus nuclear weapons at American missile defense bases in Europe. 

One thing we can credit Ivan the Terrible with is candor. When his dissident political advisor Kurbsky fled Moscow for exile in Lithunania in the mid-16th century, Ivan struck up a blistering correspondence with him, a kind of running Machiavellian dialogue but in which the cynical philosopher was also the sovereign. Kurbsky had repeatedly castigated Ivan for his unmitigated autocracy, to which the dread czar replied: 

"Is this then the sign of a 'leperous conscience,' to hold my kingdom in my hand and not to let my servants rule? And is it contrary to reason not to wish to be possessed and ruled by my own servants? And is this 'illustrious Orthodoxy' -- to be ruled over and ordered about by my own slaves?....

And as for the godless peoples--why mention them? For non of these rule their own kingdoms. As their servants order them, so too do they rule. But for the Russian autocracy, they themselves from the beginning have ruled all their dominions, and not the boyars and not the grandees...

And is this 'darkness' for the tsar to possess his kingdom and for his slaves slavishly to fulfill his orders? How, pray, can a man be called autocrat if he himself does not govern?...

And we are free to reward our slaves, and we are free to punish them... Hitherto the Russian masters were questioned by no man, but they were free to reward and to punish their subjects; and they did not litigate with them before any judge...

Am I vainglorious in that I order my slaves, who are subjected to me by God, to carry out my wishes?

The instructions for absolute self-rule here outlined were followed dutifully throughout centuries and vicissitudes of the Russian experience. One can easily state with some assurance that the only thing that has vanished from Moscow -- and did so in the early decades of the 20th century -- is the open acknowledgement that autocracy is the preferred mode of governance. What made Communism so alluring to fellow travelers and Western dupes was that it presented its actual state of existence as one of popular consent and social liberation when in fact the exact opposite was the case. Russia is unlikely to elect, or simply be ruled by, a man who claims he alone should wield total power over his "slaves," but don't be fooled by the liberal pretenses that try to mask that inner conviction. The more meretricious the dictator's boast, the worse the reality.

Here is Vladimir Putin, sounding like Stalin at his lying best:

"Of course I am an absolute, pure democrat. But you know the problem? It's not even a problem, it's a real tragedy. The thing is that I am the only one, there just aren't any others in the world."

Putin said the West's record on democracy was less than perfect.

"Let's look what happens in North America -- sheer horror: torture, the homeless, Guantanamo, keeping people in custody without trial or investigation," Putin said in the interview ahead of this week's summit of the Group of Eight (G-8) industrial nations.

"Look what's going on in Europe: the harsh treatment of demonstrators, the use of rubber bullets, tear gas in one capital or another, the killing of demonstrators in the streets."

Khodorkovsky, Gasparov, Litvinenko, Politkovskaya, Yushchenko... Fantasists and anti-democratic subversives, every one.