Uncle Volodya says, "Those who beat their swords into plowshares will end up plowing for those who didn't."

Bye-bye, 2011; Happy New Year, everyone! С Новым годом!!

It’s funny, how you can go on reading the same newspaper day after day and, if it’s a foreign paper you mostly read only for the opinion columns, you never notice who the other writers are or what the paper’s political philosophy is. I used to read the Moscow Times every day, but that was during the tenure of the Bush administration. I had taken an interest in foreign politics that year that surpassed by far my interest in what was happening politically in my own country because, as the old saying goes, it’s like sausage; plenty of people are okay with the finished product, but you never want to watch it being made. Anyway, I became a politics junkie on American and Russian issues – the former because the nation had elected a president who offered every appearance of being stone-cold crazy, and the latter because of my Russian wife. The Moscow Times (online edition) became a daily staple, because I enjoyed Chris Floyd’s column, Global Eye, in which he regularly excoriated the Bush administration, and I also browsed it for items of political or military interest on Russia. Suffice it to say that so naive was I, I thought Pavel Felgenhauer actually was an authority on defense matters rather than the western think-tank toady he is. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, all right?

It’s a measure of how long it’s been since I paid any attention to the Moscow Times that I did not notice until today that Chris Floyd was fired in 2006. Apparently his column “no longer fit in with the paper’s plans”. In 2005, the Moscow Times was sold to the Finnish publishing group Sanoma, owned by one of Finland’s richest men, Aatos Erkko (a regular at Bilderberg Group meetings), and members of his family; Sanoma also owns the St. Petersburg Times. At the Moscow Times, former Deputy Editor Andrew McChesney moved up to Editor. I honestly couldn’t say if this marked a change in ideology (although your friend and mine, “Kim Zigfeld” claimed Mr. McChesney as an associate), since I didn’t read most of what was in it.

Well, where was I? Oh, yes; Vladimir Ryzhkov. All that time reading the Moscow Times, and I never heard of Vladimir Ryzhkov. Never took notice of him at all, in fact, until Yalensis pointed out in a comment to the last post that Mr. Ryzhkov would be organizing the next Russian protest march and rally, just as he had organized the last one on December 24th. But he was there all the time, beavering away at the Moscow Times since at least 2002 (as far back as his articles go).

Western journalism long ago abandoned any pretense to objectivity, and it is usually fairly easy to figure out which way a particular source wishes any given issue to go. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, for example. Every western source I read at the time of his second conviction damned the Russian judicial system to the blackest depths of hell, to be escorted there personally by Vladimir Putin, for jailing that mild-mannered, incredibly rich prisoner of conscience – why, he wouldn’t hurt a fly, anyone can see that; just look at his little rimless glasses!! He looks like John Denver with a buzz cut!! Plainly, western sources thought Mikhail Khodorkovsky was cute as a button, more or less completely innocent, and only jailed because he represented a political threat to Vladimir the Black-Hearted. Incidentally, a theory to which Mr. Ryzhkov subscribes.

Anyway, the western media is intensely interested in the protests in Russia, and pretty much only those that occur in Moscow, especially since the others across the country seem to be dying out. But a couple of very popular – in the west – “colour revolutions”, those in Georgia and Ukraine, argued persuasively that massive protests in a country’s capital city were quite capable of bringing down the government; in the case of Ukraine, protesters were moved in to Kiev from other regions. The west plainly wants the Moscow demonstrations to succeed in the same objective, and Vladimir Ryzhkov is their point man on the demonstrations. So it behooves us to be interested in him as well.

So, who is Vladimir Ryzhkov? Let’s take a stroll thorough his resume. Mr. Ryzhvov first came to public attention in 1993 as a State Duma member of Russia’s Choice; a party headed by Yegor Gaidar. The principal architect of  the Yeltsin-era “shock therapy” and widespread privatizations that left huge sectors of state assets in the hands of a few fabulously wealthy individuals, Mr. Gaidar was immensely popular with Yeltsin’s western advisers. Jeffrey Sachs, ringleader of the “Harvard Boys” , referred to Gaidar as ” the intellectual leader of many of Russia’s political and economic reforms”. Russians who saw their savings evaporate were, understandably, less complimentary.

At that time, Mr. Ryzhkov was stand-up-and-shout-it pro-Kremlin. But that was when the “Great Reformer” was running the show. He ran as an independent in 1999, but later joined a pro-Yeltsin coalition called the Unity Party of Russia. When Vladimir Putin took over, Ryzhkov was dismissed from the coalition. Wikipedia doesn’t say if those two events were related, but Mr. Ryzhkov sure seems to have a hate on for Putin. He’s a Professor of the Moscow Higher School of Economics (somehow, I knew that was coming), and a prolific writer for Novaya Gazeta, the Moscow Times and the St. Petersburg Times; all, to varying degrees, anti-government, with Novaya Gazeta practically foaming off the presses with rage at Vladimir Putin’s temerity in continuing to live.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that the notion the Kremlin ruthlessly controls the media and makes them goose-step to its bloody tune, and that Putin has everyone killed who opposes him, appears more ridiculous with each new issue of Novaya Gazeta and the Moscow Times; the former calls Putin everything but late for dinner, and the latter is only marginally more circumspect. Somehow, enough staff members always seem to survive the hail of poison darts and the gauntlet of sword umbrellas to get the next issue out.

And what is it with Russian economists? Christ, every one of them reckons Boris Yeltsin, Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais were geniuses, while Vladimir Putin is the village idiot. The economy blew through the basement on its way to the earth’s core under the guidance of the aforementioned Yeltsin, Gaidar and Chubais, and gained steadily under Putin while accumulating the world’s third-largest cash reserves. Vladimir Ryzhkov pens rhapsodies to western business know-how that has resulted in a Eurozone that may not outlast 2012 and a USA that entered the top-20 list of the world’s most indebted nations, with external debt of greater than 100% of GDP. It seems plain that what attracts Mr. Ryzhkov’s admiration is not the west’s business sense, but its power.

Without further ado, then, let’s take a look at how Mr. Ryzhkov saw his country over years of bitterness and western envy.

Much of his earlier work is behind a pay wall at the Moscow Times. The first western daily to be published in Russia, the Moscow Times has been around since 1992. It has a daily circulation of around 35,000 copies (in a city of somewhere between 12 and 15 million), and is given out free in about 500 business centres, hotels, restaurants and embassies. You might wonder why a newspaper that is handed out free in hard copy needs to have all its electronic content behind a pay wall, and I would be wondering right along with you. Especially since sources like La Russophobe brag that while its circulation is tiny, it is one of the most-cited electronic sources in the world. Well, my commitment to journalistic integrity doesn’t extend as far as subscription, so we’re going to have to start at 2004, with a Ryzhkov piece entitled, “Putin’s Mission Impossible“. Gee: that doesn’t sound very optimistic. Maybe we’d better take a look, from the viewpoint that the author was a relatively experienced politician then and is trying to play as much of a part now as he can in the choosing of Russia’s next leader.

Hmmm…well, something that strikes me right out of the gate is that Ryzkhov is characterizing a hopeless political system (Putin’s) by contrasting it with a utopian and presently non-existing one. I know democracy advocates tend to build their fictional government models based on ideals, but still. “Only honest, well trained bureaucrats, devoted to serving the common good, could reform education, healthcare and the armed forces. Only when they are held accountable for their actions by legislatures will they change their age-old habits. Only strict and vigilant civilian control of the military, law enforcement and the security services can introduce transparency into the enormous “war economy.” To conquer poverty and social stratification, Russia needs independent trade unions and a powerful parliamentary opposition. Only an extensive network of independent media, coupled with independent prosecutors and judges, will allow us to root out corruption. Without democratic institutions, we have little hope of restricting the power of the bureaucracy and of cutting through the red tape that hinders growth.“

Let’s take a look around the world’s premiere democracies, those for which Mr. Ryzhkov has elsewhere expressed admiration, for parallels.  Honest, well-trained bureaucrats devoted to serving the public good…let’s try the United Kingdom. Ooooo..nope, sorry. Lord Taylor’s was just one of three cases in 2011 of parliamentarians fiddling their travel expense claims; in Lord Taylor’s case, to the tune of £11,277.00. In his own defense, Lord Taylor contended “it had been a common practice among peers to claim for fake journeys and enter expenses claims with a false address as a main residence, and he believed it was acceptable to do this provided there was a “family connection” with the property.” So much for honesty.

Only when they are held accountable by legislatures…let’s try Canada. I realize Mr. Ryzhkov has not specifically expressed admiration for Canadian democracy, but I’d rate it as highly as any other, and there’s no reason my own country should escape the litmus test.  Which, at least according to this source, it fails. “Instead of government “by, for, and of the people,” conducted in open, accountable, and legislative forums, we increasingly have government by executive decree that seems to focus on serving narrow partisan interests rather than the principled public interest. In Canada, this trend is magnified by the dysfunction in the sharing of power among all levels of government – national, provincial, municipal, and aboriginal – which stymies any serious progress on critical issues.” Beat that, Vladimir Putin. Particularly poignant among the largely positive comments to this article is that of Seamus McLuhan: “What is the outcome of collaboration in a society where success is all about self rather than something larger than self? “ You said it, Seamus.

Strict and vigilant civilian control of the military, law enforcement and security services…let’s have a look at the United States. Well, at least one prominent presidential candidate for the upcoming elections this year promises to end civilian control of the military in favour of military commanders. Meanwhile, since the Founding Fathers the USA has had civilian control over the military. That didn’t stop the nation from attacking Iraq on false pretenses, or from leading a regime-change initiative in Libya – while insisting it had nothing to do with regime change – which enabled an al Qaeda-friendly Islamic fundamentalist government. Law enforcement? Generally good and far superior to Russia’s often-corrupt police forces, but not without startling abuses of public trust. Any of these incidents, if they took place in Russia, would be used as exemplary of systemic rot throughout the governing party, and you know it. Rick Perry sounds at least as detached from reality as Zhirinovsky – that the kind of opposition you’re talking about?

It hardly seems fair to me to rail about Putin failing to establish a reliable system that doesn’t really exist anywhere outside conceptualized idealism. There’s nothing wrong with arguing for improvement, but let’s keep it real, what do you say?

Well, we’re going to have to pick things up a bit, or this will turn into a book. Let’s jump to 2006. In the St. Petersburg Times, Ryzhkov argues sarcastically that the delusional Russian government “has been hammering home the image of an unpredictable, aggressive Georgia that is feverishly arming itself for an attack on the defenseless, peaceful enclave of South Ossetia.” This is brought about by the government’s draconian message control via the media, to which he devotes the rest of the article. In 2008, an aggressive and unpredictable Georgia armed and trained by the U.S. government and military did strike South Ossetia. The nation’s leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, only a year before, imposed martial law to crush protest and seized and shut down independent media stations. I have to say you guessed totally wrong on that one, Mr. Ryzhkov.

Forward to 2008 in Mr. Ryzhkov’s work. Family members of Russian bureaucrats, he tells us, ” live in luxurious homes in the west, and their children study there. The money they have stolen from the state budget and major state-owned companies sits in foreign bank accounts”. Let’s recall that the last time Mr. Ryzhkov was politically active for any length of time, he was a devoted supporter of Boris Yeltsin, who handed control of state industries to connected businessmen who became so rich overnight they could easily afford luxurious homes in the west. Indeed, that’s just where several of them went. Mr. Ryzhkov hypothesizes that “corruption and the already large income gap will grow even more“. In fact, minimum wage in Russia was doubled only the year before. And I daresay there is a substantial income gap between the average Russian full-time employee and the aforementioned Mikhail Khodorkovsky – whom Mr. Ryzhkov views as a wronged political prisoner, to the extent he joined in petitioning the U.S. Senate to blacklist Russian political and judicial figures identified as “enemies of YUKOS”.

Another jump, to 2009. Mr. Ryzhkov moaned in “Very Little to Celebrate” what a mess the country was in. Incomes, he wept, have remained almost the same over the last 20 years. Is that so? No, it’s not; it’s bullshit. As you can see here, Russian per-capita GDP adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) rose steadily throughout Putin’s terms, and in 2009 was nearly triple what it was in 1999. Russia’s recovery from the global financial crisis was decidedly more robust than that of the United States. Ryzhkov’s ode to failure sounds like something that might be featured at La Russophobe – where, coincidentally, he received a ringing endorsement that year in which she informed her audience Ryzhkov reminded her of “the good old days when the mighty Moscow Times (circulation, 35,000) was not afraid to speak truth to power“. She also described Mr. Ryzhkov, last summer, as ”…with Boris Nemtsov, [one] of the three most significant political figures in Russia today”. High praise, indeed. This is the same source, I need hardly remind you, which regularly referred to Russians as pigs and characterized Russian girls as prostitutes.

Well, we have to move this along – 2010. In another sunny piece of optimism wrapped in high hopes entitled, “Forever Stuck in Stagnation”, Mr. Ryzhkov informs us that “…the situation for small and mid-sized businesses in Russia is worsening in all regions. Companies are closing down, and the unemployment rate is worsening.” Mr. Ryzhkov has no better idea than I do how many small businesses are operating at any time in Russia, as a substantial number are unregistered in order to avoid payroll taxes, and the unemployment rate in the month Mr. Ryzhkov wrote that little pick-me-up was about half what it was when Mr. Putin took the reins from Ryzhkov’s hero, Boris Yeltsin. It declined steadily throughout Vladimir Putin’s leadership except for a blip associated with the global financial crisis. Today, it is at least 2% less than that of the United States.

2010 was also the year Ryzhkov began to give voice to his hopes that the downfall of Putin’s administration lay in increased internet penetration. He dedicated “China and Russia will be Forced to Democratize” to excited rambling about the positive effect of the internet in China on bringing the authorities to heel, interspersed with smug chuckling about blogs and YouTube being used by internet-savvy Russian youth to do an end run around state television. He sings the praises of Deng Xiaoping, “visionary chief architect of Chinese reforms”, and muses ruefully about how much more competent Chinese Communist leaders are in economics and political matters than their Russian counterparts.

As much as I also admire China’s can-do attitude, I’m compelled to point out that in 2010 it shared a berth with Chad, Belarus and Syria for “severely suppressing opposition political activity, impeding independent organizing, and censoring or punishing criticism of the state” according to Freedom house’s “Worst of the Worst 2010“. That wise old visionary architect of reform, Deng Xiaoping, developed a concept known as the Socialist Market Economy. When the Great Leap Forward failed to deliver on its promises, Deng Xiaoping showed willingness to embrace the free market, but it might be characterized as a brother-sister hug in terms of passion. He “remained committed to centralized control and the one-party state”. This reference goes on to suggest, “the fundamental distinction between the Chinese and Western mixed-market economy models lies less in the implementation of the mixed economic model but rather in the underlying authoritarian political philosophy, which eschews Western notions of democracy, individual rights, and the rule of law.”

An authoritarian system, I need hardly mention, which makes that of Vladimir Putin look pretty liberal by comparison. Marxists criticize the Socialist Market Economy model “on the grounds that [it] restores capitalist commodity relations and production while further dis-empowering the working class, leading to a sharp increase in social inequality and the formation of a growing capitalist class.” That more like what you had in mind, Mr. Ryzhkov?

So, here we are back in the now. Vladimir Ryzhkov organized the rally on December 24th, and must have been very excited by the response. He hopes to pull better than a million Russians into the streets for the next one. The big draw at the December rally, and doubtless up in lights on the marquee for the next, was Alexei Navalny. Not much is currently known about Navalny’s ideas on economic reform – I’m hoping more insight will come about with Yalensis’s translation of the Navalny interview with Ekho Moskvy. But he did say that he – as Russia’s leader – would stabilize and legalize privatization.

Just like Ryzhkov’s last hero.

Uncle Volodya says, "Hate is able to provoke disorders, to ruin a social organization, to cast a country into a period of bloody revolutions; but it produces nothing."

In order to best understand the underpinnings of the gestating “Snow Revolution” (sometimes called the “White Revolution”), we’re going to have to retrace our steps a little.

Like most societies that regularly draw on their past for inspiration, western societies are fond of parables. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” used to be a favourite, although its meaning has been largely lost in the brave new generation of empire and being “history’s actors” rather than simply studying what happened after the fact. It inspires simple nostalgia for the dual personalities in Charles Kingsley’s “The Water Babies”, a book I loved as a child; Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby was kind and gentle, coaxing the stubborn to mend their ways while time to do so remained, but Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid was the grim avenger whose appearance heralded yet another fool stepping across the line that can never be recrossed. Atonement would not be far behind.

The English, too, are fond of such distilled life lessons – “a stitch in time saves nine”, and “procrastination is the thief of time” suggest that a timely effort now will save much more difficult work later.

Within this list, an emerging favourite should take its rightful place: “There’s always money for regime change”.

Leaning on the horn and pressing the pedal of the Disastermobile to the floormat, Ruin Consultant Masha Gessen waxes lyrical in the increasingly conservative Washington Post as she invites the reader to dream a little dream about what Russia would be like today had Vladimir Putin never been elected President, in “Imagining a World Without Vladimir Putin“. This comes on the heels of her “Fed Up With Putin” for the New York Times just a couple of days ago. Castigation-of-Putin material seems to be hot right now, and a little extra money for Christmas shopping always comes in handy. I hope all the “How much is the Kremlin/FSB paying you?” crowd who regularly try to change the subject in comment threads by implying those arguing for Russia are paid shills will take note that Masha Gessen – not to mention her democracy-can-fix-that brother, Keith Gessen – is well paid for simply writing her opinion on how the world order should shake out.

Putin’s grip on the regime is loosening, Masha tells us (harmonizing with the symphony of Putin-is-weak-strike-now rhapsodies coming out of Washington in the past week), and although he foolishly presumes he’s going to be elected in March, her tea leaves tell her his dictatorship will fall before then or soon after. Spoken like someone who knows a secret. She is joined in this belief, she tells us, by “many Russians”. Uh huh. I’ll bet. Anyway, never mind that, she says. Putin’s goose is cooked. Instead of pondering if he’s going to be president, let’s move on to how Russia will look after he’s gone, because his gone-ness is guaranteed. This sounds a lot like the west’s inflexibility on Gaddafi, who in fact was gone not long after, to the visible joy of somewhat-porky hawk Hillary Clinton. Never mind that an al Qaeda-sympathetic fundamentalist government took up the reins of power – what happens after the goal is achieved is less important. In that spirit, Russia may as well start preparing now for “rebuilding media, reconstructing the electoral process, re-creating political institutions and inventing a political culture virtually from scratch.”

Well, she certainly talks a good game. How’s her track record? Let’s take a look at her pre-game hype from what I believe was a blueprint for things to come in Russia – Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution.

Boy, Masha was all over that. I think it would be fair to say she was a little hyperbolic: Nationalism, she tells us, “…always the easiest and most obvious choice of ideology for
uniting people behind you, actually has a chance of being progressive
and even enlightened” in places like Ukraine. Presumably that does not include Russia, where nationalism is a dirty word. Ukrainians, she says, “felt invincible”. In a piece for Slate, she professes a liking for rap music (a bit quirky for someone born in 1967), and exults over the revolutionary example of schoolchildren who sang Ukraine’s new “fight song” as they forced a teacher to amend a schedule change that “wasn’t to their liking”. Yes, that is cute, Masha, but how long do you suppose it will be until they’re singing arm-in-arm as they decide not to bother with school at all?  Little anarchists have a way of turning into big anarchists, and it’s surprising how quickly they get a taste for overturning rules, including yours. What a welcome addition to that euphoric, giddy gathering Georgia’s  revolutionary president, Mikheil Saakashvili, must have been as everyone danced and frolicked – the crowd, Masha reports, “went wild” when Saakashvili congratulated them on their “great President”. Yes, everyone was high on revolution as they screamed a metaphoric “Fuck You!!” to Moscow. Oh, Masha – I love it when you talk dirty.

As it turned out, Masha and Misha got a little carried away in the excitement of the moment. Because although the alliance of banker Yushchenko and energy oligarch Yulia Tymoschenko sounded like a western wet dream, Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency was a revolving disaster for Ukraine, from the standpoint that it was a disaster from any angle you chose to look at it. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), the go-to barometer of national well-being for the west, fell sharply just about the time Yushchenko laid his hands on the wheel of Ukraine’s destiny. In 2009, as the smoldering wreck of Yushchenko’s presidency shuddered to a halt, Ukraine stood just above Zimbabwe on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, measurably more corrupt than such vibrant market democracies as Botswana, Tunisia and Burkina Faso (usually in the economic basement as the world’s poorest country), far, far below Greece – whose economy would implode twice in the years to come – and below Libya, Syria and Egypt, all western targets of regime change.

Come 2010, the heady impetuosity of the Orange Revolution had been stripped away by cynicism, and Ukrainians were sadder but wiser. As an unknown philosopher once pointed out, the trouble with using experience as a guide is that the final exam often comes first, and then the lesson. Viktor Yanukovych was elected with a margin of victory virtually identical to that he secured in the first election run-off in 2004, although on that occasion it tipped the country into revolution, while in 2010 the election – possibly in hopes that something, anything would arrest Ukraine’s slide into the abyss – was pronounced free and fair by international observers. So far as I know, Masha and Misha skipped the victory celebrations, and orange scarves were not much in evidence.

That’s all interesting. But more interesting to me is what and who was behind these “colour revolutions”. Because a common factor seems to be emerging as the trigger for having elections overturned and re-run, especially when the vote is relatively close – exit polls. When Saakashvili and his United Nationalists went up against Schevardnadze’s party in parliamentary elections, what precipitated cries that the election was rigged when Saakashvili didn’t win? Exit polls. Curiously, the Bush administration had only that summer sent former Secretary of State James Baker III to Georgia to secure Shevardnadze’s agreement to allow international observers (Global Strategy Group) to conduct exit polls and parallel vote counts. The exit polls allegedly revealed fraud in favour of Shevardnadze, which “lent legitimacy” to the popular rebellion. In an eerie parallel with what would later happen in Ukraine, Saakashvili talked a great game and drew all sorts of western approbation, but failed to keep almost all his promises, and Georgia is far today from the bustling, prosperous democracy that danced like visions of sugarplums in the heads of the revolutionaries.

As well as conducting research and monitoring of exit polls, Global Strategy Group specializes in “grassroots organizing, marketing and branding”.  The Youth Movement Kmara, formed in Tbilisi state university in 2000, was stood up by the NGO Liberty Institute, most of whose founders were elected to the Georgian Parliament following the revolution. Liberty Institute and Kmara were active in all demonstrations, including those that toppled the government. Trained by OTPOR and CANVAS (Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies), Kmara is funded by Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute, the European Union, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the OSCE, USAID and the Council of Europe. Many of these were recently cited as supporting organizations for Russian election-monitoring NGO Golos.

In Ukraine in 2004, what triggered the explosion of protest and demonstrations which resulted in anullment of the election results and – ultimately – Yushchenko’s victory? The exit polls. Although the official election results in the run-off recorded that Yanukovych had won by about 3%, exit polls suggested an 11% lead for Yushchenko.

Boris Berezovsky was accused of financing Yushchenko’s campaign, and documentation recording transfers of funds between companies controlled by Brezovsky and Yushchenko’s backers was produced; Berezovsky confirmed the transfers had occurred, but refused to specify what the funds were used for. Financing of election campaigns by foreigners is illegal under Ukrainian law. Berezovsky also claimed to have spent millions keeping the demonstrations going. The part played by Kmara in the Georgian revolution was taken up in Ukraine by Pora, a nearly identical youth activist group. In fact, a former member of the Liberty Institute and some of Kmara‘s senior leadership were in Ukraine for the Orange Revolution, advising and coaching Ukrainian opposition leaders. Backing Pora was the same alphabet soup of western democracy-advocacy agencies; among them, the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute are known fronts created by the Reagan administration for the diffusing of CIA money. Between 2002 and 2004, the Bush administration is alleged to have poured more than $65 million into the Ukrainian opposition, most of it in support of Yushchenko. Yushchenko’s American wife, Katya, is a longtime conservative activist who worked in the Reagan White House and for the State Department, and was the creator and president of the US-Ukraine Foundation, financed by – you guessed it – USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. With all the money and powerful backers in Yushchenko’s corner, it’s almost a shame he was such a failure.

Bishop Peter Jesep, Chancellor of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of North America Sobornopravna (Holy Trinity), appealed to the Ukrainian diaspora to put their shoulders to the wheel of regime change as well; “Ukraine“, he told them, “is the second largest and potentially one of the richest nations in Europe. It is not in America’s national security [interests] to see Russia exploit such a resource. Once that case is made, fellow citizens who would not normally care about a situation far removed from their families begin to listen. The Ukrainian cause must be made into their cause.” Drawing on his previous professional experience as – wouldn’t you know it – a strategic media planner, he went on to offer a list of suggestions for how the Ukrainian diaspora could support Yushchenko, including quickly countering “Russified” pieces by “experts” in the New York Times and on PBS by way of a press release to national media, establishing teams of professionals to guide editorial boards of major newspapers away from “the filter of 300 years of Russian exploitation ” and passing along tips to American journalists from family and friends in the ancestral motherland. He closes with a personal recipe for success – “Diaspora organizations need to be less romantic and a lot more Machiavellian.” Many diaspora Ukrainians were involved in election monitoring and the conduct of exit polls during the Orange Revolution. That Machiavellian enough for you, Brother Jesep?

Peter Savodnik, in one of the few attempts to continue American support beyond the wild party of the Orange Revolution, counseled the Bush government to lift the restrictive Jackson-Vanik Amendment for Ukraine, but not for Russia. “…There’s little doubt that graduating Ukraine from Jackson-Vanik while leaving Russia behind will roil U.S.-Russian relations” he suggested, ” but the facts on the ground have changed, and U.S. policy should reflect that. Russia is deeply ambivalent about democracy, while Ukraine has embraced it.” The Bush administration thought that was a good idea, and Jackson-Vanik was dropped for Ukraine but not Russia.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, journalism has something in common with meteorology, in that you can be wrong over and over again, and people still listen to you like you know what you’re talking about and you still have a job. Willingness to acknowledge the Orange Revolution as detrimental to Ukraine, for the cluster-bomb of incompetence and petty infighting it was, is noticeably absent among the giddy western celebrators of 2004.  Your friend and mine, Eugene Ivanov, did a fine takedown of Keith Gessen’s revisionist view of the revolution, published in the New Yorker last year; Eugene summarizes the abbreviated version with a pungent phrase that I will probably borrow just as soon as you’ve forgotten where it came from – “why waterboard your readers with details?”

For her part, sister Masha just brushes off comparisons. The Orange Revolution, she assesses, “fails as a model” for the street protests the west is trying to turn into the White Revolution; “The stand-off between street protesters and the government was resolved by the Supreme Court, which ordered a revote. Russia has no independent justice system, and election laws have been rigged in favor of Kremlin-sanction parties.” Backing away a little from her assurance that the Putin regime will fall before the end of March, she analyzes, “The more hot air the regime pumped into the bubble in which it lived, the more vulnerable it became to pressure from the outside. That is what is happening now. It may take months or it may take a few years, but the Putin bubble will burst.”

Masha should hope she’s right. If Vladimir Putin is elected president again for at least a first term in 2012, I’d be surprised not to see his attitude harden against the west and westerners who worked so single-mindedly and manipulated facts so shamelessly toward the goal of protest achieving critical mass, and bringing down the government. And there’s still the matter of the familiar trigger for demonstrations to consider – the exit polls.

Can you rig exit polls? Sure. An easy way, and one which would even show suspicious official results, would be for a significant number of people – presumably democracy activists – to vote for United Russia but report in the exit poll that they had voted for the KPRF, or Yabloko. This would have the effect of skewing the poll in favour of the party you wish to discredit. But as detractors of such conspiracies have suggested, you’d never be able to keep something like that quiet. Somebody would talk, and the whole scheme would be exposed.

However, there’s no need for a real manipulation of the vote to be present at all. As I discussed, the exit polls in Georgia for the Rose Revolution were conducted by a western market-research and grassroots organization agency. In Ukraine in 2004, exit polling was done by a combination of international observers which included many members of the western Ukrainian diaspora, who were exhorted by their religious leader to be as Machiavellian as necessary to ensure Yushchenko was victorious. In Russia in 2011, exit polling was again carried out by international observers, including the now famous Golos.

Pay attention, Russia. Remember what we learned about the drawbacks of using experience as a guide. The final exam comes first, and the lesson comes later.

Uncle Volodya says, "Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises - for, never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing."

The recently-concluded Duma elections in Russia have western media outlets in such a tizzy of self-fulfilling prophecy that you would think the opposition had actually won. In fact, although United Russia’s share of the vote slipped a little, it still (as usual) polled more than double the result of its next closest competitor, the Communists. It’s also worth remembering that United Russia still garnered better than 10% higher support than the 37.6% it gained in its first appearance, in 2003. Still, as I mentioned, western sources – almost dribbling in their excitement – now see fit to differentiate between the “Soviet Communist Party” and the New Communists, signalling their willingness to see Genady Zyuganov and the KPRF running the country if only he will defeat Putin. How very far, and by what strange pathways has America come since the xenophobic Joe McCarthy thundered, “Any man who has been given the honor of being promoted to General, and who says, ‘I will protect another general who protects Communists,’ is not fit to wear that uniform, General.” Back then, Communists were unambiguously the enemy; now, they’re the Russophobe’s best hope. Indeed, politics makes strange bedfellows.

Exemplary of what has become her signature spit-in-Russia’s-face style, Julia Ioffe spoke disparagingly - before the vote - about “a lot of people talking about going out to vote just to vote for somebody, even if the vote is falsified in the end just as a way to exercise their right and to at least participate”, as if it were a sad and wasted effort by a few despondent people who went out to just blindly push a ballot in a box so they could pretend they were voting in a real democracy. In reality, the Duma election voter turnout was better than 60%. To put that in perspective, in the last 3 U.S. midterm elections only two states (Minnesota and South Dakota) have ever broken 60% turnout, and the national average has not broken 40% since 1970. Voter turnout in Russia blows the doors off that in the USA and the United Kingdom, where it is sometimes embarrassingly in the 20′s.

The spicy vignette Ms. Ioffe offers about some previous unspecified St Petersburg municipal election, in which the first voter allegedly put his ballot in the wrong box and the box had to be unsealed and…surprise!! there were already 3 ballots in it, is just foolish. Is that how ballot-box stuffing works? Shady types just pop by throughout election day, sneaking extra ballots by threes and fives into the box? Come on.

Putin is just so skeevy, not like that dreamy Boris Nemtsov. I would so vote for him, only he didn't have a box.

Has Ms. Ioffe ever voted? That’s not how it works, anywhere – does she imagine there’s a different ballot box for each candidate, and you just put your ballot in the box marked “Kasyanov”, or whatever? What the fuck is “secret ballot” about that? Sure make them easy to count, though, wouldn’t it? In fact, procedures are set up so the voter can’t do something stupid like that, and there’s only one ballot box at each voting station. Russian election law specifically describes the procedure (I realize this is presidential electoral rather than municipal  law, but the process does not significantly differ) in the event a voter believes he or she has made a mistake, and cutting open a sealed ballot box to give the voter back their ballot is, ha, ha…. sorry – decidedly not one of them. Besides, what kind of fool would go to all the trouble of circumventing election monitors and potential international observers, to boost the vote for his favourite party by 3? How stupid does she think Russians are? I’m surprised someone supposedly as worldly as Ioffe would believe such horseshit. Perhaps it’s because she wants to believe it. But since her entire premise for suggesting the vote this time will be falsified is based on this nonsensical knee-slapper, then she is demonstrably wrong. Still, for such a short article, she managed to pack a lot into it; the suggestion that voting is a waste of time since it is meaningless serves to suppress the vote and discourage voters from turning out, while including the mandatory “party of crooks and thieves” tag reflects western efforts to help it catch on, although it is nowhere near as popular in Russia as such sources pretend. It need hardly be said that any Russian journalist who pulled a stunt like that in the United States during the midterms would be on a plane back to Moscow faster than she could say “Borscht”, freedom of the press be damned.

Well, let’s take a look at some other reactions. This “may mark the beginning of the end for Putin”, crows CNN. That’s despite noting that Russians’ disposable income rose by 10% a year between 2000 and 2008, and that it was the global financial crisis and not Putin that put an end to that. My, yes, I’d certainly be eager to put the boots to any leader who raised my disposable income by an average 10% a year. However, the author is at pains to point out that Putin still enjoys the approval of 67% of Russians and that his “regime is unlikely to collapse anytime soon”. Yes, about 2024, I’d imagine. See you, Putin, you bastard. Meanwhile, our paint-chip-eating friends over at the Caucasian Emirate are delirious with joy, quoting The Nobody Formerly Known As Garry Kasparov, who spoke from the relative safety of The Telegraph. Putin is just like Al Capone, we learn. Also that Russia has 100 Billionaires but no roads, which begs the question how Garry Kasparov got out of Russia. He must be quite a hiker, or else he has his own helicopter. Seems kind of silly to have airports in a country with no roads, comes to that. If you look here, Garry, at the fourth photo down, you’ll see a Russian road. Well, more of a highway, really – six lanes of it.

Oh, and for anyone who was still a bit on the fence regarding Litvinenko’s cause of death, you heard it here: Putin killed him during Russia’s nuclear terrorist attack on Britain in 2006. No, I didn’t make that up. You can’t make this stuff up.

Going back to the “beginning of the end for Putin” theme, Open Democracy takes a crack at explaining how an electoral result that sees the victorious party get more than double the votes of its closest competitor is actually its death knell. “By the standards of Western democracies”, Nicu Popescu wants us to understand, “falling just short of the 50% mark after three years of global economic crisis and 12 years in power would be a stellar victory. But in Putin’s Russia this is a serious setback for two main reasons. First of all, the elections were neither free, nor fair. Evidence of ballot stuffing is already swirling around the internet, and the election campaign was heavily biased in favour of United Russia.”

First of all, Nicu; evidence of ballot stuffing is not swirling around the internet – allegations of ballot stuffing are swirling around the internet. Evidence is what you have when you can prove it. Although the OSCE Preliminary Report made passing mention of “indications of ballot box stuffing”, that’s the kind of thing you say when somebody has reported ballot box stuffing, but has not provided any concrete proof at all. And many such reports to the OSCE monitors were from activists. If Egypt, Libya and now Syria taught us nothing else, they should have taught us (a) activists will tell any story they think they need to in order to get NATO involved in a rebel putsch, and (b) NATO is eager to believe activists, and isn’t really too sticky about substantiation.

Indeed, there were reports of provable instances in which employers or other authority figures appeared to pressure subordinates to vote a certain way. Those individuals should be punished appropriately – the higher the status, the sterner the sentence. However, that  philosophy should hold wherever such attempts to tilt the playing field occur. The USA even has a specific law which forbids it, called the Hatch Act. Bush administration officials threw the Hatch Act on the floor and pissed on it – figuratively speaking – more than 100 times. Please note this finding is based on more than 100,000 pages of evidence. Was anyone punished? Now that I mention it, no. The New York Times agrees the Bush White House “routinely” violated election law. More recently, the strange scenario of Alvin Greene surfaced in South Carolina, in which it looks strongly as though Greene was recruited by the Republicans to run as a Democrat against nutty-as-a-fruitcake Republican Senator Jim DeMint. The obvious winner there would be DeMint and the Republicans, as Greene – an unemployed African-American with a pornography charge pending -would theoretically drive votes to DeMint. Unethical? You tell me. Let’s not pretend Russia is the only place where party figures make an effort to skew the vote. The big difference is, Russian attempts to interfere in or comment upon American election practices are pretty close to non-existent.

Everyone’s favourite Russian grandpa, Mikhail Gorbachev, says violations were so widespread that the vote should be annulled and an election do-over held (Oh, me!!! Pick me!!! The Orange Revolution, Ukraine, December 2004). Until somebody else wins, of course, at which point it would be proclaimed free and fair to a fault, the cleanest election ever. I have to confess I love Gorbachev, although nobody in Russia really pays much attention to him any more – he’s just so dotty and bipolar. Here, for instance, is Mr. Gorbachev back in 2009: “In the West, the breakup of the Soviet Union was viewed as a total victory that proved that the West did not need to change. Western leaders were convinced that they were at the helm of the right system and of a well-functioning, almost perfect economic model…the dogma of free markets, deregulation and balanced budgets at any cost, was force-fed to the rest of the world…But then came the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009, and it became clear that the new Western model was an illusion that benefited chiefly the very rich. Statistics show that the poor and the middle class saw little or no benefit from the economic growth of the past decades.

That’d be the system he’s now advocating be force-fed to Russia. And while he’s all about the protests and reform now-now-now, he told The Independent in June only last year that “…in general, I think we went too fast. A country with our history should have taken an evolutionary course. I said reforms would need 20 or 30 years…Of Yeltsin’s chaotic final months, when state industries crumbled and the quick and well-connected got staggeringly rich, he mourns, “Destabilisation became the number one problem.” Tell the one about the day the first television set came to the Soviet Union, Grampy; I love that story.

Which brings me to Golos. A few days ago, nobody had heard of this organization – now, they’re the big story of the Russian elections; puny, defiant Golos, who stood up to the Russian bear in defense of electoral freedom, and was of course unjustly punished for its courage.

However, Golos was reined in not only at the request of the ruling party, but also following “pressure from the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) and the A Just Russia party”. Both supported UR in a lawsuit that charged Golos violated Russian election law. Director Lilia Shebanova’s laptop computer was seized because she refused to allow Customs personnel to check it at the airport as requested, and it probably has nothing to do with the legal action that found Golos guilty and fined the organization; those charges revolved around its website.

By now, most everyone is aware Golos is a wholly western-funded NGO, receiving support grants from USAID and European democracy-promotion agencies. What you may not know is that Golos lists among its partners, on its website, the National Democratic Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy. These battle-hardened engineers of regime change in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia are not candypants hand-holders; no, Sir – when they want regime change, they don’t wait around for the government to step down: they make it happen. Any doubt that the west’s intent in this and the upcoming presidential election is nothing less than the toppling of the Russian government should be dispelled by the “tweet” sent by former failed presidential candidate, darling of the Sunday talk-show circuit and general busybody who never knows when keeping his piehole shut would be the wisest course, John McCain; “Dear Vlad (McCain’s ignorant assumption of the diminutive for “Vladimir”), The Arab Spring is coming to a neighborhood near you.”

The protests, which are being fueled by social networking sites Twitter and Facebook in what has become a blueprint for western NGO’s and “regime change consultants”, are unlikely to go anywhere this time. It’s too cold right now, and the strength of the “movement” is greatly exaggerated in the western press, as has also become a hallmark of regime change. But the west is obviously serious about it, and it is likely to reach a crescendo in March for the presidential elections. Really it’s a no-win for the targeted government, because as soon as they take steps to protect the country, the western papers scream about”loyalist” military thugs emptying heavy machine guns into crowds of women and children while the majority of the military – repulsed by the regime’s heartless tactics – deserts to the rebels. Doesn’t matter if it’s true, as long as it mobilizes opposition. The end justifies the means, as they say in the regime-change business.

I’m moved to recall the sentiments expressed by Kirill in comments to Anatoly’s post, “A Quick Note on Russia’s Duma Elections 2011” at Sublime Oblivion; “ They are going to have to change Russians, not just the regime if they want a poodle…Also, browbeating Russians about how un-west they are is the ticket to success in electoral politics.”

Word, брат.

Uncle Volodya says, "Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, you're a mile away, and you have their shoes."

When I was a kid, hardly a day went by when you didn’t get called a “retard” by someone, usually another kid. The slightest mistake was enough to get you branded a retard for a day or two; growing up was tough then, and it’s tough now. But the term “retard” was common then, and its use is anathema now (although the terms “conservatard” and “libtard” are still frequently bandied back and forth in political arguments on American media sites, presumably to convey the degree of stupidity vested in those who oppose the other’s ideology). I suppose we didn’t mean any harm; we didn’t know any better, and believed retards were regular people who, through some accident of birth or generations of inbreeding, were slower than everyone else. I know now those people were born that way and couldn’t help it; I also know a lot of the people who came under the retard umbrella were simply stupid, and most certainly could help it.

Exempting, then, those poor souls who are victims of God’s disfavour from birth, let’s imagine an intense concentration of retards who are retards simply because they choose to be stupid. There have been lots of sci-fi/horror  films about small towns affected by something in the water supply or some other localized mutating factor; let’s imagine something like that has resulted in stubborn, intellect-sucking obtuseness. Let’s further imagine that, rather than all living in the same town, they all work at the same newspaper.

By that roundabout route, we arrive at “Russians are Leaving the Country in Droves“, by the stubbornly stupid Los Angeles Times (thanks, Cartman), often a bastion of bedrock conservatism in an otherwise pretty liberal state. Certain media sources – excluding committed bloggers (some of whom should be committed) like La Russophobe and her latest effort, “Dying Russia” – who owe the public a duty to at least pretend objectivity are instead stubbornly slanted in their view of Russia, and consistently misrepresent the actual situation in Russia so as to make it appear catastrophic. The Los Angeles Times shares this category with the reliably Russophobic Time Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor and often the Washington Post.

Ever heard the expression, “Too stupid to come in out of the rain”? The Los Angeles Times can claim credit for describing this past summer as one in which “heat and aridity records were bested across the United States“, apparently unaware that California experienced its wettest summer on record. You’d sort of expect them to notice that, considering that’s the state they’re….ummm…located in.

I’d have been prepared to swear one of these, “the intellectuals are fleeing Russia” stories comes up every couple of months, they seem that frequent – but according to my research, it’s only this past year that the meme has reached a crescendo of crap. I did a post on the issue myself, last spring, on the occasion of yet another disinformation dump from the Siamese brains of Miriam Elder and Time Magazine‘s Simon Shuster, and the issue has come up as a discussion point in a variety of fora. That wasn’t exactly the same rubbish as this – Simon and Miriam were howling about closure of small towns in remote areas of Russia in favour of consolidation in larger cities: something that is taking place all over the world, but is naturally somewhere to the right of terrible when it happens in Russia.

Anyway, these “catastrophic exodus of Russia’s best and brightest” pieces do come up with annoying frequency. The earliest I found during the era of highest Russophobe interest – the “Decade of Putin” – was the Christian Science Monitor, kicking it off in 2002 with, “Russia’s Population Decline Spells Trouble“. According to none other than The Doofus Of Doom, Fred Weir, “The only obvious solution – to encourage youthful immigrants from  overpopulated Asian neighbors such as China – is so politically sensitive that Russian leaders refuse to even discuss it”. Well, that might have seemed the obvious solution to Fred Weir, but here we are nearly 10 years later, the population has shrunk by about 2 million from the 2002 census (although the current figure is estimated), and Russia is still just as Russian at about 80% Russian ethnicity. In 2002, there were about 30,000 Chinese, and Chinese are still somewhere in the 12% of the population identified as “other races”. So you were wrong, Fred. Get used to it; you did it a lot between 2002 and now. Oh, here’s a good one before we leave this piece of nonsense behind; “Demographic experts say that the country is losing one million of its population annually, and the nosedive is accelerating.” Were that actually so, the population of Russia would now be less than 133 million. Is it? Ha, ha…No.

Next came Nicholas Eberstadt’s “Drunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb“, in 2009. Eberstadt, at the time a political economist at – surprise! – the American Enterprise Institute, would fit right in at today’s Los Angeles Times; whenever a figure doesn’t suit him, he says, “(insert state agency here) says the total is (whatever) – but the figure is surely much higher”. He’s also smugly in agreement that “Russia’s adult population—women as well as men—puts down the equivalent of a bottle of vodka per week.” Virtually every statistic quoted is “chilling” or “grisly” or “numbing”. This “study” remains a go-to reference for Russophobes, and smirking Washington Post popinjay George Will was happy to pick it up the same year. He was also quite taken with Woodrow Wilson Centre alumni Martin Walker’s term, “hypermortality” as applied to the Russian decline, and was happy to nod along with the bobbleheads who agreed that Russia “…is suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major war.” Once again, the figure of a million per year came up. Finally, serial muckraking fabricator Paul Goble jumped on the bandwagon with “Depopulation Threatens Russia 10 Ways” (hint – one of them was increasing mental illness), and cited Olga Lebed of Moscow State University as his source for the fact that even with immigration, Russia’s population was shrinking by a million a year. The year Mr. Goble penned (or typed) that doleful epitaph, Russia’s population was 141,903,979. The following year it was 141,914,509. Quick – which figure is larger?

In fact, the year before Ms. Lebed’s pronouncement, the population of Russia contracted by 211,162, less than a quarter of her tally. The year of her feeding salacious stories to an eager Paul Goble (if in fact that was what she said at all, as Mr. Goble has been known to take artistic license with figures and to quote selectively) it contracted by 104, 859. The year after, as I mentioned, the population expanded. You have to wonder how someone who can’t add and subtract ascends to university tenure. And if it’s Mr. Goble who’s mathematically confused, then it doesn’t much matter what people tell him; he’ll just apply the Eberstadt Doctrine; “the result is this, but the real number is surely much higher (or much lower, if you were talking about something good)”.

Fast-forward now to this year, 2011. Blogging from darkest Staunton, Virginia, Mr. Goble – unrepentant as always for peddling twaddle – informs us the “Middle Class is fleeing Russia“, according to Moscow experts. Never one to back away from a challenge, Paul the Mathematician and Sometime CIA Intellectual doubles down, telling us 1.25 million of Russia’s middle-class earners have fled the country in the last 3 years. Keep that figure in mind, because that’s how many of Russia’s artists and intellectuals have left in the last 10 years, according to the Los Angeles Times. They’re plainly talking the same figure, they just adjust it to fit a different time period and social class. Paul Goble’s source is the New Times, run by Crackpot of All Trades Yevgenia Albats, who serves as Editor, Investigative Journalist, writer and Political Scientist. Charmingly crazy, Ms. Albats distinguished herself by demanding to be arrested during the “Dissenters March” in June last year – presumably so that she could write a feverish jailhouse rant about being roughed up and incarcerated as a prisoner of conscience when she was just minding her own business. Needless to say, news about Russia that originates with the hysterical New Times might just as well come from…well, Staunton.

Not to be outdumbed, the irrepressible Simon Shuster of Time Magazine chimes in with the inside scoop that 1.25 million young entrepreneurs and businessmen have fled Russia (literally; not bothering to sell their homes or property, but simply locking up and sprinting for the airport) within, you guessed it, the last 3 years. Allegedly, his and Mr. Goble’s root sources are Russian ministers and political figures. But during the last 3 years the population of Russia experienced a net contraction of 325,460. It would take a pretty wild leap of imagination to make that look like 1.25 million, especially when Ms. Lebed tells us that immigration in does not affect Russia’s dizzying losses at all. In fact, in 2005 Russia was second only to the USA in terms of inward migration, according to the U.N. Report, “World Population Policies 2005“.

Getting the picture? Even though official state census data and international reports paint a picture considerably less grim, Eberstadt brightly infers they’re full of it, and the nightmare is orders of magnitude worse than they portray. Paul Goble insists migration from Russia under Putin’s jackboot is spinning wildly out of control, but World Bank data show us not only that migration from Russia trended steadily upward since the 1960′s, but that its only sustained and steady decline has been under the leadership of…Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin. Simon Shuster points out the departure of the last desirable group of Russians, young entrepreneurs, leaving nothing behind in Russia but the mad, the old and the crippled – yet Intel’s Steve Chase endorsed Russia as a go-to source for complex programming (not a skill you’d expect of the doddering Stalin-loving octogenarian set), and its workforce is described in outsourcing sites as “abundant, sophisticated and well-educated, with high competency in science and mathematics”. Anatoly Zhuplev’s “Small Business in Russia – Trends and Outlook” concluded, “SME’s in Russia tend to demonstrate growth in the number of companies, the number of persons employed, the volume of sales and the number and share of female entrepreneurs (the latter is particularly evident in the service sector). This growth has been facilitated by positive changes in the taxation regime and streamlining of the licensing procedures…” although he cites bureaucracy and bribery as continuing problems (worsening, in the latter case).

Let me ask you this: what sophisticated, well-educated young entrepreneur with high competency in mathematics and/or science is going to lock his door and head for Europe or the west today? Hmm; Simon Shuster’s  entrepreneurial high-roller, Alexei Terentev, left a country (Russia) with an unemployment rate of 6.4%…to emigrate to a country (Czech Republic) with an unemployment rate of 7.9%. I guess that narrows down whether he was well-educated in mathematics, or science. Well, how’s the Eurozone faring, generally? Spain? The employment situation is grisly, frankly – 21.52% unemployment. What about France? Ooooo…numbing, I’m afraid; 9.6% unemployed, worse than India. Tak, never mind those losers; how about the UK? They love immigrants….Mmmm, sorry. A chilling 8.3% unemployed. Well, there’s always the good old U.S. of A. What? Unemployment is at 9%??? Are you kidding??

I shouldn’t have to tell you that a higher standard of living, higher GDP, PPP, ABCDEFG are going to mean bubkes if you live in a YMCA flat or a cardboard box under a bridge because you can’t get a job.

The Irtenyevs, mentioned in the Los Angeles Times‘ maudlin goodbye story (which could not have been told without including the obligatory bottle of vodka, in which it seems every Russian baby is baptized) were headed for Israel, where unemployment is a touch less at 6% than in Russia. The Los Angeles Times doesn’t mention if Mr. Irtenyev boasts other skills, but I hope so, as I imagine Russian poetry to be somewhat of a niche market outside Russian-speaking countries – although Russian is reasonably widely spoken in Israel. In a stubborn return to the Eberstadt Doctrine, the Los Angles Times just somehow “knows” the Irtenyevs are gone for good, even though they specifically say they are only going for 6 months. You can just tell, because they look sad.

But never mind all that. Let’s pretend the worst-case scenario is accurate, and that the Russian population actually has dropped by 1.25 million Russians in the past 3 years, even allowing for the balancing effect of inward migration, despite that notion being contradicted by a variety of statistical data. Pretend it’s true.

So what? People leave the country of their birth for a broad range of reasons, including education, reuniting with family and a sense of adventure as well as economics. Russia seems to exercise due diligence in keeping an accurate count of how many are leaving, which information is promptly quoted inaccurately to beat it over the head. The United States, by way of contrast, does not keep any official figures at all on Americans who have left the USA to live abroad, although the figures are estimated by the State Department to be somewhere between 3.7 and 5.2 million. Did they flee because the country is going down the toilet, or because they couldn’t grow their fledgling businesses under the repressive fist of the government? Usually not – most left for tax advantage. Some 336,000 Britons left the UK in 2010 alone, and that figure was the lowest since 2005: that equates to more than 1.68 million Britons leaving in 5 years. Is that a catastrophe? Not unless somebody can prove they were all from the U.K.’s entrepreneurial and business community; net immigration for 2010 was a gain of 239,000.

But let’s look at that a little more closely. People leaving the country is bad, the message seems to be, while building up the national population is a matter for smug pride and cockiness. That about sum it up?

Wha….what?? I don’t understand. According to today’s Daily Mail, immigration to the UK is “out of control”. “It means that David Cameron must more than halve immigration if he is to get anywhere close to the Coalition ‘aspiration’ of bringing net migration down to tens of thousands a year…A raft of figures published yesterday delivered a series of blows to the Government’s hopes of curbing the levels of immigration that critics say have distorted the economy and deepened poverty and benefit dependency over the past 14 years.” This seems to say that too many people is bad, that having a bigger population than your economy can support “deepens poverty and benefit dependency”!

Well, everyone knows the English couldn’t be sent to look for lettuce in a green salad; no use expecting them to be able to manage anything competently. We’ll surely get a lesson in how to manage a healthy, burgeoning population from our American friends, what? Let’s look.

Oh, my. In the Los Angeles Times‘ own city, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a tidal wave of mass immigration has resulted in a region whose “resources and environment cannot even sustain the current population, and the area has simply run out of room to accommodate the expected growth…Almost all the natural locations for urban development have been consumed…Los Angeles air basin remains one of the most polluted in the nation…mass immigration has hurt quality of life in the region and can be a source of social friction…”

Let me get this straight. Russia is an abject failure for creating a climate so grisly, numbing and chilling that  people can’t bear to stay there, but simultaneously the leaders of the free world are grappling with furious electorates who claim their economies cannot support the current glut of immigrants. Somehow the aforementioned grisly numbing chilling environment in Russia has resulted in steady growth, advancing prosperity and low unemployment, while Europe scrambles to pull back from the crumbling edge of a yawning pit of debt. The USA flirts with recession, and both struggle with unemployment figures that are half again higher than those of Russia. But Europe and the USA feel somehow qualified to lecture Russia on a demographic catastrophe that is largely in their own heads.

Uh huh. Okay, then. I’m glad we cleared that up.

Uncle Volodya says, "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."

I’ve been thinking back over my lifetime quite a bit lately. Not that flash-before-your-eyes thing that’s supposed to happen when your death is iminent; more like a thoughtful, deliberate inventory. I can’t honestly recall doing anything really, really bad. Well, there was that time in junior high when I stole some ice-cream-on-a-stick treat from the grocery near my school by shoving it down the front of my pants. The clerk at the checkout knew I had it, too, but I grew up in a small town where every adult knew your mother, and those were different times. Rather than embarrass me with confrontation, she simply engaged me in small-talk about my family until it had melted down my legs inside my jeans. It worked, too. I never stole anything frozen again, and I never forgot the lesson.

Well, where was I? Oh, yes. I can’t recall doing anything really bad, but it seems I’m being punished for something disgraceful. I’ve said on numerous occasions how thoroughly I despise economics – but every member of the Russian liberal intelligentsia the west trots out these days to support its theory that Putin will crush Russia in his kung-fu iron grip, or to lecture Russia on the path it must take… turns out to be an economist.

The latest in the conga-line of straitjacket mannequins is Vladislav Inozemtsev, author of a somewhat scolding diatribe for the Washington Post, entitled, “Keeping Russia From Turning Back” (thanks, sinotibetan).

Hey, remember the character of “Reverend Jim” Ignatowski on the TV Sitcom “Taxi” (1978-1983)? Jim was pretty burnt out from systemic drug abuse (you could make fun of people for things like that on TV back then), but every once in awhile he would experience an epiphany when his brain and current events came briefly into alignment. When asked to explain this phenomenon, he replied somewhat dazedly, “I tend to phase in and out of reality”.

So does Vladislav Inozemtsev, apparently. Or at least he lives in alternate realities, where now Russia is kicking ass and taking names, and now it is a smoldering wreck with a gibbering Vladimir Putin at the helm as it spirals ever downward into the fiery heart of hell. How, we must ask ourselves, are we supposed to know when he is being serious?

Well, let’s see how his latest effort stands up to comparison with his previous directives. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about economists, they love to see their opinions in print. If there’s another thing I’ve learned about them, it’s that they like to forecast every possible way a situation could turn out, so that no matter how things end up, they can point to one of their theories and say triumphantly, “See? I was right”. They also often forget every contradictory theory they wrote. So let’s help Mr. Inozemtsev out a little.

First, let’s look at Inozemtsev’s contention that “Putin knows that more than half of Russian voters recall the Soviet past with affection”. Fact-checker says… Horseshit. I thought economists were supposed to be good at mathematics. Here’s the report of the scientific survey that informed Inozemtsev’s conclusion. Mendelson/Gerber also attempted to frighten the world with their suggestions that Russians in love with their vision of the Soviet Union would try to recreate it, but the poll results suggest otherwise. To the question, “If Stalin were running for president today, would you vote for him?”, 13% of Russians under 30 surveyed said yes. A block of 46% said definitely not. A further 21% said probably not, although Mendelson/Gerber creatively spin this to indicate likely yes, as if they could read their minds. Even if you add 21 and 13, you still don’t get “more than half”. The over-30′s voted slightly higher in favour of a President Stalin, but nothing like half. Later Mendelson/Gerber bemoan their conclusion that not enough young Russians know who Andrei Sakharov was: Russia needs real heroes, they say, and if the response of a university student who didn’t know who he was is typical country-wide, the country is in very serious trouble.

Let’s put that in perspective, shall we? According to research conducted by Dr. John D. Miller of Northwestern Medical School, 1 in 5 adult Americans thinks the sun revolves around the earth. More recently, a study reported in the Associated Press found that while 22% of Americans could name all 5 characters on the cartoon “The Simpsons“, only 1 in 1000 Americans could name all 5 freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. Could the United States be in very serious trouble, do you think? Once again, I’m not picking on America out of dislike for Americans, because I do not dislike them – rather, it’s because the authors of the Mendelson/Gerber report are Americans.

So. There is no evidence whatever to suggest more than half of Russian voters recall the Soviet past with affection – the Mendelson/Gerber study was the most comprehensive of all conducted, and the legwork for it was done by the Levada Centre, which is assessed as pretty credible. The study in fact found that a significant number of respondents were ambivalent, and did not want to commit to an opinion. That was spun by the report’s authors as a reluctance on the part of Russians to acknowledge the horribleness of their past, and to grovel in the dirt and beg western forgiveness for it while embracing role models chosen for them by the west. This is Inozemtsev pulling numbers out of his ass, which is a bad start for a career in economics.

It doesn’t get better, I’m afraid. Inozemtsev appears to low-ball Russian GDP per capita, at $10,360.00. Other sources which purport to be reliable have it significantly higher, at $15,900.00. But whichever is accurate – and I suspect it’s somewhere in between – it as usual does not tell the whole story. Inozemtsev is using the numbers to argue that authoritarian rule in general is bad for GDP. Is it, really? Look at the rate of climb for GDP – remembering that this figure represents Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) – for Russia since 1999, compared with the same period for the USA. Russian per-capita GDP rose nearly 3 times as rapidly, by a factor of 3.7 against 1.3 for the USA. In addition, the unemployment rate in the USA is considerably higher. Authoritarian Russia managed to drive rapid gains in purchasing power for its citizens, while keeping unemployment down around the same level as Germany’s. Germany is the powerhouse economy of the European Union, the one everyone looks to when they think “bailout”.

You can make statistics say just about anything you want, by playing up this while you play down that. Vladislav Inozemtsev wants to make them say things sucked under Putin, and that citizens should prepare for them to suck worse under a reprise of Putin leadership. How credible is Inozemtsev? Let’s see.

Inozemtsev, November 2011: “As [Russia's] ruling plutocracy seeks to turn back to the Soviet past, the attraction of a European future looms brighter.” Inozemtsev, March 2011, in “The American Interest“: “Many Western experts today portray Russia as a country spiraling down into totalitarianism, slowly (or not so slowly) following the path of the Soviet Union, whose authoritarian regime crumbled under growing pressure from an emerging civil society…Unfortunately, all of these assumptions are wrong. Contemporary Russia is not a candidate to become a Soviet Union 2.0. It is a country in which citizens have unrestricted access to information, own property, leave and return to the country freely, and develop private businesses of all kinds…Clearly, this arrangement—economic freedom coupled with political constraint—does not please everyone. To the standard American mind it suggests that something has got to give. This, too, is wrong. Some Russians do give voice to dissatisfaction with the current regime and the widespread abuse of power by police authorities, local officials and oligarchs closely connected with the ruling bureaucracy. Yet the system seems fundamentally solid and durable.” What a difference a couple of months make; I can’t help observing that in March, Inozemtsev did not know Putin would stand again for election to the Presidency.

Want to do another one? Sure; Inozemtsev, November 2011: “Accordingly, leaders in Brussels should rethink certain myths. Russia is big, but not too big for Europe; as an E.U. member, it would be the second-largest national economy and add one-fourth to the E.U. population…Russia has a kind of a European people but, unfortunately, not a European-type government. Inozemtsev, February 2007, in “Global Affairs“: “Today, Russia and America are very much alike. At the same time, they dramatically differ from Europe, which had an enormous historical impact on them…The first thing that strikes the eye when making a comparison between the United States and Russia is their remarkable similarity as very special people – “chosen” and “messianic.” I see. Russia would be a perfect choice for Europe because its people are like Europeans, except when they’re not. And then, they’re just like Americans, who are not like Europeans even a little bit.

Oh, all right – one more. Inozemtev, November 2011: “In a world orchestrated by three centers of power and wealth — the United States, the European Union and China — Russia can play a significant role only if it strengthens the beleaguered European “pole.” Inozemtsev, again in Global Affairs, March 2006: “ We all are entering a new era in which the Europeans may peacefully live in their united Europe, and the Americans may build their beloved America according to their own projects. But this will be possible only if America and Europe let the rest of the world follow the path of genuine globalization, that is, let each nation and people follow its own course. “

Clearly, Inozemtsev has experienced an epiphany. Russia, with its large cash reserves and energy-dominated economy, could best serve the cause of global greatness by joining the European Union, many nations of which are groaning under the most severe austerity budgets since the Second World War, and others of which are trembling on the abyss of bankruptcy’s crumbling edge. As I mentioned earlier, when Eurozone members think “bailout”, they think, “help us, Germany”. Enter Russia, with pots of money, a net energy exporter where the EU is a net energy importer, and a guilt complex over its sordid Soviet past that has it just looking for a good deed to do so it will be accepted by its fellow Europeans.

Here’s a helpful explanation of how Russia could be….well, helpful, as a member of the EU and the Eurozone, by way of Alex Mercouris; “ When Mervyn King (the Governor of the Bank of England) and Ben Bernanke (the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board) bought British and US government bonds by printing money (“quantitative easing”) they did so in the knowledge that behind them stood the Treasuries of Britain and the US.  This meant that if there were any danger of things going wrong and of quantitative easing undermining the stability of sterling or the dollar the British and US Treasuries would be in a position to step in and bail them out by raising the necessary money through higher taxes.

The European Central Bank is not in that position. No European Treasury stands behind it.  There is no unified European tax system that could raise money if things go wrong. The EU has no independent tax raising powers. It relies entirely on contributions to its budget from member states who negotiate the size of their contributions years in advance. What would have to happen if the European Central Bank were to print euros in order to engage in a bond buying programme and things were to go wrong is that it would have to turn to European governments for help, which in practice as everyone knows would mean the German government. Given the scale of the European sovereign debt crisis Germany could then find itself facing demands for money running into trillions of euros. With a GDP of just $3 trillion Germany could find it impossible to raise such funds in which case there would be a default.“

Economics. Hoo, Boy. Just when you think you understand it. But if you were wondering why economists don’t seem to understand them either, here’s as helpful a guide as I’ve ever read: Thales and I have our fundamental disagreements regarding political philosophy, but I’ve never seen anything as complicated as economics rendered so simple. As he (or she) says, “…acting confident and having conclusive evidence are two different things.”

What was that buzzing noise? Hopefully, it’s Vladislav Inozemtsev, rejoining reality.

ZIGFELLLLLLLDDDD!!!

Customarily, I am not a fan of the play-by-play “Twitter” style post (I’m going into the coffee shop now…whoops! I spilled my goat’s-milk latte). But I just had to share this comedic moment with you – I have been banned from commenting at La Russophobe’s latest full-on crazy manifesto, Dying Russia.

Well, that didn’t take long. Four days, to be exact. A bit less than half the time I lasted at the original blog, La Russophobe. But that’s not the funny part. So eager was Krazy Kap’n Kimmie to get rid of me as a commenter, she banned me for use of profanity, because I said “Amnesty International simply pulled those numbers out of their ass”. No, I’m not kidding; see for yourself.

That’s right; “comment deleted for violation of posted comment publication guidelines regarding profanity”. So in the same thread that I am referred to as “psychotic and evil”, “the stupidest and most dishonest person on the planet”, a “putinophilic moron” (that’s the very Bohdan who gave The Kremlin Stooge its name), and an “inbred ape”, the ears of the readers must be protected from the word, “ass”.

You probably think that’s the funny part. No, it’s not. Or maybe the funny part is that there are no posted comment publication guidelines. Nope. The funny part is the content of the comment that was deleted. Beside the use of the word “ass” in describing where Amnesty International got its figures, it was a reply to the suggestion that I am the stupidest and most dishonest person on the planet. It read, in part “Have it your way. But wasn’t it you who wept about “the WOEFUL under-reporting of violence against women in Russia”…just 18 days after you personally advocated for the gang-raping of one of your fellow countrywomen? I couldn’t help noticing your standards regarding violence against women are a little pliable.”

Sho ’nuff. “If you saw the movie “Boys Don’t Cry,” you saw Hilary Swank portray a character being brutally gang raped. Until recently, we would never have suggested than any woman deserves such a fate. But now we can’t help but think that maybe Swank herself actually does.”

Oh, later on she says Swank should be murdered, after referring to her as a “cheap slut” and a “nasty little American bitch”. Note, though, friends and neighbours, that she never stoops to using the vulgarity, “ass”.

I thought the whole episode was pretty funny, and Anatoly and I did get a few good licks in. I particularly enjoyed the self-righteous post that wants you to know the word combination “Dying Russia” registers over 28 million google hits. When I pointed out that the same search technique yields 10 times that number of hits for the combination “American Fool”, I got this reply; “Better foolish than dead, you hopeless inbred ignoramus.”

Most of you are probably too young to remember the sixties Nazi prison-camp sitcom, “Hogan’s Heroes”. Incidentally, in one of those funny twists you sometimes run across, all the actors who played the senior German officers were actually Jewish. Anyway, that’s what the groupthink over at “Dying Russia” reminds me of; they’re like Nazis, but really stupid, bumbling Nazis who are constantly being outwitted, but are too slow to realize it.

So now, I guess I’ll have to go back to mocking her here instead of there. Auf Wiedersehen, Phobie; it was fun while it lasted.

Uncle Volodya says, "They say the only sure things in life are death and taxes. Kudrin wants me to increase one of them."

Never attribute to malice, we’re told, that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Nobody seems to be sure exactly who said it first, and although most commonly linked to a Robert A. Hanlon, many believe it originated with controversial and influential American science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein. Whatever you believe, you’ll probably go through life with fewer stress-related health problems if you simply assume that people who are wrong are just stupid, and that they meant well.

Pretty much defining that genre is Dmitry Travin’s apocalyptic “Kudrin’s Warning“, for Open Democracy.  The one tickle of uncertainty is that Travin is a modernizer and reformer, anointed for his commitment to making Russia more like a liberal western democracy with broad private ownership of resources and infrastructure. So maybe he writes as he does out of malice. All I can say is, it certainly reads like stupidity. Well, let’s go through it together – see what you think.

What I think is that this is the beginning of the canonization of Kudrin. Never ones to pass up an opportunity to point at Russia and shout, “My God!! Can you believe how stupid that was??” the western media seems poised to once again shape the narrative. Take a memo, world – Alexei Kudrin was not only the most brilliant economist and financial wizard Russia has ever had, his forced resignation due to the shortsighted ideology of his political masters – thrice ungrateful considering Kudrin was the architect of Russia’s present prosperity – will surely result in disaster. Russia, in short, is playing Russian Roulette with its future.

We’re treated early to an example of Travin’s wit (speaking of Russian Roulette) in his description of the legendary exercise. It springs, according to Travin, from Russian romantic legend of Tsarist times. If so, it springs from a romantic legend that is heavy on romance and light on basic knowledge of firearms. Again according to Travin, one “twirls the barrel round several times, and puts the gun to one’s head”. Presumably, this will confuse the bullet, or it might if you could twirl the barrel on a revolver, but in fact you spin the cylinder so that the hammer does not fall on the chamber in which you just loaded the bullet, which comes out the barrel. The barrel is fixed in place, and does not twirl or rotate, or anything that could be so described. You could, theoretically, “twirl” the entire revolver if you inserted your finger in the trigger guard – but it would be difficult to imagine how that might introduce an element of chance into shooting yourself.

Mr. Travin goes on to blithely inform us that although no historical sources confirm the origins of any such game in Russia, it is likely to be true because it dovetails so neatly with “traditional ideas of Russia as a place where things were always so bad that people were happy to lose their lives”.

Makes you wonder why German Army Group North ran up against a brick wall in the siege of Leningrad, doesn’t it? People who allegedly were happy to lose their lives held out against a superb army for better than 870 days; one of the longest sieges in history. Odd behaviour for people with a death wish, I’d have thought; you’d expect them to throw the gates wide and shout, “Hey! You fucking sausage-eating kraut squarehead duraks, come in and kill us!! I can’t wait!!!” Similarly, when the forces of Alexander occupied Paris in 1814 after snapping at Napoleon’s heels throughout his retreat – which reduced the Grand Armée to less than a quarter its original strength – it was presumably owing to a fit of pique at the Emperor for failing to grant them the peace of death. Fast-forwarding to today, Travin himself tells us Kudrin’s departure had its roots in his disagreement with Medvedev over “a programme of increasing social and military expenditure”. What does a country of eager suicides need with a bigger military to defend it? Try not to be stupider than nature intended.

In fact, the earliest recorded mention of the term “Russian Roulette” was in a short story of the same name published in January 1937 – in English – by an American magazine, Collier’s Weekly, which went out of business in 1957. No historical record at all suggests Russians were so miserable at that or any other time that an opportunity to snuff it was welcomed with relief. The last Tsar was executed in 1918, nearly 20 years before the Collier’s story was published.

Anyway, I spent much longer on that than I intended; we want to talk about Kudrin. But that little vignette, I think, establishes early in the game what Travin’s views are and what they are based on – a willingness to say anything about Russia that is unfavourable regardless its provenance, and a bad case of capitalist/corporatist envy.

So, without further ado, on to The Brilliance Of Kudrin. I don’t mean to sound sarcastic, because Kudrin did in fact see Russia through a lengthy period of prosperity. But in the end, he’s a Russian economist whose skills are rated highly by the west; rather more highly since he departed from service in the Russian government and started to criticize it. Are we acquainted with other Russian economists who are admired by the west and who trot out jukebox rants against the Russian government whenever somebody says, “Say -that guy looks like a western journalist”? Sure we are. Vladimir Mau, crown prince of fiscal folly, for one. Yevgeny Yasin, for another, who predicted in 2003 that Khodorkovsky’s arrest would cast a pall of darkness over Russian investment; that long-term prospects were certain to deteriorate. That didn’t happen, of course. Oh, and one of my favourite boobs that isn’t attached to Keira Knightley – Yevsei Gurvich. Mr. Gurvich predicted in 2007 that oil (Urals Crude, to be specific) would be down to $50.00 per barrel by 2010; those high prices just couldn’t continue. As a consumer of gasoline myself, I wish he was right, but he was off by about $30.00 per barrel on average. I daresay we will catch Mr. Kudrin in a few…inconsistencies. Not to mention Mr. Travin, a fellow economist.

But first, let’s hold a finger to the winds of western hype. What does the west say about Kudrin’s “resignation”? (that’s how they say it when you were ordered to resign, which some people have difficulty in distinguishing from being fired, and I would be among them) Well, the Wall Street Journal – a somewhat….conservative source – says Kudrin was fired, and that he was “dressed down before state-run television for taking a stance against [the President's] policies”. They go on to say that Mr. Kudrin’s departure will “likely worry foreign investors in Russia, who had regarded Mr. Kudrin as a guardian of Russia’s fiscal responsibility for more than a decade.” Would that be the same guardian of fiscal responsibility who presided over alleged capital flight of $21 Billion in the first quarter of 2011, owing to political concerns that spooked investors, and over increased use by companies of domestic debt to repay foreign borrowing? Because that’s how the Wall Street Journal characterized the situation in Russia only last April. In fact, slobbering about Russian corruption, thievery and all-round bottom-of-the-barrel badness rises to the level of popularity in the Wall Street Journal, and did so unabated while Kudrin was Finance Minister – until his resignation. Then, since he could be cast as a lonely but defiant resister against the bloody juggernaut of state power, he was fitted for a halo. Have a look back through the Wall Street Journal for the last decade, and see how many articles you can find praising Kudrin for his fiscal genius, pre-resignation. How about this one? Oh, nope, sorry; it says Russia “must overcome a reputation for widespread corruption, poor infrastructure  and a murky legal system. And that will mean implementing institutional reforms and improving the business environment — measures the government has long discussed but never carried out.” What? the landscape-altering Kudrin failed to improve the business environment? Well, can the Wall Street Journal point to any successes at all under Kudrin? Apparently not. If you google any combination of “Wall Street Journal” and “Russia” and “Kudrin” and “Success”, you get a flurry of recent articles referring to Kudrin’s firing (or resignation, if you like that better) and a lot of vicarious gnashing of teeth about how this spells big problems for Russia. My own country’s “National Post“, usually only slightly less hysterical than the Wall Street Journal and sometimes more so, emphatically agrees Kudrin was the real jewel in the Kremlin crown, and dishes the gory details under the lurid headline, “Russian Finance Chief Revolts Over Putin Presidency Plot“. I particularly liked the delicate way they handled the issue of Putin/Medvedev’s popularity; “Although opinion polls show they are both much more popular than any other Russian politicians, and Putin is all but certain to win a six-year term in March, many Russians show signs of impatience with the lack of progress on democracy. ‘How much more can you take? Yet again there will be nothing, everything will stay the same. We only get empty promises,’ said retired factory worker Nikolai, in the village of Titov northeast of Moscow.” Got that? A solid majority of Russians view the return of either Putin or Medvedev to leadership positively, but that doesn’t matter because in a real democracy, the opinion of a malcontent minority that feels ill-used is the deciding factor in presidential elections.

Welcome to Spinland, where the guy who really didn’t do much at all to improve Russia’s financial state over the last decade – really, they just lucked out on the price of oil, a child could have done it – suddenly more or less invented fiscal responsibility, and now that he’s gone, disaster bursts into the enormous vacuum created by his leaving. Any truth to it? Let’s see.

Going back to the heart of the Global Financial Crisis – arguably Kudrin’s greatest test – it’s hard to say. There can be little argument that Russia was better prepared than most for the crisis and weathered it better than most, bouncing back to profitability quickly. How much of that was due to Kudrin’s stewardship? Some, certainly. But Kudrin couldn’t make policy on his own, and his recommendations would have to be passed or rejected by first Putin, and later Medvedev. Is the person who approves a sound policy as wise as its author? That, also, is difficult to say, although examples abound of governments that did not listen to good advice, and came to grief as a result. Travin includes an interesting example – Boris Fyodorov’s resignation in 1994, over policy differences with Yeltsin, who wanted to simply print more money.

Any fool knows that printing more money is not the answer to a financial crisis; the Germans tried that, and ended up with a Mark so devalued that it took a barrowload to buy a sack of flour. But for me, the interesting thing was the reversal of roles on the part of the west. Although the Finance Minister took a principled stand and resigned when pressured to do something stupid, who from that period is remembered as the Savior of Russia, the progressive genius who took Russia to the brink of a functioning democracy? Fyodorov? Hardly. We could do a name-recognition poll using the names “Fyodorov” and “Yeltsin”. But I think we’re agreed there wouldn’t be a lot of point to such an exercise. Who’s remembered as the great reformer who pulled Russia from the collapsing ruin of the Soviet Union? That’s right: Boris Yeltsin.

Let’s just be sure we have that straight. Finance Minister takes principled stand, President ignores his advice, country falls apart. President who plunged ahead on his own and handed a nation on the ropes to his successor is remembered as a “great, if flawed” leader who made mistakes, but whose love for Russia could never be doubted. Much like the introduction hinted at – short on malice, long on stupidity. Oh, except for the stupidity; don’t put that in. Fast-forward again to today. Finance Minister takes principled stand. President disagrees, Finance Minister is sacked. This time, though, the President is a fool, and the Finance Minister is the glue that shakily held the country together. Now, it must disintegrate.

I don’t know why such a simple formula is so difficult to grasp – western approbation for the accomplishments of a Russian usually indicates his/her degree of usefulness as a propaganda instrument, or signals an achievement by him/her which damaged Russia. It doesn’t hold true in every case – the west is quite fond of Maria Sharapova, for example, although her press tends to highlight the opinion that she got nothing of her athletic ability from Russia, having learned tennis in the United States – but it’s accurate often enough to show a pattern.

Which brings us back to Alexei Kudrin. In 2005, Kudrin locked horns with Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, saying “the government is making stupid mistakes” (heard that somewhere, recently?). Fradkov wanted to put more money into pensions and public sector pay. Kudrin argued that it would “stoke inflation”. Was he right? I’d have to say not even close; the historic inflation rate looks pretty flat to me. In fact, it tumbled right after Kudrin’s tantrum, falling steadily until the onset of the Global Financial Crisis (graph defaults to 2008; you’ll have to set the beginning date back to 2005). But as recently as this past June, Kudrin championed investment in pensions and forcing companies to contribute to social insurance savings, announcing that “this is the government demonstrating it can correct its mistakes”. Confused? Me, too. I thought it was Kudrin who argued against putting more money into pensions, probably because it was Kudrin who argued against putting more money into pensions. Review of Travin’s article reveals that Medvedev wanted to increase teachers’ salaries to a par with the commercial sector, and increase pensions. Kudrin disagreed. Remember what happened the last time? Kudrin was wrong, in the sense that he was all the way across town from right. He thought Russia should be putting money away for a rainy day, because those high oil prices just couldn’t last – when Russia already had the third-highest cash reserves in the world – and the old people could just suck it up. Now he’s singing the same song again, perhaps forgetting he extolled the benefit of pension reform as recently as last June. Maybe it’s just me, but he’s starting to sound like Mitt Romney. Maybe you noticed that quote from the angry factory worker in Titov, who snarled that Russians would get nothing and there would be no change. He perhaps didn’t notice that the minimum wage more than doubled during Putin’s tenure, as did pensions. And Kudrin fought those increases tooth and nail. Then cited them as example of the government demonstrating it could correct its mistakes. Which it actually didn’t make, although such a mistake was Kudrin’s recommendation.

If you read a little further down in the article from the last link, you’ll get a better idea why the west has a heart-on for Kudrin. He’s a tireless advocate for privatization, private investment and….wait for it….selling of controlling stakes in state companies.

There are two kinds of private investment in Russia that might be interested in controlling stakes in Russian state companies. One is very wealthy Russians who could afford it. The western press calls them oligarchs, and generally rates them as robber barons and pirates unless they live in England or are named “Khodorkovsky”. I can just see the press releases if the Russian government sold GAZPROM to a Russian oligarch: “MORE MONEY FOR PUTIN’S RETIREMENT FUND: PUTIN STEERS SWEETHEART DEAL TO BILLIONAIRE BUDDY!!!” The other possibility is western interests. Remember Bill Browder, and his formula for making money in Russia? Keep in mind that the west approved and approves of Browder’s conduct and continues to back him against Russia with the Sergei Magnitsky Law. Would it be smart, do you think, to sell controlling interests in major state industries to westerners? With a view to such a transaction supporting Russian national interests?

If you do, maybe we ought to take a look at why state control of industry is so bad in the first place. As an example, let’s look at the scare the lending industry gave the USA in 2008, when deregulation and unscrupulous lending practices led to the collapse of the housing bubble and precipitated the Global Financial Crisis. Two of the worst offenders were mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. What did the government do to stop the free-fall that threatened to drag the whole country into the abyss? Sold them to Russian private investors, of course. No, I was kidding; the government nationalized them. Assumed state control. Although both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were GSE’s (Government Sponsored Enterprises), both were publicly-traded companies since the late 1960′s.

In order for oil prices to ruin Russia, they would have to go down to less than $70.00 a barrel and stay there for nearly two years. Do you think that’s going to happen? Really? I’ll tell you when you can start getting ready to dance on Russia’s grave because of low oil prices – when you can convince Conoco-Phillips and Chevron-Texaco and Exxon-Mobil that rock-bottom oil prices for that long are worth it. Good luck with that. When you see signs that the world is ready to switch to green energy from petroleum, start tolling the bell for Russia. Until then, canonizing Kudrin is simply another attempt to turn public opinion in Russia against Putin and United Russia. And if Russians paid any attention to western attempts to influence their behaviour and voting preferences, it might work.

Uncle Volodya says, "Cheer up, Yulya: in prison, you get time off for good behavior. If you had to work for a living, you'd get rewarded for good behavior with more work"

In a verdict that, for all it was not entirely unexpected, appears to have surprised the world, the Pechersky District Court in Kiev found Yulia Tymoshenko guilty of abusing her office as Prime Minister of Ukraine. The charge related to a circumstance in 2009, in which she allegedly ordered the head of the state-run gas company NAFTOGAZ to sign a deal with Russia although the Verkhovna Rada had withheld its support for the deal. She has never denied ordering fomer NAFTOGAZ Ukraine head Oleg Dubyna to sign the agreement, saying that she did what had to be done. The record, however, reflects that she petitioned the cabinet of Verkhovna Rada – Ukraine’s parliament and supreme body of state power – when Dubyna refused to sign the contracts without state approval. The record further reflects that the cabinet not only denied its support, it took the issue off the table. Tymoshenko is then alleged to have ordered Dubyna to sign the contracts, which he did, and the verdict reflects the court’s confidence that it was done at Tymoshenko’s direction. She was sentenced to 7 years imprisonment and a fine for damages of her action totaling $180 million.

Western response was swift and condemnatory. “Ukraine is sliding toward Russian-style…autocratic rule” opines The Guardian. “Politically motivated prosecution” accuses the White House, exercising its new recycling policy by scratching out “Khodorkovsky” on its press releases and scribbling in “Tymoshenko”; ” [the] charges against Mrs. Tymoshenko…have raised concerns about…Ukraine’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law.” The European Union is “deeply disappointed“, sputters Foreign Affairs representative Catherine Ashton; “..the approach of Ukrainian authorities…risks having profound implications for the EU-Ukraine bilateral relationship.” Cementing its pitiable and permanent downgrade to Global Assclown, Amnesty International calls for Tymoshenko’s immediate release, quavering that the charges on which she has been convicted “are not internationally recognized offenses”. So, as long as you can find a country where it’s not a crime, it’s not a crime anywhere? Good to know. Darya, get the hell off the phone and order me some child prostitutes from Thailand. Oh, hey, and a sack of weed from Amsterdam. I know it’s bad for self-esteem to play favourites, but I have to say Amnesty International’s response bent the needle on my personal laugh-o-meter.

What really makes me shake my head in wonder at all these knee-jerk Free-The-Political-Prisoner-Of-The-Month reactions is the implied suggestion that Tymoshenko is some kind of fierce guardian of democracy: a savior, a crusader for the rights of everyman – a true Ukrainian patriot who had to be silenced so that evil might endure yet awhile. What’s really behind it? Tymoshenko is the west’s kind of leader – rich, arrogant to a fault and willing to change sides in the blink of an eye if money or power might accrue as a result.

Mind you, you can’t really blame Mrs. Tymoshenko for having a swelled head. The west loved Tymoshenko from the moment she appeared on the western media radar, dubbing her the “Joan of Arc of the Orange Revolution”: in 2005 Forbes rated her the third most-powerful woman in the world, in a display of lapdog adulation that must have nearly burst her braids. The following year, she didn’t even make the top 100. When she was arrested because she refused to recognize the court’s authority, Senator John McCain was quoted on Tymoshenko’s website as saying her arrest was directly relevant to the future of freedom and democracy in Ukraine. This arrest, he expanded, was “a violation of the basic rights that should be protected for every citizen in a democracy”.

Small wonder, then, that Mrs. Tymoshenko began to think she was bulletproof. After all, a former contender for the U.S. presidency had just explicitly endorsed her behaviour in court, which included refusing to recognize the judge’s authority, instead refusing to stand as protocol dictates when he entered the courtroom, calling him a “farce” and a “puppet”, refusing to answer questions when addressed directly by the judge and continuously talking when not addressed. This, according to Senator McCain, is every Ukrainian citizen’s basic right. What a splendid example for Ukrainians!! Have you been arrested for robbery? No problem!! Simply refuse to recognize the court’s authority, openly mock the judge and decline to answer any questions. You’ll be arrested for contempt, of course, but before the air is even cold where you were just standing, western political figures and professional activists will be denouncing your country’s legal system for trampling on your rights, insisting that your being held to account for your behaviour is “politically motivated”!! What a refreshing view of the rule of law. I can’t wait for this freedom to come to my country – which fancies itself a democracy – because here they don’t ask you twice to stand when you address a judge, and if you go to jail for contempt of court it is extremely difficult to get American senators to drop everything and rush to your defense. In fact, John McCain has been known to get pretty lippy on the subject of the U.S. Supreme court, so perhaps he just doesn’t like courts, period. Amid all the western media going gaga over her braided hairdo and encouraging her to further displays of resistance to authority with terms like “defiant” and “fierce” and “a tigress”, it should be borne in mind that when that same media took notice of Tymoshenko, she had been in politics for 8 years. That’s the same media, mostly, that was happy to spread the message that Barack Obama was too inexperienced to run his country when he had been a senator for 12 years, 4 of them national. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the western press as enthusiastic members, with rare exceptions, of Team Tymoshenko.

For her own part, Mrs. Tymoshenko is extremely adept at self-promotion, regularly linking Ukraine’s fortunes with her own and implying that resistance to letting her have her own way is somehow symbolic of standing in the way of Ukraine’s progress.

And Western pundits and officials wonder why Eastern Europeans and others laugh at their purple-faced self-righteous outrage. Why don’t they take us seriously, get their act together and do what we want? I’ll tell you why. Because the west picks its favourites among the political world based on how much they are like our own politicians, doesn’t question if their swooning over democracy and reform is genuine or merely shameless pandering, and doesn’t do the most basic research when they are in deep shit to find out if that’s where they deserve to be.

So, let’s do their homework for them. We’ve already covered the ways in which Tymoshenko embodies the ideal leader to westerners; rich, talks the progressive talk while walking the exclusive-power-elite walk, and is admitting of no fault whatsoever – when she loses an election, it’s because the winner cheated. When she’s hauled into court, it’s politically motivated because the party in power fears her righteous challenge and the stellar work she’s done in the interests of rooting out corruption.

Is Tymoshenko committed to democracy and the citizens’ right to self-determination? Insofar as it increases her personal power, maybe. Otherwise…well, let’s see.  One of the points the west keeps hammering on for Russia is the rule of law. Before the rule of law can prevail, there must be respect for it, both on the part of the prosecutors and the defendants as well as the public at large. Tymoshenko, on trial for abuse of power – which, obviously, indicates disrespect for the law – spends her time tweeting jokes from the courtroom about the judge, suggesting he is a monkey on a branch, sawing the branch from under himself. The international press eats it up, referring to her as “The Field-Marshall of the Orange Revolution”, and speculating that the trial might be a PR windfall that will return her to prominence. When she’s not doing that, she’s threatening to have the judge and the prosecutors removed from office because of their “numerous violations”, and Humanitad, a human-rights organization, backs her up. She hasn’t had time to prepare a defense, they say – although she was subpoenaed to testify in May, at which time she already had legal representation because she chose to appear on Shuster Live and ignored the order – the trial did not commence until June 24th and she was not detained until August 5th. She has claimed she did nothing wrong and that she required no permission to conclude the agreement on Ukraine’s behalf. If that’s true, how much time do you need to prepare a defense? And if that’s true, why did she call a cabinet meeting and try to get its endorsement of the agreement? Parliamentary records show that’s what happened, as well as cabinet’s refusal to approve it.

Let’s move on. Refusal for medical assistance from a personal physician, says Humanitad, is “an egregious breach of procedural fairness”. I don’t know what kind of courts they have where Humanitad is from, but here’s what happened. During her detention – only overnight, mind you – Tymoshenko became tired. She said she was unwell, and was offered medical examination. She declined, saying, “I refuse to be treated by anyone sent by the government … I demand to be seen by a doctor I trust.” Apparently, this should be everyone’s right in a real democracy. It staggers the imagination how a trial could ever proceed, since Tymoshenko’s personal physician could quite possibly be unavailable when summoned. She evidenced no symptoms except fatigue. Similarly, continuing the trial in her absence was another egregious breach, but the only alternative would have been to muzzle or gag her, since she wouldn’t shut up or display any respect to the court. And this, apparently, is de rigueur process in democratic courts. Not in any I’ve ever seen; in fact, it was my impression that arrest and removal was pretty standard courtroom procedure in the event of contempt rulings inspired by disruptive behaviour. What is the court supposed to do then – wait until you calm down?

If we are to take Humanitad and Tymoshenko’s squawking western supporters seriously, they should permit Tymoshenko’s refusal to answer questions, permit her to continuously mock and insult the judge, to pick and choose the services she will allow to determine if she is fit to carry on with the trial and allow Tymoshenko supporters to disrupt proceedings as they see fit. This, we must perforce believe, will breed respect for the rule of law in Ukraine, since it is the standard elsewhere. Is it? Is it really?

The position the west has taken on this reminds me of nothing so much as the table-full of patrons at a club who find themselves seated next to another table which features a loud, obnoxious drunk. Her behaviour is vastly entertaining to the first table, but those seated quietly thank God she’s not at their table, while cheering her on to ever greater heights of embarrassing antics.

Even more embarrassing than Tymoshenko’s boorish behaviour are the capitulating noises the Ukrainian government is making, suggesting they might reclassify her actions with respect to the gas agreement as “administrative” rather than criminal, so they can save face and let her off the hook. Get a spine, boys – that’d be a terrible mistake. Just as the court’s bending over backward to accommodate Tymoshenko creates the impression they have no case and are vaguely ashamed of themselves, cooking up a reason to let her go would only encourage her to run her narcissistic mouth even more about being unjustly imprisoned and political conspiracies and so on. It might even win her the presidency, although thus far Ukrainians don’t seem to be buying it.

Tymoshenko as leader was a disaster for Ukraine when she wasn’t even the real leader. One can only imagine her power-binges if she were so elected. The criminal charges are well-supported, and threatening to stall EU membership if she is not allowed to do as she pleases is small-minded and petty. Besides, EU membership is looking more like a liability than a gift every day, and Ukraine’s economic situation is very likely to make it a non-starter in any case, regardless the hoops jumped through to placate EU leaders on the Tymoshenko matter. Stick to your guns, Ukraine.

Uncle Volodya says, "Know the difference between a misfortune and a calamity? Well, if Kasyanov fell into the Neva, that'd be a misfortune. If somebody pulled him out....that'd be a calamity""

Did you follow the events in Libya via the international media, through the imposition of the no-fly zone right to the messy conclusion? How about the frequent reports of Assad’s thugs mowing down protesters in Syria; a deliberate provocation to get NATO involved in another revolution there? A commenter on Anatoly’s blog who appeared quite knowledgeable on the subject suggested the latter intervention was a non-starter based on the relative superiority of Syrian air defence, as compared with that of Ghaddafi. I’m not sure how that will be affected as fighter aircraft edge closer and closer to unmanned vehicles – but that’s a subject for another day.

Something the two situations have in common are the use of a desired end-state (removal of the leader) as a starting point, and shoring up of the subsequent process with a blitz of media bulletins – nearly all of which relied on sources who had a direct interest in the outcome. Time after time, media reported anti-Ghaddafi forces initiating another assault in terms that expressed no doubt they would take the objective, and time and again they were hurled back until NATO bombing ahead of the advancing rebels began to turn the tide. Whenever the Ghaddafi administration offered journalists tours of Tripoli, the resulting reports complained that they “only saw what Ghaddafi wanted them to see”, and managed conveniently to overlook a pro-Ghaddafi demonstration that drew more than a million supporters. Simply put, everything Ghaddafi told reporters was a lie, while everything the rebels said was the unvarnished truth. Similarly, every report I’ve seen that details Assad’s vicious suppression of dissent is followed by, “according to activists”.

Since this blog deals mostly with Russian issues, of course there’s a Russian connection. The criminally awful coverage of Russian politics, immigration, economics and policy results almost exclusively from people who are not Russian and do not live in Russia as a part of Russian society, but have a special interest in pushing a narrative and repeating it until it assumes the appearance of truth. Kathy Lally. Ed Lucas. Leon Aron. Anne Applebaum, as well as many others you know well, all respected in the west as scholars, academics, experts….and all painters of journalistic masterpieces on Russia rendered in subtle variations of purest horseshit.

I can offer you something different. An insider’s unbiased view of the cut and thrust of Russian politics, the effect of domestic and foreign policy on the nation’s people and a candid appraisal of current events in Russia from a Russian viewpoint. I’m not talking about myself, of course – I don’t live in Russia, and have never lived there as a resident. I’m talking about kovane, whom I managed to drag out of semiretirement with the threat of a pay cut. Without further ado…..

Managed Democracy in Russia: Unmasking the Magic

The question if there is democracy in Russia long ago turned into something akin to the question if there is life on Mars. Some people are positive that there is, others are dead set that there isn’t, but the majority doesn’t care that much. Quite characteristically, as opposed to the riddle about Mars, both groups are right in a sense. The former are just looking at the standard definition of democracy – do citizens elect representatives? Check. Is there evidence of mass-falsifying these elections? No, the results largely match polls conducted by a plethora of organisations, both independent and state-owned. Well, democracy it is. The latter camp, on the other hand, try to compare Russia with a spherical model of democracy in a vacuum, where branches of power are completely independent, freedom of speech is not influenced by corporate interests and the influence of separate power brokers on the political process is  negligible.

So, who is closer to the truth? While there is hardly a country that matches the Procrustean bed of preconditions proposed by the purists, one thing is undeniable – there are so many hidden terms in the equation of the political process that it places Russia very far from the said ideal. Much farther than a whole number of countries, it’s safe to say. In fact, as we will see below, the Kremlin holds so much sway over the political process that it would take a significant amount of dissent to push the situation out of control. And provided how nimble the Kremlin has been in the handling of it – mostly with reasonable concessions, but not shying away from using force if necessary – it would be a very unlikely scenario.

The foundations of  Russia’s modern political system were laid in 1993 with the adoption of the new Constitution. The circumstances of its adoption were tragic, as it was preceded by bloody conflict between the president and the Congress of People’s Deputies. According to the then-current Constitution, the Congress had supreme power – something that didn’t sit well with Yeltsin. The long pent-up hostilities broke out into violence, which resulted in the shelling of the building of the Congress with tanks – definitely not an act from any Constitution. Yeltsin won and, on the tide of his success, voted through a new version of Constitution, effectively turning Russia in a presidential republic: with the balance of power tipped heavily in favour of the president, at that.

During Yeltsin’s term the Constitution and main legislations regulating Russia’s political life largely remained unchanged (save for amendments regarding regions’ name changes), so Vladimir Putin inherited the same core set of laws in 2000. Nevertheless, its prior implementation showed a wide variety of predicaments that pestered the country and impeded its development: wilfulness and separatism of regions that Yeltsin initially supported; the sweep of organised crime that became a major power in many regions capable of deciding elections, and the bacchanalia of oligarchs who had whole ministries on their payroll and owned major TV stations.

All these problems became evident to Putin shortly after the beginning of his first term, in the aftermath of the submarine Kursk catastrophe. The ORT TV Channel (now First Channel), controlled at the time by oligarch Boris Berezovsky, launched a media attack against Putin. But he clearly showed that such methods would not be tolerated, and that the house rules were about to change. After three months the Prosecutor General’s Office announced that a criminal case had been opened against Berezovsky, who preferred to not return in Russia and sold his shares of ORT to Abramovich, an oligarch who is much more loyal to the Kremlin’s cause. Thus began Putin’s campaign for reshaping the political landscape of Russia.

Enter Vladislav Surkov. He was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff to the President of the Russian Federation in 1999, and now is considered the demiurge and ideologue of Russia’s political system as well as one of the most notable thorns in the side of the liberal opposition and its sympathizers – demands for his resignations are second most popular, right after “Putin must go”. It’s remarkable that Surkov has held his post all these years and through Medvedev’s presidency, adding the title of Presidential Aide in 2004. Unfortunately, he is quite a private person, and there are very few interviews with him, which certainly aids his demonising – most recently the oligarch Prokhorov, who unsuccessfully dabbled in politics, called him a “puppet-master”. Quite ironically, Surkov’s first wife is the creator of a puppet museum.

So, what did the process of gathering uncontrolled pieces of power look like? Mass media proved its enormous strength back in 1996, when it actually revived a political corpse; Boris Yeltsin had a single digit approval rating before the election, but managed to win it after an aggressive media campaign, sponsored by a consortium of oligarchs. So Putin had to get control of such a powerful weapon, which could be directed against him. After ORT another channel, NTV – controlled by another oligarch, Gusinsky  –  followed. Finally, in 2002, the last independent channel (TV6) was closed.

Today of all federal channels covering news and politics only one, Ren-TV, is private; others are under state ownership. But the independence of Ren-TV is very relative: the Kremlin has more than enough measures to ensure that it toes the line. It’s no secret that Surkov stays in contact with producers of major channels and coordinates the presentation of important events. Also, there’s a practice called stop-lists – an enumeration of political figures whose appearance on TV is highly undesirable. The lists are flexible – for example, Boris Nemtsov can grace some programmes, provided that he is chaperoned by a right person; but major channels seem to be completely off-limits for Kasparov and Limonov.

But the Kremlin’s oversight is actually not the most decisive factor in limiting the freedom of press: self-censorship is. Media producers who control cash flow from advertising are so unwilling to risk losing their lucrative positions that they cut the most innocent episodes that might be interpreted as a violation. Thus, recently, First channel cut out a sketch from the humour TV show KVN mocking Medvedev’s clumsy dance moves. After some derision from Internet users they reinserted the number in a rerun. While Surkov’s deviousness is not to be underestimated, surely he doesn’t preoccupy himself with such minutiae.

But actually Russian television is not that bad. It’s certainly complicit in the sins to which all media is prone: lies by omission, presenting a limited spectrum of opinions and generously seasoning news with spin. Basically, it’s no different from any western media network; the problem is that there are other competing networks that would be quick to point out lies and inconsistencies. In Russia, only peripheral media can do that along with Internet users; so these arguments often escape the scrutiny of the general public.  Another advantage of television to which the Kremlin occasionally resorts is short but vicious media campaigns against certain individuals, pressure on whom is expedient to the moment. So far the most notable victims are Luzhkov, Lukashenko and, most lately, Evgeny Roizman.

While the Kremlin reserves television as the most influential media to itself (according to this poll, TV is the most important source of information for 80% of Russians), it is much more liberal with other sources of information: newspapers, radio stations and the Internet. Moreover, having learnt the hard way the lesson of the USSR, the Kremlin strives to provide opposition with controlled media platforms for venting their righteous anger. Thus, the most popular opposition radio station “Echo of Moscow”, whose guests and hosts seem to hate Gazprom’s guts – judging by their words at least – is actually owned by none other than Gazprom’s subsidiary. And the Pravda of the opposition, “Novaya Gazeta”, is owned by former KGB spy and billionaire Alexander Lebedev. While he is no toady of Putin, there is plenty of leverage to keep him in check. But the audience of these media outlets is quite sparse – commensurate with the percentage of people who support opposition. The Internet is completely free, and because of that, gives shelter to most radical and fringe groups. Generally, the rule of thumb with media in Russia is the more influence, the firmer the Kremlin’s control.

Media control is only one side of the story. It would hardly be so important without thorough control of the political process. In the beginning of the 90’s, Russia was swept by a kind of euphoria of freedom in politics – there were dozens of different parties, sometimes with indistinguishable slogans. In the elections of 1993 the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LPDR) triumphed, whose leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky preached weapons-grade populism; in the 1996 elections The Beer Lovers Party got 0.6 percent of the votes, participating along with 42 other parties. Parliamentary sessions were spiced with fights, mutual insults and all manner of buffoonery. In other words, Russia’s political life was as disorderly as it gets.

The elections of 1999 were probably the first occasion big business turned its eyes to Parliament – if before laws had meant much less than the person who executed them, times were changing, and the ability to set the rules became a valuable prize. Two new contenders were “Fatherland – All Russia” – led by Primakov, Luzhkov and Shaimiev – and the Unity party, supported by Yeltsin and Berezovsky. Fatherland initially supported Primakov’s (or maybe Luzhkov’s) bid for the coming presidential election, while Unity was created to back then-prime-minister Putin’s bid. The 1999 campaign was marked by an unprecedented war of black PR. Berezovsky-owned  ORT clashed with Gusinsky’s NTV, who supported Luzkov, in what later became known as “The War of the TV-killers”.

The results of the election came as a bit of surprise: being a firm favourite as late as the summer of 1999, in December Fatherland came only third, with half the votes of Unity, created only months before the election. To a large extent that was a result of the smear campaign in the media – which Berezovsky won handily – and the recently started second campaign in Chechnya, which rallied the country around Putin. Including MPs elected from constituencies, the Communist party (KPRF) held 88 seats out of 450, Unity – 83, Fatherland – 47, the Union of Right Forces (SPS) – 32, Yabloko – 21, and Zhirinovsky’s bloc – 16. Besides, independent MPs formed their own parliamentary unions. Thus, no party had even a simple majority on its own.

So Putin came into a rather precarious state of affairs. He could only rely on Unity for passing required laws. In order to do that, any law should have been approved by a simple majority of the Parliament at first, and then by the Council of the Federation. Considering that the Council was comprised of regional governors and heads of assemblies, who amassed great independence and economic strength during Yeltsin’s terms, the Kremlin had little leeway in changing the legal system. Many regions wrote their own legislations contradicting federal laws; Tatarstan, Bashkiria and Yakutia decided to pay only 1 percent of the income in the federal budget instead of 10%. So naturally, curbing these dangerous tendencies became a top priority.

The first attack was launched in 2000, with new administrative reform. The Institute of Federal Districts was created, and governors received the President’s special representatives to watch them. Later, Putin proposed a reform of the Council of the Federation: appoint two representatives from each region – one by the governor, the other by the region assembly – instead of the old system. The proposal was met with approval – after all, governors spent most of their time in Moscow, so finding time to actually govern their regions came only as a second priority. The problem was that governors themselves had to approve this law, basically stripping themselves of power and – more importantly – immunity from criminal prosecution. And after the tumultuous 90’s, when the fight for assets in the regions was accompanied by all kinds of violence and crime, most of them sure as hell could use it. The other way was to override the Council decision with a constitutional majority (2/3 of votes) in the Parliament, but it was equally difficult. It’s hard to imagine what kind of coercing and appeasement it took, but the Council of Federation passed the bill.

By 2001, Unity and Fatherland bridged their differences and decided to join forces, forming a new party – the present day behemoth “United Russia”. Along with several independent parliamentary groups, the new party provided a stable platform for effective law-making – the coalition held 235 seats out of 450. That made it possible for the Kremlin to continue with core reforms. In July of 2011 the law “About political parties” was passed, obliging all parties to undergo registration at the Ministry of Justice. That gave the Kremlin an effective tool to control emergence of new parties. Today, only 7 are afloat, and several parties have been denied registration which was accompanied by public scandals. Among them liberal ParNaS, left Rodina – Common Sense and Limonov’s NBP.

Any party wishing to be registered should apply its political programme and charter and meet the following requirements (according to the latest edition of the law): it must have more than 45000 members and have regional branches in more than half the subjects of Russia. But the real trick is hidden in the possible grounds for denial: the Ministry of Justice can turn a party down if its chapter contradicts any minor law, or, more importantly, if the information it applied is incorrect. That gives the Ministry a huge field for cavilling at details. For example, a classic version of denial looks something like this: the Ministry finds some discrepancy in the charter and incorrect information in the members list. And if a dozen of the members out of 50000 suddenly issue a statement that they actually don’t have anything to do with the party, or another dozen happen to not exist – that’s reason enough. Picking on the charter is even more preposterous – in 2007 the Ministry found fault with the charter of Rogozin’s party “Great Russia”, despite the fact that it was a word-for-word copy of the charter of an already registered party. The same scenario was used against ParNaS.

With the high starting demands for a new party, the Kremlin ensures that it can be only created with serious financial backing. Therefore, the number of those who can foot the bill is limited, and they are more or less in the open. Besides, without access to media, the efficiency of money spent on a new party would be very low (in terms of boosting popularity).  For the especially stubborn, the Ministry of Justice is always there to keep any undesirable party out of the official political scene. The bottom line is no party can reach the Parliament without the Kremlin’s direct consent.

The 2003 elections were the next step in establishing full control over political life. Capitalising on Putin’s popularity and through generous use of state-controlled media, United Russia improved on the previous results: it got 37.5% of the votes. But the true miracle took place in regions, where United Russia won an overwhelming majority of elections in constituencies. That brought the total count of UR’s seats to 220 – almost a simple majority. For the first time both liberal parties – SPS and Yabloko – failed to pass the election threshold. Parliament finally fell under the Kremlin’s control, as United Russia could easily press other parties in order to get a constitutional majority. All that was needed to launch the most cardinal reforms was a good excuse.

Which followed shortly. In 2004, after the terrible terrorist attack on Beslan, Putin brought forward a law repealing governor elections, allegedly as a measure in the war on terror. Needless to say, Parliament found no objection to that, and the law was approved without a hitch. It stirred a wave of protest among the opposition (KPRF and SPS in particular), and to this day remains one of the most anti-democratic reforms of Putin. On the other hand, it certainly quashed any remnants of chaos in regions and restrained local barons. Thereafter, by the terms of the new law, governors have been appointed from candidates proposed by local assemblies. Considering that the latter were dominated by UR representatives, most governors preferred to join the party or were replaced. Also a campaign for ousting governors that held the post for too prolonged a period was started, finishing only in 2010.

After that the framework of the new system was largely finished. Only small touches remained, and by the 2007 elections laws were passed raising the election threshold from 5 to 7%, cancelling the option “Against Everyone” on ballot papers and repealing elections in constituencies. Those measures almost completely eradicate any chance that random people can get into Parliament and effectively hide the last legal way to displaydiscontent. It goes without saying that the 2007 elections resulted in a tremendous win by UR with 64% of the votes.

The present-day political system displays all kinds of duality: it’s democratic by formal indications, but in reality every step is controlled by the Kremlin; the opportunities for the opposition are severely restricted, but there’s no true support for it among the general public, while the Kremlin enjoys genuine popularity. All of the numerous restrictions that exist are completely legal and were adopted after due deliberations, but they to a great extent contradict the spirit of the Constitution. For all that, the Kremlin continuously shows real effort to tune the political system to real demands among the public and seems to use data from polls. For example, while liberal parties flopped on the last two elections, Surkov tried to bring to life the idea of a liberal party under the Kremlin’s wing, or at least that was the pretence.

One frequently raised issue by the Kremlin’s critics is if elections are rigged or not. While the opposition regularly bemoans a welter of violations, and watchdogs from the OSCE wag their finger, nobody presents viable evidence supporting the allegation of mass falsifications. Moreover, the question why the results of elections almost precisely match exit-polls and party ratings remains unanswered. On the Internet, stories about falsifications often surface, some of them stating that poll stations were throwing in ballot papers, but for all participants proportionally. For United Russia the main enemy now is not any other party, but the apathy of voters, so polishing the turnout numbers is important. All the aforesaid applies only to federal elections, local ones are still the subject of much more manipulation.

While it’s fun to have a Beer Lovers party in Parliament or skimp on HBO and watch great fights in its sessions, the need for a more mature political system was understood and supported by many. And it was anticipated that these changes might be taken too far. Some figures associated with the Kremlin hinted that the tight regulations might be eased in the future – thus, Medvedev promised to lower the election threshold, and the Minister of Justice supported the repealing of the mandatory party registration. The artificial conditions created for United Russia are certainly harmful for political life in general, and the party itself above all. Adding to natural weariness from the party, the pressure and discontent will only grow, and the authorities will be forced to react and compromise.

Here, and in many Western publications, the terms “the Kremlin”,  “the state” and “Putin’s regime” are a bit overused, and no explanation as to what is behind those vague descriptions is provided. Though it’s hard to make out the true disposition of forces that participate in the power struggle under the carpet, the main architects of the described political reforms are Putin and Surkov. That endeavour was evidently supported by the group known in the West as “siloviki”. The integrity of pro-Kremlin forces shouldn’t be overestimated – for example, Medvedev, the closest ally of Putin, made several critical statements about the present political system and is of moderately liberal leanings.

Looking back at where Putin started, and comparing it with his present position, some self-evident observations can be made – he is a brilliant politician. And the meaning of “politician” here is someone who seeks personal or partisan gain, often by scheming and manoeuvring. The political system he created and the popularity he commands allow him to pursuit any policy he pleases.  His critics often emphasize that Putin has done very little for the country and he has been just lucky, using growing energy prices. There’s certainly a grain of truth here – he used simple and obvious measures: stabilising the financial system, reining in oligarchs and regional barons, putting the tax system in relative order. The impression of simplicity should not fool anyone – their implementation was extremely difficult. But even those measures were enough for the country to bounce back from what seemed at the time a free-fall. Now the country faces very different problems, and their solutions are not as evident. Will Putin be able to prove himself a great statesman as well?

We have at least 6 years to see.

Uncle Volodya says, "The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

It’s good to be king, if just for a while
To be there in velvet, yeah, to give ‘em a smile
It’s good to get high, and never come down
It’s good to be king of your own little town

Tom Petty, from “It’s Good To Be King”; from the album Wildflowers

The internet is abuzz; the press rushes to warn of disaster soon to come – bloggers and journalists alike shout it from every rooftop. Vladimir Putin will stand once more for election to his nation’s highest office!! Everyone has an opinion, from poets to schoolteachers, from dreamers to cynics and from the hovels of the humble to the mansions of the mighty. The vast majority of English-speaking analysis adjudges this decision a calamity for Russia that will make Stalin’s purges look like mud-wrestling for octogenarians. Can pestilence and plagues of boils be far behind? Apparently not.

Joining the Massed Prophets Of Doom (thanks to Foppe for the link), is Yevgeny Yasin, Russian economist and former Minister of the Economy from 1994 to 1997. Economic changes will entail political risks and unpopular decisions that will stop Putin, says Yasin. The guy hasn’t even been elected yet, and already he’s a failure as a leader. Boy; tough crowd.

Yevgeny Yasin…..why does that name sound so familiar? Oh, yeah – I remember. Together with fellow numpty triplets Vladimir Mau and Yevsei Gurvich, he helped round out what I described as the Triad Of Tools, back in March of this year. On that occasion we discovered that Yasin, like his fellow numpties, appeared to be roughly as accomplished at economics as he is at extreme skateboarding. Well, perhaps that isn’t entirely fair – he’s hopeless at economic forecasting, although his economic education is enviable. But still, I ask you: what good is an economist who is reliably wrong in predictions of future economic trends? Anyone can predict economic events that have already happened – Jeeze, I could do that, and I stayed out of retail because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to make correct change. More to the point, why should anyone believe your economy-related predictions when you’re less accurate than flipping a coin?

Among the clangers dropped by Yasin during his stint as psychic visionary, “…If investment stalls, President Putin will have no hope of doubling the size of the economy within a decade, as he has promised. My longstanding skepticism about this promise has now hardened into certainty: the Yukos affair will make it impossible to sustain the growth rate required to achieve this goal because the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the seizure of his assets has dealt a devastating blow to business confidence.” 

Forecasts that stand the test of time, by the Chocolate School of Economics

Is that so? According to the CIA World Factbook, growth in Russia remained remarkably stable between the time of Yasin’s prediction (2003) and 2008 – when worldwide markets took a shitkicking that had nothing whatever to do with Khodorkovsky – and never dipped below double the best it had been under Yeltsin. GDP growth for the USA during the same period started at a measly 3.1% in 2003 (less than half that of Russia for its worst year during the period measured) and had sunk to 2% by 2007.

Did Russia somehow manage to sustain growth unassisted by FDI while investors fled for the hills, terrified at Khodorkovsky’s outrageous treatment? Doesn’t look like it: Foreign Direct Investment climbed exuberantly between 2003 and 2006. Yasin probably felt he was on solid ground, since FDI in 2003 was pitiful – less than $1 Billion. However, unfortunately – for Yasin’s forecasting – it was $15 Billion in 2004. Three years after Yasin’s Doomsday warning, it was better than $27 Billion and trending sharply upward. So much for the sobering effect imposed by Khodorkovsky’s conviction. FDI tumbled later in response to the global financial crisis, but imagining the global financial crisis as a collective expression of sympathy for Khodorkovsky (sentenced 5 years before it’s onset) would be, if you’ll forgive me, a bit of a stretch. Yasin was correct that Putin failed to double the economy in a decade, but that seems to me a bit unrealistic to expect from any leader, and Putin certainly had it going in the right direction while vastly increasing investment rather than stalling it. Also, he never actually “promised” anything of the sort – it was phrased as a goal in his State of the Union speech to both houses. Besides, it’s just annoying when economists predict, “such-and-such will happen in this many years if everything stays exactly as it is now”. A pastry chef who understands simple multiplication could do that, and everyone knows the economy barely stays the same all day, never mind over a decade.

More? Sure. Here’s NostradYasin again, still steadfastly unrepentant in 2004: “The current account balance is to drop to $15 billion in 2004 and $5 billion in 2010.” Still steadfastly wrong, too; his prediction didn’t even get the direction of the trend right. The current account balance was actually more than $46 Billion in 2004, the same year Yasin predicted it would fall to $15 Billion, and it had recovered to nearly $69 Billion in 2010, following a massive worldwide economic crisis and down from a high of $105 Billion in a year it was supposed – according to Yasin – to be heading for $5 Billion. He was only off by….$64 Billion. That’s well within the margin of error for prediction by someone whose profession is economics, surely? Not.

Anyway, as much fun as it is mocking Yasin’s portentuous peccadilloes – and God knows, there’s no shortage of material – we’re going to have to let it go for now, because it’s getting a little repetitious.  Also, given Yasin’s penchant for getting the future ass-backwards, there’s probably no more auspicious forecast he could make than that economic changes will ruin Putin – history and Yasin’s track record suggest exactly the opposite is likely to occur.

Besides, Yasin wasn’t the only former Russian government official to weigh in with silly unsubstantiated predictions – just opening your mouth and going for it seems to be all the rage these days. Mikhail Kasyanov, for example, predicts Russia may see its cash reserves dry up as it struggles against the falling price of crude oil, its main asset. Moreover, intones Kasyanov, Russia could record a 5% budget deficit, if crude price falls by a third.

Well, for what it’s worth, Brent Crude is up right now by .46%, at $107.14 per barrel. But I think everyone will agree that hardly constitutes a trend. Time to see, then, if Kasyanov knows something the pros who ride oil prices for a living don’t.

Unsurprisingly, no; he doesn’t. According to Oil-Price.Net, world oil supplies will likely tighten significantly for 2012. Writing for oil-price.net, Steve Austin reports the International Energy Agency (IEA) released strategic oil reserves to the market through July and August; a measure customarily reserved for desperate times such as a major war. This is only the third time since the IEA was established in 1974 that it has taken such action. Hmmm…interesting.  Mr. Austin also passes along the conclusion of a Goldman Sachs Group economic report that predicts oil supplies will become “critically tight” in 2012. And the IEA’s expended reserves will have to be replaced.

A very interesting analysis of Saudi Arabian capability to make up any shortfall is careful to point out the Saudis have always kept the extent of their reserves a closely-guarded state secret, and that they are likely to be considerably less than many believe. Also, Saudi Arabia is plagued with growing civil unrest; a less desirable (from a western viewpoint) corollary of the vaunted”Arab Spring”. Simply put, the Saudi government unilaterally increased production by 530,000 barrels per day in June – despite OPEC’s decision not to increase production – because it needs the money for massive domestic spending to head off revolt and to prevent the price of imported grain from climbing due to transportation cost increases, due in their turn to higher oil prices. This, according to the report, is unsustainable and will accelerate well depletion. It also has much to do with depressing the current price of oil. What’s going to happen when they stop pumping the extra? Hey – you’re good at this.

According to the UN, the world population will hit 7 Billion this year, and double by 2100 if left unchecked. Increasing affluence among the former poor and middle classes in the BRIC countries results in increasing motor vehicle ownership, and greater demand for fuel supplies. The IMF predicts a growth rate of 7.8% for India and 9.2% for China in 2012; this, the report offers, “will have a lever effect: less oil production capacity while the demand skyrockets”.

If increased demand and decreased production come together to result in crude prices that fall by a third, I’ll eat one of Kasyanov’s shoes. In more bad news for the Putin’s Election Will Spell R.U.I.N club, global economic recovery is predicted to accelerate later this year, increasing demand further.

Similar reports agree that stopping civil unrest from reaching Saudi Arabia is of paramount importance. If tumult roils the Kingdom, the go-to strategic source for the world’s energy will be its largest producer…Russia. Russia currently supplies almost 65% of the European Union’s energy needs, and views of its reliability as a producer “have undergone a paradigm shift…[owing to] steps taken by its Prime Minister”. Is that new confidence likely to be shaken by that official’s move from Prime Minister to President? I’m going to go out on a limb and say No. With the opening up of GAZPROM’s European pipelines to competitors such as Surgutneftegaz and Rosneft, “the Russian oil industry will continue its upward trend….The booming Russian oil industry will prove to be divine succor for all European nations as they no longer want to depend on the unstable and hostile mini-Iran countries for their fuel needs.”

Consider, also, that the Global Slowdown Will Crush Putin theory presupposes that – in the event of a Putin victory – the world will deliberately put itself into recession for at least 6 years just to spite Putin, by keeping oil prices artificially low. And that oil companies would joyously sing from the same song sheet, forswearing the tempting profits offered by a tight market. And that western electorates would reelect the same leaders who skipped recovery in order to put a thumb in Putin’s eye. This is analysis?? Come on.

Last and decidedly least on the list of Self-Important Discontented Russians (the only variety the west is interested in hearing from) – fluttering the heartbeats of Russophobe chicks the world over while inspiring the gag reflex in nearly everyone else – the Sochi Centerfold weighs in: Boris “Boilerplate” Nemtsov offers his opinion in an attempt to remain relevant. That’s always puzzled me – the west can’t be bothered to quote anything Putin or Medvedev says unless they disagree – offering the hope of a fight between them – or say something that might be construed as a threat against the west or one of its friends. Yet it can’t get enough of maudlin political rhetoric from its pet dissidents, who command no respect and barely any attention from the electorate in the country they aspire to lead. It’d be like the Russian press flocking around Joe Lieberman in 2004 to get his take on the election.

Anyway, Nemtsov – predictably – suggests capital flight (a concept he manifestly does not understand or is deliberately misinterpreting) could rise to $100 Billion this year (the entire Russian GDP for 2012 is only forecast to be a little over $2 Trillion), educated Russians will likely stream over the borders like fleas leaving a dead body, and the dullards who remain will surge into the streets in rage when they realize they can’t “replace the government through elections”. Sure they will, Boris. Nemtsov’s protests have never drawn more than a couple of hundred people in a nation of better than 140 million, and when he tried to co-opt an ongoing car and motorcycle show last summer and turn it into a political demonstration, he got arrested. The police didn’t get all his followers, however; they melted into the crowd – of about 200 people. Since it’s hard for a big group to disappear into a smaller one, it seems safe to assume the protesters were fewer than 200 or so.

Let me…ummm….go on record here as predicting none of the things Nemtsov warns of is going to actually happen. But it’s his political philosophy that makes me laugh – the government must be replaced every election cycle, regardless if it’s doing a good job and regardless the spotty qualifications of contenders to replace it, or the will of the people is being ignored. Is there really an electorate like that, anywhere, that simply chucks out the ruling party every election in favour of something new? If so, Nemtsov ought to think about moving there.

But the negative invective was not restricted to select Russians who believe they know more about governance than the government: oh, no. As I mentioned earlier, the western press tumbled over itself in a rush to condemn United Russia’s choice. Exemplary of the coverage is Forbes’ “Oh No, Another Twelve Years of Vladimir Putin“. Paul Gregory’s Russia coverage is uniformly pretty negative, and accompanying political articles in his sidebar suggest his empathy for the hardcore conservative Republican spectrum. Those who follow U.S. politics with any interest will know that demographic despises Russia, and would love to get a liberal narcissist like Nemtsov installed as leader. Still, the article has some standout comedy moments. For instance, Mr. Gregory describes Yury Luzhkov as “Moscow’s popular mayor“, fired by the Tandem “in preparation for the elections“. In fact, the final popularity poll on Luzhkov showed only 36% of Muscovites approved of him – hardly popular – and he was both a founding member of and reliable vote-getter for United Russia. Firing party stalwarts who are adept at generating votes to keep you in power might be solid electoral strategy for the Republicans in the USA, although I can’t say I’ve ever seen them do it, but in Russia politicians certainly know better. One of Luzhkov’s most vocal critics was none other than Boris Nemtsov.

Similarly – very much in the conservative Republican mold – Mikhail Prokhorov is portrayed as “just folks”; a down-to-earth, Regular Joe who made the mistake of openly criticizing the Kremlin (which, originally, cynics suggested would be his exact role in order to make Russians feel sorry for Medvedev or Putin, and elect whoever United Russia pushed into the ring) and was subsequently fired. Gregory’s analysis is that his party was forced by the Kremlin to fire him (which is certainly a refreshing spin on what actually happened), but that now at least he was free to “return to New Jersey to live the good life, far from Kremlin politics”.

In fact, far from being a Regular Joe, Mikhail Prokhorov is Russia’s second-richest man. Without casting undue aspersions on the residential benefits of New Jersey, Mikhail Prokhorov is about as likely to set up housekeeping there as he is to throw his entire fortune into a brussels sprouts and garbanzo beans restaurant chain. His official residence (in terms of where he pays his residential taxes) is in Siberia, birthplace of fellow Russian Maria Sharapova, although he also maintains a luxurious home in Moscow. While American media was kind enough to scout local properties for him (Regular Joe-type modest accomodations like a 7000 square foot penthouse apartment priced at an affordable $25 Million, or a 30,000 square foot stone mansion for the giveaway price of only $68 Million), he has thus far resisted the undeniable attraction of the New Jersey good life.  The world’s most expensive home was more Prokhorov’s style, although that deal fell through and a spat between he and owner Lily Safra – widow of deceased multibillionaire and William Browder patron Edmond Safra – resulted in Prokhorov losing his $55 million deposit. Perhaps New Jersey is on the Prokhorov radar after all – who knows, you might run into him at the donut shop. As if.

In fact, the previous presidential term served by Putin saw the economy grow for 9 straight years – resulting in a 72% increase in Purchasing Power Parity for ordinary Russians, the halving of poverty, an eightfold increase in real household income and a return to stability. This simultaneously explains his popularity in Russia and his unpopularity in the west, home to strong influences which hunger for Russia’s economic collapse and political reapportioning.

Taking us out, some words of wisdom from another inspirational leader, and the author of the passage which inspired half of my title for this post – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.;

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.“

Rock on, Mr. Putin; fair winds and following seas.